Customer Reviews

Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions

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For many years now Professor Bernard has been producing essays about various aspects of the life of Anne Boleyn. Most of these essays have focused on debunking various myths surrounding Anne, or challenging images about her which, although accepted in the mainstream and repeated as fact by other academics, are not always dependable when placed under close scrutiny. This book serves to bring many of these myths and images together, offering a new and in-depth analysis of the primary sources dealing with the various areas that stand as landmarks to Anne's life.

Bernard introduces his work with a short study of Anne's fall - important because it is often the first thing people remember about Anne and the part of her life everyone `knows'. This is followed by a general introduction, asking `who was Anne Boleyn? Topics now move on to Henry's infatuation with Anne; Henry's divorce and Anne's part in it; Anne as queen; the relations between Anne and the discarded Catherine; Anne's religion; the fateful miscarriage. Bernard now returns to Anne's fall, looking at the various aspects of it: the conspiracy surrounding Anne; Lady Worcester's involvement; Anne's lovers. The book concludes with an attempt to answer the question of Anne's guilt. A nice appendix discusses Anne's portraits, with interesting speculation regarding the famous `B' necklace portraits.

Bernard's book is, as expected, erudite, beautifully written and is a must for anyone interested in Anne Boleyn, the court of Henry VIII and the Tudor period in general.

I enjoyed this book very much. The point of view is quite different from the books by Alison Weir and Eric Ives on the same topic that I have read. Weir and Ives seemed to take as a premise that Anne was powerful in a political way, building factions, deciding fates, championing religious causes, skillfully and cunningly holding Henry at bay for years, demanding that he divorce Katherine, targeting people for destruction, etc., and was the boss in her relationship with Henry and in the court. In Bernard's book, he seems to begin from a point of view of what the culture was as far as women's behavior and role, even for very rich and important women, and then interprets the letters, facts and other evidence from there. In Bernard's book, Anne is influential but not a mover/shaker in her own right as she is in the other books. She is not the power in the relationship, but rather Henry is. He also does not hold to the position that it was Anne who held off Henry during their long courtship but rather that it was Henry who decided on the scope of their relationship and he gives reasons/evidence for his conclusion. He also has a different view of Anne's guilt or innocence and the reasons for her fall and whether it was a trumped up conspiracy or not as well as on her religious beliefs and views. I honestly have no idea who is correct, but it was interesting to read the story from a totally different point of view by a historian who reached some different conclusions.

This book is a long-overdue breath of fresh air in Tudor studies. "Fatal Attractions" is not a conventional biography of Anne Boleyn (Bernard himself tacitly admits that the paucity of reliable information about her life makes such a project difficult, if not impossible.) Rather, it is an effort to take a new look at many of the traditional assumptions surrounding her marriage to Henry VIII and her subsequent arrest and execution.

Bernard's Anne is a more helpless figure than is generally imagined, a woman who had some share of influence but, from first to last, was entirely in the control of her king. The most controversial part of his book is undoubtedly his suggestion that she was guilty of at least some of the charges made at her trial, and--although he does not belabor the point--he indirectly casts doubt on the paternity of the future Queen Elizabeth I.

The author is forced by necessity to resort to speculation throughout the book, but his arguments are logical, intelligently and responsibly argued, and, on the whole, convincing. He rejects most of the elaborate (and often quite bizarre) theories that have sprung up in recent years about Anne (I was particularly pleased to see him debunk the ridiculous claim that her downfall was precipitated when she miscarried a deformed child.) Instead, he argues that the most obvious, most simple explanations are the ones most likely to be true.

This book is far from being the "last word" on Anne Boleyn's oft-disputed life--that "word," unfortunately, can never really be written--but it is a novel and welcome addition to the historical debate.

Poor Bernard! He apparently so desperately wants Anne Boleyn to have been a harlot, he will go to any speculative lengths to prove it. Wildly speculative, in fact. To begin with, he completely strips Anne Boleyn of any personality or character of her own and presents her as a woman controlled by her king, her family, and pretty much anybody else who wanders past. I will agree that she was definitely a subject in a very real sense to the king, but any woman who inspires a king to write love letters that are probably still damp with 500 year old drool is powerful in her own way. Bernard also tells us that it is easier to accept Anne Boleyn's alleged adultery now that we have the example of Princess Diana for comparison. Ok, Diana may have seen more ceilings than Michaelangelo, but there are vast differences in the privacy inside the palace of a modern day princess and a Tudor period queen. Remember Catherine Howard tried it out and was caught and executed practically before the sheets had cooled. That said, I did enjoy Bernard's excruciatingly ludicrous contortions in attempting to validate the 'evidence' presented against Queen Anne. The dates of the alleged acts of adultery - which everyone from Tudor contemporaries to modern historians (the ones with sense) have dismissed as impossible? Bernard says those dates weren't meant to be exact.... I'd love to hear that in a trial - " We the jury find you guilty of robbery committed on, oh well, let's just call it Dec 8..." And the fact that the Queen wasn't even in the alleged locations on those dates? Easy, she travelled. Disguised as what - the milkmaid? Riding an extremely fast horse? And nobody ever even looked around and said, "Hey, didn't we have a Queen here this morning?" There are SO many faults with this book that I'll just leave the details at that, but before Bernard goes gallavanting off into another historical biography, it might be helpful if he did more research on the actual daily lives of the people of the period and the difficulty and time involved in traveling even twenty miles, and used at least a modicum of common sense in interpreting contemporary accounts of events.

This was a scholarly book but not overwhelmingly so. I enjoyed the adversarial aspect which set up many for and against arguments. I still have not decided, in the face of the evidence, whether she was guilty or not, but it was a thought provoking book. I did come away from it wondering if Henry's impotence led him to an exaggerated jealousy and a need to prove himself sexually, but overall my impression of Henry is that he was a pretty unfeeling man as far as women were concerned.

I have read just about everything from the Tudor era being a history major in college. This book is a great read, very enjoyable and gives new insight into the life and challenges of Anne Boleyn. Lots of detail presented in a very interesting light. I would recommend this book to anyone interested or intrigued by the Tudor years - certainly to anyone that enjoys the saga of Anne Boleyn.

While this book appears to judiciously cite facts from solid sources, its naive reliance on these alone to draw conclusions about the 'facts' of Tudor history and Boleyns is at odds with existing literature and a sly attempt to undercut previous historians. Since Bernard does not 'like' Anne Boleyn, his approach is to overinterpret what is MISSING from the written record so that if something is not in that record, then it probably didn't happen, or beliefs about these events and people are wrong, distorted, gossip and so on. This is nonsense: most written history is interpretation of such material by thoughtful scholars. His goal appears to be to'cut Anne down to size,'by adopting an overly serious, not to say pompous,tone, with a somewhat 'alas, but I have to say this' implication. And he seems to want everyone to stop being fascinated with her, since she was almost certainly a trollop (he claims she might well have been,in modern terms,'sleeping around a bit.') It's hard to be more sexist than this.

Anne Boleyn: Fatal Attractions is a look at Anne Boleyn from the perspective that she was guilty of adultery, Henry VIII was the one who put the brakes on a sexual relationship between the two, and that Anne Boleyn was personally less involved with breaking with the church and religious reform than she has been portrayed. I found parts of the book rather ridiculous. Page 156 "Some scholars have claimed that the idea that a queen could have committed adultery is preposterous - though those of us living in the shadow of the late Princess Diana might find this less implausible." This has to be the first time that Anne Boleyn's guilt is considered more likely based on the behavior of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Page 175 "Mark Smeaton, the musician,confessed, pleaded guilty and never retracted his admission. Was he tortured? De Carles explicitly denies it, George Constantyne, testifying a few years later, recalled 'the saying' that Mark had been 'first grieviously racked', which, he added, "I could never know of a truth'; he had begun his account by saying that 'I cannot tell how he was examined'. Mark admitted to sleeping with Anne on three occasions. Why should he have confessed if it was untrue?"

Perhaps because I live in the state of Illinois, I can easily fathom how easy it is for people to make false confessions. Unfortunately, it is all to common, even in an era of "innocent until proven guilty" and the right to legal council. I imagine that the experience of being seized and taken to the Tower of London to be questioned would be a terrifying experience.

I was intrigued the idea of the author's approach of Anne Boleyn's guilt, but found the actual book lacking. I understand that these books are mostly speculative, as there are so few contemporary sources. The sources that do exist are usually biased in some way. This book actually made Anne Boleyn very uninteresting.

I didn't bother finishing this book. Setting about showing how much has been 'assumed' about Anne Boleyn from the record would be fine, but after disposing of everything everyone else has 'assumed' about her, he makes his own assumptions, more than I can count. For example: He doesn't even bother to tackle the detailed refutations of the individual dates in the adultery indictment, which have been made by other historians, stating that Anne and the other party could not have been in the location in question on the date in question. He appears to say, on the one hand, that maybe the dates weren't meant literally, and on the other, that the places weren't actually that far apart and that she could have travelled. WTF??? That is what he is proposing as better history? How probable is it that a queen could have slipped away from the entire court, jumped on a horse, and ridden 20 or 30 miles alone to have a tryst with someone else who would also have had to slip away? This is just an example of the quality of his "debunking." Read something else, or if you're curious get it from the library, that's what I did, thank goodness.

Quite a boring history. All speculation and very little information to offer. Some of the information was interesting but it is basically a rehash. Very boring writer.