[Note: I’m making some edits to this review after it’s received quite a lot of attention – I’d say thank you to those of you who shared it, but I honestly didn’t write it to have it be shared widely. I wrote it because the book horrified me, and I felt the need to stick up for the historians who are so disparaged in it. But clearly it’s resonated with a lot of people because it’s being shared widely, and I’m glad I was able to put words to some of the feelings that are out there.]
I’m going to do something I have never done on this site. I’m going to write a pretty negative review of a book. In general I stay away from writing reviews, preferring to give authors a platform to share their work and then let listeners decide if they want to read it. As someone who has published my work, I understand the creative process, and the anxiety that can come from releasing all your hard work into the world, and just how crappy negative those reviews can feel. So it’s with a heavy heart that I write this.
So why am I writing it after all? Because I feel so strongly about the work, and the arrogant dismissal and twisting the words of other historians, and I think it needs to be said.
A few weeks ago I was approached by a PR company for Hayley Nolan, who has a YouTube series and accompanying podcast called The History Review. She has a new book out on Anne Boleyn called Anne Boleyn, 500 Years of Lies. Would I want to interview her on my podcast?
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ve emailed with Hayley Nolan a few times, and have always found her to be somewhat distant, but friendly. I’ve invited her to speak in the online Tudor Summit, and while she has never been able to participate, she was always pleasant, and offered to help promote it.
So when I got the email from the PR company, I responded that I would potentially be interested, but could they please send me a copy of the book first? I don’t interview authors if I haven’t read the book. It’s a rule of mine. They kindly sent me a PDF, and so I began reading it on a flight on Thursday.
Straight away I knew it wasn’t going to be a fit for my show, and told them so. And I would have stopped reading right away, except I began to feel so offended on behalf of the historians that Ms Nolan so easily and arrogantly dismisses.
[Note: I’ve since found out that an early marketing video showed Nolan burning an Alison Weir biography of Anne. Literally throwing it into flames. It was taken down after complaints, but the idea that someone would burn another respected author’s book for publicity sums up everything wrong about Nolan’s work, and makes my review pointless and moot. I already wrote it though, so it’s staying up. If you think it’s okay for someone to burn books, in any way, then you probably won’t like my review, so I’ll save you some time and tell you that you can just stop reading now.]
So let’s begin. The very first page opens with this:
“I’m angry and you should be too. Anne Boleyn has been wrongly vilified for five hundred years, her truth silenced and suppressed, with no one revealing the full, uncensored evidence of this complex, convoluted and contradictory story. Until now.”
Clickbait much? Maybe Nolan should write for BuzzFeed.
Oh, but it goes on:
“After four years of rigorous and exhaustive research, the archives have begrudgingly revealed that, contrary to popular belief, Anne Boleyn was not the smarmy and smug, cold-hearted scheming seductress we’ve so often been assured she was, in everything from 16th century propaganda to modern day mass-market history.”
Huh? I don’t remember ever reading anything that called Anne smarmy and smug. Especially in the past ten years or so. Where is she getting this from? The Tudors? Even that show manages to portray her as at least a little bit multi-dimensional. What has she been reading? Or not reading?
What about the work of people like James Peacock from the Anne Boleyn Society? Claire Ridgway from The Anne Boleyn Files (and author of numerous history books). Authors like Amy Licence who just wrote a new biography of Anne?
And, just as importantly, what is this new evidence? What archives did she scour? I turned back to the bibliography, and found…hardly any original sources at all. The normal chroniclers – Hall, Cavendish, etc. Letters and Papers from British History Online. Nothing I hadn’t seen cited in many other books. There are incredibly few primary sources or original documents listed.
I began to be skeptical, and read on. In chapter two she drops this zinger – “one historian recently described Anne as having ‘brazen self confidence,” (followed by a little dig about how Anne likely was one of those hussies who would have spoken up in the board room too!) and the end note showed she was quoting from Tracy Borman’s biography of Thomas Cromwell. Admittedly, that quote sounds pretty damning.
So I looked the quote up, to get some context – because, having actually spoken with Tracy Borman once, and read many of her books, I can’t see her thinking that brazen self confidence is a bad thing.
The full quote from Borman reads:
“While the women at court all tried to copy her style, the men were beguiled by her flirtatious, provocative manner, and her brazen self confidence. Wyatt said of her, ‘For behavior, manners, attire and tongue, she excelled them all.’ Unlike her elder sister however, Anne kept a strict reign on her desires. She pushed the boundaries of flirtation as far as she could without damaging her reputation, and retained an aloofness that only served to increase her appeal.”
Which honestly doesn’t sound to me like an insult. It sounds pretty much exactly like the picture Nolan then paints of Anne coming back from France a budding evangelical who knew how to discuss theology, and wasn’t shy in expressing her opinions. Aka, for women of the time, brazen.
That’s just one example, but the entire book goes on like this. Handpicking quotes that seem awful, but upon further inspection are pretty innocuous. As I say, clickbait.
On the next page Nolan talks about the myth that Anne’s French manners would have made her alluring. This is in the context of this myth of Anne the seductress. She said it would have been more the opposite, and cites the Evil May Day riots of 1517 as an example of the xenophobic nature of Tudor England, where, if anything, her French manners would have set her back, and she would likely have been more introverted.
Couple things on that. Yes, England and France were kind of at each other’s throats for a long time (when in doubt, make war on France!). But England and France were also inextricably linked. Remember that the English were essentially Norman, and until the 14th century French was the official language of the English court. So it was more complicated than just saying, “she’s a foreigner so people wouldn’t have liked her.” Also, those riots started over apprentices upset at Flemish workers taking their jobs.
Yes, French people were mentioned. Hall wrote: “The multitude of strangers was so great about London that the poor English could get any living… The foreigners… were so proud that they disdained, mocked, and oppressed the Englishmen, which was the beginning of the grudge… The Genoans, Frenchmen, and other strangers said and boasted themselves to be in such favour with the king and his council that they set naught by the rulers of the city… How miserably the common artificers lived, and scarcely could get any work to find them, their wives, and children, for there were such a number of artificers strangers that took away all the living in manner.”
But notice that it says the French were in high favor with the king. At court. Where Anne was. And it was the lower classes who were upset about it. So just maybe those French manners would have been attractive after all?
But let’s move on from quibbling over things like this. Reasonable people could disagree over the riots and the impression that French manners would have had. I bring it up as an example of the way Nolan starts with a belief – Anne is constantly being vilified and people are still telling lies about her (ie her French manners wouldn’t have been an asset) – and then she finds evidence that she twists around to support it.
I have two main issues with this book:
The first is the way other historians are treated. Not just the easy dismissal of their work, but the way their words are literally twisted – as with the above example from Tracy Borman – and used to prop up some clickbait theory that Anne is still being vilified by current historians, and only Hayley Nolan is able to set the record straight.
The second, and this is a huge one, is the attempt to diagnose Henry with sociopathy and multiple personality disorder, and then, later on, Anne with post traumatic stress disorder during the week after her trial leading up to her execution.
I have a pretty big problem in general with placing modern constructs on people for whom they would have meant nothing. Sociopathy was developed in that heyday of psychological discovery during the 1930’s. Four hundred years after Henry’s tyranny. To try to go back and diagnose him with a modern disease, using modern definitions, is extremely irresponsible. It’s unfair to the psychologists who study these disorders. It’s unfair to people suffering from them now. And it’s unfair to Henry.
I am not here to argue that Henry was a saint. Of course he wasn’t. And he very likely wasn’t all there in the head. But even now there are psychologists who have tried to diagnose Donald Trump with various mental illnesses – and we have his twitter feed to go off of – while an equal number of professionals have said that it’s irresponsible to diagnose someone without a full psychological workup. Which you can’t do to Henry. Because he’s dead.
But let’s go back to this whole “putting modern definitions on the past” thing. Quantum physicists have discovered that some electrons change direction, but only when you are watching them. So they will make one pattern when not being observed, and another when being watched. How the electrons know they’re being watched (and what that means for the laws of the universe) is what the quantum physicists are there to figure out, and it’s above my mental capacity to understand, but it begs a discussion around whether naming something can actually bring it into existence.
Was “feminism” a thing before there was a word to describe it? Did creating the term “Protestant” actually create Protestants? This is something I’ve thought a lot about with my child. She’s pretty hyper. And I’m fairly certain that if we were in the US, someone would diagnose her with ADHD, and want to put her on medicine (I say this because of comments I get when we’re back home). But here in Spain, they have this crazy idea that kids are hyper, and kids should be allowed to be kids, and so they run around a lot to get their energy out, and no one mentions it.
[Note to the people who are thinking I’m not taking ADHD seriously – of course I recognize that for some people this is a very real condition, and medicine can make life immeasurably better. But I think it’s also important to recognize that different cultures treat different conditions differently, and a firm diagnosis in one culture is just seen as a normal phase of life in another, and the way we react to something that is seen as simply a normal phase of life is very different to something classified as an illness]
So the question is – by labeling someone as ADHD, do you actually create more ADHD cases? And how this relates back to the Tudors – did we create sociopathy by naming it? This could lead down a lot of different rabbit holes, but I bring it up because I think it’s worth considering in the context of putting modern constructs on pre-modern people.
Let me give you a more concrete historical example of how naming things can change the world. The concept of zero didn’t always exist the way it does now. This was actually a hinderance for early trading because people had no way to quantify a void. Of course the void has always been there. Just like sociopathic people have always been around. But without a way to name it, it had a completely different relationship with reality than it does now.
There is a lot of debate over who first “invented” zero – the Chinese would use a dot to signify it, the Greeks toyed with it, but it was the Indians who formally came up with zero as we know it. And suddenly the world changed. Just putting that label – zero – on a void, and giving it a symbol has made everything in modern lives possible, from moon landings to the stock market.
Can you see where naming something changes it completely, both in the context of it in culture as well as the actual reality of it? Zero existed before it was named, but it wasn’t harnessed or used. Trying to go back in time and put the concept of zero – a staggering and mindblowing leap when you think about it – on people for whom it wasn’t quantifiable isn’t fair.
Either way you look at it, it’s unfair to people who aren’t there to defend themselves to try to put modern understandings of concepts that didn’t even exist in the 16th century on to those people. By making Anne the victim of a sociopath, Nolan has done the exact thing she accuses modern historians of doing – she’s taken away any agency Anne had in deciding her future, and made her a victim of a mental illness that wasn’t even known then.
Plus, diseases change. We don’t die from the sweating sickness. They didn’t have to deal with AIDS. It stands to reason that as changes in stress, jobs, lifestyle, exercise, pollutants, and diet increase, mental illnesses might change and evolve the same way physical ones do.
And as one final aside, let’s say that in 500 years some psychologist names a mental illness of a writer who feels the need to write a book arrogantly twisting and then dismissing the work of her colleagues in order to write what is basically the same book, rebutting nonexistent arguments in order to sell a book that she claims is groundbreaking. Would it be fair to go back and label Hayley Nolan with that disease? While it might look like a fit (just like Henry looks like a sociopath from the distance of 500 years and modern understandings of behavior and norms), it wouldn’t be fair to her.
Also, don’t even get me started on the way she tries to explain away Anne’s seemingly contradictory behavior in the week between when she knew she would be found guilty (the 12th of May, after the trial of The Men) and when she was actually executed (the 19th): she labels it as PTSD. Again, a modern construct put on Anne Boleyn, taking away any agency she may have had because someone wants to slap a label on it to more deeply understand it.
The thing she misses is that the more you label behavior – especially from a distance of 500 years – the more you put it into a box, and take away the opportunity for further study and learning. Why did Anne make the comment about her small neck? PTSD clearly, case closed, lid on the box, done. Well then, what use is there for any future analysis or study if we know what it is now? Henry was a sociopath, Anne had PTSD, mic drop, we’re done here.
Life is messy. People are messy. Especially from the distance of 500 years when you can’t talk to them, and even if you could you’d have a hard time understanding each other on a deep level because societal norms are so different.
Then we get to the lovely way she dismisses historians (whose work she still quotes), there’s this charming end to a chapter: “historians who use the fact that Anne took holy communion and prayed before the sacrament while in prison as final proof she wasn’t a true evangelical really need to go take a theology lesson and hit us up when they’re down with the basics.”
Are you kidding me? You think that after four years of “exhaustive” research you have the same level of understanding of the Reformation as Eric Ives, who was a deacon and a preacher, who wrote a book called The Reformation Experience. But okay Hayley, not only do you have a greater understanding of Reformation theology than Tudor historians, but now we do too, because we just read the eight pages you wrote. So they can hit “us” up when they get to our level.
Cool.
She goes on to dispel the myth of Thomas Boleyn as the pimp who planned for his daughters to wind up in Henry’s bed so he could advance at court. Only thing is, that myth has already been dispelled. Not only in the PhD thesis she cites from Dr Lauren Mackay (meaning that it’s not Hayley who discovered it, but is simply synthesizing someone else’s work – hardly groundbreaking research, but I’ll let that slide) but also from people like Claire Ridgway. I know for a fact Claire dispelled that myth because in the 2018 Tudor Summit she spoke about the Boleyn family, and we discussed that myth at length. Also, she wrote a book about it.
Later on, she tries to point out a double standard where men who rose from poor beginnings were celebrated (“take your pick, we’ve got butcher’s son Wolsey, we’ve got blacksmith’s son Cromwell”) whereas women were expected to just marry up. But she misses the fact that Henry was unique in that he promoted on abilities rather than nobility. Wolsey and Cromwell were both plagued during their lifetimes with the slurs and prejudices against them, and they were easy targets when their enemies – jealous of their new-found earned power – decided to band together to bring them down. So it’s not a double standard. In that way women actually had an easier time of it, as marrying up was much more common than rising from being a butcher’s son to being a chief minister.
She tries to prove that Henry didn’t really love Anne because he let her go back to Hever when she got the sweating sickness, and he didn’t fly to her bed to nurse her himself (sending one of his doctors, instead). Okay, for a normal guy that would be pretty yuck. But Henry still had no male heir. He couldn’t die. Also, he was a hypochondriac [note for those calling me out on a posthumous diagnosis – fair point – I think it’s more to do with the fact that he couldn’t die until the kingdom was secure, and I say it in jest, not as an actual diagnosis]. Still, I don’t see where that is any kind of proof of his feelings for her either way.
I could go on. I really could. I’ve got pages of notes. Like where she throws out an accusation that Charles Brandon molested his very young under-five year old daughter, and that same very young daughter possibly confided to Anne about it (and this would be why Brandon helped bring her down later). She also tries to dispel what she says is a pervading myth that Anne didn’t love Elizabeth, even though I don’t think that’s a myth… even in The Tudors, Anne is shown wanting to breastfeed Elizabeth.
From what I can tell the entire book invents myths that may have persisted until 30 years ago, but certainly don’t now. She takes modern historians’ words and twists them to fit that narrative. Then she dispels them with quotes not from any new original documentation, but from the very historians she is dissing.
So here’s what I suggest you do. Read Amy License’s new biography. Read Eric Ives. Read Claire Ridgway. Read James Peacock. Read Susan Bordo’s The Creation of Anne Boleyn. Read the people who have been breathing new life into Anne for the past decade or more, and give them your money. Because they’ve actually done the original research and work.
[PS – a few of you commented that I was clearly writing this review to get your money. I do have a super cool online shop where I sell neat Tudor Swag like Anne Boleyn leggings over at TudorFair.com, and I also produce Tudorcon (the next one is October 2-4 2020!). But you will note that I didn’t publish this review there, where you would see ads for those cool products, and I published it here, where there’s just one ad over there on the sidebar if you’re on a desktop and down below if you’re on mobile. So yeah – if you want to give me money over there, I’m totally down to sell you stuff. But that’s clearly not why I wrote it. (But seriously, Tudorcon was awesome. Since I have your attention anyways, here’s a video of this year’s!)].
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Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  one of the longest running indie history podcasts, going since 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. She writes books, created the original Tudor Planner (a yearly diary filled with Tudor history) and in 2019 created the world's first Tudorcon (you can "attend" online this year!). She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 20 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history.