Q & A with Robin Maxwell

Why do you think that almost 500 years after Anne Boleyn’s death she still provokes such strong feelings and emotions? Why does she polarize people?

I don’t think most people stop to think about what a rare individual Anne was for her time.  An especially rare woman.  In the early 16th century, women — even highborn women, as well as princesses and queens — were simply chattel – breeders to be bought and sold by their fathers to enrich the family coffers and carry on the bloodline through male heirs.  They were not valued for anything more than that.

Now here comes the commoner, Anne Boleyn, brought up in the licentious court of Francois I. She not only learns the politics of sex (how women were treated if they kept their virginity before marriage, like Queen Claude, and how they were treated when they whored around, like her sister Mary) but she gets an education in the “New” Religion, Lutheranism, which is highly heretical, from the most forward-thinking woman in the French Court, Francois’ sister, the Duchess Marguerite.  Finally, she falls in love with a young nobleman, Henry Percy, and they decide that they are going to marry each other (screw their families’ wishes).  Anne Boleyn, still a teenager, has just broken every cardinal rule of personhood and woman by the time she returns to the English court.  She has thoughts, ideas and opinions of her own.  She is interested and pursuing a heretical religion.  And she has decided her own fate regarding her love life.

Then Henry VIII falls obsessively in love with her.  Has to have her.  Will move mountains (and allow himself to be excommunicated from the Catholic Church) to have her.  He is already a very scary guy  Everybody grovels at his feet.  Nobody stands up to him, even Cardinal Wolsey.  Nobody except Anne Boleyn.  She has him wrapped around her little finger (sorry for the cliche, but it really fits here).  He takes advice from her about matters of state policy, driving his advisors mad with jealousy. He puts up with her not sleeping with him for SIX YEARS when he is used to women falling at his feet.  She turns the most beloved prince of Catholicism on to Lutheranism.  In his desperation to marry her he breaks with Rome, divorces Catherine of Aragon (a most beloved queen and his wife of 18 years) and puts to death a slew of some of the most popular men (like Thomas More) because they don’t support his marriage to Anne or his crowning himself the Pope of the new Church of England.  And let us not forget that in all of this Anne defies her father (the coldest, most ambitious, nasty sonofabitch at court, other than her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk) and rises to a position far above either of them when she becomes queen (are they pissed off!).

THEN Anne, who has promised Henry up and down that she’ll have a son (one of themain reasons he wanted her), has a daughter and three miscarriages.  Once she falls out of favor with Henry, the vultures move in and plot her downfall.  And the old adage that “history is written by the victors” has never been truer in the case of Anne Boleyn.  Almost all of what we know of her life is seen through the lens of contemporary writers who hated this women (even if they were sympathetic, they didn’t DARE to show it because Henry was still alive.  And you don’t write anything a king like Henry disapproves of unless you want your head stuck up on a pole on London Bridge.  All subsequent histories about Anne and the period are based on those contemporary accounts, and some of them are written during the Victorian age, when a woman like Anne would have been equally frowned upon.

In a nutshell, the reason there is so much poison spewed out against Anne Boleyn is that she was the most uppity and outrageous woman of her time, and at the moment that Henry VIII was the most controlling man, she was the only person who controlled HIM.  It’s my personal opinion that in all human interactions, everything comes down to “control issues,” and the control scenario between Anne, Henry and his courtiers was SO turned-on-its-head, that she ended up with the worst reputation of any woman in the history of England.  And in my estimation, it is completely undeserved.

I often think about Anne Boleyn and among other things, I wonder what she would have sounded like, how tall she was and what she would have thought of our ‘modern’ society.  What are some of the questions that you ask yourself about Anne?

The one that I asked myself the most is, “Did you ever love Henry VIII?”  I don’t believe she did in the beginning, because she was genuinely in love with Henry Percy, and I think the King and Wolsey tearing them from each other ripped her heart out.  She was put in the position of either giving in to the most powerful man in her world, or “dissing” him (not a very smart thing to do).  So she found another solution — play him at his own game.  Eventually, after many years, with him moving those mountains I mentioned to have her as his wife, I think she must have become fond of him, but I wonder if she ever REALLY was in love with him.

Your novels are rich in detail and meticulously researched. Do you feel that the facts constrain your writing in any way? Or do they assist you in your creativity?

Mostly they assist me — especially in the Tudor era, because there are just enough facts (and many of them very juicy), but not too many.  I use what I call “filling the holes in history” to write my novels.  Of course I must always remember that there were “spin doctors” back then writing the history, who had to be careful what they said, or who had a very strong bias.   The best example of a biased reporter was one of the few contemporary observers of the Anne/Henry Percy/Henry VIII situation that wrote about it.   His name was Cavendish and his famous quote about Anne — “That leggy girl yonder in the court” is oft repeated in historical fiction novels and movies.  I think I even heard it in “The Tudors.”  But Cavendish was the loyal servant of Cardinal Wolsey, who was one of Anne’s earliest and most virulent enemies.  So you’ve got to figure that his perspective of that leggy girl was not going to be very flattering.  And like I said, his was one of the only reports from that period.

As a writer of historical fiction I relish those “holes in history.”  If I have facts on either side of that hole (picture a chasm with cliffs on either side), then I take what I have and EXTRAPOLATE what probably happened, or was said by the characters involved.  The best example is the chapter in SECRET DIARY OF ANNE BOLEYN when Anne is already in the Tower of London, arrested for treason.  She still hopes Henry will bail her out.  She gets a visitor and it’s her one friend, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, whom she’s very glad to see, but who has come with a grim task. He’s brought with him a paper that Henry wants her to sign basically saying that Elizabeth is a bastard — the one thing Anne worked the entire previous 10 years to avoid — so that Henry can feel good about marrying Jane Seymour.  We know that Cranmer went to her Tower cell with the document, and we know that he came out with her signature on it.  But we don’t know what exactly went on between the two friends who had plotted to bring the “New Religion” to England, and who dearly loved each other as people.  So my imagination, what I know about human psychology and all the facts I did have about these two people were put to use as I wrote that scene.  To date, it’s one of my proudest achievements.

In SIGNORA DA VINCI, I knew exactly three facts about Leonardo’s mother Caterina (who was the protagonist), but I knew quite a lot about her son’s character and about the period and other characters (like Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de’ Medici), so I did a HUGE extrapolation job on that one.  Again, that book is one of my best, and Caterina one of my favorite “creations.”

Your novel, To the Tower Born, is about the disappearance of the young York Princes. What do you believe really happened to them?

If you don’t mind, I’d rather not say, as my solution is original and, I think, very plausible.  I’d prefer it if your readers read the book and find out for themselves.

When I read well researched, richly detailed novels with complex characters and intricate story lines I ask myself how did the author do it? Did it start with an idea or a character? Do you plan the story from start to end or simply let it evolve as you write? Could you share with us a little about your writing process?

Unlike some writers I know who start on page one and let their noses guide them to the finish, I plot everything out in detail before.  The former method would terrify me, and I don’t know how those other authors do it.  I generally start out with a concept:  “In the first year of her reign, Elizabeth I is given her mother’s secret diary to read that tells the story of Anne Boleyn’s and Henry VIII’s fateful affair, and from her reading of it, Elizabeth’s life is forever changed.”  Or “Did Elizabeth I and Robert Dudley really have a bastard child named Arthur Dudley, who grew up to be an English spy, later imprisoned by Phillip II of Spain the year before the Spanish Armada?”  Or “What actually happened to the York Princes?”  Or  “Who was Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, and what influence did she have on her genius son’s life during the Golden Age of the Italian Renaissance?”  Or “What were Anne and Mary Boleyn’s early lives in the French court really like, and what lessons did they learn?”  Or “Who was Grace O’Malley and how did she become Elizabeth I’s arch rival and the “Mother of the Irish Rebellion?”

Then I do the research (so much of it is done at this stage) and I write a long – up to 85 page – detailed, chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the book — soup to nuts.

Then when I sit down to write the actual manuscript, it’s quite easy.  I just flesh out with detail, dialogue and psychological motivation, what I have already outlined.  While many times I stray from my original proposal (and many times characters take on lives of their own and write themselves with dialogue and action that surprises the hell out of me) I never have to worry about how the story is going to end.  I know what the plot twists are, the character arcs, the climax and resolution, right from the get-go.  It takes a lot of worry out of the writing process.  The hardest thing for me is coming up with an original idea, or a great twist on an oft-told story.

Are you presently working on any Tudor books?

No.  For the moment I’ve left historical fiction altogether, though it’s a fabulous genre, and I’m sure I’ll be back writing in it some day again.

If you were only allowed a few lines in which to describe Anne Boleyn to her daughter, Elizabeth. What would you say?

“Your mother was a fabulous, courageous woman ahead of her time, completely misunderstood, who inspired jealousy in everyone because she was the only person that Henry VIII listened to for six of the most important years of his life.  When you were born a girl, while your father was furious, your mother didn’t care.  She loved you and  fought to keep you with her at court, even though it was frowned upon (she and Henry had a huge fight about this, and it was at a time when she was already in trouble with your father for giving birth to a girl).  She LOVED you and it’s a shame that you believed all those horrible things everyone said about her, and that it took you till you were 26 to even speak her name out loud.  It’s a good thing you changed your mind about her and started wearing a ring with her miniature in it, and began treating your Boleyn relatives with respect.  Your mother would have been proud of you at the beginning of your reign when you carried on her “uppity woman” tradition, but she would have cringed to see how you became like your murderous father in old age and slaughtered half the population of Ireland in your attempts to control it.”

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak to your readers, Natalie.  They were great questions!

For more information on Robin Maxwell visit her official website here.