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 The Afterlife of
Anne Boleyn
Representations of
Anne Boleyn in Fiction
and on the Screen

Stephanie Russo
 Queenship and Power

Series Editors
Charles E. Beem
University of North Carolina
Pembroke, NC, USA

Carole Levin
University of Nebraska
Lincoln, NE, USA
This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women's stud-
ies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and dip-
lomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies
that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents—pur-
sued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-­
dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well as
many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa,
and Islamic civilization.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14523
 Stephanie Russo

The Afterlife of Anne

Boleyn
Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction
and on the Screen
Stephanie Russo
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW, Australia

ISSN 2730-938X        ISSN 2730-9398 (electronic)

Queenship and Power
ISBN 978-3-030-58612-6    ISBN 978-3-030-58613-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For
Alessio Sebastian Russo
Whose story is just beginning
 Acknowledgements

This project has been long, exhausting, surprising, strange and fantastic. I
now have more Tudor novels than I know what to do with, and a serious
storage problem. To Anne Boleyn: thank you for giving me the best aca-
demic project of my life. You asked that your story be treated kindly. I
hope that I have done that.
One of the most pleasant parts of this project has been meeting my new
friend, Marian Kensler, who runs the excellent Boleyn Books website.
Marian is the real Anne Boleyn expert; I feel very much like an impostor
following in her wake. Marian has been the most enthusiastic and gener-
ous reader of my work, and I am completely in her debt for the interest she
has taken in this book since the beginning. I am entirely certain that she
will find at least three new Anne Boleyn books the day after I submit this
manuscript.
Thank you to my excellent research assistant, Sebastian Sparrevohn,
who now knows more than he ever wanted to about Anne Boleyn. I told
you this project was weird.
Thank you to Associate Professor Hsu-Ming Teo, who is truly my soul-
mate in trash and who provided an extremely valuable suggestion that has
made this book much better. Thanks are also extended to my high-flying
friend Dr Alys Moody for her perceptive help and support right from the
beginning of this project. Thanks are also extended to my other colleagues
in the Macquarie University Department of English for their collegiality
and insights.
My writing group has also consistently provided excellent advice and
put up with me talking about Anne Boleyn over chicken schnitzel and

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

margarita bowls for hours: thanks to Dr Ellie Crookes, Dr Kirstin Mills,

Hilary Locke, Dr Sabina Rahman and Dr Helen Rystrand. Thanks are also
extended to my friends and colleagues for their ongoing support: Dr
Michelle Hamadache, Dr Jimmy Van, Dr Roberta Kwan, Merril Howie,
Daniel Carrigy, Dr Daozhi Xu, Dr Aiyana Altrows, Dr Hélène Sirantoine,
Dr Marina Gerzic, Dr Kylie Mirmohamadi, Dr Kelly Gardiner, Dr
Catherine Padmore, Jacqui Grainger, Associate Professor Clare Monagle,
Professor Malcolm Choat, Dr Rachel Yuen-Collingridge and Dr Laura
Saxton. Thanks to Professors Jerome de Groot and Sharon Ruston for
saying nice things about my work in its early days. Thanks to Natalie
Grueninger for letting me come on her Talking Tudors podcast and talk
about Anne Boleyn fiction.
Thanks to the Faculty of Arts PACE team for the snacks and for giving
my coats the attention they deserve.
To my students, thanks for thinking I am sometimes a tiny bit cool.
To Mischa Parkee, the best bookseller and primary school teacher in
Australia, thanks for flying the flag for women’s writing.
The staff at the Macquarie University Library have been extremely gen-
erous with their time, even though my constant requests for obscure
Inter-Library Loans must surely have tried their patience. I am also
indebted to the Macquarie University Faculty of Arts Research Office,
who supported this project with an Outside Studies Program and a Mid-­
Career Fellowship Grant, as well as a Publication Subsidy Grant.
Special thanks are extended to Dr Estelle Paranque. Her edited collec-
tion, Remembering Queens and Kings, is the reason why I wrote this book
in the first place. Royal studies scholars have been so warm and inviting as
I have stepped into this new (to me) field. Thanks to Dr Elena Woodacre,
Dr Valerie Schutte, Dr Jessica Hower and Dr Zita Rohr, in particular.
Thank you to the Palgrave Macmillan Queenship and Power team,
especially Professor Carole Levin and Megan Laddusaw. Thank you to
Beth Nauman-Montana for her work on the index to this book.
Work coming out of this project has been published in the following
journals: a/B: Auto/Biography Studies, Parergon, Clio and Girlhood Studies.
Thanks to Professor Susan Broomhall for being such a pleasure to work
with at Parergon. Thanks also to Dr Ann Smith at Girlhood Studies for
being so lovely.
Work coming out of this project will also appear in the upcoming The
Routledge Companion to Love, and I extend my thanks to Professor Ann
Brooks for her kind invitation to take part. This project also informed my
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

forthcoming chapter on the afterlives of the Tudor consorts, to be included

in the Tudor and Stuart Consorts edition of the English Consorts: Power,
Influence, Dynasty project. Thanks to Dr Aidan Norrie for his assistance
with this project.
Thank you to Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss for writing Six and to the
fantastic Australian cast (in particular, Kala Gare, who plays Anne). It’s
absurd that a fantastic musical about the subject of this project came out
while I was writing it; we should all be so blessed.
Thank you to Meghan Markle and Beyoncé, our true queens.
Bow down.
My extended thanks are due to my kind and patient editor, Mr Lance
Branwell, who hates almost all the texts I discuss in this book and thinks
that almost none of them should have been written (with the exception of
Six). Sorry for reacting badly when you told me to do the thing that I later
did when Hsu-Ming told me to do it.
Thank you to my parents, Carmelo and Lorraine Russo, for their sup-
port over all these years. My nephew Alessio has provided the best possible
distraction from all things Boleyn; thanks for coming along at just the
right time and being so irresistibly cute.
 Contents

1 The It Girl of Tudor England  1

2 Anne Boleyn in the Sixteenth Century 21

3 Anne Boleyn in the Seventeenth Century 49

4 Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century 71

5 Anne Boleyn in Nineteenth-Century Historical Fiction101

6 Anne Boleyn on the Nineteenth-Century Stage131

7 Anne Boleyn from 1900 to 1950153

8 Anne Boleyn from 1950 to 2000181

9 Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Historical

Fiction209

10 Anne Boleyn in Twenty-First-Century Transgeneric

Fiction239

xi
xii CONTENTS

11 Anne Boleyn in Film and Television267

12 Conclusion293

Appendix297

Index305
 CHAPTER 1

The It Girl of Tudor England

Almost everybody knows something about Anne Boleyn or thinks that

they do. She was the motivation behind Henry VIII’s break from the
Church of Rome. She enthralled the King so deeply that he was prepared
to wait years to make her his Queen (or to get her into his bed). She slept
with her brother. She slept with hundreds of men. She was asexual. She
was a witch. She had a sixth finger and an unsightly deformation on her
neck. She was sexually irresistible. She would do anything for power. She
was a martyr. She was a sinner. She was a sexual harassment victim. She was
the original femme fatale. She was a proto-feminist icon. There are as
many Anne Boleyns as there are tellers of her story.
There are few English queens—indeed, few women in history—whose
biographies have been as contested as that of Anne Boleyn. Even to this
day, almost nothing about Anne Boleyn is agreed upon by either historians
or novelists, from facts such as the year of her birth (1501 or 1507/08),
to more vexed questions about how to interpret her reign and her down-
fall. Given that almost everything about the life, reign and death of Anne
Boleyn has become a matter for debate, it is not surprising that she has
become a favourite subject of novelists, poets, playwrights and, more
recently, producers of movies, television shows and popular musicals. The
elasticity of her story provides great imaginative latitude for historical fic-
tion. Anne Boleyn’s life is just remote enough to render it a colourful
subject for historical fiction, yet its very familiarity renders it strangely
comforting. Even a schoolchild can remember the old rhyme

© The Author(s) 2020 1

S. Russo, The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn, Queenship and Power,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58613-3_1
2 S. RUSSO

“divorced-beheaded-died-divorced-beheaded-survived” and place Anne

Boleyn in her position as the scandalous second wife. Beyond the fact of
her coronation and execution, however, the real Anne Boleyn remains lost
to history, unable to inscribe any kind of coherent narrative on the bare
facts of her life. Indeed, there is so much room for interpretative latitude
that her story can lapse into incoherence: so various are the Anne Boleyns
that we have access to, it is hard to ascertain what actually happened and
what it means. Even Shakespeare seems confused: his Anne Boleyn is vari-
ously a devout and modest woman, and a sexual temptress who engages in
double-entendre-laden banter. The constructedness of history and the
impact of the subjective vantage point of the teller on our understanding
of historical truth are rarely as transparent as when any attempt is made to
impose coherent meaning on the story of Anne Boleyn.
Some have attributed the ongoing fascination of Anne Boleyn, and the
temptation to reinscribe her into literature and culture, to the elemental
or universal qualities of her narrative. In her account of the development
of the mythology of Anne Boleyn, for example, Susan Bordo argues
that the

story of her rise and fall is as elementally satisfying – and scriptwise, not very
different from – a Lifetime movie: a long-suffering, postmenopausal wife; an
unfaithful husband and a clandestine affair with a younger, sexier woman; a
moment of glory for the mistress; then lust turned to loathing, plotting, and
murder as the cycle comes full circle.1

The recognisable, satisfying cycle that Bordo recognises here, quite apart
from its purported resemblance to a Lifetime movie, perhaps accounts for
the deluge of Tudor fiction that began to appear from the mid-twentieth
century onwards.2 Other scholars have affirmed the seemingly timeless
nature of the story of Boleyn’s rise and fall, with Julie Crane seeing a link
between that narrative and medieval morality plays. She writes that the
story of Anne Boleyn seems to be “a confirmation that the wheel of for-
tune was still turning, capriciously, dealing out favours as carelessly as the

1
Susan Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious
Queen (Boston: Mariner Books, 2014), xiii.
2
Steve Donoghue hyperbolically complains that “somewhere in the world, a new Tudor
novel is being written every 1.3 minutes”: an exaggeration, no doubt, but one that feels not
far away from the truth. Steve Donoghue, “From the Archives: Extravagant Things,” Open
Letters Monthly, August 2017, http://openlettersmonthly.com/july08-extravagant-things/
 1 THE IT GIRL OF TUDOR ENGLAND 3

condemned Queen had been accused of doing.”3 However understand-

able the impulse to universalise Boleyn’s story might be, these attempts
mostly fail to account for the very historic specificity of Boleyn’s narrative.
Part of Boleyn’s appeal is surely her specific place within the court of
Henry VIII and the rupture with the Catholic Church that Henry’s desire
to take her as his wife precipitated. How can we account for a woman who
apparently had so much sexual and emotional appeal she had the power to
cleave King and country from the control of the Catholic Church, yet
whose downfall was so complete she became the first English queen con-
sort to face the executioner? What is clear is that no matter how the details
of Anne Boleyn’s life and death are interpreted, whether she is the univer-
sal “other woman” or the powerless Tudor queen consort caught up in
the web of a psychopathic, tyrannical king, she continues to speak to us as
an avatar of feminine power and sexuality. Indeed, one might apply Joseph
Roach’s concept of “it” to Anne: she has “the power of apparently effort-
less embodiment of contradictory qualities simultaneously: strength and
vulnerability, innocence and experience, and singularity and typicality
among them.”4 It is perhaps that ability to hold together contradictory
meanings that has ensured the durability of her image as historical actor
and celebrity. Anne can simultaneously be femme fatale and victim, preda-
tor and prey, religious reformer and cynic.
Like most women of history, the immediate posthumous reputation of
Anne Boleyn was largely inscribed by men whose religious and political
interests shaped their interpretations of her personality, her relationship
with Henry VIII, and the causes of her downfall. As the woman who
prompted the English Reformation, insofar as the King’s “great matter”
was the immediate cause of the split from the Vatican, Anne was useful to
Protestants as a martyr to the reformist cause.5 She appears in John Foxe’s
3
Julie Crane, “Whoso List to Hunt: The Literary Fortunes of Anne Boleyn,” in The
Female Figure in Contemporary Historical Fiction, ed. K. Cooper and E. Short (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 76 (76–91).
4
Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 8.
5
Historians have disagreed about the nature of Boleyn’s religious convictions. Maria
Dowling has written that “extensive evidence points to her personal piety and her protection
and advancement of evangelicals, besides her use of radical theology as a political weapon”
(Maria Dowling, “Anne Boleyn and Reform,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35, no. 1
[1984]: 30). However, G.W. Bernard claims that she was much more conventional in her
faith, arguing that “what she revealed in the Tower through her belief in good works and her
attachment to the sacraments was a deeply conventional Catholicism” (G.W. Bernard, “Anne
Boleyn’s Religion,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 1 [1993]: 20). E.W. Ives instead claims
4 S. RUSSO

The Acts and Monuments of the Church (known colloquially as Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs), first published in 1563, in which she is deified as one of the
martyrs of Protestantism.6 However, Anne’s commitment to religious
reform, whatever its degree, was also convenient as a tool for Catholic
propagandists as they could attribute what they saw as the blame for the
Reformation to her pernicious sexual influence over Henry. If the
Reformation was about Henry’s sexual urges, rather than any genuine
religious conviction, then the case against the schism was manifestly easier
to prosecute. Moreover, one of the few contemporary sources about Anne
is the correspondence of the staunchly Catholic Spanish ambassador,
Eustace Chapuys, a personal friend of both Queen Catherine and Princess
Mary. In these dispatches, Anne is frequently referred to as “the concu-
bine.” Nicholas Sanders’s The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism
(1573) is perhaps the most significant example of such polemic. It is in this
text that some of the most notorious myths about Anne arose: namely,
that she had a goitre on her chin and an extra finger, and, most startling,
that she was actually Henry’s daughter through an affair that he had had
with her mother, Elizabeth Boleyn.7 Anne’s sexual appeal, and her per-
ceived errant sexuality, has always been at the centre of her fascination, and
so the most convenient means by which Sanders, can attack her is to cast
doubt on that appeal. Sanders could account for Anne’s sexual hold over
the King, despite physical deformities that would have been understood in
the early modern period to indicate moral and/or sexual degeneracy,
because of the rumours of witchcraft that have swirled around her since
the sixteenth century, despite the fact that Anne was never actually tried
for witchcraft. That Anne has been unable to elude charges of witchcraft,
even in contexts where the connotations of “witch” have shifted signifi-
cantly, is borne out by the fact that J.K. Rowling has her portrait appear in

that any attempts to assign a label on Boleyn’s reformist tendencies is impossible as “early
reform was an orientation, a matter of heart, not of creedal statements and defined catego-
ries,” but also summaries her religious convictions as “reformist, bible-based, humanist,
Francophile, committed” (Eric Ives, “Anne Boleyn and the Early Reformation in England:
The Contemporary Evidence,” The Historical Journal 37, no. 2 (1994): 393). The debate
over the nature and extent to which Boleyn was an evangelical is an excellent example of how
contested almost every detail of her life has been.
6
John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (Sheffield: HRI Online
Publications, 2011).
7
Nicholas Sanders, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, ed. David Lewis (London:
Burns and Oates, 1877).
 1 THE IT GIRL OF TUDOR ENGLAND 5

the corridor of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter series—a magical forerunner

to the contemporary students.
Since her execution on 19 May 1536, Anne’s life and body has been a
site upon which competing religious, political and sexual ideologies have
been inscribed—a practice that continues to this day. In her 2017 Reith
Lectures, Hilary Mantel, author of the award-winning historical novels
Wolf Hall (2009), Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the
Light (2020), in which Anne plays a key role, addressed the ongoing fas-
cination of the story of Anne Boleyn, arguing that “you can tell the story
and tell it. Put it through hundreds of iterations. But still, there seems to
be a piece of the puzzle missing.”8 The story of the rise and fall of Anne
Boleyn, Mantel suggests, is so fundamentally strange and compelling that
it resists inscription, even as it has been constantly revisited and reinter-
preted by historian and novelist alike. That sense that there is something
to the story that remains undiscovered, Mantel argues, accounts for the
seemingly endless drive to provide the “answer” to the problem of Anne
Boleyn. Of course, we can also account for the persistence of interest in
Anne to the evergreen interest in the lives of royalty. However, Anne’s
appeal does seem to transcend the appeal generated by other queens, and
even other Henrician queens. Katherine Howard, for example, has not
elicited the amount of interest as Anne Boleyn, even though they met the
same grizzly end. As Sarah Gristwood has recently argued, too, the six-
teenth century boasts no shortage of queens who were able to exercise
political power in a variety of ways, but none has had anywhere near the
posthumous glamour or appeal of Anne Boleyn.9 The image of a woman
raised high, only to be (literally) cut down, is one that has had uneasy reso-
nance across centuries, and there is something specific about the precise
iteration of Anne’s rise and fall that continues to speak to contemporary
audiences. In an age that purports to be socially progressive, yet still exhib-
its an obvious unease with the relationship of women to power, especially
when that story is refracted through sex, Anne’s story seems to take on
ever more symbolic weight.
This book is the story of those hundreds of iterations of Anne Boleyn.
It attempts to account for the myriad literary representations of Anne

8
Hilary Mantel, “The BBC Reith Lectures: The Day Is for the Living,” BBC, 2017,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp
9
Sarah Gristwood, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe
(Philadelphia: Basic Books, 2016).
6 S. RUSSO

Boleyn that have appeared across the centuries in order to trace the way
that she has become a symbol for a variety of conflicting ideas about
women and power. This book takes as its focus literary and screen repre-
sentations of Anne Boleyn, and thus academic and popular historical
accounts are included only where they directly shape subsequent literary
representations. Retha Warnicke’s work on Anne Boleyn, for example, has
an unmistakeable influence on the novels of Philippa Gregory, which I
discuss in Chap. 9.10 There are many novels in which Anne Boleyn appears
as either a major or a minor character, with more appearing every year. In
order to manage this immense corpus of material, I take as my focus only
those texts in which Anne appear as a major character in her own right,
and have excluded those novels in which she appears as a minor character
in narratives about her daughter’s reign. As I will show, Anne Boleyn has
also become something of an icon for the social media age, and Anne
Boleyn fanfiction has become increasingly popular, especially in the wake
of Natalie Dormer’s sexually charged portrayal of Anne in the Showtime
television series, The Tudors. I have not included Anne Boleyn fanfiction in
this volume, although I have included a wide range of self-­published mate-
rial. While I have endeavoured to cover most texts that imaginatively con-
struct Anne from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the chapters
that deal with twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature are necessarily
incomplete accounts, due to the sheer volume of the corpus.11 I have
selected key texts and patterns that have shaped the literary afterlife of
Anne Boleyn or those which are particularly interesting in the way in
which they treat the intersection of gender, sex, religion and power. I have
also excluded a consideration of stage productions of Anne’s story; while
I do explore dramatic representations of Anne, I focus on plays as they are
written, rather than in performance. For practical reasons, I have had to
focus on Anglophone writings about Anne and have also excluded any
consideration of Anne’s representation in opera and music (although I do
briefly consider the pop musical Six in the Conclusion to this volume).
This volume moves chronologically through the history of representations
of Anne Boleyn, as historical fictions increasingly look back at earlier

10
Retha Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry
VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
11
I have included an Appendix at the back of this volume listing all known twentieth- and
twenty-first-century fictional treatments of Anne’s life.
 1 THE IT GIRL OF TUDOR ENGLAND 7

fictions about Anne, and so any other organisation of the material would
be incoherent.
In my analysis of the literature about Anne Boleyn, I have made refer-
ence to historical consensus regarding her life, but this volume does not
advance a particular “case” as to what accounts for her spectacular rise and
fall. While Susan Bordo’s The Creation of Anne Boleyn, for instance, tests
what Bordo terms the “mythology” against either the historical record or
her own impressionistic sense of what Anne must have been like, this book
maintains that Anne is essentially unknowable and that no account of her
personality is any more authoritative than the next.12 I have, however,
taken as a given the by-now widely accepted view that she was innocent of
the specific charges of adultery and incest laid against her at her trial.
Rather than re-litigating historical fact, this volume is interested in Anne’s
role in the collective memory of the Anglophone world. As Jan Assmann
and John Czaplicka write, “which past becomes evident in that [cultural]
heritage and which values emerge in its identificatory appropriation tells
us much about the constitution and tendencies of a society.”13 This book,
therefore, in excavating Anne’s place in the collective memory of Tudor
England, is less interested in historical “fact” than the means by which
history is put to use for a range of social, cultural, political and ideological
ends. While studies of the afterlife of Henry, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen
of Scots exist, this book is, somewhat surprisingly, the first full-length aca-
demic study of literary and cultural representations of Anne Boleyn.14
There is no end of studies that attempt to parse historical fact from legend,
but this volume does not seek to chart a path between history and fiction.
Instead, I take as my central point of concern the generation and re-­
articulation of these very myths, in the belief that the mythology around
Anne Boleyn is perhaps even more interesting, revealing and instructive
than the woman herself.

12
Bordo, The Creation of Anne Boleyn: A New Look at England’s Most Notorious Queen.
13
Jan Assmann and John Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New
German Critique 65 (1995): 133.
14
Mark Rankin, Christopher Highley, and John N. King, Henry VIII and His Afterlives:
Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2009); Thomas Betteridge
and Thomas S. Freeman, Henry VIII and History (Farnham: Ashgate, 2002); Nicola
J. Watson and Michael Dobson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jayne Elizabeth Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots:
Romance and Nation (London: Routledge, 1998).
8 S. RUSSO

Chapter 2, “Anne Boleyn in the Sixteenth Century” traces some of the

earliest early modern literary representations of Anne Boleyn, focusing
especially on the sonnets of her contemporary Thomas Wyatt, as well as
poetry and prose written about Anne during the reigns of Mary I and
Elizabeth I. Anne Boleyn’s first appearances in literature were as vexed and
variable as the historical accounts. The extent to which she appears as a
subject of Petrarchan devotion in the sonnets of Thomas Wyatt is still a
matter of critical debate.15 I argue that these poems, in which she appears
as the enticing, but untouchable icon of courtly devotion, have had a for-
mative role in later literary representations of the Queen.16 While Wyatt’s
Anne Boleyn might be the epitome of the courtly love-object, she is also
consistently associated with violence: the world surrounding the crown is
beset by dangers so that the adoration of even the most exalted of lovers
is no guarantee of safety. The image of Anne, then, has always been con-
tradictory and beset by conflicting understandings of what it is to be
desired by royalty: the sexual interest she elicits in the King is the means
by which she will be elevated above all others, but the very nature of roy-
alty means that her role as queen is always under threat.
In Chap. 3, “Anne Boleyn in the Seventeenth Century,” I turn to dra-
matic accounts of the life and death of Anne. While writing about Anne no
longer had the same vexed political status as it did during the previous
century, the seventeenth century is notable for its lack of representations
of Anne. An unusual strategy also emerged in the seventeenth century, in
which Anne’s story was dramatised by stealth: writers told stories that
clearly resembled Anne’s narrative, but were putatively “about” other
women. Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam is one such text, in
which Anne’s story is disguised under a Biblical tale. This chapter also
considers William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Henry VIII, which is
unusual in that it presents us with a largely flat, unremarkable image of
Anne, especially in comparison to the dynamic portrait of Catherine of

15
Richard Harrier has limited the poems which reference Anne Boleyn to three, for exam-
ple (Richard Harrier, The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry [Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975]), while Retha Warnicke argues that the only clear reference to Boleyn
occurs in the poem “Whoso List to Hunt” (Retha M. Warnicke, “The Eternal Triangle and
Court Politics: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and Sir Thomas Wyatt,” Albion: A Quarterly
Journal Concerned with British Studies 18, no. 4 [1986]: 572).
16
Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson, Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 1969).
 1 THE IT GIRL OF TUDOR ENGLAND 9

Aragon, who dominates the play.17 However, while Anne Boleyn is not the
emotional centre of Henry VIII, the play concludes with Cranmer proph-
esying the accession of Elizabeth and her Protestant regime. Shakespeare
and Fletcher, as well as Wyatt, align Henry with David, and thus, despite
her near invisibility, Anne Boleyn becomes a Bathsheba figure, tempting
the King away from religiosity to pleasurable excess. However, it is also
Anne who secures England’s destiny as a Protestant nation. The complex,
contradictory nature of these representations of Anne Boleyn suggests a
profound ambivalence about both Henry VIII as King and the role of
Anne Boleyn in his reign. The disjunction inherent within this image of
Anne Boleyn as simultaneously religious reformer and sexual temptress
reveals much about the fragility of English Protestantism at the time and
suggests the ongoing inability to fully account for her hold on the histori-
cal imagination.
Chapter 4, “Anne Boleyn in the Long Eighteenth Century,” charts the
movement away from religious polemic towards a focus on the emotional
and affective in representations of Anne. John Banks’s Vertue Betray’d
(1682) exemplifies the tendency for religious polemicists to use Anne as a
propagandistic tool: as the title suggests, this play represents Boleyn as an
entirely virtuous, pious, innocent victim.18 The way that Anne was used in
late seventeenth-century drama reflects the tumultuous political circum-
stances of the era. However, the eighteenth century marked the period of
the rise of the novel and, accordingly, there was a developing recognition
of the capacity of literature to convey a measure of psychological realism.
Women writers like Madame d’Aulnoy and Sarah Fielding, accordingly,
began to address the question of what it felt like to be Anne Boleyn, and
a more nuanced vision of her lived experience as a woman began to be the
focus of much of the literature. For the first time, too, Henry’s desire for
Anne is conceived of as a problem that Anne had to actively manage. In
these accounts, Henry VIII is often portrayed as a sexual predator, thus
anticipating later feminist readings of the stories of Henry’s wives.19 Sarah
Fielding’s account of Anne Boleyn, which appears as the last chapter in
Henry Fielding’s Journey from This World to the Next (1743), is p ­ articularly

17
William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, King Henry VIII, ed. Gordon McMullan
(London: Arden Shakespeare, 2000).
18
John Banks, Vertue Betray’d: Or, Anna Bullen (London: R. Wellington, 1715).
19
See, for example, Karen Lindsey, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist
Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995).
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Fossil plants,
Vol. 1: [A text-book] for students of botany and
geology
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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eBook.

Title: Fossil plants, Vol. 1: [A text-book] for students of botany

and geology

Author: A. C. Seward

Release date: May 10, 2022 [eBook #68043]

Language: English

Original publication: United Kingdom: Cambridge University

Press, 1898

Credits: Peter Becker, Robert Tonsing and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOSSIL

PLANTS, VOL. 1: [A TEXT-BOOK] FOR STUDENTS OF BOTANY
AND GEOLOGY ***
Cambridge Natural Science Manuals.
Biological Series.
General Editor:—Arthur E. Shipley, M.A.
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF CHRIST’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

F O S S I L P L A N T S.
 London: C. J. CLAY and SONS,
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE,
AVE MARIA LANE,
AND
H. K. LEWIS,
136, GOWER STREET, W.C.

Glasgow: 263, ARGYLE STREET.

Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS.
New York: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Bombay: E. SEYMOUR HALE.
Tree Stumps in a Carboniferous Forest. Victoria Park, Glasgow.
 F OS S I L P L A N T S
FOR STUDENTS OF BOTANY AND GEOLOGY

BY

A. C. SEWARD, M.A., F.G.S.

ST JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
LECTURER IN BOTANY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

VOL. I.

CAMBRIDGE:
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
1898
[All Rights reserved.]
 Cambridge:
PRINTED BY J. AND C. F. CLAY,

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

 PREFACE.
IN acceding to Mr Shipley’s request to write a book on Fossil Plants
for the Cambridge Natural History Series, I am well aware that I have
undertaken a work which was considered too serious a task by one
who has been called a “founder of modern Palaeobotany.” I owe
more than I am able to express to the friendship and guidance of the
late Professor Williamson; and that I have attempted a work to which
he consistently refused to commit himself, requires a word of
explanation. My excuse must be that I have endeavoured to write a
book which may render more accessible to students some of the
important facts of Palaeobotany, and suggest lines of investigation in
a subject which Williamson had so thoroughly at heart.
The subject of Palaeobotany does not readily lend itself to
adequate treatment in a work intended for both geological and
botanical students. The Botanist and Geologist are not always
acquainted with each other’s subject in a sufficient degree to
appreciate the significance of Palaeobotany in its several points of
contact with Geology and recent Botany. I have endeavoured to bear
in mind the possibility that the following pages may be read by both
non-geological and non-botanical students. It needs but a slight
acquaintance with Geology for a Botanist to estimate the value of the
most important applications of Palaeobotany; on the other hand, the
bearing of fossil plants on the problems of phylogeny and descent
cannot be adequately understood without a fairly intimate knowledge
of recent Botany.
The student of elementary geology is not as a rule required to
concern himself with vegetable palaeontology, beyond a general
acquaintance with such facts as are to be found in geological text-
books. The advanced student will necessarily find in these pages
much with which he is already familiar; but this is to some extent
unavoidable in a book which is written with the dual object of
appealing to Botanists and Geologists. While considering those who
may wish to extend their botanical or geological knowledge by an
acquaintance with Palaeobotany, my aim has been to keep in view
the requirements of the student who may be induced to approach the
subject from the standpoint of an original investigator. As a possible
assistance to those undertaking research in this promising field of
work, I have given more references than may seem appropriate to
an introductory treatise, and there are certain questions dealt with in
greater detail than an elementary treatment of the subject requires.
In several instances references are given in the text or in footnotes
to specimens of Coal-Measure plants in the Williamson cabinet of
microscopic sections. Now that this invaluable collection of slides
has been acquired by the Trustees of the British Museum, the
student of Palaeobotany has the opportunity of investigating for
himself the histology of Palaeozoic plants.
My plan has been to deal in some detail with certain selected
types, and to refer briefly to such others as should be studied by
anyone desirous of pursuing the subject more thoroughly, rather than
to cover a wide range or to attempt to make the list of types
complete. Of late years there has been a much wider interest
evinced by Botanists in the study of fossil plants, and this is in great
measure due to the valuable and able work of Graf zu Solms-
Laubach. His Einleitung in die Palaeophytologie must long remain a
constant book of reference for those engaged in palaeobotanical
work. While referring to authors who have advanced the study of
petrified plants of the Coal period, one should not forget the valuable
services that have been rendered by such men as Butterworth,
Binns, Wilde, Earnshaw, Spencer, Nield, Lomax and Hemingway, by
whose skill the specimens described by Williamson and others were
first obtained and prepared for microscopical examination.
I am indebted to many friends, both British and Continental, for
help of various kinds. I would in the first place express my thanks to
Professor T. McKenny Hughes for having originally persuaded me to
begin the study of recent and fossil plants. I am indebted to Prof.
Nathorst of Stockholm, Dr Hartz of Copenhagen, Prof. Zeiller, Dr
Renault and Prof. Munier-Chalmas of Paris, Prof. Bertrand of Lille,
Prof. Stenzel and the late Prof. Roemer of Breslau, Dr Sterzel of
Chemnitz, the late Prof. Weiss of Berlin, the late Dr Stur of Vienna,
and other continental workers, as well as to Mr Knowlton of
Washington, for facilities afforded me in the examination of fossil
plant collections. My thanks are due to the members of the
Geological and Botanical departments of the British Museum; also to
Mr E. T. Newton of the Geological Survey, and to those in charge of
various provincial museums, for their never-failing kindness in
offering me every assistance in the investigation of fossil plants
under their charge. Prof. Marshall Ward has given me the benefit of
his criticism on the section dealing with Fungi; and my friend Mr
Alfred Harker has rendered me a similar service as regards the
chapter on Geological History. I am especially grateful to my
colleague, Mr Francis Darwin, for having read through the whole of
the proofs of this volume. To Mr Shipley, as Editor, I am under a debt
of obligation for suggestions and help in various forms. I would also
express my sense of the unfailing courtesy and skill of the staff of the
University Press.
My friend Mr Kidston of Stirling has always generously responded
to my requests for the loan of specimens from his private collection.
Prof. Bayley Balfour of Edinburgh, Mr Wethered of Cheltenham and
others have assisted me in a similar manner. I would also express
my gratitude to Dr Hoyle of Manchester, Mr Platnauer of York, and
Mr Rowntree of Scarborough for the loan of specimens.
To Dr Henry Woodward of the British Museum I am indebted for
the loan of the woodblocks made use of in figs. 10, 47, 60, 66, and
101, and to Messrs Macmillan for the process-block of fig. 25.
For the photographs reproduced in figs. 15, 34, 68, 102 and 103 I
owe an acknowledgment to Mr Edwin Wilson of Cambridge, and to
my friend Mr C. A. Barber for the micro-photograph made use of in
fig. 40.
In conclusion I wish more particularly to thank my wife, who has
drawn by far the greater number of the illustrations, and has in many
other ways assisted me in the preparation of this Volume.
 In Volume II the Systematic treatment of Plants will be concluded,
and the last chapters will be devoted to such subjects as geological
floras, plants as rock-builders, fossil plants and evolution, and other
general questions connected with Palaeobotany.
A. C. SEWARD.
Botanical Laboratory, Cambridge.
March, 1898.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
———————

PART I. GENERAL.

CHAPTER I.
HISTORICAL SKETCH. Pp. 1–11.

Fossil plants and the Flood. Sternberg and Brongniart. The internal structure of
fossil plants. English Palaeobotanists. Difficulties of identification.

CHAPTER II.
RELATION OF PALAEOBOTANY TO BOTANY AND GEOLOGY. Pp. 12–21.

Neglect of fossils by Botanists. Fossil plants and distribution. Fossil plants and
climate. Fossil plants and phylogeny.

CHAPTER III.
GEOLOGICAL HISTORY. Pp. 22–53.

Rock-building. Calcareous rocks. Geological sections. Inversion of strata. Table of

Strata:
I. Archaean, 34–36. II. Cambrian, 36–37. III. Ordovician, 37–38. IV. Silurian, 38.
V. Devonian, 39. VI. Carboniferous, 39–45. VII. Permian, 45–47. VIII. Trias.,
47–48. IX. Jurassic, 48–49. X. Cretaceous, 50–51. XI. Tertiary, 51–53.
Geological Evolution.

CHAPTER IV.
THE PRESERVATION OF PLANTS AS FOSSILS. Pp. 54–92.

Old surface-soils. Fossil wood. Conditions of fossilisation. Drifting of trees.

Meaning of the term ‘Fossil.’ Incrustations. Casts of trees. Fossil casts. Plants