Books: Dear Anne Boleyn ...

• Share

THE LOVE LETTERS OF HENRY VIII (I 12 pp.)—Edifed by Henry Savage—University of Denver ($3.50).

Henry VIII had six wives and a horde of mistresses, but none of them apparently did he love so fiercely as high-spirited Anne Boleyn. With other women he was the imperious monarch, but with her he was sometimes reduced to nail-biting anxiety.

He wrote love letters to her (mostly in French) in his own round hand—and 17 of them mysteriously disappeared. History's assumption: they were stolen and smuggled out of England by Henry's political enemies. In any event, they soon turned up at the Vatican, to be exhibited as evidence that rebellious Henry had misbehaved while still married to wife No. i, Katherine of Aragon. Now, with the political issues cooled by some 400 years, Editor-Historian Henry Savage has gotten Vatican permission to publish them, along with a few other extant letters between Henry and his several wives.

Anne kept Henry in suspense. "I beseech you now with all my heart," he formally wrote her, "definitely to let me know your whole mind as to the love between us ... necessity compels me to plague you for a reply." He was ready to be Anne's alone, "casting off all others." Though he could never forget that he was King, and usually wrote with royal restraint, sometimes, during separations, he wrote her as warmly as any other 16th Century swain, e.g., ". . . Wishing myself (especially of an evening) in my sweetheart's arms, whose pretty duckies I trust shortly to kiss . . ." The real trouble with Henry as a writer of love letters: his emotions always turned out to be so unstable.

Six years after he married her, Henry had Anne's head chopped off, and he began writing more sedate love letters to wife No. 3, Jane Seymour.