ABSTRACT
Nicholas Sander has the reputation of the slanderer of Anne Boleyn par excellence. In his notorious history of the English reformation, The Rise and Growth of the English Schism, first published posthumously in 1585 and best known as De schismate Anglicano,1 he depicted her as a strange combination of the attractive and the grotesque, sexually voracious and physically deformed, with six fingers on her right hand, a fly-away tooth and a disfiguring lump on her throat. Her downfall came about when she gave birth to a ‘shapeless mass of flesh’, and then chose promiscuity in a desperate bid to provide Henry with a male heir. These claims have been regularly tossed about by historians and biographers, most sensationally by Retha Warnicke who constructed an entire theory of witchcraft and sodomy around the myth of the ‘deformed’ foetus.2 Her view has been generally discredited, but Sander has been recently described as the author of a ‘host of … calumnies’, a ‘Jesuit’ and a ‘Catholic propagandist’; at the very least, too interested an observer to be a reliable historian.3 Yet much modern historiography, beginning with Nicholas Pocock and A. F. Pollard, has treated him with more respect: Pocock
(who had ample opportunity) confessed that the closer he studied Sander’s work, the more he came to credit his authority. It is profitable, then, to attend to his portrait of Henry, the most formative in the English Catholic imagination through several centuries.4
