Sara Eckel | Longreads | June 2018 | 17 minutes (4,267 words)
Sometimes, while out with a friend I’ve known for 10 or 20 years, I’ll pivot on my barstool and ask, “Did I ever mention that I’m a born-again Christian?” The question rarely computes. My close friends know I grew up in an agnostic household, and they’re pretty sure the only Sunday morning activities I leave the house for are yoga and brunch.Some have even heard me casually describe myself as an atheist. Nevertheless, on a bookshelf in my parents’ house, there’s a Bible with an inscription in my loopy 10-year-old handwriting: “Today, I am a born-again Christian.” Below that, the words “Hallelujah!” in a woman’s elegant, slanted script.
***
The ceremony took place at that woman’s house — in my memory, her name is Mrs. Hannah — in the suburb of Cincinnati where my family lived during my grade school years. For my parents, southern Ohio was a six-year tour of duty — just a place where my dad got a job. For my younger brother, it’s barely a memory. But for me, it was where I first encountered the world and where I was repeatedly told I lacked something essential.
“You have a black hole in your soul,” a little boy told me on the way out of kindergarten one day. I walked home and promptly burst into tears in front of my mother.
A 21st-century reader might pause at the idea that I walked home alone from kindergarten, but in 1970s Ohio, there was nothing strange about a free-range 5-year-old. However, our neighbors were appalled that my family didn’t go to church. On the playground one day, I tried to explain it to a group of baffled classmates gathered around me in a semicircle, but it was like saying that we didn’t brush our teeth or eat dinner each night. The kids weren’t mean; they simply didn’t know how to reconcile a classmate who spent her Sunday mornings lounging in her pajamas and reading the funnies.
Once, while walking to school with my two best friends, both named Debbie, the girls had a jokey debate about what would happen after I died. I had obviously not cleared the prerequisite for heaven. On the other hand, I was their friend — eternal hellfire didn’t seem quite right, either. They imagined a fight between God and the devil, with me floating up and down through the ether.
“She’s too good for hell,” the devil would say.
“She’s too bad for heaven,” God would reply.
I think they were trying to work out how God could be so cruel as to reject their friend. On the other hand, they had to go to church. They had clocked in hundreds of Sunday mornings wearing rayon dresses in the too-warm air while I was kicked back on the couch eating cinnamon doughnuts. There should be some consequences.
Arvind Mahankali of Bayside Hills, New York, participates in the finals of the 2013 Scripps National Spelling Bee May 30, 2013 at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Mahankali has won the championship of the annual spelling contest after he correctly spelled the word "knaidel." (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Back in 2013, for Deadspin, Drew Magary attended the annual Scripps Spelling Bee, in which 11 million kids spell off across America in a bid to become the brainy few who land onstage for the final round, and learns how such a simple contest had been sullied (S-U-L-L-I-E-D, SULLIED) by the need to keep the event exciting for ESPN’s television audience.
• The atmosphere at the bee is very supportive. I went around looking for nutbar stage parents, but most of the parents were either A) pleasant or B) too media savvy to act like insane people in front of a reporter. These parents weren’t talking to the media for the first time. The finalists who got knocked out late were all given standing ovations (genuine ones). The kids all high-fived one another when they got words right. Whatever cutthroat elements of the competition existed only existed under the surface, or behind closed doors. With one glaring exception …
• I can’t begin to tell you how fucked-up ESPN has made this event. In addition to changing the very rules of competition, ESPN made these poor kids tape canned segment after canned segment. Some of these kids were natural extroverts, but not all of them were. I can only imagine how awkward it is for a shy 12-year-old to have to dance around in sunglasses for an ESPN producer and then watch that canned footage up on the big screen with everyone in the house watching it. There were so many canned segments in the beginning—including a sketch in which Dr. Bailly re-enacts those AT&T ads with the dude in a classroom asking kids easy questions; a shitty Tom Rinaldi piece that reminded you that “every word is the World Series”; a montage of ESPN’s 20 years covering the bee; and a moment in which a kid tells the audience the new format is a “win-win for the Bee”—that it took a full 42 minutes to get through the first round of the finals. Without all that shit, it probably would have taken six minutes. But in their quest to Olympify the competition, ESPN added shitloads of filler. This is why a computer knocks you out now, to fit in a segment in which Sam Ponder asks people around Washington to spell the president’s name right. (Ponder noted that only one person she talked to spelled Obama’s name correctly. He was from Japan.)
• And ESPN’s opening sequence to the bee was REALLY fucked up. It had a harsh female voiceover saying, “IN LIFE THERE ARE WINNERS AND THERE ARE LOSERS. YOU CAN EITHER SPELL THE WORD OR YOU CAN’T. IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT THE WORD IS YOUR FRIEND BUT THIS IS A LIE. THE WORD IS HERE TO DEFEAT YOU.” Way to ease the pressure on these kids, ESPN. Assholes. What is wrong with you people?
At the end, the last kid standing was bee veteran Arvind Mahankali, who finally won the thing on “KNAIDEL” (though it was his spelling of “DEHNSTUFE” in an earlier round that really brought the house down). When Arvind was declared the winner, two confetti cannons went off on either side of him and showered him for what seemed like 90 minutes. Arvind barely blinked the whole time, either due to shock (again, they’re still just kids) or because he probably would rather have walked off stage to be with his family than stand there and get blasted with 800 hundred pounds of shredded paper.
California avocados are, for the moment, one of America’s most popular foods. Yet some experts predict that climate change could cut California’s avocado production in half by 2050. New weather patterns will also affect the state’s other tree crops, including citrus, almonds, walnuts, and pistachios. But even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, many Golden State farmers still plan on growing food for a living.
At Grist, food writer Nathaneal Johnson shows how California farmers are planning ahead for climate change while balancing their immediate economic concerns. Farming is a matter of long-term planning: Just because there was a drought for a nearly six years doesn’t mean farmers can remove their thirsty nut trees and plant strawberries. Fortunately, scientists are studying crop varieties to find ones that could perform well under new weather patterns. California farmers are currently experimenting with cover crops to hold water and improve soil, and testing ways to recharge aquifers before the new state law bans excessive groundwater pumping. Will this all be enough to save them, and the food we rely on? Read more…
A group of corrupt police officers on Chicago’s South Side had been framing and extorting residents for years. Then they planted drugs on the wrong people: Ben Baker and his girlfriend Clarissa Glenn.
No one knows how many men Watts and his officers framed, in part because so many of them pleaded guilty. Watts’s officers at times planted such large quantities of drugs on Wells residents that they were charged with a Class X felony, the highest-level felony after first-degree murder. If the defendant went to trial and lost, he faced up to thirty years in prison. Phillip Thomas, who sold candy from a cart in the Wells, recalled that when he told his public defender that Watts’s officers had planted drugs on him, “she made it quite clear that she didn’t believe me and that my best bet was to plead guilty.” Ignoring her advice, he represented himself at trial. He lost, and was sentenced to six years. Shaun James told his public defender a similar story, and, he said, “She’s looking at me like I’m crazy. She said, ‘Ain’t no judge is ever going to believe that.’ ” James and his co-defendant, Taurus Smith, both pleaded guilty and were sentenced to two years’ probation.
Clarissa and Ben decided to fight the cases against them: Ben’s, from when he was arrested alone, and Ben and Clarissa’s, from when they were arrested together. They assumed that, because the state’s attorney’s office was aware of Watts’s corruption, it would eventually drop the charges against them. David Navarro, the prosecutor who met with Clarissa and Ben in the spring of 2005, told me that he believed them, and spent months investigating their claims about Watts, but he couldn’t prove the allegations. “It’s very difficult to prove a case when your only witness is the guy who has a pending case against him, and that guy has a criminal background,” he said.
I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am. — Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
The landscape of theaters must be terrifying for patients, but it’s becoming normal for me. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Life wasn’t always like this.
The first operation that I watch is a heart-lung transplant. I am nineteen years old and still a student nurse. The operation takes so long: over twelve hours. It requires a team of surgeons to behave like a relay team; but instead of a baton, they pass between them a human heart and lungs. I’ve been looking after the patient waiting for the new set of lungs that day: a fourteen-year-old boy named Aaron suffering from cystic fibrosis, who is confined to bed, oxygen tubes inserted into his nose, with a tired, wet cough and sallow gray skin. I help him get ready for the operation. I rub cocoa butter onto his dry knees, take away his Game Boy and swear to guard it with my life. I wet his lips with a small salmon-pink sponge that I dip in sterile water, not wanting to risk the tiniest possibility of him being exposed to any germs.
Aaron’s room glows with lights in the shape of stars and moons surrounding his hospital bed and a journal is hidden under his pillow. There is a small corkboard next to his bed that his stepdad has Blu-tacked to the wall, covered in a mosaic of photographs of him with his friends, every single one of them smiling. It is a common thing for a child’s hospital room to be personalized. Aside from the oxygen piped through the wall and the suction canister with its thick transparent tubing, it could be a typical teenage bedroom. Read more…
On September 17, 2014, the art world’s upper crust convened in Luxembourg City to fête Le Freeport, a warehouse where the ultra-rich hoard paintings, cars, jewelry, wine, and other luxuries in duty-free comfort. Waiters in red uniforms dodged oversize bouquets of white lilies to pass around trays of champagne, and an orchestra played an overture written especially for the occasion before an audience that included the Grand Duke of Luxembourg and top executives at Deloitte.
That evening, two American businessmen mingled among the government ministers, gallerists, and local bigwigs. Kenneth Cayre, a wealthy real estate developer, and Tom Sapienza, an accountant who’d worked for years in art shipping and handling, were planning their own entrée into the fine art storage business. But instead of operating in the luxury tax haven of Luxembourg, they would open their storage facility in a place not known for its low taxes: New York City.
This story is published in collaboration with Artsy Editorial. Artsy is a global platform for readers to learn about, discover, and purchase art.
The terms “free port,” “free trade zone,” and “foreign trade zone” are used interchangeably in the art world. They generally denote a place that’s free of customs duties and other taxes— but the extent of that freedom depends largely on the jurisdiction of the facility. That’s why most of these warehouses tend to be in existing tax havens, like Luxembourg or Switzerland.
In the United States, these areas are called Foreign Trade Zones, and they’ve existed under the protection of Customs and Border Patrol since the first opened on Staten Island in 1937. Today, they’re located in airports, in seaports, and on waterfronts, but also in warehouses and urban centers. They’re a big part of the U.S. business landscape: There were 263 of these zones in 2016, employing 420,000 people across the country, with hundreds of billions of dollars worth of merchandise, from car parts to pharmaceuticals, moving into and out of them. The zones typically take advantage of what’s known as an inverted tariff. When there are federal duties on the imports of raw materials, like steel, but not on the import of a finished product, like a tractor, it makes sense to bring the steel into the duty-free zone, manufacture the vehicle there, then formally import it without incurring the taxes.
None of this applies to artwork, though, because there are no federal import duties on art. Nor are FTZs home to any art studios engaged in manufacturing. Until recently, there was only one American FTZ dedicated to art, and it was in Delaware, which from a tax perspective is as close to a Luxembourgish freeport as you can get in the continental United States, so the facility was not only free of customs duties, but also most local and state taxes.
A few inside the Arcis art storage facility in Harlem. (Zoe Wetherall for Artsy)
What Delaware lacks is prestige and proximity to auction houses, museums, and galleries, so Cayre and Sapienza recognized potential in a New York competitor. “We saw the attention at the opening,” Sapienza recalled at a 2017 art business conference, “and we decided we’re coming to market with a 21st-century storage facility. Why not, as the icing on the cake, add a Foreign Trade Zone?”
Their facility, which opened in April 2018 on a proletarian Harlem block on West 146th Street, is called Arcis Art Storage. “Arcis” is Latin for “fortress” — a fitting name for what’s essentially a museum-quality bunker, currently insured to store up to $3 billion worth of goods. Like Luxembourg’s Le Freeport, which is armed to the teeth and admits next to no one, security is tight: Guests at Arcis must have their retinas scanned to go through the first door, then present their bare forearms for a vascular scan at a second door.
Instead of operating in the luxury tax haven of Luxembourg, Arcis would open their storage facility in a place not known for its low taxes: New York City.
Once inside, visitors to the building will be wedged — geographically, at least — between a historic black church and a daycare center. But as far as the U.S customs agents are concerned, once goods are imported into Arcis — whether they’re coming from Shanghai or the Upper East Side — they are no longer within U.S customs territory.
This was going to be Cayre and Sapienza’s edge over a crowded New York art storage market. But there was a reason no one else had done it yet: Even though customs duties don’t apply, New York State taxes do. This means a painting bought at Christie’s and stored uptown would not get preferential treatment when it came to sales and use tax over a painting going anywhere else. Arcis got the competitive, insular art storage world wondering exactly what its executives were selling.
***
Kenneth Cayre, 74, has had a varied and eccentric career. His associates at Arcis, as well as friends and former colleagues, describe him as a sharp, family-oriented hustler. (He declined to be interviewed for this article.) Cayre began his import-export career in 1959 as a teenager, operating a floating duty-free store with his two brothers, sailing back and forth from Miami to the Bahamas with cigarettes, alcohol, perfume, and watches to sell to passengers who wanted to avoid high import duties. Over the years, he helped a cousin run a textile factory in Puerto Rico; operated a pantyhose manufacturer called Kandy Mills, in Hialeah, Florida; and, inspired by the rhythms of the Miami Beach club scene, started a record label with his brothers called Salsoul.
In the early 1980s, the Cayre brothers started Good Times Entertainment, which distributed VHS copies of Jane Fonda exercise tapes, knockoff Disney movies, and other videos whose copyrights were in the public domain. An early encounter with Walmart founder Sam Walton led to a long-standing distribution deal, but the company was eventually sold to a private equity firm in 2003. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2005.
A client viewing room at Arcis. (Zoe Wetherall for Artsy)
Today, Cayre owns and manages property with his sons, Jack and Nathan, including a million-square-foot chain of self-storage warehouses in the New York tri-state area called Treasure Island. In 2014, real estate heavy Steven Guttman made a splashy transition from cheap self-storage to high-end warehousing with Uovo, which now has branches in Rockland County and Long Island City, Queens — home to a burgeoning gallery scene and the contemporary art museum MoMA PS1. During this time, the art market was growing fast: Between 2005 and 2015, annual sales doubled to reach $63.8 billion, and more contemporary art is being produced and sold every day. Nearly 80 percent of all artwork is in storage,according to one storage executive, and since new art is made every day, demand for storage facilities — at least in theory — will grow continuously.
In an application for property tax breaks from the city of New York, Cayre describes himself as “an artist at heart” and claims that after Superstorm Sandy ravaged the downtown gallery scene, he felt compelled to enter the art storage business. “Ken witnessed more and more galleries and Fine Art storage facilities vacating Manhattan for locations in New Jersey like Newark and Jersey City,” the application reads. A desire to clean up his image may have also provided motivation: In 2006, Cayre was accused by New Jersey con man-turned-FBI informant Solomon Dwek of having received stolen assets worth $2.2 million. Although he was never charged, Cayre was kicked off the board of a New Jersey medical marijuana foundation in the aftermath.
Guests at Arcis must have their retinas scanned to go through the first door, then present their bare forearms for a vascular scan at a second door.
In mid-2013, less than a year after the storm, Cayre spent $4.5 million on the Harlem parking lot where Arcis now stands and an adjacent property housing a childcare and eldercare center. Six months later, one of his sons ran into a real estate developer friend at a Super Bowl party, who offered to introduce the family to someone in the art storage business.
That someone turned out to be Tom Sapienza, now a 48-year-old dad of three from Long Island with dusty blond hair and the wholesome, slightly stiff demeanor of a Little League coach. An accountant by training, he’s a khakis-and-blazer kind of guy, which makes it hard to imagine him at a glitzy art opening in Luxembourg. But Sapienza had a Rolodex of potential clients at museums, galleries, and family offices — fruits of a decade working as a consultant and CFO at Crozier Fine Arts, one of the world’s biggest art storage firms. Sapienza’s tenure there ended on a sour note: According to legal documents, he was fired in 2012 and subsequently sued the company for allegedly denying him his share of equity. His ex-colleague, Simon Hornby, declined to comment on the termination and the lawsuit; Sapienza also declined to comment on the suit, which was settled in 2017.
Cayre and Sapienza hit it off, and before long, were en route to a castle in Maastricht for a business seminar designed to educate art world professionals about finance and to educate financiers about the art world. “It was to expose Ken to the new global art world,” Sapienza says. In the class, they heard a presentation by a business professor about Le Freeport and the business of Free Trade Zones for art. “We left with binders and binders of information,” says Sapienza. “He loved it.”
***
The first free ports were established in early modern Europe as way stations for goods like grain, coffee, or spices. Their extraterritorial status saved traders time and money, but since the contents of these warehouses were perishable, the facilities weren’t intended for long-term storage, let alone keeping valuables like paintings and sculptures. But as globalization made more and more types of business transnational, these facilities evolved too. Today, free ports are a crucial cog in the global art trade. Their contents are fiercely guarded, top secret, and largely tax-free. But which exact taxes they incur depends on their location.
“The term ‘free port’ really does mean something phenomenal in Europe and Asia,” says Jason Kleinman, a partner and art-tax-law expert at Herrick Feinstein LLP. Those free ports exempt buyers and sellers from VAT and income taxes, and because of their clear perks, they have courted art collectors for decades. “These locations confer great tax advantages to the people who use them to store or conduct business,” Kleinman says, adding that when sales take place within a foreign free port, sellers also save on shipping and handling costs. For speculators flipping Picassos, free ports specializing in art and luxury items offer an attractive deal.
American FTZs, by contrast, have more limited benefits and have historically served the automotive, electronics, and oil industries. The art world got one of its own in 2015, when Austrian art shipper Fritz Dietl opened the 36,000-square-foot Delaware Freeport. His art-centric outpost allows clients who buy pieces in New York or Miami to avoid state sales taxes if they ship their pieces directly there — but the saving is due to the tax breaks offered by the state, not because it’s a FTZ.
For speculators flipping Picassos, free ports specializing in art and luxury items offer an attractive deal.
That’s because while American FTZ rules do waive federal customs duties when they are applicable, they don’t eliminate state or city sales and use taxes; in that respect, FTZs are part of the state they’re in, but not part of the country. Federal law further stipulates that goods can’t be bought and sold within the zones, so under-the-radar handoffs aren’t possible either. And New York’s sales and use taxes on art are levied based on the location where the buyer gains possession of the item, whether it’s acquired at a domestic sale or at an auction abroad — so the most an FTZ could possibly do is defer that cost while the item is in storage.
In other words, if a $10 million painting ends up hanging on a billionaire’s wall in New York after passing through an FTZ, the FTZ alone will not save its owner from the state’s 8.875 percent tax on sales and use. It might be more convenient or indeed more prudent to store a painting bought in Manhattan just a few miles uptown from the auction house than in Delaware or Long Island, because moving art is risky, but an FTZ won’t save money. And in the event that a painting was bought in London and brought to New York, the most the FTZ would do is defer tax until the piece leaves the zone. Since artwork isn’t dutiable, there’s nothing to gain from avoiding customs. “I spent hours researching it,” Kleinman says, “and I concluded that Arcis is a tax-free zone in search of a tax.”
Nevertheless, a tax-free anything sounds good to a certain clientele, even if the actual benefits are limited (or, as Kleinman suggests, virtually nonexistent). “People toss the term around all the time,” Kleinman says. “It’s P.R.”
***
After the Maastricht seminar, Sapienza called a former Crozier colleague, Kevin Lay, who joined Arcis as director of operations in 2016. For Lay, a rakish former punk rocker who is more visibly artsy than Sapienza, art preservation is a matter of philosophical import. “Art storage is time travel,” he says. “When you look at a painting you’re standing where the painter stood, and as custodians of culture it’s up to us to return this in the same condition it came in.”
Now complete, the warehouse looks a bit like a steely blue iceberg: monolithic, windowless, and blank. There’s no obvious signage save for a large purple A, for Arcis, on the north face of the building, about 10 feet above a 16-feet-high and 40-feet-wide loading dock that opens onto 146th Street. “If your art doesn’t fit here, it won’t fit anywhere in the city,” says Sapienza. (The largest dock at Uovo’s New York City facility is 13 feet 7 inches high and 11 feet 10 inches wide.) A discreet black car entrance leading into the loading area and visible only from one-way mirror windows in the executives’ offices will accommodate the rich and wary.
Detail of the Arcis storage facility. (Zoe Wetherall for Artsy)
Inside, the newly painted facility smells disconcertingly like an Ikea stockroom and looks, at first glance, like an ordinary industrial warehouse: exposed beams, large metal columns, huge mechanical doors, and stark white walls. The ground floor is divided into viewing rooms with $1,000-a-bulb lighting, per the company, and ceiling rigs for moving heavy sculptures. There’s also a loft-like space where artwork will be inventoried, and, on the higher levels, private storage units in different sizes, along with larger shared spaces.
Lay and Sapienza can — and do — talk for hours about the building’s technical specs. If a storm surge were to occur, a protective envelope of panels made of insulated metal panels between its inner and outer walls would help protect it from the elements. Its power supply is uninterruptible, with every function intentionally redundant in case a power source goes out. The generators have backups located on the roof, which run on natural gas; in theory, they will keep the building going until any emergency is over. The faint whir of the air-conditioning system, which filters the air three to six times an hour, is a constant presence; otherwise, it’s completely quiet. “They’re not taking any chances,” says Lawrence Bovich, a partner at Mechanical Technologies, LLC, one of the firms that installed part of Arcis’ HVAC system. “These guys are many folds more risk-averse than any museum might be.” Arcis would be a great place to hide during a natural disaster, or allergy season.
Cayre applied for and received $13 million in tax breaks on construction by promising the warehouse would bring six full-time and 10 part-time jobs to East Harlem.
Serious protection costs serious money. The price of storing a painting at Arcis can range from just a bit more than at your average self-storage facility to thousands of additional dollars a month depending on the size of the unit, whether there’s custom shelving, and where in the building it’s located, says Lay — but he won’t say by how much.
Cayre applied for and received $13 million in tax breaks on construction by promising the warehouse would bring six full-time and 10 part-time jobs to East Harlem and calculating that its benefit to the city, mainly in other taxes, would total $20 million. But employment at art storage facilities typically goes to aspiring artists who know how to handle, crate, and transport the art; even Arcis’s own filings note that the business will require “employees with specialized skills sets similar to those of a museum registrar.”
That could explain why an administrator at a community organization on the south side of the block called Street Corner Resources, which does job placement for young people as part of its larger mission of reducing gun violence, said on a recent afternoon that he’d heard nothing about Arcis, let alone the possibility of jobs there. Staff at neighboring bodegas, a barbershop, and a local diner were aware of the facility because they’d served chatty construction workers from the job site; none of them knew they would soon share a block with million-dollar paintings. At the senior center next door to Arcis, whose building Cayre’s company acquired, a coordinator said they’d received assurances from the newcomers that they would not be displaced.
Because FTZs are regulated by the federal customs agency, local elected officials don’t participate in the approval process. When asked how Arcis might affect this part of his district, City Councilman Bill Perkins grew aggressive, demanded more information, and directed questions to his predecessor, current State Assemblywoman Inez Dickens, who didn’t respond to requests for comment.
***
In April 2017, Arcis was a sponsor of the Art Business Conference, a glitzy annual networking event for the fine art world, at the Time Warner Center in Manhattan. “Kevin and I both keep getting calls from people pushed from locations in Manhattan,” Sapienza told the crowd during a panel about freeports. “People wanted us to commit space. We have a warehouse reservation binder, with clients signing up for the space.”
In the audience were Delaware Freeport founder Fritz Dietl and Crozier president Simon Hornby. Hornby says Crozier also consulted with advisors on the utility of an FTZ, and the benefits came up short. “Art is not a dutiable good. There are no duties on art in the U.S.,” he says. “So what’s the point of a FTZ for art if there’s no duty in the first place and it’s designed to suspend duty?”
Even Dietl says the free port part of the Delaware Freeport saves little money. But branding something as a free zone or free port sends a powerful — if empty — message to potential clients. “It absolutely works because it’s a term that’s so widespread in the art world,” he says.
A freight elevator at Arcis. (Zoe Wetherall for Artsy)
Self-storage king–turned–fine art protector Steven Guttman says his team studied the possibility hard before they opened Uovo and found no significant benefits. “We did not take this lightly,” Guttman says. “We knew about this a long time ago and kept saying this makes no sense. I’ve been in the business for three years, and never heard a tenant request an FTZ.” He adds of Arcis, “They may be onto something just by confusing people.”
Sapienza declined to comment on tax hypotheticals, insisting that it’s the client’s responsibility to obtain appropriate counsel and follow the law. Kevin Lay insists there’s some tax value to the FTZ — though that depends on how you define “art.” “Antique furniture that’s a hundred years old can be imported duty-free, but if you have a lamp from 1921 that you bought in Paris at auction for $1 million, if you were to bring it here, you would avoid those duties,” he says. The idea is that the lamp could hang out in storage until duties weren’t due. Other valuables, like some jewelry, also carry duties. In those scenarios, an FTZ can also be useful to avoid or defer them.
Herrick’s Jason Kleinman, whose job it is to help collectors manage (or as he puts it, “control”) their U.S. tax bill, says Arcis “doesn’t change anything for me or present me with any tax-planning opportunities.” Some of his clients were curious about Arcis, he says, but none had serious plans to relocate their assets. “I’d suggest anyone look at Arcis and apply to it criteria you’d demand of any other facility,” he says.
In the end, the biggest draw might be to collectors looking to keep their art close to home, and eventually sell at a New York auction. If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that the less you move art, the better. And the tax-averse, art-collecting global elite? They’ll always have Luxembourg.
Anne Thériault | Longreads | May 2018 | 23 minutes (5,949 words)
From the notorious to the half-forgotten, Queens of Infamy, a Longreads series by Anne Thériault, focuses on badass world-historical women of centuries past.
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Looking for a Queens of Infamy t-shirt or tote bag? Choose yours here.
Some people believe that the Myers-Briggs questionnaire is the ultimate way to classify personality types. Others think that the Enneagram is the way to go. Even more people set their stock in astrology, hoping that the fixed position of the stars at the time of a person’s birth will explain everything about them. I, however, think that you can tell everything you need to know about someone based on which wife of Henry VIII’s is their favorite. Do you prefer Catherine (or Catherine, or Catherine)? Do either of the Annes do it for you? Or, god forbid, are you a fan of the insufferable Jane Fucking Seymour?
Personally, I’m Team Anne Boleyn. My reasons for this are multifold. As an Anne, I am naturally sympathetic to others of my name. I also can’t help rooting for an underdog, and if being beheaded because your crusty husband wants to marry Jane Fucking Seymour doesn’t make you an underdog, I don’t know what does. Finally, I respect a good hustle, and Anne’s hustle was iconic — my god, how she hustled! Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.
But who was Anne Boleyn, exactly? The mythology surrounding her improbable rise and sensational fall is pretty well-known, yet most of the information we have access to was either written by haters or produced decades after her death (or both). It’s hard to know much about Anne as a person (as opposed to Anne, Destroyer of Marriages and Churches). We’re not even sure what year she was born — 1501 and 1507 are the two most likely candidates, with arguments hinging on a letter Anne wrote to her father in 1514. Historians have endlessly debated what age Anne was when she composed that neat, measured handwriting (in her second language, no less), and while I am absolutely not an expert, I will say that as the mother of a 7-year-old, I feel 97.5% sure that a child of that age did not write that letter. Then again, maybe my low penmanship expectations are the product of my plebeian public-school education.
Anne was writing to her father because her educational circumstances were about to change drastically. Initially, Thomas Boleyn had managed to secure a spot for his young daughter in the Burgundian court in the Netherlands. There, she was educated alongside several royal children, including Charles of Castile, the future Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It’s unknown how Thomas, a diplomat whose closest personal tie to royalty was his wife, a descendant of Edward I, managed to winkle this incredible opportunity for his daughter; some historians speculate that it may have had to do with a gambling debt owed to him by Margaret of Austria, regent of the court where Anne was staying. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the gift for aggressive upward social mobility was strong in the Boleyn blood.
Even if you think Anne Boleyn was a king-seducing homewrecker extraordinaire, it’s impossible not to appreciate the sheer audacity of it all.
Just a year after Anne’s arrival in the Netherlands, shifting international alliances caused her abrupt departure. Henry VIII’s 18-year-old sister, Mary, had initially been promised to Charles of Castile, forging strong ties between the Holy Roman Empire and the Tudors. Then, in August of 1514, Mary wed the aging French king, Louis XII, by proxy. This sudden and stunning rejection of the teenaged Charles in favor of the visibly infirm, 52-year-old Louis likely made Anne’s position in the Burgundian court very uncomfortable. Luckily, Thomas Boleyn was able to place his daughter as a maid of honor in Mary’s household (my god, how these Boleyns hustled).
The Burgundians certainly weren’t the only ones who were upset about Mary’s wedding. Mary herself was less than enthused about the whole situation — understandably so, since she was a) three and a half decades younger than her new husband and b) deeply in love with her brother’s BFF, Charles Brandon, the Duke of Suffolk. Apparently she only agreed to marry Louis on the condition that after he died she would be allowed to marry whomever she wanted; the stars seem to have aligned in Mary’s favor, because Louis dropped dead just three months after they married. Henry sent Charles Brandon to France to collect his widowed sister, but with strict instructions:
HENRY VIII: Bro, whatever you do, DON’T propose to Mary when you get to France
Charles Brandon: LOL bro, I won’t!!
HENRY VIII: I’m serious, bro. Louis just died, like, five minutes ago
HENRY VIII: so be chill, ok?
Charles Brandon: Bro!! I promise I’ll be chill!!!
FIVE MINUTES LATER
Mary: We should secretly get married while we’re still in France
Charles Brandon: YOLO
To say that Henry was pissed would be an understatement. Not only had Charles Brandon directly disobeyed him, it’s also unlikely that Henry had ever intended to let his friend marry his sister. After all, the only value royal sisters and daughters had was to cement alliances through marriage; it’s unlikely Henry would have wasted the opportunity to marry his sister off to a foreign power (again) just because she was in love with a trifling Duke. Henry’s privy council wanted to imprison and/or execute Charles Brandon for treason, but in the end the king realized that would probably make family reunions super awkward, so Brandon just had to pay a stiff fine.
What was Anne Boleyn up to while this whole Charles Brandon foofaraw was happening in England? Still in France, she was now a maid of honor in the service of the new queen, Claude. At the French court, Anne learned all the skills necessary for being a good courtier — including (allegedly) the art of the blow job which was (again, allegedly) unknown in England at the time. While this last part is entirely apocryphal, it is my favorite rumor about Anne Boleyn. I have so many questions! What did it feel like to introduce la beej to an entire nation? Do you think she later demonstrated it to her own ladies-in-waiting so that they, too, could spread the gospel of buccal onanism? What were they even doing in England before Anne taught them the joys of fellatio? The mind boggles.
In 1521, Anne’s father recalled her from France with the hope that she would marry her Irish cousin James Butler and resolve a dispute over the Earldom of Ormond. It was one of those very boring succession situations that were always popping up among the gentry: Anne’s grandmother Margaret Boleyn was the daughter of the 7th Earl of Ormond and had been co-heiress to his estates, but now James, who was a descendant of the 3rd Earl of Ormond, was claiming the title for himself. Several of the parties invested in the outcome of this situation — including Henry VIII himself — thought that a union between Anne and James would settle the Ormond question. This probably wasn’t the marriage Anne was hoping for; at the very least, she would have known that she could do better than a discount wanna-be earl.
As you’ve no doubt already sussed out, the marriage between Anne and James never happened, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.
* * *
At this point it behooves me to mention Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn; she figures importantly in this story not only as Anne’s sibling, but also as one of Anne’s predecessors in Henry’s bed. As with Anne, Mary’s birthdate is unknown — actually, it’s not even clear which sister was born first. On the one hand, the fact that Thomas Boleyn chose Anne to be the daughter brought up in the Burgundian court indicates that she was older (it would have been extremely strange to pass over an eldest daughter in favor of a younger one when offered such an opportunity). On the other hand, Mary was wed before Anne, and it would also have been uncommon for a younger sister to be married first. There’s also some boring stuff about which of their descendants inherited which titles under which circumstances, but there’s evidence to support both birth orders, so basically: who even knows at this point?
Like Anne, Mary Boleyn accompanied Henry VIII’s sister Mary to France for her wedding. (As a side note: if you’re starting to think there are too many Marys and Catherines and Annes in this story, you’re right — Tudor England was desperately uncreative when it came to names.) Like Anne, Mary Boleyn also stayed in France after the widowed Queen Mary returned to England for some Hot Charles Brandon Action. Unlike Anne, Mary Boleyn allegedly had an affair with the new King of France, Francis, who apparently referred to her as “my English mare” and “a very great whore, the most infamous of all.” I’m sure he totally meant these things as compliments!
Mary Boleyn returned to England in 1519 to become one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting, at which point she almost definitely started sleeping with the English king. We know this because later, when he was trying to get with Anne, Henry requested a special dispensation that allowed him to marry the sister of his former mistress. During the period when she and Henry were Doing It, Mary Boleyn got married to a courtier named William Carey. Mary and William had two children together, but it’s speculated that Henry fathered one or even both of them. On the one hand: maybe not. On the other hand: just look at Mary’s granddaughter Lettice Knollys and tell me she doesn’t have Tudor blood. Lettice Knollys would later go on to wed noted Tudor fuckboy Robert Dudley, a favorite of Elizabeth I’s, and their marriage would earn them a banishment from court thanks to Elizabeth’s jealousy (of Lettice) and intolerance (of fuckboys).
Some people might regard Mary Boleyn as a classic example of “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — after all, if she’d played her cards right, she could, in theory, have wound up as the king’s wife instead of his mistress. On the one hand, it’s likely that Anne viewed Mary as something of a cautionary tale, and that’s partly why she was so intent on keeping the king at arm’s length (literally, with hand jobs) until he finally put a ring on it. On the other hand, Mary was the only Boleyn sibling to come out of that whole situation with her head still attached to her body. It’s possible that Mary survived through sheer luck, but it’s also possible that she understood more keenly than Anne just how fickle the king was and how harshly this world punishes clever, ambitious women.
If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up.
While Mary Boleyn and Henry VIII were making googly eyes (and other googly body parts) at each other, Anne had her own blossoming court romance. She and Lord Henry Percy, who belonged to one of the richest and noblest families in England, fell in love and became secretly engaged. Actually, they went even further than just an engagement — they were alleged to have entered into a “pre-contract,” which involved saying wedding vows in front of a witness. This distinction is important, because the church considered these de futuro vows to be binding if they were followed by sexual consummation of the union. Percy was a page in the service Henry VIII’s favorite cardinal, Thomas Wolsey, and when Wolsey found out about the betrothal, he was absolutely furious. It wasn’t so much that Anne wasn’t wealthy or titled enough for the Percys (although she wasn’t), or that Percy was already engaged to someone else (although he sort of was), or that Henry VIII was wildly jealous (Anne wasn’t even on his radar yet); the main problem was that Percy and Anne had taken something that was supposed to be a public business contract between two families and turned it into a private love-fest. Percy and Anne brought shame on their families by violating one of the most deep-seated rules in their culture: marriage between nobles wasn’t supposed to be based on love, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to happen in secret. They had to be punished.
Percy was immediately and unhappily married off to Lady Mary Talbot, the woman to whom he had been betrothed when he was a teenager. Anne was “rusticated,” which meant that she was removed from court and sent to live in her family’s country estate. The experience must have been not just heartbreaking, but also humiliating for both of them — in trying to behave like adults, they’d ended up being treated like naughty children. At any rate, Percy seems to have loved Anne for the rest of his life; several years later, when Thomas Cromwell wanted to use the pre-contract as a way to annul Anne’s marriage to the king, Percy repeatedly denied its existence. It’s possible that Percy did this because he was (rightfully) afraid that admitting to having a past sexual relationship with Anne would get him into hot water with the king, but it’s also likely that he was doing his best to save Anne’s life.
A few years after Anne was dishonorably discharged from the court, she was given the chance to return and join her sister as one of Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting. If Anne had been subdued by her banishment, it certainly didn’t show; if anything, she came back smarter, stronger, and even more committed to marrying up. This time, she would aim high — real high. And, for a while, it would seem as if she’d succeeded in her ambitions.
* * *
By the time Henry VIII began to pursue Anne Boleyn in 1526, he’d been married to Catherine of Aragon for nearly two decades. In that time, they’d only managed to produce one living heir, Mary Tudor, the future Mary I of England. By the late 1520s, the subject of succession caused Henry a great deal of anxiety. As his father’s only surviving son, the burden of continuing the Tudor line was riding entirely on the king. A series of English civil wars, now commonly known as the Wars of the Roses, had ended only with the marriage of Henry’s parents; he knew that a succession crisis could plunge the country back into conflict. On top of all that, England had historically bucked under women’s rule, so even if Mary — by all accounts a sickly child — survived to adulthood, that was no guarantee of peace.
The big question is, of course, whether Anne was the cause or a symptom of Henry’s decision to dump Catherine. Was she a wily enchantress, luring the King away from his beloved Queen by casting dark spells on his dick? Or did she arrive back at court and catch Henry’s attention after he’d already started looking for a new wife? Catherine’s sympathizers preferred the dick-spells theory, with Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sanders writing half a century after Anne’s death that she had six fingers on one hand and a cyst under her chin, both of which were thought to be the markings of a witch. I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France? That being said, it’s absolutely no coincidence that Henry’s realization that Catherine would probably never bear him a son happened at roughly the same time as his burgeoning obsession with Anne. While it might be tempting to analyze their eventual marriage as the result of six years of cock-blocking, Henry was probably already looking for a new wife when his eye happened to wander in Anne’s direction. The fact that Henry began asking the Pope about annulling his first marriage less than a year after Anne’s return to court is evidence of this.
I guess it’s possible that, while in France, Anne learned not just blow-job skills but also black-magic skills. Who even knows what goes on in France?
That’s not to say that Anne never encouraged Henry’s pursuit of her. Did she flirt with him? Sure! Did she tell him she wanted to marry him? Totally! Did she promise him a billion legitimate sons once he finally ditched his pious snooze of a wife? Almost definitely! But there are two things we have to keep in mind when considering Anne’s role in the annulment of Henry and Catherine’s marriage. The first thing is that it’s very, very dangerous to refuse to give a king what he wants, especially if that king is a man who is only too happy to snuff out the lives of those who have disappointed him. The second thing to remember is that Anne literally had one job in life: to marry a rich, powerful man. This job was the only end-game of all her fancy education, all the years spent learning multiple languages, studying religious texts, and perfecting her dancing skills. Every opportunity Thomas Boleyn had secured for her was to serve the goal of her marrying well; to marry beneath her station or not marry at all would mean that Anne had failed to make good on her family’s extensive investment in her.
Some of you might be wondering: why Anne? Why, out of all the women available to him, did Henry fixate on her? Was she incredibly beautiful? No, not exactly; even the most flattering contemporary accounts describe her as being just average in the looks department (though the king did refer to her breasts as “pritty duckys,” thus confirming my suspicion that he was a boob man). But she was charming, witty, and apparently a lot of fun to be around. And she was patient. Boy, was she patient. Having watched her sister Mary be picked up and then later discarded by the king, Anne knew that sleeping with Henry during their long courtship would only undermine her chances of marrying him, so she dug in and played the long game — one that involved keeping her chastity technically intact while at the same time maintaining his sexual interest (which probably involved a lot of what is euphemistically referred to as “heavy petting”). It was a fine line, but one she managed to walk for six years as Henry tried to negotiate his annulment with Pope Clement VII.
HENRY VIII: Heyyyyyy bro
CLEMENT VII: Oh. Hey. It’s you again.
HENRY VIII: Remember how I’m the best Catholic?
CLEMENT VII: Not really
HENRY VIII: Sure you do! I wrote that book? About the sacraments?
CLEMENT VII: Doesn’t ring a bell, sorry
HENRY VIII: I’m officially a Defender Of The Faith!!
CLEMENT VII: I’ll take your word for it
HENRY VIII: Anyway. Since I’m really amazing at figuring out this God shit now, I’ve been thinking about my life
CLEMENT VII: Oh good
HENRY VIII: I’ve decided that I don’t have any surviving sons because I’m a horrible sinner
CLEMENT VII: So you’re going to stop having affairs? Give up drinking? Quit gambling?
HENRY VIII: Lol no, I’m going to leave my wife for a much younger woman
CLEMENT VII: …
HENRY VIII: Yeah, because in Leviticus? It says that if you marry your brother’s wife? You’ll be childless? And Catherine was totally my brother Arthur’s wife first
CLEMENT VII: That’s … ok, you’re completely misinterpreting that law
CLEMENT VII: And anyway, you were granted a papal dispensation to marry your brother’s wife
CLEMENT VII: This is a problem that has literally already been solved
HENRY VIII: Ok well I’m going to need you to cancel that dispensation lol
HENRY VIII: And also annul my marriage
HENRY VIII: Thanks in advance!!!
The Pope was not, in fact, interested in annulling Henry and Catherine’s marriage. This was at least in part because Catherine’s nephew, Charles V, had just sacked Rome in 1527 and was basically holding Clement VII hostage. Henry, never one to be deterred easily, followed up his request for an annulment with an inquiry into getting a papal dispensation for bigamy which, unsurprisingly, the Pope was not super enthused about either. There was a trial, and a lot of it involved some cold-case sleuthing over whether Arthur and Catherine had consummated their brief marriage. Catherine swore up and down that they hadn’t, but some of Arthur’s pals from back in the day said he’d emerged from his bedroom the morning after his wedding declaring that he’d “been to Spain” (because Catherine’s vagina was apparently a Spanish territory). Sadly, this A++ dick joke did not persuade the papal legate who was overseeing the trial and Henry was not granted his annulment.
* * *
In late 1532, three very exciting things happened. Anne accompanied Henry to France, a move that legitimized her position as his partner. Then, when bad weather forced them to dawdle in Calais for two weeks while their Channel crossing was delayed, Anne and Henry took a Fornication Vacation and finally consummated their love. It was also around this time that Thomas Cromwell drafted the Act of Appeals, which, when passed in 1533, would make Henry the final legal authority on all English matters, meaning that he could finally get his annulment over and done with and also take his first official step away from the authority of Rome.
Henry and Anne (who was almost certainly already pregnant) were secretly married on January 25, 1533. On May 23rd, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared Henry’s marriage to Catherine to be invalid (which meant that he’d technically been bigamous for four months, but since he was calling all the shots now that didn’t really matter); on May 28, the Archbishop declared Anne’s marriage to Henry to be good and valid. On June 1, Anne was crowned queen in an elaborate ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Six years of various jobs (hand, blow, and otherwise) had finally paid off!
Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy.
The three months that followed would later be seen as the apex of Anne’s upward trajectory. She chose “The Most Happy” as her royal motto, and certainly it must have been a very happy time for her: not only had she finally hustled her way into the highest office an English woman could occupy, but she was also pregnant with the king’s child, whose birth would hopefully secure Anne’s future. That is, if the child was a boy, of course — and everyone, including Henry, assumed that this would be the case. After all, now that he was no longer breaking Levitican law, surely God would see fit to shower him with all the sons he wanted?
On September 7, 1533, Anne gave birth to a healthy baby girl, whom she and Henry named Elizabeth. They had been so sure the child was going to be a boy that they had already commissioned letters announcing the birth of a prince; these had to be hastily corrected before being sent out. Henry cancelled the jousting tournament he’d been planning to celebrate the birth of his son, because apparently men only pretend to murder each other on horseback for fun if a baby is a boy. Still, it must have given both Anne and Henry some comfort that both mother and baby were healthy. The fact that Anne had survived giving birth was proof that God favored her, and although she wasn’t a boy, Elizabeth was still an heir — something Henry very much needed, since he was about to declare his daughter Mary illegitimate.
There’s a myth that the king’s interest in Anne began waning almost immediately after Elizabeth’s birth. Even today, Anne is often represented in popular media as a shrewish schemer who made Henry’s life miserable from the moment he put a crown on her head. Certainly she had her own ideas about how things should be done, and occasionally she and Henry were seen arguing over the course of their marriage. But her inability to produce a male heir notwithstanding, the two and a half years following Elizabeth’s birth were generally happy ones for Anne. She was finally able to put her fancy education to use and was instrumental in helping Henry reform the church in England, advocating for the availability of religious texts in vernacular instead of Latin. When her downfall came, it was swift, unexpected, and hinged on a series of life-changing events that occurred in January 1536.
In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in.
Anne became pregnant at least twice more after Elizabeth was born, but none of these pregnancies made it to term. She suffered from either a miscarriage or a stillbirth in late 1534 or early 1535; by late 1535 she was definitely pregnant again. This, along with the death of Catherine of Aragon on January 7, 1536, gave Anne and the king a good deal to celebrate, since now the persistent question of whether Henry was still legally married to Catherine was finally resolved. The day after her death, Henry and Anne dressed in yellow silk — a color of mourning in Catherine’s native Spain, but widely regarded as a symbol of joy and vitality in England. Henry, of course, could never resist the chance to be a tacky asshole.
Shortly after Catherine’s demise, on January 24, 1536, Henry fell from his horse. This accident caused the leg wound that would plague him for the rest of his life; he also suffered a head injury so severe that he spent two hours in a coma. Less than a week later — perhaps as a result of the stress from Henry’s near-death experience — Anne miscarried what appeared to be a male fetus. Around the same time, Henry began courting Jane Fucking Seymour, who was one of Anne’s maids of honor and also happened to be her second cousin. If romancing your wife’s employee-relative while she is either pregnant or has just suffered a miscarriage isn’t the definition of Tacky Asshole, I don’t know what is.
The fallout of this rapid succession of events was complex. According to some accounts, Henry was increasingly paranoid, moody, and volatile after his fall; coupled with the fact that he was unconscious for so long, these symptoms could point to a possible traumatic brain injury, which might explain the heightened violence and unpredictability he displayed for the rest of his life. The fact that Anne had miscarried his longed-for son only made things worse. As someone who believed that God rewarded the righteous, he would have seen this event as proof that he was still not in God’s favor (and that it was almost certainly Anne’s fault). In 1533, Henry had been certain that he’d solved his succession crisis by marrying Anne. Now, the old panic set in. It must have seemed to Henry that the only way forward was to marry someone new; into that void stepped Jane Fucking Seymour.
Here’s the thing about Jane Fucking Seymour: I actually have a grudging admiration for her. In many ways, she played the game just as skillfully as Anne. The things that had initially drawn Henry to Anne — her lively wit, her intelligence, her strong-willed nature — were the same things that made him tire of her. The fact that she tried to blame her miscarriage on Henry’s fall (as well as possibly implicating his nascent romance with Jane) only added to his fury towards Anne; everyone knew that reproductive issues were the woman’s fault, and were almost certainly a punishment from God. How dare she say that Henry was to blame instead of repenting whatever sin of hers had led to this? While Henry was trying to grapple with the idea of having lost a potential male heir, Jane cleverly presented herself as the anti-Anne: quiet, pious, and submissive to the king’s every whim. Although it’s tempting to view Jane as a bland, milk-fed virgin who just happened to trip and fall into Henry’s lap, the truth is that she had a few power moves up her (huge) sleeves.
* * *
Not long after Anne’s miscarriage, the king began to say that he had been tricked into marrying Anne by her use of “sortilege,” a French word for sorcery. It’s possible that he honestly believed this, or else his desire for Jane Fucking Seymour (and a male heir) meant he was beginning to build a false case against Anne. Whatever the truth is, Thomas Cromwell — who had earlier been a sometime-ally of Anne’s — now fully turned against the queen. At least part of this about-face can be traced to their disagreement over the redistribution of the church’s wealth; Anne wanted the money to go to charitable causes, and Cromwell preferred to use the money to line the royal coffers (while taking a cut for himself, naturally). Cromwell did not relish the idea of having someone undermining his authority in the king’s presence, especially if that someone was a combative and opinionated woman. It’s completely within the realm of possibility that he was the one who orchestrated Anne’s downfall, then helped pull the strings to get meek old Jane set up in her place.
HENRY VIII: Do you ever feel like Anne is, um …
CROMWELL: A total slut who’s sleeping with her own brother?
HENRY VIII: I was going to say “sometimes kind of a bitch,” but now that you mention it, yeah
CROMWELL: You should kill her
HENRY VIII: Isn’t that kind of drastic?
CROMWELL: Nah, you’re the king, you can kill whoever you want.
CROMWELL: And you need to get her out of the way if you want to shack up with Jane
CROMWELL: You don’t want a repeat of the Catherine situation where she’s still alive and people feel sorry for her
CROMWELL: So let’s just make some shit up and execute her for high treason
CROMWELL: Nice and clean, no loose ends
HENRY VIII: I do hate loose ends. Almost as much as I hate not having sons
The arrests began at the end of April: first Mark Smeaton, a musician in Anne’s employment, then a handful of noblemen and a poet named Sir Thomas Wyatt, and finally her brother George. Each was accused of having a sexual relationship with the queen; each of them denied this accusation, although Smeaton later confessed after being tortured on the rack. On May 2, Anne was arrested and brought to the Tower of London. Her charges were adultery, incest, and high treason. On May 14, the Archbishop of Canterbury — the same man who had annulled Henry’s first marriage and then validated his second one — declared Henry and Anne’s marriage to be null and void. On May 15, Anne was put on trial at the Tower of London. A jury of 27 peers found her unanimously guilty.
Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion.
When the verdict was announced, Henry Percy, now the Earl of Northumberland, collapsed and had to be carried out of the courtroom. He died eight months later, apparently having loved Anne until the end of his life.
Because Henry was such a nice guy, he gave Anne the fanciest execution possible. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed, and Henry didn’t want to look like a thoughtless jerk on this special occasion. He even brought in a swordsman from France who was skilled enough to kill a person kneeling upright with just one blow (as opposed to the traditional English executioner, a comparatively clumsier axeman — apparently France has a long-standing tradition of killing royalty with style). Historical writer Leanda de Lisle speculates that Henry preferred a sword because it was both more romantic (think King Arthur and Excalibur) and also more phallic; on the one hand, this might be a reach, but on the other hand, “killing my wife with a penis” seems extremely Henry. A true gentleman among princes!
HENRY VIII: Babe
HENRY VIII: I know things aren’t great right now, but I’m really trying
HENRY VIII: I got you the best executioner money can buy
HENRY VIII: Babe, look at me
HENRY VIII: Babe
HENRY VIII: You don’t like it, do you?
HENRY VIII: Just tell me if you don’t like it
HENRY VIII: We’ll get you whatever kind of execution you want
HENRY VIII: Do you want a swordsman from Italy instead? Is that it?
HENRY VIII: Because I can get you an Italian if you want
HENRY VIII: Lol, I mean, you still have to die
HENRY VIII: But you’ll die like a queen!
William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, reported that Anne was facing death in the most Anne-like fashion: with (almost literal) gallows humor. “And then she said, ‘I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,’ and then put her hands about it, laughing heartily,” Kingston wrote. On some level, Anne might have seen death as an escape from the shame and misery of Henry’s wrath. At any rate, she would have known that her execution was inevitable, and, according to Kingston, wished to get it over with as soon as possible. One poem, widely attributed to Anne, begins with the lines:
O death! rock me asleep,
Bring me on quiet rest;
Yet pass my guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast
On May 19, Anne climbed the steps to a scaffold that had been built especially for the occasion and made a short speech to the crowd. In it, she maintained her innocence and described Henry as a gentle and merciful ruler; although she knew that she could not spare her own life, it’s likely that praising Henry was an attempt to make things easier for Elizabeth. She took off her headdress and tucked her hair up, then knelt on the scaffold. After asking the crowd to pray for her, she repeated “Jesu receive my soul; O Lord God have pity on my soul” over and over until death came. When it did, it happened in a single stroke of the sword, just as she had hoped.
The next day, Henry announced his betrothal to Jane Fucking Seymour, because these two couldn’t even wait until Anne’s half of the bed was cold before making it official. Jane would go on to give Henry the son he wanted, although she would give up her life in the process. The fact that she had died producing Henry’s only surviving male heir gave her a mythic near-martyr status in his eyes, and he would do creepy things like having her appear in a family portrait eight years after her death (and not even as a zombie or vampire, much to my dismay). She was the only one of his wives to be buried next to him.
I know I’ve made lots of jokes about how terrible Jane Seymour was, and while I do think she’s literally the worst, I want to say a brief word in defense of all of Henry VIII’s wives. It can be tempting to think of them as a succession of catty bitches, all intent on tearing down the reigning queen in hopes of taking her place — certainly that’s how they’re often portrayed in pop culture. But really, they were all Henry’s victims, each of them placed on a pedestal by him and then toppled by his violent, capricious will. If they competed with each other, it was because they lived in a culture where women were often forced to turn on other women in order to survive. That’s not to say that any of them were completely blameless in their behavior (other than Catherine of Aragon, of course, whose picture you would probably find in the dictionary if you looked up “blameless”), but they all deserve a certain amount of sympathy. Even Jane Seymour, as much as it pains me to say that.
Anne had the last laugh, of course. Jane’s son Edward was at best a useless boy-king, and at worst a divisive religious extremist who disinherited his sisters. It was Anne’s daughter Elizabeth who would go on to become one of the savviest and most popular rulers England has ever had, leading the country into a social and political golden age. From sparking a radical religious reform to giving birth to one of England’s most beloved monarchs, it’s possible that Anne shaped her country more than any queen before or since.
Anne Thériault is a Toronto-based feminist killjoy. She is currently raising one child and three unruly cats. If she has a looming deadline, you can find her procrastinating on Twitter @anne_theriault.
A U.S. soldier uses the Biometric Automated Toolset-Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment (BAT-HIIDE) System to scan the retinas of military-aged males in Paktika Province, Afghanistan. Photo by The U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s essay at The New York Review of Books asks us to reconsider the passport: while the West uses “passport” as shorthand for “opportunity and exploration,” the reality is very different, and passports are more frequently tools of control than liberation. And what happens as they’re increasingly digitized, and we move from passports to fingerprints and retinal scans for identification? Our movement is constrained by our very bodies.
Passports, in other words, were invented not to let us roam freely, but to keep us in place—and in check. They represent the borders and boundaries countries draw around themselves, and the lines they draw around people, too. This is the case in wartime and in peace. While most countries no longer ask for Casablanca’s famous exit visas, all their elimination has done is remove a cudgel from the bureaucratic gauntlet. As barriers on people’s leaving fall away, blocks on their entering shoot up. And what is the use in leaving if you have nowhere to go?
If the passport served as a symbol of belonging to a sovereign nation, and, for the more fortunate, a way to travel outside it, not long from now the lines will be drawn around our bodies, rather than our countries. As printed papers and analogue technologies are giving way to intricate scans that can identify us by the patterns on our irises, the shape of our faces, and even maps of our veins and arteries, we no longer are our papers; rather, our papers become us.
Brittany Allen | Longreads | May 2018 | 12 minutes (3,259 words)
A kind of cognitive dissonance occurs when your body is a political battlefield, but your body is also an ordinary meat-sack, worth love and attention and a good talking-to like any other flawed protagonist. In this reader’s experience, to be black, or perhaps more generally “Other,” in today’s America, is to dwell in this contradiction; it is to feel freighted by the harrowing historical origins of one’s existence, even as it is to know what every human knows — dailiness, murk, muddle, and tedium. Fiction writers who carry the burden of “Otherhood” must contend with this paradox on the page (not to mention in the marketplace). And when one is a Lorax, one may find oneself wondering how to treat the political heft of “Otherhood,” while creating characters and situations that feel true in the most mundane, human sense. Put another way: when you’re a Lorax, how do you write for an individual truffula tree without sinking under the weight of all their combined trunks? How do you render humanity when recent history and current politics — those arch and lumpy enemies to imagination — cast tall shadows over the lives of your chosen subjects?
I’ve met few fictions that really inhabit the murkiest corners of — say — black life in America, perhaps because rare is the author who gets to write (or feels free to write), about what and who is murky and daily when such an obvious historical tragedy defines us from the get-go. I’ve encountered few fictions that explore the maddening, difficult-to-name contradictions inherent to “Otherhood” (as I know it); few characters who feel like myself, or the people I love and know. Black folk who have wondered about their own individual responsibility to blackness. Black folk who struggle to name the pesky, omnipresent sensation that they are thwarted in some way that’s vaguely but crucially connected to their skin color. But this spring marks the arrival of two new collections that take on all the cognitive dissonance with compassion, insight, and unflinching honesty: Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man(Graywolf) and Nafissa Thompson-Spires’Heads of the Colored People(Atria). Read more…
You must be aware of the intimidation factor inherent in anyone’s writing to you, but I wonder if maybe the paradigm is similar to what happens when a stunning woman walks into a room: no one approaches her, she’s simply too beautiful; everyone assumes they have no shot. Maybe you don’t get many letters. Maybe you haven’t received a truly balls-out, bare-assed communiqué since 1959.
You once signed a book for me. That’s the extent of our connection thus far, but it’s something, isn’t it? The book was The Counterlife, but I had yet to read it when I presented it to you for signature. You were unsure of the spelling of my name, and so there’s an endearing awkwardness, a lack of flow, to the inscription. For E, you wrote, and the pen held still too long on the page, leaving a mark at the point of the lowest horizontal’s completion while you waited for me to continue spelling. L, you continued on, and then, again, a spot of bleeding, hesitant ink before the i and the s and the a, which proceed as they should before your slanted, rote, wonderful autograph. I remember being all too aware of the impatient line behind me, people clutching their copies of Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, The Human Stain, the odd Zuckerman Unbound. I tried to meet your eye, I tried to communicate something meaningful. The others, of course, didn’t get it. I wanted you to know: I got it. Later, when I found my way to reading the book, I actually purchased a whole new copy so I wouldn’t sully my signed paperback. I cherish our moment of eye contact, your pen hovering over the title page, my name circulating in that colossal mind of yours.
But wait. This is no mere fan letter; no mere exercise in soft-core intellectual erotica constructed for your amusement. I have an objective. How old are you now, Philip? Early seventies, is it? You are, of course, notoriously private. I have the books, sure, like everyone else. And the reviews of the books, each of which mentions the notorious privacy. And there’s the Claire Bloom debacle, which I hesitate even to mention, given its complete disrespect of the notorious privacy (though you might be happy to know that I couldn’t find “Leaving A Doll’s House” in any of the four sizable bookstores I checked and had to finally order it on Amazon). And The Facts, which I made a point of reading after the Claire Bloom, for balance. A graduate school friend of mine was your research assistant for a few years while we pursued our MFAs and it took her almost a year of post-workshop drinking to slyly confess, to a rapt audience of salivating young writers, her association to you. (Otherwise you’ll be happy to know she was loyal; she professed total ignorance of your life, your private matters, even your address. She seemed, in retrospect, somewhat terrified of you. I half-seriously offered her boyfriend a blow job if he’d get me your address. The table of young writers giggled madly and took big sips of beer.)
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