Anne Boleyn

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Anne Boleyn went to the scaffold on the 19th of May 1536 wearing a red petticoat beneath a loose grey gown of damask trimmed in fur, and she laughed. The Constable of the Tower, William Kingston, had just told her the execution would be painless, and she replied, "I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck," then put her hands about it laughing heartily. Kingston, who had witnessed many executions, wrote that he had never seen a person show such joy in death.

  She had been Queen of England for three years. Before that, she had spent more than a decade at the center of one of the most consequential political crises in English history. The question hanging over every chapter of her life is not merely what happened to her, but what she actually caused to happen. Who was this woman who arrived at the English court in 1522 and left it in a barge bound for the Tower in 1536? And what does it mean that the charges that killed her, adultery and incest and treason, are disputed by most historians who have examined the evidence?

• 2. A Disputed Beginning

  ›

  Thomas Boleyn sent his daughter Anne to the court of Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands in 1513, where she served Archduchess Margaret and studied under a tutor. Margaret affectionately called her la petite Boulin, a hint that Anne may have been younger than the minimum age of 12 ordinarily required for such an honour. Margaret wrote to Thomas that his daughter was "so presentable and so pleasant, considering her youthful age, that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me, than you to me."

  The date of Anne's birth is genuinely unknown, and historians have argued over it ever since. British historian Eric Ives places her birth around 1501; American scholar Retha Warnicke argues for 1507. The central piece of evidence is a letter Anne wrote in 1514 in French to her father. Ives says its mature handwriting proves she was about 13 at the time; Warnicke points to the misspellings and grammatical errors as evidence she was much younger. William Camden, who was granted access to Lord Burghley's private papers, recorded in his history of Elizabeth I's reign that Anne was born in 1507, though historian Amy Licence notes that Burghley's handwriting could easily cause a "1" to be misread as a "7."

  Her family background was more distinguished than this uncertainty might suggest. The Boleyns originally came from Blickling in Norfolk, about 15 miles north of Norwich. Her paternal ancestor Geoffrey Boleyn had been a mercer and wool merchant before becoming Lord Mayor. Through her mother, Elizabeth Howard, Anne was connected to the Howards, one of the most powerful families in England. According to Ives, she was certainly of more noble birth than Jane Seymour and Catherine Parr, two of Henry's other English wives. The family name itself varied in spelling: sometimes written as Bullen, a form that explains the bull's heads in the family arms, and at the Habsburg court she was listed as Boullan.

• 3. Forged in France

  ›

  Anne stayed at the Court of Savoy in Mechelen from spring 1513 until her father arranged for her to attend Henry VIII's sister Mary, who was about to marry Louis XII of France in October 1514. From there Anne became a maid of honour to Mary, and then to Mary's 15-year-old stepdaughter Queen Claude, with whom she stayed for nearly seven years.

  In Claude's household, Anne completed her study of French and developed interests in art, fashion, illuminated manuscripts, literature, music, poetry and religious philosophy. Ives asserts that she "owed her evangelicalism to France," where she studied reformist books and Jacques Lefevre's translations into French of the Bible and the Pauline epistles. Ives also suggests that she was likely to have made the acquaintance of King Francis I's sister, Marguerite de Navarre, a patron of humanists and reformers whose own works included elements of Christian mysticism that verged on heresy, though her status as the French king's sister protected her. Marguerite's circle may have shaped Anne's interest in both religious reform and poetry.

  William Forrest, who wrote a contemporary poem about Catherine of Aragon, paid Anne a back-handed compliment, praising her "passing excellent" skill as a dancer. "Here," he wrote, "was a fresh young damsel, that could trip and go." When Anne returned to England early in 1522, she brought those French accomplishments with her, and they would serve her well at a court that was keenly interested in continental fashion and culture. Her education in France would inspire, as one observer later noted, many new trends among the ladies and courtiers of England.

• 4. The Game at Court

  ›

  Anne's public debut at the English court was at the Chateau Vert pageant on the 4th of March 1522, played a character called "Perseverance" in a spectacle honouring the Imperial ambassadors. She ranked third in precedence behind Henry's sister Mary and Gertrude Courtenay, Marchioness of Exeter. All the dancers wore gowns of white satin embroidered with gold thread.

  She had come back to England to marry her Irish cousin James Butler and settle a dispute over the Earldom of Ormond, but those plans fell apart, perhaps because her father Thomas hoped for a grander match or coveted the titles himself. What filled the gap was her post at court as lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Early in 1523 she entered a secret betrothal with Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Northumberland; Cardinal Wolsey refused the match in January 1524, and Percy was married off to Lady Mary Talbot instead. Anne was sent from court to the Boleyn country estates for a period, though it is not known exactly how long.

  Among Anne's friendships at court was one with Sir Thomas Wyatt, one of the greatest poets of the Tudor period. In 1525, Wyatt charged his wife with adultery and separated from her; historians believe the same year saw his interest in Anne intensify. He accompanied the royal couple to Calais in 1532. Henry VIII's biographer J. J. Scarisbrick writes that Anne "revelled in" the attention she received from admirers, and Retha Warnicke describes her as "the perfect woman courtier" whose energy and vitality made her the center of attention in any social gathering. Henry VIII noticed her by February or March 1526 and began his pursuit; she resisted his attempts to seduce her, refusing to become his mistress as her older sister Mary had been, and often retreated to Hever Castle. Within a year he had proposed marriage, and she accepted.

• 5. The King's Great Matter

  ›

  Henry VIII's desire for an annulment from Catherine of Aragon predated his pursuit of Anne, rooted in his need for a male heir to secure the Tudor claim to the crown. He had watched England torn apart by civil war over rival claims to the throne before his father Henry VII took power, and all of Catherine's children except Mary had died in infancy. Catherine had first come to England as the bride of Henry's brother Arthur, Prince of Wales, who died soon after their marriage; Pope Julius II had granted a dispensation for her subsequent marriage to Henry on the grounds that she was "perchance" still a virgin.

  Henry's feelings for Anne, and her refusals to become merely his mistress, probably hardened his view that no pope had the right to overrule the Bible. His quest for an annulment became known as the "King's Great Matter." In 1527, Henry's secretary William Knight was sent to Pope Clement VII, who at that time was a prisoner of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, following the Sack of Rome in May 1527. Knight returned with only a conditional dispensation that Wolsey called technically insufficient. Wolsey then convened an ecclesiastical court in England with a special papal emissary, Lorenzo Campeggio, but Clement had not empowered his deputy to make a decision; Charles V was his captor and Catherine was Charles's aunt.

  Anne saw both the opportunity and the moral quandary. She determined to yield to Henry's embraces only as his acknowledged queen, and she began taking her place at his side in policy and in state. There is anecdotal evidence, related by her former lady-in-waiting Anne Gainsford to biographer George Wyatt, that Anne brought to Henry's attention a heretical pamphlet, perhaps William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man or Simon Fish's A Supplication for the Beggars, which urged monarchs to rein in the Catholic Church. Anne, alongside Wolsey's many enemies at court, ensured Wolsey's dismissal from public office in 1529; Cavendish records that servants heard her say at dinner in Grafton that the dishonour Wolsey brought on England would have cost any other Englishman his head. Henry finally agreed to Wolsey's arrest on grounds of praemunire, and Wolsey died of illness in 1530 before he could be tried for treason. In 1532, Thomas Cromwell brought before Parliament the Supplication against the Ordinaries and Submission of the Clergy, recognising royal supremacy over the church; Thomas More resigned as Lord Chancellor the same year.

• 6. Queen and Mother

  ›

  On the 1st of September 1532, Henry granted Anne the Marquessate of Pembroke, a peerage necessary before she and Henry attended a meeting with French king Francis I at Calais that winter. Henry performed the investiture himself, with French ambassador Gilles de la Pommeraie as guest of honour; Henry lost fifteen shillings playing cards with Anne on the 11th of November. Anne and Henry married secretly on the 14th of November 1532, and after she became pregnant a second ceremony took place in London on the 25th of January 1533.

  On the 23rd of May 1533, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer sat in judgement at a special court at Dunstable Priory and declared Henry and Catherine's marriage null and void. Five days later he declared Henry and Anne's marriage valid. Pope Clement excommunicated both Henry and Cranmer. Anne was crowned queen on the 1st of June 1533 in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey; she was the last queen consort of England to be crowned separately from her husband, and unlike any other queen consort, she was crowned with St Edward's Crown, previously used only to crown monarchs. Historian Alice Hunt suggests this was because Anne's pregnancy was visible and the child was presumed to be male.

  The child born on the 7th of September 1533 was not male. She was christened Elizabeth, probably in honour of Anne's mother Elizabeth Howard, or Henry's mother Elizabeth of York, or both. The letters announcing the birth had an "s" hastily added to read "princess" instead of "prince." Henry was disappointed but hoped a son would follow. Anne went on to have at least three miscarriages; on the 29th of January 1536 she miscarried a male child which Imperial ambassador Chapuys wrote had been of months' gestation. He commented: "She has miscarried of her saviour." The infant Elizabeth, however, was entrusted to the care of Matthew Parker, who had become Anne's chaplain through her influence and who would later become one of the chief architects of Anglican thought during Elizabeth's reign.

• 7. The Fall

  ›

  On the 8th of January 1536, news reached Anne and Henry that Catherine of Aragon had died. The following day Henry wore yellow from head to toe and celebrated with festivities; in England yellow was a symbol of joy, though in Spain it signified mourning. Anne attempted to make peace with Mary, Catherine's daughter, but Mary rebuffed the overtures.

  By March 1536, Henry was courting Jane Seymour, one of Anne's own maids-of-honour, and allegedly gave her a locket containing a miniature portrait of himself. Anne, seeing Jane open and close the locket in her presence, ripped it from her neck with such force that her fingers bled. Later that month, Henry was unhorsed in a tournament and knocked unconscious for two hours; Anne believed the incident caused her miscarriage five days later. Whatever the cause, on the day Catherine of Aragon was buried at Peterborough Abbey, Anne miscarried a baby Chapuys described as appearing to be male, carried for about three and a half months.

  Towards the end of April 1536, a Flemish musician in Anne's service named Mark Smeaton was arrested. He confessed, perhaps after torture or promises of freedom. On May Day, courtier Sir Henry Norris was arrested; Sir Francis Weston and Sir William Brereton followed days later. Sir Thomas Wyatt was also imprisoned but released. George Boleyn, Anne's brother, was arrested on charges of incest alleged to have taken place in November 1535 at Whitehall and the following month at Eltham. On the 2nd of May, Anne was arrested and taken by barge from Greenwich to the Tower of London. From there, on the 6th of May, she wrote Henry a letter asking for a lawful trial and requesting that her "sworn enemies" not sit as her accusers and judges. "Let me have a lawful trial," she wrote, "and let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and judges; yea let me receive an open trial, for my truth shall fear no open flame."

  Four of the accused men were tried at Westminster on the 12th of May 1536. Anne and George Boleyn were tried separately in the Tower before a jury of 27 peers on the 15th of May. Her one-time betrothed, Henry Percy, 6th Earl of Northumberland, sat on the jury that unanimously found her guilty; when the verdict was announced he collapsed and had to be carried from the courtroom. He died childless eight months later. On the 17th of May, Cranmer declared Anne's marriage to Henry null and void. Anne's biographer Eric Ives believes her fall was primarily engineered by her former ally Thomas Cromwell, with whom she had clashed over the redistribution of Church revenues and over foreign policy. Cromwell's biographer John Schofield disagrees, contending that "not a trace can be found of a Cromwellian conspiracy against Anne" and that Henry himself issued the crucial instructions.

• 8. Last Words and Long Shadow

  ›

  On the morning of Friday the 19th of May 1536, Anne was led to a scaffold on the north side of the White Tower. She told the crowd she had come to die according to the law, prayed that God save the king, and described Henry as "a gentler, nor a more merciful prince" than any she had known. Lancelot de Carle, a secretary to the French Ambassador who witnessed the execution, composed a 1,318-line poem about the proceedings two weeks after Anne's death, describing how "the spectators could not refrain from tears."

  Anne swore on the Holy Sacraments, shortly before dawn on the day of her death, that she had never been unfaithful to the King. She knelt upright in the French style of beheadings. Henry had commuted her sentence from burning to beheading and had brought an expert swordsman from Saint-Omer in France to perform the execution; the execution consisted of a single stroke. She was buried in an unmarked grave in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London. Her skeleton was identified during renovations in 1876, in the reign of Queen Victoria, and reinterred in 1877.

  Nicholas Sanders, a Catholic recusant born around 1530, wrote in his 1585 book that Anne had six fingers on her right hand; upon exhumation in 1876, no abnormalities were found. Her frame was described as delicate, approximately 5 feet 3 inches, with tapering fingers and a narrow foot. All of Anne's portraits were destroyed by order of Henry VIII, who wanted to erase her from history; many surviving depictions may be copies of a lost original that existed as late as 1773. A medal known as "The Moost Happi Medal" was struck in 1536, probably to celebrate her pregnancy that year, and it remains one of the few contemporary likenesses. After her daughter Elizabeth became queen in 1558, Anne was venerated as a martyr and heroine of the English Reformation, particularly through the works of John Foxe, who argued that God had provided proof of Anne's innocence and virtue by ensuring Elizabeth ascended the throne. Matthew Parker, whom Anne had personally drawn to court as her chaplain and to whose care she entrusted her daughter before her death, became Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth and one of the foundational figures of the Anglican church.