Anne Gainsford

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Anne Gainsford carried a banned book that changed the course of English history, though almost nobody has heard her name. She was a waiting-woman in the household of Anne Boleyn, close enough to her mistress to be called by the pet name Nan. That intimacy placed her at the center of at least two moments that rippled far beyond the royal court. One involved a stolen book, a cardinal, and a king who would read what he was never supposed to read. The other involved a headless figure in a book of prophecies, and a chilling remark that has survived the centuries. Anne died long before most people who wrote about her were even born, and that simple fact turned her into someone else's mistaken footnote. The questions are plain: who was Anne Gainsford, what did she actually do, and why did historians spend so long getting her story wrong?

• 2. The Banned Book Incident

  ›

  In 1528, Anne Boleyn lent her waiting-woman a copy of William Tyndale's The Obedience of a Christian Man, a book that Cardinal Wolsey had proscribed. Sir George Zouche, Anne Gainsford's betrothed, took it from her hands in jest. It was discovered in his possession by Richard Sampson, Dean of the Chapel Royal, who carried it directly to Cardinal Wolsey.

  Anne Boleyn's response to losing the forbidden volume was not anger at her servant. She told Anne that it would be "the dearest book that ever dean or cardinal took away", then went straight to King Henry VIII to complain about Wolsey's confiscation. Once the King ordered it returned, Anne Boleyn persuaded him "most tenderly" to read the book himself. Henry was impressed enough to call it a book "for me and all kings to read".

  The book argued against papal power and in favour of secular rulers. Henry's encounter with those ideas, made possible by the chain of accidents that started with Zouche's prank, became one of the intellectual pathways toward the break with Rome. Tyndale's argument that kings, not popes, held supreme authority landed in exactly the right hands at exactly the right moment.

• 3. The Headless Figure

  ›

  Two years after the book incident, in 1530, a different object appeared in Anne Boleyn's apartments. A book of ancient prophecies was found, and when opened it showed three crude drawings representing Henry VIII, Catherine of Aragon, and Anne Boleyn. The figure meant to represent Anne Boleyn had no head.

  Anne Boleyn showed the drawings to her waiting-woman. Anne Gainsford's recorded reaction was stark: "If I thought it true, though he were an emperor, I would not myself marry him." Her mistress, by Anne Gainsford's account, dismissed the book as a bauble. Six years later, in 1536, Anne Boleyn was charged with high treason and adultery. She was executed. Anne Gainsford then went on to serve Anne Boleyn's successor, Jane Seymour, as lady-in-waiting.

• 4. Her Life Beyond Court

  ›

  Anne Gainsford was born in Crowhurst, Surrey, the daughter of John Gainsford and his second wife, Anne Hawte. Her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Tyrrell, was the widow of Sir Robert Darcy and the daughter of Sir Thomas Tyrrell of Heron in East Horndon, Essex. She had one sister named Mary.

  She married Sir George Zouche, the same man who had taken Tyndale's book from her hands, and together they made their principal home at Codnor Castle in Derbyshire. They had eight children. Their sons included John Zouch of Codnor, George Zouch, and William Zouch. Their daughters included Margaret, who married Augustine Babington of Normanton, and Lucy, Frances, Anne, and Audrey.

  A claim that the later-famous Bess of Hardwick was raised in Anne's household has no supporting evidence. Anne died before the 16th of July 1548, the date on which her husband George Zouche wrote his last will. In that document, he referred to "Elleyn now my well-beloved wife", making clear he had remarried by then.

• 5. A Mistaken Identity

  ›

  At the end of the 16th century, George Wyatt, the grandson of poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, compiled one of the first biographies of Anne Boleyn. He drew on the reminiscences of one of Anne Boleyn's serving women. In the 19th century, an editor named Samuel Weller Singer identified that serving woman as Anne Gainsford, and historians accepted this identification for a long time.

  The scholar Eric Ives, described in the source as Anne Boleyn's most prominent biographer, noted that given the connections attributed to Gainsford, the actual volume of material Wyatt recorded was disappointing. Researcher Sylvia Barbara Soberton eventually demonstrated why: Anne Gainsford was dead before George Wyatt was born. Wyatt was born around 1553, roughly five years after George Zouche's 1548 will was written.

  Soberton's argument is that Weller Singer's error was shaped by a surface resemblance between two different stories. The banned-book episode connected to Anne Gainsford had been published by John Louth, Archdeacon of Nottingham, in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Wyatt's biography also described a banned book ending up at Cardinal Wolsey's desk, but his chronology placed the incident after January 1533, when Henry and Anne Boleyn married, and described Wolsey interrogating the maid's suitor. Wolsey had died in 1530, three years before that date. Soberton concludes that the two stories were similar enough to fuse in Weller Singer's mind, but they were not the same story and not the same woman.