Anne Boleyn: Behind the Myth

By 1526, Henry VIII was thirty-five years old. He had reigned in England for twenty-seven years and won considerable prestige for his military ventures abroad. He was a popular king in most quarters, yet he considered the succession, even his throne, to be in jeopardy. He had no male heir to succeed him. Henry had only one legitimate child, a daughter. Although Catherine of Aragon had become pregnant at least five times during the marriage, her last reported pregnancy was in 1518. In 1526, she was forty-two years old, well passed the age of childbearing in the sixteenth century.
Disappointed, Henry was clearly troubled and beginning to give way to a nagging doubt about the validity of his marriage to Catherine. When he and Catherine married in 1509, there were some concerns about her having been the wife of Henry’s elder brother, Arthur. Although Catherine’s marriage to Arthur was short-lived, if consummated, the marriage raised questions about the viability of Catherine’s marriage to Henry. In the bible, there are several prohibitions about a man marrying his brother’s widow, although there are also several sections of the bible that encourage it. Outside of wedlock, though, Henry had at least one surviving, healthy son by his mistress, Besse Blount. There is also a strong possibility that Mary Boleyn, another of the king’s mistresses, had given birth to his child. Both of Mary’s children, Catherine and Henry, may have been the king’s children. To Henry, a keen student of theology in his youth, these facts certainly made his marriage to Catherine suspect. Even though a dispensation had been obtained to allow the marriage in 1509, the emergence of Martin Luther in 1517 and the increasing opposition to papal authority in parts of Europe must surely have increased Henry’s concerns that his marriage to Catherine could, indeed, have been against the will of god. Under the circumstances, it was quite natural for the king to doubt the validity of his marriage. He believed firmly that a king had to provide a male heir to succeed him. He was also a deeply religious man. Without there having been an incentive, Henry may had questioned the validity of his marriage to Catherine, yet in 1526, Henry was not only questioning its validity, he was in love with another woman, who was far from interested in becoming his mistress. Enter Anne Boleyn, the king’s coy mistress.
Anne Boleyn appears to have been the eldest daughter of Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard. She was probably born sometime in May or June of 1507. Some historians suggest she could have been born as early as 1499, but this makes little sense for a number of reasons that will be mentioned here.
Very little is known about Anne’s childhood prior to about 1512. She probably spent much time at her family’s home in Kent, known as Hever Castle. Her brother George was born in 1503, and her sister, Mary, apparently born in 1508. In 1512 or perhaps the following year, Thomas Boleyn sent his young daughter to the Low Countries, to enter the court of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria. Although the usual age for a fille d’honoeur was twelve or so, it was not unheard of for a six or seven year old child to be sent to Europe as Anne was. There is substantial evidence that Anne was one of several other very young children placed in the nursery presided over by the Archduchess. In “Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn”, Retha Warwicke cited the example of Anne Brandon, who was six years old at about the time Anne in the Archduchess’ care. In a letter to Thomas Boleyn, Margaret mentions that Anne was “so well spoken and so pleasant for her young age”. Further more, Anne wrote herself to her father and she apologizes in her letter for the many mistakes and the poor handwriting. She explains that it is the first letter she has written a by herself. Whatever the precise circumstances, Thomas Boleyn had secured a valuable opportunity for his daughter. Yet, many contemporaries of Anne’s, and historians centuries afterwards, have assumed that this education, her two years in the Low Countries, but more particularly, the six or seven years in France that followed, must have been principally in the art of seduction. As one 19th century historian wrote, “”. However little evidence there is to support the conclusion, many assumed that Anne must have become, if not an open wanton, at least an ambitious flirt. Rather than Anne, plenty of evidence suggests that her sister Mary, who was in France briefly around 1514, was the “great wanton” in the family. If Anne was indeed born in 1507, then it is plausible that she would have remained in the nursery of Queen Claude and thus, remained unexposed to the apparent immorality of the French court.
Reports about Anne’s character from Margaret of Austria, for one, suggest that she was intelligent and attentive, hardly lacking in good sense or moral character, but this impression hardly stood a chance when Anne caught her king’s eye and became the rival to Queen Catherine in a very threatening way. Although her sister returned to England shortly after the marriage between Henry VIII’s eighteen year old sister and the ailing French King, Louis XII, ended in the latter’s death, Anne remained in France until around 1521. Anne returned to England when Cardinal Wolsey was attempting to negotiate her marriage to a distant relative, Piers Butler. The match would have ended a long-standing dispute over land if it had come about, but it was not to be. Negotiations were suddenly and quite unexpectedly halted. Anne, without a husband, entered the English court as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. It is unclear precisely when she attracted the attention of Henry, but she certainly distinguished herself as a lady-in-waiting. As George Cavendish, the gentleman-usher of Cardinal Wolsey recalls, “such was [Anne’s] success in [her post as lady-in-waiting], shown by both her exemplary behavior and excellent deportment that she quickly outshone all the others”. Sometime close to her marriage to William Carey, Mary Boleyn entered became Henry VIII’s mistress for a time. The relationship appears to have been short-lived, and probably took place several years after Mary’s marriage to William Carey on February 4th, 1520. Mary was only thirteen when she married twenty-four year old Carey. Anne and Mary were two of eight women who participated in a special celebration at Your Palace in 1522. About three years after this, in 1525, Mary appears to have become Henry’s mistress. Her son, Henry, was born on March 4th the following year; Henry appears to have been the father.
When Henry’s interest in Anne became profound is unclear but there is some indication that it may have been as early as 1523. However unlikely it is to be true (given the circumstances of Henry’s affair with Mary, her sister), at least one account, that of Cardinal Wolsey’s gentleman-usher, suggests that Henry was the principle disruptor of Anne’s romance with the heir to the Earl of Northumberland, Henry Percy. Cavendish wrote that “the flames of desire began to burn secretly in the king’s breast, unknown to all, least of all to Anne herself”. If the report is true, then Henry’s attachment to Anne began sometime in 1523, when she and Henry Percy apparently fell in love. Anne would have been about sixteen if she was born in 1507. Henry’s attachment to Anne did not, however, become apparent until around 1526. The timing is important in that, by this point, Henry’s wife was forty-one. Anti-papal feeling was also spreading across Europe as the Protestant Reformation unfolded. Without a male heir, his wife now barren, Henry would had a relatively legitimate cause to end his marriage to Catherine and seek out a new wife. Far from being a wanton flirt, Anne appears to have been a good choice of wife, excepting that she was the daughter of a relatively low-ranked courtier. She was certainly intelligent and quick-witted. She was also lively and apparently young enough to provide Henry with at least one healthy male heir. If she had been twenty-six or so it is unlikely that Henry, and indeed Cardinal Wolsey on the king’s behalf in Rome, would have argued that the marriage ought to be accepted because it was likely to produce healthy children.
On May 19th, 1536, Anne was executed on charges of adultery. That evidence of her misconduct was fabricated is highly probably; unlike her cousin, Katherine Howard, there is little evidence, beyond the circumstantial evidence that Anne enjoyed the company of men, her intellectual equals, more than women, and had been brought up on France, to condemn her. The most likely explanation for Anne’s fall from grace was that she did not produce a male heir as Henry had so fervently hoped she would. Anne Boleyn, it seems, was the victim of her husband’s quick temper, and her own precarious position as the head of a faction, the Boleyn faction, in the sixteenth century royal court.