Anne Boleyn

Queen of England (r. 1533-1536)

• Born: c. 1500-1501
• Birthplace: Probably at Blickling Hall, Norfolk, England
• Died: May 19, 1536
• Place of death: London, England

The desire of England’s King Henry VIII to marry Anne Boleyn, his second wife and the mother of Queen Elizabeth I, led to the establishment of the Church of England.

Early Life

Future queen of England Anne Boleyn (boh-LIHN) was born into an ambitious family at a time when ambitions were realized through interactions with the court and marriage into the nobility. Young women from such families were expected to marry as their families dictated. Anne’s great-grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn, a tradesman lacking in social status, rose to become lord mayor of London in 1457 but improved his position even more through marriage; Sir William Boleyn, her grandfather, made an even more impressive marriage to Margaret Butler, daughter of an Irish earl. Thomas Boleyn, Anne’s father, was the eldest of their four sons. A highly successful courtier and diplomat, he married Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey; Elizabeth Howard was descended from King Edward I, thus bestowing a touch of royal blood on her children.

While Elizabeth Howard was frequently pregnant, only Mary, Anne, and George survived to adulthood. To prepare Anne for an advantageous marriage, she was sent abroad, first, in 1513, to the court of Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands. When Mary Tudor (Mary I ), sister of Henry VIII, married King Louis XII of France in 1514, Anne was moved to their court, where she joined her sister Mary. When Louis died, the sisters remained at court serving Claude of Valois, wife of the new king, Francis I , whose court was conspicuously vice-ridden. Mary Boleyn’s reputation became tarnished; Anne remained aloof, although she developed the charm, wit, and love of French manners and fashions expected of her in that sophisticated environment.

She returned to England in 1521 or 1522, gaining a place in the household of Henry VIII’s queen Catherine of Aragon , where her social skills brought her immediate attention. Her sister Mary was then mistress of the king, which may have facilitated Sir Thomas Boleyn’s ennoblement as Viscount Rochford. During this period, Anne attempted to marry Henry Percy, heir to the earldom of Northumberland. Her desire to arrange her own marriage was itself shocking; her plans were thwarted by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York and lord chancellor of England. Anne temporarily left court.

Life’s Work

Anne returned to court in 1524 or 1525. King Henry VIII’s affair with Anne’s sister ended, and he was attracted to Anne. She resisted his approaches, either because she was genuinely repelled or because she was unwilling to settle for a role as a mistress. Since 1509, Henry had been married to Catherine, daughter of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, rulers of Spain, but the king was increasingly frustrated by Catherine’s inability to bear a male heir. A series of pregnancies had resulted in only one child, Mary, who survived infancy. While miscarriages and high infant mortality rates were common, Henry was concerned that he have a legitimate successor to protect England against a recurrence of the previous century’s civil wars. Moreover, the birth of his illegitimate son to Elizabeth Blount had proved to his satisfaction that he could sire sons.

In 1527, Henry sought a “divorce” essentially a modern annulment, since rather than dissolving the marriage, it would show that a legitimate marriage had never taken place. The king’s argument was that despite the papal dispensation for his marriage to Catherine, his marriage was forbidden by the Bible, specifically by Leviticus 20:21, which forbids marriage with a brother’s wife. In November, 1501, Catherine had married Henry’s elder brother Arthur, who died in April, 1502, probably without consummating the marriage. Catherine’s failure to bear a son was proof, Henry believed, of divine displeasure with the marriage.

Such divorces were frequent. The duke of Suffolk, who had married Henry’s sister Mary in 1515, had secured two; Henry’s older sister, Queen Margaret of Scotland, similarly secured one and remarried in 1527. Henry expected the process to be rapid, entrusting Cardinal Wolsey with what came to be called the King’s Great Matter. In 1527, however, the troops of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V had invaded Rome; the emperor was Queen Catherine’s nephew. Pope Clement VII was now his prisoner and was unwilling to take steps against the emperor’s aunt. He began a series of delaying actions.

Anne’s role as rival with Catherine for Henry’s affection was known by early 1526. Flirtatious, volatile, outspoken, arrogant, and sophisticated where the queen was grave, mild-mannered, modest, and restrained, Anne was intelligent in an age that rarely acknowledged the value of female intelligence. Anne gained few friends. Many could not understand Henry’s attraction to her. She was no beauty. She was dark-haired; the ideal of the day was blond. She was thin, and her skin was sallow. She was said to have a rudimentary extra nail on one hand. To much of the court and the public, she became a stereotypical image of the temptress, although her frequent absences from court may have been serious attempts to avoid the king’s attentions. Anne was blamed for Wolsey’s fall from power. Henry, accustomed to having his way, replaced Wolsey with Thomas Cromwell, who was more in sympathy with Anne. Anne was accused of avenging herself for Wolsey’s earlier interference in her romance with Henry Percy. By 1529, however, she could not have saved herself from the king’s plans had she chosen to do so.

Henry was not in sympathy with the Protestant movement, which had swept through northern Europe since Martin Luther had posted his designs for church reform on a church door at Wittenberg in 1517. Henry considered himself a good Catholic and had been given the title “Defender of the Faith” for his opposition to Luther. Nevertheless, in 1529, determined to impose his will and gain a male heir, Henry convened a parliament that was to bring about a religious revolution, as Pope Clement continued to thwart Henry’s plans. In 1530, Clement told Henry to dismiss Anne from the court; in 1531, he banned the king’s remarriage while the divorce case was being heard, apparently indefinitely, in Rome.

Anne, however, had allowed Henry increasing intimacy, and by the end of 1532 they had become lovers. By December, 1532, she was pregnant, and, probably sometime in January, 1533, Anne and Henry were secretly married. Henry’s logic, apparently, was that he had a right to this second marriage because the marriage to Catherine had never been valid. On June 1, 1533, Anne Boleyn, visibly pregnant, was crowned queen of England in an elaborate ceremony that was to be the high point of her life. Despite the public pageantry, crowds were quiet and occasionally hostile as the new queen passed. Queen Catherine’s many charities and conventional domesticity won for her friends that the new queen could never possess.

In July, Pope Clement VII ordered Henry to renounce Anne and declared any child of the new marriage illegitimate. That child, the future Elizabeth I , was born on September 7, 1533. She was the wrong gender for an heir, but Henry and Anne assumed that Anne would continue to bear healthy children, although Anne by then was about thirty-three years of age, well into middle age at a time of low life expectancy. In 1534, Anne gave birth to two stillborn infants. Understanding the importance to her well-being of a healthy son, she continued to become pregnant. The increasing insecurity of her position did not improve her disposition.

Bent on having his way, Henry, via the Act of Supremacy , made himself, not the pope, the spiritual father of the English people, thus separating England from the Roman Catholic Church. From February, 1535, it would be high treason to deny Henry’s supremacy. He had already begun the series of executions that would taint his reputation for the remainder of his reign. He purged those who defied him, including his old friend the Humanist scholar Sir Thomas More, who was beheaded in 1535, and the aged John Fisher, bishop of Rochester. They and many others could not accept the Act of Supremacy. Unwilling to accept any challenge to his will, he was also tiring of Anne’s quick tongue and her apparent unwillingness to accept his unfaithfulness as had Catherine; like Catherine, Anne also failed to provide him with a son.

In January, 1536, Catherine of Aragon died. Henry was unlikely to marry for a third time while Catherine and Anne both lived, but he was pursuing Jane Seymour by November, 1535. Catherine’s death freed him to rid himself of Anne and start anew. He maintained that Anne had bewitched him into marriage; he claimed she was a sorceress and was guilty of adultery. He also claimed that she had discussed what would happen when the king died, and such discussions constituted high treason. On May 2, Anne was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. There, where she had been received on the eve of her coronation three years before, she was made a prisoner.

Despite public hatred of Anne, few believed she was guilty. According to the case prepared by Thomas Cromwell, she had committed incest with her brother, George Boleyn (Lord Rochford). Three prominent courtiers, Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, and William Brereton, as well as her musician, Mark Smeaton, were arrested as her partners in adultery. Smeaton was not a nobleman; as a commoner, he could be and apparently was tortured into a confession. Charges included conspiracy to murder the king.

The duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle Thomas Howard, presided over the trials of Norris, Weston, Brereton, and Smeaton on May 12; all were condemned to death. Anne and her brother were tried separately on May 14; again, Anne’s uncle presided. Actual evidence against them was lacking, and the case was poorly prepared, but the results were foreordained. Both were condemned. On May 17, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer convened a court at Lambeth to annul Henry’s marriage to Anne, thus preparing the way for Henry’s marriage to Jane Seymour on May 30 as, essentially, his first valid marriage. Anne Boleyn was beheaded on May 19 at the Tower of London; her remains were buried in the Royal Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula of the Tower.

Significance

Scholars have argued over the degree to which Anne Boleyn was a Protestant rebel against the Church of Rome. She encouraged individual reading of the Bible and the reading of works banned by the church, but there is little other evidence that she was a conscious Protestant. Nevertheless, because she was, willingly or otherwise, a pawn in the King’s Great Matter, she was at the heart of the separation of England from the Roman Catholic Church and of the despoliation of convents and monasteries that was to follow. Her independence of spirit and attempts at autonomy, despite the great powers that controlled her destiny, seem to ally her with the Protestant movement, whatever her intent, and cause modern feminist historians to view her with sympathetic eyes.

Bibliography

Bernard, G. W. “The Fall of Anne Boleyn.” In Power and Politics in Tudor England: Essays. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2000. Examines Boleyn’s function, as monarch, pawn, and victim, in the power struggles of her time. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Chapman, Hester. The Challenge of Anne Boleyn. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1974. Places Boleyn in the context of a politically ambitious family in an age of melodramatic excess; pays particular attention to the courts in which Boleyn was trained.

Erickson, Carolly. Mistress Anne: The Life and Times of Anne Boleyn. New York: Summit Books, 1984. Reprint. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998. In one of a series of Tudor biographies that include Bloody Mary (1978) and Great Harry (1980), Erickson vividly re-creates the world in which these people lived; her work is scholarly, but her style is popular. Her portrait of Anne is not generally sympathetic.

Fraser, Antonia. The Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Originally published in London as The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1992). Fraser balances anti-Boleyn propaganda with information from other sources to achieve a convincing portrayal, in part sympathetic.

Lindsey, Karen. Divorced, Beheaded, Survived. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995. A feminist interpretation of Boleyn’s life, this work emphasizes Boleyn as a victim of an all-powerful monarch determined to conquer her. Cites as evidence a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, who knew Anne well.

Shagan, Ethan H. Popular Politics and the English Reformation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Study of the way in which ordinary English subjects interpreted and reacted to Henry’s split from the Catholic Church. Argues that religious history cannot be understood independently of political history, because commoners no less than royals understood religion and politics as utterly intertwined. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Warnike, Retha M. The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Focusing on Anne’s society and its conventions, Warnike argues that Anne’s failure to produce a male heir doomed her.

Weir, Alison. The Six Wives of Henry VIII. London: The Bodley Head, 1991. Depending heavily on the virulently anti-Boleyn commentary of Spanish ambassador Eustace (or Eustache) Chapuys, Weir presents an almost totally unsympathetic portrait of Boleyn as manipulative seducer.

Zahl, Paul F. M. Five Women of the English Reformation. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2001. Discusses Boleyn’s role as an advocate of Protestantism in general and of the “justification by faith” doctrine in particular. Includes bibliographic references.