Anne Boleyn

1501 – 1536 · Generation XXII

Anne Boleyn was the second wife of Henry VIII and the mother of Elizabeth I. The king’s determination to marry her drove England’s break with the Church of Rome, and her fall three years after her coronation was as sudden as her rise had been slow. She was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, a diplomat who became Earl of Wiltshire, and Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the second Duke of Norfolk, and she spent her childhood at Hever Castle in Kent. Her year of birth is uncertain. Historic Royal Palaces and the historian Eric Ives put it at about 1501, while Retha Warnicke and the Encyclopaedia Britannica prefer 1507, and the evidence suggests that her sister Mary was the elder.

Her education was unusual for an Englishwoman of her time. In 1513 she joined the schoolroom of Margaret of Austria at Mechelen in the Netherlands, and the following year she went to France to attend Henry’s sister Mary, the bride of Louis XII. She then served Queen Claude as a maid of honour for nearly seven years. Ives traced her evangelical leanings to these French years. She came home early in 1522 for a marriage to her Irish cousin James Butler, which fell through, and took a place in the household of Catherine of Aragon. A secret betrothal to Henry Percy, heir to the Earl of Northumberland, was broken off soon afterwards.

Henry VIII began to pursue her around 1526. Her sister had been his mistress, and Anne refused to follow her. Henry had no legitimate son and had come to argue that his marriage to Catherine, his brother’s widow, had never been valid. From 1527 he pressed Pope Clement VII for an annulment, and he did not get one, since the pope could not afford to offend Catherine’s nephew, the emperor Charles V. The impasse destroyed Cardinal Wolsey and opened the way for Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer, who solved the problem by removing England from papal jurisdiction. On 1 September 1532 Anne was created Marquess of Pembroke in her own right, and that autumn she accompanied Henry to Calais to meet Francis I.

According to some accounts the couple went through a secret ceremony on 14 November 1532. They were certainly married, again in private, around 25 January 1533, by which time Anne was pregnant. Cranmer, newly made Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the marriage to Catherine void on 23 May, and Anne was crowned on 1 June. On 7 September she gave birth at Greenwich to a daughter, Elizabeth. As queen she protected and promoted religious reformers, helped men such as Hugh Latimer to bishoprics and encouraged the circulation of the Bible in English. But the son Henry wanted did not come. Later pregnancies ended in miscarriage, the last of them, a boy, on 29 January 1536, and by that spring the king was courting Jane Seymour.

The end came within three weeks. A court musician, Mark Smeaton, was arrested at the end of April, and Anne was taken to the Tower of London on 2 May 1536. She was accused of adultery with Smeaton and the courtiers Henry Norris, Francis Weston and William Brereton, of incest with her brother George, Lord Rochford, and of plotting the king’s death. Only Smeaton pleaded guilty. She was tried on 15 May before a court of peers presided over by her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and condemned. Most historians reject the charges, and the case is generally thought to have been engineered by Cromwell. Her marriage was annulled on 17 May, the day the five men died.

Henry commuted the sentence from burning to beheading and sent to France for an expert swordsman. Anne was executed within the Tower on the morning of 19 May 1536 and buried in an unmarked grave in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, where remains identified as hers were found during renovations in 1876. Her daughter was declared illegitimate, and Henry married Jane Seymour within two weeks. After Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558, Protestant writers such as John Foxe honoured Anne as a martyr of the English Reformation.

Images

• Anne Boleyn in a late sixteenth-century portrait, probably based on a lost contemporary likeness (National Portrait Gallery, London) (Unknown English artist, public domain)
• A chalk drawing of about 1532–36, later inscribed “Anna Bollein Queen”. Scholars disagree over whether it shows her (Royal Collection, Windsor) (Hans Holbein the Younger, public domain)
• Anne Boleyn’s signature (Connormah (vector tracing), public domain)
• The marker for Anne Boleyn’s grave in the floor of the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London (AloeVera95, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Read more on Wikipedia

Partners

• Married King Henry VIII (1491 – 1547) in 1533 — one child together

Children

• Queen Elizabeth I (1533 – 1603)

Life

• 1501 — Born
• 1533 — Married Henry VIII Tudor
• 1536 — Died

Sources

1. Anne Boleyn · Wikipedia
2. Anne Boleyn · Historic Royal Palaces
3. Anne Boleyn · Encyclopaedia Britannica
4. Anne Boleyn · World History Encyclopedia
5. Henry VIII (r. 1509–1547) · The Royal Family (royal.uk)