Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's Obsession
Amberley Publishing
This edition first published in Great Britain 2011
Copyright © Elizabeth Norton 2009, 2010, 2011
This electronic edition published 2011 by Amberley Publishing
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To my parents, Liss and Robin
With thanks to Hever Castle
CONTENTS
1. Sir Thomas Boleyn’s Daughter
2. So Pleasing in Her Youthful Age
15. Sick and Tired of the Concubine
Anne Boleyn is the most controversial woman ever to wear the crown of England. Among Henry VIII’s six wives, she is the only one to be a household name and she is remembered as both famous and infamous.
Even nearly five hundred years after her death, Anne still stirs up strong emotions. She often appears as a character in films, television and novels, as well as being the subject of numerous biographies. Accounts of Anne vary. Some biographers portray her as a victim of Henry VIII and an almost saintly figure, a woman who could do no wrong. Others portray Anne in a more hostile light, focussing on the rumours of murder and cruelty that surrounded her and on her treatment of Henry’s first wife and eldest daughter. Anne Boleyn has been widely studied since at least the early nineteenth century. She remains as much a focus for debate as she was during her lifetime. Both today and in the sixteenth century people either loved or hated Anne Boleyn.
Anne Boleyn was no stereotype however. She was an extraordinary woman living in difficult times. In a world where noblewomen received arranged marriages, Anne forged her own path. She carved out a career for herself, first in Brussels and then in Paris before returning reluctantly for the marriage that was arranged for her. Anne rejected that marriage, a scandalous course for the time, and arranged her own much more high profile match. When this engagement was broken, Anne, who had little beauty, used her wit and grace to make herself one of the most talked about ladies of the court, even attracting the king.
Anne Boleyn is often portrayed as either a notorious woman or a saint. There is no doubt that she was driven by ambition and she did cause suffering to Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and her daughter, Mary, as well as to others who opposed her. However, Anne was not the wicked murderess portrayed in hostile sources, nor a monster. Equally, she was no Protestant saint, driven only by a desire for religious reform. Anne was ambitious and it was always her ambition that drove her.
Anne Boleyn was an exceptional woman for her day. She set out to arrange a grand marriage for herself and she can never have imagined just how great a marriage she could snare. When she saw a chance, she took it and she played the game as politically as any of Henry’s ministers. In the end, Anne’s gamble failed and she suffered for this as, ultimately, so too did many of the most prominent politicians of Henry’s reign. Nobody would describe Thomas Cromwell or Cardinal Wolsey as helpless victims and Anne would also not have considered herself as a victim. She played the game and she lost, but she would have known that that was always a possibility. As Anne is frequently recorded as saying, there was a prophecy that a queen would be burned and she did not care. To become a queen, even with the risks associated with this, was a gamble worth taking.
Anne Boleyn was an extraordinary woman living in very difficult times for women. She did not set out to win the king and she may, at first, have been unsure of exactly what to do with the married Henry. She was unique and she fuelled a great love and lust in Henry which, in spite of his five other wives and numerous mistresses, he had never known before and would never know again. Only Anne Boleyn had the power to occupy Henry VIII’s every waking thought and purpose. With her charm and her outspokenness, Anne was the most remarkable woman the king ever met. For nearly a decade she was always Henry VIII’s passion and his obsession. It was that obsession that ultimately cost her her life as the reality of Anne, as wife and queen, could never live up to the image of her that had been built up in Henry’s mind.
Anne Boleyn used Henry’s obsession to drive him forward and change the course of English history over their marriage. Ultimately, however, Henry’s obsessive love turned to hate and even Anne was unable to protect herself from the consequences.
SIR THOMAS BOLEYN’S DAUGHTER
Anne Boleyn is usually considered an upstart, rising far above her station to grasp for the throne. This is the way she is perceived today and, to a certain extent, how she was perceived in her own time. However, although the Boleyns themselves were ‘new money’, Anne’s ancestry was, for the most part, noble and, with the possible exception of Anne’s first cousin, Catherine Howard, Anne was the most nobly born of Henry’s English wives. She would certainly have considered herself far superior by birth to her successor, Jane Seymour.
Anne was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and his wife, Elizabeth Howard. The Boleyn family had risen to wealth and prominence during the lifetime of Anne’s great-grandfather, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn. Geoffrey Boleyn was a merchant who rose to become Lord Mayor of London in 1457 and received a knighthood. By the time of his death in 1471 he was in a position to leave one thousand pounds to London charities, a vast sum at that time. He also purchased the great houses of Blickling Hall in Norfolk and Hever Castle in Kent.
If the Boleyn family originally came from humble origins, his newly acquired wealth allowed Geoffrey to arrange a good marriage for himself and an extremely advantageous match for his son. Geoffrey married well in choosing the daughter of Lord Hoo, and their son, Sir William Boleyn, made an even more advantageous match in marrying Margaret Butler, one of the two daughters and a co-heir of the Earl of Ormond. The Butlers were an ancient and noble family and Thomas Boleyn was a particular favourite of his grandfather, the Earl of Ormond. The earldom was also extremely wealthy and the Earl lived in England as an English peer. At the time of his death in 1515 Ormond left his daughters 72 manors in England alone, a vast inheritance. Thomas Boleyn placed himself firmly in the ranks of the nobility with his own marriage to Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Surrey, and later the second Duke of Norfolk.
If the Boleyns still retained a slight stigma of new money by the turn of the sixteenth century, there was no such stigma about the Howards. The Duchy of Norfolk was one of the premier titles in England and the family could lay claim to royal blood through their descent from Edward I. Anne’s uncle, the third Duke, also moved in royal circles through his marriage to Anne of York, daughter of Edward IV. Anne Boleyn’s mother was therefore the sister of the brother-in-law of Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York, a relatively close connection given the fact that Henry VII had no siblings of his own. Anne Boleyn’s own uncle was therefore uncle by marriage to her future husband, Henry VIII.
Although Elizabeth Howard, with her impressive family connections, played a role in Anne’s early life, it was Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, who prepared her for a position of prominence in England. Elizabeth Howard is a shadowy figure who appears rarely in contemporary sources. She is so rarely mentioned that some confusion exists about her and a number of writers have claimed that she died in 1512 and that Thomas then remarried a woman of much lower rank. This could account for the little prominence given to Lady Boleyn during Anne’s time as queen. However, it is not in fact the case. Anne’s mother, Elizabeth Howard, survived her daughter, dying in 1538.
There is evidence that Elizabeth Howard served as a lady in waiting to Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon, during the early years of Henry’s reign. This is likely, given her family connections and the ambition of her husband, and it is about her time at court that the only stories surrounding Elizabeth Howard exist. Elizabeth Howard was one of the beauties of Henry’s court and, according to a story surrounding her, she quickly attracted the attention of the much younger king. Henry VIII had led a closeted upbringing as Prince of Wales and it would therefore not be implausible that he was attracted to the older Elizabeth Howard; he was certainly attracted to Elizabeth’s two daughters when they later arrived at his court. It is possible that Mary Boleyn resembled her mother and this may have been the source of Henry’s attraction to Anne’s sister. There were certainly rumours that Elizabeth Howard and Henry VIII had a relationship that was more than merely platonic. The Elizabethan writer, Sander, writing a report hostile to Anne went so far as to claim that ‘Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s wife; I say his wife, because she could not have been the daughter of Sir Thomas, for she was born during his absence of two years in France on the king’s affairs’. According to Sander, Thomas Boleyn demanded to know the father of the child. The king ordered Thomas to stop persecuting his wife and Thomas then ‘learned from his wife that it was the king who had tempted her to sin, and that the child Anne was the daughter of no other than Henry VIII’. Sander claimed that Henry was fully aware that he was Anne’s father and later paid for her to be educated in France.
Sander’s account is clearly slander and it is impossible that Anne Boleyn could have been Henry VIII’s daughter. Not only is there no evidence that Thomas Boleyn ever doubted her parentage but even the latest possible birth date for Anne is when Henry was only sixteen and still kept closely guarded by his over-protective father. It seems likely that the young king may have shown an interest in Elizabeth Howard during his early years on the throne but there is no evidence that she was ever his mistress. Rumours claiming that Anne was Henry’s child did however circulate among their critics throughout their marriage and before.