Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn is one of the most divisive figures in British history. Her love-match with Henry VIII and her subsequent execution at the Tower of London after only three years of marriage have inspired dozens of books and films. 

Everyone wants to know how she really felt and how and why she became queen: was she a ruthless schemer or was her death simply a tragic consequence of court politics?’ We will never, really, know.

Anne has left behind virtually nothing of her own voice, and all of the histories of her life are marred by the writers’ prejudices or leaps of imaginative fantasy. Even the simplest statements about her are difficult. And all the portraits of Anne that survive were created during the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth I. 

The fascination with the life and death of Anne Boleyn lives on. The closest we can get to Anne today is by visiting her final resting place; she is buried in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London. 

The one I love

Anne was not short of admirers on her return to England.

This seems to have been partly due to her glamorous French fashions. Henry Percy, later Earl of Northumberland, and the poet Thomas Wyatt both courted her, but these dalliances seem to have remained within the accepted boundaries of flirtatious ‘courtly love’ and romantic poetry.

In 1526, the King’s interest significantly upped the stakes.

Henry VIII’s long marriage to Katherine of Aragon had produced only one surviving child, Princess Mary. By the mid-1520s, Henry was becoming increasingly desperate for a legitimate son and heir to secure the future of the Tudor dynasty.

Image: Henry VIII, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Love's great adventure

A series of 17 letters survives in the Vatican Library which detail Henry’s growing infatuation over the next couple of years. 

One, awkwardly and explicitly, declared that the King’s heart belonged to Anne alone, and that he hoped his body would soon also. It was signed with a loveheart around Anne’s initials. Anne’s responses do not survive.

It's a sin

In the Tudor period, not even a king could simply decide to get a divorce. 

If Katherine of Aragon had meekly accepted her fate, then English history may well have turned out rather differently. But Katherine was a proud and pious queen who believed that her marriage to Henry VIII was a sacred institution.

In 1527, the King began looking for a political and legal solution, petitioning the Pope and claiming that his marriage had never been legitimate because he had sinned in taking his brother’s widow, which some scholars believed to be prohibited by the Bible. 

Thomas Wolsey was charged with procuring the divorce. He failed, and his own career was destroyed in the process as the Pope refused to give into Henry’s demands.

Image: Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Anne's downfall

But Anne and Henry had no more children. Miscarriages in 1534 and 1536 may have led Henry, always spiritually superstitious, to question whether he had made the right choice in marrying Anne. 

Meanwhile, a promising new foreign alliance with the Holy Roman Empire floundered because the Emperor, Charles V, refused to ratify the Boleyn marriage.

Hostile factions gathered in the wings, led by all those courtiers who had lost their influence during the Boleyn change of regime. Thomas Wolsey too resented Anne’s influence over the King, calling her the “night crow”, cawing into his ear at night.

Image: Anne Boleyn by William Nelson Gardiner, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Fall from grace

In 1536, Cromwell made a decisive move against Anne. Accusations of adultery and even of plotting against the King’s life were levelled against the Queen, her brother and a small group of courtiers. 

Anne was arrested on 2 May 1536 and taken by barge to the Tower of London, passing under the most notorious of all the Tower's entrances, Traitors Gate. (pictured)

Henry VIII, notoriously prone to suspicion, and now besotted with one of Anne’s own ladies-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, ignored the Queen’s protestations of innocence.

A sham trial filled with Anne’s enemies found her guilty, and she found herself a prisoner at the Tower of London, in the same royal apartment where, just three years before, she had awaited her coronation.