No, Anne Boleyn was not a witch

On 7 January 1536, news arrived at Henry VIII’s court that his first queen, Katherine of Aragon, had died. To celebrate, the King and his second wife Anne Boleyn appeared ‘clad all over in yellow from top to toe’ and paraded their infant daughter Elizabeth (the future Elizabeth I) in front of the assembled courtiers.

To the untrained eye, the woman who had replaced Katherine seemed triumphant. But the ever-vigilant Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys was not fooled. ‘Notwithstanding the joy shown by the concubine [Anne Boleyn] at the news of the good Queen's death…’ he wrote, ‘she had frequently wept, fearing that they might do with her as with the good Queen [Katherine].’

More ominously, the ambassador went on to report that after only three years of marriage Henry already believed that he had been bewitched into marrying Anne.

Then disaster struck. On 29 January, the day that Katherine of Aragon was laid to rest, Anne miscarried again. Even though it was probably too early to tell the sex of the baby, Chapuys claimed that it ‘seemed to be a male child which she had not borne 3½ months, at which the King has shown great distress.’

For Henry, already tired of a wife whom he judged had given him little but trouble, this was the last straw. He privately instructed his chief minister Thomas Cromwell to get him out of the marriage.

In the event, Cromwell chose not to pursue a witchcraft allegation and instead built a case of adultery and treason against the beleaguered Queen. But the fact that Anne was accused of committing adultery with five men, including her own brother, meant that the rumours of sorcery would never go away.

These rumours were amplified during the reign of Anne’s daughter Elizabeth. Hostile Catholic sources used every trick in the book to discredit the ‘heretic’ queen so that they could put Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne instead. Writing almost 50 years after Anne’s execution, Nicholas Sander asserted: ‘Anne Boleyn was everywhere regarded as a woman of unclean life’.

Inspired by hints of Anne’s witchcraft, Sander claimed that she had a sixth finger on her right hand and a large ‘wen’ (a boil or mole) under her chin. Such blemishes were commonly thought to be the ‘Devil’s Mark’ – a symbol of having made a pact with Satan. Sander had never met Anne so his observation is unreliable, to say the least.

The Scottish author Adam Blackwood went further still and declared that Elizabeth was the incestuous daughter of Anne Boleyn by her brother George.

Another of the English queen’s Catholic enemies, Cardinal William Allen, took up the theme and declared Anne ‘an infamous courtesan’ whose relationship with Henry VIII – Elizabeth’s ‘supposed father’ – was ‘incestuous copulation’.

The only corroborating evidence that Anne had a sixth finger is found in another later but more sympathetic source, The Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleyn. Written by George Wyatt, the grandson of poet Thomas Wyatt who knew (and loved) Anne well, it refers to a small extra piece of fingernail that she had on one of her hands. But even this is not supported by any contemporary source.

As Queen, Elizabeth I wisely chose not to dignify the scurrilous rumours about her mother with a response – at least, not in words. Instead, she chose actions, expressing her loyalty towards Anne by surrounding herself with Boleyn relatives at court and displaying her mother’s famous falcon emblem everywhere. She also commissioned portraits of Anne.

New research by curators at Hever Castle into one of the most famous of these has brought to light a surprising discovery.

The artist responsible for the ‘Rose’ portrait at Hever Castle (her childhood home), started out by following what was then an established pattern, showing Anne’s head and shoulders and her famous ‘B’ necklace. But scientific imaging at Hever Castle has recently revealed a discarded triangular form beneath Anne’s right arm. This records the moment when the artist deliberately changed the composition to make Anne’s hands fully visible, clearly showing five digits on each hand.

Given the portrait was painted around the time of Sander’s scurrilous account in Elizabeth’s reign, there is a strong likelihood that it was intended to provide visual evidence to rebut a damaging myth about Henry’s second queen – and thereby to defend the legitimacy of their daughter.

But Anne Boleyn was by no means the only woman in history to be accused of witchcraft as a means of eroding her power. One of the earliest examples was Joan of Navarre, Henry IV’s widow, who in 1419 was accused of plotting to bewitch her stepson Henry V to death.

Then in 1441, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of Gloucester, who was accused of ‘treasonable necromancy’ to plot the death of Henry VI and make her husband king. She was forced to do public penance and condemned to spend the rest of her life in prison.

Later that century, Jacquetta of Luxembourg was brought before the council and accused of luring Edward IV into marrying her daughter Elizabeth Woodville through witchcraft. Although no further action was taken against her, the rumours were slow to fade; Richard III later used them to discredit his Woodville rivals.

Of course, accusations of witchcraft are almost impossible to prove. But the terrifying fact is that rumour and hearsay were considered ‘evidence’ enough to send tens of thousands of innocent women to their death for this crime between the 14th and 17th centuries. Even those who escaped the pyre or hangman’s noose would find their lives blighted by suspicion and prejudice – just as Anne Boleyn did both during her lifetime and for centuries after her tragic death.