Anne Boleyn

Anne and Mary Boleyn

By 1522, Anne had returned to England. Anne’s married sister Mary had become Henry’s mistress, and possibly remained so until 1525.

Both Mary and Anne became ladies-in-waiting to Henry’s first wife, Katherine of Aragon.

Henry VIII meets Anne Boleyn

Henry may have first encountered Anne in March 1522, when she took one of the lead roles, 'Perseverance', in a court masque at Thomas Wolsey’s residence at Whitehall. 

Anne was not short of admirers. 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.

Henry and Anne's Courtship

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

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

Either driven by her own virtue or ambition, or by her scheming relatives, and aware of the King’s dynastic dilemma, Anne refused to become a royal mistress and held out for the possibility of marriage.

Anne Receives Love letters from Henry VIII

In the Vatican Library, a series of 17 letters survives which detail Henry’s growing infatuation with Anne 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. 

In 1528 Anne was struck with the ‘sweating sickness’, a mysterious and often fatal virus. Henry sent his doctor to tend to her at Hever Castle. 

Divorce in Tudor England

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 Pope Clement VII 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. 

How much did Anne influence the English Reformation?

It was Anne who may have suggested a solution to the Pope’s refusal to grant Henry a divorce.  Driven perhaps by her own reformist faith, she gave Henry a copy of William Tyndale’s 'Obedience of a Christian Man'. 

This book argued that the supreme authority was not held by the Pope but by the words of God enshrined in the Bible. 

Henry defied the Pope and dismissed Katherine from court in 1531. 

Anne marries Henry VIII

Anne finally married Henry in January 1533, seven years after their courtship had begun. Henry's marriage to Anne was technically bigamous, as his marriage to Katherine was not annulled until May 1533. 

In May 1533, Anne was escorted by river to the Tower of London where she prepared for her coronation in the royal apartments before riding to Westminster in a triumphant procession. Anne was crowned Queen in Westminster Abbey on 1 June, when she was six months pregnant. Henry and Anne’s first child, born on 7 September 1533, was a healthy daughter, who would grow up to become Elizabeth I. 

The following year, Henry broke with the Roman Catholic Church, setting himself up instead as the Supreme Head of what would become the Church of England. This created shockwaves, which caused religious and political unrest in Britain for the next 200 years. 

What was Anne like as Queen?

Unsurprisingly, Anne supported Henry’s new religious and political policies, gathering around them a new team of rising courtiers, including Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer.

Anne seems to have been active in promoting new educational identities for monasteries, no longer under the protection of the Catholic Church.

She was also the first royal patron of the great court artist, Hans Holbein, who designed an arch for her coronation and a rose-water fountain.

Anne's downfall

After the birth of Princess Elizabeth, 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. Henry and Anne’s relationship, built on passion and expectation, seems to have become more tempestuous and Henry, again, began to look outside his marriage for solutions.

Anne's Enemies

A promising new foreign alliance with the Holy Roman Empire floundered because the Emperor, Charles V, refused to ratify Henry's marriage to Anne.

Hostile factions gathered in the wings, led by all those courtiers who had lost their influence during the Boleyn change of regime. 

Anne also fell out with her ally Thomas Cromwell, who had arranged for the proceeds from the sale of monastic property to end up in the royal (i.e. Henry’s) coffers, rather than be made available for charitable purposes, as Anne had hoped. 

Anne Boleyn's Arrest and Trial

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, arriving at the private postern gate (now the Byward Tower).

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.

Anne's Imprisonment at the Tower of London

On the eve of her execution, according to the Constable of the Tower, Anne joked “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck” before putting her hands around it and laughing heartily. Henry had granted her the ‘small mercy’ of dying at the hands of a skilled swordsman rather than an executioner’s axe. 

The execution of a queen for treason was an unprecedented event, and Henry and Cromwell ensured that it was carefully stage managed within the walls of the Tower, rather than at the public execution sites outside. There would still be a substantial crowd of courtiers and Tower officials and inhabitants. 

Execution and Burial

On 19 May 1536, Anne was beheaded on Tower Green. She protested her innocence until the last, but her final reported words were uncontroversial, “I am come hither to die, for according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it … I pray God save the King … for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never.” Some may feel her words were laced with bitter irony, but Anne was probably considering the safety of her infant daughter Elizabeth. 

Anne was buried in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. 

Henry married Jane Seymour a mere 11 days after Anne's execution.