The Age of Anne
Boleyn
By Wendy J. Dunn
At time of
canvasinge this matter so,
In the courte (newe entred) theare dyd frequent
A fresche young damoysell, that cowld trippe and go,
To synge and to daunce passinge excellent,<
No tatches shee lacked of loves allurement;
She cowlde speake Frenche ornately and playne,
Famed in the cowrte (by name) Anne Bullayne
William Forrest
At the birth of
Anne Boleyn, if a seer had predicted her important role on the stage of
English History, I feel certain her father – Sir Thomas Boleyn- would
have scoffed. Indeed, of all possible futures for this girl-child, it
would not seem conceivable that Anne’s destiny lay as a crowned Queen of
England, consort of Henry VIII. At best, her father probably thought of
a future where one of his daughters, surviving the perils of infancy and
childhood of this period, achieved a marriage strengthening Boleyn’s own
status at court. But to ever imagine his daughter Anne as Queen and
spouse to a King? The possibility of that would have been entirely
remote.
Later Earl of
Ormonde and Wiltshire, Thomas Boleyn- or Bullen as the family was known
then- was but a knight at the time of Anne's birth. A son of a man whose
own father, Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, stood even lower on the rungs of
English society- a self made man who became a Mayor of London and gained
an heiress, the daughter of Lord Hoo and Hastings, as his wife.(i)
Thomas Boleyn, the ambitious father of Anne Boleyn continued building
upon what his grandfather first built and rarely- that is, until his
daughter Anne had the misfortune to miscarry the King's son in 1536-
missed a step to raise his family higher in the Tudor hierarchy. Indeed,
Thomas Boleyn had done well enough for himself when he married Lady
Elizabeth Howard, a daughter of Thomas, Duke of Howard, head of a
prolific family, with bloodlines stretching back to Edward I, through
his second marriage to Margaret of France.
But, at Anne's
birth, Sir Thomas Boleyn- with his daughter's future as mother to one of
England's best-loved monarchs hidden from him-had no reason to leave
documentation about the date of her birth. This being the case- Anne's
birth year, as indeed the place of her birth, is shrouded in the deepest
mist of history, and has long been fodder for lively debate amongst
Tudor historians. My reason for entering this fray is a belief that the
arguments for Anne's birth in 1507 are much stronger than the other
suggested years of 1502 or 1501, indeed, as early as 1499.
For many
historians, the crux of the matter appears to revolve around Anne
Boleyn's sojourn over on the continent. Thomas Boleyn, using the
contacts he made abroad during his time as a successful diplomat, sent
Anne first as a fille d'honneur at the court of Margaret, Duchess
of Burgundy. After a brief stay in Burgundy, Anne's father arranged for
her to go onto France, perchance to join her sister Mary as attendant to
Mary Tudor, the youngest surviving sister of Henry VIII, on her marriage
to Louis XII of France. (ii) Because the first sojourn occurred in 1514,
historians have argued that Anne Boleyn must have had reached either the
age twelve or thirteen, usually the youngest ages considered for a
fille d'honneur.
I believe Retha Warwicke, in her 'Rise and fall of Anne Boleyn,'
argues a very good case that Anne Boleyn was no more than seven on her
arrival at Margaret's court. Not only does she cite the example of Anne
Brandon, six-years-old in the same time period as Anne Boleyn, placed
also in Margaret's care but in addition she cites a letter from the
Regent to Thomas Boleyn. This letter comments how Anne was "so well
spoken and so pleasant for her young years." (3) These words imply
strongly that Anne was younger than twelve or thirteen, because it is
extremely unlikely that the Regent would have commented on her 'young
years' if Anne had neared or reached her teenage years. In this period,
though admittedly not a common occurrence, girls of twelve were unlikely
to be regarded in their 'young years', as they could be legally wed, as
well as have their marriages consummated.
There is even a letter that Anne herself wrote to her father, in
obviously immature handwriting, during her stay with the Regent, in
which Anne blames her mistakes and poor penmanship on the fact that this
letter was the first she had written by herself. (4) Surely by twelve or
thirteen this would not likely be the case.
We also have evidence pointing to what happened to Anne after her
arrival in France. That Anne made acquaintance of Renče of France (5),
the French Queen's child sister who was still in the Royal nursery,
shows us that Anne was not made part of the licentious court of François
of France. Rather, because of her extreme youth, Anne spent her first
years in France in the nursery of the Royal children, at the court of
Claude, the Queen and consort of Francios. Where François' court had a
reputation for 'free-living,' if not depravity, his wife's court was
deemed almost as good as a good convent. A court very suitable for a
young, gently-bred girl, especially if she is to be returned to her
family not as 'spoiled goods, ' but with all her prospects of achieving
a good marriage still in place; that is, her 'good name, ' and
'virginity' still intact.
Another confusion concerning Anne Boleyn is whether she was in fact the
elder sister, rather than her evidently more flighty sister, Mary
Boleyn. Before Anne's involvement with the King, Mary briefly became
mistress to King Henry VIII - some people from the period believed her
son, Henry Carey, to be also the son of the King- perhaps after her
marriage to William Carey. (The confusion continues even over the timing
of Mary's relationship with the King. Warnicke believes it occurred
after her marriage with the King (6) while Antonia Fraser states it
happened before.(7)
Sir Thomas Boleyn 's decision to send Anne rather than Mary to the
Duchess of Burgundy seems to offer evidence that Anne was the elder. But
not necessarily so. It is possible that Sir Thomas Boleyn realised that
his younger daughter, besides her obvious intelligence, had inherited
his gift as a linguist- something that would one day be passed down to
his grand-daughter, Elizabeth the First. His decision to send Anne
rather than Mary to Burgundy could have been simply the result of a
parent weighing up opportunities for their children, and deciding which
child would benefit most from them. It is also possible that Mary may
already displayed characteristics of concern to her father. As an adult,
Mary had a reputation for being rather free with her 'favours; ' (8) the
King of France also remarked about her, "per una grandissima ribala et
infame sopre tutte."
During the reign
of Elizabeth, members of Anne's own family believed the Queen's mother
to be the younger sister, as shown when Mary Boleyn's grandson attempted
to claim the Earldom of Ormonde through this fact of his grandmother's
seniority. As Fraser comments, this seniority was not contested
"although in the reign of Anne Boleyn's daughter there were plenty who
would have done so, if it had been untrue." (9) There is another a bit
of evidence to sway my belief about how young Anne actually was during
her time on the continent. Anne spoke English with a French accent until
the day her husband and Thomas Cromwell found a legal way to murder her.
An accent natural to our speaking voice is something usually acquired at
a young age. That Anne had a French accent on her return to England
suggests strongly that she first came to the Continent as a child. Also,
the very fact that Anne seemed so 'French,' another thing not making her
popular, either with the English court or with the common people,
implies that she had been away from her family and England during the
important character developing years of her childhood. Supporting this
view are the words of George Cavendish, loyal gentleman usher of
Cardinal Wolsey. Cavendish wrote in his 'Life and Death of Cardinal
Wolsey,
This
gentillwoman Mrs Anne Boleyn beyng very yong was sent in to the realme
of ffraunce.(10)
Surely
Cavendish's choice of the words 'very young' tells us more than anything
else that Anne was a child in France, and goes against the argument
that, in 1527, Anne Boleyn first caught the King's eye when she was at
least twenty-six. Even in today's world, women of twenty-six are
unlikely to be regarded as 'girls.' Yet we have contemporary description
from William Forrest - a supporter of Catherine of Aragon who was in
England during her 'divorce' from the King- of Anne as a 'fresh young
damsel.' (11)
We also have Anne
Boleyn's own words to consider. Firstly there is Anne's letter written
to the King after he arranges for her to be a maid of honour to
Catherine of Aragon, just after the fire of the king's passion really
started blazing bright. Anne writes at the start of this letter,
It belongs only
to the august mind of a great king to whom nature has given a heart full
of generosity towards the sex; to repay by favours so extraordinary
artless and short conversation with a girl.
Anne's words are
also documented just before the final downfall of Cardinal Wolsey. One
night, Henry VIII decided to sup with Catherine of Aragon, the woman he
was working hard to divorce. Not surprisingly, even though somewhat
surprising to the King, he found Catherine of Aragon not prepared to be
her usual companionable self, rather her antagonistic mood soon resulted
in an argument. Henry then went to Anne Boleyn, in hope of receiving
some sympathy from his mistress, only to find Anne angry in turn. After
saying that she feared he would one day return to Catherine, she went on
to say:
I have been
waiting long and might in the meanwhile have contracted some
advantageous marriage, out of which I might have had issue, which is the
greatest consolation in this world, but alas! Farewell to my time and
youth spent to no purpose at all.(12)
If she had been
twenty-six at the start of her relationship with the King, Anne could
not lay claim to being either a 'girl' or having 'spent' her youth
during the long years prior to her marriage to the King. It is also
extremely unlikely that she could have lied about her age. Anne had too
many enemies who would have delighted in telling the truth to the King.
Anne's
relationship with the twenty-year old Henry Percy, later Earl of
Northumberland, needs to be considered here too. This relationship,
documented by George Cavendish as well as later brought up during the
trial for Anne's life, possessed all the hallmarks of 'first love,' both
of them entering into this relationship as if naive of how their lives
were controlled by their place in Tudor society. Moreover, there are
potent hints suggesting that Anne and Percy may have pre-contracted
themselves to one another, which would have put into question the
legality of any future marriage entered into by Anne and Percy. (13)
Disregarding Percy's loud protests that he had committed himself to Anne
Boleyn, Wolsey broke up their relationship, Percy being married in quick
haste to Mary Talbot. It was a marriage doomed to failure from the
start. As for Anne and Percy? Because of their youth, this break-up
apparently hit them both hard, making them never forget what had
happened. Was it just a coincidence that the man leading the party to
arrest Wolsey for treason was none other than Percy? And Anne said later
that she rather had been Henry's Countess (meaning, Percy's wife) than
Henry's Queen. When the verdict of Anne's execution was delivered,
Percy, a judge at her trial, fainted.
In 1876, St. Peter's ad Vincula, a chapel situated at the north-end of
Tower Green, was remodelled extensively. Part of the project involved
repairing the floor, under which were the remains of - amongst others-
Anne Boleyn, Katherine Howard and Jane Grey. Close to the choir chapel,
a 'beheaded' woman's skeleton was found under a paving stone. A medical
examiner described the exhumed skeleton as having a "delicate frame with
a small neck, "as one would expect of a skeleton belonging to Anne
Boleyn, a female beheaded in her middle or late twenties.(14) Thus, it
was concluded that these bones were indeed the bones of Anne Boleyn.(15)
As Katherine and Jane Grey, both also buried at St. Peters and believed
identified during these excavations, were teenagers (respectively,
nineteen and sixteen) and executed before bearing children, I believe
the differences between skeletons would have been apparent. I have no
doubt the bones found in 1876 were indeed those of Anne Boleyn.
So how do we briefly summarise society attitudes to 'age' at this time?
Life was far shorter then- with an average life expectation somewhere
around forty years. However, just because life was brief does not mean
people of the period automatically regarded those in their thirties as
'old.' Nevertheless, we have to keep in mind that life was much harder
then and consequently people did age faster than what we see today in
the Western world.
Mary Stuart,
four-four at her death, suffered with rheumatism for years prior to her
death and was found to have mostly grey hair after her execution. By his
forties, gout already caused great daily agony to William Cecil, later
crippling him as an old man. Elizabeth in her late thirties, whose
constitution as Queen was generally sound, developed a painful leg
ulcer, which caused one suitor to offend her by calling her 'an old
creature with a sore leg.' (16) . When Robert Dudley died at fifty-five
he was almost unrecognisable as the handsome, dark 'Gypsy' who had come
as close as any man to marrying Anne Boleyn's daughter. That same
daughter, after her recovery from small pox at twenty-nine, said to a
deputation who petitioned her to marry and thus safeguard the realm with
heirs of her body, "The marks they saw on her face were not wrinkles,
but the pits of smallpox, and although she might be old, God could send
her children as He did to St. Elisabeth." (17) Keeping in mind the
cadence of the time, I construe her response in that Elizabeth is
referring to a time in the future, when would indeed be 'old, ' but
still the unspoken concern about the "delay of the ripe time for
marriage"(18) is apparent. By thirty-seven, Elizabeth, no doubt seeking
reassurance from her courtiers to the contrary, was indeed protesting
that she was too old for marriage.(19) We even have the utterance of her
father to reflect upon, when he said: "I am forty-one years old, at
which age the lust of man is not so quick as in lusty youth."(20) Thus,
it is clear that they, like us, were aware of 'youth' as compared to
'maturity.' With so many children and teenagers scythed down by the grim
reaper, probably more so.
There is little
doubt that Henry VIII passion for Anne Boleyn was the 'Grand Passion' of
his life. But Henry was a King, only the second of his dynasty,
desperately in need of a son to secure the succession of his crown. To
turn his kingdom upside down to achieve his marriage with Anne Boleyn,
he must have felt confident of her ability to bear children, and healthy
children at that. Cardinal Wolsey attempts to wave a French princess
under his King's nose were not helped by the fact that Renče of France,
like her mother before her, had a physical defect, which resulted in her
walking with a limp and caused expression of doubts about Renče's
suitability to bear children(21) . But such a woman also would not have
appealed to Henry, who took great pride in not only his physical
appearance, but that of his children too. Early in 1528, Wolsey wrote to
the Pope defending the King's choice of Anne on the grounds that she was
likely to have children, (22) which suggests Anne Boleyn was youthful.
When it is
considered that Catherine of Aragon was only thirty-two when brought to
bed of her last child, a still born daughter, it seems very unlikely
that the King would place his hopes and faith in the ability of a
twenty-eight-year-old woman to give him sons. Anne Boleyn came from a
class that generally married young, though admittedly not as young as
did Princesses of the time, many of whom married not long into their
teenage years, after infant or childhood betrothals. Anne's own mother
married by the time she was seventeen, her sister Mary probably married
William Carey in her teenage years. Anne herself would have expected to
be wed by her very early twenties, the 'ripe time' for marriage. In
1519, aged only thirty-three, Catherine of Aragon was described as the
'King's old deformed wife.'(23) Of course, by then Catherine - in ten
years of marriage- had given birth at least six times, resulting in only
her daughter Mary surviving beyond the first weeks of infancy. Grief and
the constant strains of pregnancy can swiftly age any woman. But Anne
Boleyn had, physically and psychologically, a great deal to cope with
too. Even so, on the day of her execution a witness said Anne Boleyn
'never looked more beautiful.' On the scaffold, when she removed her
pearl encrusted coif to replace it with a simpler head covering, Anne
Boleyn revealed her black hair to be as black as ever. Do these
descriptions gel with a woman of thirty-six, decidedly middle-aged by
the times-who been through the terror of imprisonment, a trial for her
life, months of fear and uncertainty while her husband and his ministers
plotted to get rid of her, and a tragic second miscarriage barely four
months before her death? I don't believe so.
Whenever there is confusion about something from
the past I believe it best to seek out 'voices' from the time, to
discover whether there are voices from the past that can help untangle
the confusion. Sometimes the voices are silent, leading us to
conjecture, but in the case of Anne Boleyn's age there are, I believe,
enough 'voices' that do speak. And not only the voices I have already
put forward. Only a couple years before her marriage to the King, Anne
was described as 'young.'(24) William Camden wrote in his Annuals
Anne Boleyn's birth date as being 1507. Jane Dormer -Lady in waiting and
confidante to Catherine of Aragon's daughter Mary Tudor - believed Anne
Boleyn not quite twenty-nine when she died.(25) Mary Tudor, who had many
valid reasons to hate Anne Boleyn and as the daughter of Catherine of
Aragon, would have been in the perfect position to be aware of Anne's
true age. I want to end this investigation by comparing three portraits.
Two portraits depict two women aged around twenty-seven years, one Henry
VIII's third wife, Jane Seymour, painted by Holbein
and
the other his daughter Mary, by the artist Master John.
The
third is a portrait of Anne Boleyn, a miniature by Lucas Hornebout,
painted in 1526, about the time when King Henry VIII first fell in love
with her.
When
these three portraits are studied side by side, it is clear that that
the Horenbout portrait shows some one who could indeed be described as a
'fresh young damsel, ' a young woman no more than twenty. The other two
portraits show women with shadowed eyes, lines etched all around, skin-
especially around Mary 's mouth and Jane's chin - losing it elasticity,
clearly much maturer women, both fast losing the freshness of youth.
There is a fourth portrait to consider -
a drawing by
Holbein depicting Anne Boleyn during her brief time as Queen. Though
drawn from different angles, Holbein's drawing clearly shows the same
woman as that painted by Horenbout, but time has passed, the girl in the
miniature has become the woman. But still evident is that this woman is
not much older than that shown in the portraits of Jane Seymour and Mary
Tudor. It is a portrait, I believe, of a woman who has not reached her
middle thirties.
(i) Retha W. Warnicke; The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn; Cambridge; page
8
(ii) Scholars dispute whether Mary Boleyn was indeed one of the party to
attend the eighteen-year Queen, but I think why not? Sir Thomas Boleyn
clearly had the necessary skills to develop a network of influential
friends. I also believe his ambitions were such that he would have done
all in his ower to place both daughters in positions where they could
improve the status of the Boleyn family at court and abroad.
(3) Retha W. Warnicke, work cited, page 12
(4) Retha W. Warnicke, work cited, page 15
(5) Retha W. Warnicke, work cited, page 21
(6) Retha W. Warnicke, work cited, page 34 (Retha Warnicke believes Mary
to be the younger sister and only twelve at her marriage to William
Carey, which I believe unlikely.)
(7) Antonia Fraser, The six wives of Henry VIII, page 101<br>
(8) Antonia Fraser, work cited, page 101
(9)Antonia Fraser, work cited, page 119
(10)George
Cavendish; The life and Times of Cardinal Wolsey;
Renaissance Electronic texts, Gen. Ed. Ian Lancashire; Web Development
Group; University of Toronto Library; 1997, Fol. 18; page 29.
(11)Retha Warnicke, work cited, page 56(br> (12) Antonia Fraser, work
cited, page 169.
13 Antonia Fraser, work cited, page 126
14 Admittedly, we cannot be certain that this age is correct.
15 Retha M. Warnicke, work cited, page 235-6
16 Alison Weir, Elizabeth the Queen, page 274-5
17 Elizabeth the Queen, Alison Weir, page 138
18 Elizabeth Jenkins, Work cited, page 75
19 Alison Weir, Work cited, page 216.
20 Antonia Fraser, work cited, page 220
21 Warnicke, work cited, page 63
22 Warnicke, work cited, page 77
23 Antonia Fraser, work cited, page 76
24 Antonia Fraser, work cited, page 171
25 E.W. Ives, Anne Boleyn, Oxford, 1986 page 3.
Copyright Wendy
J. Dunn 2001
Thank you Marilee from
English History
for kindly providing the images for this conclusion.