The Enduring Myth of Anne Boleyn’s “French tricks” by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

I’m delighted to be hosting Day 4 of Sylvia Barbara Soberton’s blog tour for her latest book, ‘The Forgotten Years of Anne Boleyn: The Habsburg & Valois Courts’.

Anne Boleyn spent seven years at the Valois court serving Francis I’s wife Claude. The French court was a place of lax morals and Francis I was known as a notorious lover of female charms from the early years of his reign. One contemporary observed that he was “a great womaniser”, and many others commented upon his “whoring”, while Henry VIII heard that Francis was “not much attached to his Queen”.

In 1536, shortly after Anne Boleyn’s execution, Henry VIII refused a potential French bride and observed that he had had enough of “French bringing up and manners”, referring to Anne’s Continental education. This has been taken to mean by some writers that Anne had been “corrupted” at the French court. Was Anne really “corrupted” in France? Nicholas Sander, a recusant Jesuit whose book The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism was published posthumously in Cologne in 1585, suggested that sexual misconduct was the reason why Anne was sent to France:

“At fifteen she sinned first with her father’s butler, and then with his chaplain, and forthwith was sent to France, and placed, at the expense of the King, under the care of a certain nobleman not far from Brie.”

For a brief spell, scholars thought that Sander meant Briare, formerly written Briere, but in the nineteenth century it was established that the town Briare was confused with a small village of Briis-sous-Forges, south of Paris. Sander’s story is fabricated, as there is no evidence corroborating his tale about Anne’s sexual misconduct, but there is a strong local tradition in Briis-sous-Forges, according to which Anne Boleyn lived there. Donjon d’Anne Boleyn, Anne Boleyn’s Tower, the only remnant of the castle in Briis-sous-Forges that once loomed large over the village, still stands today. A plaque nearby states that Anne lived in the castle with the family of Du Moulin, and a local road is named in her honour. In 1654, historian Julien Brodeau asserted that Anne lived with Philippe du Moulin, seigneur de Brie, but nothing further is known about Anne’s links with the family or the castle.

Anne’s most eminent biographer, the late Eric Ives, remarked that “Anne Boleyn was to stay with Claude for nearly seven years, a period for which we have no direct evidence.”  The fact that Anne’s stay at the French court is poorly documented gives historical novelists the creative freedom to imagine and reconstruct her life in diverse and imaginative ways.

In Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, for instance, Anne catches Jane Seymour on Henry VIII’s lap and calls her a “whore”, but then Henry comes to Jane’s rescue and charges Anne with using “French tricks” on him during their courtship. In Hilary Mantel’s Bring up the Bodies, a novel about the fall of Anne Boleyn as seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, Anne’s sexuality is a recurring theme. On one occasion, Anne’s sister-in-law, Jane Rochford, confides in Cromwell that “before they were married, she used to practise with Henry in the French fashion. You know what I mean”. She then goes on to elaborate that Anne “induced Henry to put his seed otherwise than he should have” and that the King “berates her, that she caused him to do so” and thinks it was a “filthy proceeding”. This leads Cromwell to the conclusion that Henry VIII regrets lost opportunities for conceiving a male heir with Anne, “seed gone to waste, slid away in some crevice of her body or down her throat”. Later in the novel, Henry tells Cromwell that Anne maintained she was “untouched” and he chose to believe her, but now he knew that “she lied to me for seven years that she was a maid pure and chaste”.

In both novels, it is Anne Boleyn who is portrayed as the initiator of sexual practices that so outraged Henry VIII. The fictional Anne did so, presumably, to avoid conceiving a child out of wedlock, or to keep Henry at arm’s length as long as she could because she knew that when the King finally possessed her, he would quickly lose interest in her.

The notion of Anne being sexually experienced or even corrupt because of her stay at the French court is seemingly confirmed in the words of Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, who wrote that “rarely or never did any maid or wife leave that court chaste”. Historians usually accept that Brantôme was referring to the dissolute court of Francis I, but this is not the case. Brantôme was actually referring to the exploits going on in the household of Jean, Cardinal of Lorraine.

As Queen Claude’s maid, Anne was expected to live up to the high moral standards exemplified by her royal mistress. As the only Englishwoman in Claude’s entourage, Anne also had to contend with the knowledge that she represented her country. Her later refusal to become Henry VIII’s mistress may have stemmed from what she learned at Claude’s side, as well as from observation of what happened to discarded royal mistresses, whose reputations were often in scandalous tatters after kings got tired of their charms. It is telling that after she became Queen, Anne forbade her male servants to frequent “infamous places” such as “lewd and ungodly disposed brothels”. She certainly saw such “ungodly” young gallants in Francis I’s court and may even have conceived a strong distaste for men who attended brothels. At any rate, there is no reason to doubt that Anne was truly bent on living a “holy life”, as she wrote in a letter to her father.

By Sylvia Barbara Soberton

About the Author

Sylvia Barbara Soberton is a writer and researcher specialising in the history of the Tudors. She is best known for The Forgotten Tudor Women book series, which concentrates on shifting the perspective from famous figures like Henry VIII’s six wives to the lesser-known, but no less influential, women of the Tudor court.

Sylvia has written ten books to date, and her newest titles include Ladies-in-Waiting: Women Who Served Anne Boleyn and Medical Downfall of the Tudors: Sex, Reproduction & Succession. Her ground-breaking research on the women who served Anne Boleyn was profiled in Smithsonian Magazine, The Express and History of Scotland Magazine. Sylvia is a regular contributor to the Ancient Origins website and magazine. She also talks about her books and research on podcasts such as The Tudors Dynasty, Not Just the Tudors, Talking Tudors and many more.

You can find Sylvia on

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