Anne Boleyn Places- Chateau de Amboise

Chateau de Amboise

Amboise lies on the banks of the Loire River and was once home to the French royal court. Joan of Arc passed through the town in 1492 on her way to Orleans and the Battle of Patay.

Chateau d'Amboise

Francis I Chateau de Amboise sits perched on a promontory overlooking the Loire River and dominating the town.

Amboise

The chateau was built in the 11^th century and has undergone extensions and improvements over time. Charles VIII rebuilt it extensively in 1492 in the French Late Gothic Flamboyant style and then in 1495 employed two Italian mason-builders to provide Amboise with a taste of Renaissance decorative motifs.

Fancis I grew up at Amboise and in December 1515 invited Leonardo Da Vinci to the palace. Da Vinci lived and worked in nearby Clos Luce, a manor house located only 500m away.

Clos Luce in Amboise

Anne Boleyn entered the household of Francis I’s wife, the 15 –year-old Queen Claude, after Mary Tudor and the Duke of Suffolk returned to England in April 1515.

In The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Alison Weir describes how Queen Claude’s life involved almost annual successions of pregnancies spent largely at the Chateau of Blois and Amboise in the beautiful countryside of the Loire Valley. She goes on to say that Anne’s duties would have kept her the majority of the time with Queen Claude (Weir, pg. 150); therefore she would have known these palaces well .

Anne spent almost seven years with Queen Claude and was witness to her unhappy marriage and philandering husband. One can only speculate as to what affect this would have had on Anne’s own views about love and marriage. One thing is for certain, the Anne Boleyn that returned home from France was no mans’ pawn.

The Chateau later became home to another famous name, Mary Stewart Queen of Scots was raised here at the court of Henry II and remained in France until her return to Scotland in 1561.