The Age of Anne Boleyn

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.

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 (Warnicke 1989, p.8).

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.

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. * 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” (Warnicke 1989, p. 12).

These words imply 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 (Warnicke 1989, p. 15). 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 Renée of France (Warnicke 1989, p. 21), the French Queen’s young sister, born 1510 (Britannica Online 2009), 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 François. 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 William Carey (Warnicke 1989, p. 34) while Antonia Fraser states it happened before (Fraser 1992, p. 101). Retha Warnicke also believes Mary to be the younger sister and only twelve at her marriage to William Carey, which I believe unlikely.

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 have already displayed characteristics of concern to her father. As an adult, Mary had a reputation for being rather free with her ‘favours’ (Fraser 1992, p. 101), 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” (Fraser 1992, p.119) There is another 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 gentlewoman, Mistress Anne Boleyn being very young was sent into the realm of France (Sylvester, R. S., D. P. Harding, et al.1962, p. 31).

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 not regarded as young 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’ (Warnicke p. 56).?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 (Hanson, M. 2009).

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 (Fraser 1992, p.169).

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 (Fraser 1992, p.126).

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 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 found 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. Admittedly, we cannot be certain that this age is correct, but it was concluded that these bones were indeed the bones of Anne Boleyn (Warnicke, pp. 235-6). As Katherine and Jane Grey, both also buried at St. Peter ad Vincula and also 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, forty-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’ (Weir 1998, pp. 274-5). 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” (Weir 1998, p. 138). 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”(Jenkins 1959, p. 175) 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 (Weir 1998, p. 216). 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 “(Fraser 1992, p.220). 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 Renée 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 Renée’s suitability to bear children (Warnicke 1989, p.63). 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 (Warnicke 1989, p. 77), which suggests Anne Boleyn was youthful.

When it is considered that Katherine 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 in England (Harris 2002, p.56), though admittedly not as young as did Princesses of the time, often 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” (Fraser 1992, p.76).

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 put already forward. Only a couple years before her marriage to the King, Anne was described as ‘young’ (Fraser 1992, p.171). 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 (Ives 1986, p.3). Mary Tudor had many valid reasons to hate Anne Boleyn as the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, and was in the perfect position to be aware of Anne’s true age.

Figure 19 Jane Seymour?Lib Art, http://www.lib-art.com/imgpainting/7/8/12387-jane-seymour-queen-of-england-hans-the-younger-holbein.jpg (accessed 21/07/09)

Figure 20 Mary Tudor?English History, http://englishhistory.net/tudor/mary1faq.jpg (accessed 21/09/09)

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.

Figure 21 Anne Boleyn?? Tudor History, http://tudorhistory.org/boleyn/boleynmin.jpg (accessed 11/11/10)

Figure 22 Believed to be the only period drawing of Anne Boleyn?Daily Mail, http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/03_01/boleynES1403_468x614.jpg (accessed 21/07/09)

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.

Notes:

* Scholars dispute whether Mary Boleyn actually attended 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 power to place both daughters in positions where they could improve the status of the Boleyn family at court and abroad.

Bibliography

Bailey, K. (Dec97/Jan98). ‘The coronation of Anne Boleyn.’ British Heritage; 19(1): 4.?Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/498078/Renee-of-France (accessed 01/08/09).

Bruce, M. L. (1972). Anne Boleyn. London, Collins.

Chapman, H. W. (1974). Anne Boleyn. London, J. Cape.

Denny, J. (2007). Anne Boleyn: a new life of England’s tragic queen. Cambridge, MA, Da Capo Press.

Fraser, A. (1992). The wives of Henry VIII. New York, Knopf.

Hanson, M. English History. http://englishhistory.net/tudor/letter6.html (assessed 22/07/09).

Harris, B. J. (2002). English aristocratic women, 1450-1550: marriage and family, property and careers. New York, Oxford University Press.

Ives, E. W. (1986). Anne Boleyn. Oxford, OX, UK; New York, NY, USA, Blackwell.

Ives, E. W. (1998). ‘A Frenchman at the Court of Anne Boleyn’ History Today 48: Pages 21-26.

Ives, E. W. (2004). The life and death of Anne Boleyn: ‘the most happy’. Malden, MA, Blackwell Pub.

Jenkins, E. (1959). Elizabeth the Great. New York, Coward-McCann.

Lofts, N. (1979). Anne Boleyn. New York, Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.

Warnicke, R. M. (1989). The rise and fall of Anne Boleyn: family politics at the court of Henry VIII. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Weir, A. (2001). Henry VIII: the king and his court. New York, Ballantine Books.

Weir, A. (1998). Elizabeth the Queen. London, J. Cape.