In the 1530s, Anne Boleyn turned England on its head and shortly lost her own. From Channel 5’s new production Anne Boleyn to Thomas Wyatt’s yearning poetry penned when she was alive and kicking, what explains the enduring appeal of Henry VIII’s second wife almost half a millennium after her time?
Drawing by Hans Holbein, circa 1533. (Photo: Hulton Archive)
I’m trying to remember how I first encountered the Tudors in general, Anne Boleyn in particular. I’d love to say that I stumbled across an entry in a dusty encyclopaedia, or found myself transfixed by a Holbein in the National Gallery. The truth is much less romantic – I think it was probably Horrible Histories – but I know I was in primary school when I first learned about the king who chopped off his wives’ heads, and his second queen who was not only bewitching but perhaps literally a witch.
Those buzzwords, monarchs and magic, come up a lot for a child. Every fairy tale worth its salt has kings and queens, a scintillating dash of sorcery – and if you’re really lucky, an evil stepmother (a role that Anne stepped into seamlessly with King Henry VIII’s first daughter Mary, by long-suffering Catherine of Aragon).
Forget Jack and Jill or Hansel and Gretel – I was transfixed by Anne and Henry with the fervour that only a child can muster. A courtly romance with a brutal crescendo; a low-born queen with six fingers on her left hand and a trigger-happy king already lining up his next squeeze – and best of all, it was true! Kind of.
Blickling Hall, birthplace of Anne Boleyn
A nobleman’s daughter, Anne appeared at the English court in 1522 and set her sights on the man around whom it orbited. He moved heaven and earth to marry her, breaking from the Catholic church more than a decade later in 1533. Anne played a long game, and she played it near perfectly… until the very end.
There’s a lot we don’t know about her, but some things are undeniable: Anne was super bright, super ambitious and super charismatic. Within the era’s constrictive ideas of what women ought to be and do, where power came by marriage or not at all, she pushed the limits and was ultimately punished by a king and court who’d lately been eating out of her hand.
For me twenty years ago, Anne was nothing less than catnip; the older I get, the deeper her resonances rumble. As the king turned against her (and towards wife #3, Jane Seymour), so did the tide of public opinion. Helped along by some very nasty smear campaigns (that fabled sixth finger, for instance, was never seen during her lifetime) piggy backing on ancient misogynist tropes, Anne went from courtly darling to Scheming Temptress, via Cunning Witch and finally Lying Whore, seemingly in the blink of an eye.
The horse shoe cloister built for Anne Boleyn by King Henry VIII at Windsor Castle. c. 1930. (Photo: Lionel Green)
Anne’s agency was confined to what she held back rather than what she put forth
So what’s the truth? We may never know the ins-and-outs of Anne’s stratospheric rise and fall – who pulled which string, who set what trap – but fiction can tell us more than you might think. Our favourite villains are our best mirrors, and we’ve been reading and writing her story for centuries, revising and revisiting even as it unfolded in real time.
Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem Whoso List to Hunt is a contemporaneous favourite, a thinly veiled account of the king’s infatuation with Anne (some would say Wyatt’s too – he was among the men tried as her lovers years later), through the analogy of a hunting expedition. In the sonnet, Henry is cast as the heroic ‘Caesar’ and Anne his irresistible prize, ‘wild for to hold though I seem tame’.
It was written while the pair were courting, and passions only heightened as months turned to years – seven years, in fact, until Caesar could call the hunt a success. To his mounting frustration, Anne would not sleep with Henry until she was sure they’d marry – hence Wyatt’s line Noli me tangere: ‘do not touch me’. In a world where women were still considered property rather than people (‘Caesar’s I am’), Anne’s agency was confined to what she held back rather than what she put forth. A master chess player, both hands tied but always ten moves ahead.
Wolsey’s Hall, Hampton Court, 1525. (Photo: Hulton Archive)
At long last, in January 1533, the pair were married and Anne’s coronation as queen followed in June. Less than three years later, she was on the White Tower’s scaffold speaking her final words to a crowd of onlookers. By then, Anne had given Henry his second daughter Elizabeth – as if one, Mary, wasn’t enough! – and miscarried at least once.
One account describes Anne going into premature labour after walking in on Henry with her Lady-in-Waiting Jane Seymour on his knee; perhaps much like she had once done while he was still married to Catherine.
Cause and effect are tricky enough to untangle at the best of times, let alone when it comes to strangers five centuries ago – nonetheless, after Anne’s loss of the baby (believed to be a son) things moved quickly. Henry claimed that Anne had seduced him with ‘sortilege’, French for ‘sorcery’, and Jane was promptly moved into the royal quarters. Then came the ‘trial’ – not so much an investigation as a performance – where the seven men accused alongside her were variously tortured into confessing or set free.
Every generation has reappraised Anne with its own preoccupations (18th and 19th century historians portrayed her as a brutal tyrant, only to push public opinion to reassess her more favourably; she’s been picked up and put down by various waves of feminist thought, and described as a pawn of her family as well as an ardent reformist who came to blows with Oliver Cromwell) but there’s no way of knowing much at all about her inner life. That vacuum is precisely what’s made her such a ripe target for our own wonky beliefs about women, power, and their overlaps.
It’s comfortable and familiar, for instance, to think of Anne as a cautionary tale – a female Icarus, skewered on her own ambition. A reminder to stay in your lane or suffer the consequences. It’s also tempting to look at her savage treatment in life as in death and pat ourselves on the back for having left the dark days of policing women’s agency behind us – if only we weren’t staging another kangaroo court of public opinion about a modern female royal who has dared to question how she’s been treated by ‘The Firm’.
Anne Boleyn being led to her death (colourised)
Anne certainly rang a bell with me. My earliest encounters with her provided a stirring antidote to the passive poison of Disney princesshood. While the bare bones of life at court offered fairy tale familiarity, Snow White never had a discernible thought in her head, let alone a bona fide plan. Sleeping Beauty was unconscious, not networking her way to the top. Cinderella was too busy losing her slippers to want anything, let alone come within a hair’s breadth of a life’s work come good. The Little Mermaid never miscarried, and Rapunzel wasn’t interesting enough to set her sights on another woman’s man or have her heart broken.
Anne’s realness, however misty, was what seemed important when I was a child. Lament the lack of historical sources all you want, argue over the archives till you’re blue in the face – Anne Boleyn taught me a lot about the world just by being spoken about. Only when she ceases to be worth mentioning will we know the world has really come to terms with what she’s represented for so long.
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