Was Anne Boleyn a 'thin old woman' of thirty-six years old when she was executed on sensational charges of adultery, incest, and attempted regicide in May 1536, or was she actually a 'fearful beauty' of only twenty-eight?
Portraits: The Nidd Hall portrait (left) is often used to support the argument that Anne was born c.1501, since she is depicted as looking tired and aged. By contrast, the National Portrait Gallery portrait of Anne (right) depicts her, in the words of Joanna Denny, as 'radiant' and a 'beauty'. Readers should note that neither of these portraits was painted from life - they were both done years after Anne's death.
When Sir Thomas Boleyn, a rising
courtier, married the daughter of the second duke of Norfolk, Elizabeth Howard,
sometime between 1498 and 1501, he could surely not have envisaged the
momentous consequences for the nature of English history that his union with
this prosperous gentlewoman would eventually lead to.[Between the date of that marriage and c. 1505, Elizabeth gave birth to no less
than five children who survived, although it seems likely that she also
suffered miscarriages and/or stillbirths, a tragic series of events her
daughter, Anne, would one day also experience. These children included two
daughters, Mary and Anne, and three sons, Thomas, Henry, and George, the only
one of whom to survive was George, later beheaded for incest with his sister
Anne.
Thomas Boleyn was later to inform Sir
Thomas Cromwell, the Master Secretary and a decisive player in the fall of
Queen Anne, that his wife Elizabeth brought him ‘every year a child'.[If one takes the view that the couple had wedded in 1498 at the earliest and
1501 in the latest, this surely indicates that their eldest child must have
been born in 1501-2 at the latest and possibly as early as 1499. There is
considerable controversy about which of the Boleyn children was the eldest,
with historians usually focussing on it being either of the Boleyn daughters,
Mary or Anne. Eric Ives, the principal biographer of Anne Boleyn, suggested
that Mary Boleyn was the elder daughter after carefully considering surviving
contemporary evidence. In 1597, during the reign of Mary’s niece Elizabeth I,
Lord Hunsdon, grandson of Mary, petitioned the Queen for the Boleyn earldom of
Ormonde which had reverted back into Boleyn hands on the grounds that the Queen’s
aunt Mary was the elder of the two Boleyn sisters. As one would expect, he
would surely not have contemplated this had he been aware that his grandmother
was younger than the queen’s mother. Furthermore, Mary Boleyn actually married
before her sister Anne, in February 1520 to William Carey, a gentleman of the
Privy Chamber who later died of the sweating sickness in the summer of 1528. As
Ives indicates, ‘nor was a marriage for Anne discussed in England until nearly
two years after Mary was Mistress Carey’.
Opposing this argument, Warnicke argues
that Hunsdon made a mistake and that his daughter Elizabeth ‘later confirmed
his error by having it engraved on her tombstone that Mary was younger than
Anne’. She also draws attention to the fact that Hunsdon was actually
unsuccessful in his attept to obtain the title of Ormonde via this method. Furthermore, the contemporary John Weever in his work Ancient funerall monuments (1631) stated that Anne was the elder
daughter, not her sister Mary. However, Warnicke’s argument that Mary Boleyn was never a maid of honour at the
French court, along with her sister Anne, can be disputed. The name ‘M. Boleyn’
was on a list of ladies in the period October-December 1514, which indicates that
she became a maid of honour the year after Anne was sent to the court of
Margaret of Austria in the early summer of 1513. [
In considering which Boleyn daughter was
elder, one has to consider social, religious, and cultural values prominent in
the early Tudor period which would have influenced marriage customs,
appointments at court, and family politics. Although it is strange that Anne
was appointed a maid-of-honour a year before her sister Mary – in Warnicke’s
words, ‘by contemporary custom, the younger child would not have been favored with
such a splendid opportunity to the detriment of her older sister...’
– it would make even less sense why the younger daughter would have been
married before the elder, since according to Tudor family customs, the eldest
child was almost invariably married before other siblings as a means of
extending family influence and securing prestige. From Ives’ perspective, ‘the
decision to leave Anne to make her career in France’ surely suggests ‘there was
no place for her in Boleyn family plans’ and her ‘failure to marry while in
France suggests that she was not much of a prize’.
As has been suggested, there may have been a completely reasonable explanation
why Anne was appointed a maid-of-honour in 1513 before her elder sister Mary
the year after – it has long been supposed that Anne was intellectually
superior to her sister, or perhaps Mary was ill or incapacitated at this time,
or perhaps their ambitious father was hoping to secure an appointment for his
eldest daughter at court to serve Katherine of Aragon in 1513 while his
youngest daughter was appointed a maid-of-honour in France. On a balance of
probability, however, it does seem likelier that Mary was older than Anne.
So if Mary was older than Anne, then
when was she born? Estimates for Mary’s birth usually run between 1498 and
1502. Warnicke’s suggestion that she was born in 1508 is not supported by contemporary evidence.[
If Mary was born in 1508, she would have been only eleven years old when she married William Carey – since she
married in February 1520, and as Warnicke herself admits, she may only have
been born after March 1508 – which seems totally implausible. As Ives argues,
only landed heiresses were married at the young age of twelve, which was
something that the Boleyn sisters were not. [
Warnicke weakens this argument by conceding that most Tudor women
married at the age of twenty.
Considering court customs and prevailing social and cultural views about women,
it seems likely that Mary was born considerably earlier than 1508. If she was
appointed a maid of honour to the French queen in the summer or autumn of 1514,
she must have been thirteen or fourteen years old at the least. The Emperor
Maximilian was later to write that this was the minimum age a European teenage
girl should be in order to expect an opportunity of being appointed a maid of
honour to an aristocratic noblewoman. Bearing this in mind, it seems likely
that Mary was born in around 1500. She was to marry William Carey in the early
spring of 1520, when she would likely have been nearing her twentieth birthday,
which was the average age that Tudor gentlewomen married at. If her parents,
moreover, had married between 1498 and 1501, and she was the eldest child as is
here being suggested, a birthdate of 1500 seems plausible.
As Weir suggested, if Mary was older
than Anne, then Anne cannot have been born before around 1501.
Since the nineteenth century, there have been two schools of thought – or divergences
between Tudor scholars – in terms of when this most controversial queen was
born, arguing a date of either c.1501 or 1507. As Ives recognised, 1507 was the
most popular date well into the early twentieth century. This is supported by
contemporary evidence from the late sixteenth century. The memoirs of Jane
Dormer (1538-1612), duchess of Feria and maid of honour to Queen Mary I, Anne’s
stepdaughter, have been frequently cited as providing evidence of a 1507 birth
date. Referring to Anne Boleyn’s execution on 19 May 1936, the Duchess stated: ‘but
to come to her death... she was convicted and condemned [and] she was not
twenty-nine years of age’, ie. suggesting that Anne would have celebrated her
twenty-ninth birthday in the summer of 1536.
If she was correct, the Queen was therefore born in 1507. This birth date has
been supported by other existing evidence from the sixteenth century. William
Camden, who wrote a life of Queen Elizabeth I which was subsequently published
in 1615, stated that Anne was born in 1507 – MDVII. However, Russell’s argument
that 'the fact that he stated 1507 quite specifically cannot be dismissed, anymore so than the Duchess of Feria's pronouncement in her memoirs' should be reconsidered in light of alternative evidence which
decisively challenges this argument that Anne was born in 150
As has been established earlier in
this essay, Thomas Boleyn decided to grant his youngest daughter Anne the prestige of being appointed a maid of honour to the Archduchess
Margaret of Austria in the early summer of 1513. With reference to Mary Boleyn,
it has been established also that a maid of honour had to be aged thirteen at
the very youngest in order to enjoy such a prestigious appointment – as Warnicke
states, girls had to be at least thirteen since ‘on ceremonial occasions they
were expected to serve as “decorative foils” to their mistress’. Surely then it makes
little sense why a young girl of only six or seven years of age would have been
chosen to act as a maid of honour to the new French queen, Mary, sister of
Henry VIII, when other girls were aged at least thirteen or fourteen. By
contemporary custom, this seems an implausible conclusion to make. In 1981 Hugh
Paget, the art historian, analysed a letter which Anne wrote to her father
Thomas in the summer of 1514, and concluded that Anne must have been born in
1501 at the very latest. Readers should bear in mind that this early date had
actually been suggested in the nineteenth century by the prominent Victorian
historian of the queens of England, Agnes Strickland.
Some historians continue to
advocate a birth date of 1507, despite its inherent improbability; most
famously Warnicke. Yet in Ives’ words she ‘requires us to believe that Henry
VIII summoned a now seven-year-old Anne from Brussels in order that his sister
could converse in French with a beginner in the language who would today be in
a primary school’. [ When one actually looks
at a copy of the letter Anne wrote in 1514, it is clear that it is written in ‘the formed hand
of at least a teenager’, not a seven-year old, as G.W. Bernard makes clear.
The actual nature of historical sources which describe Anne Boleyn as being born in 1507 need to be rigorously challenged. As Joanna Denny indicated, Jane Dormer's memoirs should be viewed only with considerable caution, since she was hostile to Anne and resented her daughter Elizabeth, by virtue of her extremely close relationship with Queen Mary. It is entirely possible that she chose to characterise Anne as being a young and foolish woman in order to belittle her or weaken her status; instead of portraying her as an independent, fiery woman (as the hostile Nicholas Sander does; more importantly, he presented Anne as being born in around 1500), she remembered Anne as a worthless younger woman. William Camden, despite his different religious beliefs to Dormer, may have read her memoirs published by Henry Clifford - it has never been proved that he did not.
The archduchess’ reference to Anne
Boleyn in a letter to Thomas in 1514 as ‘so bright and pleasant for her young
age’ has often been cited as evidence that Anne must have been born in 1507 –
if she had been born in around 1501, and was therefore the usual age of a maid
of honour in European courts, it would make little sense why her youth was
emphasised, in Warnicke’s words: ‘had she been twelve or thirteen and thus old
enough to be a maid of honor, these reporters would not have regarded her age
as noteworthy’.
Yet this approach is problematic. If one follows the argument that Anne was
sent to the archduchess’ court in the early summer of 1513, when she would not
yet have been twelve years old, it does not seem wholly impossible that she
would have been seen as rather younger than most other girls. Indeed, if she
was still only eleven, she would not yet have reached the minimum age of
thirteen that the Emperor expected most maids of honour to be. Furthermore,
this was only a minimum – many girls at court would have been somewhat older
than thirteen or fourteen. The fact that Thomas Boleyn described his daughter as 'le petite Boulaine' is also likely to have been because of her status as his younger daughter, rather than her age.
The argument that Anne Boleyn may
have been born in 1507 because another girl at the Burgundian court, Anne
Brandon, was born around 1506 and so there were other pre-pubescent girls
serving the archduchess, makes little sense for several reasons. First, as
Warnicke states, Brandon’s birth date is actually unknown. [19] She may have been born in
1503 and would therefore have been aged ten or eleven, rather than merely
seven. The suggestion, therefore, that Anne Boleyn may have been close to her twelfth birthday when she arrived in spring 1513 becomes a great deal more compelling. Second, she was the daughter of future Duke of Suffolk, Charles
Brandon, a considerably more influential nobleman than Thomas Boleyn was as yet,
and so Charles may have been granted special privileges in allowing his
relative to reside at court at a young age which the daughter of Thomas Boleyn
would simply not have enjoyed. Finally, as Ives has pointed out, Anne Brandon’s
status at court was actually unknown and so it is unhelpful to attempt
comparisons between her status and that of Anne Boleyn. [
There is, indeed, other
contemporary evidence to support an earlier birth date of 1507, somewhere
around 1500-1501. Lord Herbert of Chadbury, who was a prominent historian in
the late sixteenth century, wrote that Anne returned to England at the age of
twenty. We know that Anne returned in January 1522 in order to contract a
marriage with her father’s chosen man, James Butler, an Irish relative, in
order to settle family disputes over the earldom of Ormonde. If one follows
Herbert’s claim, she must have been nearing her twenty-first birthday and so
would have been born around 1501. Warnicke’s attempts to reinterpret this to
mean that Herbert was referring to 1527 – based on her suggestion that
Anne only became Katherine of Aragon’s maid of honour that year – makes little
sense. It seems apparent that Anne was appointed as a maid of honour to the
English queen on her return to England in the winter of 1522, and not as late
as 1527. Indeed, if Herbert had been referring to Anne's age when she was at court in 1527, he would more likely have stressed that this was when the king fell in love with her, for by 1527 their relationship were certainly well-known. An Italian observer writing in 1600, furthermore, believed that Anne
had been born as early as 1499, while the Spanish ambassador’s comment in
February 1536, the last year of Anne’s life, that Anne was ‘a thin old woman’
would seem to make little sense if she was still a ‘radiant’ beauty of only
twenty-eight. Admittedly, he often made spiteful comments about Anne, who he
hated and viewed as a she-devil, but the Nidd Hall portrait of Anne (albeit
only painted at least fifty years after Anne’s death) can cautiously be seen to
support this view.
One must also consider attitudes to
marriage and family customs in early Tudor England as a means of establishing
Anne’s birth date. Having returned to England in early 1522 in order to marry
her relative James Butler, Anne would confidently have expected to have become
a countess sometime that year aged twenty-one. However, the marriage
negotiations, mysteriously, failed, and nothing came of the proposed marriage.
Her father made no more moves to marry his youngest daughter, until famously in
1526 the king himself fell in love with ‘this fresh young damsel’. Supporters
of 1507 have argued that it is totally implausible that a Tudor gentlewoman
would have been left unmarried as ‘old’ as twenty-five or twenty-six, yet this
view does not take into account the fact that, aged twenty-one, Anne had
expected to marry some four years earlier. Contemporary social customs do not
support the suggestion that ‘having reached the age of 25 without a husband,
Anne would have been sailing dangerously close to the "unmarriageable
age," something which it is almost impossible to believe her father would
have allowed’.
Martin Ingram’s research, for instance, has indicated that the mean age of
women who married in early modern England was usually twenty-four, while in
some areas of England it was as late as twenty-seven. Following Warnicke’s
argument that most Tudor women married aged twenty, it makes little sense why a
young lady of twenty-five would have been regarded as at an ‘unmarriageable’
age in 1526-7. Indeed, Anne’s later supplanter, Jane Seymour, was consistently
referred to by the Spanish ambassador as ‘a young lady’ in 1536, when she was
actually aged twenty-eight.
Furthermore, Henry VIII proposed
marriage to Anne in 1527. If one believes that she was born c1501, she would
have been around twenty-six and confidently expecting to marry the king that year
and perhaps bear his long-awaited heir the year after. There is no reason to
suppose that she had to have been only nineteen or twenty in order to be
regarded as having ‘apparent aptness to procreation of children’. Surely no one
at court could have envisaged that the king’s mission for an annulment of his
marriage to Katherine of Aragon would take six long years – as Ives has pointed
out, Anne and King Henry expected to marry immediately.
In 1529, Anne ‘worried aloud that
her time and youth would all be spent for nothing’, famously railing at the
king for his failure to bring about their marriage and, as a consequence,
lessening the chances of her bearing a child. It seems questionable why
she would have made such an issue of this had she been aged only twenty-two;
yet if she was closer to twenty-eight or twenty-nine, it becomes more apparent
why Anne fretted about her diminishing chances of bearing a healthy male heir
once she became queen. One writer has actually suggested that Anne made this comment in 1531, supposedly aged thirty, but Chapuys' dispatches make clear that she actually made the comment on St Andrew's Day, 1529.[23] A consideration of similar court ladies' experiences will justify a 1501 birth date in this context. Mary Boleyn, born in 1499-1500, married in 1520, aged 20-21; Jane Parker, born around 1505, was married in 1524-5, aged 19-20, and Elizabeth Howard, Anne's mother, born c.1480, had married in 1499-1500, aged 19-20. If Anne was only twenty-two in 1529, as supporters of 1507 believe, then it does not make any sense why she would have bewailed her lost youth, when she was actually at the perfect age for marriage in context of Tudor customs. Yet if she was 27 or 28, it becomes far more obvious.
There is other compelling evidence for Anne being born earlier than 1507, and around 1501. Gareth Russell, in his essay 'The Age of Anne Boleyn' writes:
'One question the 1501 side of the debate has never fully answered is the issue of Anne's suitability to be the mother of the King's children... Why did no-one highlight the fact that she was simply too old to be the mother of the next Heir to the Throne?'
Russell then cites the letter to the Vatican in 1528-9 which stresses Anne's 'apparent aptness to procreation of children' which would seemingly indicate that she was a young woman of about 22, rather than an older court lady of 28 or 29.
However, reading evidence in a new light weakens this argument. Following Anne Boleyn's execution in 1536, her husband Henry VIII married her former lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour, and in the Parliament held in June 1536, Lord Chancellor Audley described the Queen Jane as such:
'that our excellent Prince... hath consented to accept that condition and has taken to himself a wife, who in age and form is deemed to be meet and apt for the procreation of children'.[24]
Jane Seymour's exact age is unknown, but if 29 women walked at her funeral only one year later, she must have been aged around 28 when Audley made this comment. Thus, it is entirely appropriate that Anne Boleyn, at about the exact same age, had been described as likely to bear children.
To summarise, there is no reason to believe that a woman in her mid twenties
was considered ‘old’ in context of early modern Tudor customs, nor is there any
reason to suppose that her likely age of thirty-five at death is highly
unlikely in view of the fact that Anne still became pregnant regularly during
her queenship. It also seems tenuous to argue that Anne’s father and the
archduchess would only regard Anne as being 'young’ if she was aged six or
seven rather than being eleven or twelve, particularly in view of the sense
that children this young were simply not appointed maids of honour in the first
place. Although the discovery of the remains of a Tudor woman in the Tower of London
aged between twenty-five and thirty was believed to have been Anne, this is not
necessarily the case since Victorians commonly believed that Anne had been only
twenty-nine at her execution and so this presupposition may have influenced
their judgments. Furthermore, it is not certain that this woman was Anne – it may have been another,
since, as has been recognised, there were four other decapitated females buried
in the Tower: teenage queens Katherine Howard and Jane Grey, the Lady Jane
Rochford, and Margaret, countess of Salisbury. All in all, a birth date of
between 1500 and 1502, most likely 1501 has to be regarded as more likely than
that of 1507.
Briefly, in view of Boleyn family
history it seems apparent that George Boleyn was the youngest surviving Boleyn
child and not, in Warnicke’s view, the eldest. George took part in his
first masque at court at Christmas 1514 and was later married in late 1524 to
Jane Parker. It has been seen as significant that he was made his first grant
in April 1522, perhaps when he was eighteen years of age. If one follows that
Mary and Anne were older than George, being born in 1500 and 1501 respectively,
and he married in 1524 perhaps aged twenty, a birth date of c1504 seems highly
likely. His older brothers Thomas and Henry, who died aged young, were likely
born in 1502 and 1503.
This article has refuted the notion
that Anne Boleyn was born in 1507. It seems apparent that we should be regarding
her birth date as likely to have been in the summer of 1501. Furthermore, it
seems even less credible to claim that her sister Mary was younger and only
eleven or twelve years old when she married in 1520. Surviving contemporary
evidence and contemporary social and cultural customs indicate a birth date of
1499-1500, meaning that Mary was likely aged fourteen when she became a maid of
honour to the French queen in 1514 and around twenty when she married Carey in
1520. Mary’s brother, George, was probably born in 1504 as the youngest
surviving Boleyn child. This would, therefore, support Thomas Boleyn’s claim
that Elizabeth Howard bore him every year a child, if the two married in around
1499 and their daughter Mary was born either that year or the next, followed by
Anne, followed by Thomas and Henry, and lastly by George in 1504. It is also
possible, of course, that Elizabeth suffered failures in pregnancy; her
daughter Anne was to suffer at least two. If the Spanish ambassador’s depiction
of Anne as a ‘thin old woman’ in the winter of 1536 can be regarded as
spiteful, there is also a chance that it was, unfortunately, an accurate
presentation of a queen whose miscarriage the month before had undoubtedly
saddened and, plausibly, weakened her.
