500 years on, Anne Boleyn still fascinates

Five hundred years on, Anne Boleyn still fascinates. But how much of what we think we know about her is actually her — and how much was constructed by the people who brought about her end?

I went to hear Tracy Borman speak on her new book, The House of Boleyn, at St James Church in Clerkenwell. A striking thread running through her talk: how many of the women in this story have been miswritten by the people who outlived them.

Lady Rochford - married to Anne Boleyn’s brother, George Boleyn - has been vilified for five centuries for allegedly betraying her husband and Anne. Borman’s perspective suggests she was in fact loyal, and the narrative we inherited was constructed after her death by those with reasons to construct it.

Anne herself may have been recast as the ambitious seductress to justify what was done to her.  She was a woman deeply educated by an unusually forward-thinking father, Thomas Boleyn, who, according to Borman, was likely cautious and hesitant about a marriage with Henry, having already seen the king discard his other daughter Mary as his mistress.  Indeed, it was Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, who was the far more enthusiastic embracer of this regal connection.

Thomas Boleyn’s own mother, Lady Margaret Butler - a formidable Irish aristocrat, daughter of the Earl of Ormond, who lived at the Boleyn home, Hever Castle, held very significant assets in her own name, which was also exceptionally rare for a Tudor woman. From 1519, she was declared by legal inquisition to have suffered periods of insanity, making her incapable of managing her own estates. Control passed to her son Thomas which - rather conveniently - elevated him from being a solid gentleman to being one of the great magnates of the realm.

Henry’s love letters to Anne are preserved in the Vatican - we know exactly how he felt about her. No letters from Anne to Henry are known to exist anywhere. We have no record of her feelings written in her own hand.

The current exhibition at Hever Castle adds another layer. No portrait of Anne painted during her lifetime is known to survive. The most famous image we do have - the Hever Rose portrait - was deliberately altered after her death. Scientific analysis has revealed that her hands were added by the artist specifically to disprove a rumour, spread by a Catholic propagandist, that she had six fingers - a physical abnormality that at the time carried associations with witchcraft and the devil. Even the portraits that survived were shaped by other’s agendas.

Five hundred years later, we are still trying to find her - behind the portraits painted for other people’s purposes, the letters that weren’t kept, and the stories told by the people who brought about her end.