BOLEYN (or Bullen), Anne (c. 1507-1536), queen of Henry VIII. of England, daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, afterwards earl of Wiltshire and Ormonde, and of Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Howard, earl of Surrey, afterwards duke of Norfolk, was born, according to Camden, in 1507, but her birth has been ascribed, though not conclusively, to an earlier date (to 1502 or 1501) by some later writers.1 In 1514 she accompanied Mary Tudor to France on the marriage of the princess to Louis XII., remained there after the king's death, and became one of the women in waiting to Queen Claude, wife of Francis I. She returned in 1521 or 1522 to England, where she had many admirers and suitors. Among the former was the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt,2 and among the latter, Henry Percy, heir of the earl of Northumberland, a marriage with whom, however, was stopped by the king and another match provided for her in the person of Sir James Butler. Anne Boleyn, however, remained unmarried, and a series of grants and favours bestowed by Henry on her father between 1522 and 1525 have been taken, though very doubtfully, as a symptom of the king's affections. Unlike her sister Mary, who had fallen a victim to Henry's solicitations,3 Anne had no intention of being the king's mistress; she meant to be his queen, and her conduct seems to have been governed entirely by motives of ambition.
The exact period of the beginning of Anne's relations with Henry is not known. They have been surmised as originating as early as 1523; but there is nothing to prove that Henry's passion was anterior to the proceedings taken for the divorce in May 1527, the celebrated love letters being undated. Her name is first openly connected with the king's as a possible wife in the event of Catherine's divorce, in a letter of Mendoza, the imperial ambassador, to Charles V. of the 16th of August 1527,4 during the absence in France of Wolsey, who, not blinded by passion like Henry, naturally opposed the undesirable alliance, and was negotiating a marriage with Renee, daughter of Louis XII. Henry meanwhile, however, had sent William Knight, his secretary, on a separate mission to Rome to obtain facilities for his marriage with Anne; and on the cardinal's return in August he found her installed as the king's companion and proposed successor to Catherine of Aragon. After the king's final separation from his wife in July 1531, Anne's position was still more marked, and in 1532 she accompanied Henry on the visit to Francis I., while Catherine was left at home neglected and practically a prisoner. Soon after their return Anne was found to be pregnant, and in consequence Henry married her about the 25th of January 15335 (the exact date is unknown), their union not being made public till the following Easter. Subsequently, on the 23rd of May, their marriage was declared valid and that with Catherine null, and in June Anne was crowned with great state in Westminster Abbey.
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Notes
1 See Anne Boleyn, by P. Friedman; The Early Life of Anne Boleyn, by J. H. Round; and J. Gairdner in Eng. Hist. Review, viii. 53, 2 99, and x. 104.
2 According to the Chronicle of VIII., tr. by M. A. S. Hume, p. 68, she was his mistress.
3 Of this there is no direct proof, but the statement rests upon contemporary belief and chiefly upon the extraordinary terms of the dispensation granted to Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, which included the suspension of all canons relating to impediments created by "affinity rising ex illicito coitu in any degree even in the first." Froude rejects the whole story, Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, p. 54; and see Friedman's Anne Boleyn, ii. 323.
4 Cal. of St. Pap. England and Spain, iii. pt. ii. p. 327.
5 According to Cranmer, Letters and Papers of Henry
VIII. vi. p. 300, the only authority; and Cranmer himself only knew
of it a fortnight after. The marriage was commonly antedated to the 14th
of November 1532.
This article is from the 1911 edition of an encyclopedia, which is out of copyright here in the U.S. See the encyclopedia main page for disclaimer and copyright information.
