Vixen or political schemer? My quest to find the real Anne Boleyn

Telegraph

11-05-2025

Anne Boleyn is big box office. To millions of devotees across the world, she holds the same powerful and magnetic appeal that she wielded over Henry VIII and his court almost 500 years ago. By far the most popular of the six wives, she attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Tower of London and Hever Castle every year. Her online following is immense, with numerous websites, blogs and social media events dedicated to discussing the details of her dramatic life. Her story has inspired numerous books, documentaries and films, and is still the subject of intense debate today.
There is a delicious irony in all this because Anne is the one wife whom Henry VIII wanted the world to forget. The day after her execution at the Tower in May 1536, her estranged husband was betrothed to a new wife, Anne's former lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour. He set about removing all trace of Anne from his palaces – tearing down her emblems, destroying her portraits and ordering their daughter Elizabeth from court so he didn't have to be reminded of his scandalous second wife. By the time his marriage to Jane Seymour took place on 30 May, it was as if her predecessor had never existed.
So how did Anne go from zero to hero? Partly, she had her daughter to thank for that. Even though Elizabeth's birth had been a profound disappointment because she was supposed to be a boy, she proved Anne's ultimate revenge against Henry. She ruled for longer and more successfully than any of his other children, including his 'precious jewel', Jane Seymour 's short-lived son Edward VI. Elizabeth spent much of her long reign steadily rebuilding her mother's shattered reputation.
The 'Great Whore' was now 'our dearest mother', 'the root and fount of the reformation', a woman not just scorned, but heinously destroyed by scheming courtiers. The self-proclaimed Virgin Queen surrounded herself with her mother's relatives throughout her reign – in fact, it was nigh-on impossible to get a job in Elizabeth's court unless you were a Boleyn. By contrast, she persecuted her father's side of the family.
But it was not until the reign of Queen Victoria a couple of centuries later that the cult of Anne Boleyn really got going. A devotee of the opera, Victoria fell in love with Anne's story thanks to Donizetti's masterpiece, Anna Bolena. Victoria subsequently ordered a memorial to the fallen queen, close to where she was buried in the Tower chapel. Victorians loved a good tragedy and Anne's story had all the elements of a Shakespearean play – although, ironically, the bard himself hardly did her justice with his rather insipid portrayal in Henry VIII.
In more recent times, it has been the feistier aspects of Anne's character that has resonated. Natalie Dormer put in an excellent performance as the headstrong temptress in big budget bonk-buster, The Tudors, while Claire Foy was both mesmerising and magisterial in the BBC's high-acclaimed Wolf Hall adaptation. In the phenomenon that is Six the Musical, Anne is cast as an Essex girl par excellence, delivering the immortal line to her rival Catherine of Aragon: 'He doesn't want to bang you, somebody hang you.' She also rails against her new husband Henry for being 'so judgemental' when she 'flirts with a guy or two just to make him jel'.
And now we have a new stage portrayal, 1536, now showing at the Almeida. Anne herself doesn't feature, but it's set around the time of her catastrophic fall from grace. Three ordinary women in rural Essex gather to gossip about the dramatic events that are unfolding in London, as well as what is happening in their own lives. It's the latter that dominates their conversation. After all, even though today we tend to focus more on the big-hitters of history, to people living at the time their own hopes and fears, health and welfare were of more immediate concern than which woman Henry VIII had married now or whether he would finally have the son he had craved for nearly thirty years.
In fact, we know little of what ordinary people thought of Anne Boleyn. Almost all the surviving sources were written by ambassadors, courtiers and other high-ranking members of society. They reported that the King's second wife was universally known as the 'Great Whore' or 'Concubine', that people jeered her in the streets and longed for the 'true queen', Catherine of Aragon, to be restored. But such authors were themselves hostile to Anne so their perspectives cannot be wholly relied upon. It's at least equally possible that women such as the three featured in the play felt some sympathy for a woman who had been plucked from obscurity to unimaginable heights as Henry's new queen, only to be discarded like yesterday's turnip peelings when she failed to give him a son.
For the most part, Anne has reflected the tastes and attitudes of the times, her character adapting chameleon-like to her changing fanbase. But how true is any of this to the woman herself?
Seconds before her death, Anne entreated those gathered to witness her bloody demise: 'If any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best.' Since that day, numerous scholars and historians (myself included) have taken up Anne's challenge to 'meddle'; to find out her truth. The divergence of their interpretations – from bewitching vixen and scheming social climber to social and religious reformer and feminist icon – is at least partly due to the fact that Anne left precious few traces of her own voice behind. Some of this was perhaps deliberate: Anne was by nature an enigma. She liked to be mysterious; to keep people guessing – Henry VIII most of all. She would show herself flattered by his attentions one moment and utterly spurn them the next.
But there was also the deliberate destruction of Anne's memory in the wake of her dramatic fall from grace. While 17 of his king's love letters to her survive, there are none of her replies. In the voluminous collection of state papers and personal correspondence from the 1500s, there is just a smattering of documents written by Anne. Her words were recorded by others, but almost without exception they were hostile contemporaries so cannot be wholly relied upon. Fragmentary it may be, but the evidence gleaned from archives and portraits, the places Anne lived and the people she knew, does provide some revealing insights into this fascinating, enigmatic woman.
Anne's date of birth is not known, but it's likely to have been around 1501. She was one of three surviving children born to the ambitious courtier, Thomas Boleyn, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of the second Duke of Norfolk. A combination of political cunning and advantageous marriages had transformed the Boleyn family from obscure tenant farmers into titled gentry with a presence at court. Thanks to Thomas Boleyn's connections, Anne's upbringing and education were far superior to most of her female contemporaries.
A natural scholar, she was described as exceptionally 'toward' (advanced) by her proud father, who secured her a place at the court of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, when she was only about 12 years old. It was a finishing school like no other, giving Anne an excellent grounding in languages and exposing her to some of the most brilliant minds of the European Renaissance – Erasmus included. Her education continued in the French court, where she remained for several years before finally returning to England in 1522, when she was probably in her early twenties.
Once at the court of Henry VIII, Anne made an immediate impression. Although contemporaries were at pains to point out that she was no great beauty, with her 'swarthy' complexion and 'bosom not much raised', she had charisma and sophistication in spades. Before long, she had a host of adoring male courtiers trailing in her wake, the King himself at the head of the queue. But Anne was not prepared to be a mere mistress, painfully aware thanks to her sister Mary's experience that this was a heady but fleeting honour that left the woman concerned with little but a shattered reputation and a few anecdotes to tell her grandchildren. Instead, she kept Henry at bay for seven long years until, driven to desperate measures by frustrated lust, he broke England from Roman Catholic Europe and set himself up as head of a new Church of England so that he could finally secure an annulment from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, and marry Anne.
Anne broke the mould of a queen consort, whose sole ambition had been to fill the royal nursery with heirs and spares. She was feisty, outspoken and fiercely intelligent. She defied the male-dominated world of the Tudors and seized control of her own destiny. A passionate advocate for female education at a time when most of society saw that as a waste of time, she also promoted radical social and religious reform, even though it made her the focus of some deadly enemies.
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Anne was determined to use her position as queen to make a difference, but in this she was at odds with her new husband who, once his passion had been sated, wanted only one thing from her: a son. Anne's failure to give him that led to her downfall less than three years after being crowned. The King's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, dispatched her with ruthless efficiency, concocting a case of adultery involving five men, including Anne's brother George. Even before she stood trial, the King had already sent for a swordsman from Calais to perform the execution.
No matter the brilliance of Anne's mind, it was her body by which she was ultimately judged. Only now, five centuries on, can we strip back the layers of misogyny and romanticism that have obscured the true Anne Boleyn and see her as she really was: religious firebrand, political schemer, visionary reformer and, above all, a woman who broke all the rules.