Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies

In arguing the case against the censorship of evidence surrounding Anne Boleyn’s life, it would be easy for me to risk giving an uneven character profile. While focusing on proving the truth behind the lies we may forget to acknowledge the human flaws that she inevitably possessed.

Well, not on my watch! Make no mistake, Anne Boleyn was no saint. Her excitability could often turn to cockiness. Her go-to trait was bravado when scared, overcompensating with arrogance when she found herself losing a fight. She would get angry when challenged and, good lord, we like an angry woman even less than a brazenly confident one.

If you have a problem, voice your opinion calmly, dear – don’t shout and rant, it’s not becoming of a fair maiden!

Yet although Anne’s character and story have been staggeringly twisted and manipulated over the centuries, and subjected to sexist double standards that have us calling Cromwell’s political work masterful while Anne’s is labelled ruthless, I’m not here to dismiss all the bad. I’m not trying to explain away every negative report only to replace it with a happy, sunny, alternative version of events.

Instead, I am here to argue the case for Anne Boleyn: the Human Being.

This means she wasn’t an infallible angel of virtuous perfection who should be worshipped at the altar of martyrdom; I’m not sure anyone on earth is worthy of such unbridled praise.

She was a complex multidimensional paradox – aren’t we all? Yes, she had negative sides, and I’m not about to gloss over them to rehabilitate her image. That’s not the purpose of this new analysis. In fact, in this chapter we are going to pick apart each and every flaw, every damning story we’ve heard, and every disappointing decision Anne Boleyn ever made, because a woman doesn’t have to be perfect in order to be good.

It’s the stories of Anne’s short temper and sharp tongue that have had sceptics questioning how someone so angry at the world could also care about its people. But of the multiple reports of Anne cutting courtiers down to size, none have become as notorious as the story of her reaction in July 1532 to a priest who had been caught shaving gold clippings from coins to keep for himself. After the man was imprisoned by Henry VIII, Thomas Boleyn is said to have waded into the issue, asking Anne to spare him; at which point she rounded on her father, tearing into him for trying to save the man, declaring there were already too many priests in England.³⁸⁴ The man was subsequently executed.

Now, this story leaves a bad taste for me. His was such a minor crime, and Anne had always been ‘for the people’, so how could she not step in and stop his death over such a petty theft?

Or have I just hit the nail on the head here?

Anne was for the people. Her whole fight was against the clergy who had been taking advantage of the people for their own financial gain, and here was yet another priest highlighting the corruption of the Church with an act of greed. In which case, should we really be surprised that his story riled Anne rather than tugged at her heartstrings? Of course, when her conscience kicked in, she hid behind the Boleyn bravado, throwing out her cocky retort about there being too many priests and stubbornly refusing to back down.

It’s not a pretty trait, nor an endearing one. But this is what happens when you are presented with a human being rather than a fictional character. There are going to be ugly traits that come to light, stories that don’t play out as we hoped they would. Human beings have this nasty habit of disappointing us, and I’m afraid Anne Boleyn is no different. Though we can perhaps start to understand why she reacted the way she did, there’s still no doubt she should have helped, and it was searingly hypocritical of her not to.³⁸⁵

But what of those stories closer to home and Anne’s treatment of her own sister, Mary Boleyn? In the summer of 1534, widowed six years earlier following William Carey’s death from the sweating sickness, Mary caused a stir when she appeared at court, married . . . and pregnant.

Anne was stunned by Mary’s blatant disregard for her position as sister to the queen of England. Not only had she broken with sixteenth-century royal protocol and married without the king’s consent (even today’s monarch must give consent up to the sixth in line to the throne), but Mary had married staggeringly beneath her status. Ives describes her new husband, William Stafford, as ‘one of the hangers-on at court and second son of minor Midlands gentry’, while elsewhere he is called ‘a poor soldier with no prospects’.³⁸⁶

From Anne’s reaction, it’s clear she thought Mary’s next marriage should have been an opportunity for a political or religious alliance. But here Anne shows what a blinkered outlook she had on life, for she failed to comprehend that not everyone was ready to lay down their life for the greater good. For Mary’s part, she was no doubt sick of hearing about the bloody cause and simply wanted to be happy. But Anne couldn’t understand such a notion; to be driven by personal desire rather than duty and morals was inconceivable. Which explains why she saw Mary’s actions as irresponsible and careless.

So, Anne did what siblings do best and lashed out, thoroughly overreacting to the situation by banishing Mary from court, just as she herself had been banished years before.

But where some historians will purposefully mislead readers by concluding, ‘Mary was obliged to stay away from court’³⁸⁷ – after all, this was meant to be the climax of a long-running feud between the sisters, wasn’t it? – you might be surprised to find that this is not how the story ended.

Not only did Anne, realising she’d been too harsh, bring Mary back to court soon after their argument, she also attended to her sister whilst in confinement during her final weeks of pregnancy.³⁸⁸ This may sound like a surprising turnaround but not when we discover there is a lot more to the sisters’ story than history cares to inform us; for example, when Mary’s first husband died in 1528 leaving her in extreme financial difficulty, not only did Anne pay her a regular allowance but she personally took on Mary’s son as her own ward³⁸⁹ – something I imagine is rarely advertised for fear of ruining the infamy of their apparent feud. Anne also fell out with Wolsey while fighting to help Mary’s sister-in-law, Eleanor Carey, gain the prestigious role of abbess of Wilton.³⁹⁰ She even spent Christmas 1531 with Mary, and went on to take her sister as a personal companion on the fateful Calais trip shortly before her wedding.

Oh, bugger. We were meant to be highlighting Anne’s shortcomings as a sister, and the truth just can’t help but pop up and ruin that too. Perhaps, then, we should take a look at Anne’s actions with her younger sibling, George, for it’s when this excitable pair got together that we often hear of a jarring insensitivity in her personality.

Anne and George had what sounds like an incredibly close bond, heightened by the isolation the Tudor court could bring. But the two had fun. You wanted to be in their gang, yet it seems they rarely trusted others enough to let them in. Safe inside their little bubble, they appeared to be unaware of how their in-jokes and banter could make those on the outside feel. It was George’s wife, Jane, who would go on to accuse the two of mocking everything from the king’s clothing to his attempts at poetry.³⁹¹ While their teasing shows a certain degree of immaturity, it does still sound like the kind of playful family banter you might expect to find in any household, so perhaps not really worthy of our outrage. But what of the more serious accusations that Anne mocked Henry’s virility, prompting George to question whether Elizabeth was indeed the king’s child? Though quite the controversial subject to be mocking in the Tudor court, this appears to be the Boleyn black humour covering up a much deeper concern.

For Anne, her husband having problems in the bedroom was no laughing matter. Everything depended on them conceiving a son, all too aware was she of the very real and dire consequences of not producing an heir to the throne. So, it’s highly doubtful that the siblings’ conversation about Henry’s performance in bed was one of malicious mockery, as it’s all too often interpreted, but one of grave concern.

Not that this meant Anne turned to incest to remedy the problem, as she has been accused of, particularly as her brother had even less success at conceiving than Anne, with he and his wife never having children in all the years they were married.

Though these incidents hardly reveal endearing personality traits, I feel they are forgivable in the grand scheme of Anne’s life. Who has not acted badly towards a family member, only to regret it later? Though, granted, failing to intervene in a man’s execution may be somewhat less relatable for us.

But I’m fully aware these are not the reasons readers struggle to bond with Anne Boleyn. You don’t know how many times I’ve heard people say things like, ‘I would feel sorry for Anne but I simply can’t after the way she treated Katherine and Mary!’

Not that I blame them, as some of the most popular ‘six wives’ biographies would have readers believe that Anne pursued the crown only to spend her reign tormenting Katherine and Mary purely for kicks. And while evidence thus far proves this is clearly not the case, we nevertheless have an abundance of nasty little stories to pick through when it comes to Katherine that are not all so easy to dismiss.

It’s said that in 1534, Katherine was upset when she was told she could only hold her Maundy service as ‘princess dowager’ rather than queen. But Anne is credited with the extra touch of stopping the poor from approaching Katherine’s home, believing her charity to be the only reason for Katherine’s remaining popularity.

That Anne would stop anyone helping the poor when it was a cause that meant so much to her feels faintly ridiculous. But as I said, I’m not here to gloss over the accusations, so let’s consider that Anne did advise Henry that he should put a stop to Katherine’s charitable giving to hurt her popularity. It would have been a petty victory and a spiteful act that Anne had not fully thought through, losing sight of the fact that the only people she would really be hurting were those who needed help.³⁹²

It should probably be pointed out that a good number of the derogatory stories you are about to hear about Anne come from Chapuys, Katherine of Aragon’s loyal Spanish ambassador and friend. As I’ve mentioned previously, the majority of his letters are extremely biased against Anne Boleyn, for obvious reasons, so we have to wade through the defamation and gossip to reach the probable truth behind little stories like Anne supposedly demanding Katherine’s jewels so she could wear them herself.³⁹³ As Anne’s anger built with Katherine’s refusal to take a dignified step back, were these the actions of a frustrated new wife caught up in her husband’s bitter divorce battle? Or is it a case of Anne being blamed for Henry’s own actions – a safe alternative to directly criticising the king?

But to be honest, these stories seem rather petty when in October 1534 came the more serious accusation that Princess Mary suspected Anne was working with members of her household to cause her ‘bodily hurt’. Now this is something that needs clearing up.

It is Cromwell who admits in writing: ‘True, it is that the King has occasionally shown displeasure at the Princess’ and that ‘some of the king’s Privy Councillors who, imagining they were doing pleasure to [Anne], put forward certain measures and plans to the Princess’s great disadvantage.’³⁹⁴

So not only is Cromwell solely blaming Henry here, he is also stating that no harm was ordered by Anne. It’s also worth pointing out that at this particular time she was recovering from her devastating miscarriage at eight months, while also dealing with the attack on her marriage from the Imperial Lady. So I will leave it to the reader to decide if she would have simultaneously been scheming up ways to hurt her stepdaughter.

But stories like these cannot hold a candle to the most heartless and offensive tale of them all – that Anne wore yellow in celebration of Katherine’s death. Somewhat more distasteful on Anne’s part than jewels and alms, I’d say. So, is it true?

There was but one written account at the time, and that came from Chapuys. Well, nothing shocking there. He hated Anne and loved Katherine, taking any opportunity to highlight how evil Anne supposedly was towards her. In which case, you might be interested to hear that Chapuys did not say that Anne wore yellow, nor celebrated her death.

The king, yes, but not Anne.

Chapuys writes in his letter of 21 January 1536: ‘You could not conceive the joy that the King and those who favour [Anne] have shown at the death of the good Queen . . . The King, on the Saturday he heard the news, exclaimed “God be praised that we are free from all suspicion of war.”’³⁹⁵

This reaction certainly sounds more Henry than the unlikely and contradictory reports that he cried when he heard the news of her passing. (Unlikely for the simple fact that we know a sociopath does not have a conscience and therefore lacks the emotional capacity to experience such heartfelt grief.)

Chapuys continues:

On the following day, Sunday, the King was clad all over in yellow, from top to toe, except the white feather he had in his bonnet, and the Little Bastard [three-year-old Elizabeth] was conducted to mass with trumpets and other great triumphs. After dinner the King entered the room in which the ladies danced, and there did several things like one transported with joy. At last he sent for his Little Bastard, and carrying her in his arms he showed her first to one and then to another. He has done the same on other days since, and has [jousted] at Greenwich.³⁹⁶

So, what do we make of the fact that Chapuys’s extensive reports don’t even mention Anne?

If she had been wearing yellow or celebrating or parading Elizabeth around, then Chapuys would have been lamenting her insensitivity as he always did. But nothing. Not one indication that Anne was even present at the celebrations.

Instead, Chapuys was alleged to have reported the unsavoury reactions of Anne’s father and brother, ‘the earl of Wiltshire and his son, who said it was a pity the Princess [Mary] did not keep company with [Katherine]’. Meaning they wished she had died too. However, as Chapuys’s biographer recently revealed, this was a mistranslation in the Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII; in Chapuys’s original report he simply speculates that Thomas and George ‘must have said to themselves, what a pity it was that the princess [Mary] had not kept her mother company’.³⁹⁷

But still no mention of Anne. Could that be because she behaved respectably? Or even refused to take part in these ‘celebrations’?³⁹⁸

The only other sixteenth-century report that claims it was in fact Anne who wore yellow and not the king was written by the English chronicler and lawyer Edward Hall, who published his own account of what happened six years later in 1542. By this time Anne was long dead and the anti-Boleyn propaganda was in full swing, so it’s easy to see why Chapuys’s original eyewitness account got twisted so that Anne was the insensitive one wearing yellow and not the king.³⁹⁹

Towards the end of Chapuys’s report we finally come to the only mention of Anne in this entire letter, which spans several days’ worth of reports, explaining that she sent Mary a message via her governess ‘that if she would lay aside her obstinacy and obey her father, [Anne] would be the best friend to her in the world and be like another mother, and would obtain for her anything she could ask, and that if she wished to come to court she would be exempted from [serving her]’.⁴⁰⁰

Perhaps not the most delicate olive branch Anne could have held out at such a sensitive time, if those were indeed her exact words; but the point is that this is all Chapuys has to say about Anne’s initial response to Katherine of Aragon’s death – and it is that of a caring parent, not an evil stepmother.

Eight days after writing this, Chapuys was desperately hunting for any hint that Anne reacted disrespectfully following Katherine’s death, and indeed he finds it, writing that ‘[Anne] showed great joy at the news of the good Queen’s death, and gave a good present to the messenger who brought her the intelligence’.

But you know it’s flimsy evidence when even Chapuys is forced to admit that he heard this ‘from various quarters, though I must say none sufficiently reliable’.⁴⁰¹

Of course, the Spanish ambassador’s doubts regarding Anne’s reaction are never brought to readers’ attention, in order to manipulate their opinions of the cold-hearted fairy-tale villain.

While the evidence here proves Anne did not react in the way we’ve been told, I have the niggling suspicion that some may remain adamant that of course Anne celebrated if Henry did! And given I was all set to explain Anne wearing yellow when I discovered she didn’t, let’s play devil’s advocate for a moment and imagine these rumours were true: what would cause Anne to make such a poor choice in celebrating Katherine’s death? Indeed, there would be no excusing this extreme lapse in judgement. Yet it would be quite easy to understand the psychology behind it. By the time Katherine died, she would have come to represent everything Anne was fighting against, while simultaneously being held up as the exemplar of everything she herself was not. And so Anne would have essentially dehumanised Katherine in her mind.

Dr Kevin Dutton explains:

When we dehumanise others we deliver a shot of anaesthetic to our conscience to render cruel or hurtful behaviour painless. Anne would have had to subconsciously create a feeling of psychological distance to Katherine’s death, and so reduced her to a status where she couldn’t feel for her.⁴⁰²

Indeed, I would say this is why Princess Mary was said to have reacted with similar glee to Anne’s own death later that year. They had all dehumanised each other to the point where they no longer saw their enemies as people but as vermin to be exterminated.

Which leads us neatly to the other rumour – that Anne was the one who killed Katherine. Any guesses as to how she was meant to have taken out her nemesis?

Yes, poisoning! Who saw that accusation coming?!

A post-mortem revealed that Katherine’s heart was black, leading Chapuys to suspect foul play and, of course, Anne Boleyn. Yet, modern medical knowledge suggests this was more likely a sign that poor Katherine died of cancer.⁴⁰³ Chapuys even admits in his letter that ‘several of them confess, and even keep on saying that grief was the cause of [Katherine’s] death, [and] to exclude suspicion of anything worse’.⁴⁰⁴ He then immediately follows this up with the contrasting report that Anne had ‘nevertheless, cried and lamented, herself on the occasion, fearing lest she herself might be brought to the same end as [Katherine]’. This in itself disproves his theory that Anne was responsible for Katherine’s death, for if she were, she wouldn’t be worried that she might be next. She was hardly going to poison herself now, was she?

Yes, it appears Chapuys gets lost in his own accusations at this point, but it must be said that he himself was severely grief-stricken at Katherine’s death. He was trying to gather as much intelligence as possible, and all these contrasting reports are simply the various rumours that were swirling around court in the days following Katherine’s passing. So, we can forgive him for not thinking straight, which might explain why he also failed to pick up on the fact that Anne seemed pretty surprised at the death of someone she was meant to have killed herself. Not only that, but the timing made no sense: why kill her now? Why not before Anne’s marriage, when Katherine was a real obstacle? Why not shortly after, when the legitimacy of her marriage was in question? Besides, in the final months of her own life, as you will soon see, Anne had bigger things to focus on than her husband’s banished ex-wife.

So, it appears that most stories of Anne Boleyn’s cruelty towards Katherine have no real basis in fact, bar some possible ill-judged attempts at taking her jewellery and stopping her alms; however, it appears there is no escaping Anne’s dealings with Henry’s daughter Princess Mary. And herein lies Anne’s real guilt and fault in character.

Mary was said to be as stubborn as Katherine when it came to accepting Anne, but this was no mere teenage rebellion from the royal seventeen-year-old. Mary would never accept Anne, not only out of loyalty to her ousted mother but for the plain and simple fact that she saw Anne as a heretic. Both she and her mother believed it was God’s will for Katherine to be queen of England, Mary to be princess and Catholicism to reign supreme; meaning Mary’s fight against her father and his new wife was motivated by her desperation to correct his sacrilegious mistake in depriving them of the throne.⁴⁰⁵

It also didn’t help that from an early, impressionable age Mary was taught some pretty disturbing views by Spanish scholar Juan Luis Vives, such as that women were God’s only imperfect creations, ‘the devil’s instrument and not Christ’s’.⁴⁰⁶ Charming! He advocated the whole ‘women should be seen and not heard’; even then he wasn’t such a great supporter of them being seen, saying they should be entirely covered when leaving the house. So it’s not surprising that Mary was horrified beyond belief when evangelicals like Anne heralded new, liberated religious reform.

However, we have multiple accounts of Anne reaching out to her stepdaughter in order to make peace, all of which fly in the face of modern claims that Anne didn’t approve of Henry visiting Mary and would apparently ‘throw a tantrum’ whenever he suggested it.⁴⁰⁷ Even from a cynical point of view, to get Mary’s approval for their marriage would help win over the Catholic faction at court and at large, so it made sense for Anne to treat Mary with honour and respect.

Admittedly, that didn’t always go to plan.

The first recorded attempt at a reconciliation came nine months after Anne’s coronation, in March 1534. When visiting Elizabeth at Eltham Palace, where she lived with Mary, it’s reported by Chapuys that Anne ‘urgently solicited [Mary] to visit her and honour her as queen, saying that it would be a means of reconciliation with the King’ vowing Mary would be ‘better treated than ever’ if she did.⁴⁰⁸

Even though Mary came back with the reply that she knew no queen in England except her mother, Anne kept her cool and persisted, repeating the offer during the same visit. But when she continued to hit a brick wall, her restraint failed her and Anne’s anger issues burst to the surface, apparently threatening to ‘bring down the pride of this unbridled Spanish blood’.⁴⁰⁹ Ah. And she started off so well.

Another well-documented yet undated attempt comes courtesy of The Life of Jane Dormer. Once again, while visiting Elizabeth at Eltham Palace, Anne heard Mass with Mary. However, unbeknown to Anne, Mary was said to have acknowledged her with a curtsey as she left. When one of Anne’s maids informed her of this, she immediately sent Mary a messenger, who explained:

The queen salutes your grace with much affection and craves pardon . . . if she had seen [your curtsey] she would have answered you with the like; and she desires that this may be an entrance of friendly correspondence which [the queen] shall find to be completely embraced on her part.⁴¹⁰

But Mary now responded by asking how the queen could have sent this message, as she was ‘so far from this place’, meaning, once again, that her mother was the only woman she recognised as queen; in other words, she threw Anne’s olive branch back in her face.

With patience wearing thin – and Anne wasn’t too good at keeping her temper under control at the best of times – the same source reports that Anne was ‘maddened’ by Mary’s rude response. So it’s becoming clear that here is a woman who would have benefited greatly from a course in anger management, her bouts of diplomatic restraint continuously wrestling with the overwhelming urge to fly off the handle.

Interestingly, Chapuys appears to report on one of her moments of attempted sensitivity when Mary fell ill later in September 1534, saying, ‘The King sent his own physician to visit her, and permitted . . . her mother’s . . . apothecary who has been her medical adviser for the last three years, should also be in attendance; which . . . has considerably helped to her recovery.’⁴¹¹

Considering that Anne is often accused of being behind the king’s actions should we, by the same logic, presume she was behind this too? Or is it just the nasty and spiteful incidents that she was secretly responsible for? Perhaps in order to come to the most likely conclusion here we should ask ourselves if this sounds like the caring actions of a kind-hearted sociopath, or the maternal instinct of a stepmother keen to make amends after an argument?

Anne’s final attempt at peace with Mary was, as we have just seen, following Katherine’s death. As well intentioned as this may have been, the timing was probably not the best. Mary would have been overcome with grief, and now here was her wicked stepmother offering to take her mother’s place. It’s not surprising Mary lashed out and rejected her once again.

Did Anne take this raw emotion into account?

Of course she didn’t. She just saw it as yet another unreasonable rebuff after she had gone out of her way to be kind. Which is why Anne fired off an angry and somewhat misjudged letter to Mary’s governess Lady Shelton, telling her to stop pushing Mary closer to the king if Mary was so opposed to it, explaining that ‘What I have done has been more for charity, for if I have a son, as I hope shortly, I know what will happen to her’ and that ‘considering the word of God, to do good to one’s enemy, I wished to warn her beforehand’ because she had ‘daily wisdom’ of the king’s thoughts.⁴¹²

We will see all too soon exactly what Anne’s ominous warning of the king’s actions related to. But for now, she ended her final letter with the usual go-to trait when hurt: that brash Boleyn bravado, saying she didn’t need Mary and Mary couldn’t hurt her anyway, so there!⁴¹³

On 29 January, Chapuys reports how Mary read Anne’s letter and ‘has been laughing ever since’.⁴¹⁴

So it would appear that Anne dealt with Mary as immaturely as Mary dealt with Anne. Even though Anne evidently had moments of approaching her stepdaughter with delicacy and understanding, she was too quick to lash out in anger when her attempts to heal the situation were thrown back at her.

Of course, when added to the fact that Anne considered the young princess an ‘enemy’, you might be inclined to think she was viewing her stepdaughter in a somewhat overly dramatic light. But when put in the context of the times, we need to realise that Mary was always seen as more than a disobedient stepdaughter; she represented the potential threat of a Catholic uprising against Anne’s ‘heretical’ evangelical mission. Though isolated, Mary was no powerless young girl. As the daughter of the former queen, most saw her as the rightful heir to the Tudor throne who had the might of the Holy Roman Empire behind her. Anne had to take Mary’s threat of rebellion very seriously – a truth that often gets lost when the Tudor monarchs receive the soap opera treatment.

So if Mary was a genuine enemy, does that mean Anne was guilty of the other accusations – that she humiliated the girl and deliberately made her life a misery? Or would she have not risked antagonising her in such a spiteful way?

The king had already banned Mary from seeing her mother in an attempt to weaken their resolve to fight their demotion in the royal household. Some may assume Anne supported this decision, possibly in the belief that she had a better chance of winning Mary round without Katherine poisoning her ear with stories of her ‘scheming stepmother’. There are, unsurprisingly, those who believe that Anne bullied the king into separating mother and daughter against his will – beleaguered and browbeaten husband that he was – in order to hurt and isolate them for not stepping aside quietly.

After all, when Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, replaced Mary as princess, we’re told Mary was made to serve in her little sister’s household as lady-in-waiting, conjuring up images of a Cinderella figure slaving away for her evil half-sister. (You know how history loves a good fairy tale.) But away from the fables, what truth is there in these reports?

It was in Chapuys’s 1533 account of the latest court gossip where he wrote that ‘I hear [Anne] has lately boasted that she will make of the Princess a maid of honour in her Royal household . . . or marry her to some varlet.’⁴¹⁵

Can we pause a moment here and ask if we really believe Anne was planning to marry the king’s daughter off to a member of the household staff? This was clearly a joke. And so too must be the quip about making her serve as a maid of honour. We’ve even just read a quote from 1536 where Anne specifically reassures Mary she would not serve in her household – perhaps indicating that she realised her silly remarks three years earlier had become the stuff of court legend and wanted to reassure her stepdaughter.

Yet Anne’s wisecracks were jumped on with all the gravity of attempted murder, not just by Chapuys but by modern-day historians who have called them ‘vulgar threats’.⁴¹⁶ But why let rationale get in the way of a salacious and dramatic plot point – even if it is meant to be a non-fiction biography. In actual fact, Mary was never made to serve Elizabeth, nor was she given any formal title of lady-in-waiting or maid of honour. Her main indignity was the loss of status. But far from her newborn half-sister ordering her to do chores, this merely meant things like Mary being asked to take her meals with the rest of the household – something she flatly refused to do, which consequently had a detrimental effect on her health.⁴¹⁷

So, in light of this, and considering that royal protocol meant both Elizabeth and Mary were separated from their mothers, could it have been more that Anne thought it might be a comfort for the two sisters to grow up together with each other for company? Or perhaps, slightly more cynically, that she thought living with her baby sister might thaw Mary’s iciness when it came to her new family set-up? Of course, the two girls lodging together at Eltham Palace could have simply been a convenience for when the king and queen came to visit and we’re all just overthinking this! But that’s probably far too boring an idea to contemplate. Let’s discuss a death threat, pronto.

We’ve seen Anne throw around retorts to ‘bring down the pride of this Spanish blood’, along with many reports of her lashing out with other hot-headed empty threats, such as wishing ‘all Spaniards at the bottom of the sea’.⁴¹⁸ While the king was away in France, Anne even once huffed that she wanted to have Mary killed while he was gone.

You know, quick, while he’s not looking!

However, when George tried to make light of his sister’s controversial remarks by informing her that Henry wouldn’t be best pleased, Anne retorted she didn’t care if she would burn for it.⁴¹⁹ Now, does a rational mind take this seriously and believe that she was willing to die for the sake of murdering a stroppy teenager? Or are we to hazard a guess that this was Anne’s dark and inappropriate sense of humour?

The fact of it was that if Charles V could storm Rome and kidnap the pope, or hold Francis I and his two young children hostage, he wouldn’t think twice about launching an attack on England for the murder of his cousin Mary or aunt Katherine. This would appear to be all the proof we need that Anne’s off-the-cuff remarks about wanting Mary dead were simply that damn Boleyn bravado once again.

Yet there is one statement Anne was meant to have said about Mary that feels more sinister than the empty death threats and bolshie retorts we have seen so far: ‘She is my death and I am hers.’ Considering this was reported a mere six months before Anne’s execution, it may have been one of the few times she was deadly serious. Although we may question if she even said it at all, once we hear the source.

Charles V’s representative Dr Ortiz said in a letter on 22 November 1535, ‘[Anne] has often said of [Mary] “She is my death and I am hers; so I will take care that she shall not laugh at me after my death.”’⁴²⁰

However, I am tempted to believe the truth of this if only because while, no, neither Anne or her supporters tried to kill Mary . . . Mary’s supporters did succeed in killing Anne, proving that for all Anne’s ‘big talk’, her stepdaughter was indeed the dangerous one.

As we’ve touched on, when it comes to Henry’s mistreatment of his ex-wife and child, such as sending Katherine to inhospitable castles to coerce her into submission, it has become standard practice to blame Anne as the brutish mastermind behind all his evil doings. As though the formidable force of nature that was King Henry VIII was a nervous child goaded and bullied daily by Anne Boleyn. A man who lived in fear of a good telling-off if he didn’t carry out her senseless list of cruelties.

Here the melodrama of popular history threatens to become faintly ridiculous, so we need to bring it back to the bare facts – the most obvious being that Henry went on to carry out terrible acts of evil long after Anne had stopped supposedly whispering in his ear. This being due to the fact that the hapless and innocent king had decapitated her.

The best piece of evidence for this shortly followed Anne’s death. In order for Mary to be welcomed back to the Tudor court, Henry demanded his daughter sign a document recognising him as the supreme head of the Church of England, and also accepting her own illegitimacy and the invalidity of her parents’ marriage.

When Mary refused, Henry commenced plans for her to be tried for treason, which would have ended in the execution of his own daughter. Suddenly, those who helped in bringing down Anne Boleyn were targeted themselves, interrogated and imprisoned in the Tower.⁴²¹ Understanding the perilous position she and her supporters were in, Mary reluctantly signed the document, bullied into submission at last; at which point, Henry welcomed her back into the fold with open arms, as any loving, mentally unstable father would.

It is here he scolded the courtiers who were watching their tearful reunion, saying, ‘Some of you were desirous that I should have put this jewel to death.’⁴²²

Upon hearing this admission, Mary is said to have fainted with shock. Evidence, if we really needed any more, that somewhat ruins the rhetoric that Henry ‘was an affectionate man, happy to dote upon his children’.⁴²³ Until they defied him – at which point he might murder them.

Yes. Such an affectionate and doting father.

Regardless of where you stand on this whole debate, it’s interesting to note that Mary never came close to harm while Anne Boleyn was alive – it was only after Anne was dead and, some might argue, no longer there to protect her that she came perilously close to death. It’s possible that due to this, Mary might have come to finally realise – granted, all too late – that her father’s treatment of her and her mother wasn’t so much Anne’s doing after all.

The stories and reports we’ve heard of Anne Boleyn up until now apparently cause confusion; the fun-loving flirt, the charitable activist, the frustrated new wife, the caring humanitarian, the abrasive boss, the religious warrior, the harsh sister, the loving mother.

Which one was she? Who was the real Anne Boleyn?

Allow me to let you in on a secret: she was all of them. Anne Boleyn can’t be boxed into a neat little category of saint or sinner. It’s these jarring contrasts and juxtapositions that reveal her to be a real and complex person as opposed to a flat fictional character. But because of these human flaws, perhaps one of the most disturbing conclusions to Anne’s life and, ultimately death, is the belief that the new queen had it coming – a view that is common currency even today.

If only she hadn’t been so ferocious. A little more ‘grateful and gracious’ – the exact words Chapuys expressed to Cromwell the day before her arrest.⁴²⁴

Well, excuse the crass analogy, but Anne Boleyn was no reality show contestant needing to be humble as well as talented in order to reach the semi-finals. She was a monumental queen in British history. We don’t berate the pope for his lack of people skills when it comes to politics, and we rarely judge the likes of Charles V on his personality; the majority only note the historic impact his reign had on Europe. Yet with Anne Boleyn, we have to want to have been her best friend, or she was a bitch who deserved downfall and decapitation.

When she won victories, yes, she got overexcited and cocky; when she clashed with family, yes, she overreacted immensely. When frustrated and betrayed she would turn on that obnoxious bravado, fighting back harder for what she believed was right. She wasn’t subtle; she was a bulldozer trying to achieve good. And the more she faced opposition, the louder, angrier and more abrasive she got.

Was this the right way to achieve things? Maybe not. Should she have learned better people skills from her father, the consummate diplomat? Most definitely. But for Anne, even he represented the stuffy ways of the past. She wanted to represent the future, and so her overeagerness to change the world sometimes rubbed people up the wrong way and did not always come across in the manner she intended. But we need to realise that, away from the vamped-up drama Anne Boleyn’s story has now become, being human isn’t a character fault worthy of euthanisation.