The Six Wives of Henry VIII | Anne Boleyn

Although Anne Boleyn has had an incredible impact on world history, we don't really even know the year she was born. Historians guess it's either 1501 or 1507, no-one had thought it that important to record it, she was just a daughter of an aristocratic family. No-one in their wildest dreams would have imagined that one day she would be Queen of England.

As her father was a successful diplomat, Anne spent a lot of her childhood and teens on the European continent. She was even a young lady-in-waiting to Margaret of Austria for a period of time, the first woman I wrote about in this blog.

In 1514, her Dad, Thomas Boleyn, got her a prime spot as a lady-in-waiting in the French court and there she soaked up the culture, language and fashion as if she was a native born French woman.

In the 1520s Anne moved back to England where she became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine of Aragon. Her French customs were seen as incredibly sophisticated and exotic back home and people were entranced (especially the men).

She was also witty, charming and well educated, all things which eventually caught the eye of King Henry himself. Henry had already had an affair with Anne’s older sister Mary, but Anne was different. For one thing, she refused to be ‘just’ his mistress and said she would not sleep with Henry unless they were married. Henry was not used to rejection and so pursued Anne relentlessly. The more she rejected him the hotter he got for her. He was madly, passionately in love, there was only one, BIG, problem, his wife Catherine.

Catherine had reached an age where she was unlikely to bear any more children, and the only thing Henry wanted more than Anne was a male heir. Henry thought he had a solution, divorce Catherine and trade her in for a younger more fertile model, Anne, win-win, or so he thought…

Anne waited, not so patiently, seven years for the divorce to come through and her chance to become queen. In the end, it paid off and in 1533 she was finally the Queen of England and Henry’s wife. To crown her victory Anne gave birth later that year. Everyone was incredibly confident it would be a boy. There were announcements prepared and written up for the birth of a prince... except when it came out it was very much a girl. Two Ss had to be squeezed in to turn the ‘prince’ to a ‘princess’. The baby was called Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth I.) A girl isn’t too bad though people thought, she had one healthy child, she’ll likely have more. But Anne didn’t, she had miscarriage after miscarriage.

And that wasn’t all, Anne’s sassiness, which he had so loved when she was his mistress, had started to annoy Henry now she was his wife. In typical 16th Century fashion, he expected a wife to be submissive and a bit of a doormat, Anne could never be any of those things.

She was also very unpopular. People saw her as a home wrecker and ‘the other woman’. It didn’t help matters that Queen Catherine had been so popular. Anne was surrounded by enemies at court and it was at this moment they decided to pounce.

After only three years of marriage, trumped up charges that Anne had been cheating on Henry emerged. The accusations were wild, they even accused her of sleeping with her own brother, George.Henry was all too happy to go along with the accusations against his quarrelsome, non-son producing wife.

For Henry, cheating on the King was considered treason and the punishment for treason was death. So Anne was locked in the Tower of London, as well as the men she was accused of cheating on Henry with (including George).

Anne and her so-called lovers were given show trials and sentenced to death.

She was beheaded on the 15th May 1536. Henry got engaged to his next wife, Jane Seymour the very next day.