She has been called a “goggle-eyed whore”, a proto-feminist and a romantic heroine — but whatever her latest historical incarnation, the memory of Anne Boleyn has always accreted extraordinary excrescences: an alleged large wart on her face, a fabled sixth finger on one hand, and a whole host of other half-truths, myths and misinformation cling tenaciously to her remembrance.
It’s not quite clear why Anne has often been misremembered as a self-made woman of humble birth. Perhaps it’s the appeal of a rags-to-riches story. Or perhaps the gravity-defying rise of low-born men like Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell has been silently projected onto Anne. From modest and mean origins to monarchy itself, Anne becomes a Tudor Cinderella (albeit with a far from fairy-tale end).
So we’re told that her paternal great-grandfather was a cloth-merchant — which is accurate, in much the same way that it is accurate to describe Sir James Dyson as a man who sells vacuum cleaners. Geoffrey Boleyn, too, had a knighthood to match.
Anne’s father, Thomas, was of sufficient gentry status to marry Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, later second Duke of Norfolk and Elizabeth Tilney, former lady-in-waiting to Queens Elizabeth Woodville and her daughter Elizabeth of York (this was not an imaginative period for naming).
Thomas Boleyn was himself made a Knight of the Garter in 1523 — before Anne caught Henry VIII’s eye — for his own service to the king as his “squire of the body”, as an ambassador to the French court, and as a member of the king’s council. Anne had privilege.
Then there’s the idea that Anne was young and beautiful — for surely she must have been to attract a king.
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