The Mentoring of Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn

Mary Queen of Scots, the rival of Elizabeth I, said, shortly before submitting to the execution ordered by her cousin, “In my end is my beginning.”

For Elizabeth, it is the opposite. What happened to her, how she reigned, and the queen she became, developed in ways she could never completely escape because of her beginning. Specifically, her mother. She would not have been who she was if she’d been the child of any wife of Henry VIII’s: the second, the great disruptor of society, Anne Boleyn.

Anne Boleyn is one of the most famous women in English history, but there are gaps in our knowledge of her for two reasons. First, at her birth she was the middle child of a gentry family of no great distinction, and after her death many portraits and proof of her existence were destroyed, most likely at the command of her vindictive husband or by those anxious to please him.

Historians’ shrewdest estimate is that Anne was born in 1501, when the fortunes of her father, the ambitious and avaricious Thomas Boleyn, were at a low ebb. He had little income to draw on and yet his wife, Elizabeth, “brought me every year a child,” as he wrote.

Later, through inheritances and his own achievements, Thomas Boleyn rose steadily. He moved his young family into the grand Hever Castle around 1505, and he was knighted at the 1509 accession of Henry VIII. Thomas was a quick study in languages and could speak them flawlessly, a talent shared by his daughter Anne, his son George, and his granddaughter Elizabeth.

Anne soon impressed her father as a child to bet on. When she was about 12 years old, Thomas placed her in the prestigious household of one of the most remarkable women in all of Europe: Margaret of Austria. A Hapsburg and daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian, Margaret was twice widowed by the age of 24 and had had enough of marriage. Her father appointed Margaret as Regent of the Netherlands, a role she filled brilliantly for 24 years, ruling a peaceful land and a vibrant court that supported all forms of culture and science.

Anne attended what has been described as the premiere finishing school for young women in all of Christendom, and won warm praise from Regent Margaret in her letters to Thomas Boleyn. Margaret, incidentally, was also the guardian of her…