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…