“But to come to her death... She was convicted and condemned [and] she was not twenty-nine years of age.”
- Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (1538 - 1612)
“She would have been around thirty-five when she died, middle-aged by Tudor standards. Life had not been kind to her, and stress had aged her prematurely.”
- Alison Weir, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1991)
A mistress of King Louis XV of France always insisted that there was only one rule in polite society that could never be broken - and that was that you should never ask a pretty woman her age. So, it seems a tad impolite that for years historians have been trampling over such niceties, by debating back and forth about the age of Henry VIII's second wife, Queen Anne Boleyn. But then, as with so much about Anne Boleyn, it may not be appropriate, but it's certainly important.
The issue of Anne Boleyn's age is one which is particularly important to me, because a research paper on the subject was one of those I submitted when applying to Oxford. In the course of recently researching my own biography of Anne Boleyn, which I believe may take me the next five or six years to complete, I returned to that paper and began to research in-depth the issue of Anne's birth. It is my conclusion that the current chronology of Anne's childhood that we have been given by most historians is utterly wrong and highly misleading. Anne Boleyn was, I believe, born six years later than most modern historians suggest - not in 1501, but in the summer or autumn of 1507.
Since parish records were not kept in England until later in the 16th century, we only have exact birthdays for Henry VIII's two foreign-born wives - Katherine of Aragon, who was born in Spain on December 16th 1485, and Anna of Cleves, who was born in Germany on September 22nd 1515. For his English wives, historians have had to use comments about the ladies' generic age and appearance, ambassadorial reports, family wills and even funerary details to try and guess the birth date of Jane Seymour (?1507 - 1509), Catherine Howard (?1521 - 1525) and Katharine Parr (?1512 or 1514.)
Of course, had Anne Boleyn lived out a normal life-span, the issue of when exactly she was born would have become less and less important with the passing years. For example, had she lived to the same age as her Irish grandmother, Lady Margaret, and died at the age of 83, Anne would have lived well into the reign of her daughter Queen Elizabeth and would have died sometime around the time of the Spanish Armada. By that point, Anne would have been the Queen Mother and her influence in politics, perhaps still considerable, would have been so long-lasting that the issues concerning her early rise to power in the 1520s would not have mattered so much. Furthermore, had she been properly buried her date of birth would perhaps have been recorded on the tomb.
But Anne Boleyn did not live into her eighties and she was buried in an unmarked grave. Yet, it matters very much to what we know about her, her marriage and the English Reformation that we accurately date her birth. Was she a young woman of eighteen when the King first began to pursue her or an accomplished, mature lady of twenty-five? Was she twenty-eight at the time she was executed or was she thirty-five? Because if she was 28, as one of her stepdaughter's ladies-in-waiting claimed, then the reasons behind her execution become infinitely more sinister - at 28, Anne Boleyn was still undeniably in her childbearing years. Yes, she would have been at the tail-end of them by Tudor standards, but she would have had at least four or five more years before she was considered infertile, and so the idea that it was just her "failure" to produce a son which led to her death in 1536 suddenly becomes a good deal less convincing and the idea that it was her husband who orchestrated her monstrously unfair death becomes infinitely more likely. However, if she was 35, then she was already practically middle-aged by Tudor standards and it becomes far more likely that the entire reason for her destruction was politics pure and simple, with Anne - and to some extent, perhaps, maybe even her husband - being victims of a savagely brilliant process of character assassination, lies, manufactured hysteria and a ruthless palace coup organised by the King's chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell.
This much about Anne Boleyn's life is certain - we know that she was sent abroad for her education in 1513, that she returned to London as a débutante in 1522, Henry VIII asked her to marry him in 1527, she was crowned queen and became a mother in 1533 and she was executed in 1536. If one follows the 1501 argument, then she was 12 when she went abroad, 21 when she came back, 26 when she was engaged, 32 when she was crowned and 35 when she died; the alternative scenario has her leaving England at 6 and returning at 15, betrothed at 19, crowned at 25 and dead at 28.
Anyone who is well-acquainted with the numerous modern books published on the Tudor dynasty will know that for the last twenty years - with the exception of the American historian Professor R.M. Warnicke of the University of Arizona - that all major writers and academics have argued that Anne was born in 1501. Joanna Denny in her highly pro-Protestant biography Anne Boleyn: A new life of England’s tragic Queen, wrote that Anne was ‘born most probably in the early summer of 1501’, whilst Lady Antonia Fraser in The Wives of Henry VIII went even further by dismissing the 1507 date as 'impossible.' Professor E.W. Ives in in his magisterial biography The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy concluded that it ‘is established beyond question’ that we should be ‘dating the birth of Anne Boleyn to 1500-1’ and Alison Weir, in her four books on the period, The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Britain’s Royal Families, Henry VIII: King & Court and The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, has argued that Anne Boleyn was, without question, born in 1501, building much of her analysis of Anne's early romances and final years on the assumption.
However, despite this academic consensus, there are only two sources from Anne's lifetime (or thereabouts) which specifically mention her age and neither of them support such confidence in 1501 being the date of Anne's birth. The first source are the memoirs of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, who was a loyal lady-in-waiting to Anne's stepdaughter, Mary Tudor. Jane was actually born two years after Anne's death, but she was in Mary's service for the first twenty years of her life and Mary's tendency to talk about her hated, dead stepmother did not diminish with the passing years. Rather, as she got older, the memory of her feud with Anne seemed to haunt Mary more and more, further poisoning her already-fragile relationship with her half-sister, Elizabeth. After Mary died, Jane Dormer married a Spanish aristocrat and moved to Madrid, where she died in old age in 1612. Shortly before her death, she dictated her memoirs to her English secretary, Henry Clifford, in which she recalled her time as Mary's lady-in-waiting and told him the various recollections that Mary had told her of life during the time of Henry VIII. On the subject of Anne Boleyn, Jane was quite specific when she stated that when Anne had been executed on May 19th 1536 she was 'not yet twenty-nine years of age.' The implication is that Anne was nearing her twenty-ninth birthday at the time of her death, indicating that the Duchess knew she had been born in the summer or autumn of 1507. Given that it was such a specific statement, it is almost certain that this was the age Mary Tudor believed her stepmother had been at the time of her death and she had passed this information on to Jane. Some have pointed out that Mary hated her stepmother so much that she was apt to lie about her at any given opportunity, but even if that is true, there is absolutely no reason for her to have lied about her age (certainly not to the point of making her younger) and whatever one thinks about Mary and Anne's assessment of each other's personalities, the fact remains that neither can have been ignorant about their respective ages. Furthermore, that such a specific recollection from someone so intimately placed within the Tudor court as the Duchess of Feria, who was actually within Anne’s extended network of acquaintances, should simply be discounted as impossible, inaccurate or deluded is indicative of the worrying malaise of historical writing which assumes that historians must know more about the period than those who actually lived through it.
Independently of the Duchess of Feria, an English writer called William Camden began to write a life of Anne's daughter, Queen Elizabeth, at the end of the 16th century, with the backing of the English government. Shortly before his death, Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister, Lord Burghley, suggested to Camden that he should write a chronicle of Elizabeth’s life and reign. It was, if you like, an Elizabethan version of an "official biography." Burghley saw to it that Camden was given free access to his own personal papers and also many of the state archives, guaranteeing a degree of accuracy quite unusual for works of the period. Camden researched his subject heavily, but did not start writing until 1607, by which time Elizabeth had been dead for four years and Lord Burghley for nine. In the section of the Annales covering Elizabeth’s early life, Camden wrote in the margin that her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been born in 1507.
As I have said, Camden’s access to the original sources was better than anyone writing at the same time and given the intervening centuries and the destruction of the coming Civil War, it is perfectly possible that he not only had access to more sources than anyone writing at the same time, but also perhaps anyone writing since. The fact that he stated 1507 quite specifically cannot be dismissed, anymore than the Duchess of Feria’s pronouncement of the same date in her memoirs. In a rather lame attempt to explain away how someone with such excellent access to the original sources could have gotten it so wrong, modern-day proponents of the earlier birth-date have hypothesised that the number “7” has been misread in Camden’s manuscript and that it was in fact simply a curved “1.” Such an explanation would only work, and even then tentatively, if Camden had written the date in Arabic, which he did not. He wrote it in Roman numerals: MDVII. There is no room for an alternative explanation – writing just over a century after her birth and with unparalleled access to state papers about her, as granted by her daughter’s friend and adviser, William Camden explicitly stated that Anne Boleyn had been born in 1507.
What about the possibility that for some unknown reason Camden and the Duchess of Feria were influenced by each other's work? Well, Camden cannot possibly have known of the Duchess’s memoirs, since she did not dictate them to her secretary until the final year of her life, five years after Camden had started writing and fifteen after he had first begun his research. Moreover, the Duchess’s accounts were not actually published into general circulation until the 19th century. It is also equally unlikely that she could have read Camden’s work – for even if she had, her recollections would hardly have been altered to suit the words of a Protestant scholar and, moreover, the first instalment of his work was not published in England until half a decade after the Duchess of Feria’s death in Spain.
Proponents of the 1500/1501 date of birth often cite the fact that Anne was sent to the Hapsburg Empire as a young girl to become a maid-of-honour in the palace of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria, in modern-day Belgium. The minimum age for a fille d'honneur at Margaret's court was twelve and since we know Anne was sent there in 1513, it seems logical to suggest that she was born in 1501. Yet, this argument completely ignores the fact that in a letter to Anne's father, the Archduchess wrote:
"I have received your letter by Squire Bouton, who has also presented your daughter to me, who is very welcome ... I find her so bright and so pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me."
Why would the Archduchess have made a point of referring to Anne's age as being exceptionally young, if she was the same age as every other maid-of-honour? We also know that Anne was nicknamed "La Petite Boulaine" ("the Little Boleyn") by the Archduchess and whilst this may have been a reference to her delicate figure, it also offers further evidence to suggest that Anne was younger than most of the other girls in the Archduchess's entourage. We also know that whilst it was unusual to have someone as young as six or seven at the Court, it was not as impossible as some supporters of 1501 have claimed. There was, in fact, another English girl there at the same time - Anne Brandon - and she was born in 1506, meaning that it is possible Anne Boleyn was very young when she was sent abroad, something which the Archduchess's comments seem to support. It is also telling, I think, that Anne's escort from her family home in Kent to the Hapsburg Court in Brussels was Claude Bouton, a Flemish nobleman in the Archduchess's service. No reference is made of a female chaperone, which would almost certainly have been required if Anne had been anywhere near the age of twelve, by which point Canon Law at the time claimed she was legally and biologically a woman.
A letter the young Anne wrote from her time in the Archduchess's household is usually held up as incontrovertible proof that Anne was born in the earlier date of 1501. She wrote it from one of the Archduchess's hunting lodges, where the Court was summering during the particularly sweltering August of 1514. From there, Anne found time to write a letter to her father in London (young ladies were, in any case, discouraged from going out in the Sun too much in case they tanned). Since arriving at the Hapsburg court, Anne had been given rigorous instruction in learning French and some Latin as well and this was the first time she had ever written back to her father in the new language he wanted her to master. Some have claimed the handwriting in the letter is impossibly mature for a girl of seven and that Anne was therefore about thirteen at the time she wrote it. However, as Professor Warnicke has pointed out in her book The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, the letter actually consists of 'extremely bad handwriting ... like that of a small child'.
Either in the winter of 1514 or early in 1515, Anne left the Archduchess's household and was moved to Paris, where she joined the household of the Queen of France. Her father spent much of his time there as one of England's ambassadors to the French Court and given that his youngest daughter was by now fluent in French, it seems very likely that she acted as translator when her father had an audience with the Queen. From her time in France, we also know that Anne was clearly on friendly terms with the Queen's younger sister, Princess Renée, later Duchess of Ferrara, because forty years later the princess made a point of discussing her relationship with Anne Boleyn with Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, then the English Ambassador to Paris. The princess remarked to Sir Nicholas that she had a special fondness for his queen Elizabeth, due to her childhood friendship with Anne Boleyn and we know that Renée was born in 1510, making it highly unlikely that she would have been friends with someone nine years her senior.
What about the fact that Anne remained unmarried until 1526, when Henry VIII proposed to her? Anne was highly attractive, well-connected, vivacious and charming; attracting male attention certainly wasn't something she had a problem with. In fact, getting rid of it seemed to be the difficulty. She was also the daughter of the heir to the Ormonde earldom and the granddaughter of the Duke of Norfolk, which made her a valuable catch. In Tudor terms, it seems frankly incredible that she would have made it to the age of 25 without being married. We know that Sir Thomas Boleyn had a habit of marrying his children at the age of about 19 or 20; Anne's elder sister, Mary, was married to Sir William Carey in 1520 and their brother, George, who was born in about 1504, was married to his wife Jane Parker in 1524. We know that there was talk of marrying Anne to one of her Irish cousins, the future Earl of Kildare, throughout the mid-1520s and, of course, most people know of her unlucky betrothal with the future Earl of Northumberland. Having reached the age of 25 without a husband, Anne would have been sailing dangerously close to the "unmarriageable age," something which it is almost impossible to believe her father would have allowed. However, if she was born in 1507, then she would only have been approaching 19 when the King fell so dangerously and obsessively in love with her, a much more believable age given the matrimonial careers of her siblings and attitudes towards suitable marriageable age at the time.
One question the 1501 side of the debate has never fully answered is the issue of Anne's suitability to be the mother of the King's children. In the half-decade-long battle with Rome between Henry's proposal to Anne and their actual marriage, every conceivable objection was thrown up at Anne Boleyn by those who did not wish to see her become queen. Her ancestry was queried as being insufficiently grand (although that argument was rather hampered by having to go back to one of her great-grandparents before you could find one who wasn't an aristocrat); her religion, her friends, her foreign sympathies, her sister's private life - they were all cited loudly and frequently as being reasons why Anne could not become the next Queen of England. When something new could not be found, it was simply made up - usually by the Duke of Suffolk or the Spanish Ambassador. And yet, Anne and Henry did not go through a marriage service until November 1532 and she did not give birth to their first child until September 1533. If she had been born in 1501, she would have been 32 years-old at the time she gave birth to Elizabeth - over-the-hill, by Tudor standards. Why did no-one highlight the fact that she was simply too old to be the mother of the next Heir to the Throne? Thirty-two was the age when Henry's first wife, Katherine of Aragon, had gone through her last pregnancy and after that everyone assumed (rightly) that she would never fall pregnant again - why did no-one point out that the new Queen was going into labour for the first time at exactly the same age as the old "barren" Queen had gone through it for the last time? When Henry VIII married his sixth wife, Katharine Parr, in 1543, she was already in her thirties and twice-widowed; so everyone assumed that this marriage had been embarked upon because the King had finally given up on having any more children and he simply wanted a companion in his old age. When Katharine Parr married again after King Henry's death in 1547 and fell pregnant with her new husband's baby at the age of about thirty-five, panicked letters arrived from her friends and family pointing out that in a woman of her age, childbirth was likely to kill her - which, tragically, it did. Never, at any point, did anyone question whether or not Anne Boleyn would be able to have lots of children - like most of her Howard aunts and cousins, all of whom had started having children in their late teens or early twenties. In fact, in a rather gushing letter to the Vatican a few years earlier, one cleric had written in praise of: -
"the purity of her life, her constant virginity, her ... wisdom, descent of right noble and high thorough regal blood, education in all good and laudable manners, apparent aptness to procreation of children, with her infinite other good qualities..."
It is true that at the very end of her life, the Spanish ambassador, who hated her, referred to her as a 'thin, old woman' and this has been held up as proof that she was 35, not 28. Much has been made of these comments and yet, only a few months later, during her downfall, comments were once again being made about her youthful appearance - a French bishop described her as being a woman of almost 'fearful beauty' and a Portuguese merchant who saw Anne's execution wrote that on the day of her death: 'Never had the Queen looked so beautiful.' Clearly, the ambassador's comments about her looks having faded were inaccurate and spiteful; moreover, only a few months earlier he, and every other diplomat, had been describing her as still young. It may have been that the strain of her miscarriage in January had caused her to look haggard and tired (the ambassador's comment about her being old was made in February) - we know that she had to stay in bed for weeks after it and that for quite sometime she was incapable of walking, suggesting that the physical toll of this tragedy had been far worse than the one she had suffered through two years earlier.
Throughout the late 1520s, when Anne would have been in her late teens or early twenties if the 1507 date of birth is accepted, palace servants referred to her as 'young,' Cardinal Pole described her as 'very young,' a Cambridge don described as 'young and good-looking,' a palace priest as 'youthful,' and as late as 1529, Cardinal Wolsey was describing her as a 'girl,' something he was unlikely to have done had been 28 at the time. On the Feast of Saint Andrew in 1531, Anne complained that her youth was passing her by - a comment which would have raised eyebrows almost to the ceiling had she already been thirty, because by that point her youth would most definitely have left her behind a long, long time ago, particularly by Tudor standards.
Examining all the evidence impartially it is impossible, I think, to accept that Anne Boleyn was born as early as 1500 or 1501. Any piece of evidence that has been put forward to support the idea that she was born at the turn-of-the-century can be refuted, once common sense is applied to the problem. It is true that all the evidence I have offered here has been circumstantial - the comments about Anne's age, her place in the family marriage network and attitudes to marriagability at the time. None of them prove that she was born in the summer or autumn of 1507, as I stated at the beginning of this article. However, try as we might, we cannot get away from the testimony of two people who had no reason to lie about Anne Boleyn's age and who were both expertly placed to know the truth - the Duchess of Feria and William Camden - one of whom was a close friend of Anne's stepdaughter and another who was working on a book for Anne's daughter who, presumably, could have corrected him had he been wrong, as could the numerous grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Anne's sister, Mary, who were still alive at the time Camden was writing. Independently of one another and with absolute certainty, Jane Dormer and William Camden both stated that Anne Boleyn had been born in 1507 and to my mind there is no evidence whatsoever that has yet come to light which contradicts them.