For most people, Anne Boleyn simply appeared at the Tudor court one day, an ice-hearted villain, ready to smarm and smirk her way into history. Yet there is an incredibly valid reason writers tend to brush over Anne’s early life, and that’s because it contradicts and spectacularly ruins the whole ‘scheming seductress’ image we’ve been repeatedly fed.
However, these aren’t just the revelations that have come to light in recent decades of a strict upbringing at the hands of several pious, powerhouse European monarchs – although this was indeed a long overdue, truthful counterargument to sixteenth-century propaganda that had Anne practically raised as a courtesan in the sex-driven boudoirs of the French courts. Not that even this admission of virtue would cause modern historians to stop and question how such an honourable upbringing could produce a depraved schemer who would soon stalk the halls of the Tudor court. In fact, it only served to add a delicious new element to their juicy story: that of the good girl gone bad.
But no, as it turns out, Anne’s childhood was more monumental than the mere fact that she was nurtured in the royal courts of the Low Countries and France; for she grew up in the pulsating heart of the religious Reformation. This meant that far from simply attending a finishing school that churned out well-bred young ladies brought up to honour and obey, Anne was taught instead to fight back against the questionable authority of Rome by the very activists who kick-started the Reformation.
This ‘fierce intelligence’ Anne was later said to possess was not used to outwit and bring down petty rivals at the royal court, but to join a war that was brewing across the whole of Europe. This was the rousing religious climate in which Anne thrived and became a passionate fighter for those who had not been afforded the same privileges in life as she; those who had not yet understood that they were being suppressed by what many saw as the all-dominating authority of the Church.
It’s only when we delve into Anne’s world during the vital years in which she entered adulthood – the people she grew up with, the court influences and hot topics debated daily – that we can truly grasp how laughable it is to say that she returned to England an unscrupulous temptress whose sole aim in life was to be flirty, frivolous and to frolic with kings.
Of course, even when taking her story back to the innocent years of her childhood, we have to wade through an onslaught of eye-roll-inducing lies. The obvious one we should get out of the way first is that Anne was banished abroad as punishment in adulthood. Contrary to what has been depicted in recent novels and movies, she was in fact sent on a prestigious placement as a child.
However, it would appear this lie wasn’t plucked entirely out of thin air and was inspired by sixteenth-century propagandist Nicholas Sander. One of his stories is that Anne was sent away to France after her father caught her in bed with both the family butler and chaplain at her childhood home of Hever Castle in Kent. Anne was only fifteen years old when this illicit debauchery was meant to have taken place, following which we’re supposed to believe that her father sent his disgraced daughter to one of the most distinguished courts in Europe, that of Archduchess Margaret of Austria, which Thomas Boleyn frequented as a special envoy representing the king of England.
Of course.
It makes perfect sense to risk Anne continuing her alleged sexual exploits in the legendary imperial court, where she could bring shame on not just the Boleyn family and the English monarchy, but her new mistress, Archduchess Margaret, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, governess of the Low Countries, who was charged with overseeing the education of her nephew, the future King Charles V of Spain.2
Need I really point out the improbability of this claim? Not likely. Particularly as we’d have to also overlook the fact that Anne had been living in France for two years by the time this scandal was meant to have taken place back in England. Ah.
In reality, Anne was sent to Margaret of Austria at around the age of twelve, following her father’s first diplomatic mission at her court, where it’s said the pair struck up a friendship of mutual respect. This resulted in the offer for Anne to finish her education there in 1513. Boleyn family expert and historian Dr Lauren Mackay states in her doctoral study of Anne’s father, Thomas, that securing such an illustrious placement for his daughter reveals a great deal about his relationship with his middle child: not only in that he sought out such a placement, but trusted she would conduct herself well and bring honour to the Boleyn family.3
Margaret even wrote to Thomas: ‘I find [Anne] so bright and pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me.’4
This note proves what an asset Anne was considered to be and the incredible impression she made on the royals and nobles of Europe within mere months of her arrival.
So, no sign of her hooking up with the mail man, then.
It has to be said, this education was seen as a highly radical move in itself. While it was the norm for boys in the Tudor era to be given tutors and sent to university, girls of Anne’s social standing were merely expected to be taught at home by their mothers. Here they would specialise in household chores, while simultaneously tackling heavyweight subjects such as embroidery, music and dancing.5
Anne’s placement also supports the argument for her year of birth being 1501, not 1507, as some have suggested, with the generally accepted age to serve abroad being twelve. But more to the point, a letter Anne sent home to her father where she spoke of being a ‘worthy woman when I come to court’ is written with the intelligence of a young teen, not a six-year-old.6
Though it has been widely acknowledged that Anne’s French education was responsible for the more radical belief system that would carry her through life, the impact this first year abroad at the Habsburg Imperial Court would have had is often overlooked. Even to just take a look at the works Margaret of Austria promoted within the court library shows us the intellectual, religious and cultural interests Anne was exposed to. Among them were names that are still studied in universities to this day, including philosophers Aristotle and Boethius, the Renaissance humanist Boccaccio as well as the incredibly progressive work of Christine de Pizan, who became infamous for challenging misogyny and stereotypical views of women in the late medieval era.7
In addition to the books they read, Margaret’s court was well known for accepting some of the most enlightened thinkers of Europe, including the humanist priest and theologian Erasmus of Rotterdam, who would go on to be commissioned later in life by Anne’s father.
So it was here, in this extraordinary setting, that Anne would spend over a year following a strict regime of study and courtly etiquette at the hands of an inspirational and powerful female ruler. But even that short time was filled with drama.
It was some time around 1514 that rumours began to swirl that Anne’s mistress, Margaret of Austria, was set to marry King Henry VIII’s closest companion, the infamous Charles Brandon. The couple had seen each other regularly in the autumn of 1513, at approximately the time of Anne’s arrival.
Historians revel in playing up the importance of the moment when Henry and Anne most likely set eyes on each other for the first time, at the iconic Tudor summit that was the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520. This was the first time she saw the man who would become her husband! Talk about romanticising history. You mean, this was the first time she laid eyes on the man who would murder her?
But as historian Steven Gunn confirms, Anne would have met the king many years earlier, because Henry VIII and Charles Brandon visited the court of Margaret of Austria together during the time of Brandon and Margaret’s courtship, if we can even call it that.
So realistically this is more likely to have been the moment and the setting in which a young Anne Boleyn first saw her future killer.8 But what did she make of him? Was she besotted? In awe of the two men? Probably not. In fact, the events that unfolded were likely to cement Anne’s lifelong disdain for the king’s best friend and fuel a feud that would one day destroy her.
It started when Margaret and her ladies were summoned to celebrate the victory of her father the emperor and Henry VIII at Tournai, in September 1513. Drunk on high spirits and no doubt copious amounts of wine, Charles Brandon appears to have taken the game of courtly love too far when, egged on by a boisterous Henry, he proposed to Archduchess Margaret.
To confirm their ‘engagement’ and as a token of their love, Brandon then took a ring from her. But clearly feeling the joke had run its course, Margaret was quick to ask for it back; at which point Brandon refused, no doubt thinking the whole thing was totally hilare. But the situation soon got out of hand – as most drunken proposals tend to do. She called him a thief; people in London started taking bets on a wedding; her father, the emperor, was shocked to say the least, and Margaret began threatening death to those who continued to spread the story.
All in all, this was not the best first impression for Anne Boleyn to have of Henry VIII, but it most certainly would have fixed her low opinion of Charles Brandon.9
By the final months of 1514, Anne’s French was so accomplished that she was requested to join the court of the new French queen, Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor. Yes, on the advice of Henry’s chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, England and France were to settle their political differences with a marital alliance between Henry’s younger sister and the old and ailing King Louis XII of France.10 She was eighteen. He was fifty-two. I believe this is what they call ‘taking one for the team’.
However, the royal request for Anne to move to France caused friction between her father, Thomas, and his old friend the archduchess of Austria, as Mary Tudor was breaking her betrothal to Margaret’s nephew Charles V in order to marry their rival over in France. Boleyn biographer Eric Ives gives this as the reason for a gap between the request for Anne to join the French court and official records of her eventual arrival, suspecting the archduchess might have held on to her for a while just to spite them.11 But for his part, Thomas was honest with Margaret, saying he ‘could not, nor did not know how to refuse’ the request.12
This meant that, although Mary Tudor arrived in France and married the French king in October 1514, we don’t have evidence of Anne’s arrival until January 1515. So consequently, she spent hardly any time serving the new French queen, Mary, for after a mere eighty-two days of marriage, King Louis died on 1 January.
Louis’s daughter, the fifteen-year-old Claude, was poised to take her father’s place on the throne; however, due to the delightfully sexist sixteenth-century French laws, her new husband, Francis, became the reigning monarch. Claude was henceforth relegated to baby-making machine, apparently a fair trade-off back then. ’Twas indeed a great time to be alive.
But eager to not let Mary Tudor’s short-lived reign stunt his daughter’s education, Thomas Boleyn pulled a few strings in order for Anne to remain as lady-in-waiting to the new Queen Claude – not that this was a hard sell, coming straight from the tutelage of the Imperial Court in Mechelen and being the same age, Anne was no doubt seen as the ideal companion for the young queen.
Some historians have tried to argue that when Anne moved on to serve the wife of the notorious womaniser King Francis I, she most definitely must have been corrupted; that, as French historian Brantôme once said, no one leaves the infamous French court chaste,13 and that this is how Anne became the sultry seductress the world has come to know.
However, if we look closely into the time Anne spent in France, we discover that she lived an extremely sheltered existence and was never exposed to the legendary shenanigans for which the court was well known. In fact, far from joining a court of debauchery, when Anne entered the service of the French royal family in the early months of 1515 it was a sad and subdued time.
When Claude’s father, King Louis, married Mary Tudor, it had been a mere nine months since Claude’s mother had passed away. Fifteen-year-old Claude was so distraught that she cried throughout her own wedding ceremony to her twenty-one-year-old husband, Francis, on 18 May 1514. The court at the Château Royal de Blois was still in mourning when Francis’s sister Marguerite d’Angoulême joined them, taking on the role of big sister to Claude and her younger sister Renée.14 To add to Claude’s misery, several days after her wedding her new husband left for Paris to be with his mistress for two months.15
As Queen Claude began her spate of obligatory pregnancies, she spent more and more time retired within the castle at Blois, accompanied by Anne Boleyn and her other ladies-in-waiting, living what sounds to have been a pretty dull life of seclusion.
Tudor historian Elizabeth Norton confirms that Queen Claude was renowned for her piety and keeping her household apart from that of her scandalous husband.16 It’s well known among Anne’s more serious biographers that in this household, she was educated in a strict code of conduct and the highest moral standards. Claude was known for being reserved and retiring. She rarely made public appearances, which was why it was said her husband’s sister, Marguerite d’Angoulême, was queen in all but name, performing most of the duties usually required of Claude. Even when attending the legendary Field of the Cloth of Gold it was Claude’s mother-in-law, Louise of Savoy, and sister-in-law, Marguerite, along with her husband’s official mistress, who stepped in to perform Claude’s duties at the event.17 Vitally, what this demonstrates is that as lady-in-waiting, Anne was given rare opportunity for the life of smut and corruption she was meant to have led in her early years in France.
Now, the reason for Claude’s isolation was less to do with social anxiety and more to do with illness. She was never a healthy girl to begin with, walking with a limp from a young age, and she soon found herself crippled with continual pregnancies, giving birth to seven children in eight years. That’s a lot of time to be pregnant and confined to bed rest. So, what did Anne Boleyn and her fellow ladies do during those months Claude was being ‘churched’ alone?
After careful discussions with the Château Royal de Blois, where Anne and Claude spent the majority of their time, it’s thought likely that Anne would have been put to work in the retinue of other members of the royal household. But who?
Well, let us consider the evidence: two decades later, in 1535, Anne would write to Marguerite d’Angoulême saying that her ‘greatest wish, next to having a son, was to see you again’18 – quite the statement for someone she had known only at a distance. Similarly, in 1534, when Henry VIII wanted to get out of a meeting with Francis I, Anne was the one who sent a message to Marguerite via her brother, George Boleyn, that she was, in fact, pregnant and needed Henry by her side, so could they possibly postpone. Pretty intimate information to be sharing with someone she barely knew. It’s certainly not the kind of excuse you would give another politician – which the royals of Europe essentially were in the sixteenth century – if schedules had to be changed. It is these glimpses into the obvious intimacy of the two women’s friendship that indicates it was most likely that, during Claude’s bouts of sickness and pregnancy, Anne and the other ladies-in-waiting were placed in the unofficial service of Marguerite.19 This explains why Francis I referred to Anne Boleyn as Claude’s lady rather than his sister’s, because, officially, that was the role she was contracted to do.20
Yet, if you are an avid reader of Tudor biographies you will be aware that this friendship is something many have set out to discredit. But why do historians feel it so necessary to prove, or more to the point disprove, that Anne was close to Marguerite during her time in France? Because Marguerite was a renowned reformist and a huge supporter of France’s leader of religious reform, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. So, of course, such a strong, religious upbringing for the young Anne Boleyn does not, I repeat not, fit in with the slutty, scheming seductress image we have of her. It works much better for historical writers on #TeamAragon if Anne was involved in the immoral depravity that we are repeatedly told was rife at the French court.
But even if we don’t take into account the likelihood of Anne directly serving Marguerite, with the latter seen as the ‘unofficial queen’, it’s inescapable that all courtiers would have been hugely impacted by this powerhouse ruler. So, what did this mean for the religious climate at court?
Marguerite was only twenty-two, yet already known to be ‘learned and witty’. She called herself the ‘prime minister of the poor’, something you’ll come to see Anne Boleyn could equally have called herself later in life. Marguerite was a woman of high moral standards; even though she was in an infamously unhappy marriage, she apparently never took a lover, when it was all the rage in sixteenth-century Europe.21 She was to fill the French court at Blois over the years with religious activists who would go on to be major players in the rebellion against the Catholic Church. These were the very people with whom Anne Boleyn would have been interacting on a daily basis and found herself inspired and influenced by.
In 1515, following the deaths of Queen Claude’s parents, their valet de chambre, the poet Jean Marot, moved into the household of Francis I along with his son, Clément.
Clément Marot would go on to become the renowned French reformist who controversially translated the Psalms. Interestingly, he moved into the new royal household at the same time as Anne, and together the two became immersed in court life. The fact that when Clément was later accused of heresy he was offered royal protection by Anne Boleyn, it’s clear she was not just aware of his work but cared deeply about him, indicating she knew him on a personal level from her childhood in France.22 But one might question how they could have become so closely acquainted when working in the separate households of the king and queen. Quite. Which is why it’s intriguing to learn that Clément moved into the service of Marguerite d’Angoulême as her valet in 1518, with her becoming his patron the following year,23 suggesting that the obvious time frame Anne would have got to know Clément was during her stints serving Marguerite.
Whenever Clément Marot’s time at Blois is discussed, it’s implied that it was he, as an avid reformer, who ran around court radicalising all those he came into contact with. But in actual fact, it appears it was the other way around; it was here that Clément first came into contact with the evangelical ideas that would drive the course of his life. This confirms one vital thing for us: that the French court was a hotbed for reformist ideology. And if it was to have this impact on Clément, then what effect would it have on Anne Boleyn?
Alas, despite the clear evangelical influence of Anne’s French childhood home, some historians have tried to skirt around this by pointing out that we only have evidence of Marguerite’s own interest in religious reform from mid-1521, when she started writing letters to the reformist Bishop Guillaume Briçonnet; and that this being a mere six months before Anne left court, it could not have had the profound effect we presume.
But in fact, European historians suspect it was Marguerite who, in 1515, encouraged her brother, Francis I, to make Briçonnet the bishop of Meaux in the first place: a post that would see him create the Circle of Meaux, an infamous group of French reformists including Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, France’s leader of the Reformation.24
Indeed, religious reform is something that Marguerite would have been debating with the scholars and theologians of the court for years before her letters to Briçonnet began. The Cholakian biography states that it was as early as 1516, when Marguerite was on an expedition with the royal court, that she began to show early signs of being unhappy with the Church and was actively trying to reform its ways. During the trip she called in on badly run convents that were home to nuns surviving on insufficient funds. This was where she came across a pregnant nun who revealed a monk had seduced her, and at another had stopped a nun from self-harming as penance for her sins.25
But guesswork is not required here, as we have evidence that Marguerite’s interest in reform had an impact on young Anne Boleyn’s childhood more than is ever revealed, with Marguerite’s letters to Briçonnet showing she was actively working on converting the whole French court to this new underground religion.
The explosive letters exchanged between Marguerite and the man who would become her confidant and counsellor date from 12 June 1521 to 18 November 1524. So sensitive were the contents that she only entrusted a few close allies to deliver them, one being Clément Marot. During this correspondence Marguerite wrote excitedly to Briçonnet telling him, ‘My sister-in-law, my dear sister is quite of our opinion.’ Marguerite’s biographer, Mary F. Robinson, believes she could only have been talking about Queen Claude.
There is the possibility that the ‘sister-in-law’ Marguerite speaks of could have been Françoise, the sister of her husband Charles, duke of Alençon. However, considering Marguerite’s main aim was to convert the king, her excitement at getting his wife, Queen Claude, on side would make more sense than her husband’s sister, who had no power to help the Reformation whatsoever. Her victory there would certainly not have been worthy of writing with celebratory news to Briçonnet. Nor would it have prompted Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples to write to congratulate Marguerite, as he did, on her good work.26
Briçonnet was ecstatic that the ‘true fire which since long has been lodged in your heart, [is now] in that of the King and Madame’, again confirming that this had long been an issue of importance for Marguerite, not a burning new religious query that suddenly began to eat away at her only months before Anne left court.
Marguerite later responds, ‘Madame has begun to read in the Holy Scriptures. You know the confidence that she and the King place in you.’27
So, you see, the detail of this correspondence proves to us that Marguerite had long been questioning the Church. Not only that, but she had been recruiting at court for her religious cause. To that end, it makes perfect sense for her to try and influence the young daughter of the English ambassador who, one day, would be returning to the royal Tudor court of England, where she would be able to spread the word of their new religious fight.
Mackay points out that when Thomas Boleyn joined his daughter at the Château Royal de Blois for almost two years, from November 1518 to March 1520, he found numerous evangelical and humanist priests preaching the reform message, to which, at this stage, Francis I and his sister, Marguerite, were sympathetic. This was a court that was at the forefront of the reformist development. So it’s unrealistic to think that Anne lived among these progressive thinkers, was educated alongside them and socialised with them, without them influencing her and enlightening her as to the revolution that was tearing through Europe.
Oh, but wait, what was that you say? Anne’s father joined her in France?
Oh yes, as if a strict, religious upbringing at the hands of France’s leading reformists wasn’t enough to keep Anne in check during her years abroad, then her father living with her for nearly two years as an ambassador for King Henry VIII ought to do it!
Sorry, what was that? No one’s told you that before?
No, of course they haven’t. I mean, how could she have been running riot, learning sordid French tricks at the court, if she was the respectable daughter of the royal ambassador representing the king of England? Once again, we have the pesky facts ruining the slutty narrative.
In 1518, Thomas Boleyn joined his daughter at the Château Royal de Blois, during which time he became so highly respected by the royal family that he was invited by Louise of Savoy to personally socialise with Queen Claude herself. Similarly, it would be during those intense years abroad, when Thomas and Anne were each other’s only immediate family, that father and daughter would have really bonded, becoming closer than ever before.
Thomas’s role negotiating diplomatic relations between England and France was such a delicate one that it was of utmost importance that the whole Boleyn family represented king and country with grace and dignity. So where did that leave the ‘great and infamous whore’ Mary Boleyn – Anne’s sister, who, history will tell you, was banished from the French court following an illicit affair with the new French king?
The original source of the Mary Boleyn/Francis I affair rumours is a single letter written by the pope’s official representative, Pio, Bishop of Faenza, on 10 March 1536. The fact it was sent mere months before Anne’s death, when the anti-Boleyn slur campaign was in full swing, should tell us all we need to know about its reliability, but here we go nevertheless. Pio wrote:
Francis said that ‘that woman’ [Anne Boleyn] pretended to have miscarried of a son [her last miscarriage before her death] not being really with child, and, to keep up the deceit, would allow no one to attend on her but her sister, whom the French king knew [supposedly in the biblical sense, having slept with] in France to be a great prostitute and infamous above all.28
Considering that two months later, this same man would write that Anne had been arrested with her whole family, including mother and father,29 should again highlight the fact that Pio’s reports are to be taken with a pinch of salt and dash of seasoning.
The only problem with his Mary Boleyn claim – which has built in momentum and infamy with historians ever since it was written – is that she has been recorded as having spent a grand total of seven months in France before returning home to England, along with Mary Tudor, at the end of April 1515. Mary first arrived with the royal party from England in October 1514, ahead of her sister Anne’s arrival, and was not one of the ladies who were kept on to serve Queen Claude after the death of the French king in January.
It was during the transitional, crossover period of the monarchs that both Anne and Mary Boleyn would have spent the obligatory forty days of mourning locked away with Mary Tudor, a precautionary move to check Louis’s widow was not pregnant with his heir before King Francis I and Queen Claude took over the throne. Mary Boleyn left with the English party in April once the all-clear was given.
For two of her months in the French court, January and February, Francis was away from Blois in Rheims and Paris for his coronation;30 then we have the forty days spent in isolation with Mary Tudor. So, if these accusations of Mary Boleyn’s string of torrid affairs are true, this must have been some record achievement, with the young girl treating sex as an Olympic sport during the five short months she and Francis were actually in court at the same time. This, in order for them to not only hook up, but for Mary to stand out to Francis as a particularly depraved sexual beast. That’s if Bishop Pio did indeed mean Francis knew Mary in the biblical sense; after all, he said he ‘knew her to be a great prostitute’, not that he simply ‘knew her’, implying that he had slept with Mary himself.
After all, if this had been the case, it would certainly beg the question as to quite why her sister, Anne, would have been allowed to serve Queen Claude, if Mary had been having it away with her husband. Come to think of it, if Mary Boleyn had earned herself a sordid reputation and been disgraced, would she really have been taken on to serve Queen Katherine of Aragon back in England in 1519? More to the point, would Mary have realistically been allowed to marry the king of England’s cousin and member of the exclusive privy chamber, William Carey, in 1520? This was two years before she was to begin an affair with Henry VIII, so not something we can dismiss as a reward for being the king’s mistress, as many have claimed over the years.
So, you see, when you consult the facts and not the gossip, the idea that Mary Boleyn ever had an affair with the king of France, or indeed anyone at the French court, starts to look less and less likely. But if you came here for sex and scandal, worry not, for as I say, it appears she did have an affair with Henry VIII, and all the juicy gossip there is yet to come.
Can’t have a Boleyn biography without at least one affair, can we?
The religious revolution that was brewing during Anne’s years in France was inescapable. It was at the forefront of everyone’s mind, and everyone had an opinion. It would divide not just the country but the whole of Europe.
In 2017 we marked the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Yes, it’s been five hundred years of war, death and sacrifice over exactly how we pray for love, peace and forgiveness. Oh, the irony. But you may note that Henry VIII didn’t break from Rome in 1517. Indeed, he did not, and that’s because the sixteenth century experienced two very different reformations that often get muddied and mixed into one.
1517 was to be the year of sixteenth-century whistle-blower Martin Luther’s infamous war with the pope that created a religious storm and made fighters out of the most unlikely of people. You want to know what was Anne Boleyn’s driving force? What made her the ballsy, driven and unapologetic fighter she grew up to be? Then it’s vital we take a look at the religious climate of her youth that she was to rebel against.
Like their rulers, the people of England and Europe lived for Catholicism and all its so-called ‘superstitions’ that these new reformists were opposed to. People would wake in the night to pray, suffer treacherous pilgrimages to have their prayers answered and wear hair shirts in penance for their sins. English reformer and Bible translator William Tyndale complained of the relentless tolling of bells from dusk till dawn by friars and nuns who ‘vex themselves, night and day, and take pains for God’s sake’.31
It’s difficult in this day and age to convey how deeply religious the sixteenth century was, and how seriously the people took all these rituals. Yet to understand it, we have to remember just how grim the Tudor times truly were. The mortality rate was high and life expectancy was low; disease could unexpectedly wipe out whole communities within days, and public executions were a normal part of daily life. Death wasn’t something that would eventually creep up many decades later, but was ever looming ominously overhead. For the nation, faith was more than saying prayers by rote; it was a vital connection to an afterlife that not only promised salvation beyond the dour realities of the world around them, but one they might have to face in the not-too-distant future.
So, believe me when I say it was no joke that there were charms to recite during childbirth to make sure babies were born without complications, certain incantations were said to halt bleeding, and fevers could be stopped in their tracks by ‘casting of the heart’, which is not an 80s pop song but apparently some sort of magical process.32 It was said that a prayer to St Apollonia would cure toothache, and oats offered to the statue of St Wilgefortis apparently rid women of unwanted husbands.33 There were ‘dismal days’ on which weddings and travel were to be avoided at all costs;34 and when high winds once hit the steeple of St Alkmund’s Church, there was talk that Satan himself had left scratches on the bell.35
It’s all too easy to mock now, but sixteenth-century folk had a true fear of God, and apparently some priests were all too happy to take full advantage of it. But by 1517 the people had finally had enough. You see, the backlash that was to come with the Reformation wasn’t against God or even initially the Catholic faith – it was against a number of people who ran the Church at the time.
The storm finally broke in October 1517, when Martin Luther accidentally released hell by posting his now infamous Ninety-Five Theses. However, this was not on the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church, as we’ve been told, and I say ‘accidentally’ because it was never intended to be the war cry it became.
Now, if a Ninety-Five Theses sounds like quite a heavy tome to pin anywhere, let me explain that it was actually a one-page document, a sort of Ninety-Five Dos and Don’ts of how Luther believed the Catholic Church should be run. For the uproar it caused you would have thought he had condemned the pope to the fiery pits of purgatory, but in actual fact it listed simple notes such as: ‘Only God can give salvation and forgiveness, not a priest. Penitence must be accompanied by a suitable change in lifestyle. An indulgence will not save a man; people are being deceived by indulgences.’
Now, indulgences were pardons for sins that were being sold by the Catholic Church.
Yep, you could buy a pardon for your sin. Pay for salvation, not pray for it.
Early modern humanist Erasmus famously mocked those who ‘enjoy deluding themselves with imaginary pardons for their sins’ in his satire In Praise of Folly.36 To illustrate this point, in 1519 Frederick the Wise catalogued over five thousand supposed holy relics at Castle Church in Wittenberg, which you could pay to be in the presence of.37 It was said the saints in heaven would listen more attentively to prayers made close to these holy relics.38 And let’s just say that the authenticity of some of them was somewhat questionable – this, in particular, is an issue we will see Anne Boleyn personally fighting against during her time as queen.
Yes, depending on which relics you prayed in front of, you earned a certain number of days’ suspension from your sins. In 1513, Castle Church was offering forty-two thousand years’ worth of cancelled sins in the afterlife – that’s if you could perform all the devotions for their five thousand or so relics.39
Sounds great. Where do I pay?!
Safe to say, indulgences were quite the money-spinner for the Church. So, when Martin Luther and his fellow reformists suddenly called them out and tried to regulate or put a stop to them altogether, you can imagine the Church wouldn’t have been all too happy about it.
The money from the sale of indulgences and access to holy relics at Castle Church largely paid for the establishment of the university in 1502, at which Martin Luther also taught. So, there is something to be said for the money going to good use. In England and Europe, money raised from the sale of indulgences was often ploughed back into the local community to build roads and bridges, so you could see it as some sort of religious tax. Indeed, people who bought into these indulgences sometimes did so just to support local projects, not necessarily to ‘save their soul’.
But that wasn’t so much the issue; after all, there is such a thing as free will. No, it was more the lies the preachers were telling their congregations in order to get them to pay up, playing on their fears of damnation in the afterlife. Indulgences even had a slogan: ‘As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, at once the soul to heaven springs!’
Ah yes, so that was the other issue the new evangelicals had with indulgences: the promise that a priest could forgive your sins.
Reformists were firmly of the belief that no man on earth could guarantee your salvation. Only God could forgive. Not even the pope could save you, who, the people had been told, was the only figure of authority who could grant complete forgiveness for sins – meaning if he deemed you worthy, you could skip purgatory altogether and go straight to heaven.
Another area where these bothersome evangelicals were demanding reform, and one Anne Boleyn was to be heavily involved with in her lifetime, was how the Bible should be read; they claimed it should be available in all languages for everyone to read and understand. This was as opposed to hearing it only in Latin from a priest. Given that the majority of people couldn’t understand Latin, this made the language barrier in daily Mass somewhat tricky. Yet the pope was adamant that Latin was the official language of the Church and the only language the Bible should be read in. However, he clearly flunked religious education in school, as that’s not quite the case.
The Old Testament was originally written in Hebrew, and the New Testament in Greek. It was only from there that they were both translated into Latin. But, unable to understand it, the majority had no idea what was being preached to them; so the reformists wanted this changed in order for the people to have a more meaningful connection with God’s word. These may sound like pretty reasonable requests now, but in 1517 they were radical and dangerous thoughts.
But why would the Church be so scared of the people reading the Bible in their own language?
Some claimed it was so the priests could have more power over them. This way they could twist the scripture to suit their own agenda regarding the sale of indulgences and exactly who was responsible for a soul’s forgiveness. After all, if the people didn’t understand what was written in the Bible, they couldn’t challenge what they were being told.
Martin Luther wasn’t the first to speak out or question the Church about all of this. Nor did the poor bloke intend to be the spokesperson and international hate figure for the Reformation. On 31 October 1517, rather than posting his Ninety-Five Theses on the door of Castle Church, as has been reported for the past five hundred years, Martin Luther sent it to the Bishop of Mainz for approval. It was accompanied by a very polite letter drawing the bishop’s attention to the shocking sermons of controversial indulgence preacher Johann Tetzel, for the ‘insanity’ of claiming that the latest indulgence he was selling was so powerful it could even forgive a sinner who had violated the Virgin Mary!40
Ah. Right. Tad blasphemous.
But Luther ran into problems due to the fact that his Ninety-Five Theses was intentionally provocative. It was purposefully written and designed to stir up academic debate at the university where he taught. Years later Luther would say of his gutsy letter: ‘I did not yet see the great abomination of the Pope but only the crass abuses’ and that his intention was not ‘to attack the Pope, but to oppose the blasphemous statements of the noisy declaimers’, meaning the indulgence preachers.41 Either way, I’m sure he didn’t expect the Bishop of Mainz to forward the thesis directly to the pope. Nor did Luther expect such an overwhelming reaction from the people.
After university staff posted his Ninety-Five Theses around the city of Wittenberg to advertise the upcoming debate (historian Peter Marshall believes it was more likely they who posted it on the church door bulletin board), Luther went viral. He was shocked to find his argument was spread ‘throughout the whole of Germany in a fortnight’, and by spring the next year it had reached the rest of Europe.
Henry VIII got his hands on the controversial thesis when Erasmus sent a copy to Thomas More,42 who was acting at the time as, among other things, Henry’s secretary, interpreter, chief diplomat and adviser.
Reformists at the French court would have been abuzz with news of this gutsy priest who was daring to stand up and challenge the pope. There is no doubt that Anne would have followed the story just as intently as everyone else. Whether you were for or against Luther, you could not have failed to hear about him. And there were plenty who were against him, with Henry VIII fast becoming one of Luther’s most famous critics. As the increasingly volatile situation developed, the king of England was kept up to date with secret coded letters via his right-hand man, Cardinal Wolsey.
The people’s army of rebel ‘Lutherans’ grew so fast in Europe that by June 1518 the pope was forced to react. He authorised a judgement saying that, ‘Whoever says regarding indulgences that the Roman church cannot do what it de facto does, is a heretic.’43
This wasn’t just a threat against Luther but all reformists who took issue with indulgences, making it incredibly dangerous for the likes of Anne Boleyn and Marguerite d’Angoulême to go on to support such radical thinking. A line had been drawn in the sand.
The pope’s judgement also stated, quite incredibly, that his authority was greater than that of the Bible.
Tensions continued to build, but by 1520 Luther had well and truly had enough. He had been accused of being a heretic, ripped to pieces by every high-profile figure in the land, and so he fought back by publishing three pamphlets that put his little Ninety-Five Theses to shame. Here he called for German nobility to reform the Church, incredulously declaring that four of the seven sacraments had been invented. It was at this point that the pope issued a papal decree, in June, threatening to excommunicate Luther if he didn’t abandon his entire belief system immediately. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud when I learned that this meek friar, who had at first set out to get papal approval for his unassuming university debate and didn’t want to upset anyone, on 20 December 1520 threw the pope’s threat on to a bonfire outside Wittenberg’s Elster Gate, to the rapturous cheers of his supporters.44
Perhaps caught up in the adrenaline rush of rebellion, Luther then published the jauntily titled ‘Assertion of All the Articles Condemned by the Last Bull of Antichrist’.
Needless to say, the pope confirmed Luther’s excommunication in January 1521.
Like all his new fellow reformists, Luther was scared but defiant. Sometimes, in order to cover our fear, the human psyche will have us play up the bravado even more, which certainly seems to have been the case here, and is something we will see in Anne Boleyn many a time, too.
And so, you see, this was the explosive religious climate in which Anne was being raised in Europe. After seven years of a radical religious upbringing, in which she was taught to question the authority of those she had been conditioned to follow blindly, and made aware of how she and the people were being manipulated and taken advantage of, like most of her generation she was ready to join the crusade: fight with the people for the people in order to reconnect with the undiluted doctrine.
It was then, at this crucial moment, that Anne is meant to have returned to England and magically morphed into a ruthless, morally corrupt, scheming seductress for no apparent reason whatsoever.
