Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn was born in about 1501; the exact date is not known. Her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was a respected courtier who later became Earl of Ormond and Wiltshire, and her mother, Elizabeth Howard, was the daughter of Sir Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk. She spent her childhood at Hever Castle in Kent.⁠[1][2]

In 1513 Thomas Boleyn sent Anne to the court of Margaret of Austria and then to the French court; after the death of King Louis in 1515 she stayed in France for seven years in the household of Queen Claude, and she was admired for her sophisticated French fashion, her intelligence and her charm.⁠[1][3]

In 1522 she returned to England and lived at Henry VIII’s court as a lady-in-waiting to his queen, Katherine of Aragon; Henry may have first encountered her in March 1522. Anne was described as having a long neck, a wide mouth and “eyes which are black and beautiful”.⁠[3][1][4]

Henry VIII courted her for years, but she refused to become a royal mistress and held out for the possibility of marriage.⁠[4][1]

Between 1529 and 1532 a psalter in French was made in Rouen, France, for Anne Boleyn and illuminated by the “Master of the Ango Hours”; it later became known as the “Psalter of Anne Boleyn”. The octavo manuscript on vellum has 274 leaves, with two full-page coats of arms and 16 armorial initials, and was rebound in London in about 1630 in white satin embroidered with a pelican feeding her young on the front cover and flowers on the back.⁠[5]

In January 1533, seven years after their courtship had begun, Anne Boleyn married Henry VIII in secret. Because his marriage to Katherine was not annulled until May 1533, the marriage was technically bigamous.⁠[1][4]

Her coronation celebrations lasted four days: she travelled by river from Greenwich to the Tower of London in a flotilla of some 50 boats and barges, rode in procession from the Tower through the City to Westminster on May 31, and on Whit Sunday, June 1, 1533, was crowned queen in Westminster Abbey by Thomas Cranmer while six months pregnant, followed by a great feast in Westminster Hall. None of Henry’s later wives had a coronation.⁠[2][6][1]

On September 7, 1533, Anne and Henry’s first child, Elizabeth, the future Elizabeth I, was born; she was their one surviving child.⁠[1][3]

On May 2, 1536, Anne Boleyn was arrested and taken by barge to the Tower of London. She was charged with adultery and incest and executed for treason; Historic Royal Palaces states that “A sham trial filled with Anne’s enemies found her guilty”.⁠[1][4]

On May 19, 1536, she was beheaded on Tower Green; Henry had granted her the “small mercy” of dying at the hands of a skilled swordsman rather than an executioner’s axe. She was the first queen to be executed in England and had been queen for just three years; eleven days later Henry married his third queen, Jane Seymour. She is buried in the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London.⁠[1][3]

Few portraits of Anne survive from her lifetime, and it is thought that after her death Henry may have had her portraits removed from public display and destroyed; no contemporary painting of her survives. The National Portrait Gallery’s oil on panel NPG 668 was painted in the late sixteenth century, more than 50 years after her death, during the reign of her daughter Elizabeth I; the gallery considers it probably a copy of a likeness taken during her brief reign, while also noting that the artist probably used descriptions of Anne from her lifetime. Elizabeth I reigned for 45 years.⁠[3][4]

From January 27 to May 2, 1999, the Morgan Library in New York held an exhibition of the library of Sir Paul GettyJohn Paul Getty Jr.John Paul Getty Jr. (1932–2003), known as Sir Paul Getty, was a son of oil businessman J. Paul Getty and a Britain-based philanthropist and book collector who made large gifts to the National Gallery, the British Film Institute and cricket, and received an honorary KBE in 1986.Open the full entry (J. Paul Getty Jr.), in which the “Psalter of Anne Boleyn” was shown as a loan from The Wormsley Library. A 2003 account of Getty’s library, published shortly after his death, also listed the psalter among its treasures.⁠[5][7]

Hever Castle holds and displays two illuminated Books of Hours that belonged to Anne Boleyn, one of which bears the inscription “remember me when you do pray, that hope dothe led from day to day”. On May 19, 2021, Hever Castle published research by its former steward Kate McCaffrey, carried out for a master’s thesis at the University of Kent: using ultraviolet light and photo-editing software, she found three family names in the book, Gage, West and Shirley, centred on the Guildford family of Cranbrook, and concluded that the book was passed from woman to woman.⁠[8]

Descriptions of the Wormsley Library in Buckinghamshire from 2020, 2024 and 2026 all list Anne Boleyn’s Psalter among its highlights; the library, assembled by Sir Paul Getty, was still offering librarian-led tours to small groups in June 2026.⁠[9][10][11]

Historic Royal Palaces: Official website: https://www.hrp.org.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

Hever Castle: Official website: https://www.hevercastle.co.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]