Anne Boleyn

d. 19 May 1536.

Second wife of King Henry VIII of England, and mother of later Queen Elizabeth I.

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Little is known about how Henry and Anne Boleyn met. By 1520, however, Henry was already deep into an affair with Mary Boleyn, Anne's sister, and even had a ship named after her. It is possible that Anne met Henry through her sister; what is certain, however, that by 1523, she had already come to the attention of Thomas Wolsey, Henry's lord chancellor and go-to man. The king's pursuit after Anne met with little success in the beginning. She turned down his gifts and offer to make her his only mistress. In the end, she seemed to have persuaded Henry that she would only give herself to him if he would, and could, marry her as queen.

By the spring of 1527 Henry had become convinced that his marriage to Catherine was against God and not Pope could have given him a dispensation to marry her as had been done. He began proceedings to find a way for his marriage to Catherine to be annulled. The task to given to Wolsey, but it was a doomed task. With Catherine's nephew, Charles V, as the Holy Roman emperor, the pope would hardly dare to give Henry such an annulment, and so the matter dragged on, until Henry sacked Wolsey, and took things into his own hands, muscled the clergy of England into submission, and was getting ready to break with Rome. He had already separated himself from Catherine of Aragon, and making his relationship with Anne more public, conferring on her a hereditary peerage in the autumn of 1532, making Anne the first woman in England to be so honoured. By December Anne was pregnant, and a secret wedding held in January the following year. An ecclesiastical court declared their marriage fully lawful in May 1533, and a crowned Queen on 1 June. The child, not the son Henry had hoped for, was born on 7 September, and named Elizabeth. But even during Anne's pregnancy, Henry was already having an affair with an unknown but, so reported an imperial ambassador, "very beautiful" lady of the court.

Though Henry was still hopeful of a son, his relationship with Anne soon soured. His inability or refusal to discipline his libido did not help. She did become pregnant again, but the son miscarried in 1536 (the same day that Catherine of Aragon was buried). In April two commissions were establish to investigate charges of adultery against Anne. Five men, including George, her brother, were found guilty of sleeping with her, and executed. She was arrested, judged guilty, and beheaded on 19 May 1536. The next morning, Henry VIII married Jane Seymour.

Anne Boleyn's execution and death was not greeted by the people of England with no great dismay. Rome rejoiced that "the witch" was now dead, and hoped that Henry had been chastened by the experience to return to the fold.