There has been controversy over Anne's date of birth - 1501 or 1507 - for nearly 500 years.
The case for 1501
- Thomas Boleyn's statement
- He said (in a letter to Cromwell in the 1530s) that “When I married, I had only £50 a year to live on for me and my wife, so long as my father lived, and yet she brought me every year a child.”
His father, William, died in 1505. - In Austria (now Belgium)
- • She may have, to begin with, dwelled in the nursery alongside the children raised by Margaret:
- Charles, later Holy Roman Emperor
- Eleanor, later queen of Portugal and France
- Isabella, later queen of Denmark
- Mary, later queen of Hungary.
• William Forrest referred to Anne as “a fresh young damsel” when the king first fell in love with her.
• Cardinal Reginald Pole alluded to her as a “girl”.
• As is well known, the Archduchess Margaret herself described Anne as “so bright and so pleasant for her young age”.
The case for 1507
- Potential for marriage
- • There is no evidence that her father or uncle sought a marriage for her between 1522 (when the Butler marriage was broken off) and 1526 (when the King fell in love with her). Why there was no effort made to achieve Anne's marriage during these years, if she was (if born in 1501) between 21 and 25 years of age? Gentlewomen and the nobility married young during then.
Note, however, she was secretly betrothed to Sir Henry Percy in 1523, although the betrothal was broken off by Thomas Wolsley in January 1524. -
- Anne's mother was married between the age of 18 and 21
- Mary Boleyn was probably no more than 21 at the time of her marriage
- Anne's sister-in-law, Jane Parker, married George in 1524 when she was perhaps only 19 years of age
- Katherine Parr's first marriage was negotiated by her mother before Katherine had attained the age of twelve, although her marriage actually took place when Katherine was seventeen.
- • If she had returned from France aged only fourteen years old (i.e. born in 1507) in order to marry James Butler, when the marriage plans fell through there would have been no rush to marry Anne off to someone else, given her youth. Her father could reasonably have believed that his daughter could remain in her unmarried state for another four or five years.
- • When the king began his courtship of her in 1526, she would have been aged only nineteen. The absence of initiatives among Anne's male relations between 1522 and 1526 to secure her marriage can be explained by the fact that her youth allowed the matter to rest until she was older. Moreover, although details of her liaison with Henry Percy are mostly given only by George Cavendish, the hastiness and defiance involved in defying social and political custom are perhaps more indicative of an impressionable sixteen-year-old than they are of a mature twenty-three year-old well acquainted with court protocol [although she had learned this in France. RDP].
- Jane Dormer's evidence
- Jane Dormer, duchess of Feria and close confidant of Anne's stepdaughter Mary Tudor, reported to Henry Clifford, her biographer, that Anne had been “not twenty-nine years of age” when she was executed in May 1536, which implies that she was nearing her next birthday and so was born in the summer of 1507.
- Gareth Russell's argument
-
“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)
(Note, Jane Dormer was born 2 years after Anne died) “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)
(Note, Alison Weir was born 415 years after Anne died) 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. Had Anne been properly buried her date of birth would perhaps have been recorded on the tomb. If Anne died at 28, then the reasons behind her execution become infinitely more sinister - at 28, Anne Boleyn could still bear children. 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.
But, 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 being victim to a savage character assassination and a ruthless palace coup organised by the King's chief adviser, Thomas Cromwell. Anne was sent abroad for her education in 1513.
She returned to London as a débutante in 1522.
Henry VIII asked her to marry him in 1527 (although he'd met her in about 1522).
She was crowned queen and became a mother in 1533.
She was executed in 1536.
If she was born in 1501, then she went abroad aged 12, she came back at 21, was engaged at 26, crowned at 32 and was executed at 35. If she was born in 1507, then she left England aged 6, came back at 15, was betrothed at 19, crowned at 25 and executed at 28. Prof. R.M. Warnicke says Anne was born in 1507.
Joanna Denny wrote that “Anne was 'born most probably in the early summer of 1501'”.
Antonia Fraser says 1507 is 'impossible.'
Eric Ives stated 'is established beyond question' that we should be 'dating the birth of Anne Boleyn to 1500-1'
Alison Weir has argued that Anne Boleyn was, without question, born in 1501. Jane Dormer, was a lady-in-waiting to Anne's stepdaughter, Mary Tudor. Jane was in Mary's service for the first twenty years of her life and, in about 1611, she dictated her memoirs to Henry Clifford, in which she said that when Anne was executed 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. William Camden began to write a life of Anne's daughter, Queen Elizabeth, at the end of the 16th century. In the margin he stated that Anne was born in 1507. 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.
Nor can the Duchess of Feria's pronouncement of the same date in her memoirs.
Some say Camden's writing of a '7' was just a curved '1'. But Camden wrote the date in Roman numerals - MDVII.When Anne went to Margaret's court, Maragaret wrote to her father “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 referred to Anne's age as being exceptionally young, if she was the same age as every other maid-of-honour??
Anne wrote to her father in 1514. 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, Prof. Warnicke pointed out that the letter 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 and became friends with Princess Renée. About 40 years later, Renée told Sir Nicholas Throckmorton that she liked Queen Elizabeth because of her friendship with Anne Boleyn. Renée was born in 1510. Anne was highly attractive, well-connected, vivacious and charming. She was the daughter of the heir to the Ormonde earldom and the granddaughter of the Duke of Norfolk - quite a catch. It seems incredible that she would have made it to the age of 25 without being married. [except that she had liaisons with James Butler and Henry Percy during that period. RDP].
We also know that Anne was nicknamed “La Petite Boulaine” (“the Little Boleyn”) by the Archduchess and this 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 another English girl (Anne Brandon) there at the same time and she was born in 1506.
Anne's escort to Brussels was Claude Bouton. If Anne had been as old as 12, she would have had a female chaperone.
We know that Sir Thomas Boleyn liked to marry off his children at about 19 or 20; Anne's sister, Mary, was married to Sir William Carey in 1520 and their brother, George, was married to his wife Jane Parker in 1524.
We know that there was talk of marrying Anne to James Butler throughout the mid-1520s and she had an unlucky betrothal with Henry Percy. Having reached the age of 25 without a husband, Anne would have been sailing dangerously close to the “unmarriageable age”. But, 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. If Anne had been born in 1501, she would have been 32 years-old at the time she gave birth to Elizabeth. Why did no-one highlight the fact that she was simply too old to be the mother of the next Heir to the Throne? 32 was the age when Katherine of Aragon had gone through her last pregnancy.At the very end of Anne's life, the Spanish ambassador, who hated her, referred to her as a 'thin, old woman' and this suggests she was 35, not 28. Yet, at her downfall, 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.'
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,'
in 1529, Cardinal Wolsey was describing her as a 'girl,'
Impossible conclusion
Leaving aside all the inferences, assumptions and age calculations taken from the 16th century, we are left with three statements taken from very soon after Anne's death. Of these, surely, her father's must be the most reliable.- Pro 1501
- The letter from Anne's father to Cromwell after Anne's and George's deaths:
“When I married I had only £50 a year to live on for me and my wife, so long as my father lived, and yet she brought me every year a child”.
The statement was made just after Anne and George's deaths, between 1536 and 1539 (<3 years after Anne's death). - Pro 1507
- Jane Dormer, duchess of Feria and close confidant of Anne's stepdaughter Mary Tudor, reported to Henry Clifford, her biographer, that Anne had been “not twenty-nine years of age” when she was executed in May 1536, which implies that she was nearing her next birthday and so was born in the summer of 1507.
The biography was written in 1616 (80 years after Anne's death). - William Camden wrote a life of Queen Elizabeth, at the end of the 16th century. In the margin he stated that Anne was “born in 1507”.
The first volume of the biography was written in 1615 (79 years after Anne's death).
↻