Anne Boleyn: The Rise, the Reformation, and the Fall of Henry VIII's Second Queen

The most famous queen in English history has no certain birth year, no portrait painted from life, and no grave that anyone can identify with confidence.

What she did is another matter, because from about 1527 on nearly everything Anne Boleyn did was a matter of state. A diplomat's daughter educated in the courts of the Netherlands and France, she came home in 1522 with French manners and French books and refused, for years, to become the king's mistress. Henry VIII decided to marry her instead, and when the Pope would not free him to do it he broke the English Church from Rome. She put a banned book in his hands. She was crowned on 1 June 1533, six months pregnant with the son every physician and astrologer had promised. The child was Elizabeth.

Three years later she was dead. Arrested on 2 May 1536, tried on the 15th on charges of adultery with five men and of plotting the king's death, executed on the 19th by a swordsman sent for from Calais. Most historians believe the charges were false. They do not agree on who built them, or why; the indictment placed her with lovers on dates she can be shown to have been elsewhere. The next morning Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour.

This is a full life, not a third of a group portrait, and it is the second volume of a series on the six queens of Henry VIII. It gives her European education its due, treats her religion as an open question, and ends with a conclusion that sets every serious explanation of her fall side by side: a minister's coup, a court in a panic, a case with something in it, a queen convicted out of her own mouth, a king who wanted a new wife. At every famous moment it says who reported it, when, and with what motive. The ambassador who recorded most of her reign called her the concubine, and he is flagged as hostile each time he is used. Nothing from the novels is treated as evidence.

What you'll learn:

• Why her birth year is argued between 1501 and 1507, and why six years change how the whole story reads
• What Henry's seventeen surviving love letters say, and how they came to be in the Vatican Library
• How a copy of Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man reached the king, and what he is reported to have said about it
• Whether she drove the break with Rome or was the occasion for one that Henry, Cromwell and Cranmer had their own reasons to want
• Which day she was married, since the sources give two of them, months apart
• What the indictment alleged, date by date, against where she actually was
• What she said in the Tower, as the Constable wrote it down for Cromwell, and why the most important sentences end in holes
• Where the sixth finger came from, and why no one who saw her mentions it

This book is for you if:

• You have watched the dramas and read the novels and want to know which parts the sixteenth century can actually support
• You want the historians' disagreements laid out side by side instead of one verdict handed down
• You want the Reformation treated as something she may have shaped, not as the background to a romance
• You read biographies of women who held power and want one who held it against a Pope and an Emperor

She outlasted Wolsey, Catherine and Thomas More. She did not outlast the spring of 1536.