Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies

by Hayley Nolan

As historian Professor Timothy Snyder says, ‘To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.’1 It starts with knowledge. It starts with the truth. It starts here.

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.

Anne was taught instead to fight back against the questionable authority of Rome by the very activists who kick-started the Reformation.

However, the vital part we must take away from this insider family account is Anne’s response to his unwanted advances, with his grandson conceding that upon ‘finding

him to be then married . . . rejected all his speech of love’.51 Now, it’s certainly not improbable that Anne played along in the etiquette of courtly love and flirted with the good-looking Wyatt.

But Wyatt’s grandson hits the nail on the head when he confirms in his biography that Anne ‘was not likely to cast her eye upon one who had been married ten years’.53 I rest my case.

Cavendish reports that Wolsey berated Percy for attempting to marry without consulting his father or the king, who would have ‘matched you according to your estate and honour’. Ouch. Wolsey’s public declaration that he deemed Anne too lowly to marry the son of an earl

would have made for salacious gossip at court, and soon enough it got back to Anne, who was understandably mortified at the slur.75 Cavendish reported she was ‘greatly offended’, apparently saying, ‘If it ever lay within her power, she would work the cardinal as much displeasure.’76

Reformists like Anne were liberated by this new evangelical understanding that no amount of self-punishment and deprivation would advance your salvation before God.

Ignoring the ban on English Bibles, Anne

defiantly owned a copy of Tyndale’s 1534 English translation of the New Testament and Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples’s French translation of the Bible, which caused just as much outrage to the authorities as its English counterpart, and was burned en masse. Anne also owned two other highly controversial works by Lefèvre, The Pistellis and Gospelles and The Ecclesiaste of 1531.81 Rose Hickman, a friend of sixteenth-century historian John Foxe, also remembered that Anne had her father import manuscripts of the scriptures written in French, an incredibly risky move at a time when freedom of religious expression was essentially illegal.82 By the time Anne was arrested in 1536, among her seized possessions were forty progressive reformist books and manuscripts.83

I have discovered a note written by Jacques Lefèvre D’Étaples in his Commentarii initiatorii in quatuor evangelia in 1522, during Anne’s first year at the Tudor

court, which reads: ‘Le temps viendra bientôt où Christ sera prêché purement et sans mélange de traditions humaines, ce qui ne se fait pas maintenant . . .’85 which translates as: ‘The time will soon come in which Christ will be preached purely, unsullied by human traditions, which is not being done now.’

Yet it appears to be only modern historians who question Anne’s religious conviction, because sixteenth-century supporters and enemies alike saw her as an evangelical reformer who championed the work of religious activists.

during Anne’s ascent to the throne, regularly complained in letters home of her being ‘the cause and nurse of the spread of Lutheranism in this country’.86 It was also Chapuys who said Anne was ‘more Lutheran than Luther himself’,87 quite the statement knowing, as we do, how passionate Luther was about reform.

‘Was not queen Anne . . . the chief, first, and only cause of banishing the beast of Rome? Was there ever in England a greater feat wrought by any man than this by a woman?’

confided that she dedicated her time to furthering the ‘purity of the scriptures’ and to the ‘abolishing of the blind ignorance and abuses grown in this land’ – clearly a reference to practices such as the sale of indulgences and fake holy relics.

Wyatt takes this one step further, controversially confirming that it was Anne’s pushing for religious reform ‘which has moved so many to write and speak falsely and foully of her’.

While they both display deceitful and manipulative behaviour, psychopaths are fearless, but sociopaths aren’t.

Sociopaths see the object of their desire as just that: an ‘object’ they must win, not a person for whom they have developed deep emotions.

Whereas psychopaths are born (nature), sociopathy can be due to childhood trauma such as abuse or neglect (nurture), or as previously mentioned, it can be the result of a brain injury.

So, while it may have been repeatedly sold to us as Henry VIII divorced Katherine and broke from Rome in order to marry Anne Boleyn while citing Leviticus as

the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, that doesn’t actually appear to be the case. In fact, we have evidence that Henry was making secret enquiries about divorce long before he had the end goal of marrying Anne.

So she made the extreme decision to remove herself from the Tudor court, and stayed away for almost a year.

G. W. Bernard argues that Henry alone was pulling the strings regarding this alliance, but ten bonus points to the reader who can tell me why anti-heretic Henry, self-professed Defender of the Faith, would be interested in an alliance with the decidedly heretical Lutheran leaders? Yes, the young lady at the front is right, his evangelical fiancée, Anne Boleyn.

Indeed, in July 1532, after Anne became patron to Cambridge scholar Thomas Cranmer, taking him into the heart of the Boleyn family, he was sent by the king to Nuremberg, where he had five days of meetings with the Lutheran princes.197

After being forced to leave England, Fish wrote to Anne appealing for help, and to inform her and the king that he had found the answer to the issue of gaining an annulment from the pope.

While in exile, Fish had written A Supplication for the Beggars, a pamphlet that called out the immoral actions of the clergy, and, as he pointed out in his letter to Anne, how the pope made a mockery of England’s laws.

As it currently stood, if a man was excommunicated by the Church Henry could do nothing to challenge it, which essen...

Chaplain William Latymer said in his sixteenth-century biography of the frivolous flirt that ‘she favoured good learning so much’ that she paid large sums to cover their education at Cambridge University.294 John

Stephen Gardiner, once a supporter of the king’s marriage to Anne yet one who had always held on to his traditional religious beliefs, started rumours as far afield as the French court, where he was working as ambassador, that she was having an affair.508 Letters containing this salacious gossip were to find their way back to England, where Cromwell could show the king and overwhelm him with suspicion.

One of the few things sociopaths can experience is something called Blame Externalisation, where they don’t believe they are ever to blame; everyone else is. People are against you and out to get you. This paranoia isn’t an emotion, it’s faulty reasoning;

you’ve got to get them before they get you.