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S i d e b a r
Lady Anne Boleyn
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This Rock
Volume 18, Number 4
 April 2007 
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"Lady" is the title that courtesy and history have bestowed on Anne, but to the Spanish ambassador to England, Eustace Chapuys, she was the king’s "concubine." To the common people of England, who loved Catherine, Anne was "the goggle-eyed" whore and a "sorceress," names routinely flung at her when she appeared in public. Henry VIII had kept a string of mistresses, but Anne was not content to be another one of these. She wanted to be queen. The fact that there was already a queen in place was just a matter to be overcome. Anne was an unattractive creature. She had a wart and six fingers on one hand, and, according to contemporary accounts, a pronounced goiter. She was too skinny. She did possess, however, a pair of large, dark eyes and fantastic powers to seduce. Her father was Thomas Boleyn, first Earl of Wiltshire, a member of the new nobility created by wealth and ambition rather than blood and tradition. Anne took her formation as a lady in waiting in the notoriously anti-Catholic court of Marguerite of Navarre, sister to Francis I, king of France. At court, Anne and her older sister Mary would have reveled not only in the salacious writings of Marguerite but also in the heretical ideas so popular in that French court. When she returned to England in 1522, she was, in Chapuy’s words, "more Lutheran than Luther." Anne and her sister took positions as attendants to Queen Catherine. First Mary, and then Anne, sometime around the beginning of the year 1527, captured the king’s attention. Mary was content to be Henry’s concubine for a time. Anne had bigger plans.
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