Anne Boleyn’s Religion… Debunking the myths

When it comes to pinning down Anne Boleyn’s religious beliefs, the major point of contention is reconciling the image of a sexpot with that of a Bible-reading, committed evangelical who actively patronised reform. There is also the added complication of some contemporary evidence suggesting Anne was religiously conservative. Contemporary commentators and subsequent historiography take seemingly irreconcilable stances on the matter. Some describe the queen as a radical reformist who behaved piously, ‘a devout evangelical eager to foster reform’, whilst others basically consider her a Catholic and many variations in between.

Accounts by John Foxe and William Latymer, a chaplain of Anne Boleyn’s and later her biographer, characterise Henry’s second wife as a devoted heroine of the English Reformation. As many historians have acknowledged, the problem with taking their portraits of Anne at face value is that their works were essentially Elizabethan propaganda, written in order to influence the religious settlement of Anne’s Protestant daughter. Others were not so charitable in their descriptions of Anne Boleyn. In the writings of Jesuit historian Nicholas Sanders Anne is rigorously demonised as an irreligious, heretical she-devil with a ‘large wen under her chin’, a ‘projecting tooth’ and ‘six fingers’. These polarising stereotypes are not only wildly inaccurate; they simplify the intricacies of early sixteenth-century theology and confuse ideas on the subject of Anne’s religious beliefs.

Historical opinion on Anne Boleyn’s religion tends either to correlate with John Foxe and William Latymer’s image of her as a committed evangelical and reformist or to completely contradict their views. John Foxe, the Elizabethan martyrologist, immortalised Anne Boleyn as a paragon of virtue and a patron of reformers in his Acts and monuments, otherwise known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’. Published twenty-seven years following Anne’s execution for incest and adultery, Foxe’s book asserts that papal power in England was ‘abolished by the reason and occasion of the most virtuous and noble lady, Anne Boleyn, who was not as yet married to the king by whose godly means and most virtuous consul the king’s mind was daily inclined better and better’. Foxe goes even further in his godly portrait of Anne, describing the private charity she afforded to widows and poor households as well as a small purse she carried around with her to distribute alms to those in need. William Latymer, in his Cronikelle of the Most Vertuous Ladye Anne Bulleyne, describes how the queen ‘exercised herself continually in reading the French Bible and other French books of like effect’. According to Latymer Queen Anne, having bought cloth to be made into clothing for the destitute, ‘commanded the ladies and maidens of honour attending her highness to make a great number of the same shirts, smocks and sheets with their own hands’. The principle picture that emerges is that of a charitable and virtuous queen who believed in reading the Bible in the vernacular and who was influenced by French evangelicalism.

David Starkey supports Latymer’s view that Anne’s religion was a result of her continental education. At the age of around thirteen, Anne Boleyn was sent to France as an attendant to Henry VIII’s sister, Mary. She remained at the court of King Francis I until the winter of 1521–22 when she returned to England as a lady-in-waiting to Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Starkey argues that France was undergoing a religious revolution during Anne’s time there, and that the two figures leading the way were the humanist scholar Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the king’s sister Marguerite of Angoulême. Starkey sights Lefèvre as one of the principle inspirations behind Anne’s religious convictions, as Lefèvre ‘became convinced that true Christianity could reach the people only if they could read and hear the Word of God in their own language’. Starkey sights his evidence of Anne’s religious Francophilia in a treatise written for Anne in early 1530 by Louis de Brun, a French teacher living in England. De Brun praises her reading material: ‘one never finds you without some French book in your hand… such as Translations of the Holy Scriptures… I always saw you reading the salutary Epistles of St Paul that contain the complete teaching and rule of good living according to the best moral principles’. Furthermore the daughter of William Lock, Henry VIII’s silk merchant, remembered how when her father ‘was a young merchant and used to go beyond sea… Anne Boleyn caused him to get her the Gospels and Epistles written in parchment in French’. Starkey draws two conclusions from his research: one is that Anne’s committed reading of the Scriptures ‘shows her to be an evangelical’ and secondly that Anne’s pity can be characterised as ‘proudly and consistently French’. Starkey’s research on Anne’s religion seems to echo Foxe’s assertion that she was an ‘open comforter and aider of all the professors of Christ’s gospel… her life being also directed in the same’. According to Maria Dowling, reflecting upon the same evidence as Starkey, Anne ‘was regarded as a reformer by her own servants and associates, and… in both her private life and public policy, she was a fervent and committed evangelical’.

It would appear, then, that whilst Foxe and Latymer’s accounts of Anne should be read with caution and skepticism, they have by no means been totally dismissed by historians and contemporary evidence does support some ideas expressed within them. There is further evidence to buttress Latymer’s opinion that Anne enjoyed reading French Bibles. In the British Library there is a copy of Lefèvre’s translations of the Bible in French that belonged to Anne Boleyn. Biblical quotations attached to reformist, evangelical beliefs are inscribed on both the front and the back cover. On the front flyleaf, inscribed between the ‘HA’ monogram of Henry and Anne’s names reads ‘grace and truth came by Christ’ in French. This quotation was adopted by evangelicals whose belief it was that the Bible should be read in the vernacular, the message being that only then can true Christianity be known. It is no coincidence that Anne owned a copy of a Bible translated by a famous French evangelical, someone whose works Anne would most likely have come across during her stay in France. There is also evidence to support Anne’s patronage of students and reformists. Harder to verify are the claims about the piety and respectability of Anne’s household once she became Queen, but this shall be commented on in greater detail later.

Despite the contemporary evidence that supports such claims, some have understandably totally dismissed anything Foxe and Latymer have said as Elizabethan propaganda, the vanguard of this strand of historiography being George Bernard. Bernard writes how the notion of Anne as a reformer ‘rests heavily on the later testimony of John Foxe and of one of Anne’s chaplains’. Bernard asserts that the available contemporary evidence actually paints a very different picture of the queen. He strongly believes that what Foxe and Latymer wrote regarding Anne’s religion is worth nothing since they were ‘writing propaganda’ and ‘trying to influence the Elizabethan settlement’. Bernard goes further, however, in thinking that these propagandists were trying to retrieve Anne’s dubious reputation by presenting her as a virtuous reformist who kept an orderly and pious household of women, ‘suggesting that so devout a lady could not possibly have been guilty of those shocking adulteries for which she had been condemned’.

Bernard presents evidence that suggests Anne’s household was not necessarily the hub of sober piety that Foxe and Latymer perpetuate. Anne’s chamberlain, Sir Edward Bainton, wrote to her brother George in June 1533 that the queen’s chamber was full of pleasure-loving, frivolous women; ‘the ladies’ dancing and pastime… as ever hath been the custom’. There is also the evidence that Anne herself gave during her terrifying downfall in the Tower in May 1536. According to Sir William Kingston, Anne had been overly familiar with Henry Norris, a courtier accused of adultery with her, and teased his constant delay in marrying the lady he was courting. Anne told him ‘you look for dead men’s shoes for if nothing came to the king but good you would look to have me and he said if you should have any such thought he would… and then said she could undo him if she would’. The idea that Anne enjoyed flirting with male courtiers is not mentioned by Foxe or Latymer, presumably the fact sat uncomfortably alongside the saintly image Foxe and Latymer set out to create.

On the point of Anne Boleyn’s personality, the diluted descriptions offered by Foxe and Latymer of a devout woman are not necessarily corroborated by the evidence. Anne’s unique spirit and personality are absolutely significant because they help explain why Henry selected her as his wife. While Bernard would argue against the fact that the French court shaped Anne’s religious beliefs, he would support the notion that France transformed her from an English girl to a sophisticated Frenchwoman. With her ‘swarthy’ skin, dark brown hair and ‘beautiful black eyes’, Anne was a far cry from the archetypical fair-haired Renaissance beauty. Even Anne’s principal detractors felt compelled to compliment her wit and charm. George Cavendish, a man who had little reason to praise Anne as a gentlemen-usher of Thomas Wolsey, admitted she possessed a ‘very good wit’. Even Nicholas Sanders, a man accountable for phenomenal inaccuracies about Anne, observed her innovative character, calling her ‘the glass of fashion’. We can reasonably deduce that Anne Boleyn was unconventional, attractive, witty and fashionable. This intelligent and lively woman, it seems doubtful, would have spent all her time giving alms to the poor and living a humble, sober life in prayer and reading Bibles.

This does not mean to say, however, that she was not a supporter of reform or evangelicalism as Bernard would have it. In fact, Bernard goes as far as to suggest that Anne was principally a secular figure whose connections to evangelicalism were purely cynical. Bernard suggests that Anne’s primary reason for attaching herself to religious reform was that most reformist figures supported the king’s divorce from Queen Catherine, which benefit Anne as Henry’s queen-in-waiting. This is where Bernard’s argument begins to fail as he ignores much of the aforementioned evidence that supports the idea that Anne was an eager patron of reform and a woman a genuine interest in evangelicalism. Bernard discredits Anne’s religious patronage as evidence of her religious beliefs but rather concludes that ‘Anne would obviously favour clergy who defended… the break with Rome’ since ‘the single most important factor in appointments of bishoprics in the early 1530s was not evangelical or Lutheran doctrine but involvement in the canon law and diplomacy of Henry VIII’s divorce’. Whether intentionally done or not, by suggesting that Anne used religious piety as a cynical bid for power rather than out of genuine religious conviction, Bernard goes some way to reinforcing the poisonous narrative of Chapuys and Sanders that perpetuates the image of Anne Boleyn as a manipulative vixen who seduced her way to power.

If Anne had any religious leanings at all, Bernard argues, it was towards Catholicism. Bernard picks up on Anne’s request during her last days in the Tower for ‘the sacrament in the closet in her chamber so that she might pray for mercy’. For Catholics, the sight of the sacrament was deemed to be spiritually efficacious. According to William Kingston, Anne questioned ‘shall I be in heaven? For I have done many good deeds in my days’. Bernard concludes from this that Anne believed in the power of good works, a Catholic belief, as opposed to gaining salvation via justification by faith, a major point of theological division between Catholics and reformists. Retha Warnicke supports Bernard’s view that Anne was religiously conservative. She too picks up on Anne’s requests for the sacrament. She also argues that since Thomas Cranmer, a committed reformist whom Anne offered patronage to, had denied ever accepting ‘Luther’s view of the Eucharist, it is reasonable to assume that Anne, who died before the archbishop was converted to an even more radical stance than the German reformer’s, adhered to the doctrine of transubstantiation’.

To perpetuate the notion that Anne Boleyn was actually a Catholic is to distort the record: the lesser pieces of evidence must be inflated and the greater diminished. Furthermore, Warnicke’s assumption that Anne’s beliefs mirrored those of Thomas Cranmer is misleading. As a response to the idea of Anne asking for the sacrament, it is important to remember that 1536 is still relatively early on in the theological shift that was taking place in England. Anne may have been exposed to evangelicalism in France, but her upbringing in England would have been Catholic and conventional. Perhaps when facing the inevitability of death, Anne drew on all her spiritual resources to find solace and comfort. This is just one, admittedly unsubstantiated, view, but the point is that the evidence of the sacrament and the queen’s brief reference to good works do not conclusively prove that Anne was a Catholic.

Eric Ives’ work on Anne Boleyn’s religion reveal that her reformist beliefs were a prominent aspect of her religious identity. Of the nine books known to have belonged to Anne, Ives concludes that ‘seven are religious and six of those are reformist in character’. Furthermore, five of those are French. The only reformist book owned by Anne that we know of that is of English origin in William Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament. Tyndale’s translation was inspired by Martin Luther’s belief that people should be able to read the Bible in their own language; a belief apparently shared by Anne Boleyn. The other known books belonging to Anne relate to French reform, at least two (one of which has already been mentioned) by Lefèvre and another by the French evangelical Clément Marot. Marot’s links with Anne can be further evidenced by his dedication to Anne of his poem Sermon of the Good Pastor and the Bad in which he bestows upon Anne pious good wishes: ‘o lady Anne, o Queen incomparable’. Ives concludes that Anne Boleyn’s religious stance can be defined with clarity: ‘reformist, bible-based, humanist, francophile, committed’.

To understand Anne Boleyn’s religion we must move beyond the polarised debate and adopt a more nuanced approach. The debate over Anne’s religion has been split into two camps: those who find evidence to support Foxe and Latymer’s watered down hagiography of Anne and those who support the unflattering descriptions of her Catholic defamers. In other words, Anne was either a saintly patron of reform, a heroine of the English Reformation, or a cynical and power-hungry nymphomaniac. The solutions to avoiding this polarity are twofold. Firstly, it is vital to recognise that Anne’s beliefs need not be seen as homogenous and neatly fit a prescribed religious formula. It is possible that she patronised reformers, financially aided Cambridge scholars and read translations of the Bible into French and English as well as, in her last days, showing some reversion back to her religiously conservative early childhood. Evangelicalism itself was extremely fluid. Marot wrote a poem clarifying his theological stance; that is, one independent of influences outside the Gospel, whether they be ‘Luther…Zwinglian’ or ‘Anabaptist’. What Marot’s poem speaks volumes on the subject of what constituted evangelicalism by the early 1520s. As far as Marot was concerned, evangelical faith was a very personal affair, flexible and distinct for each individual.

Secondly, we must not reduce Anne to the boring stigmas of saint or schemer. The truth is far more interesting. The contemporary evidence compels us to accept that Anne Boleyn may have been a flirt, a lover of French fashions and sexually attractive to Henry and other men, but she was also a reader of the Bible and a patron of reform. As a sixteenth-century queen, Anne recognised that her household had to be decent but also attractive enough for the king to come and visit. In a time where men expressed their love for their queen in the chivalric context of courtly love, innocent flirtation and adultery could be a difficult line to tread; one which would spell the end for Anne Boleyn. Anne flirtatiousness, wit and charisma should not be dismissed or ignored as an inconvenience; they should be seen as what they were, part of her appeal to Henry, an appeal universally recognised even by her detractors. The overall picture that emerges of Anne Boleyn is of a lively woman who supported reform and showed evangelical sympathies. Dr. Linda Porter, although writing about Catherine Parr, a later reformist queen, confronts the same issue of reconciling the seemingly frivolous and theological aspects of the queen’s character: ‘the apparent contradiction between the lover of finery and the student of scripture is easily explained by the complexity of Catherine’s character and the preoccupations of the times in which she lived’. If a similar understanding could be afforded to Catherine’s predecessor, aspects of the debate surrounding Anne’s religion could be reconciled. When Anne Boleyn can be understood as a living, breathing and complex woman and not a symbol for either piousness or depravity, the issue surrounding her religious affinities can be better understood too.