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In favor of 1499-1502...
Biographers Alison Weir and Eric W. Ives more or less favor
a birth year of 1501 based on Anne's appointment as maid of
honor to Margaret of Austria in 1513. One had to be at least 11 to be a
maid of honor so, based on this, the very latest possible birth year
would be 1502.
This is further supported by an example of Anne’s handwriting
in 1514 (click here to
view). If Anne had been born in 1507, she would have written the
letter when she was seven years old. However, the handwriting is unmistakably that of a
young adult because it has small, tightly controlled and evenly
formed letters. A child of seven, no matter how intelligent, would
only have the mechanical ability to write in a large, uneven scrawl.
In
addition, the letter is written in French, her second language. The
sentences are lengthy, which suggests her thought processes were mature
enough to enable her communicate complex concepts, something a
seven-year-old is unlikely to do in her first language, much less her
second. If she were copying text written for her by an adult, the
handwriting would show hesitation, which it does not. And while she does make corrections, these are infrequent and are
skillfully inserted between lines (which are very evenly spaced) rather
than messily, as one might expect of a child.
Furthermore, a biography of Henry VIII written
by Lord Herbert of Cherbury in the 1600's quoted a number of Anne's
contemporaries - people who actually knew her - and stated Anne was "20 years old" in
1522 when she returned from France, where she had been a member of the
French court for several years.
Finally, 16th century
historian, Nicholas Sanders (1530-1581), wrote that Anne was raped by
one of her father's officials at Hever Castle when she was seven
years old. The information is considered questionable by biographer
Alison Weir, but if it were to ever be proven
true, a birth year of 1507 would place Anne in England in 1514 - the year
she wrote that letter from the Netherlands, where she was known to have
been since 1513. Even without proof that the rape ever took place, the
details of the rumor indicate that the historian presumed or knew that
Anne was born earlier than 1507.
In favor of 1507...
The birth year
"1507" came from a note by William Camden jotted in
the margin of his manuscript copy of the biography of Elizabeth 1,
printed in 1615. However, the number "1" can
be written with a hook or a tag at the top, and a "2", if
written carelessly, could have an angular upper curve and a shortened
bottom line. Either number could appear to be a "7" if
Camden's handwriting was poor or his quill pen ran low on ink - and a note jotted in a margin might not
have been written in his most careful hand! Without
seeing the actual sample (and I have not) I can only wonder if perhaps
his handwriting was misread. Either way, he was not even born when Anne
died, his source for the information
is unknown, cannot be verified, and could have been misinformed.
Conceivably, it could, in fact, only be the information source mentioned
next...
Also supporting a birth year of 1507 were the
late-in-life reminiscences of a maid of honor to Henry VIII's sister, Mary
Tudor, as told to her secretary.
She was quoted as saying that Anne was "not 29 years of age"
when she was executed. The source of the information was someone from
the "enemy faction" who very likely did not know Anne well, if
at all, because Mary Tudor refused to appear at court when Anne was present,
according to Alison Weir. Mary Tudor's entourage would most often be
with her, giving them few opportunities to commiserate with Anne and
learn much about her firsthand (And even
if they were in the same location, it is unlikely that they socialized
for political reasons). Furthermore, these reminiscences were published by Henry
Clifford in 1645 - 109 years after her death and three persons
removed from Anne.
Retha Warnicke insists upon the later date citing an examination in 1876 of the
beheaded remains of a female thought to be Anne. Examiners concluded
she was in her mid- to-late twenties, which Anne would have been at
her death in 1536, had she been born in 1507. However, other sources note that the
examination techniques for determining age were very new in 1876, and were subject to a wider margin of
error than they would be today. Examiners were not even 100% certain
that the body was Anne Boleyn's (Anne's family was rumored to have taken
her body out of the Tower compound for burial elsewhere. If this rumor was
true, hers would not have
been the body unearthed and examined in 1876). They just mentioned that, true to
Anne's famous quote, the skeleton had a "very small neck".
Warnicke also quotes Margaret
of Austria, who wrote to Anne's father, complimenting Anne as being
"so perfect an address for a lady of her years". Warnicke
presumes that Margaret of Austria would not have found Anne's age worthy
of mention unless she was much younger than usual. However, this
suggests that a child of 11 is too old to be considered
"young", which is a completely subjective observation. Most
people would still consider an 11-year-old to be a child, and young
enough to warrant a compliment if she conducted herself well.
Drawing conclusions...
The data conflicts, so is it possible to determine
Anne's year of birth from the little that we know?
Novelists are always forced to
make good guesses on the basis of vague and conflicting facts when they
tackle historical fiction. There is very little verifiable data about
Anne Boleyn - there is much more speculation. So, while writing Threads, I employed a strategy
to help me select one conclusion out of several possibilities when
situations such as this one arose.
I first examined each information source to see if it was MORE likely to be trustworthy or
LESS likely. Then I considered each individual
"fact" to see if it was MORE likely to be valid or LESS likely based on
its information source.
In this instance, the sources that
suggest a later birth year are
either questionable, purely speculative, are second or third hand,
are noted 80 to 100 years after Anne's death,
and/or have no verifiable source for the information. The facts
that support an earlier birth year (the known age requirements of a maid
of honor, for instance, without any documentation to state they were relaxed
for Anne), appear to be more sound.
In addition, I study the methods
that a researcher, biographer or writer seemed to be using to draw a conclusion, and
consider his or her approach. Are the methods objective? Do they weigh
all the facts? Do they rely heavily on unproven supposition and
speculation? Do they quote a clearly prejudiced or uninformed source? Do they
interpret the evidence in a manner that contradicts the obvious? (For
example, one
biographer asks us to
agree that the handwriting in the example is "obviously
juvenile" when it clearly is not!)
Biographers and others who argue in favor of 1507
presume (and require) that the following unproven and unlikely conditions ALL are
true. Omitting any one of them invalidates the position and weakens or
nullifies the argument in favor of a birth year of 1507:
-
Margaret of Austria must
have accepted Anne into her employment at age five or six, even though
it is both unlikely and undocumented that she would bend the rules to
accept a non-royal child. Plus, a
pampered upper-class child of that age undoubtedly required more care
and supervision than she could offer in service and responsibility.
-
Anne must have been
completely fluent and literate in her second language by the time she was seven,
an age at which most children are struggling with their first
language.
-
She had to have had
unparalleled mechanical ability and matured thought processes for a
child of seven in order to compose the letter she wrote in
1514.
Even taking into account the
variances in children's abilities and offering arguments that some
children are brighter than others, the fact that some children CAN
perform tasks over and above their age does not mean that all children
MUST (or we would all be Mozart!), or that Anne Boleyn DID. You or I may
know, or know of, someone who was fluent in two languages and at the same
time had adult handwriting at age seven (I don't, actually), but that kind of argument is
merely personal anecdotal evidence and provides no substantiated proof of Anne
Boleyn's abilities as a child. Anecdotal evidence can only be used
to bolster a more solidly grounded argument, and none has been
forthcoming thus far, to the best of my knowledge.
There is no
documented proof of a birth year of 1507, or solid logic to support it,
other than the items mentioned above. None of the arguments is
conclusive or indisputable, in fact, they all require plausibility
stretching in order to make them fit.
As a result, the people who
argue that position give the
impression that they are bending the facts to support a conclusion
they've already drawn, rather than drawing a conclusion on the basis of
the evidence. When I see this, my inclination is to dismiss the conclusion in favor of one that
is better substantiated and relies less on speculative conditions.
Where
the birth year 1507 may have come from...
So where might the later birth date
have come from if it
wasn't true?
Anne
remained single for a very long time and, if born in 1499 to 1502,
would have married in her 30's - middle-aged by the standards of the
time. Since a woman's sole purpose in the 1500s was to marry and breed
(and do it young!), her advancing age would likely have been an
embarrassment or a problem for her.
Nevertheless, she was vivacious, slender and petite, and retained
a youthful bearing and appearance until the years just before her death
when she was described as "that thin old woman". Portraits
confirm that Anne Boleyn had significantly aged by the end of her
reign.
It is
possible, though not entirely likely, that a 27 or 28-year-old could be
described as an "old woman".
On the other hand, Anne could simply have lied
about her age (people do) and had the younger age quoted as
truth by people who were not close to her and didn't know differently
(this is a speculative conclusion drawn from observing human
nature, spoken as a novelist rather than a scholar). Or, people she was
not close to might have guessed her age on the basis of her appearance
and stated the younger age as fact, or had their speculation and
guesswork about her age repeated as fact (and Anne never stepped in to
correct them for obvious reasons). At the same time,
her contemporaries claimed she was older.
Under the stress of her
marriage to Henry VIII and her tumultuous reign, the years may finally
have caught up with her, so her age, which she may have previously
successfully disguised, finally showed. This seems to me to be more
likely than presuming that stress could age a young woman in her 20's to
such a degree that she could be described as "old", and be
depicted in portraits - which artists invariably made flattering - as
having aged beyond her years.
Anne's handwriting is the only indisputable physical
evidence, carries (in my opinion) the most weight, and supports other documentation
that states she would have had to be in her mid-thirties when she
died. For this reason, I would argue that she was born around 1500.
In summary, no one knows with
absolute certainty when Anne was born, but the most persuasive evidence supports the earlier rather than the later
date(s).
Also see
Hever
Castle for photos and information about her childhood home.
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