![Anne Boleyn, painted by an unknown artist, late 16th century](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/01/TELEMMGLPICT000298359146_16935667447990_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqoQmI6CCYeWXI2SDtPW01M00LoKc4qSRYG1k6EyxQm_I.jpeg?imwidth=680)
The truth about Anne Boleyn’s majestic rise and grisly fall
Machiavellian schemer – or innocent caught up in wider affairs? Two new books re-examine the life of Henry VIII’s infamous second wife
![Anne Boleyn, painted by an unknown artist, late 16th century](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/books/2023/09/01/TELEMMGLPICT000298359146_16935667447990_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqoQmI6CCYeWXI2SDtPW01M00LoKc4qSRYG1k6EyxQm_I.jpeg?imwidth=680)
Each year, millions of tourists visit the Tower of London. It is hard to imagine, moving through the busy thoroughfare, that one of the more infamous events to take place within its walls – the 1536 execution of Anne Boleyn – was a relatively private affair. When she climbed the scaffold on the north side of the White Tower and made her final speech, praising her ex-husband Henry VIII as ”a good, a gentle and sovereign lord”, it was likely heard by fewer than a thousand people.
For crimes of adultery, incest and high treason, all levelled with dubious provenance, Boleyn’s head was cut off. It was done in the French style, with a two-handed sword rather than an axe, and a professional headsman was brought in at great expense from Calais (at the time a territory of the English crown) to ensure that it all went smoothly. It’s a story that most of us know well – Boleyn surely ranks among the most written-on historical figures – and yet this month brings us two histories that each manage to do something new with the story of her unfortunate life.
Heirs of Ambition (★★★☆☆) by Claire Martin is the more unorthodox of the pair, a bold study of the Boleyn family which takes us from the first evidence of the name in the village of Salle (one John Boleyn in 1283), through to the members of the family who bore witness to Anne’s grisly end. From humble beginnings as sheep farmers, the family’s fortunes turned in the late 15th century thanks to Geoffrey Boleyn, great-grandfather of Anne. He was a merchant whose savvy investments saw him ascend to become a leading figure of the London Mercers’ Guild, running the import and export of textiles. By the end of his life, he had been knighted by Henry IV and purchased Blickling Hall in Norfolk (where Anne would be born), along with a series of other properties that included the “sparkling jewel” of Hever Castle in Kent.
Geoffrey’s lifelong work paid off. His son William climbed higher still and was made a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Richard III, “a personal honour and an individual reward” for a man of no hereditary noble standing. Their position established, William’s son Thomas was sent as a diplomat to the Low Countries where he met the Habsburg regent, Margaret of Austria. It was in her court that he would secure a foothold for his young daughter Anne.
This is a tale of intergenerational graft and wit, of social rise achieved “not by right of birth but by right of worth”. The Boleyn family narrative is propulsive and engaging, so it is a shame that the book’s successes are undercut by an over-lyrical style, rammed with boring and inelegant clichés from TV documentaries. Four times I read of cities “simmering with tension”, though it was London which offered the coup de grâce when it “exploded” like an “explosive powder keg”.
Martin’s closing chapter dovetails well into Hunting the Falcon (★★★★☆) by John Guy and Julia Fox, even if their idea of history is very different. The pair pick up the tale showing how Anne spent her childhood, not only with Margaret but as a maid of honour in the court of Claude, queen of France. Their contention is that the major upheavals of Anne’s life can be best understood not as a consequence of domestic strife but according to a series of large-scale shifts in continental politics.
This grand-scale approach works very well, and is perhaps at its best in how it recasts Anne’s dispute with Henry’s most trusted advisor, cardinal Thomas Wolsey. Normally this is told simply: Wolsey failed to secure a papal annulment of Henry’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon and so, tussling for the king’s favour, he and Anne began to conspire against one another. Eventually he was arrested for treason, but died of natural causes en route to his trial.
Guy and Fox don’t dispute Anne’s central role in Wolsey’s fall, borrowing one courtier’s description of her as a “night crow” that filled Henry’s head with “subversive ideas” about where power should lie, but they complicate the argument, suggesting that Wolsey had already outlived his usefulness to Henry. The Treaty of Cambrai, which made peace between France and the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, was signed in the same period. This consolidated Habsburg influence over the papacy, and “destroyed what was left of Wolsey’s credibility” by undoing decades of diplomatic work.
The authors’ research is some of the finest out there, but here too, weak prose blunts its brilliance. Metaphors come fast, jumbled and rarely original. During Anne and Henry’s courtship she “bowled him over, flinging open the doors of his perception”. As her fortunes fade, we find her “walking a tightrope” with “everything to lose”.
Still, knitting together domestic drama and the tangled web of foreign policy is no small feat. What emerges in Hunting the Falcon is a necessary corrective to the old, broad-strokes story that paints Henry as a fickle child and Anne as the essential Boleyn-dynasty machiavel, however much she was abused.
Heirs of Ambition is published by The History Press at £20, and Hunting the Falcon by Bloomsbury at £30. To order your copy for £16.99 and £25 respectively, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books