Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I. Two of the most famous women in British history. Their stories are as familiar as they are compelling. Henry VIII’s obsessive love for Anne turning to bitter disappointment when she failed to give him a son, her bloody death on the scaffold barely three years after being crowned queen. Her daughter Elizabeth’s turbulent path to the throne, her long and glorious reign – a ‘Golden Age’ for England, with overseas adventurers, Shakespeare and Spenser, royal favourites, the vanquishing of the Armada, all presided over by the self-styled Virgin Queen.
And yet, until now, Anne and Elizabeth’s stories have never been told together: the nature of their relationship, the impact it had on their own lives and those around them, and its enduring legacy. In part, this is understandable. Elizabeth was less than three years old when the Calais swordsman severed her mother’s head at the Tower of London on 19 May 1536. Even while Anne had lived, Elizabeth had seen little of her and had followed the traditional upbringing for a royal infant, established in a separate household, far removed from her parents at court. And then there is the impression that Elizabeth herself gave. ‘She prides herself on her father and glories in him’, observed Giovanni Michiel, the Venetian ambassador to England during the reign of Elizabeth’s sister Mary. The many references that Elizabeth made to her ‘dearest father’, and the way in which she tried to emulate his style of monarchy when she became queen, all support this view.
By contrast, Elizabeth is commonly (but inaccurately) said to have referred directly to Anne only twice throughout her long life. She made no attempt to overturn the annulment of her mother’s marriage or to have her reburied in more fitting surrounds than the Tower of London chapel. The obvious conclusion is that Elizabeth was at best indifferent towards, and at worst ashamed of Anne. But the truth is both more complex and more fascinating.
Elizabeth did not make a song and dance about her feelings towards the mother she had known for only a brief time, but she was painfully aware that doing so would be – literally – digging up the past. Anne Boleyn might be the most famous of the six wives today, but in her time she was the most reviled. She was the wicked adulteress who had seduced the king with witchcraft, ousted the rightful queen, Catherine of Aragon, and failed to deliver on her promise of a son and heir, giving birth to just one surviving child, a mere daughter – and Henry already had one of those. When she herself became queen, Elizabeth knew that at least half of her subjects viewed her as the illegitimate offspring of the ‘Great Whore’. Political expediency therefore required her to be discreet about her mother.
But if Elizabeth uttered few words about Anne, her actions spoke for her. She dedicated much of her long reign to avenging the injustice of her mother’s fate. In assembling her court, it was her Boleyn relatives to whom she showed the greatest favour and her father’s kin who found themselves out in the cold. As her queenship became more established, she proudly displayed her mother’s badges in public and cherished personal mementoes of her in private – the most poignant of which was the ’Chequers’ ring. Courtiers soon learned that honouring Anne’s memory was the surest means to win her daughter’s favour.
With her flame-red hair and mercurial temper, Elizabeth may have resembled her father, but in temperament, ambition and statecraft she was very much her mother’s daughter. Both women broke the mould that Tudor society had created for queens – and, indeed, for women in general. Elizabeth became a ruler of whom Anne would have been inordinately proud – indeed, the sort of queen she herself might have become if her life had not been cut so brutally short. There is a delicious irony in the fact that the child who had been the bitterest disappointment to Henry VIII would go on to become by far the longest reigning and most successful of his heirs. Her legacy would reverberate down the centuries and can still be felt in this, the second Elizabethan age. And it was a legacy that derived primarily from her mother.
Piecing together the intertwining threads of Anne and Elizabeth’s stories for my new book was a fascinating journey of discovery. In so doing, I considered the influence that each of these famous Tudor queens had on the other, and found that this shed dramatic new light on the private desires, hopes and fears that lay behind their dazzling public personas.
When it comes to the Tudors, we are obsessed with the story of Henry VIII and his six wives and debate endlessly the question of whether Elizabeth I really was the Virgin Queen. Along the way, we have missed the most fascinating relationship of all: that between a mother and daughter who changed the course of British history.
About the Author
Tracy Borman’s new book is Anne Boleyn & Elizabeth I: The Mother and Daughter Who Changed History (published by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and Grove Atlantic in the US, 2023).
ahpurse's Blog: Tudor and Victorian Historian 