My paper in the Royal Studies Journal

I am delighted to announce that my paper entitled “Large wen” or “swelling”?  Exploring Myths and Misconceptions about Nicholas Sander’s Description of Anne Boleyn and Its Link to Witchcraft was published in the Royal Studies Journal in December 2023. 

                       

Here's an abstract:

Despite the recent surge in Anne Boleyn-themed books and articles, scholars still cannot agree on the subject of Anne and witchcraft. There are two polarising schools of thought: one is that Anne had “the physical characteristics of a witch,” based on the hostile account of Nicholas Sander, and the other that she was never “branded a witch in her own lifetime.” This essay argues that neither of these two views is correct and that there is enough compelling evidence to refute them both. It is time to return to the original source material and re-evaluate this part of the narrative of Anne Boleyn’s life. 

And here is an excerpt from the introduction. You can read the entire paper here since it's an open access.

"One of the most enduring descriptions of Anne Boleyn comes from one of her ardent enemies. In 1585, Edward Rishton posthumously published the work of Nicholas Sander, Catholic propagandist in exile, entitled De origine ac progresu schimsatis anglicani.[1] The book was translated in 1877 by David Lewis as The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism.[2] Published in Latin in Cologne, Sander’s book quickly became a bestseller. By the seventeenth century, Sander’s De Origine had been translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Spanish. The book was not published in English until the nineteenth century, when the religious controversies related to the reign of Henry VIII had long cooled down. Nevertheless, the English people read Sander’s book in Latin with enthusiasm, and it was especially popular with exiled Catholics during the reign of Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth I. Sander’s work laid the foundation for modern theories of portraying Anne Boleyn as a witch.

In 1989, Retha M. Warnicke proposed that Anne’s sudden downfall and execution were triggered by her miscarriage of a deformed male foetus in January 1536, which led to suspicions of witchcraft, adultery, and incest.[3] This theory hinges on Nicholas Sander’s description of Anne’s physical appearance and on his assertion that she had miscarried a “shapeless mass of flesh” in 1536.[4] Whereas the theory that Anne had given birth to a deformed foetus and this triggered her downfall has long been debunked by such historians as Eric Ives and Suzannah Lipscomb, the theory that Sander aimed at depicting Anne as a witch by describing her physical appearance is still credited in academia. Eamon Duffy in his 2017 Reformation Divided Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England repeats after Warnicke that “for Sander she [Anne Boleyn] was in fact a sort of witch, who enchanted the King, her seductive powers a triumph of artifice over nature.”[5] Yet it will be argued in this essay that Sander was not aiming at depicting Anne as a witch."                                                                                                                      

    

                       

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[1] Nicholas Sander, De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani (Cologne, 1585), 17.

[2] Nicholas Sander, Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, trans. by David Lewis (London: Burns and Oates, 1877).

[3] Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 241, 297.

[4] Sander, Rise and Growth, 132.

[5] Eamon Duffy, Reformation Divided Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 217.

My new book is OUT NOW!

 Drumroll please!

My new book "The Forgotten Years of Anne Boleyn: The Habsburg & Valois Courts" is out NOW in paperback, hardcover & eBook formats. I would be honoured if you buy the book, and happy if you glean new insights into Anne Boleyn's forgotten years.

The Forgotten Tudor Women on Not Just the Tudors podcast

Hello everyone,

This is just a quick post to let you know that the new episode of Not Just the Tudors podcast with Professor Suzannah Lipscomb is out now and I'm in it!

I was invited to talk about the forgotten Tudor women Anne Seymour, Jane Dudley & Elisabeth Parr.

Please take a listen & enjoy!

My article in the newest issue of History of Scotland magazine

I wrote an article for the newest issue of History of Scotland magazine , focusing on the relationship between Anne Boleyn & Henry VIII's elder sister Margaret Tudor, Dowager Queen of Scots.

While researching my newest book "Ladies-in-Waiting: Women Who Served Anne Boleyn", I came across a letter Margaret wrote to Anne in 1534 so I decided to explore it further.

The relationship between the two queens is rarely mentioned so I think it's going to be an interesting read for Anne's fans.

Did Katherine of Aragon suffer from prognathism?

Did Katherine of Aragon suffer from prognathism? 

This is an excerpt from my book "Medical Downfall of the Tudors: Sex, Reproduction & Succession" (pp. 111-113).

"In 1519, Francis I quipped that Henry VIII “has an old deformed wife, while he himself is young and handsome”.[i] It is generally assumed that the French King was referring to Katharine’s corpulent figure; several years later one eyewitness described her as “of low stature” and “rather stout”.[ii] Yet there’s evidence that Francis was referring not only to Katharine’s bulky figure but also to a deformity of her jaw—a deformity that has been overlooked by modern historians until now.

In the vast collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, there is a boxwood draughtsman that bears a portraitof Katharine of Aragon, dating to c. 1535.[iii] She is depicted in profile to the left, with her head covered by a hood of English making, and wears a dress with a low-cut décolletage that emphasises her ample bosom. Around her neck, she wears a chain with a pendant. The feature that draws the viewer’s attention is the half-opened, jutting jaw. 

This is not the only depiction of Katharine with a pronounced jaw. The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna holds a set of twenty-seven boxwood-on-walnut game pieces, dating to c. 1535, depicting various historical personages of the sixteenth century.[iv] Katharine of Aragon is one of them: She is depicted wearing similar headdress, clothes and pendant as in the Victoria & Albert boxwood draughtsman but faces the viewer with her eyes turned to the left. Like in the Victoria & Albert piece, her jaw is half-opened and pronounced. 

The National Portrait Gallery in London preserves a miniature of Katharine, dating to c. 1525-26, wherein her jaw is more pronounced that in other known portraits.[v] Finally, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has a portrait of the Queen wherein her jaw is closed but clearly jutting.[vi]

The abovementioned evidence suggests that Katharine of Aragon suffered from mandibular prognathism, much like her Habsburg nephew Charles V (Katharine’s sister Joanna married into the Habsburg dynasty in 1496, espousing Philip the Handsome, Duke of Burgundy). The so called “Habsburg jaw” refers to the inherited trait which was present and clearly evident in the Habsburg family, Maximilian I and Charles V being the most prominent examples in the sixteenth century. This condition manifests itself as a jutting of the jaw. Yet the Habsburgs were not the only ones who suffered from prognathism. The Trastámara dynasty, from which both of Katharine’s parents descended, had several members who suffered from prognathism. Katharine’s half uncle, Henry IV of Castile, was the most prominent example, as evidenced by his skeletal remains. John II of Castile, Katharine’s maternal grandfather, also suffered from prognathism, as did the first Trastámara King of Castile, Henry II. Clearly, prognathism ran in Katharine of Aragon’s family and was a trait she inherited."

 

Sources:

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[i] Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 2, 1509-1519, n. 1230.

[ii] Calendar of State Papers Relating To English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Volume 4, n. 694.

[iii] Catherine of Aragon, gamesiece, Museum number: A.35-1934, http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O96204/catherine-of-aragon-gamespiece-kels-hans

[iv] The Kunsthistorisches Museum, KK 3851-77.

[v] Katherine of Aragon, attributed to Lucas Horenbout (or Hornebolte), watercolour on vellum, circa 1525-1526, NPG L244, https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw191234/Katherine-of-Aragon

[vi] Catherine of Aragon, 48.1142, https://collections.mfa.org/objects/33353

Was Francis I really “banging” Mary Boleyn? Discussing Netflix's "Blood, Sex & Royalty"

 

If anyone asks me if there's really a need for another book on Mary Boleyn, I'm going to say that it's an emphatic YES. It’s a well-established part of the narrative to depict Mary as a duller and less intelligent of the Boleyn sisters. According to Netflix's new documentary series “Blood, Sex and Royalty”, sex was apparently on her mind a lot.

We see the Boleyn girls at the French court. Anne is reading Christine de Pizan’s "Le Livre de la Cité des Dames" ("The Book of the City of Ladies") while a servant is trying to lace Mary into a corset. Anne and Mary are shown walking down the corridor; Mary is acting seductively towards the two courtiers who pass them by (she blows them a kiss) while Anne treads behind her somewhat timidly.  

We hear Dr Suzannah Lipscomb’s commentary: Mary, Anne's sister, "is much more interested in the immediate pleasures and the immediate satisfactions of things, whereas Anne, she holds out for something more.”

Then we see Anne again, who introduces Francis I, King of France: “King Francis: Ruler of France, patron of the arts and banging my sister".

The two sisters are pitted against each other in an already familiar fashion. Anne: bookish, intelligent, quick-witted. Mary: looking for carnal pleasures, not the type of girl you would call learned ("you can't possibly have read all these", Mary says as she's pointing at the pile of books belonging to Anne despite the fact that in her own letter Mary once mused that she read "old books" too). 

Was Francis I really “banging” Mary Boleyn?

Every single book about the Tudors tells the same tale: Mary Boleyn became Francis I's mistress at some point during her stay at the French court. Francis, however, had only two known mistresses (the official title was maîtresse-en-titre) and a lot of sexual partners. Maîtresse-en-titre was an office and if Mary became the King's mistress, we would have more evidence of it. Did they have sex? Perhaps; if anything happened between them, it was likely a fling. 

The notion that Mary Boleyn was sexually promiscuous during her stay at the French court is based on the French King’s reminisce from 1536, when he boasted that he knew Mary Boleyn “here in France” as “una grandissima ribalda” which means more or less that she was notoriously infamous for her promiscuity. The whole report was recorded by Rodolfo Pio di Carpi, Bishop of Faenza, who stated that:

“Francis said also that they are committing more follies than ever in England, and are saying and printing all the ill they can against the Pope and the Church; that ‘that woman’ pretended to have miscarried of a son, not being really with child, and, to keep up the deceit, would allow no one to attend on her but her sister, whom the French king knew here in France ‘per una grandissima ribalda et infame sopre tutte’ [“a great wanton and notoriously infamous”].” [1]

No other contemporary source records Mary’s allegedly infamous reputation. In the 1580s, Nicholas Sander hinted that Anne Boleyn was Francis I's mistress and known in France as his mule or mare; perhaps he confused the Boleyn sisters or was just trying to be malicious. His book entitled "The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism" depicted Anne and her family as lechers and heretics so anything Sander says is mostly based on lies or anti-Boleyn propaganda that circulated during their times. If the Boleyn sisters were indeed as notorious for their promiscuity as Nicholas Sander and Rodolfo Pio di Carpi claimed, the rumours would have been circulating in England as well as in France, and it remains dubious whether Henry VIII would take one sister as his mistress and the other as his wife had they been so notorious.

Also it looks like the Bishop of Faenza was referring to Anne and not Mary when he made a comment about “that woman...whom the King knew here in France”. I doubt that Mary Boleyn was notoriously promiscuous because there’s just not enough evidence to substantiate this claim. 

 Pio's report is wrong on many levels. First, “that woman”, Anne Boleyn, was indeed pregnant and did not pretend to have miscarried a son—she really did miscarry a foetus that had the appearance of a male, at about fifteen weeks’ gestation, as recorded by a contemporary chronicler. [2]  There is also no tangible evidence that Mary Boleyn was back at court after she and her newly wedded husband, William Stafford, were banished for marrying in secret in 1534. Because of these glaring errors, the report is generally regarded with a touch of reserve when it comes to Anne Boleyn. Oddly, it is rarely questioned when it comes to Mary, and the Bishop of Faenza’s words are often quoted to prove that Mary was Francis I’s mistress and sexually promiscuous because it is assumed that the French King “knew” Mary in the carnal sense.

 

PS. The only historian who challenged the view that Mary Boleyn was promiscuous while in France is Retha M. Warnicke, who pointed out that in 1514 Mary Boleyn was too young to achieve such notoriety and that Francis I may have well referred to the 1532 meeting in Calais and “come to this conclusion about her character at that time, aware that she was Henry’s ex-mistress.”  [3] 

 

 

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 [1] Letters and Papers, Volume 10, n. 450.

 [2] Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, Volume 1, p. 33.

[3] Retha M. Warnicke, Wicked Women of Tudor England, p. 30.

Is the NPG portrait of Anne Boleyn really based on a lost original? Update.

Do you remember my last post about the eerie similarity between Anne Boleyn's NPG portrait and Elizabeth I's Compton Verney portrait?

Apparently, these two portraits were painted by the same artist who used similar face patterns. But there's more!

Dr Owen Emmerson - Historian has kindly provided more details when I posted about this on my Facebook page: The artist also painted the Hever corridor portrait of Katherine of Aragon, and the Weiss Gallery portrait of Mary I.

Now look at the spooky similarity in face patterns in the Weiss portrait of Mary I and the NPG portrait of Anne Boleyn. The proportions are identical. These portraits were painted around the same time in the 1580s so that explains a lot. Anne Boleyn's painting was dated to 1584.

I was informed that there is going to be more about this discovery by art historian Lawrence Hendra, so we have to wait for more developments. So far it's truly fascinating.