Who was anne boleyn english literature essay

UNIVERSITATEA ” 1 DECEMBRIE 1918″ ALBA IULIASPECIALIZAREA: LIMBA ȘI LITERATURA ROMNĂ-LIMBA ȘI LITERATURA ENGLEZĂTHE PRIVATE LIFE OF QUEEN ANNE BOLEYNCOORDONATOR ȘTIINȚIFICLECTOR. UNIV. DR GABRIEL BĂRBULEȚABSOLVENTMATEIES ADELINA IOANAALBA IULIA2013CUPRINSCAPITOLUL IANNE’S EARLY YEARS1. 1 Who was Anne Boleyn? 1. 2 Anne’s Appearance1. 3 The rise of Anne BoleynCAPITOLUL IIKING HENRY VIII2. 1 Henry VIII’s life2. 2 Henry VIII’s infatuation with Anne2. 3 Henry’s divorce and Anne2. 4 King Henry and Queen AnneCAPITOLUL IIIANNE THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND3. 1 Birth of the Anglican Church3. 2 Anne against Catherine3. 4 Anne Boleyn religion3. 5 Anne miscarriageCAPITOLUL IVANNE AND THE OTHERS4. 1 Mary, her step-daughter4. 2 Her sister Mary Boleyn4. 3 Elisabeth4. 5 George BoleynCAPITOLUL VDOWNFALL AND DEATH5. 1 The fall of Anne Boleyn5. 2 The executionChapter IAnne’s early years1. 2 Who was Anne Boleyn? For a woman who played such an important part in English history, we know remarkably little about her earliest years. Anne Boleyn is often presented as a ‘ self-made’ woman, rising from lowly origins to the top of her dramatic fall. Antonia Fraser puts Anne’s birth at 1500 or 1501, probably at Blickling (Norfolk) and the date of birth seems to be at the end of May or early June. Other historians put Anne’s birth as late as 1507 or 1509. Anne was not ‘ a poor knight’s daughter’as one Nicholas Delanoy allegedy said to a skinner of St Omer Calais. Anne was born into the English social and political elite. Anne spent part of her childhood at the court of the Archduchess Margaret. Fraser puts her age at 12-13, as that was the minimum age for a ‘fille d’honneur’. Her father was Thomas Boleyn, who was an increasingly prominent courtier-administrator at the court and in the gouvernement of Henry VIII. It is not known for certain when Anne Boleyn was born. William Camden, writing, towards the end of of Elisabeth’s reign, said she was born in 1507, and something like that date is implied by Henry Clifford in his ‘ Life of Jane Dormer’, duchess of Feria, when he said that at her execution Anne was not twenty-nine years of age. But the most telling evidence for Anne’s age is the handwriting in a letter that she wrote to her father in French in 1513 from La Vure near Brussels. It is written in a neat and regular hand. It is most improbable that anyone younger than ten could write as clearly aas this. A telling parallel is to be find in a letter from Emperor Maximilian to Don Diego de Guevarre, in charge of the emperor’s son Charles, in which Maximilian confirmed his earlier promise that Don Diego’s niece should join the imperial household at Malines now she has reached the appropriate age: she was just over thirteen. So it is very likely that Anne was born around 1500-most likely 1501. Anne Boleyn had a sister, Mary, and a brother , George, who will feature proeminently in this account of her life. It is not known when they were born, or whether they were older or younger than Anne. There is nonetheless, a good deal of circumstantial or later evidence which suggest that Mary came first. George Boleyn date of birth is also uncertain. A remark in verses by George Cavendish, suggest that he served in the privy chamber before ‘ years thrice nine’had gone, in other words before he was twenty-seven, that implies that he was born no later than 1499 and probably earlier. But George was reappointed to the privy chamber in 1529, then George could have been born in 1503 or 1504, after his sister Anne. Of Anne’s early years, as of the childhood of all in her position, it is known next to nothing. In these years her father Thomas Boleyn was rising in importance and favourIn May 1512 he was sent by Henry VIII as his ambassador to the court in the Low Countries Of the Archduchess Margaret of Austria. On returning to England in summer 1513 he seny Anne to serve there, where she stayed mainly at Malines. Margaret found Anne so bright and pleasant for her young age, that she was more beholden , she said, to him for sending her than he was to her. Anne evidently studied under a tutor called Symonnet. It was than she wrote the letter to her father. Anne assured her father that she had written the letter herself. Her handwriting is more impressive than her French. Thomas Boleyn’s intention in sending Anne to Margaret was that she should acquire sufficient French to be employable in Chaterine’s household . In Margaret court, Anne was much influenced by the paintings and music that Margaret commissioned. Anne was one of eighteen ladies and maids of hounour. It is not know exactly what Anne did, but ladies and maids in such household were both companions and servants, keeping their mistress company and running errands. That could mean playing musical instruments, singing and dancing. Such ladies and maids would also be involved in festivities. Anne stayed just over a year. On 14 August 1514 her father Thomas Boleyn wrote to the archeduchess Margaret, asking her for Anne to return home. He said that there is going to be a wedding between Anne’s siter Mary and Louis XII, king of France, and that Mary would need attendants who could speak French.’Which request’, he wrote,’I neither could nor knew how to refuse.’It is not know exactly when Anne came backe home, but a list in the Biblioteque Nationale in Paris of those attending the wedding celebrations includes Anne’s siter Mary but not Anne. But the marriage was short-lived: Louis died on 1 January 1515. After Mary’s housband death she secretly married Charles Brandon, who had been sent to negotiate her return. From 1514 until 1521 Anne served as a member of Queen Claude’s household. QueenClaude was crowned in Saint-Denis in May 1516, surely Anne was there too. In June 1519 Anne’s father Thomas Boleyn attended the christening of Henri, the future Henri II, Queen Claude’s second child: and it is unknown if Anne was present there too. Anne also made the acquintance of Francis’s sister, Marguerite of Angouleme. In September 1535 one of the French ambassadors in England would write to tell Marguerite how Anne said that her grestest wish was to see her again. Anne spent the most formative years of her adolescence at the French court. However she must surely have thouroughly mastered the language. Francis, his wife, his sister Marguertite, and his mother Louise of Savoy were all commited patrons of arts, and Anne very likely absorbed some of their tastes. Also Anne and her brother George would later build up a significant collection of books in French, printed in Paris, and it was surely during her years in France that she aquired that interest. By the end of 1521 Anne was recalled to return back in England. Diplomatic reasons largely explain her return. At the end of January 1522 Francis noted her departure, along with that of the English scholars in Paris, suspecting that all of this meant that Henry intended to make war on him. Cardinal Wolsey’s remarks alluded to Anne father’s wish to see her well married as she entered in her twenties. In autumn 1529 Sir Thomas become earl of Ormond, thoughthat title was overshadowed by the English titles also received. In these years Anne’s father was rising in prominence and his daughter was evidently a lady at court. It is known that she took part in a pageant at Cardinal Wolsey’s residence York Place in March 1522, at Shrovetide, playing the part of Perseverance, as she is mentioned in the accounts. At some point there was evidently talk of marrying Anne to Henry Percy. heir of the fifth earl of Northumberland. For Anne’s father that would undoubtedly have been something of a coup, settling his daughter in the family of one of the leading nobleman of early Tudor England. Henry percy was serving in the cardinal’s household. When Wolsey went to court, Percy would resort his pastime to the queen’s chamber, where he would fall in dalliance with the queen’s maidens, among whom was Anne Boleyn. There grew such a secret love between them, Carvendish continued, that at length they were ensured together intending to marry. When the king heard of ii he was much offended, because he too had been smitten by Anne. And so he got Wolset to enfrynge to break the pre-contract between them. Anne did not married Henry Percy because Henry had already fallen in love with Anne., and employed Wolsey to block her marriage. Anne was also persued by Thomas Wyatt. The son of Sir Henry Wyatt of Allington castle near Maidstone, Kent, treasures of the chambers, Thomas had married Elisabeth Brooke, daughter of Thomas, Lord Cobham, around 1520 and a son, Thomas, had been born in 1521, followed by a daughter. Mary Boleyn Anne’s sister was the one who catches the eye of Henry VIII when she comes to court as a girl of fourteen. Dazzled by the golden prince, Mary’s joy is cut short when she discovers that she is a pawn in the dynastic plots of her family. When the capricious king’s interest wanes, Mary is ordered to pass on her knowledge of how to please him to her friend and rival: her sister Anne Boleyn. Anne soon become irresistible to Henry, and Mary can do nothing but watch her ambitious sister’s rise. In 1528, sweating sickness broke out with great severity. In London, the mortality rate was great and the court was dispersed. Henry left London, frequently changing his residence; Anne Boleyn retreated to the Boleyn residence at Hever Castle, but contracted the illness; her brother-in-law, William Carey, died. Henry sent his own physician to Hever Castle to care for Anne, and shortly afterwards, she recovered. It soon became the one absorbing object of Henry’s desires to secure an annulment from Catherine.[54] Henry had set his hopes upon a direct appeal to the Holy See, acting independently of Cardinal Wolsey, to whom he at first communicated nothing of his plans related to Anne. In 1527 William Knight, the King’s secretary, was sent to Pope Clement VII to sue for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine, on the grounds that the dispensing bull of Pope Julius II permitting him to marry his brother’s widow, Catherine, had been obtained under false pretences. Henry also petitioned, in the event of his becoming free, a dispensation to contract a new marriage with any woman even in the first degree of affinity, whether the affinity was contracted by lawful or unlawful connection. This clearly referred to Anne. As the Pope was, at that time, prisoner of Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, as a result of the Sack of Rome in May 1527, Knight had some difficulty obtaining access. In the end he had to return with a conditional dispensation, which Wolsey insisted was technically insufficient.[56] Henry now had no choice but to put his great matter into Wolsey’s hands, who did all he could to secure a decision in Henry’s favor,[57] even going so far as to convene an ecclesiastical court in England, with a special emissary, Lorenzo Campeggio from the Pope himself to decide the matter. But the Pope never had empowered his deputy to make any decision. The Pope was still a veritable hostage of Charles V, and Charles V was the loyal nephew of Henry’s queen, Catherine.[58] The Pope forbade Henry to contract a new marriage until a decision was reached in Rome, not in England. Convinced that Wolsey’s loyalties lay with the Pope, not England, Anne, as well as Wolsey’s many enemies, ensured his dismissal from public office in 1529. George Cavendish, Wolsey’s chamberlain, records that the servants who waited on the king and Anne at dinner in 1529 in Grafton heard her say that the dishonour that Wolsey had brought upon the realm would have cost any other Englishman his head. Henry replied, ” Why then I perceive… you are not the Cardinal’s friend.” Henry finally agreed to Wolsey’s arrest on grounds ofpraemunire.[59] Had it not been for his death from illness in 1530, he might have been executed for treason.[60] A year later in 1531 (fully two years before Henry’s marriage to Anne), Queen Catherine was banished from court and her rooms were given to Anne. Public support, however, remained with Queen Catherine. One evening in the autumn of 1531, Anne was dining at a manor house on the river Thames and was almost seized by a crowd of angry women. Anne just managed to escape by boat. When Archbishop of Canterbury William Warham died in 1532, the Boleyn family chaplain, Thomas Cranmer, was appointed, with papal approval. In 1532, Thomas Cromwell brought before Parliament a number of acts including the Supplication against the Ordinaries and Submission of the Clergy, which recognised royal supremacy over the church, thus finalizing the break with Rome. Following these acts, Thomas More resigned as Chancellor, leaving Cromwell as Henry’s chief minister.