Boleyn, ANNE, second wife of Henry VIII., was born in 1507, and was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn, afterwards Viscount Rochford and Earl of Wiltshire, by Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. She spent some three years (1519-21) at the court of France, and soon after her return to England was wooed by Lord Henry Percy, the heir to the earldom of Northumberland, and by King Henry himself, who in the April of 1522 began to shower wealth and honours on her father, and who ere this had dishonoured her sister Mary. Not till the king's divorce from Catharine of Aragon was set afoot (in May 1527) does Anne seem to have favoured his addresses; but long before Cranmer pronounced the divorce (23d May 1533) she was Henry's mistress, and in the preceding January they had been secretly married. She was crowned with great splendour in Westminster Hall on Whitsunday; but within three months Henry bade her 'shut her eyes to his unfaithfulness, as her betters had done, for he could abase yet more than he had raised her.' His cooling passion was not revived by the birth, in September 1533, of a princess, the famous Elizabeth, still less by that of a still-born son, on 29th January 1536, barely three weeks after the death of Queen Catharine. On next May-day the king rode off abruptly from a tournament held at Greenwich, leaving the queen behind, and on the morrow she was arrested and brought to the Tower. The story runs that his jealousy was kindled by her dropping a handkerchief to one of her lovers in the lists below; anyhow, a week before, a special commission had been secretly engaged in examining into charges of Anne's adultery with her own brother, Lord Rochford, with Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris, and William Brereton, gentlemen of the privy chamber, and with Mark Smeaton, a musician. Only Smeaton made any confession; but on the 12th the four commoners, on the 15th Anne and her brother, were tried and convicted of high treason. Her own father and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, were instrumental in her death, the latter presiding over her judges, the twenty-six peers, and pronouncing her doom. No vestige of the evidence remains. On the 17th Smeaton was hanged, and the other four beheaded; and two days later, upon Tower Green, Anne submitted her slim neck to the headsman's axe. Henry the next day married Jane Seymour. That Anne was guilty of adultery with Henry is certain; that she was guilty of incest with her brother, or even of adultery with her other alleged paramours, remains at least not proven. The character of this 'mother of the English Reformation' was not saintly; but she probably was not the Jezebel that Saunders, the Jesuit, would have us believe.
According to him, she was even in person ugly, misshapen, monstrous; whereas we know that she was a comely brunette, her only defect a supplemental nail. See Hepworth Dixon's History of Two Queens (1874); Paul Friedmann's Anne Boleyn (2 vols. Lond. 1885); and works cited under HENRY VIII.