The Forgotten Years of Anne Boleyn: The Habsburg & Valois Courts, by Sylvia Barbara Soberton

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In The Forgotten Years of Anne Boleyn: The Habsburg & Valois Courts, Sylvia Barbara Soberton takes you on a journey through sixteenth-century Belgium and France, showing you where Anne Boleyn spent her formative years and introducing the royal women she served. 

In her lifetime, Anne Boleyn was said to have been “more French than Frenchwoman born”, and in her death Henry VIII granted her the mercy of being executed by a French executioner instead of an English one, who would butcher her “little neck” to pieces. 

This executioner from Calais who wielded a two-handed sword was, however, ordered before Anne was put on trial for adultery, incest and treason, making it clear that her death was a foregone conclusion. Anne’s rise and fall is a tale of love and loss, religion and spirituality, queenship and power. The final years of her life are well known, but her youth remains an understudied topic.

 
Anne Boleyn was raised in Belgium and France, spending seven years at the most glittering and progressive courts of Europe. Her mentors were the most brilliant and fascinating women of the sixteenth century: Margaret of Austria, Claude of France, Louise of Savoy and Marguerite of Navarre. 

It is from them that Anne received a spiritual and humanistic education and learned how women could wield power and use it for greater good. When she returned to England in 1521, Anne was equipped with knowledge and Continental gloss that most of her female contemporaries lacked.

 
Anne Boleyn was first sent to the court of Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands, where she stayed for a period of about fifteen months. Margaret was one of the most powerful women of the sixteenth century Europe and Anne’s first example of how a woman could wield power in a man’s world. 

At first glance, she might have cut a rather sombre figure in her widow’s apparel, but this was just a ploy devised to underline her status as an influential widow, feme sole, as widowhood gave women opportunities to operate independently of men. Margaret was an avid book and art collector, as well as an accomplished musician and painter; life at her court was never dull.

 
Towards the end of 1514 Anne left Margaret’s court and joined Mary Tudor’s household in France. Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s eighteen-year-old sister, married the French King Louis XII in October 1514. Both Anne and her elder sister Mary Boleyn served as Mary Tudor’s maids but it was Anne who would make a lasting impression on the French. Following Louis XII’s death in January 1515, Mary Tudor hastily remarried to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, creating a scandal of epic proportions. 

She and her entourage left France in an atmosphere of scandal in April 1515 but Anne Boleyn was not among Queen Mary’s maids. “After Mary returned to this country”, wrote Lancelot de Carle many years later, Anne “was kept back by Claude, who succeeded as Queen”. 

The fact that Anne was able to stay at the French court despite the scandal caused by her previous royal mistress speaks volumes about Anne’s character. Margaret of Austria was probably right when she wrote to Anne’s father that Anne was exceedingly “bright and pleasant for her young age”. Queen Claude shared this view.

 
Queen Claude was Louis XII’s eldest daughter by Anne of Brittany. Born in 1499, she was about the same age as Anne Boleyn, who is believed to have been born in or around 1501. An eye-witness reported in 1518 that Claude was “small in stature, plain and badly lame in both hips” but was “very cultivated, generous and pious.” 

The Salic law in France prevented women from assuming the crown but Claude married Francois of Angouleme, her father’s closest male kinsman, who succeeded Louis XII as king. It is sometimes suggested that Claude’s court was run almost as a convent but there is no evidence to that effect. Quite the contrary; Claude was a patron of the arts, enjoyed reading romances and had a deep appreciation for poetry.

 
After Anne spent seven years at the Valois court serving Queen Claude, “no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman.” She spoke impeccable French, read French books, especially religious texts on current ecclesiastical debates, dressed in French fashions and slipped French mannerisms into her conversations. It was this aura of continental gloss that singled her out from the crowd upon her return to England in 1521.

 Sylvia Barbara Soberton

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About the Author

Sylvia Barbara Soberton is a writer and researcher specialising in the history of the Tudors. She debuted in 2015 with her bestselling book “The Forgotten Tudor Women: Mary Howard, Mary Shelton & Margaret Douglas”. Sylvia’s other best-sellers include “Golden Age Ladies: Women Who Shaped the courts of Henry VIII and Francis I” and “Great Ladies: The Forgotten Witnesses to the Lives of Tudor Queens”. You can find Sylvia on Facebook,  Goodreads and Twitter @SylviaBSo