Erasing Anne Boleyn From History: The Badges and Emblems

After Anne Boleyn's execution, Henry sought to erase her from history. The records of her trial -assuming any were kept in the first place - were destroyed. Her personal correspondence - which appears to have been voluminous - was destroyed. Her portraits were destroyed or hidden away so carefully we're unaware of them today. Henry hoped no trace of his thousand-day queen would remain and history would take him at his word and dismiss Anne as an adulterous whore best forgotten. It was a task at which the king was ultimately unsuccessful.

After the records and portraits were purged, and her possessions had been disposed of, Henry began the monumental task of erasing Anne from the buildings that had been erected and renovated during her short reign. It proved to be a much more difficult task than he may have anticipated.

In the days of high illiteracy, the nobility relied on heraldry and emblems to make their identity known. The crest was mainly for the nobility, who would be able to decipher the family connections it displayed, but the ordinary people would be more familiar with the personal device or badge.








Badges were sometimes derived from their family's coat of arms, or might be a play on words. The Tudor symbol of two portcullises was one of the latter. ("Two doors." Get it?)
Badges could incorporate a number of elements to form an emblem that would relay a message to the viewer.

(Photo by lizzybeans11 CC License)

An emblem favored by Henry VIII was his initial woven with his queen's in a "love knot" pattern. Below is an example of the HK Henry wore on his armor until he ended his marriage to Katharine of Aragon.

Those initials could be found everywhere: on Henry's armor, on the walls of his palaces, public buildings, on his personal possessions, stamped on the covers of books, and painted on furniture. Because Henry's reign was one of unprecedented royal construction, his initials - and those of his current queen - ended up adorning a multitude of structures.

When Anne became queen, she and Henry embarked on a concerted effort to replace all of the HKs, pomegranates, and Katharine's arms with Anne's symbols.

Anne Boleyn's principal badge was a white falcon. After her coronation, the crowned bird held a scepter in one claw and stood on a stump that spouted red and white roses. The falcon symbolized steadfastness, and its color symbolized purity. The latter aspect was celebrated in her coronation song. The stump symbolized the fruitless reign of her predecessor, which she would bring to life again. Anne also used the emblem of the leopard (it was the animal that flanked her arms on the left.)

The white falcon reigned supreme. HA, and RA (Regina Anna) were carved into ceilings and walls, framed into windows, cast into jewelry, and stamped on the covers of books. The falcon perched on the lids of Anne's cups and on the back of her chairs.

But when Anne fell, there was a concerted effort to wipe out all of those emblems, and replace them with those of his new queen, Jane Seymour. The new windows Henry had ordered installed at Dover Castle (likely the site of their marriage in November, 1532) with Anne's badge were ordered to be torn back out and replaced with HI ("Iana" for Jane) and Jane's phoenix. Anne's leopards were given re-carved heads and tails to become Jane's secondary emblem of the panther.

But there were so many, some were bound to be missed. Some of them remained because they were high on ceilings, hard to reach - like the ceiling of the Great Hall in Hampton Court - or in buildings where Henry had forgotten they had been installed.


The ceiling of the gate at Hampton Court known as "Anne Boleyn's Gate" is a Victorian reproduction, but a few real examples of Anne's initials and emblems still exist, despite Henry's efforts. HA ciphers remain on one of the walls. The rood screen at King's College Chapel, Cambridge still bears her falcon emblem, RA, and AS (For "Sovereign Anne.")

Henry couldn't even root all of them out from among his own belongings. The postmortem inventory of Henry's possessions notes items that were still adorned with Anne's initials, including a bowl of gold dust (for drying ink on letters) with an enameled HA on the lid, and a tablet of gold inscribed with the same cipher.

When Henry saw those initials, was there ever a jolt of memory? Did it make him recall the joyous days when their love was writ large across the edifices of England and monogrammed on every possession?

Henry continued honoring and blotting out queens throughout the rest of his reign, but the efforts became slapdash as time went on. After Jane Seymour's death, he no longer bothered putting his wife's initial on the coinage.

Henry never spoke Anne Boleyn's name again, but he failed in his mission of eradicating her memory. Oddly enough, he allowed his daughter, Elizabeth, to wear her mother's initial in the Whitehall Family group mural. Around her neck, Elizabeth wears a necklace with a dangling "A" pendant.

Elizabeth's choice of jewelry displays a touching tribute to her mother's memory. Henry's motivations in allowing it are less clear.



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Erasing Anne Boleyn From History: The Documents

Very little documentary traces of Anne Boleyn remain. We know her mostly through the accounts of others - accounts that are often extremely hostile. Were her records destroyed intentionally, or by Time's indifferent hand?

Only a few of Anne's letters in her own handwriting still exist. A letter written to her father in 1514, and one written to Wolsey. We have the text of a handful of others, copied in the State Papers. Anne appears to have been a prolific correspondent, so this dearth of surviving copies would seem to indicate they were intentionally destroyed. This would not be unusual, since people would not want to be found with the letters of a convicted traitor among their papers.

We also have a letter, supposedly found among Cromwell's papers after his execution, which may be a copy of a letter from Anne Boleyn in the Tower. Historian John Strype, who had access to records which may have been destroyed in a fire in 1731, says he saw another letter from Anne in which she angrily rejected a plea bargain which would depend on her "confessing" and would stand on her innocence, even unto death.

There are very few records of Anne's trial. Only the salacious indictments and the verdicts survive. Contrast this to the numerous records concerning Katheryn Howard, which include interviews with witnesses, reports of the investigating commissioners, transcripts of testimony, and the written confessions of the accused themselves. That was just the investigation - Katheryn was never brought to trial.

Image courtesy of Luminarium.org

Yet nothing like that from Anne's trial survives.

We know that there once were some more records, because they were examined by William Camden, who had access to the state papers of Elizabeth's minister William Burghley. It was Camden who confirmed some of the biographical details of Anne Boleyn which are still subject of debate by historians. It's assumed these papers were later destroyed, possibly in the 1731 Cottonian Library fire. What we lost is almost impossible to tell. But from the silence of the early historians, it's assumed that the trial records were already gone.

But if the records were - indeed - intentionally destroyed, who did it and why?

Historian David Starkey has put forth the theory that the documents never existed in the first place, that Anne was condemned primarily on verbal testimony that intentionally wasn't transcribed.

The theory explains why we don't know what Lady Bridget Wingfield supposedly confessed on her deathbed, or what was actually said by the Countess of Worcester when her brother confronted her. By contrast, Katheryn Howard's fall was a genuine investigation that generated paperwork as the investigators tried to determine what had happened, instead of a hasty frame-up to justify a pre-determined verdict.

A joint letter by Henry and Anne,
showing the scars of the 1731 fire

Another theory claims that Henry VIII and Cromwell had Anne's trial records quietly destroyed because they were trying to cover up the shameful lack of solid evidence against the queen, hoping the people of the future would take the indictment and verdict at face value. The purge supposedly occurred around the same time as Henry had Anne's portraits and emblems destroyed.

Yet another theory puts forth that Queen Elizabeth had the documents destroyed when she came to the throne to try to eliminate the evidence of her mother's condemnation. But why would she leave the salacious indictment intact, if that was the case? Elizabeth seems to have taken the position that the past was past, and left it at that. She seems an unlikely culprit.

All in all, Starkey's explanation, or a purge of documents by Cromwell seems the most likely to me.




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Erasing Anne Boleyn From History: The Portraits

After Anne Boleyn's execution, her remains were hastily buried in the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula with no stone to mark the spot where they rested. After she was dead, Henry set about the task of erasing his wife from history. He was rather proficient at it.

It appears most of Anne's portraits were destroyed. The only contemporary portraits that survive are a badly-damaged lead portrait medal, the sketch made for her coronation feast, and - possibly - a Holbein sketch. The other images we have of her were painted in her daughter's lifetime.

Anne's renown and the amount of curiosity this lady inspired meant there once had to be many portraits of her. (Consider the number of portraits created during the short reign of Kateryn Parr.) It is almost a certainty that Anne sat for several portraits. We have no record of a Holbein painting, but it's highly possible one was done, considering Henry's preference for this artist. There may have also been miniatures.

Once a painting of a monarch was created, artists were frequently commissioned to make copies for families to display in their own homes. In those days, prominently displaying a portrait of the monarch was a popular way of demonstrating allegiance, and portraits were also frequently given as gifts from monarchs to favored courtiers and diplomats.

The famous "B" pattern portrait likely is based from a image of a younger Anne, painted before she was queen, during the time when Henry was perusing her as a love interest. After she was queen, Anne would have worn finer jewels that she's pictured in that image; in her portrait medal, she may be wearing the "consort's necklace" (she also wears it in the Nidd Hall painting.) Charles I had a painting of Anne Boleyn copied in miniature by John Hopkins the Elder. It was noted in a 1625 inventory of the king's art as "don by Hoskins after an oweld pictur." It may have been the original image on which the "B" pattern portraits (The NPG/and Hever versions) are based.

So, what happened to Anne's portraits? After her fall, most people probably destroyed them. Courtiers would not have wanted to have the image of a traitor displayed in their home for fear of angering the king. But a few may have survived the purge. Some may remain hidden away to this day.

One full-length portrait of Anne Boleyn supposedly survived in the collection of Baron Lumley, an art lover who collected portraits, especially those of Holbein. It appears after Anne's fall, Lord Lumley chose to put the portrait in storage instead of destroying it. If Anne's portrait was painted by Holbein, that may be the reason Lumley decided to preserve it.

In the 1590s, Lord Lumley had a dispute with Queen Elizabeth over a debt, and all of his property was inventoried. The painting was one of the items that was noted in the inventory. (Of the over 200 portraits in Lumley's collection, only 30 can be identified as extant today.)


The Lumley portrait was known to have survived until the latter part of the 1700s, but after that, it vanished without a trace. It was presumably sold off from the collection, as the other pieces were, but who bought it, and what did they do with it?

It's also possible that portraits still exist but are not identified or are mislabeled. Our "image" of Anne may not match the reality of her appearance, and so we may already have portraits of her we simply do not recognize.

A sketch by Holbein of a woman labelled as Anne Boleyn still exists and is definitively identified in the Royal Collection as being Anne, but people insist it cannot be her because the light reddish hair and double chin which do not match how we picture Anne.

Perhaps the Holbein portrait is still out there somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. One can hope.


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