The Real Face of Anne Boleyn?

The "Moost Happi" medal is the sole surviving contemporary portrait of Anne Boleyn that we know of. It's badly damaged, so it's a source of frustration for people who want to know the true appearance of Anne Boleyn.














The most commonly recognized portraits of Anne - the National Gallery portrait and the Hever Castle portrait - were created during the reign of her daughter, and may have been intentionally designed to look like Elizabeth. They may bear very little resemblance to the real Anne Boleyn.

Another portrait - a sketch by Holbein - is labeled as being Anne Boleyn (and is accepted as being an authentic portrait of her by the Royal Collection) but many people insist it can't be Anne because the heavy jawline, double chin, and light auburn hair do not match the more "accepted" version of her appearance. Go to this website to see a side-by-side comparison of the two Holbein sketches labeled as Anne Boleyn.














Elizabeth seems to have accepted something close to the Holbein portrait as an authentic likeness of her mother, if her portrait ring is to be believed.

But now, we may be closer to the true face of Anne Boleyn. Using facial-recognition software, Amit Roy-Chowdhury of the University of California, Riverside, has matched the portrait medal to an extant painting of Anne Boleyn. And the closest match to the medal is a portrait that has been long-dismissed as being a true likeness: the Nidd Hall portrait. Research on the subject is not complete, but the association is very interesting.

The Nidd Hall portrait isn't flattering. The sitter wears an English-style gable hood, and is identified as Anne by the AB brooch pinned to her gown. But the face with its long nose and receding chin is so different from our "accepted" image of Anne that for a long while, experts have suggested that it was a portrait of Jane Seymour re-touched during the reign of Elizabeth to turn it into a portrait of Anne.

This link has a superimposed slider which allows you to compare the image to the portrait medal.

Some of the jewelry the sitter wears shows up in portrait of Henry's other queens.

Jane Seymour wears the ropes of pearls across her bodice, and Kateryn Parr wears the tri-stone pendant.

The Nidd Hall sitter may also be wearing the "consort's necklace" all of Henry's queens after Anne were painted wearing.

Like the National Portrait Gallery version and the Hever Castle portrait, the Nidd Hall painting was created at least fifty years after Anne Boleyn's death. Unlike the prior two examples, the Nidd Hall portrait was obviously based off of a different "pattern."

The NPG and Hever portraits are supposed to be based off of the same painting ("B" necklace pattern) as the Hoskins miniature. Some suspect the original was a lost Holbein, or the portrait which belonged at one point to Lord Lumley.

It's possible that the positive identification of the Holbein sketch, Lucy Churchill's reconstruction of the portrait medal, and the identification of the Nidd Hall portrait have brought us closer to the true face of Anne Boleyn.

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Did Anne Boleyn Have Six Fingers?

Poor Anne Boleyn, the most slandered woman in history. In her lifetime, she was called "the great whore," and she died on the scaffold, convicted of incest and adultery. She made a morbid joke at one point and said history would call her "Queen Anne Lack-Head," but she ended up being called even worse things.

The myth that Anne had six fingers originated soon after her death. It was never mentioned during her lifetime, and her enemies - who criticized her for every flaw - would have been sure to make note of a sixth finger. Deformities of any kind were seen as the mark of the devil.

Anne would never have been accepted as one of Katharine of Aragon's ladies in waiting if she'd had even the "small bit of nail" some authors and historians have mentioned. Competition for these positions was fierce. Even a small imperfection could disqualify a candidate.

Nor would Henry VIII have considered her a suitable mother for his children if she had a physical flaw. He might not have even sought her as a mistress in that case.

She could not have hidden such a deformity with swinging sleeves, or by tucking it behind another finger as is sometimes alleged. Her servants washed her hands before every meal and saw her completely nude every day. And servants were the number one source of gossip in those days. It would have been known by the whole court within days of her arrival and it would have been made a big issue when it became clear Henry wanted her to be the next queen.

Nicholas Sander is the one who popularized the rumor of a sixth finger in his book, The Rise And Growth of the Anglican Schism, written in 1585. Sander likely never saw Anne Boleyn in person; he was only about six years old when she died. He was a fervent Catholic apologist, writing during the time of Anne's daughter, Elizabeth. Sander despised Elizabeth and her mother, whom he blamed for the start of the heresy that drove England from the Catholic faith.

As a result, Sander piled every slander and infamy he could think of on Anne Boleyn's memory. In that era, physical deformity or ugliness was thought to stem from evil inside. Since Sander saw Anne as evil, he made her hideously ugly in his descriptions.

Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair, and an oval face of a sallow complexion as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness she wore a high dress covering her throat. In this she was followed by the ladies of the court, who also wore high dresses, having before been in the habit of leaving their necks and the upper portion of their persons uncovered.

I've previously written about why Sander was wrong about Anne's hair color, and a casual glance at portraits of the era shows Anne and her ladies continued to wear low-cut gowns. But the myth about the sixth finger found traction. It was so pervasive that George Wyatt, grandson of Thomas Wyatt, the poet, had to mention it in his The Life of Queen Anne Boleigne:

There was found, indeed, upon the side of her nail upon one of her fingers, some little show of a nail, which yet was so small, by the report of those that have seen her, as the Workmaster seemed to leave it an occasion of greater grace to her hand, which, with the tip of one of her other fingers, might be and was usually by her hidden without any least blemish to it.

Wyatt never saw Anne either - and was born after his famous grandfather had died - but likely felt he had to take on a myth that kept growing and defend her in a way that felt reasonable to him, conceding that maybe one of her fingers was a bit irregular, but it wasn't as bad as people thought it was. He did the same thing with the "wen" Sander mentioned. Wyatt explained she had a few moles, though he's the first to mention she had them. He also said she had the "clearest of complexions," but her contemporaries described her as being "swarthy" or olive-skinned.

Still, myths are sometimes more fun than the truth, and so it remained as a bit of "trivia" passed down over the years. Even some modern biographers accept the Wyatt description of an extra nail on her finger, but there is not a single shred of evidence originating from her lifetime - and, again, it's something people would have mentioned.

Recently, a lifelike mannequin of Anne Boleyn was installed at Hever Castle ... they asked the artist to remove the sixth finger.



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Anne Boleyn, A Redhead?

Hollywood has continually given Anne fair, pale skin and dark hair. However, from the scant evidence we have, it seems more likely that Anne had auburn hair, and her contemporaries described her as having a "swarthy" or "dark" complexion, which may have meant she had an olive skin tone. Anne Boleyn’s coloring might have been closer to a young Sophia Loren than any of the pale, dark-haired actresses who have depicted her.

Though there aren’t any extant contemporary portraits that show her coloring, the earliest portraits of Anne show reddish hair. To the left is the Hoskins miniature in which Anne wears her famous “B” necklace. It's suggested by Eric Ives that John Hoskins copied an original portrait by Holbein, which is known to have existed until the late 1700s, when it vanishes from the historical record.

Queen Elizabeth owned a ring which contained a miniature of herself and her mother. While Elizabeth is unlikely to have had any memories of Anne Boleyn, others in the court would have been able to describe her features and confirm whether or not the portrait in the ring was a good likeness.

The identification of the portrait has been questioned because the woman has light red hair. Some have suggested it's actually Kateryn Parr, but Elizabeth would not have had to conceal an image of Kateryn, as she seems to have concealed this image, and it's unlikely she would have chosen an image of Kateryn from an era decades before Elizabeth knew her.

Owen Emerson of Hever Castle has examined the ring and has found traces of darker pigment in the creases. It's difficult to tell the shade from the traces that remain, and of course, lighting conditions could give us a false impression. 

Another argument in favor of Anne’s hair color being something other than black is the Holbein sketch. The identity of the sitter has been long in dispute, but it is now definitively identified in the Royal Collection as Anne Boleyn.

Sir John Cheke was the one who did the identifications. The young King Edward was fascinated by the "great booke" of sketches Hans Holbein had done of the members of the court, and asked Cheke, his tutor - later his secretary - to identify the sitters.

Anne Boleyn was Cheke's patron, so he should have been able to identify her. Cheke was reliably accurate in his other identifications (as the link above explains, only a couple of his identifications are in question.) What’s most interesting is that Cheke identified Anne as a woman with light-colored hair.

The sketch been long contested by historians who feel the round face and double chin do not match other, more accepted portraits of Anne. However, the puffiness of her features could be explained by pregnancy. Another argument in favor of the sitter being Anne Boleyn is the casual attire she's wearing. Only the highest-ranking ladies could be seen in such clothing.

Another, less well-done portrait of Anne based on the National Portrait Gallery pattern shows Anne with a shade of hair associated more with her daughter, though that could have been intentional.

Due to the lighting conditions in Tudor palaces, it would have been easy to mistake Anne’s hair color as darker than it was. Similarly, her eyes were likely brown, but they were called "black" by her contemporaries.

This portrait of Mary Tudor Brandon is an excellent illustration of the point. In the locket on the right is an actual piece of Mary's hair, retrieved from her tomb in the 18th century.

The only reference to Anne's hair color we have is Thomas Wyatt's description of her as "brunette." That means "brown" to us, but it may have had a completely different meaning at the time. "Auburn," as an example, meant blonde or whitish at the time. Wolsey called her "the night crow," but that is not necessarily a reference to her hair color.

Nicholas Sander was the one who popularized the notion Anne had black hair in his ardently pro-Catholic Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism, published in 1585. Sander almost certainly never laid eyes on Anne Boleyn. He was less than ten years old—and in another part of the country— when she died. He is so painfully biased in his account that he has been nicknamed “Slanders” by other historians.

His biographical section on Anne included claims of the famous sixth finger, bucked tooth, jaundiced complexion, and a big, ugly wen on her throat that forced her to wear high-necked gowns to conceal it. He also makes the unfounded allegation that Anne was Henry’s own daughter, from an affair with Elizabeth Howard Boleyn. (Henry would have been barely more than a child when this alleged affair occurred.) 

Sander's purpose in claiming Anne had black hair was to make her as sinister as possible. The Victorians saw women with dark hair as being earthy and sensual, as opposed to the delicate, blonde, English rose, and so Anne continued to be depicted with black hair. Not everyone followed the convention, however. Eduoard Cibot painted Anne Boleyn as a blonde in his famous portrait of her in the Tower.

In the end, it was the dark-haired image of Anne in the Hever portrait that captured the popular imagination, and every actress who has portrayed her since has modeled their look on this portrait.

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