Retha Warnicke - Warnicke's Theories On Anne Boleyn

Warnicke's Theories On Anne Boleyn

• She argued against the general theory that Anne Boleyn was born around 1501. Instead, she believes that Anne was born much later - in the summer of 1507.

• The popular rumours that Anne had several small deformities—like an extra fingernail or moles—are incorrect, since rumours of deformities only began after Anne's death and no-one who met her ever commented on them; - "... the two cannot logically be reconciled to each other. Had there been even a hint of a deformity in Anne's appearance, the Venetian, as well as the Imperial ambassadors... would have eagerly revealed this intriguing fact to their respective governments."

• "For many historians Anne remains the lady with the extra fingernail who was too flirtatious, even if in a harmless courtly way, for her own safety and well being. The result of this interpretation is that the responsibility for her tragic death resides with her, the victim, rather than with the king and his ministers, the ones who orchestrated her execution."

• Most importantly, she argues that Anne miscarried a deformed fetus in January 1536 which fueled 16th-century fears of witchcraft and sexual deviance and led to her execution - "In an attempt to understand her by the terms of her society, information from a wide range of sources will be used to support the argument that she miscarried a defective fetus in 1536. It was because Henry VIII viewed this mishap as an evil omen, both for his lineage and his kingdom, that he had her accused of engaging in illicit sexual acts with five men and fostered rumors that she had afflicted him with impotence and had conspired to poison both his daughter Mary and his illegitimate son, Henry, duke of Richmond."

Warnicke's theories were harshly criticised by some other historians - particularly E.W. Ives and G.W. Bernard. She defended her arguments in a 1993 article The Fall of Anne Boleyn Revisited, although she did not insist on some points as rigorously as before. She suggested that Ives's theory on Anne's fall (that it was caused by foreign policy and palace politics) was based on an over-reliance on Spanish sources and that his theory on her youth was ridiculous. Warnicke was even harsher with G.W. Bernard's suggestion that Anne might have been guilty of adultery in 1536. She called it a "dubious assertion" with no reliable documentary proof. She concluded:

As long as the lurid charges against the Queen exist only in unsubstantiated indictments and contradictory diplomatic writings, historians ought to remain sceptical about factional theories of her adulterous guilt or of factional politics. At the least, they owe it to the past not to further obscure the facts.

In her "author's note" to bestseller The Other Boleyn Girl, Philippa Gregory said her novel's conclusion was based upon Warnicke's findings in The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, but Warnicke has publicly distanced herself from the novel and its presentation of the Boleyns.