The mysterious prophecies about Anne Boleyn

Dive into the mystical world of Tudor England with us as I explore the enigmatic prophecies surrounding Anne Boleyn!

In an era rife with superstition, discover how visions and omens foretold the rise and fall of one of history’s most captivating queens. From eerie books of prophecy to foreboding dreams and cryptic verses, see how these predictions shaped the fate of Anne Boleyn and those around her.

Uncover the stories behind these chilling prophecies and decide for yourself: were they mere coincidence, or a glimpse into the future?

Transcript:

Tudor England was a superstitious place and time, with events being taken as portents and prophecies being taken seriously, but did you know that there were prophecies concerning Anne Boleyn?

George Wyatt, grandson of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, who was, of course the famous poet and courtier who appears to have been in love with Anne at one point, wrote a biography of Anne in her daughter Elizabeth I’s reign. At the start of his work, George Wyatt explains that one of his sources for his book was “a lady, that first attended on her both before and after she was queen”, which is believed to be Anne Gainsford who did, indeed, serve Anne Boleyn, both before and after Anne’s marriage to the king. She was a woman close to Anne.

Anyway, Wyatt shares as story concerning Anne Boleyn, while she was waiting to be queen, being sent a book claiming to contain old prophecies. Let me share George Wyatt’s own words about this:

“There was conveyed to her a book pretending old prophecies, wherein was represented the figure of some personages, with the letter H upon one, A upon another, and K upon the third, which an expounder thereupon took upon him to interpret by the king and his wives, and to her pronouncing certain destruction if she married the king. This book coming into her chamber, she opened, and finding the contents, called to her maid of whom we have spoken before, who also bore her name: “Come hither. Nan,” said she, “see here a book of prophecy; this he saith is the king, this the queen, mourning, weeping and wringing her hands, and this is myself with my head off.” The maid answered, “If I thought it true, though he were an emperor, I would not myself marry him with that condition.” “Yes, Nan,” replied the lady, “I think the book a bauble; yet for the hope I have that the realm may be happy by my issue, I am resolved to have him whatsoever might become of me.””

So it wasn’t something that Anne Boleyn took seriously, a bauble, something worthless.

George Cavendish, gentleman usher to Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, wrote of a prophecy that the cardinal spoke of in his final days as they gazed at an image of a dun cow:

“When this cow rideth the bull,
Then, priest, beware thy scull.”

Cavendish writes that Wolsey didn’t understand the prophecy, but with hindsight of what later happened, Cavendish notes that “it was a-working to be brought to pass”. He explains that the dun cow was the king’s beast, “appertaining of antiquity unto his earldom of Richmond, which was his ancient inheritance”, and that the bull “betokened Mistress Anne Boleyn” because “her father, Thomas Boleyn, gave the same beast in his cognisance”, so when the two eventually married, the prophecy was fulfilled, “for”, Cavendish writes, “a number of priests, both religious and secular, lost their heads for offending of such laws as were then made to bring this marriage to effect.”

Still further prophecies are those maid by Elizabeth Barton, a young woman known as The Holy Maid of Kent or Nun of Kent. Elizabeth began having visions when she was about 19 and working as a servant. She entered a convent and began having visions about the king and his desire to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled and his plan to marry Anne Boleyn. Barton claimed that she was visited by an angel telling her to go to the king “to command him to amend his life” and that “if he married Anne, the vengeance of God should plague him.” She had many more visions, including regarding the king’s reign, and “that he shall not be king a month after he married the Queen’s grace”, and she was eventually executed in 1534 for high treason.

Yet another prophecy concerning Anne was one about a Queen of England burning.

In July 1530, according to Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, when Henry VIII commented to Anne that “that she was under great obligation to him, since he was offending everyone and making enemies everywhere for her sake”, she replied to him: “That matters not, for it is foretold in ancient prophecies that at this time a Queen shall be burnt: but even if I were to suffer a thousand deaths, my love for you will not abate one jot.” In May 1536, Chapuys mentioned this prophecy again, writing: “The Concubine, before her marriage with the King, said, to increase his love, that there was a prophecy that about this time a queen of England would be burnt, but, to please the King, she did not care. After her marriage she boasted that the previous events mentioned in the prophecy had already been accomplished, and yet she was not condemned. But they might well have said to her, as was said to Cæsar, “the Ides have come, but not gone.”
Chapuys refers to the prophecy being ancient, but in 1535 the Abbot of Garadon was recorded as saying to John Bower that by 1539 “When the Tower is white and another place green, then shall be burned two or three bishops and a queen; and after all this be passed we shall have a merry world.”

Now Anne Boleyn was not burnt at the stake, she was beheaded in May 1536, but after she had been found guilty at her trial on 15th May 1536, she was actually sentenced to be burnt at the stake or beheaded, Henry VIII chose for her to be beheaded.
However, she apparently did escape a fire at one point. Lancelot de Carles, secretary to the French ambassador and author of Poeme sur la mort d’Anne Boleyn, a poem written in 1536 about Anne Boleyn’s life and execution, wrote:

“Thus it happened that by two or three signs
Marvelous and great that the Queen received,
She found herself greatly confused in spirit.
The first was by a furious flame
That suddenly surprised her in her chamber,
If there not been one there to warn her promptly
To escape and take her
To a place she could stay;
It was such that had she not left then,
She would not have been safe from the fire.”

It appears that this fire in her chamber was in early/mid January 1536 because de Carles mentions it after Catherine of Aragon’s death (7 January) and before Henry VIII’s jousting accident (24 January) and Anne Boleyn’s miscarriage (29 January). It sounds like a serious fire and it appears that Anne only escaped because someone spotted it, perhaps one of her ladies.

In his 19th century book “Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, Charles Mackay mentions the prophecies of Mother Shipton, who is believed to have been born in Knaresborough in the reign of Henry VII. He explains that she went to the Abbot of Beverley and foretold Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, amongst other events.

A final prophecy is one mentioned by Andy Holroyde in his Masters dissertation “Prophecy and the Fall of Anne Boleyn” and an article he wrote on the subject for History Today magazine. Holroyde found a document in the British Library which he believes is a document sent to Thomas Cromwell in 1535. It was printed in London, but originated in Flanders, and Cromwell claimed that it was a prophecy made in Flanders “threatening the king with a conspiracy of those who were nearest his person”. This caused him to launch an investigation into Queen Anne Boleyn and her circle, and eventually resulted in her fall.

The document found by Holroyde was printed in London at the end of 1535 for the coming year and was translated by Miles Coverdale, having originated in Flanders. Holroyde explains that it contained a chapter “concerning ‘the strife and trouble of this year, and the cause therof’” and that the chapter contained “an unusually specific prediction, which states that in 1536, in response to God having guided the righteous kings such as Henry away from the false Roman Church, Satan will do all he can ‘by the children of unbelief (especially by the shaven Madianites)’ to stir up trouble, including instigating ‘secret treason’.”

Holroyde goes on to say, “In the frenzied atmosphere of those few days in May 1536, rumour became evidence, conversations became conspiracies and flirtations became treason, all under the cloud of a prophetic warning”.

Did Cromwell really act on a prophecy? It’s hard to know, but Holroyd states that Cromwell was regularly sent prophecies.

So, those are the mysterious prophecies concerning Anne Boleyn. I hope you’ve found them interesting.

Notes and Sources

• Cavendish, George (1827) The life of Cardinal Wolsey, which also includes “Extracts from the Life of Queen Anne Boleigne, by George Wyatt”: p. [417]-449, London, For Harding and Lepard, p. 300, and p. 429-30.
• Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 4 Part 1, Henry VIII, 1529-1530, 373
• Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 10, January-June 1536, 909
• Ascoli, Georges, La Grande-Bretagne Devant L’opinion Française Depuis La Guerre de Cent Ans Jusqu’à La Fin Du XVIe Siècle, 233–34, De la Royne d’Angleterre, Lancelot de Carles, lines 303-312. Translated by Susan Walters Schmid in “Anne Boleyn, Lancelot de Carle, and the Use of Documentary Evidence”, Dissertation, ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY, December 2009.
• ‘Henry VIII: Appendix’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 6, 1533, document 10, ed. James Gairdner (London, 1882), pp. 681-685.
• Holroyde, Andy (2017) “Predicting the Fall of Anne Boleyn”, https://www.historytoday.com/archive/history-matters/predicting-fall-anne-boleyn and https://www.hud.ac.uk/news/2018/june/predictingthefallofanneboleyn/
• ‘Henry VIII: November 1533, 21-25’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 6, 1533, ed. James Gairdner( London, 1882), British History Online https://www.british-history.ac.uk/letters-papers-hen8/vol6/pp578-591 [accessed 7 July 2024].