ANNE BOLEYN, Second Queen of Benry the Eighth. CHAPTER I. Birth-Descent-Parentage-Education-Goes to France as maid of honour to Queen Mary-Enters the service of Queen Claude-Her talents and accomplishmentsHer proposed marriage-She returns to England-Appointed maid of honour to Queen Katherine-Regulations of the Royal Household. HE records of no Queen Consort of England more fully exemplify the vanity of human ambition, nor are more replete with startling and romantic incidents, than those of Anne Boleyn; a queen, whose character remains to the present day a debateable point in history. By the advocates of the Reformation, whose cause she zealously supported, even her vices have been painted as virtues, whilst the opposite party have depicted her as a monster, deformed in person, and base and brutal in mind. Sanders, one of her bitterest detractors, says, "she was ill-shaped and ugly, had six fingers, a gag tooth, and a tumour under her chin, with many other unseemly things in her person. At the age of fifteen she permitted her father's butler and chaplain to have access to her person; afterwards she was sent to France, where she was kept privately in the house of a person of quality; then she went to the French court, where she led such a dissolute life that she was called the English hackney. Two and be reconciled to his wife; to which he consented. "Thus," continues Sanders, although Anne went under the name of Sir Thomas' daughter, Henry the Eighth was in reality her father." Burnet pronounces this assertion a falsehood, invented more than half a century after the death of the parties implicated, to blacken their fame, and injure the reputation of Queen Elizabeth. And when we consider, that Anne was born in 1507, the date given by Camden, or, what is more probable, 1501, as Herbert says she was twenty years old when she returned from France, we cannot for a moment put faith in this statement by Sanders; for Henry the Eighth, who was born in 1491, was at the period of Anne's birth but a mere boy. Sir Thomas Boleyn was not sent ambassador to France till 1515; and if the records of his family are to be relied on, all his children had been born previous to that date. The family of Boleyn, Bullen, or Bolen -the name is differently spelt-was of French descent, and appears to have settled in Norfolk shortly after the Norman Conquest. Anne's great-grandfather, Geoffrey Boleyn, was apprenticed to a mercer, and became one of the most wealthy and distinguished citizens of London. Having entered the Mercers' Company, he was advanced to the dignity of Lord Mayor in 1457. For his energy, wisdom, and discretion, in preserving the peace of the city, when the partisans of the rival roses met in congress there to reconcile their differences, he was invested with the titles of knighthood. In all his undertakings he prospered, nothing he touched but turned to gold; and to crown his good fortune, he married the daughter of the lord of Hoo and Hastings. To firmly establish his family, he purchased the manor of Blinking in Norfolk, of Sir John Falstaffe, and the manor of Hever from the Chobhams in Kent; and thus, whilst he gave good portions with his daughters, who intermarried with the Cheyneys, the Heydons, and the Fortescues, of Norfolk, he reserved for his son an estate fully adequate to the pretensions of a noble bride, who was the fair Margaret, daughter and co-heiress of Thomas Boteler, the great Earl of Ormond, whose ancestors had suffered in the Lancasterian cause. But conspicuous as he was for shrewd sense and enterprising perseverance, munificence and generous liberality formed equally prominent features in his character. To the poor householders of London he left the magnificent bequest of one thousand pounds, and to the poor of Norfolk a donation of two hundred pounds. His equally fortunate, but more aspiring son, Sir William Boleyn, attached himself to the court, and was made a • Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Richard the Third. Sir William succeeded in marrying his children into noble families, the most successful match being that of his son Thomas, the father of Anne Boleyn, to the Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the Earl of Surrey, afterwards Duke of Norfolk. During the greater period of the reign of Henry the Seventh, Sir Thomas Boleyn lived in retirement at his paternal mansion of Rochford Hall, in Essex; but the marriage of his wife's brother, Lord Thomas Howard, with Anne, sister of the consort of Henry the Seventh, brought him into close connection with royalty. At the commencement of Henry the Eighth's reign, after being appointed a knight of the body, he was made deputy warden of the customs of Calais, and from this time he regularly took part in the toils and pleasures of the court. Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn and Elizabeth Howard. The place is no more certain than the date of her birth; history, topography, and tradition, having all referred it to Blickling Hall in Norfolk, Hever Castle in Kent, and Rochford Hall in Essex. In 1512 her mother died of puerperal fever. Her father afterwards married a Norfolk woman of mean origin; and it is not improbable that it was this second wife, and not the mother of Anne, as Sanders, perhaps by mistake, has asserted, who listened to Henry the Eighth's improper overtures. After the death of her mother, Anne resided at Hever castle, where she received a better education than usually fell to the lot of court ladies at that period. When the peace with France was |