Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn was queen of England for three years, and the effort to marry her broke the English church from Rome. She was raised at the courts of the Netherlands and France, came back to England around 1522 unusually well educated and fashionable, and refused to become Henry VIII's mistress as her sister Mary had been. The seven years that followed were spent trying to have the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled by a pope who was effectively a prisoner of Catherine's nephew, the emperor Charles V. When that failed, Thomas Cromwell built the alternative: a series of statutes making the king supreme head of the church in England, which is the legal foundation of the English Reformation and was produced by a marriage problem rather than by doctrine. Anne herself owned and circulated reformist books, including Tyndale's work, and pressed evangelical clergy on the king, so the religious direction was not incidental to her. She was crowned in 1533, heavily pregnant, and gave birth to Elizabeth in September; two further pregnancies ended in miscarriage, the second in January 1536 of a male foetus. Within four months she was arrested, tried for adultery with five men including her own brother, and beheaded on Tower Green by a swordsman brought from Calais. The charges are disbelieved by almost every modern historian; the dates in the indictment place her in places she was not. Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour the next day. Her daughter reigned for forty-four years and never spoke publicly about her.

• Lived: 1501 CE – 1536 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: royalty