The Real Story of Anne Boleyn's Teenage Years | With Suzannah Lipscomb

thank you Anne Berlin one of the most talked about women in history Henry VII's second wife married for love and a male Heir executed at the Tower of London the woman who helped bring about the English reformation and who changed history forever thank you this year marks 500 years since amberlynn's debut at the English court and for all ambulance Fame and for all the fact that we think we know everything about her actually there's a period of her life about which we don't know that much it's the period before she returned to the English Court in 1522. so I've come to the beautiful heever castle her childhood home to think about who amberlyn was what made her what formed her into this character who would change the course of history how did she become amberlin foreign [Music] so what do we know about Anne and her upbringing she was the daughter of Thomas and Elizabeth Berlin well connected and Wealthy her mother Elizabeth came from the powerful Howard family Anne had two siblings who grew up with her Mary and George two other Berlin children died in infancy it seems likely that Mary was the oldest and Anne was the middle child but you really have to scrutinize the remaining evidence to piece together the many missing parts of her story [Music] there's so much we don't know about amblin we don't even know when she was born historians have disputed what year it was we do know for certain though that she spent her childhood here at heaver Castle in Kent the Berlin family had been on the rise for several Generations acquiring property all over Southern England including Hever Castle this was the ideal location for Anne's father to have his country base heaver was perfectly positioned for the career of her father Sir Thomas Berlin being able to get quickly to London to the court and also relatively quickly across the channel for his diplomatic connections on the continent [Music] Eva wasn't the grandest castle in Britain but it was a very comfortable place to grow up the blinds had turned it into a fine country home and now heva is staging a special exhibition about Anne's formative years even though it's been much changed since she lived here you can still feel that you're walking in her footsteps and find clues about Anne and her family including her ambitious and talented father Thomas foreign this is Thomas Berlin this is taken from the top of his tomb which is just outside Hebrew castle and it tells us a lot about who he was he was a man who had risen to power under Henry the seventh Henry VII father because Henry VII chose his courtiers to be men who were not just of noble birthbot who were ambitious educated intelligent they got there by their Merit in other words and Thomas continued to rise under Henry VII he could speak languages he was a diplomat he was sent off to negotiate with Margaret of Austria just three years after Henry came to the throne but we know why Henry liked him so much and it's in this picture here we have Thomas decorated with his robes and with his jousting armor because like Henry VII he was completely mad for the tournament and he was very good at it and this is pretty much how Henry VIII chose his friends and many of his advisors people who were spending time with him doing the things he loved and Thomas Berlin was one of those people and we can see that he rose because the robes that he's wearing and this garter here he was a knight of the Garter the highest order of Knighthood all of Thomas Berlin's children must have felt quite a burden of expectation they had a lot to live up to they certainly inherited their parents intelligence I'm meeting heaver Castle's historian Dr Owen Emerson to discuss the Berlin children's time here Anne's relationship with her siblings was such an important part of her life wasn't it and here of course we've got Mary her sister what do we know about the relationship between the two girls I think they shared a lot in common I think we can say they had a close and meaningful relationship and they are each other's equals in a way they like pushing each other's boundaries what do we know about the girls education we know that Thomas Berlin is a humanist he believes in educating his daughters as well as his sons and we know that he is a gifted linguist himself I think he um you know felt very deeply about education and we know that and goes on to be very a very keen champion of Education as well but also it's very expedient to have well-educated uh children that can be placed in multiple different courts and that can have an ear to the ground as to what's going on very convenient if you're a diplomat and courtier as as Thomas Berlin is and I suppose we can see here that he is Edge educating his daughter the same way as Catholic Catherine of Aragon has Mary and had been himself so there's a sense that he's preparing Mary and Anne to enter Catherine's service and be appropriately educated for that absolutely and Elizabeth Berlin is obviously well educated as well she is in the train of Catherine of Aragon right from the start so I think he is thinking of you know where their position is going to be they're most likely going to marry into the nobility as he and three generations of the berlins have by this point and he's really sort of trying to open their Horizons as broadly as possible one gets the sense that the Berlin children were very close but also very brilliant I think they are dazzling to a degree they are incredibly close I think they're as thick as thieves uh together and they really sort of Riff Off each other in terms of um education in terms of political thought theology [Music] heaver was a place where all the blind children were actively encouraged to excel at music dance and learning in the Castle's collection is an extraordinary book that reveals the sophisticated and learned woman that Anne was to become [Music] so this is a book of ours that belonged to amberlin and it is an incredibly valuable wonderful thing so a book of ours was a personal Book of Prayers full of prayers to the Virgin Mary that could be said at certain hours of the day but also it has information in it about how to pray to Saints or how to Mark festivities and it's in Latin and you can see that this is just gorgeously uh decorated so this is on Vellum which is calf skin very very fine and it's it's all been done by hand so you have to imagine the hours that went into creating this look at this gorgeous little angel here in the Border or this strange Fantastical creature and of course it shows the Virgin Mary and here we have Jesus's death we don't know how it came into ambulance possession but we know it was hers because we find a page that tells us that this once belonged to Anne Berlin because there are maybe eight inscriptions in this book here's one of them but the earliest Was Won by Anne herself and here it is it says amberlin the time will come amberlyn but we need to note the context of this so we've got here one of the penitential Psalms Psalm 6. it says Lord do not be angry with us forever when will you return how long O Lord and on this page we have Christ doing just that returning this is the second coming of Christ and we've got the resurrection of the Dead these little heads popping up out of the ground and it's under this that Anne has written Luton vyanthra the time will come and Berlin she signed it and quite a lot of the time people might talk about this inscription of ants the time will come as being something that she's hoping for on Earth that she hopes the time will come when she's Queen and we know that maybe she's hoping for that as well but above all I think this tells us something else about Aaron because we know that she becomes Queen and she marries Henry VIII and there's been lots of judgment about whether she is being a sort of Vixen in acquiring this man what we forget is that Abilene is actually a very Pious person somebody for whom her faith was Lively and animating and actually who encouraged Henry in his faith to break from Rome because in part of what she believed she believes the time will come when Christ comes again at Hever Anne was brought up to be full of Faith artistic and clever but her education and experience was about to be accelerated profoundly as her family connections took her away from Kent and into a much wider world [Music] in 1513 whilst am was still a young girl she was sent away to the court of Margaret of Austria at Michelin in the low countries Thomas Berlin's negotiations there as a diplomat the previous year had obviously secured this place for Anne to be a maid of honor at one of the major European courts [Music] and traveled across the channel into lands controlled by the vast Habsburg Holy Roman Empire governing the Netherlands for the emperor was Margaret of Austria Margaret was both powerful and inspiring promoting the education of women and setting up a special library for the female members of her Court Margaret seems to have been immediately delighted with her young guest she reported to Thomas Berlin that Anne was so well educated and so pleasant for her young age that I'm more beholden to you for having sent her to me than you are to me Anne set about writing her own letter home to heaver if you look at it closely I think it helps settle one of the recurring debates about Anne one of the questions about Avalon is when she was born and this is a key piece of evidence for deciding that question because the possible dates of 1501 or 1507. and this is a letter written by Anne to her father from the court at Michelin where she had gone to serve Margaret of Austria and it is clearly not a letter by a six-year-old we know that Anne went there in 1513 this is a letter that she wrote when she was probably 12 years old and the letter is back to her father and I find it so touching it's touching because it's written in French so she's trying to demonstrate to her father that she is doing precisely what he wants she's learning this language that he surprises so much but bless her it is written in really bad French and it is written with appalling spelling the 16th century was not an age of very consistent spelling but Anne is excelling herself here with the eccentricity of her orthography and it also tells us a bit about the pressures of being Thomas's daughter because it starts by saying that when she comes to the court she will be noticed by the queen this is Catherine of Aragon of course and feels the pressure even as this young girl of at 12 years old to conform to her father's wishes and to please him she apologizes in the middle of the letter for the fact that it's so badly written that her spelling is so bad I mean she knows that she's not doing a great job but she's trying hard and at the end she signs off that she is very humbly to your grace uh your most humble daughter and Boolean and a bull in notice there she's added the duh who's very French and Boulan which she's spot in a very French way so she is trying here to be the girl that her father wants her to be as the young daughter of a powerful and ambitious man Anne was not the Mistress of her own destiny European power politics soon meant that the young woman was on the move again as Henry VII redrew his alliances in late 1514 she moved from one European superpower to another from the Holy Roman Empire to France [Music] this amazing tapestry was produced in France in 1525 until May and it was commemorating an event that had happened a decade earlier the marriage of the king of France Louis XII to Mary Tudor Henry VII's sister and we know that amberlyn was there at least she had been moved into the service of Mary now to be queen of France having come from Margaret of Austria and so I like to think that she could be that young girl just over Mary's children because Ann was still a teenager and here she is among Mary's women all of them here and among them a young woman can you imagine going through adolescence and all of the strain of that and here being in the midst of this extraordinary occasion and being trusted to be serving this new queen of France to be operating there because you can speak French and English you can be a go-between that this responsibility being given to this young girl it's a lot on her shoulders and yet Anne seems to have thrived but it demonstrated the faith that was put in amblin the trust that this teenage girl could bear the responsibility of now being a lady in waiting to a queen it shows that Henry VII trusted Thomas Berlin's girl to be in that Prime position and I wonder how much the sense of the occasion and the ceremony the magnificence impressed itself on Anne I wonder if it's set in her an ambition to be part of something like that one day [Music] oh foreign [Music] but the marriage didn't last within three months King Louis was dead Mary Tudor returned to England but Amber Lynn remained in France now she became one of the women attending Queen Claude wife of the new French King Francois the first her main residence was the beautiful Chateau de blois in the Loire Valley here at Bloor Ann was close to the heart of another impressive group of powerful well-educated women Who provided challenging and inspiring role models so these are 18th century Miniatures of Anne and some key players at the French court so we are seeing these individuals who perhaps a more romantic lens yeah so quite beautified aren't they it's like a romantic they do look quite sort of sentimental look at this one of Anne with her little little cheeks a little pink lipstick it's very very nice but they tell us about the people with whom Anne was mixing in France who do we have here so we have King Francis the first um and queen Claude uh to whom was in service we also have the King's sister Margarita who I would argue is a very influential figure in Anne's life and so too is Louise of Savoy the King's mother what influence do you think these two women had because it's true that Queen Claude as I actually didn't knock Queen for very long is she she does quite early and she's quite shy and having children a lot of the time so these two women might have been women to whom and was exposed in terms of seeing power operated Louise of Savoy acts as Regent for Francis and so she's seeing a a real model of queenship almost in Louisa Savoy and Marguerite is surrounding herself by rather radical religious thinkers and I think we can very much see Anne's own strain of ideas about reforming the church germinating here that's fascinating isn't it because this is really early in terms of Reform I mean this is a really the beginning to protestantism but Anne is being exposed to these ideas whilst he's in France and I think also what you're saying about power within Louise of Savoy being a regent is crucial because and I suppose saw two ways of being a woman in power in France you've got Claude who is retiring and doing the right thing and producing sums but then you've got Louise who obviously has produced a son who's King but also who's operating with much more of that kind of forthright power and it's almost as if Anne felt like she could choose between these two models and it does seem that Anne took some inspiration from a shy Queen Claude Recent research has found an artistic connection between the two women in a beautiful book that was made for Anne in the 1520s the work was carried out by heaver's assistant curator Kate McCaffrey ah here we go this is this wonderful book of ours in which you've recently done such important research well it's a really exciting object that we have in our collection and I think it can show a lot of direct inspiration really that Anne took from her time in France and in the train of Queen Claude the book itself was printed in Paris in 1527 so we have a direct French link but also the style of the book The decoration is directly reminiscent of books that that Anne would have been exposed to at the French Court in the service of Claude so these are the very same borders that feature in claude's own book of hours that Anne would have been around it's a Renaissance style of border so you see these kind of classical columns with decoration and the oval borders with inscriptions and these were very much influenced by Anne's time spent in France and a really nice direct link to her time with Claude and her inspiration that she took from her that's fascinating because that means that your research into the decorative scheme of the book gives us some important information about things that um hold dear from her time in France but also piety I absolutely think that Anne was influenced in terms of her religion whilst she was in France Queen Claude was known for being very Pious and conducting very Pious household she was also around religious figures like Marguerite donglem who obviously was a kind of real Patron for the religious reform that was happening at the time which we know Anne enjoyed later she held France dear to her throughout her life so we know that this book belongs to Anne Berlin because actually she has signed an inscription within the book which actually is just here and it reads remember me when you do pray that hope doth lead from day to day and Berlin why has Anne's signature been cut off it's been cut there very frustratingly by a later binder so when the book was rebound he's cut the pages and he has sliced and signature there which is very frustrating it really tells us a lot I think about Anne and also her love of opulent books uh beautifully illuminated books that she she took from her time in France [Music] foreign almost certainly attended events where she encountered her father Thomas representing Henry VII it's tempting to think that she was able to update him on the Affairs of the French Court from an Insider's perspective particularly at the famous diplomatic spectacular between Henry VIII and Francois the first in 1520 known as the field of cloth of gold we don't know for sure if Anne was there but Queen Claude definitely was and it's likely that Anne was in her retinue but the wheels of diplomacy were turning again anglo-french relations worsened and this may be why Anne now aged around 21 finally returned to England after over seven years abroad France had become wholly familiar to her now leaving must have been an enormous wrench but it was time to enter a different world the court of Henry VIII and his Queen Catherine of Aragon heaver has recently identified one of its paintings as being of Henry's Spanish Queen ah so this is beautiful Kate and you've recently re-identified this picture for this exhibition we have decided to actually rename this beautiful portrait it was actually bought by heaver in 2004 when it was labeled in good faith as Catherine Parr so Henry VII's sixth wife but we have decided after research by the National Portrait Gallery in Tui very similar version of the same portrait that actually we are going to rename this beautiful woman as Catherine of Aragon so obviously Henry's first wife and yes you see she's beautifully gowned in this cloth of gold it's very resumptuous red velvet as well some historians think that she still is Catherine Parr but our research comes from the National Portrait Gallery who worked on the Lambeth portrait which is a very similar copy of this same portrait and they actually dated it so they used dendro technology X-ray and UltraViolet Imaging and have dated it to 1520 at which point Catherine Parr would have only been eight years old so it seems much more likely that this is a portrait of Catherine of Aragon so she's got this I mean lovely Hood and the very very fine clothing very rich fabrics and I suppose what we see here is a woman very different from the one we've come to expect we're told normally by the 1520s she's losing her looks if this is an accurate image of her though this is a much more striking woman much more like the beautiful Catherine she was than we've been led to believe so we think uh in 1520 Catherine of Aragon would have been around 35 so at this point she has had her last pregnancy although she does not yet know that and I think there's still hope that she will bear a male Heir although that Fades quickly after this point um and so yes this is really the face that Anne would have seen when she arrived back at the English Court 500 years ago of course it's very dangerous to read character into 16th century portraits and so we can't really tell the mind of the woman behind this picture but one thing that is striking to me is this attire and this kind of pose gives such a sense of this powerful formidable Regal woman that Catherine was and the ambling was coming in contact with when she came back to the court in 1522 yes so I I completely agree actually I think this really might really very much represents Catherine in her prime almost she's secure in her position here as Queen of England and at this point Catherine favored the Berlin's and obviously nobody knew what was to come in the next decade when that friction would occur foreign [Music] that the first record of Anne at the English court is during the joyful festivities before the beginning of Lent 500 years ago in March 1522 fresh from France Thomas Berlin's youngest daughter burst theatrically onto the scene so here she is here she is absolutely this is Anne in the English fashion so that tells us of course that she has made it back to the English Court after all this time what do we know about her first appearance at the court so we know she makes her first appearance at a pageant called The Chateau vet it's part of the shrewd hide celebrations for some ambassadors that are visiting she's playing one of the virtues and uh yeah she is playing perseverance her sister Mary is also present playing kindness and they are essentially held captive in the castle guarded by vices and ultimately King Henry VII will liberate them from the castle it's so interesting isn't it with the perspective of posterity we know that the role that Anne played that day would turn out to be so apt if only she knew what was going to happen next and she certainly needed a huge amount of perseverance in the years ahead now we know that Anne wasn't playing the part of beauty which is one of the other virtues that they could have chosen I think Anne was certainly not defined as a beautiful woman even her closest contemporaries uh referred to her as moderately beautiful I think she was defined by something else by her Charisma her wit her intelligence and often people talk about Anne's eyes that she's able to command people's attention and a room so if we imagine she's here before us and he was this amazing clothing that you've got here this gorgeous dress would have passed through the court and been just another lady but be distinguished by her whipped I think so yes I mean we we see her here in the English fashion this is an English gown we know from the only contemporary likeness that we can say for sure is and that she wore an English Gable Hood as we now call it we probably more readily associate her because of her posthumous portraiture with the French fashions but we know that Anne very much wore the English Fashions so yes this would have been her her day where her every day wear and so just for those who are thinking what's the French and English fashion you're thinking of the French rounded hood that portrait we all know of her was what's not what she's got on here at all not at all she's got on what we today would call an English gablehood that then would have been called a bonnet and a frontlet and it looks probably more severe than that rather more Sleek French fashion which rather daringly showed a bit of hair this is probably more conservative and there's sort of a myth that Anne brought the French fashion to the English Court whereas we know it was there for some time beforehand I think you really get a flavor here of uh the layers and the the quality of the clothing that Anne would have been wearing it's almost like her her battle armor here batalarm is such a good phrase for it because actually this is beautiful and luxurious and gorgeous but that's what you need to put on if you're appearing at the court of Henry VII you're being in Castle of Aragon's train you need to appear of a certain stature and status and and this is it this was an extremely expensive gown to create only a family of her station and above will be able to afford to wear it this is not where for labor this is a dress for leisure [Music] of events the wooden golf England and Beyond nothing would be the same her extraordinary personality would Place Anne at the very Heart Of History so by 1522 when Anne came to the English Court 500 years ago who was she well she was a woman of sophistication she had been brought up here with an education that was finer than almost any other woman of the time she had gone to these European courts where she had become Cosmopolitan and glamorous and sophisticated she was someone who had become dazzling someone who could attract the attention of the highest in the land foreign [Music] thanks for watching this video on the history Hit YouTube channel you can subscribe right here to make sure you don't miss any of our great films that are coming out or if you are a true history fan check out our special dedicated History Channel History hit dot TV you're gonna love it

Channel: History Hit

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Keywords: history hit, history hit youtube, anne boleyn documentary, anne boleyn hever castle, anne boleyn childhood home, life of anne boleyn, anne boleyn life, anne boleyn history, suzannah lipscomb, suzannah lipscomb documentary, suzannah lipscomb anne boleyn, suzannah lipscomb tudors, hever castle history, henry viii anne boleyn, anne boleyn and henry viii, anne boleyn, becoming anne boleyn, the making of anne boleyn, history hit tv, history hits, history documentary

Id: sreCunWDqm8

Length: 32min 56sec (1976 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023