[MR] BBC: Will the Real Anne Boleyn Please be Upstanding

[Garth Groff and Sally Sanford]

Noble Friends,

A controversy is raging among Tudor academics over how Anne Boleyn actually
looked.

All this brouhaha is because Anne was crowned Queen on 1 June 1533. At this
time she was heavily pregnant, and would soon give birth to Elizabeth.
Henry was disappointed and was already considering dumping Anne. After
several miscarriages, Henry was fed up, and in 1536 decided to get rid of
her with trumped up charges of adultery and treason.

Because of Anne's quick fall from favor in Henry's eyes, she just wasn't
around long enough to sit for an official portrait. Her most famous and
accepted portrait is generally considered to have been painted in 1583:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Boleyn#/media/File:AnneBoleynHever.jpg .

Ah, but there are at least Holbein studies for a portrait. One is labeled
as Anne Boleyn, but it seems to show a somewhat older woman. A second
three-quarter view of a younger woman, may be  a real image of Anne. An
unidentified full-face sketch is thought to be of Anne, and is at the
center of the current controversy.

To find the "truth", investigators from the University of Bradford have
applied facial recognition techniques to drawings, and to paintings of
Queen Elizabeth and Anne's two cousins, to look for family characteristics.
Their tentative conclusion is that the drawing of the older woman is
mislabeled, and is suspected of being Anne's mother Elizabeth Howard. The
unidentified full-face drawing is *likely* to be Anne herself. The
three-quarter view is not mentioned.

We will probably never know for sure, but to nobody's surprise some other
academics are already diputing the Bradford team's work.

You can see the two drawings in this video:
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c3d2e581k7do .

For more about Anne herself, go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Boleyn
.

Yours Aye,

Mungo Napier, Laird of Mallard Lodge 🦆
Continuing a crusade to keep the original Merry Rose relevant and in
business.