![]() There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness, she wore a high dress covering her throat. She had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand, six fingers. Nicholas Sander, a hostile Jesuit priest writing in the reign of Anne's daughter Elizabeth I, clearly subscribed to the latter view:Īnne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. Contemporary descriptions of Anne’s appearance, moreover, were rarely objective and were influenced by religious, political and cultural mores, viewing her either as a paradigm of religious virtue or as the incarnation of the Devil. So much, then, for discovering what Anne Boleyn ‘really’ looked like.Īs Susan Bordo notes, ‘beyond the dark hair and eyes, the olive skin, the small moles, and the likelihood of a tiny extra nail on her little finger, we know very little with certainty about what Anne looked like’, in no small part because of the campaign of destruction waged against her by her husband after her death, in which portraits of her were destroyed. The overall results from their research remain incomplete. Yet the researchers involved in this have warned that their recent findings have been misinterpreted by the press. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the news this week, when it was declared that the Nidd Hall portrait of Anne (above, right) is in fact a realistic depiction of Anne, because of its close match to the 1534 medal bearing a defaced Anne alongside her motto ‘The Most Happi’. But it is Anne's physical appearance that is perhaps the most lingering and heated of controversies about her. Her birth date, her personality, her relationship with Henry VIII, whether she was guilty of the crimes attributed to her – all of these, and more, arouse fierce debate. Every aspect of Anne Boleyn's life is controversial.
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