Anne Boleyn: Villain or Victim?

Anne Trivia 

• Anne was sometimes called 'The Great Whore', 'The Concubine', or 'the goggle-eyed whore' by her critics.
• Anne was also called Anna and Nan and Anne's last name was sometimes spelled Bullen, Bolina, and Bollein because uniform spelling had not yet been adopted.
• Katherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry VIII, who was also charged with adultery and executed (although in her case the charges were not false), was Anne Boleyn's cousin.
• Anne Boleyn's portrait is in the halls of Hogwarts in the movie Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. Whether or not this was an intentional reference to the rumors that she was a witch is unknown.
• Henry VIII may have become betrothed to Jane Seymour the same day Anne was beheaded.
• Anne Boleyn's ghost is said to haunt the Tower of London.
• Anne was so emotionally unstable during the last months of her life that her ladies were afraid to tell her that her beloved dog, Purkoy, had died.
• Henry made a gift of Anne's family home, Hever Castle, to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, after their marriage was annulled.
• Henry VIII never mentioned Anne Boleyn by name after she died. He always remembered his third wife, Jane Seymour, who died in childbirth, as his 'true' wife.
• Anne was purported to have six fingers on one hand, although there is some speculation that this was a rumor generated to lend credence to the accusation that she was a witch.
• Anne's true birt date is unknown. Most scholars place her birth year in either 1501 or 1507.
• On April 1, 2005, Wing Commander George Melville-Jackson approached British Home Secretary Charles Clarke in a bid for a formal pardon for Anne. Although she was long-dead, he asserted that she never deserved to be branded as a criminal; in the event that a declaration that she was not guilty of her alleged crimes was not possible, he would have settled for a pardon. He also sought the removal of her remains from her resting place at the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey, where Elizabeth I was buried. [2] The request was later rejected, since the antiquity of the case meant that so much of the original evidence had been destroyed that the British government was incapable of proving her innocence.
• The most popular theory behind her downfall is that Anne was removed by a palace plot created by her political enemies. They wanted to control foreign policy and religious politics themselves and get the queen out of the way. They were more than prepared to sacrifice five innocent men to do it (who were also Anne's friends and might, therefore, object to her destruction if they were left alive.) The architect of the plot was Thomas Cromwell, the king's favourite adviser, who had angered the queen over his destruction of the monasteries and friendliness to the Seymours. He therefore wanted to get rid of Anne before she did to him what she had done to Thomas Wolsey in 1529.