ANNE BOLEYN, limili (awtit nf liitrjj tiri figjitjj. CHAPTER I, Birth—Descent—Parentage—Education—Goes to France as maid of honour to Queen Mary—Enters the service of Queen Claude—Her talents and accomplishments—•Her proposed marriage—She returns to England—Appointed maid of honour to Quern Katherine—Regulations of the Royal Household. j IIE records of no Queen Consort of England more fully exemplify the vanity of human ambition, nor are more replete with startling and romantic incidents, than those of Anne Boleyn; a queen, whose character remains to the present day a debateable point in history. By the advocates of the Reformation, whose cause she zealously supported, even her vices have been painted as virtues, whilst the opposite party have depicted her as a monster, deformed in person, and base and brutal in mind. Sanders, one of her bitterest detractors, says, "she was ill-shaped and ugly, had six fingers, a gag tooth, and a tumour under her chin, with many other unseemly things in her person. At the age of fifteen she permitted her father's butler and chaplain to have access to her person ; afterwards she was sent to France, where she was kept privately in the house of a person of quality ; then she went to the French court, where she led such a dissolute life that she was called the English hackney. That the French king admired her, and from the freedoms he took with her, she was called the king's mule." These slanders, however, bear the colour of untruth upon their face. Her exquisite portrait by Holbein, in the British Museum, and from which the engraving in this work is taken, is an incontrovertible witness of her beauty ; and the preceding pages will show that her moral conduct, although highly exceptionable, was, at least, not so black as her detractors would have us to suppose. Of her birth more than one idle tale has been dressed up in the sober garb of truth. The most scandalous is by Sanders, who assures the world that the King entertained a tender penchant for her mother, and to gratify his desires, sent her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, ambassador to France. Two years afterwards, Sir Thomas returned, when finding his wife enceinte, be sued for a divorce in the Archbishop of Canterbury's court ; but the Marquis of Dorset was sent to him, to declare that the King was the father of the child, and to request him to pass the matter over,