The Lyte Pedigree – James I, Elizabeth I and Anne Boleyn

 

The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)

 

‘Scotland's James VI 'stole the English Crown’ ran a recent headline in The Telegraph. (1)

According to historian Tracy Borman, who has a written a biography of James, his accession was suspect as his predecessor Elizabeth I had never formally named him as her heir.

Whatever was the legality of James’s kingship, what was indisputable was that throughout her long reign, the question of the succession was a touchy subject to Elizabeth. She was reluctant to say who should come after her, even when it became clear in her advancing age that she would never marry and bear a child.

Even on her deathbed, Elizabeth evaded the issue. Although a story had circulated that in her last days she had indeed nominated the Scottish James as the next monarch of England – “Who should succeed me but a king... but our cousin of Scotland”? she said, it was almost certainly a fabrication. The statement was attributed to Sir Robert Cecil and his party, who in the queen’s declining years were secretly paving the way for James’s accession. (2)

Although the king was largely greeted with enthusiasm by his new English subjects — the people always looked to the rising than the setting sun, Elizabeth herself had even admitted — his right to rule England had not always been certain.

According to the will of Henry VIII, James’s Stuart line had been barred from the English succession due to Henry’s acrimonious relationship with his nephew — James’s grandfather — James V of Scotland. That left the crown to Henry’s sister Mary Tudor’s descendants. However, Elizabeth I muddied the waters. Mary’s great grandson Edward Seymour was declared illegitimate by the queen who loathed Edward’s mother, Lady Katherine Grey. Katherine had made a clandestine marriage behind her back.

Even with Edward Seymour disbarred, James still had rivals lasting into Elizabeth’s later years. There were other descendants of Mary Tudor to consider, and there was the royally connected Earl of Huntingdon. And there was also the problem of Lady Arbella Stuart, a cousin whom James would later keep under lock and key.

  

 

Isabella Clara Eugenia by Jan Muller after Peter Paul Rubens, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

James was particularly alarmed by the Infanta of Spain, Isabella Clara Eugenia. Like Huntingdon, she was a descendant of King Edward III, and as a Roman Catholic, the hope of those of the old faith in England. In 1594, a tract entitled A Conference about the Next Succession to the Crown of England was published arguing that Isabella, not James, had the strongest claim. (3) To make matters worse, in 1601, Robert Devereux, the hotheaded Earl of Essex, led a rebellion, wrongly claiming that his enemy Robert Cecil was plotting to place Isabella on the throne upon the death of Elizabeth. But all this came to naught. When the old queen finally expired in March 1603, James peacefully assumed the English crown.

To firmly establish his right and to celebrate the new Stuart regime, James used the propaganda of visual imagery. One good example is an early 17^th century painting of Elizabeth ripping apart the myth of the eternally youthful Gloriana. It presented her as old and weary accompanied by Time and Death. The public at large would not have seen the painting, but the idea of ‘out with the old and in with the new’ was widely disseminated with prints celebrating the new Stuart Dynasty. Many were in the form of illustrated genealogies showing James’s descent from King Henry VII. The message was loud and clear — he was the rightful successor to the Tudors.

 

 

Elizabeth with Time and Death by an Unknown Artist, Corsham Court

 

The most impressive of these is the Lyte Pedigree created by the antiquarian Thomas Lyte. ‘Written in parchment and set forth in rich colours in a very large table’ (that is a panel), it was presented to the King in 1610. (4) The original has not survived, but a copy, also by Lyte, is the British Library. Unfortunately, of the original nine panels put together, only five remain. The corner pieces are missing.

The top panel is the most significant. At the apex, King James sits enthroned surrounded by portraits, descriptions and escutcheons of his ancestors and relations. On the right, he appears again with his wife Anna of Denmark, with a branch setting forth between them meant to depict their offspring Henry, Elizabeth and Charles (their images are absent in the ovals).

 

 

 

  The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)

 

Beneath the Stuarts are the Tudors, starting with likenesses of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. Emerging from the couple are small circles (with very brief descriptions) of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I among others. These four monarchs are of lesser significance in the chart as James wanted to stress that he was ‘sole monarch of both kingdoms... as next and immediate heir to Henry VII and Elizabeth his queen’ through their daughter Queen Margaret of Scotland.

Of the many heraldic devices in the Lyte Pedigree, a curious one is of a crowned falcon on a stump with the legend Mihi et Mea. It is the emblem of Anne Boleyn during her brief time as queen. She appears in the chart not as an especial mark of honour, but simply for genealogical value as the mother of Elizabeth I. Jane Seymour similarly shows up as the mother of Edward VI.

 

 

 The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)

The crowned falcon is on the right

 

Thus the inclusion of the falcon badge seems puzzling. Given Anne’s insignificance to James, not to mention her lingering infamy — the inscription ‘Queen Anne Bullein, Marchioness of Pembroke, and eldest daughter of Thomas Bullein, Earl of Wiltshire, she was put to death 1536 in the Tower’ alludes to her execution — why was her emblem depicted in the pedigree at all? Lyte was known to be friends with fellow antiquarian William Camden and most likely read his Remains of A Greater Work. Camden had included a description of the royal bird: 'His wife Queen Anne, a happy mother of England's happiness by her most happy daughter, bare a white crowned falcon, holding a sceptre in her right talon, standing upon a golden trunk, out of the which sprouted both white and red roses, with MIHI ET MEA’. (6)

Despite Lyte’s almost certain awareness of the falcon’s association with Anne Boleyn, as a researching historian, he would also have known of its other significance — it represented her daughter Elizabeth. Despite Anne’s notoriety and what little memories she had of her mother, Elizabeth was not adverse to her memory. At the start of herreign, Anne’s image was included in a tableau at her coronation, and at the end of it, a banner of Anne’s coat-of-arms, combined with Henry VIII’s, was carried at her funeral (7). Elizabeth had even adopted her mother’s crowned falcon as her own. It appears on her virginals, on napkins at her court, and upon a book banner in combination with Elizabeth’s device of the phoenix. (8)

In spite of James's dynastic intentions to elevate the Stuarts, the presence of the falcon in the Lyte Pedigree gave acknowledgement to Elizabeth as his predecessor. But it was not only the falcon that served this purpose, to the right of it is a missing panel which would have contained verses paying tribute to the late queen. These would have been comparable to the epitaphs for Henry VII and Henry VIII (beneath a pillar surmounted by a seated female figure, probably Concordia). The falcon, as one of Elizabeth’s devices, would have been placed as a ‘supporting beast’ upon her missing epitaph, similar to that of Henry VIII’s, which had an English lion and a Welsh dragon on either side.

 

 

 The Lyte Pedigree by Thomas Lyte, The British Library (detail)

At Anne Boleyn’s fall in 1536, Henry VIII had taken pains to erase traces of her. Her heraldic emblems were largely destroyed, though some have survived. (9) How interesting it is that some remnant can still be found in a document made decades after her death in the new century.

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1. The Telegraph, Aug 22, 2025.

2. Paul Johnson, Elizabeth I – A Study in Power and Intellect, Omega - Futura Publications, London, 1976, p. 436.

3. A Jacobean Antiquary Reassessed: Thomas Lyte, The Lyte Genealogy And The Lyte Jewel by Arnold Hunt, Dora Thornton, and George Dalgleish. The Antiquaries Journal, 96, 2016, p. 183.

4. Ibid., p. 174.

5. Anne Boleyn is generally considered to be the younger daughter, though some modern historians, like Retha Warnicke (The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989), propose that Anne’s sister Mary was the younger.

6. A Jacobean Antiquary Reassessed, p. 173. William Camden, Remains of A Greater Work, printed by G.E. for Simon Waterson, London, 1605, pp. 163-164.

7. Roland Hui, Anne Boleyn: An Illustrated Life of Henry VIII's Queen, Barnsley, Pen and Sword Books, 2023, pp. 180-181.

8. ‘Queen Elizabeth’s Napkin’, Tudorfaces blog: https://tudorfaces.blogspot.com/2013/06/queen-elizabeths-napkin.html. Elizabeth’s regard for her mother was also evident in a locket-ring which included miniature portraits of the two women together: ‘The Chequers Locket Ring: A Mother and Daughter Reunited?’, Tudorfaces blog: https://tudorfaces.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-chequers-locket-ring-mother-and.html.

9. For example, the falcon badge in the choir screen in King's College Chapel, Cambridge.

‘The Witch Bullen’

 

 

Anne Boleyn (by an Unknown Artist after Hans Holbein). Hatfield House. According to novelist Norah Lofts, 'the Devil's Pawmark' can be seen below her right ear' 

During the filming of Anne of the Thousand Days, actress Genevieve Bujold commented upon her starring role. “Day by day I discover more about Anne Boleyn until now I know her very well. I like Anne very much”, she said. However much Bujold admired Anne, historically, the tragic queen did have her enemies, she added. “People hated her. They called her a witch — she was supposed to have had a sixth finger growing on her left hand.” (1)

Bujold’s comment showed how persistent the witch legend of Anne Boleyn was — the seductress who made her way into Henry VIII’s bed through witchcraft and used it against her opponents until her final reckoning by an executioner’s sword upon her ‘little neck’. But as I had once argued, there was no evidence of Anne being called a witch in her own lifetime. The notion was in fact a twentieth century creation. (2)

Much attention has been given to a remark made by Henry VIII in January 1536. Anne had miscarried the longed for male heir, and the king, in mix of rage and sorrow, supposedly uttered that his marriage was void as it had resulted from Anne’s use of ‘sortileges and charms’ upon him. The incident was reported by Anne’s bête noire, the Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys. However, even the envoy was suspicious of Henry saying such a thing as he told his master Emperor Charles V. He had received this piece of gossip through the Marquess and Marchioness of Exeter who hated the queen and eager for her to be rid of. (3)

Even if Henry VIII did say that Anne had trapped him into marriage through magic spells — echoing a similar accusation made in 1532 of her employing ‘philters, charms or otherwise’ (which should be read in the context of Anne as the King’s seducer — not as a witch — dabbling in love potions and such) — he was surely just blowing off stream. (4) The remark ‘may have been no more than bluster’ as historian Eric Ives opined. (5) Henry was a pious man, and had he truly believed that Anne was a witch in league with the devil, he would have immediately put an end to the marriage. Instead, the couple stayed together (and presumably continued to try for a baby) and were even planning a trip to Dover in the spring of 1536. This was abruptly cancelled when Anne was arrested for high treason in wishing/plotting the King’s death as evident by her alleged adultery. Tellingly, the charges never included witchcraft.

Before and after her death, Anne’s critics were vocal about their dislike of her, centred her supposed sexual immorality. The outcries against Anne as a ‘whore’ were numerous. She had ‘justly lost her head, because that she did spot the king’s bed’ wrote George Cavendish in his Metrical Visions, and she was remembered by her embittered stepdaughter Mary Tudor as ‘a criminal who was punished as a public strumpet’. (6) Anne as a proponent of religious reform had also won her enemies. Reginald Pole, who later became Mary’s Archbishop of Canterbury, lamented England’s break with Rome and railed against Anne as the ‘domestical evil’; ‘the person who caused all this.’ (7) However, neither Mary nor Pole ever saw fit to call her a witch. Even the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Sander who popularized Anne having a sixth finger on one hand, did not either. (8)

So where and when did ‘Anne the witch’ arise? The stirrings began much later in the earlier part of the 20^th century. In the 1932 novel Anne Boleyn by E. Barrington (Elizabeth Louisa Moresby), the author wrote how Anne, having natural imperfections on her hand and neck was an object of derision by the ignorant:

How could she forget that when she was a child she had heard her nurse whisper to another, ‘Look at her hand, her throat—the devil’s marks in her body. She will come to a bad end—the devil’s own brat. Her rages are like his own!

She is a witch. She bears the devil’s marks on her body. She hides her left hand for it is a claw, and her throat bulges with his apple that she ate. (9)

Edith Sitwell would describe Anne in similar terms. In her historical fiction Fanfare for Elizabeth, she was presented as ‘a creature of Doom’, ‘not a woman at all’, but ‘an infernal region, a Pandemonium of the Princes of Darkness and all the Powers and Principalities of the Air’. (10) Even in nonfiction, Anne as a malevolent being took hold. The historian Garrett Mattingly wrote as as novelist using colorful prose in describing her extra finger — it made ‘the pious cross themselves to avoid the evil eye and the more superstitious still to whisper of devil’s gets and the sure sign of a sorceress’. (11)

At around the same time, Montague Summers and Margaret Murray added more fuel to the fire. Summers was a believer in the occult who truly thought Anne was a witch. In his nonfiction study Witchcraft and Black Magic, he reported – with no evidence — that she ordered the severed head of Bishop John Fisher brought to her so she could ‘thrust a silver bodkin through the dead tongue’. (12)

Murray was equally outrageous. Anne was not a wicked witch, she claimed, but a follower of old paganistic beliefs. As an anthropologist and folklorist, Murray argued for the existence of an ancient European witch cult that survived into the Medieval and Tudor periods. Those in the know — and this included Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn and others at the royal court – believed that the king’s vitality was tied to that of the land. Should the king decline or die, the kingdom will too. Hence to ensure the king’s continuing might, living sacrifices in his place were necessary. In the 12^th century, Thomas Becket was killed for King Henry II’s sake, and in the 16^th century, Anne Boleyn was executed to preserve Henry VIII. (13)

Murray’s theories were widely dismissed, but they took root in some modern pagan circles. In 1970, when rock star Jim Morrison of The Doors married Patricia Kennealy, a follower of Wicca, they underwent a blood mingling ceremony to join their souls ‘on a karmic and cosmic plane that had an effect on future incarnations’ in keeping with ‘a legend that Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had been married in the witch ritual—probably for some of the same reasons.’ (14)

 

 

Dorothy Tutin in The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1970) and Charlotte Rampling in Henry VIII and His Six Wives (1972)

 

Television also spread the idea of ‘Anne the Witch’. In an episode of the BBC television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Anne (played by Dorothy Tutin) jokes how her followers would be seen as ‘her familiars’. Then in another, she is referred to as having supernatural powers and that occult forces were at play on her wedding night. In the follow-up series Elizabeth R, Anne was denigrated as ‘the witch Bullen’. (15)

The Six Wives of Henry VIII (as was Elizabeth R) was a hit with audiences, and a movie version entitled Henry VIII and His Six Wives was made shortly afterwards. Anne who ‘wasn’t a nice girl’ and ‘had dangerous qualities of spitefulness and arrogance’, according to actress Charlotte Rampling who now played her, was described in the novelization of the film as a ‘witch-haired, slant-eyed beauty’. (16) To further emphasize Anne as an antagonist, Rampling was shown with a deformed finger and a disfigurement upon her neck.

In the 1980s, Anne continued on her broomstick thanks to Norah Lofts’ biography of her. A portrait type believed to be of Anne revealed ‘the Devils’ pawmark on her neck, Lofts claimed, and she went to great lengths in suggesting that Anne could really have been a witch devoted to her ‘dark master’. Among other things, she had made threats of affecting the weather as witches do, and she had a pet taking ‘one of Satan’s many names’. (17)

It would not be surprising if rock singer Anne Hull (of the Heavy Metal music band Hellion formed in 1982), was influenced by Loft’s ideas. She adopted the stage name ‘Ann Boleyn’ after learning the famous queen was ‘accused of being a witch’, which evidently appealed to Hull whose band liked to use Satanic imagery in their act. (18)

 

 

Anne Hull (Ann Boleyn) of the musical band Hellion

 

Novelist Jean Plaidy might well have been equally captivated. While an earlier novel of hers about Anne Boleyn had no mentions of witchcraft, the newer The Lady in the Tower did not shy away from the notion. In it she had Anne lamenting about how she was vilified:

“Now I was called the Sorceress. I had a sixth finger which had been given to me by the Devil. By spells I had seduced the King from the path of virtue. The Devil and I had concocted a scheme to break up the King’s marriage.” (19)

In a similar fashion, Margaret George, author of popular historical epics, portrayed Anne as a ‘wild and dark and strange’ creature — ‘half supernatural, half mad’ — who practised black magic to make herself queen in The Autobiography of Henry VIII, with Notes by His Fool, Will Somers. (20)

Given the popularity of Anne as a witch into the 1980s, academia did not lag behind. Historian Retha Warnicke, in her controversial The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn proposed that Anne’s fall from result was the result of ignorance and superstition surrounding her stillbirth in 1536. The child was born deformed, according to Warnicke, and Henry VIII, anxious to deny paternity, was convinced that his wife had consorted with others. Though she was not directly accused of it, she was indeed suspected of witch-like behaviour in her adultery and in the resulting birth of her baby. Warnicke’s theory was controversial, with many historians arguing against it, but it was great material for fictional works by by Philippa Gregory and Carolly Erickson. (21)

 

Anne Boleyn by an Unknown Artist. Lyndhurst Castle, Tarrytown, New York

 

Besides literature, Anne was said to be witch-like in the visual arts. Along with the painting referred to by Lofts, a portrait of Anne wearing the well-known ‘B’ pendant was used as a Halloween decoration at Lyndhurst Castle in Tarrytown, New York. (22). Another version of this portrait type was described as depicting Anne as

’something of a wicked witch, the arch manipulator whose sexual allure drove Henry into the break with Rome: a portrayal clearly visible in the black dress, cold eyes and pale skin seen here’. (23)

Despite the fact that Anne was never called a witch in her own lifetime, the label has stuck. In popular culture it’s pervasive. Some years ago, she was memorialized with a ‘Witch’s Garden’, complete with ‘aphrodisiacs, fertility and other potions’ at Hampton Court, (24) and her portrait was seen at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the movie Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. More recently in 2024, she appeared in the fantasy novel Queen B: The Story of Anne Boleyn, Witch Queen by Juno Dawson.  

 

 

 Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001)

 

While some still argue that Anne Boleyn’s contemporaries thought she was a witch (25), the facts suggest otherwise. It was a modern notion. Though fanciful, it has added to Anne’s allure — another aspect of the fascination she has held over people for centuries.

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(1) Genevieve Bujold: Rare Bloom in a Royal Garden, Seventeen Magazine, November, 1969, p. 140.

(2) Anne of the Wicked Ways: Perceptions of Anne Boleyn as a Witch in History and in Popular Culture by Roland Hui. Parergon - Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Volume 35, Number 1 (2018), pp. 97-118.

(3) Calendar of State Papers Spanish, v (ii), no. 13.

(4) Calendar of State Papers Spanish, iv (ii), no. 967.

(5) The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn by Eric Ives, Wiley-Blackwell, 2005, p. 298.

(6) The Life of Cardinal Wolsey and Metrical Visions by George Cavendish. Edited by Samuel Weller Singer, 2 vols. Chiswick: Whittingham, 1825, ii, 39–46. Calendar of State Papers Venetian, vi, no. 884.

(7) Life of Reginald Pole by Martin Haile, Pitman, 1910, p. 173; and The Correspondence of Reginald Pole, edited by Thomas F. Mayer, 4 vols, Ashgate, 2002–08, i, 106, no. 110. Agnes Strickland claimed Pole had called Anne ‘a sorceress’, but she gave no source for this: Lives of the Queens of England, 12 vols., Blanchard and Lea, 1856, iv, 179. This was later repeated in The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn by Alison Weir, Ballantine, 2010, p. 296, and in The Faith: A History of Christianity by Brian Moynahan, Doubleday, 2002, p. 402.

(8) For a discussion of Sander’s controversial description of Anne, see: note 4.

(9) Anne Boleyn by E. Barrington, Doubleday Doran, 1932, pp. 10–11, 329.

(10) Fanfare for Elizabeth by Edith Sitwell, Macmillan, 1946, p. 17.

(11) Catherine of Aragon by Garrett Mattingly, Vintage Books, 1941, pp. 246–47.

(12) Witchcraft and Black Magic by Montague Summers, Rider, 1946, pp. 123–24.

(13) For Murray’s theories: The God of the Witches, Oxford University Press, 1952 and The Divine King in England: A Study in Anthropology, Faber, 1954.

(14) No One Here Gets Out Alive by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, Warner Books, 1980, p. 296. The novel Anne, the Rose of Hever, (by Maureen Peters, Beagle Books, 1969) — influenced by Margaret Murray — also had Henry and Anne married by a pagan blood ritual.

(15) The Six Wives of Henry VIII (BBC, 1970): Anne Boleyn by Nick McCarty and Jane Seymour by Ian Thorne. Elizabeth R (BBC, 1971): The Lion’s Cub by John Hale.

(16) Henry VIII and His Six Wives (London: Anglo-EMI Film Distributors, 1972), a publicity

press book. Henry VIII and His Six Wives by Maureen Peters , Fontana, 1972, pp. 42, 82.

(17) Anne Boleyn by Norah Lofts, McCann & Geoghegan, 1979, pp. 36–39 and the frontispiece for the portrait.

(18) Ann Boleyn (Hellion), interview by Anders Ekdahl, March 2012 

(19) The Lady in the Tower by Jean Plaidy, Fontana/Collins, 1988, p. 285.

(20) The Autobiography of Henry VIII, with Notes by His Fool, Will Somers by Margaret George, St Martin’s Griffin, 1986, pp. 246, 300.

(21) The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory, HarperCollins, 2001. The Favored Queen: A Novel of Henry VIII’s Third Wife by Carolly Erickson, St Martin’s, 2011.

(22) Michael W. Handis, ‘Lyndhurst’, The Researching Librarian, 28 December 2013 <https://researchinglibrarian.wordpress.com/2013/12/28/lyndhurst/> [accessed October 29, 2025].

(23) Lost Faces: Identity and Discovery in Tudor Royal Portraiture, edited by Bendor Grosvenor, Philip Mould, p. 59,

(24) ‘Henry VIII’s wives honoured Hampton Court Palace Flower Show gardens’, Your Local Guardian, 14 May 2009 <http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/kingstonnews/4364680.display/> [accessed October 29, 2025].

(25) For example:“Large wen” or “swelling”? Exploring Myths and Misconceptions About Nicholas Sander’s Description of Anne Boleyn and Its Link to witchcraft by Sylvia Soberton. Royal Studies Journal, 10, no. 2 (2023).