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 20th 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 12th century, Thomas Becket was killed for King Henry II’s sake, and in the 16th 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)
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).
