Ring with portraits of Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I. © Trustees of Chequers. Scanned by Douglas Dowell.

After her death in 1536, silence descended upon Anne's memory. Her enemies were happy to leave her consigned to history, while her erstwhile reformist allies seem to have taken the view that "least said, soonest mended". Cranmer, who seems fairly certain to have believed in Anne's innocence, began to attempt to dissociate her from the cause of reform as early as the day after she was arrested, in his letter to the King:

I trust that your Grace will bear no less entire favour unto the truth of the gospel, than you did before; forasmuch as your Grace's favour to the gospel was not led by affection unto her, but by zeal unto the truth.

In fact, Cranmer would have been terrified that Anne would bring the cause of religious reform down with her. Happily for him, Cromwell's coup against court conservatives also succeeded. The King himself participated fully in the conspiracy of silence; there is no record of him ever mentioning Anne's name again. After the events of 1536 he showed a marked intolerance of any attempts by his wives to play a political role in the way she had - Jane Seymour, on attempting to plead for the monasteries, was told not to meddle in affairs of state and to take her predecessor as a warning.

Anne remained, in effect, a non-person until the accession of her daughter Elizabeth in 1558. She was not, however, to receive the vindication Mary I afforded her mother Katherine of Aragon. Mary had passed an Act re-establishing the legitimacy of her mother's marriage; Elizabeth relied upon the 1544 Act of Succession to establish her claim, and left Anne Boleyn's position well alone. There are no records of her ever making a direct reference to Anne, but she was not ashamed of her Boleyn connections; the children of Mary Boleyn were very much favoured, and she owned a ring with her own and Anne's portraits enclosed.

Despite the silence of the Queen herself, it is in reaction to Elizabeth's reign that Anne's shade was resurrected - both by hostile and by friendly sources. On the Protestant side, she was generally portrayed as one of theirs - an evangelical heroine. She has a place in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (or Book of Martyrs): Foxe says of her that "Again, what a zealous defender she was of Christ's Gospel, all the world doth know, and her acts do and will declare to the world's end." William Latimer, Anne's chaplain, presented a treatise to Elizabeth in defence of her mother, while Alexander Ales wrote to her with his recollections of "the sainted Queen, your most religious mother". In the 1590s, George Wyatt (descended from Sir Thomas) would describe Anne in his "Life of Queen Anne Boleigne" as "elect of God".

However, on the Catholic side, Anne was also seen as the woman responsible for the break with Rome and vilified for it. Aside from the charges for which she was convicted, Anne was painted as grossly libidinous before her marriage and a multiple murderess, as well as being responsible for allowing Protestantism its first entrance:

Anne Boleyn, the bane of that virtuous and religion Queen Katherine, the ruin of many pious, worthy and famous men who favoured not that unlawful marriage, the first giver of entrance to the Protestant religion and the principal cause of her husband's dissolving of religious houses [after her death!] and slaughtering multitudes of religious people as not favouring her marriage with Henry VIII in the lifetime of his first wife.

The tradition culminated in the indictment written by Nicholas Sander, portraying Anne as a witch - grossly deformed, massively libidinous, a murderess and a heretic to boot. Until relatively recently, the Catholic tradition has been considerably more influential than the Protestant; now, however, most historians are paying considerably more attention to Anne's religious credentials and are more questioning of the allegations made by those hostile to her.

Nowadays, most acquit Anne of the charges laid against her; G.W. Bernard is highly unusual in arguing that she was guilty, at least, of adultery with Norris and Smeaton. Issues as wide-ranging as her birthdate, the degree to which she bears responsibility for Katherine and Mary's treatment, the presence or absence of a "sixth finger" and when exactly the Boleyn marriage turned sour remain fiercely contested. Anne's fall is highly controversial; E.W. Ives, R.M. Warnicke and G.W. Bernard have been engaged in quite heated debate over the causes of the events of May 1536, while others give more credit to other theories. Anne, in death as in life, remains a highly debatable figure.

Dorothy Tutin as Anne Boleyn. © BBC. Scanned by Douglas Dowell.

In drama, film opera and novels, Anne has featured frequently. Her portrayal has varied dramatically depending upon the preferences of the writer, unsurprisingly, from Shakespeare's Henry VIII (showing Anne as the good mother of Queen Elizabeth), through Anne of the Thousand Days (Anne as romantic victim) and the BBC's The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Anne as an intelligent woman and a courageous victim, but also proud and incapable of playing the part of a subservient wife) to The Other Boleyn Girl (Anne as calculating shrew).

The story of Anne Boleyn's life is one of high drama and of a fascinating individual. But how significant was she, herself, to the events in which she took part and which followed her? The most obvious line to take would be that Anne was incidental - secondary to Henry VIII's desire for a male heir and secondary to Thomas Cromwell's reforming ideas - and important mainly thanks to her daughter.

To take such a view, however, is to ignore Anne's own involvement in the affairs of her day. In religious terms, Anne herself was clearly of a reforming cast of mind; her stance was not pure expediency. William Latimer, Nicholas Shaxton, Hugh Latimer and John Skip (among others) were all helped along their way by Anne - and of course, Thomas Cranmer was a Boleyn protégé. When Henry VIII died in 1547, the majority of the reformist clergy were still those patronised by Anne. The way in which Cranmer moved to dissociate Anne from the cause she had promoted is an indication of the depth of that association - he feared that her fall could wreck reform in its entirety. It was Anne and her allies who promoted the radical ideas which Henry would ultimately pursue, leading to the Royal Supremacy - Henry may have had an interest in the delineation of papal and royal authority throughout his reign, but it was ultimately Anne's pregnancy which pushed him to take the plunge. Despite the steps taken away from Rome by August 1532 and the death of Archbishop Warham in August, leaving the way open for Henry to appoint a more amenable candidate, who could declare his marriage to Katherine of Aragon invalid, it was not until January 1533 that Cranmer was appointed, and approved in February. Why the delay, and then the sudden shift? The reason was not so much the desire to control the Church or belief in his constitutional rights; it was that, sometime in the first week of December, Anne Boleyn had become pregnant. This made speedy action absolutely imperative - it was inconceivable that Henry would allow his "son" to be born illegitimate. Once the decision was taken, though the king himself was doctrinally conservative, it meant that the Catholic settlement became more questionable in a broader sense, and Anne was one of the key patrons of those who might wish to question it. By 1547, although the doctrinal position in many ways had retreated from that of 1536-7, evangelicals were increasingly winning the battle of personalities at court, with men such as Sir Anthony Denny, William Butts and Thomas Cranmer predominant at court and in the Privy Chamber. Many of them, including all of these three, had been preferred by Anne Boleyn.

When the king died in 1547, the nature of the Regency Council allowed one Lord Protector to emerge, who with his successor Lord President took doctrinal reform far further than Anne herself ever went (although we cannot know how the queen's thinking would have progressed had she not died in 1536; she certainly need not have been the only one whose views radicalised). By 1552, the doctrinal position in law was Protestant. It is ironic that the Lord Protector's name was Edward Seymour - brother of Jane. And when, in 1559, Elizabeth I re-established a broadly Protestant settlement, it was Matthew Parker she chose to be her first Archbishop of Canterbury - her mother's chaplain.