#i think there’s a desire to perceive anne boleyn as uniquely victimised by history

[edwardseymour]

i'm shocked that theirs no evidence of their being a order to have all of anne boleyn’s portraiture be destroyed one of the things i hear anne fans talk about all the time is a attempt to "erase" her from history by henry and jane!! they make it sound like their was a bonfire of all of anne's paintings and personal belongings like that one scene from sleeping beauty

✨ terfs/zionists fuck off ✨

it’s another one of those popular anne boleyn isms that’s uncritically widely accepted but i don’t think it holds up.

there’s simply no evidence of such an order. plenty exists of her to suggest there was no top down command that was acted upon. more reasonably, she likely simply became an unpopular figure to have displayed in one’s house after her execution… but she was still referred to posthumously as “the late queen”, her iconography was left in place in actively used palaces, henry kept several of her possessions in his inventory, and her portraiture outlasted the tudor period with one surviving as late as 1773 in the lumley collection. so it seems improbable that there was a formal order or enforced policy of erasure or damnatio memoraie against her, as an anointed queen and mother to a child of henry’s, illegitimate or otherwise — nor does there seem to be much evidence of that as a strategy taken against other traitors. henry howard’s portrait still survives, for example.