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Parergon, Number 4, 1986, pp. 135-153 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/pgn.1986.0014

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The physical deformities of Anne Boleyn and Richard III:

myth and reality

But...in thirty round frames that made an arc were the

inhabitants of the unknown worlds, of whom only the
Physiologus and the vague reports of travelers speak
slightly. Many of them were unfamiliar....For example,
brutes with six fingers on each hand; sirens...the hairy
men of India...Pygmies,...These and other wonders were
carved on that doorway.1
Fiction can stimulate historians to take another look at
familiar evidence or to seek insights in unusual sources. In his
Defense of Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney argued that as poetry was not
limited to facts revealed in old records, it had a greater capacity
for moral instruction and for delighting its readers than history.2
Relevant to Sidney's claim is the above quotation from Umberto Eco's
The Name of the Rose, a best-selling, twentieth-century murder
mystery set in a fourteenth-century abbey. Eco's description of the
"wonders...carved on that doorway" is directly responsible for this
re-examination of the charges that Anne Boleyn and Richard III were
disfigured. It is fitting that fiction has led to this latest
attempt to refute the allegations of their deformities, which are
almost certainly fictional but which have been accepted as
historically valid.
A problem basic to this investigation is its reliance on the
absence of evidence for its arguments. Caution is called for and
will be taken, but it must be emphasized that in early modern Europe
a deep insensitivity to the suffering of a person born with a
physical abnormality, something as minor as an unusual tuft of hair
around his navel, caused him to be characterized as a monster.3
Thus, in considering a royal deformity, like an extra fingernail or
uneven shoulders, there is strong reason for accepting the lack of
reference to it during the lifetime of the individual involved as
compelling in itself. Before turning to the accounts of Anne's and
Richard's disfigurement, further comments about how their
contemporaries perceived and treated monsters will be useful.
Monster literature was ubiquitous and popular at all levels
of society. It flowed from three sources: 1) the scientific works
of Aristotle and other ancients; 2) references to the birth of
monsters as portents or divine signs by pagans, like Cicero, and
1 My thanks to Sir Geoffrey Elton, Cambridge University, for his
critical review of this paper and suggestions about its structure:
I am grateful for his assistance and encouragement. Umberto Eco,
The Name of the Rose, tr. William Weaver, New York, 1980, 405.
2 Sidney: A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten, New York, 1966,
11-30.
3 John Barker, The True Description of a Monsterous Chylde (London:
W. Gryffith, 1564).

136

R.M. Warnicke

Christians like St Augustine; 3) the descriptions of races in the

East and in Africa by Alexander the Great, Solinus, and Pliny, among
others.4 Drawing upon these sources, writers produced a wide range
of publications: broadsides, sermons, and treatises. To generate
the greatest possible interest the works contained drawings of an
assortment of real and imaginary subjects, such as grotesque pigs,
fish, and humans, especially babies with birth defects. Siamese
twins loomed large in this literature, partly because clergymen were
confronted with the serious theological problem of whether to
baptize both heads.5
Writers argued that monsters were born when God deliberately
interfered with natural forces, for nature left alone could be
viewed as mightier than He. In addition,they often claimed that
deformities were a sign that the Almighty had visited the sins of
parents upon their offspring. Since occasionally people with
unimpeachable morality had handicapped children, other causes could
be added or substituted, such as portents of a disaster, an
unfavourable position of the stars at conception, or a mother's
focussing during her pregnancy on something hideous, the
characteristics of which developed in her baby.6
Fascinated by grotesque creatures, early modern Christians
displayed them in towns and fairs, a custom that has been continued
in the exhibition of fat ladies, giants, and thin men at carnivals.
Modern medicine, which has revealed many causes of birth defects,
makes it necessary for us to remember that former generations
lacking our knowledge truly believed that God created these
creatures, monsters as they were called, for a purpose. The major
problem for religious leaders was determining the reason for their
appearance. The great reformer, Martin Luther, for example,
interpreted them as portents of the ruin of the Roman Catholic
Church and later of anabaptism.7 In light of so much serious
attention given to the defects of insignificant individuals, it

4 Katharine Park and Lorraine J. Daston, Unnatural Conceptions: The

Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and
England, Past and Present 92, 1981, 22-26; John B. Friedman, The
Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, Cambridge, Mass., 1981,
5-25 (hereafter, Friedman). See also Anne Schutte, Such Monstrous
Births: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy,
Renaissance Quarterly 38, 1985, 85-106.
5 William Leigh, Strange News of a Prodigious Monster Borne at
Adlington in Lancashire, 1613 (London: J. Pindley f.S. Man, 1613);
William Elderton, The True Fourme and Shape of a Monsterous Chyld
Borne in Stony Stratforde, 1565 (London: T. Col well, 1565); Edward
Fenton, Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature (London: Henry Bynneman,
1569), 35, 98, 123, and 136; see also Friedman, 180.
6 Fenton, op.cit., 13-16.
7 Park and Daston, op.cit., 26.

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

137

seems inconceivable that an adult of high social status could have

had even the slightest imperfection without some reference to it
surviving from his or her lifetime.
More specifically, royalty carefully checked for deformities,
especially during marriage negotiations. When Henry VIII's brother,
Arthur, was a small child, Spanish diplomats were invited to
scrutinize his naked body for imperfections. John Leland's story in
which King Arthur was permitted to view his prospective mates in a
disrobed state and Sir Thomas More's Utopian custom in which
betrothed individuals inspected each other in a naked condition
treated in a light vein this emphasis upon breeding and the desire
for physical regularity. On the popular level, sermons and courtesy
books warned against unions with deformed people, especially dwarfs,
whose offspring might be pygmies.8
As both Anne and Richard, because of their pivotal roles in
the succession and in the Reformation, were and have been the focus
of great attention, it strains credibility to believe that any
disfigurement they had could have escaped notice in all extant
documents written during their lifetimes. In Richard's case, modern
scholars have either denied that he had any irregularity or claimed
that it was hardly perceptible, but their attempts to discover the
origin of the story have not progressed much beyond simplistic
claims of Tudor prejudice. By contrast, Anne's most recent
biographer has accepted as valid only somewhat modified versions of
her alleged deformities.9 A fresh study is thus called for because
a knowledge of the origins of these myths will be helpful in
uncovering the process by which they gained acceptance. In
addition, an examination of first Anne's and then Richard's alleged
disfigurement in the same paper helps to establish a fuller and more
comprehensive context in which they can both be invalidated.
Whether or not these two royal personages committed horrible acts is
not at issue; the point is that detractors were receptive to
unfavorable rumours about them because they believed that they were
innately evil.10
8 Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, relating to the
Negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the Archives of
Vienna, Simancas, Besan?on and Brussels, ed. Pascual de Gayangos,
London, 1862, I, 11; The Itinerary of John Leland, ed. Lucy Toulmin
Smith, Carbondale, Illinois, 1964, V, 148; St. Thomas More, Utopia,
New Haven, 1964, 69; for an example of the warnings about dwarfs,
see Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving (London:
N.O. for Leonard Becket, 1615), 10.
9 Carolly Erickson, Anne Boleyn, London, 1984, 12, 195, 197, and
259.
10 For references to the perceived need for evil spirits to be
housed in monstrous bodies, see Jeffrey B. Russell, Lucifer: The
Devil in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, 1984, 68-69 and 209-210
(hereafter, Russell, Lucifer).

138

R.M. Warnicke

Although Anne attracted the serious attention of courtiers

and politicians in 1527 when they realized that Henry VIII planned
to marry her as soon as his divorce from Catharine of Aragon was
approved, the earliest descriptions of her date from the 1530s. In
1532 the Venetian ambassador, whose report is the most detailed that
has survived from her lifetime, indicated he was unimpressed by her
features:
Madam Anne is not one of the handsomest women in the
world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion,
long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in tact
has nothing but the English King's great appetite and her
eyes, which are black and beautiful....
In his letter to Martin Bucer a year earlier, Simon Grynaeus had
agreed that her complexion was rather dark but had judged her "good
looking". Within two weeks of her execution for adultery, amidst
charges that she had bewitched the king, Lancelot de Carles, the
future bishop of Riez, wrote a poem in her honour that was published
in 1545. Praising her accomplishments in music and dancing, he
recalled her beauty, her elegant figure, and enchanting eyes.H
The comments about her appearance can, in some cases, be
found alongside less flattering statements about her morality. In
1531, about two years before her marriage to Henry, rumours
circulated as far away as Rome that she had suffered a miscarriage.
Indeed, in the same letter in which Grynaeus complimented her looks,
he suggested that she and the king might have children being brought
up in private. He was not the only observer willing to charge her
with immorality, but none of them, including Eustace Chapuys, the
Imperial Ambassador, mentioned a deformity. As Chapuys nicknamed
Anne the "concubine" and her daughter "the little bastard", it is
unreasonable to believe that he would have omitted in his voluminous
correspondence with Charles V any hint of a physical abnormality.
Surely, he would have forwarded any such gossip with relish,
particularly as he informed the Emperor in 1533 that "this accursed
Lady has so enchanted and bewitched him (Henry) that he will not
dare say or do anything against her will or commands".12
In the reign of Elizabeth, Protestants praised Anne's support

11 Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English

Affairs in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other
Libraries of Northern Italy, ed. Rawdon Brown, London, 1864 IV, no.
824; Edward E. Lowinsky, A Music Book for Anne Boleyn, Florilegium
Historiale: Essays Presented to Wallace K. Ferguson, ed. J.G. Rowe
and W.H. Stockdale, Toronto, 1971, 186-187; Original Letters
Relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson, London,
1845, II, 552-553. For these events, see G.R. Elton, Reform and
Reformation, Cambridge, Mass., 1977.
12 Calendar of...State Papers...Spain, IV:2:ii, 884; IV:2:i, 343;
IV: 1, 300 and 433.

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

139

of religious reform.13 Because her daughter was on the throne, the

charges of immorality no longer circulated publicly in England, but
among Catholics they had not been forgotten, and in 1585 a treatise
against Henry's divorce appeared at Cologne. Written in Latin by an
ordained Catholic priest, Nicholas Sander, it had been finished
after his death and published under the direction of Edward Rishton.
In it Sander, who had been born in 1527 and who had spent his last
years in Ireland struggling against Elizabeth's government, charged
her parents with sexual immorality and gave her mother grotesque
features. He claimed that Henry had not only had carnal relations
with Anne and her sister but also with their mother, Lady Boleyn.
Consequently, Anne had married, Sander charged, her own father. He
further claimed that at the age of fifteen, Sir Thomas Boleyn had
sent her to France when he discovered that she had been sexually
involved with two of his servants. Upon her return to England, she
had become the mistress of Thomas Wyatt, the poet. Sander gave an
extremely unflattering description of her appearance. Anne was
tall, he said, with black hair, a sallow complexion, a projecting
upper tooth, a six-fingered right hand, and a large wen on her
throat. Even so, he inexplicably admitted she was handsome with a
pretty mouth.14
The gossip about the king's and Anne's immorality was not
new. G.R. Elton has pointed out that some of it had surfaced during
Henry's reign. In an audience with the king, George Throckmorton, a
knight of the Reformation Parliament who was hostile to the bills on

13 John Aylmer, A Harborowe for Faithfull and Trew Subjects...

Against the Late Blowne Blaste, Concerning the Government of Wemen
(London: J. Daye, 1559), Sig. CI; John Foxe, Actes and Monuments,
ed. George Townsend, London, 1837, reprint 1965, V, 135-136.
14 Nicholas Sander, The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism
(1585), tr. David Lewis, London, 1877, 24; another reference to a
swelling in her neck does exist in some French extracts from a
catalogue of papers at Brussels, which is no longer extant and
therefore cannot be dated. In this mainly inaccurate account of
Anne and her coronation procession, the anonymous author claimed
that her gown was designed with tongues pierced through with nails
and that she personally had a wart and a swelling in the neck like a
goitre. It is interesting that the author described her with this
swelling during her coronation procession, for the most obvious
physical characteristic of Anne that day was her pregnancy. Early
modern Europeans believed that one of the tell-tale signs of
pregnancy was a swelling in the veins of the neck. For the extracts
see Letters and Papers (as in note 8), V, no.585. For evidence
about the signs of pregnancy, see Audrey Eccles, Obstetrics and
Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England, Kent, 1982, 58-59; for a
discussion of her age, see Retha M. Warnicke, The Childhood and
Adolescence of Anne Boleyn, Historical Journal 28, 1985, 937-954.

140

R.M. Warnicke

religion, startled Henry by saying to him with reference to Anne,

"It is thought that you have meddled both with the mother and the
sister". When the king responded, "Never with the mother", Thomas
Cromwell, who witnessed the exchange, quickly added, "Nor never with
the sister either". Three years later when the queen was tried for
adultery and incest, questions were raised in the investigation
about her relations with Wyatt and with Henry Percy, sixth earl of
Northumberland.15
During the reign of Mary, Catharine of Aragon's daughter,
those rumours had continued to win acceptance. In the 1550s
Nicholas Harpsfield, archdeacon of Canterbury, who had attended
Oxford University in 1544, wrote a treatise about Henry's divorce.
Although this manuscript, which was not published until 1878, was
scholarly, Harpsfield revealed that part of it was based on the oral
testimony of those who he believed had been in a position at court
to know the facts. He credited the rumours that Henry had been
involved sexually with both Anne's mother and her sister and that
Anne had been intimate with Wyatt, but he did not claim that she had
been promiscuous when she was only fifteen, as Sander was later to
do. His work is an accurate reflection of the state of gossip in
Mary's reign about Anne's and Henry's sexual conduct. Although he
damned her moral character, Harpsfield did not endow Anne with any
disfigurement.16
Many of his contemporaries expected inner evil to have
outward physical manifestations, "The sins of the flesh were
regarded as actual physical diseases, as poisonous growths...."17
For Sander, less scrupulous than Harpsfield, Anne was the embodiment
of evil; by enchanting Henry, she had not only broken up his
marriage but had also caused the religious schism. He thought of
her as the daughter of adulterers, as the wife of her father, and as
the lover of her brother. Within that context he chose to depict
her as physically abnormal, for sexual misconduct, especially
incest, was associated with monstrous births. She was perceived as
a witch; both the Imperial Ambassador and her husband had accused

15 G.R. Elton, Tudor Government: The Points of Contact, Studies in

Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, Cambridge, 1983, III, 48;
see also Retha M. Warnicke, The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Reassessment,
History 70, 1985, 1-15.
16 Nicholas Harpsfield, The Pretended Divorce Between Henry VIII and
Catharine of Aragon, ed. Nicholas Pocock, London, 1878, reprint
1965, 236.
17 For the quotation see Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque, London,
1980, 118; I.R., A Most Straunge and True Discourse of the
Wonderfull Judgement of God. Of a Monstrous, Deformed Infant,
Begotten by Incestuous Copulation, Betweene the Brothers Sonne and
the Sisters Daughter, Being Both Unmarried Persons (London: R.
Jones, 1600).

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

141

her of that offence. As witches were supposed to have hidden,

identifying marks or growths for suckling their familiars, he gave
Anne a wen, a tumour on her throat, which, he said, was concealed by
high-necked dresses. Although the pudenda were a more usual place
for this mark, he understandably refrained from placing it there;
and in any case for convenience in witch hunts, experts had agreed
that it could be found in other places, including between the
shoulders, on the throat, or in the region of the heart. 18
The reason for giving her the mythical deformity on her
throat is relatively obvious, but the others are more obscure. As
an educated man, Sander was undoubtedly aware of ancient writings on
the wonders of the East. Since he believed Anne was a witch, other
qualities of that species may have led him to remember those
accounts. One of the prevailing legends about witches was that they
could change into wild animals, a feat that caused them to be
associated with werewolves and with hairiness. Among the monstrous
races described by Alexander the Great and Pliny were groups of
hairy people who sometimes had six fingers and sometimes boars' or
dogs' teeth. From these people, Sander surely borrowed Anne's extra
finger and her protruding tooth.19 The remaining unusual feature
was her tallness, for the Venetian ambassador had said she was of
medium height. Part of the folklore about grotesque human beings,
the monsters, was that they were either giants or dwarfs.20 As an
ordained priest, Sanders would also have been familiar with II
Samuel 21:20:
And there was yet a battle in Gath, where was a man of
great stature, that had on every hand six fingers, and on
every foot six toes....And he also was born to the giant.
Even though Sander endowed Anne with several other distorted
features, the sixth finger has attracted the greatest attention. He
may have had personal reasons for choosing an image for her that
required an extra digit, since his anger, when he wrote, was not
only directed against her but also against her daughter, Elizabeth,
as a Protestant leader. Many people were aware that of her own
18 The witches' mark, or nipple, from which the familiar sucks
blood, is different from the devil's mark, which is insensitive to
pain and resembles a footprint or birthmark on the skin. See Henry
Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. A.C.
Howland, New York, 1957, II, 858; for a social study of witchcraft
in Tudor England and an analysis of the decline in the belief in
magic, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies
in Popular Belief in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England,
London, 1971.
19 Friedman, 15-16; Jeffrey B. Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle
Ages, Ithaca, 1972, 63; George L. Kittredge, Witchcraft in Old and
New England, Cambridge, Mass., reprinted 1972, 175, 184, and 248
(hereafter, Kittredge).
20 Russell, Lucifer, 178-179 and Witchcraft, 53, 55 n. and 68.

142

R.M. Warnicke

physical attributes Elizabeth admired her hands and her long,

delicate fingers more than any other. This knowledge, or perhaps
references to fingers in witchlore, could have led Sander, out of a
warped sense of humour, to adopt the extra one for her mother. A
finger figured in the alleged pacts between devils and witches
either the witch surrendered a finger or had one withered. It was
also charged that one of their aphrodisiacs was made from the
"finger of a birth-strangled babe".21
In the late sixteenth century George Wyatt, grandson to the
poet, challenged the statements of Sander. His memoir or apology
for Anne has greatly influenced modern references to her appearance.
Since he wrote out of a personal need to clear her and his own
grandfather of the charges of sexual immorality and dishonest
behaviour, most of his treatise dealt with those issues. He pointed
out that she could not have had an affair with the poet, who was a
married man, since both her parents and the king were supervising
her conduct. He went on to praise her charity, honour, "spousal
integrity", and support for religious reform.22
Although he firmly denied Anne's sexual involvement with his
grandfather, modern scholars are still questioning the validity of
his remarks. In contrast, almost everyone believes that he was
correct in his statements about her looks. He said that instead of
the wen she had "certain small moles incident to the clearest
complexions" and instead of a sixth finger she had "upon the side of
her nail upon one of her fingers, some little show of a nail". The
projecting tooth and the tall stature charges were ignored, perhaps
because they were so obviously associated with monsters. Evidently,
since in the case of Wyatt the poet who had, along with other
courtiers, admired Anne, the claims about sexual immorality were
based on real facts, Wyatt the grandson seems to have assumed the
same was true about the deformity allegations.23
The witches' mark was easier for him to explain away, for
moles were normal growths and could be considered beauty marks.24
The sixth finger proved more difficult, but it had to be refuted
because of the terror and wonder such a strange disfigurement
generated. It was reported in a publication of 1609, for example,
that at Sandwich, Kent a monstrous child had been born with no neck
and with seven fingers on one hand and nine on the other. In this
21 Russell, Witchcraft, 294; William Woods, A History of the Devil,
New York, 1974, 176 (hereafter, Woods); for other uses of fingers
and fingernails, see Kittredge, 90, 93, 101-103, and 143.
22 George Wyatt, Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian
and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne Written at the Close of the
Sixteenth Century, in George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey,
ed. George Singer, 2nd edn., London, 1827, 425, 430-433, and 438444.
23 Ibid., 424.
24 Ibid.

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

143

anonymous treatise the author claimed that the birth was a sign of
God's anger with England. As Wyatt lived in Kent until 1623, it is
possible that he heard about the child.25
In his discussion of Anne's extra finger, which he reduced to
an extra nail, he gave contradictory statements. First, he said it
was so small that the "workmaster" had left it there "as an occasion
of greater grace to her hand". Then he tried to dismiss it by
saying that it was usually hidden by the "tip" of another finger so
that there was less "blemish". Later, he pointed out that Henry had
been attracted to her by "her matchless perfections", but in an
attempt to reinforce his observations about her honour Wyatt also
claimed that she had been careful to let the king see her extra
nail. That Wyatt dwelled on this imperfection more than the others
can be interpreted as a sign of his own understandable anxiety about
it.26 Almost certainly he was so personally repelled by the mere
thought of this deformity he never suspected that Sander was capable
of clothing Anne with totally imaginary features in order to paint
vividly for his readers a picture of her evil nature. Undoubtedly,
when Wyatt quizzed some ladies with knowledge about her appearance,
they responded that they had never seen a sixth finger or wen. It
is significant that he failed to credit them, as he did for other
information, with describing her moles and extra fingernail.
Surely, in a misguided effort to transform her alleged deformities
into normal growths, he personally chose to reduce her extra finger
to a nail in the mistaken belief that she might ordinarily have been
able to conceal it.
Neither she nor anyone else so active and so visible at court
could have kept an extra nail hidden. Far from being a retiring,
quiet personality, she generated excitement and interest everywhere
she went, even among people who were hostile. Observers noted that
she played cards, sewed exquisitely, loved to dance, played the lute
well, was involved in political scheming, and went horseback riding,

25 Indeed, evidence does exist that one entire anecdote may have
been a complete fabrication. In order to set the stage for Anne to
be able to show Henry her extra fingernail in a discrete setting,
Wyatt had her playing cards with Catharine of Aragon. A
contemporary of Catharine's, however, in a versified account of her
life, said that she never played cards. See William Forrest, The
History of Grisild the Second, ed. W.D. Macray, London, 1875, 28.
Garrett Mattingly (in Catherine of Aragon, Boston, 1941, 260)
included only one reference to the queen's playing cards, and his
source was this Wyatt anecdote (Strange Newes Out of Kent, London:
T. Creed f. W. Barley, 1609). For more information about George
Wyatt and his manuscripts, see D.M. Loades, ed., The Papers of
George Wyatt, Esquire, Camden Society, 4th series, vol. 5, London,
1968, 5-18.
26 George Wyatt, op.cit., 424, 428, and 437.

144

R.M. Warnicke

among other activities.27 It is ridiculous to imagine her

simultaneously participating in these events and secretly keeping
the side of one finger covered with the tip of another. It is
equally ridiculous to believe that Henry VIII would have married her
had she possessed even one strange growth on her body, no matter how
slight. He was, himself, a product of the cultural milieu in which
deformities were viewed as unnatural, as the result of some kind of
divine or demonic interference in conception. Unless he were
bewitched, an allegation that has no credibility, the king, in his
desire to continue his dynasty with a male child, surely made
matrimonial decisions fully conscious that any physical irregularity
of his new wife could be visited upon their children. Certainly, in
the negotiations for marriage with Anne of Cleves in 1539 he
demanded personal information about her, including a painting by
Holbein.28
In the late seventeenth century, Bishop Gilbert Burnet wrote
a history of the Reformation. Apparently unaware of Wyatt's memoir,
which was not published for the first time until 1808, Burnet
attacked Sander's work with a vengeance, thundering, "and, in fine
that she was ugly, misshaped, and monstrous, are such an heap of
impudent lies, that none but a fool, as well as a knave, would
venture on such a recital". Detached in a personal way from Anne's
life as Wyatt had not been, Burnet saw more clearly the implications
of Sander's work than either Wyatt or many subsequent writers, and
the bishop did well to warn his readers not to give any credence to
Sander's work,
For if it were true, very much might be drawn from
it...to disparage King "Henry....It leaves also a
...lasting stain both on the memory of Anne Boleyn, and
of her incomparable daughter Queen Elizabeth, tt also
derogates...from the first reformers, who had some kind
of dependence on Anne Boleyn.... 29
This investigation into the historical attitude toward the
queen's alleged imperfections is helpful for establishing a pattern
by which the charges of Richard's disfigurement may be studied. His
case is somewhat more difficult because there is less information
about his appearance surviving from his lifetime. Although there
are major differences in the details of the legends about these two
royal people and the reasons for their origins,they followed a
similar pattern: the reduced versions of the deformities were
27 Ibid., 428 and 443; Lowinsky, op.cit. (as in note 11), 186-187.
28 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry
VIII, ed. James Gairdner and R.H. Brodie, London, 1895, XlV.i, no.
489 and XlV.ii, nos. 33, 117, and 258.
29 Bishop Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the
Church of England, Oxford, 1816, I.i, 75 and I.ii, 419; his attack
found a defender for Sander. See Joachim LeGrand, Histoire du
Divorce de Henry V m , Roy D'Angleterre et de Catherine D'Arragon, 2
vols. (Paris: La Veuve d'Edme Martin, et.al., 1688).

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

145

manifestations of, rather than causes of, the monstrous claims,

which themselves were the creations of individuals who had
contemporary reasons for damaging the reputations of this king and
queen.
Among the early sources for the reign of Richard, the account
of Nicholas von Poppelau, a Silesian diplomat, is the only extant
one with a description of the king's appearance. Poppelau spent
several days at court in May, 1484. Upon his arrival, the king took
him by the hand and ordered a chamberlain to see to his lodgings.
Poppelau continued to have close contact with him, dining at his
table, engaging in a lengthy conversation with him, and attending
mass in his presence. In his journal, written between 1484 and when
he died, perhaps as late as 1494, the ambassador gave specific
information about the king's torso and limbs. Comparing Richard to
himself, he said the king was three fingers taller (about 2 1/4
inches), thinner and much leaner with delicate arms and legs and a
great heart.30 Given the contemporary fascination for deformities,
it is absurd to believe that in such a detailed account even a minor
abnormality would have escaped attention, especially as its author
did not write for publication or for English view.
An event that occurred in July 1484 is the key to any attempt
to unravel the origins of the disfigurement myth.
William
Collingbourne, who was later executed for treasonable communication
with Henry Tudor, fastened a now famous rhyme on the door of St
Paul's:31
The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell our dog
Rule all England under a Hog.
The couplet gained wide publicity at the time, causing many to
assume that it was the reason for Collingbourne's death, but the
more important charges against him were his dealings with the exiled

30 Dominic Mancini, The Usurpation of Richard The Third, trans.

C.A.J. Armstrong, 2nd edn., Oxford, 1969, 136-137. A problem with
Poppelau's testimony is that the travel journal is no longer extant,
but it exists in several copies and was published; any inaccuracies
that now exist do not result from a built-in prejudice either for or
against Richard; see Paul M. Kendall, Richard the Third, New York,
1956, 388-389.
31 Robert Fabyan, The New Chronicles of England and France, In Two
Parts, ed. Henry Ellis, London, 1811, 672; James Gairdner, History
of the Life and Reign of Richard the Third, revised ed., Cambridge,
1898, reprinted 1968, 186-191; Charles Ross, Richard III, Berkeley,
1981, 202 (hereafter, Ross); this couplet seems to have been
patterned after another nursery rhyme:
The calf, the goose, the bee,
The world is ruled by these three.
See James Orchard Halliwell-Phlllipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery
Tales: A sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England, London, 1849,
reprinted 1968, 144.

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Henry, although Richard was also outraged by the public ridicule of

him and his advisers as beasts. To the modern mind the association
of a human being with an animal seems benign, especially as in the
king's case when the one chosen was a hog, which symbolized in a
vulgar way the boar worn on the royal badge. Indeed, modern
scholars often refer to Richard as a boar and display that beast in
their works about him. Yet Collingbourne wrote the rhyme as an
insult and the king so took it, for deeply embedded in folklore was
the myth that demons took on animal forms at will and that the devil
himself occasionally assumed the shape of a wild boar.32
In 1600 Thomas Heywood published a play on Edward IV in which
Collingbourne's old couplet formed the first two lines of an octave.
The second and third lines were:
The crookbackt Boar the way hath found
To root our Roses from the ground.33
Although Heywood, not Collingbourne, was probably the author of the
last six lines of the octave, including the two above, they still
provide insights into how the deformity myth arose, for they are
corroborated by statements in Welsh literature. In Richard's reign
over thirty different bards began to promote Henry Tudor's return
and succession to the throne. Partly because of his Welsh lineage
but also because he had spent his youth in Wales, Henry was regarded
as their hero and as their resurrected Arthur, an enthusiasm to

32 For his badge see Ross, 138 and St. Thomas More, The History of
King Richard III and Selections from the English and Latin Poems,
ed. Richard S. Sylvester, New Haven, 1976, cover; Russell,
Witchcraft (as in note 19), 54 note 58, 114, 163, 237, and 242; some
stories were associated with the birth of pigs: A Certaine Relation
of the Hogfaced Gentlewoman (London: J. Okes sold by F. Grove,
1640), which argued that her mother had been bewitched during her
pregnancy; William Fulwood, The Shape of ii Monsters (London: J.
Aide, 1562); Lawrence Price, A Monstrous Shape, or a Shapeless
Monster (London: M. Flesher f. T. Lambert, 1639).
33 The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood now First Collected With
Illustrative Notes and a Memoir of the Author in Six Volumes,London,
1874, reprinted 1964, I, 177; see also Albert M. Stevens, The
Nursery Rhyme: Remnant of Popular Protest, Lawrence, kansas, 1968,
reprinted 1974, 71 and Mary M.D. McElroy, Literary Patronage of
Margaret Beaufort and Henry V H : A Study of Renaissance Propaganda
(1483-1509), PhJJ. Dissertation, University of Texas, 1964, 168 note
39. Because McElroy believed that Collingbourne was the author of
Heywood's octave, she interpreted this reference to the boar to mean
that Richard was actually hunchedback. The last four lines are as
follows:
Both flower and bud will be confound
Till King of beasts the swine be crowned.
And then the Dog, the Cat, and Rat
Shall in his trough feed and be fat.

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

147

which he later responded by naming his first-born child after their

Celtic hero.34
From calling him the "crookbackt boar", one of the actual
characteristics of this animal, it was an easy step for Richard's
enemies to label him the "crooktback". This stage in the myth's
development helps to explain the language used in an altercation at
York five years after the king's death. During a drunken brawl in
1490, it was alleged, John Burton, a schoolmaster, called him "a
crouchback", and claimed he was "buried in a dike like a dog".35 As
the years went by, in an age of literal-minded people, the symbolism
of the boar's back and the allegations to it were converted into
facts.
The other imagery in this statement is also important in
unravelling the origins of Richard's alleged deformity. To the
modern mind a dog conjures up a variety of images, foremost among
them friendly companionship. In contemporary folklore, however, it
was a terrifying animal, symbolizing both Jews and Satan. Although
Burton's meaning remains a mystery, given the context it is
reasonable to suggest that he meant for the dog to represent a Jew,
who, Christians believed, sacrificed gentile children to the devil
during passover. Similarly, Richard's enemies maintained that he
had murdered his nephews. Furthermore, Burton's reference to a dog,
if he meant a Jew, corroborates contemporary charges in Welsh
ballads in which Richard was called a Jew, a "hang-lipped saracen",
and charged with slaying "angels of Christ".36
Against this background John Rous, a chantry priest in
Warwickshire, included an account of Richard's reign in a longer
history, which he completed just before his death in January, 1492.
Not published until 1716, the tract was written in Latin and
intended as a gift for Henry VII. There are many reasons for
doubting its claims about Richard's appearance. First, Rous may
never have seen the king, and he certainly did not have a private
interview with him, for if he had he would have said so. Secondly,
when he turned to write this treatise, he attempted to destroy all
copies of a previous one he had produced in which he had heaped
praise upon Richard, probably in hopes of currying favour with
him.37

34 McElroy, ibid., 112-128 and 168 note 39; for information about
Richard's activities in Wales, see Gwen Waters, Richard III, Wales
and the Charter to Llandovery, The Ricardian 7, 1985, 46-55.
35 York Records: Extracts from the Municipal Records of the City of
York, 1941, II, 72-73 in Alison Hanham, Richard III and His Early
Historians, 1483-1535, Oxford, 1975, 63 (hereafter, Hanham).
36 Russell, Lucifer, 67; Friedman, 61; See also Barbara A. Woods,
The Devil in Dog Form, Berkeley, 1959, 1-14; McElroy, 112-128 and
168 note 39.
37 Ross, xxii and 139 believed he had seen Richard.

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Thirdly, his history has many inventions, the most obvious of

which concerned the royal birth. Richard remained in his mother's
womb two years, he said, and was born with hair down to his
shoulders and with teeth. He may have decided to adopt an extended
pregnancy for the duchess because he had seen in London an elephant,
which does have a gestation of about two years. Although abnormal
teeth were associated with the birth of demons, he may have thought
to include them here because of the elephant's large tusks, a
grander version of the more familiar ones of a wild boar. To modern
minds the elephant is rather likeable, but to the medieval world it
was an awesome creature included with sirens in beastiaries and
feared since it was perceived to be inhabited by the devil. He also
suggested that the king's death by steel was foreordained because he
had been born with Scorpio in the ascendant, although, in fact,
Libra was his sign.38
A birth like this, in which nature had been interfered with,
could not, it was thought, result in a normal human being.
Accordingly, Rous compared the king's behaviour to that of the
Antichrist but stopped short of identifying him as that demon, a
comparison that is interesting because many Christians believed that
at the Last Judgment the Antichrist would appear as a Jew.39
Obviously, Rous could not suggest to Henry VII that his wife's uncle
had been a Jew or a devil. The description of Richard's looks came
a few paragraphs after the assertion that he had been in his
mother's womb two years: "He was small of stature with a short face
and unequal shoulders, the right higher and the left lower".
Finally, near the end of the account, after commenting about the
king's generosity, his "great quantities of treasure", and his
cruelty, the author concluded: "despite his little body and feeble

38 Excursus, John Rous' Account of the Reign of Richard III, in

Hanham, 118-121; for reference to a baby with teeth, see Kittredge,
117. In Central Europe a baby born with teeth was thought to be a
changeling; see Leo Kanner, Folklore of the Teeth, New York, 1928,
reprinted 1968, 10-13. Perhaps Rous did not see a real elephant,
for he claimed the one he saw had died (rather conveniently) shortly
thereafter; an elephant at the Tower during the reign of Henry III
had created such a furor according to Louise Collis (Seven in the
Tower, London, 1958, 18) that if Rous had seen one in Edward's
reign, surely the chroniclers would have referred to it. For
example, Robert Fabyan (as in note 21) 612, reported that all the
lions in the Tower had died in Henry VI's reign. Perhaps Rous
viewed an elephant in a bestiary; see, for example, The Bestiary of
Guillaume Le Clerc, trans. George Claridge, Ashford, Kent, 1936, 7888 and 708. For the devil in elephants, see Maximilian Rudwin, The
Devil in Legend and Literature, Chicago, 1931, reprinted 1970, 38.
39 Woods, 135.

Anne Boleyn and Richard III

149

strength, Richard honourably defended himself to his last breath".40

This section displays a perverse sense humour on the part of Rous,
who first had the king born in the manner of elephants, the largest
land beasts, and then had him grow up to be one of the little
people.
Unfortunately, the height of the Silesian diplomat is
unknown, for instead of describing Richard as tall or short, he
compared the king's height to his own, with Richard winning the
contest by three fingers. He also noted that the king had delicate
arms and was thinner than himself. A reasonable speculation is that
Richard was of average height, that he was neither tall nor short
but middling, and that he had a slim build with even shoulders.
Admittedly, this is a strong statement in light of Rous' charges,
but he undoubtedly intended the uneven shoulders, a normal feature
of a hunchedback person, to be a veiled reference to the popular
deformity claims. Furthermore, in two drawings he made of Richard,
he gave the king no trace of a physical defect. Finally, size is
relative. Had Richard been of medium height, in any comparison with
his brother who was over six feet tall, he would have seemed
short.41 The contention here is that Rous deliberately set out to
give Richard the features of a mythical dwarf or pygmy, and his
comment that the king was born with long hair is the key.
A reference was made above to more than thirty Welsh bards
who celebrated the succession of Henry VII and defamed Richard as
deformed. The folklore of Wales, particularly the Arthurian
legends, is rich with dwarfs; many of them are warrior kings, the
greater part of them ugly, some with humps, large heads, unkempt
hair, often falling to their shoulders, and warped limbs. Like
Richard, as Rous described him, they are frequently fierce fighters,
preside over large treasuries, often are generous with their money,
and occasionally are malevolent. The Church had categorized them
and other elf s, who were celebrated in European fairy legends, as

40 Hanham, 122 note 4 and 123. The left and right sides were
written in later, possibly in a second hand. The highlighting is
mine.
41 George B. Churchill, Richard the Third up To Shakespeare,
Palestra 10,1900, 51-52. In the seventeenth century George Buck
apparently invented a Latin oration given by a Scots ambassador to
Richard in 1484. In it he had the diplomat quote a poem praising
"the most renowned Prince of the Thebeans", which Buck translated as
follows: "So great a Soul, Such Strength of Mind. Sage Nature ne'r
to a less Body joyn'd". This statement surely does not mean that
Richard was short but that his divine qualities were not usually
present in human form. See White Kennett, A Complete History of
England, 2nd edn., London, 1719, I, 572-573.

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minor demons.42
Modern histories of Richard have not sufficiently recognized
that a crooked or hunched back is a symptom of one kind of dwarfism.
By referring only to "uneven shoulders", Rous refrained from
blatantly characterizing Queen Elizabeth of York's uncle as a dwarf
in a work written for her husband to read. Surely, the calling of
his wife's blood uncle a fairy demon would have offended Henry VII
about as much as calling him a Jew. Besides not wanting others to
believe that he had married into a family with demons, the king
would have objected to the epithet for two reasons. First, Rous'
contemporaries often confused the elfish spirits with pygmies of the
East, whom ancient writers described as subhuman beings with long
hair. As late as 1699 an English scholar wrote a tract to explain
that he had proved scientifically that they were subhuman.43
Secondly, the mythical fairy demon and the pygmy were usually
associated with real dwarfs, some of whom were kept at royal courts
as pets. There was, moreover, a noble contemporary of Richard who
may well have suffered from dwarfism. Scholars have variously
described Jeanne, the daughter of Louis XI of France, as deformed,
misshapen, and hunchedback. Her story is instructive as to the
treatment of a member of the royalty with such an affliction. In
1476 her father forced the young duke of Orleans (the future Louis
XII) to marry her in the belief that she would not be able to have
children and that her barrenness would extinguish the duke's line.
Reportedly, Orleans' mother, Maria of Cleves, "almost fainted from
horror" when she learned the identity of her young son's bride.
After their marriage, the duke dutifully visited his wife in her
house at Lignieres twice a year but refused to talk to or look at
her. Upon his succession to the throne, the couple was divorced and
she willingly retired to a nunnery.44
At the time Rous described Richard's features, the drama of
the French royal family formed a vivid example of contemporary
attitudes toward human deformities. He seems to have gone as far as
possible toward identifying Richard as a dwarf in the account, given

42 Vernon J. Harward Jr., The Dwarfs of Arthurian Romance and Celtic

Tradition, Leiden, 1958, 31; Russell, Witchcraft, 101 and 111; in
1584 Guillaume Bouchet published Les Serees, which had an entire
section on hunchbacks and monsters, cited by Park and Daston (as in
note 4), 40-41; see also Kittredge, 175.
43 Friedman, 18, 179, and 191-196; Edward Tyson, A Philological
Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Antients, ed. Bertram CA.
Windle (Bibliotheque de Carabas, 1884, reprinted 1972).
44 Paul M. Kendall, Louis XI, New York 1971, 344 (hereafter,
Kendall); Sabine Mechior-Bonnet, Chateaux of the Loire, tr. Angela
Armstrong, Paris, 1984, 39.

Anne Boleyn and Richard H I

151

the limitations imposed by his intended recipient, Henry VII, who

would understandably have objected to explicit names that might cast
direct aspersions on his own family and lineage. Considering the
context, the uneven shoulders were a milder exaggeration than the
absurd stories about Richard's birth.
Polydore Vergil came to England in 1502 and within three or
four years began his history of the country, which contained the
first scholarly study of Richard. Vergil continued to work on the
manuscript after the death of Henry VII in 1509 and had it published
in 1534. As a humanist he hoped to instruct his readers in morality
by the critical use of historical evidence, and surely one of the
primary sources he reviewed was Rous' work. Ignoring the story of
Richard's birth, Vergil seems to have followed Rous in the statement
that the king was "lyttle of stature, deformyd of body, thone
showlder being higher than thother", a description that was more
reasonable than the popular view of his "crooktback". Vergil drew
on other evidence, perhaps a treatise by Dominic Mancini, who
visited England during Richard's reign. Mancini revealed, without
giving details, that one of Richard's arguments for seizing the
throne had arisen from his claim that he looked more like their
father, the Duke of York, than did Edward IV. Richard was said to
have used this comparison as evidence to prove that Edward was
illegitimate and that his issue was ineligible to succeed to the
throne. Vergil enlarged upon Mancini's statement, transferring
Rous' characterization of Richard to the duke of York, whom he
described as "very little" and "short and rownd". It is impossible
to determine whether Vergil had other sources for this description,
for by 1506 no one would have had a vivid memory of the duke who had
died in 1460. In fact, in at least one attribute, York did not
resemble Rous' version of his royal son. An epitaph written shortly
after the duke's death praised his powerfulness; by contrast Rous
allowed Richard only "feeble strength".45

45 Three Books of Polydore Vergil's English History, Comprising the

Reigns of Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III, ed. Sir Henry Ellis,
London, 1844, 184 and 226. The highlighting in the quotation is
mine. It has been assumed that Vergil had information given to him
by those who had known Richard, but a statement written in Latin by
a priest who had died in 1492 would have seemed more authoritative
to him, although it is not certain that he possessed Rous' account.
By the time Vergil published and perhaps by the time he reached the
point in his history when he had to write about the reign of
Richard, most of those who had been in close contact with that king
were probably dead or perhaps inaccessible. Further, when more than
twenty years after his death people were asked if he had been short
with uneven shoulders, their answer could reasonably have been,
given the absurd rumours about him, that he was clearly shorter than
Edward IV and might have had uneven shoulders obscured by his
clothing. Eyewitness accounts tend to become clouded by (cont.)

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R.M. Warnicke

The final contemporary contributor to this legend was Sir

Thomas More, who was only a child when Richard died. In his
history, written about 1513, he included many rumours, which he
hedged by qualifications such as "it is said" or "people think".
The king was "little of stature", he wrote, "ill featured of limbs,
crook-backed with his left shoulder much higher than his right".
This king had been born, he continued, feet first, with teeth, and
had been "afore his birth, ever froward". It was the basis for all
later Tudor works, which were, in turn, the source for Shakespeare's
drama, the most damning of all because of its greatness as
literature and its wide dissemination. Shakespeare's Richard
becomes a "hedge-hog", a "hunch-backed toad", a "boar", and an
"elvish-mark's abortive, rooting hog", the last phrase directly
linking him to the world of fairies and dwarfs.46
Tudor prejudice has been blamed for the lack of sympathetic
accounts of Richard's appearance, an explanation that blurs the
difference between the existence of attacks and the absence of
defence and tends to obscure what may have been the real reason he
was not defended. Dwelling in the Low Countries during this period
was the dowager duchess of Burgundy, Richard's sister, who could
easily have set the record straight about her brother's looks,
except that the full force of the extraordinary claims about them,
in the way of publications, did not occur until about the middle of
Henry VUI's reign, fifty years after Richard's death. By then she
and most of the people who could have remembered him and who might
have been personally offended by printed suggestions that he had
been a monster, a dwarf, were dead. Later in the century, when John
Stowe, the London antiquary, asked oldtimers about Richard's
features, they conceded that he had not been hunchedbacked but that
he must have been short.47
In the early seventeenth century favourable studies of the
king began to surface,48 and in the succeeding centuries many more,
particularly in the post World War II period, have attacked the

(45 cont.) rumour and the passage of time. See also Denys Hay, The
Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil, AJ). 1485-1537, Camden Series,
vol. 74, London, 1950, xiv-xix; for the epitaph, see Political Poems
and Songs Relating to English History Composed During the Period
from the Accession of Edward I H to that of Richard H I , ed. Thomas
Wright, London, 1861, II, 256-257.
46 St Thomas More, Richard III, 8, 50, and 95; the highlighting in
the quotation is mine. William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Richard
The Third, I,ii,103; I,iii,246; V,iii,157; I,iii,228. See also
Jeremy Potter, More about More, The Ricardian 7, 1985, 66-73.
47 John Stowe quoted in White Kennett (as in note 41) I, 548.
48 For the seventeenth-century studies, see Kendall, 506-507 and
Ross, xliii-xlix.

Anne Boleyn and Richard H I

153

legends about his physical features. There are a few recent

scholars, like William H. Snyder, who have entirely discarded Rous'
claims, despite Vergil's support of them, and have denied that
Richard had any disfigurement at all. Many others still assert
that, even though Rous, Vergil, and More disagreed about which
shoulder was higher, the "crooktback" myth must have been based on
an actual, minor difference in the height of the king's shoulders.
This belief has led to speculation that the unevenness may have
arisen because as a puny youth Richard set out with such zeal to
learn how to fight with the sword that he greatly enlarged the
shoulder muscles on his right side. It has also been suggested that
he suffered from "Sprengel's deformity", a bone disease.49
Many historians also continue to award Anne physical defects
in the mistaken belief that the incredible story about her sixth
finger and wen must have been based upon some actual, minor feature.
But, instead, the origins of the alleged imperfections of both of
these controversial members of the royalty almost certainly lie in
the work of individuals who sought to malign them for their own
contemporary purposes. Those who blamed Anne for Henry's divorce
and the Protestant victory and those who blamed Richard for the
death of his nephews and the downfall of the Yorkist dynasty sought
to emphasize the perceived inner evil nature of this queen and king
by giving them ugly and misshaped forms. The subsequent reduced
nature of the defects arose from different causes. Rous downplayed
his description in order to curry favor with Henry VII, the husband
of Richard's niece, but Wyatt, in contrast, reduced the invented
imperfections of Anne out of a sense of loyalty to her, as the lady
he believed his grandfather had admired but not seduced. When the
origin and subsequent pattern of these myths are compared and
contrasted, as they have been here, and reviewed within the
political and cultural contexts of their day, the arguments against
the existence of both, valid individually, grow even stronger. The
deformities are fabrications based on ancient monster stories and
Tudor demonology, and it is high time they were so regarded.

Retha M. Warnicke
Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona

49 William H. Snyder, The Crown and the Tower, The Legend of Richard
III, Richard III Society, Inc., 1981, 30-38; Kendall, 177 and 537
note 26. The shoulder theory inspired a medical study; see Philip
Rhodes, The Physical Deformity of Richard III, British Medical
Journal 2, 1977, 1, 650-1, 652, cited by Ross, 139 note 38.