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alienating as this one.
    Twelve years old; or about that, anyway. We do not know the date of Anne Boleyn’s birth with certainty. We deduce it, in fact, partly from the knowledge that she came to Margaret of Austria’s court in 1513 and that twelve was the youngest age at which a girl would normally take up such duties.
    ‘I find her so bright and pleasant for her young age that I am more beholden to you for sending her to me than you are to me’, Margaret wrote to Anne’s father. The tribute meant the more for the fact that Margaret had herself served a European-wide political apprenticeship unparalleled even in the sixteenth century. At thirty-three, after six years ruling the Netherlands on behalf of her father Maximilian and his grandson, her nephew Charles, she was a figure of international authority. To follow the early career of Margaret of Austria is to read a Who’s Who of sixteenth-century Europe. And Margaret would come to play a significant role in the lives of two of the most controversial queens in English history.
    ‘Whatever you do, place yourself in the service of a lady who is well regarded, who is constant and who has good judgement’, one of Margaret’s mentors, the French governor Anne de Beaujeu, had advised in a manual of instruction for her daughter. If Anne Boleyn were to learn the lesson that a woman could advance ideas, exercise authority and control her own destiny, she could hardly have fallen into better hands.
    The controversial German scholar Cornelius Agrippa dedicated On the Nobility and Excellence of the Feminine Sex to Margaret of Austria. Agrippa said the differences between men and women were merely physical: ‘the woman hath that same mind that a man hath, the same reason and speech, she goeth to the same end of blissfulness, where shall be no exception of kind’, and that the only reason women were subordinate was lack of education and masculine ill-will.
    In schoolgirl French – French being the chosen language of Margaret of Austria’s court – Anne Boleyn wrote to her father of her determination to make the most of her opportunities. She wrote with distinctly idiosyncratic grammar and spelling (she would strive, she wrote in that letter, to learn to speak French well ‘and also spell’) but under a tutor’s eye. Margaret’s court might be a centre both of power and of pleasure but it was also Europe’s finest seminary. The French diplomat, Lancelot de Carles, later described how the young Anne ‘listened carefully to honourable ladies, setting herself to bend all her endeavour to imitate them to perfection and made such good use of her wits that in no time at all she had command of the language’.
     
    Portraits of the woman Anne Boleyn met in 1513 display a subtle mixture of messages. Since the end of her third and last marriage, Margaret of Austria had made a point of having herself painted always in a widow’s coif, with only the white of the headdress and the sleeves of her costume relieving the inky black. At first sight, no more sombre figure could be imagined. But appearances can be deceptive. To appear as a widow was on the surface a statement of self-abnegation, almost of weakness, a plea for pity. But in fact it allowed a woman both moral and practical authority; the only role that allowed her to operate independently, as neither child nor chattel.
    In heraldry, black was the colour of trustworthiness, or ‘ loyaute ’. Margaret of Austria had a name for reliability but one Italian visitor noted that as well as ‘a great and truly imperial presence’, she had ‘a certain most pleasing way of laughing’. Black fabric, which needed much expensive dye and labour to produce its depth of colour, was the luxury material of the sixteenth century. And in the portrait, now in Vienna, the pale fur on Margaret’s sleeves is costly ermine. The court to which Anne Boleyn had come, whether at the summer palace of Veure (La Veuren), or at Margaret’s main base