Discover the SECRETS of Anne Boleyn’s only authentic image | What is the Moost Happi medal of 1534?

The Most Happy Medal of 1534 is the only confirmed contemporary image of Anne Boleyn, which has survived the ravages of time. But why was it created? Why does only one copy of it survive? How and why is it damaged? And most importantly of all, what can we learn about the real Anne Boleyn by looking at this artefact and analysing how she chose to be presented on it? From its text to the clothes and jewellery she's wearing, what was Anne trying to tell us with Stay tuned to hear all the secrets held within the only original picture of Anne Boleyn we have left. This lead medal, of which no other example survives, shows Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, in a mid-length pose which encompasses her head and shoulders It has a diameter of 38mm, weighs in at 30.06g and is called the Most Happy Medal, because those words, which were one of Anne's personal mottos she had several over the years, appear around the edge of the medal, along with the date, Anno 1534, telling us when this piece was created. This makes it the only confirmed likeness of Anne taken during her lifetime which has survived to us, for the Queen was executed in May 1536 and all the portraits we have of her are later copies of lost originals. There are two drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger which some believe to be her, but I personally do not and I'll leave my video about why I think one of them has been incorrectly labelled linked below for you. The medal is English made, probably cast at the Royal Mint which was in the Tower of London during Anne's lifetime, and it is now held in the British Museum in London, having been purchased in 1860 from one of its former keepers of the Department of Antiquities, a Mr Edward Hawkins, upon his retirement. Hawkins was born in 1780 and joined the museum's staff in 1825, having previously been a banker, but we don't know when or from where he obtained the Most Happy Medal, and I can't account for its whereabouts between 1534 and his ownership, which could technically have begun as late as 1860. The front of the item has unfortunately suffered some damage over the years, most notably on the nose which is rather squished, and on her left eyebrow, eye and cheek which are on our right as we look at the medal. You can also see some superficial scratches in various areas. I don't think that any of this was the result of malicious intent though, but rather simply a mark of the medal's age, the comparatively soft nature of lead as medals go, and the fact that it's probably been handled a great deal and not stored well. The damage simply isn't severe enough to make me think anyone was trying to obliterate Anne's image. If that was the goal, you'd do much worse to it than this. Just think about the damage done to statues of historical figures in the modern era whose legacies are now contested if not flat out condemned. If the aim had been to insult or erase Anne's memory, the medal could have just been melted down. The damage notwithstanding, we can see that the Queen had a long oval face, high cheekbones, a slightly pursed mouth I think, and a slim build. She is looking off to our left, her right. On her head, she wears an English style gable hood with lapets down to the bottom of her chin, and with a veil pinned up on her right, then flowing down her back on her left. Her dress has a square cut neckline and large flared sleeves below her shoulders, which we can just see the beginnings of. Around her neck is either one necklace wrapped around her twice, and from which is suspended a cross, or a choker holding the cross and a separate necklace which disappears into the front of her dress. On the left side of the medal, we see the letters AR, which stand for Anna Regina, meaning Anne the Queen in Latin. In the 21st century, a woman named Lucy Churchill was allowed to view the original item in the British Museum and create a modern reconstruction of it. In the course of creating this reconstruction, she discovered another great piece of information about the medal which I don't think I would have ever noticed myself. This is the fact that Anne is wearing the famous Tudor consort necklace, seen around the necks of four of Henry's wives, and consisting of sets of four pearls alternating with rubies set in quadrufoils. We can see it much better, albeit with a different pendant, in Hans Holbein's famous portrait of Anne's successor, Jane Seymour, and the sequence of jewels carries on around her headdress and neckline, though on the medal it seems to be on the hood only. I have a video all about this necklace which I'll leave linked for you. There's not a great deal to say about the reverse of the medal, except that it should be blank. We can see, however, that at some point someone has crudely scratched the words Anne Boleyn Regina in all capitals onto it with an extra E on Boleyn, and it is heavily scratched around the edges from the 10am to 5pm positions. As this was obviously not part of the original design though, and we don't know when it was done or by whom, I don't think it's of any importance, and won't be discussing it any further. Now let's think about why this medal was created in 1534 specifically. Early theories were put forward by Edward Hawkins, who drew up a catalogue of British medals up to the year 1760, which was then further edited and published posthumously in 1885, Hawkins having died in 1867. This book includes a drawing of the medal, restored to an undamaged state, or perhaps it simply wasn't as badly damaged at that stage, and the suggestion that it was associated with Anne's marriage or coronation. However, both of these events took place in 1533, and so cannot be the reason behind a medal created and specifically dated the following year. Furthermore, the book's little paragraph on Anne is just littered with errors, so you really wouldn't trust anything it says. It doesn't even get the year of her death correct, which suggests little to no research by either Hawkins or the later editors. The most popular theory put forward to explain the medal's creation today is that it was struck in anticipation of the birth of a male heir to Henry and Anne, for the Queen was pregnant in the first half of 1534. I'll leave my video about that pregnancy and whether it was a pseudo-pregnancy linked for you. I agree with this idea, mostly because of the timing, but also, and I think this will give you a little laugh, because Anne's bust, which eyewitnesses said wasn't much to look at, is pretty generous here, which might suggest a pregnancy. And again, kudos to Lucy Churchill for noticing that fact while she was creating her reconstruction. Furthermore, this wouldn't have been the first time that she and Henry jumped the gun in anticipation of a son. Anne had had letters drawn up before her daughter Elizabeth's birth in September 1533 announcing the arrival of a boy, only to then have to squeeze in the letter S at the end of the word prince to make it into the word princess, which could be spelled with one S in the 16th century. The early celebrations for the arrival of a male child in 1534 were to prove equally ill-judged, for Anne lost the baby that summer. This would account for why there are no other medals extant. There was clearly never a full run of them produced and distributed, and the one we have may even have been a solitary prototype. Perhaps had she not also lost her third pregnancy, which ended at about 15 weeks' gestation in January 1536, there would have been a medal for that too. Or maybe by then she and her husband would have learnt not to count their chickens before they'd hatched. We'll never know. So that explanation tells us why the medal was created in 1534, but why create a medal in anticipation of a child at all, when there had been no such fuss before Elizabeth's birth? Well, I certainly don't think it was intended as just a show of simple parental joy. Rather, I believe it had a political purpose, and was designed to cement Anne's shaky position as queen. Henry's first wife was still alive in 1534, and Anne's marriage was regarded by many in England and across Europe as being bigamous, and her daughter illegitimate. If anything, her position was even worse than it had been a year earlier, before Elizabeth's birth, where the little girl's gender had been a disappointment and had undermined her mother's position. Anne needed a win by 1534, and a showy one at that. Having medals sent around the country proclaiming her as queen, presenting her wearing the consort's expensive and highly recognisable jewellery, one of the ultimate status symbols for the Tudor queens in this era, celebrating her position as the mother of the new male heir who had never been as happy, would certainly have made an impact, showing people who the real consort was, and the strength of her position. It would also have robbed Catherine's nose in it, especially as I suspect that cross she's wearing had also been taken from the previous queen, for Catherine was made to surrender her jewels to Anne back in 1532. So I very much think that Anne is trying to assert her position here, or rather she was getting ready to once her boy had arrived, and I don't actually believe the medals claim that she was the most happy at this stage in her life. Instead, I think she was probably rightly worried about her position, given her unpopularity in many quarters, the fact that her only child was a girl, and that she herself was already in her thirties. This was propaganda. Anne was trying to craft a particular story about herself and her situation, and control the narrative around her. We shouldn't take it at face value. Now for the really serious question. How far can we trust this image as a picture of the real Anne Boleyn? The medal is of course very small, as these things generally are, and we've discussed the damage it has suffered to the nose and other areas of the face. Nevertheless, it is the only image we have of Anne made during her life, and though it will never be as good as a portrait, or the pictures of modern royals on coins and medals, I think we can take it as a good approximation of her looks. Though we have no documentary evidence to tell us about its creation, or much of its journey between 1534 and today, I think we can guarantee that she had at least some, and perhaps a great deal, of input into what it would look like, and I don't think that this is an imagined image. She's wearing jewels which we know were real, suggesting that she either had her picture drawn for this medal specifically, or a portrait was made available to the person who created this to work from. The oval face and high cheekbones also match what we see in other images of her, most notably the Hever Rose portrait held at her childhood home, Hever Castle, and the miniature in the checkers ring opposite a portrait of her daughter Elizabeth. Both these items were created during Elizabeth's reign, when there may have been people alive who remembered Anne, and portraits of her taken from life still available. The fact that she is not presented as a great beauty here either, makes me think it's probably quite accurate too, as that accords with eyewitness descriptions of her. She was described as being only moderately pretty, and not as good-looking as Henry's former mistress, Bessie Blunt, who was the mother of his son, the Duke of Richmond. Why, we might ask, would Anne not want to Well, first and foremost, I think we need to realise that her looks might actually have been improved for this image. We don't know, but even if they were, I doubt she was rendered unrecognisable. I think it would have been important to her, as she tried to build her position as queen, that people know her face, and having potentially thousands of medals sent out with an inaccurate image wasn't the way to do that. I also think that medals from this time period are more accurate than a lot of people realise. If we look at other examples from the 16th century of people for whom contemporary portraits exist, which can be used for a comparison, we can see that the technology was available to make really good little portraits of people in this medium, and these portraits were generally pretty close to reality, or at least the reality we can see in paintings. As the queen, Anne would of course have had her medal made by the best workmen available, and it must have been state-of-the-art for the time. So to sum up, I think this portrait medal is a prototype for a much larger run of medals which would have been created and distributed around England, and perhaps even further afield, had Anne given birth to a son, and that they were intended to be used as propaganda to solidify her position as queen consort of England over Catherine of Aragon. When the baby was lost though, there was simply no reason to create any more, and we are lucky that this one has made it to us. I hope you enjoyed my take on this famous image of Anne Boleyn. If so, please do give the video a thumbs up to let YouTube know you approve, and helped get my work in front of other interested people, and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already, with the notification bell switched on so that you'll get a little ding when I upload. If you're already subscribed, it's sometimes worth checking too that your notifications are still switched on, as they sometimes get deactivated, possibly due to device updates on your phone etc. You can get more from me by becoming a YouTube channel member by hitting the join button, or by heading over to patreon.com forward slash history calling to become one of my patrons, for whom I provide bonus material like early access to ad-free videos and extra podcasts. That's linked below for you, as is my book, Find Your Irish Ancestors Online, which you can purchase from Amazon as an e-book or paperback, and my website, historycallingofficial.com, where you can get two complimentary downloads by joining my free mailing list, plus my monthly newsletter. Last but not least, thank you to all those who support the channel using the super thanks button under videos, as this is very much appreciated. Let me know in the comments how trustworthy you think this image is as a picture of Anne Boleyn. For more on Henry's doomed second queen, I have an entire playlist on her which you can check out, but if you'd like my personal recommendation, try my videos on the checkers ring and on her bee pendant. Whatever you choose, please enjoy, and until next time, keep learning.