Anne Boleyn ABSOLUTELY Despised Queen Mary I - Here's Why.

In February 1534, the Holy Roman Emperor's ambassador in London, a lawyer from Savoy named Eustace Chapuys, sat down to write his boss a letter, and somewhere between the news from Parliament and a new rule about silk imports, he dropped this. A gentleman had told him that Anne Boleyn, the brand-new queen of England, had sent word to her aunt, the woman in charge of King Henry VIII's seventeen-year-old daughter, Mary. The message came with a condition. If Mary kept calling herself a princess, the aunt was supposed to box her ears, and I'm quoting the old English translation here, "as a cursed bastard." Box her ears! Dang. That's not "we got off on the wrong foot" energy. That's the queen of England telling her own family to smack a teenager for using the wrong title, and in the very same letter Chapuys adds that Anne had ordered the girl to stop getting her meals served privately in her room. So today we're tackling the question in the title. Why did Anne Boleyn absolutely hate Queen Mary I? And right out of the gate I have to confess something, because the title has a small technical problem that a bunch of you are already typing into the comments: Anne Boleyn never met Queen Mary I. Not once. Anne lost her head in May 1536, and Mary didn't become queen until July 1553, seventeen years later, which is about how long it takes a newborn to get a driver's license. The Mary that Anne knew? A demoted teenager, officially banned from calling herself a princess. So why'd I keep the title? Because the woman who became Queen Mary I was forged, in a very real way, during those three years when Anne Boleyn was the most powerful woman in England and Mary was the girl she could not break. Here's my thesis, and the rest of this video is going to try to prove it or blow it up. Anne didn't hate Mary because of some fairy-tale wicked stepmother thing. She hated her because the two of them could not both be legitimate at the same time, and every single day that Mary stayed alive and stubborn, she was a walking legal argument that Anne Boleyn was a mistress and Anne's baby daughter was a bastard. We've got threats, poison rumors, a teenager plotting an escape in a sieve, a letter left lying around on purpose (maybe), and an ending that flips the whole story on its head. Let's go!