Henry VIII’s filthy love letters to Anne Boleyn: King wanted to ‘kiss her pritty duckys’
KING HENRY VIII penned filthy love letters to Anne Boleyn before the pair married, according to an historian, who told Express.co.uk how the monarch wrote that he wanted to "kiss her pritty duckys".
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Henry VIII is often portrayed as a monster, who behaved as a brute towards those close to him. England’s larger-than-life Tudor King inflicted terror on some of the several lovers he courted during his 36-year reign. Nobody felt this more than his doomed second wife, Anne Boleyn, who started out as a lady-in-waiting to his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Henry had Anne put to death at the Tower of London in 1536, where she was beheaded by a French swordsman.
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It is believed that Anne fell victim to a vicious briefing campaign against her at court as she was accused of being unfaithful to her husband.
She also could not give birth to the healthy male heir her husband desired, although did have a daughter, Elizabeth, the future Queen.
Despite Henry ordering Anne’s execution, during their years together, the couple enjoyed a whirlwind romance and Henry penned flirty love letters to his Queen.
Historian Sandra Vasoli explained to Express.co.uk how in one love letter, the King wrote that he hoped to “kiss Anne’s kiss pritty duckys” – slang for her breasts.
The author of the book, ‘Anne Boleyn's Letter from the Tower: A New Assessment’ visited the Biblioteca Apostolica in the Vatican Library in Rome, where she pored over a collection of 17 letters Henry wrote to Anne.
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She said: “He's saying ‘Gosh, I'd rather you were sitting here instead of your brother, and I wish of an evening that I could be kissing your pretty duckys’, which are her breasts.
“So, at that point in time, there had been physicality between them.
“Not necessarily intercourse. But, you know, stuff was going on.
“Because he wasn't just saying that if it had never, ever happened.”
The letter is not dated but Henry may have written it to Anne in around 1528, while he was still married to Catherine, and by which point he was already infatuated with Anne.
Ms Vasoli explained that the King would rather have Anne by his side than her brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, one of his courtiers.
She said: “One of the famous quotations from the letters is where he says, ‘I wish you were here instead of your brother’.
“Because her brother George was one of his courtiers and was around him all the time.”
Ms Vasoli claimed that although Henry’s letters to Anne were polite at first, they grew racier as time passed and Anne began to reciprocate the King’s advances.
She said: “He is very polite in there. He does use terms of endearment, but they were the ones that were politely used then – ‘my mistress and friend’.
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“Only later did he start to address her as ‘sweetheart, darling’.
“So, you knew in the early ones it was almost like a young man coming for a date and kind of meeting the parents and being all dressed and being very neat and very proper.
“Because that's how they were. And over the course of several letters, you can see his writing becoming more casual, more relaxed.
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“And in there he is putting terms of endearment that I believe he would have never used if she was not returning affection to him.”
She added: “Many expressions of love, shared love and then ultimately there are letters in which he was kind of racy.”
‘Anne Boleyn's Letter from the Tower: A New Assessment’ was written by Sandra Vasoli and published by MadeGlobal Publishing in 2015. It is available here.
