Owen Emmerson & Kate McCaffrey - Capturing a Queen: The Image of Anne Boleyn

For nearly five hundred years, Anne Boleyn’s face has been everywhere and nowhere at once.

She is one of the most recognisable women in British history, yet no securely identified painted portrait of her is thought to survive.

Instead, her image has been shaped by copies, imagination, romanticism, and repetition, until myth has often eclipsed evidence.

In this talk, Kate McCaffrey and Dr Owen Emmerson reveal the discoveries behind their new book and the landmark exhibition it accompanies at Hever Castle.

Bringing together an unprecedented assembly of portraits traditionally identified as Anne Boleyn, alongside objects she once owned or handled, they explore how her image has been constructed, altered, revived, and misunderstood from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The talk takes audiences inside the detective work of art history and material culture.

From the scientific re-examination of the famous Hever Rose portrait, to the identification of a previously unrecognised contemporary image of Anne, Owen and Kate explain how new technical analysis is reshaping what we can confidently say about her appearance.

Along the way, they uncover how Elizabeth I carefully rehabilitated her mother’s image, how later generations romanticised her into a tragic heroine, and why certain visual “types” of Anne became so powerful and persistent.

At its heart, this is a story about memory, evidence, and the desire to see the past clearly.

What does it really mean to “capture” a queen? And why does Anne Boleyn’s face still matter so much today? Owen and Kate will be guiding a 30 minute tour around the exhibition straight after the talk.

This is included in the price of your ticket if you would like to attend.

Kate McCaffrey is the Castle Historian and Assistant Curator at Hever Castle in Kent.

She is also a CHASE-funded PhD researcher with the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent.

Her MA research revealed ground breaking new insights into Anne Boleyn’s prayerbooks, and she was also part of the research team that identified the book in Hans Holbein the Younger’s famous portrait of Thomas Cromwell.

In 2024, she led the re-interpretation of a suite of rooms inside Hever Castle, known as ‘The Boleyn Apartment’, aiding the greatest change the Castle had seen in over a generation.

In 2024, she was named as one of BBC History Extra’s ’30 under 30 historians.

She has co-authored four books, appeared on multiple television documentaries, and contributed to many podcasts.

Dr Owen Emmerson is a social and cultural historian, author, and consultant.

He is part of the curatorial team at Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn’s childhood home.

In 2024, he worked as one of the historical consultants for the BBC adaptation of Dame Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.

Emmerson was part of the research teams that identified the Book of Hours captured in Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell in 2023 and a miniature portrait of Queen Mary I as Princess by Suzannah Horenbout in 2024.

He is the co-author of several books and has contributed to numerous television documentaries, such as The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family (2021, BBC2) and Holbein’s The Ambassadors (2025, Arte).

Owens’ website can be found here: https://drowenemmerson.com and Kates’ here: https://kateemccaffrey.wordpress.com/about/