I’d love to know more about them, the information on that isn’t as accessible as other aspects of her life.
I think she had a close relationship with her sister, Mary, despite their falling out– she sent her a gold cup even after she’d been banished from court, and Mary said in a letter to Cromwell that it was Anne’s affection she missed most of all, among all her family.
Anne definitely had a close friendship with her brother, George, also.
It seems she was close with Bridget Wiltshire, who was one of her ladies-in-waiting, but they had a falling-out of some kind.
As for friends from childhood, likely Lady Margaret Lee (née Wyatt), as she later became one of her ladies, and the Wyatt estates were near Anne’s family’s.
To Marguerite of Navarre, Anne wrote “that her greatest wish, next to having a son, was to see [her] again’– not definite proof of a close friendship, but she did know her and I tend to think they were at least somewhat friends.
This about Margery Horsman, one of her ladies (it’s not the impression I got from Ives’ bio, but I could be misremembering):
Margery was close enough to Anne to know that she grieved when her favourite dog, Purkoy, was found dead after he fell out of a window. Margery also knew that nobody dared to inform the Queen of Purkoy’s tragic death until “it pleased the King’s Highness to tell her Grace of it”. Margery had free access to the Queen’s Privy Chamber, as demonstrated by Thomas Warley’s letters, and distributed golden cramp rings blessed by Henry VIII on Good Friday to Anne Boleyn’s supporters.
She’s often written in fiction as someone that had closer friendships with men than women; however my own independent research done doesn’t show much of an indication of that characterization– if anything, it seems she was the opposite to the point of antagonizing some powerful men at court:
“After the elder Katherine Howard’s (that is, the aunt of the more famous Catherine Howard) husband was put to death for treason, Anne swept in to arrange a marriage for Katherine to save her from ruin. She matched her with Lord Daubeney, and when Daubeney was promoted to Earl of Bridgewater by Henry VIII, Katherine became a Countess. Court gossip eventually turned against Katherine, who would write that:
“I have none to do me help except the Queen, to whom I am much bound, and with whom much effort is made to draw favour from me.”
Sir Edward Baynton, who had “a strong antipathy for what he saw as feminine independence under the protection of the Queen’s household” knew of enough women favored by Anne to construct a list in 1536 to give to the lord treasurer. He offered to “apply pressure to them himself to elicit evidence that [could] condemn Anne at trial”.
Even in years when Anne’s queenship was secure, Baynton was “quick to criticize the ‘frivolity’ of Anne’s ladies and the cavalier attitude towards men that the household supposedly encouraged”.
“Sir Anthony Browne had quarreled with his sister Elizabeth, Countess of Worcester, over the freedom she enjoyed when she served Anne Boleyn and the subsequent enstrangement her residency in the household had apparently created with her husband” (Russell, 2016).
In the case of Elizabeth, Anne had not only paid her midwifery bills but loaned her £100 without Lord Worcester’s knowledge.
When her friend Anne Gainsford was under heat for reading heretical work that she had borrowed from Anne, Anne herself owned up to her ownership of the book so that Gainsford would not be blamed.
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