V.E. Lynne's Blog
May 18, 2014
The Execution of Anne Boleyn
On a clear May morning in the year 1536 a crowd of about two thousand people, including several leading courtiers, gathered inside the precincts of the Tower of London to witness one of the most shocking and endlessly controversial events in english history: the execution of Queen Anne Boleyn.
Her fall from grace had been as sudden and swift as her rise had been drawn-out and slow. Her husband, King Henry VIII, his passion for her having fatally soured, had publicly abandoned her at the traditional May Day tournament, held at Greenwich just three weeks earlier. During the proceedings the king had received a note, the contents of which probably outlined the arrest and confession to adultery with the queen of the young court musician Mark Smeaton. Seemingly stunned, the king had stood up and departed the tournament ground, without a word to his wife. He never saw her again.
After that dramatic moment, events moved at a rapid pace. The queen was arrested as were her brother George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton. They were all tried, convicted and executed for adultery with Anne. Smeaton was the only one who confessed but his admission must be treated with caution as it may have been obtained under torture. The others admitted no guilt at all.
They had all fallen to the axe two days before Anne on 17 May. In an act perhaps of some mercy, the king decided that his second queen would not die in the same way. To that end he hired, at the cost of twenty three pounds, a swordsman from Calais to dispatch his wife. The traditional english method of beheading by axe often went wrong - it had taken three strokes to sever George Boleyn's head.
And so, on the morning of the 19th, Anne Boleyn went to meet her fate. She was dressed in a grey gown with a low neck, furred sleeves and crimson kirtle and many spectators commented on how beautiful she looked. Beautiful she may have been but she must also have been in a state of exhaustion and terror. Nevertheless, in a display of great courage, she walked calmly onto the scaffold and told the Constable, Sir William Kingston, that she had "a mind to speak."
There are several versions of her speech but all seem to agree that she exhorted the crowd to pray for the king, "one of the best princes on the face of the earth", and added that if any person sought to meddle with her cause she required them to "judge the best". By and large though it seems to have been a speech that stuck to the accepted conventions but, like her supposed lovers before her, she confessed to nothing.
Once she had finished speaking, Anne bid farewell to her weeping ladies, knelt in the straw, and prepared herself for death. She prayed aloud, repeating over and over again "Jesu receive my soul, oh Lord God have pity on my soul!". The swordsman earnt his fee and took her head off at one stroke and the brief, dazzling and tumultuous life and reign of Anne Boleyn was over.
A proper coffin had not been provided for her body and there would be no funeral. Her ladies, sobbing pitifully, were left to wrap her remains and place them in an old arrow chest. They then carried it to the Tower chapel of St Peter ad Vincula where their erstwhile mistress was hastily buried beneath the chancel stones. The king remarried, to Jane Seymour, within a month and reportedly never mentioned his second wife by name again. He soon however provided her with company in her lonely grave - her cousin, Catherine Howard, and her sister in law Jane Boleyn were both beheaded in 1542 and buried beside Anne in the chapel. Centuries later, in his 1848 book 'History of England', Thomas Babington Macaulay was so affected by the final resting place of Anne Boleyn, and many others, that he was moved to write that "in truth, there is no sadder spot on Earth."
Her fall from grace had been as sudden and swift as her rise had been drawn-out and slow. Her husband, King Henry VIII, his passion for her having fatally soured, had publicly abandoned her at the traditional May Day tournament, held at Greenwich just three weeks earlier. During the proceedings the king had received a note, the contents of which probably outlined the arrest and confession to adultery with the queen of the young court musician Mark Smeaton. Seemingly stunned, the king had stood up and departed the tournament ground, without a word to his wife. He never saw her again.
After that dramatic moment, events moved at a rapid pace. The queen was arrested as were her brother George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton. They were all tried, convicted and executed for adultery with Anne. Smeaton was the only one who confessed but his admission must be treated with caution as it may have been obtained under torture. The others admitted no guilt at all.
They had all fallen to the axe two days before Anne on 17 May. In an act perhaps of some mercy, the king decided that his second queen would not die in the same way. To that end he hired, at the cost of twenty three pounds, a swordsman from Calais to dispatch his wife. The traditional english method of beheading by axe often went wrong - it had taken three strokes to sever George Boleyn's head.
And so, on the morning of the 19th, Anne Boleyn went to meet her fate. She was dressed in a grey gown with a low neck, furred sleeves and crimson kirtle and many spectators commented on how beautiful she looked. Beautiful she may have been but she must also have been in a state of exhaustion and terror. Nevertheless, in a display of great courage, she walked calmly onto the scaffold and told the Constable, Sir William Kingston, that she had "a mind to speak."
There are several versions of her speech but all seem to agree that she exhorted the crowd to pray for the king, "one of the best princes on the face of the earth", and added that if any person sought to meddle with her cause she required them to "judge the best". By and large though it seems to have been a speech that stuck to the accepted conventions but, like her supposed lovers before her, she confessed to nothing.
Once she had finished speaking, Anne bid farewell to her weeping ladies, knelt in the straw, and prepared herself for death. She prayed aloud, repeating over and over again "Jesu receive my soul, oh Lord God have pity on my soul!". The swordsman earnt his fee and took her head off at one stroke and the brief, dazzling and tumultuous life and reign of Anne Boleyn was over.
A proper coffin had not been provided for her body and there would be no funeral. Her ladies, sobbing pitifully, were left to wrap her remains and place them in an old arrow chest. They then carried it to the Tower chapel of St Peter ad Vincula where their erstwhile mistress was hastily buried beneath the chancel stones. The king remarried, to Jane Seymour, within a month and reportedly never mentioned his second wife by name again. He soon however provided her with company in her lonely grave - her cousin, Catherine Howard, and her sister in law Jane Boleyn were both beheaded in 1542 and buried beside Anne in the chapel. Centuries later, in his 1848 book 'History of England', Thomas Babington Macaulay was so affected by the final resting place of Anne Boleyn, and many others, that he was moved to write that "in truth, there is no sadder spot on Earth."
March 29, 2014
Why the Tudor Obsession?
Since 1066, there have been many dynasties that have ruled England: Normans, Plantagenets, Stuarts, Hanoverians, Mountbatten-Windsors. All of them have made their mark but none has been able to match the fame or the level of public fascination that continues to cling to the House of Tudor, a dynasty that spawned five monarchs and came to an end 411 years ago. Why?
The Tudors came to power when the forces of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the last viable male Lancastrian claimant to the throne, defeated those of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. Richard was slain and then carted off to an ignominious grave, only recently discovered underneath a carpark, and Henry spent the rest of his reign defending the crown he had supposedly picked up from under a hawthorn bush on Bosworth Field. He was a man who was forever looking over his shoulder but, despite that, he was in many ways a successful ruler and he certainly left a healthy treasury for his son, Henry VIII, to inherit. And that was when things got interesting.
Henry VIII 'achieved' the following over the course of his 38 yr reign: married six times, had two wives beheaded, broke with the Church of Rome, abolished the monasteries, founded the Royal Navy, built numerous palaces, and largely squandered the vast wealth his father had left him. All three of his children succeeded to the throne but none provided any heirs and the direct line died with Elizabeth I in 1603.
So the Tudors were the people who changed everything and perhaps that explains part of the obsession with them. They laid the foundations of modern day Britain and they literally turned the existing order upside down to do it. Their story is colourful and dramatic and replete with tantalising 'what if' scenarios: what if Prince Arthur, Henry VII's eldest son, had lived and Henry VIII had therefore never become king? What if one of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon's sons had survived? What if Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had had a son? What if Edward VI had grown to maturity? What if Elizabeth I had married? Events would have turned out very differently if even one of those scenarios had come to pass.
For me, I love the theatre and the pageantry of the Tudors, the stark contrast they make between splendour and savagery. They themselves are intriguing enough figures on their own but they also surrounded themselves with an equally interesting cast of supporting characters: Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Essex, the list goes on. All of them virtually jump off the page and demand the attention of the reader. There is, quite simply, just something about them, about all of them, that still speaks to us from across five centuries. We still want to hear the story of their lives no matter how often it has been told to us before. We still wonder about, for example, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. What were they really like? Did she really love the king? Why did Henry turn against her so brutally? All unanswerable questions but we still hanker for the truth. We still try to discern the echo, however faint, of their long lost voices. Hopefully we always will.
The Tudors came to power when the forces of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, the last viable male Lancastrian claimant to the throne, defeated those of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth. Richard was slain and then carted off to an ignominious grave, only recently discovered underneath a carpark, and Henry spent the rest of his reign defending the crown he had supposedly picked up from under a hawthorn bush on Bosworth Field. He was a man who was forever looking over his shoulder but, despite that, he was in many ways a successful ruler and he certainly left a healthy treasury for his son, Henry VIII, to inherit. And that was when things got interesting.
Henry VIII 'achieved' the following over the course of his 38 yr reign: married six times, had two wives beheaded, broke with the Church of Rome, abolished the monasteries, founded the Royal Navy, built numerous palaces, and largely squandered the vast wealth his father had left him. All three of his children succeeded to the throne but none provided any heirs and the direct line died with Elizabeth I in 1603.
So the Tudors were the people who changed everything and perhaps that explains part of the obsession with them. They laid the foundations of modern day Britain and they literally turned the existing order upside down to do it. Their story is colourful and dramatic and replete with tantalising 'what if' scenarios: what if Prince Arthur, Henry VII's eldest son, had lived and Henry VIII had therefore never become king? What if one of Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon's sons had survived? What if Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had had a son? What if Edward VI had grown to maturity? What if Elizabeth I had married? Events would have turned out very differently if even one of those scenarios had come to pass.
For me, I love the theatre and the pageantry of the Tudors, the stark contrast they make between splendour and savagery. They themselves are intriguing enough figures on their own but they also surrounded themselves with an equally interesting cast of supporting characters: Thomas Wolsey, Thomas Cromwell, Anne Boleyn, Lady Jane Grey, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Essex, the list goes on. All of them virtually jump off the page and demand the attention of the reader. There is, quite simply, just something about them, about all of them, that still speaks to us from across five centuries. We still want to hear the story of their lives no matter how often it has been told to us before. We still wonder about, for example, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. What were they really like? Did she really love the king? Why did Henry turn against her so brutally? All unanswerable questions but we still hanker for the truth. We still try to discern the echo, however faint, of their long lost voices. Hopefully we always will.
