Anne Boleyn Loses It October 16, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Anne Boleyn was, of course, the second wife of Henry VIII, who ended her short life with French steel interposing between her chin and her shoulders, 19 May 1536. Her execution came after a travesty of a trial in which she was found guilty of high treason against the king (a man of unusual psychology): she had slept, allegedly, with various other men including her brother and had, so the charges said, plotted Henry’s death. But anyone who comes to this post via the title might be interested less in the history recap and more in the title. Anne ‘lose what’? Her job, her life, her virginity… The answer is, instead, her dignity.
In our Tudor and Elizabethan sources there are a number of extraordinarily vivid sentences describing Anne’s destruction and several touch on 2 May when she was first confronted with the charges and then escorted by barge to the Tower of London. Anne was a tough cookie who – and how easily modern fictions like The Other Boleyn Girl forget this – had a milk cow full of blood on her hands, having goaded Henry VIII to ‘adjustments’ in the three years before. However, even her enemies were impressed by her bearing in the sixteen days before her death. She was particularly impressive at the trial when she was told that she would be burnt to death. She looked up at the sky as if a mosquito was annoying her. You need some sang-froid to keep calm when a judge tells you that you will soon be charcoal: in fact, the burning was demoted into decapitation as a favour from her x. She had shown too defiance earlier on May 2 when faced by Henry’s ministers, who were apparently rather rude with her: she joked to them, according to one late but credible source, that it would be off with her head. However, the sheer horror of her circumstances grew on her as she was brought by barge to the Tower of London and through those black gates from which so few had emerged.
and when she came to the court gate, entring in, she fell downe on her knees before the said lords, beseeching God to helpe her as she was not giltie of her accusement, and also desired the said lordes to beseech the Kinges grace to be good unto her, and so they left her their prisoner.
The ‘Lordes’ were not men who were likely to be sympathetic to Anne. They included her arch-enemy, the schemer Cromwell (who had planned Anne’s accusement) and her uncle Norfolk who hated Anne. For a woman of Anne’s pride to beg, for that is what she did, before her bitterest foes, must have marked one if not the worst moment of her life. She may have wept too, she is certainly reported as weeping as she was shown the room where she would be housed: it was the room where almost twenty years later her daughter Elizabeth would be kept awaiting for an execution that (happily for England) never came. But the weeping inside is a lot less interesting than Anne on her knees before Cromwell and co. The best WIBT scenes are, after all, not those of joy (gold medals, liberated prisoners…) or serenity (Churchill sleeping like a baby after Pearl Harbor) but those where the last defences of human nature are ripped up by the roots and the cowering mush of personality is left naked in full burning sunlight.
Poor, poor Anne… The swordsman was already en route from Calais.
Other WIBT scenes: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
