1536: Anne Boleyn
May 19th, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1536, Anne Boleyn lost her head.
Any queen decapitated by her king would of course rate an entry in these grim pages. But this does not quite explain Anne Boleyn’s enduring appeal, relevance and recognizability for the most casual of modern observers, and her concomitant footprint in popular culture, even with the “Greek tragedy” quality of her life.
Anne stands at the fulcrum of England’s epochal leap into modernity. Whether she was that fulcrum might depend on the reader’s sympathy for the Great Man theory of history, but little more do we injure our headless queen to regard her as the woman for her time and place — the accidental hero (or villain) raised up and thrown down by the tectonic forces of her milieu.
Through Anne was born — for reasons of momentary political arrangements of long-forgotten dynasts, which seems a shockingly parochial proximate cause — the English Reformation, and through the Reformation was born the crown’s decisive triumph over the nobility, the broad middle class nurtured on the spoils of Catholic monasteries, the rising Britannia fit to rule. Most would take as an epitaph historical accidents of such magnitude.
Of course, by those same accidents, Anne was the instrument of thousands of deaths herself, and little did she appear troubled in life by the corpses upon which she ascended the throne.
Her own family maps the change wrought on England. An ancestor was beheaded in the Wars of the Roses, medieval England’s last great breakdown; her uncle Thomas Howard was one of the throwback scheming Dukes, mastered by his sovereign to the extent of issuing Anne’s capital sentence from his own lips;* the beheaded woman’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, set a recognizably centralized English state on the path of empire.
Fitting tribute that, from the Tower where she met her end** to lands undreamt-of in her time, people still, like Henry, find her captivating.
* Anne’s father also declared for her guilt. Unprincipled as these men undoubtedly were, it cannot have been a pleasant responsibility; the question of whether she was actually guilty of adultery-cum-treason, the fatal charge extracted from a supposed lover by torture, has been hotly and inconclusively disputed by posterity.
** With a solemn speech submissive to Henry but not admitting any guilt — in an earlier moment of levity, she had famously remarked of the French swordsman hired to do the job, “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.”
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Entry Filed under: 16th Century, Arts and Literature, Beheaded, Capital Punishment, Death Penalty, England, Execution, Famous, Famous Last Words, Gallows Humor, Heads of State, History, Infamous, Milestones, Nobility, Notable Jurisprudence, Notable Participants, Notably Survived By, Political Expedience, Politicians, Popular Culture, Power, Public Executions, Royalty, Scandal, Sex, Torture, Treason, Women, Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1536, anne boleyn, henry viii, The Tower of London, tudor england
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12 Comments Add your own
1. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 13th, 2008 at 3:37 am
[...] Anne Boleyn, who caused More’s fate, shared it less than a year afterwards. [...]
2. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 3rd, 2008 at 2:46 pm
[...] can hardly fail to think of that more renowned decapitated queen of the next century Anne Boleyn. Like Anne, Parisina lost her head to an incest allegation after a few years’ failure to give [...]
3. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 22nd, 2008 at 1:55 am
[...] Anne Boleyn [...]
4. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | February 11th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
[...] middle-aged priest when happenstance acquainted him with the circle then endeavoring to engineer Anne Boleyn’s elevation from Henry VIII’s enamored to Queen of [...]
5. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | February 13th, 2009 at 1:04 am
[...] She was the second of Henry’s queens to face this fate, the other being Kathryn’s first cousin Anne Boleyn. This Hans Holbein miniature is generally thought to be Kathryn Howard, though the identification [...]
6. keylee | March 8th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
i will translate this story in BM ..thanks
7. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | April 26th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
[...] Edward II; its succession fell to James’ younger brother Thomas, who was great-grandfather to Anne Boleyn. (Anne’s father Thomas Boleyn was the 8th Earl of [...]
8. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | June 8th, 2009 at 1:57 am
[...] authorities. The pope was persuaded not to excommunicate Henry — that step would be reserved a later King Henry — but many contemporaries viewed the monarch’s subsequent (and ultimately fatal) bouts [...]
9. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 12th, 2009 at 6:39 am
[...] Robert Aske, the barrister who had come to the fore of the Pilgrimage movement and had personally negotiated terms with Henry, was among about 200 to suffer death for their part in the affair. In Aske’s case, it was against the will of Jane Seymour, Henry’s demure third queen and also a Catholic-inclined traditionalist; she made an uncharacteristic foray into state policy by ask(e)ing for Aske’s life, summarily vetoed by the king’s reminding her the fate of her politically-minded predecessor. [...]
10. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 28th, 2009 at 1:18 am
[...] of the English Reformation is as an initial flowering of Protestantism followed — after the execution of Anne Boleyn — by a reactionary crackdown by the [...]
11. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | September 25th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
[...] matter of importance in 1530’s England concerned Cromwell. He raised and then destroyed Anne Boleyn; he managed the realm’s religious turmoil so fearsomely that his ouster was one of the [...]
12. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | October 6th, 2009 at 1:07 am
[...] when the once-staunch Catholic Henry VIII broke with Rome over Anne Boleyn, the English manhunt for Tyndale continued: Henry’s reformation did not share radical [...]
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