The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 11): An attempt to bully the Queen

May 11th marks the day, I think, when Henry ordered the Privy Council to visit Anne in prison to try and intimidate her.

"Escorted into the imprisoned Queen's rooms by Sir William Kingston, the councillors perhaps expected to see her dishevelled, miserable or contrite after nine days of captivity. Instead, they were confronted by the sight of a waif-like brunette with cold, glittering eyes, regarding them with haughty disapproval. She had spent much of the day in prayer, but once told of the Council's impending visit, she had gone to get ready. The Queen knew the importance of appearances better than anyone and she had been waiting for the Council to come to her for over a week. Her would-be interrogators walked in to see Anne sitting on something very like a throne in her Audience Chamber, dressed immaculately, with some of her remaining jewels glistening from her fingers, wrists, ears and throat. "She did not give up her greatness," wrote an admiring chronicler, "and spoke to the lords as a mistress"."

Click HERE for the full account of the meeting.

Above: Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury (1489 - 1556), who was the Council's delegated spokesperson.

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 10): The Queen's Brother

"32 year-old George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, currently being held in the Martin Tower of His Majesty’s Tower of London, on a charge of incest with his younger sister, Queen Anne Boleyn, had been – until his arrest eight days earlier - a generally well-liked figure at the royal Court. Tall, muscular, wealthy, powerful, funny, confident, intelligent and impossibly handsome (the comparison to Adonis has been made before), it was difficult not to like him, at least on first impressions..."

Click here to take a look at my post "My Lord of Rochford's conscience," examining the imprisonment of George Boleyn on the charge of incest with his royal sister. 

Above: (Left) Padraic Delaney as George Boleyn in the Showtime series The Tudors, opposite Jamie Thomas King as Sir Thomas Wyatt. 

The Surviving Jewels of Marie-Antoinette

Via Tea at Trianon comes an article about the few surviving fragments of Marie-Antoinette's legendary jewel collection.

For this blog's post on the fashion preferences of the Queen, click HERE.

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 9): The Blame Game

Historians still continue to debate about how far Henry VIII was involved in his second wife's murder. It may surprise many who are not well-acquainted with the academic debates surrounding Henry's personality to learn that in many modern histories he is presented as an essentially weak sovereign, who was easily manipulated by those around him. In this scenario, the chief culprit for orchestrating Anne's downfall becomes Thomas Cromwell, the King's chief adviser and her one-time ally turned mortal enemy. I do not agree with this interpretation of events and it seems to me that the arguments put forward by J.J. Scarisbrick and Derek Wilson, that Henry was the main architect of what happened.

"For me personally, however, the missing third of this tragedy is not Thomas Cromwell, but Henry VIII. It was, after all, Henry who signed the death warrants and whilst it may have been Cromwell who organised the interrogations, arrests and trials, it frankly beggars belief that Henry could have been so easily duped into believing in his wife’s guilty. As far as I’m concerned, Henry was neither a participant nor a victim in what happened in 1536 – rather, he was the chief architect and the author of the tragedy. Cromwell certainly organised the details and oversaw the execution of the plot, but under no circumstances could he have dared act so audaciously – and so manically (the entire thing was a swift, brutal mess, without any of Cromwell’s usual slow, brilliant, relentless tactics) – without having been told to do so, in so many words, by Henry and to do so quickly."

Click HERE for the post on Henry's role from last year.

Above: Australian actor Keith Michell as Henry VIII in the television series The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1971.)

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 8): Rich Pickings

"In his study at Westminster, Thomas Cromwell was beginning to feel the pressure of the case against the Boleyns. His visit to the Tower two days earlier, coupled with the daily reports coming in from Sir William Kingston, must have shown him that whilst the Queen had wobbled, she had not cracked like they might have hoped. The tactics of surrounding her with unfriendly faces, withholding information about her friends and family, refusing to give her the full details of what she would be tried for and denying her access to her own servants had certainly upset and occasionally infuriated her, but it had not made her any more afraid of the government, or inclined to co-operate. If anything, she seemed to be taking it as some kind of challenge. There was also the issue of the logistics of the trial - only Cromwell, and possibly Sir William Fitzwilliam, knew the full details of what was true and what wasn't and so it was vital that he kept on top of things. The trial of Sir Henry Norris, Sir William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton were due to take place on Friday and the Grand Jury, the evidence, the alleged dates of their adultery and treason, all needed to be arranged without drawing too much attention to the gaping holes in the Crown's case. Cromwell also had a rising tide of public disapproval about the Queen's imprisonment to quell and various pamphlets lampooning both the King and Jane Seymour were beginning to circulate in the city; if the King found out, he would be furious. And added to all this, Cromwell also had to continue fielding the dozens of letters arriving asking that when the money and jobs of the Queen's so-called lovers were divided up, Cromwell would use his "good mediation and furtherance" to help his friends and supporters, all of whom were now declaring their inviolable loyalty to him in the same fulsome terms they had once used in letters to Anne Boleyn."

This blog's look at the upper-class reaction to the Queen's downfall and the opportunity it presented for the lands, titles and fortunes of her alleged lovers to be carved up amongst Thomas Cromwell's supporters. Click HERE.

Above: Hans Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII's chief adviser for most of the 1530s, and who organised the logistics of the Queen's downfall. Historians are still divided today about what role he played in the events of May 1536 and if deposing Anne was his own idea or whether he was simply following orders. 

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 7): Her Majesty would like to pray

The fifth day of Anne Boleyn's imprisonment was the first Sunday she spent in the Tower and the Queen's demand that she be allowed access to her priests and the Sacrament provoked yet another spat between the imprisoned royal, her gaolers and the government.

"... the Queen’s repeated insistence that the Sacrament be brought to her rooms ... posed a plethora of problems for the government. Since she had not performed penance for her abominable crimes, it would have been highly inappropriate for an adulteress to have the Host displayed in her rooms. The Queen, on the other hand, did not consider herself tainted by sexual sin and therefore, she could not understand why the Sacrament was not being brought to her, as requested. Aside from the fact that he did not like the visual of the Queen prostrate before the Sacrament, which would conjure up unwelcome images of a doomed, pious heroine, Cromwell also could not run the risk of being forced to answer awkward questions about the display of such a holy object in the room of someone who – officially – was still an unrepentant harlot. If Kingston brought the Sacrament to her, as asked, there were bound to be questions about why he had been allowed to do so and it would make the government’s case against the Queen even weaker, certainly in terms of the public relations’ war being waged for the hearts and minds of the ever-cynical Londoners."

For the full post about the spiritual dilemma of May 7th, click HERE.

Above: British actress Merle Oberon in the role of Anne Boleyn in the movie The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933.)

The Fall of Anne Boleyn (Day 6): The Queen's Last Letter?

Reading back over my post from last year, when I analysed the debate over whether or not the letter (above) allegedly written by Anne Boleyn to the King on the fourth day of her imprisonment, I think perhaps that I should have been slightly harder on it. I still agree fundamentally with my conclusion that there probably was a letter, but that it's since been lost or accidentally destroyed. However, I think I was wrong to suggest that the May 6th letter probably contains authentic sayings from a lost-original. I tend to agree now that it's either entirely genuine (extremely unlikely) or a complete, if sentimental, forgery. And in the comments section for the original post, many thanks to Little Miss Sunnydale for putting forward Professor R.M. Warnicke's theory about how such letters were forged in Elizabethan school rooms. I think it's an excellent theory and could potentially explain a lot about the letter's origins. To quote from my original article: -

"The letter's authenticity has been the subject of debate therefore since the earliest days of Tudor historiography. Writing his biography of Henry VIII in 1649, Lord Edward Herbert believed it was probably a forgery, perhaps penned by a pious devotee of Anne’s sometime in the reign of Queen Elizabeth; on the other hand, Gilbert, Bishop of Salisbury, writing his 7-volumed History of the Reformation of the Church of England thirty years later was convinced that it was genuine. Having spent a lifetime compiling the Original Letters of Henry VIII’s reign in the mid-19th century, the archivist Henry Ellis positively gushed about the letter’s style, panache and validity and pointed out that there were always some alterations in Anne Boleyn’s handwriting depending on her mood. There are, for instance, considerable differences between the letter she wrote to her father from the Hapsburg Empire in 1514, that penned to Cardinal Wolsey after the plague epidemic of 1528 and one she dispatched to her friend, Lady Wingfield, in the summer of 1532. The unsentimental and sombre giant of Victorian historians, J.A. Froude in his The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon and History of England, accepted Ellis’s arguments and believed that all clear documentary evidence pointed to the letter being authentic."

For the full post I wrote last year discussing the debate over whether the letter is real or not, click HERE.