The Last Days of Anne Boleyn - Learning Zone

On the 19th May 1536,

one of the most infamous episodes in English history

moved towards its gruesome conclusion.

Anne Boleyn became the first queen in Britain's history to be executed.

On the face of it, the year 1536 began well for Anne Boleyn.

Henry had divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon,

and married Anne three years earlier.

Catherine had refused to recognise Anne Boleyn as queen.

But on 7th January 1536, Catherine died.

In their favourite palace at Greenwich,

the King and his new wife threw a party.

To celebrate Catherine's death, Henry and Anne danced.

And there are accounts of him and Anne coming out dressed in yellow,

and this has been interpreted to be a sort of sign of unbecoming glee.

So I think for Anne this is a great moment.

Finally her old rival, her old enemy is dead.

Anne had begun her rise to power ten years earlier.

Although her family were commoners,

they were notorious for their scheming ambitions.

After a period of training in the French royal household,

Anne made her debut at court

and became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Catherine.

She came, at the age of about 21, to the English court

and she seems to have burst upon it with a certain brilliance.

And she was very confident, very stylish, very French.

And it was said you would have taken her for a French woman born.

And she clearly made an impact.

She's obviously not a girl that everybody goes, like,

"That's the prettiest girl at court".

But I think she's probably the sexiest girl at court.

She's very, very intelligent, she's very quick witted.

There was a lot of discussion about theology.

She has a genuine interest in that.

So you've got a young woman of some substance.

King Henry was infatuated.

He bombarded Anne with love letters, begging her to become his mistress.

But the new girl at court was a shrewd operator.

We don't know to what extent she loved him, if she ever did,

or if she operated on the basis of cold ambition.

But she strikes me as a woman

slightly too cool, detached and intelligent

to stake everything on love.

In a move of astonishing boldness,

Anne told Henry she would settle for nothing less than to be his queen.

And of course, for a king this is wildly exciting!

Nobody's ever talked to him like this before.

Nobody has ever effectively given him orders.

So Henry made a momentous decision,

to divorce his Spanish wife of 24 years.

To do so Henry was forced to break with the Catholic Church in Rome

and declare himself head of a new Church of England.

So there were many who resented Anne Boleyn

as a destructive and immoral force.

There's this famous account of her being called a goggle-eyed whore.

I think there is a sense that people feel that wrong has been done

and that Catherine was the true queen and therefore Anne

is a usurper and who has wormed her way into the King's bed.

No woman had ever done what she did before.

No woman had ever made that step from royal mistress to the throne,

getting the queen, a real queen, out of the way.

This is something utterly, completely extraordinary.

It changes all the rules.

After a six year legal battle Henry finally got his divorce

and Anne Boleyn got her crown.

And by 1536 she had another reason to be happy.

She had already given birth to a daughter, the Princess Elizabeth.

Now she was pregnant again.

All she needed to do was bear Henry a son

and her position as Queen would be secure.

On 29th January 1536, after three years of marriage,

Henry VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, suffered a miscarriage.

Even worse, the unborn child was a boy.

Desperate for a male heir to secure the dynasty,

King Henry was devastated.

But was it Anne Boleyn's failure to give Henry a son

that set in motion the events which led to her downfall?

Records from the period offer a clue into Henry's thinking.

The day after the miscarriage he declared to a courtier

that he had been charmed into marrying Anne

by magic spells, or sorcery.

But were these the wild words of a distraught husband?

Or something more ominous?

When Henry talks about enchantments, charms, magic tricks,

Henry is beginning, it seems,

to think about annulling his marriage to Anne.

He cannot imagine what he ever saw in Anne Boleyn,

and he cannot imagine why for her sake he broke with Rome,

turned the politics of Europe upside-down.

So he's thrashing about trying to find a reason, and he's saying,

"Perhaps my marriage was always null and void

"for lack of proper consent."

But some perceive a different,

darker tale in the story of Anne Boleyn's miscarriage.

According to some accounts, Anne's miscarried child

was found to have physical deformities...

..clear evidence to 16th century minds of evil-doing.

Anne miscarries a baby,

and it's inspected by a midwife

who says that it was a boy but it's malformed.

Now, that's of enormous importance.

The belief was, in the medieval world,

was that if a woman gave birth to a deformed or a malformed foetus

then what everybody would genuinely, thoroughly and sincerely believe,

is that she's done a truly awful sin

and that would be like adultery, like gross adultery,

or it would be incest, or it might be witchcraft.

When she loses the baby, you know, Henry,

what he sees is conclusive evidence that his wife is not a good woman,

and that his marriage is not blessed by God.

And that's the least of his fears. I'm certain that he feels that.

It may be that he goes further and believes that his wife is a witch.

There's no indication, in the contemporary records,

that this was anything other than a normal pregnancy with a sad end.

The idea that Anne was delivered of a shapeless mass of flesh

comes along 40 years later, to the best of my knowledge and belief,

in the work of Nicholas Sander who was a Catholic propagandist.

And a great edifice of speculation has been built up on this,

so that it's, it's quite hard to remember

that there is no evidence at the root of it all.

This hypothesis, let's call it, is so sensational,

so hair-raising and, of course, it's attractive to novelists.

But there is, really it's just hot air.

We will probably never know

whether it was Anne's miscarriage that sealed her fate.

Whatever King Henry's intentions, one thing seems beyond doubt.

By March 1536, his infatuation with Anne Boleyn was over.

Some historians believe that Henry VIII decided to get rid

of Anne Boleyn in 1536 because she had failed to give him a son.

But was Anne's downfall simply the result of a breakdown

in her marriage to Henry?

There were other dangerous tensions at work in the Tudor court

between Anne Boleyn and King Henry's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell.

In nomine Christus.

On this day, when we remember the passion of our Saviour,

we do well to recall his words in the temple -

"Which of you can convict me of sin?"

But Anne's chaplain appeared to have a particular courtier in his sights.

Let us not forget the book of Esther

and the sins of the wicked counsellor.

Skip told the Biblical story of an evil royal adviser named Haman.

But few in the chapel could have doubted who his real target was.

Thomas Cromwell was Henry's chief political counsellor.

Although the fortunes of Cromwell

and Anne Boleyn were closely entwined,

some believe that by 1536

their relationship had reached a crisis point.

Cromwell, by this stage, is minister of everything.

There's very little business done in England that doesn't cross his desk.

Cromwell is astute. He's omnicompetent.

He's as clever as a bag of snakes.

He's a supreme master of the political game.

And he was, of course, one of the people who made the marriage possible

but political divisions have crept in.

Anne is not, as she had hoped,

Henry's frontline political advisor.

Cromwell is.

And the King said, "Who is in the court?"

And his servants said unto him,

"Behold! Haman stands in the court."

And the King said, "Let him come in."

I think that sermon is totally extraordinary.

To invoke Haman, it has to be directed, absolutely,

full-on square at Cromwell himself.

It's, it's throwing a grenade.

And to do it in front of the King, in the Chapel Royal,

surely it's a declaration of war.

I think there is a power rivalry.

I think Cromwell has come up since 1532

and Anne fears her influence is waning,

and I think there is this power struggle going on,

so I think that Anne is feeling threatened by Cromwell

but I think he's also feeling threatened by her.

I think that's rather far-fetched.

I don't really see the analogy.

I don't quite see what Cromwell should have been the author of

that Anne Boleyn would be so opposed to.

And the assumption there is that Cromwell is a leading minister,

that perhaps he is a controlling minister.

I see Cromwell as very much the King's servant.

I'm not convinced she would campaign to get rid of Cromwell in that way.

I don't think that we can necessarily say that

because her chaplain has said something, he's Anne's mouthpiece.

We are making all sorts of leaps

in order just to use this piece of evidence

to suggest that Anne is opposed to Cromwell.

I'm sorry. Forgive me, but why do you have the sermon invoking Haman?

Why does Cromwell mention it three or four times in conversation?

Sorry, if this isn't evidence, I don't know what is!

Six centuries on, it is still hard to disentangle

the troubled relationship between Anne, Henry and Cromwell.

Nearly six centuries after Anne Boleyn's execution

for treason and adultery,

it's hard to establish exactly where the evidence against her came from.

According to some accounts, in April 1536,

a series of scandalous rumours about Anne began to spread through court,

started by Anne's own ladies-in-waiting.

One of Anne's ladies, Lady Worcester, was being told off

by her brother for her loose living.

She says, "Huh! Don't blame me!

"It's nothing to what the Queen gets up to!"

Or words to that effect.

And to cut a long story short, she said,

"If you think I'm bad you should see the Queen.

"She entertains men late at night,

"including her Mark Smeaton who's a musician at the Queen's court."

The situation then explodes.

Everything accelerates and the game changes.

On 30th April the court musician

Mark Smeaton was taken in for questioning.

His interrogator was none other than Thomas Cromwell.

Nobody knows what happened behind closed doors.

But the outcome of their little chat would have fatal consequences.

So he takes him back to his house, and questions him.

We're not sure whether torture was used,

some people say there was torture, other people say there wasn't.

But he, remarkably, confesses.

He says, "I had sex with the Queen on three occasions."

That could have been fantasy,

it could have been, if there was torture, you know, who knows?

I would probably confess to having sex with the Queen

if I was tortured and want it to stop. Wouldn't you?

But amidst the torrent of lurid allegations,

Anne stood accused of one particularly monstrous crime.

According to rumours at court, she had been overheard talking

with Sir Henry Norris a few days earlier.

And the content of their discussion was to prove highly inflammatory.

So they've been in her chamber and she's asked him

why he hasn't got married yet and he says that he'd like to tarry a time.

And she responds, and this is the crucial line,

"You look for dead men's shoes,

"for if aught came to the King but good, you would look to have me."

In other words she's saying,

"You want to marry me when my husband's dead, don't you?"

Speculating about the King's death is an extremely dangerous matter.

It's a short step from saying,

"One day Henry will die", to saying, "And I hope it's soon".

And it's a short step from saying, "I hope it's soon,"

to saying, "Let's accelerate it".

So Norris and Anne are coming very close to treason.

Anne Boleyn's fall had been so sudden and so spectacular

that today many believe she was the victim of a terrible injustice.

But there is one other possible explanation

for the extraordinary events of 1536.

In the absence of any hard evidence of a conspiracy,

one scholar at least believes Anne could have been guilty as charged.

Why do we all assume that Anne Boleyn must have been innocent?

Henry, I think, is committed to his marriage,

then something happens to call his marriage into question

and it happens suddenly.

And this is where the accusations made by the Countess of Worcester,

Anne's lady, seem to acquire a greater degree of plausibility.

It makes sense.

After all, she'd be in a position to know what she was talking about.

It's difficult to see what motive she would have for making it up,

because she must have realised it's a serious charge.

With Smeaton, the difficulty

is to explain why he should have confessed.

Now, he may have been tortured,

the sources are divided about that.

Torture is not something which is

commonly in use in Henry VIII's England.

But there it is, he did confess.

He never withdraws his confession,

he never denies or says that he's made it under pressure.

Anne Boleyn, her comments hint, again,

at a rather intimate relationship, she teasing him.

Erm, it's unusual.

And even the Duke of Norfolk, her relative,

describes her as a grand, great whore at one point.

Erm, so it is just possible.

And in the end, my hunch would be that Anne Boleyn

did sleep with Mark Smeaton and Henry Norris.

All the accusations that are made against Anne give various dates

and say, "Oh, so Anne and um, you know,

"at Hampton Court on the 7th of December, 1533,

"did traitorously procure and incite said man to violate her."

And we can disprove three quarters of them

by proving that Anne wasn't in that palace at that time,

or the man in question wasn't there.

They are made up!

But they're made up in order to achieve an end,

which is to make sure that Anne doesn't come out of this alive.

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