The Black Crow: why Anne Boleyn won't die

Henry VIII's second wife, to whom he was married for just three years but for whom he broke the English church, has a stranglehold on the public imagination

The Tudors are in my bones. It’s more than 30 years now since my brilliant and beloved history master, Dr Brian Mains, began teaching my A-level class the English history component of our course and we opened the pages of our fresh copies of John Guy’s Tudor England, then only four years old and recognised as supplanting Geoffrey Elton’s England Under The Tudors of 1955 as the standard single-volume history of the dynasty. I was spellbound, and it was not just an early thirst for constitutional and parliamentary history (yes, sorry, I was that boy; don’t get me started on the Eltham Ordinances); somehow, the passing Tudor shades, from the narrow-eyed miser Henry VII to the agonised, haunted figure of Cardinal Pole, seemed very real, instinctively vivid and familiar.

Of course it’s not just me. The Tudors are big business, for historians and for the creative industries. Dame Hilary Mantel’s towering Cromwell trilogy is the most recent landmark (and if you enjoyed that, you really should read Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Thomas Cromwell: A Life), and the roughly coterminous Showtime series The Tudors caught the public imagination, Jonathan Rhys Meyers smouldering as Henry VIII before his descent into pain-riddled, bloated psychopathy. Henry, however, is a fixture in our imagination, the larger-than-life monarch who is a kind of Casanova-cum-Brian Blessed, roaring and fucking his way across the royal residences of England. And Hans Holbein, of course, gave us the perfect visual cue in his depiction of Henry in the Whitehall mural, now, ironically, lost but preserved in a full-sized cartoon by the artist himself and countless copies of varying quality.

We all know about Henry’s marital exploits. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” as the mnemonic has it. Except, of course, Henry never divorced anyone in his life: his marriages to Katharine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn and Anne of Cleves were all annulled—in Boleyn’s case, two days before she was executed—and the king didn’t believe in divorce. Holy matrimony was a sacrament of the Catholic Church, and Henry had, after all, written a treatise refuting Martin Luther’s beliefs in 1521 entitled Assertio Septem Sacramentorum, the Defence of the Seven Sacraments. Marriage would remain a sacrament in the Church of England, though one of the five lesser sacraments not ordained in the Gospel. Remember that England had no civil divorce laws until 1857, and the Church of England did not permit people who had divorced and whose spouses were still alive to remarry until 2002.

The six wives are iconic, axiomatic, inseparable from his legacy. When you have given your name to a prog-rock concept album and a West End musical, it is safe to say you are a cultural phenomenon. No English or British monarch has married so often, and his half-dozen spouses unwittingly give every fan a favourite, like the Spice Girls or Boyzone: Spanish Spice, Protestant Spice, Mummy Spice and so on. There cannot be many consorts before the late Queen Mother of whom the public knows at least a little, whether it is Anne of Cleves’s unprepossessing apprearance (“I liked her before not well, but now I like her much worse!”) or Kateryn Parr’s cautious good luck in marrying Henry late and outliving him without incident.

The star of the group, however, for the general public is Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife. She was not queen of England for long—she went to the scaffold 11 days before her third wedding anniversary—but seems to have done enough in that short time to snatch an enduring place in our collective consciousness. Consider that Anne of Bohemia, Richard II’s wife, was queen for four times as long, while Catherine of Braganza was married to Charles II for 23 years. And I have sometimes, not wholly from stubborn perversity, wondered why this should be.

Some of the explanation, of course, is that she happened to be there. Henry VIII’s eternally hungry eye alighted on her early in 1526, having already had an affair with her elder sister Mary, a maid of honour to the Queen. The “other Boleyn girl” was thought a great beauty, more conventionally attractive than her sister: there is only one portrait which has been identified as Mary, but it shows a pale-skinned woman with a rounded face and bee-stung lips. She is certainly said to have attracted male attention. From 1514 to 1519, she lived at the French court as a maid of honour to Henry’s sister Mary, who married Louis XII and was briefly Queen of France. In her time in Paris, it was said she had several affairs, not least with the new king, Francis I; some of these stories may be exaggerated, but Francis referred to her as “my hackney” (a powerful but attractive breed of horse with an excellent trot) and “una grandissima ribalda, infame sopra tutte”, a very great whore, the most infamous of all.

We don’t know exactly when Mary’s relationship with Henry started or ended, but what was clear was that her sister was a good deal cannier. Despite the king’s obvious interest in her, Anne refused to become a royal mistress making it clear, centuries in anticipation of Beyoncé, that if he liked it, he would have to put a ring on it. This might not have mattered, but by 1526 Henry’s marriage to Katharine of Aragon was stale, and, at 40, the queen was unlikely to have any more children. She had had six pregnancies between 1509 and 1518, but there had been two miscarriages, two stillbirths and a son, Henry, born in January 1511, had died at six weeks old, cause of death not recorded. The only child which survived was their daughter, Mary, born in February 1516, a precocious child, clever and musical, whom Henry (at that stage) adored; but England had never been ruled by a woman. What was to happen when Henry died?

It’s obviously an oversimplification to say that Henry VIII broke with Rome because he wanted to have sex with Anne Boleyn. When he began his pursuit of her, he was already worried about his lack of an heir and therefore the potential succession. But at the beginning of 1526, he was only 34, with no time pressure on his side to father a child. It did seem, however, that ending his marriage to Katharine was inevitable. Anne’s refusal to begin a relationship outside of wedlock therefore brought together two priorities: put away Katharine and marry Anne.

Equally, there were those in England by the mid-1520s who had religious beliefs sufficiently divergent from the mainstream for them to countenance breaking with Rome. England had a native dissenting tradition: John Wycliffe, a Yorkshire priest who moved to Oxford in his early 20s, was first master of Balliol College and then warden of Canterbury Hall in the 1360s, arrived at a set of beliefs which are now seen as proto-Protestant. He rejected papal and clerical authority, believed the Bible should be used in the vernacular, subscribed to the notion of predestination and condemned transubstantiation, auricular confession and the selling of indulgences. First condemned by the pope in 1377, he attracted followers who became known as Lollards and who carried his intellectual torch after his death in 1384. After 1401, the government introduced a series of measures against Lollardy, and Wycliffe was posthumously found guilty of heresy at the Council of Constance in 1415.

Nevertheless, there was no groundswell of Protestant feeling forcing the king’s hand. A young Oxford scholar called William Tyndale began to translate parts of the Bible into English in 1520s, but he did so while on the Continent, having failed to gain the patronage of Cuthbert Tunstall, Bishop of London. Indeed, when the New Testament was published in 1526, Tunstall condemned it, warned booksellers against dealing in copies, tried to buy any editions which reached London and had them burned in public at Paul’s Cross. (Tyndale himself was condemned as a heretic by Cardinal Wolsey in 1529.) The English Church was not perfect—though it was relatively free of defects compared to some areas of Europe—but there was not an irresistible tide surging across the divide between reformist-minded Catholics and out-and-out Protestants. What made the difference was Henry VIII, and one of the issues which persuaded him was a potential marriage to Anne Boleyn.

So she was there during the first steps of the great tearing-apart. If we date the beginning of Henry’s involvement with Anne from 1526, and it ended with her execution in May 1536, then by the end of that period Henry’s marriage to Katharine had been annulled, he had married Anne, who had then been crowned queen; the authority of the pope in England had been legally refuted; Henry VIII had been declared “Supreme Head” of the church in England; and it was declared treason to disavow any part of this settlement. Two months after Anne’s death, Parliament passed An Act extinguishing the authority of the bishop of Rome; but it was stating what was already a fact.

There is much more to Anne’s memory that simply being there. She exerts a fascination, and, more strikingly, seems to act as an exemplar in many way. Eric Ives, in his 2004 biography The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: The Most Happy, explained it like this:

To us she appears inconsistent—religious yet aggressive, calculating yet emotional, with the light touch of the courtier yet the strong grip of the politician—but is this what she was, or merely what we strain to see through the opacity of the evidence? As for her inner life, short of a miraculous cache of new material, we shall never really know. Yet what does come to us across the centuries is the impression of a person who is strangely appealing to the early 21st century: A woman in her own right—taken on her own terms in a man’s world; a woman who mobilised her education, her style and her presence to outweigh the disadvantages of her sex; of only moderate good looks, but taking a court and a king by storm. Perhaps, in the end, it is Thomas Cromwell’s assessment that comes nearest: intelligence, spirit and courage.

It’s a heavy burden to place on the shoulders of a woman about whom we still know relatively little. No contemporary portraits of Anne survive, as Henry ordered them all destroyed, and the only definite depiction of her from her lifetime is the battered lead medallion known as the Moost Happi, held in the British Museum. It is, to put it mildly, not much to go on.

There is something undoubtedly winning about Anne’s ability not to be consumed and digested casually by the machine of the Tudor court. Her wiliness and determination in holding out for marriage rather than submitting to the temptation of life as a mistress is impressive; though she may also have learned lessons from her sister’s tribulations after her husband, William Carey, died of sweating sickness in 1528 and she was left with substantial debts. We are so used to stories of women as the passive figures in male-dominated situations throughout history, that it gladdens the heart to see a woman escaping the weight of inevitability and forcing events to march, even if only a little, to her own drumbeat.

Ives goes further than that, though: he talks about Anne “taking a court and a king by storm”. Did she? The second half of the 1520s, for the Tudor monarchy, was about annulling the king’s marriage. The need for a male heir did not come upon Henry like a thunderbolt when he met and was attracted to Anne; he was an extremely intelligent, if erratic, man, and he understood very well that a sovereign’s primary duty was to continue the dynasty. In that respect one has to remember how new the house of Tudor was. Henry VII had had a thin claim to the throne by descent, resting on his status as the son of Margaret Beaufort, great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, but her grandfather, John, Earl of Somerset, was born out of wedlock and only legitimated by royal and papal decree and recognised by Act of Parliament in 1397. But Henry IV, who seized the throne in 1399, inserted into the decree in 1407 the phrase “excepta regali dignitate”, “excepting the royal dignity”, which meant that Gaunt’s chldren could inherit lands and titles, but explicitly were prevented from the royal succession. The legality of this has been questioned, and by 1485 Henry VII was the last man standing of the House of Lancaster, but his primary claim to the throne was by conquest.

The achievement of Henry VII in securing his dynasty was extraordinary. His marriage to Elizabeth of York, the eldest child of Edward IV, was a shrewd move, but it was particularly shrewd to contract the marriage in 1486, after he had already been crowned king. A year later, he easily rode out a rebellion ostensibly on behalf of a boy known as Lambert Simnel, who was presented as Edward, son of the Duke of Clarence and nephew of Edward IV and Richard III. (Simnel was pardoned and given a job turning the spits in the royal kitchens.) In 1497, another pretender, a Fleming called Perkin Warbeck who posed as Richard of Shrewsbury, the younger of the Princes of the Tower, started an uprising in the South West; although it was a greater threat to the Tudor state than Simnel had been, the rebellion was similarly put down. Thereafter he wasn’t seriously challenged again. When he died in 1509, Henry VII had been king for nearly 25 years, and he left a monarchy that was stable, prosperous and solvent.

Other options for securing the dynasty’s future were considered. Henry VIII had fathered a son, Henry FitzRoy, with his mistress Elizabeth Blount in 1519, and the young boy was created Duke of Richmond in 1525. Some felt that this was a preliminary move towards making the boy legitimate and recognising him as heir to the throne; as late as 1536, Parliament was considering legislation to disinherit Princess Elizabeth and allow the king to nominate his own successor. This became the Second Succession Act, and it gave Henry “full and plenary power and authority” to choose his heir, either by letters patent or in his will. Richmond could, therefore, have been named as the king’s successor. We don’t know if that was Henry’s plan, but it quickly became moot. Five days after the act was given royal assent, the Duke of Richmond, then aged 17, died of consumption.

A third option was to find a husband for the king’s daughter and heir, Princess Mary, and hope that she quickly produced a son who would eventually inherit the throne directly from Henry. This was in some ways the most straightforward way of resolving the succession, since it relied on no innovation nor device which might invite a challenge. But Mary only turned 10 in early 1526 and would not be likely to produce a child for perhaps a decade. To imagine that child coming to something like majority was looking perhaps a quarter of a century into the future. At this stage, Henry, in his mid-thirties, was still healthy, six-foot-two and weighing around 15 stones; he had suffered smallpox in 1514 and contracted malaria, rife in the marshy parts of England, in 1521, but these seem to have had relatively little long-term impact on him.

However, in March 1524, Henry was unseated during a tournament, his opponent’s lance passing through his open visor and splintering (said opponent was his close friend and brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk). Although not as serious as his infamous jousting accident in 1536 which left him unconscious for two days and may have caused major traumatic brain injury, it was a worrying incident. Onlookers, seeing that the king’s visor was open, had shouted “Hold! Hold!”, but to no avail. Henry seemed not to have been badly injured, getting up straight away and laughing off the incident, and he went on to ride six more courses that day. But the blow, just above his right eye, must have been a fearsome knock. It cannot be coincidence that he began to suffer from migraines which would plague him for the rest of his life.

Finding a way to marry Anne, therefore, was by far the most attractive route to producing an heir, and the route to marriage caused enormous constitutional and ecclesiastical upheaval. It is hard, though, to credit Anne with very much agency in this. I’m quite willing to believe that the king was deeply taken by Anne, and perhaps frustrated and thrilled in equal measure by her resistance to his advances; but look at it this way. If Anne had not existed—just imagine removing her from history, like George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life—do we really suppose that Henry would have knuckled down to a barren and unsatisfactory relationship with Katharine? So, to an extent, Anne happened to be there.

Great claims are made for Anne, however. Retha Warnicke, in The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn: Family Politics at the Court of Henry VIII (1989), described her as a “remarkable, intelligent, quick-witted young noblewoman… that first drew people into conversation with her and then amused and entertained them”. Her time at the French court certainly seems to have given her a joie de vivre which the English found exotic and intriguing. She was educated, but only to the limited standards of the age for well-to-do ladies: in 1513 she was placed alongside four other girls in a schoolroom at the court of the formidable Margaret of Austria, governor of the Netherlands, in Mechelen, where she learned arithmetic, genealogy, grammar, history, reading, spelling and writing. Her intellectual horizons were broadened when she moved to France the following year, absorbing not only French poetry and literature, but becoming interested in some of the reformist religious works circulating. The French king had an enormous library at Château de Blois, and several historians are giddily excited to connect Anne to it and ascribe to her a voracity in reading.

Yet there is a great deal of supposition. One devotee, writing of the books available at Margaret of Austria’s court and focused on Anne as the outlier, writes “it is not hard to see how Anne’s future tastes might have been formed”, but what does the phrase mean? Why are we to believe Anne was quite so exceptional? The author goes on to make suppositions like “there can be no doubt that Anne would have seen some of these exquisite curiosities and gained a considerable breadth of knowledge and appreciation of fine things”.

Margaret, it is true, was a genuinely remarkable woman: daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, she had been widowed (for the second time) at 24, and had tried to throw herself out of a window in grief, but three years later, in 1507, her father had named her governor of the Netherlands on behalf of her nephew Charles (later emperor, king of Spain and ruler of much of Europe). The ever-present effective consort, she managed relations with the States General, the assembly of delegates from the individual provincial legislatures across the Low Countries, and helped develop trade and prosperity, including restoring the Intercursus Magnus, a major commercial treaty first agreed in 1496, with England. Apart from a brief period between 1515 and 1519, when Charles took personal control, Margaret governed the Netherlands, and governed well, until her death in 1530 (she contracted gangrene after stepping on a piece of broken glass).

We can allow that Anne never had the kind of opportunity granted to Margaret, or to Isabel I of Castile, or even to her predecessor as queen, Katharine, who had been named “Governor of the Realm and Captain General” in 1513 while Henry was absent in France and had defeated an invasion from Scotland at the Battle of Flodden in that capacity. Yet we are told she was exceptionally intelligent and well-read. Gareth Russell, a playwright and novelist as well as historian, boldly asserted that “Anne was someone who, on her worst day, was Henry’s intellectual equal. On her average day, she was more intelligent than him.”

For this to make any sense, Anne is being set up against formidable competition. The typical imagination of Tudor society—not a wholly inaccurate one, admittedly—is of a stiflingly patriarchal one, with no place for feminine independence. But there were outstanding women. Henry VII’s mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was not far from an assistant monarch (she wore robes of the same quality as the queen, Elizabeth of York, and walked only half a pace behind her), and in 1499 changed her signature to read “Margaret R.”, the “R.” perhaps standing for her one-time title of Countess of Richmond (the earl had died in 1456) or perhaps… not. Margaret Roper, Sir Thomas More’s daughter, wrote a treatise on death, judgement, heaven and hell called The Four Last Thynges (now lost) and translated Erasmus’s Precatio dominica in septem portiones distributa, as well as writing poems. Much closer to home, Princess Mary, whom Anne’s marriage effectively bastardised, was notably intelligent and cultured: at the age of four, she entertained a delegation of French visitors by playing the virginals; she could read and write Latin by the age of nine and went on to master French, Spanish and possibly Greek; and her education was based on advice from the great Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives, whose 1523 work, De institutione feminae Christianae, was commissioned by Katharine of Aragon specifically for her daughter’s instruction.

Anne left no published works, few letters, no diaries. There is a song, or rather a poem set to music, attributed to her, though it is a speculative attribution, as is a second poem which only had her name attached to it in the 18th century. So we are, in effect, asked to take her extraordinary intellect and learning on trust and intimation.

Nevertheless, some wild claims are made: one eternal optimist wrote brightly that “Anne introduced several policies in her short time as Queen”, which is obviously nonsense. It has recently been suggested, incredibly, by Hayley Nolan that Anne actually wrote the Vagabonds Act 1536, which made provision for collecting money for the poor. There is simply no evidence for this, as another author has demonstrated at length; it is possible that the legislation had its origins in a draft by William Marshall, a radical evangelical whose patron Anne was, but the idea that Anne was not only the fons et origo of this scheme, but also managed it into law, is silly and wishful thinking. That said, Nolan seems to be comfortable in that zone and has described Anne, spuriously and pointlessly, as “a working politician”.

This brings me more neatly than I had expected to my overarching point, which is that these inflated, breathless and unsupportable claims are made for Anne because many seem to feel she must be seen as a morality tale. We are encouraged to see her, variously, as a proto-feminist, a savvy operator working in a man’s world but knowing how to succeed, a virtuous religious reformer (her story is pretty much the last redoubt of the Whiggish “Anglicanism good, Catholicism bad” mantra) who tried to influence Henry for the good, and, of course, as a tragic martyr, a woman sacrificed, literally, to the machinations of court politics and the brutality of Tudor gender roles.

I’m not going to dwell on how much of this is true and how much isn’t. Of course we can agree that a woman who was put to death by her husband in her 30s (or late 20s; Anne’s year of birth is uncertain) after a very rapid trial suffered a terrible fate. She had been charged with adultery, incest and high treason: the charge of incest may have been concocted, while the accusations of adultery are disputed; a 2010 biography by Professor George Bernard of the University of Southampton argues that Anne may well have been unfaithful to the king. If she was guilty of adultery, then, as queen, she was guilty of high treason too, under the Treason Act 1351 (which is still on the statute books, so beware).

Her trial was conducted in the Tower of London before a jury of 27 peers, one of whom was her former betrothed, the Earl of Northumberland. They returned a unanimous verdict of guilty. Yet, while this seems to modern eyes to verge on the summary, it has been powerfully argued that the trial was held in accordance with contemporary procedure. We may not like it now, but it was not utterly beyond the Tudor Pale. There was a small act of mercy at the end: Henry commuted her sentence from burning at the stake—the prescribed sanction for a woman convicted of high treason—to beheading, and an expert swordsman was sourced from Saint-Omer rather than entrusting the queen to the usual headsman’s axe.

But where was “it was sad” take us? We can go further and say that Henry VIII was a “bad” man, selfish, headstrong, arrogant, impatient. Of course he was; he was an early modern king, anointed by God. He may even have had those characteristics to a greater degree than some of his contemporaries. That said, if you imagine the English king to have been high-handed, read the inscription the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, had put on the citadel at Tighina, renamed Bender, in Moldavia:

By the grace of God I am head of Muhammad’s community. God’s might and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions. I am Süleymân, in whose name the hutbe is read in Mecca and Medina. In Baghdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the caesar, and in Egypt the sultan; who sends his fleets to the seas of Europe, the Maghrib and India. I am the sultan who took the crown and throne of Hungary and granted them to a humble slave. The voivoda Petru raised his head in revolt, but my horse’s hoofs ground him into the dust, and I conquered the land of Moldovia.

The truth is that every time we measure a mediaeval or early modern monarch against the mind, emotions, imagination, self-image or self-awareness of the 21st century, we have missed the whole point of history. So to judge Henry VIII, or anyone else of the period, by our moral standards is at best a waste of time, and at worst a pair of blinkers that stop us seeing the world as it was.

I’m not totally without emotion. I have my own heroes and villains of the Tudor age, those for whom I cheer or boo internally, but that is not history. That is my own internal, subjective, preferential assessment, made without proper account of the evidence, and sometimes in the teeth of it. To be blunt: the past doesn’t care about your feelings.

Almost every image we try to force on to Anne Boleyn will not work. Either you have to misshape the facts of her life, or else you have to redefine the image or description you want to impose so radically that it loses its meaning. Was Anne a feminist? The term itself is anachronistic. It didn’t acquire its current sense of an advocate for women’s rights until the 1890s, though we are now in the fourth wave of modern feminism. But let’s try to look behind the labels insofar as we can.

If we look as far back as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects, published in 1792, she was arguing for the education of both sexes in day schools and a “rational” education for all. This would have made little sense to Anne; in the 16th century schools existed largely for the poor, teaching a basic curriculum of reading, writing, Latin and religious instruction, but children from wealthy families would be educated at home by private tutors (remember that the current sovereign, Charles III, is the first king ever to have gone to school). Children would also leave school as soon as their labour was required to support their family.

Wollstonecraft had notions of marriage which, if Anne had recognised them, would perhaps even have seemed old-fashioned. She downplayed the importance of romantic love in marriage, and advised her audience to “calmly let passion subside into friendship”. The outline of that might have been visible to a Tudor woman, in that a lucky heiress might have been married to an aristocrat whom she did not mind; but Anne’s courtship by and marriage to Henry VIII is defined by passion and desire. It is hard to imagine her regarding with equanimity Wollstonecraft’s attempt to circumscribe or ignore female sexuality, or agreeing with the notion that “love and friendship cannot subsist in the same bosom”.

Another failure to connect would have been the essentially bourgeois values which suffused Wollstonecraft’s conception of men and women. Tudor England was rigidly stratified in terms of class. Social movement was not impossible: the Church had always provided opportunities for intelligent and able young men to rise far beyond the station of their birth: Roger of Salisbury, according to chroniclers, had been born in obscurity and found a living as a priest near Caen, but became bishop of Salisbury in 1102 (he would serve for 37 years), and was one of the earliest lord chancellors in 1101-02 and twice chief justiciar of England; while John Peckham had come from humble origins through the Franciscan order to be archbishop of Canterbury between 1279 and 1292. The two great early Tudor statesmen, Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, proved this social mobility in the religious and the secular world, Wolsey the son of an Ipswich butcher, Cromwell born to a brewer, innkeeper and occasional fuller.

But Tudor England had no middle class, let alone a bourgeoisie. The social order ran roughly along the lines of aristocracy, gentry, professional class, yeomen, husbandmen and labourers or cottagers, below which was the group of those who were cut adrift from the system itself like vagabonds, criminals and beggars. Without a bourgeoisie, there could be no deification of quiet, industrious thrift and diligence, exactly the sort of virtues which Wollstonecraft found comfortingly familiar and within which she saw her version of sexual equality flourishing; and these virtues would have been alien to Anne, to her family and to the court.

I fear I’m labouring this point, but it demonstrates that trying to recreate Anne in another time or another society makes no sense. We can certainly say that she was unusually—if not exceptionally—well-educated for a woman of her time, unusually intelligent, and able to exercise more influence over public affairs than many in her milieu. But she did so wholly through traditional male-dominated structures of power. There was nothing revolutionary about Anne, nor did she change the lot of women. We can even see how little she changed the queenship within months of her execution. In the autumn of 1536, the French ambassador in London, Jean d’Inteville, wrote that the new queen, Jane Seymour, moved by the dissolution of the first monasteries to fall to Cromwell’s visitors, threw herself publicly to her knees in front of Henry and begged him to intervene and save the monks. The king paid no mind and pulled no punches; d’Inteville related that “he had often told her not to meddle with his affairs, referring to the late Queen”, that is, to Anne Boleyn. Quite a warning shot.

None of this is criticism of Anne. The poor woman has been dead nearly half a millennium. But the burden we place upon her memory is insupportable. Not only that, it’s bad history and distorts the way we look at the past. Let us try to be more dispassionate, more rational and more analytical. Yes, these were flesh-and-blood human beings, like us, but the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.