Why was Anne Boleyn executed? This was a question I asked myself when writing my debut novel, The Beheading Game, in which Anne Boleyn wakes up after her own execution, escapes from her grave in the Tower of London, sews her head back on, and goes on a revenge quest to kill Henry VIII before he can marry his next wife, Jane Seymour.
Legally, the answer is she was executed because she was convicted of the crimes of treason, adultery and incest, but most historians today agree those charges were probably false. So, how did Anne go from being a queen consort, steps from the seat of English power, to climbing the steps to the scaffold in a matter of months? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most likely, and, although I came to many answers to this question during my research, all of them circled around one central theme: misogyny.
The story of Anne Boleyn had always bothered me. In film and books, Anne is often portrayed as a manipulative seductress, who breaks up Henry VIII’s first marriage to Katherine of Aragon, forces England to break with the Catholic Church, and gets what she deserves when she’s beheaded. This has been the pervasive attitude toward Anne for almost five hundred years. It’s one based largely on slanderous characterizations of her made by her political enemies shortly after her death. It’s false, yet it endures.
This is partly because, centuries later, we are all still obsessed with the Tudors. Tudor fans pick their favorite of Henry’s stable of queens, and declare allegiance. We watch Six, and sing along to catchy showtunes about each woman. We buy a six-pack of Henry VIII’s wives cast as Christmas ornaments at the Hampton Court Palace gift shop. We hold the little ornaments in our hands, each small woman so manipulatable.
“Anne Boleyn ran a good game while it lasted, but eventually she had to pay the price. Sorry, I’m team Katherine,” a librarian at the college where I work said when I went to pick up a book about Anne Boleyn while researching The Beheading Game. Her statement reflects a lot of people’s attitudes toward Anne. Rather than looking at the six wives of Henry VIII and recognizing a half dozen women who were mistreated by the same egomaniacal man, we look for faults in the ones we like less, and blame them for their own abuse.
These are the facts of Anne’s life, as I knew them, as they bothered me, before I began writing The Beheading Game: She courted Henry for seven years and was married to him for three; he left his first wife to marry her, and, in order to do so, split with the Catholic Church; she had one surviving child, Elizabeth, who went on to be Queen Elizabeth I, England’s great Renaissance queen, who never married (no wonder, with a father who churned through six wives and beheaded her mother); that Anne was the first, though not last, English queen to be executed; and that Henry married his next wife, Jane Seymour, just eleven days after Anne’s execution.
There has to be more here, I thought, every time I encountered Anne. In the TV series The Tudors, we see one of her miscarriages, but, as I researched, I found most scholars agree she had three or four miscarriages, on top of a full-term pregnancy, all in the span of three years.
For anyone who has been pregnant or suffered a miscarriage, the idea of stacking a full-term pregnancy and three or four miscarriages into a three-year window of time is absolutely harrowing—the sorrow, the guilt, the physical suffering, the hormonal crashes, the blood loss—I could only imagine. Not to mention the unique ways that women, then, and now, are punished for failing to reproduce properly, the ways they are treated socially and legally with misogynistic suspicion for their pregnancy losses.
In Anne’s case, how much were her miscarriages at fault for her execution, including the late miscarriage months before her execution of the boy Henry had so longed for? A lot, I’d hazard to say.
Anne, I learned, was a whip-smart reformer who steered Henry Tudor toward joining the Protestant reformation, not just because she wanted him to divorce his wife, but because she truly believed in religious reformation. Like other reformers, she saw the Catholic Church as a corrupt system of monasteries and abbeys that took advantage of common people by selling them pardons, failed to spiritually educate those same commoners, and hoarded its wealth.
She was a progressive humanist who wanted a more forward-thinking England. She advocated for the vast wealth of the dissolved monasteries and abbeys to be spent to fund schools and hospitals to help common people, and she envisioned an English court filled with artists and great thinkers, like the other Renaissance courts of Europe. She was continental, fashionable, had a French air from the decade she’d spent at the French court, and enchanted half the English court upon her return at twenty-one to serve as Katherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting.
“She was not traditionally attractive,” begin many biographies of Anne Boleyn, misogynistically anchoring their analyses of this brilliant woman to her looks, but there is no evidence that that was true. The portrait of Anne housed in the National Portrait Gallery in London (painted posthumously), portrays a striking enough woman. As does the Hever Rose Portrait that hangs in Anne’s childhood home.
There are records of men vying for her affections. She turned suitors down. Men wrote love poems about her. All evidence points instead to her being pretty hot stuff. But this is the way shunned women are characterized. Anne Boleyn becomes, in historical casting, somehow both ugly but extremely licentious; not attractive, but also able to entice numerous men into sleeping with her, despite the penalty for such a liaison being death. Ok. Sure. I know a PR hit job when I see one.
In fact, much evidence exists that Henry loved Anne precisely for her mind and intelligence, that he was setting her up to be a co-sovereign, that he intended to rule with her, not over her. During their long courtship, he regularly sought her advice on matters of governance, so much so that Cardinal Wolsey started calling her “the night crow,” due to her outsize influence, and at her coronation she was crowned with St. Edward the Confessor’s crown, an honor usually reserved for kings regnant, not queen consorts, like Anne.
She was a smart, outspoken, ambitious, highly educated woman who refused know her place, and thought she’d found a partner who appreciated her. She was wrong. Would Henry have loved her more if she’d had a son? Maybe. Who’s to say. What we know is that his love was conditional, fickle, and self-serving.
Most historians today agree that Anne was innocent of all charges against her. There is no evidence that she had any affairs; and none of her ladies were charged with assisting her in lining up these supposed liaisons. Like most queens, Anne was constantly being supervised and watched, and the lack of evidence is conspicuous. There’s a certain “everything plus the kitchen sink” element to the sheer number and variety of men she was accused of bedding.
Was Anne Boleyn a perfect person? No. She was a snob and opinionated and could be a bully, and, like most members of the aristocracy, she was completely unaware of how her own wealth was pried off the backs of common people. She made off-color jokes. She didn’t know when to shut up.
Today, we’d call her difficult, or unlikeable, or rude, or selfish, or arrogant, or messy, or we’d say she’s breaking up the band, or we’d chant “lock her up” at her. She was held to impossible standards, like many women then, like many women now.
But why do we want women to be so likable? You know who was unlikeable? The aging, bloated, stinking-leg-wound, serial-womanizing, wife-murdering megalomaniac king she married, who somehow gets a pass. Just doing his job. Just being a strong leader. Decisive. Says it like it is. Man of the people! I’d like to have a beer with him. Sometimes you have to ruffle a few feathers. That’s his private business. What happens behind closed doors. That’s a family matter and shouldn’t be dragged out into the public eye. And on, and on, and on.
Why was Anne Boleyn executed? Misogyny. Is there a more complex answer? Sure. She failed to birth a male heir; she picked fights she couldn’t win with powerful opponents; she thought people would see her brilliance and applaud her for it, rather than despise her for being a pushy woman.
Why was Anne Boleyn executed? Because she failed to see how her womanhood colored other people’s perceptions of her every action. She assumed that if she was smart enough and cunning enough and broke with a corrupt church, she’d escape the orbital gravity of sexism and be praised for her accomplishments. If she’d been a man, she’d have been called a bold leader. Instead, she’s an ugly, horny homewrecker, who stuck her nose into issues of governance that didn’t concern her.
But she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see the way the world dismissed her for being a woman. She couldn’t see the sword swinging until it was inches from her neck.
And, thank god for that. Thank god for women everywhere who are oblivious to the misogyny around them, or who see it but push forward anyway. Thank god for loud, bossy, disagreeable women, who get things done. What world would we have without them? We are lucky when they grace us with their willful disobedience.
If you see a comet streak across the sky, don’t run the other way shrieking, “Oh no, a comet! The sky is falling!” Instead, say, “What a beautiful comet! What fire!” You are lucky to have seen it.
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