"remember me when you do pray...": a love letter to Anne Boleyn (May 19th 1536) -- Darcy R. Keim, MA

"remember me when you do pray...": a love letter to Anne Boleyn (May 19th 1536) by Darcy R. Keim, MA

“remember me when you do pray, that hope doth lead from day to day – anne Boleyn”

At 8 am on the 19th of May 1536, Anne Boleyn - Queen Consort of England - prepared for her walk to the scaffold. After having been informed by Sir William Kingston that the hour of her death was near, she left her coronation apartments (housed inside the Tower of London) and took her final steps toward the erected scaffold within the Tower walls. A cruel sense of irony on Henry’s part, but perhaps a match for Anne’s notoriously dark humour. At 9 am, the cannons at the Tower were fired; signalling to all of the brutal end (and first ever execution) of a Queen of England. On trumped up charges, Anne was taken from this world by a single swift stroke of a Calais sword.

The question of her fall continues to spark debate and controversy among historians. There are three leading arguments regarding the factors that contributed to Anne’s dramatic finale: (1) Anne had failed to provide Henry VIII with a son and with two miscarriages, he desired to remove his wife - permanently. (2) Tensions between Anne and Thomas Cromwell had threatened Cromwell’s stability at court and therefore - with the help of Eustace Chapuys - Cromwell instigated the charges to ensure his position was maintained. (3) The jousting accident in January 1536 caused Henry to suffer a lasting brain injury; significantly altering his personality and mood -- hence the increase in execution statistics during his reign after this event.

It has been fifteen years since I began travelling down this road; studying Anne and getting to know her story. Or what is left of it -- which is mostly historiographical debate, uncertainty, and limited primary source documentation based on hearsay. What historians suffer now is a reliance on secondary interpretation -- the knell that secured Anne Boleyn’s status as a historical enigma. Beginning from the moment Henry set himself on erasing her from history. My own views (and certainly, research prompts) align with the following excerpt from Susan Bordo’s The Creation of Anne Boleyn:

“Anne has been less the perpetual victim of the same old sexist stereotyping than she has been a shape-shifting trickster whose very incompleteness in the historical record has stirred the imaginations of different agendas, different generations, and different cultural moments to lay claim to their “own” Boleyn. In cutting her life so short and then ruthlessly disposing of the body of evidence of her “real” existence, Henry made it possible for her to live a hundred different lives, forever.”

It is important to emphasise that I do not  romanticise her position in English history. I cannot justify doing so and it is an element to public history that I find inherently disrespectful. I do not aim to present her as a saint or as any other popularised historiographical image that has been posthumously conjured of her (“Martyr”, “Lover”, “Hero”, “Proto-Feminist”).

Instead, I look to Anne as a figure of strength and tenacity. I also accept her enigmatic position - as an individual shrouded by history - who, nonetheless, has held a lasting impression on [British] cultural awareness and contemporary political institutions (for example, the separation of Church and State). I look to her as someone who faced each battle with a degree of conviction, agency, and a high awareness of her own self-worth; a characteristic that was largely unprecedented of women at the English Court during her lifetime (more commonly exhibited on the continent, if you look to figures like Margaret of Austria). I acknowledge her as a nuanced figure who had her faults -- as you and I do. On this day, I remember Queen Anne Boleyn. Not as a “hero” but as a historian ought to -- as a landmark figure within Queenship Studies and English History.

Her final speech - the following of which was recorded by Tudor Chronicler, Edward Hall - demonstrates that very courage that has transcended over the centuries (if you are to trust in his account, I have yet to reach my own judgement on the matter):

“‘Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that, whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never: and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul.’

After being blindfolded and kneeling at the block, she repeated several times: ‘To Jesus Christ I commend my soul; Lord Jesu receive my soul.’”

 

Requiescat in Pace, Anne Boleyn.