The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn

I've been watching The Tudors on Showtime since last summer, and at some point--possibly when Henry started having visions of his past wives in a kind of Dickensian Christmas Carol of a final episode--I started wondering about whether Showtime was giving me anything remotely historically accurate or if they were just making a really big deal about the sex lives of the Tudors. I posed this question to a Dean who is a British history buff, and he lent me The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn by Retha Warnicke. I don't believe it ever occurred to him that I'd actually read the book, at least not during the semester, but little does he know I've actually read a dozen books this semester, because I don't let school work get in the way of extracurricular reading.

Warnicke suggests that Anne was totally innocent of all the crimes of which she was accused--she was not a witch, and she did not seduce half the court, including her brother. Rather, Henry wanted her dead because she miscarried a male child, which would have reflected badly upon his masculinity, not to mention robbed him of the legitimate male heir he so desperately wanted. Henry was more than ready to move on to wife the third at this point, and he could not admit Anne's real crime, so he and his advisers conspired to frame Anne as a witch and seductress so that he would have a rock solid reason to execute her.

Further, the popular belief that Anne more or less brought about the the British Reformation seems to be largely false.Yes, Henry contrived to obtain a highly questionable divorce in order to marry her, and yes,  raised in the French court, she did have a penchant for reading the scriptures in both French and English translation, and she did keep abreast of developments on the Continent, but she hardly fomented any kind of religious uprising. (That was Cromwell, I think, but I'm waiting to borrow that biography.)

In short, this is a very practical and down to earth biography. Unfortunately, by humanizing Anne and more or less proving that her one crime was actually her miscarriage, Warnicke more or less robs her of her power. Had she been a witch or a seductress or a religious revolutionary then one could see her as dying for a cause and turn her into a kind of feminist icon. That she died for nothing more than bad luck certainly says a great deal about the status of women at the time, but it makes her much less of a heroine to emulate.