Anne Boleyn

It was 482 years ago today Henry VIII had Anne Boleyn beheaded on trumped up charges of adultery. Some say she was a Protestant.

More on The Tudors

With Wolf Hall staring next Wednesday (see here) I'm not the only one going Tudor. BBC2 were showing a documentary on The Last days of Anne Boleyn recently I see (a repeat from 2013 with Hilary Mantel, David Starkey, Philippa Gregory, etc), which I hope to get round to watching soon (see here). Philippa Gregory in The Times recommends, on the Tudor theme, the anonymous painting at Hampton Court Palace The Family of Henry VIII, c. 1543-1547 (see here), Mark Twain's novel The Prince and the pauper (see here), the 1970 TV series with Keith Michell as Henry VIII (see here), Donizetti's opera Anna Bolena (see here), the 1969 Richard Burton film Anne of the thousand days (see here) and Edmund Spenser's unfinished poem The Faerie Queene (see here). No room for Rick Wakeman's six wives I see. Leave it to me.

Anne Boleyn

Ever since I first heard as a boy that there was a King of England who had so many wives (Henry VIII and his six wives or was it Henry VI and his eight wives?) I have found the story of the Tudors fascinating. It was the Tudors and Stuarts that I chose to study for 'A' level history ( I remember being amazed that I was the only boy to make that choice over modern history when we were asked to choose). Of course, the whole period of the Reformers and Puritans begins in the days of the Tudors (Tyndale, Latimer, Cranmer, Perkins, Ames, etc) so I have constantly been drawn back to the period. Then Hilary Mantel has drawn us all in with Bring up the bodies and Wolf Hall, which I have now both read and seen acted on stage and am looking forward to the TV version. (I think I must have read Philippa Gregory's relatively racy book on the Boleyn girls and I certainly saw Howard Brenton's play about Anne at The Globe. Oh yes, there's also Rick Wakeman's hugely enjoyable Six wives. Perhaps I can make it my retro album of the week. I have David Starkey's book here but it is unread).

Perhaps one of the most interesting characters of all the Tudors is Elizabeth I's mother, Anne Boleyn. I picked up a copy of Elizabeth Norton's Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's obsession a little while ago and have just finished reading it. Norton is an academic and has done all the research but writes quite well and keeps all the reference details to the end. So you get a book quite abreast of scholarship, judicious and fair not speculative and it made for a good read. Clearly Anne was a friend of reform but is unlikely to have had a personal faith. What makes her story so gripping is to see her rags to riches to rags story played out in history and to imagine what it must have been like to go from obscurity to Queenship only to see the whole thing unravel in a relatively short time. Her death was an undoubted travesty yet she was in a sense the cause of her own undoing. Fascinating.

Anne Boleyn at the Globe

We are back in London now and last night we had a real treat courtesy of my father-in-law, passing through en route to the USA. An avid reader of reviews, he had noticed that Howard Brenton's drama Anne Boleyn was playing at the Globe Theatre. He was only able to get tickets for the four of us (we and our wives) to stand and with an atrociously rainy day we were fearful of a soaking. As it turned out, there was hardly a drop. We really had two things for the price of one then - a positive experience of seeing a play in the interestingly reconstructed Globe as groundlings (something I've not done before although we have gone to the Globe itself more than once) and a very well acted and thought provoking play too.

Current day groundlings are thankfully much, much quieter than Shakespearean ones I guess but we got a real idea of what it might have been like to stand under an open sky and see a play in Shakespeare's time.

The play itself was of great interest to us featuring not only as it did Ann Boleyn and Henry VIII, etc, but also James I commissioning the AV and William Tyndale in unlikely but plausible scenes with Ann (the play takes place in two time periods - that of Boleyn and that of the early years of James I). Boleyn (Like Henry adn James) is an endlessly fascinating figure and although there was much speculation here the play cast an interesting light on her undoubted Protestantism and on Tyndale and the effect of the Bible on the English nation too. There were sadly some crudities that marred the beauty of the piece but many could enjoy it. For reviews see here.