What are your thoughts about Anne Boleyn?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Do you think she was wrongfully murdered?

Yes, she was wrongfully murdered.

She was trying to push King Henry VIII for more religious reforms; but he was deeply and devoutly Catholic at heart. Yes, he left the Roman Catholic church because the Pope wouldn't grant him a divorce, and he set himself up as the head of the Church. But that was as far as his reforming went. He didn't actually want to change anything else about the church - he wasn't a real reformer, and Anne was.

If she had managed to give birth to a healthy boy or two, he would have stuck with her; but since she didn't, and since she was meddling too much in the king's politics, she needed to be done away with.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:She had 6 fingers.

What happened to the other 4?

This was a lie perpetrated by the Anne-haters! She had 5 plus 5 fingers but the Tudor press worked to smear her.

I once read that when we drink tea with our pinkie up, it’s an old-school English way of making fun of poor Anne Boleyn and her supposed sixth finger. I have no idea if this has any truth to it

I was just doing the Steel Magnolias bit.

https://youtu.be/biphyhFphMc

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I can honestly say that I have not had any thoughts about Anne Boleyn since high school (which was 40 years ago) and I don't really remember what my thoughts about her were back then.

I don't think about Anne Boleyn often, but just yesterday I remarked to my husband that if he wasn't careful, I'd invent divorce and go find a sixteen year old French girl.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think she played politics (converting the king to Protestant) and lost.

Fair.

But did not deserve to DIE. And lbh, the pretext for killing her were just that. She was killed for trumped up reasons.

[Anonymous]

I've heard the reason Henry killed her instead of just divorcing her or sending her off to a nunnery might have been because she was actually pregnant again.
Female prisoners were usually examined before execution to make sure they were NOT pregnant. Anne was not examined.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I’m descended from her sister Mary. I’m appreciating this thread.

My understanding is that her parents were so ambitious that they were willing to risk their children. But true - that was the nature of the times.

Is Henry your grandpapa?

NP here, He could very well be. IF it's true that a few of Mary's kids were his, there's a very good chance his descendants are with us today.

I think some people think all her kids were Henry’s. The theory being he was still sleeping with her even after marrying anne because he didn’t want to risk anne miscarrying any of the preganancies (plus she likely needed some recovery time after birth or miscarriage). It seems to me somewhat less likely only because the evidence seems pretty good that Henry had Kell blood group antibody so she could not have had more than one kid with him unless Mary was also Kell positive. That’s possible but would also be so deeply ironic that he just picked the wrong sister — less than 10% of the population could give him more than one kid, and he got so close. I’d love to see DNA analysis on all of them. It’s probably hard to do because the English royalty is all so interrelated — they were basically all cousins anyway so testing dependents would not be useful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I've heard the reason Henry killed her instead of just divorcing her or sending her off to a nunnery might have been because she was actually pregnant again.
Female prisoners were usually examined before execution to make sure they were NOT pregnant. Anne was not examined.

This doesn't quite work for me. He was desperate for a son and heir, so her being pregnant would have been good news. If he didn't like her personality he could have just farmed her off to somebody's country manor.

[Anonymous]

My thoughts are that her thoughts have been preserved. Wow.

[Anonymous]

Could you summarize it for us? Thx

[Anonymous]

She didn’t convert him to Protestant. She was also a catholic - but he wanted a divorce and to remarry and the Pope didn’t let him so he had a tantrum and declared himself the head of a new church.

Not quite accurate. Henry had an older brother Arthur who was expected to become king. That brother married Catherine of Aragon. After--according to lore--one night together, he was sent back to his books. He died unexpectedly, leaving Catherine his widow. Her father was the powerful Philip of Spain. What to do with the widow was a real problem. It wasn't clear whether he, who was I think 14 on their wedding night, had actually consummated the marriage.

The obvious solution was to marry her off to Henry, i.e., give Philip what he had bargained for: a daughter married to the Crown Prince of England. In Catholicism, you cannot marry your brother's widow. The pope granted Henry--really the English government--a dispensation from this rule so the marriage could take place.

Henry didn't want a divorce; he wanted an annulment. He wanted his marriage to Catherine to be annulled on the ground that he had married his brother's widow, which was prohibited. His argument was that this is God's law and the pope had no power to grant a dispensation. Understandably, the Church refused to state that a pope did not have this authority. So, Henry declared himself the observant Catholic who wouldn't accept the Pope's manipulation of God's law. He self-annulled his marriage to Catherine.

Now, in Catholicism, it's not only prohibited to marry your brother's widow, you are prohibited from having sex with the sibling of anyone you've slept with. It's basically the same prohibition. Ironically, by arguing that the Church could not grant him the dispensation to marry Catherine, Henry enforced the prohibition of having sex with the sibling of anyone you've had sex with. (Catherine had potentially done this by having sex with Arthur and his brother Henry.) By sleeping with Anne after sleeping with Mary, Henry also violated God's law, especially in the minds of the common people.

After giving birth to Elizabeth, Anne had several miscarriages. According to lore, one of these was a nearly full term male who was horribly deformed. Midwives allegedly saw this child and the news of how deformed it was spread through the kingdom. Such deformities were commonly viewed as God's punishment of sinful parents. So Henry's inability to have a male heir with Anne was seen as his punishment by God for abandoning Catherine AND for having slept with her after sleeping with her sister Mary.

That's why Henry charged Anne with witchcraft and with infidelity. He was trying to create the case that the deformity was the result of ANNE"S sins, not his.

Anne's brother was a leading Protestant and Anne's knowledge of the scriptures was very much formed by this brother, who probably convinced her to use what influence she had over Henry to steer him towards the Protestants and away from Catholicism. It was in her best interest to do this because Protestants did not have the same stricture against having intercourse with someone who has had sex with your sibling.

[Anonymous]

Of course it was wrong.
And the cruelest of ironies that the FATHER'S chromosome determines a baby's sex. Looking at you, Henry.

[Anonymous]

No. She didn’t actually have much say and was ultimately a pawn of power hungry men all around her. I don’t fault her for trying to make the best of an inevitable situation. If the king wanted her he was going to have her, better to be queen then not. And her daughter went in to be one of the greatest rulers.

[Anonymous]

I think we know her name 500 years later.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There’s a book being released by D.C. historian and author, Leah Redmond Chang, called Young Queens. It’s being released in a couple of weeks and I have pre-ordered. Sounds interesting - might appeal to DCUM history buffs.

Thanks, I will definitely check it out.

+1

[Anonymous]

He couldn’t divorce her because there was t really divorce at that time. In his mind, his marriage to Catherine was annulled, or has never actually been a valid marriage, because the papal dispensation has been canceled invalid.
He actually never got a divorce — he had two annulments.

Anne would have been very dangerous to leave alive. Her father and brother were ambitious and had some connections. She had a living child with a claim to the throne. Having Catherine squirreled away was bad enough but she has been effectively isolated as mostl or her supporters were out of the country, and he had already executed a number of high profile Catholics (like bishop fisher) who might have supported cetherine.

Plus it is highly likely that he was starting to go crazy at that point with either syphillis or McLeod syndrome. Combine that with a prevalent worldview that construed infertility and birth defects as God’s wrath and it’s not a big leap for him to conclude that Anne was a witch. Particularly when you think about the fact that he was basically obsessed with her for 7 years in which she refused to sleep with him, and then as soon as they were married, they were fighting a lot. (Everyone knows people like that, where the chase is much better than the reality.). For those who wanted to get rid of her, easy to convince a half crazy king that she had bewitched him. He probably half believed it, or half believed something akin to it.