Anne Boleyn was beheaded today by order of her husband

Anne Boleyn was beheaded today by order of her husband

, Henry VIII who, on the one hand, had condemned her as an incestuous strumpet, and on the other hand had hired an expert French headsman to decapitate her as painlessly as possible – with a sword, not an axe (all while courting his next queen Jane Seymour).  While, at the time, Anne was blamed for Henry’s cruelty, and dubbed ‘the king’s whore’, by 18th and 19th centuries she was seen more as a romantic victim; a strong-willed and beautiful woman destroyed by her brutal tyrant husband.  The film Anne of the Thousand Days, with Geneviève Bujold as Anne, is very much in this tradition.

A more pragmatic and Feminist view from the late Twentieth Century is that Anne was one of the most ambitious, intelligent and important queens in European history, and that it was her own Reformist Christian agenda - rather than just her inability to produce a male heir - that put her at odds with the conservative religious establishment, Thomas Cromwell and thereby, the king, and her very courtship by Henry was a concerted campaign of regal harassment that she coped with to the best of her ability.  (His courtship of Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr is often seen as equally short on consent).

Another modern view is that, in an age that was extraordinarily sexist, Anne followed the rules of the time, and used her beauty and sex-appeal very effectively for her own and her family's advancement and, since the Boleyns were social climbers, it is even possible to view Anne as calculating, venal and unscrupulous.  If the downright villainous Anne of Philippa Gregory’s novel The Other Boleyn Girl might stretch the idea almost to breaking point, it’s not quite as extreme as the story once told to tourists visiting Mount Etna which was that, deep in the heart of the volcano, the wicked Queen Anne Boleyn was kept in eternal fiery torment for seducing Henry VIII away from Catholicism.