The king and Anne Boleyn were secretly married in January , causing Henry and the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time, Thomas Cranmer, to be excommunicated from the Catholic church. This in turn led to the establishment of the Church of England, a major step in the Reformation that added England to the list of Protestant nations. Thomas Cromwell. In , she bore a female child, who would grow up to be Queen Elizabeth I.
But Anne suffered miscarriages and her only male child was stillborn in January At that point, Henry decided to make a change. Historians speculate that her father probably tried to warn her of the situation. But there was little she could do. Boleyn was accused of sexual affairs with male members of her court, who in some cases were tortured into making confessions. In addition, she was accused of incest with her own brother and of using sorcery to bewitch the king.
Boleyn was sent to confinement in the Tower of London and her trial took place on May 15, But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
At dawn the next day Norris was taken to the Tower. Anne and her brother George, Lord Rochford, were also arrested. The latter was questioned and released, but the others were imprisoned in the Tower. On 10 May, a grand jury indicted all of the accused, apart from Page and Wyatt.
On 15 May, Anne and Rochford were tried within the Tower by a court of 26 peers presided over by their uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Both were found guilty of high treason. Later that day, Cranmer issued a dispensation allowing Henry and Jane Seymour to marry; they were betrothed on 20 May and married 10 days later. What could explain this rapid and surprising turn of events? The first theory, argued by Boleyn biographer and scholar GW Bernard, is simply that Anne was guilty of the charges against her.
The key piece of evidence was undoubtedly the confession by the first man accused, Smeaton, that he had had sexual intercourse with the queen three times. Though it was probably obtained under torture the accounts vary , he never retracted his confession.
Unlikely as it was to be true, it catapulted the investigation to a different, far more serious level. All subsequent evidence was tainted with a presumption of guilt. Yet, as another Boleyn biographer Eric Ives noted, three-quarters of the specific accusations of adulterous liaisons made in the indictment can be discredited, even years later.
Certainly, Anne maintained her innocence. Anne was not alone in professing her innocence. Another set of historians have favoured the explanation that Anne was the victim of a conspiracy by Thomas Cromwell and a court faction involving the Seymours. But why should Anne and Cromwell, erstwhile allies of a reformist bent, fall out? Differences of opinion are thought to have arisen over the use of funds from the dissolution of the monasteries, as well as matters of foreign policy — seemingly slender motives for destroying a queen.
Chapuys mentioned Jane in a letter of 10 February , reporting that Henry had sent her a gift of a purse full of sovereigns, accompanied by a letter. She did not open the letter, which — Ives speculated — contained a summons to the royal bed. She ran away from the royal court for a year starting in the summer of to escape, and those love letters appear to encompass the time when she was absent from court, distancing herself from his advances. If it can end in decapitation, it was never love.
Nolan sees parallels with how some stories about women are told today. Earlier this fall, a New Zealand jury found a year-old man guilty of the murder of British backpacker Grace Millane.
It filters down and has an effect. Boleyn was arrested along with five men she was accused of committing adultery with — one of whom was her own brother George — in May of She was tried first and found guilty of adultery, incest and high treason, including the charge that she planned to kill the King so she could elope with a lover. Nolan suspects there was more to the story than adultery, a contentious issue about which historians have disagreed for decades.
Two months before her execution, Boleyn was involved in passing nationwide legislation titled the Poor Law, which stated that local officials should find work for the unemployed.
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