Execution of Anne Boleyn (1536): Fall of Henry VIII's Queen

Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII and mother of the future Elizabeth I, was beheaded inside the Tower of London on 19 May 1536. Only three years after her coronation she was arrested, tried and condemned within less than three weeks on charges of adultery, incest and plotting the king’s death. Her sudden fall remains one of the most debated episodes in English history.

Background: from favourite to queen

Anne Boleyn was born in about 1501, though some historians argue for 1507, into an ambitious gentry family whose home was Hever Castle in Kent. Her father, Thomas Boleyn, was a diplomat, and Anne spent several formative years at the courts of Margaret of Austria in the Netherlands and Queen Claude of France, returning to England in about 1522.

By 1526–1527 Henry VIII was in love with her and determined to marry her. Anne refused to become his mistress, and Henry’s quest to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon led to the break with Rome. Anne, who was sympathetic to religious reform, encouraged the king to read reforming books and supported evangelical clergy.

Henry and Anne married secretly in about January 1533. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer declared the first marriage void in May, and Anne was crowned on 1 June 1533. Their daughter Elizabeth was born on 7 September 1533, but the son Henry wanted did not follow.

Causes of her fall

The marriage soon came under strain. Anne was clever, outspoken and quick-tempered, qualities that had attracted Henry as a lover but irritated him in a wife. She suffered at least one miscarriage or stillbirth before 1536, and by late 1535 Henry was paying attention to Jane Seymour, one of her ladies-in-waiting.

Several events in early 1536 changed the situation. Catherine of Aragon died on 7 January, which meant that Henry could now end his second marriage without being pressed to return to his first. On 24 January the king was badly hurt in a jousting accident. On 29 January, the day of Catherine’s funeral, Anne miscarried a male child. Henry is reported to have said that he had been seduced into the marriage by witchcraft, though the report comes from a hostile source.

Court politics added to the danger. Anne had quarrelled with Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, partly over how the wealth of the dissolved monasteries should be used, and partly over foreign policy towards the Emperor Charles V. In April 1536 her almoner, John Skip, preached a sermon that was widely read as an attack on Cromwell. Meanwhile a conservative group at court, together with the Seymour family, was promoting Jane.

Arrests in the spring of 1536

On 24 April 1536 a special legal commission was created to investigate treasons. On 30 April Mark Smeaton, a court musician, was arrested and questioned at Cromwell’s house. He confessed to adultery with the queen, probably under threat or torture.

On 1 May, at the May Day jousts at Greenwich, Henry left suddenly and rode to London. Henry Norris, one of his closest companions and Groom of the Stool, was arrested. The next day Anne was taken by barge to the Tower of London, as was her brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford. Sir Francis Weston and William Brereton were arrested soon afterwards. The poet Thomas Wyatt and Sir Richard Page were also held but later released.

In the Tower, Anne was guarded by the Constable, Sir William Kingston, whose letters to Cromwell record her distressed and sometimes careless remarks. Some of these remarks, about conversations with Norris and Weston, were used to build the case against her.

The trials

The four commoners, Norris, Weston, Brereton and Smeaton, were tried at Westminster Hall on 12 May 1536. All were found guilty of adultery with the queen and of conspiring the king’s death. Only Smeaton pleaded guilty.

On 15 May Anne and her brother were tried separately in the Great Hall of the Tower before a court of peers presided over by her uncle, Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, as Lord High Steward. Among the peers was Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, to whom Anne had once been romantically linked. Anne defended herself calmly and, by most accounts, well, but both she and George were convicted unanimously. The sentence for a woman convicted of treason was burning or beheading, at the king’s pleasure.

On 17 May the five men were beheaded on Tower Hill. On the same day Cranmer, at a hearing at Lambeth, declared Anne’s marriage to Henry invalid, most likely on the grounds of Henry’s earlier affair with her sister Mary Boleyn. The ruling made the adultery charges legally awkward, since a woman who had never been the king’s wife could hardly betray the marriage, but it was not reversed.

The execution

Anne was executed early on the morning of 19 May 1536, at about eight or nine o’clock according to differing accounts, on a scaffold within the walls of the Tower, before a limited audience that included Cromwell and many of the king’s council. Henry had granted her the “mercy” of a skilled swordsman brought from Calais rather than the axe.

According to the accounts that survive, Anne made a short and dignified speech in which she praised the king, did not admit guilt and asked those present to pray for her. She was killed with a single stroke. Earlier Kingston had reported her remark that she had heard the executioner was very good and that she had a little neck.

No proper coffin had been prepared, and her body and head were placed in an elm chest and buried in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula in the Tower. The traditional scaffold site on Tower Green is marked by a modern memorial, although some historians think the scaffold actually stood to the north of the White Tower.

Key people

• Anne Boleyn (c. 1501–1536): queen of England from 1533 and mother of Elizabeth I.
• Henry VIII (1491–1547): the king who allowed and almost certainly wished for her destruction.
• Thomas Cromwell (c. 1485–1540): the minister who directed the investigation; according to the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, he later said he had planned the affair himself.
• George Boleyn, Lord Rochford (c. 1504–1536): Anne’s brother, accused of incest and executed on 17 May.
• Jane Seymour (c. 1508–1537): Anne’s lady-in-waiting, who became Henry’s third wife.

Guilty or framed? The historians’ debate

Almost all historians agree that Anne was not guilty as charged. On many of the dates listed in the indictments, either Anne or the man accused with her can be shown to have been somewhere else, or Anne was recovering from childbirth. The incest charge rested on little more than the fact that she and her brother were close.

The main debate concerns why she fell. Eric Ives argued that Cromwell organised a coup against her after their political quarrel, with Henry’s approval. Retha Warnicke suggested that the miscarriage of a possibly deformed foetus led to fears of witchcraft, though there is no firm evidence for a deformity. G. W. Bernard has argued that there may have been some truth in the allegations of flirtation or even adultery, a view most scholars do not share. What is clear is that Henry wanted a new marriage and an heir, and that the charges gave him both.

Consequences and legacy

Henry and Jane Seymour were betrothed on 20 May, the day after the execution, and married on 30 May 1536. A new Act of Succession in July 1536 declared Elizabeth illegitimate and settled the crown on Jane’s children. In October 1537 Jane gave birth to the future Edward VI, but died less than two weeks later.

Anne’s fall did not reverse the religious changes of the 1530s. The dissolution of the monasteries continued, and Cromwell remained in power until his own fall in 1540, described in Fall of Thomas Cromwell.

Anne’s daughter became Elizabeth I in 1558 and reigned for forty-four years. Elizabeth rarely spoke of her mother in public, but she promoted Boleyn relatives and wore a ring that is believed to have contained a portrait of Anne.

Anne Boleyn was the first English queen to be executed, and her story has been retold endlessly in novels, plays, films and television. Popular images range from a scheming seductress to a Protestant heroine and a victim of a ruthless king. Historians today tend to see her as an intelligent, politically engaged woman whose position depended entirely on producing a male heir.

Her remains were among those identified in 1876 when the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula was restored and are marked by a memorial in the chancel floor. Like that of Mary, Queen of Scots half a century later, her execution showed how dangerous royal politics could be even for a crowned queen.

Timeline

• 1533, 1 June: Anne crowned queen in Westminster Abbey.
• 1533, 7 September: birth of Princess Elizabeth.
• 1536, 7 January: death of Catherine of Aragon.
• 1536, 29 January: Anne miscarries a male child.
• 1536, 30 April: Mark Smeaton arrested.
• 1536, 2 May: Anne and George Boleyn sent to the Tower.
• 1536, 15 May: Anne and George tried and condemned.
• 1536, 17 May: five men executed; the marriage declared invalid.
• 1536, 19 May: Anne Boleyn beheaded in the Tower of London.
• 1536, 30 May: Henry VIII marries Jane Seymour.

Why it matters

Anne Boleyn’s execution revealed the ruthlessness of Henry VIII’s court, where even a queen could be destroyed within weeks. It cleared the way for the king’s third marriage and the birth of his son, and it left her daughter Elizabeth, who would become one of England’s most important monarchs, without a mother and for a time without a place in the succession.