Anne Boleyn: 500 Years of Lies

As all Tudor biographies reach 1536 the reader knows what’s coming. In under five months Anne Boleyn will be dead. As the weeks tick by, we search for signs of what catastrophic events could possibly have led to the unprecedented murder of the queen of England. By now it seems painfully clear how Henry VIII could order the death of the woman he was meant to have been passionately in love with for the past decade; the sociopath without a conscience could plot her demise without flinching. The only thing is, he wasn’t actually part of the conspiracy to frame her. The evidence we are about to discover proves the king didn’t have any hand in Anne’s takedown until the final days, when he called for her arrest and the death warrant had to be signed.

And so the countdown begins to Anne’s execution on 19 May.

Following the previous summer’s religious activism around the country, the fact that his wife was pregnant again gave the king hope that God was finally to bless him with a son and heir to his progressive new monarchy.

Yet, for Anne, as much as her pregnancy brought her reassurance and security, it also brought back deep-rooted fears as Henry sought his sexual kicks elsewhere while she was busy incubating the saviour of the kingdom. This meant the king suddenly fell prey to every Imperial Lady-wannabe at court, hoping to recreate her success at driving a wedge between the king and his evangelical wife. But Anne’s cousin, the demure and unassuming Jane Seymour, was all too happy to step in and help keep him onside.

There was just one problem: Jane Seymour was not on Anne’s side.

Jane was as devout a Catholic as she was fiercely loyal to Katherine and Mary, and suddenly it was déjà vu as Anne saw Henry fall for the charms of a young woman in her service who was out to ruin her. But this time the rules were about to change in favour of the imperial faction.

On 7 January 1536 the entire court, and indeed England and Europe, was rocked by the news that Katherine of Aragon had died. We’ve already seen how overjoyed Henry was at this, showing that he hadn’t fully considered all the potential repercussions of his ex-wife no longer challenging the crown.

With Henry’s former queen out of the picture, Princess Mary and her supporters suddenly saw themselves that much closer in their fight for Mary to outrank Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, as next in line to the throne. Think about it: while before, if Henry were to concede and place Mary back in the line of succession, it would mean him acknowledging his marriage to Katherine was valid. Something he would never do. But now, with Katherine gone, it was only a simple matter of relegitimising Mary in Parliament – which, incidentally, he did go on to do with both Mary and Elizabeth in his lifetime.

On top of that, all Mary’s supporters who did not recognise the king’s marriage to Anne believed that Katherine’s death left Henry free to remarry. So the game had abruptly changed for the anti-Boleyn/anti-reformist faction at court. Anne would have been made all too aware of this by her diplomat father, who was fully in the loop with the delicate intricacies of international politics. So, does this explain Anne’s absence from any celebrations of her enemy’s death? Either way, it should serve as final proof against the theory that Anne poisoned Katherine, because her death placed Anne in a more perilous situation than ever before.

This much was made abundantly clear when, following Katherine’s death, de Carles tells us Anne woke one day to a fire in her rooms. This story has been twisted since to insinuate that she had left a candle burning after ‘entertaining a lover’ through the night, but the timing points to it being something much more ominous. Was it a threat, a warning, or a real attempt on her life disguised as an accident? We’ll never confirm the culprit’s true intent, but I’m inclined to think it was the former: someone wanted Anne to know that she should be scared, and by all accounts it worked, with the queen clearly shaken that she and her unborn baby only narrowly escaped death.⁴²⁵

But things were about to get much worse. Mere weeks later, on 24 January 1536, Henry suffered his infamous and incredibly serious jousting accident.

Chapuys and Wriothesley both reported that even though the king ‘fell so heavily that everyone thought it a miracle he was not hurt and killed’⁴²⁶ and that Anne ‘took a fright’, they concluded that the king ‘had no hurt’⁴²⁷ and ‘sustained no injury’. The fact that both failed to report the wound on Henry’s leg that would turn ulcerous in time, causing him chronic pain for the rest of his life, suggests they were downplaying the accident in order to help the king appear strong, fit and well to outsiders. It was only Charles V’s representative Dr Ortiz who reported a more worrying version of events when he wrote ‘the French king said that the king of England had fallen from his horse, and been for two hours without speaking’, meaning he was unconscious.⁴²⁸

External injuries are one thing, but as we have learned, severe trauma to the head is one of the causes of sociopathy; so there’s no denying this accident had an irrevocable effect on the king’s mental health. Not that he was a well-balanced individual in the years leading up to this moment. Just look at the wording Chapuys used in his letter regarding Henry’s fall, comparing it to that of ‘the other tyrant’⁴²⁹ who escaped death. To be considered a tyrant in the sixteenth century meant your actions must have stood out as particularly psychotic, it being arguably one of the most brutal eras in British history. Meaning that this head injury only served to amplify every factor of Henry’s pre-existing mental illness: the anger, the impulsiveness, the detachment from those he was supposed to have loved. Inevitably, this was to have a fateful and fatal impact on his reaction to Anne’s downfall in the coming months.

But Henry wasn’t the only one to be affected by his accident, for the shock was just one trauma too many for Anne. It’s believed the stress of slowly losing her husband to another mistress, paired with her own brush with death days earlier, followed by her uncle Norfolk’s scaremongering announcement of Henry’s fall caused Anne to miscarry her baby on 29 January – in fact, the very same day as Katherine of Aragon’s funeral. A sad coincidence that is repeatedly played up for dramatic effect, insinuating this was Anne’s haunting comeuppance for celebrating the death of the former queen.

There could not have been a worse time for Anne to lose her safety net of the boy heir Henry needed – which in itself has been the subject of much debate.

Chapuys reported the foetus ‘seemed to be a male child which she had not borne 3½ months’.⁴³⁰ Had fate delivered its cruellest hand in aborting what could have been the much sought-after male heir? Was the foetus really a boy? With Wriothesley confirming a similar age, fifteen weeks, would it have even been possible to tell the sex of the child at such an early stage? Experts give mixed reports, some saying it is possible to tell at as early as twelve weeks, with others saying not before nineteen.

Midwife Judith E. Lewis confirms you can sometimes tell the gender of a baby at around fifteen weeks, but not always, and it is possible to get it wrong, concluding, ‘The midwife examining Anne’s baby could have seen certain developments and made an educated guess.’

While biographer Wyatt claims the king came to Anne ‘bewailing and complaining unto her the loss of his boy’,⁴³¹ we also have slightly contrasting reports that he declared ‘I see God will not give me male children’,⁴³² hinting that he saw the baby and believed it to be a girl, or not yet formed and perhaps mistaking it for a girl. Indeed, it was the baby’s lack of form that prompted Catholic propagandist Nicholas Sander to start the tasteless rumour, while in exile during Elizabeth I’s reign, that it was a ‘shapeless mass of flesh’ – an attempt to insinuate that Anne had miscarried a deformed child, proving it to be the demonic result of an unnatural incestuous affair.⁴³³ But as this was the same man who started the rumour that Henry VIII was Anne Boleyn’s father, I think we know how seriously to take him.

Anne was understandably distraught at the loss of her baby. Indeed, Wyatt reports that both she and Henry were in ‘extreme grief’, which would explain why Anne was said to have lashed out and blamed Henry for the miscarriage, an accusation the king apparently ‘took hardly’. It is here Henry ‘was then heard to say to her: he would “have no more boys by her”. With clear emphasis upon the word “her”.’⁴³⁴

Things were deteriorating fast.

With rumours swirling of a breakdown in the royal marriage, the anti-Boleyn faction suddenly saw Henry as ripe for the picking. If ever there was an opportunity to strike and take Anne out, this was it. It was at this point that Jane Seymour was advised to change tack. If she played the situation right, she could have more than her five minutes of glory in the king’s bed.

But this much we know. After all, it’s this Tudor catfight, which saw the two cousins scratching each other’s eyes out, that has garnered so much attention from historians of the Mills & Boon generation. And if this was all that was unfolding in the early months of 1536, Anne would have survived it, as she had before.

But in spite of, or perhaps because of the fact that Anne saw herself increasingly cornered into a factional checkmate and felt her days on the throne numbered, she stepped up her political work. But this time it was to be a radical, all-or-nothing, national takeover in the name of the people.

Now, anyone in the perilous situation Anne was in at this point might toe the line a little, waiting for a safer moment to continue their campaigns. But not our Anne.

Although, to the outside world in the spring of 1536, that’s exactly what it appeared she was doing when Tristram Revel tried to present her with a controversial English version of Francis Lambertus’s Farrago rerum theologicarum via her chaplain William Latymer.

This work has been called ‘dangerously radical’, yet Anne apparently said she ‘would not trouble herself’ with it.⁴³⁵ Some historians have used this uncharacteristic response as final proof that she couldn’t have been a true evangelical, and that therefore this was never the motivation behind her reign.

To put an end to that myth once and for all, allow me to point out several vital pieces of information. Firstly, Lambertus’s book denied the sacrifice of Mass, something Anne Boleyn did not. So her reluctance to promote the book merely confirms, once again, that she was a moderate reformer who still believed in key practices of Catholicism.

As with all religious movements, there will always be radical offshoots (groups like the Anabaptists were notorious radicals at the time). Indeed, Revel had found himself under investigation in February of that year for his work, and so the evangelicals championing moderate reform had to be very careful as to whom they were seen to support, as they believed it was this kind of extremism that threatened to derail their own movement.⁴³⁶

Secondly, it must be pointed out that Revel first sent his controversial translation to Archbishop Cranmer and his brother, Edmund, the archdeacon of Canterbury, and to Hugh Latimer and William Latymer, all of whom declined to support the book before Anne said no herself.⁴³⁷ But is these men’s faith called into question on the basis of their refusals? Of course not. Only Anne’s.

So don’t be fooled by those who try to tell you she was playing it safe, too scared to stand up for her religious beliefs when things got serious; for as we are about to see, she was preparing to do quite the opposite. At this pivotal time Anne was picking her battles wisely, choosing to focus on her political campaigns that were already underway, and one of the biggest has been covered up for centuries.

Whether sixteenth-century politics is your jam or not – you’d be forgiven if it’s the latter – you cannot fail to have come across the very basics of Anne’s fall: that she and Cromwell fell out over the dissolution of the monasteries. Out of the millions of pounds being raised, Anne believed the religious houses bringing in less than £200 a year (approximately £88,000 in today’s currency⁴³⁸) should be used for educational purposes and as refuges for the poor.

But if Cromwell plotting the murder of a queen over several thousand pounds of government money has never felt like a satisfactory explanation, and perhaps somewhat excessive, you would be right in your suspicions – for I have discovered the real reason for their almighty falling-out. Only two months before her death, Anne was involved in passing nationwide legislation to combat poverty. With her power increasing and now interfering with government acts, this provided Cromwell with a much more devastating reason to kill the king’s wife, the woman who had helped raise him to the position he was now in.

Throughout history, the infamous Tudor Poor Law that was passed in 1536 has been accredited to Thomas Cromwell, but it actually originated from an abandoned draft by William Marshall, a pamphleteer and ardent reformer to whom Anne Boleyn was patron.⁴³⁹ This draft was based on a report of a similar scheme run in the city of Ypres in Flanders, which Marshall translated and dedicated to Anne Boleyn back in 1534. In his dedication he explicitly asked her to petition the king to launch the scheme in England.⁴⁴⁰

Not only did Anne successfully pitch this to the king but Henry instructed his now top man, Cromwell, to oversee the scheme’s proposal in Parliament and subsequent launch. And this is where we come to that vital discarded draft of the original Poor Law scheme, the contents of which were astonishingly ambitious and ahead of its time – in fact, very similar to the national laws in place in Britain today. The document has been identified as written in the autumn of 1535, and it is stated twice within its pages that it was intended for Henry VIII’s Parliament, which was to open on 4 February 1536 – four months before Anne Boleyn’s assassination.⁴⁴¹

Coming as he did from an underprivileged working-class background, I have no doubt Cromwell approved of the core values of the proposal; not just helping the poor, but more usefully putting them to work. Yes, a key part of the initiative would provide those who were out of work with jobs on community projects, such as repairing harbours and the country’s defences – something that is backed up by Cromwell’s own notes of potential local projects that could be worked on.⁴⁴²

However, as it would cost the Crown heavily to put this national scheme into place it appears the downsides far outweighed the good for Cromwell. For, you see, a major part of this proposed law was a radical Tudor version of the National Health Service: where sick people would get free medical care in order to get them well enough to work again.⁴⁴³ But fear not, Tudor England was no nanny state, and would be much tougher on those who failed to turn up for the work the government provided them with: skivers would be jailed and upon release ‘burned on the ball of their right thumb’!⁴⁴⁴

And yet this was not the most excessive part of the Poor Law.

The original draft proposed a council of eight people to oversee extensive nationwide work, starting on the first day of the impending parliamentary Easter Term in 1536 in order to launch the following year. Also, all local government officials around the country would have to swear an oath that they would enforce the act in their cities and towns.⁴⁴⁵ This was monumental. This was Anne Boleyn looking to form a council to rival the powers of the king’s privy council.⁴⁴⁶ There is no mistaking that this would have been a major threat to Cromwell. But no doubt he calmed his nerves with the reassurance that the likelihood of such a revolutionary law getting the backing of Parliament was pretty slim.

That was until the king himself came to the House of Commons on 11 March 1536 to personally introduce it, and promised to contribute to the cost of running the scheme.⁴⁴⁷ Ah. Suddenly Cromwell was faced with the king fighting in Parliament for a law his wife and her patronee were pushing. Not only was Anne Boleyn now effectively working as a politician and involved in laws passed in the Commons, but she had got the king to agree to use all this new money pouring in from the dissolution of the monasteries to fund it.

So, when people speak of Anne and Cromwell clashing over how to spend the money raised by the dissolution of the monasteries, in missing out this vital information it has made his plot to murder her seem a little over the top. But now, I believe the story is complete. Is this widespread, not to mention incredibly expensive-sounding, Poor Law what Anne Boleyn wanted to spend the new money on? It would appear so. And even more dangerously, the king agreed with her.

But the scheme never saw the light of day; Anne and Marshall’s proposal never got off the ground, with the most ambitious version of their draft abandoned.

So, what happened? Did Cromwell sabotage it in some way? Is that why he was happy to be in charge of the scheme, to make sure he could control it? We question the motives behind all Anne’s good work, so in the name of fairness and equality let’s apply the same measure to Cromwell. If he opposed Anne’s wish to use the smaller monastery money for charity – a theory widely accepted by historians, I hasten to add – why would he be so happy about backing a scheme that would heavily rely on funding from the Crown? And we’re no longer talking £200 per monastery; this would be hundreds of thousands of pounds in Tudor currency, if not millions.

So, did Cromwell encourage Marshall and Anne to make this law as radical and extreme as possible, so that it would obviously be rejected by Parliament? Because that’s exactly what happened. Following the king’s appearance at the Commons on 11 March, opposition to this expensive bill was said to be so great it had to be withdrawn almost immediately.⁴⁴⁸

But wait. It just so happened that Cromwell had another version of the Poor Law up his sleeve and ready to propose. So Marshall and Anne’s scheme was quickly replaced with a drastically diluted version that has since been deemed pretty ineffectual by historians the world over.

Funny, though, that Cromwell should be ready and waiting with another act that would appease the king and make it appear that he was helping yet he really wasn’t.

The Poor Law that was passed in 1536 simply stated that local officials should find work for the unemployed. The rest of the act focused on banning begging, setting up basic and optional donation boxes in parishes, and that churchwardens should collect alms every Sunday and national holiday. Oh, and older children refusing to work were to be whipped.

But most importantly this version was minus the proposed income tax. (If they were going to tax the people then it should fund wars, not go straight back to the people themselves, right?) Lo and behold, this new bill was also minus the funding from the Crown. Oh, and minus the rival council.

Fun fact: between 1532 and 1540, when Cromwell was at the height of his power at court, he saw a staggering 333 acts that he proposed passed in Parliament. This astounding figure proves one thing: if he wanted to get a law passed, he did.⁴⁴⁹ Even sixteenth-century political expert G. R. Elton is perplexed by the mission’s failure to launch, stating that ‘the failure . . . is surprising, especially because the government of the 1530s did not usually fail when administrative reforms were called for.’

The thing is, we know the Poor Law wasn’t Cromwell’s brainchild, having first come from Marshall via Anne, with Cromwell merely assigned to oversee the scheme by the king. But if we needed any further proof that it was not ‘Cromwell’s Poor Law’, as it’s repeatedly called, then look no further than the abandoned document on which it was all based. For it has no official writer. After centuries of trying to identify the author of this incredible draft, historians have concluded that it could only have been Anne’s client William Marshall. Not only that, but after comparing handwriting and syntax styles, it’s been determined that it definitely could not have been written by Cromwell himself, nor the king, nor any of their official draftsmen. The language of the draft clearly indicates it was not written by a government official, and even the style of its parchment – folded in half like a book – indicates the writer was a private individual and was not used to drafting official documents.⁴⁵⁰

With his experience of translating the similar Ypres scheme, I’m not here to challenge William Marshall as the author of the document; I do believe it was him. But I am here to pose the obvious question in light of our new analysis of Anne Boleyn’s work, and that is – did she also work directly on the draft? Even Foxe references her involvement in a scheme to provide work for the poor around the country.⁴⁵¹ It would be bizarre that Anne was passionate enough about Marshall’s appeal to get the king and Cromwell involved, only for her then to leave her protégé to it, never taking any interest in the scheme again. Particularly when we have just learned how committed she was to providing poverty relief from within her own household.

Who do you think got the king to personally lobby for it in Parliament? Is this not exactly the sort of thing Anne had done many times before, having Henry intervene in international cases of amnesty?⁴⁵²

All the evidence leads us to conclude that Anne Boleyn was the driving force behind this radical new law – a law that history has accredited to Cromwell ever since. Not surprising, really. When removing all trace of Anne after her death, were they honestly going to credit the dead adulteress with a powerful and positive government law?

Sadly, the fate of the scheme was almost as pathetic as what remained of it. When it came to its second renewal in 1539, the Poor Law didn’t get passed and was finally laid to rest once and for all.⁴⁵³

Well, who saw that coming? I really thought Cromwell was going to push for it this time.

Historians have been mystified, baffled even, as to why Cromwell couldn’t get his own measly little law passed again a mere three years after his initial supposed victory.

Hmmm, I wonder why? He never wanted it to pass in the first place.

But Anne and Marshall’s work was not entirely in vain, and interestingly enough the closest Tudor England was ever to get to their original scheme was a law implemented by none other than Anne’s own daughter, Elizabeth I. Was she finishing what her mother tried to start? G. R. Elton indirectly alludes to this when he points out that parts of the Elizabethan Poor Law are replicated word for word from Marshall and Anne’s 1535 abandoned draft document.⁴⁵⁴ Did Elizabeth know full well that she was implementing her mother’s last mission before she was murdered? For closure and comfort, we might like to think so.

Anne Boleyn’s mission may have failed in March 1536, but for Cromwell this had clearly got way too close for comfort. Something had to be done about the queen.

In trying to piece together what went wrong, Anne must have quickly come to realise that far from working with her on the scheme, Cromwell had been working against her all along. Her suspicions were seemingly confirmed when on 2 April Cromwell opposed her call to use the smaller monasteries for charity and education, the very themes of the failed Poor Law. William Latymer tells us how Anne wanted to convert the smaller abbeys and priories into places of study and continual relief for the poor.⁴⁵⁵ The monasteries had always been a refuge for the sick and destitute, from children who had been orphaned to widows who couldn’t support their families; not only did they give these people vital support but they kept them off the streets and from turning to crime in order to survive. So, Anne saw the monasteries as vital to the people and the safety of the country. But it would seem Cromwell did not.

The important thing about the Reformation’s dissolution act is that it had a clause whereby the king could save any monasteries he wished. So, with Anne calling for him to do just that, and Henry’s eagerness to support her poverty schemes only the month before, this must have been a scary prospect for Cromwell.⁴⁵⁶ He knew the Crown needed all the money it could get for his plans to modernise the country’s defences. Hey, wars weren’t cheap!

However, undoubtedly still reeling from Cromwell’s last political betrayal, Anne was not about to let him get his way with this one, and so she directed her full vengeance and fury his way. In fact, she hit just about everyone with a few home truths – her husband included.

In a daring act of defiance, Anne commanded her almoner John Skippe to preach a controversial sermon to the royal congregation on Passion Sunday that read like a war cry against their dodgy dealings. This infamous sermon has now gone down in history owing to the mass controversy it created. Skippe chose John, Chapter 8, Verse 46,⁴⁵⁷ and accused them all of following the king blindly for personal gain. At which point he used King Solomon as a barbed example of how he became ‘un-noble’ in his ‘carnal appetite’ for taking many wives and mistresses – a nice little dig at Henry’s increasingly serious affair with Jane Seymour.⁴⁵⁸

Yet how do we know Skippe was preaching this message at Anne’s command? Because, as Ives has correctly pointed out, no cleric in Anne’s household would have dared say such things without her explicit approval.⁴⁵⁹

Skippe ploughed on to the main event: Anne’s scathing attack on Cromwell. This time he gave the rather accurate example of Ahasuerus of Persia and his evil councillor Haman, who set out to destroy the Persian Queen Esther.⁴⁶⁰ As Latymer tells us, Skippe spoke of the ‘good woman (which this gentle king Ahasuerus loved very well and put his trust in because he knew that she was ever his friend) and she gave unto the king contrary counsel.’⁴⁶¹ He finished his sermon with a daring and direct warning to the king that he needed to be wary of his counsellors ‘for the malice that they bare towards many men’.

Now, because the story used in Skippe’s analogy ends with the evil councillor being killed, it has been concluded by many that Cromwell saw this as a direct threat, and that his subsequent destruction of Anne was merely a pre-emptive strike in self-defence.

But as we’ve seen, with the timing of the Poor Law and dissolution of smaller monasteries, Cromwell had already struck her twice. This sermon was Anne fighting back, and not a perfectly understandable reason as to why that downtrodden man we’ve seen in Wolf Hall might be compelled to kill a woman.

Anne wanted to show Cromwell she was not scared of him, and with Skippe preaching this message so publicly in front of king and court, this was her drawing the battle lines. She was ready to fight – and not sneakily behind closed doors; the extent of Cromwell’s political duplicity meant the time had passed for subtle point-scoring. This sermon was a serious statement that she knew would have real implications. But at the same time, she might have also hoped the dramatic scriptural guilt trip would urge the councillors to rethink advising the king purely for personal gain. It was a bold and daring move that showed her true nerve.

Safe to say the sermon went down like a lead balloon, with Skippe accused of treason, malice and inciting anarchy.

But Anne Boleyn did not stop.

Almost as if she knew she was running out of time, she refused to be frightened into submission. So, she instructed her chaplain Hugh Latimer to preach a new sermon with the same message, discouraging the total destruction of all religious houses and imploring the king to put them to better use. And she went on and on. Over and over. Urging all other preachers to ensure their sermons included ‘continual and earnest petitions’ of the same nature.⁴⁶²

Then something amazing happened. A delegation of the country’s abbots and priors came to Anne to ask for her protection. Yes, the Catholic clergy wanted to work with Anne Boleyn – the woman who has been sold to us as the ultimate morally corrupt she-devil of the sixteenth century. Yet the Church in 1536 was starting to wake up to the fact that Anne wasn’t the dastardly party in England’s version of the Reformation – but all that came a little too late.⁴⁶³

Anne was willing to try and help them, but that doesn’t mean she was about to let them off the hook that easily; and so, she thoroughly ripped into the priests and all the corruption they had imposed on the people thus far.

Latymer doesn’t give many details as to how this came about, who exactly Anne was speaking to and where, but my goodness, it has all the drama and pay-off of a Shakespearian play.⁴⁶⁴ They say Anne had a sharp tongue, but I couldn’t help but cheer her on as I read her rant to the Catholic priests that day. Now, bearing in mind that I am providing a modern translation of what is essentially Latymer’s recollection of her words, nevertheless you get the gist of why Anne had been campaigning for reform all these years:

I am convinced that the godly persons who first erected your foundations wanted their priests to be focused on God’s glory and to help the learned. I know they would have wanted you to be pure and diligent professors of God’s word and not enjoying that charity for yourselves. But it’s been clear for the world to see just how negligent you have been in performing your role. As for me, I am deeply disappointed to see how stubbornly you have departed from God’s true religion, forsaken your sovereign and most cowardly given in to the bishop of Rome, whose detestable sleights and frivolous ceremonies you have taken to be the pillar of your fantastical religion. Like hypocrites, you have fed your false superstitions to the unwitting congregation who know no better. You do not listen to the preachers of God’s word and sit either idle or keeping yourselves busy in your cloisters, completely devoid of knowledge. Neither will you give any charity or fund students in universities in the hopes of them giving back to the congregation and indeed the country. So, know this, that in my opinion the dissolution of your houses is a deserved plague from Almighty God who abhors your lewdness and blind ignorance, and until you cleanse and purify your corrupt life and senseless doctrine, God will not cease to send his plagues upon you until your downfall and ruin.⁴⁶⁵

And with that Anne stormed out, leaving the men, as Latymer describes, ‘betwixte fear and heaviness half dismayed’.

Needless to say, her dramatic speech had a positive effect – or, at least, scared them into action – and the men ended up ‘most liberally offering to her grace large [payments] and exhibitions to be distributed yearly to preachers and scholars by the only assignment of her majesty’.⁴⁶⁶

Towards the end of her life, as the situation became increasingly perilous, Anne saw her chaplains as her crew, her family, as allies she could rely on. People that she could genuinely trust were all working towards the same shared goal. And so, it’s only right that in her lifetime she repaid their loyalty and work with promotions for all; as we’ve seen very early on, Cranmer became archbishop of Canterbury, then later Shaxton was given the see of Sarum and Foxe the bishopric of Hereford.⁴⁶⁷ But it was Hugh Latimer’s appointment as bishop of Worcester that was a particularly symbolic victory for the evangelicals, as only two years earlier it was the very same clergy of Worcester who had been trying to condemn him for heresy.⁴⁶⁸ And though Skippe was not to take over the bishopric of Hereford until three years after Anne’s death, it was he who visited her regularly while she was imprisoned in the Tower, showing just how close she considered him to be.⁴⁶⁹

In an emotional statement William Latymer said, ‘Before it pleased God to call her out of this transitory life she expressed thoroughly the wonderful affection she bare the preachers and vigilant pastors of God’s flock.’⁴⁷⁰

This was a carefully loaded pronouncement. Latymer’s talk of the ‘vigilant pastors’ subtly implied that the officials who should have been looking out for the people’s best interests weren’t doing their job, and so it fell to reformist campaigners like Anne and her chaplains to put the pressure on the authorities to clean up their act.

As we’ve seen, the Reformation made fighters and rebels out of the straightest, most law-abiding citizens – those who at first tried to play nice by being polite and compliant. But in angering their opponents, they were each forced to choose: were they going to back down in submission or rise up and fight?

We witnessed this change in Martin Luther, and to varying degrees in Anne Boleyn and even Henry VIII.

None of them set out to be as radical as they became, but as each experienced what they saw as an injustice, they grew stronger, their voices getting louder and more threatening every time they were challenged. The idea of things continuing as they were was so unthinkable that they realised they had to act and take on a rebellious role they never sought to play.

So, if you’re wondering what on earth came over Anne Boleyn in those final months of her life, what gave her the strength and courage to journey on when she was obviously playing with fire, it comes down to the natural instinct of fight or flight. This is also known as acute stress response, a theory first founded in the 1920s by the physiologist Walter Cannon in relation to an animal’s reaction to threat, which has since been discovered to apply equally to humans. The body releases hormones to aid either running away from danger or staying to fight. And in this instance, Anne stayed to fight. It is this adrenaline rush that powered her on in the face of growing opposition.

It is also this exact same instinct that caused Cromwell to realise he had picked a fight with the woman who had helped get rid of Wolsey, the very man he had replaced. Cromwell knew he could not go the same way as his former master. But by April 1536, the essential difference between Anne and Cromwell’s plans for each other was that Anne simply wanted to overpower her oppressor. Cromwell, on the other hand, decided he must kill her.