Anne Boleyn
They called Anne Boleyn the Great Whore. It is a Bible thing. Great Whore is a title from the Book of Revelation, and it is "end of the world" stuff.
An apocalyptic title is overdoing it a bit. They exaggerated the threat Anne posed. Or has history grossly underestimated Anne Boleyn?
Was Anne an existential threat to the Catholic religion and what is known as Abrahamic faith?
*****
I must thank historians Lucy Worsley, Suzannah Lipscombe and Tracy Borman
for introducing Anne Boleyn to me. I must thank William Shakespeare for humanism. I must thank Elizabeth I for Shakespeare.
Anne Boleyn
A Love Story (Part 2)
A giant horse falls on Henry VIII, and England is forever changed—not because he died, but because of what returned in his place. This extraordinary exploration of Tudor history suggests that when the 44-year-old king suffered a catastrophic riding accident on January 24, 1536, his soul departed while his concussed body became a puppet for the manipulative Thomas Cromwell.
At the heart of this tale stands Anne Boleyn, not merely as Henry's infamous second wife, but as England's first true humanist. Sent away at age five and raised under the tutelage of Margaret of Austria, Anne emerged as a "child genius" and "a princess by design." Her progressive humanist philosophy—deemed witchcraft by the Catholic establishment—set her on a collision course with the medieval institutions that dominated Tudor England. The narrative reimagines their first meeting at a masked ball where Henry went incognito as "Romeo" to meet the teenage Anne, who would become his intellectual challenger and eventually his queen.
The struggle between Henry's humanist inclinations and his Catholic conditioning represents the fundamental challenge faced by Renaissance monarchs caught between medieval tradition and modern thinking. How much of history might be explained if we consider that the Henry who executed Anne Boleyn wasn't truly Henry at all?