Cover

Title page

Preface

Howard Brenton

Every year on the 19th of May flowers are delivered to the Tower of London. Queen Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, was executed on that day in 1536. The flowers have been arriving for forty years and no one knows who sends them. They are put on the floor of the small Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, beneath which Anne’s body – and head – were buried in a wooden chest, without a plaque or stone. All traces of her were then obliterated with a Stalinist ruthlessness: all of the pictures, but perhaps for one, all of the images of her crest of arms. Henry had his ‘H’ and her ‘A’ carved entwined on panels and embossments throughout Hampton Court. They were all removed – though one was missed: it can be seen in the Great Hall, high up to the right on the wooden screen.

Today there is a fast-growing Anne Boleyn cult. She appeals both to adolescents and to ageing romantics. Her story has a Wagnerian intensity of love, death and betrayal, shot through with a very un-Wagnerian sense of reckless fun, of daring sexiness. But there is a deeper reason for the growing obsession with her. The flowers acknowledge an unease; we love her story but feel guilty toward her. I think I’ve understood why and it’s made me a paid-up cult member.

Anne was convicted of adultery, incest and treason. At her trial she had been accused of being her brother’s mistress, of being a witch, of sleeping with a hundred men while married to the King. She had been Queen for three years. In the glow of her husband’s devotion she was the most powerful woman in the Kingdom, a force in her own right against whom no one dared speak openly. But when the protective veil of the King’s affections evaporated she became ‘the Concubine’, the great whore of the age. It was the Devil’s work that she could not give the King a male heir. Wild rumours spoke of her third miscarriage delivering a fetus so distorted that the father must have been a succubus, a demon, even Old Nick himself. In the last days in the Tower, Anne went to pieces. But her wild spirit did not wholly desert her. From within her spinning hysteria she joked ‘I shall have a nickname: Queen Anne the Headless’.