Boleyn’s songbook brought back to life
In 1536, Anne Boleyn, queen of England for only three years, is in the Tower of London awaiting execution on charges of adultery. She writes a letter to Henry VIII, protesting her innocence, and composes a doleful poem: “O Deathe rock me asleep / Bringe me to quiet rest / Let pass my weary guiltless ghost ... For I must dye, there is no remedy.” Someone then turns those words into a song, which has survived for five centuries.
There’s no evidence the poem really is by Anne. But it’s touching to think we have a song by a queen lamenting her own demise, and it might even be true. Anne was an educated woman, well able to compose a poem, and she was musically literate too.
The proof is a leather-bound volume on the shelves of the Royal College of Music, known as Anne Boleyn’s Songbook. It’s a fascinating collection of 42 compositions, one of the most important sources of French Renaissance music anywhere. Remarkably, it’s lain untouched for nearly 500 years. Now David Skinner, director of the choir Alamire, has picked out around 20 of the best pieces and recorded them.
Alamire has released an album of their recording on the Obsidian label. The book has an air of mystery, because there’s no rubric inside to explain the choice of pieces, or even name them. Does it really have anything to do with Anne Boleyn? Why are some pieces only half written out? Why is the songbook of an English queen so full of music by French composers?
The most obvious clue to the book’s ownership is an inscription in tiny writing that says “Mistres ABolleyne nowe thus.” “Nowe thus” was the motto of the Boleyn family, and the word “mistress” is a sign that the book was put together before Anne became queen in 1533.
This suggests the songbook is the musical equivalent of a commonplace book, which Anne started after she was sent to Europe in her early teens, to complete her education. After a year at the court of Margaret of Austria, who was a great patroness of composers, she spent many years at the French court. The book could well be a record of the music Anne encountered on her travels, and later in England.
The book’s contents are in some ways just what you’d expect from a well-bred young woman of the time (she clearly had good taste, since some of the works are among the masterpieces of Renaissance music). When she was queen, Anne employed a young commoner named Mark Smeaton as her personal lutenist. It didn’t end well — Smeaton was later convicted of adultery with the queen, though Thomas Cromwell’s agents almost certainly trumped up the evidence against him.