Was Anne vixen or victim?
THE LAST DAYS OF ANNE BOLEYN BBC2, 9pm THIS is an interesting piece of postfeminism polemic which looks at Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, who of course met the ultimate grisly end.
Perhaps because of what happened to her, and the fact that until recently, the story of her fate has been written by men, Anne has been painted as a sex-driven commoner, a woman out of control, even a kind of she-wolf.
What this documentary does (with the help of some nice stylish reenacting) is retune that.
Anne was certainly the commoner who captivated the king. She was also the victim of a husband who decided that he wanted rid of her but that divorce was not enough –it must be death. Eleven days after she was heheaded in the Tower on Friday, 19 May, 1536, Henry married his third wife, Jane Seymour.
But the heart of this programme is an attempt to fix some of the common misconceptions around Anne. It presents evidence that Thomas Cromwell framed her and although the story is still about sex, and the fact that Henry wanted to have sex with someone else, Anne emerges as a much more positive figure.
Some of the most prominent historians and writers on the period are witnesses for the defence, including Hilary Mantel, Philippa Gregory and David Starkey.
Mantel in particular is keen to rehabilitate Anne.
“Do not cast her as a victim,” she says, “she was a woman who chose to step into a tough political game, she made her calculations, and although ultimately she lost, she played a winning hand.”
This is one of the most infamous periods in Tudor history and one that came to a gruesome conclusion but the facts are pieces that can be moved around.
The fashion now is to rehabilitate Anne from victimhood to heroine status – in years to come, after we have continued to pick over the evidence surrounding the journey one of history’s most controversial figures took to the executioner, the fashion may move again.