Hi history lovers and welcome or welcome back to the channel where I bring you new videos
every week on all aspects of the past.
Today on History Calling I’m responding to some queries I got on an earlier video
(linked on screen and below) which looked at some of the potential fertility problems
faced by Henry VIII and his partners.
Beneath that video I had a number of people ask me if Anne Boleyn was executed whilst
pregnant.
In this video, I’m therefore going to look at the origins of this theory and whether
or not it has any merit.
In particular, we’ll study the comments made by Henry VIII which are cited as evidence
of a pregnancy and what Anne did and didn’t say while she was being held prisoner in the
Tower of London and during her scaffold speech directly before her death on 19 May 1536.
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where my username is History Calling and to plenty of books, movies and TV shows all about
Anne.
Anne Boleyn did indeed begin the year 1536 pregnant, however she lost her child (a boy)
at about 15 weeks gestation at the end of January.
This was her second such loss (the first having been in mid-1534) and so her only successful
pregnancy was that which produced her daughter Princess Elizabeth, on 7 September 1533.
She was arrested on 2 May 1536 and taken to the Tower of London, where, after a show trial,
she was found guilty of adultery and treason and sentenced to death.
She was executed by sword within the confines of the Tower on the 19th and buried in the
nearby Chapel of Saint Peter Ad Vincula, where her remains still rest.
If you’d like to know more about her execution and the Victorians’ exhumation of her remains,
I have videos on both which I’ll leave linked below for you.
Given this timeline, we therefore have a period of less than 4 months in which she could have
fallen pregnant again in order to be pregnant on the scaffold and we need to assume that
to know about that pregnancy, she would need to have been at least a month along at the
time of her death, meaning she couldn’t have conceived later than mid-April.
The theory that she was indeed expecting when she died can be traced to the author Alison
Weir, who wrote about it in her 2001 book, Henry VIII: King and Court.
In this book, Weir writes that in April 1536:
Henry had every reason to be pleased with Anne, for the evidence strongly suggests that
she was pregnant again.
Just as she had conceived rapidly after the birth of Elizabeth, so her reconciliation
with the King after the miscarriage in January had quickly borne fruit.
Henry made what was probably an oblique reference to her pregnancy that April, when he rounded
on Chapuys [that’s Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador] for suggesting that God
had not thought fit to send him male issue because He had ordained that England should
have a female succession.
‘Am I not a man like other men?
Am I not?
Am I not?’ shouted Henry.
‘You do not know all my secrets’.
On 25 April, in a letter sent to his ambassador Richard Pate in Rome and duplicated to Gardiner
and Wallop in France [that’s Stephen Gardiner and John Wallop, who were both English ambassadors
in France at the time], Henry announced ‘the likelihood and appearance that God will send
us heirs male’, implying that ‘our most dear and entirely beloved wife the Queen’
was once more expecting a child.
Had Anne conceived towards the end of February, it would have been possible for the King to
state this with some certainty, and clearly he was eager to do so.
Weir goes on to add that: ‘It is unthinkable … if there had been no certain hope of a
child, that he, a normally discreet man in such matters, would have made such a statement,
knowing that his ambassadors would make it public.’
On the face of it, this all sounds perfectly plausible, however Weir has unfortunately
made a critical error with one of the sources here and misunderstood the context of the
other.
The result is that her argument is fatally flawed.
Allow me to explain.
The conversation with Chapuys which Weir is referencing did indeed occur and was reported
by the ambassador to this man, Chapuys’ master, Charles V of Spain (aka the Holy Roman
Emperor), who was the nephew of Henry’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
However, the letter dates from 15 April 1533, when Anne was pregnant with Elizabeth.
This source is freely available online and I’ll leave a link to it in the description
box so that you can check it for yourself, but I promise you, Weir’s dating is off
by 3 years.
The letter even discusses Catherine in the present tense, because of course she was still
alive in April 1533, but was dead by April 1536.
That leaves us with the correctly dated comment made in a letter to Richard Pate on 25 April
1536 that, ‘there is greate lightlywood and apparance that God wil sende unto Us heires
masles to succeed Us in the Crowne of this our Realme’.
Here though, this source has been misunderstood because this line has been taken out of context.
When you read the letter from the beginning, it puts things in a very different light.
I’m going to summarise the very start of this letter slightly for the sake of time,
but again, I’ll leave the original linked below for you if you want to double check
my research.
Henry writes that the previous Tuesday he had received a visit at Greenwich Palace from
Eustace Chapuys, who, on behalf of Charles V of Spain, sought to repair the relationship
between the two Kings.
This relationship had been strained because Charles was unhappy at how his aunt Catherine
and cousin, Princess Mary, had been treated by Henry, but with Catherine having died on
7 January, there were hopes that it could be improved.
Chapuys, according to Henry:
Made unto Us certain overtures for thadvancement of suche a renovation [that’s a renovation
of the two Kings’ relationship].
The first was, that He wold be a meane to have a reconciliation betwene Us and the Bisshop
of Rome [that’s the Pope].
The seconde overture and request was that, forasmoche as there is great lightlywood and
apparance that God wil sende unto Us heires masles to succeed Us in the Crowne of this
our Realme, We wolde vouches sauf, at his contemplation, to legitimate our daughter
Marye, in suche degree, as in defaulte of yssue by our moost dere and most entirely
beloved wife the Quene, she might not be reputed inhable to some place in our succession.
Can you see the difference here, once you read the whole section?
As David Starkey has correctly noted, Henry is actually repeating back what Chapuys has
said to him on behalf of Emperor Charles.
In other words, to try to butter Henry up and have Mary restored to the succession,
Chapuys has come to see the King and said ‘Your Majesty, I’m sure you will have
sons by Queen Anne, but just in case you don’t, would you not consider relegitimising your
daughter Mary so that she’s able to inherit after any children you have by Anne?’
There’s absolutely nothing here which either suggests that Anne was pregnant, or that Henry
thought she soon would be.
He’s not announcing anything.
In fact, after her miscarriage in January, Henry had said that ‘I see God will not
give me male children’ and remarked that he would ‘have no more boys’ by Anne.
I kind of feel like I’ve made my point and I could end the video right here, but in the
interests of thoroughness, I’m going to add in a few other things to consider, just
in case anyone is still on the fence about this.
First, the idea that Henry, a man who had been struggling for a male heir since 1509,
when he came to the throne and married Catherine, would knowingly kill his pregnant wife, is
preposterous.
Even if he wanted rid of Anne (which he did), he could afford to wait an extra 6 or 7 months
to see if she had a boy and then decide what to do with her.
Weir attempted to explain this away by saying that Henry wanted the baby dead too to avoid
‘a disputed succession’, however with Catherine of Aragon dead, the succession of
any son Anne now bore was much less disputed.
Anne herself had said after her January miscarriage that it was for the best because now the next
child she conceived wouldn’t be conceived during Catherine’s lifetime.
The King and Queen could even have gone through another marriage ceremony if they really wanted
to shore up their future children’s claim to the throne.
Second, the theory that Anne would go to her death knowing she was pregnant and not mention
it is also ridiculous.
It would have saved her life and her child’s.
She made no recorded mention of a pregnancy during her time in the Tower (and a bombshell
like that would surely have been reported either then, or later on by one of her attendants)
and if you see my video on her execution, I go through the numerous accounts of her
scaffold speech in detail there.
These accounts all differ from each other, but something they have in common is that
none of them talk about a baby.
Weir claims that Anne didn’t mention it because ‘she must have realised that to
do so would be futile, for Henry had hardened his heart against her’.
She adds that the fact that Anne didn’t mention Elizabeth whilst in the Tower is additional
evidence that she’d given up fighting Henry, both on her own behalf and that of her offspring.
In fact we don’t know for certain that she didn’t speak of Elizabeth, but even if that
was the case, other evidence shows that her daughter’s welfare was clearly on her mind
during her final weeks.
Just days before her arrest, the Queen had already taken what steps she could to protect
her child by asking her chaplain, Matthew Parker, to watch over the Princess should
anything happen to Anne herself.
Finally, Weir speculates that documents relating to Anne’s trial were destroyed to cover
up any reference to a pregnancy and says that it’s strange the Queen wasn’t examined
prior to death to check if she was pregnant.
I would counter that any document loss or destruction can be attributed to the passage
of time, poor record keeping, or a desire to cover up what a shambolic show trial Anne
had been put through and the fact that aspersions may have been cast on Henry’s performance
in the bedroom (this is something that happened during her brother George’s trial).
If she wasn’t examined for a pregnancy in the Tower this can be explained by Henry knowing
that she couldn’t be pregnant with his child because he hadn’t slept with her for such
a long time, or by her having had her cycle whilst imprisoned, again proving that there
was no pregnancy.
Last but not least (and I mention this only because I think I’ll get questions about
it in the comments if I don’t), when Anne was disinterred by the Victorians, there was
no evidence of a pregnancy.
Given the amount of time that had passed and the fact that any pregnancy would have been
in the very early stages, this really doesn’t mean anything, especially as she’d evidently
been disinterred at some point before the 1870s, but like I said, I thought if I didn’t
mention it that I would get queries about it.
I hope therefore that I’ve convinced you that Anne Boleyn wasn’t pregnant when she
died.
I’d like to add that to her credit, Weir knows that she made an error here and hasn’t
pursued this theory.
In her 2010 book The Lady In The Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn, she specifically attributes
the 1533 letter to the correct year, no longer claiming it comes from 1536 and when citing
the Pate letter, she wrote:
Taken at face value, this suggests that Henry was still sleeping with Anne, and it could
even imply that he thought she was pregnant again, which is highly unlikely.
We should not read too much into him publicly referring to her in such affectionate terms,
because he was merely using the conventional style employed by royalty when writing of
their spouses.
I do wish that she’d taken this opportunity to properly explain the Pate letter’s context,
but this is still a vast improvement on the 2001 book.
I’d also like to finish by saying that I’m not telling you to never read Alison Weir
and I don’t mean this video to be a personal attack on her.
I will admit that I think she can be a little over enthusiastic in her reading of the sources
at times, stretching them beyond what I would consider a reasonable conclusion, such as
when she claimed in The Lady in The Tower that Anne had ‘borne probably a stillborn
son near full term’ in the summer of 1534.
In reality, although that pregnancy will have been in its later stages, there’s no evidence
as to what the baby’s gender was or when the pregnancy was lost and Weir is basing
her supposition that it was male on the fact that Chapuys said in 1536, after Anne had
definitely lost a boy, that she couldn’t bear male children.
There’s also the claim that she had another miscarriage in June 1535 which is based on
an incorrectly dated letter which actually comes from either 1533 or 1534.
If you see my video on whether Anne had a pseudo pregnancy in 1534, it will take you
through the evidence for all her pregnancies after Elizabeth and explain all of this in
more detail.
All that being said, Weir writes in a very accessible manner and she’s helped to bring
a lot of people to history, especially that of the Tudors and I think that that’s brilliant.
What’s more, mistakes happen to all of us and that very much includes me.
I’m still properly haunted by the time I accidentally said Elizabeth I was the daughter
of Henry VII instead of Henry VIII and that’s certainly not the only slip I’ve ever made
or ever will make in my videos, so none of us are perfect.
I guess my advice would be that if you read or hear someone make a claim which you’ve
never heard elsewhere, maybe just double check the sources.
No one is above making a mistake.
And that my friends, brings us to the end of another video.
Let me know in the comments below if I’ve persuaded you that Anne wasn’t pregnant
at the time of her death and if you’d like to learn more about her, try one of the videos
you see on screen now.
Whatever you choose, please enjoy and until next time, keep learning.