Anne Boleyn’s Last Letter

Did She Write It?

In the edition of the British Journal, Spectator, in an entry published for June 5th 1712 over three hundred years ago is reproduced a letter composed 176 years earlier by Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIIIth weeks before her execution for incest and treason and betraying her husband, the king by adultery. This well-known and poignant letter has been remarked about over the centuries as she pleads desperately for her honour and dignity.

History understands that Anne was innocent (there are other views and books have been written to that effect1) and the king, being desperate for a male heir wanted an excuse to rid himself of his wife, incapable as she seemed of producing a son. He had already had an embarrassing divorce from his first wife Catherine of Aragon, who also couldn’t produce a son in the face of opposition from the pope given the church disagreed with divorce. This affair split off the UK from the rest of Catholic Europe that would lead to wars and tensions in the decades to come and changed the course of world history. Divorcing Anne would have placed the king in a humiliating position, so she was framed by the king’s henchmen on trumped up charges based on false evidence and forced confessions. This has been the stuff of drama as in the film Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) starring Genevieve Bujold.