December seems to be racing by, doesn’t it? I can’t believe we’re on day 10 already!
Today’s treat is from JoAnn DellaNeva and is an excerpt from her brand new book on the French poem written on Anne Boleyn’s life and death by Lancelot de Carle, secretary to the French ambassador in England at the time of Anne Boleyn’s fall. Thank you, JoAnn!
Enjoy some of the verses translated by JoAnn on our Anne Boleyn Files Advent Calendar – click here.
You can enjoy an extra Tudor treat over at the Tudor Society Advent Calendar – click here.
From a joyous and fine comedy was turned into a sad tragedy indeed! Lancelot De Carlos had known Anne from her days in France and had described her beautiful eyes which she well knew how to use, her elegance and command of his mother tongue, her style and great wit, he was mystified by her great rise to fortune and spectacular fall like so many, this was the woman who had so enchanted the king he had split from Rome, he had waited ten long years to marry her, he had cast of a queen of high renown and had risked civil war and also war with Spain, was excommunicated by the pope and had beheaded several esteemed and imminent men because of her, now she was cast aside and it was if all the longing all the impassioned letters he had sent her, all the years of turmoil and bitterness had been for nothing, like many poets he put his feelings into verse and we have an insight into his troubled mind at this moment in his life, just like Sir Thomas Wyatt’s sad poem on the deaths of his friends and the queen he had once loved, it reminds us that this tragedy really did occur and was truly dreadful in its day.