On this day in Tudor history, Saturday 31st May 1533, a pregnant Queen Anne Boleyn, second wife of King Henry VIII, processed from the Tower of London to Westminster Hall.
This eve of coronation procession was huge and comprised lots of entertainment, including lavish pageants, orations, music, and wine flowing in the conduits and in fountains. I’d love to go back in time to see it.
Hear all about the pageantry in this video or click here to read about it.
And on this day in 1529, a special legatine court opened at Blackfriars in London. The court’s purpose was to hear the case for an annulment of Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, and it was presided over by papal legate Cardinal Lorenzo Campeggio and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey.
Find out about the context of this court, what happened at the court and what happened next in this video:
It is strange that May was the month for both Anne’s triumph and later tragedy, from being feted and having the highest honour bestowed on a mortal woman, – that of queen the first lady in the kingdom, to then become disgraced shamed and imprisoned a cast out woman, the three years she was queen must have flitted by so swiftly for her and seems to have a surreal feeling about it, the watching crowds to must have felt it, they had been subservient to Henry’s first queen for nearly twenty four years, now they observing a another woman walk barefoot to the abbey, dressed in sumptuous silver and white a slight dark woman so unlike their ageing beloved Katherine, a fair short plump woman with kindness and love etched on her sweet motherly features, they must have peered at their new queen and wondered is this the woman their king had wrecked such havoc in the land for? But as ever they would have forgotten their animosity in the delights of the procession and the wine that flowed in the streets, we are soon approaching another celebration, that of our current queens jubilee, who of course is Anne’s great niece many generations removed, maybe Anne looking down will raise a toast to her ?
Yes, and just three years apart!