Depression isn’t a modern disease. It’s been recorded throughout history, and many English kings – including Henry VIII – were believed to have suffered from what their doctors would have called “excessive melancholy”. Shakespeare immortalised the symptoms of depression in Hamlet, wherein the titular Prince of Denmark complained that, “I have of late, but wherefore… Read more Be of Good Cheer
Henry VIII became engaged to Jane Seymour on 20 May 1536, one day after beheading his second wife, Anne Boleyn. On the morning of Anne’s death, he had a barge waiting for him in order to whisk him downriver to Jane as soon as the former queen’s head was off, and while Anne’s body cooled… Read more Funeral Food and Wedding Feasts
It’s May 19th, the anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution, so let’s talk about Anne’s enduring and unjustified reputation as a home-wrecking whore. Bearing the historical facts in mind, what exactly did Anne do to be slut shamed for more than five centuries? She refused to date a married man until she knew he was getting… Read more For Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn was beheaded on 19 May 1536. When this maligned and falsely accused queen walked her last steps to the scaffold where a swordsman waited to take her head, four ladies accompanied her. I agree with historian Eric Ives (no surprise there) that the ladies with her were probably the ones assigned to spy on… Read more The Ladies Upon the Scaffold
Anne Boleyn spent 18 May 1536 preparing for death. Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, a man who hated her and refered to her as ‘the concubine’ and worse, reported one of the ladies who attended Anne in the Tower had sent him, “word, in great secrecy, that before and after [Anne] receiving the Holy Sacrament, she… Read more Anne Boleyn’s Final Sacrament
The five men accused of adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn — Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton, Mark Smeaton, and her brother, George Boleyn – were beheaded on 17 May 1536 in the Tower yard. Apparently the execution of Francis Weston caused some of the most brouhaha. The only son and heir of the former… Read more The Deaths of Five Innocent Men
Queen Anne Boleyn was put on trial on 15 May 1536. According to Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, she was tried “by a tribunal composed of the principal lords of the kingdom … the Duke of Norfolk presiding over it .” The trial took place in the Tower rather than in Westminster Hall, “yet the trial… Read more The Trial of Anne Boleyn
On the surface Anne Boleyn’s judicial murder seems quite straightforward. Henry VIII wanted to marry a new, hopefully more fertile, son producing wife, and so he ordered Thomas Cromwell to rid him of his troublesome and miscarrying second queen. Cromwell, a brilliant legal mind, soon came up with a way to dispatch Anne and a… Read more The Plot Against Anne Boleyn
Anne of Bohemia, future queen consort of King Richard II of England, was born on 11 May 1366, the eldest daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor (who was also King of Bohemia), and his fourth wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania. Even though her father was emperor of half of Europe, she didn’t have a big… Read more Anne of Bohemia, Queen of England
Louis-Nicolas Davoust was born into a noble Burgundian family on 10 May 1788, and would become one of Napoleon Bonaparte‘s greatest generals and France’s most devoted Minister of War and Marshal of the Empire. In spite of his illustrious birth, Davoust was anything but a royalist. He loved the French Republic every bit as much… Read more Louis-Nicolas Davoust, Napoleon’s Man’ O War