Talking about the beheading of Anne Boleyn (Henry VIII’s
second wife) seems like a tabloid stuff; a topic of People magazine or one of those one grabs at the checkout line at
Supermarket. But this event is of great
historical significance. This is how a
nation (England) changed her religion, breaking away from Pope and thus
Catholicism.
Henry VIII tried to get a blessing from the Pope to annul
his marriage with Queen Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne
Boleyn. Cardinal Thomas Wolsey failed
his mission and almost lost his head.
This was a mission impossible for Wolsey as Pope Clement VII was then
literally a “hostage” of the powerful Spanish King Charles V, who was a nephew of Queen Catherine. (After all Queen
Catherine was the daughter of King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Queen Isabella of
Castille, who commissioned Columbus to discover the “new world”.)
It took four years for Henry VIII to completely dissolved
and destroyed monasteries, large and small. In fact, Oxford and Cambridge
Universities, considered religious institutions then, were afraid to meet the
same fate of closure.
One of the 11 volumes of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization is Reformation;
it led to the creation of Anglicanism or so-called Church of England as we know
it nowadays.
Anne Boleyn didn’t do it, but things happened because of
her. She was not just a woman with a
pretty face; she spent many years in Paris as the maid of honor to Queen Mary. She was well versed in French literature, art
and music. Of note, in those days France
was much more developed, cultural and sophisticated, comparing with
England. And she is the mother of Queen
Elizabeth I. By the way, T.S. Eliot was
an expert on Elizabethan literature.
British would like to claim Eliot as one of their own (he was indeed naturalized
as a British citizen and converted to Anglicism). When in the Poet Corner at Westminster Abbey,
we’ll see the lines from T.S. Eliot’s Little
Gidding inscribed on his memorial stone,
“. . .the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the
living.”
And of course we’ll also see the burial site of Elizabeth I
and Henry V (the theme of Shakespeare’s Henry
V is about war) in Westminster Abbey.
While entering the Traitor Gate in the Tower, I’ll think
about what Anne Boleyn said when she entered it coming from the River Thames.
When I see a building, be it Hampton Court Palace,
Westminster Abbey, and the Tower of London, I’ll also ‘see’ the people (I
mention above) and think about their stories. So this is not just a morbid and
macabre interest as one may suspect.
Most of our lilies (in three different locations) are in full bloom. You can share with us their
sublime beauty, but you cannot indulge the pleasant fragrance they exude.
