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librarianonparade 's review for:
The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn
by Alison Weir
I always enjoy Alison Weir's books, although I do tend to read them with a certain amount of reserve as she does have a tendency toward bias. She writes with a very clear, intelligent style, and her books are always a pleasure to read - but as I said, I always read them with a pinch of salt in store, and this one is no exception.
Anne Boleyn is one of the most fascinating and probably most mythologised figures of the Tudor period. Indeed, the whole history of Henry VIII often gets reduced to mythology, little more than the 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived' rhyme that every schoolchild grows up knowing. This book covers the brief period of Anne's fall in incredible detail, analysing the evidence of her guilt and finding on the whole that Anne was the victim of dynastic manoeuvring and was quite probably blameless, of these crimes, at least.
My main criticism of this book is the whitewashing of Henry VIII, the absolving of almost any blame. Weir heaps most of the blame for Anne's downfall and execution on Cromwell, arguing that Henry was mostly reacting to the trumped-up evidence he was shown, believing what he wanted to believe. I personally find it hard to believe that a man such as Henry VIII, a man so wilful and dominant that he deliberately and with full knowledge of his actions isolated England from Europe, broke with Rome, turned his country upside down, dissolved the monasteries, executed a large swathe of English nobility, threatened to execute his own daughter on more than one occasion and certainly had no qualms about seeing her declared bastard - I find it hard to believe that he had no hand in Anne's downfall, and that Cromwell was acting entirely on his own initiative. And yet Henry in this book comes across as a man simply behaving within the law, even as Weir argues, acting with benevolence(!) in allowing Anne her own ladies at the end and permitting her to die by the sword instead of the axe. Spare us all from such benevolence!
Anne Boleyn is one of the most fascinating and probably most mythologised figures of the Tudor period. Indeed, the whole history of Henry VIII often gets reduced to mythology, little more than the 'divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived' rhyme that every schoolchild grows up knowing. This book covers the brief period of Anne's fall in incredible detail, analysing the evidence of her guilt and finding on the whole that Anne was the victim of dynastic manoeuvring and was quite probably blameless, of these crimes, at least.
My main criticism of this book is the whitewashing of Henry VIII, the absolving of almost any blame. Weir heaps most of the blame for Anne's downfall and execution on Cromwell, arguing that Henry was mostly reacting to the trumped-up evidence he was shown, believing what he wanted to believe. I personally find it hard to believe that a man such as Henry VIII, a man so wilful and dominant that he deliberately and with full knowledge of his actions isolated England from Europe, broke with Rome, turned his country upside down, dissolved the monasteries, executed a large swathe of English nobility, threatened to execute his own daughter on more than one occasion and certainly had no qualms about seeing her declared bastard - I find it hard to believe that he had no hand in Anne's downfall, and that Cromwell was acting entirely on his own initiative. And yet Henry in this book comes across as a man simply behaving within the law, even as Weir argues, acting with benevolence(!) in allowing Anne her own ladies at the end and permitting her to die by the sword instead of the axe. Spare us all from such benevolence!