[Bedhead]

XXXVII –Anne Boleyn

London’s aristocracy has almost always lived amongst the cleaner air and water on the west side of town, so it is unusual to find a royal connection as far out east as Newham, the Olympic borough.

In 1904, West Ham United Football Club rented an old cabbage patch to use as a pitch in the grounds of ‘Boleyn Castle’ – a stately home once visited by Henry VIII’s famous second wife, Anne Boleyn.

Although there are plans for West Ham to move north to the new Olympic Stadium, for now it is still based in the stadium that is officially known as the ‘Boleyn Ground’. Next door is the glorious Victorian pub, the ‘Boleyn Tavern’ and just down the road is the ‘Boleyn Cinema’, which now specialises in Bollywood films (or should that be Boleywood?)



West Ham, based in the middle of London’s east end, has a reputation for developing talented young players, only to sell them to richer clubs. Once minute it will be mixing it with the big boys in the Premiership, the next minute its fans will spend the winter touring northern industrial towns like Burnley and Doncaster. Fans on its forum, ‘Knees up Mother Brown’ (KUMB) debate whether their team has become a yo-yo club. So it’s appropriate that it shares the name of its ground with an aristocrat who had a few ups and downs of her own.

When Henry decided to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragorn, and marry Anne he alienated the Pope, half of Europe and many of his own subjects. They condemned Anne as a ‘harlot’, a ‘she-devil’ and a ‘goggle-eyed whore’. Then things got worse for her. After failing to deliver Henry a male heir, she was executed on trumped up charges of adultery and incest.

Thomas Wyatt - a courtier and poet who had been in love with Anne before Henry began to pursue her - found himself caught up in the purge that surrounded Anne’s execution, and witnessed her beheading from a cell in the Tower of London. Later, writing a poem about the dangers of ambition, he warned that the power of the king ‘thunders through the realm’, and
‘The high mountains are blasted oft
When the low valley is mild and soft.’

But Anne, struck by lightning at the summit, managed to claw her way back up the mountain. Her daughter - described by the Spanish ambassador as ‘the concubine’s little bastard Elizabeth’ - became Elizabeth I, and during the reign of one of England’s most successful monarchs Anne was praised as a saint of the Anglican Church, a ‘worthy and Christian lady’.

Today, she is remembered as one of the few people who had the courage to answer back to Henry VIII – bravery that even enemies like Thomas Cromwell understood and respected.