By Karim Adel El-Sayed
ANKARA
With an e-petition launched to pardon and rebury Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, and the reburial of Richard III, the last English King to die in battle, March 2015 has been a month of royal revival in the United Kingdom.
An e-petition was created half-way through March to: “Grant Anne Boleyn a royal pardon for the crimes she was wrongly accused of. Let her be re buried in Westminster Abbey with her daughter Elizabeth I. Grant her a royal funeral as she rightly deserved.”
The author of the petition, Laura Collins, is referring to the charges of adultery and incest which ultimately led to Anne’s execution in 1536.
The petition was suspended on March 30 as parliament dissolved in the run-up to the country’s general election, but it points to a recently revived interest in the country’s rich history.
Religion and politics
Anne Boleyn was King Henry VIII’s second wife out of six.
In order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, King Henry VIII separated the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, which refused to grant the English King an annulment.
The main driving force behind this tectonic shift in English religion and politics was Henry VIII’s obsession for a male heir.
Although Anne bore Henry a daughter, who would go on to be Queen Elizabeth I, in 1533; her inability to produce a male heir proved fatal.
Three years later, having grown weary and frustrated with Anne, Henry set his sights on his future wife, Jane Seymour.
On May 2, 1536, Anne was arrested and taken to the notorious Tower of London.
She was arrested along with a number of her friends and family, all of whom were accused of being the Queen’s lovers, found guilty of treason and executed.
Anne herself was tried before a jury and found guilty of adultery, incest and plotting to murder her husband.
She was beheaded on May 19, 1536 at the Tower of London and buried at the tower’s parish church, the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula.
The 2008 film The Other Boleyn Girl, based on the 2001 novel of the same name, can be seen as proof of her life’s enduring imprint on the imagination of the British public.
‘She's lying in a criminal's grave’
This is not the first time an attempt to pardon Anne Boleyn has been launched.
In 2005, 85-year-old George Melville-Jackson, a former wing commander during the Battle of Britain, called on then Home Secretary Charles Clarke to pardon the “obviously innocent” beheaded Queen.
The veteran and keen amateur historian, like Collins 10 years later, also called for her remains to be moved from the Tower of London to Westminster Abbey alongside her daughter.
"I have always felt that Anne Boleyn suffered a great injustice," Melville-Jackson told The Daily Telegraph at the time. “I know there are lots of other cases of injustice in this world, but Anne Boleyn was such a wonderful and gifted woman.”
"She was so unjustly treated, and she's lying in a criminal's grave. She deserves better than that," he said.
‘Pardon will not change people’s attitudes’
Since 2009, Claire Ridgway has written and managed The Anne Boleyn Files blog to change misconceptions of the former Queen.
In a blog post published on March 17, 2015 she explained why she did not sign the petition.
She cited the difficulties faced by Melville-Jackson, who admitted that after 500 years no new evidence had emerged to prove Anne’s innocence, thus making judicial review of the decision impossible.
While the veteran viewed a pardon as the “next best thing”, Ridgway felt it “suggests that she did something to be pardoned for.”
In a separate blog post written a few years earlier on the same topic, she argued that a pardon “won’t help Anne and we will still be arguing with those who are convinced that she was a whore and traitor. I sincerely believe that a pardon will not change people’s attitudes, only re-educating people will change those,” she wrote.
Ridgway argued that, far from lying in a “criminal’s grave,” Anne was in fact buried as a queen in 1877.
“Anne may not have had a fitting burial at the time of her death, but the Victorians… buried the remains they thought to be Anne as queen,” she wrote. “A beautiful memorial tile marks the spot where they buried her remains and it reads “Queen Anne Boleyn.”
“That tile speaks of Anne’s story and she is remembered with a basket of roses and flowers from visitors every 19 May. I don’t feel that that could happen at Westminster,” she said.
She hoped that the tile would make tourists wonder why a Queen of England is buried in a little church at the Tower of London.
Describing Anne as a “charitable woman” who “cared about poor relief,” she also questioned whether the cost of a royal funeral and the time and energy spent on this issue could be better spent campaigning “for those suffering miscarriages of justice today instead.
Richard III
On March 26, one of England’s most famous kings, Richard III, was reburied in an extravagant ceremony in Leicester – 530 years after his death. His body was found in 2012 under a car park in the same city.
Richard was the last English king to be killed in battle and the last member of the House of York to rule England.
After his defeat and violent death in 1485 at Bosworth Field, during the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, he was buried in a hastily prepared grave.
Richard's reputation still provokes debate as he is often cast as a cruel and power-hungry tyrant.
In what could be seen as vindication of Ridgway’s views, the £2.5 million cost of the funeral was the focus of much media criticism.
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