[Previous entry: "l8"] [Main Index] [Next entry: ""]

07/06/2005 Entry: "She cried More More More"

Wednesday marked the aniversary of the execution of Sir Thomas More, 1478-1535.

A respected philosopher and brilliant jurist, More is best remembered as a man of unshakable integrity. This is summed up quite succinctly in the very title of a wonderful drama portraying the end of his life a Man for All Seasons.

As a devout Catholic--it is said he wore a shirt of hair and flogged himself almost daily--he refused to recognize the sovereignity of the king's newly formed Church of England.

The formation of said church basically served one purpose: to remedy Henry VIII's numb nuts. Yes, nowadays we all know that the gender of a child is determined by the agility of the father's seed. Spermatazoa with only x chromasomes will mean a chick. Those who--uh, I mean that--contain the y make a dude. Although the y's are fewer than x's, they are slightly smaller and therefore just a tad faster, thus evening the odds out to a minor advantage to the x's. But Henry, a fine example of royal inbreeding, was incapable of siring a dude who lived past infancy. Typical of middle ages-styled doltery, he was sure the fault lie with his chick, Queen Katherine of Aragon (no, not Aragorn and not son of Arathorn).

Henry's eye needed not wander long before he noticed another woman: his wife's lady in waiting, Anne Boleyn, also known as "Annie Baloney" by her mates. Kidding. Skipping ahead a bit, finally having Anne as his mistess, the only thing he needed now was a divorce. He couldn't get one so he did the next best thing: schism, which is a church term meaning taking the theological ball and going home.

More, a somewhat zealous persecutor/prosecutor of heresies himself, felt Henry had committed heresy. After almost a year in prison he still refused to play ball, was tried for treason and beheaded. But he wasn't the only one, and his fate was--despite being killed and all--a great deal more pleasant than that of many others, thanks to his prestige. That year, at least six monks and a handfull of other lesser officials were executed by being publicly hung until almost dead, stretched until dislocated, disemboweled alive, and then beheaded. That year, the body parts of many a pious man where blatantly on display impaled on spikes that peppered various London tourist attractions.

Henry married Anne quickly, and she as queen was widely viewed as the most hated wretch across the entire Old World. She gave birth to a daughter -- again no sons -- who grew up to be perhaps the most remarkable woman of all time, Elizabeth I.

Just a few years later, and after a whole bunch of intrigue and a miscarriage, Henry's wandering eye happened upon yet another younger woman, yet again the lady in waiting of his wife. With still no male heir, Henry thought it a good time to move on and do the right thing: have his wife killed. With Katherine now dead and then Anne also out of the picture, he could marry a third time free of the stigma of bigamy.

Anne was arrested and tried for adultery, witchcraft and incest, accusations that even her enemies --and she had plenty of those-- found ludicrous. Of course, she was found guilty and sentenced to death. As a nice touch regarding the fact that she was the queen and all, she was beheaded by an exceptionally skilled famous French executioner with a sword. She was the first English queen to be publicly executed.

Henry married Jane Seymour ten days later.

In Anne's defence, she really didn't do anything wrong -- at least nothing that would warrent her own husband having her killed. She was an exceptionally intelligent woman, whose wit far compensated for her lack of good looks to make her at large the object of male coutiers' desires. At first, she rejected Henry, and it was only after Henry sent the man whom she truly wanted to marry far away from court that she had to look around and make the best of things. So, while she did have some ambitious tendencies and was ready to play the game, she was far cry from the manipulative homewrecker the population played her to be. I suppose her mistake was relying too much one source of power --albeit one of the greatest sources of power in the world in her day -- her husband, while neglecting to make more friends elsewhere. That one source itself depended on Henry's affection, which in turn was mainly dependent on the prospect that she could have his son. And sister, you know damn well that was out of her control.

You can go see her, and Henry's five other wives, alive in wax at Madame Tussaud's on Baker Street in London. They stand there flanking Henry in full regalia. Thinking of it now, it's a pretty crass spread. Two wives murdered, two divorced, one died nonviolently and the last one survived him. Seeing it as a child I knew that the guy was bad egg and a bit of a rooster, but as an adult I can only think of him as what he really was: a selfish monster, a serial killer, a psychopath.

These early events set the stage for decades of power struggle, holy civil war, and rivers of blood. Casualties numbered in the thousands, even his own grandchildren fell prey. And it all started because the most powerful man in the world was shooting blanks.