The Tudors Season 2, Episode 10, Destiny & Fortune, delivers one of the most haunting depictions of Anne Boleyn’s final hours ever filmed. As Anne awaits execution, Henry VIII plans his wedding to Jane Seymour, while Thomas Cromwell and the court prepare for her death. This episode balances elegance and tragedy, with Natalie Dormer’s remarkable last performance as Anne Boleyn capturing the quiet dignity, fear, and faith of a woman condemned. But how much of what we see on screen is historically true? This post unpacks the historical inaccuracies, symbolism, and real details behind Anne’s last day and Henry’s chilling transformation.

Inside This Post:

• Why The Tudors Skipped Anne Boleyn’s Trial
• The French Swordsman: Mercy or Machiavellian Planning?
• Henry VIII’s Breakdown Over a Song
• Null and Void: The Legal Farce That Erased Anne’s Marriage
• The Swan Metaphor: Henry’s Descent into Monstrosity
• Anne Boleyn’s Final Moments: Faith, Fear, and Grace
• Cromwell’s Guilt
• Closing Reflections on The Tudors’ Strongest Season

Episode 10: Destiny & Fortune

Anne Boleyn awaits her death with serenity but struggles to remain composed during endless delays that enrage the king, since he wants her “dead and gone!” These brief interludes give her hope that God may spare her life after all, but the executioner arrives at last. Her enemies celebrate her downfall but feel moved by her death. Delighted, Henry thinks of his future with Jane Seymour and sets their engagement in motion.

Why The Tudors Skipped Anne Boleyn’s Trial

I have often wondered why this series didn’t depict her trial, but I can see why unless Showtime felt willing to pay for an additional episode, it would have ruined the perfect sorrowful flow of this episode, which is all about Anne reconciling herself to death. The episode is a masterpiece, with access to all the emotions a human can experience. And love her or hate her, you cannot help but feel sorry for her, as Natalie Dormer turns in another astonishing performance, and one that should have “won all the awards.”

There are fewer inaccuracies in this than in most, so this post will be a mix of pointing out clarifications and giving additional history.

The French Swordsman: Mercy or Machiavellian Planning?

One might wonder why Anne was beheaded with the sword rather than an axe, as befell her brother and those who came after her. And the truth is rather grisly. With a specific executioner’s sword and a trained executioner, there is less of a chance of botching it. The swords were heavy enough to sever the spine in one stroke, and a skilled executioner knew just where to strike to avoid missing or embedding it in the prisoner’s skull or his back.

Henry knew this would be a public, well-attended affair whose actions would be reported throughout Christendom and that would reflect on him, and could not afford to have Anne “suffer” in her death. Only one queen had been executed before her, and he owed her the dignity of a swift and sudden death. This was relatively unprecedented ground. Besides that, he wanted it over as soon as possible. He did not want anyone to gawk at a prolonged depiction of her death, the same as he refrained from putting the heads of her brother and his friends on pikes on the Tower for treason, which usually happened to traitors (poor Thomas More’s head wound up there, until his daughter rescued it; imagine living in a time and a world in which not only your dad, brother, or friend can be executed, but you have to walk past their severed body parts day after day).

Although the series says Anne requests the French executioner, the real Henry sent for him before the trial, since he knew how it would end, with a guilty verdict. There was never any chance of Anne being sent to a nunnery, even if she prayed for that outcome.

Henry VIII’s Breakdown Over a Song

A chorus opens the episode, playing out over various scenes, until we find Henry attempting to pray in the chapel, becoming irritated, and finally screaming at them to stop singing and storming out. I wasn’t sure what this meant to depict, other than that his nerves are frayed and he’s experiencing guilt, which he turns into anger, but then I looked at the lyrics of the hymn they were singing:

It’s called Jerusalem, My Happy Home, and is all about dying and going to heaven. (“When shall these eyes thy heaven built walls and pearly gates behold? … Why should I shrink at pain and woe? Or feel at death dismay? … Apostles, martyrs, prophets there around my Savior stand, and soon my friends in Christ below will join the glorious band.”)

No doubt it’s reminding him of Anne’s swift impending death, and he’s getting mad about the thought that, in Reformist views, she might go right to heaven instead of dwelling in Hell or Purgatory for all eternity.

Null and Void: The Legal Farce That Erased Anne’s Marriage

Archbishop Cranmer has the “sad task” of informing Anne her marriage has been made null and void. But if that is so, then how could she commit adultery against the king? Glad you asked! The answer is, it couldn’t, but nobody gave a damn. First, they waited until after her conviction to insist the marriage never happened, and then they gave no reason. They just did it to sever her ties with Henry and make her daughter a bastard. Initially, they tried to convince her first prospective husband, Henry Percy, to claim they had been betrothed or had lain together, but he refused. Good for him.

It could have come about, as the series cites, because Henry slept with her sister… and as we all know, that’s a huge no-no, and that he slept with his brother’s widow had been troubling his conscience for a long, long time.

Rather than stick around after he finds out Anne’s execution has been delayed, he goes off to the country to woo Jane, talk to her father about their marriage, and make a grand show of baptizing himself in a pond and rising to a ‘new world.’ The truly heinous thing is, this happens the day before her death, and he intends to bring them all back to court and announce their engagement as soon as it’s over.

For once, the real Henry is not the asshole that he is on The Tudors. The series states he is cannibalizing his daughter’s estate to pay for her mother’s imprisonment, but he actually paid for them himself. It’s a nice moment with his daughter, though, as she listens intently to her governess’ words about the execution, Anne, and the princess’ fall from grace. You can see the wheels in her mind turning, and Michael Hirst is setting them in motion to link this series with his Elizabeth films.

(I wonder why the costume department put Jane in such a god-awful, inaccurate medieval outfit, when all of her ladies are wearing period-accurate Tudor gowns. It looks dumpy on her because it sits on her all wrong, the color is terrible on the actress, and it makes her look wildly out of date and unfashionable, which she would not have been.)

The Swan Metaphor: Henry’s Descent into Monstrosity

Last, this episode opens with Henry watching a pair of mated swans on his lake throughout the episode. You think, oh, he is thinking of Jane and romance, or admiring their beauty; and at the end of the episode, he’s gorging himself on swan pie, because he had one of them caught and butchered, in a metaphor for how he destroyed Anne. It’s a heavy-handed metaphor, and all I can think is, “Swans mate for life. Poor lonely swan. You asshole.”

I will give the actor props, though, because this is the first time Jonathan Rhys Myers has allowed himself to be grotesque. He never agreed to put on weight or wear a fat suit for the role, because it would diminish his sex appeal, but there’s nothing less sexy than this demented lunatic of a king, with a sadistic glint in his eye, stuffing his mouth with meat pie while gravy rolls down his chin. Yuck.

Anne Boleyn’s Final Moments: Faith, Fear, & Grace

Anne has a few fleeting moments of hope that maybe she won’t die, which severely tug on the heartstrings. You can see how deluded it is, and that she realizes it even after she says it (maybe this is an omen, can you not ask the bishops to plead for me? … no, of course not). She teeters between stoicism and wanting to “die well” (a theme explored in other posts in this series) and being on the verge of hysterics; such as when she says the executioner is very good, she has heard, and anyway, she only has a little neck, and bursts into nervous laughter.

The Tower master gives her £20 with which to hand out alms and to pay her executioner; she is to hold back £15 for him. In history, Anne gave out the entire £20 to the crowd (she was known for generosity, and often tried to outdo her predecessor). Any who received alms at an execution were expected to pray for the person’s soul, and speed them out of Purgatory.

She also gave her executioner a purse full of coins, while Henry paid him an additional £23. In today’s money, that would be worth £17,162 (or $22,573). That’s quite a fee for the work of thirty seconds!

The show has her noticing the executioner at once, because he wears a mask; Anne did not know which one he was, in history, because he wore no mask and stood among the other men on the platform. As she walks through the crowd, many people reach out to touch her. Superstitions of the time believed the condemned person had powerful supernatural energy that they could leech off him / her through physical touch. Some believed they could be healed from minor afflictions; others thought that the person about to die was atoning for their sins and were in a “sacred, transitional state.” Touching them might cleanse the onlooker of sin or allow them to receive a portion of their spiritual influence and power.

The series depicts Charles Brandon and his son, Thomas Wyatt, and Archbishop Cranmer as being there. Brandon attended, but his sons by Mary Tudor were both dead. Wyatt witnessed her execution from his window in Bell Tower, because he was not released for another month. And Cranmer was not there; he heard about it in his garden, where he wept at her downfall. It’s a modest crowd, when over a thousand people attended.

Anne becomes increasingly anxious, kneeling and awaiting her fate; as she prays for her soul, she looks around for the sword, just as the executioner said she would. He finally distracts her by calling for it, and she looks away in time for him to strike. Two things here. One, she falls with her “eyes open and her lips parted,” as one contemporary wrote; and second, the real Anne was blindfolded.

Cromwell’s Guilt

It also flashes to Thomas Cromwell, dropping to his knees in the royal chapel, trembling until he collapses. It’s up to the viewer how to interpret this; I read it as him knowing he just sent an innocent woman to death based on lies, and being afraid for his own soul; but also realizing that Henry is a monster, and Cromwell gave him unlimited religious power in England. He has, as Sir Thomas More once said, brought to bear that “if the lion knew his own strength, no man could control him.”

Closing Reflections on The Tudors’ Strongest Season

This has been a heartbreaking year of The Tudors and ends the strongest season of all. The show suffers with so many of its main characters gone, proof that Maria Doyle Kennedy, Natalie Dormer, and Jeremy Northam filled the screen with charisma and powerful performances. All of them were tremendous, and will be much missed as we forge ahead into the “lesser” years of Henry’s reign.

I will be back in 2026 to continue this series, since I would like to spend some time delving into The White Princess instead. I hope you will join me!