In The Tudors Season 2, Episode 9, The Act of Treason, Anne Boleyn’s downfall reaches its devastating climax. As Thomas Cromwell tightens his web of lies and coerced confessions, Henry VIII turns coldly away from his once-beloved queen. The episode dramatizes Anne’s arrest, the fabricated charges of adultery and incest, and her friends’ tragic downfall. Between Mark Smeaton’s brutal torture, Jane Boleyn’s betrayal, and Henry’s descent into paranoia, this episode captures the chilling machinery of Tudor politics and the human cost of one man’s pride.

Inside This Post:

• Anne Boleyn’s Final Days: Fear and Defiance.
• Jane Boleyn: Villain or Victim of Lies?
• The Fall of Mark Smeaton: Torture, Lies, and Confession
• Guilty as Charged: William Brereton?
• Guttural Grief: Natalie Dormer’s Finest Performance
• Minor Inaccuracies

Episode 9: The Act of Treason

Sir Thomas Cromwell ruthlessly tightens the noose around the necks of Anne’s ladies-in-waiting and her accused lovers to find enough evidence to arrest her, while she tries to appeal to the king for “one more chance.” But there’s only one path forward for her and everyone she ever loved… and it ends on the scaffold.

Anne Boleyn’s Final Days: Fear & Defiance

The opening scene has Henry refusing to do more than glance at his “deformed male child,” which further makes him believe it cannot be his (since no king could create a deformed child!) and that she is a witch. There is no evidence the child was deformed, nor that anyone said otherwise at the time; someone like Ambassador Chapuys, who hated Anne Boleyn, would have spread it around like wildfire if it were even rumored at court hoping to undermine her.

Anne is terrified and fearful of losing her position and possibly her life; but historically, while she might have feared a marital annulment, she had no reason to fear for her life. Henry could simply put her away in a nunnery or insist the marriage was invalid. Which is what a sane man might have done; but because of Henry’s narcissism and inability to admit to being wrong, he had to destroy everyone he grew disappointed in, which meant she had no hope of survival.

The series plays her argument with Cromwell over what’s happening to the monasteries and where the money is going (into the treasury) and her threats to him as her over-compensating for her insecurities. In real life, Anne still felt important enough at this time to challenge him, and she received no consequences from her husband. This feud and disagreement had been ongoing for the last few years. Cromwell saw the religious houses as a way to rebuild a depleted treasury. Henry VIII had inherited vast wealth from his stingy father, but squandered most of it on high living and wars with France. Cromwell wanted to replenish it, and without taxing the citizens to such a degree that they hated the king for it.

Anne probably felt more conviction in her religious beliefs, and she objected to his behavior on several fronts. First, he was disassembling and selling them off to the king’s friends as property without looking at the individual cases; turning out hundreds if not thousands of monks into the proverbial street, even the houses that were not corrupt and could be swayed to Reformist ideals. Second, all that money was going into the royal pockets, when she wanted to stand in the shoes of her successors and use it to fund universities and charities, like Margaret Beaufort had done. Both were trying to shape the Reformation in England, but she wanted more actual religious reform.

Her angry statement to her sister-in-law, Jane Boleyn, that “the king cannot please a woman, for he has neither the skill nor the virility” is a bit of a slander against this Anne, since it makes her out to be vindictive and foolish. There was “hearsay” at the time that she made such a statement against the king, which was presented at trial to show her treasonous intentions, but given that everything else said about her was fabricated to gain a guilty verdict, it’s unlikely this is true of her. (Sadly, this is probably what got her brother killed; he was handed a piece of paper with that on it in court and told to read it silently, but he read it aloud; the entire court heard it, and… we can’t have anyone alive who would dare repeat such a thing about the king.)

Jane Boleyn: Villain or Victim of Lies?

When confronted by Cromwell, Jane Boleyn sees a way out of her marriage to a gay rapist and smugly says yes, she believes George has committed incest with his sister.

Damn, girl.

Okay. So, this perspective on Jane fits in with “older” accounts of her, claiming she must have given Cromwell the evidence by which to implicate George at his trial (such as times and dates of when he visited his sister alone in her rooms), that she accused Anne of stating that the king could not please a woman, and reasoning that if she was eventually executed, she probably deserved it. But more recent historians have been kinder to her, given her the benefit of the doubt, and cast doubt on those who implicated her in these events.

Chapuys never record her as testifying against either George or Anne, and neither did secondary sources. George accused a “woman” of condemning him and spreading allegations, but he never called her his wife, an important detail. He was probably referring to Elizabeth Somerset, who testified against Anne by claiming she committed adultery with Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton, and her brother.

Jane had at least an amiable relationship with her husband, since she sent him a letter of comfort in the Tower, promising to petition the king for his release.

The Fall of Smeaton: Torture, Lies, and Confession

One of the nastiest things to watch in this episode is Smeaton’s arrest and torture until he confesses to all the lies Cromwell tells him to say, just to make it all stop. First, I feel bad for him. He’s such a sweet, happy-go-lucky fellow, who shows up thinking he’s been summoned to play for Cromwell, only to get pinned to a chair and have his eye squeezed so hard it almost bursts out of his skull.

It’s important to note that if Smeaton was tortured, it’s because he was of such low birth; he had no connections to prevent it. It wasn’t cool to torture the nobility, but you could rack a “nobody” and not a soul would stick their neck out for him. Cromwell knew Smeaton spent most of his time in the queen’s chambers, knew all the gossip, and would be the most likely person easily pressured into confessing. (It’s also worth saying that unlike on the show, Anne and Mark Smeaton were not “close” confidantes; he rarely spoke to her, and one instance we have of her talking to him includes her being snotty because he didn’t move out of her way and dared to look at her too much.)

Nobody really knows what Smeaton went through, but Cromwell held him in his own house for two days before shipping him off to the Tower. There, nobody could record what they did to him. And whatever he said or did worked, since Smeaton confessed.

What we know is he never had his eye squished with a knotted rope, and he was not racked. The former rumor came about twenty years later, but… Smeaton walked to his execution on his own two feet (not dragged in/half carried and bleeding) and showed no apparent signs of abuse. If Cromwell tortured him, he did it in such a way that it didn’t show. It could have been more nefarious and manipulative, such as promising him a great deal of money or his life if he confessed, and killing him anyway.

Guilty as Charged: William Brereton?

The show hasn’t done Brereton any favors; he started out as an assassin hired by Chapuys, then commissioned by the Pope to slay the “great whore,” and now when arrested, he sees the chance to become a martyr in a historic cause and also kill Anne, so he says yes, he slept with her. Cromwell can hardly believe his ears! In history, of course, Brereton was an innocent man who maintained his innocence to the bitter end.

Guttural Grief: Natalie Dormer’s Finest Performance

In one of the most gut-wrenching scenes in the show’s history, Anne watches her brother’s execution from a window and lets out the soul-wrenching scream that anyone who has ever lost someone they love feels to their core.

I want to stop and reflect on the magnitude of this moment and what it must have been like for Anne. She went from being a queen overnight to knowing everyone she cared about had either abandoned, betrayed, or would die with her. In the show, her best friend Mark Smeaton had been tortured and bloodied to implicate her in adultery; they then accused her not only of sleeping with other men, but of committing incest with her own brother. Plus, being a witch. It would have become increasingly clear Henry just wanted her dead, and they should slander her as much as possible in the process. He wanted it to hurt her.

Natalie Dormer has been an insane powerhouse of talent from the start, but this is one of her finest moments. She has played Anne in all of her moods, a complex woman who can be petty, vindictive, jealous, bratty, scheming, loving, seductive, and compassionate. All of it. But here is just raw, guttural emotion, and her howls like a wounded animal echo down the hall to where her father sits, staunchly refusing to watch or listen to any of it in his prison cell.

Historically, Anne did not witness George’s death. Thomas Wyatt saw his friends die from a window (he had not been released) instead. The series also gives George a peaceful end with one stroke, while it takes three hacks and a kick to separate Brereton from his head. In truth, it was George who took three strokes.

Maybe Michael Hirst wanted to spare Anne that anguish.

Minor Inaccuracies:

• Thomas Boleyn is arrested and throws his children under the bus to save his own skin; in reality, he was not arrested and even sat on the trial of her “lovers” and judged them as guilty.
• The show omits Francis Weston, who perished with Smeaton, George, and Brereton.
• The show moves things around for dramatic flow; it has Anne appealing to Henry for one more chance while carrying their daughter, after Norris is arrested. If it happened (a witness said it did, but it’s unsubstantiated; he also said he never heard what they said between them, except that Anne was upset and Henry was unmoved by whatever she said), it happened before. Henry got the news of Smeaton’s confession at the May Day Joust, got up from his seat at the tournament, and walked away from Anne, never to see her again. He took Norris with him, who was immediately arrested (rather than out on a hunt as in the series).