A woman caught in a triangle of love, royalty, and religion. What would you imagine her life to be? Irrespective of the timeline, it is hard to think of a woman caught in a web as nebulous as this, leading a life of social acceptance and peace. That is how anti-female and fascist our socio-religious power structures have been throughout history. Netflix’s three-part docu-drama Blood, Sex, and Royalty unpacks how this triangle played itself out in early Europe, through the life and times of Anne Boleyn, the controversial Queen of England from 1533 to 1536. Shot in a format that amalgamates fictional enactment of historic events with testimonies of contemporary historians, the series begins with Anne’s testimony to her jailer, who was also her only friend, while she was on trial for adultery and treason. It then unravels how Anne went from being Queen to a prisoner.
The first episode establishes Anne and the general context of Europe. England was under the reign of King Henry VIII, an orthodox Roman Catholic, and the Pope of the Vatican decisively influenced state policies and the monarchy. It is this scenario that Anne walked into. A young woman with sharp wit, and a sense of radical social justice — a combination which was, at that time (and at all times), fatal. Anne’s family, the Boleyns, as testified in the series, did not come from aristocracy or wealth. They were social climbers who maintained powerful contacts and traded in favours.
King Henry was already married to his first wife Catherine of Aragon, who was his brother’s widow. The couple did not have children, and Henry was desperate for a male heir to strengthen the footing of the Tudors, who were a relatively new dynasty. He pursued Anne for over five years through gifts and love letters that revealed how he fetishised virginity and longed for a son through their union.
From the start, for a female viewer of the 21st century, Anne and Henry’s relationship raises many red flags. But Blood, Sex, and Royalty also showcases how Anne makes these lapses in judgement under the magnetic pull of love and fervent passion.
This is how she paved the way for Protestantism in England.
For Henry to marry Anne, they would have to annul his first marriage, a sin that could get the King banished from the Church. This was also the time when the Protestant reformation started echoing throughout Europe. Anne is found with a copy of William Tyndale’s controversial book titled The Obedience of a Christian Man, which challenged the authority of the Catholic Church over the king.
At a time when being a heretic is considered the highest form of treason, Anne convinced Henry that the book would help them separate from Rome. Henry followed suit, thus separating the English monarchy from the authority of the Pope. This caused huge agitations and protests against him, and everyone blamed Anne for radicalising the king. But their relationship went strong until 1532, when Queen Anne Boleyn birthed a baby girl. This sowed the seeds for the undoing of Henry’s love for Anne, and she saw how she was trapped within a scheme of things that would eventually cost her life.
It is only poetic justice that Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth, would later go on to rule England and Ireland as Queen Elizabeth I, the last monarch of the Tudor house. Elizabeth was only two years old when Anne was executed, and in fact, it was Elizabeth’s birth that set the ball rolling for her mother’s persecution.
In the events that follow, Blood, Sex, and Royalty chronicles how a woman – once coveted and pursued by a monarch – becomes an enemy of the state and religion, only because she could not produce a male heir. It did not help that Anne, with her French education and progressive values, wanted to do more as Queen than just birth heirs. She wanted to introduce ideas like charity and welfare into a monarchy. She wanted the wealth of England’s religious monasteries to be taken away and spent to address poverty, healthcare, education, and religious reforms. She suffered miscarriages in between, and there were rumours about her being a witch. This also endangered her family’s survival because when a woman’s honour is questioned, the family is simultaneously unseated from power and grace.
Henry believed that their marriage was cursed because he disregarded the Pope to marry Anne, and grew distant. Everyone was waiting for her to trip and fall so that she could be brought down. Here, we see Anne Boleyn, Queen of England – a lonely, friendless woman, who was forced to perform for the public eye. Anne could be a woman of any era at this point, and she would still be relatable.
This is where one recognises, once again, the truth of the celebrated feminist saying that we are all the granddaughters of the witches they couldn’t burn. The series underlines how violence against women is systemic, and that religion and power are patriarchy’s best confidantes.
The famines, economic hardships, and uprisings against Henry in 1536 only made it worse for Anne, as the King started taking mistresses. He took over the wealth of the Church by dissolving the monasteries with the support of his court, and Anne was extremely critical of him. By this time, he wanted Anne gone, and therefore, he allegedly masterminded a trial against Anne on charges of adultery, treason, and incest. All the charges against her were based on hearsay and hushed testimonies from her maids who constantly spied on her. She was accused of having had affairs with several men, including her brother George, a fellow radical, who was often her only consolation. Anne was eventually executed in the name of King Henry VIII. This may have been a heartbreak for Anne. But as a woman viewing this in 2023, with all references of history before me, I could only feel helpless for her hopeful naivety and faith that love would push Henry to overlook his masculinity and need to further his dynasty.
In today’s court, none of the charges against Anne would stand because they cannot be corroborated. The law and the idea of the state have progressed enough to be separate from faith and morality, but the intricacies of how they bias each other in a patriarchal society remain somewhat the same.
Anne Boleyn’s story was unprecedented in the history of England. She was a queen who was put to death upon orders of the king. A woman who fought her way up, and ensured that the monarch could not just fancy her and walk away, without legitimising the children that were to be born. She insisted on marriage and had her way. As she walked that path, she also critiqued the unquestionable authority the Church had over the state, radicalising Catholicism in England. This was a walk of fire for Anne, and she paid for it with her life. Anne’s story essentialises the universality of how a fascist, authoritarian state turns faith, desire, and power against women who call out its monstrosities.
Blood, Sex, and Royalty tries to encompass Anne Boleyn’s temperaments and showcase how passion and desire intermingled with her objectivity, making her weak and perhaps dismissive of the possibility that Henry would stop desiring her the day she stopped delivering what he wanted. A woman as intelligent as her was emotionally lured into a marriage that finally took her life, only because she failed to birth a male heir, and the weapon used for that was character assassination through religion and moral judgment. Heard as a one-line without context, this could easily pass off as a story of our times.
It is testified by historians in the Netflix series that before being beheaded, Anne asserted that King Henry was a loving husband and gentle ruler, so that she would not further endanger her daughter Elizabeth’s survival or standing. Elizabeth, often referred to as the ‘Virgin Queen’, wedded no man, established the English Protestant Church, and interrogated the very cycle of injustice that killed her mother.
During her reign, the efficiency of female leadership was also a point of debate, with most people contending that a woman would never be as good as a man at ruling. But Elizabeth steered England into a new era of cultural and social renaissance, and her Queenship is today referred to as England’s ‘Golden Era’. In our popular imagination of power as a masculine vocation, women still struggle to cope and push back, just like Elizabeth and Anne did. Elizabeth dismissed the expectation of a ‘domesticated Queen’ with a husband and children, something that women in power struggle with even today.
Elizabeth was caught between the same triangle of power, religion, and passion as her mother.
If nothing, after watching the tragic story of Anne Boleyn, one is left with a sense of triumph that Elizabeth used the life she earned with her mother’s death to resurrect whatever she could. How she dealt with her colonies, though, is an entirely different history.
Disclaimer: This review was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the series. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the producers or any other members of its cast and crew.