On this day in Tudor history, Cardinal Wolsey presided over a book burning; four men were tried for sleeping with and plotting with Queen Anne Boleyn; Baron Hussey was charged with treason; and a friar refused to recant his allegiance to Rome…
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On this day in Tudor history, 4th May, claimant Edmund de la Pole was executed; four monks and a priest were executed for rejecting royal supremacy; an imprisoned George Boleyn received a letter and two more men joined him in the Tower; and Bess of Hardwick was buried…
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On this day in Tudor history, 17th May 1536, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford; Sir Henry Norris, groom of the stool; courtier Sir Francis Weston; courtier William Brereton, and musician Mark Smeaton were beheaded on Tower Hill for treason.
The five men had all been condemned to death after being found guilty of sleeping with Queen Anne Boleyn and conspiring with her to kill her husband, King Henry VIII.
Poet Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, who'd also been arrested and imprisoned in May 1536 in Anne's fall, witnessed their executions from his prison in the Bell Tower.
William Brereton (or Bryerton) was the sixth son of a leading, landowning Cheshire family. He was born between 1487 and 1490; his father was Sir Randolph Brereton of Malpas, chamberlain of the county palatine of Cheshire. Randolph became a knight of the body in 1513. William’s mother was Eleanor Dutton, daughter of Piers Dutton of Halton. Brereton, like three of his brothers, entered royal service and by 1524 (perhaps even 1521) he had become a groom of the privy chamber.
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