Sir William Brereton

That Anne was unjustly convicted on trumped-up charges of the vilest kind and murdered by her monstrous and tyrannical husband is certainly true but that she ever loved Henry is disputable. She was a highly intelligent, manipulative, ruthless and politically motivated woman who kept Henry dangling for seven years, the price for her surrender being Queen Katherine’s crown and nothing less – as, doubtless, you know.

The penalty for a woman convicted of treason was to be burned alive. The penalty for a man was to be hanged and eviscerated whilst still living. A lesser end rested on the king’s pleasure! None spoke out upon the scaffold – and who could blame them? The full penalty could be exacted at the last moment upon the whim of the King, He just needed an excuse to regret his ‘mercy’. All of them, apart from George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, had estates and families to protect and none more so than Anne herself. She needed to protect the life and dynastic rights of Elizabeth. Hers was a brave, touching, eloquent and extremely generous farewell to her murderer, a man responsible for the deaths of over 23,000 people! She was a hard political realist who failed in her ultimate ambition and paid the price. The very qualities that so captivated Henry initially, he came to loathe ten years later. No princess with powerful relatives, she! You have to admire her courage and resolve but as relentless ambition drove her, she knew the pitfalls but felt they did not apply to her and so it is impossible to feel sorry for her, although entirely possible to feel sorry for the manner of her end. I have to say that it is her victims, both real, to whom she was pitiless, and those unintended, that I regret; Queen Katherine and Cardinal Wolsey, harried and hounded to their deaths, Thomas More et al and all those murdered and despoiled during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Lives shattered, laws broken and religious belief tossed aside and all for her. If Henry had died following his catastrophic fall in full armour, his horse having landed on top of him, (thus rendering him deeply unconscious for over two hours, during which time he was reported to have died), Anne may have been made regent for Elizabeth, who at that time was the heir to the throne. Certainly her uncle, Norfolk, would have moved quickly to take the throne using Elizabeth as a pretext. She was, too, carrying a child that proved to be a boy. It is fair to assume that she would have moved quickly to kill Mary, the true heir. She had, after all, tried hard previously to encompass her death.

I feel very sorry for Simon Weston, only 25 and father of a baby son, her brother, Henry Norris, the king’s best friend, William Brereton and poor Mark Smeaton. Their deaths were not her fault but she was the cause and the cause, too, of many others for whom she expressed no regret. Her end was, indeed, a great tragedy and a huge affront to the rule of law and natural justice – given how basely it was accomplished and who died with her, but she played the game, played it well but overplayed her hand in the last analysis. Love? What’s love got to do with it? Theirs was not a romantic idyll but a cold-blooded and implacable progress driven by self-obsession on both sides that stamped on the face of the nation and cost the lives and happiness of those closest to them. I see her for who she was and I view her with both admiration and distaste. The irony is that she did, in fact, succeed dynastically in granting Henry his greatest wish and need. She gave him a prince who was arguably the greatest monarch in English history. He just happened to be a girl.

When did the name Brereton become Brewington in the United States ??

Regarding “Brereton” becoming “Brewington” in the U.S., I am from a village in Maryland, now called Allen, that was originally named “Brereton” for William Brereton, husband of Sarah Smith, both of whom came here, to what was then Somerset County, Maryland, in about 1679 from Northumberland County, Virginia, just across the Chesapeake Bay. They settled on land given to them by Sarah’s father, and a village grew up around the mill that that served their plantation and the other settlers who followed them. Our William Brereton was born in Cheshire around 1648; his family was prominent in Virginia and may have come to America during Cromwell’s Commonwealth (I’m still trying to verify or disprove that). Our William died in Somerset County in 1790, where he had served as a Justice of the Peace and also as High Sheriff. He managed to keep his position even in the aftermath of the Restoration, then through upheaval in the Maryland colony against the Proprietor, Lord Baltimore. His grandson, also William (1719-1796) appears to have been the one to change the name to Brewington, for the reasons Gilbert Brewington spoke of, above. The Brereton name had been associated with service to the Royal Family for hundreds of years and many generations. Distancing at that time was most likely quite prudent. But also very sad.