May 19: Anne Boleyn’s Last Morning, Marilyn at Madison Square Garden, and Malcolm X

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On the morning of May 19, 1536, a swordsman hired specially from Calais — English executioners used axes; Anne Boleyn had requested a sword — walked onto Tower Green and found Anne Boleyn already kneeling, her long hair pinned up under a headdress to expose her neck. The execution was scheduled for nine in the morning and had already been postponed once; Anne had been waiting in the Tower since the previous morning, and by all contemporary accounts she was calm in a way that discomfited observers. She had made a speech acknowledging the king’s justice, which was the formula required and bore no relationship to her actual opinion of the king’s justice. She was twenty-eight or possibly twenty-nine — her birthdate is uncertain — and had been Queen of England for three years and two months. She was the reason the Church of England existed. In approximately twenty minutes she would be dead, and her daughter, two years and eight months old, would begin the journey toward becoming the most significant English monarch in history.

The trial that preceded the execution had lasted two days, May 15 and 17. The charges were adultery (with five men, including her brother George), incest, and plotting the king’s death. The evidence was extracted through torture and consisted largely of statements about conversations that may or may not have taken place. Most historians now regard the charges as fabricated; Henry VIII wanted out of the marriage, could not obtain an annulment because the marriage had produced a living child (invalidating the grounds he had used to dissolve his previous marriage), and found it more convenient to charge Anne with treason than to find another way. The men convicted alongside her were almost certainly innocent. One of them, musician Mark Smeaton, confessed under torture; the others denied everything. The jury convicted in approximately two hours.

The Last Queen and the Next

What makes May 19, 1536, interesting as a historical hinge is the number of things that happen simultaneously: Anne Boleyn dies at approximately nine in the morning, and Henry VIII is betrothed to Jane Seymour by eleven the same morning. Jane Seymour will become queen within days. Henry has been technically mourning the death of his wife for less than two hours when he is engaged to marry again. Jane Seymour will die in October 1537, a few days after giving birth to Edward, the male heir Henry has been trying to produce. Edward will become king at nine and die at fifteen. Jane Seymour will be the queen Henry chooses to be buried next to. The competition for which wife mattered most to Henry VIII was not won by the one who dominated his reign or the one who produced his heir, but by the quiet one who died first and left no room to be complicated.

Anne Boleyn’s daughter, Elizabeth, was declared illegitimate within days of her mother’s execution, stripped of the title “princess,” and raised at Hatfield. She was two years and eight months old. Twenty-two years later, she became Queen Elizabeth I and reigned for forty-four years, presiding over what the English have been calling a golden age ever since, and which was also an era of executions, religious persecution, poverty, and aggressive colonial expansion. Anne Boleyn never knew her daughter became queen. This is one of the more poignant “what they didn’t know” facts in history, competing with “Marie Curie never knew her daughter also won a Nobel Prize” and “Mozart never knew Don Giovanni was considered one of the greatest operas ever written.” History is very long; the people in it are not.

The Specific Embarrassment of “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”

On May 19, 1962, at a Madison Square Garden fundraiser for the Democratic Party celebrating John F. Kennedy’s forty-fifth birthday (his actual birthday being May 29), Marilyn Monroe walked onto the stage in a dress that Peter Lawford described as “skin and beads” — it was a flesh-colored, rhinestone-encrusted Jean Louis gown so tightly sewn onto her body that she had to be sewn into it backstage — and sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in a voice of such performative breathiness that the audience laughed, and Kennedy laughed, and the performance became immediately famous.

She had been announced several times before finally appearing; Peter Lawford, acting as emcee, had taken to calling her “the late Marilyn Monroe” and pretending she wasn’t coming. When she did appear, in the dress that gossip columns described for weeks, Kennedy’s reaction onstage was a studied smile. His response at the microphone: “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” The joke was that it was obviously not wholesome. The entire room was in on the joke. The joke is part of the reason the moment has been replayed so many times — it is evidence, publicly staged and performed, of exactly the relationship everyone suspected existed.

The relationship’s actual nature remains disputed. Monroe and Kennedy had certainly met multiple times. Whether the relationship was sexual is something biographers have argued about since Monroe died three months later, in August 1962. What’s certain is that the Madison Square Garden performance is one of the most deliberately public displays of intimate suggestion in American cultural history — not private, not hidden, but staged in front of fifteen thousand people at a Democratic fundraiser with the sitting President watching and his wife at home. Jackie Kennedy did not attend the event. She was reportedly in Virginia, riding horses.

The dress Monroe wore that night sold at auction in 1999 for $1.267 million to Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It sold again at auction in 2016 for $4.8 million, making it the most expensive dress ever sold at auction at the time. The economics of celebrity relics are not rational in any way that standard economic theory can account for. The dress is an object. It is valued because of what happened in it. What happened in it was a performance. The performance is what’s actually valuable, and you cannot auction a performance.

El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, Born Malcolm Little

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little on May 19, 1925, in Omaha, Nebraska, the fourth of eight children of Earl and Louise Little. Earl Little was a Baptist preacher and a local organizer for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. When Malcolm was four, a white supremacist group burned the family home. When he was six, his father was killed — officially in a streetcar accident, though the family believed he had been murdered by white supremacists. His mother, who raised eight children alone, had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized when Malcolm was thirteen. He was split from his siblings into foster care.

Malcolm excelled academically but was told by a teacher, when he expressed interest in becoming a lawyer, that law was “no realistic goal for a nigger.” He left school. He moved to Boston, then Harlem, was convicted of burglary in 1946, and served six years in Massachusetts state prison, where he encountered the Nation of Islam through a fellow prisoner and his brother Reginald. He converted, began educating himself voraciously — he reportedly copied an entire dictionary by hand — and emerged from prison as Malcolm X, the X replacing the slave surname Little and representing the unknown African name his ancestors had carried before it was taken from them.

He became the Nation of Islam’s most effective organizer and most visible spokesperson, building the Nation’s membership from around five hundred when he joined to somewhere between fifty thousand and five hundred thousand by the early 1960s. His rhetoric — “by any means necessary,” his blunt characterization of white America’s treatment of Black Americans, his rejection of the nonviolence doctrine that Martin Luther King was then articulating — made him the figure that white America found most threatening in the civil rights era, and the figure that significant numbers of Black Americans found most honest. He broke with Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam in 1964, traveled to Mecca, returned having revised his views on racial separatism, was assassinated in February 1965 at the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, Manhattan, at age thirty-nine.

The autobiography he wrote with Alex Haley, published posthumously in 1965, is one of the essential documents of American literature, not just American politics. It is a book about transformation — about a person remaking himself so completely, multiple times, that the person at the end is barely recognizable as the person at the beginning. The theme of radical self-reinvention is an American obsession; the autobiography taps into it from a direction that makes the obsession strange and serious again. He was thirty-nine when he died. The last years, the post-Mecca years, when his thinking was opening into something new, were cut short. What he would have become is one of history’s genuine unknowns.

Jacques Cartier and the Second Attempt

On May 19, 1535, the French explorer Jacques Cartier set sail from Saint-Malo with three ships and 110 men on his second voyage to North America, the voyage on which he would sail up the St. Lawrence River, reach the sites of present-day Quebec City and Montreal, and make the first sustained European contact with the St. Lawrence Iroquoians. He named the river “Canada” — a misunderstanding of the Iroquoian word kanata, meaning “village” or “settlement.” The misunderstanding stuck. He brought back to France a vivid account of the interior of North America and the possibility of a Northwest Passage to Asia. He did not find the passage. He did find the river that would become the entry point for French colonization of North America, and for the fur trade that would finance much of it.

Cartier’s first voyage, in 1534, had been the reconnaissance. His second voyage went deeper, went slower, and ended badly: the expedition was trapped by winter at the St. Lawrence, twenty-five men died of scurvy, and Cartier was saved only by the Iroquoian people who taught him to make a tea from white cedar bark — a preparation rich in Vitamin C. He repaid this generosity by kidnapping several Iroquoian leaders, including the chief Donnacona, and taking them to France, where most of them died. He returned for a third voyage in 1541, this time as part of a larger colonization attempt. The colony failed. The minerals he brought back as gold and diamonds turned out to be iron pyrite and quartz. The St. Lawrence Iroquoians had largely disappeared from the historical record by the time Samuel de Champlain arrived in the early 17th century — killed by disease, by conflict with other Indigenous nations, or by internal displacement, the records are too thin to say which. Cartier’s voyages began a chain of contact whose full consequences he did not live to see.

Also on This Day

• 1780: The Dark Day — an unexplained darkening of the sky over New England and parts of Canada so complete that candles were lit at noon and birds roosted as if for night. The cause has been identified as a combination of dense smoke from forest fires in Ontario and a thick fog layer; at the time, many people believed it was the Day of Judgment. The Connecticut legislature was in session and moved to adjourn; legislator Abraham Davenport refused: “The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty.” Davenport is remembered primarily for this sentence, which is a more durable legacy than most legislators achieve.
• 1898: William Gladstone, four-time British Prime Minister, dies at Hawarden Castle in Wales, age eighty-eight. He had served his last term as PM from 1892 to 1894, taking office at eighty-two — the oldest person to serve as British Prime Minister. He was also the most prolific: about 15,000 pieces of correspondence per year during his active career, addressed personally. He chopped down trees for relaxation. He spent significant effort, outside his political career, attempting to rehabilitate women who had entered prostitution, a Victorian philanthropic project that has been interpreted with varying degrees of charity ever since.
• 1994: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis dies in New York City at age sixty-four, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. She had been diagnosed in January and died quickly. She chose to die at home rather than in hospital. The public reaction was striking in part because Jackie Kennedy had spent the thirty years since her husband’s assassination being one of the most famous people in the world while giving almost no interviews and maintaining a privacy that felt, in the media environment of the 1990s, increasingly impossible and therefore impressive. She had built a second life as a book editor at Doubleday. Very few people knew she was ill.

May 19 is a day of people who were defined by how others used them, and who used those definitions back. Anne Boleyn was a political instrument who became queen, was executed as a traitor, and whose daughter became the century’s most consequential monarch. Marilyn Monroe performed the role she had been assigned until the performance consumed the person inside it. Malcolm X refused every definition assigned to him by white America and spent his life rewriting his own. Jacques Cartier was sent to find a passage to Asia and found a continent instead, and called it by the wrong name, and the name stuck. History is mostly the wrong names sticking.

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