Why does Anne Boleyn often wear a white cap during her execution in movies?

[u/Ok-Design1478]

In watching a few of the Anne Boleyn movies, they often depict her wearing a white cap before the execution, is there any reason for this besides keeping her hair off her neck? I’ve seen others in white caps before too, typically women, and wondered if there was a reason.

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[u/Double_Show_9316]

Contemporary accounts of Anne Boleyn’s execution mention the cap. Here is one account (probably not an eyewitness from what I understand, but certainly based on first hand accounts):

The said Queen (unjustly called) finally was beheaded upon a scaffold within the Tower with open gates… She brought by the captain upon the said scaffold, and four young ladies followed her…. She was then stripped of her short mantle furred with ermines, and afterwards took off her hood, which was of English make, herself. A young lady presented her with a linen cap, with which he covered her hair, and she knelt down, fastening her clothes about her feet, and one of the said ladies bandaged her eyes.

The point of this cap, as you mentioned, would have been to keep her hair off her neck and help make the execution go more smoothly. I’m not familiar enough with the accounts of Anne Boleyn’s execution to say whether observers attributed any special significance to it, but I don’t suspect they did.

I am somewhat more familiar with Stuart execution accounts, when the white cap sometimes appears with a new level of symbolic significance. P.J. Klemp has argued that during the mid-seventeenth century, “the earlier ‘uniformity of behaviour on the scaffold’ that characterized executions in the sixteenth century, in which only one role was available to the dying man—‘that of a Christian dying well’—gave way to a range of possible roles” which the dying chose to act out in part through their choices of clothing. Archbishop William Laud, for example, wore a fine new suit “after an old fahion” and a velvet cap to emphasize his authority and status.

Charles I, meanwhile, placed a white satin cap on his head immediately before his execution. While this served the same functional purpose as Anne Boleyn’s linen cap, it had an additional symbolic function that many observers would have noted. Charles had famously worn white satin at his coronation, associated with innocence and symbolically representing a bridegroom marrying his kingdom. At his execution, Charles was calling to mind both his own coronation, as well as those associations—white as a symbol of innocence (or martyrdom) took on new meaning at his execution, and instead of a bridegroom marrying his people, he now talked about “my second marriage-day” when in death he would be “espoused to my blessed Jesus.”

When the parliamentary military officer Captain Browne Bushel was executed for treason after switching sides and surrendering a castle to the royalists, he chose to wear a white cap like the king had, consciously associating himself with the king and framing himself as a royalist martyr (he also asked his executioner whether the Block and Axe were the same that “my late Royal Master received the fatal blow from”). Other executed royalists similarly chose to dress in white, probably for similar reasons.

TL;DR, while wearing a white cap to an execution came to hold powerful political significance much later, in Anne Boleyn's case, it seems to have been a much more utilitarian choice.

Sources:

P.J. Klemp, The Theatre of Death: Rituals of Justice from the English Civil Wars to the Restoration (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2016)

David Cressy, Charles I and the People of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)

James Gardiner, ed., Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII Preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and Elsewhere in England, vol. x (London: HMSO, 1887)

[u/ConsiderTheBees → u/Double_Show_9316]

It would also just be something most people (and especially most women) would wear. If you are wearing a Breton or "French" hood (a style of headdress very popular at the time, and that Anne seemed to be fond of), your hair isn't just worn loose underneath it, it would likely be braided and either wrapped around the head and tied with tape, or formed into a bun at the back of the head, and then covered with a linen cap (same for the gable or "English" hoods). Women wore those for the same reason you'd wear a shift under your dress and stays- to keep the oil from your skin/hair from damaging the (expensive, difficult to wash) outer garments, and in the case of caps, to keep your hair neat. It's a lot easier to wash smaller linen garments than it is your heavier silks, wools, etc.

Hoods would have to be removed for executions so the executioner had a clean path to your neck, but there was no reason to take a cap off, and women at the time likely preferred to keep them on for modesty's sake. It would have been *very* rare, in pretty much any situation, for women to go about bare-headed. Even at home (even in bed!) people of both sexes as all ages often wore linen caps. The long, flowing hair you see in contemporary art is largely allegorical (most of the time it is used to show characters from mythology, or religious figures like Mary Magdalene or the early Roman martyrs), and in modern film it is a style choice because directions don't think we will know a woman is hot if she is in a wimple or hood. There were some exceptions, like women entering into holy orders (who wore their hair down so it could all be cut off), or the Queen on the day of her coronation, and a couple other exceptions, but for the most part, you wore your hair covered most of the time.

As a side tangent- sometimes you will see people trying to "gotcha" the "women wore their head covered" thing by saying "ah! but that was only married or older women! Young women and girls wore their hair down!" Yes, they did- in the Victorian and Edwardian era. Not in the Tudor one. Paintings of young children and even infants almost always show them wearing caps or baby bonnets. Princess Elizabeth wasn't running around the countryside with her hair blowing in the breeze like a Pantene model.

Sources:

- A Visual History of Costume: The Sixteenth Century by Jane Ashelford

- Dress at the Court of Henry VIII by Maria Hayward