ANNE BOLEYN'S entry into London took place on Saturday 31 May 1533, the day before her coronation at Westminster Abbey on Whit sunday 1 June. Parliament had passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals less than two months earlier on Monday 7 April. The Appeals Act declared England an empire, autonomous of the Holy Roman Empire, but also independent of the See of Rome. By preventing Rome's interference in what Archbishop Cranmer termed Henry's ‘great cause of matrimony’, the act allowed Cranmer to annul Henry's marriage with Catherine of Aragon, and to make lawful his clandestine marriage to Anne.

Cranmer pronounced sentence on the validity of Anne and Henry's marriage on 28 May, and the entry occurred in the happy aftermath of this verdict three days later. The passage of the Appeals Act had paved the way for Anne's coronation, and the entry proved the first opportunity to give public expression to ‘empire’ as it had been defined in this act – an empire compact of church and state, and ‘gov[er]ned by oon Sup[re]me heede and King’. Where the Habsburg Empire was expansionist, the empire of the Appeals Act looked inwards. This chapter approaches the 1533 entry as propaganda for Henry's imperial claims to power. It explores how these claims informed the stagecraft of Anne Boleyn's entry, which cast Anne as Astraea, and identified England under Henry VIII with the Golden Age of Virgil's fourth eclogue.