She didn't need to instruct her chaplains to look out for needy people and to tell her about them; she didn't need to increase the amount in the Maundy purses; she didn't need to be so generous with her time, money and influence; but she did so. Yes, it was good for her image, and some might call it public relations or propaganda, but through these deeds she risked her reputation and image to support reformers, so I don't believe that it was all about making Anne look good to the people. Her good deeds and her charity surely came from her faith and her love for her people.
Notes and Sources
1 Lindberg, "Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples by Guy Bedouelle," 25–26.
2 Dowling, "Anne Boleyn and Reform."
3 Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 283.
4 Fox (Foxe), Fox's Book of Martyrs: Acts and Monuments of the Church in Three Volumes, II:407.
5 Dowling, "William Latymer's Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne," 53.
6 Ibid., 54.
7 Ibid., 49.
8 Ibid., 52–53.
9 Ibid., 54.
10 Ibid., 56.
11 Ibid., 57.
12 Dowling, "William Latymer's Cronickille of Anne Bulleyne."
13 Dowling, "Anne Boleyn and Reform."
14 Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey, 443.
15 Dowling, "Anne Boleyn and Reform."
16 "Calendar of State Papers, Spain, Volume 5 Part 1: 1534-1535," n. 170.
17 Stewart, "The Relief of the Poor Bill, 1535."
18 Schofield, The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell: Henry VIII's Most Faithful Servant, 103.
19 Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, 285.
20 Ives, "A Frenchman at the Court of Anne Boleyn."
21 Ives, "Anne Boleyn on Trial Again."
22 Dowling, "Anne Boleyn and Reform."
18. Anne Boleyn and the Tower of London
The Tower of London, or Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, as it is officially called, is famous for being the site of much bloodshed and for being the prison of many hundreds, if not thousands, of people since it was first built by William the Conqueror in the late 11th century. However, during its 900-year history, it has enjoyed many different roles:
• Fortress
• Prison
• Royal Palace
• Armoury
• Mint
• Place of Execution
• Home of the Royal Menagerie
• Jewel house
• Resting Place
In Tudor times, one of the functions of the Tower of London was a prison. Notable prisoners included:
• Anne Boleyn and the five men condemned to death for committing adultery with her
• Sir Thomas More and Bishop John Fisher
• Thomas Cromwell
• Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Rochford
• Anne Askew
• Thomas Cranmer
• Lady Jane Grey and Guildford Dudley
• Princess Elizabeth Tudor and Robert Dudley during Mary I's reign
• Sir Walter Ralegh
Figure 23 - A view of the Tower of London
However, the Tower was not just a prison; it was also a Royal Palace, complete with Great Hall and royal lodgings which were used by a monarch traditionally before his/her coronation.
Anne Boleyn and the Tower of London
There is much misinformation out there regarding Anne Boleyn, her execution and her links with the Tower of London. Errors and myths I've come across include:
• Anne Boleyn was executed by an axeman
• She was executed where the glass memorial stands today on Tower Green
• Anne was imprisoned in a room in the Queen's House overlooking Tower Green where she carved "ANNE" into the stonework
• The bodies in the chancel were exhumed and then buried in the crypt or in a mass grave
• An extra finger was found when the Victorians exhumed her remains
• Anne was escorted through Traitors' Gate
I haven't read these in fiction; I've read them on forums and websites, or heard tour guides like Yeoman Warders and Blue Badge Guides tell them to tourists. When one person confronted a Yeoman Warder and told him that Anne was not executed on the spot being pointed out, she got the rather sarcastic reply, "Oh, you've been reading Alison Weir". Oh dear.
Today, we think of the Tower of London as a prison and fortress. The Yeoman Warders tell you its history, and then concentrate on the grisly goings-on. Of course, this is what tourists want to hear about - executions, daring escapes, murders, the Princes, ghosts, the menagerie and the Polar bear who once swam in the moat. These are all interesting stories, but there is so much more to the Tower. There are plenty of books available on the history of the Tower, but in this chapter I'm going to focus on Anne Boleyn's links with the Tower.
The Tower and Anne's Coronation
It was traditional for monarchs to go to the Tower before their coronations and to process from there to Westminster; hence why Edward V, one of the Princes in the Tower, was housed there after his father's death. Henry VIII wanted his queen consort, Anne Boleyn, to follow this royal tradition, to thus show the people that Anne was his rightful wife and Queen. He spent a fortune refurbishing the royal palace and commissioning lavish timber-framed lodgings for Anne's comfort. Improvements included "a rebuilt great chamber and a rebuilt dining room, while a new bridge across the moat gave access from her private garden into the city."1 The great gallery had also been restored. It is estimated that Cromwell spent the equivalent of nearly £1.3 million in today's money on the repairs and improvements.2 It is sad that these apartments became uninhabitable by the end of the 16th century and were demolished in the 18th century when so much was spent on them and when they had such history.
The royal palace consisted of :-
• The Great Hall, the centre-piece of the palace and a huge hall built by Henry III in the 13th century
• Kitchens
• The Queen's lodgings, which overlooked the palace gardens
• The jewel house
• The Queen's gallery, used for promenades and viewing the gardens
• The palace gardens with their courtyards, railings and posts topped with heraldic beasts
It was a sumptuous royal palace.
Figure 24 - Plan of the Tower in 1597
In Figure 24, the Great Hall is in the royal palace complex ("n"); the Queen's lodgings are the buildings on the right of it ("g"), running between the White Tower's Wardrobe Tower ("o")and the Lanthorn Tower ("p"). The kitchens were situated beside the Wakefield Tower ("q").
On 29th May 1533, Anne Boleyn's coronation celebrations began with a river pageant from Billingsgate to the Tower of London. The procession paused at Greenwich Palace for Anne to board her barge and then made its way to the Tower, where Anne disembarked at the Court Gate of the Byward Tower. The royal couple spent the next forty-eight hours in the royal palace of the Tower before Anne's procession to Westminster in readiness for her coronation ceremony. The traditional Order of the Bath ceremony took place from the night of 30th May to the morning of the 31st, with eighteen Knights of the Bath being created.
At about 5pm on Saturday 31st May, Anne left the Tower of London to process to Westminster. The lavish rebuilding and refurbishments that Henry VIII had ordered were rather decadent for a mere forty-hour stay; ironically, however, Anne would make uses of the Queen's lodgings once again following her arrest in May 1536.
The Queen's House
Various websites state that Anne Boleyn was imprisoned in a small room within the Queen's House, the Anne Boleyn room. The Queen's House is a part-timbered building which overlooks Tower Green. Victorian visitors interested in the tragic queen were once shown around this bedroom, complete with "Anne" carved into the stonework; but we now know that this building was not built until around 1540. Anne could not have been imprisoned in a building that did not exist in her lifetime.
The Tower and Anne Boleyn's F
all
On 30th April 1536, court musician Mark Smeaton was apprehended and taken to Thomas Cromwell's house in Stepney. There he was interrogated until he confessed to sleeping with the Queen three times. At dawn on 2nd May, Sir Henry Norris, Henry VIII's groom of the stool, was escorted to the Tower of London following his apprehension after the May Day joust the previous day. Smeaton joined Norris at the Tower that morning; George Boleyn, Lord Rochford and the Queen's brother, was taken there in the early afternoon. Smeaton was kept in irons, probably due to his lower status. We do not know whereabouts in the Tower the men were held, but in the stone of the Martin Tower there is a carving of a rose with what looks like a letter "H" and the name "Boullan" etched beside it. In the Beauchamp Tower there is another carving, this time of Anne's falcon badge, but without its crown and sceptre.
On the morning of 2nd May, the Queen was watching a match of real tennis when she received a message telling her to present herself before members of the King's council. She duly presented herself and was informed that she was being accused of committing adultery with three different men: Mark Smeaton, Sir Henry Norris and a third man, at this stage unnamed. She was also told that Smeaton and Norris had confessed. Anne remonstrated with her accusers, but her words had no effect and the royal commission ordered her arrest. Anne was then taken to her apartments until the tide of the Thames turned and then, at two o'clock in the afternoon, she was escorted by barge to the Tower of London.
Upon arrival at the Tower, it is likely that Anne's barge would have entered through the Court Gate (also called the Tower Gate) of the Byward Tower, the King and Queen's private entrance, rather than through Traitors' Gate. This was the same gate through which she had entered in 1533; she was even met by the same man, Sir Edmund Walsingham, the Lieutenant of the Tower. Anne was then escorted to the Royal Palace where she encountered the Constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston. Much to Anne's surprise, he informed her that she was to be imprisoned in the Queen's lodgings, rather than a dungeon.
On 4th May, courtiers Sir Francis Weston and Sir William Brereton were arrested and taken to the Tower. They were joined on 5th May by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Richard Page. Wyatt's poem about the executions of the five men includes the words "The bell tower showed me such sight", so he must have been imprisoned there.
The trials of Norris, Smeaton, Weston and Brereton took place in Westminster Hall in front of a special commission of oyer and terminer. The men were taken there and back by barge along the river Thames. Anne and George, however, were tried in front of a jury of their peers in the Great Hall, or King's Hall, of the Tower. A great platform had been erected in the hall so that everybody could see. The Great Hall no longer exists, but we can gain as sense of what it might have looked like by considering the Great Hall at Winchester Castle, which was built at around the same time (in the 13th century) and on the orders of the same man, Henry III.
Winchester's Great Hall (Figure 25) was built in a "double cube" design, i.e. the height and width measure exactly half its length. It measures 110 ft by 55 ft by 55 ft,3 so it is easy to imagine how 2,000 spectators managed to fit in the hall for Anne's trial.
Figure 25 - The Great Hall in Winchester Castle
Mark Smeaton, Sir Henry Norris, George Boleyn, Sir Francis Weston and Sir William Brereton were executed on Tower Hill on 17th May 1536. Tower Hill is outside the Tower walls and is sometimes missed by tourists and visitors to the Tower because you have to cross a road to get to it. The scaffold site is next to the Tower Hill war memorial and is marked by a simple paved square with plaques commemorating some of the people who were executed there. Eustace Chapuys, the imperial ambassador, recorded Anne Boleyn witnessing the executions of the men, something that she would not have been able to do from her lodgings in the palace complex. Historian Gareth Russell4 wonders if, therefore, Anne asked Sir William Kingston to move her to one of the towers, such as the Bell Tower.
We know from contemporary accounts that Anne Boleyn's scaffold was not where the present day glass memorial is situated on Tower Green. In the 16th century, Tower Green was much bigger and stretched around the back of the White Tower. Figure 26 is a photo is of the parade ground between the White Tower and the Waterloo Barracks, where the Crown Jewels are, and that's where Anne's scaffold was built.
On the morning of 19th May 1536, Anne exited the Queen's Lodgings, walked past the Great Hall, through Cole Harbour Gate (Cold Harbour Gate), and along the western side of the White Tower to the black-draped scaffold. There, she was executed by the famous Hangman of Calais who used a sword, not an axe. She did not lay her head on a block, she knelt upright; images of Anne with an axeman and block are not at all accurate. After her execution, Anne Boleyn's body and head were wrapped in white cloth and placed in a chest, which had been fetched from the Tower armoury. This chest had once contained bow staves. The chest was buried in the chancel area of the Chapel Royal of St Peter ad Vincula (St Peter in Chains), where it lay in peace until 1876, when much-needed restoration work was carried out on the chapel. During the work, it was found that the pavement of the chancel area, where Anne Boleyn, Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Grey were buried, was sinking. It was decided that proper foundations were needed, so the chancel area was dug up and the remains exhumed.
Figure 26 - Parade Ground, looking from St. Peter ad Vincula, Tower of London
In the area where Anne Boleyn was recorded to have been buried, the bones of a female were found at a depth of about two feet. The remains were examined by Dr Mouat who confirmed that they belonged to "a female of between twenty-five and thirty years of age, of a delicate frame of body, and who had been of slender and perfect proportions".5 He went on to say that "the forehead and lower jaw were small and especially well formed. The vertebrae were particularly small, especially one joint (the atlas), which was that next to the skull, and they bore witness to the Queen's 'lyttel neck'." Although the bones were mixed up, they had been heaped together in a small space and there were no further female remains at that spot. Dr Mouat's memorandum said of Anne Boleyn's remains:
"The bones found in the place where Queen Anne Boleyn is said to have been buried are certainly those of a female in the prime of life, all perfectly consolidated and symmetrical, and belong to the same person.
"The bones of the head indicate a well-formed round skull, with an intellectual forehead, straight orbital ridge, large eyes, oval face and rather square full chin. The remains of the vertebrae, and the bones of the lower limbs, indicate a well-formed woman of middle height, with a short and slender neck. The ribs show depth and roundness of chest. The hands and feet bones indicate delicate and well-shaped hands and feet, with tapering fingers and a narrow foot."6
He noted that she had been around 5' to 5'3 inches in height. Both hands were entirely normal; no extra finger was found.
After the work had been completed in the chapel, the remains found in the chancel area were "soldered up in thick leaden coffers, and then fastened down with copper screws in boxes made of oak plank, one inch in thickness. Each box bore a leaden escutcheon, on which was engraved the name of the person whose supposed remains were thus enclosed, together with the dates of death, and of the year (1877) of the reinterment. They were then placed in the respective positions in the chancel in which the remains had been found, and the ground having been opened, they were all buried about four inches below the surface, the earth was then filled in, and concrete immediately spread over them".7
Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, Lord Redesdale, recorded how a plan of the burials was deposited amongst the Tower of London records and a "solemn ceremony" was carried out, presided over by the chaplain, the Reverend E. Jordan Roberts.8 Beautiful memorial tiles were used to mark the resting places of those buried in the chancel. These can still be seen today, although a rope cordons off the chancel area and some tiles lie underneath the altar table. As you look at the altar, Anne Boleyn's tile is to the left of the table.
Every year, a basket of re
d roses is delivered to the Tower with instructions to lay them on her memorial tile. The card simply reads "Queen Anne Boleyn 1536." The roses have been delivered every year as far back as anyone can remember. According to one article,9 Major General Chris Tyler, a former director-general of the Tower, played detective and tried to find out who was sending the rose. He tracked down a family of Boleyn descendants who live in Kent. After polite questioning during a visit to the Tower they admitted that they had been responsible for the flowers, and their relatives before them. The florist shop closest to the Tower confirmed that they had been receiving the order since the 1850s but a few years ago the order was moved to florist in a Kent village close to where the descendants lived. When I spoke to the Chief Yeoman warder about it in 2010, he was under the impression that the flower order was part of a bequest and that it would go on and on until the money ran out.
The Tower Today
The Queen's lodgings once stood in the area between the Wardrobe Tower (D) and the Lanthorn Tower (E) on the plan of the Tower of London as it stands today. The Great Hall stood on the lawn (F) between the Wakefield Tower (J), Lanthorn Tower (E) and the White Tower (A), at right angles to the Queen's Lodgings. Anne's final walk took her past the Great Hall, out of Cole (Cold) Harbour Gate (G) and around the White Tower to the present day parade ground (B) between the White Tower (A) and the entrance to the Crown Jewels (H). You cannot walk in Anne Boleyn's footsteps today because the raven enclosures block the way, but you can walk from Cole Harbour Gate (G) to the parade ground (B).
The glass memorial is on the lawn marked (I) on the plan, but, as I said, it's not where Anne was executed. The real spot is marked (B) on the plan. However, the glass memorial is moving as it has a beautiful verse etched on it in memory of those who died. It reads:
The Anne Boleyn Collection II: Anne Boleyn & the Boleyn Family Page 16
