The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (63 page)
Read The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn Online
Authors: Alison Weir
Tags: #General, #Historical, #Royalty, #England, #Great Britain, #Autobiography, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Biography And Autobiography, #History, #Europe, #Historical - British, #Queen; consort of Henry VIII; King of England;, #Anne Boleyn;, #1507-1536, #Henry VIII; 1509-1547, #Queens, #Great Britain - History
Worthy attempts were made to identify the remains. A heap of bones carefully arranged and assumed to be Anne Boleyn’s, and found only two feet below the chancel floor “in the place where [she] is said to have been buried,” were thought to have been disturbed and disarrayed in 1750, when the lead coffin of one Hannah Beresford was buried two feet beneath them.
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The skeleton assumed to be Anne Boleyn’s was examined by a surgeon on the committee, Dr. Frederic Mouat, and described by Bell, both of whom were present at the exhumation. It comprised the bones of “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; the forehead and lower jaw were especially well-formed. The vertebrae were particularly small.” The committee thought that this bore witness to Anne Boleyn’s “little neck.”
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This female had “a well-formed round skull, 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 hand and feet bones indicate delicate and well-shaped hands and feet, with tapering fingers and a narrow foot.” There was no evidence of a sixth fingernail, as described by George Wyatt. Judging from the vertebrae, Dr. Mouat estimated the woman’s height to have been “five feet, or five feet three inches, not more.”
Dr. Mouat confidently opined that the bones all belonged to the same person, and had lain in the earth for upward of three hundred years, and voiced his opinion that these remains were “all consistent with the published descriptions of Queen Anne Boleyn, and the bones of the skull
might well belong to the person portrayed in the painting by Holbein in the collection of the Earl of Warwick.”
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Setting aside for a moment the question of age, Anne’s authenticated portraits all show her as having a pointed chin, not a square one, while—as has been noted—no painting of her by Holbein is known to have survived. The portrait of Anne at Warwick Castle is an eighteenth-century copy in oils of Holbein’s sketch of a lady who was not identified as Anne until 1649, which is discussed in the Appendix; other versions of the Warwick portrait are at Hever Castle and Hatfield House. Even today these are still believed to portray Anne Boleyn.
We do not know how tall Anne Boleyn was. The hostile Nicholas Sander, writing fifty years after her death, called her “rather tall of stature,” but his account is in many ways suspect. Only one eyewitness description of the Queen survives, that of Francesco Sanuto, a Venetian diplomat, who described her as being “of middling height,”
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which, in Tudor times as in the Victorian age, might have meant rather shorter than we would interpret “middling height” today. But Sanuto also refers to her having a “long neck,” whereas the neck of the skeleton in the Tower was described as short.
More to the point, four other decapitated females were buried in the chancel in Tudor times: Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, age between sixteen and twenty-three, depending on which evidence for her age one accepts; Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, aged sixty-eight; Lady Jane Grey, age probably seventeen; and Lady Rochford, whose age at death is unknown, but who was of marriageable age (twelve or over) in 1524, and was thus born in 1512 at the latest. Forensic science was not exact in the Victorian age, and Dr. Mouat’s estimates of the ages of the deceased could have been inaccurate. It is just possible that the bones thought to be Anne Boleyn’s—the diminutive slender female with a square jaw—actually belonged to Katherine Howard, miniatures of whom by Holbein show her with what could be a jutting square jaw.
It is interesting to note that close by the remains of the Duke of Northumberland, in the place where Katherine Howard was thought to have been laid to rest—and whose remains were supposedly not found at all (and were thought either to have dissolved in the quicklime found in the graves or to have decomposed into dust)—parts of the disarrayed skeletons
of two woman were found. It was thought that they were moved there in the eighteenth century to make room for other burials.
One female, much advanced in years, was almost certainly Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, who was beheaded in 1541 at the age of sixty-seven. The other skeleton was thought by Dr. Mouat to have been that of a woman of “rather delicate proportions,” of “about thirty to forty years of age, [but] probably forty years of age.” This female was “of larger frame” than Katherine, who had been “a very little girl,” according to one French ambassador. Surely these bones belonged to Anne Boleyn, whose age at death has now been credibly established as thirty-five, not twenty-nine, as the Victorians believed. It therefore follows that the two dukes, Somerset and Northumberland, were indeed buried between two queens, but that the queens were in opposite positions to the ones in which they were thought by the committee to have been laid to rest.
In April 1877 all the skeletons and bones—except the remains of Lord Rochford, Thomas Seymour and Lady Jane Grey, which had not been disturbed
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—were reverently laid in individual leaden coffers, which were screwed down and placed inside oaken outer coffins one inch thick, these being sealed with copper screws. A lead plaque bearing the name and arms of the person thought to be inside was affixed to the lid of each coffin, and all were decently reburied in the place where they were found, just four inches beneath the altar pavement. This was then concreted over and laid with decorative octagonal memorial slabs of green, red, and white marble in a mosaic design, each having a border of yellow Sienna marble and the names and armorial crests of the deceased.
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The remains in the chancel were replaced in the order in which they were found, with the two dukes between the two queens, although these burials do not correspond to the memorial slabs. Presumably a space was left beneath the place where Katherine Howard’s “vanished” remains were supposed to lie. However, the partial skeleton of the woman that had been found there, and which—given the fact that other bones were mistakenly identified as Anne Boleyn’s in 1876—no one thought to be of great significance, was buried as Lady Rochford.
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Thus, we can be almost certain that Anne’s memorial stone does not mark the last resting place of her actual remains, and that she lies beneath Lady Rochford’s memorial.
The Victorian historian Thomas Babington Macaulay, referring to the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, famously wrote:
There is no sadder spot on Earth. Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster and St. Paul’s, with genius and virtue, with public veneration and imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities: but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny; with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame. Thither have been carried through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, and the ornaments of courts.
Each year, since at least the 1960s, on the anniversary of Anne Boleyn’s execution, a bunch of red roses—such as appear on her coat of arms—has been delivered anonymously to the Tower, with a request that it be placed on her memorial. The flowers, sent by a shop in London on the instructions of an undisclosed firm of trustees, are always accompanied by a card bearing only the dedication
Queen Anne Boleyn 1536
. This request is complied with by the Yeoman Warders, who lay the flowers on Anne’s grave and only remove them when they have withered.
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Anne Boleyn might have died in ignominy, but she left, all unwittingly, a rich heritage in her infant daughter, the child who grew up reluctant to speak her name, and who so nearly met the same fate as her mother.
Significantly, after complying with tradition and spending a week in the Tower palace prior to her coronation, Elizabeth I never stayed there again. The place held too many terrible memories of her imprisonment there in 1554, and of her mother’s fate. She may well have been thinking of Anne as well as her own past experiences when, reining her horse to a standstill as she arrived at the Tower on that January day in 1559, she announced to the watching crowds, “Some have fallen from being princes of this land to be prisoners in this place. I am raised from being a prisoner in this place to be a prince of this land. That dejection was a work of
God’s justice. This advancement is a work of His mercy.” One can sense the elation in her words, for she had overcome much, starting with the loss of her mother and her bastardy, to achieve her throne. This was Anne Boleyn’s great legacy to England: her daughter, the great Virgin Queen, Elizabeth. How she would have gloried in and enjoyed Elizabeth’s triumph.
APPENDIX
LegendsLegends about Anne abound. Her ghost has long been reported in at least a dozen places. At Blickling Hall in Norfolk, the house in which she was probably born around 1501, the specter of her father, Thomas Boleyn, seated in a coach drawn by headless horses and driven by a headless coachman, has been reportedly seen on many occasions. The legend has the coach racing along country lanes to the door, followed by a blue light or screaming devils, or sometimes by a headless male corpse, said to be that of Lord Rochford, which is itself sometimes supposed to be dragged across hedges and ditches by four headless horses. This tale was probably well established by the eighteenth century.
According to some late Victorian versions, it is Anne herself who occupies the coach, dressed all in white and bathed in a red glow; she sits there headless, holding her bleeding head on her lap. Some have claimed that as soon as this spectral vision reaches the door of the hall, it vanishes; others assert that Anne alights and walks through every room of the house. A tradition grew up over the years that it made its appearance every year on May 19, the anniversary of her execution.
By 1850 superstitious country folk were claiming that Thomas Boleyn was condemned—as punishment for having connived at his daughter’s fall—to drive his coach and horses once a year, for a thousand years from his death in 1539, over the twelve—or forty, according to later versions—bridges that lie between Wroxham and Blickling, including those at Belaugh, Coltishall, Hautbois, Aylsham, and Burgh. It was said he carried his head, its tangled hair matted with blood, under his arm, and flames shot from his mouth while performing this annual ritual, which is somewhat strange, as he died in his
bed.
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It was also once said that anyone witnessing this coach would immediately be dragged down to Hell. Despite this dire prediction, in 1940, Christina Hale, a member of the English Folklore Society, wrote that “the occupants of the house are so used to this annual appearance that they take no notice of it,”
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although around that time the wife of the head gardener confessed she could never go to sleep on the night of May 19 until she had heard the crunch of coach wheels on gravel. In 1985 an old local man, asked by the writer Richard Whittington-Egan if he believed in this apparition, replied that it was “a load of old squit.”Although Blickling was rebuilt in 1616-27, more than a century after Anne’s birth, there are also claims that her ghost has been seen in the drawing room, walking its corridors and, dressed in gray, reading a book in the long gallery. Around 1979 an apparition was seen there by a steward, but vanished almost immediately, leaving behind the book—on Hans Holbein’s paintings—open at a portrait of herself. There is, in fact, no surviving portrait of Anne by Holbein, only two sketches by him that are unproven—and unlikely—to be her. One, in the collection of the Earl of Bradford at Weston Park, is a portrait of a noblewoman who was identified as Anne only in 1649 and bears little resemblance to the standard portrait types, even though it has been widely copied, as Anne, by several painters over the centuries (two notable examples are at Hever Castle and Warwick Castle). The other, in the Royal Collection at Windsor, of a blond lady in a furred gown and nightcap, labeled “Anna Bollein Queen,” has been misidentified, as proved to be the case with sitters in other Holbein drawings labeled in the same hand. Again, the lady in this picture bears little resemblance to known paintings of Anne, and the coat of arms of the Wyatt family is sketched on the reverse, so it is possible that she was the promiscuous Elizabeth Brooke, and that this sketch was a companion portrait to that of her husband, Sir Thomas Wyatt.
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So the ghost in this story—if there was indeed a ghost—may not have been Anne but someone else entirely.As recently as 1985, Steve Ingram, a former administrator of Blickling Hall, was asleep one night in his flat there when he was awakened by the sound of light female footsteps advancing along the corridor and into his bedroom. He thought it was his wife, then realized that she was asleep beside him, yet when he turned on the light, expecting to see a form standing at the end of the bed, there was no one there. One might be tempted to dismiss this as a dream, save for the fact that, the next morning, Mr. Ingram’s colleagues pointed out to him that the previous day had been May 19.
4A former custodian of Blickling Hall, Dennis Mead, told the author Joan Forman that during the Second World War a butler named Hancock had seen a woman wearing a long gray gown with a white lace collar and white mobcap walking across the lawn to the lake. He went up to her and asked her if she was looking for someone, to which she replied mysteriously, “That for which I search has long since gone.” Hancock glanced up at the house at that moment, but when he turned back the woman had disappeared. Forman suggested to
Mead that the costume she wore perhaps belonged to the seventeenth century, but he pointed out that Anne Boleyn had been wearing a gray gown, white coif, and white cape on the day of her death.
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However, the costume worn by the woman on the lawn would appear to be of a later date than the 1530s; lace was barely known in England then, and there is no record of Anne wearing a lace collar—or any collar at all—at her execution.Norah Lofts reported a tale that a ghost called “Old Bullen” haunted Blickling, and that a room called “Old Bullen’s Study” had such a bad atmosphere that the servants were too scared to enter it, so it was locked up, but its location is supposed to have long been forgotten.
Anne is also said to haunt Rochford Hall in Essex, which was formerly owned by her family and lived in by her sister Mary, with her second husband, William Stafford. In the 1920s it was believed that Anne had been born there, and her ghost was said to appear in a large room called “Anne Boleyn’s Nursery,” but the building dates from Henry VIII’s reign, and since Mary Boleyn died there in 1543, we might wonder if it was her shade, not Anne’s, that people claimed to have seen. At Wickford in Essex, at the turn of the year, Anne is said to travel in a phantom coach in the area where Runwell Hall, a house belonging to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral, once stood.
Surprisingly, there are few accounts of Anne Boleyn’s ghost haunting Hampton Court, a royal residence where much supernatural activity has been reported. There is a late nineteenth-century tale that she was seen drifting along a corridor wearing a sad face and a blue gown in which she is supposed to have been painted;
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yet no such portrait exists. However, a female ghost in a blue velvet cloak has in recent years been reported in a grace-and-favor apartment that was once Katherine of Aragon’s presence chamber. In 1945, Lady Baden-Powell, who had a grace-and-favor apartment just off the great hall, recorded in her diary that a visitor, a Mrs. Hunt, sensed the presence of “Queen Anne Boleyn!” Anne, she went on, “used my little turret room at the end of my bedroom as her secret praying room,” and Mrs. Hunt “sees the Queen, who is beautiful, in the room.” Quite how Mrs. Hunt made the identification is not recorded, and Anne Boleyn’s apartments, the Queen’s Lodgings that were built for her at Hampton Court, were nowhere near this end of the hall. Adjacent to the hall, in the southeast corner of the Base Court, were the apartments refurbished by Henry VIII for Katherine Parr in 1543; prior to that date they were occupied by ladies-in-waiting of his previous wives.Anne’s ghost has also reportedly been seen on Christmas Eve, crossing a bridge over the River Eden on her way to Hever Castle, her family home in Kent, or as a wraith in white, gliding across the castle lawns; and she has apparently appeared at Windsor Castle, looking through a window in the Dean’s Cloister or walking along the eastern parapet.
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She is also said to walk every May 19, on the anniversary of her execution, at Salle Church in Norfolk, where some of her Boleyn ancestors—including her grandparents—are buried, and where tradition once had it that her own remains were moved in secret. Norah
Lofts related a tale told her by the sexton, who sat up to watch for this ghost; all he saw, however, was a hare, which ran around the church and then vanished. Lofts, a true East Anglian with an interest in the long tradition of witchcraft in that region, and with a lively imagination, made the connection between witches and their familiars, hares having been so commonly associated with the latter that few Norfolk people would eat their meat.Anne is also said to haunt thirteenth-century Bollin Hall, Cheshire (demolished in the 1840s), where local legend erroneously has it that she was born. Even though she had no connection with the place, she was at one time thought to be the White Lady seen on the grounds of a property owned by Jane Seymour’s family, Marwell Hall, Hampshire, walking in the shade of the Yew Walk behind the hall. Local legend (falsely) claims that Henry VIII waited with Jane at Marwell for news of Anne Boleyn’s death, having arranged for a chain of beacons to be lit to signal the event.
A ghostly vision of a barge, manned by shadowy gray oarsmen, taking Anne along the River Thames to the Tower, has been glimpsed passing the Water Tower of Lambeth Palace, despite the fact that in real life she was not conveyed so far upriver; and there are tales that her voice, moaning, crying, and pleading for her life, echoes in the dark and ancient undercroft of the palace. These tales seem to be based on the untrue but oft-repeated assertion that she appeared before Archbishop Cranmer’s eccleciastical court in the undercroft on May 17, 1536, the day her marriage was dissolved, or even on the myth that she was tried there and, after being condemned, was taken down the steps of the Water Tower to the barge that would convey her back to the Tower.
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Her ghost is also said to have appeared in Durham House Street off the Strand in London, in an ancient basement that is all that remains of Durham House, a former episcopal palace in which she once resided before her marriage. She is also said to be responsible for ghostly footsteps and lights in a shoe shop in Wisbech, on the premise of its proximity to Blickling, about forty miles away! The shade of a Tudor lady in green that manifests itself at the King’s Manor in York cannot be Anne, despite claims to the contrary, for she never traveled as far north as York.Predictably, there have been several tales of Anne’s spirit appearing at the Tower of London. The figure of a headless woman in a Tudor gown has been seen several times near the Queen’s House, formerly the Lieutenant’s Lodging, where Anne was once thought to have been confined before her execution; since she was never held there, she cannot be the “Gray Lady” in Tudor dress whose ghost haunts the building but can only be seen by females. The room next to the one in which Anne is supposed to have spent her last days is unaccountably colder than the other rooms in the house. In 1899, at a meeting of the Ghost Club, Lady Bidduph related how she had seen a lady with a red carnation over her right ear looking out of the window of Anne Boleyn’s room in the Queen’s House.
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Even today, the room next door has an evil reputation because of its chill, forbidding atmosphere, and strange perfumed odor, and
because people have awoken there with a dreadful feeling of being suffocated, no child is permitted to sleep there.
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However, these tales can have nothing to do with Anne Boleyn.One night in 1864 a guardsman of the Sixtieth Rifles saw a white figure emerge from the dimness of a doorway of the Queen’s House, where he was standing on duty. As it moved toward him, he challenged it, but as it came out of the shadows, he saw to his horror that it was headless and raised his bayonet, only to see the figure walk straight through it and himself. At that, he fainted with terror, and after being found by his angry commanding officer, was court-martialed for drunkenness and dereliction of his duty. Fortunately, two other people revealed that they too had seen the figure at that spot, and two other guardsmen swore that they had watched from a window of the Bloody Tower as it approached the sentry, and heard his scream of terror as he collapsed. In the face of this evidence, the court acquitted him.
11Later in the nineteenth century a Yeoman Warder testified under oath to seeing a bluish form drifting across this area toward the Queen’s House, while another soldier saw a woman in white coming out of that house soon after midnight; he could hear her heels tapping on the ground. He watched her walk toward Tower Green, but when she moved into a moonlit area, he was shocked to see that she had no head. He fled from his post, but when he explained what he had seen, he too escaped punishment. Similarly, in 1933, a soldier claimed to have seen the indistinct white form of a headless woman near the Bloody Tower; it seemed to rise out of the ground, then floated toward him; horrified, he thrust his bayonet at it, only to see it vanish.
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Given that five different people saw this apparition at various times, there is perhaps some substance to these accounts, but the connection with the Queen’s House again precludes any connection with Anne Boleyn.In 1972 a nine-year-old girl from the North of England, visiting London for the first time with her parents, was standing by the scaffold site in the Tower, listening to a guide reciting the names of all the people who had been executed by the axe there. The child, who had no prior knowledge of Anne Boleyn, said to her mother that Anne had not been executed by the axe but by the sword, and afterward described in detail the Queen’s last moments, even asserting that the executioner had removed his shoes so as to come up behind her unawares and behead her.
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The only thing she did not mention was that the scaffold site was in the wrong place!In the late nineteenth century an officer, peering through the windows of St. Peter ad Vincula after seeing an unauthorized light inside at night, claimed to see the elegant figure of Anne Boleyn (whose face he said he recognized from portraits) at the head of a line of knights and ladies in period costume who were proceeding up the aisle toward the altar.
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He watched astounded for a few moments until the procession and the light vanished.