The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (65 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
John Stow
(1525-1605), author of
The Annals of England
(1592) and
A Survey of London
(1598), was an antiquarian writing in the reign of Elizabeth I.Agnes Strickland’s
monumental
Lives of the Queens of England
, dedicated to Queen Victoria, in whose reign it was published, is now much outdated, but in its day was a milestone of historical research, for Strickland was indefatigable in seeking out original source material, traveling around the country to look at documents in private collections. She also made use of secondary works that were respected at the time, but her work reflects the values of the Victorian age and is highly subjective. Its chief value lies in the scattered original sources that it cites.Charles Wriothesley
, Windsor Herald (1508-62), was the first cousin of Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Lord Chancellor of England (from 1544), and wrote the larger part of his chronicle over the years before 1552 (although it was not published until 1581). Well placed—he was in the service of Lord Chancellor Audley; and his cousin, the rising courtier Thomas Wriothesley, was Clerk of the Signet and Cromwell’s man—and therefore well informed, he has been shown to be a highly reliable source.George Wyatt’s
late sixteenth-century eulogistic memoir of Anne Boleyn, written in answer to Sander’s virulent attack on her, is one of the chief primary sources for her life. Wyatt (1554-1624), of Boxley, Kent, was the grandson of the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne’s Kentish neighbor and sometime admirer, and he had been fascinated by tales of Anne from his youth, when he “gathered many notes touching this lady.”Wyatt himself wrote that he had had “the peculiar means, more than others, to come to some more particular knowledge” of his subject. Much of his information came from anecdotes handed down in his family, from George Cavendish’s
Life of Cardinal Wolsey
, a copy of which he owned, and from the reminiscences of three ladies: his mother, Jane Haute, who married his father Thomas, the poet’s son, the year after Anne Boleyn’s death; Anne Gainsford (later the wife of George Zouche of Codnor), who had been Queen Anne’s maid-of-honor “that first attended on her both before and after she was queen,” and afterward served Jane Seymour in the same capacity; and an unidentified “lady of noble birth, living in those times, and well-acquainted with the persons” about whom Wyatt wrote. Much of this source material survives in the Wyatt manuscripts in the British Library (Loan ms. 15) in the form of drafts, notes, and extracts from various works.Wyatt’s work, which was left unfinished, is so strongly biased in her favor as to be virtually hagiographic, and virulently anti-Catholic.
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