Episode 237 was on Anne Boleyn’s final week, when she was imprisoned and awaiting her execution. Let’s discuss Anne in the Tower.
Listen below, or read the Very Rough Transcript.
A very rough transcript on Episode 237: Anne Boleyn’s final week in the tower
Hey friend, and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network, and the original Tudor History Podcast, telling stories of Tudor England since 2009. I am your host, Heather. I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
So this is episode 237, I think, and I’m It was around this time of year, of course, May 1536, when Anne Boleyn was being held in the Tower of London, awaiting her fate, which would, of course, come to her on May 19th. So, I’ve been doing a couple of different episodes. Members and patrons will have seen a couple of episodes on the timeline of Anne’s downfall.
Members and patrons got an episode yesterday on whether or not there really was a romance with Thomas Wyatt. The evidence against him because he was also one of the men accused, although he was not formally indicted and he was freed. Hillary Mantel has some interesting thoughts on that in the Wolf Hall series as well.
So in this episode, I’ve been reading, um, Alison Weir’s The Lady in the Tower, which is something I kind of come back to at this time of year every year. It chronicles the plot against Anne, and Basically, what happened, man’s final month of life, how Anne was reacting, how the people around her were reacting.
And I want to talk today about the early period in her imprisonment. So the period before her trial, when things were still kind of uncertain, when news was still spreading, when people weren’t sure what was happening. Um, So, if you want to really dig deep, I mean, Alison Weir’s book, I have the e book, so I don’t know exactly how many pages it is, but it’s a full book.
It goes into huge amounts of detail on this, so I obviously cannot do that in a 20 minute podcast episode. But we’re going to talk about, um, you know, the period from Anne’s arrest, kind of up to around her trial time, and what was going on, and What she was saying, what the letters say, all of that kind of stuff.
So let us get right into it. On the morning of May 2nd, 1536, Anne Boleyn was actually very busy. She was watching a tennis match. She was supporting a player who won and she actually said that she should have placed a bet on him. So she was just kind of finishing up that train of thought when a messenger arrives.
Telling her that she needs to present herself before the Privy Council. So Anne goes to the Privy Council. She’s probably nervous. And the truth is, she also had likely been expecting something like this. Just a few weeks earlier, she had mentioned to her chaplain, Matthew Parker, that she had hoped that Matthew Parker would take care of her daughter, Elizabeth, if anything had happened to her, which was a charge that he took very seriously and would honour for his entire life.
There was also a very famous, uh, argument between her and Henry where she wrapped up the young toddler Elizabeth in her arms and, you know, that’s been portrayed many times. So, Anne knew things weren’t right. Just how unright they would be was still to be seen. So she enters the Privy Council chamber and there are three men.
There are her uncle, Norfolk, and then Sir William Fitzwilliam, and Sir William Pollett, the King’s Controller. William Fitzwilliam had actually just returned to Greenwich, which is where they all were, from London that morning, having, um, Just had the, uh, responsibility of committing Henry Norris to the Tower.
So these people were not men who were very supportive of Anne. Right away, they informed her that she was accused of evil behavior. And they formally accused her of having committed adultery with Norris, with Mark Smeaton, and there was one other that they could not name. Of course, Anne denies the charges.
And she said she was the King’s true wife. No other man had ever touched her. And she would have known that these crimes were serious and that her enemies were out to destroy her. She would have known right away, then after this, that this is what the plot was. And she also would have known that the king himself had ordered her arrest.
Because they couldn’t do this without the king’s knowledge. So, she knew right away what the charges were. Uh, she knew kind of what the game was, what the plot was that they were going to be playing. and she knew that the king was okay with it. Later on she would say that when she was at Greenwich she was handled very cruelly and the other thing she mentioned is that her uncle Norfolk didn’t really say much except he would just tut tut her.
Tut tut. Which, you know, kind of just looking down on her. Although when I hear tut tut I think of Winnie the Pooh because didn’t he say tut tut it looks like rain? Wasn’t that a Winnie the Pooh? Was it tut tut? Putt putt? I forget. Anyway, I digress. So. And still at Greenwich, she hears about these charges, and then they take her back to her rooms for her dinner.
Because of course, you know, we need to have things go according to propriety. She is the queen. So she’s taken back to her rooms for dinner. Can you imagine what a terrible dinner that would have been? There she is. She’s under guard. And one thing she noticed, apparently, regularly, it was a custom that the king’s waiter would arrive to wish her, on her husband’s behalf.
Much good may it do you that the meal so the waiter would arrive and say much good may it do you and this did Not happen today She also looking around saw that her ladies and servants were struggling to contain their tears So she tries to eat what little she can eat also keep in mind She is just three months post miscarriage where she miscarried of a baby that was about 15 weeks gestation So, it wasn’t an early miscarriage, this was a late miscarriage, so she, probably her hormones were all over the place.
It was not, this was not a, an easy time for Anne, and here she is having this lunch. Everybody’s crying, she doesn’t know what’s happening. Norfolk returns, she’s still seated at the table, she’s still under her cloth of estate. Norfolk has Cromwell with him, as well as some other Lords of the Council, Captain of the Kingsguard, and Norfolk has a warrant for Anne’s arrest in his hand.
And asks why they came and Norfolk says they came by the king’s command to take her to the tower. She replies that if it be his majesty’s pleasure, she was ready to obey. So they took her right away. She wasn’t given any time to pack. She wasn’t even given any time to say goodbye to Elizabeth or gather her women.
You know, and it’s hard because I look at this and I say, that’s so terrible. I can’t even imagine. Oh, it’s so tragic. Catherine of Aragon wasn’t given time to say goodbye to her daughter either, so it’s all, it’s all tragic. It’s all sad. And so she doesn’t have time to do anything. No gathering her women, nothing.
The men told her that she would be provided for in the Tower, and she was, actually. They budgeted over 8, 000 pounds in today’s money just for her food. Now, I know food is expensive and inflation and cost of living and all that kind of stuff, But 8, 000 pounds is a lot of money. So she was clearly going to be served as a queen, taken care of as a queen, but her household was left behind in Greenwich.
Anne is taken during the daytime. This was a big deal because normally with something like a queen or someone really famous or noble. You would want to take them in the evening, at night, under the cover of darkness so people couldn’t necessarily see, it wouldn’t be a spectacle. They took Anne in the middle of the day.
News spreads quickly, there’s crowds that come along the river to watch Anne, jeering crowds, you know, all of that kind of stuff. Anne enters the tower by the court gate. It took a couple of hours to get there. She was apparently arrested after her dinner at about two o’clock. And then the reports say that she arrived at the tower at five o’clock.
It shouldn’t really take that long by barge, so there might be a little bit of a mix up, but, you know, it wasn’t just a quick ten minute drive or something. This was a process, and the whole way people are staring and, you know, along the river watching, all that. So she gets there, she goes to the court gate, and the normal tradition was whenever a noble person entered the tower, uh, they lit off a cannon.
So there’s a cannon shot, and she’s greeted by the constable of the tower, Kingston. He is kind and respectful to her, which was more than what her uncle had been. And as she entered, of course, there’s the famous story that she fell down on her knees, asked God to help her since she was innocent. And then the counselors left her after formally committing her to Kingston.
There’s also then the very famous story that she worried she was going to be put into a dungeon and Kingston said no, she would go into the same lodging that she had during her coronation, Queen’s Apartments. Just three years before, hard to believe, almost three years exactly, she was in the Queen’s Apartments.
They had just been refurbished for her. So she made the remark that She had been a bit better received the last time she arrived at the Tower, so, which the last time would have been her coronation. So she’s taken to her lodgings. By this point, she was fairly hysterical. She was crying, she was laughing, going back and forth.
Um, the stress must have been unbelievable. So we actually know a lot about Anne’s time in the Tower because Kingston regularly sent reports to Cromwell and the Council. He was instructed to do this. These reports were kept in the British Library. They were damaged in a fire in 1731, but they had been transcribed before then.
Kingston’s report. Kingston’s wife was also with Anne. So again, Kingston’s wife was reporting things to, to him as well. So Anne enters her rooms and she sees the women who were chosen to be her household while she’s in the tower. There was one kindness granted to her and that her old nurse had been chosen to be one of her ladies in waiting.
But her other four household ladies were clearly spies. There was her aunt, Lady Boleyn. Now, this aunt was the wife of her father’s younger brother, James, and they had switched allegiance to the Lady Mary shortly before. There was also Lady Shelton, her father’s sister. Lady Shelton was the mother of Madge Shelton.
Of course, Madge Shelton is famous because Anne had positioned her to be Henry’s paramour when Anne knew that Henry had a roving eye, as it were, and she wanted someone who would be on side to be Henry’s chosen person so that they at least would, you know, not say bad things about Anne. But all of that had damaged Madge’s reputation quite a bit.
And so Lady Shelton was no fan of Anne. Lady Shelton had also been an attendant for Princess Mary. And had been the one who had been officially charged with making Lady Mary, Princess Mary’s life miserable. There was also Kingston’s wife, she was a friend of Catherine of Aragon, and a supporter of Princess Mary, so she also was not a fan of Anne.
Anne was apparently quite angry at Henry for these appointments, and it was clear that Cromwell, Cromwell was hoping that Anne would incriminate herself to these ladies. that as they were talking throughout the day she would say things and let things slip. But Anne knew she was being watched. She had dinner that night with Kingston.
Royal prisoners especially would have been invited to have dinner with the constable. So at dinner she asked if she could have Holy Communion so that she could pray for mercy. This was for a couple of reasons. She wanted to make it very clear that she saw no reason why she shouldn’t receive the sacrament.
There was nothing between her and God that she needed to confess or anything like that. And she also wanted to show herself as a pious woman. At dinner, she asked about her brother, wondered where he was. Kingston didn’t give any information away. He said he didn’t know why she was there. He didn’t know anything about her brother.
But by asking about her brother, that shows a couple of things. It shows that she didn’t know that he was accused. And she didn’t know what these terrible accusations between her and her brother would be. It also, though, was twisted. All of these questions she would ask about the men who were involved It painted her in a very bad light to her enemies.
It was interpreted that, you know, she had this extraordinary amount of care for these men. She asked about Henry Norris. She wondered if he had accused her, saying that maybe they should just die together. And then she also said that her mother would just die when she found out what was going on. She said, Oh, like my poor mother, it’s just going to kill her.
So the truth of the situation was, it was kind of starting to set in for her. And she did ask, also famously, whether she should die without justice. To which Kingston responded that, of course, the poorest subject of the king has justice. And Anne kind of giggled at that because, of course, of course they do.
By that evening, most of the people in London had heard all of this news. Had heard that Anne, their queen, had been arrested. This was the first time in the history of England that a queen had been arrested like this. So it was a big deal. Chapuis was just over the moon and wrote back home that the plan that he had wanted had come to pass, better than anything ever could have been believed, to the disgrace of the concubine, Anne, who had been brought in full daylight to the tower with only four women left to her.
Now, of course, Chapuis was convinced that God had set this all up in retribution for what Anne had done to Mary and to Catherine. Later that night, members of the Privy Chamber were heard saying that they were just so happy that the king had escaped the great danger that he had been in being around Anne.
And most people seemed to agree that Anne was guilty, and the city actually seemed to hope that Princess Mary would be restored. Anne had never been popular. Those stories of during her coronation procession, the initials H and A for Henry and Anne, people would call out, ha ha, laughing. So, she was never popular with the people, and she didn’t have very many friends who were willing to speak up for her.
Most of the people seemed to have believed, or let themselves believe, that Anne was capable of these crimes. On May 2nd, that evening, there was a Roland Buckley, who was a lawyer at Grayson, and he wrote a letter to his brother, Sir Richard Buckley. Who was a friend of Henry Norris, was also a deputy of Norris.
And he wrote, Sir, you shall understand that the Queen is in the Tower, the Earl of Wiltshire her father, and my Lord Rochefort her brother, Master Norris, on the King’s Privy Chamber, and on Master Mark, with diverse other sundry ladies. The cause of their committing is of certain to be treason committed concerning their Prince.
That is to say that Master Norris should have due with the Queen. And he wanted Sir Richard to come back and maybe use his influence on behalf of Norris. But the courier was actually delayed. Cromwell had spies all around who were intercepting letters. The courier was delayed and didn’t get to Buckley in time.
Now, Henry was apparently ready to believe anything of Anne, and think about it, she had been ruthless in her ambition. She had even suggested, now it was in malice, it was in anger, it wasn’t, I would hope, really legitimate, but she had suggested that Henry maybe should execute his own daughter. There was suspicion that she had murdered Catherine of Aragon.
And what about all those rumors that came back five years before that she had tried to poison Bishop Fisher? So, Henry, of course, was letting himself believe all of this, and that night he saw his son, Henry Fitzroy, and he cried and said he was just so very happy that his children had survived, despite her attempts to kill them all.
Of course, Henry Fitzroy would die just about a month later. There were people who said that maybe that was Anne’s retribution, that she had actually been poisoning them, but it was a very slow acting poison. That is very unlikely. But at this point, Henry Fitzroy is still around. Henry VIII is very happy about this and saying they’re all just so lucky to have had such an escape.
So during this time in the Tower, Kingston made sure that he was hearing everything possible from the women spies in her room. Anne shared conversations that she had had with the men, including Frances Weston, about each other. And these conversations were all reported back to Cromwell via the women.
There wasn’t much else for her to do in this time, there in her rooms, except speculate about what was happening, or what wasn’t going to happen, or who knows. So, there was a lot of time where, you know, Anne saying, oh, there was this time when Francis Weston said this, or maybe they’re thinking about the time when Henry Norris said that.
There was a lot of speculation, and that was all going back to Cromwell. For example, on May the 3rd, Kingston wrote to Cromwell that Anne spoke of teasing Francis Weston, and saying that he loved Mad Shelton better than his own wife. And this is where we get the very famous story of him replying that he loved one in her household above them both.
And when pressed as to who that was, he said that it was Anne herself. Now, this was all just courtly love games, but in this context, it was taken literally by Cromwell and her enemies. Some of the men who worked for Anne during this time as these arrests are coming down were understandably nervous that they would be caught up in it.
Francis Bryan, for example, was ordered back to court and questioned by Cromwell himself. A very tense atmosphere at court. Now, some of this might be down to the counsel thinking maybe there were more men involved, but it also could have been an intimidation technique by Krahlma, like, hey, don’t raise your hand and speak up for Anne because you don’t know I might be coming for you next.
So many of those who worked for Anne wanted to distance themselves and they participated in the investigation against her just to make sure that their own names were clear. On May 5th, Thomas Wyatt was arrested with Sir Richard Page, who was a former secretary to Cardinal Woolsey. And, as I said in the Members Only episode this week, of all the men who were imprisoned with Anne, it’s Thomas Wyatt that there was actual evidence for a romantic flirtation with Anne.
And Wyatt got off and was freed. Cromwell himself made at least two visits to the Tower while Anne was there, but there’s no evidence that he actually saw Anne. Anne continued talking to her women, and saying stories about the men who were involved with her, who were accused with her, and this was still being interpreted by the women that she was being indiscreet, and that she was unnaturally interested in them.
Also, they were saying, look, she was fraternizing with the men inappropriately. At least, by not keeping enough distance between herself and them, she left herself open to accusations and suspicions. So, you know, you can’t win either way. Either you’re one of the people, or you’re, and then you’re being accused of potentially fraternizing with them inappropriately.
Or you’re up high and, uh, completely unavailable, and then people don’t like you for that. So, there’s no winning, you can’t please everybody. So, in this case, Anne’s style came back to haunt her. Now, I’m going to talk about a very mysterious letter that was supposedly written on May 6th. It’s in the Cotton Manuscripts in the British Library, and it’s called To the King from the Lady in the Tower.
This letter was first published in 1649, so a hundred years later. And it’s said to be a copy in Cromwell’s handwriting of an original letter sent by Anne to Henry. And it was supposedly found lying among Cromwell’s papers collected after he himself was executed in 1540. I’m not going to read the whole thing because it’s pages long, but I’m going to read a little bit of it.
It says, Your Grace’s displeasure and my imprisonment are things so strange unto me that what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether ignorant, whereas you send on to me. Willing me to confess a truth and so to obtain your favor by such a one whom you know to be mine ancient and professed enemy I no sooner received this message by him that I rightly conceived your meaning and if as you say Confessing the truth indeed may procure my safety.
I shall with all willingness and duty perform your command But let not your grace imagine that your poor wife will ever be brought to acknowledge a fault We’re not so much as a thought ever preceded. And to speak a truth, never a prince had a wife more loyal in all duty and in all true affection than you have found in Anne Boleyn, with which name and place I would willingly have contented myself if God and your grace’s pleasure had been so pleased.
You have chosen me from a low estate to be your queen and companion far beyond my dessert or desire. If then you found me worthy of such honor, good your grace, let not any light fancy or bad counsel of my enemies. Withdraw your princely favor from me neither. Let that stain, that unworthy stain of a disloyal heart towards your good grace.
Ever cast so foul ablo on me and on the infant princess, your daughter. Try me good king, but let me have a lawful trial and let not my sore enemies sit as my accusers and my judges. So it’s actually much longer than that, but that is the gist. There’s been a lot of argument over the years about this, the authenticity.
The tone itself seems set up to just kind of pick at Henry a little bit. Talking about his potentially changeable nature, and that justice might not be served, that would be a real insult to the idea of royal justice. Anne certainly wouldn’t have wanted to make Henry angry at this point. And when she was on the scaffold, she said very nice things about him.
But, this is two weeks before her execution, she might have risked it thinking she had nothing left to lose. So, who knows, many people think it is for man, many people think it’s not. It’s one of those history’s mysteries that we may never know the answer to. On May 8th, William Latimer, one of the Queen’s chaplains, had returned to Kent from Flanders, where he was informed about the Queen, and he was searched and interrogated about his own knowledge of the Queen’s deeds.
So, by this point, a week, 10 days after the initial arrest on May Day. Things were starting to wrap up in terms of the investigation. On May 9th, the King ordered 22 noblemen and 27 men of his privy chamber to meet at Hampton Court about what was going on, and they decided to have a trial by jury rather than a simple act of attainder, suggesting that they believed they had enough evidence to get a condemnation.
By having a trial by jury, they could make sure that justice was seen to have played out. And to have been fair, the evidence could be made public, ensuring that Anne’s reputation would be damaged and no one would question the guilty verdict. However, historical precedent was on Anne’s side. There had been other cases of Queens in both England and France committing adultery, even having had children with their lovers and they hadn’t been executed.
Even noble women accused of witchcraft were simply imprisoned. What Anne could have reasonably expected would have been something like what had happened to Isabella of Angoulême, whose husband, King John, had ordered that all of her lovers be strung up and hanged above her bed. Even Eleanor of Aquitaine, who had helped her sons in actual treason in a rebellion against their father, Henry II, she was simply imprisoned.
So, based on precedent alone, Anne could have expected that the men would have been executed, but herself to have been imprisoned. But she already was beginning to suspect that she was doomed, which of course she would be. So, by the 9th, 10th of May, there is an indictment that is formally unveiled, and then the trials begin.
And that is a whole other story. So we will leave it there for right now. We’ll talk more in another episode about the trials. I’ve done a couple of YouTube videos on the trials as well, which I will link to in the show notes and again, check out the Alison Weir book for real, um, Lady in the Tower, which, which is where most of this has come from to dig even deeper into this story.
Boleyn fan, you might, you might want to make it like a ritual of reading something like that. All right, my friend. Yeah. I hope that you are having a fan tabulous week. I hope that you continue to have a fan tabulous week and I will be back next week and we will talk again then. All right, thank you so much for listening.
We’ll talk soon. Bye bye
Heather Teysko is the creator, writer, and producer of The Renaissance English History Podcast,  the original Tudor history podcast, started in 2009. She's been writing about history online for over 25 years, since her first site on Colonial American history became number one in history on Yahoo in 1998. In 2019 she created Tudorcon, which is now a yearly event, in addition to writing books, and running TudorFair.com - a whimsical Tudor Merch shop.
She has been passionate about Tudor England since she first read Alison Weir's The Six Wives of Henry VIII 30 years ago, and subsequently moved to London after college to spend her time immersed in Tudor history (how exciting when she got to interview Alison for the first time!). In addition to history, she is passionate about travel, and has lived in 3 countries and 4 states (not counting her perpetual state of confusion), and her family (who help her host her YouTube channel occasionally).
