Anne Boleyn's last seventeen days

Anne Boleyn came to the Tower twice. In May 1533 she stayed in freshly decorated royal lodgings before riding in triumph to Westminster Abbey to be crowned. On 2 May 1536 she was brought back as a prisoner, accused of adultery, incest and treason, and lodged, at the king's order, in the same rooms. Asked whether she would be put in a dungeon, she was told no. She was tried in the Tower, condemned, and on 19 May 1536 beheaded with a single stroke by a swordsman brought from Calais, a rare mercy. She was buried without ceremony in the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, a few steps from where she died. The lodgings are gone; the chapel and the green remain.

Read the full story

The first time Anne Boleyn came to the Tower of London, in May 1533, the fortress had been made ready for her. Henry VIII had the royal lodgings south of the White Tower refurbished for his new queen, and the two of them feasted there the night before she processed through the City to Westminster Abbey to be crowned. She was six months pregnant. The child, born that September, was Elizabeth.

The second time was 2 May 1536. She was brought upriver from Greenwich under arrest, charged with adultery with five men, one of them her brother, and with plotting the king’s death. On the way in she asked whether she would be put in a dungeon. “No, madam,” the Constable, Sir William Kingston, told her, “you shall go into the lodging you lay in at your coronation.” Kingston wrote down what she said in those days, in letters to Thomas Cromwell, and much of what we know of her last weeks comes from them. She laughed and wept in turns; she asked whether she would die without justice; she said the king’s only reason was to be rid of her.

The trial and the swordsman

Her supposed lovers were tried first, at Westminster, and condemned. Anne and her brother George were tried on 15 May inside the Tower, in the great hall of the palace that no longer stands, before a court of peers that included her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, as presiding judge. Both were found guilty. The five men were executed on Tower Hill on 17 May; her marriage was annulled the same day, which made the adultery charge logically impossible and changed nothing.

Henry granted one mercy. Instead of the axe, which could take several blows, he sent to Calais for a swordsman skilled in the French manner of beheading, in which the condemned kneels upright rather than laying a head on a block. Anne’s execution was set for 18 May, then delayed a day because the swordsman was late. On the morning of 19 May she walked out to a scaffold inside the walls, spoke briefly and conventionally, praying for the king, and knelt. It took one stroke.

No coffin had been provided. Her body was placed in an arrow chest and buried under the chancel floor of the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, the Tower’s parish church, a few yards away. Three days later Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour.

Finding her now

The lodgings where she stayed both times are gone, demolished in the seventeenth century, and the green has been relaid many times. The memorial on Tower Green marks the traditional scaffold site, though the exact spot is argued over. In the chapel, Victorian restorers lifting the chancel floor in 1876 found remains they identified as hers, and reburied them beneath a marked tile.

Her daughter came back in 1554, as a prisoner of her half-sister Mary, and was lodged in the same apartments. She was released on 19 May, the eighteenth anniversary of her mother’s death. Five years after that she returned to the Tower one more time, to sleep here the night before her own coronation.