by Karen Davies | Mar 13, 2026 | Blog, History, Writing
In Anne Boleyn’s Book of Hours, still held at Hever Castle, she wrote the phrase Le Temps Viendra, “the time will come,” beneath an image of the Last Judgement. The moment when every soul is called to stand before God.
The author of the Tower Letter speaks in exactly those terms, reminding Henry VIII that at God’s general judgement-seat, where both you and myself must shortly appear, his conduct towards her would be weighed and found wanting.
Elsewhere in the letter the writer describes herself as having been raised from a low estate. Gareth Russell, historian, has described this as a psychological inconsistency, since Anne Boleyn, niece to the Duke of Norfolk, belonged to one of the most powerful families in England. He argues she would never have spoken of herself this way.
But that reading misidentifies the essence of the passage. It assumes that at the point of death, with everything at stake, Anne’s concern was social status rather than strategic intent.
The heart of the passage is not the low estate. It is what follows it. The writer says she could willingly have remained Anne Boleyn had God and the king been pleased so to leave her there. This is not social commentary. It is scripture. The educated sixteenth century mind thought in parables, hidden meaning, metaphor and allegory. Wording designed to land on one level but to resonate on another. David raised from shepherd boy to king. Moses drawn from the bulrushes. Esther lifted from obscurity. In every case the elevation belongs to God. The person is the instrument, not the architect.
The writer is placing Henry VIII inside that same framework, quietly and deliberately. You raised me, yes. But God raised you. And God’s judgement seat awaits us both. This kind of theological precision, embedded so subtly that it challenges the most astute Tudor historians, is exactly the intelligence scholars elsewhere attribute to Anne Boleyn.
Anne Boleyn was the woman who placed William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man before Henry VIII and introduced him to the divine right of kings. A woman who understood the divine order, that God could raise those according to his purpose, that kings rule by divine appointment, that earthly power is borrowed, and that it answers to something higher. The same young woman who wrote Le Temps Viendra in her prayer book, the time will come, her belief that God alone is judge. A conviction she carried to the very end.
If this is forgery, it requires a forger of very curious psychological profile.
What do you think?
by Karen Davies | Mar 13, 2026 | Blog, History, Writing
Anne Boleyn’s Tower Letter. Some historians say it is a forgery. Let us look at that claim carefully.
Two manuscript copies survive. The Cotton MS Otho C X is held within the collection of Sir Robert Cotton, a respected antiquarian whose grandson bequeathed the entire library to the nation without controversy or dispute.
The Tower Letter sits within that same collection. A collection that became one of the founding collections of the British Museum in 1753 and the basis of the British Library as it exists today. The second manuscript copy is the Stowe manuscript, copied in the hand of the Feathery Scribe. Neither is in Anne’s hand. The original is lost. And from this absence some historians have concluded forgery.
We do not have Shakespeare’s original manuscripts. What we have are later copies and printed texts. Nobody disputes they are his words. The absence of an original is not evidence of forgery. It is simply how documents from the sixteenth century were preserved and transmitted. They were copied. They were collected by antiquarians and eventually printed. That is the nature of the historical record. The surprise would not be that Anne’s original letter is lost. The surprise would be if it had survived.
But the letter does not exist only in manuscript. Lord Herbert of Cherbury printed it in 1649 in his Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth. After him came Burnet, Strype, Kennett, Ellis, Strickland, Froude. Generation after generation of historians and antiquarians copying, printing, and preserving this letter. The idea that all of them were unwittingly reproducing a forgery seems unlikely. What is far more probable is that what we are looking at is simply the nature of transmission and preservation.
There is something else that sits uneasy with forgery. The Cotton manuscript contains the letter written in Anne’s first person voice and a postscript written in the third. Some historians point to this as suspicious. But consider the risk. A forger’s entire purpose is to construct something convincing. Switching person in the same document is the opposite of convincing. It is far more likely to reflect transmission. Anne dictating. A scribe writing. Another hand adding a note.
Then there is the date. 6th May 1536. The trials have not yet taken place. The men are not yet condemned. Anne does not know what is coming. She is writing as events unfold, pleading for men whose fate is not yet sealed, with everything still to play for. Forgeries tend to be written in retrospect, with the benefit of knowing how things ended. This letter reads like someone who does not yet know.
Then there is what the letter does not say. Anne refers to her ancient professed enemy without naming him. She refers to the person whose affection has already settled on another party without naming her. She is writing to someone who already knows exactly who she means. That is not a forger writing for posterity. That is a woman writing privately to her husband.
Could a forger have done that? Would a forger even have known to?
What do you think?
by Karen Davies | Mar 13, 2026 | Blog, History, Writing
Some historians say it is a forgery. But there is something hiding in plain sight that nobody has noticed. Something so subtle that even scholars with strong biblical knowledge have missed it for nearly five centuries.
On Passion Sunday, 2nd April 1536, just over five weeks before her execution, Anne Boleyn’s own almoner John Skip stood in the Royal Chapel at Greenwich and preached a sermon from the Book of Esther. Passion Sunday was one of the most solemn days in the church calendar, the Sunday before Palm Sunday, when the court would have been expected to attend. Skip chose his moment carefully.
The Book of Esther tells the story of a woman raised by God for a time such as this. A queen chosen not by chance but by providence, to stand between her people and their destruction. The villain is Haman, a powerful royal adviser who manipulates the king into signing a death warrant against an innocent people in exchange for silver from their destruction. The king is Xerxes. Haman pays with his life on the gallows.
Skip’s sermon mapped that story onto the present. Anne was Esther. Raised by God to her queenship for a purpose. Henry was Xerxes. Cromwell was Haman. And the destruction being promised for silver was not the Jews but the monasteries. The dissolution was already underway. Cromwell had promised the king their wealth. Skip stood in the Royal Chapel and told the court exactly what he thought about that.
It was an act of extraordinary audacity. And Cromwell knew it.
Cromwell was in that chapel. Every person present understood exactly who Haman was. And exactly who had sent Skip there to say it.
Some historians say the Tower Letter is a forgery and that there is no connection between Skip’s sermon and Anne Boleyn. I beg to differ. Read on.
We know about this sermon because Skip was interrogated about it afterwards. That interrogation is itself the evidence of how it landed. You do not interrogate a man for a sermon that passed without notice.
Whoever wrote the Tower Letter reached for Esther’s words to plead for the lives of the condemned men, weaving the echo so subtly into the fabric of the letter that it has gone undetected for nearly five centuries, even by scholars with strong biblical knowledge.
Esther 7:3: “If I have found favour in thy sight, O king, and if it please the king, let my life be given me at my petition, and my people at my request.”
The Tower Letter: “If ever I have found favour in your sight, if ever the name of Anne Bullen hath been pleasing in your ears, then let me obtain this request…”
And the question it raises is simple. Could that kind of subtlety be faked? Would someone constructing a forgery quietly embed a biblical echo tied to a sermon preached just over five weeks earlier in the royal chapel at Greenwich? A sermon we only know about because the preacher was interrogated afterwards?
It seems unlikely to me. But I will let you decide.
The Cotton manuscript, one of the two surviving copies of the Tower Letter, contains two distinct parts. The main body, written in Anne’s first person voice. And a postscript, written in the third person, as if by a different hand entirely. If you were looking for evidence of Anne’s own words, it is the main body you would turn to first. And that is precisely where the Esther echo sits. Not in the postscript. Not in a later addition. In the most carefully composed part of the document. The part written in her own voice. The part most likely to be hers.
What do you think?
by Karen Davies | Mar 13, 2026 | Blog, History, Writing
We all know the story. We have heard it a hundred times. Anne Boleyn, 29th April 1536, allegedly turning to Henry Norris and saying “You look for dead men’s shoes, for if aught came to the King but good, you would look to have me.” Words so dangerous they helped send five men and a queen to the scaffold. Perhaps we have heard it so many times that we have stopped actually listening to it. Stopped questioning it. Stopped asking whether it happened at all.
The formal indictment charges have been subjected to rigorous scrutiny and rightly so. Over half of the prosecution’s case collapsed, dates where Anne was demonstrably elsewhere, circumstances that were impossible. Yet when it comes to this conversation we still accept it as fact without question. We put it down to Anne’s personality, outspoken, impulsive, and move on. But those present at her trial describe a different woman entirely. One who answered every charge with precision and articulation. The Anne of historical record was shrewd, calculated, politically sharp. Not a woman who blurted treasonous words openly before witnesses and then sent the other party to swear her innocence. Perhaps it is time to apply the proper scrutiny this conversation deserves.
Let’s start with the phrase itself. Dead men’s shoes was a common Tudor expression. Everyone knew what it meant. Yet an immediate explanation of what it meant is embedded in Anne’s alleged words, “for if aught came to the King but good, you would look to have me.” Do we say “it’s raining cats and dogs, although after all it is April, and we would expect April showers”? Of course not. Nobody explains a familiar idiom to someone who already understands it perfectly well. But perhaps the explanation is doing different work entirely. Perhaps it is there for the benefit of a very different audience, the peers who would sit in judgement.
Now look at what happens when you apply pressure to the sourcing.
Mark Smeaton was arrested on 30th April 1536. No surviving document explains why. There is no letter, no warrant, no report recording the original suspicion. The trigger for the arrest that began everything simply does not exist in the documentary record. That is not a minor gap. That is the foundation of the entire case missing.
Anne Boleyn arrived in the Tower on 2nd May. Only then do her alleged recollections of conversations with Smeaton and Norris enter the record, reported by Mistress Coffin, a lady specifically placed to report everything Anne said, to Sir William Kingston, who sent it directly to Thomas Cromwell. One pipeline. Every hostile filter you could imagine standing between the words and the record.
Here is where it becomes structurally uncomfortable. Smeaton was arrested before Anne spoke. Norris was arrested before Anne spoke. The surviving explanations for why both men were targeted appear only after they were already in custody. What the chronology shows us is this, Cromwell was still building the case while the suspects were already in the Tower. The narrative solidified after the arrests, not before.
Baynton’s letter makes this visible. Sir Edward Baynton was vice chamberlain of Anne’s household, one of the men at the heart of the investigation. Writing during the investigations he states that no man will confess anything against Anne except Mark Smeaton. If the alleged dead men’s shoes conversation had already happened publicly before witnesses you do not need confessions. You already have the evidence. Baynton’s letter shows a prosecution without it. Kingston’s reports of Anne’s alleged Tower musings filled that gap.
Kingston’s letters show the prosecution did not have the evidence when the arrests were made. Historians have accepted that Anne filled that gap herself, retrospectively, unwittingly, a frightened woman handing Cromwell what he needed. And because it looks retrospective it has been read as authentic. But look again at the language. An idiom everyone knew explained to a man who already understood it, a man she is allegedly intimate with, allegedly planning a future with. You do not explain dead men’s shoes to your co-conspirator.
And then consider this. Both alleged conversations, reported on the same day, pass through the same hostile pipeline to the same destination. Place them side by side and look at the language.
To Mark Smeaton: “You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do to a noble man because you be an inferior person.”
To Henry Norris: “You look for dead men’s shoes, for if aught came to the King but good, you would look to have me.”
The same construction, look to have me, in conversations with two entirely different men, both of whom are accused of being intimate with her. But pause on the Smeaton exchange for a moment. Anne reportedly rebukes him sharply for his presumption, reminding him of his inferior status. Yet this is a man she is simultaneously accused of taking as a lover. Are we to believe that a queen so conscious of rank in her presence chamber abandoned it entirely in her bedchamber? And it is worth asking why Smeaton is there at all. As a commoner he was the only one who could be tortured. He served a precise structural purpose in a prosecution that needed a confession it could not extract from men of rank. His inferiority was not incidental. It was useful, useful perhaps in the mind or minds of those constructing the charges. Are these really the linguistic fingerprints of a woman speaking in fear and shock in the Tower? Or are they the fingerprints of a record being constructed? The retrospective framing has obscured this conversation for too long.
Then there is the oath. After the alleged conversation Anne sent Norris, the man she allegedly said it to, to swear before her almoner John Skip that she was a good woman. Sending the other party in a treasonous conversation to swear your innocence does not protect you. It implicates him. It puts his name into the record before any formal investigation has placed it there. This is not the behaviour of the woman described at her trial, precise, articulate, politically sharp. If the conversation had happened as reported it is hard to imagine a more self-destructive response from a queen who by every other account knew exactly what she was doing.
The alleged dead men’s shoes conversation is load bearing for the entire treason charge. It is the moment that transforms alleged adultery into imagining the king’s death. Without it you have a struggling prosecution and a case built on a confession extracted under duress from one musician. With it you have a queen who spoke treason openly before witnesses.
The formal indictment charges were scrutinised and found wanting. This conversation deserves the same treatment. We have accepted a narrative as the explanation for these arrests when the evidence shows that narrative was assembled after the arrests had already happened.
Cromwell has received considerable rehabilitation in recent years. He has been recast as a brilliant administrator, a moderniser, a man of formidable intelligence. And perhaps he was all of those things. But brilliance and ruthlessness are not mutually exclusive. If this conversation was constructed, and the evidence invites us to ask that question seriously, then it was constructed with extraordinary precision. An idiom carefully explained for a court. The same phrase placed in two separate mouths. A retrospective framing so convincing it has stopped historians asking the harder question for nearly five centuries.
