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?