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?