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?