Read Online The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn by Alison Weir - Free Book Online Page B

Library:
    Letter 1, undated, Cotton ms. Otho C. X. f225
Letter 2, undated, Cotton ms. Otho C. X. f222
Letter 3, undated, Cotton ms. Otho C. X. f224b
Letter 4, dated May 16, Harleian ms. 283, f134
Letter 5, undated, Cotton ms. Otho C. X. f223

    Singer also includes in this sequence Sir Edward Baynton’s undated letter to Sir William FitzWilliam, sent while Anne Boleyn was in the Tower. This is Cotton ms. Otho C. X. f209b.
    Gregorio Leti (1630-1701) was an Italian historian whose life of Elizabeth I was written in 1682. Educated by Jesuits, he converted to the Protestant faith and for some years lived at the court of Louis XIV of France. He then came to Britain and wrote a history of England for Charles II, but fled to Amsterdam in 1683 after offending the King. Because his biography of Elizabeth was allegedly biased against Catholicism, it was suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church, and nearly all the original copies were destroyed. A French translation was published in 1692 in Amsterdam under the title
La Vie d’Elisabeth, Reine d’Angleterre
, but some of the original content is certainly missing. Leti researched his work in the libraries of the Earl of Anglesey (which boasted five thousand volumes) and Bishop Burnet, and perhaps used contemporary sources that are now lost. Although some passages are almost certainly apocryphal and contemporaries had no great opinion of Leti’s veracity, there is something of interest in it for the historian.
    Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII . This is a monumental archive of contemporary documents (some in abstract), now available online, and said to include at least one million separate facts about Henry VIII.
    Clement Marot (1496 1544) and Crispin, Lord of Milherve , were two renowned French men of letters, whose writings are a valuable source of informationon Anne Boleyn, whom Marot knew personally. Milherve, who was present at Anne’s trial, wrote a separate metrical history, which was published in 1618.
    Girolamo Pollini , an Italian Catholic historian, wrote his
Istoria dell’ Ecclesiastica della Rivoluzion d’Inghilterra
in 1594. His work is biased in favor of Katherine of Aragon and Mary I, but while some passages appear to be apocryphal, much of what he wrote can be corroborated by other contemporary sources.
    William Roper (1496-1578) wrote a highly regarded biography of his father-in-law, Sir Thomas More, around 1556. He was married to More’s eldest daughter, Margaret, and his work, which has a strong Catholic bias, remains the primary source on Sir Thomas, to whom Roper was close.
    Nicholas Sander (1530-81), one of Anne Boleyn’s most virulent critics, was a Catholic who fled from England to Rome in the reign of Elizabeth I and became a Jesuit. His most famous work was his short and highly biased treatise on the Anglican Schism,
De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani, (The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism)
, which was published in 1585 in Rome and Cologne (and reprinted several times up to 1628) and reflected the damning Catholic view of Anne Boleyn. He was savagely critical of Henry VIII, but Anne, whom he regarded as the chief cause of the Reformation and vilified as “the English Jezebel,” was the chief object of his venom. He was responsible for several apocryphal but damaging slanders about her, such as the assertion that she was the bastard child of Henry VIII by her own mother, Elizabeth Howard, and the unsubstantiated tale that Anne herself was raped at the age of seven. Sander’s work was received with outraged scorn in England, and it prompted George Wyatt’s memoir of Anne, written in her defense. Wyatt called Sander “the Romish fable-framer.” The reprinting of Sander’s book in a French edition in 1673-74 spurred Bishop Burnet to write his history of the Reformation.
    The Spanish Calendar
(Calendar of Letters, Despatches and State Papers relating to Negotiations between England and Spain, preserved in the Archives at