Free The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn by Alison Weir

Simancas and Elsewhere)
. Informative and often biased, this vast array of documents incorporates Spanish and Imperial ambassadorial dispatches and correspondence (many of which are also reproduced in the
Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII)
, and is by far the most useful diplomatic source.
    The “Spanish Chronicle”
Cronico del Rey Enrico Ottavo de Inglaterra (The Chronicle of King Henry VIII of England)
. An often controversial source, this was written before 1552 by a Spaniard living in London, who was perhaps an eyewitness (but not always a reliable one) to some of the events he describes. It has been attributed by some to Antonio de Guaras, who came to England in the train of Eustache Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador, in 1529. Much of the information it contains is based on hearsay and rumor, and its seemingly authentic detail is not always corroborated by other sources. As far back as 1905, M.A.S. Hume dismissed this source as “to a great extent hearsay” that “truly represented the beliefcurrent at the time,” while Ives has described it as “garbled street gossip, strongly laced with the picaresque.” 2
    John Stow (1525-1605), author of
The Annals of England
(1592) and
A Survey of London
(1598), was an antiquarian writing in the reign of Elizabeth I.
    Agnes Strickland’s monumental
Lives of the Queens of England
, dedicated to Queen Victoria, in whose reign it was published, is now much outdated, but in its day was a milestone of historical research, for Strickland was indefatigable in seeking out original source material, traveling around the country to look at documents in private collections. She also made use of secondary works that were respected at the time, but her work reflects the values of the Victorian age and is highly subjective. Its chief value lies in the scattered original sources that it cites.
    Charles Wriothesley , Windsor Herald (1508-62), was the first cousin of Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Lord Chancellor of England (from 1544), and wrote the larger part of his chronicle over the years before 1552 (although it was not published until 1581). Well placed—he was in the service of Lord Chancellor Audley; and his cousin, the rising courtier Thomas Wriothesley, was Clerk of the Signet and Cromwell’s man—and therefore well informed, he has been shown to be a highly reliable source.
    George Wyatt’s late sixteenth-century eulogistic memoir of Anne Boleyn, written in answer to Sander’s virulent attack on her, is one of the chief primary sources for her life. Wyatt (1554-1624), of Boxley, Kent, was the grandson of the poet, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Anne’s Kentish neighbor and sometime admirer, and he had been fascinated by tales of Anne from his youth, when he “gathered many notes touching this lady.”
    Wyatt himself wrote that he had had “the peculiar means, more than others, to come to some more particular knowledge” of his subject. Much of his information came from anecdotes handed down in his family, from George Cavendish’s
Life of Cardinal Wolsey
, a copy of which he owned, and from the reminiscences of three ladies: his mother, Jane Haute, who married his father Thomas, the poet’s son, the year after Anne Boleyn’s death; Anne Gainsford (later the wife of George Zouche of Codnor), who had been Queen Anne’s maid-of-honor “that first attended on her both before and after she was queen,” and afterward served Jane Seymour in the same capacity; and an unidentified “lady of noble birth, living in those times, and well-acquainted with the persons” about whom Wyatt wrote. Much of this source material survives in the Wyatt manuscripts in the British Library (Loan ms. 15) in the form of drafts, notes, and extracts from various works.
    Wyatt’s work, which was left unfinished, is so strongly biased in her favor as to be virtually hagiographic, and virulently anti-Catholic.

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PRIMARY SOURCES

Additional manuscripts, British