Was Anne Shelton one of the women who served Anne Boleyn in the Tower?

Myth-Buster

On 2 May 1536 Anne Boleyn was arrested and taken by barge to the Tower of London. “Master Kingston, do you know wherefore I am here?” Anne asked the Constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, when she arrived. Kingston himself knew little but refused to tell her anything of substance. “I hear say that I should be accused with three men, and I can say no more but nay”, she said nervously. She bombarded her gaoler with a torrent of questions. When did he see the King, her husband? Did he know where her “sweet brother” was? What about her father? In a state verging on nervous breakdown, Anne cried out: “Oh Norris, hast thou accused me? Thou are in the Tower with me and thou and I shall die together; and, Mark, thou are here too”. She knew that her quarrels with them were the main reason for their arrests. What she did not know at this point was that the third man arrested as her putative lover was her own brother, George. Soon, more arrests followed: Francis Weston, William Brereton, Thomas Wyatt and Richard Page.

Anne Boleyn in the Tower by Edouard Cibot. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Anne expected to have been lodged in the gloomy, airless dungeons, but Kingston led her to the royal suite she had occupied during her coronation only three years earlier. “It is too good for me”, she knelt down and started weeping, “Jesus, have mercy on me”. She cried and laughed at the same time, wondering whether she would be justly treated by the King, who was perhaps only testing her. “Oh my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow”, she sobbed, knowing that her mother suffered from a “cough that grieved her sore”

Anne was angry that the King had appointed women she was never close with as her attendants. In his letters to Thomas Cromwell, Kingston often mentioned four women who tended to Anne’s daily needs in the Tower: his wife, Mary Kingston; Margaret Coffin, the wife of Anne’s master of the horse; “Lady Boleyn”, Anne’s aunt and “Mrs Stoner”, who could have been the mother of the maidens, serving as mistress overseeing the behaviour and education of the young maids of honour. These women were to report everything Anne said during her imprisonment.

The identity of “Lady Boleyn”, the Queen’s aunt who served her in the Tower, has not been satisfactorily established by historians. Anne had two aunts who married her paternal uncles and were thus known as Ladies Boleyn: Elizabeth Boleyn, née Wood, and Anne Boleyn, née Tempest. The most plausible candidate is Elizabeth Boleyn, wife of Sir James Boleyn, who served as chancellor in Anne Boleyn’s royal household. Only one “Lady Boleyn” took part in Anne’s coronation procession—Elizabeth Boleyn’s position as the wife of the Queen’s chancellor makes her the most plausible candidate.

Some historians assert that Lady Anne Shelton, the Queen’s aunt who served as governess in the joint household of Princess Elizabeth and Lady Mary, was also present in the Tower with Anne Boleyn. Yet Eustace Chapuys’s dispatch dating to 19 May 1536 makes it clear that three days after Anne Boleyn’s arrest Lady Shelton was still in the household of the King’s daughters, making decisions as to who was allowed to visit Lady Mary and communicating with Chapuys. She is not mentioned in William Kingston’s letters as having been present in the Tower at any point during the Queen’s incarceration. She was not one of the women who served Queen Anne in the Tower.