On Tuesday 26th August 1533, Queen Anne Boleyn ‘took’ to her chamber to prepare for the birth of her first child, who would, of course, be the future Queen Elizabeth I.
Chronicler Edward Hall records that in the summer of 1533 “the kyng kept his progresse about London, because of the Quene”1 and we know from contemporary records that carpenters carried out work on Greenwich Palace to prepare the Queen’s chambers for her confinement. Eric Ives notes in his book on Anne that “details of the arrangements were handed on from one royal confinement to the next”2 with William Mountjoy, Catherine of Aragon’s lord chamberlain, writing to Thomas Cromwell on 24th July:
“I send you certain remembrances of things to be provided against the Queen’s taking her chamber, of which I had experience when I occupied the room.”3
On 19th August 1533, George Taylor, Anne Boleyn’s receiver general, wrote to Lady Lisle in Calais of the arrangements for the queen’s confinement:
“The King and Queen are in good health and merry. On Thursday next they will come by water from Windsor to Westminster, and on Tuesday following to Greenwich, where the Queen intends to take her chamber.”4
Anne did indeed take to her chamber on that Tuesday and you can read more about this in my article from 2013 – click here.
Notes and Sources
- Hall, Edward (1809) Hall’s chronicle: containing the history of England, during the reign of Henry the Fourth, and the succeeding monarchs, to the end of the reign of Henry the Eighth, in which are particularly described the manners and customs of those periods. Carefully collated with the editions of 1548 and 1550, J. Johnson, p. 805.
- Ives, Eric (2004) The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, Wiley-Blackwell, p.184.
- Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume VI, 890.
- Ibid., 1004.
