The Tower of London in Anne’s Life
If you read my post “Anne Boleyn and the Tower of London”, you will know that the Royal Palace where Anne stayed before her coromation and where she was tried and imprisoned no longer exists as it was demolished in the 18th century.
Here is a plan of what the Tower of London was like c1597:-
The White Tower is the black squarish blob in the middle and below that you can see an x below it which marks the site of the Great Hall and if you follow that around to the right you can see 2 which marks the Palace Building and then a 4 which marks the Queen’s Lodgings.
In the plan below, you can see the Queen’s Lodgings marked with a “g”:-
If you then compare these plans with the present day Tower plan found at https://www.hrp.org.uk/media/1587/tower-map-2018.pdf, you can see that the Queen’s Lodgings would have stood on the present day lawned area between the White Tower (2) and Lanthorn Tower (3).
Here is a video on the Royal Palace that Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII would have known:-
Location of Scaffold
Anne Boleyn’s scaffold was not built on Tower Green where you can see the glass monument today. In “The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn”, Eric Ives writes:-
“It was a short journey. Out of the Queen’s Lodgings, past the Great Hall where she had dined on the night before her coronation, through the Cole Harbour Gate (marked Coldharbour Gate remains, number 11, on the map), along the west side of the White Tower and then the first sight of the scaffold.”
and in “The Lady in the Tower”, Alison Weir writes:-
“Anne was escorted across the palace courtyard and through the massive twin towers of the Coldharbour Gate, which stood to the west of the White Tower and led to the Inner Ward of the fortress. Ahead was the scaffold.”
Weir also writes that Anne’s scaffold was “erected on the present parade ground north of the White Tower” and if you look on the map of the Tower of London this is the area between the White Tower (43) and the Waterloo Barracks (40).
For information and discussion on Anne’s resting place, see my post Anne Boleyn and the Tower of London (at the bottom).