Wraith of Anne Boleyn

Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, was beheaded on 19 May 1536 within the precincts of the Tower of London, charged with adultery, incest and treason after a trial presided over by her own uncle, Thomas Howard, third Duke of Norfolk. One detail sets her execution apart from every other: no axe was used. A professional swordsman was fetched from the continent for the purpose and paid twenty-three pounds, six shillings and eightpence, though the sources disagree over whether he came from Calais or from Saint-Omer. His name is lost. The "Jean Rombaud" that circulates online is a twentieth-century novelist's guess, borrowed from an executioner of Saint-Omer recorded in that decade.

The place is not the one visitors are shown either. The glass memorial that now marks the scaffold on Tower Green was unveiled in 2006, over Victorian paving laid after an enquiry by Queen Victoria, and modern research puts the scaffold on the parade ground north of the White Tower, where the Crown Jewels are kept today: the carpenters raised it on the night of 17 May before the House of Ordnance. She was buried the same day in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, and six years later her first cousin Catherine Howard was laid in the same floor.

The best-documented tradition is not the Tower's but that of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, the house of her childhood. William Dutt set it down in 1901 exactly as the villagers told it: on every anniversary of her execution Anne returns to Blickling in a black carriage like a hearse, drawn by four headless horses and driven by a headless coachman. She is dressed all in white, and her hands support her severed head, which rests upon her knees. The sentence ran in the family: her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, was condemned to cross forty bridges of the county before cockcrow on that same night.

The Tower came later, and not without resistance. In 1864 a sentry swore he had challenged a whitish figure in a French hood where the face should have been there was nothing. He lunged with his bayonet, the blade passed clean through, and a flash ran up his rifle. He was court-martialled for sleeping on watch and acquitted because other witnesses, including an officer watching from the Bloody Tower, testified to the same sight. Even so, in 1907 Charles Harper still wrote that no stories were told of Anne Boleyn revisiting the Tower, and quoted Ernest Law, the palace historian, saying he had been hunting spectres for thirty-five years without meeting one, and suspected somebody had seen Jane Seymour and failed to recognise her.

That Anne Boleyn should now be the most travelled ghost in Britain says less about her than about the way legends grow: every house she ever had dealings with ended by claiming an apparition. She is placed at Hever Castle, where she was raised, under the oak or crossing the bridge over the Eden; at Marwell Hall, which is really Seymour ground; and at Salle Church, where there is no apparition story at all, only the belief that her body was carried there by night, the sightings being a later graft onto that belief.

The image everyone now carries the queen walking with her head under her arm was fixed in 1934, and it was a joke. "With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm", the music-hall song by R. P. Weston and Bert Lee with music by Harris Weston, sung by Stanley Holloway, is a comic turn about Anne haunting the Tower in search of revenge. From there it leapt into the rest of English folklore and stuck to any executed queen, including her cousin Catherine Howard, whom the tradition never described as headless. In the older versions Anne is not headless either: she has it with her, in her lap.