Anne Boleyn's Letter from the Tower: A New Assessment

“Sir, Your Grace's Displeasure and my Imprisonment are Things so strange unto me, as what to Write, or what to Excuse, I am altogether ignorant.”

Thus opens a burned fragment of a letter dated 6 May 1536 and signed “Anne Boleyn”, a letter in which the imprisoned queen fervently proclaims her innocence to her husband, King Henry VIII.

This letter "from the Lady in the Tower” has divided historians in recent years, with some dismissing it as a fake. There has been no definitive study of the letter or its mysterious provenance... until now. In Anne Boleyn's Letter from the Tower, Sandra Vasoli provides an in-depth investigation of the individuals who may well have kept the letter safe for nearly 500 years, from author to its present home in the British Library.

• Did Anne Boleyn actually compose the letter from the Tower?
• Did Henry VIII regret his final tragic actions against Anne Boleyn?

Sandra Vasoli unravels the mysteries of this letter and also reveals a startling comment found buried in an age-old document which gives us a cryptic clue into Henry VIII's anguish over his second wife. The culmination of this research may well alter the accepted view of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII's doomed marriage…