Here’s how to make English history come alive for your child: Put a face on a headless body.
That’s right — get a picture of Queen Anne Boleyn, point to Anne’s delicate neck and cut right to the facts:
Anne so enchanted King Henry VIII in 1533 that he defied the pope and divorced his first wife to marry her. When Anne produced a daughter but no son, Henry trumped up some adultery and witchcraft charges against her, and Anne lost her head. The queen chose a silver sword for the job, not the traditional ax, because she thought a French swordsman would do a cleaner job.
Anne’s body was discarded in a mass grave for 350 years, until Queen Victoria decided to give Anne a proper burial. How were her bones identified from thousands of bodies found beneath the chapel floor in the Tower of London? By an unusual deformity, a defect that, according to Henry, proved Anne was a witch: She had six fingers on one of her hands.
Grisly stuff? Certainly. But tell a 10-year-old girl the sad story of the six-fingered queen, and she will remember. She also may long to stand on the spot where Anne, dressed in a fur-trimmed gown and red petticoat, calmly delivered her final words: “To Jesus Christ, I commend my soul.”
One stroke and Anne was gone — to live forever in the imagination of romantics like me and my daughter, Kate. We visited the site of the scaffold at the Tower of London in February, on Friday the 13th, 456 years to the day after Henry’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard, met the chopping block.
By then, Kate knew all about Anne. She knew all about Katherine. She knew about Henry’s four other wives, and she knew that Henry was so fat in the end that it took 16 men to lower him into his tomb.
By then, my daughter, who turned 10 on the day Princess Diana died, had come to know England because of its tragic endings.
“I’d like to have been Jane Seymour,” Kate says as we tour the Tower, “since she was the wife Henry really seemed to love.”
There’s just one problem with being Jane, I remind her: Henry’s third wife was just 28 when she died after an agonizing childbirth.
“OK, OK, then,” Kate says, “I’ll be Catherine Parr.”
Parr was Henry’s sixth and last wife. She outlived him and provided the ending for this rhyme, the easiest way to remember the fate of the corpulent king’s six wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.”
Horribly cruel in life, Henry has proved to be quite profitable 450 years after his death. He remains England’s best-known king — thanks to his indulgent ways and his wives. Nothing sells souvenirs quite like scandal.
At the Tower, his influence survives: the Yeoman Warders, known as Beefeaters, wear traditional Tudor costumes from the time of Henry’s reign and regale tourists with bloody tales of traitors and torture.
No one misses the site of the scaffold, where special prisoners such as Anne, Katherine and Lady Jane Grey (the nine-day “queen” who succeeded Henry’s son, Edward) met their ends.
On this day, a bunch of yellow roses, left in Katherine’s memory, adorns the scaffold site. And inside the nearby Chapel of Peter Ad Vicula, bouquets dot the graves of Anne and Katherine. Who left the flowers? No one knows, says Beefeater Mick Casson, but nary an anniversary goes by without somebody remembering.
“Not much in those graves now,” Casson says, “just a few bones.”
Just enough to give visitors a vivid history lesson — and the creeps.
It was another set of bones, though, that fascinated my daughter most — the skeletons of two children that were discovered in the Tower in 1674. Legend has it that Richard, Duke of Gloucester, desperate to steal the throne of his brother, Edward IV, locked his two nephews into the Tower after Edward IV’s death in 1483. The princes — heirs to the crown — disappeared, and the duke was crowned Richard III.
Two hundred years later, two skeletons were found at the base of a staircase in the White Tower, and though they were never positively identified, the bones were officially reburied as the remains of the princes.
Today, a plaque marks the spot where the bones were found, though most tourists miss it on their way inside the 900-year-old White Tower, which once held the royal armories but is now being renovated. (The armories and the famous executioner’s ax have been moved to a museum in Leeds.)
The princes’ marble urn rests in Innocents Corner at Westminster Abbey, close to the tombs of Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Mary, Henry VIII’s daughters.
The story of Mary and Elizabeth appeals to any girl who ever wanted to lock up a kid sister. To my daughter, who previously thought Marcia and Jan Brady embodied the height of sibling rivalry, the tale enthralls: Mary distrusted her younger half-sister, Elizabeth, so much that she threw Elizabeth into the Tower in 1554 just because they had different religions (Mary was Catholic and Elizabeth was Protestant). Mary was so nasty that a nursery rhyme was written in her honor: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary . . .” And to top all that off, “Bloody Mary” had 300 Protestants burned at the stake.
Poor Mary must’ve had a chip on her shoulder. That’s what happens when dad divorces mom and world domination hangs in the balance.
“Mary was really, really mean,” Kate decides as we inspect the royal tombs at Westminster Abbey. “Elizabeth was the nice one. I’ll be Elizabeth.”
Well, Elizabeth wasn’t quite that nice, I remind her: When Elizabeth heard that her own cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, might be plotting against her, Elizabeth had her cousin’s flame-haired head cut right off.
Today, the unloving sisters and their headless cousin rest near each other in the Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey.
Elizabeth and Mary share one tomb, and it is Elizabeth who gets all the attention. Her haunting effigy — high hairline and pointy nose, hands holding the royal orb and scepter — adorns the tomb. Mary’s bones rest under her sister’s, practically in bloody oblivion.
The inscription on their tomb reads, “Partners both in throne and grave, here rest we two sisters, Elizabeth and Mary, in the hope of one resurrection.”
Their brother Edward VI also lies in Westminster Abbey, as does one of Henry’s wives, Anne of Cleves. Her grave is near Poets Corner and easy to miss — much as Anne was in life. Henry disliked the “Flanders mare” on sight and quickly divorced her.
For his fifth wife, Henry, then 49, chose Katherine Howard, 19, a cousin of Anne Boleyn and Henry’s “blushing rose without a thorn.”
When they wed, Katherine vowed to be “buxom in bed,” and the king could hardly keep his hands off her — until he found out he wasn’t alone, and his rose lost more than her bloom.
We looked for what’s left of Katherine’s memory at Hampton Court Palace, Henry’s grand palace on the Thames. We found her in the Haunted Gallery, which owes its name to Katherine’s ghost. Before she was sent to the Tower, Katherine was imprisoned at Hampton Court.
There’s one other spot in London where Henry is united with all of his wives: Madame Tussaud’s, the wax museum that is the No. 1 tourist attraction in the city.
Forget the statue of Michael Jackson. The really spooky thing here are wax figures done by Madame Tussaud herself — more than 200 years ago. Madame Tussaud lived during the French Revolution, and it was her job to hunt through Paris cemeteries to find the heads of guillotined royals.
She sculpted the death masks of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI from their actual severed heads! These 204-year-old masks, dripping wax blood, are displayed on stakes in the Chamber of Horrors, next to the actual blade that chopped off Marie’s head.
This is jaw-dropping stuff, and so is the likeness of Princess Diana.
Our tour of London was quick — just four days — but it made a lasting impression on a child who was so moved by Diana’s funeral that she couldn’t wait to see Westminster Abbey, where it was held.
Kate’s favorite spot, however, was not majestic but stark: Beauchamp Tower, one of several towers inside the Tower of London. Inside this tower, on nearly every stone, are inscriptions scrawled by doomed prisoners — some elaborate, some unfinished.
One prisoner’s simple carving — “Jane” — is particularly moving. It was done 445 years ago by the Lord Guildford Dudley, the husband of Lady Jane Grey. The lady and her lord were beheaded when a plot by Dudley’s father to put Jane on the throne failed.
“Right there, right across from the scaffold where Lady Jane lost her head, is a message her husband left for the centuries,” says our guide, Beefeater Casson, raising his voice in excitement.
“That, my friends, is history come to life!”
IF YOU GO
– THE BASICS
Westminster Abbey: Entrance to the abbey is free, but it costs adults $8.75 and children $3.50 to see the royal tombs.
Madame Tussaud’s: $13 for adults and $8 for children under 16. This is the most popular attraction in London, and the crowds are tremendous all year. If you buy your tickets at the tourist information center at Victoria Station before you go, you’ll save lots of time.
Tower of London: $13 for adults, $8 for children 5 and up. Lines are long here, too, especially to see the crown jewels.
Hampton Court Palace: $10 for adults, $7 for children. The palace is 15 miles west of London. Take the train from Waterloo station (about $15 round trip for two).
– INFORMATION
Call the British Tourist Authority at 800-462-2748 or visit the Chicago office at 625 N. Michigan Ave., Suite 1510. It offers great free brochures, maps and advice.
