Experts believe Cromwell had a hand in Anne Boleyn’s demise

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The mysterious history of the Tower of London has been explored in a fresh season of a documentary series on Channel 5. ‘Inside the Tower of London’ has returned, with the third episode to be shown this evening. The series goes behind the walls of the 11th-century citadel on the bank of the River Thames, and catches up with the Queen’s Yeomen Warders, or Beefeaters, who help manage and protect the Tower.

This season includes tributes held at the Tower for the late Prince Philip, who died this year, and also looks at the birth of four new raven chicks at the site.

The latest episode features Rob Fuller, the new Yeoman Gaoler, the person historically in charge of prisoners at the Tower, who gets to wield a ceremonial axe.

With the Chief Yeoman Warder on leave, Rob is tested as he presides over the 62-gun salute in June of this year for the anniversary of the Queen’s coronation in 1953.

During the Tower’s 1,000-year history, the site has been used as a fortress, a prison and a palace.

Anne Boleyn is one of the Tower’s most famous residents, staying there both ahead of her coronation, and later as a prisoner before her execution.

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Authors Sarah Morris and Natalie Grueninger, who wrote the 2013 book ‘In the Footsteps of Anne Boleyn’, described the contrasting moments of England’s former Queen at the Tower.

They wrote that “within the shadows of its walls”, Anne experienced both the “pinnacle of her triumph” and “the darkest days of her cataclysmic downfall”.

The pair said Anne “lodged at the Tower with Henry in sumptuous splendour prior to her Coronation in 1533”.

However, they added that she also witnessed her “the darkest days of her cataclysmic downfall” at the Tower as she was thrown in prison almost 1,000 days later in May 1536.

Anne became the second wife of King Henry VIII after he controversially divorced Catherine of Aragon without the Pope’s blessing.

The pair married in 1533 but their relationship later broke down as, like Catherine, Anne failed to provide her King with a male heir.

Just three years after their marriage, in 1536, Henry had Anne arrested and interned in the Tower.

The Queen was accused of adultery, incest and plotting against Henry with a group of courtiers.

Her eventual beheading at the Tower that year was carried out by a French swordsman to limit her pain, compared to if an axe had been used.

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Ms Morris and Grueninger claimed Anne went “bravely to her death”, which they described as a “private execution”.

They wrote: “It took only one stroke of the executioner’s sword to sever her delicate neck, the very same neck that the poet Thomas Wyatt had once praised as ‘fair’ in one of his admiring verses.”

The only time Anne was known to have visited the Tower before the run-up to her coronation, was with Henry in December 1532 after the pair returned from Calais, France.

Anne was taken to the Tower to inspect the lodgings that were being constructed for her in the run-up to her coronation.

Henry showed Anne the Tower’s Jewel House, which housed the Crown Jewels and coronation regalia, which she would later wear as she was crowned Queen in Westminster Abbey.

The authors said: “This was a great honour indeed. Many items of gilt and partially gilt plate were transferred to adorn Anne’s increasingly lavish household during that December.

“Did the royal couple select the items from here? We can only begin to imagine what sights Anne laid eyes on for the first time that day?”

‘Inside the Tower of London’ airs on Channel 5 from 8pm-9pm.

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