ANNE BOO-LEYN

Anne Boleyn is one of the most famous English Queens, despite having lived nearly 500 years ago and having sat on the throne for only three years.

While her King, Henry VIII had absolute power, Anne pulled his strings, but for her miscarriage of two sons she would have been Henry’s second and last wife. Anne came to court as a handmaiden to Henry’s first wife Catherine of Aragon but quickly gained favour despite her physical abnormality: she had eleven fingers and an unnaturally giraffine neck, she was known to her foes as ‘the goggelley-ey’d whore’. However her failure to bear an heir for Henry was the first and only nail in her coffin, she had the book thrown at her with preposterous charges of witchcraft and incest. Anne was banished from court to Durham House on the site of southern Covent Garden. For the last and gloomiest months of her life, Anne Boleyn resided here answering accusations which everyone knew to be hooey. Her living corpse was taken to the tower for execution but she left her soul in Covent Garden.

On occasion her ghost can still be seen on Durham House Street, she flounces in a crimson gown seemingly aimless and with an attendant frosty aura; her countenance (unlike when she haunts the Tower as an amorphous ghost) is said to be unmistakeably that of Boleyn with the long neck and the bonus finger.