Commemorating a Queen: Anne Boleyn, Memory, and the Making of the Tower of London

Anne Boleyn’s execution in May 1536 is one of the most famous moments in English history. But how much of what we think we know about her final hours, her burial, and her presence at the Tower is actually grounded in evidence, and how much has been shaped by later storytelling, Victorian assumptions, and heritage tradition?

In this talk, Alfred Hawkins and Dr Owen Emmerson take audiences behind the scenes of the Tower’s commemorative landscape to explore how Anne has been remembered, reimagined, and physically marked across nearly five centuries. From the reliability of Elizabethan-era accounts of the execution, to the 1876 exhumation that claimed to identify Anne’s remains, they examine how confident conclusions were sometimes built on shaky methods and foregone assumptions.

The talk also explores the powerful places associated with Anne today: the supposed site of the scaffold on Tower Green, inscriptions and graffiti linked to her memory, and the creation of the “Anne Boleyn room” as a focal point for visitors. Along the way, the audience is invited to think about how historic sites balance emotional resonance, public expectation, and emerging research, and what happens when new evidence challenges long-established stories embedded in stone, space, and tradition.

Alfred Hawkins is an historian, building archaeologist, and building curator with a decade of experience working in the commercial archaeology, heritage, and museum sectors. He is Curator of Historic Buildings for HM Tower of London for Historic Royal Palaces, and he works as Cathedral Archaeologist at both Salisbury and Portsmouth Cathedrals. In these roles, he helps to conserve, research, and share the histories of some of England’s most important sites. In his broadcasting career, he has featured on prominent programmes such as Digging for Britain, Wonders of Europe, and Unearthed, on history platforms like HistoryHit, and he is a frequent expert contributor on the popular television series Inside the Tower of London. He has recently led a once-in-a-generation archaeological dig at the Tower, which has garnered extensive international press and has resulted, so far, in two peer-reviewed articles in the Ecclesiastical Law Journal and the Archaeological Journal.

Dr Owen Emmerson is a social and cultural historian, author, and consultant. He is part of the curatorial team at Hever Castle, Anne Boleyn’s childhood home. In 2024, he worked as one of the historical consultants for the BBC adaptation of Dame Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light. Emmerson was part of the research teams that identified the Book of Hours captured in Hans Holbein the Younger’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell in 2023 and a miniature portrait of Queen Mary I as Princess by Suzannah Horenbout in 2024. He is the co-author of several books and has contributed to numerous television documentaries, such as The Boleyns: A Scandalous Family (2021, BBC2) and Holbein’s The Ambassadors (2025, Arte).

Owens’ website can be found here: https://drowenemmerson.com and Alfreds’ here: https://www.hrp.org.uk/about-us/research/staff-research-profiles/alfred-r-j-hawkins/