The Long Gallery Blickling Hall, Norfolk.
Blickling Hall, Norfolk was built on the site of the childhood home of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII. It is a magnificient house with beautiful grounds and gardens and is now owned and managed by The National Trust.
We have often visited Blickling, both the house itself, the gardens and the parklands. I've purchased plants there, although I have to say they have never thrived. Blickling does not feel happy or friendly, it is a haughty house that sits brooding in it's beautiful setting, resentful of it's loss of status, reduced as it is to a tourist attraction.
Well that is how I feel about Blickling Hall, I'm sure others feel differently. But perhaps a haunted house will always feel odd, you see Blickling Hall is home to the ghost of Anne Boleyn.
Blickling Hall, Norfolk.
Anne Boleyn, daughter of Lord Rochford and niece of the Duke of Norfolk, was lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon the first wife of Henry VIII. Henry had been married to Catherine for 18 years when he became besotted with Anne, determined to marry her he sought to have his marriage to Catherine annulled. Unfortunately, Pope Clement VII refused to annull the marriage, but Henry was not to be thwarted. He had Parliament pass a law abolishing appeals to Rome on the subject of marriage and Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury declare the marriage illegal and void. This was to eventually lead to Henry VIII declaring himself "the Supreme Head on earth, under God, of the Church of England" in the Act of Supremacy, the break with Rome and the Reformation in England. Dangerous times indeed.
In the meantime he had secretly married Anne Boleyn. She was unpopular with the masses who considerd her to be an upstart, a schemer and possibly a witch. She bore Henry a daughter, Elizabeth, but failed to produce a son and within 3 years Henry had tired of her and determined to rid himself of her. She was arrested on a trumped up charge of adultery with a number of young men, including her brother.
Drawing by Stanley Herbert from R.J Unstead's book Crown and Parialment.
May 19th 1536, Anne Boleyn was beheaded. It is said that each year on the anniversary of her execution the ghost of Anne Boleyn travels to Blickling Hall in a carriage drawn by a headless horse and driven by a headless horseman. The carriage races up the drive only to vanish just before it reaches the hall. Lady Lothian, wife of the last owner of Blickling Hall, believed in this ghost, apparently she never looked out of the window on the night of the 19th May!
But perhaps there is another explanation for these ghostly appariations. Some say that smugglers would use a white horse with it's head blacked to make it appear headless, thus terrifying, to draw their carriage when running contraband.
What do you think? Will the ghost of Anne Boleyn ride again this weekend?
