Wonderful words but, as David Starkey points out, Elizabeth did not enter the Tower through Traitors Gate as it was low tide, instead, she was taken to Tower Wharf. “Here landeth as true a subject, being prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs.” According to “The Miraculous Preservation of the Lady Elizabeth, now Queen of England”, a tract which was added to John Foxe’s famous “Book of Martyrs” ( or “Acts and Monuments”), when the boat landed at Traitor’s Gate Elizabeth refused to budge and when she finally did get up and get out of the boat she said: On Palm Sunday, Elizabeth was taken from Whitehall to the Tower of London by boat, along the Thames. Click here to read a transcript of the Tide Letter. Elizabeth’s delay tactics gave her a few more hours at home but the words of her letter fell on deaf ears, Mary was determined to see her sister taken to the Tower and interrogated.

This was when Elizabeth wrote what David Starkey calls “the letter of her life”, the famous Tide Letter, so-called because as Elizabeth wrote this letter to her sister the tide turned, making it impossible to take Elizabeth to the Tower that day. On the 17th March 1554 two of Mary I’s councillors, Winchester and Sussex, arrived to escort Elizabeth to her prison by water. Elizabeth was told that Mary wanted her sister taken to the Tower for questioning and that she would be escorted there the next day. We can only imagine the sheer terror she felt when Mary I’s council turned up at her doorstep on the 16th March to formally charge her with being involved in Wyatt’s Rebellion, the revolt which had taken place in January and February 1554. The twenty-year-old Elizabeth had been taken to the Tower on 18th March 1554, Palm Sunday. Nobody knows what was going through Elizabeth’s mind as she left the Tower on the anniversary of her mother’s execution, but being released from the Tower was not a relief for the young woman as she feared that she was going to be assassinated on her way to Woodstock, where she was going to be placed under house arrest. On this day in history, 19th May 1554, the 18th anniversary of her mother Anne Boleyn's execution at the Tower of London, the future Elizabeth was released from her prison in the Tower of London and placed under house arrest.

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