The History Girls

 Researching my novels has always led me to fall in love with places. Hever Castle was my first love affair with a place – a love affair that continues to this day. I suppose this is not surprising considering the length of time my imagination lived within its walls. Dear Heart, How Like You This?, my first Tudor novel and published in 2002, took ten years to find a publisher. It was also the first novel I had ever completed.

Copyright and with thanks to Dr Owen Emmerson.

While I had proved to myself that I could indeed write a novel, getting it published proved another challenging story. Despite receiving a twice year although encouraging rejection, I was not brave enough to start a new project, so, as soon as another year of teaching was over for the year, I spent hours of my summer breaks revisiting my novel, which meant revisiting Hever Castle of my imagination. Hever Castle was a vital part of the fabric of my story. I imagined my main character, the poet Tom Wyatt, spending his growing-up years at Hever Castle, and falling in love with Anne Boleyn there. Having his heart broken there.

Living in Australia forced me to rely on the research of history books to build up in my mind my imagined Hever Castle. It did not take long before I burned with desire to see the castle for myself. I wanted to smell its air, walk its grounds, explore the interior of Hever Castle, climb its narrow, spiral staircase, listen to my footsteps crunching and echoing within the castle’s stone walls.

Eight years before my first novel found its publisher and two years before the birth of my last child, I got my wish. My husband and I took our children to England to visit their grandfather. One day, we left our three older children with an unsuspecting close relation, and we travelled along the winding roads to Kent.
‘It’s so small,’ I said to my husband on first seeing Hever Castle. Not an original observation, I must admit. But Hever Castle, for an English castle, is indeed small. Small, yet immensely beautiful. Tom Wyatt in Dear Heart describes Hever Castle as ‘enchanting’. I cannot remember now whether I wrote that before or after my first visit to the castle. I can only say truthfully, Hever Castle has deepened its enchantment on my psyche each time I have visited it.

Copyright VB.

In my eyes, few places in the world rival Hever Castle’s perfection when backed by the blue skies of an English summer, with green grass spread out before it.
Hever Castle is a moated castle built out of amber-coloured stones, stones usually heavily festooned with climbing, flowering plants in the warmer seasons. 

Copyright VB.

The lowered drawbridge takes its visitors through a gateway. Raise your eyes and you’ll see the niches with four stone saints protecting the gateway and its timbered courtyard. Originally built in 1270, the Gatehouse and walled Bailey are its oldest existing parts. Anne Boleyn’s ‘self-made’ grandfather, Geoffrey Bullen, purchased the castle in 1459.  Since Hever Castle was first built, the castle has experienced periods of great neglect, followed by extensive rebuilding. Such was the case when Geoffrey Bullen bought the castle. During the more settled period of the Tudors, a castle such as Hever rarely needed to be put to its original purpose, protecting all within and without from armed assault; rather those people high on the English social scale used castles like Hever to showcase their wealth. This happened at Hever Castle. Geoffrey Bullen was on the up and up, and he wanted the castle to assert his new status and wealth. He built for his family a fine Tudor home with large lattice windows within the castle’s walls. Nowadays, every room at Hever Castle seems filled to the brim with treasures of the Tudor age. The paintings are especially wonderful and set out for the visitor a feast for the eye, as well as for the Tudor lover, with their depictions of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, Mary I and – of course – Elizabeth I.

Still possessing the dark timber from the Tudor era, the castle’s entrance hall leads to the inner hall, once serving as Hever Castle’s ‘Great Kitchen’ in the time of the Boleyns. Here, in pride of place upon a mantelpiece, is a replica of a clock believed given by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn on the morning of their wedding in 1532.

 Portraits abound in the castle, original Tudor art and copies of paintings from the period. On one wall, there is a Holbein painting of Henry VIII alongside portraits of Anne and Mary Boleyn from the Holbein school. On another wall hangs a portrait of Philip II, surrounded by important women in his life: his mother, Isabella of Portugal, his second wife, Mary Tudor, and his third wife, Elisabeth Valois, her portrait painted by the famous French artist Clouet, the same artist who painted Mary, Queen of Scots, during her youth in France. 


The Dining Hall was originally the Boleyn’s Great Hall. Over its fireplace, a rectangular tapestry depicts the arms of Henry VIII. Wall tapestries featured in the Tudor period not only as items of great beauty but because they also helped to keep the fire’s warmth within the draughty confines of their homes.
Affixed to the dining room doors are copies of locks that Henry VIII took on his travels around his kingdom. The king’s locksmith, a servant accompanying the king when he stayed at the home of a subject, would attach a lock to the door of the king’s sleeping chamber, as a protective measure against the king’s enemies. 



The room where Anne Boleyn supposedly slept as a girl has an attention-grabbing architectural feature: a half-domed ceiling. Huge bedroom furniture dominates this room, as does the bedroom furniture in each and every bedroom at Hever Castle. It also possesses one feature I love most about homes from the Tudor Period: window-seats recessed into castle walls, backed by lattice windows. When I viewed this chamber in 1994 (how long ago that is now), I saw not only several depictions of Anne Boleyn, but also for the first time her book of hours. There is a legend that Anne Boleyn – moments before her execution – gave it to her friend and kinswoman Margaret Lee to pass to Sir Thomas Wyatt. Knowing how Anne Boleyn treasured that exquisite tiny book, I always shiver seeing it again as if touched by a ghost. 



Hever Castle has inspired my imagination and continues to do so. I only hope to return there one day.

New Edition of Dear Heart, How Like You This?