Mystery
The Sopwell Wedding
In a riverside nunnery, they say, a king secretly took a new queen.
See it clearly
- What's there
- Tudor ruins in a riverside park
- Legend from
- 1530s
- Tone
- Curious
By the river stand the ruins of Sopwell, where, so the story goes, Henry VIII secretly married Anne Boleyn.
Beside the River Ver on the edge of St Albans stand the ruins known as Sopwell Nunnery. A Benedictine priory for nuns was founded here around 1140 by the abbot of St Albans, and after the Dissolution it was pulled down and replaced by a Tudor mansion, whose shell survives. A persistent local story claims that Henry VIII was secretly married to Anne Boleyn at Sopwell. The tale was already current in the eighteenth century, when the gazetteer writer Stephen Whatley recorded that the king, 'they say', was married there. It sits uneasily with the accounts historians usually give of where the wedding took place.