In June 1509 a king not yet eighteen was crowned in Westminster Abbey beside his new wife, his dead brother's widow. Twenty years later he had no legitimate son, and he wanted out. What followed is the most famous marriage story in English history: six wives, two set aside by annulment, two queens beheaded, one wife dead after giving him his son, and one who outlived him. This walk tells it along a single line across London, from the Abbey where it began to the Tower where it turned darkest. From Temple Bar on, you follow Anne Boleyn's coronation procession of 1533 in reverse, all the way to its starting point. The route runs about five and a half kilometers from Westminster Abbey to Tower Hill, one of our story-driven self-guided walking tours.

Before you set off

The walking takes about an hour and twenty minutes. With the stories, allow two and a half hours. It is nearly flat, with a gentle climb up to St Paul's. Start at Westminster station on the Jubilee, District and Circle lines, and finish at Tower Hill station, right beside the last stop. The Abbey and the Tower both charge for entry, so check before you go if you want to see inside. The little gardens at Blackfriars keep weekday hours, but the story works just as well from the lane outside. Twice the story steps back in time, at Durham House Street and at St Paul's, and we will tell you when.

Westminster Abbey

You're on the north side of Westminster Abbey, looking at its great north front. Beside it stands the small church of St Margaret, and across the road to the east rises the huge old roof of Westminster Hall.

Henry was born at Greenwich on the twenty-eighth of June, 1491, a second son. His elder brother Arthur died in 1502, and in April 1509 Henry became king. Within weeks, on the eleventh of June, he married Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon. On Sunday the twenty-fourth of June they walked in procession from the Palace of Westminster to this Abbey and were crowned together by Archbishop Warham. Henry was four days short of his eighteenth birthday.

Then came the banquet, across the road in Westminster Hall, which the Abbey's own history calls "greater than any Caesar had known." In the east window of St Margaret's, made around 1526, Henry and Catherine kneel together in glass. Their first son, Henry, lived less than two months, and he is buried in this Abbey.

The Abbey would see one more coronation of a wife. On Whit Sunday, the first of June, 1533, Anne Boleyn was crowned here by Archbishop Cranmer. None of the later wives had a coronation.

And one wife lies inside. Anne of Cleves, the fourth, died at Chelsea in 1557, and Queen Mary gave her a Catholic funeral. Servants with a hundred torches met her hearse at Charing Cross. Her low tomb, south of the High Altar, is carved with her initials under a crown. Henry himself is buried at Windsor, beside Jane Seymour.

Twenty years on, the man meant to end this marriage lived just up the road. Walk north up Parliament Street and Whitehall. The Banqueting House is on your right, opposite Horse Guards, about eight minutes.

Banqueting House

In front of you is the Banqueting House, built by Inigo Jones between 1619 and 1622. It is the only important building left of Whitehall Palace, which burned in January 1698. Across the road, Horse Guards stands where Henry's tiltyard was.

Go back to the 1520s, when this was York Place, the London house of the Archbishops of York. Thomas Wolsey, an Ipswich butcher's son, became archbishop in 1514, and a cardinal and Lord Chancellor the next year. George Cavendish, his gentleman usher, says the King came here "divers times in the year," to banquets "set forth, with masks and mummeries, in so gorgeous a sort, and costly manner, that it was a heaven to behold." On one October night in 1518, after a lavish supper here, twelve lords and twelve ladies came in disguised as masquers, the King himself first among them.

But the marriage was failing. Catherine had borne six children, and only one survived, a girl, Mary, born in 1516. By the end of the 1520s the queen was in her forties, Henry was desperate for a son, and he had fallen in love with Anne Boleyn. By 1528 Wolsey had a commission from the Pope to judge it, and Cardinal Campeggio was sent from Rome to sit beside him.

Here is what this palace will see. On the second of November, 1529, Henry came by water from Greenwich and took over "the house which once belonged to the Cardinal." The building accounts soon mention "Lady Anne Rochford," Anne Boleyn. York Place became Whitehall. Wolsey was arrested and died before he could be tried. On the thirtieth of May, 1536, eleven days after Anne's execution, Henry married Jane Seymour here "in the Queen's closet." And on the twenty-eighth of January, 1547, he died here.

Why was the first marriage in doubt at all? For that, we step back to a young widow by the river. Continue north up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, then go east along the Strand. Durham House Street is a short lane on your right, about eight minutes.

Durham House Street

A rose window of Westminster Abbey You're at the top of Durham House Street, a short lane running down from the Strand toward the river. The palace is gone. Only the name remains.

Here we step back in time, to 1502. Catherine of Aragon had married Prince Arthur, Henry's elder brother, in November 1501, and the young couple went to live at Ludlow Castle. On the second of April, 1502, Arthur died, aged fifteen.

Catherine was left a widow in a foreign country. She was lodged here, at Durham House, the riverside palace of the Bishop of Durham, while her father, Ferdinand of Aragon, and Henry the Seventh argued over her dowry. She was short of money and kept waiting. The plan that won out was to marry her to the new heir, young Henry. But church law forbade a man to marry his brother's widow, so the Pope had to grant a special dispensation. He did, and in June 1509 the wedding finally happened.

Hold on to this, because the whole case would turn on it. Years later, Henry argued that a verse in Leviticus says a man who takes his brother's wife will be childless, and that God had punished him by leaving him without a son, dispensation or no dispensation. Catherine's side answered that her marriage to Arthur had never been consummated. If that was true, there had been no real first marriage, and nothing for Leviticus to forbid. At Blackfriars she would say so to Henry's face.

Now into the City of London. Continue east along the Strand, past the two churches standing in the middle of the road, to where the Strand becomes Fleet Street. The Temple Bar memorial, topped by a dragon, stands in the middle of the road, about thirteen minutes.