CHRIS KOENIG says the important role of Wallingford Castle in changing English history is not to be forgotten

Was the Constable of Wallingford Castle, Henry Norreys, really in love with Queen Anne Boleyn, and did she really countenance his love enough to carry on a dangerous liaison with him?

We will never know for certain. What is certain is that the mere rumour was enough to drive that despot and ogre, Henry VIII, to murderous paroxysms of jealousy.

Talk about loose words costing lives! Court tittle-tattle was rife and inevitably reached the ears of the king. Was it then by design or mistake that Anne dropped her handkerchief during a jousting tournament? Certainly it was unwise of Norreys in the circumstances to pick it up, wipe his face with it, and then courteously give it back to her on the tip of his lance, driving the king apoplectic with rage.

Norreys was arrested, tried in Westminster Hall, found guilty and executed five days later on May 17, 1536. Anne Boleyn herself suffered the same fate a couple of days later.

"Put not your trust in Princes," he may well have quoted from the psalms (as Lord Stafford famously did of Charles I in the next century when he he received notice of his own forthcoming execution), for it seems unlikely that such an experienced courtier, knowing the king's horrible personality, would have done more than carry on a playful repartee with her.

Certainly Anne's daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, believed in his innocence and in that of her mother. She created Norreys' son, the first Baron Norreys of Rycote.

The trouble had apparently started the year before the executions when a courtier called Sir Francis Weston told Anne that Norreys was in love with her. She then had a word with Norreys, joking about how he was waiting to "step into dead men's shoes".

Norreys had long been a favourite of the king's. In 1519 he was created Keeper of the King's Purse and Bailiff of Ewelme. In 1523 he became Bailiff of Watlington and in 1535 Constable of the castle of Wallingford, then in royal hands.

Certainly he helped Anne rise to power and plotted against Cardinal Wolsey and against the king's first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Little remains of Wallingford Castle now to show its past, vast importance. But one building that would have been there even when King Henry and Queen Catherine visited Wallingford in 1519 is the George Hotel, formerly known as the George and Dragon, built a year earlier. It would almost certainly have been used to accommodate some of his courtiers.

The irony here is that Henry VIII owed his very existence to an intrigue at Wallingford involving another Catherine.

This beautiful Catherine was the widow of Henry V. She retired to Wallingford Castle after her husband's death. Her son, Henry VI, was educated there, and it was there too that Owen Tudor seduced her.

At the end of the Wars of the Roses, when Henry VI's wife, Queen Margaret, was imprisoned at Wallingford Castle, the Lancastrian cause seemed lost - until , that is, Catherine and Owen's grandson (father of Henry VIII) took the throne as King Henry VII Tudor.