by Julia Fox
And for them, as the Marchioness of Exeter cheerfully informed Chapuys, matters were going from bad to worse. Henry was so touched by Mistress Seymour’s response to his note and the gift that he comfortingly assured her that he would only speak to her in the presence of her relatives. He would be scrupulous. To make such discourse easier, he proposed that their meeting place should be the room just requisitioned from Cromwell that he had assigned to Edward Seymour and his wife and which happened to have private access. Naturally, the carefully tutored young lady regretfully declined this too. And, equally naturally, Henry admired her virtue still more.
Anne and the family viewed Henry’s actions with dismay. Yet it was also very difficult for any of them to find consistency or coherence in Henry’s behavior. Chapuys jubilantly told Charles that the king had not spoken to Anne for weeks even before the miscarriage. He really could see light at the end of the tunnel in the form of Anne’s removal. But it did not occur. She was still there in April. The family land portfolio was increased too when Anne was given grants of land, as were Thomas and George. Perhaps the storm was subsiding again; Henry always had been fickle. Plans were made for the queen to be at his side on a forthcoming trip to Calais and, most significantly, Chapuys was inveigled into publicly acknowledging her. Jane knew just how much that precious moment meant to her husband and his sister. Coming to the palace at Greenwich to discuss foreign policy issues, now so much easier with Katherine out of the equation, Chapuys agreed to go into the chapel. Anne was there already. George escorted him and watched the ambassador’s encounter with his sister. Anticipating an acrimonious confrontation, many courtiers flocked to the scene to see “what sort of mien” queen and ambassador would adopt. If hoping for fireworks, they were disappointed. Carefully maneuvered so that he was behind the door as Anne emerged, the two came face to face as she returned the “reverence” Chapuys made to her. Sensibly, she was at her most gracious, “affable and courteous” to the man who frequently called her “the Concubine” in his many dispatches to the emperor.
But just when Jane might begin to hope that Anne would weather the current uncertainty, George missed out on an honor that would once have been unquestionably his. When a vacancy arose for a new Knight of the Garter, George was a clear contender. He could have joined his father, a member of that august order for more than ten years. George’s rival, Sir Nicholas Carew, was currently in the Seymour camp. The king allowed Carew to be elected, Anne’s influence not withstanding. She did not have “sufficient credit to get her own brother knighted,” reported Chapuys with obvious satisfaction.
It was a body blow, all the more damaging because it was so blatant. And it was with this snub to brazen out that the Boleyns took their places for the traditional May Day jousts at Greenwich. As both Anne and the king watched the proceedings, George, still a keen sportsman, faced Henry Norris on the field. It was all good humored and ostensibly quite normal. What was not normal was the peculiar behavior of the king. To everyone’s surprise, including Anne’s, he left the jousts abruptly to travel to Wolsey’s old palace of York Place in London. Spurning his barge, he rode back, having ordered Norris and a mere handful of attendants to accompany him. Anne and George were left behind at Greenwich, unable to make sense of the king’s conduct, but presumably after a hurried conference between them, George rushed to London in desperate pursuit of his brother-in-law to try to find out what was happening. Blissful ignorance was not to last. On the following day, May 2, 1536, brother and sister were taken, separately, to the Tower. Accompanied by Norfolk, Anne was rowed in full daylight, a stark parody of her triumphant entry into the city for her coronation. Then, the banks had been lined with spectators agog to catch a glimpse of their new queen; now, anyone by the side of the river was treated to a sight that was barely credible as she was moved from palace to prison. Anne and George’s nightmare was about to begin. So was Jane’s. And the origins of her own posthumous vilification started to take shape.
CHAPTER 21
The Edge of the Precipice
NEWS OF ANNE’S DISGRACE spread like wildfire and so did the rumors. Chapuys, in his report to the no doubt astonished emperor, asserted that her imprisonment was “by the judgment of God.” He managed to find out who was first taken, although the details of their offenses were still hazy. The Concubine was incarcerated for adultery “with a player on the spinet of her chamber,” he said. Norris was arrested too, “for not having revealed the matter,” and so was George Boleyn, but even the sharp Chapuys could not work out what George was supposed to have done. Roland Bulkeley, rushing the news to his brother, Richard, the chamberlain of North Wales, threw in additional victims for good measure: Thomas Boleyn, “one of the king’s privy chamber, and sundry ladies” were also captured, he wrote, all with a treason charge hanging over them, but he assessed Norris’s crime more as having “a do with the Queen.” The bishop of Faenza was convinced that Anne’s mother was another detainee.
In fact, these tendencies toward exaggeration were not that far from the truth. Thomas and his wife escaped detention but the existence of a complete list of the grants accumulated by Thomas and George, which was compiled after March 3, 1536, suggests that George’s father had every reason to feel threatened. For the king to have demanded an account of everything that he had given to Thomas and George over the years meant that Henry was considering taking it all back; if George fell, his property would be subject to confiscation, of course, but clearly the king was pondering the arrest of Thomas too. At any rate, the sheer speed of the arrests that did occur was staggering. The young musician, Mark Smeaton, was actually the first behind the walls of the Tower, escorted there on May Day, followed by Henry Norris at dawn the next day, then Anne, and then Jane’s husband a few hours afterward. But it did not stop there. Two days later, the bewildered prisoners were joined by Sir Francis Weston and Sir William Brereton and, on Monday, May 8, by Sir Richard Page and Anne’s early love, Sir Thomas Wyatt. It appeared that no one was safe. The question on many a lip during those tumultuous days was who would be next?
The investigation into the queen’s “incontinent living” was entrusted to Thomas Cromwell, who set about his task with assiduous thoroughness and his usual lack of sentiment. He painstakingly examined “certain persons of the privy chamber and others of her side,” basically anyone connected to Anne, to find out exactly what had been going on. One of those questioned was Jane. She was in a unique, if somewhat unfortunate, position for she was the individual most intimately linked to both brother and sister and with freedom of access into the queen’s most private apartments. If anyone had known what went on between Anne and George, and between Anne and those gentlemen who flocked to her chamber, it would be Jane.
When she was ushered into Cromwell’s presence, therefore, she had every reason to be frightened. Her previous experience of rustication from court, the only time so far that she had felt the effects of Henry’s wrath personally, was nothing compared with this. As a noblewoman, she would not face torture, definitely a reassuring thought, but Henry had just proved that imprisoning his wife, a crowned queen and his “own sweetheart,” left him completely unmoved, and Elizabeth Barton’s gender had provided no protection against the death penalty. If Cromwell discovered that she had any knowledge that she should have divulged, then she was in the worst trouble of her life. Jane’s peril was very, very real. Moreover, should she evade an unwelcome sojourn in the Tower, there was her financial status to consider. If George was convicted of treason, all their possessions were subject to confiscation. George would be dead, she would be near penniless, with only her jointure to rely on, and the lands and estates so carefully accumulated would be a thing of the past. She could forget her expensive dresses, her silver and gilt plates, and that glorious bed; she could, literally, be in the street, dependent on her parents’ charity, since she would face a legal wrangle to obtain her jointure should Thomas be arrested too. Jane had before her the example of the plight of Alice More, the
executed Sir Thomas’s widow: while she had been allowed by Henry’s gracious mercy to retain a tiny proportion of their former property, the king had kept the bulk. There was no guarantee that he would let Jane keep anything. No woman wanted to be destitute. Jane would not beggar herself if she could avoid it.
However, every potential witness had the considerable handicap of not knowing what information Cromwell had amassed so far or what the scope of his enquiry entailed. Even the prisoners themselves were not told the full extent of the charges. “Do you know wherefore I am here?” Anne had asked the constable of the Tower, Sir William Kingston, her jailer, who feigned ignorance. Although there was a precious minute when she allowed herself to believe that she was somehow being tested by the king only “to prove” her, laughing in the same way that she had in front of the French ambassadors on a happier occasion, she did not maintain that illusion for long. She could not work out quite why she was under suspicion but she understood that a number of men were somehow involved and, in her fear, kept on blurting out incriminating scraps of conversations and events that the loyal Kingston dutifully reported.
One in particular stuck in her mind. On the day before the jousts, she had had an exchange with Norris in her privy chamber. This time the banter had got dramatically out of hand. In her usual fashion, she had teased him over his relationship with Madge Shelton, whom court gossip maintained he would wed. Why had he not married her, she wanted to know? He was a widower, so there was no reason to hold back. When Norris had replied that he “would tarry a time,” she had foolishly retorted that he looked “for dead men’s shoes” for he would have her if any harm befell the king. Norris, stunned by the danger of her thoughtless remark, quickly responded that if any such thoughts crossed his mind “he would his head was off.” He had understood at once that even such ostensibly trivial badinage could be construed as a plot to murder Henry. It was terrifying. Realizing that she had gone way too far and that someone might have overheard their conversation, Anne had rushed him off to her confessor to swear that she was a “good woman.” But it was too late; the damage was done. The king’s life was clearly threatened. This was treason.
And, in her incoherent babblings in the Tower, all carefully noted by Kingston and the unsympathetic ladies sent to serve her, Anne unwittingly presented the king’s chief minister with more and more circumstantial froth that he was only too happy to use against her and against any man whose name tripped from her tongue. Indeed, within hours of her idly mentioning chiding Weston for flirting with Madge Shelton despite being married, and his gallant response that the woman he loved more than both his own wife and the delectable Madge was the queen, he found himself behind bars, as did Brereton, Page, and Wyatt, to whom she also made reference in her almost hysterical outpourings. In those early days, the formerly shrewd queen was a prosecutor’s dream. She wondered about the Countess of Worcester, whose child, she said, “did not stir in her body…for sorrow she took of me.” Quite what her references to the Countess of Worcester meant perplexed Kingston as much as they still perplex us today, but he recorded her words nonetheless in case they might prove useful. She worried about her “sweet brother,” about her father and her mother who, she thought, would “die with sorrow.” To voice concern about her parents was natural; in the current circumstances, any mention of her brother was suspect. She managed to remember a potentially incriminating conversation with Mark Smeaton as well. Finding him standing forlornly by the window in her presence chamber, she reminded him that he could not expect her to speak to him in the same way as she would a nobleman, as he was “an inferior person.” His riposte that “a look sufficed” him coupled with a perfunctory “fare you well” demonstrated her occasional overfamiliarity wonderfully clearly. It was another gift to Cromwell, for no one would have addressed Katherine with such a lack of respect, and Mark had been his first prey.
For, although Jane was unaware of it, Cromwell had collected a plethora of evidence he could use when the trials came. The pivotal confession of Mark Smeaton, the “spinet player” of Chapuys’ missive, made a comfortable start. Mark’s downfall had begun even before the May Day jousts. On Sunday, April 30, Cromwell had ordered the young musician’s arrest. Smeaton was taken to Cromwell’s house in Stepney where he was questioned about just how familiar his relationship with his queen truly was. A statute of 1351 had pronounced it treason to “violate” the king’s companion even with her consent. The minister’s agents were skilled interrogators, highly accomplished in prizing secrets out of even the most reluctant or most courageous of prisoners. Few could resist for long. We will never know what pressure they applied to Mark, although there were suggestions that he was racked or that a rope was tightened around his head with a cudgel until the pain was so intense that he had no choice but to say anything that might stop the agony. Perhaps he was promised his life if he cooperated. But whether tortured or not, confess he did: he had, he said, slept with Anne. Once the king was told, there was no going back. Enquiries had to be undertaken, and Cromwell was the man to pursue them. No one doubted that he would approach his mission with diligence. After all, Henry’s honor was at stake, and if Anne’s foolish comments to Norris were taken seriously, so was his life.
Jane and the rest of the Boleyns were completely in the dark about all of this. Naturally, they had agonized over the various difficulties that had beset them over the past few months. It was plain that Anne and Henry could be closer, or he would not be looking at any other woman. The lack of a son was the main stumbling block, but there was still a chance that Anne might conceive, and the royal marriage had always been a roller coaster of emotions. They could come through this. Even the inevitable fallout from Katherine’s death was not insurmountable. Should Henry want to shift allegiances toward the emperor and away from Anne’s beloved France, very much a current possibility, they could accept that. If that happened, the rehabilitation of Lady Mary would be a major problem, of course, but there might be room for accommodation there too. As for Anne’s disappointment that the proceeds from the current round of monastic closures were going into Henry’s pocket rather than into her cherished schemes of poor relief, she would have to get over it for the time being and work on Henry once she regained her influence. She ought also to patch up her recent quarrel with Cromwell, no longer a staunch ally.
But for Henry there was a hidden agenda. What the minister understood was the depth of his master’s involvement with the gentle and demure Mistress Seymour, whom the king was no nearer to enticing into his bed. With Anne’s shining example before her, she was holding out for marriage. If anything so dented the king’s faith in Anne that he made up his mind to get rid of her, Jane Seymour would soon wear a crown. Then anyone who helped him achieve his goal, and the happiness he was sure he would find with a new bride, would gain his gratitude. Jane might have the fate of Alice More before her; Cromwell had that of Wolsey before him. Henry was used to getting his own way. It was his minister’s job to get it for him or suffer the consequences of failure. The evidence we have on when or why the king decided that he no longer wanted Anne as his queen is inconclusive, but it was probably a sudden decision, perhaps taken shortly after Chapuys was forced to acknowledge her in the chapel at Greenwich. Jane, naturally, had even less forewarning than her sister-in-law. The first she knew was the dramatic arrest of her husband and her own subsequent interrogation.
But it had started a little before that. By the time he got around to interviewing Jane, Cromwell’s dossier was getting thicker. John Husee, writing to Honor Lisle, told her that three women had accused the queen of infidelity, “the lady Worcester, Nan Cobham and one maid mo[re].” Of the three, Husee offered no clues about what Nan or the maid might have said but he identified Elizabeth, Countess of Worcester, who had stood at Anne’s side during the coronation banquet, and about whom Anne’s mutterings had been overheard by Kingston, as “the first ground,” or original witness. The story was that she had betrayed Anne’s secret affairs w
ith Mark and with George Boleyn when reproved by her brother, Sir Anthony Browne, for her own immorality. Nothing she had done, she was supposed to have said wildly, was as bad as the behavior of the queen. As Jane was to find out for herself, anyone who concealed knowledge as spectacular as that was in peril. Browne, concerned for his own safety, therefore discussed the matter with Sir William Fitzwilliam, Elizabeth’s half brother, and the matter eventually reached the ears of Cromwell. Perhaps. In view of Anne’s friendship with the countess it all seems far-fetched but certainly something prompted the arrest of poor Smeaton.
What we do know is that Cromwell sent for the private correspondence of Bridget, Lady Wingfield, because one particular letter to her from Anne can be found in the British Library among documents extracted in the seventeenth century from the State Papers. Had Cromwell not kept the note, it would not have ended up here but in the private archive of the Wingfield family. As it is, it was seized at Cromwell’s fall and is therefore a matter of public record. Anne had written this puzzling letter some time before becoming Marquess of Pembroke. The note is conciliatory to the point of obsequiousness, for Anne apologizes profusely for appearing to neglect Bridget, acknowledging that she had not “at all times” showed “the love that I bear you as much as it was indeed,” but reassuring her that she did in fact love her “a great deal more than I fair for.” Anne’s love, was, she stated, “unfeigned” she loved Lady Wingfield “so entirely.” Indeed, she said, she hoped that Bridget would accept that she would “write nothing to comfort you in your trouble” but would “abide by it as long as I live.” The nature of that trouble probably mystified the minister as much as it does us. What he surely realized, though, was that Anne wanted to keep on the right side of Bridget; she did not want her as an enemy. And the only possible reason for that was that Lady Wingfield knew something that Anne preferred to keep hidden from her royal lover, presumably originating either from Anne’s early years in Kent or when she had first come to court. And when Bridget died some time in 1534, she is alleged to have made a deathbed confession, the golden nugget that Cromwell gathered up and that had raised his suspicions in the first place.
