“As God is my witness, I do not understand.”
“Stop the pretence!” I hissed. “You are the Queen’s lover. I know the truth, and you shall die for it.”
“It is not true!” His voice rose in terror. “It is not true! Never have I betrayed you with the Queen, in thought or deed!”
“Come, Norris. She has betrayed us all; you are not alone.” He, too, was a victim. “Confess the truth, and you shall go free.” Suddenly I meant it. How could I punish him for a fault I shared with him?
“Confess the truth!” I repeated. “Let someone, at last, speak truth to my face!”
The whole truth was a different creature from the half-truth. I wanted him not to deny the accusation, for I knew the physical facts were true, but to somehow redeem it, to acknowledge the bald facts but to give them some interpretation I could live with h wa>
They came into her presence boldly, not deferentially.
“You have committed adultery,” the Duke accused her, “with five known men. These men are already imprisoned and have confessed. You, too, must confess. There is no more need to hide and lie. All is known.” He also accused her of incest and intent to murder her husband.
Anne angrily denied it. “I am clean from the touch of any man but my true wedded husband, the King!” she screeched.
Her uncle shook his head sadly at her stubborn lie. Already the State Barge, which would convey her to the Tower, was waiting by the water-steps of the palace, manned by Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, and four enemy women spies chosen by Cromwell to report every word Anne uttered henceforth.
“Tut, tut, tut,” murmured the Duke, shaking his head like the clapper of a bell.
That afternoon Anne was rowed to the Tower, while the bright spring sunlight glanced off the Thames and common folk waved excitedly at the State Barge.
When she was received at the entrance, she fell to her knees. “God help me!” she cried. “I am not guilty of the accusation!”
Then Kingston and his men took her away—to the selfsame rooms she had lain in the night before her Coronation. There she would stay, alone, with no kind person nearby. Where there had been flatterers and singers that other May night three years ago, now there was silence and mystery.
“Where is my sweet brother?” she cried.
“I left him at York Place,” Kingston answered. The truth was that George Boleyn had been taken to the Tower that very morning.
“I hear say that I shall be accused with five men; and I can say no more but nay without I should open my body,” she cried, flinging open her skirt hysterically. No one understood her words.
“O Norris, hast thou accused me?” she asked the air. “Thou art in the Tower together, and thou and I will die together; and Mark, thou art here too.”
When the King heard how she called upon her brother, Norris, and Smeaton, he wept.
Cromwell knew the Queen well. He knew that she was “as brave as a lion,” as someone had once described her, but that even a lion needs an adversary. Without an adversary, without a clear-cut accuser, she would nervously babble and betray herself. He directed every word she spoke to be recorded. Anne Boleyn had never known how to keep silent. Cromwell, who had heard the “I have a longing to eat apples” speech, knew well how to exploit her fatal weakness.
The very first day he reaped a bountiful harvest. She recalled her conversation with Weston in which he had professed his love. She compared him with Norris. “I more fear Weston,” she said, and explained why.
The next day she came to her brother. Her spies had told her that he had been arrested.
“I am very glad that we both be so nigh together,” she said.
Kingston confirmed that five men had been arrested and now lay in the Tower because of her.
“Mark 220;That is because he is no gentleman,” said Anne, callously. She looked about. “They shall make ballads of me now,” she said dreamily. “But there is none but my brother to do so. Shall he die?” she asked Kingston.
At his refusal to answer, she descended to threats. “We shall have no rain until I am delivered out of the Tower!” she cried.
Kingston shrugged, unmoved. “I pray it may be shortly because of the fair weather,” he replied.
In the meantime the King stormed and screamed. He was wilder than Anne. The night after Anne had been taken to the Tower, his natural son, Henry Fitzroy, had come to call upon him and bid him good night. The distracted, sorrowing King fell on his thin shoulders and cried, “God be praised you are safe from that cursed and venomous whore, who was determined to poison you!”
The bewildered, coughing Fitzroy merely held him fast: son comforting father.
Then an eerie silence descended. The Queen and all her accused paramours and conspirators were held behind the stone walls of the Tower. Juries were being assembled, and formal accusations drawn up. Parliament was prorogued, not to meet again for a month. The King forbade any mail or ships to leave England. The outside world wondered what was happening there. They knew it must be something terrible and momentous.
HENRY VIII:
I started receiving letters. First Cranmer wrote me, in amazement and condolence:
And I am in such a perplexity, that my mind is clean amazed; for I never had better opinion in woman than I had in her; which maketh me to think she should not be culpable. And again, I think that Your Highness would not have gone so far, except she had surely been culpable.
Now I think that Your Grace best knoweth, that next unto Your Grace I was most bound unto her of all creatures living. Wheretofore I most humbly beseech Your Grace to suffer me in that which both God’s law, nature, and also her kindness, bindeth me unto; that is that I may with Your Grace’s favour wish and pray for her, that she may declare herself inculpable and innocent. And if she be found culpable, I repute him not Your Grace’s faithful servant and subject, that would not desire the offence without mercy to be punished.
Then Anne took pen in hand to persuade me. But the letter venomously accused me of shortcomings rather than addressing her own:
Your Grace’s displeasure and my imprisonment are things so strange unto me, that what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether ignorant. Whereas you send to me such a one, whom you know to be mine ancient professed enemy; I no sooner received this message by him, than I rightly conceived your meaning; and if as you say, confessing a truth indeed may procure my safety, I shall, with all willingness and duty, perform your command.
But let not Your Grace ever imagine your poor wife will ever be brought to acknowledge a fault, where not so much as a thought ever proceeded. And to speak a truth, never a prince had wife more loyal in all duty, and in all true affection, than you have ever found in Anne Boleyn-with which name and place I could uld become her adulterers and concubines... contrary to the duty of their allegiance ... she most falsely and treacherously procured them by foul talk and kisses, touchings, gifts and various other unspeakable instigations and incitements ... in accordance as her most damnable propensity to crime drove her on: that, moreover, for the perpetration of that most wicked and treacherous crime of adultery by the Queen certain servants of the said lord King, through the most vile provocation and incitement day after day by the said Queen, were given over and attached to the said Queen in treacherous fashion, and that from here and from other sources this is the account, as here follows of the treacherous deeds and words.
The list of actual acts and adulteries began:
On 6 October 1533 at the palace of Westminster ... and on various other days, before and after, by sweet words, kissings, touchings and other illicit means, she did procure and incite Henry Norris, a gentleman of the Privy Chamber of Our Lord the King, to violate and carnally know her, by reason whereof the same Henry Norris on October 12 violated, stained, and carnally knew her.
As for her own brother George, Lord Rochford, on November 2:
... with the Queen’s tongue in the mouth of the said George and George’s tongu
e in the mouth of the Queen, with kisses with open mouth, with gifts and jewels, by reason whereof Lord George Rochford, despising all the Almighty God’s precepts, and by every law of human nature, on November 5 violated and carnally knew his own natural sister.
The rest of the list (filled in with lascivious details) was:
—On Nov. 19, 1533, at Westminster, with Henry Norris.
—On Nov. 27, 1533, at Westminster, with William Brereton.
—On Dec. 8, 1533, at Hampton Court, with William Brereton.
—On May 19, 1534, at Greenwich, with Mark Smeaton.
—On May 20, 1534, at Greenwich, with Francis Weston.
—On June 20, 1534, at Greenwich, with Francis Weston.
—On April 26, 1535, at Westminster, with Mark Smeaton.
—On Dec. 29, 1535, at Eltham, with George Boleyn.
In addition to her “foul and insatiable lust,” she had conspired with her paramours against Henry’s life. She had told them “she had never wished to choose the King in her heart” and had “promised to marry one of them when the King died.” To keep them her love-slaves, she had played one off against the other, giving them outrageous gifts.
Cromwell and his Attorney-General, Sir Christopher Hales, introduced two other charges: that she had poisoned the Princess Dowager and attempted to do the same to the Lady Mary; and had injured the King’s health maliciously—for when the King became aware of her evil, he “had conceived in his heart such inward dis I knew, regardless of how others snickered at it.
She had mocked the King behind his back, her accusers said, made fun of his poetry, his music, his clothes, and his person. She had also written her brother George concerning her pregnancy, indicating that the child was in fact his.
Anne rose to defend herself. Standing as proudly as ever I had seen her, she tossed her head and spoke in a loud, ringing voice that carried to the farthest reaches of the stone chamber.
Significantly, she did not answer the latter charges. She addressed only the adultery ones, claiming that she was innocent, although she had given Francis Weston money, and had asked Mark Smeaton to her chambers to play the virginal. She spoke with eloquence and wit, and with unearthly charm.
But it did her no good. When the verdict was called, the majority of peers pronounced her guilty. Then her dread uncle Norfolk rose to pronounce sentence:
“Guilty of high treason, adultery, and incest. Thou hast deserved death, and thy judgement is this: That thou shalt be burnt here within the Tower of London on the green, else to have thy head smitten off as the King’s pleasure shall be further known.”
A great silence, then a movement from the peers. Henry Percy has collapsed. He must be carried, lying limply on his attendant’s shoulder, from the Hall. Anne watches him, and something in her face changes, withers.
She speaks now, but without fire.
“O God, Thou knowest if I have merited this death.” She pauses. “My Lords, I will not say your sentence is unjust, nor presume that my reasons can prevail against your convictions. I am willing to believe that you have sufficient reasons for what you have done, but then they must be other than those which have been produced in court, for I am clear of all the offences which you then laid to my charge. I have ever been a faithful wife to the King, though I do not say I have always shown him that humility which his goodness to me and the honour to which he raised me merited.
“I confess I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him which I had not discretion and wisdom enough to conceal at all times. But God knows, and is my witness, that I never sinned against him in any other way.
“Think not I say this in the hope to prolong my life. God hath taught me how to die and He will strengthen my faith.
“Think not that I am so bewildered in my mind as not to lay the honour of my chastity to heart now in my extremity, when I have maintained it all my life long, as much as ever Queen did. I know these my last words will avail me nothing, but for the justification of my chastity and honour.
“As for my brother and those others who are unjustly condemned, I would willingly suffer many deaths to deliver them; but since I see it so pleases the King, I shall willingly accompany them in death, with this assurance, that I shall lead an endless life with them in peace.
“I beg you, good people, pray for me.”
She rises wearily, and Kingston leads her out of the Hall and back to her imprisonment.
Her uncle is crying openly">The charges are read. They consist of the incest and adultery with his sister, the Queen. He denies it. Of plotting the King’s death. He denies it. Of implying that he is the father of the Princess Elizabeth.
At this he smirks and keeps silent, raising one eyebrow mockingly.
A last charge, written on paper, is presented to the peers, then shown to Lord Rochford; it is forbidden to speak the charges aloud before the people. The information has been supplied by Rochford’s own wife, Jane.
“Ah, yes,” George Boleyn says loudly, and reads the paper word for word. ‘My sister Queen Anne has told me that the King is impotent. He no longer has either vigour or virtue in his private parts.’” He laughs, jarringly. Cromwell protests, scolding like an angry jaybird. Boleyn smiles, saying, ”But I will not create suspicion in a manner likely to prejudice the issue the King might have from a second marriage.”
In one sentence, the King is now the accused. The next marriage has been mentioned, the unspoken thing the people are wondering about. Is it true the King has already chosen a successor? Could it be that all this is arranged merely to facilitate a new marriage?
But Cromwell has a higher trump: yet another statement by Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. She swears that there is an incestuous relationship between her husband and his sister the Queen. The “accursed secret,” known heretofore only to herself, she must in conscience reveal.
Now the accuser is discredited by his own wife, shown for the foul thing he is.
The twenty-six peers pronounce him guilty, and the Duke reads the sentence:
“You shall now go again to the Tower from whence you came, and be drawn from the said Tower of London through the City of London, there to be hanged and then, being alive, cut down—and then your members cut off and your bowels taken out of your body and burnt before you, and then your head cut off and your body divided into four pieces, and your head and body to be set at such places as the King shall assign. ”
A cruel hush descended on London after the trials, a breath-holding until the executions. Those who passed by the Tower could hear hammering, and knew the scaffolds were being reassembled, dragged out of storage where they had lain since More’s execution last summer.
It was said that the King passed these spring nights on his barge, courting Jane, and that the sound of music and the glow of lanterns carried across the water. They said he was rowed back and forth under the shadow of the Tower. They said a great deal of nonsense, but it made a striking story and painted a picture of the King as a satyr. The truth is that he went out on his barge only once, and not to “the shadow of the Tower,” but to visit Jane at Nicholas Carew’s house on the Thames.
LXXIV
HENRY VIII:
It was over, then. The trial was over and the Witch had not escaped her just sentence. Crum reported it all to me—even, sadly, the personal attacks on me. I was not affected by that; my only fear was that somehow, even yet, Anne w>To be burnt or beheaded at the King’s pleasure—I remembered her horror of fire. Would it not be revenge for my “pleasure” to inflict that on her? For her to meet her death, bound and screaming, for her flesh to be roasted, her blood boiled in her veins? I could smell the charred flesh, the stench of her hair aflame....
But I could not. I could not do that, knowing that she was bound for hell as soon as her soul quitted her body—where there would be fire aplenty, the everlasting fire that burns but does not consume. I would not imitate or mock the Devil in providing an earthly substitute. Let Anne quit this earth without bodily pain.
But there was one thing I would have of her, one thing that only she could give: information, a confession that our marriage had been false all along. I would send Cranmer to her, to receive her confession, holding out the promise to spare her the flames if she only admitted it, admitted that she had brought this marriage about by witchcraft, and now abjured it. For I would be freed of her before her death. She would not breathe her last as my wife. I would not be linked to her!
“Go to her,” I commissioned Cranmer, “to her suite in the Tower, and extract an oath from her regarding this matter.” I noted the questioning look on his face. “Yes, she still keeps state, under my express command. She has her royal quarters, her jewels and gowns.” I remembered More in his bookless cell. “They were what she sold her soul for, were they not? Let her enjoy them to the end.”
She would keep everything to the end (except her title as my wife), and suddenly I envisioned the fitting way for her to depart this life. I would send for a French swordsman, and he would perform the execution deftly and with style. She had always loved the “French way”; doubtless a good English axe would be too crude for her sensibilities. I wrote out the order for the Lieutenant of Calais. What a surprise I was giving her, right up to the last....
I began to laugh—first a little, then hysterically.
WILL:
We heard the screams of laughter coming from the King’s private chamber, but dared not enter. It sounded as if a madman were within, and we feared that somehow an intruder had gained entrance. The laughter was not recognizable as the King’s; that was the reason why at length a guard opened the door and checked inside.
There was no one there but King Henry, seated before his writing desk, and red in the face, looking apoplectic.
I approached him—I was the only one who dared—and stood ready to summon the physician. He had suffered a seizure, I was sure.
“Now, good my Lord, help is coming,” I said, in what I meant to be my most reassuring tone.
The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers Page 37
