On the day of Katherine of Aragon’s funeral, Anne lost a male fetus said to be fifteen weeks old, blaming the miscarriage on two incidents that had caused her great anxiety. Sparked by Henry’s latest flirtation, they’d had a violent quarrel, during which Anne angrily exclaimed, “I saw this harlot Jane sitting on your lap while my belly was doing its duty!” And on January 24, 1536, five days before Anne’s miscarriage, Henry’s horse had fallen heavily in the tiltyard at Greenwich, and after the king in his hundred pounds or so of armor was thrown from the saddle, the mount may have rolled on top of him. Henry had lain unconscious for two hours, and naturally his queen despaired for his life and feared for her own future, should the king die of his injuries.
But Henry wasn’t buying either reason. Utterly insensitive to Anne’s grief at losing another baby, he bewailed the death of his son. “I see God will not give me male children,” he lamented, leaving his wife devastated, and terrified of losing his love.
Yet Anne may have conceived again soon after this miscarriage, because in April, Henry was very indiscreetly boasting to his ambassador in France that God might yet see fit to “send us heirs male,” averring, “You do not know all my secrets.” However, there is no mention of this pregnancy in any surviving records. As Henry would never have executed his pregnant queen, it’s likely that if Anne had been with child in the spring of 1536, she lost that fetus as well, unless Henry’s “secret” was his plan to marry Jane Seymour.
There were also international matters that were nearly as pressing as Henry’s need for a son. Charles V was willing to enter an alliance with England, and even accept the legitimacy of Henry’s marriage to Anne, if his cousin Mary were to be recognized as Henry’s heir presumptive. But Henry refused to countenance the validity of his first marriage, which meant that Mary remained illegitimate and therefore unable to succeed him. The way Henry’s Chief Minister Thomas Cromwell saw it, Henry’s allegiance to Anne was jeopardizing, if not obstructing, England’s safest and most effective foreign policy.
Therefore, Anne had to be eliminated from the picture. So Cromwell, who had once been Anne’s staunchest ally for religious reform, switched horses and allied himself with the court’s pro-Seymour faction. It took the crafty Cromwell just a month and a day to transform Anne from Henry’s beloved wife and queen to the executioner’s victim.
On April 24, 1536, at Cromwell’s prompting, the king signed a document appointing a committee to investigate Anne’s possibly treasonous activities. Yet historian Eric Ives believes that Cromwell may have been acting of his own volition, presenting Henry with a fait accompli—a committee that he’d already covertly appointed—because the commission wasn’t set up according to the customary procedure. Its aim was to make Anne appear unfaithful and disloyal so that Henry would have an airtight reason to be rid of her.
Cromwell worked swiftly. On Tuesday, April 24, Anne had been Henry’s “entirely beloved wife”; yet by Thursday, April 27, she was the devil incarnate. According to Ives, Cromwell may not have told Henry why he called the commission; his intention to use it as an engine of Anne’s destruction was his own little secret; therefore, by the time the legal machinery was already grinding away it was too late to halt it.
It was politically expedient for the minister to destroy Anne’s supporters as well, and within a brief space of time, Cromwell had all his scapegoats in the pen, awaiting slaughter.
On the weekend of April 29 and 30, Anne had an enormous spat with Henry Norris, the king’s groom of the stool, in which she accused him of being attracted to her. Norris stammered that if he ever had such a thought, “he were his head were off,” whereupon Anne threatened to undo him if she chose. Witnesses to their altercation interpreted the quarrel as a come-on from Anne to Norris. To succeed in toppling Anne from the throne, Cromwell’s commission needed to compile a dossier of Anne’s purported lovers; the contretemps between the queen and Norris (because it included a hypothetical exchange about the king’s death), allowed them to put a treasonous construct on it, thereby ensnaring Norris in their lethal net.
Anne’s argument with Norris led to another, even more volatile one with Henry. A letter sent twenty years later to Queen Elizabeth from an eyewitness to the aftermath of the royal squabble, a Scottish Lutheran clergyman named Alexander Ales, describes the mood: Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene king your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard, when she brought you to him. I did not perfectly understand what had been going on, but the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the king was angry, although he could conceal his anger wonderfully well. Yet from the protracted conference of the council (for whom the crowd was waiting until it was quite dark, expecting that they would return to London), it was most obvious to everyone that some deep and difficult question was being discussed.
On April 30, a court musician and dancer named Mark Smeaton was arrested on the grounds that he had committed adultery with the queen. After being put to the rack the hapless and innocent Smeaton confessed to the blatant lie. The following day, three men of Henry’s Privy Chamber—Sir Francis Weston, Sir Henry Norris, and Sir William Brereton—were arrested, also charged with having bedded Anne. Weston was tagged because the previous year he had been overheard boldly telling Anne that Norris came to her chamber to see her, and not his intended bride, Madge Shelton. Brereton allegedly owed Cromwell money. The witch hunt was under way.
The indictment against the queen stated that “she, following daily her frail and carnal lust, did falsely and traitorously procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts, and other infamous incitations, divers of the king’s daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines.” She also stood accused of promising to marry one of her lovers after Henry’s death, and for swearing “that she would never love the king in her heart.”
Anne was arrested on May 2, 1536, on the charges of adultery, incest with her brother George, and conspiracy to kill the king. As her barge was rowed to the Traitors’ Gate, Anne was on the verge of collapse. “I was treated with greater ceremony last time I was here,” she exclaimed woefully, referring to her coronation procession. During her imprisonment Anne’s every word and movement were jotted down by the wardresses who had been entrusted with watching her, in the hope that the queen might say something to implicate herself and give Henry legitimate proof of her infidelity or other treasonous act.
Anne’s trial began on May 15 in the Great Hall of the Tower of London. Her brother George, Viscount Rochford, was to be tried by the same council of peers, on the charge of committing incest with his sister. Their uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, presided over the proceedings as High Steward. Two thousand spectators watched the circus from purpose-built stands. Among the bogus charges against the queen was an allegation of statutory treason pursuant to the 1534 Succession Act: “slander, danger, detriment and derogation of the heirs” of Henry and Anne. In other words, Anne was charged with being a traitor to her own daughter, Elizabeth.
She was also accused of a bizarre form of adultery. According to Chapuys, the most Protestant of the bishops claimed that “according to their sect, it was allowable for a woman to ask for aid in other quarters even among her own relatives” when her husband failed to satisfy her sexually. It beggars belief that anyone could have testified to such an absurdity. But rumors like these served to galvanize and maintain public opinion against the queen. Other stories that gained traction years later were the reports by Nicholas Sander, an exiled Catholic propagandist, of the “shapeless mass of flesh” or deformed fetus that Anne miscarried in 1535 as proof that the queen had indulged in unnatural sexual acts (such as incest with her brother) or dabbled in the dark arts, so desperate was she to conceive a son. Sander was also the author of the treatise alleging that Henry was Anne’s father, so nothi
ng he wrote should be credited by historians.
Yet in an age when “witches” were routinely rooted out and brutally executed, there are no mentions of witchcraft or the dark arts within the annals of the investigation and trial. The notion of witchcraft took root in yet another dispatch of Chapuys’s, which reads more like a Tudor game of “Telephone.” The imperial ambassador wrote that according to the Exeters, Henry told a courtier (in total secrecy, of course) that he had “made this marriage seduced and constrained by sortileges and for this reason he held the said marriage void and that God had demonstrated this in not allowing them to have male heirs and that he considered that he could take another” [wife]. Chapuys wrote his dispatches in French and the word “sortileges” as used at the time translated to “divinations” or witches’ spells.
Also among the more ludicrous allegations was the accusation that Anne had slept with her own brother. The charge was made by George’s jealous wife, Lady Rochford—a lady of Anne’s bedchamber. She thought her husband spent far too much time in his sister’s company in preference to her own, and therefore accused the Boleyn siblings of “undue familiarity.” As the prime architect of Anne’s downfall and her bitterest enemy during her final days, Cromwell hoped that the charge of incest would suitably shock and appall the council, with its titillating allegations of Anne’s “alluring [George] with her tongue in [his] mouth and his tongue in hers.”
According to the herald, Charles Wriothesley, Anne gave “wise and discreet answers” to her examiners, concealing her terror beneath a calm and regal demeanor. Chapuys wrote that when Anne addressed the court, she stated that she was ready to die, but regretted that loyal and innocent men should be executed as well. Of her own conduct, she allegedly admitted, “I do not say that I have always borne towards the king the humility which I owed him, considering his kindness and the great honor he showed me and the great respect he always paid me; I admit, too, that often I have taken it into my head to be jealous of him. . . . But may God be my witness if I have done him any other wrong.”
All four men accused of adultery with the queen were found guilty and sentenced to a traitor’s death—beheading, followed by castration, disembowelment, and quartering. However, in a fit of generosity, Henry commuted the sentence to a simple beheading. At the trials of the two peers, Anne and George, their uncle Norfolk read the sentence: the queen and her brother were either to be burned at the stake or executed, according to the king’s pleasure.
Two days after the verdict, George Boleyn, Mark Smeaton, and the men of the Privy Chamber were beheaded on Tower Hill. The throng that had amassed to witness this judicial murder placed bets on the possibility of a last-minute reprieve, particularly for the viscount, but none came.
“They will not let me live,” Anne acknowledged. “I am too great a threat to their religion.” In fact, many years later her daughter, Elizabeth, was told, “True religion in England had its commencement and its end with your mother.”
As a final gesture of kindness to the woman he once called his “fresh young damsel,” Henry, moved by pity to spare her from the flames, had spent £24 (roughly the equivalent of $12,600 today) to hire the executioner from St Omer in Calais. This agent of death wielded a sword rather than an axe, ensuring a swifter and less painful demise.
In a letter to Thomas Cromwell on the day of Anne’s execution, Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, recorded his conversation with Anne when she heard the news: This morning she sent for me, that I might be with her at such time as she received the good Lord, to the intent I should hear her speak as touching her innocency. . . . And . . . at my coming she said, “Mr. Kingston, I hear I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.” I told her it should be no pain, it was so little. And then she said, “I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,” and then put her hands about it, laughing heartily. I have seen many men and also women executed, and that they have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady has much joy in death.
But before she was executed, Anne suffered another ignominy. She was stripped of her title as queen, and her marriage—after all the struggles to achieve it—was declared invalid. It fell to Archbishop Cranmer to divorce them. He had been one of Anne’s closest confidants during the King’s Great Matter, and even as the hour of her death loomed large, Cranmer admitted, “I never had better opinion in woman than I had in her.”
The Decree of Nullity was dated May 17, though it was not signed until June 10, and it would be another two weeks before both houses of Parliament subscribed to it. Henry had gotten his marriage to Anne annulled on the grounds that his affair with her sister, Mary, had placed him and Anne within the first degree of affinity, even though, in 1528—at Henry’s urging—the Pope had issued a special dispensation that set aside the subject of Henry’s affinity to Anne based on his romantic history with Mary Boleyn.
But Henry had cleverly inserted a clause into the 1534 Act of Supremacy to the effect that any existing papal dispensations would no longer be considered valid if they were contrary to Holy Scripture and the law of God. This phraseology was relied upon to justify the invalidity of Henry’s marriage to Anne as incestuous. Their daughter, Elizabeth, not yet three years old, was made a bastard by it. Elizabeth, in fact, was the real target of the May 17 decree. The absurdity of it all was that if Henry’s marriage to Anne had never been valid, then how could she have committed adultery? Yet her guilt was accepted with the straightest of faces.
On May 18, Anne made a full confession to Cranmer, swearing on the sacrament that she had never been unfaithful to Henry. She went to the block maintaining her love for him and her innocence of the crimes for which she had been convicted.
Though she was to die as the Marquess of Pembroke, Anne looked every inch a queen as she mounted the scaffold on Tower Hill on May 19, 1536. Her red petticoat resembled a swath of blood beneath her dark gray gown of damask trimmed in fur. An ermine mantle enveloped her slender shoulders. Her long auburn hair was bound up under a simple white linen coif over which she wore a gabled headdress in the English style. Witnesses described Anne’s steps as light, almost blithe. Perhaps she was relieved to be released from her mental torment, knowing there was nothing left for her in the temporal world.
According to custom, she handed the headsman his fee, for which he thanked her, begging her forgiveness. After a brief exhortation to the crowd to pray for her, Anne knelt upon the platform and removed her headdress. “O, Jesu, have mercy on my soul . . . O, Jesu have mercy on my soul,” she repeated as she awaited the fatal blow.
Historian Antonia Fraser claims that the headsman, taking pity on Anne’s terror, deliberately and generously distracted her by turning toward a staircase, as if to call for his weapon. Anne instinctively followed the sound, giving the executioner just enough time to retrieve the Sword of Calais from the straw and remove her head with one swift, smooth stroke.
Although Anne had been Queen of England for only a thousand days, her legacy is enormous. Profoundly influential on the development of the Christian religion, Anne’s convictions were genuine. Eric Ives in his exemplary biography makes the point that she truly wanted to see the religion reformed, corrupt practices ended, and the Bible and Church services printed and performed in the vernacular so that the people could become more personally connected to their own religion.
The venerated English chronicler Raphael Holinshed praised Anne’s “singular wit . . . zeal of religion and liberality in distributing alms for relief of the poor.” She annually gave away £1,500 to the less fortunate—nearly $800,000 in today’s economy. She and Henry enjoyed a meeting of the minds as well as a shared physical passion, and a mutual interest in the arts, culture, and building—taking particular pleasure in renovating the properties that had once belonged to Cardinal Wolsey. Anne’s political influence on her husband and his kingdom remains undeniable; during their marriage English policy
took directions that continue to shape and impact the kingdom’s constitution.
By dint of her own intellect and abilities, Anne achieved what others could merely dream of. Although her ambitious father and uncle were seasoned courtiers whose success afforded her an entrée into the highest echelons of Tudor society, once she arrived, she was there to stay—despite her family—until an equally self-made individual, Thomas Cromwell, destroyed her. Few question the fact that Anne Boleyn was innocent of the charges for which she forfeited her head. But neither her bloodline nor her spirit perished on Tower Hill, for she left behind a daughter who would become England’s most venerated queen, and perhaps the greatest female monarch the world has ever known: Queen Elizabeth I.
HENRI II 1519-1559
RULED FRANCE: 1547-1559
an∂
CATHERINE DE MEDICI
1519-1589
married 1533-1559
“. . . never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore.”
—Catherine de Medici
ON A BRISK OCTOBER DAY IN 1533, IT WAS LUST AT FIRST sight when Catherine de Medici first beheld her fiancé, Henri d’Orleans, the second son of King François I of France. Unfortunately, the feeling wasn’t mutual.
Notorious Royal Marriages: A Juicy Journey through Nine Centuries of Dynasty, Destiny, and Desire Page 14
