by David Loades
This fairly straightforward account, however, creates some difficulties. Why did Henry postpone a trip which he was apparently planning to make to Calais, and why did he allow a public tournament to go ahead on 1 May, a tournament in which both Norris and George Boleyn were taking part? He seems to have ridden off unexpectedly before the conclusion of this event, whereat Edward Hall tells us ‘many men mused’.[353] The details of the King’s behaviour suggest a mind in turmoil. Norris was one of those who accompanied Henry when he left the tiltyard, and the latter seems to have taken advantage of the short ride from Greenwich to Westminster to persuade Norris to confess the truth. It was only when he persisted in his denial that his arrest was ordered, and then not until the following morning. At the same time Anne was herself arrested, and George, who seems to have been intent on finding out what was going on, was taken into custody later the same day.[354] So the timing of Henry’s conviction presents some difficulties. Was he persuaded a week earlier, when he decided to postpone the Calais trip? Or on the evening of the 29th when he heard about Anne’s indiscreet remarks? Or did something happen during the tournament which finally converted him? The suggestion is that Cromwell informed him of Smeaton’s confession in the course of that day, and that it was the receipt of that news which caused his sudden departure, and his confrontation with Norris.[355] That is plausible, because what is clear is that Cromwell had won and over the next few days consolidated his advantage by building a case against the Queen which would admit no rebuttal. Francis Weston and William Brereton, both members of the Privy Chamber, were also arrested and charged with the same offence, although how they came to be identified as suspects is not clear. What is clear is that they both, along with Henry Norris, denied any wrongdoing. As Sir Edward Baynton, who had been involved in the interrogations, wrote to William Fitzwilliam a few days later, the problem was ‘that no man will confess anything against her, but all-only Mark of any actual thing. Whereof (in my foolish conceit) it should much touch the King’s honour if it should no further appear …’.[356]
In other words to secure a conviction on the evidence available would involve overt pressure on the court of a kind which the King was not supposed to apply. Nevertheless, by using circumstantial stories, of which there was a great abundance, Cromwell soon had enough for his purpose, and juries were empanelled on 9 May. Indictments were found with convincing details of dates and places where the alleged offences took place, and their trial was ordered for the 12th. It was obviously intended, by securing the conviction of the accomplices first, to leave the trials of the principals as foregone conclusions. And so it transpired. The juries were packed with Cromwell’s clients and agents, who did their duties as required and all the four defendants were condemned to a traitor’s death.[357]
Meanwhile Anne was her own worst enemy. Taken to the Tower with a handful of attendants, she began to indulge in inconsequential chatter which seems, as reported, to have had an hysterical edge to it. While consistently denying the charges against her, she recalled a number of flirtatious conversations of the kind which were bound to arouse suspicion. Flirting seems to have been second nature to her, and Norris and Smeaton were not the only ones on the receiving end of her attentions. She seems at the same time to have indulged in a certain ribald humour at the King’s expense, casting doubt upon his virility in a manner which was bound to arouse the ire of a man who was notoriously sensitive on that subject.[358] Brought before the Lord Marshall’s court on 15 May, she and her brother were separately tried, and in spite of a composed and intelligent defence, both were found guilty. The Lord Marshall was the Duke of Norfolk, who in spite of being Anne’s uncle was sufficiently alienated from her to be a reliable agent for such a service. Their father, the Earl of Wiltshire apparently wished to serve on the court but was excluded, although whether on the grounds of his blood relationship or to spare his feelings is not apparent. The only substance to the charges against Rochford was provided by his known affection for his sister, and by the regular access to her which their blood relationship guaranteed. Nevertheless, he was indicted and found guilty of certain specific offences, incest being particularly obnoxious both in the eyes of the law and of the King.[359] Witchcraft was not mentioned, but one of the charges specifically levelled against Anne was that she had conspired to poison both Mary and Henry Fitzroy, an indictment which seems to have owed its provenance to the King’s personal conviction, and for which the supporting evidence is nebulous. When the news of her condemnation reached him, Henry’s first thought was, typically, for himself, and how he had been abused by this notorious woman. The conservative party in the court rejoiced, but Cromwell, knowing the volatility of the King’s emotions, could not afford to relax until she was safely dead.
He assiduously encouraged Henry’s quite irrational belief that his wife had had a hundred lovers, and even Chapuys, who had no time at all for Anne or her family, found the proceedings against her ‘very strange’.[360] He was not alone in his reaction, and for the first time in her life the ex-Queen found some public sympathy. Archbishop Cranmer, who had been close to her, even made a half-hearted attempt to intercede for her, an attempt which it took all Cromwell’s vigilant control over access to the King to frustrate. Above all, the remnants of the Boleyn faction must be kept away. That was one of the reasons why Lord Rochford was pursued with such fury. After Anne he was the most formidable member of that party, and nothing but his death would prevent the possibility of his making a come-back. ‘Stone dead’, as was to be observed of the Earl of Wentworth over a century later ‘hath no fellow’. Sir Francis Bryan was only allowed to see Henry when he had been summoned to court and briefed by the Secretary. Sir Thomas Wyatt was imprisoned, but not charged, and even such humble functionaries as George Taylor, Anne’s Receiver General, were hugely relieved once the investigations were over.[361] No one who had had regular access to the Queen could assume that he was safe until she was dead. Only the Earl of Wiltshire appears to have escaped suspicion, and that was by making the extent of his religious estrangement from Anne’s agenda sufficiently obvious. Whether he believed the wild charges levelled against his daughter we do not know, but given his silence on the subject, probably not. Anne seems to have spent the last few days of her life in a mixture of tearful despair and religious devotions. There had been some talk of despatching her to a nunnery, and at times she clung to that as a hope of life. At others she discussed the details of her own execution with Sir William Kingston, the Lieutenant of the Tower, with apparent relish.[362] The omens were not good. On the 17th, Archbishop Cranmer was constrained to find some pretext for dissolving her marriage to Henry – that marriage which he had pronounced good and true only three years earlier. Because the cause papers have disappeared, we do not know the reason which was found, but it could not have been her subsequent adultery. That could have been a ground for ending the marriage, but not for declaring it null in the first place.[363] Anne was being erased from the record as though she had never been, and their daughter consequently became illegitimate. George was executed on the 17th, making a suitable scaffold speech in which, without confessing to the truth of any of the charges against him, he submitted to the law, and admitted that he deserved death for having been a ‘great reader of the scripture’, but a poor follower thereof.[364]
Then at noon on the 19th, it became Anne’s turn, the Calais executioner, who used a sword rather than an axe, having been specially imported for the occasion. Whatever her sins may have been, she made a splendid exit. She is reported as saying:
Good Christian people, I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die. For according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I have come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the King and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler and more merciful prince there never was … And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and hea
rtily desire you all to pray for me …[365]
It could hardly have been a more composed or orthodox departure, and even Chapuys was impressed. The formalities were quickly completed, and her body was committed for burial beside that of her brother in the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula.
So the King had his desire, and was free to marry again, which he proceeded to do with what many considered to be indecent haste, taking Jane Seymour as his wife on 30 May, just eleven days after Anne’s death. Pope Paul III was encouraged, now that Anne and Catherine were both dead, to believe that England’s relations with the Holy See might be renegotiated. The Emperor was also optimistic of the same outcome, and before the news of Jane Seymour’s advent reached him was talking of a possible Portuguese bride for Henry.[366] However, the man who gained most from the demise of the Boleyn party was undoubtedly their chief rival, Thomas Cromwell, who now had no obvious challenger for the King’s confidence. The Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, in spite of the prestige of their rank, were no competition in terms of political astuteness, or in their ability to read the King’s moods. Nor was Jane Seymour, who was totally lacking Anne’s political intelligence, and seems to have had no agenda beyond that of general pacification. She was a meek and submissive soul; just what Henry needed after his bruising confrontation with Catherine and the constant edginess of his relationship with Anne.[367] Her brother Edward became Earl of Hertford in the wake of her elevation, but the Seymours did not constitute a party in the same sense as the Boleyns, and did not have the same type of agenda. In spite of his acquiescence in all that had happened, the Earl of Wiltshire now found himself excluded from the inner circle of the council, and lost the office of Privy Seal to Cromwell on 29 June. He did not give up, but rather seems to have set out to recover his position. He served the King loyally during the Pilgrimage of Grace in the autumn of 1536, paid his subsidy assessment in full, and was assiduous in attending the ceremonies of the Garter. In January 1538 he was back at court, and according to one report ‘well entertained’. When his wife Elizabeth died later in the same year there was even talk of his marrying Margaret Douglas, the King’s kinswoman by virtue of being the daughter of his sister Margaret by her second marriage.[368] However, his health was probably failing by then, and he died at Hever on 29 March 1539, having recovered neither power nor influence.
But was Anne guilty of any or all of the offences which were alleged to destroy her and the power of her family? Professor Ives thinks not, arguing that the evidence against her was flimsy and circumstantial, and would not stand up for a moment in a modern court of law.[369] Professor Bernard thinks differently, without denying the validity of the modern comparison. He takes much more seriously the Countess of Worcester’s testimony, and the stories related to it, arguing that Anne’s notorious flirtatiousness did occasionally stray over the boundary into actual sexual misdemeanours.[370] The women of her Privy Chamber did indeed know what was going on, and it was from their testimony that the case against her and her accomplices was formulated. The reason why all this did not come out at the time lay in the legal protection which the Queen’s reputation enjoyed under the Treasons Act of 1534. ‘No one,’ as de Carles observed, ‘on pain of martyrdom, dared say anything to the detriment of the Queen.’ Without denying the possibility that these were all opportunistic fantasies, dreamed up when Cromwell was obviously dredging for dirt, Professor Bernard nevertheless argues for their cumulative plausibility, although whether all those subsequently condemned were guilty is another matter.[371] With regard to the charges of incest brought against her brother, there is more agreement. Bernard points out that even according to Chapuys, Rochford was accused only ‘by presumption’, and that no actual witnesses were brought to accuse him. It is probably wisest to believe that this was a politically motivated charge, brought for the purpose of removing him from the scene, and that it was plausibly dressed up in the ‘certain other little follies’ in which an affectionate brother and sister had indulged.[372] The generally hostile attitude of the trial jury would have been sufficient to secure a conviction, in spite of his ‘prudent and wise’ defence, which many at the time thought had earned him an acquittal. On Anne’s sexual conduct as a whole, the jury may still be regarded as out, although in the absence of any more conclusive evidence it is probably wisest to return a ‘not guilty’ verdict, while admitting that her demeanour at various times during her reign gave perfectly genuine causes for suspicion.
Although they had not been instrumental in bringing it about, the friends of Princess Mary rejoiced greatly at the fall of the Boleyns, and particularly at the execution of Anne. Taken along with the annulment of her marriage that had, in their eyes, restored a level playing field – a view which they shared with the Pope and the Emperor, as we have seen. However, the thing that they had not grasped was the seriousness with which Henry took his role as Supreme Head of the Church. This, he was quite convinced, was how God intended his Church to be run. Also he had committed himself by authorising the Bishops’ Book, and by giving the royal assent to the Act dissolving the smaller monasteries, both intrusions upon ecclesiastical jurisdiction as that was traditionally understood.[373] He also knew perfectly well that the Act of Supremacy and the dissolution of his first marriage were two sides of the same coin. Consequently there could be no question of receiving his daughter back into favour unless she recognised that supremacy, and her own illegitimate status. Mary did not recognise this fact either. As far as she was concerned, the breakdown of relations with her father had been entirely the responsibility of ‘that woman’, and given what we know of their mutual recriminations, that is not surprising. So Nicholas Carew, the Poles and the Courtenays were encouraging her in what was soon demonstrated to be an illusion. Chapuys was not so sure. In an interview with Henry before Anne’s execution, but when her fate was already decided, he had been told:
… as to the legitimation of our daughter Mary … if she would s to our Grace, without wrestling against the determination of our laws, we would acknowledge her and use her as our daughter, but we would not be directed or pressed herein …[374]
And even if she did submit, there was no guarantee of her legitimation. Realising the conditional nature of the King’s reaction, he wisely advised Lady Shelton, who was still in charge of the joint household in spite of her Boleyn kindred, not to receive any of Mary’s former servants who were regularly turning up at Hunsdon expecting to be reinstated.[375] The King now had two illegitimate daughters and the household which cared for them had no particular designation.
Felicitations arrived from everyone, except the one person who mattered. Henry sent no word to Hunsdon, and as the suspense became unbearable, it occurred to Mary that she was expected to make the first move. On the 26th she wrote to Cromwell, asking for his intercession with her father, now that the great obstacle to their reconciliation was no more. The Secretary appears to have replied promptly – his letter does not survive – giving her to understand that obedience was looked for as the first condition for reinstatement.[376] ‘Obedience’ however, is flexible term, and on the 30th she wrote again, offering to be ‘as obedient to the King’s Grace as you can reasonably require of me’. Apparently satisfied that she had met his conditions, the next day she wrote to her father, in terms of disarming innocence, acknowledging her offences and begging for his blessing. Unfortunately she also made it clear that her submissiveness reserved her conscience. She would obey him in all things:
Next to God … humbly beseeching your highness to consider that I am but a woman and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God, and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand with your pleasure …[377]
Since both the points upon which he required her submission, the ecclesiastical supremacy and her mother’s marriage, were covered by this reservation, from his point of view she had conceded nothing and he did not deign to reply. Instead he approved the drawing up of a set of articles to be presented to her which would leave no room for e
quivocation or evasion. Chapuys and Cromwell were both on tenterhooks, although for very different reasons. It was no part of the Secretary’s plans for a reconciliation with the Emperor to see his cousin imprisoned, or worse still executed for high treason.[378] Meanwhile, buoyed up by a false optimism which may have derived from her friends at court, that the King would change (or had changed) his mind, on 7 June she wrote again to Cromwell. This time she expressed her joy that her father ‘had withdrawn his displeasure’, and asked for some token from the King, so that she might visit the court and pay her respects. On the 10th she wrote to Henry, asking for his blessing, and this time copied it to Cromwell with a covering note asking not to be pressed further than her conscience would bear. This last was precisely what neither Henry nor Cromwell wanted to hear, and few days later, probably on the 15th, a commission headed by the Duke of Norfolk visited her at Hunsdon requiring an answer to two straight questions: would she repudiate the authority of the Bishop of Rome, and would she accept the nullity of her mother’s marriage?[379] In a stormy and emotional confrontation, she rejected both demands, and the crisis which both Cromwell and Chapuys had dreaded had now arrived. Technically Mary was guilty of treason, and the judges recommended that she be proceeded against. The council went into emergency session, with her friends the Marquis of Exeter and Sir William Fitzwilliam excluded. Sir Anthony Browne and Sir Francis Bryan were arrested for idle chatter concerning the Lady Mary’s status, and the whole court seems to have been in a state of high tension.[380]
