What Anne had not grasped was that Henry badly wanted the church’s wealth. By threatening Cromwell’s life Anne had united Henry’s vague hope that one day he might be free to choose a new wife with Cromwell’s ability to get a nasty job done, and given the king another reason to wish to see the back of her.6
For a short while there was nothing to suggest any change in the king’s attitude. Indeed, on 18 April, Chapuys was invited to kiss Anne’s ring before meeting Henry at Greenwich Palace. Since this would have been a public recognition of Anne’s status as queen, the ambassador made excuses not to do so. But standing in the king’s chapel for Mass he was tricked into being positioned in such a place that he was obliged to acknowledge Anne as she entered. Later the same day, the rattled ambassador informed Henry that the emperor wished for an alliance – but only as soon as the princess Mary was restored to the succession and he was reconciled with Rome. A furious Henry shouted back that his relationship with the Pope was none of the emperor’s business, and as for his daughter Mary, ‘he would treat her according as she obeyed him or not’.7
Henry was soon sending letters to his diplomats across Europe insisting that his marriage to Anne be recognised wherever they had been posted. Yet this was not about any personal attachment to Anne, only his desire to protect the royal supremacy with which their marriage was, for the time being, associated. His interest in Jane Seymour continued unabated and Cromwell now sought allies amongst her promoters. The first sign of his success was his giving up his rooms at Greenwich to Jane’s brother, Edward Seymour, which allowed Henry to meet her more discreetly and conveniently. Meanwhile, that other court romance, between Margaret Douglas and Thomas Howard, had culminated at Easter in a secret betrothal.8
Henry had seemed to smile on his niece’s relationship in its early days, but the couple only confided their decision in a few friends. The situation at court remained volatile. From the close quarters of the queen’s Privy Chamber, Margaret could see that Anne was extremely angry with her husband. Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, would spend time with his sister laughing with her about the clothes the king wore and the ballads he wrote. George let slip once that Anne had even complained about Henry’s abilities as a lover, telling him that her husband had neither talent nor vigour in bed.9 Some wondered if he was suggesting that the princess Elizabeth was not her father’s child. If she was complaining that Henry was such a poor sexual performer, it followed that she might have a lover. Many noticed the pleasure the queen was taking in the dangerous game of courtly love. Even lowly servants were speaking to her in a familiar manner.
On Saturday 29 April Anne stopped by the round window in the Presence Chamber and addressed a young musician called Mark Smeaton. She asked him why he was looking sad. It was ‘no matter’, he replied sulkily. It was an attempt to draw her into romantic banter and Anne reminded him that she couldn’t speak to him as if he were a nobleman. ‘No, no madam,’ he replied, evidently stung; ‘A look sufficed, and so fare you well.’10 On the same day the king’s close body servant, Sir Henry Norris, came to see one of Anne’s maids. Anne asked him teasingly why he had not yet married his betrothed. Norris answered that he preferred to ‘tarry a time’, to which Anne joked, ‘You look for dead men’s shoes, for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me.’ No sooner were the words out of her mouth than Anne realised that she had overstepped the line. Imagining the death of the king was a treasonous offence. Norris, aghast, replied that ‘if he should have any such thought, he would [wish] his head were off’.11
The next day Anne and Henry had a row. A Scottish visitor at court later recalled seeing Anne in a courtyard, with the princess Elizabeth in her arms, pleading with the king who was looking down at her from a window. It was clear he was very angry, ‘although he could conceal his anger wonderfully well’.12 That Henry had accused Anne of being unfaithful, and that she believed he suspected Norris, is suggested by the fact that on the same day Anne asked Norris to go and see her chaplain and assure him she was a ‘good woman’. But had Anne got it wrong? Was Henry referring to Norris or someone else? Smeaton was being questioned that very same day on whether or not he had committed adultery with her.
Smeaton’s interrogation took place at Cromwell’s house in Stepney. We do not know if Cromwell had taken the initiative in arresting him, or if it was on the king’s orders. But accusing the queen of adultery would have been very dangerous for Cromwell. He could not be certain how Henry would react. On the other hand, if Henry had learned of a rumour concerning Norris or Smeaton it makes sense that he demanded Cromwell get to the bottom of it. The French learned that ‘the discovery was owing to words spoken by [Smeaton] from jealousy’, and according to Cromwell, ‘some of his grace’s council . . . with great fear’ declared ‘what they heard unto the king’s highness’.13 Anne’s conversation with Norris gave Cromwell a means of accusing her of treason. But Norris was unlikely to confess to adultery and so make a charge of plotting the king’s murder plausible. A weaker man was required if Anne’s chastity was to be besmirched – and Smeaton would fill that role.
Before that evening Smeaton had confessed to having committed adultery with the queen on three occasions. According to later gossip Smeaton was kept in a sweetmeat cupboard with Anne calling for marmalade when she desired him. Had this really happened? Anne would go to her death denying any such activity, and to have lied on the eve of eternity was to risk hellfire. Despite later tales of a knotted rope being tightened around Smeaton’s head, and of his being racked, there is no evidence that torture was used in his questioning, but it is not uncommon for people to make false confessions under psychological pressure. Strangely, perhaps, suggestible people will sometimes even come to believe that they have committed a crime of which they are completely innocent, and this too may be true of Smeaton, for he never withdrew his confession.14
On the Sunday evening Henry postponed, but did not cancel, a trip he had planned to take with Anne to Calais in June. He could not yet be certain how matters would continue to unfold. Cromwell had more interviews to conduct. The next morning, May Day 1536, was warm and sunny: the perfect day for the jousts taking place at Greenwich Palace. The king, sitting to the front of the royal stand between the twin towers of the tilt-yard, was enjoying himself. Henry’s brother-in-law, George Boleyn, was the leading challenger, while his old friend Sir Henry Norris led the defenders. Also watching them was Anne Boleyn and her ladies. The pennants flew, and horses galloped down the sandy list where only a few months earlier Henry had fallen, and come close to being killed. As the tournament ended a message was passed to the king. Abruptly he rose from his seat and left for Westminster, taking with him only a handful of attendants. Norris was called to join him, while an astonished Anne was left to oversee the closing of the competition.
As the king’s party rode off Henry asked Norris an extraordinary and terrifying question – had he committed adultery with the queen? It was usual for courtiers accused of a serious offence to be kept away from Henry since this spared him the embarrassment of their pleading for mercy to his face. But Henry, having read Cromwell’s message, had chosen to have Norris ride with him and was acting as his chief interrogator. He made it clear to Norris he wished to play the roles of judge and jury too. He offered the horrified man a pardon if he admitted to sleeping with Anne. Norris was a fellow member of the Order of the Garter, Henry’s equivalent to the Knights of the Round Table, and now found he was being cast in the role of Lancelot.15 Norris angrily – desperately – asserted his innocence. It did him no good. He joined Smeaton in the Tower that night. Anne was taken there the following day.
‘Shall I go into a dungeon?’ the terrified Anne asked the Lieutenant of the Tower on her arrival. ‘No madam,’ he replied, ‘you shall go into the lodgings you lay in at your coronation.’ This reduced the queen to hysterical laughter and bouts of weeping. Anne had heard, she said, that she would ‘be accused [of adultery] with three men’. She knew the names o
f those already in the Tower. ‘O Norris,’ she wondered, ‘hast thou accused me? Thou art in the Tower with me, [and we shall] die together; and, Mark, thou art here too.’16 Since adultery was not a capital offence, Anne expected to be accused of imagining the death of the king. In fact further capital offences were being sought.
As Anne prepared to spend her first night as a prisoner, Henry kissed his son Henry Fitzroy goodnight and, with tears trickling down his face, Henry claimed that Anne had intended to dispose of both his children, poisoning Fitzroy and his half-sister Mary. It also emerged that Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, who had followed her to the Tower, was accused of adultery with his sister. This was intended to demonstrate Anne was capable of any horror or perversion and it rapidly became evident she would be accused of adultery with more than merely three men. Interviews with Norris and Anne’s own comments led to the arrest of the young Sir Francis Weston, who had flirted with Anne in the summer of 1535, and another courtier called William Brereton was also arrested. A couple of knights and the courtier poet Thomas Wyatt followed, but they had sufficiently powerful friends to escape trial.17
The evidence against Anne and her remaining co-accused was extremely weak, as even Chapuys was moved to comment. According to one of the judges the adulteries had been revealed by a former lady-in-waiting ‘who shared the same tendencies’ as the queen and had described Anne’s crimes on her deathbed in 1534.18 But how did this confession reach Cromwell two years after the woman had died? The answer may lie in the fact that her family were clients of Anne’s old enemy, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, widower of Henry’s sister, the French queen. Here was a man always ready to oblige the king, and who disliked Anne. Wyatt blamed Brandon for his arrest and the accusation that Anne had committed incest with her brother suggests revenge for her accusation in 1531 that Brandon had slept with ‘his own daughter’.
Two of Anne’s current ladies were also named as giving evidence for the trial.19 The first was the Countess of Worcester, whose sister-in-law was married to one of Anne’s supposed lovers, William Brereton.20 He had few links with Anne, but he was a troublesome figure in the Welsh Marches, and one Cromwell was happy to see out of the way. The second woman named was Anne, Lady Cobham, whose husband was to be one of the trial judges.21 In later generations a case was built to suggest that George Boleyn’s wife, Jane, Lady Rochford, was a third, and that she informed against her own husband. This is inspired, however, by later gossip rather than contemporary fact.22 Indeed there is little to suggest that any of Anne’s women deliberately betrayed her. The frightened women were pressed hard on what they had seen and heard of Anne’s behaviour. Anxious not to be accused of withholding anything, they repeated the jokes between Anne and her brother about Henry’s impotence, his gaudy clothes and dull poetry. The pregnant Lady Worcester had been so distressed by the pre-trial interrogations that Anne Boleyn had feared her friend would miscarry her baby (a little girl destined to be named Anne).
At the trial Anne’s complaints about the king’s abilities as a lover made it easy to assert that she had found her sexual satisfaction elsewhere. George Boleyn was described leading Anne in dances in her Privy Chamber, passing her on to other men, and kissing her. This brotherly affection became, in the hands of the lawyers, sexual perversion: with George’s tongue in Anne’s mouth, and him passing on his sister not merely to dance with other partners, but for sex. As one judge noted, ‘all the evidence was bawdy and lechery’.23 On Friday 12 May 1536 the four commoners were found guilty of plotting to see the king dead and replaced by one of them. George Boleyn and his sister were condemned on the Monday. All were doomed.
23
LOVE AND DEATH
ANNE WAS SENTENCED TO DEATH IN THE KING’S HALL AT THE Tower, right next to the rooms where she was imprisoned. As the gruesome details were read out one of the judges, her former beau, the Earl of Northumberland, collapsed. With 2,000 witnesses looking on from the newly built stands, he was helped from the room. The king, meanwhile, was at court, and in a merry mood. The Imperial ambassador thought no man had ever been so content to advertise he was a cuckold, or to show so little sign he minded. When Henry claimed he had heard Anne had slept with over a hundred men it sounded like a boast.
On 17 May the men accused of being Anne’s lovers were processed to their executions on Tower Hill. An anonymous verse later circulated at court remembered each of them: Norris the flirt, George Boleyn with his wit and pride, Weston, ‘that pleasant was and young’, Brereton, loved by his friends, and Mark Smeaton who had enjoyed the high life, and whose confession destroyed them all, ‘thy death thou hast deserved best’, it concluded damningly.1 The same day they died Archbishop Cranmer annulled Anne’s marriage to Henry on the grounds of his previous relationship with her sister. Since Henry was soon to be a widower, the decree’s principal purpose was to bastardise their daughter, Elizabeth.
The two-and-a-half-year-old princess, described by her governess ‘as toward a child and gentle of conditions as any I have known in my life’, had not lost her father’s affection, despite what her reduction in status suggests.2 It is true that by late summer she was beginning to grow out of her clothes and her governess had to remind Cromwell that she needed new ones. But this reflected only the absence of her mother’s attention. Elizabeth was still dining in state every day, something her governess begged to be stopped as it meant she could not prevent the toddler from helping herself to wine, or whatever food she wished.3 Elizabeth was not capable of doing anything personally to anger Henry; he had decided simply to re-acknowledge that his daughter Mary – whose mother had been royal and loyal – was the elder sister. As Chapuys observed it would have been far simpler for Henry to have it decreed that Elizabeth was Norris’ child than to have his marriage to Anne anulled.4 The fact he did not do this implies a strong conviction that Elizabeth was his. It also suggests he did not really believe Anne was the nymphomaniac he claimed – what Anne was guilty of was seducing him into a cursed union.5
When his sexual inadequacies were paraded during the trials Henry could console himself that it was only proper that he was unable to copulate in a damned marriage. Cranmer reassured him that Anne’s adulteries were indeed ‘only to her dishonour not yours’. Nevertheless Henry felt it necessary to advertise his masculine vigour by staying out all hours, banqueting with beautiful girls, seemingly full of ‘extravagant joy’.6 In private he comforted himself in a different way, taking a close interest in the details of his wife’s coming death. In Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, King Arthur had sentenced his adulterous Queen Guinevere to death by burning, although it was never carried out. Henry decided Anne would be beheaded with a sword. It was the preferred method of execution for the nobility in France where Anne had spent so many happy years in her girlhood, and this has given rise to the myth that Anne requested it. But there is no evidence for that. The choice of a sword – the symbol of Camelot, of a rightful king, and of masculinity – was Henry’s alone. He also pored over the plans for the scaffold. Taking control of the minutiae of how his wife was disposed of helped Henry to convince himself that he was empowered rather than diminished by her fall.
On the morning of 19 May Anne walked to the scaffold Henry had designed for her within the walls of the Tower. Ever elegant, she was dressed in grey damask. The poet Thomas Wyatt, who had been amongst her admirers, looked down from his prison window in the Bell Tower to seek out her procession. Wyatt’s literary predecessor, Geoffrey Chaucer, had described in ‘The Knight’s Tale’ a hero spotting a beautiful maiden from a tower window, on a morning just such as this. Although it was not possible for Wyatt to see Anne, he could see men coming and going as preparations were made for what was to follow. He could imagine the rest. ‘The Bell Tower showed me such sight/That in my head sticks day and night’, he wrote, ‘circa regna tonat [around the throne the thunder rolls]’.7
The rituals of Anne’s beheading followed a strict cultural code. Prisoners were expected to give a l
ast speech in which they would pronounce themselves judged guilty by the laws of the land and so content to die, as prescribed by the law. If they were innocent they knew that God was punishing them for something, and did not doubt they deserved death. Their speeches concluded with a request for forgiveness and the hope their sovereign would reign long and happily. Anne’s followed these conventions. Of Henry she said, ‘a more merciful nor more gentle prince was there never, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign Lord’. There was no insistence that she was innocent. She hoped her killing would be quick and clean, and had joked earlier that she had ‘but a little neck’. Carefully, she tucked her skirts in around her feet so that she would keep her modesty when her body fell. Then she turned her head, uncertain when the blow would come. When it did her head was struck off with one stroke, her famous black eyes and lips still moving as her head landed in the straw. She was buried that same day in the Tower church of St Peter ad Vincula.
Archbishop Cranmer had already issued a dispensation to free Henry to marry Jane Seymour, his fifth cousin.8 Henry still needed a male heir – and to prove his virility. On 30 May 1536, eleven days after Anne died, his third wedding took place with his niece, Margaret Douglas, carrying Jane Seymour’s train. Margaret had shared in the trauma of pre-trial interrogations with Anne’s other ladies. Wyatt wrote of being made an ‘instrument/to frame others’ and they copied his words into the book of verses they collected: ‘I was made a filing instrument/To frame others, while I was beguiled/But reason hath at my folly smiled/ And pardoned me.’ Yet the terrors of the summer were far from over.
That Henry had no intention of legitimising Mary, as many assumed he would on Anne’s death, became clear on 22 June. Only five weeks after Anne’s execution, Mary was threatened with her death and that of several named friends, until she accepted the royal supremacy and her illegitimacy. The Imperial ambassador advised Mary to sign the articles without reading them and so make the intolerable, bearable. The twenty-year-old princess hated it, but she bowed to the threats. She was learning to be a survivor and she composed an abject letter designed carefully to win back her father’s favour: ‘Here’, she wrote, ‘is my poor heart which I send unto your highness to remain in your hand, to be for ever used, directed and framed . . . at your only pleasure.’9
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