by Linda Porter
Chapuys knew her brother, Edward Seymour, who had undertaken an earlier mission to the imperial court.While the Boleyns remained in power, Seymour’s chances of further advancement seemed small. His sister, still unmarried in her late twenties, had been at court since 1529, first as an attendant to Katherine of Aragon and then Anne Boleyn. There was evidently still no prospect of finding a husband, which perhaps tells us indirectly quite a lot about Jane’s charms, though it may also reflect on the Seymour family themselves. Her father had seduced Edward’s first wife and their affair could scarcely have enhanced the chances of his eldest daughter. When she described herself, in rejecting Henry’s clumsy attempt to buy her favours, as the daughter of ‘good and honourable parents’, she must have hoped her father’s peccadilloes were forgotten.
She nearly was herself, until she became the object of ‘courtly’ pursuit by the king, in the early stages of his wife’s third pregnancy. Jane Seymour might have remained the platonic object of these chivalric courtesies had her brother not scented an opportunity. With careful coaching and help from others who wanted to see Anne Boleyn removed, he could turn Jane from a meek lady-in-waiting into a queen. To achieve this, he needed friends at court, and his political intelligence told him that now, while the queen was low and the king uneasy, was the time to begin his campaign. But Jane must be wholly committed in order to play her role to perfection. She could have declined, or muffed the part she was given. Instead, she held her nerve and carried everything off with consummate skill. When Henry sent her a letter and a purse of gold at the beginning of April, she declined to accept the money, telling the king’s messenger, on her knees,‘there was no treasure in the world she valued as much as her honour, and on no account would she lose it, even if she were to die a thousand deaths … if the king wished to make her a gift of money, she requested him to reserve it for such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage’.28 Henry was touched by her modesty, captivated by the quietness she radiated in stark contrast to Anne’s sound and fury. Jane was a clever little mouse.
But for all her cleverness and her brother’s ability, with the help of Carew and Mary’s supporters, to manipulate the king, Jane Seymour’s success was far from certain. Anne, typically, chose to fight and to do so very publicly. She would not be ousted, and the Boleyns ruined, by a scheming goody-two-shoes whose backers lacked any real power or influence. But beyond her immediate family, Anne could command few friends herself. Her uncle, the duke of Norfolk, was disgruntled that the Howards had profited less than he had expected. His daughter, Mary Howard, was married to the king’s illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, at Anne’s behest, but he did not see this as any reason to be grateful, and his estranged duchess was infuriated by it. But the real danger to Anne, as April approached, was not from her own proud uncle or pasty Jane Seymour, or even from the unconquered spirit of Princess Mary. It came from Thomas Cromwell. And he was an enemy more formidable than all the rest put together.
So why did Thomas Cromwell, that assiduous servant of the crown and Anne’s ally throughout the tortuous process of the divorce, decide to ‘think up and plan’, as he put it, the coup against Anne Boleyn, in Easter Week 1536? Recent scholarship, especially the work of Eric Ives, has clarified much of the mystery that, for centuries, surrounded the fall of Anne. But some questions, particularly about the degree of Henry’s foreknowledge and involvement in the plans against his wife, remain. One thing seems certain, however. Thomas Cromwell had fallen out with Anne (or, at least, believed that their disagreements on policy matters were serious enough to threaten his life) and he saw, in Mary and her supporters, a means of defeating the queen.They welcomed him to the cause. Chapuys remained slightly suspicious, never entirely sure of Cromwell’s motives, but he acknowledged that nothing would be achieved on Mary’s behalf without him. So the stage was set for one of the most audacious plots in English history.
Anne’s relationship with Cromwell foundered on religious policy rather than his attempts to ingratiate himself with Charles V, though these later added to the tension. A fundamental disagreement developed between the queen and the minister during the first months of 1536 over the legislation to confiscate the wealth of the smaller monasteries. Up to this point, Anne and Cromwell had much in common on religious matters. Both were supporters of new ideas, of promoting the reading of the Bible in English and emphasising the individual’s relationship with God as opposed to the oppressive structure of the Church. The queen had not disapproved of the attack on monastic wealth, but she fiercely opposed the idea of its passing into the hands of a small, self-serving group of individuals at the expense of the wider community. She hoped to influence Henry to use the money for educational purposes. Suddenly, Cromwell saw the possible ruin of all his plans. If Anne prevailed, she would effectively negate the Dissolution Bill. He had visions of going the same way as Wolsey, but perhaps without a natural end. And he had also realised that his discussions with Chapuys on improving Anglo-Imperial relations were likely to leave him further exposed. Charles V was willing to give support ‘for this last matrimony or otherwise’ (a splendidly vague phrase), but only so long as Mary was legitimised and recognised as heir presumptive. Cromwell now knew that Henry VIII would never agree to such an outcome and he did not need to imagine Anne’s reaction if she discovered the emperor’s terms for a rapprochement. His sanctimonious assurance to Chapuys at the end of February that ‘he would not, for anything in this world, be held as a liar and dissembler’ sounded very hollow now.
On 1 April a meeting took place between Chapuys and Cromwell in which the ambassador sought to play on the rumours he had heard. He told Cromwell he had avoided meeting him personally for some time, in order to avoid the queen’s further anger:‘I recollected well his telling me that she would like to see his head off his shoulders. Such a threat, I said, was constantly before my eyes … and I sincerely wished him a more gracious mistress than she was, and one more grateful for the immense services he had rendered to the king.’ Piling it on, Chapuys continued that Cromwell must be careful not to ‘offend or over-irritate’ Anne, and he hoped that the minister’s ‘dexterity and prudence’ would protect him from what had happened to Wolsey. A fresh marriage for the king would surely be the way of ‘preserving him from many inconveniences’. Not, Chapuys added, that Anne Boleyn had ever done him any harm personally.
Cromwell thanked him rather sourly, observing that ‘he was well aware of the precarious nature of human affairs, to say nothing of those appertaining to royal courts’. He went on to talk about Jane Seymour, describing her rejection of the king’s advances, saying she had been ‘well-tutored and warned’. At least he could assure Chapuys that a future wife for the king would not be French. Chapuys departed feeling very positive about developments. He had been asked to lend his support to the moves against Anne Boleyn and believed these would give Mary better security, even if male heirs were born of a new match. He wrote to the emperor:‘I shall again inform her [Mary] of what is going on, and, with her advice, will act in such a manner that if we cannot gain, at least we shall lose nothing.’29
Charles V was also more interested than he had been for some time in improving his relationship with England, and, more to the point, getting Henry VIII’s active support in his eternal struggle with the French. Over the course of the decade since the catastrophe at Pavia, Francis I had never fully abandoned his claims on northern Italy and he had eventually recouped his military strength.With Katherine of Aragon no longer a factor, Charles hoped that Henry might be inclined to commit himself to imperial support. After several meetings, both Chapuys and Cromwell believed they had a workable set of proposals. All that remained was to present them to the king and gain his approval. Chapuys was summoned to court for 20 April. He was pleased by his gracious reception and by the attention shown him by Viscount Rochford, who had been assigned to escort him. He was careful, though, not to enter into any discussion with the queen’s brother about
his ‘Lutheran principles’.The imperial ambassador was taken to the chapel at Greenwich before dinner and there, for the first and last time, he bowed to Anne Boleyn. He had earlier politely declined Henry’s invitation to be received by the queen and kiss her hand. But his bow amounted to some kind of formal acknowledgement. Did he, given his knowledge of what was afoot, privately regard it as an empty gesture?
To the disappointment of both Chapuys and Cromwell, the meeting went badly. The king seemed more irritated and capricious than anyone had anticipated. One of the sticking points was Mary. Henry made it quite clear that he would not tolerate the interference of Charles V over her future. She was, he said, his daughter,‘and that accordingly as she was obedient or disobedient he would treat her; nobody had anything to do with that’. If Chapuys reported these words to Mary and her partisans as well as Charles V, it is surprising that they did not take more notice of them. Henry had consistently followed the same approach to Mary since the birth of Elizabeth, and it could be argued that, in the broader frame of his dynastic requirements, his stance had not changed, where she was concerned, since 1527. Mary’s supporters were too focused on plotting against Anne to heed the very clear signals coming from the king. Instead, Sir Nicholas Carew exhorted the princess to be of good cheer. The Boleyns were about to get their comeuppance: ‘shortly the opposite party’ (his own) ‘would put water in their wine’.
With prospects for improved Anglo-Imperial relations now looking much less certain, Cromwell represented himself to Chapuys as a man in despair. He may also have been a man in fear of having overstepped the mark where Henry was concerned. In trying to explain and justify his inability to deliver, he made a revealing remark to Chapuys: ‘He declared to me that although he had all the time dissembled and made me believe that what he said to me was his own private view of the affair, not the king’s, he could assert - nay swear - that he had done or said nothing without his master’s express commands.’ When Chapuys asked what could have brought about so radical a change in the king’s mind, Cromwell professed to having no idea. But the minister ended this awkward exchange by observing ‘that princes were endowed with qualities of mind and peculiarities unknown to all other people … whoever trusts in the word of princes, who one day say one thing and on the next retract it, relies on them, or expects the fulfilment of their promises, is not a wise man’.30 Just how unwise he was not to find out for four more years, but his comments on the role Henry had played prior to the audience with Chapuys must raise the question of how much - and when - Henry knew about the moves against Anne Boleyn. Cromwell may have had an increasingly urgent personal need to get rid of the queen, but his master was fast succumbing to Jane Seymour’s pallid charms.
There is much that remains confusing about the precise timings of Anne’s destruction, though evidently Cromwell began to work on it in earnest at the end of Easter Week. He had taken the legal steps that would allow him to proceed, including the preliminaries for the recall of Parliament, but he needed an occasion, something on which a case could be built. Then, on 30 April, Anne herself supplied the first piece of ammunition he was seeking. She had a heated and very public row with Henry Norris, the king’s groom of the stool and one of those closest to Henry in his privy chamber, about his feelings for her. Though Anne was a flirt she may not have intended to encourage Norris to contemplate anything beyond the accepted moves of the game of courtly love. Now, she put him very firmly in his place. Perhaps she had been attracted to him and sensed the danger. For whatever reason, she seems to have wanted to deter him in no uncertain terms. Piqued, Norris denied that he was lovestruck, but the damage had been done.
The confrontation was witnessed by a fascinated audience, not all of whom were well intentioned. It seems likely the story got back to the king, and Anne was alarmed that it could be misconstrued. The next day, she appealed directly to Henry for understanding, with Elizabeth in her arms. Such behaviour was not calculated to win the king’s confidence. His anger and unease were aroused. But this, in itself, was not enough. Cromwell knew that they fought frequently and were always reconciled. More evidence was needed before the queen could be apprehended. And then, suddenly, luck was on his side.The ammunition was unintentionally provided by one of Anne’s musicians, Mark Smeton. He also seems to have harboured feelings for Anne, and, like Norris, she slapped him down, reminding him scathingly of his lowly position. She would have done better to ignore him, but she was very conscious of her rank and evidently on edge.
Smeton’s lovelorn posturing in her apartments again attracted the attention of those who wanted to topple Anne Boleyn. Finally, Cromwell had a target and he struck. Smeton was arrested and subjected to 24 hours of fierce torture that may have had a physical as well as a psychological element. When it was over, he had confessed to adultery with the queen. On 2 May, Henry VIII received a message, presumably about Smeton’s confession, that caused him to leave Greenwich in a hurry. The previous day, he and Anne had attended the May Day jousts together. Now he left her behind, to be interrogated by the duke of Norfolk and other members of the council. Later that day, she was taken to the Tower of London. She never saw Henry or Elizabeth again.
Thereafter, events moved swiftly. Anne suffered from a nervous collapse once she entered the Tower and could not stop talking. Sometimes she laughed almost hysterically. Her desperate thinking aloud about the possible causes for the calamity that had overtaken her provided the resourceful Cromwell with all the remaining evidence that he needed. So the ramblings of an innocent woman, implicated by some of her personal servants and paying the price for the years of resentment she had aroused, were used against her. Viscount Rochford was also arrested, as were Norris and several others who served in the privy chamber. Cromwell wanted their collective influence destroyed, and he saw in Anne’s plight the means of being rid of them all. The charges against the queen, of adultery with three gentlemen of the privy chamber and Smeton, were given even more spice by the additional accusation of incest with her brother. One of the people who gave evidence to support this charge was George’s own wife, Lady Jane Rochford. Her motives for this terrible act of revenge have never been made clear, but she must have hated her husband and her sister-in-law a great deal. Cromwell made sure she was well taken care of financially once it was all over.
The charges against Anne seem preposterous. Even Chapuys, scarcely a well-wisher, commented on the lack of evidence against the queen and those accused with her. As well as the sexual element, she was also accused of having tried to poison Katherine of Aragon and Mary. At the time, Archbishop Cranmer, always close to the queen, refused at first to believe these accusations. He thought she had always been a virtuous woman: ‘I am in such perplexity’, he wrote to Henry, ‘that my mind is clearly amazed; for I never had better opinion in a woman, than I had in her; which maketh me think, that she should not be culpable…I loved her not a little for the love which I judged her to bear toward God and his gospel.’31 Many others, titillated by the lurid details of the accusation, wanted to believe otherwise. And Cranmer’s first duty was to do Henry’s bidding. Once Anne was condemned, he speedily annulled her marriage, as he had done Katherine of Aragon’s. This left Elizabeth a bastard, just like her half-sister Mary.
The queen defended herself with courage and dignity at her trial, and her brother with considerable energy and defiance at his. There was never the slightest doubt about the verdict. Tudor state trials did not allow for sudden and miraculous acquittals. Anne was spared the flames, the prescribed means of death for an adulterous queen, and faced her execution with resignation. On 16 May, Cranmer heard her confession; she seems to have asked him to watch over the education and upbringing of her daughter and to have then assumed, wrongly, as it happened, that her death would follow the next day. It was not until 19 May that she went to the scaffold. Before her death, she addressed the crowd, as was the custom. She was dutifully loyal to the king, but she refused to confess any wrongdoing: ‘According to the law a
nd by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am 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 was there never and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord.’32 Was this said just to ensure better treatment for Elizabeth, or did she go to her grave remembering only the happier moments that had characterised her love affair and marriage with Henry VIII? Then she prayed. She was still praying when the Calais swordsman took off her head.
Among the spectators that spring day in 1536 was Thomas Cromwell, the man who had destroyed her in the space of less than three weeks. The day after her death, HenryVIII was betrothed to Jane Seymour, who had been tactfully lodged at Sir Nicholas Carew’s house during Anne’s trial. It was a short engagement. Jane and Henry were married on 30 May and Anne Boleyn’s name was not spoken again at court for more than 20 years.
Henry’s unquestioning acceptance of the guilt of the woman he had lived with for nine years is remarkable.Theirs had been a great love and he abandoned it on the basis of evidence that even Anne’s enemies found incredible. He must have wanted to believe it. According to Cromwell, he had ‘been authorised and commissioned by the king to prosecute and bring to an end the mistress’s trial, to do which he had taken considerable trouble’.33 But who was managing whom? It all depends when Cromwell’s commission was received. And even supposing that it was after revelations that shocked the king, was he putting the responsibility for solving the problem on his chief adviser out of distress or guile? Emotionally he was a strangely fragile man with an infinite capacity to feel sorry for himself. He also knew how to get others to do his dirty work and he expected complete, unquestioning loyalty. Opposition made him ruthless, but Anne’s opponents, and Mary above all, did not learn from the lessons of her fall.
