Six Wives (86 page)
Authors: David Starkey
A
nne spent the night after the jousts in her apartments as usual. But the following morning she, too, was interrogated by the Council at Greenwich. The questioning was harsh and Anne later complained that she was 'cruelly handled'. Her uncle Norfolk, anxious to distance himself from her fall, set the tone of high moral opprobrium. 'He said "Tut, tut, tut" and shaking his head three or four times.' Treasurer Fitzwilliam, fresh from his success with Norris, joined in the hunt from different motives. He had been Wolsey's 'Treasure'; now he relished destroying Anne, because she had been the Cardinal's nemesis. 'He was in the Forest of Windsor,' Anne said bitterly. On the other hand, Controller Paulet was 'a very gentleman'.
nne spent the night after the jousts in her apartments as usual. But the following morning she, too, was interrogated by the Council at Greenwich. The questioning was harsh and Anne later complained that she was 'cruelly handled'. Her uncle Norfolk, anxious to distance himself from her fall, set the tone of high moral opprobrium. 'He said "Tut, tut, tut" and shaking his head three or four times.' Treasurer Fitzwilliam, fresh from his success with Norris, joined in the hunt from different motives. He had been Wolsey's 'Treasure'; now he relished destroying Anne, because she had been the Cardinal's nemesis. 'He was in the Forest of Windsor,' Anne said bitterly. On the other hand, Controller Paulet was 'a very gentleman'.
The examination over, Anne was taken by boat to the Tower. And neither in life nor in death would she ever leave it.
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* * *
It was not quite three years since she had travelled the same route on her pre-coronation river pageant. As then, the weather was fine. She had a distinguished escort, including Norfolk, Oxford, the Great Chamberlain, and Sandys, the Lord Chamberlain of the Household. And there were great crowds of spectators. But they had come to witness her shame, not her triumph.
And there was no Henry to greet her with a kiss when she landed. Instead, Kingston, the Lieutenant of the Tower, met her to conduct her to her prison. 'Mr Kingston,' she asked, 'shall I go into a dungeon?' 'No, Madam,' he replied, 'you shall go into your lodging that you lay in at your Coronation.'
So far, her courage had held up. But now she broke down. 'It is too good for me,' she cried. 'Jesu, have mercy on me,' she prayed, kneeling and weeping profusely. Then suddenly, the tears dried, 'and in the same sorrow [she] fell into a great laughing', Kingston reported, 'and she hath done so many times since.'
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Anne's hysteria proved as valuable to Cromwell as Smeaton's agony on the rack.
* * *
Also on the Tuesday, Anne's brother Rochford was arrested at the Court at York Place, where he had followed the King. He was examined on the spot before the Council and, like Norris, denied any impropriety. Nevertheless, he too was brought to the Tower, where he arrived some hours after Anne.
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The investigation now seemed to have hit a rock. Smeaton had indeed confessed under terrible torture. But neither Norris nor Rochford had admitted anything useful. Nor had Anne. 'There is much communication', Anne's former Vice-chamberlain Baynton wrote to Fitzwilliam, 'that no man will confess anything against her, but all only Mark of any actual thing.' 'Wherefore', he continued, 'in my foolish conceit, it should much touch the King's honour if it should no further appear.' Falling over himself to turn King's evidence, Baynton then recommended a trawl through Anne's ladies. 'Mrs Margery' Horsman, the Mistress of the Maids, had behaved 'strangely' to him. She must be in the know because 'there hath been great friendship between the Queen and her of late'. And so on.
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But all such endeavours were rendered redundant by Anne's own behaviour. The original intention had been to hold her incommunicado. She was given four unsympathetic women who were headed by the pious and disapproving Lady Kingston. And there were strict instructions that she should speak only in Lady Kingston's presence. But the arrangement turned out to be impracticable. Two of the women slept on a pallet mattress in Anne's chamber; while Kingston and his wife slept in the next room. Left unchaperoned, Anne talked uncontrollably. And it soon became clear that it was not in Cromwell's interest to silence her.
For, within twelve hours of her imprisonment, she had given full details of her conversation with Norris. Then she remembered another incident. 'She more feared Weston,' she said. 'For on Whitsunday Tuesday last [18 May 1535] Weston told her that Norris came more unto her Chamber for her than for Madge [Shelton].' 'Weston' was Sir Francis Weston, a young rake-hell and Henry's former favourite page. Oral reports of what Anne said were passed on to Kingston by the aptly named Mrs Coffin, while Kingston in turn made written reports to Cromwell.
On the morning of 3 May 1536, Anne again babbled. She had remembered further details about the Weston incident. 'She had spoke to him', she said, 'because he did love her kinswoman Mrs Shelton and that . . . he loved not his wife.' This was Anne acting properly in her role of censor of morals. But Weston had ready a tart reply. 'He loved one in her house better than them both,' he said. The Queen walked into the trap. 'Who is that?' she asked. 'It is yourself,' the insolent boy replied.
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It was a smart retort. But it would cost him his head, and within a few hours he too was in the Tower.
* * *
Weston's imprisonment marked a turning-point in the investigations. Hitherto, only Anne's closest circle had been involved. Now the arrests widened into a moral purge which picked up the most notable reprobates of the Court. By Monday, 8 May, Sir Richard Page, Richmond's indulgent guardian, and Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, lover and flagrant adulterer, were also in the Tower. And Anne's cousin, Sir Francis Bryan, who was an obvious target in view of his nickname of the 'Vicar of Hell', narrowly escaped the same fate.
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Rather apart from these was William Brereton. At Court, he held the relatively minor office of Groom of the Privy Chamber. But he was a mighty figure in the local administration of his native Chester and North Wales. Constantine had spoken with him on Thursday, 4 May, at about 9 a.m. and found him resigned to his fate. 'There was no way but one with any matter,' he said. His premonitions proved correct and he was a prisoner in the Tower by 2 o'clock. 'What was laid against him', Constantine said a few years later, 'I know not nor never heard.' And posterity is little the wiser. Was he too close to Rochford? Had he trodden on toes in North Wales? We do not know.
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Anne's revelations in the Tower were not confessions, of course. Far from it. Instead, they were part of a desperate quest for meaning. 'She to be a Queen', she said, 'and [so] cruelly handled . . . was never seen [before]'. What could have brought it about? Was it the work of accusers, as she fancied Weston to be? Was Henry testing her? 'I think the King does it to prove me,' she said. 'And', Kingston added, 'she did laugh withal and was very merry.'
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These violent mood-swings continued. Sometimes she prophesied vengeance. There would be no rain till she came out of the Tower, she said on one occasion. And, on another: 'If I die, you shall see the greatest punishment for me within these seven years that ever came to England'. Then, in another frame of mind, she ate a hearty dinner and joked and punned. Would the male prisoners have anyone to make their beds? she asked. 'Nay, I warrant you,' Lady Kingston replied. Anne's exact answer is lost because of the damage sustained by the Kingston correspondence in the Cottonian Library fire. But it clearly involved a pun on the 'ballets' (ballads or poems), for which Rochford as well as Wyatt was famous, and the 'pallets' (beds), on which they would now have to exercise their skills as 'makers' (which also meant poets).
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This, for better or for worse, was the old Anne. 'Such desire as you have had to such tales has brought you to this,' one of her women brutally informed her. But there was also the old Anne in her religious observances. Almost her first request was that she might have the sacrament in the closet or oratory next to her chamber, 'that she might pray for mercy'. A day or two later, she repeated the request. She also asked for Almoner Skip – 'whom', Kingston noted drily, 'she supposeth to be devout'. Clearly, Skip's Passion Sunday Sermon was unforgiven, by one of its victims at least.
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Also impressive is Anne's family feeling. The Boleyns were nothing if not a tight-knit clan. And it showed. Where was her father? Her brother? How would her mother cope? 'Oh my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow!' she lamented. When she finally discovered that her brother was also in the Tower, it came almost as a relief. 'I am very glad', she said, 'that we both be so nigh together.'
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Her attitude to her fate changed as swiftly as her mood. 'One hour she is determined to die', Kingston reported, 'and the next hour much contrary to that.' Even her religion was pressed into service. 'I would God I had my Bishops', she said on 4 or 5 May, 'for they would all go to the King for me.' Unfortunately for Anne, Cromwell had anticipated this manoeuvre and took care to block access to the King, by the bishops or anybody else.
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* * *
Cromwell's particular concern was Archbishop Cranmer. Cranmer was at his palace of Knole in Kent when the blow fell and it is unclear what, if anything, he knew of recent events at Court. On the 2nd, he received a letter from Cromwell, commanding him in the King's name to come to Lambeth but equally forbidding him to make any attempt to see the King. The letter gave no details, but 'open report' filled Cranmer in all too fully on the charges laid against his patroness.
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Once arrived at Lambeth Cranmer did what he could. He was forbidden to see the King. But he could try to send him a letter. It was, however, one of the most difficult compositions of his life. On the one hand, he had to soothe Henry's wounded pride. On the other, he wanted to plead for Anne to whom, as he frankly acknowledged, he owed everything 'next unto [the King]'. Yet he could not plead too hard, for that would be to doubt the King's justice.
'I am in such a perplexity', he wrote to Henry, 'that my mind is clean amazed.' 'For I never had better opinion in a woman', he continued, 'than I did in her, which maketh me to think that she should not be culpable. And again, I think your Highness would not have gone so far, except she surely had been culpable.'
But beyond Anne, and even beyond Henry, Cranmer had a higher duty still: to God's Word itself. Here, too, Cranmer confronted a paradox. 'As I loved her not a little, for the love which I judged her to bear towards God and his Gospel', so, he explained, 'if she be proved culpable, there is no one that loveth God and his Gospel that ever will favour her, but must hate her above all other.' Indeed, 'the more they favour the Gospel, the more they will hate her; for there was never creature in our time that so much slandered the Gospel'.
But what has happened? And what subconscious voice is it speaking through the writer's grammar? For in this last clause Cranmer has shifted from talking of Anne's guilt in the conditional, as something to be proved, and slipped into the indicative, as though it were already manifest.
He ends with a plea and an assertion: 'wherefore I trust that your Grace will bear no less entire favour unto the truth of the Gospel than you did before:
for as much as your Grace's favour to the Gospel was not led by
affection unto her but by zeal unto the truth
'.
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for as much as your Grace's favour to the Gospel was not led by
affection unto her but by zeal unto the truth
'.
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Already, therefore – before trial, before even formal charges were laid – Anne's strongest supporter had leaped beyond her individual fate to the bigger question. For what mattered for Cranmer and his ilk was not Anne, nor the guilt or innocence of the men accused with her, but the future of Reform. She and they might go. But Reform must remain. It was bigger than them, bigger than them all. But it would survive, Cranmer acknowledged, only if Anne and her contribution were air-brushed out of history.
It was a price, finally, that he was prepared to pay.
Cranmer has been much criticised for the queasy tone of his letter, for its 'on the one hand this' and 'on the other hand that'. Why did he not defend his mistress and co-Reformer directly and courageously? And to the hilt? The answer, of course, is that he would have destroyed himself without saving her. And what would have been the point of that? Within the limits of prudence, he acted courageously. And certainly more courageously than anyone else.
But it is unlikely to have done much good. Indeed, the letter over which Cranmer had laboured may never have reached Henry. If it did, it would have been read cursorily. For Henry was not interested in defences of Anne. He had eyes and ears only for Jane Seymour.
* * *
But before Henry could have Jane, Anne had to be disposed of. On her first evening in the Tower, she questioned Kingston closely. 'Shall I die without justice?' she asked. Kingston answered gravely: 'The poorest subject the King hath had justice'. That was the official line. Anne, intelligent, perceptive Anne, had the sense to laugh at his reply. Nevertheless she returned to the theme. 'I shall have justice,' she said a day or two later. 'I have no doubt therein,' replied Kingston once more. 'If any man accuse me', she continued, 'I can say but "nay" and they can bring no witness.'
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Like the rest of Anne's comments, this remark was reported to Cromwell. And he did not forget it in his preparation of the case.
* * *
Normally, in cases of High Treason, the accused were subject to repeated examination before the Council. Detailed questionnaires, known as interrogatories, were prepared to guide the questioning, and verbatim transcripts were made of the answers. Nothing of the kind survives for Anne or her co-accused. The papers could, of course, have been abstracted from the records at a subsequent date – say when Anne's daughter Elizabeth was Queen – and destroyed. But it does not seem very likely. For Elizabeth, unlike her sister Mary, lived firmly in the present and showed no interest in rewriting history, much less in obliterating it.
Instead, it is probable that the records do not exist because the examinations never took place. Early in the second week of May, for instance, Rochford asked Kingston 'at what time he should come afore the King's Council'. 'For I think I shall not come forth till I come to my judgement,' he continued, 'weeping very [much]'. Anne had similar concerns. 'I much marvel', she told Kingston, 'that the King's Council comes not to me.'
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