The Creation of Anne Boleyn (18 page)

5

The Tower and the Scaffold

Rushing to Judgment

W
HEN CHAPUYS HEARD
of Anne’s arrest on May 2, he could barely suppress his glee. He marveled at “the sudden change from yesterday to this day” and declared that “the affair” had “come to a head much sooner and more satisfactorily than one could have thought, to the greater ignominy and shame of the lady herself.”
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Anne and Smeaton, he reported, were charged with adultery, and Henry Norris and George Boleyn were sent to the Tower for not having revealed what they knew of the “adulterous connexion” between the spinet player and the queen.
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Until the actual charges were formally made—and sometimes long after—reports of who was arrested and why were often inaccurate. The bishop of Faenza told Protonotario Ambrogio that the queen was arrested along with “her father, mother, brother, and an organist with whom she had been too intimate”
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; Philipp Melancthon wrote to Justus Jonas that those arrested for adultery were “her father, brother, two bishops, and others.”
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John Hannaert wrote Charles that “the so-called Queen was found in bed with her organist, and taken to prison. It is proved that she had criminal intercourse with her brother and others, and that the daughter supposed to be hers was taken from a poor man.”
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False gossip circulated throughout Europe concerning the arrests, with Chapuys, for once, getting it mostly right. His intelligence was muddled with respect to the charges—for Norris was already under suspicion of adultery (although it’s possible that wasn’t yet revealed)—but accurate with respect to those arrested. For Francis Weston and William Brereton were not arrested until May 4.

Anne may have unwittingly contributed to those later arrests. “M. Kyngston,” she asked when brought to the Tower, “do you know wher for I am here?”
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In a state of shock and disbelief, she searched her mind for the reasons for her arrest and shared her anxious musings with Kingston (who reported everything to Cromwell) and also with the ladies-in-waiting whom Cromwell had chosen to spy on her. In particular, Anne fretted about a possibly incriminating conversation she had with Norris, a longtime supporter of the Boleyns and the Groom of the Stool in the King’s Privy Chamber. Norris, who was honored to oversee Henry’s intimate bodily functions—Groom of the Stool, unbelievable as it may seem today, was a privileged spot in the king’s service—was closer to Henry than anyone else except for Charles Brandon. On May Day, when he left the jousts, Henry had asked Norris to go with him, and they had ridden together, discussing some serious matter. That evening, Norris was arrested.

The serious matter may have had to do with an exchange Norris had with Anne late in April, which had made its way to Cromwell, undoubtedly in garbled form. The actual details only came out when Anne, wondering why she had been arrested, speculated about it out loud with Kingston. Anne had been verbally jousting with Norris about his constant presence in her apartments and had chided him for “looking for dead men’s shoes, for if aught should come to the King but good, you would look to have me.”
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This particular statement must have alarmed Norris, who replied that “if he should have any such thought, he would his head were off.”
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There was good reason for his alarm. In 1534, Cromwell had engineered an extension of the legal definition of treason, which was passed by Parliament and made it high treason to “maliciously wish, will or desire by words or writing” bodily harm to the king.
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Under this new definition, Anne’s remark could be construed as referring to Norris’s desire for the king’s death. Anne apparently eventually “got it,” too, for after Norris made the comment about his head, she then told Norris that “she could undo him if she would.”
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What had (probably) begun as casual teasing ended with both of them ostentatiously declaring their horror at the thought that either one of them entertained fantasies of Henry’s death.

But Anne worried that this wasn’t enough. Later, realizing that their remarks may have been overheard, she asked Norris to go to John Skip and “swear for the queen that she was a good woman.”
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Unfortunately, this attempt at damage control only worked to make Skip suspicious. He confided his suspicions to Sir Edward Bayntun, who then went to Cromwell, who surely felt that gold from heaven had fallen into his lap. All this happened in late April. So clearly, at the point of Anne’s arrest on May 2, Norris was suspected of more than simply withholding information about her purported affair with Smeaton. However, the full details of the conversation may only have been revealed by Anne in her rambling self-examination with Kingston.

Anne also told Kingston about how she had teased Francis Weston, then reprimanded him for telling her that he, too, frequented her apartments out of love for her. Under other circumstances, it would undoubtedly have been regarded as innocent courtly banter. But Cromwell was on the hunt, attempting to assemble a case that would be overwhelming, if not in the evidence, then in the sheer magnitude and scope of the charges. Both G. W. Bernard and Suzannah Lipscomb suggest, too, that Anne’s banter with Weston had “crossed the acceptable boundaries of courtly interchanges.”
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But I suspect that what was considered “courtly” and what was suspected to be something more had changed since Anne had learned the rules and that Cromwell was able to take advantage of the different climate with regard to heterosexual behavior.

Anne was trained in traditions of courtly love within which flirtatiousness, far from being suspect, was a requirement of the court lady. But it must never go too far; the trick was to go just to the edge and then back off (without, of course, hurting the gentleman’s feelings). Purity was required, but provocative banter was not just accepted, it was expected. Especially in the French court, a relaxed atmosphere was the norm in conversations between men and women. As the Middle Ages segued into the Renaissance and then into the Reformation, however, conversations that would have been seen as entirely innocent may have begun to be viewed differently. In an earlier chapter, I looked at the change from Capellanus’s version of courtly love, still rooted in Plato, that cautions young men to turn their backs on carnal pleasure and aim for spiritual transcendence of mere bodily love, to Castiglione, with his cynical advice for the most effective ways to overcome the resistance of their female prey. If actual behavior followed ideology, then by the time Cromwell mounted his conspiracy against Anne, people may have been disposed to believe things, based on the exchanges with the men she was charged with, that would have been dismissed as ridiculous forty years earlier.

In addition to his spies in the prison, Cromwell may have had some malicious female accomplices helping him out. One of those could have been Jane Parker (George Boleyn’s wife), who many historians believe provided the incriminating “evidence” against her husband—that she had seen the siblings kissing on the mouth and that Anne had told George first about her last pregnancy. Both of these were completely appropriate behavior for a brother and sister, but by the time they reached the point of formal indictments, tongues and other body parts had been added to raise the suspicion that the pregnancy was the result of George’s having “carnally” known Anne “at Westminster [and] also did on divers days before and after at the same place, sometimes by his own procurement and sometimes by the Queen’s.”
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Jane is also said to have told Cromwell that the two had mocked the king for being unskilled and having “neither potency nor vigor” in bed.
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Jane’s role has not been definitely confirmed, however. Her involvement is hinted at by Chapuys (not the most reliable source, admittedly); stated outright by George Wyatt, who calls George’s “wicked wife” the “accuser of her husband”; and accepted by later historians Gilbert Burnett, Peter Heylin, and others who attribute her turn against her husband and sister-in-law to Jane’s jealousy of Anne’s close relationship with George.
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Alison Weir, more plausibly, I think, points to a possible self-protective switch of political allegiance from the Boleyns to the Seymours. Jane saw which way the wind was blowing and followed its course. Howard Brenton, in his play
Anne Boleyn,
portrays Jane as actually a close ally of Anne’s. She was, however, a weak person in Brenton’s telling, and she capitulated to Cromwell’s pressure on her. The latter two explanations—self-protection and pressure from Cromwell—rather than animosity toward Anne and George seem most convincing to me.

Another accomplice appears to have been Elizabeth Browne Somerset, Countess of Worcester, the sister of a member of the Privy Council, Sir Anthony Browne, who accused Anne of relations with both Smeaton and George. This accusation, as related in a poem by Lancelot de Carles written after Anne’s death, was made by Lady Worcester after one of her brothers (which one is not made clear) had criticized his sister for her own “dishonorable love,” to which she replied that “it was little in her case in comparison with that of the Queen.”
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To my ears, this sounds very much like a desperate attempt to deflect attention from her own guilt, as a child will do when accused. But this was the sort of stuff on which Cromwell’s case was built. The tactic seems to have been to create as much smoke as possible and to count on people believing there must therefore be a fire.

And then, of course, there was the intimidation factor. Thomas Cranmer, the archbishop of Canterbury, who shared Anne’s religious inclinations and had been a champion of hers since before the marriage, was in emotional turmoil on hearing of Anne’s arrest. On May 3 he wrote to Henry, his soul clearly in struggle, wanting to defend Anne but fearing for his own safety. “I am clean amazed, for I had never better opinion of woman; but I think your Highness would not have gone so far if she had not been culpable. I am most bound to her of all creatures living, and therefore beg that I may, with your Grace’s favor, wish and pray that she may declare herself innocent.”
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Still, he cautiously hedged his bets. “Yet if she be found guilty, I repute him not a faithful subject who would not wish her punished without mercy.”
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The “if” evaporated in the middle of his letter writing after Cranmer was called to the Star Chamber by Cromwell and his cronies. When he returned to his desk, having “chatted” with Cromwell, Cranmer concludes his letter: “I am sorry such faults can be proved against the Queen as they report.”
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It is astonishing how quickly events proceeded from then on, both in the criminal investigation and trial, and in the disintegration of whatever remained of Henry’s relationship with Anne. On May 4 Francis Weston and William Brereton, a Groom of the Privy Chamber who was married to Elizabeth Savage, a second cousin of Henry’s, were arrested. The charges for both: high treason and adultery. On May 5 Thomas Wyatt and Sir Richard Page were arrested. It was rumored that Wyatt (who is credited with introducing the sonnet into English) and Anne were romantically involved before Anne’s marriage to Henry, and several of his love poems, although ambiguous, seem to refer to his feelings for her, which had to be abandoned because she “was Caesar’s.”
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However, whatever Wyatt felt, there is no evidence that Anne reciprocated. Wyatt was brought in for questioning at the Tower of London, but he was later released. Richard Page had been appointed a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber for his support for the king’s “great matter,” and had been helpful in bringing Wolsey down. Like Wyatt, Page was later released from the Tower. Unlike the other nobility who had been arrested, neither was a member of “the Boleyn faction” at court.

On May 12 Smeaton, Brereton, Weston, and Norris were tried. Three of the men—Norris, Brereton, and Weston—pleaded “not guilty.” Smeaton, who had earlier confessed under torture, “pleaded guilty of violation and carnal knowledge of the Queen, and put himself in the King’s mercy.”
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They faced a handpicked jury that was well aware of the verdict Henry wanted, and there was no effort to keep them from gossip. In fact, questions were put to potential jury members about their knowledge of the case, and the more they “knew,” the more fit they were considered for service. The trial itself would have been very speedy—any crime, from petty theft to grand larceny to murder, took only thirty minutes to try at the most. And, of course, when a king or queen had a vested interest in a case, they would be favored. As Wolsey once remarked, “If the Crown were prosecutor and asserted it, justice would be found to being in a verdict that Abel was the murderer of Cain.”
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The verdict of guilty was no surprise, and the convicted men were sentenced to be hanged and drawn and quartered.