The Creation of Anne Boleyn (19 page)

Anne must have felt great anguish on hearing of the verdict. She could not know yet if Henry would spare her own life, but she knew how drastically the verdict would affect the families of these men, who would not only lose their husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers, but their livelihoods as well. And with the crown’s judgment against the men, she knew she automatically stood judged as an adulteress. The only question that remained was what punishment would be handed down to her.
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The sentences were a gross injustice; an overwhelming number of the purported sexual encounters would have been impossible by virtue of the queen’s absence from court or highly improbable due to her being pregnant or recently postpartum on the dates specified. But two “smaller” yet horrible cruelties were visited on the condemned men. On May 16 Henry signed all the death warrants. But although the men were due to die the next day, they were left in suspense as to the method of their execution, which normally was commuted for royals and nobles from hanging (to be followed by drawing and quartering) to beheading. As late as after dinner on that same day, Kingston was begging Cromwell to let him know how they were to die, but word didn’t come until much later, possibly the following morning. George and the other nobles thus spent many unnecessarily agonizing hours anticipating the more excruciating, humiliating death. In the end, all of them—even Smeaton, who was a lowly musician—met death by beheading.

Henry was apparently too occupied with other activities to worry about such an inconsequential decision as choosing the method of the men’s deaths. On the day of the arrests, “to cover the affection which he has for [Jane Seymour],” Henry had “lodged her seven miles hence in the house of the grand esquire, [Sir Nicholas Carew].”
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Oddly, while Jane was sequestered at Beddington, the king was often seen at “banquets” with diverse ladies, “sometimes remaining after midnight, and returning by the river . . . accompanied by various musical instruments” and “singers of his chambers.”
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Was this some sort of final fling, a smoke screen for his intentions with Jane, a show of macho bravado? It isn’t clear. Chapuys remarked that he never saw a man “wear his horns more patiently and lightly,” which to him was an indication of how little he cared about Anne’s future.
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Suzannah Lipscomb’s explanation is more penetrating. If we accept the premise that Henry believed Anne guilty of at least some of the charges, then it would have gravely wounded Henry’s sense of masculine honor, already made less sturdy by his physical decline and inability to perform the athletic feats that brought men glory.

Honor was chiefly a measure of one’s ability to conform to the ideals demanded of one’s gender. For a man, it meant exerting masculinity, imposing patriarchy, controlling the women in one’s household, maintaining a good reputation and demonstrating physical and sexual prowess . . . Anne’s very behavior, if assumed to be true, testified to the king’s lack of manliness, and, as if this weren’t enough, Anne and Rochford’s ridicule of the king on this very matter drove the point home.
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It was out of a desperate need to feel himself a man that Henry both escalated the relationship with Jane and “felt the need to cavort himself with the ladies . . . [He] did it to restore the patriarchal order and to prove his manhood.”
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On May 13 preparations were made for the trials of Anne and her brother. The grand juries were commanded to furnish the indictments, and Constable Kingston received a precept from Thomas Howard, the duke of Norfolk (Anne’s uncle), ordering him to bring the prisoners to trial on Monday, May 15. Norfolk also sent a precept to Ralph Felmingham, sergeant-at-arms, to summon at least twenty-seven “peers of the Queen and Lord Rochford, by whom the truth can be better made to appear.”
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While these official legal steps were being taken, physical preparations were also begun to make the King’s Hall in the Tower amenable to two thousand spectators, with benches lining the walls and a high platform for the interrogator and the condemned, so that all could see. “The King was determined,” Alison Weir writes, “that justice would be seen to be done” and was sure of the judicial strength of the evidence.
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Weir argues, as Lipscomb does, that he was honestly convinced that the charges were true and that “he had nourished a viper in his bosom” who had “betrayed and humiliated him, both as a husband and a king.”
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Other scholars are not so sure. But whatever his actual beliefs about Anne’s guilt or innocence, for Henry the outcome was such a foregone conclusion that on the same day that preparations were being made for the trial, he ordered Anne’s household dissolved and her servants discharged. On May 14 Jane was brought to Chelsea to be within quick reach when the sentence was pronounced on Anne. Henry, as always, was an excellent recycler of resources; Jane was installed in Thomas More’s former home, which Henry had taken over and lavishly redecorated after More was executed.

In the Tower

While Jane waited patiently in the various lodgings to which she had been moved, already being treated (and apparently regarding herself) as a queen, Anne was in the Tower of London. Her moods, according to Kingston, vacillated wildly from resignation to hope to anxiety. She had always had a wicked sense of humor, and no irony was ever lost on her. When taken to the Tower, she had asked, “Master Kingston, shall I die without justice?”
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He replied, “The poorest subject the king hath, had justice.”
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Hearing this, despite her fear, Anne laughed. She was too sophisticated and savvy about the dispensing of royal power to swallow the official PR. But she also seized on any glimmer of hope, and she had reason to believe that in the end she might be spared. She was the queen, after all, and no one in England had ever executed a queen. Isabella of Angoulême and Isabella of France, both married to English kings, had been adulterous, but only their lovers were executed. Even those who had been involved in acts of treason—the most famous of all being Eleanor of Aquitaine, who almost succeeded in toppling Henry II from his throne—were put under house arrest at most. It was almost unthinkable to Anne that Henry would have her put to death. But so, too, was her imprisonment, which had come so suddenly and seemingly without reason.

Until very near the end, she still harbored the belief that Henry might pardon her. It was not an unreasonable expectation. The last-minute rescue of the condemned queen was a centerpiece of the romance of chivalry, which was still being avidly consumed at court via Malory’s
Le Morte d’Arthur.
In the Arthurian legend, Guinevere is condemned to death twice for treason (the second time for adultery with Lancelot) and both times is saved from the stake by Lancelot—with King Arthur’s blessings. Arthur had, in fact, suspected the queen’s infidelity for years, but because of his love for her and for Lancelot, had kept his suspicions a secret. When Modred and Agravain, plotting their own coup d’état
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told the king about it, he had no choice but to condemn his queen, while privately hoping she would be rescued. It was a romantic fantasy—but one that Henry and Anne had grown up with and that had no doubt shaped their ideas about love. Henry had been an adroit and seductively tender courtier who had pledged himself Anne’s “servant” and swore his constancy. The pledges may (or may not) have been made manipulatively, but his infatuation was real and the gestures were convincing. Why wouldn’t Anne, whom Henry had, in fact, honored for six years as if she were Guinevere, cherish the hope that she, too, would be rescued from death?

From the time she was taken to the Tower, then, a razor-thin edge separated hope and doom for Anne. She had been treated very gently and with great respect by Constable Kingston, and no doubt the fact that she was housed not in a dungeon but in the lodgings she had slept in before her coronation lent an ambiance of (mistaken) comfort to her stay in the Tower. After a visit from Cranmer on May 16, she appears to have been offered hints—or even proposed—some sort of “deal,” in which her admission of the illegitimacy of her marriage and Elizabeth might win her life in a nunnery instead of death. Cromwell had been working to find a way to annul the marriage and bastardize Elizabeth. Two likely “impediments” to the lawfulness of the marriage were a possible precontract with her young love Percy and the “consanguinity” of the king’s affair with Mary Boleyn. Percy denied the precontract, so Cranmer was sent to get Anne to admit that she knew of the relationship with Mary when she married Henry. Weir speculates—accurately, I believe—that Cranmer may have suggested to Anne that if she admitted to the impediment, the king might spare her life. After Cranmer left, Kingston reports that Anne was in a “cheerful” mood and talked about her hopes of being spared death. Instead, the only “mercy” Henry had planned was her death by a skilled French swordsman, who was on his way even before Anne’s trial.

Anne’s emotional vacillations—from terror to prayerful resignation to black humor (speculating the night before her execution that her enemies would remember her as “la Royne Anne sans Tête”) suggest that the strangeness of what was happening to her was at times impossible for her to assimilate. Just a few short months before, she had been pregnant. Just a few weeks before, Henry had been insisting that Charles V acknowledge the legitimacy of their marriage. Now she was in the Tower, condemned to death. Her fortunes had turned around so swiftly and extremely that it must have been difficult to keep a steady grip on reality. Yet she managed, at her trial on May 15, after nearly two weeks in the Tower and the certain recognition, after the verdicts of the men accused with her, that she would be found guilty, to summon her renowned pride and dazzling confidence for the grim occasion. Dressed in black velvet over a scarlet petticoat, her cap “sporting a black-and-white feather,” she “presented herself with the true dignity of a queen, and curtseyed to her judges, looking round upon them all, without any sign of fear . . . impatience, grief, or cowardice,”
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according to Crispin de Milherve, whom Alison Weir cites as an eyewitness at the trial, but who may have been Lancelot de Carles. When it was time for her to speak, after hearing the full charges for the first time—including trivial, noncriminal but “atmospherically” damaging accusations that she had made fun of the king’s poetry and taste in clothing—she made such “wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her” that “had the peers given in their verdict according to the expectations of the assembly, she had been acquitted.”
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But, of course, the verdict was not dependent on the impression Anne made or how convincing her defense was. When she protested against Smeaton’s confession “that one witness was not enough to convict a person of high treason,” she was simply informed “that in her case it was sufficient.” Also “sufficient” were numerous bits of gossip that nowadays would be regarded as worse than hearsay, since they came from obviously prejudiced sources. George Wyatt, writing about the trial later, says that he heard nothing that could be considered evidence. Instead, as author Jane Dunn described the case, it was “a ragbag of gossip, innuendo, and misinterpreted courtliness.”
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Anne almost certainly expected the guilty verdict that followed, which makes her calm, clear, and highly intelligent (according to numerous observers) responses to the charges all the more remarkable. It is less likely that she expected the sentence that followed: “that thou shalt be burnt here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off, as the King’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.” On hearing the verdict, several onlookers shrieked, took ill, and had to leave the hall. But Anne, as Chapuys observed, “preserved her composure, saying that she held herself ‘
pour toute saluee de la mort
’ [always ready to greet death], and that what she regretted most was that the above persons, who were innocent and loyal to the King, were to die for her.”
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And then, as summarized by several onlookers but reported in the greatest detail by the witness identified by Weir (controversially) as Crispin de Milherve, she delivered the extraordinary speech that I quoted from briefly in the previous chapter.

My lords, I will not say your sentence is unjust, nor presume that my reasons can prevail against your convictions. I am willing to believe that you have sufficient reasons for what you have done; but then they must be other than those which have been produced in court, for I am clear of all the offences which you then laid to my charge. I have ever been a faithful wife to the King, though I do not say I have always shown him that humility which his goodness to me, and the honours to which he raised me, merited. I confess I have had jealous fancies and suspicions of him, which I had not discretion enough, and wisdom, to conceal at all times. But God knows, and is my witness, that I have not sinned against him in any other way. Think not I say this in the hope to prolong my life, for He who saveth from death hath taught me how to die, and He will strengthen my faith. Think not, however, that I am so bewildered in my mind as not to lay the honour of my chastity to heart now in mine extremity, when I have maintained it all my life long, much as ever queen did. I know these, my last words, will avail me nothing but for the justification of my chastity and honour. As for my brother and those others who are unjustly condemned, I would willingly suffer many deaths to deliver them, but since I see it so pleases the King, I shall willingly accompany them in death, with this assurance, that I shall lead an endless life with them in peace and joy, where I will pray to God for the King and for you, my lords.
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