The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (27 page)

Anne was already doomed. There was no way Henry VIII or his advisers were going to risk a repeat performance of what had happened when the King tried to set aside Katherine of Aragon. She had not gone quietly, but held her ground and stood up for her rights for nine tortuous years, maintaining—even after he had their marriage annulled and married Anne—that she was the King’s true wife and her daughter his lawful heir. Anne might be unpopular, but she still had a considerable number of powerful relatives and supporters of the reformist persuasion, who might make trouble on her behalf. The way had to be cleared for the King to make a third, undisputed marriage, and that could only be achieved literally over Anne’s dead body.
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By nightfall on May 2, most people at court had learned of the Queen’s arrest. Never before had a queen of England been charged with adultery and imprisoned in the Tower. Chapuys was almost jubilant, and at once penned a somewhat self-congratulatory letter to the Emperor:

Chapuys was convinced that the Almighty had ordained Anne’s fall in vengeance for the wrongs she had inflicted on the late Queen Katherine and Lady Mary, and he felt no pity whatsoever for her. He went on:

Chapuys obviously did not as yet know that Norris had also been accused of adultery with the Queen, but he had heard that:

The ambassador had no doubt at this stage that Anne was guilty as charged; this dramatic—and fortuitous—new development only served to confirm his low opinion of her. He had known already that her days as queen were numbered.

He then went on to inform the Emperor of the abortive plan to have the union annulled on the grounds that Anne had secretly married the Earl of Northumberland some years earlier.

This dispatch shows that Chapuys, for all his connections at court and his efforts to further Imperialist interests and befriend Cromwell, was not
quite at the center of affairs, and was certainly not privy to everything going on in the privy apartments and the council chamber. Yet he had been able to discover, or had been fed, certain information, such as that concerning Northumberland’s possible precontract with Anne.

Sir Francis Bryan was to reveal in June that, “upon the disclosing of the matter of the Queen,” Sir Nicholas Carew, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Knight of the Body to the King, “and the rest of his fellows of the Privy Chamber [were heard] saying that they rejoiced that the King had escaped this great peril and danger, and that the issue the King might have, if he took another wife, should be out of all doubt.”
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Out of all doubt also, in their minds, was the Queen’s fate.

Most people appear to have agreed with Chapuys and Bryan that Anne was guilty, including the populace at large. Her dismal progress along the river had not passed unnoticed, while Cromwell’s agents may have been at work spreading the official version of events, and very soon—within a matter of hours—the sensational news of her arrest and imprisonment was all around London. “The City rejoiced on hearing the report, hoping that the princess would be restored.”
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That the reports became somewhat garbled and embroidered in the process, and that there was little doubt of what the outcome would be, is clear from a letter written from London on May 2 by a panic-stricken Roland Buckley (or Bulkeley), a poor lawyer of Gray’s Inn, to his brother, Sir Richard Buckley, Norris’s friend, who enjoyed some influence with the King, but who, in his capacity as Knight Chamberlain of North Wales and deputy to Norris, had made an enemy of the powerful Brereton:

Some details reported by Buckley were incorrect: Anne’s father had not been arrested, nor had any ladies. It is often assumed that Buckley, anticipating that rich pickings would be had in the wake of the arrests, wanted to ensure that Sir Richard got his share, but it is more likely that he was urging Sir Richard to hasten to London in order to use his influence on behalf of those who had been arrested; Cromwell evidently thought that was his purpose, for Buckley’s courier was halted at Shrewsbury, relieved of his letter and clapped into gaol. The letter was forwarded to Cromwell, and Sir Richard never knew how nearly he was embroiled in the political drama being acted out in London. Within three months he would have attached himself to the Seymours.
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Had Roland Buckley been obeying a chivalrous impulse to champion Anne’s cause, or that of the men accused with her, his would have been virtually a lone voice, for Anne had never been popular; she had few powerful friends in England or abroad to speak up for her, and now hardly anyone was prepared to make any protest at her arrest. Most people appear to have believed—or to have affected to believe—that Anne was capable of the crimes of which she had been accused, and even that it had been her “full intent lineally to succeed to this imperial crown.”
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From the time of Anne’s committal to the Tower, Henry VIII’s behavior was typical of a man confronted with appalling evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and whose masculine pride has been deeply wounded. He avoided parading his humiliation in public, and remained incommunicado until all was over.
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Henry was apparently ready to believe anything of Anne. He would shortly manifest the conviction that she was a monster not only of lechery but also of cruelty. The latter was, to him, probably entirely credible. She had hounded Wolsey nigh unto death; repeatedly urged Henry to send Katherine of Aragon and Mary, his own daughter, to the scaffold; been ruthless against her enemies. Five years earlier, rumor had placed her faction behind an attempt to poison John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, an outspoken
and upright opponent of the Boleyns; and only a couple of months ago it was bruited that Katherine of Aragon had been poisoned, and that Anne was the culprit. Now it appeared she had plotted to do away with the King himself, her own husband. That certainly gave Henry a jolt, and his imagination began to run riot. When his bastard son, the seventeen-year-old Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond, came on the evening of May 2 to receive his father’s blessing before retiring for the night, “the King began to weep, saying that he and his sister [Lady Mary] were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them.”
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These tears were the only ones Henry is known to have shed in connection with Anne Boleyn’s fall,
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while his tirade betrayed his conviction that she was guilty of far worse than adultery, and the sharp-minded Chapuys picked up on this: “From these words, it would appear the King knows something about it.”
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When Richmond unexpectedly died the following month of what was probably a suppurating pulmonary infection (rather than the tuberculosis that has traditionally been blamed for his demise), that would no doubt have reinforced the opinions of Henry and others, who “thought he was privily poisoned by the means of Queen Anne and her brother, Lord Rochford, for he pined inwardly in his body long before he died. God knoweth the truth thereof.”
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In fact, Richmond’s final illness was short and unexpected.

Stained in Her Reputation

A
s soon as they heard of her arrest, Anne’s family and supporters sought to distance themselves from her, and effectively abandoned her to her fate. Aless recalled reactions in London:

One influential member of her circle who did feel some sympathy for Anne Boleyn, and shock at her fall, was Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury since 1533, when he had controversially declared Queen Katherine’s marriage null and void, and Anne’s valid. A former chaplain to the Boleyns, and a closet Protestant, he had done much to promote reform within the Church of England, a cause very dear to Anne’s heart and his own.

On the day of the Queen’s arrest, Cromwell sent a letter to Cranmer, who was then at his palace at Knole in Kent, informing him that his former patroness was in the Tower and that the King wished him to go to Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the archbishops of Canterbury, there to await his pleasure. Henry intended for Cranmer to find grounds for the annulment of his marriage to Anne. It was unthinkable that he could have lawfully been married to such a woman, and unthinkable too that the office of Queen of England should be brought into such disrepute, but on a more practical level, Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, whose right to succeed to the throne was enshrined in the Act of Succession of 1534, could not be allowed to stand in the way of any heirs Jane might bear Henry. Thus Henry had asked Archbishop Cranmer to find a pretext for dissolving this marriage that he had found to be good and valid just three years earlier, and for declaring Elizabeth—like her half-sister Mary before her—a bastard.

No one thought—or dared—to point out (as Bishop Burnet did 150 years later) that the two concurrent lines of proceedings against the Queen—the one to prove marriage unlawful and invalid, the other to prove her adultery—were incompatible.
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It would have made little difference to the outcome, however, for there remained that charge of plotting the King’s death, which was high treason by anyone’s reckoning.

Cranmer was shocked to hear the news of Anne’s arrest. He returned to Lambeth at once, as he had been instructed, but he knew—because Cromwell had told him so—that it was pointless trying to obtain an audience with the King. So he did the next best thing. On May 3, in evident distress—not only on Anne’s account but also, probably, because he feared that, with her influence removed, Henry might proceed no further in the cause of religious reform, or even abandon it—he wrote cautiously to the King to express his astonishment at the Queen’s crimes, his forlorn hope that she would be proved innocent, and his loyalty to his master—and to soothe Henry’s wounded ego. His opening words—the first of which strangely presage the eloquent liturgy in his future
Book of Common Prayer
—suggest he was aware that his master was distressed by the recent revelations regarding the Queen, which is perhaps further evidence that Henry had taken them seriously: