The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (45 page)

But there were more explosive revelations to come. Chapuys wrote circumspectly to the Emperor:

Why should Rochford have wished to impugn the legitimacy of a royal heir with Boleyn blood?
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It would not have been in his, or his family’s, interests to do so. But that was beside the point. His accusers seem only to have been concerned with crediting him with treachery, for to say such things of the sovereign was not only shocking, but also—under the provisions of the 1534 act—high treason, in that they impugned the King’s issue.
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There was an accepted medieval belief, still widely prevalent in the sixteenth century—that impotence, temporary or otherwise, was often caused by magic, as was alleged in many requests for marriages to be
annulled. This might explain the discreet assertion in the indictment that certain harms and perils had befallen the King’s body,
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which implied that the harm done to the man imperiled both his dynasty and his kingdom. So entrenched in society was the assumption—and awareness—that most cases of impotence were brought about by witchcraft,
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that the fact did not even need to be stated in the indictment. And although this was a far cry from Henry’s reported belief that he had been seduced into this marriage by witchcraft, which was why it was barren of sons, it was but a short step from that suspicion to the conviction that Anne had taken things a stage further and used magic to prevent her husband from impregnating her. It did not matter that the Queen, in confiding this matter to her sister-in-law—if she ever did so—had perhaps been expressing her fears about not being able to conceive, nor that her very future depended on her bearing Henry an heir. Once she was suspected of witchcraft, people would have been ready to believe anything of her, however irrational; and such a charge would have made sense in the light of her alleged plot to murder the King, marry one of her lovers, and rule in Elizabeth’s name.

However, it is unlikely that Anne ever made that unguarded remark to Lady Rochford. By the summer of 1535 they had almost certainly fallen out, and Jane had switched her allegiance to Katherine and Mary. If Anne had confided in Jane prior to that date, and her assertions about the King were true, his incapacity must have been temporary, for he had begotten a son on her in October that year. It is highly implausible that Anne would have trusted Jane with such sensitive information after their estrangement, and therefore unwise to accept this evidence for Henry VIII’s supposed impotency at face value.

It has been suggested that Henry’s embarrassment about his poor sexual performance, and his suspicion—or awareness—that Anne despised him for it, may have been a fundamental cause of her fall.
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Yet there is little evidence to support the widely discussed modern theory that Henry VIII suffered from erectile problems. In 1532, lamenting the fact that he had waited so long to marry Anne Boleyn and still did not have a son to succeed him, Henry himself told Parliament, “I am forty-one years old, at which age the lust of man is not so quick as in lusty youth.”
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This was a strange remark from the man who had been waiting for more than six
years to marry Anne, and was supposedly desperate to bed her, but it was probably made to justify the speedy putting away of Katherine of Aragon.
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Eight years after the King uttered it, even when he had become ill, incapacitated, and grossly obese, he was to tell his doctor that he was still having wet dreams twice nightly; at that time—1540—he insisted that he was unable to consummate his marriage to Anne of Cleves, who revolted him in various ways, but that because of his “nightly emissions,” he felt himself capable of intercourse with other ladies. It would therefore appear that the King’s remark to Parliament in 1532 was merely made to curry sympathy and emphasize the urgency of the situation.

Then there was that touchy response made to Chapuys in 1533, “Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?”
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though perhaps we should not attach too much significance to that, for it was made in response to the ambassador’s suggestion that the King might never have sons. The fact that Anne Boleyn conceived four times in three years, and that Jane Seymour was to become pregnant after only six months of marriage, is proof that Henry VIII functioned sexually as normally as any man of his age.

Whether Anne actually complained of Henry’s impotence to Lady Rochford is immaterial, for the real purpose of this evidence was probably to reinforce the implication in the indictment that Henry VIII had not fathered the child of which Anne miscarried.
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What is strange, though, is why the Crown was being so coy about this, and did not openly accuse Anne of impugning the royal succession by foisting a bastard on the King; and why it took a gamble that Rochford would not disobey orders and read out loud what was supposed to be kept secret.

Rochford’s answer, followed by his silence, made plain to everyone listening the thrust of the evidence, and its effect was to create a sensation, while every foreign ambassador was to report it in gleeful detail.
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Too late, Rochford protested, “I did not say it!” No one was willing to listen.

He responded better to the other charges, replying “so well that several of those present naively wagered ten to one that he would be acquitted, especially as no witnesses were produced against him.”
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George Constantine told Cromwell that “there were [those] that said that much money would have been laid that day, and that at great odds, that the Lord Rochford should have been quit.”

Even “the judges at first were of different opinions, but at last one view overturned the other” and the twenty-six peers (Northumberland being absent) came to a unanimous decision: when Norfolk “asked them if he was guilty or not, one (speaking for them all) replied, ‘Guilty.’”
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The duke then had to sentence his nephew to the full horrors of a traitor’s death: “That he should go again to prison in the Tower from whence he came, and to be drawn from the said Tower of London through the City of London to the place of execution called Tyburn,
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and there to be hanged, being alive cut down, and then his members [genitals] cut off and his bowels taken out of his body and burnt before him, and then his head cut off, and his body to be divided in quarter pieces, and his head and body to be set at such places as the King should assign.”
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Hearing these dread words, Rochford observed that every man was a sinner and that all deserved death.
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According to Chapuys, he “said that, since he must die, he would no longer maintain his innocence, but confessed that he had deserved death.” He only “requested the judges that they would beg the King that his debts, which he recounted, might be paid out of his goods.”
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Effectively, unless Chapuys got it wrong, Rochford confessed that he was guilty as charged, and that his sister was guilty by implication. It would have been unusual for a man facing imminent divine judgment to confess an untruth, but Rochford perhaps made this declaration with a view to protecting the surviving members of his family, for on the scaffold he was to protest that he had never offended the King and, according to Chapuys himself, “disclaimed all that he was charged with.”
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Plainly, people did believe him innocent. “By the common opinion of men of best understanding in those days,” George Wyatt later wrote, Rochford was “condemned only upon some point of a statute of words then in force.” Wyatt, like others, was clearly not impressed by Lady Rochford’s evidence. “I heard say he had escaped, had it not been for a letter,” Constantine recorded. He did not specify whether this was his wife’s letter detailing his crimes, or the letter produced at the Queen’s trial as evidence that he had fathered her child. Had Rochford not been so proud, the poet Wyatt wrote later, every man would have bemoaned his fate, if only for his great wit. But he had made so many enemies through his arrogance that there were few willing to speak up in his favor, however much they had admired his courage during his trial.

“After this, the court broke up.”
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It had been one of the most momentous days in English judicial history.

Afterward, news of the verdict was speedily conveyed to the King. On May 19, Chapuys reported that Henry had “supped lately with some ladies in the house of John Kite Bishop of Carlisle.”
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This would have been on one of the evenings after the trial, perhaps May 15 itself. The Bishop of Carlisle’s Inn (later Russell House) stood by Ivy Bridge in the Strand, next to the Savoy Hospital; part of this house was currently being leased to Sir Francis Bryan.

Bishop Kite told Chapuys the next morning that Henry had “shown an extravagant joy” at dinner, and was “heard to say that he believed upward of a hundred men had had to do with [Anne], and said he had long expected the issues of these affairs, and that thereupon he had before composed a tragedy, which he carried with him; and so saying, the King drew from his bosom a little book written in his own hand; but the bishop did not read the contents,” probably because it was not the occasion for it. Chapuys gained the impression that the book may have contained “certain ballads that the King has composed, at which the Concubine and her brother laughed as foolish things, which was objected to them as a great crime.”
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Henry added that Anne only kept his love through practicing her spells and enchantments.
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His conviction that she had bewitched him was probably genuine, and would go a long way toward explaining his ill-advised passion for her, and prevent him from losing face in the light of recent events. Whether Henry really believed that Anne had been rampantly promiscuous with more than a hundred men is dubious: if he had long expected something of that nature, why had he not acted on his suspicions before? No, this was probably another blustering, face-saving remark.

Chapuys sought out Henry that evening to offer his commiserations on the Queen’s treachery, upon which Henry observed complacently that “many great and good men, even emperors and kings, have suffered from the arts of wicked women.” He did not appear to be suffering very greatly. “You never saw a prince or husband make greater show or wear his horns more patiently and lightly than this one does,” Chapuys observed with irony to the Emperor. “I leave you to imagine why.”
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The reason for Henry’s complacency was staying a mile or so along the river, at Chelsea, where Henry had himself rowed after dinner. That
night, he stayed up late with Jane Seymour, enjoying a supper prepared by his own master cooks. The next day, May 16, Chapuys noticed that the courtiers were visiting Chelsea in increasing numbers to pay their respects to Jane, whom they expected would soon become their queen. The common people were aware of this too, and crowds were gathering outside the gates in the hope of catching a glimpse of her. Their mood was not entirely approving; at least one defamatory ballad about Jane was already circulating in London, much to the King’s annoyance.

The cynical Chapuys was doubtful that Henry’s love for Jane would last. “He may well divorce her when he tires of her,” he opined, doubtless thinking of the King’s two failed marriages. But for now Henry was an amorous suitor, as is apparent in this, the only one of his letters to Jane Seymour to survive; it must have been sent around this time, and refers to one of the scurrilous ballads:

Just, True, and Lawful Impediments