The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (46 page)

A
t some point between May 15 and 17—Strickland asserts it was on May 16—Henry VIII signed the death warrants of the Queen and the men who were to perish on her account. Six years later, when his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, was condemned to death by Act of Attainder, a wooden stamp bearing his signature was impressed on the document, sparing him the pain of signing away the life of a woman he had once loved. But in the case of Anne Boleyn, he had personally to put pen to parchment. In so doing, he was merely obeying the law.
¹
There is no contemporary evidence that he took “a positive delight” in planning her execution, as one historian has written;
²
on the contrary, as will be seen, he was anxious to get it over with, and moved by pity—and pragmatism—to commute the sentence.

On the morning after the trials, Kingston went to York Place to see the King, one of the few privileged persons allowed to do so at this time. Later that day, back at the Tower, he wrote another letter to Cromwell: “This day I was with the King’s Grace, and declared the petitions of my lord of Rochford, wherein I was answered. Sir, the said lord much desireth to speak with you, which touched his conscience much, as he sayest, wherein I pray you I may know your pleasure, for because of my promise made unto my said lord to do the same.” Rochford was fretting about
some debts of his that had not been settled, and Kingston had undertaken to raise the matter with Master Secretary.

One of the prisoners was spending his final hours carving Anne’s falcon badge on the wall of his cell in the Beauchamp Tower. This carving, which still survives, must date to the days after her condemnation, as the falcon is without its customary crown.

Although the King informed Kingston that the male prisoners were to die the next day, the Constable had not yet been given a date for Anne’s execution, nor been told if she was to be burned or beheaded, and had perhaps not liked to ask Henry face-to-face. Instead he raised the matter with Cromwell: “I shall desire you further to know the King’s pleasure touching the Queen, as well for her comfort as for the preparation of scaffolds and other necessaries concerning. The King’s Grace showed me that my lord of Canterbury should be her confessor, and [he] was here this day with the Queen, and not in that matter.”

Appointing no less a personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury, who knew her well, to look after Anne’s spiritual needs was another kindness on the King’s part, but there was an ulterior motive involved. Cranmer, perhaps advised by Dr. Sampson, had now found grounds for annulling Anne’s marriage to the King, but there is no record of what they were, as the case papers documenting his deliberations have disappeared, which has given rise to much speculation. He certainly did not argue—as the Imperialists wanted—that Henry’s union with Katherine of Aragon had after all been lawful, not after all the trouble Henry had gone to in having it dissolved and insisting he had been right to do so; moreover, to have acknowledged that union as valid would automatically have restored Lady Mary to the succession.

Charles Wriothesley states that the archbishop declared Anne’s marriage invalid on the supposition of a precontract with her former suitor, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and initially Cranmer did consider those grounds. Bishop Burnet asserts—without citing his source—that Anne would willingly have confessed to such a precontract in the hope of saving her life or, if worse came to worst, suffering the kinder death. But Percy himself thwarted her.

In the summer of 1523, according to the account of George Cavendish, Cardinal Wolsey’s gentleman-usher, Henry Percy and Anne Boleyn, headstrong young lovers, had secretly contracted to wed in the
presence of witnesses, which was sufficient to create an impediment to any subsequent marriage with other partners. But by law such a precontract
per verba de praesenti
would have been invalid because Percy had been betrothed since 1516 to Lady Mary Talbot, whom he married in September 1523 after being forced by Cardinal Wolsey, on the King’s orders, to part from Anne. In the summer of 1532 the Countess of Northumberland had applied to Parliament for a divorce on the grounds that her husband had been precontracted to Anne at the time of their marriage, but the earl had that July sworn on oath that he had not been (see his letter below), whereupon Parliament turned down his wife’s petition.
³

Undaunted, after Anne’s arrest Cranmer again approached Northumberland on the subject of the precontract, and again Percy denied its existence. A week later Cranmer was forced to admit to Cromwell that he had as yet found no grounds for the desired annulment, at which Cromwell sent Sir Reynold Carnaby, one of the King’s officers in the North and a man who would have known Percy well, to visit the earl at Brook House, his residence in Newington Green, Hackney, northeast of London, and put pressure on him to confess that he had indeed been precontracted to Anne. But Northumberland would not allow himself to be bullied, and on May 13, he sent an exasperated letter to Cromwell:

Cromwell knew when he was beaten, and he directed Cranmer to find other grounds for the annulment of the royal marriage. In the end, according to Chapuys, the archbishop found a solution that was somewhat embarrassing and damaging to the King’s honor, which may account for
the proceedings being held in camera. He cited the impediment raised by Henry’s sexual liaison with Mary Boleyn, which had placed him within the forbidden degrees of affinity to her sister Anne.
⁵
In January 1528 the Pope, anxious to do anything to please the King but grant him the annulment he so desperately desired, had dealt with this impediment in a dispensation permitting Henry to marry anyone within the forbidden degrees (so long as it were not his brother’s widow) as soon as he was free to do so; in 1533, after Henry had broken with Rome, an Act of Parliament was passed permitting marriage with the sister of a discarded mistress, but that was followed by the Dispensations Act of March 1534, which decreed that existing papal dispensations would not be held as valid if they were contrary to “Holy Scripture and the laws of God.”
⁶
In the end, in declaring Anne’s marriage null and void, Cranmer chose to follow the old canon law.

The preamble to a new Act of Succession that would be passed by Parliament in July 1536 was to be suitably discreet: the union had been dissolved because of “certain entirely just, true, and lawful impediments hitherto not publicly known” and “confessed by the Lady Anne before the most reverend father in God, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury,”
⁷
presumably when he visited her on May 16, and by the King, the other party, probably days before that, because at some stage the Archbishop had forwarded copies of articles of objection to the validity of the marriage to both Henry and Anne, “that it might be for the salvation of their souls,” and summoned them to appear before his ecclesiastical court at Lambeth Palace to show why a sentence of nullity should not be passed.
⁸

What exactly did Anne—and Henry—confess to Cranmer? It has been suggested that another possible ground for annulment was Anne’s having used witchcraft to render Henry impotent, recognized as an impediment since the twelfth century under canon law.
⁹
Yet while this construction may be placed on the evidence produced at George Boleyn’s trial, it is clear that both Henry and Anne confessed to knowing of a bar to their union, and that both their souls were in peril as a result, not just Anne’s. Thus we should conclude that the true cause confessed to Cranmer was that Henry and Anne knew their union was incestuous and invalid due to the existence of the impediment created by Henry’s liaison with Mary Boleyn, and were aware that the Dispensations Act had rendered their
marriage unlawful. What amounts effectively to confirmation of this can be found in the 1536 Act of Succession, which banned marriages between people who came within this particular degree of consanguinity.
¹⁰

Certainly the impediment of consanguinity was known by both Anne and Henry when they entered into their illicit union. But they had married in good faith, because in 1533 the Pope’s dispensation of 1528 could still have been cited. It was the Act of 1534 that rendered both the dispensation and the marriage invalid. Strictly speaking, the legitimacy of Princess Elizabeth, born before that date, of a marriage entered into in good faith, should never have been denied, but evidently Cranmer, Cromwell, and the King were not interested in such legal niceties.

When Cranmer saw Anne at the Tower on May 16, the purpose of his visit was not—as Kingston’s letter makes clear—to provide spiritual consolation and administer the Holy Sacrament, but to obtain her admission of the impediment to her marriage, and her consent to the dissolution of that marriage and the disinheriting and bastardizing of her child; and also to apprise her of the proctors whom the King had appointed to act for her, and to seek her approval of them.
¹¹
It is more than likely, as will become apparent, that the archbishop had instructions to offer her the kinder death by decapitation by the sword (as historians have long suspected), or even the hope of mercy, in return for her cooperation. He certainly discussed the possibility of her being spared the extreme penalty, probably as an inducement, and probably without committing himself, for after he left, Anne was much more cheerful, and in his letter to Cromwell, Kingston reported that “this day at dinner, the Queen said she should go to a nunnery, and is in hope of life;”
¹²
her entering religion would render her marriage null and void.
¹³
It might be concluded, therefore, that she had agreed to the annulment without undue protest.

But it was a cruel deception. There would be no question of Anne being banished to a nunnery, which would have had to be abroad anyway, since those in England were scheduled for dissolution. The only reward she would get for her cooperation was a mercifully quick end.

Weston’s family were still making frantic efforts to save him, offering the King 100,000 marks (over £11 million) in return for his life,
¹⁴
but Henry either was not told of this or remained impervious to bribery. Chapuys
reported on May 19 that the French ambassadors—Antoine de Castelnau, Bishop of Tarbes, and Jean, Sieur de Dinteville—had done their best to plead for Weston.
¹⁵
It is frustrating to discover that Jean de Dinteville’s correspondence is missing for the two months covering Anne Boleyn’s fall and its aftermath. Froude speculated that all his letters on that subject had been either set apart and lost, or destroyed. The latter is a distinct possibility, since Dinteville found Henry VIII so terrifying that he begged to be recalled after his first audience in 1533, from which he emerged visibly shaking.
¹⁶
He would not have wanted such sensitive letters falling into the wrong hands.

“Notwithstanding [the ambassadors’] intercession on Weston’s behalf,”
¹⁷
there was no hope of liberation for any of the condemned men. All were to be executed. It was after Kingston returned from seeing the King that he informed them they must prepare to die the next day, and that it would not be at Tyburn after all, or within the Tower, as John Husee had speculated, but on the public scaffold on Tower Hill; an anonymous account in the Vienna Archives confirms that they were executed “on a scaffold in front of the Tower.”
¹⁸

Kingston had been given very little notice to prepare for the coming executions. In his letter of May 16 (quoted above), he reminded Cromwell that:

It was traditional—and indeed was perceived as a right and a privilege—for royal or noble persons condemned to death for treason to have the customary brutal sentence commuted by the King to beheading, which was seen as a more honorable way to die. But Kingston had as yet received no such instructions. He urged Cromwell: “Sir, I shall desire you that we
may know the King’s pleasure here as shortly as may be, that we here may prepare for the same which is necessary, for the same we here have now may for to do execution. Sir, I pray you have good remembrance in all this for us to do, for we shall be ready always to our knowledge.”

Kingston’s letter to Cromwell was dispatched after dinner on May 16, probably in the afternoon, so the condemned men had several agonizing hours to wait to hear how they would die. At length—and it may not have been until the next morning—word came that the King had been pleased graciously to commute the dread sentences to decapitation. Despite Bishop Burnet’s later assertion that Smeaton was hanged, the contemporary
Lisle Letters
confirm that all five, including the lowborn musician, “suffered with the axe,” as do Wriothesley (who says they “were all beheaded”), Edward Hall, the anonymous Imperialist account,
²⁰
the Grey Friars’ Chronicle, the
Histoire de la Royne Anne de Boullant
, and Cavendish, who refers to the great clemency extended by the King to Smeaton: