The Creation of Anne Boleyn (17 page)

Chapuys was horrified by their reaction; grief stricken at having lost his longtime friend, whom he had comforted and championed over the years, he quickly began spreading rumors that Katherine had been poisoned by Anne. But good news was to come a bit later that month when Chapuys reported, thirdhand as usual, that one of the king’s “principal courtiers” said that the king had confessed to another lady and her husband “that he had been seduced and forced into this second marriage by means of sortileges and charms, and that, owing to that, he held it as null. God (he said) had well shown his displeasure at it by denying him male children. He, therefore, considered that he could take a third wife, which he said he wished much to do.”
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Even Chapuys, ever alert to promising signs that Anne would be supplanted, finds this report “incredible.” Anne was in her final month of what was to be her last pregnancy; how could the king be sure that God would not bless the marriage with a male heir this time around? Was someone whispering in Henry’s ear, planting suggestions about Anne?

It seems that this is exactly what was happening. By April 1 Chapuys was writing to the emperor, informing him that the king was “paying court” to Edward Seymour’s sister, Jane, and that he had “heard” (from the Marchioness of Exeter) that Jane had been “well tutored and warned by those among this King’s courtiers who hate the concubine, telling her not in any wise to give in to the King’s fancy unless he makes her his Queen, upon which the damsel is quite resolved. She has likewise been advised to tell the King frankly, and without reserve, how much his subjects abominate the marriage contracted with the concubine, and that not one considers it legitimate.”
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The marchioness also requested, at this time, that Chapuys aid in whatever way he can the “meritorious work” of removing Anne and thus not only protecting Princess Mary from Anne’s evil plotting and ridding the country of the “heretical doctrines and practices” of “Lutheranism,” but also “clearing the King from the taint of a most abominable and adulterous marriage.”
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In the four months between Katherine’s death and Henry’s open courting of Jane, two momentous events had occurred. On January 24, Henry had a bad jousting accident, which left him unconscious for two hours, and this undoubtedly stirred up his anxiety about his own diminishing physical competence and reminded him of his mortality—something he had been trying to avoid all his life through a hypochondria bordering on obsession. Then, on January 29, Anne miscarried. Although it was probably too early in the pregnancy for attendants to determine the sex of the child, which was later described by Nicholas Sander as a “shapeless mass of flesh,” it was reported by both Chapuys and Wriothesley to have been a male. This was a “huge psychological blow” to Henry.
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We have only Chapuys to rely on for details—“I see that God will not give me male children,” he reports Henry as saying and then ominously telling Anne that he would “speak to her” when she was up—but whether the quote is accurate or not, it makes sense that the loss of a potential heir, especially after at least one other miscarriage and his own recent brush with death, would have affected Henry deeply.
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Anne, on her part, was distraught. She appealed to Henry, telling him that the miscarriage was the result of the shock over his accident, which is not improbable, although Chapuys dismisses it. In a letter of February 17, he wrote to Charles that Anne’s inability to bear male children was due to her “defective constitution,” that “the real cause” of this particular miscarriage may have been the king’s “behavior toward a damsel of the Court, named Miss Seymour, to whom he has latterly made very valuable presents.”
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Jane was a startling contrast to Anne: “fair, not dark; younger by seven or eight years; gentle rather than abrasive; of no great wit, against a mistress of repartee; a model of female self-effacement against a self-made woman.”
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Plus, whether through coaching or inspiration of her own, she refused the king’s gifts, saying that her greatest treasure was her honor and that she would accept sovereigns from him in “such a time as God would be pleased to send her some advantageous marriage.”
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She may have not been of “great wit,” but she (or her brother) knew that this would increase Henry’s ardor. The refusal of sovereigns happened after Anne’s miscarriage, an event that undoubtedly emboldened Jane and her supporters. For if Anne had produced a living son, all the rumblings about Anne, both at court and among the people, and all the conniving of the Seymours, would have crashed against a brick wall. But it was Anne’s disastrous luck that not only did she miscarry, she miscarried soon after Katherine died. Initially, this had been a cause for celebration. What Anne did not take into account (or perhaps did, but had no reason to consider probable at this point) was that with Katherine’s death, Henry could have his marriage to Anne annulled, or invalidated in some other way, without having to deal with Katherine’s claims to the throne. Disastrously and without precedent, it was the “some other way” that prevailed.

The Storm Breaks

There are a number of theories as to what allowed the unthinkable—the state-ordered execution of a queen—to happen. One theory, first advanced by Retha Warnicke and then adopted by a number of novels and media depictions, is that the miscarried fetus was grossly deformed, which led to suspicions of witchcraft. If Henry truly believed that Anne was guilty of witchcraft—which, of course, was a possibility in those times—he would have virtually no choice but to destroy her, as he would have to do with anyone in league with Satan. But although Henry complained at one point that he had been bewitched by Anne, that was a notion that, as in our own time, was freely bandied about in a very loose, metaphorical manner. It could mean simply “overcome beyond rationality by her charms”—as Chapuys means when he complains that the “accursed Lady has so enchanted and bewitched him that he will not dare to do anything against her will.”
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Moreover, none of the charges later leveled against Anne involved witchcraft, and there is no evidence that the fetus was deformed.

Another theory, which Alison Weir puts forward in
The Six Wives of Henry VIII
but revises in
The Lady in the Tower,
is that Henry, fed up with Anne, newly enamored of Jane, and eager “to rid himself” of his second wife but not knowing how, eagerly embraced Cromwell’s suggestion in April that he had information that Anne had engaged in adultery, and then asked Cromwell to find evidence to support the charges.
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But even if we accept the idea that Henry would cynically encourage a plot designed to lead to Anne’s execution, and despite his flirtation with Jane and disappointment over the miscarriage, Henry did not behave like someone looking to end his marriage until Cromwell put the allegations before him. Whatever he was feeling about Anne, recognition of his supremacy was still entwined with her, and even after the miscarriage, he was still working for imperial recognition of his marriage to “his beloved wife” Anne. With Katherine gone, that seemed a real possibility. And, in fact, in March the emperor offered, in return for the legitimation of Mary, imperial support for “‘the continuance of this last matrimony or otherwise,’ as Henry wished.”
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The deal didn’t work out due to Henry’s refusal to acknowledge that anything about his first marriage—including Mary—was legitimate. He was utterly committed to maintaining his own absolute right to the organization of his domestic affairs, and that meant both recognition of Anne as lawful wife and Mary as bastard.

Most scholars nowadays (with a couple of exceptions I’ll discuss later) believe, following Eric Ives, that the plot against Anne was orchestrated by Thomas Cromwell without Henry’s instigation or encouragement. Things had been brewing dangerously between him and Anne for some time, and by April she probably knew that he had become friends with the Seymours and had also been sidling up to Chapuys. On April 2 Anne had dared to make a public declaration of her opposition to his policies by approving a potently coded sermon written by her almoner, John Skip, in which he (implicitly) compared Cromwell to Haman, the evil Old Testament councilor (which would make Anne Esther to Henry’s Xerxes). The specific spur for the sermon was proposed legislation to confiscate the wealth of smaller monasteries, which was awaiting Henry’s consent and against which Anne was trying to generate public sentiment. But by then, the enmity between Anne and Cromwell had become more global than one piece of legislation. Still, as he told Chapuys, Cromwell felt more or less secure in Henry’s favor until a crucial meeting between the ambassador and the king on April 18, in which Henry, who had seemed to be in favor of the reconciliation with Rome that Cromwell had been negotiating with Chapuys, now revealed his true hand and refused any negotiation that included recognition of his first marriage and Mary’s inclusion in the line of succession. Cromwell was aghast at Henry’s stubbornness, as he had been working hard toward the rapprochement with the emperor, burning his bridges with France and (because of his relationship with Chapuys) with Anne and her faction as well. Earlier in the day, it had seemed that some kind of warming between Chapuys and Anne was being orchestrated. Chapuys had been invited to visit Anne and kiss her hand—which he declined to do—then he was obliged to bow to her when she was thrust in his path during church services. Later, at dinner, Anne loudly made remarks critical of France, which were carried back to Chapuys. But when Henry took Chapuys to a window enclosure in his own room for a private discussion after dinner, he made it clear that he wouldn’t give.

“Far from the issue of April 1536 being ‘When will Anne go and how?’” Ives writes, “Henry was exploiting his second marriage to force Europe to accept that he had been right all along.”
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Cromwell was furious, humiliated, and fearful that he had unexpectedly found himself on the wrong side of Henry’s plans. In a letter to Charles, Chapuys wrote about the April 18 meeting, and what he wrote suggests that what was already on high heat between Cromwell and Anne was about to boil over. Chapuys reports that one reason why he would not “kiss or speak to the Concubine” and “refused to visit her until I had spoken to the King” was because he had been told by Cromwell that the “she devil” (Chapuys’ appellation, not Cromwell’s) “was not in favor with the King” and that “I should do well to wait till I had spoken to the King.”
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With the king still pushing for her recognition, Anne must have felt deceptively safe. On April 25 Henry wrote a letter to Richard Pate, his ambassador in Rome, and to Stephen Gardiner and John Wallop, his envoys in France, referring to “the likelihood and appearance that God will send us heirs male [by] our most dear and most entirely beloved wife, the Queen.”
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But something had already begun to seem wrong to Anne, who sought out her chaplain, Matthew Parker, on April 26 and asked him to take care of Elizabeth, should anything happen to her. And in the days that follow, Chapuys was clearly (and gleefully) aware that plots were being hatched against Anne. He wrote to Charles that there was much covert discussion at court “as to whether or not the King could or could not abandon the said concubine,” and that Nicholas Carew was “daily conspiring” against Anne, “trying to convince Miss Seymour and her friends to accomplish her ruin. Indeed, only four days ago the said Carew and certain gentlemen of the King’s chamber sent word to the Princess to take courage, for very shortly her rival would be dismissed.”
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When the bishop of London, John Stokesley, expressed skepticism, “knowing well the King’s fickleness” and fearful that should Anne be restored to favor, he would be in danger, Chapuys reassured Stokesley that the king “could certainly desert his concubine.”
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In fact, after the April 18 meeting, Cromwell, claiming illness, had gone underground to begin an intense “investigation” into Anne’s conduct. On April 23 he emerged and had an audience with Henry. We have no record of what was said. But many scholars believe that the illness was a ruse—that during his retreat he carefully plotted Anne’s downfall, and that what he told the king on April 23 were the deadly rumors about Anne that eventually led to her arrest and trial. The king, however—perhaps dissembling for public consumption or perhaps unconvinced by what Cromwell had told him—was still planning to take Anne with him to Calais on May 4 after the May Day jousts and was still pressing Charles to acknowledge the validity of his marriage to Anne. Then on April 30, Cromwell and his colleagues laid all the charges before Henry, and court musician Mark Smeaton was arrested.

Anne had no idea that Cromwell and Henry were meeting to discuss the “evidence” that she had engaged in multiple adulteries and acts of treason. The evening of April 30, while Smeaton was being interrogated (and probably tortured), there was even a ball at court at which “the King treated [Anne] as normal.”
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He may have been awaiting Smeaton’s confession, which didn’t come for twenty-four hours, to feel fully justified in abandoning the show of dutiful husband. Although we don’t know for sure what message was given to Henry during the May Day tournaments, it was probably word of Smeaton’s confession, for the king immediately got up and left. Anne, who had been sitting at his side, would never see him again; the very next day, as her dinner was being served to her, she was arrested and conducted to the Tower.