The Other Tudors (35 page)

According to a Spanish account, ‘… the lady Mistress Semel [Seymour] … besought the king … to consider carefully that she was a gentlewoman, born of good and honorable parents and with an unsullied reputation. She had no greater treasure in the world than her honour which she would rather die a thousand times than tarnish, and if he wanted to give her money she begged that he would do so once God had sent her a good match.’
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Henry then said that he would only see Jane in the company of her family. He took Cromwell’s rooms at Greenwich and installed Edward Seymour and his wife there; the apartment connected with the King’s. A faction grew supporting Jane and pushing her to work against Anne. The group included Lord Montagu, the Earl of Exeter; Sir Nicholas Carew, Sir Thomas Elyot and Jane’s own brothers.

Chapuys reported to the Spanish King on the wooing of Jane by the King, ‘To cover the affection he has for the said Seymour he has lodged her seven miles away in the house of a grand esquire, and says publicly that he has no desire in the world to marry again, unless he is constrained by his subjects to do so.’
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Jane moved to Sir Nicholas Carew’s house at Beddington, near Croydon, supposedly for propriety, but probably more so that Henry would have to make an effort to see her, riding or going by boat to Carew’s, and thereby taking his mind off Anne and making Jane the focus of his attention. It also made it almost impossible for any members of the Boleyn faction to get to Henry, surrounded as he now was by the Seymours and their supporters.

Cromwell moved the final plot against Anne, because he believed she was the major block to his plans of an Imperial alliance, which was impossible while Anne remained queen. Anne and her supporters were pro-French, and the Emperor also hated her. On 24 April, Henry gave his approval for a routine assize court, to discuss all and any treasonable activities in Middlesex and Kent. This was a cloak for a secret Commission to look into how Henry could divorce Anne. The King saw, once again, the hand of God in his failure to have a living son. Henry’s ministers eventually came up with the reason of Anne’s multiple adultery – with Henry Norris, Frances Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton as named partners – and Anne was also accused of having an incestuous relationship with her brother George. The Commission also suggested that Anne had poisoned Catherine of Aragon, and planned to do the same to Henry’s children, Princess Mary and the Duke of Richmond.

The very fact that Anne had miscarried a son may have given weight to the belief, expressed by his courtiers, that the King had been the victim of witchcraft and that Anne Boleyn had cast a love spell on him. This explained why the King had abandoned the saintly Catherine of Aragon and married an unworthy woman, and still failed to have a living son. If Anne had had sex with other men while she was married to the King this was treason, a crime punishable by death. Anne’s familiarity with the young men of the Court only gave colour to the story.

The inclusion of Anne’s brother amongst her supposed lovers originated, in part, from their close relationship. Even George Boleyn’s wife was supposed to be jealous of Anne, a sister who held so great a place in his affection. George was also famous as a womaniser, and so the jump from women in general to his sister in particular was made. It also supported the charge of witchcraft – a witch would be prepared to ignore the sacred laws of God and man, such as incest.

It was George’s wife, Jane Parker, who raised the old story of the ‘poisoning’ of the Duke of Richmond, while he had been in France with the Earl of Surrey in July 1533. Jane Parker said that George, under orders from Anne, had tried to poison Richmond, a rival to the throne for any child she might bear. It was added that Richmond remained in France until he heard that Anne had had a daughter and not a son.

Mark Smeaton was arrested for questioning on 30 April. Henry and Anne also had a public quarrel on the same day. Alexander Ales, a Scottish clergyman, was visiting London and was present at Greenwich. He later wrote to Elizabeth I in 1559 of his recollection of that day:

What seems to have happened earlier in the day was that Norris had gone to the Queen’s almoner to take an oath that Anne was ‘a good woman’. This was the result of a flirtatious exchange either that morning or the previous day that had got out of hand. Anne had been teasing Norris, asking why he was taking so long to sort out his marriage to Margaret Shelton. Norris was noncommittal and Anne erupted. She accused him of being too fond of her, ‘you look for dead men’s shoes; for if ought came to the King but good, you would look to have me.’ Norris denied this (to wish for the King’s death was treason), but Anne kept on and a quarrel ensued. In the end, they realised what had been said, and tried to minimise the damage.
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On May Day Henry and Anne were at Greenwich, but that evening Henry travelled with a handful of servants to Westminster. The following day, Anne was arrested and charged with adultery. She was moved to the Tower of London that afternoon. Cromwell’s first batch of arrests were Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton and George Boleyn. Two days later, Sir Francis Weston and William Brereton were also taken into custody. On 5 May, it was the turn of Sir Richard Page and Thomas Wyatt. The Queen was accused of adultery with the first five, affairs that started directly after Elizabeth’s birth. She was said to have promised marriage to one of them after Henry was dead and also to have said that she had never loved the King. On 17 May all five were executed; Page and Wyatt were released.

Another of the detainees was Sir Francis Bryan, Anne Boleyn’s cousin, who had been the King’s Cupbearer in 1516 and Master of Toyles (driven deer provided for hunting) in Greenwich Park in 1518. When Anne was queen, but was falling out of favour, Bryan set up an argument with George Boleyn so that he could distance himself – just in time it seems. Cromwell, however, disliked Bryan enough to have him arrested, but he was freed almost immediately.

Mark Smeaton was ‘one of the prettiest monochord players and deftest dancers in the land’.
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He was also the only one of the accused who was not a ‘gentleman’. Smeaton eventually admitted, after torture, that he had slept with the Queen three times, claiming that she had seduced him.

The Wyatts and Boleyns were neighbours – Sir Thomas Boleyn at Hever and Sir Henry Wyatt at Allington Castle, near Maidstone, about 20 miles apart. Thomas Wyatt wrote a poem that encapsulated his relationship with Anne, stating that he had been one of her many admirers, but not the foremost; that he lost interest or withdrew since he saw no hope of winning her and that once she was Henry’s mistress, she had become ‘off limits’ to all men.

Anne had several fits of hysterics, recorded by Sir William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower. One of Anne’s ladies, Mistress Cofyn, who, along with Jane Parker shared the Queen’s bed, was also Kingston’s spy, and reported all Anne’s conversations to him.
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The charges against Anne were very detailed, specifying dates, times and even the locations of her acts of adultery, although many of the dates were quite obviously fabricated. On 20 May, she was allegedly with Weston at Westminster but from 17 May onwards, Anne and Henry were at Richmond together for Whitson. On 20 June, Anne was accused of being with Weston at Greenwich but from 3 to 26 June Anne and Henry were at Hampton Court. On 26 April, she was said to have been with Smeaton at Westminster yet Anne and Henry spent Easter at Greenwich, arriving on 14 April.
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According to Chapuys, Cromwell confessed that he had himself invented these dates and times.

Almost until the end, Anne believed that Henry would reprieve her, either sending her into exile or to a nunnery. According to Anne, ‘The king does this to prove me’ – that is, that he was testing her love and faithfulness. Once in the Tower, Anne said, ‘I hear say the executioner is very good and expeditious and I have such a little neck’, at which she put her hands round her neck and laughed. Kingston wrote, ‘I told her it should be no pain, it was so subtle.’
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In fact, the King’s visits to his latest mistress, while his wife was under arrest and sentence of death for adultery on spurious charges, caused a good deal of public comment. Even Chapuys, who did not like Anne, commented that the situation of her condemnation and Henry’s subsequent behaviour had aroused some public sympathy for her. It transpired that many of those people, who had condemned Anne when she displaced Catherine, were not happy with Henry’s affair with Jane. Henry wrote to Jane, ‘… there is a ballad made lately of great derision against us, which if it go abroad and is seen by you, I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found, he shall be straitly punished for it’
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Two days before Anne’s death, on 17 May 1536, Henry had his second marriage declared null and void on the grounds of consanguinity established by his earlier affair with her sister Mary, thereby making his daughter Elizabeth a bastard.

On the morning of her execution Anne said to the Constable of the Tower. ‘I hear I shall not die before noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.’ Anne went to the scaffold dressed in a grey damask gown with a crimson underskirt, attended by four of her ladies (one of whom was Margaret Shelton) and a small crowd of onlookers. She took off her ermine-trimmed cloak and white hood and put on a white cap to hold her hair. Blindfolded, she knelt down and arranged her skirts modestly to cover her feet. Anne then gave a scaffold speech:

Anne was beheaded at 8 a.m. on Friday 19 May. According to a Spanish eye-witness account:

Anne Boleyn was buried in St Peter ad Vincula, the church within the Tower of London, but there is a legend that she was secretly exhumed and reburied in the church at Salle, Norfolk, near her home. Her heart is also said to be buried at All Saints Church, East Horndon, near Billericay, Essex (altar tomb, south transept), or SS Andrew and Patrick Church, Elveden Park, near Thetford, Norfolk (south wall, found and moved to site beneath the organ 1836).
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On the day of Anne’s execution, Henry went to meet Jane Seymour, whom he had moved to a house in Whitehall after Anne’s arrest. The next day, on 20 May, Henry became formally betrothed to Jane, and they were married 10 days later. In the following week, Jane’s brothers Edward and Henry Seymour were made Earl of Hertford and a groom of the privy chamber respectively (although Henry Seymour left Court shortly after to live a private life).

This time, the King was not taking any chances. He passed a law stating that he could nominate his successor. If he had Richmond in mind (in lieu of a legitimate son), he was unlucky. Richmond died two weeks after the bill was passed. In 1536, Henry advised his daughter, Mary, once again that her marriage was of the utmost importance. As the eldest of his surviving bastards, Mary was told that she should marry and give Henry a lawful grandson who could then inherit the throne. However, all these plans were set aside when Jane gave birth to a boy, Edward, on 12 October 1537 at Hampton Court. By 24 October the rejoicing was cut short by Jane’s death from puerperal fever, a complication in childbirth that was untreatable at that time.