Tudor Women: Queens and Commoners (11 page)

This so-called 'double standard' of morality, which has caused so much anguish through the centuries, was not merely a matter of male pride and possessiveness. It was based on inescapable biological fact and the haunting fear that an upright citizen might be tricked into giving his name to another man's gettings or, worse, that land and property might pass to some cuckoo in the nest and a noble line be dishonoured forever. It followed, therefore, that adultery, even suspicion of adultery, committed by a King's wife, was tantamount to treason. To cast doubt on the purity of the royal line, on which the peace and welfare of the whole country depended, was the ultimate crime. No one disputed that. Whether or not Anne Boleyn was guilty as charged is quite another matter, and there is every probability that she was not. On the other hand, she had certainly been indiscreet in her dealings with the young gentlemen of the Privy Chamber-indiscreet enough to give at least some semblance of credibility to an indictment listing ten separate occasions on which the Queen was said to have procured and incited the King's daily and familiar servants to violate and carnally know her.

Anne herself denied all the charges absolutely and, although she had suffered something close to a nervous breakdown when she was first arrested, she faced her judges - twenty-six peers of the realm who included her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, and her old sweetheart Henry Percy, now Earl of Northumberland - with courage and dignity. As in the case of most political trials, the proceedings were little more than a formality and the actual guilt or innocence of the accused an irrelevance. Anne's real crime was her failure to produce a son, compounded by the fact that she'd been the cause of the King's making a lovesick fool of himself before the world. Anne knew this as well as anyone, but she heard with composure the sentence of burning or beheading at the King's pleasure. She was ready for death, she said calmly, and only regretted that the other prisoners, all innocent and loyal subjects of the Crown, had to die for her sake.

Henry's revenge seemed complete, but it appeared that he was not content with killing the woman he had once sworn to love 'unchangeably' - he meant to annul their marriage as well. Ostensibly the reason was to bastardize Anne's daughter (for one so set on establishing the succession, the King was prodigal in disposing of heirs), but was he also perhaps eager to expunge all traces of a thoroughly unsatisfactory and slightly discreditable interlude, to wipe the slate clean and to forget?

In order to provide grounds for an annulment, Thomas Cromwell tried to establish the existence of a pre-contract between Anne and Henry Percy, but Northumberland denied this so furiously and so categorically that the Secretary was forced to fall back on the King's own misconduct with Anne's elder sister. This was unfortunate because it drew attention to an inconvenient fact, always hitherto carefully ignored. Canon law made no distinction between a legal and an illicit connection, and Henry's intercourse with Mary Boleyn made Anne just as much his sister-in-law as ever Catherine of Aragon had been. On 17 May Thomas Cranmer obediently provided a decree of nullity, and that other inconvenient fact - that Anne had been condemned for adultery having never been a wife -was also brushed aside.

This would be the first time an English queen consort had suffered death by judicial execution, and there was considerable public interest in the event. There had also been a significant shift of public opinion in Anne's favour. Not that many people felt much sympathy for her personally, but, remarked Chapuys, 'there are some who murmur at the mode of procedure against her and speak variously of the King'. Thomas Cromwell had stage-managed the Queen's downfall with his usual efficiency and had no desire to see the final scene marred by any anti-government demonstrations. He was particularly anxious that no adverse reports should be carried overseas and gave strict orders that all foreigners were to be excluded from the precincts of the Tower. This may have been the reason for a sudden, last-minute postponement of the execution date, which had been set for 18 May. Anne chafed at the delay and complained to William Kingston, Lieutenant of the Tower, 'I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.' When Kingston tried to reassure her, telling her there should be no pain to speak of, Anne remarked that she had heard the executioner was very good, adding 'and I have a little neck'. She then put both hands round her throat, laughing with what the solemn Lieutenant could only regard as most untimely levity. He had seen many men executed and women, too, but never one like this lady who, to his own knowledge, had 'much joy and pleasure in death'.

Death came at last at eight o'clock on the morning of 19 May, when 'Anne Boleyn, Queen, was brought to execution on the green within the Tower of London,' looking, according to one eye-witness, 'as gay as if she was not going to die'. The executioner from Calais, who had been brought over for the occasion, drew his great two-handed sword from its hiding-place under a pile of straw, and it was all over. Head and trunk were bundled into a makeshift coffin and buried that afternoon in the chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula overlooking the execution ground.

And so she was gone, that strange, disconcerting creature who had conformed to none of the accepted rules of conduct. She was twenty-nine years old and 'had reigned as Queen three years, lacking fourteen days, from her coronation to her death'. There were no mourners at that hasty, unceremonious funeral. Only Eustace Chapuys, who had feared and hated Anne alive, was generous enough to give credit where it was due, and in a despatch dated on the day of her execution he praised her great courage and readiness to meet death. He also informed the Emperor that he'd heard from a reliable source that, both before and after receiving the sacrament, Anne had sworn, on the peril of her soul's damnation, that she had never been unfaithful to the King.

The King, who believed - or said he did - all the stories now circulating about the Queen's 'abominable and detestable crimes' and 'incontinent living', had been waiting with unconcealed impatience for the news that he was free again, and barely twenty-four hours later he and Jane Seymour were betrothed. On 30 May they were married in the chapel of York Place, and Jane was installed in the Queen's seat under the canopy of estate royal. Meanwhile, in the palaces of Hampton Court, Richmond and Greenwich, carpenters, painters and plasterers were hard at work obliterating Anne Boleyn's badges and coats of arms and the true lovers' knots with the linked initials ha (which had provoked rude cries of 'Ha! Ha!' from the Cockneys) and replacing them with the insignia of her successor. Jane had taken the motto 'Bound to Obey and Serve', a tactful choice, and Henry would have no cause to complain of this wife's violent temper and bitter, scolding tongue. Indeed, as a personality, Jane seems to have been silent and submissive almost to the point of non-existence. But although the King enjoyed parading his new-found domestic bliss, one piece of unfinished business remained, and during the summer of 1536 he turned to strike at his elder daughter in an all-out bid to obtain her surrender.

Mary herself was still clinging, as her mother had done before her, to the belief that her sufferings had been due entirely to the malign influence of Anne Boleyn, and she clearly hoped that the way would now be open for an honourable reconciliation with her father. She had yet to face the chilling truth that the change in him was permanent and that the gay, easy-going, affectionate parent she remembered from happy childhood days no longer existed.

Guided by Thomas Cromwell, who had cast himself in the role of peacemaker, Mary wrote to her father at the beginning of June, begging 'in as humble and lowly a manner as a child can' for his daily blessing, which was her chief desire in this world, and acknowledging all her past offences. 'Next unto God,' she went on, 'I do and will submit me in all things to your goodness and pleasure .. . beseeching your Highness to consider that I am but a woman, and your child, who hath committed her soul only to God and her body to be ordered in this world as it shall stand in your pleasure.'

Ten days later Mary received a letter from Cromwell enclosing the draft of a formal apology which he advised her to copy and send to the King. She returned two copies of this document in which she was prostrate before the King's most noble feet, his most obedient, repentant and humble child who was ready henceforward, next to Almighty God, to put her 'state, continuance and living' in his gracious mercy. In a covering letter to the Secretary, Mary told him that, God and her conscience not offended, she had followed his advice and would continue to do so in all things concerning her duty to the King. She was grateful for his help but begged him not to press her any further, for she had now done the uttermost her conscience would suffer her.

When Cromwell had read his copy of the apology, he withheld the sealed letter for the King. There had been nothing about 'next to Almighty God' in his original, and it was a reservation which rendered Mary's submission worthless from Henry's point of view. Cromwell had staked a good deal on getting that submission, and now he wrote again, more sharply, sending yet another draft in which there was to be no 'exception'. Mary knew by this time that she was in no position to quibble over a form of words and would be lucky to escape with a general act of contrition, however abject. She returned the draft 'without adding or diminishing' -just the one copy this time because she could not endure to write another.

Still it was not enough, and a commission, headed by the Duke of Norfolk, came down to the nursery palace at Hunsdon in Hertfordshire bringing with them a deposition drawn up for her signature - a deposition in which she would explicitly recognize her father as Supreme Head of the Church in England and the nullity of her mother's marriage. When Mary refused to sign, the behaviour of the commissioners finally killed any lingering hope of making peace with honour. They told her that she had so long been so obstinate towards the King's majesty that she seemed 'a monster in nature'. She was such an unnatural daughter, said one, that he doubted if she was even the King's bastard. Another added pleasantly that were she his daughter, he would beat her to death and knock her head against a wall until it was as soft as a boiled apple. They told her she had shown herself a traitor to the King and his laws and would be punished as such. Finally they said she could have four days to think it over and left orders that she was not to be left alone for a moment, night or day.

Nevertheless, Mary did manage to make last desperate appeals to both Chapuys and Cromwell. But Chapuys, her friend and ally, could not help her in this extremity and advised her to yield if she felt her life was really in danger. Trying to make things easier for her, he said that God looked more at the intentions than the deeds of men, and she might be better able to serve Him in the future if she gave way now. As for Cromwell, he was badly frightened. When the commission had reported their failure with Mary, Henry had flown into a calculated rage, directed not only at his daughter but at anyone else who could be suspected of sympathizing with her or encouraging her resistance. The Privy Council was in continuous session, and the King had prevailed on the judges to agree that if Mary continued to defy him, she could be proceeded against in law. According to Chapuys, Henry had been heard to swear that not only Mary should suffer for her obstinacy, but Cromwell and many others.

In his reply to her final appeal, the Secretary made it very clear that Mary could expect no further help from him. 'To be plain with you, madam,' he wrote, 'as God is my witness, I think you the most obstinate and obdurate woman that ever was.' Unless she speedily abandoned her 'evil counsels' which had brought her to the point of utter undoing, he wanted nothing more to do with her. 'For', he went on, T will never think you other than the most ingrate, unnatural and most obstinate person living, both to God and your most dear and benign father.' He did, however, give her one last chance, enclosing 'a certain book of articles' which she was to sign and return to him with a declaration that she thought in heart as she subscribed with hand.

When Cromwell's letter reached her, Mary knew that she was beaten. For three years she had fought bravely to defend her principles and her good name - now, utterly alone, exhausted and afraid, she gave in. At eleven o'clock one Thursday night towards the end of June, she set her name to Cromwell's book of articles, recognizing her father as the 'supreme head in earth under Christ of the Church of England' and rejecting the Bishop of Rome's 'pretended authority, power and jurisdiction within this realm'. She also acknowledged that her parents' marriage had been 'by God's law and man's law, incestuous and unlawful'.

Her reward, a few weeks later, was a visit from the King and Queen. Her stepmother gave her a diamond ring, and her father put a cheque for a thousand crowns into her hand. Chapuys reported that it was impossible to describe the King's kind behaviour towards his daughter. 'There was nothing but conversing with the Princess in private; and with such love and affection and such brilliant promises for the future, that no father could have behaved better.'

Henry was obviously immensely relieved that his terror tactics had paid off, for it had become increasingly important to secure Mary's submission in view of the growing signs of unrest among those who disliked his revolutionary policies. Already that summer the smaller monasteries were being suppressed and their revenues appropriated by the Crown, which, as at least one observer noted, was the cause of 'great lamentation by the poor people'. Mary had always been a popular figure, and she represented the old, familiar ways. She had many friends and sympathizers, too, among the older, more conservative nobility and gentry and, as long as she continued to resist, might very well have been used as a figurehead by those who sought a way of forcing the King back into the paths of righteousness.

On the more domestic level, it looked bad for the King's own daughter to be defying him. In a society based on the family unit ruled by the benevolent despotism of husband and father, filial obedience was an essential ingredient of peace and stability. It was, therefore, a virtue highly prized by parents, who were generally considered within their rights to enforce it, where necessary, however brutally. The King, as father of the national family, could least afford the continuing spectacle of dissension within his household.