The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (5 page)

This latest calamity—“a great discomfort to all this realm”—left Henry understandably devastated and unable to hide his “great distress,”
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and Anne in “greater and most extreme grief.” George Wyatt, who says that she had become “a woman full of sorrow,” wrote that when “the King came to her, bewailing and complaining to her the loss of his boy, some words were heard [to] break out of the inward feeling of her heart’s dolors, laying the fault upon unkindness, which the King more than was cause (her case at this time considered) took more hardly than otherwise he would if he had not been somewhat too much overcome with grief, or not so much alienate.”

Plainly, Anne’s accusation of unkindness had stung. Wyatt says that “wise men” judged at the time that if she had kept quiet and borne with Henry’s “defect of love, she might have fallen into less danger” and tied him closer to her “when he had seen his error;” instead, she had railed at him, and in consequence “the harm still more increased.” Yet she perhaps
had good cause to complain. That very morning—according to the account of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, who got her information years later from her mistress, the King’s daughter Mary—Anne had come upon Henry with Jane Seymour on his knee, and became hysterical.
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Abashed at being caught in flagrante, and aware of the need to appease his gravid wife, Henry hastened to calm Anne. “Peace be sweetheart, and all shall go well with thee,” he soothed.
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But it was too late: the damage had been done, and Anne, “for anger and disdain, miscarried.”
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Now, having lost her baby, Anne reportedly was “attributing her misfortune to two causes.”
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She “wished to lay the blame on the Duke of Norfolk, whom she hates, saying he frightened her by bringing the news of the fall the King had five days before;” that, she asserted, had triggered her premature labor and miscarriage.
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“But it is well-known that this is not the cause,” Chapuys wrote, “for it was told her in a way that she should not be too alarmed nor attach much importance to it.”
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Nevertheless, the tale gained currency, and on February 12, in France, the Bishop of Faenza would report that the Queen “miscarried in consequence” of being told of the King’s fall, while the same would be claimed in Rome by Dr. Ortiz, who asserted on March 6 that Anne “was so upset that she miscarried of a son.”
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Anne also told Henry “that he had no one to blame but himself for this latest disappointment, which had been caused by her distress of mind about that wench Seymour.”
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Chapuys says she averred that “because the love she bore him was greater than the late Queen’s, her heart broke when she saw that he loved others. At this remark the King was much grieved.”
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According to Jane Dormer, though, he softened and “willed her to pardon him, and [said] he would not displease her in that kind thereafter;” but that is at variance with what George Wyatt heard, which was that Henry angrily told Anne “he would have no more boys by her.” This is more in keeping with Chapuys’s account of the conversation, in which he states that the King “scarcely said anything to her, except that he saw clearly that God did not wish to give him male children, and in leaving her, he told her, as if for spite, that he would speak to her after she was up.” Then, “with much ill grace,” he left her.
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These parting shots sounded ominous, and we can only imagine how Anne felt, but Chapuys was “credibly informed that, after her abortion,” she put on a brave face and told her weeping attendants that it was all for
the best “because she would be the sooner with child again, and that the son she bore would not be doubtful like this one, which had been conceived during the life of the [late] Queen, thereby acknowledging a doubt about the bastardy of her daughter,”
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and also her awareness that some people still regarded Katherine as Henry’s only lawful wife, and did not recognize her own marriage.

One of those people was undoubtedly Jane Seymour, who may not only have felt genuine grief at Katherine of Aragon’s death, but must also have realized that, in the eyes of many people like herself—and indeed of most of Europe—Henry VIII was now a free man. And suddenly, in the light of the Queen’s miscarriage, Anne’s enemies saw in this pallid young woman, who up till now probably had been of no more significance than any other of the King’s passing fancies, an opportunity to bring her down.
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The Scandal of Christendom

H
enry’s fall had no doubt brought forcibly home to him the fact that he was without an heir; had he died in the Greenwich tiltyard, the realm would have been plunged into dynastic chaos. During those five days between his fall and Anne’s miscarriage, he must have brooded often on his urgent need for a living son. Hence the understandably bitter remarks that he flung at her in the pain of his unbearable disappointment, and his need to apportion blame. He had been through all this before with Katherine’s fruitless pregnancies, and it seemed that he was fated to lose his sons by Anne as well—his reaction is further proof that the infant Anne lost in 1534 had been a boy. But now time was no longer on his side: he was forty-four, too old to wait much longer for an heir, and he was evidently beginning to believe that God would never grant him a son while he remained married to Anne.

Anne was now older than Katherine had been when her last child was conceived, and Henry may well have been aware of this.
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Yet there was perhaps another, deeply atavistic reason for the King’s growing conviction that he had incurred the wrath of the Deity through marrying Anne. In a superstitious age, when it was widely believed—even by educated, rational people—that supernatural powers governed or subverted the natural order of things, a string of miscarriages or stillbirths did not happen without
good reason. Either they were the result of divine displeasure—as Henry believed was his punishment for marrying Katherine of Aragon, his brother’s widow—or they were brought about by witchcraft. It may have been in this context that Anne’s latest miscarriage “made an ill impression on the King’s mind” and reinforced his growing conviction that this second marriage too “was displeasing to God.”
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On the day of Anne’s miscarriage, Chapuys—not yet having heard of it, for he does not mention it in his dispatch, and was not to report it until February 10—was told by the King’s cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquess of Exeter, and the Marchioness, Gertrude Blount, how they had been “informed by one of the principal persons at court” that the King “said to someone in great confidence and, as it were, in confession, that he had made this marriage seduced and constrained by sortileges [i.e., divination or sorcery], and for this reason he considered it null, and that this was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue, and that he believed he might take another wife, which he gave to understand that he had some wish to do.”
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It is easy to conjure up an image of a bitterly disappointed Henry railing at cruel Fate and saying such things. Possibly he uttered these chilling words in the heat of the moment, needing someone to blame for the loss of his son. Probably he perceived the avenging hand of God in the tragedy. But he might also have felt the need to explain having been so long in thrall to this woman he had ill-advisedly married, and who so grievously failed him, and one way to do this was by claiming that he had been bewitched.

It has been argued that, in speaking of sortileges, Henry—if he uttered these words at all—was merely referring to having been seduced into marriage by predictions that it would bring him heirs,
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yet the rest of the reported speech makes it clear he believed there was an element of sorcery involved, for predictions or divinations regarding its fruitfulness would not have rendered the marriage invalid.

Chapuys was rightly skeptical. “The thing is very difficult to believe, although it comes from a good source,” he wrote to his master. “I will watch to see if there are any indications of its probability.”
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Anne, the ambassador added, had already repented of her hasty words of reproach, and was “in great fear.”
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Certainly she had good reason to be so, for Henry might now consider
her as barren of sons as Katherine, and find a pretext to have their marriage annulled and their daughter declared a bastard, just as he had with Katherine and Mary. But Anne did not have Katherine’s powerful friends—in fact she had not very many friends at all—so there would be few to champion her cause, and the outcome would be alarmingly predictable. Without Henry, she would be an object of derision, calumny, and hatred; her very life might well be at risk.

We might wonder if Anne’s great fear sprang from finding out that Henry believed her guilty of witchcraft. At that time, witchcraft was not an indictable offense; it was not until 1542 that an act was passed under Henry VIII making it a secular crime, and it did not become a capital offense until 1563, under Elizabeth I. Prior to that, the penalty for witchcraft had been determined according to evidence of actual criminality, with proof of evil deeds necessary to obtain a conviction; in the cases of persons of high rank, there was often a suspicion of treason against the Crown.

In the previous century, three royal ladies had famously been accused of witchcraft. In 1419, Joan of Navarre, the widow of Henry IV, was imprisoned for three years on trumped-up charges of sorcery on the orders of her stepson, Henry V, who wanted her dowry to pay for his wars, and she was not freed until after his death in 1422. In 1441, Eleanor Cobham, the wife of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, uncle of Henry V, was convicted of practicing witchcraft upon Henry VI, and was incarcerated on the Isle of Man for the rest of her life. Unlike Queen Joan, she was probably guilty as charged. Lastly, in 1469, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, then in rebellion against Edward IV, had paid two informers to accuse Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Duchess of Bedford and mother of Edward’s consort, Elizabeth Wydeville, of making obscene leaden images of the King and Queen and practicing her black arts upon them to bring about her daughter’s marriage to Edward—a marriage that Warwick had opposed. The duchess was also accused of casting another image to bring about Warwick’s death. When the witnesses whom Warwick had bribed refused to testify upon oath, the case against her collapsed, and she was freed and declared innocent.

Sir Thomas More also asserted that in 1483 the future Richard III accused Elizabeth Wydeville of using sorcery to wither his arm, although this tale is probably apocryphal. Nevertheless, to the medieval mind,
witchcraft was a very real threat; there was a history of it being used as a political weapon for nefarious ends, and Henry VIII’s suspicion of sorcery would have been fully in keeping with the spirit of the times. He would surely have known about these precedents.

Did Henry say much the same thing to Anne as he had to the unnamed person referred to by Chapuys? And did he give voice to suspicions that had perhaps been festering in his imagination for some while? If so, then Anne had every reason to be fearful. For if Henry was talking about witchcraft, then he might well be casting about in his mind for ways of getting rid of her, weighing the idea of having their marriage dissolved, since canon law provided for an annulment on the grounds of sorcery.

Was that what Henry really intended? Given Anne’s unpopularity, the fact that she had no powerful connections to defend her, and her having a rudimentary sixth fingernail on one hand, as well as “certain small moles”
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—which might have been regarded as devil’s marks in a superstitious age, or as signs of inner corruption and even divine disfavor—a charge of witchcraft might appear very credible, and would almost certainly lead to her condemnation.

What of the slender possibility that Anne had indeed dabbled in witchcraft? She had a hound called Urian, which was one of the more obscure names of Satan; in fact, he was given to her by, and named after, the courtier Urian Brereton. Then there would be her prediction in the Tower of London, made probably out of sheer desperation and bravado, that if she were to die, there would be no rain for seven years, seven being a magical number used by witches, who it was believed could control the weather. Was Henry’s long-standing infatuation with Anne that of a man under a spell? Again, there is more likely to have been a less than occult reason for it.
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It is barely credible that a woman who was an ardent evangelist and deeply committed to the cause of religious reform should secretly have resorted to sorcery.