Read The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn Online
Authors: Alison Weir
Tags: #General, #Historical, #Royalty, #England, #Great Britain, #Autobiography, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Biography And Autobiography, #History, #Europe, #Historical - British, #Queen; consort of Henry VIII; King of England;, #Anne Boleyn;, #1507-1536, #Henry VIII; 1509-1547, #Queens, #Great Britain - History
On June 7 the King brought Queen Jane by barge from Greenwich to Whitehall. London was
en fête
, and crowds lined the riverbanks. As the
royal couple were rowed past the Tower, they could see that it was bedecked with fluttering pennants and streamers in honor of the occasion
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—in stark contrast to the grim drama that had been played out within its walls not three weeks before. We might wonder if either Jane or Henry allowed their thoughts to dwell on the woman who had been its central player, and whose body was now decomposing beneath the pavement of the Tower chapel.
When Henry VIII reopened Parliament on June 8, 1536, Lord Chancellor Audley, in his speech to the King and both Houses, spoke of Anne Boleyn’s crimes and the need to settle the succession on the issue of Queen Jane. “Your Majesty, not knowing of any lawful impediments, entered into the bonds of the said unlawful marriage and advanced the Lady Anne to the sovereign state. Yet she, nevertheless, inflamed with pride and carnal desires of her body, confederated herself with her natural brother” and the other men accused with her, “to the utter loss, disherison, and desolation of this realm; and so, being confederate, she and they most traitorously committed and perpetrated diverse detestable and abominable treasons, to the fearful peril and danger of your royal person, and to the fearful peril and danger of this realm, if God of His goodness had not in due time brought their said treasons to light. For the which, being plainly and manifestly proved, they were convict[ed] and attainted by due course and order of your common law of this realm, and have suffered according to the merits.”
Lord Chancellor read out to both Houses the King’s speech, in which Henry—possibly mounting a damage-limitation exercise to quell the rumors—publicly lamented that, having been so disappointed in his first two marriages, he was obliged, for the welfare of his realm, to enter upon a third, “a personal sacrifice not required of any ordinary man.”
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Here the Lord Chancellor paused, then asked, “What man in middle life would not this deter from marrying a third time? Yet this, our most excellent prince, not in any carnal concupiscence, but at the humble entreaty of his nobility, again condescended to contract matrimony, and hath, on the humble petition of the nobility, taken to himself a wife this time whose age and fine form give promise of issue.” There was resounding applause, and Audley, on behalf of the Lords and Commons, thanked the King for his selflessness and the care he had shown for his subjects. After that, the
King left smiling benignly, confident that he had emerged from the whole tragic affair as the innocent party—as indeed those close to him made plain their conviction that he was. “The King hath come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this [Queen] and the cursedness and unhappiness in the other,” Sir John Russell observed.
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The chief business of this Parliament was to ratify the condemnation of Anne Boleyn, as well as Cranmer’s annulment of her marriage, which was sealed on June 10 and approved by the bishops in convocation on June 21 and by both Houses of Parliament on June 28.
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Parliament’s other priority—as Chapuys predicted on May 19—was to exclude “the Concubine’s little bastard” from ever succeeding to the throne,
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and it now passed a new Act of Succession, declaring that the King’s marriage to Anne was unlawful and that its issue, Elizabeth, was to be “taken, reputed, and accepted to be illegitimate, and utterly excluded and barred to claim, challenge, or demand any inheritance as lawful heir to Your Highness by lineal descent.” Instead the crown was to pass to the heirs of Jane Seymour.
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A general pardon was thereupon issued to those persons who had been cast into prison for slandering Anne or calling her daughter a bastard.
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Four years later, when French ambassadors showed themselves reluctant to consider Elizabeth as a bride for the French King’s son, her great-uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, openly agreed with them that it would not be an “honorable” match, and explained that “the opinion of Queen Anne, her mother, was such that it was quite decided to consider her illegitimate.”
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No longer were the Boleyns a force to be reckoned with: their power and spirit had been crushed, their faction toppled and discredited in less than three weeks. Those who survived the purge, like the Howards and the late Queen’s reformist protégés, had to keep their heads down in order to save themselves. Although Anne’s parents had escaped being sent to the Tower, her father, Wiltshire—who had made no protest, nor expressed regret or grief at the fate of his son and daughter—was deprived of his lucrative office of Lord Privy Seal on June 24, to be replaced by Cromwell on July 2,
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around the time when—had Anne’s child gone to term—he would have become grandfather to the future king.
Nevertheless, Wiltshire retained his place at court and on the King’s
Council. He attended the christening of Prince Edward, the son whom Jane Seymour finally bore Henry VIII, in October 1537, helped to suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace that year, and even, on one occasion, lent Cromwell his Garter insignia. In January 1538 we find him being “well-entertained” at court.
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After his wife, Elizabeth Howard, passed away in April that year,
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there was talk of a marriage between him and the Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece.
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Clearly Wiltshire had not fallen far from favor, and when he died in March 1539, the King ordered masses to be said for his soul.
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There is no evidence to support Sander’s assertion that he “died of grief,” yet it would not be surprising if grief had been a factor in hastening his end. His fine tomb brass may be seen in St. Peter’s Church at Hever. Neither he nor his wife lived to see the triumphant accession of their granddaughter, Elizabeth I, in 1558. In 1540, Hever Castle, the family seat in Kent, was given to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, as part of her nullity settlement.
Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, lived until 1543, dying in obscurity at Rochford Hall in Essex, a Boleyn property. Having incurred the wrath of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1534 for secretly marrying the impecunious William Stafford without their consent, she was banished from court and is not recorded there again. Hence she probably had no further contact with her niece Elizabeth.
There has been speculation that George Boleyn perhaps left one son, his namesake, who became Dean of Lichfield under Elizabeth I and who described himself in his will as the kinsman of her cousin, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, who was Mary Boleyn’s grandson and Anne Boleyn’s great-nephew. It is unlikely that was the son of George Boleyn and Jane Parker, since Thomas Boleyn’s heir at his death was his daughter Mary. The name George—unusual in the Boleyn family—suggests he was Rochford’s bastard. Barred from inheriting, and fatherless, with his Boleyn grandparents dead, it is entirely credible that, in November 1544, he should have entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar—a student of limited means who was charged reduced fees and given assistance with food and lodging while at the university. A career in the Church was always the best option for gentlemen without independent means, and it was later claimed (by the antiquarian Browne Willis in his survey of Lichfield Cathedral, published in 1727 and based on original records and registers)
that Elizabeth I wanted to appoint this kinsman Bishop of Worcester, but that he turned it down. But he was grateful for what she had done for him, and in his will he stated, “Her Majesty gave me all that ever I have.”
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Lady Rochford, “a widow in black full woebegone,”
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retired from court after her husband’s fall. After his execution, his confiscated assets, which had been inventoried, and now reverted to the Crown, were distributed among loyal courtiers such as the Earl of Sussex and Sir Thomas Cheyney; on May 31, 1536, no doubt to reward his willingness to condemn his son-in-law, Lady Rochford’s father, Henry Parker, Lord Morley, was granted the lucrative office of chief steward of the manor of Hatfield Regis, which was part of the honor of Beaulieu in Essex, a royal palace that had been given to Lord Rochford and had also reverted to the Crown; in addition, he was appointed master of the deer in the forest there, and keeper of the park.
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Lady Rochford, however, was left in serious financial difficulties; even her rich court attire had been seized.
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It was probably in late May that she was reduced to sending a begging letter to Cromwell, in whom, she declared, “her special trust” reposed after God and the King, for he was well known for his “gentle manner to all them that be in such lamentable case.” She implored him “to obtain from the King for her the stuff and plate of her husband,” saying it was “nothing to be regarded” by Henry, but would be to her “a most high help and succor.” She reminded him that “the King and her father paid 2,000 marks [£232,800] for her jointure to the Earl of Wiltshire, and she is only assured of 100 marks [£11,650] during the earl’s life,” which, she wrote, “is very hard for me to shift the world withal.” She prayed Master Secretary “to inform the King of this” and make him think “more tenderly” of her, assuring him of her “prayers and service” for the rest of her life, and signing her letter as “a poor desolate widow, without comfort, Jane Rochford.”
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It seems that despite the fact that she furnished evidence that had helped their case, Jane was overlooked by Henry and Cromwell in the hectic aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s fall. Cromwell did see that she was well provided for:
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he and the King acted immediately, Henry forcing her father-in-law, Wiltshire (who had control of her income), to increase her allowance to £100 (£34,900); understandably, the earl did so reluctantly, bitterly insisting that Cromwell “inform the King that I do this alonely for his pleasure.”
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This was on July 2, 1536. However, Jane’s jointure, the part of her marriage settlement allocated
for her security in widowhood (which included Blickling Hall in Norfolk, where Anne Boleyn had probably been born), was not restored to her until after Wiltshire’s death and that of his mother, Margaret Butler, in 1539.
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Lady Rochford perhaps sought refuge at her father’s house, for it is unlikely that she was welcome at her father-in-law’s castle at Hever; but she was back at court, as a lady-in-waiting to Jane Seymour, by the end of 1536. Her reappearance at court so soon after the fall of the Boleyns, and within months of her husband’s death, suggests she was being rewarded for her complicity, while other evidence implies that she was to go on being rewarded. In 1539 she obtained, probably through Cromwell’s good offices, the passing of an act of Parliament confirming her jointure and protecting her interest in certain Boleyn manors; this bill was passed after its three readings were rushed through on the same day, and it was signed by Henry VIII himself, who granted her two manors in Warwickshire at the same time.
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Jane continued to enjoy royal favor, and was to serve two of Henry’s subsequent wives, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard. But in 1541 she rashly and “traitorously” became a “go-between” in Katherine’s extramarital trysts with the courtier Thomas Culpeper; for which, when these were discovered, she was arrested after the Queen, whom she betrayed under questioning. The theory that she abetted Katherine’s adultery in order to wreak vengeance on Henry VIII for executing her husband is hardly convincing, given that her own evidence had brought George Boleyn to the block. Lacey Baldwin Smith’s description of Lady Rochford as “a pathological meddler with the instincts of a procuress who achieves a vicarious pleasure from arranging assignations”
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may not be far wide of the mark. Katherine Howard herself accused Jane of having a “wicked imagination,”
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and of acting as agent provocateur for her own purposes; both behaved with “unbelievable imbecility.”
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Taken to the Tower, “that bawd the Lady Jane Rochford”
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suffered a nervous collapse so severe that it was thought she had gone mad.
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It did not save her. Parliament passed an Act of Attainder condemning her to death, and she followed Katherine Howard to the block on February 13, 1542. By the time Jane reached the scaffold, she was calm and resigned, although one bystander thought she spent too long a time dwelling on the “several faults she had committed in her life.”
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“Good Christians,” she
said, “God has permitted me to suffer this shameful doom as punishment for having contributed to my husband’s death. I falsely accused him of loving, in an incestuous manner, his sister, Queen Anne Boleyn. For this I deserve to die. But I am guilty of no other crime.”
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Her end, George Wyatt later observed, was “a just punishment by law after her naughtiness.”
Less than twenty years later George Cavendish observed that her “slander forever shall be rife” and that as a result of her deeds “both early and late” in her life—which implies that her testimony against her husband was notorious—she would be called “the woman of vice insatiate.” And so she has gone down in history, there having been just one not very convincing attempt, in 2007, to rehabilitate her memory.
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On the day of Anne’s execution, Chapuys had reported that “there are still two English gentlemen detained on her account, and it is suspected that there will be many more, because the King has said he believed that more than a hundred had had to do with her.”
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