A switch to supporting Jane Seymour was, nevertheless, replete with risk. Jane’s backers were all talk, and the odds were very much on the queen. Then, too, Cromwell had much in common with Anne - beliefs, ideals, even religious experience. He had achieved great things with and for her, and she had helped to make his career. Moreover, if Anne were rejected in favour of Jane, the victorious conservative faction would look to reverse the very policies Cromwell himself had put in place. How could he expect to remain in office or even, perhaps, keep his head on his shoulders? Anne or Jane — Cromwell was between the devil and the deep blue sea. How long the minister deliberated we do not know, but as he later told Chapuys, he concluded that he must act.
62
A hostile Anne threatened both his standing with the king and his key financial achievement, as well as encouraging the king in demanding diplomatic impossibilities. Henry must be brought to want someone else. Despite the risk, despite all his past debts, Cromwell’s very survival no longer coincided with the survival of the queen. She must go.
Thomas Cromwell set out to plan the removal of Anne Boleyn with the caution the exercise demanded; the risk involved was a measure of his desperation. Simply to remove the queen would be to invite his own ruin. He had to come to terms with the conservatives first. But even should the respect he had recently shown to Mary and the kindnesses he had done her, such as returning a cross which her mother had left her, secure his safety, there was no profit in a mere exchange of masters.
63
Moreover, the policies he had devoted the past four years to promoting would be at risk. Somehow, therefore, he must achieve the gymnastic feat of a double reversed twist, ridding himself of Anne first, with the support of Mary and her allies, and then ditching them too.
The secretary’s first step was to gain the confidence of Carewe, Seymour and the others supporting Jane and Mary. How he achieved this, and achieved it within a matter of days, we do not know. Chapuys was probably the broker, for the ambassador certainly secured the guarded approval of Mary.
64
Cromwell’s switch also tells us much about his convincing personality, for it would be two months before these new allies realized that Cromwell did not share their view that the destruction of Anne and the restoration of Mary were two sides of the same coin. Knowing his monarch’s constitutional convictions in a way his intimate attendants did not, possessed of a wider, more analytical experience than minds formed by the ideals of
The Courtier
and the
Roman de la Rose
, being a statesman and politician where they were bred in the court and conspiracy, Cromwell understood and shared — as they did not — Henry’s commitment to the royal supremacy. Already the king had been warned that to divorce Anne could imply acceptance of the papal decision in favour of Katherine of Aragon, and, without precautions, the same implication could be drawn from the restoration of Mary.
65
Thus, the minister could be sure that the king’s
amour propre
would demand a show of obedience and contrition before the princess was restored to favour, and that this would include acceptance of Henry’s title as supreme head and the invalidity of her mother’s marriage. The princess, in effect, could be compelled to offer an equivalent of the loyalty oath she appeared to have escaped. That would cut the ground from under her supporters and force them to acquiesce, at least in public, in the policies that Cromwell had carried through since 1532. The victory of that year would be confirmed, and there would now be only one victor, Thomas Cromwell. What is more, in the euphoria at Anne’s fall, indiscreet advocacy of Mary might well draw the conservatives within the provisions of the new treason law. If they were given enough rope they could hang themselves - or at least allow Cromwell to truss them up.
What to do about Anne was more difficult. Until Cromwell joined them, the opponents of the queen seem to have thought in naive terms of Henry being persuaded to repudiate her — that is, to admit what they had believed all along, that Anne was only ‘an
affaire’ —
and this despite the time, effort and, most significantly, money that the king had expended over almost a decade to convince everyone, at home and abroad, that the opposite was the case.
66
Alternatively their talk was of ‘divorce’, yet with Henry publicly endorsing Anne’s position on the Tuesday after Easter, how could any separation be achieved, still less one convincing enough to quiet English and European opinion?
67
Above all, would Anne go quietly and could Henry be relied on not to return to his ‘so great folly’?
In any case, the problem was not simply Anne. Cromwell might wish to disengage himself, but the Boleyn faction would not go away. Norris, Rochford and their associates had rallied to the queen and would undoubtedly seek to keep her in power. After all, if Jane replaced Anne, the Seymour faction would become the ‘ins’ and they would be the ‘outs’, forced to smile at promotions and policies they did not like, just as Carewe and the others had done for nearly a decade. But if the Seymours were successful and the Boleyn faction remained, Cromwell would have no chance of ‘dishing’ the conservatives and coming out on top. Removing Anne from Henry’s bed was no answer by itself. Her supporters had to be neutralized at the same time. Any change which left Thomas and George Boleyn in place, Norris as groom of the stool, Anne as marquis of Pembroke and Elizabeth begotten in as ‘good faith’ as Mary ever was, would be no more safe or final than the defeat of Wolsey had been in the autumn of 1529. When, late in Easter Week 1536, Cromwell put his mind, as he said, to ‘think up and plan’ the coup against Anne, he faced the biggest challenge of his life.
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22
THE COUP, APRIL — MAY 1536
I
F we are to believe Thomas Cromwell — and there is no good reason not to — he moved against Anne Boleyn only when the king’s behaviour on Easter Tuesday 1536 had finally convinced him that so long as she was queen, Henry would obstruct what was safest both for his kingdom and for his secretary. From that point twelve days turned decision into action, and on Sunday, 30 April, the first suspect was under arrest. Less than three weeks later Anne was dead. A month and a day — from Chapuys’ acknowledging her in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich on Tuesday, 18 April, to her burial in the Tower on Friday, 19 May — this is all the time it took for the most romantic, the most scandalous tragedy in English history. It was a tragedy which took the life of a queen, her brother George, Henry Norris — the closest to a friend Henry VIII had — Francis Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeton (all of the privy chamber), and left yet another of the privy chamber staff, Sir Richard Page, in prison in the Tower, along with Sir Thomas Wyatt. It was Wyatt who wrote the epitaph to it all:
These bloody days have broken my heart:
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert:
Of truth,
circa Regna tonat.
1
‘About the throne the thunder rolls’ — a sentiment from the classics which has shaped discussion after discussion of Henry VIII’s repudiation of Anne Boleyn. The decision to charge her with high treason was made, so the story goes, by 24 April, when the king approved the setting up of a commission of oyer and terminer to investigate and dispose of a catch-all selection of treasons and other offences in Middlesex and Kent.
2
On the 27th, writs went out to summon a parliament. This was an emergency measure — the Reformation Parliament had been dissolved only a fortnight before — and, when Lords and Commons met on 8 June, the summons was explained by the need to settle the succession and to repeal statutes favouring Anne.
3
Mark Smeton, the first suspect, was detained at Cromwell’s house in Stepney on Sunday, 30 April, accused of adultery with the queen. Despite this, the May Day jousts at Greenwich went ahead. Anne’s brother, Rochford, led the challengers and Henry Norris the answerers, and nothing untoward was noticed by the spectators. Indeed, if we may trust the French verse account of 2 June 1536, the king was very affable and offered his own mount when Sir Henry’s renowned charger began to play up.
4
But suddenly, at the end of the joust, Henry left for Whitehall, travelling on horseback instead of by river and with only six attendants, one of them Norris whom, throughout the journey, he had ‘in examination and promised him his pardon in case he would utter the truth’.
5
Norris insisted on his innocence, but was sent to the Tower at dawn on Tuesday, 2 May.
6
Later that morning the queen was accused of adultery apparently with three men, and told that she would be taken to the Tower.
7
Thus much is fact and traditional interpretation, but tradition bristles with difficulties. Why, if the court to try Anne was set up on 24 April, was she not arrested until 2 May? The Tudor rule was arrest first, interrogate later; no need to wait to collect evidence; delay spelled danger, particularly for Thomas Cromwell. Why did the arrests take place piecemeal? Suspects were still being discovered a week later. Why did the king, so careful of his majesty, invite gossip by walking out of a tournament being held in public? In Hall’s words, ‘many men mused’ at Henry’s behaviour.
8
The state of the tide may have dictated a journey to London by road, but why with the chief suspect?
9
The standard procedure was to isolate immediately anyone accused, precisely to prevent access to the king. Above all, there is the contradiction of a scrambling and drawn-out climax to a coup which had supposedly been lined up for a week, and by someone who had even foreseen the need to call parliament. The resolution to these questions is often said to be that Henry willed the end but kept aloof from advance knowledge of the means. Yet to suppose this is to suppose that Cromwell chose a remarkably risky course. Norris was renowned for his influence with Henry. Supposing he had been able to convince the king of his innocence during that fateful hour-long ride?
Where traditional assessment has gone wrong is in failing to recognize that it was hugely difficult to separate Henry and Anne. The king, in spite of the inducements of the Seymours and their allies, had openly committed himself to Anne during the Easter celebrations, and he was unlikely to reverse this within days, merely because Cromwell added his voice to the chorus against the queen. Only one way offered any hope: the technique which the minister had used so brilliantly in 1532. Bounce the king into decision! Henry must be tipped by a crisis into rejecting Anne. Yet what crisis was on offer? By the end of the month, all that Chapuys’ usual ‘good authorities’ could come up with was annulling the Boleyn marriage on the grounds that the queen had married the earl of Northumberland ‘nine years before’ — whatever that meant - and had consummated the match.
10
That was hardly a spectre to frighten Henry into the arms of Jane Seymour. He knew all about the 1532 investigation and it is hard to have much faith in the witnesses which Chapuys said had now become available. Given such vague notions among his new conservative allies, Cromwell was certainly in difficulties. Indeed, it is tempting to see that as explaining Chapuys’ report (in a private letter of Saturday, 29 April) that Cromwell had just spent four days closeted with Richard Sampson, the dean of the chapel, the royal adviser on canon law who would represent Henry when he came to divorce Anne.
Chapuys, however, did not connect those discussions with Anne — the rumour was that Sampson was to go on an embassy — and the ambassador commented that he had nothing of importance to report. Certainly, too, he exaggerated whatever time the minister spent with the lawyer.
11
The dominant issue of that last week in April was deciding between an imperial and a French alliance, and despite his council, Henry continued to insist on vindicating the Boleyn marriage. This was made crystal clear, on Tuesday, 25 April, in a letter to Richard Pate, the ambassador at Rome. The king rehearsed very fairly the altercation with the imperial envoy, and instructed Pate to press the line of policy taken on that occasion when he came to negotiate with the emperor (then in Italy). His letter also referred to ‘the likelihood and appearance that God will send us heirs male’, and described Anne as ‘our most dear and most entirely beloved wife, the queen’. Parallel instructions were sent the same day to Gardiner and Wallop in Paris.
12
As well as the wording of these letters, the fact that they were sent once again says that Henry had no intention of rejecting Anne. If tradition were correct and he had already begun to move against his wife, why did he instruct Pate to implement a course of action predicated on the continuance of the Boleyn marriage? Similarly, if he was not still committed to Anne, why, on Sunday the 30th, the day before the first arrests, did he sign with his own hand conditions for an Anglo-French alliance which required Francis I to end his alliance with the pope unless the Curia annulled all actions against England?
13
Anne’s death would void all existing positions. Henry VIII was capable of considerable self-deception, but self-deception which issued instructions he knew were out of date before they were sent seems decidedly improbable.
14
What then of the patent of oyer and terminer of 24 April? Had the king forgotten his signature of the day before? Not at all, because despite what is universally assumed, he had signed nothing; such commissions appear to have been authenticated by the chancellor and issued of course.
15
On the other hand, the 24 April commission to investigate and try treason was highly unusual in one key respect - timing. During Henry’s reign there were seventeen politically sensitive treason trials where the crown’s procedural material was deposited in the
Baga de Secretis,
the Tudor equivalent of the top-secret file. In fifteen of these, formal legal moves were begun against the accused only
after
arrest and interrogation.
16
The two exceptions are the trials of Anne and her ‘lovers’, where the commission was issued six days
before
the first arrest.