The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn (65 page)

Read The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn Online

Authors: Eric Ives

How then to explain this aberration? At first sight it might appear to support the story given to de Carles that investigation of Anne’s conduct took some time, during which Henry ‘treated her as if he had no cause for displeasures and showed her in every way that she was more than ever dear to him’, and even when he was convinced ‘he gave no indication of this [and] enjoyed all pleasures together with her.’
17
However, that conjecture collapses because, as the seventeen examples in the
Baga
establish, a commission of oyer and terminer had nothing at all to do with
investigation.
18
It set up a special court to
try
the accused. The king needed no commission in advance to authorize enquiries or arrests, or to empower him should he want to play a suspect like a fish. Thomas More was interrogated for eight weeks before the oyer was issued against him on Saturday 26 June. He was tried the following Thursday — six days from start to finish. At the end of the reign the earl of Surrey (a commoner) was held for four weeks, then indicted on 7 January, an oyer was issued on the 10th and he was tried on the 11 th. If the accused was a peer, a commission appointing a high steward took the place of the oyer and terminer, but the result was the same. In 1521, the duke of Buckingham was held for two weeks before a steward was appointed and tried and condemned eleven days later.
19
As Henry would subsequently make clear to Cranmer, once a suspect was in custody, machinery took over - hence the chancellor’s power to issue trial commissions ex officio.
20
Thus, even if by 24 April the king was intent on disposing of Anne, he could have relied on the appropriate commission appearing in due course.
21
Issuing an oyer and terminer in advance served no purpose. It was not the habit of the Tudor state to hang about once it had decided to dispose of a victim judicially.
If Henry is absolved from responsibility for the patent, the only other suspect is Thomas Cromwell. He was well placed to secure a secret commission — Lord Chancellor Audley was a close ally — and the twenty peers, judges and officials to whom it was addressed (any four of whom could act) would not know they had been nominated until called upon to begin work. But was a commission even needed for an attack on Anne? As peers of the realm, the queen and her brother would have to be tried before the high steward (as was Buckingham), not before commissioners of oyer and terminer. A possible reason for deciding to act by commission was that it could receive indictments and forward them to the high steward. However, that seems not to have been necessary in the duke’s case. A more sinister motivation could be that an oyer commission would be required if commoners were to be dealt with as well as the queen. Does that imply that Cromwell already had Norris in his sights? And there is still the problem of dates. Why did Cromwell need an oyer and terminer on 24 April before there was anyone to try? The likeliest explanation is speed. Delay between issuing an oyer and the consequent trial averaged eleven days, but if the king had to be bounced into action, delay spelled danger, particularly in respect of someone so essential to Henry’s personal comfort as Henry Norris. The plan, therefore, seems to have been to go from arrest directly to prosecution. With a commission to hand process could start at once, allowing no possibility of second thoughts while examinations were conducted. Condemnation could be achieved in as little as four days. Hence too, there was no serious interrogation of either Anne or Rochtord.
22
In the event, of course, it would be eleven days from arrest to the first trial, but that is readily explained by Anne’s psychological collapse. After her first night in the Tower, Cromwell knew that the queen had fatally incriminated herself — and others.
23
One matter in the week which must have required Henry’s sanction was the summoning of parliament, and it may be that we should see this as the earliest identifiable move against Anne. On the other hand, for that to be the case, something must have happened to cause the king to act on Thursday, the 27th, against his ‘entirely beloved wife’ of Tuesday, the 25th. Indeed, since discussions must have preceded the order to start work on the parliamentary writs, we could even have Henry making contradictory decisions within twenty-four hours. Equally difficult is explaining what was gained by calling parliament in advance of Anne’s arrest, if repudiating her was the only issue. When parliament did meet it had to wait three weeks for the relevant bill to be ready.
An alternative is that Cromwell explained the need for a parliament on grounds which Henry and his advisers could accept, keeping to himself the possibility of using it against the queen. If that were so, the legislation which was so imperative must have been ‘the act extinguishing the authority of the bishop of Rome’, a measure usually assumed to be a tidying-up operation, but which reached the statute book only after some difficulty.
24
It closed a loophole in earlier statutes which had omitted to criminalize defending papal authority. Thereafter any murmur of even respect for the traditional head of the Western Church was a
praemunire
offence. Henry might well have agreed on the necessity for such a bill, assailed as he was at home by the conservatives and abroad by the efforts of Charles V to persuade him to put the royal supremacy on the negotiating table in an effort to reach a settlement with the pope. A law to strike at the ‘imps of the said bishop of Rome and his see, and in heart members of his pretended monarchy’, which also imposed an oath on everyone who mattered and which it was treason to refuse (no second Sir Thomas More), went a long way towards satisfying the king’s obsession about the inward thoughts of his people. Even more necessary would such an Act seem to Cromwell, now faced with the need to disavow in due course the supporters of Mary, who clearly fell into the impish category. One may note that in mid-June, even as the bill was being readied for the Commons, Mary was forced ‘for the perfect declaration of the bottom of her heart and stomach’ to repudiate ‘the bishop of Rome’s pretended authority’.
25
The issue of parliamentary writs on 27 April could mark the king’s first move against his wife, but that seems decidedly improbable.
So as the end of April 1536 approached, Cromwell had not yet found his crisis. He had the oyer and terminer ready and a parliament summoned, but no occasion to use them. And then, suddenly, the opportunity presented itself. Henry had planned to go with the queen and the court to Calais that spring, and preparations had been in hand for some time.
26
May Day was to be celebrated at Greenwich, and then the journey would begin, with the first night, Tuesday, 2 May, being spent at Rochester. At eleven o’clock on the Sunday night, 30 April, without warning, these arrangements were cancelled and instructions given that the king would be travelling a week later.
27
It is rare in Tudor history to be able to date an episode so exactly, but evidently something had happened that was serious enough to cause the king to change his plans at the last minute and remain in England to sort matters out.
28
What had happened was a major dispute between the queen and Henry Norris, either on Saturday, 29 April, or early the following day. In a furious altercation, Anne had made personal accusations about Norris’s feelings for her and had been too angry to notice an audience.
29
Soon the story was all over the court.
30
When sanity returned the queen tried to forestall gossip by instructing Henry Norris to go to her almoner on the Sunday morning and volunteer to take his oath that the queen ‘was a good woman’. This incredible step — and we have Anne’s word for it - almost certainly explains a second confrontation, nearly as public, but this time between Anne and Henry. The Scottish Lutheran divine, Alexander Ales, sent an account of this to Anne’s daughter in September 1559.
31
He had, he said, been at court that Sunday, seeking from Cromwell the payment of a gift Henry had promised him:
Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene king your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard, when she brought you to him. I did not perfectly understand what had been going on, but the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the king was angry, although he could conceal his anger wonderfully well. Yet from the protracted conference of the council (for whom the crowd was waiting until it was quite dark, expecting that they would return to London), it was most obvious to everyone that some deep and difficult question was being discussed.
 
Although the dispute between Anne and Norris will explain Sunday, 30 April - the involvement of Anne’s almoner, Henry’s anger and Anne’s desperate defence even to the point of appealing to him through Elizabeth - it was clearly insufficient to provide the jolt Cromwell was looking for. Somehow the two must have quieted the king’s mind, for Sir Henry remained in attendance and the May Day celebrations went ahead as planned.
32
But sufficient tension remained for the king to postpone the move to Rochester, and if anything more emerged, the attempts of Anne and Norris to pacify the king would then seem like a conspiracy to deceive. That fatal catalyst would be Mark Smeton.
33
Smeton is variously described as a musician, a player of the virginals or the spinet, or an organist; he was possibly not much over 20 years old. According to Cavendish, he was the son of a carpenter, but perhaps better evidence suggests that he was a Fleming, as others of the king’s leading musicians were. Initially on Wolsey’s staff, he had been recruited by the king and nurtured alongside Francis Weston.
34
But unlike Weston, he was not a gentleman. His court upbringing thus made him
déclassé,
and he belonged nowhere. Highly vulnerable, Smeton had, on the crucial Saturday, made a moody exhibition of himself in Anne’s apartments. The story reached Cromwell, who had him taken the next day to his house at Stepney and interrogated. The young man seems to have held out for nearly twenty-four hours, but in the end he confessed to adultery with the queen and was committed to the Tower, arriving about six o’clock on the Monday afternoon.
35
As soon as he had the confession, Cromwell must have informed Henry, who thereupon left Greenwich and, with his previous day’s suspicions of Anne and Norris seemingly confirmed, proceeded to challenge his groom of the stool. There is, in fact, a hint that the initial accusation was of concealing Smeton’s offence, and that only when Norris denied that he knew anything of the musician’s adultery was the conclusion drawn that the groom of the stool must have been involved as well.
36
Smeton’s confession turned the denials of Anne, Norris, and later Rochford into evidence of guilt. Sir Edward Baynton wrote on the Wednesday or Thursday morning to William Fitzwilliam, one of those who had interviewed Anne on the Tuesday:
here is much communication that no man will confess anything against her, but all-only Mark of any actual thing. Where of (in my foolish conceit) it should much touch the king’s honour if it should no farther appear. And I cannot believe but that the other two [Norris and Rochford] be as fully culpable as ever was he. And I think assuredly the one keepeth the other’s counsel... I hear farther that the queen standeth stiffly in her opinion ... which I think is in the trust that she [hath of the] other two.
37
 
How Smeton’s confession was obtained is not known. George Constantine, one of Norris’s servants, reported some years later that ‘the saying was that he was first grievously racked, which I never could know of a truth.’
38
His caution is in contrast to the
Cronica del Rey Enrico
, which tells a story of Cromwell enticing Smeton to his house, where he was seized by six men while the secretary forced him to confess by tightening a knotted rope around his head.
39
Such a course would have been illegal, and in any case is at variance with the racking in the Tower which Constantine suspected. By the time Smeton had arrived there, the king had already received the information which drove him from Greenwich.
40
What undoubtedly was used against the musician was psychological pressure. Possibly Smeton, like Norris, was promised pardon if he confessed, although he may only have been promised royal favour, which might mean life or, failing that, at least a quick and decent death — not the agony of being dragged through the streets on a hurdle, half-strangled, castrated and then disembowelled while still conscious. Cromwell kept up the pressure too by holding the musician in irons (the only one of those arrested so treated), an earnest of what worse might befall if he changed his story.
41
Read in this way, the coup against Anne Boleyn was a piece of inspired improvisation. But there was more to it than grabbing a chance to remove the queen at the cost of a few unfortunates who had given grounds which might be represented as suspicious. Cromwell may well have rationalized his actions as duty in the face of what he had learned, yet the fact that Norris had become vulnerable meant that the most influential man in the Boleyn faction could be neutralized at the same time as the queen. As we have seen, this would mean that Cromwell could henceforth expect to exercise greater control over the privy chamber, but it is doubtful whether that was yet his prime concern.
42
The immediate gain was that the minister had by a single pre-emptive strike taken out both the queen and the groom of the stool. It remained to be seen whether the Boleyn faction possessed a second-strike capacity.

Other books

Mummified Meringues by Leighann Dobbs
At Empire's Edge by William C. Dietz
Deceptive Nights by Sylvia Hubbard
The Marriage Trap by Elizabeth Thornton
Wife and Mother Wanted by Nicola Marsh
A Splash of Red by Antonia Fraser
Murder in the Garden of God by Eleanor Herman
Out of the Ashes by Lori Dillon
All for a Rose by Jennifer Blackstream
Wrestling With Desire by D.H. Starr