Cromwell, therefore, could not relax. He left Henry to Carewe, the Seymours, and the seductive promise of Jane, and to the king’s own capacity for self-pity. A maudlin readiness to feel sorry for himself was one of the least endearing features of Henry VIII’s unappealing personality and he now indulged it to the full.
43
He claimed that Anne had had more than a hundred lovers and, if Chapuys had the story right, he even poured his sense of ill-usage into a tragedy which he carried in his pocket and tried to get people to read. On the very night of Anne’s arrest, when the duke of Richmond had come to say goodnight to his father, Henry had begun ‘to weep and say that he and his sister [Mary] owed God a great debt for having escaped the hands of that cursed and poisoning whore who had planned to poison them.’ This exchange with Richmond also allows us to see how quickly the Seymour alliance had got to work. The story that Anne intended to poison Mary and actually had poisoned Katherine had been a fixation with them for months. As for Jane, she was removed to Sir Nicholas Carewe’s house at Beddington, near Croydon, ostensibly for propriety but actually to inflame royal ardour. The result was a series of romantic night-time assignations and river trips which actually began to win popular sympathy for Anne. No man, Chapuys reported, ever paraded with such regularity the fact that his wife had cuckolded him, and with so little sign that he minded!
44
Cromwell, meanwhile, had more serious things to attend to. The Boleyn faction must not to allowed to recover its balance. That alone necessitated the arrest of Rochford, and it may be that George did attempt to intervene. He was detained at Whitehall on Tuesday and transferred to the Tower at two o’clock. Since he could perfectly well have been held and interrogated at Greenwich, as Anne was, it is reasonable to suspect that George had gone to London with the intention of reaching Henry.
45
That he failed was probably due to Cromwell’s block on access to the king. Boleyn supporters were simply unable to get through; Henry remained incommunicado, venturing out only ‘in the garden and in his boat at night, at which times it may become no man to prevent him’.
46
Obstruction certainly killed Cranmer’s attempt to speak up for Anne. As soon as she was in the Tower, he was summoned to return to Lambeth but instructed not to attempt to see the king. This left the archbishop having to write the most difficult letter of his life, pleading for Anne without impugning either the king’s actions or motives, while at the same time (since he did not know the strength of the evidence) trying to distance Anne from the reformed cause she had favoured.
47
That some writers have stigmatized his efforts as sycophantic or cowardly is a measure of their failure to appreciate Cranmer’s dilemma. He was then called across the river to the Star Chamber, where the council presented the accusations against Anne as fact. This produced a postscript to his letter, expressing one final vibration of doubt before the inevitable loyal coda: ‘I am exceedingly sorry that such faults can be proved by the queen, as I heard of their relation. But I am, and ever shall be, your faithful subject.’
Francis Bryan was similarly treated. He was away from court but was ‘sent for in all haste on his allegiance’, and only admitted to the king’s presence after an interview with Cromwell.
48
A man with either a greater loyalty or perhaps a less well-developed sense of self-preservation was Sir Richard Page. He, like Bryan, was away from court at the time and, no doubt, called back by another ‘marvellous peremptory commandment’, but on Monday, 8 May, he was in the Tower.
49
Sir Thomas Wyatt was another taken there earlier that day, though we have no details.
50
It would be all of a piece with his character for Wyatt to have shown open contempt for the servile rush to vilify Anne and the other unfortunates; even the Tower would only keep him quiet briefly. Other Boleyn men seemed lucky to have escaped. Harry Webbe, sewer of the chamber, was suspected by some; George Taylor, Anne’s receiver-general, was reported to be showing visible signs of relief after the executions were over.
51
The arrest of Rochford and the others and the blocking of access to the king drew the teeth of the remaining Boleyn supporters. The earl of Wiltshire bought safety by a willingness to condemn his daughter’s alleged lovers, while others, like Bryan, began to think more about adapting to the new situation and coming away with a share of the inevitable spoils. Yet, as Edward Baynton stressed on 3 May, Cromwell still had to demonstrate that ‘such faults can be proved’. What sources, then, were available to the secretary as he built the case against the queen and the five men?
Rumour there was in plenty. Alexander Ales would have it that Anne had persuaded Henry to ally with the German Protestants, and that to frustrate this, Stephen Gardiner, that
bête noire
of the reformers, sent reports from France, where he was ambassador, to the effect that stories were circulating at the court there (based on certain letters) that Anne was guilty of adultery. This was disclosed to Henry by Cromwell and his allies. He told them to investigate, and spying, bribery and invention did the rest.
52
An anonymous French poem told of a plot by Rochford, Anne Boleyn and their supporters to poison the king, who intended to abandon Anne and return to Katherine (
sic
), a plan that is overtaken by two counsellors who strike at Anne by accusing her of adultery with Brereton, Weston, Smeton, Norris and Rochford himself
53
The Spanish
Cronica del Rey Enrico
has Anne fall for Smeton and use an elderly female attendant named Margaret to hide the boy naked in the sweetmeat closet in the anteroom to the queen’s bedchamber, and produce him when she calls for marmalade. The queen has also to sleep with her former lovers to assuage their jealousy, and the dénouement comes via a Thomas Percy, who envies the material prosperity that has followed Mark’s nightly services and informs Cromwell of the musician’s activities.
54
Margaret is then racked, confesses all and is burned by night in the Tower.
These and later stories, such as Sander’s tale of Henry being finally convinced of the queen’s guilt when she threw one of her lovers a handkerchief to mop his face after the exertions of the May Day tilt, have enlivened many accounts of Anne Boleyn’s fall, but they preserve what was essentially popular gossip.
55
In stark contrast to their speculations is the note made by John Spelman, a judge who took part in Anne’s trial:
Note that this matter was disclosed by a woman called the Lady Wingfield who was a servant of the said queen and shared the same tendencies. And suddenly the said Wingfield became ill and a little time before her death she showed the matter to one of her etc.
56
Despite what has sometimes been assumed, the final ‘etc’ is not a sign that something is missing, but a lawyer’s abbreviation for self-evident matter, in this case, ‘who reported the story’. Bridget, Lady Wingfield, was the daughter of Sir John Wiltshire, of Stone Castle in Kent. She had married Richard, one of the twelve Wingfield brothers and a knight of the Garter prominent in diplomatic circles until his death in 1525. Her second husband was Sir Nicholas Harvey, an ambassador to Charles V and a strong supporter of Anne Boleyn. He died in 1532 and Bridget then married another courtier, Robert Tyrwhitt.
57
Chapuys reported Lady Wingfield’s arrival at court in 1530, no doubt interested in the wife of the ambassador to his own home government, but she was in no way a newcomer. She was in Katherine’s retinue as far back as the Field of Cloth of Gold.
58
That she was subsequently close to Anne is clear from a tantalizing letter which Anne wrote to her between 1529 and her elevation as marquis of Pembroke:
I pray you as you love me, to give credence to my servant this bearer, touching your removing and any thing else that he shall tell you on my behalf; for I will desire you to do nothing but that shall be for your wealth. And, madam, though at all time I have not showed the love that I bear you as much as it was in deed, yet now I trust that you shall well prove that I loved you a great deal more than I fair for. And assuredly, next mine own mother I know no woman alive that I love better, and at length, with God’s grace, you shall prove that it is unfeigned. And I trust you do know me for such a one that I will write nothing to comfort you in your trouble but I will abide by it as long as I live. And therefore I pray you leave your indiscreet trouble, both for displeasing of God and also for displeasing of me, that doth love you so entirely. And trusting in God that you will thus do, I make an end. With the ill hand of
Your own assured friend during my life,
Anne Rochford
59
The most plausible explanation of this letter is to presume that when Chapuys first noticed Lady Wingfield, she was responding to Anne’s invitation and returning to court after an interval.
60
If so, the letter suggests that initially she had been reluctant, for two reasons: first, her sense that Anne, in her new-found prosperity, had been neglecting an old friend (something that Anne freely admits and promises to correct), and second, an ‘indiscreet trouble’. Alternatively, since ‘indiscreet’ and ‘displeasing to God’ imply that it is Lady Wingfield’s reaction to her trouble that is being questioned as excessive, an obvious though unlikely occasion would be Harvey’s death in August 1532.
61
These are by no means the only possible constructions - there may be far more in Lady Wingfield’s grievance than they allow for - but what is more important is that the letter establishes her as a bona fide source for Anne’s behaviour. Thus her deathbed revelations, if genuine, could have been very relevant. Nevertheless, their opportune appearance invites suspicion. To start with, how did whatever she said reach Cromwell? There are two possible routes, neither of them neutral. One is through the family of her third husband, the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby in Lincolnshire. The behaviour of her erstwhile father-in-law, Sir Robert, during the Lincolnshire Rising, plus his links with Lord Hussey and with Sir Robert Constable, a leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace in Yorkshire, suggest that Tyrwhitt might willingly have supplied evidence against Anne.
62
The other possible vector is the duke of Suffolk whom, as we have seen, Wyatt blamed for his arrest.
63
The duke’s lack of sympathy with Anne is not in doubt and the Wingfields were his clients. They could readily have passed on reminiscences - say, of Anne’s early passages with the poet. Any such stories would have been ten years old, in which case ‘the deathbed’ was embroidery to disguise the time lag. In Tudor society, safety lay in revealing dangerous knowledge as soon as possible.
64
Moreover, when did Lady Wingfield die? Her last certain mention is in January 1534.
65
Given the perennial watch kept by the queen’s enemies for material to use against her, it is hard to believe that anything of substance would have been left to gather dust until Cromwell started to ask questions.
We know nothing of any response which Anne or George made to stories from Lady Wingfield’s deathbed, but George did respond to the evidence of another court lady, his own wife Jane. It was she who had told the Crown of Anne’s remarks about Henry’s sexual capacities, and according to de Carles, Rochford said to his judges, ‘On the evidence of only one woman you are willing to believe this great evil of me, and on the basis of her allegations you are deciding my judgement’.
66
A foreign visitor to London in May 1536 wrote of ‘that person who more out of envy and jealousy than out of love towards the king did betray this accursed secret and together with it the names of those who had joined in the evil doings of the unchaste queen’.
67
The lost journal of Antony Antony also referred to the role of Lady Rochford, and probably included words to the effect that ‘the wife of Lord Rochford was a particular instrument in the death of Queen Anne.’
68
Bishop Burnet was no contemporary, but access to sources no longer extant could explain his assertion that Jane Rochford ‘carried many stories to the king or some about him’, and in particular, damaging evidence, ‘that there was a familiarity between the queen and her brother beyond what so near a relationship could justify’
69
Why Jane Boleyn provided information is another question. We can dismiss out of hand the nonsense that she felt insulted because George was a homosexual, a fiction for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, indeed, quite the reverse.
70
Burnet’s suggestion that Jane was motivated by jealousy of Anne’s closeness to her brother could be correct. Alternatively, she could have been influenced by her own family’s long association with the Princess Mary.
71
Jane did, it is true, send to ask after her husband in the Tower and promised to intercede with the king, apparently to get him a hearing before the council. However we may, if we choose, smell malice, for the message was brought with Henry’s express permission and by Carewe and Bryan in his newly turned coat.
72
It is also the case that Lady Rochford’s interests as a widow were carefully looked after by Cromwell.
73
Three other court ladies - Anne Cobham, ‘my Lady Worcester’ and ‘one maid more’- were also believed to be sources of information against Anne. John Hussey listed them in a letter to his employer, Lord Lisle.
74
The significance of what Mrs Cobham said we do not know, but the anonymous lady was almost certainly Margery Horsman, who was well known and useful to Hussey, and whose identity he therefore had reason to keep close.
75
Edward Baynton, Anne’s vice-chamberlain of the household, had already pointed to her in his letter of 3 May about the need to find more evidence: ‘I have mused much at [the behaviour] of Mistress Margery which hath used her [self most] strangely toward me of late, being her friend as I have been. But no doubt it cannot be but that she must be of council therewith; there hath been great friendship between the queen and her of late.’
76
Margery Horsman’s involvement may explain the ‘Marguerite’ or ‘Marguerita’ of the European accounts, but these clearly magnify and blacken her role out of all reason. Despite what Baynton says as to her obstinate support of her mistress, on Anne’s death Margery Horsman passed smoothly into the service of her successor.
77