What, then of Elizabeth, the countess of Worcester? She was the sister of Sir Anthony Browne of the privy chamber, a staunch supporter of Mary, and step-sister of Sir William Fitzwilliam, treasurer of the household and a person heavily involved in the Boleyn enquiries.
78
Elizabeth was certainly close to Anne, close enough, indeed, for the queen to lend her .£100 secretly.
79
She had been married to Henry, earl of Worcester, for nine years, and the earl’s sister was married to William Brereton. In the spring of 1536 Elizabeth was expecting a baby, and the queen was very concerned at the difficulties which the countess was experiencing. Even in the Tower, Anne ‘much lamented my lady of Worcester for because her child did not stir in her body, and [Lady Kingston] said, “What should be the cause?” She said, “For sorrow she took for me.’”
80
What Anne meant is not altogether clear. She apparently made the remark on the day of her arrest, so she cannot have been referring to Lady Worcester’s reaction to the shock of immediate events. Presumably the queen had in mind some earlier failure of the baby to quicken, so that ‘sorrow she took for me’ must refer to Anne’s own miscarriage or to her recent struggle to preserve her marriage, or both. Certainly the remark indicated that Lady Worcester was a Boleyn supporter worth cross-examining.
Cromwell, indeed, constructed the official version of events round the countess, choosing to present her evidence rather than the events of 29 April as the first warning of Anne’s offences. She is never directly named and Cromwell’s own summary, which he sent to the English ambassadors in France (and later refused to elaborate), simply stated that the ladies of the privy chamber told certain counsellors about Anne’s behaviour and an interrogation of some of the privy chamber and a number of the queen’s staff followed.
81
However, the fuller version of the story supplied to the French ambassador in London and put into verse by his assistant, Lancelot de Carles, specifies a single woman as the source of the story, and describes her as the sister of one of the most strait-laced of the king’s counsellors.
82
That we should identify the two as Antony Browne and Lady Worcester seems highly plausible, particularly because the name ‘Antoine Brun’ survives in an otherwise garbled French prose account of the crisis dating from Elizabeth’s reign and now among the Lansdowne Manuscripts in the British Library.
83
What is noticeable about these accounts is their distance from the actual events of that single violent weekend. Cromwell indicates a measured investigation and de Carles concurs, describing an enquiry over several days.
84
Smeton meanwhile is under investigation in prison, and his eventual confession satisfies Henry, only for the king to continue to conceal his suspicions until after the May Day tilt. The reality of the actual forty-eight-hour crisis sits ill with all this; de Carles even puts Rochford and Norris in the frame from the start. The lords who go to break the news to the king say that:
when at night you retire, she has her toy boys [
mignons
] already lined up. Her brother is by no means last in the queue. Norris and Mark would not deny that they have spent many nights with her without having to persuade her, for she herself urged them on and invited them with presents and caresses.
85
This is moonshine, of a piece with the spin which would appear in the indictments.
Cromwell tried to cover up the inadequacy of the Crown’s case by telling Gardiner that the story was ‘so abominable’ that a good part had not even been given in evidence at the trial.
86
One may doubt, indeed, that whatever Lady Worcester said gave him a great deal; Justice Spelman, who heard all the evidence presented at the trial, makes no mention of her. De Carles, however, does provide ground for a reasonable guess. He says that the countess was taken to task by her brother for loose behaviour, and hit back by saying that the queen was worse and had offended with both Mark Smeton and her own brother.
87
This sounds very much like exaggeration of an altercation in which Antony Browne criticized his sister’s involvement in the lively society of the queen’s chamber and she hit back that she was no more, or even less, of a flirt than the queen. That would certainly have fallen into Spelman’s category that ‘all the evidence was of bawdry and lechery.’
Of itself, knowledge of an altercation between Browne and his sister would have done little more than direct attention to the possibility of making something incriminating out of behaviour in the queen’s household, but it was then that Thomas Cromwell found an unwitting ally in Anne herself.
88
She managed with dignity the ignominious daylight journey from Greenwich - not yet three years since her coronation triumph along the same stretch of river - with a hostile escort of men like Cromwell whom she had trusted, in through the Tower gates as far as the inner ward; and when the counsellors made to leave her at the Court Gate she was able to go on her knees to declare her innocence and ask them to intercede for her with the king. When, however, she realized that Kingston, the constable of the Tower, was taking her to the royal apartments, relief broke her. He reported to Cromwell what happened:
‘Master Kingston, shall I go in to a dungeon?’
‘No, Madam you shall go into your lodging that you lay in at your coron-
ation’.
‘It is too good for me. Jesu, have mercy on me!’
And she kneeled down weeping a great pace, and in the same sorrow fell
into a great laughing, and she hath done so many times since.
89
Put with four unsympathetic attendants, she began to babble incriminating material, and Kingston, whose instructions had been to discourage conversation with the queen, seized the chance to inform Cromwell of this flood of talk.
90
Unfortunately, his letters were damaged by fire in 1731, but a good deal can be reconstructed from the work of John Strype, who had used them earlier.
91
The first thing to come out from Anne’s temporary nervous collapse was the full story of the quarrel with Norris. It had begun by Anne asking Norris, till then a close ally, why he was postponing his proposed marriage to her cousin, Margaret Shelton, the king’s old flame. She obviously suspected that Norris was reluctant to complete the match in view of the current pressure on the Boleyns, so the noncommittal reply he made provoked Anne into a shocking imprudence. Flinging away the safety of courtly convention, she said, ‘You look for dead men’s shoes; for if ought came to the king but good you would look to have me.’ Norris’s horrified response to this totally unfair and improper shift in the basis of their relationship was to stammer that if he had any such thought, ‘he would his head were off,’ but the queen would not let him escape. She could, she said, undo him if she wanted to. A right royal quarrel about their relationship had then ensued.
Of itself, the pretence that Norris loved his sovereign’s wife was the common currency of courtly dalliance. What made the Norris episode so dangerous was the current tension at court and the fact that the queen was the aggressor. The rules said that the courtier should proposition the great lady, but Anne had reversed the roles. At once that put Norris’s reply on a different level. Anne was attempting to force a commitment far beyond convention. Even worse, ‘if ought came to the king but good you would look to have me’ could be interpreted as Anne having a personal interest in Norris, hence the oath offered to her almoner.
If admitting this encounter was not dangerous enough, Anne had also told her attendants that she was more afraid of what Francis Weston would say. More than a year before, she had taken him to task for neglecting his own wife and flirting with Madge Shelton, instead of leaving the field clear for Norris. He had replied that Norris came to the queen’s chamber more for Anne than for his intended bride, and had capped that by saying that he himself loved someone in her household better than either his wife or Madge. Anne had, she said, asked, ‘Who is that?’ and when Weston replied, ‘It is yourself,’ she had ‘defied him’ - slapped him down. All this was evidently part of a cheeky game, but the revelation led to Weston’s immediate arrest - a valuable bonus for the secretary, since Francis’s affinities were with those hostile to Anne. She had clearly thought of the danger if he deposed that Norris had had a personal interest in her for more than a year. Cromwell, however, realized that Weston was more use as a victim; his arrest disproved the allegation that the whole affair was a sordid factional putsch.
92
That, however, is what it was, and about the same time as Weston, yet another of the Boleyn faction was taken to the Tower: William Brereton, groom of the privy chamber.
93
The next Kingston letter furnished the secretary with further details about Mark Smeton’s behaviour.
94
The scene was Anne’s presence chamber at Greenwich on Saturday, 29 April. Smeton was standing in a window embrasure, and noticing that the young man appeared downcast, Anne had asked why. Smeton replied that it did not matter, at which the queen said, ‘You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do to a noble man, because you be an inferior person.’ ‘No, no, Madam,’ he answered. ‘A look sufficed me, and thus fare you well.’
This interchange is revealing. It shows Anne not acting in the ‘unfeminine’ way she had to Norris (which commentator after commentator has censured as evidence of either guilt or immodesty), but exercising authority in a way which was kind and considerate. The exchange also suggests that, though he was a skilled and valued professional, Smeton resented being excluded as an ‘inferior person’ from the game of courtly love around the queen and her ladies. At the subsequent trials, a separate count in the indictment alleged friction and competition between Anne’s alleged ‘lovers’, and most of the comments on the affair imply that Smeton was trying to compete above his station. The poem attributed to Wyatt clearly portrays him as an outsider:
A time thou haddest above thy poor degree,
The fall where of thy friends may well bemoan:
A rotten twig upon so high a tree
Hath slipped thy hold, and thou art dead and gone.
95
Alternatively, Smeton may have genuinely failed to distinguish between being a servant in the menial sense, which he was, and being a servant in the chivalric sense, which he was not.
96
Most poignant of all is the possibility that the young man had failed to realize that courtly love and true love were different coin.
Kingston’s original instructions to discourage conversation with Anne show that Cromwell had not expected to get anything incriminating out of the queen after her arrest. All we know of her initial questioning at Greenwich is that she was, so she said, ‘cruelly handled’, apparently by having accusations of misconduct with three (possibly unnamed) men hurled at her by Crown lawyers, unchecked by a bemused handful of counsellors.
97
Anne described how her uncle, the duke of Norfolk, ‘said, “Tut, tut, tut” ... shaking his head three or four times, and as for Master Treasurer [Fitzwilliam], he was in the Forest of Windsor [dreaming]’, although she did allow ‘Master Controller [William Paulet] to be a very gentleman’.
98
Rochford asked to appear before the council but apparently never did, and there is no evidence that he was ever formally interrogated.
99
Is it too cynical to suspect that Cromwell did not dare to give sister and brother a chance to answer until in the disadvantage of the court room? But, armed with Kingston’s letters, Cromwell now had material to work on to whip into shape a case against Anne. How substantial he could make it was another question, and one which first would have to be decided by two grand juries and then by two trial juries, one for the four commoners and the other for the trials of Anne and her brother, comprised of peers and presided over by the lord steward of England. When the queen had been taken into custody by Sir William Kingston she had asked, ‘Master Kingston, shall I die without justice?’ and he had replied, ‘The poorest subject the king hath, had justice,’ whereupon she laughed.
100
It remained to be seen whether her laughter was justified.
23
JUDGEMENT
A
FTER a week Cromwell had enough for his purpose. The judicial machine was then put to work with a despatch eloquent of the need to end matters speedily.
1
On Tuesday, 9 May, the sheriffs of London were ordered to assemble the next day a grand jury of ‘discreet and sufficient persons’ to decide prima facie on the offences alleged at Whitehall and Hampton Court. Despite the short notice the sheriffs produced a list of forty-eight men, three-quarters of whom, as instructed, turned up at Westminster before John Baldwin, chief justice of the common pleas, and six of his judicial colleagues.
Why Baldwin was there is a minor puzzle. John Fitzjames, chief justice of the king’s bench, was the obvious choice, and Baldwin was Norris’s brother-in-law. Whether he was selected to forestall later obstruction, or because Fitzjames had been less than decisive in the prosecution of Thomas More, it is impossible to say.
2
Practically speaking, the jury’s only option was to send such serious allegations for trial, but to make doubly sure the foreman was none other than More’s son-in-law, Giles Heron, while another grand juryman was a senior officer of the royal household. The next day, Thursday, Baldwin and three colleagues went to Deptford, where a Kent grand jury gave a positive verdict on the offences alleged at Greenwich. Meanwhile, in London there was frantic activity. As soon as the Middlesex return was in - or very possibly in anticipation - the constable of the Tower was ordered to have Weston, Norris, Brereton and Smeton at Westminster Hall the next Friday, 12 May. At the same time individual summonses must have gone to the trial jury; the orders from the sheriffs only went out on the actual day, by which time thirty-six knights and esquires were already on the way to do their duty.