The most dangerous part of this courtly brinkmanship was, of course, tolerating the discussion of how good - or bad - the king was in bed. When Rochford was asked, as we have seen, whether Anne had talked about that to his wife, he neatly evaded the question as likely to impugn the royal issue. He was, however, silenced by a supplementary: ‘Had he at any time spread the story that Elizabeth was not Henry’s child?’ Very clearly something of the kind had been said, and apparently more than once. We can imagine it as a joke -‘With his problems, it’s hard to see how the king ever produced Elizabeth!’ - but could anything be more foolish to joke about or for Anne to condone? Strange though it is - and we may put it down to ageing, to stress, to overconfidence, to what we will - Anne had allowed herself to relax at the point of her greatest strength, her court-craft. Perhaps she now remembered with bitter regret the advice of Margaret of Austria over twenty years before: ‘Trust in those who offer you service, and in the end, my maidens, you will find yourselves in the ranks of those who have been deceived.’
37
Folly was, nevertheless, not crime, nor was it justice to punish with death what at most deserved the rustication which Henry had imposed on Carewe, Bryan and other ‘minions’ who forgot their place years before. The ninety-five voices which had cried ‘guilty’ were lying, or deceived, or chose to be deceived. A case sufficient to quiet the general public and satisfy pliant consciences had been manufactured by innuendo and implication, but those in the know were aware how flimsy it was. Clearly informed by his friend Nicolas Bourbon, the French reformer Etienne Dolet published an epigram declaring Anne falsely condemned and beheaded for adultery.
38
Chapuys did not believe her guilt - ‘condemned on presumption and not evidence, without any witnesses or valid confession’ was his conclusion - and the reaction of Mary of Hungary, that niece of Margaret of Austria whom Anne had known as a 7-year-old in Mechelen, was completely cynical.
39
The king had
paid considerable attention to [Jane] before her predecessor was dead which, along with the fact that none of those executed with her except for the organist admitted the deed, any more than she had, made people think he invented the ploy to get rid of her. Nevertheless the woman herself suffered no great injustice by this for she was well known to be a worthless character... I think that women will not be all that happy if such ways of going on become the custom - and with good reason. And although I do not intend to take the risk myself, yet for the sake of the female sex I will pray like the rest that God will protect us!
Thomas Cromwell made a more personal assessment in which we may detect at least a hint of posthumous amends. When discussing her with Chapuys early in June, he went out of his way to praise the intelligence, spirit and courage of the queen and her brother.
40
Henry VIII, by contrast, had to face the fact that in permitting the arrest of his wife and friends, he had taken a step which he could not reverse, even if the rage and suspicion which had tipped him over the edge were to seem more questionable in the cold light of reflection. He admitted nearly ten years later that a victim in the Tower had no defence against false evidence.
41
In the case of Anne, the Jane Seymour faction kept up the enticement, while Cromwell fed Henry ‘facts’ about Anne’s guilt which he could hide behind. The king responded by whipping up a prurient self-righteousness which anaesthetized all doubt. He declared that his wife had been unfaithful with more than a hundred men, and was morbidly concerned about the plans for the executions, even to the making of the scaffolds.
42
He was at his most judicious in refusing the very considerable persuasions and inducements he was offered to reprieve Francis Weston, so unhappily caught on the wrong side of the factional battle.
43
Since Francis’s father was still alive, his death would bring the Crown little profit, and Henry would not normally have turned down the chance to trade blood for cash. But not so this time; justice must be done! The king was at his most nauseous in making arrangements - even perhaps in advance of the trial - to bring over the executioner of Calais to kill Anne.
44
He was an expert in the use of the heavy continental executioner’s sword which could cut the head off a prisoner who was kneeling upright, in place of the clumsier English axe needing the prisoner’s chin on the block. He charged £23 6s. 8
d
.
45
A death in the French style may have been requested by Anne herself; it was certainly intended as an act of grace towards her, to add to the kindness of a death by beheading, instead of the accustomed fire of the female traitor. The warrant for Anne’s execution actually states that the king, moved by pity, was unwilling to commit her to the flames.
46
One can only wonder at a psychology which transmutes doubt about the guilt of a loved one into a loving concern about the way to kill her.
James Anthony Froude, that great nineteenth-century historian of English nationalism, laboured mightily to exonerate Henry’s ministers from the charge of judicial murder.
Though we stretch our belief in the complacency of statesmen to the furthest limit of credulity, can we believe that Cromwell would have invented that dark indictment - Cromwell ... the dearest friend of Latimer? Or... Norfolk,... who had won his spurs at Flodden? Or... Suffolk and ... Fitzwilliam, the Wellington and the Nelson of the sixteenth century? Scarcely among the picked scoundrels of Newgate could men be found for such work; and shall we believe it of men like these?
As for the king himself:
I believe history will be ransacked vainly to find a parallel for conduct at once so dastardly, so audacious, and so foolishly wicked as that which the popular hypothesis attributes to Henry VIII.
47
A. F. Pollard, too, found uxoricide hard to square with his vision of ‘Henry the Lion’:
it is not credible that the juries should have found her accomplices guilty, that twenty-six peers should have condemned Anne herself, without some colourable justification. If the charges were merely invented to ruin the queen, one culprit besides herself would have been enough. To assume that Henry sent four needless victims to the block is to accuse him of a lust for superfluous butchery, of which even he, in his most bloodthirsty moments, was not capable.
48
In the very different atmosphere of recent years, the thought has been that Anne was justified in being unfaithful:
Anne, realising that her survival depended on her production of a son, may have hoped that other men would succeed where the king had failed. The king, moreover, was being unfaithful to her, and she may have tried to get her own back. Above all, perhaps, she was losing her beauty and was anxious to reassure herself by the admiration of others - an admiration which would always be forthcoming from an ambitious courtier.
49
G. W. Bernard has gone further and argued ‘that Anne and at least some of her friends were guilty of the charges brought against them’.
50
The evidence, however, justifies nothing of this. Two days before Anne appeared to plead ‘not guilty’ the Crown began breaking up her household and, according to Chapuys., Henry had told Jane on the morning of the trial that Anne would be condemned by three in the afternoon.
51
His wife was the victim of a struggle for power, and Henry at his rare moments of honesty admitted it. When he told Jane Seymour not to meddle in affairs of state, he pointedly advised her to take Anne as a warning.
52
Innocent but a prisoner, guiltless but condemned, Anne awaited her fate. We need not believe that she was forced to watch the execution of her brother and the others, as Chapuys suggests.
53
This would have meant moving her across the Tower, to one of the few vantage points in the Bell Tower from which the Tower Hill scaffold could be seen 200 yards away. The prisoner who did watch from there was Thomas Wyatt:
The Bell Tower showed me such a sight
That in my head sticks day and night:
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory or might,
That yet
circa Regna tonat.
54
Excused such horrors, and after the hysteria of the first few days, Anne showed some signs of adjustment, but all the time she was battered by the demoralization and fragmentation of the prisoner under constant and unsympathetic scrutiny. What we learn of her then is certainly revealing. Nothing has come down to us of anything Anne said about her daughter of 2 years and 8 months. From the start, her family was uppermost in her mind, not only her ‘sweet brother’ but her mother, and the father we think of as deserting her.
55
Perhaps he did, but Anne was evidently concerned that her whole family would be destroyed with her - as it very largely was. Thomas Boleyn would, in fact, end with little to show for his lifetime of service to Henry VIII except for his earldom.
56
Not that he gave up in May 1536. Despite losing his place in Henry’s inner circle and its many benefits, he set himself with enthusiasm once more to climb the greasy pole. He helped to suppress and punish the rebels of 1536, paid his subsidy in full and promptly, buttered up and cooperated with ministers (even lending Cromwell his chain and ‘best’ Garter badge), was assiduous at the Order’s functions, active in royal ceremonies and by January 1538 was back at court and ‘well entertaincd’.
57
There was even talk of his marrying the king’s niece, Margaret Douglas.
58
Thomas also promised Henry that he would settle the Ormonde lands on the illegitimate Elizabeth, although in the end he thought again and they went to his surviving daughter.
59
In the past Anne had easily eclipsed her sister, but now Mary was the only legitimate hope of the Boleyn line.
Deserted, cut off and disoriented in time, Anne became avid for news. She built great castles of imagination - that it would not rain until she was released, that the evangelical bishops would intervene on her behalf, that most English people were praying for her, that a disaster from heaven would follow her execution. She harked back to the happy time with Margaret of Austria.
60
Sometimes her hope ran high - the king was doing it all to test her, she would be sent to a nunnery; at others she would be determined to die, and would discuss the technical details with Kingston as if it was the most amusing subject in the world. There would, she said, be no difficulty in finding her a nickname: ‘Queen Anne the Headless’. Then her mind would run over details of her treatment or she would recall a promising bet on the game of tennis she had been watching when first summoned before the commissioners - ‘if it [the chase] had been laid she had won.’ But, increasingly, preparation for death occupied her thoughts, hours spent with her almoner and before the blessed sacrament until her spirit reached the exaltation of the martyr. Kingston wrote towards the end: ‘I have seen many men and also women executed and that they have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death.
61
Yet before Anne could be allowed to die there was to be one final twist in the story, and the nastiest. Her marriage to Henry was declared null and void and Elizabeth, the daughter whose legitimacy she was supposed to have defamed, was bastardized. The formal award was made by Cranmer at Lambeth on Wednesday, 17 May - the afternoon following the execution of the men - but no justification was published and, as the cause papers have disappeared, we do not know the grounds alleged.
62
It is clear that the notion of a divorce had been under consideration for some days. The previous Saturday (that is, before Anne was tried), the earl of Northumberland wrote to Thomas Cromwell because news had reached him that the old story of the supposed pre-contract had been resurrected. He reminded the secretary of his denials in 1532, and insisted that he would stick by that ‘to his damnation’. As well as showing that to divorce Anne was not, as is often said, a last-minute idea, this letter disposes of one explanation which was circulating.
63
Chapuys picked up two others - that Elizabeth was the daughter of Norris and that Henry’s relations with Anne’s sister Mary had been summoned up again.
64
Some writers see Henry’s sending of Cranmer to hear Anne’s confession on 16 May as a tactic to secure grounds for a divorce.
65
Did the archbishop hint at life in return for compliance? Did Anne confess to a consummated relationship with Percy or a third party, a quid pro quo, perhaps, for Henry not rejecting Elizabeth? There is no way of knowing what passed between the client, now archbishop, and his patron, now a condemned traitor.
66
In all probability the meeting was what it purported to be, pastoral. Now that the verdict had been given against Anne, it was safe to let Cranmer back on the scene to do what he excelled at. It asks a great deal to believe that the archbishop secured information on the Tuesday (volunteered or by deceit), and was then able to rush the legal processes through in time to pronounce sentence within twenty-four hours.
67
In any case there was no reason to rush; the court at Lambeth could as easily have sat on the Thursday. That it sat when it did implies that by the time of Cranmer’s visit, annulment was well in hand.