Unaware of what the future held, the victorious faction exuded satisfaction at the destruction of Anne Boleyn. Sir John Russell wrote: ‘The king hath come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this [Jane] and the cursedness and the unhappiness in the other.’
16
Even before Anne had faced her judges, Henry had sent Carewe to bring her successor to a house on the river a mile from Whitehall, and as soon as news of the execution reached him he set off to meet Jane
17
The following day they were betrothed, and on Tuesday, 30 May, the marriage took place in the queen’s closet at Whitehall.
18
A week later Edward Seymour was elevated to the peerage, and soon after Henry Seymour, probably his younger brother, took the privy chamber place made vacant by Smeton’s death.
19
And always comparison was made to Anne’s disadvantage, although we may not today draw quite the pejorative implication intended by another John Russell remark, made after attending the marriage, that ‘the richer she [Jane] was in apparel, the fairer and goodly lady she was and appeared; and the other [Anne] he said was the contrary, for the richer she was apparelled, the worse she looked.’
20
Anyone familiar with Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour might be forgiven for feeling that she needed all the help she could get.
21
For Thomas Cromwell, intent on being free of these troublesome courtiers, the death of Anne, Rochford, Norris and the rest was only the end of Act One. The Seymour family had been paid off for the moment - and he would have to work with them anyway - but Carewe and the other supporters of Mary were in a high state of excitement, daily expecting her return to favour and a place in the succession.
22
London was buzzing. Cromwell appeared to countenance these expectations, but from the start he knew the price to be exacted from Mary: full acceptance of the supremacy and her own illegitimacy. There was to be no conservative reaction or return to the traditional powers and status of the Church, as the princess and her allies fondly expected. Poor Mary; it was so obvious to her that everything was the fault of Anne, ‘nobody dared speak for me’ - and we may add ‘or the Church’ - ‘as long as that woman lived, which is now gone.’
23
For a while the princess’s comeback seemed a formality, but it was not long before the secretary revealed the terms.
24
Mary’s moral fibre held, and Cromwell, who had clearly promised Henry to secure her submission, began (or so he said) to feel for the head on his own shoulders; there are signs indeed of Henry’s own characteristic sledgehammer in the start of judicial moves against his daughter. By now, however, the secretary had enough on Mary’s supporters to proceed against them; he convinced Henry that they were behind her obstinacy, thereby facing the princess with isolation and the loss of her friends. Fitzwilliam was excluded from the council, and his half-brother, Anthony Browne, interrogated. The seriousness of the situation is indicated by orders to list the treasurer’s grants and offices, as was done when Rochford was arrested.
25
Exeter, too, was banned from the council, Lady Hussey was put in the Tower, and other court ladies found themselves being grilled by Cromwell and Audley, along with members of the privy chamber staff; and there was a burst of activity in the royal households, demanding that suspects should swear allegiance to the established succession.
At this point Mary succumbed both to the king’s pressure and to the pleas of her friends to sign whatever her father wanted. She admitted all that was asked of her. Even so, Cromwell continued to press his enquiries, and despite denials to a man - and woman - of any disloyalty, and especially of any discussion of the bona fide argument about Mary’s legitimacy, he soon had ample evidence for a charge of conspiracy far more convincing than that against Anne. Lady Hussey was still being held in the Tower under investigation as late as August.
26
This time, however, there was no need to press matters to the scaffold. The court, led by Mary, surrendered abjectly to the will of the king and his minister. Cromwell’s triumph was complete. At the start of July Anne’s father, Wiltshire, was required to hand over to him the office of lord privy seal, and a week later Cromwell was raised to the peerage.
27
The relegation of Mary and her supporters to the periphery of power had a number of consequences. The fear Rochford had expressed on the scaffold, and which Cranmer had certainly shared, that Anne’s destruction would mean the end of religious reform, would not now materialize. Instead, the clients she had promoted would remain to hold and consolidate a bridgehead for the Protestant religion in England. The defeated conservatives had nowhere to go and, although the rebellions which broke out in the autumn in Lincolnshire and the north were substantially popular and immediate in causation, one factor was undoubtedly the behaviour of Mary’s discredited supporters.
28
Hussey and Darcy would die by the executioner’s axe for their lukewarm loyalty, and although a number of Mary’s friends chickened out of supporting the rebels in the field, an attitude of continued disaffection marked them out for suspicion. Several of Anne’s conservative enemies thereby followed her to the scaffold - Exeter, Lord Montagu and Sir Edward Neville in December 1538, Carewe in the following March; Lady Exeter was in the Tower for eighteen months and her son for nearly fifteen years. Richard Tempest, one of the petty jury which condemned Norris and the other commoners, caught typhus and died in the Fleet Prison in August 1537; Giles Heron, foreman of the Middlesex grand jury which endorsed the original indictment, was drawn, hanged and quartered at Tyburn in August 1540.
29
In the narrower confines of the royal court, the check to the Marian faction allowed some recovery among those associated with Anne. Richard Page was released from the Tower and restored to favour, but decided to give up being ‘a daily courtier’.
30
Wyatt, who seems to have been protected by Cromwell himself, celebrated his release by telling the truth in circumspect but suggestive verse.
31
One poem attributed to him is an elegy on May 1536:
In mourning wise since daily I increase,
Thus should I cloak the cause of all my grief;
So pensive mind with tongue to hold his peace
My reason sayeth there can be no relief:
Wherefore give ear, I humbly you require,
The affect to know that thus doth make me moan.
The cause is great of all my doleful cheer
For those that were, and now be dead and gone.
What though to death desert be now their call,
As by their faults it doth appear right plain?
Of force I must lament that such a fall
Should light on those so wealthily did reign,
Though some perchance will say, of cruel heart,
A traitor’s death why should we thus bemoan?
But I alas, set this offence apart,
Must needs bewail the death of some be gone.
As for them all I do not thus lament,
But as of right my reason doth me bind;
But as the most doth all their deaths repent,
Even so do I by force of mourning mind.
Some say, Rochford, haddest thou been not so proud,
For thy great wit each man would thee bemoan,
Since as it is so, many cry aloud
It is great loss that thou art dead and gone’.
Ah! Norris, Norris, my tears begin to run
To think what hap did thee so lead or guide
Whereby thou hast both thee and thine undone
That is bewailed in court of every side;
In place also where thou hast never been
Both man and child doth piteously thee moan.
They say, ‘Alas, thou art far overseen
By thine offences to be thus dead and gone’.
Ah! Weston, Weston, that pleasant was and young,
In active things who might with thee compare?
All words accept that thou diddest speak with tongue,
So well esteemed with each where thou diddest fare.
And we that now in court doth lead our life
Most part in mind doth thee lament and moan;
But that thy faults we daily hear so rife,
All we should weep that thou art dead and gone.
Brereton farewell, as one that least I knew.
Great was thy love with divers as I hear,
But common voice doth not so sore thee rue
As other twain that doth before appear;
But yet no doubt but thy friends thee lament
And other hear their piteous cry and moan.
So doth each heart for thee likewise relent
That thou givest cause thus to be dead and gone.
Ah! Mark, what moan should I for thee make more,
Since that thy death thou hast deserved best,
Save only that mine eye is forced sore
With piteous plaint to moan thee with the rest?
A time thou haddest above thy poor degree,
The fall whereof thy friends may well bemoan:
A rotten twig upon so high a tree
Hath slipped thy hold, and thou art dead and gone.
And thus farewell each one in hearty wise!
The axe is home, your heads be in the street;
The trickling tears doth fall so from my eyes
I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.
But what can hope when death hath played his part,
Though nature’s course will thus lament and moan?
Leave sobs therefore, and every Christian heart
Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone.
32
Of the victims, Wyatt misses only one - Anne herself. In the years to come few voices would be raised in her favour, though the king’s rapid remarriage made suspicions about the official story widespread.
33
For her, the most poignant memorial was in the Tower of London, where it remains to this day on the wall of one of the cells in the Beauchamp Tower (plate 47). There crudely and hastily scratched by a man who knew he had little time, is Anne Boleyn’s falcon.
34
Which of her ‘lovers’ made it we do not know, but the image is unmistakable. The tree-stump is there - the barren Henry - the Tudor rose-bush bursting into life, the perching bird whose touch wrought the miracle. But there is one change to the badge which Anne had proudly flourished in the face of the world. This falcon is no longer a royal bird. It has no crown, no sceptre; it stands bareheaded, as did Anne in those last moments on Tower Green.
EPILOGUE
F
OR twenty years after May 1536, Anne Boleyn was a non-person. People who had known her said nothing, while the king, who knew most, grew old, obese and bad-tempered. When he had allowed Cromwell to strike Anne down, Henry had been at the height of his magnificence. By the time he allowed Cromwell himself to be struck down four years later, the physical deterioration was obvious. Four more attempts at marriage brought him little joy. Jane Seymour’s death in childbirth left him with the son he had done so much evil to get, but his remaining wives were barren. Number four was divorced; number five, Katherine Howard, died by the axe on Tower Green and is buried in St Peter’s, near her cousin Anne; but the luck of the sixth held out, despite the risks of mothering a sick and irascible old man. And all the while there was little said of Anne, and little left of her but her child, the young Elizabeth, who had been declared a bastard but who was nevertheless acknowledged as the king’s daughter. Despite her youth and her mother’s shame, she was a valuable card in the diplomatic marriage game and in 1544 she was restored to the succession. A ‘very pretty’, bright and intelligent girl, prematurely cautious. When her elder sister Mary came to the throne in 1553, the 20-year-old Elizabeth found she needed that caution as never before. On Palm Sunday 1554 Anne Boleyn’s daughter was brought by river to the Tower of London, just as her mother had been almost eighteen years earlier. Suspected of plotting rebellion, she spent the next two months in the Bell Tower, followed by almost a year under house arrest in Oxfordshire.
In 1558, however, the miracle happened. On Monday, 28 November, to the cheers of the London crowd and the roar of the Tower artillery, Elizabeth came through the gates to take possession of the fortress as queen. The bastardized daughter of the disgraced Anne Boleyn, with her father’s complexion but her mother’s face, splendidly dressed in purple velvet: Elizabeth, by the grace of God, queen of England, France and Ireland, defender of the faith. Is it fanciful to feel that after twenty years, the mother in the nearby grave in the chapel of St Peter was at last vindicated?
NOTES
Chapter 1 A Courtier’s Daughter
1
Parker,
Correspondence
, p. 400. In calling himself Anne’s ‘poor countryman’, Parker is following sixteenth-century usage where ‘country’, applied within England, meant ‘county’ or district. For full information on all abbreviated titles, see Bibliographical Abbreviations, pp. 425-34.
2
For the Boleyn pedigree see J. C. Wedgwood and A. Holt,
History of Parliament: Biographies(1936),
pp. 90-1;
House of Commons
, i.456; G. E. C.,
Peerage,
x. 137-40.
3
Strickland, Queens of England
, ii.273.
4
For William Boleyn see
Cal. Close Rolls,
Henry
Vll
(1955-63), i.143;
Cal. Inquisitions
Post
Mortem, Henry VII
(1898-1955), i.322; Polydore Vergil,
Anglica Historia,
ed. D. Hay, Camden Society, 3rd series, 74 (1950), pp. 52, 94.