Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (30 page)

Under the intolerable pressure – his eyes felt as though they were being forced out of their sockets and his skull seemed like an eggshell about to be crushed – Smeaton crumbled. Ready to say anything to stop the agony, he confessed that he had been the queen’s lover, along with more elevated courtiers in her circle. Perhaps hoping that the sheer number would demonstrate the absurdity of the charges, he agreed to every name that Cromwell spat at him: Henry Norris, yes; William Brereton, yes; Francis Weston also. Thomas Wyatt, too, and Richard Page, and not forgetting the queen’s own brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, with whom, said Smeaton, she had committed incest.

By the time that Smeaton, bruised, battered, his head ringing and aching, and scared out of his wits, was locked into an attic room in Cromwell’s house for the night, he had accused half a dozen men closest to the queen of being her lovers. The charges were almost certainly lies, but that was beside the point – Cromwell had enough evidence to rid Henry of his inconvenient queen. Cleverly, he ensured that the men he accused all had reputations for sexual laxity. The atmosphere of flirtatiousness and the air of sin that hung around the queen’s circle like a bad odour lent Cromwell’s charges some credence. It is significant, however, that the only man who actually admitted them was the only one who was subjected to torture (and doubtless to promises of lenient treatment if he told his tormentors what they wanted to hear): young Smeaton. As aristocrats, the other
accused were not subjected to the Tower’s grosser forms of pressure – a privilege not enjoyed by the humbly born musician.

By 1 May, Smeaton was in the Tower, fettered by iron manacles in an underground dungeon. Henry was at Greenwich watching a tournament when Cromwell’s report reached him. Anne was with him, although by now the royal pair were barely on speaking terms. Immediately, without bothering to bid his wife a final farewell, the king summoned a knot of courtiers, including Sir Henry Norris. Riding through the spring countryside which then separated Greenwich from London, Henry told Norris that he was accused of adultery with the queen – an act of treason punishable by death.

Norris indignantly denied the charge, and protested the innocence of the queen too. With the jousting they had witnessed fresh in his mind, he offered to face the king in a trial by tournament to establish his innocence. Henry dispatched him to the Tower instead. There he was joined by Sir Francis Weston, one of those dubbed a Knight of the Bath at the Tower ceremony honouring Anne’s coronation. The party was completed by William Brereton, a wealthy Cheshire landowner, and by the queen’s brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, accused of incest with his sister. Although married – his wife Jane would play a dishonourable part in the downfall of Henry’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard – Boleyn was said to be both a fornicator and a sodomite, and thus was another easy target for Cromwell’s malice. Perhaps Boleyn’s biggest crime in the king’s eyes, however, was to have heard Anne’s complaints about Henry’s inadequate performance in bed. Two more gentlemen in Anne’s circle, also accused of adultery by Smeaton, Sir Richard Page and the poet Thomas Wyatt, were hauled in for questioning but then released. The four remaining accused stoutly denied the charges but were detained in the Martin Tower in the north-east corner of the fortress’s inner ward.

The next day, 2 May 1536, nemesis knocked for Anne. It came in the shape of a four-man delegation from the Privy Council, headed by Cromwell and her own uncle, Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, as she ate dinner at Greenwich. When she learned of what she was accused from Norfolk’s lips, Anne hotly protested her innocence.

She was the king’s faithful wife, she said, and only he had touched her body. To Norfolk, a vile crawler who would undergo any abasement to keep his power and privileges, the sacrifice of a close family member was
barely a minor embarrassment. Without giving Anne the opportunity to change her clothes, he had her hustled into a barge, which retraced her coronation journey and delivered her to the same Tower that had been the scene of her triumph three short years before.

With dreadful irony, she was received by the same constable who had been her deferential host on that occasion – Sir William Kingston. Then, he had been all smiles, bows and flowery compliments. Now, he was cold, formal and grimly correct. Nervously, Anne asked if she was to be sent to a dungeon, to which Kingston replied, ‘No, Madam, to the lodging that you lay in at your coronation.’ Detaining Anne in the palace rooms where she had stayed at the height of her glory was itself, of course, an act of psychological cruelty.

Deprived of her usual ladies, and with the closest members of her male coterie also in the Tower, as Anne was escorted under the arch of the Bloody Tower she came close to despair, flinging herself on the ground and calling on God to bear witness to her innocence. She was under round-the-clock surveillance by a quartet of women – including her aunt, Lady Boleyn, and the constable’s wife Lady Kingston – under orders to report her most casual remarks. As her dire position sank in, Anne alternated between bouts of weeping and fits of laughter. One remark in her distracted talk, ‘Oh, Norris, hast thou betrayed me?’, was twisted by Cromwell when reported to him as a confession that she had slept with Norris. More likely, it was in reaction to the lie that Norfolk had told her when she was detained in an effort to unnerve her: that both Norris and Smeaton had confessed their guilt. This was true of Smeaton, but never of Norris, who maintained his and the queen’s innocence until the end.

Anne recovered some composure and wrote to her husband from the lodgings of the lieutenant where she was transferred while the palace was made ready for her trial. Her letter, headed, ‘From my doleful prison in the Tower’, was a dignified plea, not for mercy (she knew Henry well enough to realise that that quality was in short supply) but for justice. Expecting to die, she pleaded with him not to involve wholly innocent men in her ruin. Most of all she was anxious to shield their daughter Elizabeth from his wrath. Anne begged Henry not to let ‘that unworthy stain of a disloyal heart towards your good Grace ever cast so foul a blot on me, or on the infant Princess, your daughter’.

Henry, however, could not wait to rid himself of the wife he now hated.
So hasty was the preparation of the indictment against Anne and her co-accused, that of the twenty counts of adultery, she had cast-iron alibis for twelve. Ignoring such inconsistencies, the authorities pressed ahead with the trials with indecent speed. On 12 May, Norris, Weston, Brereton and Smeaton were taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall for their trial. The jury was presided over by none other than Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne and George. This disgusting man was even more eager than the Duke of Norfolk to distance himself from his own flesh and blood. All the accused save Smeaton continued indignantly to deny the charges. Their obvious innocence availed them nothing, and the patently rigged verdicts of ‘Guilty’ by the hand-picked jury were duly passed. The unfortunate quartet were all condemned to be beheaded on Tower Hill.

Anne and George, thanks to their high status, and also for fear that there would be popular demonstrations of sympathy, were tried within the Tower – in the great hall of the royal palace. The Duke of Norfolk presided, along with twenty-six other peers (the repulsive Thomas Boleyn’s eager offer to serve was politely refused). Anne, dressed in a black velvet gown over a kirtle of crimson brocade, a simple cap with a black and white feather on her famous raven-black hair, entered the hall, the eyes of 2,000 spectators upon her. Accompanied by her ‘minders’ Sir William and Lady Kingston, she was escorted to a chair on a raised dais covered with purple velvet in the middle of the room. She bore herself well under the fearful circumstances, one witness noting, ‘She made an entry as though she were going to a great triumph and sat down with elegance.’

Impassively, she listened as Cromwell listed the monstrous charges. In addition to her adultery, she was also supposed to have supplied poison to Norris which had killed her predecessor, Queen Katherine, and was intended to kill Princess Mary and the king’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, too. There were no witnesses to this or to the supposed ‘adultery’; because neither offence had ever been committed. The only thing she had ever given Norris, said Anne, were a few trinkets from her jewel box. She also owned up to dancing with her own brother, but fiercely denied charges that they had exchanged ‘French’ kisses. Perhaps the most judicious verdict on this farce was pronounced by an eye witness, London’s lord mayor, who as a magistrate had witnessed many trials. He remarked, ‘I could not see anything in the proceedings against her, but that they were resolved to make an occasion to get rid of her.’

Despite the lack of evidence, the kangaroo court, whose verdict had been decided in advance – Henry had told Jane Seymour that morning that Anne would be condemned – lost no time in returning a unanimous vote of ‘Guilty’. Only Anne’s sometime suitor, the Earl of Northumberland, after casting his ballot in line with the other twenty-five judges, was overcome by remorse and collapsed. After he was removed to lie at an open window, the Duke of Norfolk, weeping copious crocodile tears, passed the terrible sentence on his niece: ‘Thou hast deserved death and thy judgment is this: That thou shalt be burned here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off as the King’s pleasure shall be further known.’

As the savage sentence was pronounced, an inhuman shriek split the silence. Mrs Orchard, Anne’s childhood nurse, was led wailing from the court. Anne herself retained her icy composure. Calmly she addressed her judges:

‘I think you know well the reason why you have condemned me to be other than that which led you to this judgment. My only sin against the King has been my jealousy and lack of humility. But I am prepared to die. What I regret most deeply is that men who were innocent and loyal to the king must lose their lives because of me.’

As she was led from the court by the ever attendant Kingstons, her face was deathly pale beneath her now dishevelled hair.

Economically, the same court and jury sat for the trial of George Boleyn which followed immediately. Lord Rochford shared his sister’s fiery spirit, and during his initial interrogations had defended himself with such wit and conviction that those who heard him bet each other odds of ten to one that he would be acquitted. They underestimated Henry’s vindictiveness. George Boleyn had apparently spread rumours of the increasingly obese Henry’s near-impotence with his sister. Reports so sensitive were not referred to in open court, but were written down and shown to the accused before George, too, was condemned to death.

Anne still hoped against hope for a reprieve – according to Kingston offering to enter a nunnery if it would save her. But the only concession Henry made was to commute her sentence to beheading rather than burning, the traditional punishment for a witch. Granting this ‘mercy’ was probably his intention all along, but it was offered to Anne as an
inducement by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he visited her in the Tower the day after her trial. Cranmer – who sympathised with Anne as a fellow reformer – told her that in exchange for her agreement that her marriage to Henry had been invalid because the king had been the lover of her elder sister Mary, she would be offered the swift death of decapitation. She consented to this diplomatic discretion – thereby giving Cranmer convenient grounds to annul her marriage the next day, without the huge embarrassment of declaring Henry’s marriage to Katherine legal after all.

Having agreed to this face-saving deal, Anne was told that she would die four days later, on 19 May – the first ever English queen to be executed. In a mood of fatalistic resignation, the doomed woman – like Smeaton an accomplished player of the lute – put her feelings into a sad song:

Oh death rock me asleep

Bring on my quiet rest
,

Let pass my very guiltless ghost

Out of my careful breast
.

Ring out the doleful knell
,

Let its sound my death tell
;

For I must die
,

There is no remedy
,

For now I die
.

So resigned was Anne to her fate that Kingston wrote that his prisoner ‘hath much pleasure and joy in death’. In fact, it was not dying that Anne minded, so much as the false accusations she would take to the grave. In a cell elsewhere in the Tower, George Boleyn was also taking leave of the music-making that had been his joy:

Farewell my lute, this is the last

Labour that thou and I shall waste
,

For ended is that we began
,

Now is the song both sung and past
,

My lute be still, for I have done
.

The king’s chief concern was to dispose of both Boleyns as cleanly and covertly as possible. He wanted to ensure that there would be no public demonstrations, no embarrassing speeches from the scaffold, and no
long-drawn-out messy deaths. In keeping with his desire to get things over as discreetly as possible, he commuted George’s sentence from hanging to beheading; and confirmed that Anne would be executed by a swordsman weilding a two-handed broadsword, rather than the usual headsman hacking with an axe. Finding no one in the kingdom with the necessary lethal skills, Henry had sent for a French swordsman from St Omer with a reputation for performing quick, clean decapitations. This is further evidence that the queen’s trial was rigged in advance, since the swordsman had been summoned to London even before she had appeared in court.

Anne’s five alleged lovers were executed together on Tower Hill early on Wednesday 17 May. In a piece of refined cruelty, a reluctant queen was brought to the window of her room in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings to see them cross the great courtyard on their way to their deaths. The men were brought from separate cells in the Martin and Beauchamp Towers, and were also watched from his cell in the Bell Tower by Thomas Wyatt, who had only just learned that he was to be reprieved. The poet remembered the moment in doggerel verse when he wrote: