Wives of Henry the Eighth and the Parts They Played in History — A Fleeting Triumph - Political Intrigue and the Betrayal of Anne - Part 4

There was to be a May-day jousting in the tilt-yard at Greenwich, at which Anne's brother, Lord Rochford, was the challenger, and Sir Henry Norreys was the principal defender.

Early in the morning of the day, Cromwell, who of course took no part in such shows, went to London, and asked Smeaton to accompany him and dine,[151] returning in the afternoon to Greenwich in time for the ridings.

Mark accepted the invitation, and was taken ostensibly for dinner to a house at Stepney, that probably being a convenient half-way place between Greenwich and Westminster by water.

No sooner had the unsuspecting youth entered the chamber than he saw the trap into which he had fallen.

Six armed men closed around him, and Cromwell's face grew grave, as the Secretary warned the terrified lad to confess where he obtained so much money.

Smeaton prevaricated, and "then two stout young fellows were called, and the Secretary asked for a rope and a cudgel.

The rope, which was filled with knots, was put around Mark's head and twisted with the cudgel until Mark cried, 'Sir Secretary, no more!

I

will tell the truth.

The Queen gave me the money.'

"[152] Then, bit by bit, by threats of torture, some sort of confession incriminating Anne was wrung out of the poor wretch: though exactly what he confessed is not on record.

Later, when the affair was made public, the quidnuncs of London could tell the most private details of his adultery with the Queen;[153] for Cromwell took care that such gossip should be well circulated.

Whatever confession was extorted from Smeaton, it implicated not only himself but the various gentlemen who shared with him the Queen's smiles, and was quite sufficient for Cromwell's purpose.

Hurrying the unfortunate musician to the Tower in the strictest secrecy, Cromwell sent his nephew Richard post haste to Greenwich with a letter divulging Smeaton's story to the King.

Richard Cromwell arrived at the tiltyard as the tournament was in progress, the King and Anne witnessing the bouts from a glazed gallery.

Several versions of what then happened are given; but the most probable is that as soon as Henry had glanced at the contents of the letter and knew that Cromwell had succeeded, he abruptly rose and left the sports;

starting almost immediately afterwards for London without the knowledge of Anne.

With him went a great favourite of his, Sir Henry Norreys, Keeper of the Privy Purse, who was engaged to be married to Madge Shelton, Anne's cousin, who had at one time been put forward by the Boleyn interest as the King's mistress.

Norreys had, no doubt, flirted platonically with the Queen, who had openly bidden for his admiration, but there is not an atom of evidence that their connection was a guilty one.

[154] On the way to London the King taxed him with undue familiarity with Anne.

Horror-stricken, Norreys could only protest his innocence, and resist all the temptations held out to him to make a clean breast of the Queen's immorality.

One of the party of Anne's enemies, Sir William Fitzwilliam, was also in attendance on the King; and to him was given the order to convey Norreys to the Tower.

After the King's departure from Greenwich, Anne learnt that he had gone without a word of farewell, and that Smeaton was absent from the joust, detained in London.

The poor woman's heart must have sunk with fear, for the portents of her doom were all around her.

She could not cry for mercy to the flabby coward her husband, who, as usual, slunk from bearing the responsibility of his own acts, and ran away from the danger of personal appeal from those whom he wronged.

Late at night the dread news was whispered to her that Smeaton and Norreys were both in the Tower; and early in the morning she herself was summoned to appear before a quorum of the Royal Commissioners, presided over by her uncle and enemy, the Duke of Norfolk.

She was rudely told that she was accused of committing adultery with Smeaton and Norreys, both of whom had confessed.

She cried and protested in vain that it was untrue.

She was told to hold her peace, and was placed under arrest until her barge was ready and the tide served to bear her up stream to the Tower.

With her went a large guard of halberdiers and the Duke of Norfolk.

Thinking that she was being carried to her husband at Westminster, she was composed and tranquil on the way; but when she found that the Traitors' Gate of the Tower was her destination, her presence of mind deserted her.

Sir William Kingston, one of the chief conspirators in Mary's favour, and governor of the fortress, stood upon the steps under the gloomy archway to receive her, and in sign of custody took her by the arm as she ascended.

"I was received with greater ceremony the last time I entered here," she cried indignantly; and as the heavy gates clanged behind her and the portcullis dropped, she fell upon her knees and burst into a storm of hysterical tears.

Kingston and his wife did their best to tranquillise her; but her passionate protestations of innocence made no impression upon them.

Her brother, Lord Rochford, had, unknown to her, been a few hours before lodged in the same fortress on the hideous and utterly unsupported charge of incest with his sister; and Cromwell's drag-net was cast awide to bring in all those whose names were connected, however loosely, with that of the Queen by her servants, all of whom were tumbling over each other in their haste to denounce their fallen mistress.

Sir Thomas Weston and William Brereton, with both of whom Anne had been fond of bandying questionable compliments, were arrested on the 4th May; and on the 5th Sir Thomas Wyatt, the poet, and a great friend of the King, was put under guard on similar accusations.

With regard to Wyatt there seems to have been no doubt, as has been shown in an earlier chapter, that some love passages had passed between him and Anne before her marriage; and there is contemporary assertion to support the belief that their connection had not been an innocent one;[155] but the case against him was finally dropped and he was again taken into Henry's favour; a proof that there was no evidence of any guilt on his part since Anne was Queen.

He is asserted to have begged Henry not to contract the marriage, and subsequently to have reminded him that he had done so, confessing after her arrest that Anne had been his mistress before she married the King.

The wretched woman babbled hysterically without cessation in her chamber in the Tower; all her distraught ravings being carefully noted and repeated by the ladies, mostly her personal enemies, who watched her night and day; artful leading questions being put to her to tempt her to talk the more.

She was imprudent in her speech at the best of times, but now, in a condition of acute hysteria, she served the interests of her enemies to the full, dragging into her discourse the names of the gentlemen who were accused and repeating their risky conversations with her, which were now twisted to their worst meaning.

[156] At one time she would only desire death; then she would make merry with a good dinner or supper, chatting and jesting, only to break down into hysterical laughter and tears in the midst of her merriment.

Anon she would affect to believe that her husband was but trying her constancy, and pleaded with all her heart to be allowed to see him again.

[157] But he, once having broken the shackles, was gaily amusing himself in gallant guise with Mistress Seymour, who was lodged, for appearance' sake, in the house of her mentor, Sir Nicholas Carew, a few miles from London, but within easy reach of a horseman.

Anne in her sober moments must have known that she was doomed.

She hoped much from Cranmer, almost the only friend of hers not now in prison; but Cranmer, however strong in counsel, was a weak reed in combat; and hastened to save himself at the cost of the woman upon whose shoulders he had climbed to greatness.

The day after Anne's arrest, Cranmer wrote to the King "a letter of consolation; yet wisely making no apology for her, but acknowledging how divers of the lords had told him of certain of her faults, which, he said, he was sorry to hear, and concluded desiring that the King would continue his love to the gospel, lest it should be thought that it was for her sake only that he had favoured it."

[158] Before he had time to despatch the letter, the timorous archbishop was summoned across the river to Westminster to answer certain disquieting questions of the Commissioners, who informed him of the evidence against the Queen; and in growing alarm for himself and his cause, he hurried back to Lambeth without uttering a word in favour of the accused, whose guilt he accepted without question.

Thenceforward Anne's enemies worked their way unchecked, even her father being silenced by fear for himself.

For Cromwell's safety it was necessary that none of the accused should escape who later might do him injury; and now that he and his imperialistic policy had been buttressed by the "discovery" of Anne's infidelity, not even the nobles of the French faction dared to oppose it by seeming to side with the unhappy woman.

The Secretary did his work thoroughly.

The indictments were laid before the grand juries of Middlesex and Kent, as the offences were asserted to have been committed over a long period both at Greenwich and Whitehall or Hampton Court.

To the charges against Anne of adultery with Smeaton, who it was asserted had confessed, Norreys, Weston, Brereton, and Lord Rochford, was added that of having conspired with them to kill the King.

There was not an atom of evidence worth the name to support any of the charges except the doubtful confession of Smeaton, wrung from him by torture; and it is certain that at the period in question the death of Henry would have been fatal to the interests of Anne.

But a State prosecution in the then condition of the law almost invariably meant a condemnation of the accused; and when Smeaton, Weston, Norreys, and Brereton were arraigned in Westminster Hall on the 12th May, their doom was practically sealed before the trial.

Smeaton simply pleaded guilty of adultery only, and prayed for mercy: the rest of the accused strenuously denied their guilt on the whole of the charges; but all were condemned to the terrible death awarded to traitors, though on what detailed evidence, if any, does not now appear.

[159] Every effort was made to tempt Norreys to confess, but he replied that he would rather die a thousand deaths than confess a lie, for he verily believed the Queen innocent.

[160] In the meanwhile Anne in the Tower continued her strange behaviour, at times arrogantly claiming all her royal prerogatives, at times reduced to hysterical self-abasement and despair.

On the 15th May she and her brother were brought to the great hall of the Tower before a large panel of peers under the presidency of the Duke of Norfolk.

All that could add ignominy to the accused was done.

The lieges were crowded into the space behind barriers at the end of the hall, the city fathers under the Lord Mayor were bidden to attend, and with bated breath the subjects saw the woman they had always scorned publicly branded as an incestuous adulteress.

The charges, as usual at the time, were made in a way and upon grounds that now would not be permitted in any court of justice.

Scraps of overheard conversation with Norreys and others were twisted into sinister significance, allegations unsupported, and not included in the indictment, were dragged in to prejudice the accused; and loose statements incapable of proof or disproof were liberally introduced for the same purpose.

The charge of incest with Rochford depended entirely upon the assertion that he once remained in his sister's room a long time; and in his case also loose gossip was alleged as a proof of crime: that Anne had said that the King was impotent,[161] that Rochford had thrown doubts upon the King being the father of Anne's child, and similar hearsay ribaldry.

Both Anne and her brother defended themselves, unaided, with ability and dignity.

They pointed out the absence of evidence against them, and the inherent improbability of the charges.

But it was of no avail, for her death had already been settled between Henry and Cromwell: and the Duke of Norfolk, with his sinister squint, condemned his niece, Anne Queen of England, to be burnt or beheaded at the King's pleasure; and Viscount Rochford to a similar death.

Both denied their guilt after sentence, but acknowledged, as was the custom of the time, that they deserved death, this being the only way in which mercy might be gained, so far as forfeiture of property was concerned.

Anne had been cordially hated by the people.

Her rise had meant the destruction of the ancient religious foundations, the shaking of the ecclesiastical bases of English society; but the sense of justice was not dead, and the procedure at the trial shocked the public conscience.

Already men and women murmured that the King's goings on with Mistress Seymour whilst his wife was under trial for adultery were a scandal, and Anne in her death had more friends than in her life.

On all sides in London now, from the Lord Mayor downwards, it was said that Anne had been condemned, not because she was guilty, but because the King was tired of her: at all events, wrote Chapuys to Granvelle, there was surely never a man who wore the horns so gaily as he.

[162] On the 17th May the five condemned men were led to their death upon Tower Hill, all of them, including Smeaton, being beheaded.

[163] As usual in such cases, they acknowledged general guilt, but not one (except perhaps Smeaton) admitted the particular crimes for which they died, for their kin might have suffered in property, if not in person, if the King's justice had been too strongly impugned.

Anne, in alternate hope and despair, still remained in the Tower, but mostly longing for the rapid death she felt in her heart must come.

Little knew she, however, why her sacrifice was deferred yet from day to day.

In one of her excited, nervous outbursts she had cried that, no matter what they did, no one could prevent her from dying Queen of England.

She had reckoned without Henry's meanness, Cromwell's cunning, and Cranmer's suppleness.

Her death warrant had been signed by the King on the 16th May, and Cranmer was sent to receive her last confession.

The coming of the archbishop--_her_ archbishop, as she called him--gave her fresh hope.

She was not to be killed after all, but to be banished, and Cranmer was to bring her the good news.

Alas!

poor soul, she little knew her Cranmer even yet.

He had been primed by Cromwell for a very different purpose, that of worming out of Anne some admission that would give him a pretext for pronouncing her marriage with the King invalid from the first.

The task was a repulsive one for the Primate, whose act alone had made the marriage possible; but Cranmer was--Cranmer.

The position was a complicated one.

Henry, as he invariably did, wished to save his face and seem in the right before the world, consequently he could not confess that he had been mistaken in the divorce from Katharine, and get rid of Anne's marriage in that way, nor did he wish to restore Mary to the position of heiress to the crown.

What he needed Cranmer's help for was to render Elizabeth also illegitimate, but still his daughter, in order that any child he might have by Jane Seymour, or failing that, his natural son, the Duke of Richmond, might be acknowledged his successor.

At intervals during Anne's career her alleged betrothal to the Earl of Northumberland before her marriage (see p. 126) had been brought up to her detriment; and the poor hare-brained earl had foresworn himself more than once on the subject.

He was dying now, but he was again pressed to say that a regular betrothal had taken place with Anne.

But he was past earthly fear, and finally asserted that no contract had been made.

Foiled in this attempt, Henry--or rather Cromwell--sent Cranmer to the Tower on the 16th May on his shameful errand: to lure the poor woman by hopes of pardon to confess the existence of an impediment to her marriage with the King.

What the impediment was was never made public, but Anne's latest biographer, Mr. Friedmann, adduces excellent reasons for arriving at the conclusions that I have drawn, namely, that Mary Boleyn having been Henry's mistress, he and Anne were within the prohibited degrees of affinity for husband and wife; the fact that no marriage had taken place between Henry and Mary Boleyn being regarded as canonically immaterial.

[164] In any case, the admission of a known impediment having been made by Anne, no time was lost.

The next day, the 17th May, Cranmer sat, with Cromwell and other members of the Council, in his Primate's court at Lambeth to condemn the marriage that he himself had made.

Anne was formally represented, but nothing was said on her behalf; and sentence was hurriedly pronounced that the King's marriage with Anne Boleyn had never been a marriage at all.

At the same time order was sent to Sir William Kingston that the "concubine" was to suffer the last penalty on the following morning.

When the sleepless night for Anne had passed, mostly in prayer, she took the sacrament with the utmost devotion, and in that most solemn moment swore before the Host, on her hopes of eternal life, that she had never misused her body to the King's dishonour.

[165] In the meanwhile her execution had been deferred until the next day, and Anne again lost her nerve.

It was cruel, she said, to keep her so long in suspense: pray, she petitioned, put her out of her misery now that she was prepared.

The operation would not be painful, Kingston assured her.

"My neck is small enough," she said, spanning it with her fingers, and again burst into hysterics.

Soon she became calm once more; and thenceforward only yearned for despatch.

"No one ever had a better will for death than she," wrote Chapuys to his master: and Kingston, hardened as he was to the sight of the condemned in their last hours, expressed surprise to Cromwell that instead of sorrow "this lady has much joy and pleasure in death."

Remorse for her ungenerous treatment of the Princess Mary principally troubled her.

She herself, she said, was not going to execution by the divine judgment for what she had been accused of, but for having planned the death of the Princess.

And so, in alternate prayer and light chatter, passed Anne's last night on earth, and at nine o'clock on the spring morning of the 19th May she was led forth to the courtyard within the Tower, where a group of gentlemen, including Cromwell and the Dukes of Richmond and Suffolk, stood on or close to a low scaffold or staging reached by four steps from the ground.

Anne was dressed in grey damask trimmed with fur, over a crimson petticoat, and cut low at the neck, so as to offer no impediment to the executioner's steel; and for the same reason the brown hair was dressed high in a net under the pearl-bordered coif.

Kept back by guards to some little distance from the platform stood a large crowd of spectators, who had flocked in at the heels of the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs; though foreigners had been rigidly excluded.

[166] When Anne had ascended the steps she received permission to say a few words; and followed the tradition of not complaining against the King's justice which had condemned her.

She had not come thither to preach, she said, but to die, though she was not guilty of the particular crimes for which she had been condemned.

When, however, she began to speak of Jane Seymour being the cause of her fall, those on the scaffold stopped her, and she said no more.

A headsman of St. Omer had been brought over from Calais, in order that the broadsword instead of the axe might be used; and this man, who was undistinguishable by his garb from the other bystanders, now came forward, and, kneeling, asked the doomed woman's pardon, which granted, Anne herself knelt in a distraught way, as if to pray, but really gazed around her in mute appeal from one pitiless face to another.

The headsman, taking compassion upon her, assured her that he would not strike until she gave the signal.

"You will have to take this coif off," said the poor woman, and one of the ladies who attended her did so, and partially bound her eyes with a handkerchief; but Anne still imagined that her headdress was in the way, and kept her hand upon her hair, straining her eyes and ears towards the steps where from the headsman's words she expected the sword to be handed to him.

Whilst she was thus kneeling erect in suspense, the sword which was hidden in the straw behind her was deftly seized by the French executioner, who, swinging the heavy blade around, in an instant cut through the erect, slender neck; and the head of Anne Boleyn jerked from the shoulders and rolled upon the cloth that covered the platform.

Katharine in her neglected tomb at Peterborough was avenged, but the fissure that had been opened up between England and the Papacy for the sake of this woman had widened now past bridging.

Politicians might, and did, make up their differences now that the "concubine" was dead, and form alliances regardless of religious affinities; but submission to the Papacy in future might mean that the most powerful people in England would be deprived of the fat spoils of the Church with which Cromwell had bought them, and that the vainest king on earth must humbly confess himself in the wrong.

Anne herself was a mere straw upon a whirlpool, though her abilities, as Cromwell confessed, were not to be despised.

She did not plan or make the Reformation, though she was forced by her circumstances to patronise it.

The real author of the great schism of England was not Anne or Cranmer, but Luther's enemy, Charles V. , the champion of Catholicism.

But for the pressure he put upon the Pope to refuse Henry's divorce, in order to prevent a coalition of England and France, Cranmer's defiance of the Papacy would not have been needed, and Henry might have come back to Rome again easily.

But with Cranmer to provide him with plausible pretexts for the repeated indulgence of his self-will, and Cromwell to feed his pride and cupidity by the plunder of the Church, Henry had already been drawn too far to go back.

Greed and vanity of the ruling powers thus conspired to make permanent in England the influence of evanescent Anne Boleyn.

[Illustration: _JANE SEYMOUR_ _From a painting by_ HOLBEIN _in the Imperial Collection at Vienna_] CHAPTER VII

1536-1540