Mary Tudor (16 page)

On the day of Katherine’s burial, Anne Boleyn was delivered of a stillborn son. Four days earlier, Henry had fallen badly from his horse during a joust, and Anne claimed the shock had brought on the miscarriage. As Chapuys reported, much to Henry’s “great distress” the fetus “seemed to be a male child which she had not borne three and a half months.”
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Gertrude Courtenay (née Blount), marchioness of Exeter, and her husband, the marquess, who was the honorific head of the Privy Chamber and Henry’s first cousin, reported that Henry had shared with someone “in great confidence, and as if it were in confession” his
doubts about Anne. “He had made this marriage,” he said, “seduced by witchcraft and for this reason he considered it null; and that this was evident because God did not permit them to have any male issue.”

He now believed that he might take another wife.
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He had been “making much of a lady of the Court, named Mistress Semel [Seymour], to whom, many say, he [Henry] has lately made great presents.”
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Jane Seymour, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of a Wiltshire gentleman, had formerly been in the service of Katherine of Aragon and was now the focus of the king’s affection. As for Anne, “her heart broke when she saw that he loved others.”
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IN EARLY FEBRUARY
, Mary changed residence. The imperial ambassador reported that the princess was well and “better accompanied on her removal and provided with what was necessary to her than she had been before.” Her father had put “about 100,000 crowns” at her disposal to distribute in alms. It had been rumored that the king meant “to increase her train and exalt her position.” But, as Chapuys wrote, this had been before Anne’s miscarriage:

Mary’s supporters, including the marquess and marchioness of Exeter; Lord Montague (the son of Margaret Pole); Sir Nicholas Carew, the master of horse; and the imperial ambassador sought to capitalize on Anne Boleyn’s loss of favor and looked toward restoring Mary as the rightful heir to the throne. Jane Seymour’s sympathy for Mary was well known. Two years before, she had sent to Mary to “tell her to be of good cheer, and that her troubles would sooner come to an end than she supposed, and that when the opportunity occurred she would show herself her true and devoted servant.”
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On April 29, it was reported that Sir Nicholas Carew was promoting
Jane Seymour and communicating with Mary, telling her “to be of good cheer, for shortly the opposite party would put water in their wine.”
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Carew and his allies at court coached Jane as to how she should behave to secure the king’s affection, urging her “that she must by no means comply with the King’s wishes except by way of marriage.”
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When, in March, Henry sent her a letter and “a purse full of sovereigns,” Jane returned them unopened and, falling to her knees, begged that Henry “consider that she was a gentlewoman of good and honourable parents, without reproach” and that if he “wished to make her some present in money she begged it might be when God enabled her to make some honourable match.”
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As Gertrude Courtenay, the marchioness of Exeter, put it, “Henry’s love and desire … was wonderfully increased.”
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It was claimed that “[Anne] and Cromwell were on bad terms, and … some new marriage for the King was spoken of.”
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Now, with the king looking to marry once more, Cromwell sought to bring about Anne Boleyn’s downfall.

EASTER WEEK PROVED
to be of fateful consequence. Two public rows—the first between Anne and Mark Smeaton, one of the queen’s musicians, the other between Anne and Sir Henry Norris, the chief gentleman of the king’s Privy Chamber—gave Cromwell the excuse he needed. The conversations had suggested that they were infatuated with the queen and desired the king’s death. By the afternoon of Sunday, March 30, Henry had been told of the exchanges and had angrily confronted Anne. They both attended the May Day jousts as planned, but as soon as the tournament was over, Henry left for his town palace, Whitehall, formerly York Place, accompanied by Henry Norris. As Edward Hall’s chronicle related, “of this sudden departing many men mused, but most chiefly the Queen.” George Constantine, Norris’s servant, reported, “[The king] had Mr Norris in examination and promised him his pardon in case he would utter the truth.” Yet “whatsoever could be said or done, Mr Norris would confess no thing to the King.”
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The following day he was sent to the Tower, where Smeaton was already imprisoned. After four hours of torture and interrogation, Smeaton confessed to adultery with the queen.

On May 2, Anne and her brother, George, Viscount Rochford,
were taken by river to the Tower. To Henry, Anne was now an “accursed and poisoning whore” who had conspired to kill Katherine and Mary, Henry Fitzroy, and the king himself.
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Two days later there were further arrests of members of the Privy Chamber: Sir William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston, and Sir Richard Page, together with the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. A grand jury indicted all the accused, except Wyatt and Page, on charges of having committed adultery with the queen. At their trial days later, all except Smeaton pleaded innocent, yet all were found guilty and sentenced to death for high treason “upon presumption and certain indications,” but, Chapuys noted, “without valid proof and confession.”
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Two days later Anne and Rochford stood trial in the Tower before a crowd of two thousand spectators. Anne was “principally charged with … having cohabited with her brother and other accomplices,” that there was “a promise between her and Norris to marry after the King’s death, which it thus appeared they hoped for,” and that she “had poisoned [Katherine] and intrigued to do the same to [Mary].” The ambassador continued, “These things, she totally denied, and had a plausible answer to each.”
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It made little difference; each member of the jury declared her guilty, and the duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, who was presiding as lord high steward, pronounced the sentence. The usual punishment for a traitoress was being burned alive, yet, “because she was Queen, Norfolk gave judgement that she should be burnt or beheaded at the King’s pleasure.”
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On Monday, May 17, the men condemned to death for high treason were executed. On the nineteenth, at eight in the morning, Anne was led out to the scaffold on Tower Green. Henry had decreed that she should be beheaded, not burned, and granted her one final “mercy”: that she be beheaded by a French executioner’s sword rather than an ax, as was the English fashion. Foreigners were prevented from attending the execution, and large crowds were discouraged by the delaying of the death from the usual hour. Anne begged the people to pray for the king, “for he was a good, gentle, gracious and amiable prince.”
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With one swing of the sword she was dead. She was buried in the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower.

The day before her execution, Anne asked Lady Kingston, the wife of the lieutenant of the Tower, to go to Hunsdon and on her behalf
kneel before Mary and beg her pardon for all the wrongs she had done her.
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On her way to the scaffold, as Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal Granvelle wrote to Chapuys, “the Concubine declared that she did not consider herself condemned by divine judgement, except for being the cause of the ill-treatment of the Princess, and for having conspired her death.”
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Two days after Anne’s execution, Thomas Cranmer pronounced her marriage with Henry to have been invalid. Elizabeth, like Mary, now became a bastard. The love affair that had wreaked such havoc was over.

On the day of Anne Boleyn’s death, Henry VIII was betrothed to Jane Seymour. They were married ten days later in the queen’s closet at Whitehall.
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“She is,” Chapuys told Antoine Perrenot, the emperor’s minister, “the sister of a certain Edward Seymour, who has been in the service of his Majesty [Charles V]”; while “she [herself] was formerly in the household of the good Queen [Katherine].” The ambassador described Jane as being “of middle stature, and no great beauty; so fair that he would call her rather pale than otherwise.” Her personal motto was “Bound to obey and serve.”
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On Whitsunday, June 4, she was formally proclaimed queen.
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For most of the three years that Anne Boleyn had been queen, Mary had lived in fear of death. Now, with a new stepmother whose patrons were Mary’s leading supporters at court, there was hope of a return to favor and to the line of succession. Even before Anne’s execution, Jane had, much to Henry’s annoyance, begged for Mary’s restoration, but Henry had resisted. “She was a fool,” he declared, and “ought to solicit the advancement of the children they would have between them, and not any others.” Jane was not deterred: “in asking for the restoration of [Mary as] Princess, she conceived she was seeking the rest and tranquillity of the King, herself, her future children, and the whole realm.”
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Over the Easter holidays, April 14 to 17, Chapuys, supported by Cromwell, made overtures for a settlement between Henry and Charles V and a renewal of their earlier alliance. Three proposals were made: that Charles broker a reconciliation between Henry and the pope; that in default of male issue, “we would,” as Henry recounted, “legitimate our daughter Mary, in such degree, as in default of issue by our most dear and entirely beloved wife the Queen, she might not be reputed unable to some place in our succession”; and that Henry help Charles against the Ottoman Turks and against the anticipated French assault on Milan.
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But when, on the eighteenth, Chapuys was summoned for an audience, Henry dismissed each of the proposals and instead unleashed an attack on the emperor’s fidelity. Charles would not “have acquired the Empire or enjoyed Spain without him” but had “treated him with neglect … tried to get him declared schismatic and deprived of his kingdom”; and he had not kept his promise “not to make peace with the King of France” until Charles had obtained for Henry the crown of France. As Chapuys reported, the “Chancellor and Cromwell appeared to regret these answers, and in spite of the King’s gestures to them that they should applaud him, neither of them would say three words.”

The next day, the whole of the King’s Council was assembled for three or four hours, and, as Cromwell told Chapuys, “there was not one of them but remained long on his knees before the King to beg him, for the honour of God, not to lose so good an opportunity of establishing a friendship so necessary and advantageous.” However, no one could change the king’s mind: “he would sooner suffer all the ills in the world than confess tacitly or expressly that he had done you any injury, or that he desired this friendship.”
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He again made it clear that he would not tolerate interference from Charles: