The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (15 page)

Elizabeth, Countess of Worcester, the daughter of Sir Anthony Browne, was married to Henry, the second earl, the son of Charles Somerset, Earl of Worcester, an illegitimate descendant of the Beauforts and, through them, cousin to the King.
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The countess, whose tomb effigy survives in St. Mary’s Church, Chepstow,
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was one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and evidently close to her, despite her half brother, Sir William FitzWilliam, treasurer of the King’s household, being (according to Chapuys) “a man of sense and a good servant” of Lady Mary.
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FitzWilliam, who had once been Cardinal Wolsey’s “treasure” and had no love for the woman who brought down his old master,
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was to be instrumental in bringing about Anne’s fall, while the countess’s brother, the younger Sir Anthony Browne, would openly rejoice at it. This might suggest that, aside from acting as was required of them on their allegiance to the King, they both felt they were justified in doing so.

Lady Worcester had attended the Queen at her coronation banquet in 1533, and seems to have been in her confidence, as can be inferred from the fact that on March 8, 1537, ten months after Anne’s fall, the countess was to confide to Cromwell that she had borrowed £100 (£34,900) from her mistress without telling her husband. He responded by reassuring her that she need not trouble to pay it back, as it had been given out of the former Queen’s privy purse. “On that matter I most heartily thank you,” Lady Worcester replied, “for I am very loath it should come to my husband’s knowledge. I am in doubt how he will take it.”
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As will be seen, Anne was certainly under the impression that the countess was a good friend: Elizabeth Browne was pregnant in the spring of 1536, and Anne was to attribute the fact that the baby “did not stir in her womb” to the sorrow the countess suffered on account of her mistress’s misfortunes.
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But Anne may have been harboring a false impression.

At some point in the spring of 1536, according to Lancelot de Carles, a “lord of the Privy Council, seeing clear evidence that his sister loved
certain persons with a dishonorable love, admonished her fraternally. She acknowledged her offense but said it was little in her case in comparison with that of the Queen, who did more than she did, and was accustomed to admit some of her court to come into her chamber at improper hours.” She then declared that “as he might ascertain from Mark Smeaton,” a court musician and member of the King’s Privy Chamber, Anne was “guilty of incest with her own brother,” and added “that Smeaton could tell much more.”

This passage appears to refer to Lady Worcester. There is another version of this tale in the Lansdowne manuscripts in the British Library, in which the brother’s name is given as “Antoine Brun,” but since the countess’s half brother, FitzWilliam, was a member of the Privy Council, and her brother, Sir Anthony Browne, a member of the Privy Chamber, was not, it is more likely that she confided in FitzWilliam. It has been claimed that there is no evidence for her being promiscuous
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but, equally, there is none that she was not, although the theory that she was pregnant by Cromwell does not bear serious scrutiny.
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Since most sources agree that the only evidence for incest would rest upon the testimony of Jane Parker, Lady Rochford, it appears that Lancelot de Carles got some of his facts mixed up, and that Lady Worcester revealed to her kinsman only that the Queen was promiscuous and that Mark Smeaton could testify to that.

Nan Cobham has never been conclusively identified,
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but she was clearly one of the Queen’s maids, and was perhaps the “Mrs. Cobham” who had been the recipient of a royal gift at New Year 1534,
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and/or the Anne Cobham who in May 1540 was granted the advowson of Warminghurst, Sussex, with remainder to Edward Shelley, who died in 1554 and was buried in the church there.
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She may perhaps credibly be identified with Anne Braye, the wife of George Brooke, Lord Cobham, who was among the peers who would sit in judgment on Anne Boleyn. It is highly unlikely that she had acted as midwife during Anne’s last confinement, as has been suggested,
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for she was probably a lady of rank, although she may have been present.

The “one maid more” who was the third of the first three accusers mentioned by Husee has been identified as Mistress Margery Horsman,
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who was quite an important mover and shaker in the Queen’s privy chamber. Mrs. Horsman, who had arranged for a kirtle to be delivered
from Anne’s wardrobe as a royal gift to a grateful Lady Lisle in March, was highly influential and would end up serving every one of Henry VIII’s six wives.
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However, on May 3, Anne’s chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton, would reveal in a letter that he had not managed to extract any information from Mrs. Horsman, who was behaving “strangely” toward him, probably (he thought) because she was a friend of Anne’s;
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and furthermore, she was clearly too important to be a mere maid-of-honor, so it is unlikely on both counts that she had been one of the first witnesses.

Although we do not know what it was, one of the most damning pieces of evidence against Anne came from someone who claimed to have spoken to Bridget Wiltshire, Lady Wingfield, before that lady’s death in 1533.
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The daughter and heiress of Sir John Wiltshire of Stone Castle, Kent, Bridget had married the courtier, diplomat and substantial Huntingdonshire landowner, Sir Richard Wingfield of Kimbolton Castle, around 1513, and borne him ten children before his death in 1525. Thereafter she was married twice more, to Sir Nicholas Harvey of Ickworth, who died in 1532, and by whom she had four sons, and to Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby who long outlived her. She had last received a New Year’s gift from the King in January 1533,
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and probably died later that year.
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It has been suggested that Lady Wingfield’s revelations, which were possibly made on her deathbed, were conveyed to Cromwell by her stepson, Sir Thomas Harvey,
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the son of Sir Nicholas by his first wife, Elizabeth, who was a sister of William FitzWilliam. This theory rests on the grounds that Harvey, who had been born before 1512 and acted as FitzWilliam’s executor upon the latter’s death in 1542, apparently fled abroad on the accession of Anne Boleyn’s daughter Elizabeth in 1558, and remained there until his death in 1577. But Harvey was a lifelong Catholic, and had served Mary I as Knight Marshal; his going into voluntary exile could equally have been to ensure that he could practice his religion unmolested. However, the FitzWilliam connection could be significant.

Lady Wingfield’s hearsay testimony was mentioned by Sir John Spelman, a justice of the King’s Bench and a member of the jury that would try the Queen and her alleged lovers. He recorded in his Commonplace Book: “Note that this matter was disclosed by a woman called the Lady Wingfield, who had been a servant to the Queen and shared the same tendencies; and suddenly the said Wingfield became ill, and a little time
before her death she showed the matter to one of those etc.”
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Whatever Lady Wingfield had confided, if she in fact said anything at all, could only have related to the period prior to her death in 1533-34,
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and whoever repeated her words had kept these revelations to him-or herself for at least two years. That is perhaps understandable, for during that period the law had come down heavily on anyone who spoke ill of the Queen. But once word got out that her conduct was the basis for an investigation, that person—who might have been Thomas Harvey, Lady Worcester, Nan Cobham, or the “one maid more” referred to by Husee—may have felt obliged to speak out.

Some historians have wondered if Lady Wingfield should be identified with the privy councillor’s sister of dubious morals referred to by Lancelot de Carles, yet there is no record of a brother with the surname Wiltshire among the lords of the Privy Council, so the reference in the poem must have been to FitzWilliam or, less probably, Anthony Browne.

Various writers have also speculated that Lady Wingfield was in possession of sensitive information about Anne Boleyn, and even that she had once tried to blackmail her. At least four years earlier (between December 1529—when Anne’s father had become Earl of Wiltshire and she began using his subsidiary title of Viscount Rochford as a surname—and September 1532, when she was created Lady Marquess of Pembroke,
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Anne had written to Lady Wingfield, who still lived at Stone Castle, twenty miles north of the Boleyns’ castle at Hever:

We might infer from this that Anne’s relations with Lady Wingfield, whom she had evidently known for many years and was fond of, had not always been congenial. There is no clue as to what Lady Wingfield’s “trouble” was; she might have been mourning the death of her second husband, Sir Nicholas Harvey, in August 1532,
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or the loss of one of her children, yet Anne would hardly have thought to comfort someone newly bereaved by urging her to “leave your trouble” because it was displeasing to God and herself. In saying effectively that she would stand by any advice she gave her and exhorting Lady Wingfield to pull herself together, she was perhaps telling her that she was worrying unnecessarily about something.

Excessive courtesy was common in Tudor letters, so it would be unwise to read too much into Anne’s fulsome protestations of affection. It is hard to infer from this letter that Anne was being blackmailed, which is one recent theory.
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In October 1532, after it was written, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn stayed the night with Lady Wingfield at Stone, en route for Calais,
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and the following January that lady was the recipient of royal New Year’s gifts, as she had been the year before
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—all of which suggests that relations were congenial. The fact that the letter ended up among Cromwell’s papers may only prove that he asked to see any correspondence his informants could produce, and could have no more significance than that.

Yet there
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a hint of compulsion in this letter, almost a threat that, if Lady Wingfield does not take Anne’s advice, she will get no sympathy from her, or the friendship might be tested to the limit, but this suggests that it was Anne who had the upper hand in the relationship. The first sentence implies that she is constraining Lady Wingfield to do something which that lady is reluctant to do. To sweeten the pill, Anne is laying on the flattery, and perhaps trying to comfort her friend in her trouble by reassuring her of her own affection, of which she might not always have been aware.

The letter is therefore probably a “red herring,” of which too much has been made. However, Lady Wingfield may have had good reason to
speak out later against Anne. Her third husband, Sir Robert Tyrwhitt, was a staunch supporter of Lady Mary, while she herself was related to both the Duke of Suffolk and Sir William FitzWilliam, who were no friends to the Queen. Even if she’d been friendly with Anne earlier, she might have been persuaded that it was not in her interests to continue it, and she may thereupon have divulged what she knew—if, of course, she divulged anything at all.

It seems that the initial testimony of these ladies led Cromwell to construct the criminal process against Anne.

Anne had failed to give the King a son. She had proved unstable and unfit in many people’s eyes to be a queen, with her strident tantrums and her immoderate behavior. She had not been a meek and submissive wife. Despite her conscious efforts to portray herself as virtuous, and her genuine devotion to the reformist cause, she was known to be pleasure-loving and flirtatious, and to enjoy the admiration of the men in her circle. Prior to her marriage, her reputation had been notorious, which in sixteenth-century eyes was irrevocably damning: she had encouraged the advances of a married man, and there were frequent allegations that she had lived with the King out of wedlock; indeed, from the autumn of 1532, these were justified, for her daughter Elizabeth was born only seven months and thirteen days after her parents’ secret marriage. It would not be difficult for people to credit that a woman who had indulged in premarital intercourse could also indulge in extramarital affairs. Earlier still, Anne had spent years at the French court, which was a byword for promiscuity; after marrying her, Henry discovered that she had been corrupted there and become quickly disillusioned. Cromwell probably realized that charges of immorality would stick because people would believe them.

Later commentators, writing in the reign of Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I, evolved their own spin on Anne’s reputation. William Latymer, who had been one of Anne’s chaplains during the last months of her life, wrote a eulogistic chronicle of her that was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth, and in it asserted that, after she became queen, she endeavored to set a high moral standard for her household, instructing her officers to set a godly “spectacle” to others, to attend mass daily, and to display “a virtuous demeanor.” If any person employed by the Queen was caught brawling, swearing, or frequenting brothels, they risked instant dismissal and
“utter shame.” That these rules were enforced is suggested by the testimony given by Jane Wilkinson, Anne’s former silkwoman, to John Foxe, the Protestant author of the famous
Book of Martyrs
, also published in Elizabeth’s reign: Jane claimed that she had never seen “better order amongst the ladies and gentlewomen of the court than in Anne Boleyn’s day.” George Wyatt mentions the Queen’s lavish charitable donations, and asserts that her ladies were required to be pious and above reproach, and had to devote hours of their time to sewing garments for the poor, yet it is clear from contemporary accounts that these strictures did not preclude them from having illicit affairs.