The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (16 page)

Latymer, Foxe, and Wyatt were all eager to rehabilitate the memory of the mother of the Virgin Queen, and to stress her reformist virtues, so their accounts are naturally biased in Anne’s favor, and they are somewhat at odds with what we know of social relations within her court. According to the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry’s courtiers worshipped “Venus and Bacchus all their life long.” There is ample testimony to the merry “pastime” that went on in the Queen’s chamber: in 1533, Anne’s own vice chamberlain, Sir Edward Baynton, wrote that “if any man had gone away leaving at court a lady who might mourn at parting, I can no whit perceive the same by their dancing and pastime they use here.”
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Anne’s was a court primarily bent on pleasure; there was nothing but “sporting and dancing,” as Sir Thomas More’s daughter Margaret was to report in 1535.
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To that she might have added gambling.

Given that there were probably fewer than a hundred women among the court’s population of between eight and fifteen hundred persons (depending on the season), it is hardly surprising that a hothouse atmosphere prevailed when it came to interaction between the sexes. George Wyatt refers to “those that pleased the King in recounting the adventures of love happening in court.” The gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber would flock to the Queen’s apartments knowing that she appreciated witty, stimulating conversation, and that there would be opportunities aplenty for flirting with her ladies. Nor was Anne above joining in the repartee, as her own accounts of her banter and familiarity with the gentlemen of the King’s Privy Chamber vividly show.
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Thanks to her upbringing at the French court, she was familiar and free-and-easy in her manner and her social relationships.

Her flirtations were probably innocent; they were an accepted aspect
of the game of courtly love that had been a tradition in European courts since the twelfth century. A knight might pay his ardent addresses with all seemliness to a mistress who was above him in rank and might even be married; he could wear her colors at a tournament, write songs and poems for her, sigh and languish for one sign of favor, or even pursue her with greater intent. The theory was that she was unattainable, and that this behavior was acceptable so long as it did not go beyond the bounds of propriety and lead to seduction or the breaking of marriage vows.

Of course, such courtly relationships
were
often an excuse for sexual dalliance or adultery, and there is much evidence to show that this was commonplace at Henry VIII’s court. But Caesar’s wife had to be above reproach, and by indulging in the flirtatious games and lighthearted innuendo of courtly love, the Queen of England ran the risk that her behavior might be misconstrued—as may have been the case with Lady Worcester and other people who testified against her—while actual adultery was another matter entirely, for any gentleman who thus ventured to compromise her honor would have been guilty of high treason. The Statute of Treasons of 1351 provided for the prosecution of any man who “violated the king’s companion”—the word “violated” being used in its widest sense—and the punishment was hanging, drawing, and quartering. For it was not honor alone that was compromised, but the succession itself: as William Thomas, Henry’s apologist, was to point out in 1546, “adultery in a king’s wife weigheth no less than the wrong reign of a bastard prince.”
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The Statute of Treasons, however, did not provide for a queen to be accused of high treason for adultery, only the man who had violated her. It was not until 1542, in the wake of the fall of Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, that the definition of treason was extended specifically to embrace adultery on the part of a queen.
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But in 1534, Parliament, seeking to protect Queen Anne from her enemies, had passed an act widening the definition of treason to all who “do maliciously wish, will or desire, by words or writing, or by craft imagine” the King’s death or harm, and to anyone who impugned the King’s marriage to Anne or his issue.
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Perversely, this same statute was to prove Anne’s downfall, for committing adulterous acts was construed as treason on the count of impugning the King’s issue, and thus justified a capital charge. But an even worse accusation was to be leveled against her, of a crime that was treason by any legal
definition. According to Cromwell, who had mentioned those reports from abroad, “there brake out a certain conspiracy of the King’s death,” and that, he said, left him and his colleagues quaking in their shoes.
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Cromwell stayed away from court, perfecting his case against the Queen, until April 23. By then his plans were well advanced; various councillors had been taken into his confidence, and the support of Chapuys, the Seymours, Bryan, Carew, Exeter, and other partisans of Lady Mary enlisted. This may have been put in place before Cromwell even left court to feign sickness.

This unlikely—and, indeed, temporary—alliance between the conservatives at court and the reforming Cromwell would previously have been unthinkable, but both sides now shared a common aim in working for elimination of the Queen and her faction, while Cromwell—despite his ongoing support of Lord Lisle in a property dispute with Sir Edward Seymour
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—had realized that supporting Jane Seymour, and exploiting the Imperialist network of support that had formed around her, offered him his best chance of political survival.

Hitherto, the Imperialists had naively envisaged that an annulment of the King’s marriage to Anne would be sufficient to get rid of her. Cromwell had disabused them of that idea—had the King not just insisted upon Chapuys and Charles V acknowledging her as Queen?—and rapidly secured their backing for his more radical solution.
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It was Chapuys who obtained Lady Mary’s qualified approval of the plot to remove Anne.
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He was happy to work with anyone who “could help in its execution,” believing they did “a meritorious work, since it would prove a remedy for the heretical doctrines and practices of the Concubine, the principal cause of the spread of Lutheranism in this country.”
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Of course, what the court conservatives did not know was that there was no intention for the removal of Anne to lead to reconciliation with Rome and the reinstatement of the Lady Mary,
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which they fondly expected would happen. But Cromwell, who would immediately distance himself from them once his goal was achieved, was not about to disillusion them. Not yet.

Anne’s every move was probably being observed by Cromwell’s spies and informants. Speed was of the essence: the King—who had fallen out with Anne many times, yet remained in thrall to her—must not be
allowed time for skepticism, sentimental feeling, or the residue of passion to overtake the shock of hearing that his wife had not only been unfaithful with several men, but had planned to kill him. That would surely be sufficient to alienate the insecure and suspicious Henry, and preclude another reconciliation.

The ruthlessness with which the Queen was brought down was indicative of the extent to which Cromwell and others feared her.
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What they were afraid of was not so much her ability to command support from an affinity of adherents—which was unlikely, as she was so unpopular—as the power she undoubtedly wielded over the King, which had just been demonstrated so alarmingly.

Events now moved forward swiftly. We have Cromwell’s own account of what happened next, in his letter of May 14. He saw Henry VIII on his return to court on April 23, and although there is no record of what passed on that occasion, it was probably then that he and other privy councillors—“with great fear, as the case enforced, declared what they had heard” of the Queen’s conduct—told the King that “we that had the examination of it quaked at the danger His Grace was in” and realized that, “with their duty to His Majesty, they could not conceal it from him.” On their knees, they “gave [God] laud and praise that He had preserved him so long from it.”
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Alexander Aless makes it clear in his account of the period leading up to Anne’s arrest that Henry VIII was made aware of the suspicions of Cromwell and others before ordering further investigations, and only after these had been carried out did they report back to him (probably on April 30). Thus it is likely that Cromwell approached the King as soon as he returned to court. Many historians have remarked upon the speed with which the investigation progressed, but it would only have needed a few days to arrange and conduct the interrogation of members of the Queen’s household.

Lancelot de Carles states that, prior to this audience, the privy councillor—almost certainly FitzWilliam—to whom the Countess of Worcester had confided her suspicions of the Queen, “did not know what to do, and took counsel with two friends of the King, with whom he went to the King himself, and one reported it in the name of all three. The King was
astonished, and his color changed at the revelation, but he thanked the gentlemen.”

Although, according to Carles, this evidence was supposed to have been revealed to the King at the end of April, on the same day the decision was made to proceed against the Queen, the Lisle letters make it clear that the first evidence had been laid by Lady Worcester, probably sometime before April 18, so it almost certainly formed the basis of the councillors’ revelations to Henry, which internal evidence suggests were disclosed to him before April 24. It is obvious that very few people were aware of what was really going on behind the scenes, and that Carles was relying on gossip and hearsay. Yet some of it perhaps was based on fact, and his poem may reflect what actually happened when Henry VIII was first informed of his councillors’ suspicions, with FitzWilliam consulting with Sir Anthony Browne, his kinsman, and Cromwell, and acting as spokesman for them all,
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bearing in mind that Cromwell was still, to all intents and purposes, out of favor.

Aless, who was in a position to be a reliable source, says that Thomas Wriothesley went with Cromwell to confront the King, so maybe he, rather than Anthony Browne, was the other “friend of the King” to whom Lancelot de Carles refers. Aless adds that the King “was furious” when informed of the Queen’s misconduct, but quickly “dissembled his wrath” and ordered Cromwell and the other privy councillors to make further enquiries, “trusting them with the investigation of the whole business.” It would appear from this that Henry’s displeasure with Cromwell had rapidly dissipated in the face of this far more serious crisis, as Cromwell had no doubt hoped it would.
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Did Henry think to question the evidence? Contemporary sources suggest that, until recently, the King had been toying purely with the idea of an annulment. It has been asserted that Henry’s “egotism and credulity” brought about Anne’s fall;
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egotism almost certainly played a part, but the King was an intelligent man and well able to exercise his own judgment. The evidence laid before him must have looked damning on the face of it, and had serious implications for the succession. Yet he did not immediately swallow it whole, nor act impulsively, gleeful that someone had provided him with a pretext for ridding himself of his unsatisfactory
queen. Having recently been trounced by Anne for infidelity—and not for the first time—he could have used these accusations of immorality against her to regain the high moral ground and salvage his pride. But at this stage he did not.

Instead, he prudently resolved to wait and see what further investigation would uncover. We might today look askance at Cromwell’s extravagant claim (made to Chapuys in 1533) that Henry was “an honorable, virtuous and wise prince, incapable of doing anything that was not founded on justice and reason,” yet there is no evidence that the King “personally exerted himself to pervert the course of justice,” as the chronicler Charles Wriothesley’s Victorian editor put it, while charging Anne with infidelity was almost certainly not his idea. He was an egotistic male who was perhaps touchy about his virility. “Am I not a man like other men? Am I not? Am I not?” he had angrily rounded on Chapuys in 1533, when Chapuys dared to suggest that he could not be sure of having any more children. “I need not give proofs to the contrary; you do not know all my secrets,” Henry had snapped.

Is it then likely that the King would have suggested, or approved in advance, charges that would see him publicly branded a cuckold, with hints about him being impotent to boot? Even though, four years and two wives later, he was loudly to proclaim himself impotent with Anne of Cleves in the hope of freeing himself from their marriage, he would instruct his doctors to make sure it was publicly known that, although incapable with her, he was able to perform the sex act with any other woman.

Cromwell would surely never have dared, acting on his own initiative, to instigate an inquiry into the Queen’s conduct without first ensuring that he could marshal credible and convincing evidence against her. He would have been aware that such accusations would proclaim his formidable master a cuckold, and irrevocably insult the Queen of England—for there was always the risk that Henry would take Anne’s part. Cromwell knew he had to make the most convincing case against Anne and present it to Henry as a fait accompli—the King, it has been said, was “bounced” into a decision
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—but he would have known also that, in doing so, he was risking all. This was one of the rare occasions on which Cromwell, backed by the conservatives, forced Henry’s hand.
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Certainly Henry could not have ignored the things that people were alleging against Anne
without compromising his own honor, and he could never have risked ignoring a plot to assassinate him.
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