The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (19 page)

M
eanwhile, Cromwell and his colleagues had been carrying out their master’s orders. Spies were already at work in the Queen’s household, “watching her privy apartments night and day” and “tempting her porter and serving men with bribes; there is nothing which they do not promise the ladies of her bedchamber. They affirm that the King hates the Queen because she has not presented him with an heir to the realm, nor was there any prospect of her so doing.”
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“In most secret sort, certain persons of the Privy Chamber and others of [the Queen’s] side were examined.”
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The inquiries that were made in the Queen’s household must by now have alerted several of those questioned to what was going on, and it may be that some of those who served Anne had old scores to settle.

In the course of these investigations, the councillors questioned “many other witnesses,”
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including Lady Rochford, Anne’s sister-in-law; “in which examination[s],” Cromwell later wrote, “the matter appeared so evident, that besides that crime with the accidents, there broke out a certain conspiracy of the King’s death, which extended so far that all we that had the examination of it quaked at the danger His Grace was in.”
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Anne, it was alleged, had not only taken lovers, but conspired with them
to murder Henry VIII so she could marry one of them and rule England in her infant daughter’s name.

Plotting the death of the King was high treason, the most heinous of all crimes, for the sovereign was the Lord’s anointed, divinely appointed to rule. “Kings of England,” Henry VIII once told his judges, “never had any superior but God.” The royal prerogative was regarded as the will of God expressing itself through the will of the King. Thus anyone who offended against the King was punished with the greatest severity. Here was the capital charge that Cromwell needed, yet its very incongruity argues that it was merely a device for getting rid of Anne. For it is patently clear that Anne reveled in being a queen, a rank she had aspired to for many years, and it is therefore highly unlikely that she would ever have contemplated throwing away her status, her greatness, and her power, in order to marry a man who was far below her in rank and could give her nothing on a par with what the King had to bestow. Never mind the fact that the unpopular Anne was hardly likely to have intrigued to murder the King, who was her chief protector and defender—the death of Henry would have been “absolutely fatal” to her.
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Since 1536 there has always been a strong suspicion that Cromwell threw everything he could against Anne Boleyn, including the useful ploy of character assassination, in order to get rid of her. It is probably no coincidence that her alleged crimes were so heinous as to inspire universal shock and revulsion, which would preclude anyone taking up her cause. That way, the King would emerge from this the victim of a woman’s wickedness rather than a man who changed wives at a whim; and as such, he would earn the sympathy of all.

Master Secretary now constructed what was almost certainly a convincing case against the Queen, in which she was to be charged with adultery with five men—one her own brother, another a lowly musician—and conspiring regicide.

The five men who over the next few days would be arrested for committing treason with the Queen were George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford; Sir Henry Norris; Sir Francis Weston; Sir William Brereton; and Mark Smeaton.

George Boleyn was probably the youngest of the three surviving Boleyn siblings, having been no older than twenty-seven when he was
preferred to the Privy Council in 1529, the year his father was created Earl of Wiltshire and he himself was given the courtesy title Viscount Rochford.
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His sister’s connection with the King had brought him royal favor, rapid preferment, lucrative offices—including Gentleman of the Privy Chamber (1528), Constable of Dover, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and Master of the Buckhounds—and a career as a leading diplomat, as well as the palace of New Hall, which Henry VIII had renamed Beaulieu, in Essex; and he was not only one of the two noblemen of the King’s Privy Chamber, but also the foremost member of Queen Anne’s court. Both before and after her marriage, she had gathered around her young people with wit, charm, and intelligence, who could be relied upon to ensure that life was never dull, and Lord Rochford was at the core of this inner circle. There was a close bond between Anne and George, who shared—among other things—a love of poetry, George having “the art in meter and verse to make pleasant ditties.”
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The poet Richard Smith wrote admiringly that “Rochford clamb the stately throne which muses hold in Helicon.”
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Brother and sister were also fervent for religious reform—George’s views, inferred from the French literature he imported, were bordering on the heretical—and both hated and despised Lady Mary. When Katherine of Aragon died, George said “it was a pity” that she “did not keep company with her mother.”
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George Boleyn had been at court since his early teens, if not before. He married Jane Parker, daughter of Henry, Lord Morley, late in 1524. In looks he was an Adonis,
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in character promiscuous. George Cavendish, Wolsey’s former usher, who had no love for the Boleyn faction that brought his master to ruin, wrote candidly of Rochford’s “sensual appetite”:
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This strongly implies that Rochford omitted even to stop at rape, and—there is no other interpretation that can be placed on Cavendish’s use
of the word “bestial”—that he indulged in buggery too.
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Cavendish also refers to Rochford being unable to resist “this unlawful deed,” while:

This points at something far worse to contemporary eyes than the lechery to which Rochford, as personified in these verses,
had
openly confessed, or the crime of treasonable incest for which he would publicly be condemned. It may of course refer to the “lewd adultery” that Cavendish’s Rochford asks people to take example from, yet it is also likely that Cavendish is alluding to illegal sexual practices such as buggery (with women or men) and even homosexuality, then regarded as odious sins against God, with both being capital crimes.
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Rochford himself, in his dying speech, was to confess he had sinned more shamefully than could be imagined, and that he had known no man so evil.
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As he had stoutly denied charges of incest, it is likely that he was referring to other sexual practices then regarded as perversions.

Rochford’s reputation—and possible unlawful sexual predilections—made him an easy target for Cromwell, who would have realized that any accusations of criminal congress would appear entirely credible, and who was well aware that it would take more serious charges to bring down the formidably powerful Rochford.
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Rochford’s other notorious vice was his insufferable pride. “Hadst thou not been so proud,” the poet Wyatt would write after George Boleyn’s fall, “for thy great wit, each man would thee bemoan.”

Sir Henry Norris was the second son of Sir Edward Norris by Frideswide, daughter of Francis, Viscount Lovell, a close friend of Richard III, the last Yorkist king. Sir Henry, a discreet, level-headed man of proven integrity, was Groom of the Stool to the King, and had held this office since before 1529. In this capacity, he was not only the Chief Gentleman of Henry’s
Privy Chamber, which was the King’s private household, but its most trusted member and the “best-beloved of the King,”
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whom he had served faithfully for twenty years.
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There were just twelve Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, and there was rampant competition for places, for these men were closer to the monarch than any other. They had the right of entry to his private chambers, attended on him in shifts, and provided him with daily companionship. They were in a highly privileged and powerful position, able to advise and influence the King, control access to his presence, and exercise patronage. Some were in office simply because Henry liked them, some because of their usefulness, but all were expected to be loyal and trustworthy. Norris’s office of Groom of the Stool obliged him to be present when the King performed his basic natural functions, so he was unavoidably more intimate with his master than most. Yet there was more to his role than that, for any who wished to present a petition to the King had to lay their request before Norris, rather than Cromwell, something that Cromwell may have resented.

Norris’s other posts reflected Henry’s confidence in his abilities. The King “extended his benignity with wealth, worship, and huge abundance”;
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in 1531 he had made Norris Chamberlain of North Wales, and since then, thanks to the favor of Henry and Anne, Norris had been appointed Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse, Master of the Hart Hounds and of the Hawks, Black Rod in the Parliament House, “graver” of the Tower of London, collector of subsidy in the City of London, weigher of goods in the port of Southampton, High Steward of the University of Oxford, and keeper or steward of many castles, manors, and parks. His modest annual Privy Chamber income of £33. 6s. 8d (£11,650) was boosted by fees and annuities of £400 (£139,700) from other offices, and rents from lands he had been granted or leased.
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Norris was not only “a man in very great favor with the King,”
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but had also been a supporter of the Boleyn faction since at least 1530. So trustworthy was he considered that he had been one of the few witnesses to the secret marriage of the King and Anne Boleyn in 1533.
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Norris’s first wife, Mary Fiennes, the daughter of Lord Dacre, died before 1530, leaving behind three young children, and he had recently become betrothed to the Queen’s cousin, Madge Shelton, who had briefly been the King’s mistress in 1535. Norris owned a house at Greenwich, which Henry VIII generously maintained.

That Anne should have betrayed the King with someone so close to him would have appeared shocking in the extreme. Cavendish believed that ambition blinded Norris and drove him to commit a grave “misdemeanor” against the master whose bounty had been so generous:

Cavendish is here referring to the treasonable crimes of which Norris would shortly be accused.

Sir Francis Weston was twenty-five, and also—since 1532—a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber; he had served Henry VIII there as a page since at least 1525. The son of Sir Richard Weston, former Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer, by Anne Sandys, one of Queen Katherine’s gentlewomen, he came from an old and honorable family whose seat was Sutton Place, a beautiful Tudor house near Guildford in Surrey; it had been granted to Sir Richard by Henry VIII in 1521.

Francis was a talented lute player and a first-class athlete—“in active things, who might with thee compare?”
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—who was described by the poet Wyatt as a “pleasant” young man, and “well-esteemed.” He had been “daintily nourished under the King’s wing,”
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and over the years had received a number of grants and pensions.
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In 1533, at Anne Boleyn’s coronation, he was dubbed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath. He was much liked by the King (“who highly favored me and loved me so well”),
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the Queen, and Lord Rochford; he played cards with them all, beating the King at nearly every game, and partnered Henry at tennis and bowls.
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At night the King often chose him as one of those gentlemen who would sleep in his bedchamber and be on call to attend to his needs.
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When Weston married Anne, the daughter and heiress of Sir Christopher Pickering, in May 1530,
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Henry presented him with ten marks (£1,200) and wished him better fortune than he himself had found
in marriage. A fine oak marriage cupboard, bearing the carved portraits of Francis and Anne in relief, is now in the museum at Saffron Walden, Essex. A sixteenth-century portrait at Parham Park in Sussex, of one “Weston Esq. of Sutton [Place], Surrey,” may be a likeness of Francis. He and his wife now had an infant son, Henry, born in 1535.

Despite this apparent marital felicity, the biased Cavendish refers to “Weston the wanton … that wantonly lived without fear or dread … following his fantasy and his wanton lust;” he castigates Weston for his “unkindness against my sovereign lord,” he who, thanks to Henry’s favor, had his “will and lust in every thing.” In this young man, Cavendish avers, willfulness and “hot lust kindled the fire of filthy concupiscence,” and, “having no regard to princely disdain,” finally that “lust presumed to the Queen.”
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Yet Weston seems to have been generally popular prior to that, for he “was young, and of old lineage and high accomplishments.”
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