The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (30 page)

Later still, deeming the third line of this poem too sensitive, Wyatt changed it to “Brunette, that set my wealth in such a roar.” In 1532 he would look back in verse to a time when he had “fled the fire that me brent [burned], by sea, by land, by water and by wind;” he was surely thinking back to January 1527, when, seeing that Henry’s passion for Anne grew more serious, he had begged to be allowed to join an embassy to Rome.
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Five years on, as he accompanied the King and Anne, lately become Henry’s mistress in every sense, to Calais, he could reflect with equanimity on how his desire for her was “both sprung and spent.”

George Wyatt relates a tale of Henry VIII’s rivalry with his grandfather at the time they were both pursuing Anne. Thomas Wyatt had covertly stolen a jewel threaded on a lace from her pocket, and was cherishing it in his doublet, next to his heart. Soon afterward, aware of Henry’s interest in Anne, he was the King’s opponent at bowls; both men believed they had won, and argued the toss, but there can be little doubt that they were really fencing over Anne Boleyn, for Henry kept “a watchful eye upon the knight, noting him more to hover about the lady, and she to keep aloof from him.”
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Wyatt was mortified to see the King pointing to the winning cast with a finger on which was blatantly displayed one of Anne’s rings.

“Wyatt, I tell thee, it is mine!” Henry insisted, smiling triumphantly. He was not talking about the cast. Thus provoked, Wyatt rashly pulled out Anne’s jewel.

“If Your Majesty will give me leave to measure it, I hope it will be mine!” he said meaningfully, and proceeded to measure the distance between casts with the lace, telling the King there was no doubt that he, Wyatt, was the winner.

“It may be so, but then I am deceived!” Henry snapped, and broke up the game. When, soon afterward, it became clear that the King’s intentions toward Anne were serious, Wyatt accepted defeat.

In 1530, when people began noticing that the King’s brother-in-law, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, had been absent from court for “a long time,” Chapuys heard “people say that he is banished for some time because he revealed to the King that the Lady had found her pleasure with a gentleman of the court who already has been formerly dismissed, and this last time people have avoided him at the instance of the said lady, who
has waxed very courageous by him; but at last the King has been interceded to by her that the said gentleman return to court.”

The dubious evidence of later Catholic writers has led several historians to conclude that Chapuys was referring to Thomas Wyatt, but the details in the ambassador’s report are at variance with that identification. Wyatt was never dismissed from court; he had been abroad—at his request—on a prolonged embassy from 1526-27, and appointed High Marshal of Calais in 1529, a position of honor. Nor is there any evidence of Anne having an affair with any man then at court, or of a previous sex scandal involving her. And although Henry, having banished the man, is supposed to have given in to her pleas for his speedy return, he was hardly likely to have done this if he believed that she had slept with this courtier; after all, for more than four years Anne had been holding Henry at arm’s length, staunchly protesting her virtue, and telling him, “Your wife I cannot be, your mistress I will not be.”
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George Wyatt asserted that Suffolk did bear “a perpetual grudge” against the poet, the cause of which he had never uncovered, but he thought that if Suffolk had said such a thing to the King, “he did it upon zeal that in his conceit it was true.” That may be correct, for Suffolk had no love for Anne, who had been rude to him, while his wife, Mary Tudor, would have nothing to do with her; it is also likely that Henry would have reacted by banishing Suffolk had the duke alleged such a thing of Anne. However, it looks as if Chapuys, in reporting what Suffolk allegedly said, had relied on embroidered gossip.

By January 1533, when Anne married the King, Wyatt was still a member of her circle, and it was to him that she hinted, in February, in front of a crowd of courtiers, that she might be pregnant.
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It was logical, given their long-standing association and former romantic connection, for Cromwell to proceed now against Wyatt as one of her adulterous lovers, but Wyatt was not a prominent member of the Boleyn faction and no threat to Cromwell or the Spanish alliance. Indeed, he was on good terms with Cromwell. It is therefore possible that he was the only one of the accused arrested on the King’s initiative, Henry remembering jealously that Wyatt had pursued Anne in the past. According to the “Spanish Chronicle,” he had “sent a message to Cromwell, that he should send for Master Wyatt and question him.”

Recently, the theory has been put forward that it was Lady Wingfield’s
dying revelations that led to Wyatt’s apprehension,
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because she had been at court in the early 1520s when Wyatt was pursuing Anne, and could perhaps testify to what happened between them then. (This is also the basis for the unfounded theory that Lady Wingfield was at one time blackmailing Anne.) At the time of his arrest, Wyatt himself held the Duke of Suffolk responsible for it. In 1541 he wrote, “My lord of Suffolk himself can tell that I imputed it to him, and not only at the beginning, but even the very night before my apprehension now last.” It has been seen as significant that Suffolk was friends with Cromwell, and the Wingfield family were his clients; Lady Wingfield’s brother-in-law, Humphrey Wingfield, was the duke’s man of business.
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It seems plausible that there could be a connection, but it is unlikely, because, according to Sir John Spelman, Lady Wingfield’s evidence was offered at the trial of the four commoners charged with adultery with the Queen, and Wyatt was not among them. Therefore it must have related to the charges against either Norris or Brereton, because the offenses said to have been committed by Weston and Smeaton allegedly took place after Lady Wingfield’s death. And we might also infer from Wyatt’s use of the past tense in 1541 that while he had at the time blamed Suffolk for his arrest, he had been mistaken, or no longer did so.

Catholic writers, writing with hindsight after Anne’s fall, made much of her supposed affair with Thomas Wyatt. The “Spanish Chronicle,” Sir Thomas More’s admiring biographer, Nicholas Harpsfield, and the Jesuit, Nicholas Sander, all intent on demonizing her, assert—sometimes in salacious detail—that she and Wyatt were at one time lovers in the fullest sense.

These three sources all claim that Wyatt, not Suffolk, sought to warn the King that Anne was unchaste. The “Spanish Chronicle” states that, when he at length was moved to confess all to the King, Henry refused to believe him.

Nicholas Harpsfield claimed to have gotten his story from the well-informed merchant and banker, Antonio Bonvisi, who had been a business associate of Wolsey and a friend of Sir Thomas More, and who “heard [it] of them that were very likely to know the truth thereof.” Clearly, though, the tale had gotten garbled in the telling. Harpsfield
states that Wyatt dared to “utter [his] own shame” and caution Henry that Anne was “not meet to be coupled with Your Grace … Her conversation hath been so loose and base; which thing I know not so much by hearsay as by my own experience, as one that have had my carnal pleasure with her.” Henry, although “somewhat astounded,” merely praised Wyatt for his honesty and charged him “to make no more words of this matter to any man living.” It is barely credible that Henry VIII would have reacted so mildly to such serious allegations, especially considering that he was set upon making Anne his queen. Harpsfield’s tale, though, was written during the reign of Mary Tudor, before Anne Boleyn’s reputation had been rehabilitated, and when it was permissible, even desirable, to slander her.

Sander, of course, gave this tale great credence, and embroidered it still further with details that are nowhere else recorded, which suggests that he must have made them up. He represents Wyatt as being afraid “if the King discovered afterward how shameless Anne’s life had been” and “that his own life might be imperiled;” “grievously” troubled by his conscience, he went before the council and confessed “that he had sinned with Anne Boleyn, not imagining that the King would ever make her his wife.”

Hearing that “Anne Boleyn was stained in her reputation,” the councillors, concerned for their sovereign’s moral welfare and good name, repeated to the King “all that Wyatt had confessed.” When Henry dismissed “these stories [as] the invention of wicked men,” and declared that he “could affirm on oath that Anne was a woman of the purest life,” Wyatt grew angry at not being believed, and told members of the council that “he would put it in the King’s power to see with his own eyes the truth of the story, and would bring the King where he might see him enjoy her, for Anne was passionately in love with Wyatt;” there is, as has been shown, very little contemporary evidence for this last assertion. Suffolk was deputed to inform Henry of this preposterous proposal, and still—perhaps understandably—Henry “believed it not,” and “answered that he had no wish to see anything of the kind,” as Wyatt was “a bold villain, not to be trusted.” Again, this is at variance with Henry’s known regard for Wyatt. Sander claimed that Henry revealed all this to Anne, “who shunned Wyatt”—which also is not borne out by the historical record.

George Wyatt dismissed Sander’s tale as “fiction;” he had learned that it was Sir Francis Bryan, not Wyatt, who confessed to enjoying one of Henry’s mistresses, and that the lady in question was not Anne Boleyn. Henry had pardoned Bryan and “gave over the lady ever after to him.” George Wyatt was sure that, had Henry cause to believe that Anne had sex with Wyatt, he would have “thrown her off” also. Nor is it likely that he would have allowed Wyatt to remain at court, or made him chief ewerer at her coronation in 1533, or have preferred him to the Privy Council that year. One only has to remember that, when Henry married his sixth wife, Katherine Parr, in 1543, he sent Sir Thomas Seymour, her former suitor, abroad on an extended diplomatic mission, even though he had no reason to think that Seymour had ever been Katherine’s lover.

The obvious flaws and discrepancies in these stories, and the fact that they only appear in partisan Catholic sources and are at variance with the evidence in Wyatt’s poems, render them highly suspect.

The “Spanish Chronicle” also gives a detailed account of Wyatt’s arrest. Summoned by Cromwell’s nephew, Richard (he who had changed his name from Williams to Cromwell), Wyatt rode to London, to York Place, where the secretary took him aside and said, “Master Wyatt, you will know the great love I have and always have had for you, and now I tell you it would grieve me sorely should you be guilty in the matter about which I wish to speak to you.” He then proceeded to tell Wyatt about the arrests of the Queen and her alleged lovers.

Wyatt was astounded, and immediately grasped that he himself was being implicated. Spiritedly, he declared, “Master Secretary, by the loyalty I owe to God and the King my lord, I have nothing to fear because I have not erred even in my thoughts, for His Majesty the King well knows what I told him before he married.” Cromwell is said to have replied, “Well, Master Wyatt, you must go to the Tower, and I promise you that I shall be your good friend.” And indeed, he would prove that, which suggests that there is some truth in this account.

“I shall go readily because I am without stain, have no fear,” Wyatt assured him, then allowed Richard Cromwell to escort him to the Tower, which was done so discreetly that “nobody suspected that he was under
arrest.” When they arrived, Richard said to Kingston, “Captain, Secretary Cromwell sends to beseech you to treat Master Wyatt with honor.” Kingston “then put him in a chamber over the gate.”

This account is compatible with the other evidence, apart from the reference to Wyatt warning the King about Anne. It is quite possible that Wyatt was imprisoned where the chronicler describes, either in one of the rooms above the Byward Tower (“Tower by the Gate”) or in one of the old royal chambers above St. Thomas’s Tower, above the Watergate that later became known as Traitors’ Gate. These chambers had been largely rebuilt by Henry VIII to provide accommodation for the Lord Great Chamberlain and the Lord Chamberlain when the court was in residence, which was rare, so they would have been empty. But given that Wyatt was to watch the executions on Tower Hill from a window, it is more likely that he was lodged in the Byward Tower.

According to the “Spanish Chronicle,” on reaching the Tower, Wyatt wrote a letter to the King, confessing in full the details of his relations with Anne Boleyn in the years before Henry began to pay court to her. The chronicler reproduces the exact text of the letter: