The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (32 page)

Although Herbert was skeptical, both Burnet and the magisterial Froude were convinced of this letter’s authenticity, yet many historians over the years have expressed doubts. Agnes Strickland noticed that the handwriting
differed from Anne’s. James Gairdner, the Edwardian editor of the encyclopedic
Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII
, who studied the original document, was of the opinion that “the handwriting and style alike indicate beyond reasonable doubt” that “this letter was not really written or composed by Anne Boleyn.” In his view, it was written decades later, in an Elizabethan hand.
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Friedmann recorded that it “is now generally admitted to be a forgery,” while Sergeant dismissively wrote that “all evidence for its authenticity is lacking, neither the handwriting nor the style being Anne’s.”

In regard to the handwriting, which is not too dissimilar from Anne’s, Henry Savage makes the point that her authenticated letters date from the late 1520s, while this was supposedly written several years later when she was under enormous stress and in great fear of her life. Jasper Ridley, while saying that no one can challenge Gairdner’s opinion that the handwriting was not Anne’s, thinks that the letter “bears all the marks of Anne’s character, of her spirit, her impudence and her recklessness.”
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It is just possible that on May 6, four days after her arrest, she was too agitated to write it herself and dictated it to someone else.
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The language used in the letter certainly shows it to have been contemporaneous to the sixteenth century, but it is certainly not very consistent with the style of Anne’s authenticated letters, and the fact that it was kept by Cromwell is suspicious, for why would Cromwell think it desirable to keep a letter from Anne protesting her innocence? He would surely have preferred to suppress or destroy it. And he would not have referred to her in the heading as “the Lady in the Tower” but as the Queen. It is possible that Henry had sent a message to Anne urging her to confess and so merit leniency, and that Cromwell—her “ancient professed enemy”—had conveyed this message when he visited the Tower, although there is no evidence for this in Kingston’s reports or anywhere else.

Anne’s injured, pious, and reproving tone would surely have outraged Henry. “Every word is a sting, envenomed by the sense of intolerable wrong.”
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In asserting that her enemies were the instruments of his great sin, and that she was in the Tower on Jane Seymour’s account, Anne was effectively saying that he had instigated this plot against her with the sole purpose of marrying Jane. Her provocative remarks about his changeable fancy might have been true, but they were tantamount to accusing him of fickleness and, along with her implication that he might not proceed
against her strictly according to law nor allow her an open hearing, her accusation that he’d had her imprisoned merely because his affections were set on Jane Seymour—as well as her suggestion that he had already determined that she must die—were an insult to royal justice and guaranteed to arouse his anger, which was surely the last thing Anne would have risked doing at such a time. She was to praise him fulsomely on the scaffold, when she was in far greater extremity than this, so one would expect that, had she indeed written to him from her prison, she would have reined in her sharp tongue in the interests of ameliorating his displeasure.

But Anne had never been afraid to speak her mind, nor even to upbraid or ridicule Henry; she was his wife and had grown used to speaking openly to him. Driven by her fears, her anger, and her sense of injury, might she not yet again have let her tongue run away with her, as she already had during her confinement? She may have felt she had nothing left to lose and could freely let Henry know what she thought of him. But there was her child’s future to think of, and the threat of repercussions on her family. Would Anne truly have dared to be so provocative at this crucial time? Jasper Ridley is of the opinion that she did so dare, and that this was why an outraged Henry showed her little mercy.

Yet the writer’s claim that she had never desired to be queen is certainly untrue. And the signature is odd, as well as the repeated use of the name Anne Boleyn, for Anne would surely have signed herself, as she customarily did, “Anne the Queen.”
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However, the final paragraph, in which she says that she understands that others are in prison for her sake, rings true, and reflects her perception of the situation as it would have been on May 6. The question must be, if Anne did not write this letter, then who did? It must have been a person with some detailed knowledge of her imprisonment, someone who had an interest in showing her to be innocent. It may be that one of her Elizabethan apologists, overzealous in her cause, resorted to forgery. Or, if Jasper Ridley is correct, this letter is indeed a copy—kept for reasons of state—of a letter that Anne wrote herself. But that does not explain its other anomalies, which strongly suggest that it was indeed a forgery.

Just to complicate matters, the antiquarian John Strype, who wrote his
Annals of the Reformation in England
in the early eighteenth century, claimed to have seen another letter written by Anne in the Tower, apparently on a later date than the one referred to above; Strype recorded that,
in this second letter, she responded to an invitation to make a full confession of her crimes by saying that she could confess no more than she had already spoken. That rings true, and may refer to the accounts of her conversations with Norris, Weston, and Smeaton that she had given to her attendants.

Kingston’s third letter to Cromwell is undated, but was written no earlier than Sunday, May 7, since he refers to “yesterday after your departing,” and it is clear from his previous report that Cromwell had not been at the Tower on May 5.

Kingston began by reminding Master Secretary that “the Queen hath much desired to have here in the closet the sacraments, and also her almoner [John Skip], who she supposeth to be devout, for one hour she is determined to die, and the next hour much contrary to that. Yesterday, after your departing, I sent for my wife and also for Mrs. Coffin, to know how they had done that day”—presumably Kingston had been closeted with Cromwell and not had a chance to see the Queen—and “they said she had been very merry and made a great dinner, and yet soon after she called for her supper, having marvel where I was all day; and after supper she sent for me.”

“Where have you been all day?” she asked him. “I made answer I had been with prisoners,” he told her.

“So,” she said, “I thought I heard Master Treasurer.” She was referring to FitzWilliam. Kingston told her—perhaps untruthfully—that “he was not here.” Then Anne began to talk; it was now that she recalled the way in which the King’s councillors had treated her at Greenwich on the day of her arrest, “shaking her head three or four times.” “But I to be a Queen and cruelly handled as was never seen!” she lamented. “But I think the King does it to prove me.” And she “did laugh withal, and was very merry.” Then her mood suddenly changed.

“I shall have justice,” she declared.

“Have no doubt therein,” Kingston assured her.

“If any man accuse me, I can say but nay, and they can bring no witness,” she replied.

Anne then “talked with the gentlewomen.” It was in this conversation that she revealed she had known, that first evening in the Tower, of the imprisonment of Smeaton and Norris. She wished she could have made
some statement of her innocence: “If it had been laid [before the Council] she had won.” She then added, “I would to God I had my bishops”—the ten prelates who owed their sees to her patronage—“for they would all go to the King for me.” In fact, their silence had been deafening.

Anne went on, somewhat extravagantly, “I think the most part of England prays for me, and if I die you shall see the greatest punishment for me within this seven years that ever came to England. And then shall I be in Heaven, for I have done many good deeds in my days.” This reveals that Anne was, at heart, true to the faith of her childhood, for had she been secretly of the Lutheran persuasion, she would have hoped to attain Heaven through faith alone rather than good works.

She harked back once more to the subject of her attendants: “I think [it] much unkindness in the King to put such about me as I never loved.” Kingston reminded her “that the King took them to be honest and good women,” a judgment with which he himself agreed.

“But I would have had of mine own privy chamber, which I favor most,” Anne said plaintively, but in vain. Kingston remained impervious to her complaints.
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News of the arrests took several days to reach the outlying shires of the realm. That Sunday, May 7, Rowland Lee, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, and his associates in the Council of the Marches on the Welsh border, acknowledged receipt of letters from the Privy Council and expressed their shock: “As the news in this letter is very doleful to this council and all the liege people of the realm, God forbid it should be true.”
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That same day, the aging Sir Henry Wyatt, who had clearly not yet learned of his son Thomas’s arrest, wrote him a letter from Allington Castle. He considered himself “most unfortunate that he could neither go nor ride without danger to his life, or do his duty to the King in this dangerous time that His Grace has suffered by false traitors” and “desired his son to give the King due attendance night and day,” adding: “I trust that ye have so declared yourself that ye are found true to His Grace. His Highness is most bounden to God that He hath given him such grace that this false treason is brought so wisely out. I pray to God give him grace long enough to be with him, and about him that hath found out this matter, which hath been given him of God, and the false traitors to be punished according to justice, to the example of others.”
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The unwitting Sir
Henry’s acceptance of the guilt of the as yet untried prisoners reflects the view expressed—and probably held—by the majority of people at that time.

It was a view shared by the highest in the land, and there is evidence that, already, the outcome of the affair was expected to be a foregone conclusion. On May 7, orders were sent in the King’s name to the sheriffs of every county, informing them that “since the dissolution of the late Parliament, matters of high importance have chanced, which render it necessary to discuss the establishment of the succession in a Parliament assembled for that purpose.” The King desired each sheriff to “declare to the people that the calling of a Parliament is so necessary, both for the treating of matters so necessary for their weal and the surety of our person, that they will have cause to think their charge and time, which will be very little and short, well spent.”
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Given that the annulment of the Queen’s marriage had already been discussed, and that Parliament had been summoned on April 27, before Anne’s arrest, what else could this presage but her certain removal by the due processes of Church and state?