The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (33 page)

On May 8 one of the Queen’s chaplains, William Latymer, returning from Flanders, where he had been about her business, was informed, upon landing in Sandwich, Kent, that “the Queen and other prisoners were in the Tower,” and was then searched, in case he had any incriminating evidence on him. Having shown the mayor and local justices “the contents of his budget and purse” and the books he had with him, he was allowed to proceed on his way.
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This incident would indicate that every member of the Queen’s household had been subject to questioning.

In Calais, on May 8, the King’s cousin and deputy, Arthur Plantagenet, Lord Lisle, learned of the arrests of the Queen and her alleged lovers, and, not doubting that all would be condemned—if they had not already been—and that their offices, lands, and goods would be confiscated along with their lives, which was the fate of convicted traitors, hastened to join the fray of court vultures hoping for rich pickings; as early as May 2, the day of Norris’s arrest, Richard Staverton of Warfield, Berkshire, a landowner and lawyer of Lincoln’s Inn (whose wife was Margaret Weston, who was probably related to Francis Weston), had written to Cromwell saying he “shall be glad to have” Norris’s rooms and properties
near Windsor, “as I have fourteen children.”
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On May 3 an official inventory of Norris’s wardrobe stuff had been drawn up, and two days after that, John Longland, Bishop of Lincoln, wrote to Cromwell offering, “If it is true that Norris has not used himself according to his duty to his sovereign lord,” to transfer Norris’s stewardship of the University of Oxford to Master Secretary for a small fee.
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Too late, the Duke of Richmond himself was to write to the Bishop on May 8, referring to “the trouble and business that Mr. Norris is now in, the which I think is not to you unknown,” and asking, as “it is presupposed with many men that there is no way but one with him,” if he could have Norris’s stewardship of Banbury for his servant, Giles Forster; Longland, however, had already promised it to Cromwell.
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Not wishing to lose out, Lord Lisle now wrote to Master Secretary:

In order to expedite the matter, Lord Lisle immediately dispatched to London his attorney, John Husee. Husee carried with him Lisle’s letter to Cromwell and also one for the King. Four days later he was able to tell Lisle that he had given his letter to Cromwell, “who hath promised to be your very friend” and commanded Husee to deliver the King’s letter. But Husee was “in no wise” permitted to deliver it in person or speak with Henry, and was obliged to entrust Sir John Russell with the task of handing it over. Russell promised to consult with Cromwell, “and between them both, if they keep promise, I trust something will rise on your lordship’s behalf. But there is no time to make hot suit till time the matters which are now in hand be overblown.”
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Lisle would just have to be patient.

…

Speculation at court was rampant; no one knew quite what was going on, and so far there had been no official announcement. At length, on Tuesday, May 9, the King summoned twenty-two noblemen, and twenty-seven gentlemen of his Privy Chamber, to a meeting at Hampton Court to treat “of such great and weighty matters as whereupon doth consist the surety of our person, the preservation of our honor, and the tranquillity and quietness of you and all other our loving and faithful subjects.”
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Among those summoned were men who had long conspired Anne’s downfall, notably Exeter and Montagu, as well as Sir William Kingston, William Coffin (whose wife was in attendance on the Queen in the Tower), and Sir William Brereton, who was a relative of one of the accused.
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There can be little doubt that the findings of the commissioners were already known to the King and Cromwell (who was after all a member of both grand juries), and that the lords and gentlemen had been summoned for the purpose of discussing them, and—in the case of the lords—to try the Queen and Lord Rochford, who had the right to be tried by their peers. The official summons to the peers for this purpose would not be issued until May 13, and to twenty-seven lords, five more than the King summoned on May 9; but the fact that Lord Latimer wrote to Cromwell on May 12, asking to be excused, proves that they were actually called earlier. Since Latimer was at that time staying in his house at Wyke in Worcestershire, he must have been summoned on May 9 at the latest, and cannot have been expected to attend the meeting at Hampton Court on that date.

That day, May 9, the justices of the King’s Bench, sitting at Westminster, sent their precept for the sheriffs of London to arrange for the return of the grand juries the following day.
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Legal proceedings against the Queen formally began on Wednesday, May 10, when the grand jury of Middlesex assembled in Westminster Hall before John Baldwin, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and six other judges. There, its foreman, Sir Thomas More’s son-in-law, Giles Heron, announced that the commissioners had found a true bill against the accused on all the charges, that being the written decision of the jury that it had heard sufficient evidence that an accused person was probably guilty of a crime and should be indicted.

The decision to proceed to trial by jury, rather than following the summary and incontestable procedure of the passing of an Act of Attainder
against the accused by Parliament, strongly suggests that the Crown was confident it had a sufficiently strong case to secure Anne’s condemnation. Of course, this confidence may have stemmed from the knowledge that the King’s will in the matter was known, or had been communicated, to those who would be sitting in judgment; and in most cases, the King’s will prevailed. But clearly Cromwell felt that his case was sound. Had he not, he would surely have opted for attainder, which allowed no possibility of escape for the accused. The decision to go to trial in open court suggests also that the King cared what his subjects thought of this extraordinary process, and that he was aware that, in proceeding against no less a personage than the Queen herself—a move that would undoubtedly cause a sensation—the Crown’s case must publicly be seen as unassailable.

Nevertheless, a guilty verdict, although likely, was not always a foregone conclusion. Only two years earlier, in 1534, Lord Dacre had famously been acquitted of treason, much to the King’s disgust, yet although Henry’s disapproval was made clear to them, no vengeance was visited upon those lords who found Dacre innocent.
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For all that, when the Crown was a party, the chances of a trial being fair by modern standards were remote, and it is true that of the hundreds of people accused of treason in Tudor times, very few had the bravado to enter a plea of not guilty. When Sir Nicholas Throckmorton was acquitted of treason in Mary I’s reign, this was thought to be extraordinary.

Yet the possibility remained that the lords might be reluctant to condemn the Queen of England, for such a conviction was unprecedented. Earlier English queens had been unfaithful, notably Isabella of Angoulême, whose husband King John had ordered her lovers to be strung up and hanged above her bed, and Isabella of France, who unquestionably committed adultery with Roger Mortimer while she was married to the homosexual Edward II; neither of these ladies had met with anything worse than infamy. More seriously, in the twelfth century, Eleanor of Aquitaine had abetted her sons in a treasonous rebellion against Henry II that nearly cost him his throne, and led to her being held under house arrest for sixteen years. And Matilda of Flanders, the wife of William the Conqueror, had also supported a renegade son against her husband, earning little more than a ticking-off. As we have seen, Joan of Navarre, the widow of Henry IV, had been accused (falsely, as it turned out) of witchcraft, for which she was imprisoned for just three years; in 1441, Eleanor Cobham, Duchess of
Gloucester, had schemed to predict the death of her nephew Henry VI by witchcraft, but escaped execution; instead she was condemned to perpetual imprisonment. No English royal lady, therefore, had ever been sentenced to death for the kind of crimes of which Anne Boleyn was accused.

Nor had this happened in France, where, in 1314, three French princesses, among them the wife of the heir to the throne, were found guilty of committing adultery; but while their lovers were savagely butchered on the scaffold, they themselves were condemned only to divorce and imprisonment. Given the precedents, Anne could reasonably have expected that to be her fate. Yet it is clear from her recorded utterances in the Tower that she already believed herself to be doomed.

In the indictment drawn up by the grand jury of Middlesex for use at the coming trials, the charges against the Queen and her alleged accomplices—already branded as “traitors”—were enumerated in shocking detail. The original documents survive in the records of the King’s Bench in the famous
Baga de Secretis
in the National Archives, along with other records relating to Anne’s fall. The two indictments—those of Middlesex and Kent—in which were listed twenty-one specific offenses, are likely to have been largely the work of Thomas Cromwell, who sat on both grand juries, and they reflect the scale of his investigations—and perhaps his powers of invention. They constituted a formidable case against the accused.

The Middlesex indictment read as follows: