The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (42 page)

The top part of the parchment in the
Baga de Secretis
has perished, and only seventeen names remain on the list of peers. There is a prick mark beside each, probably made as, one by one, the lords took their seats.
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Notable absentees were the Duke of Richmond, the King’s bastard son, who was perhaps excused on account of his youth—he was not quite seventeen;
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the two female peers; four lords—the Earl of Kent and Lords Dudley, Say, Sele, and Tailboys—who were too poor to attend; three—the Earl of Cumberland, Lord Dacre of the North, and Lord Lisle—who were serving as deputies on the northern Marches and in Calais; and several others,
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among them John Neville, Lord Latimer, the second husband of Katherine Parr (who would become Henry VIII’s sixth wife in 1543). Latimer had written to Cromwell on May 12, begging him “to have me excused by reason of business in Worcestershire,” and protesting, “I have been at every prorogation and session of the last Parliament since it began, which has been very painful and chargeable to me.”
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Alexander Aless was told—by his landlord, who heard it firsthand from people in the crowd who would witness Anne’s end—“that the Earl of Wiltshire, the Queen’s father, had been commanded to be an assessor along with the judges, in order that his daughter might be the more confounded, and that her grief might be the deeper.” The account of Anne’s trial that is preserved in the Harleian manuscripts states that Wiltshire “was among [the peers] by whom she was to be tried,” and Chapuys was told that “the Earl of Wiltshire was quite as ready to assist the judgment as he had done at the condemnation of the other four.”
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The Bishop of Faenza was to report, on May 24, that Wiltshire, “being on the council, was present at his daughter’s sentence,”
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but he is not the most reliable source, and neither is Dr. Ortiz, who asserted on June 2 that “her father approved her condemnation.”
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In the official record in the
Baga de Secretis
, Wiltshire’s name is not included among those who sat in judgment at the trials of his daughter and son, but the list is incomplete. It may be that Wiltshire was the twenty-seventh peer—Norfolk had summoned that number—and that it is time to revise the long-held assumption that he was not among the lords who gathered to try his daughter and his son. Even had he not been, in serving on the jury that condemned the others, he effectively colluded in the destruction of his children, for, as Sander’s Victorian editor shrewdly pointed out, he “could not have been ignorant of the effect of the first verdict.”

Conducting the trial was Sir Christopher Hales, the Attorney General and thus the chief prosecutor for the Crown, as well as Sir John Aleyn, “the Mayor of London with certain aldermen, with the wardens and four persons more of twelve of the principal crafts [guilds] of London.”
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The French ambassador and other foreign diplomats were permitted to watch the proceedings, but Chapuys was unwell and unable to attend, so had to rely on people who were present for information. Much of what we know of the two trials that were to follow comes from his dispatches.
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Other eyewitnesses who left records of the proceedings were Sir John Spelman, one of the judges, and the Tower official, Anthony Anthony, Surveyor of the Ordnance, who also owned an inn called The Ship, and served as churchwarden at St. Botolph’s Church, Aldgate. Unfortunately, his chronicle has not survived, and is known only through the notes on it made by the seventeenth-century writer Thomas Turner, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in his copy of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s life of Henry VIII.

By the King’s express command, members of the public were admitted to the trial, and were allowed to stand in the well of the hall behind wooden barriers that had been erected to contain the press of people.
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George Wyatt gained the impression that Anne’s trial was heard “close enough, as enclosed in strong walls,” but Chapuys had the truth of it when he stated that “the thing was not done secretly, for there were more than two thousand persons present.”
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The King was determined that justice would be seen to be done, which suggests that he and his advisers felt they had built a strong enough case against the Queen. Cromwell—as he would tell Chapuys—had “taken considerable trouble” over the judicial process.
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This was not to be quite the farcical trial some historians have claimed.

The records relating to the legal process against Anne Boleyn and Lord Rochford were long thought to have been suppressed in their entirety, but in fact the Henrician government took unwonted care to preserve some of the official documentation of these proceedings. Nevertheless, crucial papers are missing: actual trial records, details of the evidence produced in court, statements known to have been made by Smeaton and Norris, depositions of all the witnesses who had supposedly been questioned, and transcripts of the interrogations of Smeaton, Norris, and the Queen.
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It was the magisterial Victorian historian, Froude, who first noticed
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that
the records of Anne Boleyn’s trial “survive only in a faint epitome, and we know neither by whom nor why the evidence was done away with.” Yet since the trial was conducted so publicly, there was really no need for anyone to do away with it. It has been speculated that these documents were destroyed in the sixteenth century, on the orders of either Henry VIII or Cromwell, both of whom perhaps wished to suppress details of dubious evidence or of a scandal that so touched the King’s honor, although if that was so, why was the indictment itself, the very substance of the case, not destroyed too? Cromwell, as Master of the Rolls, would have had control of such documents and the ability to dispose of them, and although it is not unusual for depositions to be missing in such cases, and it is clear from the other documents that depositions were never included with the records in the
Baga de Secretis,
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there is a real possibility that, in response to negative comments about the evidence produced at the trial, they were purposely destroyed.

David Starkey has put forward the theory that no depositions ever existed in the first place, and that Cromwell and his colleagues never had all the evidence of which they boasted.
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In support of this, he cites Rochford’s concern—expressed to Kingston probably on May 5—that he had not yet been summoned before the Privy Council for further questioning, and Anne’s marveling on the same day that the Privy Council had not come to take a deposition from her.
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But certainly the authorities had Smeaton’s confession; there is also good evidence that they had Lady Rochford’s testimony, and Sir John Spelman, a judge at the trials of Anne and Rochford, refers to the evidence of the person to whom Lady Wingfield confided her doubts about Anne, which Starkey does not mention. But even the hostile Chapuys would report that there was no valid proof of Anne’s guilt, so it may well be that there were very few “interrogatories” produced at her trial and that of her brother, and that the Crown relied chiefly on the force and shock value of the indictment and on the prisoners being directly confronted with only the verbal evidence of their accusers.

It has also been suggested, by several writers, that Elizabeth I, Anne’s daughter, wanting to suppress proof of her mother’s guilt, destroyed the missing trial documents, although again that begs the question of why she did not make a more thorough job of it. Furthermore, it seems Elizabeth’s policy to have left well alone regarding any matter concerning
Anne Boleyn. Quite simply, these papers may have been lost,
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although considering how crucial and sensitive they were, that is possibly too convenient a theory.

The surviving documents relating to the trials survive in pouches eight and nine of the
Baga de Secretis
in the National Archives. These particular treason trials are among the earliest where some documentation is preserved. Originally, these papers were kept under lock and key, with only three key holders: the Lord Chief Justice, the Attorney General, and the Master of the Crown Office. This archive consists in each case of an enrollment or summary of the trial and most of the original documents employed in it, including an abstract of the evidence. All have been carefully calendared in the Deputy Keeper’s Third Report.

Fighting Without a Weapon

J
ane Seymour did not appear in public on the day of Anne’s trial, but stayed indoors with her family at Chelsea. She was agitated about the outcome of the proceedings and was anxiously awaiting the return of Chapuys with news of the verdict. But according to the ambassador, “one of her relations, who was with her on the day of the condemnation, told me that in the morning, the King had sent that morning to tell her that he would send her news at three o’clock in the afternoon of the condemnation of the Concubine.” Clearly Henry had made his will in the matter plain, and expected the verdict to be a foregone conclusion.

“On Monday, the fifteenth of May 1536, there was arraigned within the Tower of London Queen Anne, for treason against the King’s own person.” The court being assembled, the proceedings opened with the Crown’s commission being read aloud.
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Then silence was called for and the Duke of Norfolk cried, “Gentleman Gaoler of the Tower, bring in your prisoner.”
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“Summoned by an usher,”
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the Queen was brought forward, having been escorted through the waiting crowds in the Tower precincts and into the great hall by Sir William Kingston and Sir Edmund Walsingham.
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“She walked forth in fearful beauty” and “seemed unmoved as a stock, not as one who had to defend her cause, but with the bearing of one coming to great honor.”
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Wearing a gown of black velvet over a petticoat of scarlet damask, and a small cap sporting a black and white feather,
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she advanced attended by Lady Kingston, Lady Boleyn, and “her young ladies.”
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It would appear that these young ladies, probably four in number, had served as maids-of-honor in the Queen’s household, and retained to attend her at her trial and afterward.

Beside Anne, according to custom, walked the Gentleman (or Yeoman) Gaoler of the Tower carrying his ceremonial axe,
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its blade turned away from the prisoner, to signify that she was as yet uncondemned. This was not Sir William Kingston, the constable, but the Tower officer who had overall supervision of the prisoners and their warders and occupied the house on Tower Green that lay between the Lieutenant’s Lodging and the Beauchamp Tower.

The Queen “made an entry as though she were going to a great triumph,” carrying herself with calm poise as she was brought to the bar. “She presented herself with the true dignity of a queen, and curtsied to her judges, looking round upon them all, without any sign of fear,” wrote Crispin de Milherve, an eyewitness at the trial. “She returned the salutations of the lords with her accustomed politeness,”
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and even when she saw her father among them, “she stood undismayed, nor did ever exhibit any token of impatience, or grief, or cowardice.”
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Anne’s composure was clearly admirable: there was no hint of the hysteria she had shown earlier. Cromwell, by contrast, was tense, concerned lest “the sense, wit, and courage of Anne would go against him”
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and secure an acquittal—with goodness knew what dire consequences for himself.

A chair had been placed before the bar on the raised platform in the center of the hall, and Anne now “took her seat” with notable elegance.
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Common prisoners stood to hear the charges read, but this was after all the Queen of England, and due ceremony was observed.

“Then her indictment was read before her”
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in all its embarrassing detail by Sir Christopher Hales, the Attorney General, but Anne’s face betrayed no shame as she heard it alleged against her “that she had procured her brother and the other four to defile her and have carnal notice
of her, which they had done often; and that they conspired the death of the King, for she had said to them that she had never loved the King in her heart, and had said to every one of them by themselves that she loved them more than the others, which was to the slander of the issue that was begotten between the King and her, which is made treason by the statute of the twenty-sixth year of the King that now is.”
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