The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (55 page)

Aless, a Protestant recounting these events for Elizabeth I, was biased and probably exaggerating public opinion, yet his is not the only evidence for the small but growing swell of sympathy for Anne Boleyn. “Although everybody rejoices at the execution of the Concubine,” Chapuys reported, “there are some who murmur at the mode of procedure against her and the others, and people speak variously of the King, and it will not pacify the world when it is known what has passed, and is passing, between him and Mistress Jane Seymour. Already it sounds ill, in the ears of the people, that the King, having received such ignominy, has shown himself more glad than ever since the arrest of the Concubine.”
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So soon, a legend was in the making.

As the murmuring spread, Anne began to be seen as a victim done away with on a flimsy pretext, particularly in the wake of Henry marrying Jane ten days after her beheading. That view was openly expressed in England just over a month after Anne Boleyn’s execution, when an Oxfordshire man, John Hill of Eynsham, was brought before the local justices for saying that “the King caused Mr. Norris, Mr. Weston, and such as were put of late unto execution to be put to death only of pleasure,” and that “the King, for a fraud and a guile, caused Master Norris, Master Weston, and the Queen to be put to death because he was made sure unto the Queen’s Grace that now is half a year before.” Master Hill pleaded
guilty and was thrown into prison. Another man, William Saunders, who had said much the same thing, was examined with him.
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It would surely have occurred to those who privately thought the same as John Hill that it could well have been the King, and not Cromwell, who resolved to be rid not only of Anne but also of her powerful faction in the Privy Chamber, in order to clear the way for the rising stars, the Seymours.
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Although Chapuys famously referred to Anne in 1536 as “the English Messalina or Agrippina,” and Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s cousin and a stern Catholic, that same year called her “a Jezebel and a sorceress,” the reformer Philip Melanchthon was horrified at news of her death and its disastrous implications for any Protestant alliance with England: “The reports from England are more than tragic. The Queen, accused rather than convicted of adultery, has suffered the penalty of death, and that catastrophe has wrought great changes in our plans. How dreadfully this calamity will dishonor the King. What a great change has suddenly been made.” As a Protestant, he was in no doubt “that blow came from Rome. In Rome, all these tricks and plots are contrived.”
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In France, poems were written honoring Anne’s memory,
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while one French reformist, Étienne Dolet, raged that Anne had been condemned “on a false charge of adultery.”
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Even the Emperor’s sister, the politically acute Mary of Hungary, did not believe in Anne’s guilt and was dismayed to hear of her fate: As none but the organist confessed, nor herself either, people think [the King] invented this device to get rid of her. Anyhow, no great wrong can be done to her, even in being suspected as wicked, for she is known to have been a worthless person. It is to be hoped, if hope be a right thing to entertain about such acts, that when he is tired of this one, he will find some occasion of getting rid of her. I think wives will hardly be well-contented if such customs become general,” she added dryly. “Although I have no desire to put myself in this danger, yet, being of the feminine gender, I will pray with the others that God may keep us from it.”
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By 1538 the young Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, a niece of Charles V—who, when Henry VIII later sued for her hand, was pertly to reply that if she had two heads, one would be at His Majesty’s disposal—was voicing the kinder view that Anne Boleyn had been “innocently put to death”;
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later still, in
1544, Jean de Luxembourg, Abbot of Ivry, asserted that Henry VIII had “murdered” her.
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Although he had done so when Katherine of Aragon died, Henry VIII did not mark Anne’s death with celebrations and feasting. The royal household accounts for May 19, 1536, show the lowest expenditure for any day that year: £44.12s. (£15,600).
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That was probably because, after hearing the guns signaling that he was a widower, Henry VIII left Whitehall in the morning to join Jane at Chelsea. “The people will certainly be displeased at what has been told me, if it be true,” Chapuys wrote on May 20, “that yesterday, the King, immediately on receiving news of the decapitation of the Concubine, boarded his barge and went to [Mistress] Seymour, whom he has lodged a mile from him in a house by the river.”
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By then Sir Francis Bryan had already brought Jane the news that Anne was dead.

Henry did not, as legends have it, go hunting and wait in Richmond Park or Epping Forest for the Tower cannon to be fired,
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and Chapuys’s report belies the crude assertion made by Cromwell’s servant to Aless that the King was “enjoying himself with another woman” as Anne faced the executioner, although he might well have done so later on, as he spent the day quietly with Jane at Chelsea, and dined with her there in the evening.

Henry had still not appeared in public. John Husee, in his letter of May 19 that detailed the executions to Lord Lisle, stated apologetically that despite having “waited diligently and made all the friendship that I can make,” he could “find no ways to come to the King’s presence. His Grace came not abroad these fourteen days, so that I have been, and yet am, at bay. I trust it be ere long, seeing that these matters of execution are past, to speak with His Grace, and then deliver your [gift of] spurs.” In the end, after all the frustrating delays, Lisle’s request “to have something of what came to his hands by these gentlemen’s deaths” reached the King (as Henry was to explain a week later) “too late, because all things were disposed long since, and there was nothing worth giving Your Lordship.”
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By the time Anne died, preparations were already in train for the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour. In the royal palaces, an army of carpenters, stonemasons, glaziers, and seamstresses were busily removing Anne’s
initials, mottoes, and falcon badge, and replacing them with Jane’s initials and her emblem of a phoenix arising from a flaming castle;
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that this was done in a hurry is evident from the fact that in some places Anne’s devices are still visible underneath; in others they were clearly inaccessible or just overlooked. At Hampton Court, for example, her initials, entwined with Henry’s, can still be seen adorning the vaulted ceiling of Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, and her initials and badges are to be seen in the roof timbers of the great hall and in the Great Watching Chamber, while her falcon badge survives in the rood screen in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. On Henry’s orders, a stained-glass window depicting St. Anne, the fallen Queen’s patron saint, was removed from the chapel royal at Hampton Court.
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Portraits of Anne were probably taken down and hidden away, or destroyed, which would explain why hardly any contemporary likenesses survive.

At Dover Castle the King’s master glazier, Galyon Hone, had just added “the Queen’s badge” to windows in the royal lodgings, for which he was paid £200 (£69,850); more money was wasted when the King had to pay him to replace the badges with those of Jane Seymour, in time for the summer’s royal visit to Dover. Galyon Hone is also known to have replaced Anne’s badges in the windows at Ampthill and Greenwich.
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With stone emblems, Anne’s heraldic device of a leopard was more easily remodeled to look like Jane’s panther “by new making of the heads and tails.”
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When news of Anne’s fate reached Zurich, where Miles Coverdale’s English Bible with its dedication to Henry and his “dearest wife and most virtuous princess, Queen Anne” was being reprinted, Jane’s name was hastily superimposed on the frontispiece.
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Anne’s name, and her image, were being thoroughly erased from view: it was as if she had never existed.

At Hever Castle, her family home, there is a posthumous reminder of her fate: on the stone newel of the spiral staircase leading to the Long Gallery, there is incised the cipher that appears in Henry VIII’s love letters to her, and below it—at some unknown date—someone has carved an axe.

During the night after Anne’s execution, Henry left Whitehall and was rowed upriver to Hampton Court; at six o’clock the following morning, May 20, Jane Seymour was conveyed from Chelsea “secretly by river to
the King’s lodgings” and they were betrothed there at nine o’clock. “The King means it to be kept secret till Whitsuntide,” Chapuys added, “but everybody begins already to murmur by suspicion, and several affirm that, long before the death of the other, there was some arrangement, which sounds ill in the ears of the people.”
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Jane, Agnes Strickland sternly observed, had “given her hand to the regal ruffian before his wife’s corpse was cold. Yes, four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed since the sword was reddened with the blood of her mistress.”

News of the betrothal could not be kept secret for long. “It is presumed that there shall be by midsummer a new coronation,” the perceptive Husee wrote on May 24.
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Six days earlier Chapuys had expressed his doubts about Jane’s virginity. “Perhaps the King will be only too glad to be so far relieved of that difficulty,” he added mischievously. “According to the account of the Concubine, he has neither vigor nor competence, and besides, he may marry her on condition that she is a maid, and when he wants a divorce, there will be plenty of witnesses ready to testify that she was not.”

Although Jane had proved useful to him and his friends, Chapuys was unimpressed by her: “The said Seymour is not a woman of great wit, but she may have good understanding. It is said she inclines to be proud and haughty. She bears great love and reverence to the princess. I know not if honors will make her change hereafter.”
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On the Sunday after Anne’s execution, which was Ascension Day, “the King wore white for mourning.”
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That weekend, he ordered the settlement of an account submitted by Sir William Kingston in respect of expenses incurred in connection with the imprisonment of “the late Queen”: £100 (£34,900) “for [the redeeming of] such jewels and apparel as [she] had in the Tower;” £25.4s.6d (£8,800) for her “diet;” £23.6s.8d (£7,800) “to the executioner of Calais for his reward and apparel;” and £20 (£7,000) for the alms Anne had distributed on the day of her death.
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That came to the princely total of £168.11s.2d (£58,500), which would be paid in August. Some of Anne’s outstanding debts were also settled by the King’s comptroller—the rest would not be paid by Cromwell until February 1538—and moneys owing to her totaling £1,073.6s.8d (£374,850) called in.
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Meanwhile, Cromwell, on May 20, had drawn up a list of “Remembrances,” and made a note to himself “To remember… Sir William Kingston.”
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He also remembered George Constantine, and how
he had been a friend to Norris and sent details of the events in the Tower to John Barlow, once chaplain to the Boleyns. Constantine was briefly arrested, which suggests that Master Secretary was still anxious to control and censor information about Anne’s fall.
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The news of Anne’s execution had spread like wildfire through Europe. In Rome, the Pope, in the false hope that the English Reformation had been halted, suspended the excommunication process against Henry VIII. There was a virtual stampede to find a bride for the eligible royal widower. Charles V, on May 18, before Anne Boleyn’s death, had proposed that “since the case [against Anne] is so manifest, as we suppose, by the divine will, and the King takes it to heart as he ought,” a marriage for Henry VIII with the Infanta of Portugal, “as he is of amorous complexion and always desires to have a male child”;
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while on May 24, the Bishop of Faenza reported that “the Imperialists have offered the King of England the Queen of Hungary for a wife, but it is thought he will not take her as she is in bad health and not fit to bear children.”
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The French were also keen to seize the advantage: Chapuys says that on the day after Anne Boleyn’s execution, their ambassadors offered the King the hand of Madeleine of Valois, a daughter of Francis I. But Henry replied “that she was too young for him, and he had too much experience of French upbringing in the case of the Concubine.”
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Of course, he was entertaining no thoughts of taking another foreign bride, and on May 29, “incontinent after the suffering of Queen Anne,”
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and before people in far-flung parts of the kingdom had even heard of Anne’s death, he married Jane Seymour at Hampton Court.
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It was thought strange by some that “within one and the same month that saw Queen Anne flourishing, accused, condemned and executed,” another was “assumed into her place, both of bed and honor.”
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A courier from England informed the Bishop of Faenza that Henry had “showed the greatest preference for [Jane], even during the life of the other.”
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It is easy to see why people were beginning to take a cynical view. By June 4, Henry VIII had emerged from seclusion and was again presiding over “a great and triumphant court,”
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and on June 5 the Queen’s brother, Sir Edward Seymour, was created Viscount Beauchamp
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and launched on the glittering path to power and, ultimately, tragedy.