The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (62 page)

Serious historians are now fairly united in believing Anne guiltless of the crimes for which she died. John Scarisbrick found it “difficult to believe that she was ever guilty of adultery or incest.” Professor Ives wrote stridently that “to substantiate nymphomania, incest, and quadruple adultery, there is no evidence worth the name,”
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while Anne Somerset has called Anne the victim of “a deadly combination of court intrigue and royal disfavor.”
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Professor Loades is almost certainly correct in saying that she fell “because of the dynamics of court politics, and the fact that her power over the King was based on nothing more durable than sexual chemistry.”
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There are few who have disagreed with this view. Back in 1902, A. F. Pollard felt that there must have been some “colorable justification” for the charges, but Professor Bernard is now virtually alone in suggesting that Anne was quite possibly guilty, yet perhaps not of all the crimes of which she was accused, and not with all the men alleged to have been her lovers. Ives, however, concedes that the case against her must have been plausible enough to convince those ninety-five jurors of her guilt.

In assessing Anne’s character and impact on history, we should ask ourselves how she would be viewed today if she had not perished on the scaffold. Her end was one of the most dramatic and shocking episodes in English history, her last days the best documented period of her life, vividly described in the sources, while that powerful image of her on the
scaffold, courageously facing a horrible death, has overlaid all previous conceptions of her.

Had Anne survived into old age—setting aside all other ramifications of that “what if”—she might now be remembered merely as a ruthless “other woman” who got her man and proved to be a none too popular queen. Had she borne the King no son, and lived to see her daughter succeed—probably in the late 1540s, when Anne herself would have been in her own late forties—something approaching the hagiographic Protestant view of her, as the lauded Elizabeth’s mother, would certainly have prevailed, at least in England. But it is virtually certain that, dying in her bed, she would not have enjoyed the charismatic, romantic posthumous reputation that is hers today.

Conversely, Henry VIII’s reputation has undoubtedly suffered as a result of his treatment of Anne Boleyn, and there is a popular misconception—even among some serious historians—that he had her “murdered,” even though she was executed in accordance with the law as it then stood. Sir Patrick Hastings, the former Attorney General, writing in 1950 about Anne Boleyn’s “appalling trial,” called Henry “one of the most unutterable blackguards who ever sat upon this or any other throne.” Jane Dunn sees him as a “grotesque failure as a husband and father;” Linda Porter calls him “a wife murderer,” and refers to the “obscene charade” of Anne’s fall. Karen Lindsey, in her overimaginative feminist perspective on Henry VIII’s wives, asserts that Henry needed to kill Anne simply because he loathed her.

Eric Ives rightly draws attention to the oft-stated—and simplistic—view that if Anne was innocent, then Henry VIII, Cromwell, and many members of the Tudor establishment “contrived or connived at coldblooded murder.”
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We have to remember that she was executed according to the due process of the law as it then stood. Virtually the whole of the establishment—the King, the Privy Council, the two grand juries, the twenty-six peers who sat in judgment at the trial, and the judges—not forgetting Parliament itself—all played their proper parts, and it may even be that the law was allowed to take its course without undue influence being brought to bear upon it. Certainly care was taken that the case be heard in public, and that some records of it were preserved for posterity to see. Because the depositions are missing, the Crown’s case looks weak and
contrived to modern eyes, but we can be certain there was more to it than the surviving sources reveal. According to Cromwell, some of the evidence was so “abominable” that it did not bear repetition in court, doubtless for the sake of the King’s honor; he may have been exaggerating, but we just do not know. It is this lack of documentation that hampers our understanding of why Anne Boleyn was condemned. Above all, there is no evidence that Henry VIII did not believe in Anne’s guilt, and it is barely credible that he sent six victims unnecessarily to the scaffold merely to satisfy “a lust for superfluous butchery,” as N. Brysson Morrison put it.

David Loades believes that Henry was able to deceive himself into believing the charges, and that in the momentous events of 1536, he demonstrated for the first—and certainly not the last—time that his self-deception was “capable of taking the form of a monstrous and amoral cruelty.”
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Yet if one accepts the case for self-deception, one also has to accept the populist modern view of Henry as Starkey’s “great puppet” who was easily manipulated by clever advisers, a view effectively demolished more than thirty years ago by Lacey Baldwin Smith.
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It is also worth remembering that Henry did not immediately accept at face value what his councillors told him about Anne’s conduct, but insisted that they investigate further.

Yet Professor Loades makes a valid point in response to Henry’s detractors who accuse him simplistically of sending Anne to the scaffold on trumped-up charges merely because she no longer pleased him: had this been the case, why hadn’t he meted out the same punishment to Katherine of Aragon, who defied him and was a constant thorn in his side for nine aggravating years?
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His life would have been far less complicated with Katherine safely dead. Of course, she had powerful relations abroad, while Anne had no one to fight for her. Nevertheless, Katherine could legitimately have been accused of inciting the King’s subjects to rebellion, or her nephew—the Emperor—to make war on him, and charges of high treason could easily have been made to stick. No one could have complained about that, given that Katherine was betraying the man whom she staunchly insisted was her husband and her sovereign lord. This argues that Henry VIII did not lightly stoop to subverting the law to follow his own desires, and also that whatever evidence about Anne was laid before him, it must have been convincing.

Modern historians tend to view Cromwell’s role in Anne’s fall as
“hideously corrupt,” as Hester Chapman has noted, yet she makes the point that he was operating in a period when justice yielded to expediency, and, as the principal Secretary of State, saw his duty as cutting away “a malignant growth from the body politic.” Taking this line of argument to its logical conclusion, those cooperating in Anne’s destruction acted as loyal subjects, putting the needs of the kingdom first.

Helen Miller has said that if the King believed the charges against Anne, few others did. Yet, as has been demonstrated, the evidence shows that many at the time unquestioningly believed them. Had Elizabeth never succeeded to the throne, people might have continued to do so, and it might have been left to modern scholarship to rehabilitate Anne’s reputation.

Notwithstanding all this, it is almost certain that there was a grievous miscarriage of justice. The circumstances of Anne’s fall strongly suggest that she was framed; even her enemy Chapuys thought so. Nowadays, many historians would agree with David Loades that she was “the victim of a political coup of great skill and ruthlessness,” which also destroyed her faction.
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Henry VIII virtually admitted as much when he told Jane Seymour that Anne had died “in consequence of meddling too much in state affairs.”
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In assessing the surviving evidence for and against her guilt, the truth becomes staggeringly clear. Against Anne, we have merely her own account of compromising conversations and familiarity with Norris, Weston, and Smeaton; reports of adverse testimony against her, with barely any details; and that odd remark—“It is too good for me”—about being lodged in the Queen’s apartments, rather than in a dungeon, made when she was in great distress.

In her favor, there are a multitude of compelling factors: the fact that she was involved in a life-or-death power struggle with Cromwell; his admission to Chapuys that he “thought up and plotted” her fall; the incongruity of the charges, particularly that of plotting the King’s death; the alteration of the dates in the Kent indictment; the discrepancies and illogicalities in both indictments; the striking absence of any evidence of Anne indulging in extramarital affairs during the three years of her queenship, and of any real proofs of infidelity; the fact that no female attendants (without whose cooperation Anne could not have contrived any illicit meetings with her “lovers”) were arrested with her; the fact that
four of her coaccused were convicted first, thus prejudicing her own trial; that crucial documents are missing from the case records in the
Baga de Secretis;
the superficial nature of the surviving evidence; the disbanding of Anne’s household and the summoning of the executioner before her condemnation; the King telling Jane Seymour in advance that Anne would be condemned; Anne and others voicing the suspicion that there was some other reason for her fall than the crimes of which she was accused; her repeated denials of her guilt, and—above all—her last confession, in which, both before and after receiving the Holy Sacrament, she maintained her innocence.

In weighing up the evidence for and against her, the historian cannot but conclude that Anne Boleyn was the victim of a dreadful miscarriage of justice: and not only Anne and the men accused with her, but also the King himself, the Boleyn faction, and—saddest of all—Elizabeth, who was to bear the scars of it all her life. In the absence of any real proof of Anne’s guilt, and with her conviction only on suspicious evidence, there must be a very strong presumption that she went to her death an innocent woman.

Norfolk legend claimed that Anne Boleyn’s body was removed from the Tower at some stage and reburied near her ancestors beneath a plain black marble tombstone in Salle Church near Blickling Hall, where she was born.
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That was debunked, however, when the stone was lifted a few years ago and no remains were found beneath it. Early nineteenth-century tradition had it that a much smaller black slab in the ancient churchyard of the parish church at Horndon-on-the-Hill in Essex marked the place where her heart or her head had been buried, or that this was where her corpse rested overnight on its way to Salle.
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A similar legend is connected with an altar tomb in the churchyard of the disused Tudor church at East Horndon, Essex.
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There are other legends that Anne’s heart was stolen and hidden in a church near Thetford, Norfolk,
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or at Erwarton Church in Suffolk, where a heart-shaped tin casket was discovered in the chancel wall in 1836 or 1837, and reburied under the organ, beneath the Cornwallis memorial slab; even today, there is a notice in the church stating that it is on record that Anne’s heart was buried in there by her uncle, Sir Philip Parker of
Erwarton Hall. This is all highly unlikely, since heart burial had gone out of fashion in England by the end of the fourteenth century, while the uncle in question was in fact Sir Philip Calthorpe of Erwarton, who was married to Anne’s aunt, Amata (or Amy) Boleyn, and died in 1549. Nevertheless, the legend is commemorated in the name of the local inn, the Queen’s Head.

George Abbott, the Yeoman Warder who has written many books on the Tower of London, but does not in this instance quote his source, states that the vault in St. Peter ad Vincula, in which Anne had indisputably been buried, was opened, and its contents viewed, in the reign of her daughter Elizabeth I. However, there was no vault, because the executed persons who were laid to rest before the altar were all buried in the earth beneath the chancel pavement, as later excavations would prove. Thus the anonymous Tudor observer could not have described what he saw, only what he was told, probably by Tower officials. But since the burials had all taken place within living memory, the information he recorded is likely to have been fairly accurate: “The coffin of the Duke of Northumberland [executed for treason in 1554] rests besides that of the Duke of Somerset [executed 1552], between the coffins of the queens, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard, and next unto these last is the coffin of Lady Jane Grey [executed 1554]. Then comes the coffins of Thomas Seymour, Lord of Sudeley [executed 1549], and of the Lady Rochford; and lastly that of George Boleyn, that was brother to Queen Anne—all beheaded.”
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This suggests that Anne and her brother were buried at opposite ends of the vault, and that Lady Rochford was interred beside her husband. In the same period, the chronicler John Stow famously recorded, “There lieth before the high altar in St. Peter’s Church two dukes between two queens.”

In 1876, Queen Victoria approved the restoration of the dilapidated royal chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula in the Tower, but only on condition that any disturbed remains be treated with the utmost reverence and that a careful record should be kept of any evidence that might aid identification. Before work began, it was noted that there was no memorial to mark the place where Anne Boleyn was buried.
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In November of that year, excavations beneath the sunken altar pavement commenced, revealing the remains of most of the executed persons,
some apparently still in the places they occupied three centuries earlier. The excavation committee did not know for certain where the bodies of the Tudor victims had actually been interred. One of its six members, Doyne Bell, drew up a plan “showing the relative positions in which it was believed that these persons had originally been buried.” He did this “after consulting various historical authorities,” although he did not specify which ones. In fact, apart from Stow, there was no other reliable source he could have consulted, aside from the Elizabethan observer, and Bell’s plan
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shows that he did not see that. Hence it was highly speculative, and inaccurate.