Tudor (30 page)

23

LOVE AND DEATH

A
NNE WAS SENTENCED TO DEATH IN THE
K
ING'S
H
ALL AT THE
Tower, right next to the rooms where she was imprisoned. As the gruesome details were read out one of the judges, her former beau, the Earl of Northumberland, collapsed. With 2,000 witnesses looking on from the newly built stands, he was helped from the room. The king, meanwhile, was at court, and in a merry mood. The Imperial ambassador thought no man had ever been so content to advertise he was a cuckold, or to show so little sign he minded. When Henry claimed he had heard Anne had slept with over a hundred men it sounded like a boast.

On 17 May the men accused of being Anne's lovers were processed to their executions on Tower Hill. An anonymous verse later circulated at court remembered each of them: Norris the flirt, George Boleyn with his wit and pride, Weston, ‘that pleasant was and young', Brereton, loved by his friends, and Mark Smeaton who had enjoyed the high life, and whose confession destroyed them all, ‘thy death thou hast deserved best', it concluded damningly.
¹
The same day they died Archbishop Cranmer annulled Anne's marriage to Henry on the grounds of his previous relationship with her sister. Since Henry was soon to be a widower, the decree's principal purpose was to bastardise their daughter, Elizabeth.

The two-and-a-half-year-old princess, described by her governess
‘as toward a child and gentle of conditions as any I have known in my life', had not lost her father's affection, despite what her reduction in status suggests.
²
It is true that by late summer she was beginning to grow out of her clothes and her governess had to remind Cromwell that she needed new ones. But this reflected only the absence of her mother's attention. Elizabeth was still dining in state every day, something her governess begged to be stopped as it meant she could not prevent the toddler from helping herself to wine, or whatever food she wished.
³
Elizabeth was not capable of doing anything personally to anger Henry; he had decided simply to re-acknowledge that his daughter Mary – whose mother had been royal and loyal – was the elder sister. As Chapuys observed it would have been far simpler for Henry to have it decreed that Elizabeth was Norris' child than to have his marriage to Anne anulled.
⁴
The fact he did not do this implies a strong conviction that Elizabeth was his. It also suggests he did not really believe Anne was the nymphomaniac he claimed – what Anne was guilty of was seducing him into a cursed union.
⁵

When his sexual inadequacies were paraded during the trials Henry could console himself that it was only proper that he was unable to copulate in a damned marriage. Cranmer reassured him that Anne's adulteries were indeed ‘only to her dishonour not yours'. Nevertheless Henry felt it necessary to advertise his masculine vigour by staying out all hours, banqueting with beautiful girls, seemingly full of ‘extravagant joy'.
⁶
In private he comforted himself in a different way, taking a close interest in the details of his wife's coming death. In Thomas Malory's
Le Morte d'Arthur
, King Arthur had sentenced his adulterous Queen Guinevere to death by burning, although it was never carried out. Henry decided Anne would be beheaded with a sword. It was the preferred method of execution for the nobility in France where Anne had spent so many happy years in her girlhood, and this has given rise to the myth that Anne requested it. But there is no evidence for that. The choice of a sword – the symbol of Camelot, of a rightful king, and of masculinity – was Henry's alone. He also pored over the
plans for the scaffold. Taking control of the minutiae of how his wife was disposed of helped Henry to convince himself that he was empowered rather than diminished by her fall.

On the morning of 19 May Anne walked to the scaffold Henry had designed for her within the walls of the Tower. Ever elegant, she was dressed in grey damask. The poet Thomas Wyatt, who had been amongst her admirers, looked down from his prison window in the Bell Tower to seek out her procession. Wyatt's literary predecessor, Geoffrey Chaucer, had described in ‘The Knight's Tale' a hero spotting a beautiful maiden from a tower window, on a morning just such as this. Although it was not possible for Wyatt to see Anne, he could see men coming and going as preparations were made for what was to follow. He could imagine the rest. ‘The Bell Tower showed me such sight/That in my head sticks day and night', he wrote, ‘
circa regna tonat
[around the throne the thunder rolls]'.
⁷

The rituals of Anne's beheading followed a strict cultural code. Prisoners were expected to give a last speech in which they would pronounce themselves judged guilty by the laws of the land and so content to die, as prescribed by the law. If they were innocent they knew that God was punishing them for something, and did not doubt they deserved death. Their speeches concluded with a request for forgiveness and the hope their sovereign would reign long and happily. Anne's followed these conventions. Of Henry she said, ‘a more merciful nor more gentle prince was there never, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign Lord'. There was no insistence that she was innocent. She hoped her killing would be quick and clean, and had joked earlier that she had ‘but a little neck'. Carefully, she tucked her skirts in around her feet so that she would keep her modesty when her body fell. Then she turned her head, uncertain when the blow would come. When it did her head was struck off with one stroke, her famous black eyes and lips still moving as her head landed in the straw. She was buried that same day in the Tower church of St Peter ad Vincula.

Archbishop Cranmer had already issued a dispensation to free Henry to marry Jane Seymour, his fifth cousin.
⁸
Henry still needed a male heir – and to prove his virility. On 30 May 1536, eleven days after Anne died, his third wedding took place with his niece, Margaret Douglas, carrying Jane Seymour's train. Margaret had shared in the trauma of pre-trial interrogations with Anne's other ladies. Wyatt wrote of being made an ‘instrument/to frame others' and they copied his words into the book of verses they collected: ‘I was made a filing instrument/To frame others, while I was beguiled/But reason hath at my folly smiled/ And pardoned me.' Yet the terrors of the summer were far from over.

That Henry had no intention of legitimising Mary, as many assumed he would on Anne's death, became clear on 22 June. Only five weeks after Anne's execution, Mary was threatened with her death and that of several named friends, until she accepted the royal supremacy and her illegitimacy. The Imperial ambassador advised Mary to sign the articles without reading them and so make the intolerable, bearable. The twenty-year-old princess hated it, but she bowed to the threats. She was learning to be a survivor and she composed an abject letter designed carefully to win back her father's favour: ‘Here', she wrote, ‘is my poor heart which I send unto your highness to remain in your hand, to be for ever used, directed and framed . . . at your only pleasure.'
⁹

With Mary and Elizabeth now illegitimate, James V of Scots became Henry's heir under the usual rules of primogeniture and Margaret Douglas followed her half-brother in line of succession.
¹⁰
It was, however, possible – even probable – that if Margaret were married to an English nobleman her claim would be preferred in England over that of the Scottish James. Significantly, Henry was having it written into a new Act of Succession that if he died without legitimate children, he could appoint his heirs so James V could be excluded, if Henry wished it. Astonishingly on 4 July, when the new Act was ready, it emerged that Henry had chosen not to name an heir. The Act explained
that he feared ‘such person that should be so named, might happen to take great heart and courage, and by presumption fall into inobedience and rebellion'. It further stated that anyone who attempted to stake their own claim in preference to any heir he might appoint in the future, would not only be guilty of treason, their heirs would also forfeit any right to the throne. This reflected Henry's extreme anxiety that he would not be able to pull off what he was now considering, which was to appoint his illegitimate children over the legitimate royal heirs born to his sisters.

Foreign ambassadors had picked up rumours that Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond would be the leading beneficiary of Henry's will. Fitzroy's name had been raised in council at the beginning of June when it was argued that of the king's three illegitimate children he was, at least, a boy.
¹¹
But Fitzroy was terminally ill with ‘a rapid consumption'. This left the way clear for Mary, whose submission – and carefully composed letters to her father – led, seemingly, to her rehabilitation.
¹²
On 6 July, Henry and Jane Seymour visited the princess and gave her 1,000 crowns ‘for her little pleasures', as well as a diamond.
¹³
Henry also promised that she would soon be restored to a full household and be received at court. Nothing further would be done until he felt she had proved her loyalty; however, Henry still hoped for a son.

Two days later Henry learned of Margaret Douglas' betrothal. His daughters, illegitimate and unmarried, would make weak claimants: far weaker than the legitimate Margaret Douglas if she married into the powerful Howard family. Even if Henry had a son, the boy would be vulnerable until he reached adulthood. Henry ordered the couple arrested and taken to the Tower. The twenty-five-year-old Thomas Howard admitted to his interrogators that he had been in love with Margaret Douglas for a year; that they had been betrothed at Easter and that he considered Margaret to be his ‘sweet wife'.
¹⁴
She described the gifts she had given him. In their youthful naivety they hoped that when the king's anger had abated their promise of marriage would be
recognised. After all, they had not committed any crime under prevailing law. In the Tower, Thomas Howard composed romantic verses describing the pain of seeing ‘her daily whom I love best in great and intolerable sorrows'. Margaret, in turn, celebrated having ‘the faithfullest lover that ever was born' and kept a couple of Thomas Howard's servants to wait on her, as a mark of her good faith.
¹⁵
But they were about to discover just how angry and fearful Henry was.

On 18 July an Act of Attainder proclaimed it was ‘vehemently suspected and presumed' (i.e. there was no proof) that Thomas Howard, having been ‘led and seduced by the devil' had ‘contemptuously and traitorously contracted himself by crafty, fair and flattering words to and with the Lady Margaret Douglas'. His object, it was decreed, was to usurp the throne, trusting people would prefer the English-born Margaret to her half-brother, the King of Scots, ‘to whom this Realm has, nor ever had, any affection'.
¹⁶
The attainder sped through Parliament and created the law for which Thomas Howard was to be convicted. Marrying into royal blood, or for those of royal blood to marry without the king's consent, was now treason. On 23 July Chapuys reported that Thomas Howard had been condemned to death and that the twenty-year-old Margaret Douglas was spared only because the marriage had not been consummated.
¹⁷
There was, in fact, a further reason. The annulment of the marriage of Margaret's parents had left her legitimacy intact. The attainder nevertheless referred on several occasions to Margaret Douglas as being her mother's ‘natural [i.e. bastard] daughter'. This was a clear attempt to demote her in the succession, and ensure Henry's children had the superior claim.
¹⁸
Henry's sensitivity on the issue was the more acute because Henry Fitzroy had just died. Anxious to downplay the significance of this Henry had ordered Norfolk – Fitzroy's father-in-law – to take the body out of London in a closed cart and bury his beloved son without any public ceremony.

Margaret's father, Angus, who was living in England on a pension from the king, could or would do nothing to help her. But in August
her mother, the dowager Queen of Scots, wrote to Henry crossly observing that she believed her daughter's betrothal had taken place ‘by your grace's advice'.
¹⁹
Queen Margaret could not understand why, therefore, Henry should mind if she ‘should desire or promise such'. If he was angry with her daughter he should, she suggested, return the girl to Scotland forthwith. Instead, Henry sent Cromwell to Margaret Douglas to offer her advice. Margaret believed Cromwell was responsible for the king's decision not to have her condemned and so she paid close attention to what he had to say. After their meeting she agreed to send away Thomas Howard's servants and promised she would ensure that no one thought ‘that any fancy remains in me touching him'.
²⁰
In November, when Margaret fell ill in the Tower, Henry was sufficiently mollified to permit her to be released into the care of the nuns at nearby Syon Abbey.
²¹
The following month he also allowed parcels to be sent of ‘deep crimson silk', ‘fringe of silver' and ‘crimson velvet' to upholster a suitable chair for her. Henry promised Queen Margaret that her daughter would continue to be well treated provided she remain ‘convenient'.
²²
But she remained under arrest as Henry now faced a major political crisis provoked by the succession issues, and his associated religious policies.

Promoting the jurisdiction of the Pope had been made an offence and informers were being encouraged to report anyone suspected of it. People were expected to accept that they would do as well to pray to Christ as to any saint. Purgatory had ceased to exist by name and praying for the dead was endorsed, less as a means of helping souls pay for their sins and go to heaven and more as a matter of ‘custom'. When Owen Tudor's son, Sir David Owen, had died the previous year, he had left money to be lavished on Masses to be said for his soul, those of his parents, for his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor, and for his nephew, Henry VII. Already this was largely wasted, as were his other bequests to the church at the priory of Easebourne where he was buried: gold and silver gilt crucifixes, silver bells and
candlesticks, fine chalices and Mass books in parchment, paper and vellum, rich fabrics of green damask with red roses, swallows and wolves for altar hangings and vestments. The priory was dissolved, granted in July 1536 to the Treasurer of the Royal Household, Sir William Fitzwilliam.
²³