1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII (10 page)

Two days later, Rochford, Norris, Brereton, Weston and Smeaton were all executed (the sentence was transmuted to beheading) on Tower Hill. The same day, Anne’s marriage to Henry was annulled, probably on account of Henry’s previous relationship with Anne’s sister. Elizabeth was declared a bastard. That this annulment made something of a mockery of the charges of adultery does not seem to have been considered at the time. On 19 May, Anne herself was brought out to die. The day before her execution she had told Kingston that she had ‘heard say that the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck’, and putting her hands around it, had laughed heartily. Seeing this, Kingston remarked in his letter to Cromwell that ‘this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death’. Anne came to the scaffold with her four attendants, delivered her simple speech of humility and forgiveness, exchanged her ermine mantle and hood for a linen cap, one of her ladies bandaged her eyes, and the French executioner did his office. Wyatt, who sat in the Bell Tower as the executions took place, wrote the following lines:

…These bloody days have broken my heart.
My lust, my youth did them depart,
And blind desire of estate.
Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.
Of truth,
circa Regna tonat.

The bell tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I learn out of a grate,
For all favour, glory, or might,
That yet
circa Regna tonat.

By proof, I say, there did I learn:
Wit helpeth not defence too yerne,
Of innocency to plead or prate.
Bear low, therefore, give God the stern,
For sure,
circa Regna tonat.
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Was Anne Guilty?

So, was Anne guilty? This was the view promulgated at the time; it emerges in contemporary comment and has had a recent champion. The official line emerges in Cromwell’s letter to Bishop Gardiner, who was on a diplomatic mission to France, on 14 May: ‘the Queen’s incontinent living was so rank and common that the ladies of her privy chamber could not conceal it’. John Hussey, Lord Lisle’s London agent, wrote to Lady Lisle on 13 May, ‘if all the books and chronicles were totally revolted, and to the uttermost persecuted and tried, which against women hath been penned… since Adam and Eve, those same were, I think, verily nothing in comparison of that which hath been done and committed by Anne the Queen’. Soon after Henry VIII’s death, his first biographer, William Thomas, said that Anne’s ‘liberal life were too shameful to rehearse’. Others found it hard to believe. Archbishop Cranmer wrote to Henry VIII on 3 May in an attempt to curb the damage that Anne’s sudden and apparent disgrace might have on the evangelical cause, a letter that has been described as ‘a model of pastoral wisdom and courage’. In it Cranmer wrote:

I am in such a perplexity, that my mind is clearly amazed; for I never had better opinion in woman, than I had in her; which maketh me to think, that she should not be culpable. And again, I think your Highness would not have gone so far, except she had surely been culpable.

His bewilderment and incredulity are palpable. In the end, despite being acquainted with the accusations against her, Cranmer could still not believe her guilt. In the early hours of the morning on the day of her execution, Alexander Alesius found Cranmer walking in the gardens at Lambeth Palace. Cranmer could only manage to say to him, ‘Do not you know what is to happen today? … She who has been the Queen of England upon earth will today become a Queen in heaven’, before bursting into tears.
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There are, in fact, several pieces of evidence that speak strongly of Anne’s innocence. The chronicler Wriothesley claimed that as Anne entered the Tower, she ‘fell down on her knees… beseeching God to help her as she was not guilty of her accusement’. The first letter sent by Kingston upon Anne’s committal to the Tower reported their first audience and Anne’s request for the sacrament in a closet by her chamber, for, she ardently declared, ‘I am as clear from the company of man, as for sin… as I am clear from you, and the king’s true wedded wife’. Anne reiterated this a few days later. She comforted herself that she would have justice, for ‘she said if any man accuse me I can say but nay, & they can bring no witness’. The night before her execution, she also swore ‘on peril of her soul’s damnation’, both before and after receiving the body and blood of Christ, that she was innocent. The significance of this in an age when few doubted the realities of heaven and hell, especially for one who had been a zealous evangelical reformer, is paramount. In addition, she was not the only one professing her innocence. As Sir Edward Baynton put it, ‘no man will confess any thing against her, but only Mark [Smeaton] of any actual thing’. While neither Anne nor her co-accused used their scaffold speeches to declare their innocence, as we would perhaps today, on the scaffold it was conventional piety, Eric Ives has argued, for all, as sinners, to express that they deserved to die, to ask forgiveness, and to commend the judicial system that condemned them. Anne demonstrates this precisely in her speech when she said, ‘by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it’, asked God to have mercy on her soul and commended the goodness and gentleness of the king, but her additional comment, ‘and as for mine offences, I here accuse no man’, suggests there may have been someone to accuse. Finally, even now, three-quarters of the accusations of adulterous liaisons on specific days in specific places made against Anne in her trial can be discredited.
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Yet, she was arrested, found guilty and executed. Why? I would argue that the fifth possible scenario (see page 75) describes what actually happened – that neither Henry nor Cromwell malevolently condemned Anne for their own ends, but that Anne’s apparent guilt, despite her actual innocence, convinced Henry that she deserved to die.

Let us return to Henry. In all the writing about Anne’s fall, Henry’s behaviour has never been adequately explained. Eric Ives is the most upfront about this, arguing that ‘all discussion of the fall of Anne Boleyn ends in the ultimate unresolvable paradox of Tudor history: Henry VIII’s psychology’. We have seen that Henry pushed and pursued the investigation up until the time of his interview with Norris but, persuaded of Anne’s guilt, he then changed his behaviour dramatically. Firstly, he became ‘morbidly concerned’ about the execution plans, including the making of the scaffolds and the ordering of the French executioner from Calais, who used a sword and could behead a person while they knelt. The executioner charged a large fee of £23 6s 8d for his work. Henry wanted to ensure Anne was removed quickly and cleanly and it seems that he channelled his vengeance into practical arrangements for her death. Secondly, he displayed his sense of betrayal in an exaggerated, tragicomedic manner. The evening of the day Anne was taken to the Tower, his (illegitimate) teenage son Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Richmond, came to say goodnight to his father and Henry wept over him, saying that he and the princess Mary ‘were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them’. While Anne was in the Tower, Henry was heard saying that he believed that ‘upwards of 100 gentlemen’ had known her carnally. He also composed a tragedy, that he wrote out in a little book, carried with him and offered for people to read, and, on Ascension Day, he ostentatiously wore white for mourning. This behaviour displays Henry’s enormous capacity for hyperbolic self-pity and how quickly his view of Anne had polarized. Finally, he went out of his way to celebrate and step up his relationship with Jane Seymour in a way that seemed flagrant and scandalous to observers. He was reported as ‘going about banqueting with ladies, sometimes remaining after midnight and returning by river’. He lodged Jane within a mile of his palace and provided cooks and officers of the royal household to serve her. On 18 May, Chapuys wrote, ‘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 whore’ and further ‘you never saw a prince or husband show or wear his (cuckold’s) horns more patiently and lightly than this one does’. Waiting the two and a half weeks between Anne’s arrest and execution apparently grated on Henry: ‘I think the King feels the time long that it is not done already’. As soon as Anne was dead, Cranmer, at the king’s behest, issued a dispensation for Jane and Henry to marry and they were betrothed on 20 May just one day after Anne’s execution and married ten days later. Why such a rush? Charles V’s simple statement that ‘the king is of an amorous complexion’ (or its various reiterations since) will not do as an explanation.
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Two contemporary comments provide a clue. Cranmer, in his letter to the king concerning his disbelief at Anne’s guilt, wrote that he could not ‘deny but your grace hath great causes… of lamentable heaviness; and also, that… your grace’s honour of every part is so highly touched’, before rushing on to undo these words by disingenuously assuring Henry, ‘if the reports of the Queen be true, they are only to her dishonour, not yours’. A similar sentiment was expressed by a European observer, the reformer Philipp Melancthon, when he wrote, ‘see how dreadfully this calamity will dishonour the King’. Honour, as we have seen, was chiefly a measure of one’s ability to conform to the ideals demanded of one’s gender. For a man, it meant exerting masculinity, imposing patriarchy, controlling the women in one’s household, maintaining a good reputation and demonstrating physical and sexual prowess. Chiefly, it meant controlling the morality of the women under his care and, specifically, their sexual morality. That Henry had been unable to do this denoted two things: it was evidence of Henry’s inability as a man and as a monarch. Contemporary thought made a clear link between a man’s sexual potency and his wife’s fidelity – men who were cuckolded were those whose ‘lack of sexual dominance led their wives to adultery’. ‘To be a man’, writes Lyndal Roper, ‘was to have the power to take a woman.’ Anne’s very behaviour, if assumed to be true, testified to the king’s lack of manliness, and as if this weren’t enough, Anne and Rochford’s ridicule of the king on this very matter drove the point home. It was not something that went unnoticed in the kingdom. Sir Nicholas Porter, the parson of Freshwater, was reported to have said in 1538, ‘Lo, while the King and his Council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made cuckold at home.’ There was also a strong connection in the popular mind between impotency and old age – the image of ‘Old Adam’ whose feeble old body could not satisfy his vigorous young wife was a constant refrain in the ballads found in contemporary broadsides. There were huge repercussions if such a failure were found in a king. Early modern thinking linked the governance of a house with the governance of a realm; as John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote in 1612, ‘it is impossible for a man to understand how to govern the commonwealth, that doth not know how to rule his own house’. Any woman’s adultery, but especially that of a queen, upset the social order and gender hierarchy upon which society was based. Cranmer was right the first time – Henry’s honour was ‘highly touched’ by Anne’s apparent adultery. This also explains why Henry felt the need to cavort himself with ladies and increase the pace of his relationship with Jane Seymour, marrying her so quickly. It wasn’t just, as Alesius later hypothesized, that he was ‘openly insulting’ Anne: in the light of Anne’s devastating assault on his masculinity, Henry did it to restore the patriarchal order and to prove his manhood.
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C
HAPTER
8

A Dearth of Heirs

T
here was a final sub-plot in the events touching Henry VIII’s honour in 1536. It is well known that Henry had long sought a legitimate male son and heir. Mary was the only surviving child of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, who had otherwise suffered five miscarriages, still-births and cot deaths, including the death of a celebrated prince named after his father, who lived for less than eight weeks in 1511. Anne Boleyn had promised him sons – and it had been prophesied that she would have them – but she too had borne him a daughter and miscarried of a son.

Henry did, of course, already have a son. But he was illegitimate. Born to Henry’s mistress Elizabeth Blount in June 1519, the boy was named Henry Fitzroy, a name that announced his parentage. He was openly acknowledged by Henry; Thomas Wolsey was even godfather at his christening. In 1525, the boy, aged six, had been ennobled, and made first, Earl of Nottingham and then Duke of Richmond and Somerset. There were only two other dukes in England at this time, and Richmond’s double dukedom made him the highest-ranking peer in the country. His additional Somerset title particularly suggested that Henry VIII was smoothing the path towards legitimating his son, as John Beaufort, a royal bastard who had been legitimated in the late fourteenth century, had been the Earl of Somerset. Being illegitimate did not mean that he lived remote and apart from the king. His recent biographer, Beverley A. Murphy, has argued that a letter from the royal nurse implies Richmond was part of the royal nursery, and he was often at court after 1530. Observers commented on the closeness of the father-son relationship. In 1530, the French ambassador, John Joachim, Seigneur de Vaux, remarked on Richmond’s good looks and the fondness of the king for his son, ‘a most handsome, urbane and learned young gentleman, very dear to the King on account of his figure, discretion and good manners… he is certainly a wonderful lad for his age’. Arrangements continued to be those appropriate to a king’s son: an early marriage was arranged for Richmond with the daughter of the one of the highest-ranking peers, the Duke of Norfolk (uncle to Anne Boleyn). In 1532, Henry presented Richmond to the king of France. Richmond was also deployed on occasion to represent the king, playing host at a feast in November 1534 in honour of a visiting French admiral and attending, in the king’s place, the execution of three Carthusian monks who had refused to swear the oath accepting the king’s royal supremacy and marriage to Anne Boleyn in May 1535. Richmond’s resemblance to the king – he had the same red hair – helped remind onlookers of his line of descent. The Venetian ambassador commented in 1531 on Richmond ‘so much does he resemble his father’.
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