By the end of April 1536, Anne knew she was living on borrowed time.
She had declared war on the most powerful people in the country and started to suspect that her risky strategy of fighting fire with fire had only served to ignite the powder keg on which she was precariously balanced. We know this gut-wrenching moment of realisation hit Anne in that last week of April because on the 26th she called her chaplain Matthew Parker for an emergency private meeting. Twenty-three years later Parker would reveal in a letter that Anne had heartbreakingly asked him to watch over Elizabeth, stating, ‘not forgetting what words [Elizabeth’s] mother said to me of her, not six days before her apprehension’. He further admitted in 1572, ‘Yea, if I had not been so much bound to the mother, I would not so soon have granted to serve the daughter in this place.’489 This referred to his later appointment as Elizabeth I’s archbishop of Canterbury.
The fact that Anne felt desperate enough to put care into place for her daughter’s spiritual well-being meant she had serious concerns she would not be there to see her grow up. Whether she imagined this would be due to her death, or a separation similar to that experienced by Katherine and Mary, we can’t know for sure. But it proves Anne was aware in those final weeks of just how dirty Cromwell was willing to play, and how dangerous a man he was to challenge.
After all, she had been up against the anti-reformist faction at court for ten years now, but this was the first time that Master Cromwell was working against her. Anne must have been aware of what he was capable of for her to suddenly feel this afraid. As her paranoia built day by day, she knew something was coming; she just didn’t know what or when.
Ironically, Cromwell was also working from a place of fear in Anne’s final month. He wasn’t plotting to kill her because she was evil or cruel, but because he was scared of her. He had come to the realisation that not only was she actively pushing for political policies that were in direct opposition to his own but she also had the power and intention to overrule his authority. You see, at this point in his career, Cromwell was not yet at the height of his political reign. That all-conquering dominance history knows him for would only come with the removal of this powerful queen and the key members of her faction. In fact, Ives calls him ‘second division’ in comparison to the personal favour and private influence enjoyed by men like Henry Norris and George Boleyn.490 You can almost see it coming.
It’s clear Cromwell felt restrained by his lack of control when only months before, the king warned him he was exceeding his authority. Of course, when we learn that Cromwell took over Thomas Boleyn’s prestigious role of Lord Privy Seal following the murder of two of his children and the Boleyn family’s fall from grace, we can see how his plans for dominance fell seamlessly into place.491
So how does a man with limited power get the queen of England sentenced to death?
Despite Henry and Anne’s catastrophic falling-out over her miscarriage and the Jane Seymour affair, and despite Anne following this up by publicly challenging her husband’s questionable work on the dissolution act, surprisingly Henry wasn’t the one who wanted Anne dead and gone in those early months of 1536.
No, Henry realised Anne was much more useful to him as a political bargaining tool. We know this because the king was still pushing for Europe to recognise his marriage to her as late as one month before her arrest. Not, you might note, the actions of a man preparing to dispose of his wife.
So, in March 1536, just around the time of the ill-fated Poor Law, a real war was rumbling once more in the on-again/off-again romance between Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France. What were they fighting over this time? Italy. Well, Milan to be precise, and both rulers wanted England on their side; so this meant, quite unbelievably, that Charles V was open to an alliance with Henry VIII.492
As in the Holy Roman Emperor. As in Katherine’s nephew. As in are you serious? After everything that had happened? But remember, Charles’s aunt was now gone, and family loyalty is important and all, but, you know: war!
However, a reconciliation with the Holy Roman Empire came with a clause. In order to bury the hatchet, not only did Charles V want military support, he also wanted his cousin Princess Mary back in the line of succession to the English throne. In turn, he was offering imperial support for Henry’s marriage to Anne.493
Really!? A seven-year battle, then all to be forgiven over a potential war? Yes, apparently, because Henry was evidently open to a reconciliation. Sure, Charles had helped ruin his life but, guys, war!? We know this because Henry offered his daughter Elizabeth for an imperial marriage in late 1535, when negotiations had recently begun. However, his offer didn’t get much of a response, which probably set a few alarm bells ringing for Henry.494
Of course, it can’t have escaped Cromwell’s notice that if it was Elizabeth who was the bastard child and not Mary, it would help immensely with this imperial alliance they were now pursuing.
Nevertheless, he kept negotiations going with Spanish ambassador Eustace Chapuys, the two having had so many discussions that the latter noted in June 1535:
Cromwell said lately to me that were the Lady [Anne Boleyn] to know on what familiar terms he and I are, she would surely try to cause us both some trouble, and that only three days ago they spoke angrily together, the Lady telling him, among other things, that she would like to see his head off his shoulders. ‘But,’ added Cromwell, ‘I have so much confidence in my master, that I fancy she cannot do me any harm.’
Even Chapuys was sceptical of this apparent threat from Anne, as he voices in the very next line of his letter – a statement that is conveniently omitted from historical biographies at large: ‘I cannot tell whether this is an invention of Cromwell, in order to raise the value of what he has to offer.’ This is when he concludes, ‘All I can say is that everyone here considers him Anne’s right hand [man], as I myself told him some time ago.’495
Considering that at this stage Anne had no reason to suspect foul play by Cromwell – and there being no evidence to suggest a falling-out in early 1535 to cause her to wish Cromwell dead – I feel we cannot take this as evidence that his subsequent plotting of her murder, a full year later, was an elaborate act of self-defence in retaliation for this mysterious argument. So, rationally, we may have to agree with Chapuys, that this was just a tactic from Cromwell to win over the Spanish; although it’s very interesting to note that by April the following year, Chapuys was repeating this suspiciously false statement as fact in his letters to Charles V, conveniently forgetting his own earlier scepticism in order to paint Anne as the evil monster, saying, ‘[Cromwell] had previously told me [Anne] would like to see his head cut off. This I could not forget for the love I bore him.’496
Well, Cromwell’s words certainly appeared to have done the trick. On 19 April 1536, exactly one month before Anne’s execution, the king met with Chapuys at Greenwich to discuss this long-awaited potential reconciliation with Charles V. George Boleyn greeted Chapuys and invited him to meet Anne and kiss her hand. Not such an unreasonable request, if this new alliance meant complete acceptance of Henry’s marriage to Anne. However, Chapuys declined.497
Ah. More alarm bells.
Chapuys was then taken to Mass and positioned by a doorway so that Anne would pass him as she entered. It’s at this point the story gets twisted due to a mistranslation in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII,498 meaning that for centuries historians have told us Anne stopped and curtseyed to Chapuys499 – a bizarre notion in the first place that a queen would curtsey to an ambassador – but the idea Anne was imagined to have had was that owing to courtly etiquette, and all eyes being on Chapuys, he would be forced to reluctantly return her polite gesture with a bow, hence forcing him to finally acknowledge her as queen of England, something he had steadfastly avoided doing for the past three years out of loyalty to Katherine. In fact, he and Anne had never met in all his years at court. But despite this having now gone down in history as the stuff of Tudor legend, as Chapuys explains in his original sixteenth-century report in the Calendar of State Papers, Spain, that’s not quite how the moment unfolded.
Firstly, it appears both Anne and the king passed him in the doorway, where Chapuys tells us first-hand that he was already bowing in respect – something, we might wonder, that would allow those present to interpret as being meant only for the king? But as Chapuys tells us, Anne simply ‘turned round to return the reverence I made to her when she passed’,500 meaning she was responding to and accepting his voluntary submission.
In all the accounts of Anne’s life so much has been made of this ‘tricking Chapuys to acknowledge her as queen’, as though it was seen as a major and somewhat smug victory for her. But in reality, Anne was suspicious that Chapuys went on to dine with George and Jane Seymour’s brother Edward, rather than with her and the king.501 Henry, in turn, was concerned that Chapuys was still hostile to Anne, having refused to kiss her hand and bowing only when he thought he should. All this must have led them to worry that Chapuys’s boss, old Charles V, couldn’t have been that keen on accepting their marriage after all.
The king had already been having doubts about the imperial alliance. Henry was adamant that he wouldn’t budge on the clause recognising Mary as his legal heir – a concern he had already expressed to Chapuys at Christmas – as he felt it would inadvertently validate his marriage to Katherine.
All in all, the imperial alliance seemed decidedly one-sided in favour of the Holy Roman Emperor, and it appears Henry chose this moment to tell Cromwell just how unhappy he was with the deal. Chapuys reports that this caused Cromwell and Henry to have a heated debate. So heated, in fact, that Cromwell had to excuse himself and sit alone to regain his composure before he really lost his shit with the king of England.
Forgive the clichés, but the pressure was really starting to get to Cromwell, the cracks clearly beginning to show.
But just when the king thought international relations couldn’t get any worse, England learned that Francis I had a devastating papal decree that denied Henry’s right to the throne – the contents of which the king of France was threatening to publish, hoping that by doing so he would win kudos with the pope, who would then back him in the war. This is what the Tudors had feared all along – someone questioning their claim to the throne.
Luckily, Charles V was using all his power to stop Francis from actioning his papal decree – a nifty little blackmail attempt to sway Henry VIII to side with him and the Holy Roman Empire.502 Henry, and indeed England, were backed into a corner. The king’s council met every day in April 1536, desperately trying to decide how to play the situation. And so, this was Henry’s main concern in the few weeks leading up to Anne’s arrest – not, it should be pointed out, his love life.
Of course, this vital information is rarely included in Anne’s more commercial biographies nor in the countless media portrayals of the ‘six wives’, let alone the historical fiction based on her life. But why on earth not? After all, it changes the climax to Henry and Anne’s ‘love story’ somewhat, dramatically moving it away from love and passion to war and politics – or have I just hit the nail on the head?
Could it be that the more commercial historians and producers of Anne Boleyn’s story believe their audiences to be predominantly female? We can’t deny that this is certainly how most Boleyn–six wives biographies and period dramas are packaged and sold to the public at large503– and we ladies aren’t meant to be interested in war, are we? We want love triangles and seduction presented in the outmoded style of a 1970s novella. Do you know what I’m told when I challenge the status quo on this? ‘It’s not what the audience want to hear!’
Do you want to tell them, or should I? That this is the twenty-first century and we’re here for the truth, not the fantasy.
Don’t decide for us what we do and don’t want to see; like a parent putting childproof settings on the internet!
This is why all these media depictions of historical women’s stories – fiction and non-fiction – presented to us only in the style of a whimsical romance minus the serious work and politics, are not so innocent and easily dismissed. With each one, they seep into the subconscious of readers and viewers, telling them over and over that women should only be interested in fluff and frivolity.
But I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Henry and Anne’s story was not about love. It never was. Not in the beginning and certainly not now it was nearing the end. Because one thing Henry’s war game proves is that up until just two days before Anne’s arrest, he was using his marriage to her as a political tool, not plotting how to get rid of her. Indeed, six days before her arrest the king sent a powerful message to the ambassador of Rome, Richard Pate, boldly affirming the ‘likelihood God will send us heirs male’ with ‘our most dear and most beloved wife, the queen’.504
So, what on earth happened in that one week to cause him to order his wife’s arrest? Whimsical writers, rejoice – we’ve arrived at the affairs!
With Anne’s increasing power in Parliament, convincing the king to use money from the monasteries to help the poor rather than the war effort, and now her marriage to Henry being a key make-or-break reason this reconciliation with the Holy Roman Empire was collapsing, Cromwell panicked.
He made the drastic decision to defect from the Boleyn faction to the opposition – something he managed to do pretty quickly through his connection with Chapuys, by giving the impression he would endeavour to reinstate Mary as the imperial reconciliation negotiations lumbered on. Of course, this wasn’t quite how things would eventually pan out – with Cromwell arresting most of Mary’s faction soon after Anne’s death in order to push her into accepting her own illegitimacy. Not that her faction suspected his double-dealing at the time of his defection; the former lawyer was skilled in the art of deception.
We know Cromwell was behind the plot to bring down the queen thanks to not one but two admissions of guilt, as recorded by his new pal Chapuys.
In a letter to Charles V on 6 June 1536, Chapuys writes that ‘[Cromwell] himself had been authorised and commissioned by the King to prosecute and bring to an end [Anne’s] trial, to do which he had taken considerable trouble.’505
This statement should not be misunderstood to mean that Henry told him to concoct a reason to arrest Anne but rather that, upon hearing Cromwell’s ‘evidence’ against her, the king instructed him to destroy his wife. Chapuys backs this up with a second incriminatory admission that ‘It was [Cromwell] who . . . had planned and brought about the whole affair,’ meaning the charges against Anne that he presented to the king.506
But before we feel inclined to sympathise on the basis that the minister was merely backed into a corner, that he couldn’t have taken any joy in plotting Anne’s murder, even for political reasons, may I draw your attention to a horrifying moment during a later conversation. Chapuys describes how Cromwell stifled laughter when discussing Henry and Anne’s disintegrating marriage the very day before Anne was arrested: Cromwell ‘leaned against the window in which we were, putting his hand before his mouth to avoid smiling’.507 This account gives us a deeply disturbing insight into how Cromwell truly felt about framing Anne and sending an innocent woman to her death.
But considering that defecting to the other side is exactly what got his predecessor Wolsey arrested, Cromwell had to make sure there was no room for Anne to outmanoeuvre him. He needed all hands on deck, with everyone conspiring together, looking for anything they could turn into evidence against her. Luckily for him, there were more than enough people ready to hatch a plan to kill the queen.
Everyone had a role to play.
Stephen Gardiner, once a supporter of the king’s marriage to Anne yet one who had always held on to his traditional religious beliefs, started rumours as far afield as the French court, where he was working as ambassador, that she was having an affair.508 Letters containing this salacious gossip were to find their way back to England, where Cromwell could show the king and overwhelm him with suspicion.
Hey, there’s no smoke without fire.
Unless, as in this case when there was no fire, we start the fire ourselves.
Key members of Anne’s household were cornered by Cromwell’s newly adopted faction and instructed to be on the hunt for anything they could turn into incriminating evidence, and on 29 April they got their first piece. To be fair, it was pretty damning.
Anne and Henry Norris had a ‘furious altercation’509 in which she accused the king’s long-standing and closest companion of having feelings for her. Surely, we’ve all heard her infamous line by now: ‘You look for dead man’s shoes; for if ought came to the king but good you would look to have me.’
Following which, she demanded Norris go to her almoner the next morning and swear on oath that she was ‘a gud woman’.510
Now where would this have come from? What triggered such an intimate argument? I’ve witnessed academics and popular historians alike explaining Anne’s ‘dead man’s shoes’ comment as flirtatious banter; courtly love gone too far before she comes to her senses, realising she has just committed treason by imagining the king’s death.
But Anne was not stupid. At this most dangerous time, while waiting for some catastrophe to befall her, why would she publicly flirt with her husband’s closest companion, accusing him of wanting to marry her should the king die?
However, when put into context of what had been happening with Norris at court, it starts to make a lot more sense. While poised for disaster to strike, Anne was given the news that Norris was backing out of a long-arranged marriage match between himself and Anne’s cousin Margaret Shelton.511
Why the sudden change? Who had got to him? Was Norris being advised to distance himself from the Boleyn faction? What did he know?
You immediately get a sense of Anne’s panic and paranoia that would have led to this uncontrolled outburst where she went too far and once again said the wrong thing. But that’s the old Boleyn foot-in-mouth syndrome for you – her badly phrased comment not ringing of excessive flirting but of suspicion and hot-headed anger. Anne wasn’t teasing him at all; she was goading him into telling her the truth, a sort of ‘Why else would you delay marriage arrangements with a member of my family? Is it because you truly love me? Because that’s what it looks like to the court.’ She’s almost saying it to provoke him into confessing the real reason and perhaps revealing what plot was going on behind the scenes, which would be less damaging to him than the accusation that he’d fallen for the king’s wife.
But why would Anne even think of accusing Norris of wanting her instead?
It appears to have come from an earlier conversation in which she had warned off courtier Francis Weston from flirting with Margaret Shelton because she was intended for Norris, at which point Weston hit back with the claim that Norris went into the queen’s chambers more for Anne than Margaret. So underneath it all, Anne was aware that Norris might have harboured inappropriate feelings for her, and on the spur of the moment it seems she used this to try and embarrass him into revealing the truth.
Of course, it was because this argument got out of hand that Anne asked Norris to go to her almoner to swear she was ‘a gud woman’512 – not, I hasten to add, because there had been suspicions of an affair circulating.
Yet time and time again, historians report that this conversation was merely risqué flirting on Anne’s part because she was feeling unloved, and was testing her powers of attraction to see if they had survived the years. In fact, this is how some academics have explained away the possibility that Anne actually had full-blown affairs with several men and it not being a set-up at all. I guess they do have a point; there is no better way for a woman to feel more desirable than to have an affair that would undoubtedly lead to her own gruesome execution. Personally, when I want to test if I’ve still got it I like to try something equally as dangerous, like bear-baiting.
Of course, this ‘testing of her prowess’ theory is seemingly backed up by the much-repeated notion that Anne ‘liked to surround herself at court with men’.
Well, firstly, that’s simply not true. She was surrounded at all times by her ladies. But the reason Anne was encircled by men in her political work was the same reason that any woman in modern politics is surrounded by men: not because we are all sultry seductresses wanting to test our sexual prowess but due to a gender imbalance that is beyond our personal control.
Alas, to those who still insist that Anne’s interaction with Norris was flirting gone too far, I say this cannot be the case because of one final, and vital, piece of evidence: this story is provided by one source only – Anne Boleyn herself. She recounted her argument with Norris during her time in the Tower, after being arrested on suspicion of adultery with several men.
In the past, when hearing of how Anne spilled so much incriminating information knowing full well her every word was being recorded by spies, I wondered what on earth she was thinking by speaking so unguardedly about such a delicate issue. But the minute you read the original letters from William Kingston, the constable of the Tower, which detail Anne’s so-called ‘confession’, it suddenly becomes clear that her words weren’t incriminating at all. In fact, she was going out of her way to talk about the only interactions she’d had recently with the opposite sex to prove just how innocent they were – how there was no part of them that warranted her arrest.
Think about it logically: if Anne was being charged with adultery, why would she tell several stories to her captors about flirting with men only a few days before? She wouldn’t! Cromwell had to work extremely hard to make her stories sound salacious and worthy of condemnation.513
Anne’s interaction with Norris was undoubtedly based on anger, which we can fully understand given her growing paranoia.
But how did Francis Weston get dragged into all this and become a suspect himself? Well, it goes back to when Anne accused him of not loving his wife (yes, he was married) and flirting with Margaret Shelton instead, subsequently distracting her from Norris. Making a joke of the situation, Weston told Anne that he loved someone in her household more than his wife or Margaret. When Anne enquired who, Weston replied, ‘Yourself.’
Now this sounds like a bit of courtly love banter. See the difference?
Once in prison, Anne recounted this story, so keen was she to illustrate that it wasn’t her fault the men fancied her, and that in actual fact she had been telling them off for flirting with other women.514 However, it’s safe to say that her plan backfired, and her words went on to be used as proof she had committed adultery with both Norris and Weston.
It’s left for us to presume that it was Anne’s argument with Norris that triggered the scene we’ve seen played out so many times in her story, where she and Henry are spotted arguing at Greenwich the next day, Sunday 30 April, by Alexander Alesius – who was to later relay this story to Elizabeth I in 1559. Alesius explains how Anne was holding Elizabeth in her arms as she approached Henry, who was looking out of an open window. The Scottish reformer reports that the king was angry and it was obvious some ‘deep and difficult question was being discussed’.515
As it turns out, Cromwell managed to frame two of his five male victims with evidence from the same day. Yes, 29 April turned out to be quite eventful, as that was the day Anne noticed the young musician Mark Smeaton looking lonely and made the mistake of trying to cheer him up. Granted, her words of comfort left much to be desired, as by her own admission she told him, ‘You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do to a noble man, because you be an inferior person.’516
But before we leap to the conclusion that Anne was a rude and raging snob, we have to understand that this was, again, relayed by her while in prison, and reeks of a desperate attempt to get across just how professional her relationships with her courtiers were; she knew her place as queen and would not interact with the ‘lowly’ staff.
Eager to drum this message home, Anne insisted Smeaton was never in her chambers, and that she only asked him to play for her once, at Winchester, as her rooms were directly above the king’s. The letter cuts out here (the originals were, rather devastatingly, damaged in a fire) but the implication seems to be that she merely asked Smeaton to play for her so the king would hear some music through the ceiling.
Alas, that innocent interaction with Smeaton was all it took for the nervous young man to be the first suspect singled out for interrogation.
But before we go any further past the events of 29 April, it must be pointed out that five days earlier, on the 24th, Cromwell commissioned an ‘oyer and terminer’ – a small council tasked with trying the accused. A lot of historians over the years have wrongly presumed that this was Henry VIII giving the go-ahead to launch an investigation into Anne, as he would have had to sign off on it. But that is not quite the case, because Henry VIII did not sign that commission. As his minister, Cromwell actually had the power to do this alone, and it appears he did so, in secret, with the presumed help of his close ally the Lord Chancellor Audley.517
But as an oyer and terminer didn’t run an investigation itself – it was their job only to try the accused – they were usually commissioned after an investigation had been conducted. So why would Cromwell feel the need to secretly issue one without the king’s knowledge or consent, and most importantly, without anyone to try yet?
Because it takes approximately eleven days between the commission and the trial being set up. Cromwell wanted everything in place so there would be no delay, and vitally, no time for Henry to back out of his decision – that is, once Cromwell had managed to convince the king Anne was guilty of whatever crimes he had manage to concoct.518
While we’re on the subject of the oyer and terminer, there is no better time to clear up the lie that just won’t stop resurfacing – that Anne’s father, Thomas Boleyn, was part of the team that condemned his daughter to death. This was a rumour that began when Anne was arrested; but as Thomas’s biographer informs us, her father was not part of either the Middlesex or Kent-based oyer and terminer used to try Anne and her fellow prisoners. He was originally listed for Middlesex, but by the time it was used to try Anne, her father had been scrapped from the list, for obvious reasons.519
It was around this point that Cromwell ran into a problem. If he was going to try the queen of England then this was a parliamentary matter. The only thing was, Parliament had been dissolved just two weeks earlier, shortly after the attempt to pass the Poor Law, meaning an emergency Parliament would need to be summoned.520 This time, Cromwell definitely needed the king’s consent and signature, and so created the pretence of fixing a loophole in a current law whereby defending the pope was not a criminal act. If anything was going to get Henry to leap into action, this would do it. So, on 27 April Parliament was summoned, Cromwell knowing full well that it could then be used against Anne at a moment’s notice.521
Now everything was in place, and most of it without the king or queen’s knowledge.
Three days later, on 30 April, Smeaton was invited to dine at Cromwell’s house, where he was apparently seized by six men upon arrival and held in unofficial questioning for twenty-four hours.522
An important bit of backstory to know about Mark Smeaton is that he was just a young lad, not much older than twenty. A low-ranking musician at court, Cavendish says he was the son of a carpenter – in other words, an easy first target. Smeaton didn’t have the confidence or authority that come from a lifetime of privilege to help him hold his nerve. If they could scare a false confession out of anyone, it would be him.523 So, while Smeaton wasn’t an important or influential courtier to dispose of, he was a vital element in creating the devastating domino effect that Cromwell needed to frame Anne.
It’s presumed Smeaton must have been offered a plea bargain or tortured until he confessed to a crime he hadn’t committed. Over the years there were rumours that he was stretched on the rack, but as he was still at Cromwell’s house and only taken to the Tower upon confession, this couldn’t have been the case. However, it was reported the poor lad was held in irons for the whole twenty-four-hour interrogation period, which might lead one to ask what kind of person has iron shackles casually waiting for use at home. The fact that de Carles goes out of his way to tell us Smeaton gave his confession ‘without being tortured’ shows there were suggestions at the time that he was.524 One method they spoke of was tightening a knotted rope around his head – although Eric Ives points out that this may not have happened as ‘such a course would have been illegal’.
Yeah, I’m thinking the whole ‘creating false evidence to kill six people including the queen of England’ was also illegal, so I’m not entirely convinced that working within the confines of the law was Cromwell’s main concern.
But whether it was via intimidation or battery, the offer of a plea bargain or a deal for a less gruesome death, Smeaton would have felt the situation to be hopeless: he was trapped, with no way out other than to confess to a crime that, as we are about to discover, was impossible for him to have committed. Cromwell himself must have been in slight shock that after twenty-four hours of exhaustive interrogation it actually worked, and they finally got a fake confession out of him.
Smeaton arrived at the Tower at 6 p.m. on 1 May 1536.525
Smeaton’s confession was a start, but Cromwell’s case against Anne couldn’t rest upon the testimony of one fragile and unreliable boy. However, now that he had a confession from one man to convince Henry his powerful wife had committed the ultimate crime, he saw a unique opportunity to get rid of all the key members of the Boleyn faction in one fell swoop.
Later that afternoon, after receiving the shocking news of Smeaton’s confession during the May Day celebrations at court, possibly on Cromwell’s recommendation the king decided to confront and interrogate Norris about his suspicious altercation with Anne. As they rode to Whitehall, Henry reassured Norris that even if he was guilty his life would be spared if he simply admitted his affair with Anne. However, Norris had nothing to admit, and wasn’t as gullible as Smeaton; but despite his ardent denial, he was arrested the next day and sent to the Tower.526 And yet the lawyer in Cromwell felt it was still a weak case. He could not fail. Anne could not come back from this. They needed more. They needed statements from the queen’s most loyal and trusted ladies who would swear on oath that they had witnessed these imaginary affairs taking place. This is where history credits Cromwell with the work of one other key player in the framing of Anne Boleyn, a player who, until now, has been astonishingly overlooked, and whose connection and influence over every single key witness in the case against Anne has been bafflingly ignored. Well, not any more.
Charles Brandon, it’s time to take the stand.
You may have heard Cromwell’s officially approved story527 of how investigations into Anne’s alleged affairs began, when one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Browne, was reprimanded for her rather dubious conduct at court; at which point she threw Anne under the bus by saying that her own actions were nothing compared to those of the queen.
This admission is all the more incriminating for Anne when we learn that Elizabeth Browne was not only her lady but a close and supposedly loyal friend who was by her side at her coronation, and that Anne had even lent her money for a private matter. So it didn’t bode well for the queen that this admission of debauchery came from such a reliable source. That is, until you learn that Elizabeth Browne’s sister was once married to Anne’s arch-enemy Charles Brandon.
In 1503 Brandon had a romance with Elizabeth’s sister Anne Browne, and the couple were contracted to marry. However, true to form, he abandoned her while she was heavily pregnant with their first child to marry her rich aunt Dame Margaret Mortimer. Browne’s family were horrified at the abandonment and took Brandon to court,528 where he was forced to annul his new marriage on account of now having a child with his wife’s niece. So, Brandon cut his losses – not before the old charmer sold Margaret’s manor house in Devon for £260,529 I hasten to add – and went back to Anne Browne, marrying her in 1508. However, she died within two weeks of giving birth to Brandon’s second daughter, Mary, in 1510, freeing Charles to move on to Margaret of Austria in Anne Boleyn’s early days in France, where the duo’s lifelong feud began.
Given that Brandon had put the Browne family through intense emotional turmoil, we might be tempted to presume he wasn’t on the most affectionate terms with Elizabeth, but he was still the father of her nieces and worked closely in the king’s privy chamber with her brother, Anthony Browne, who himself was a huge supporter of Princess Mary. So when we consider that Elizabeth’s ‘statement’ was first given to her brother, it looks increasingly suspicious, and smacks of intimidation from both men.
At this point, I probably don’t even need to inform you that Elizabeth Browne was also the stepsister of Sir William Fitzwilliam, treasurer of the household, who was one of the men who arrested Anne. So, as far as reliable witnesses go, her evidence would hardly hold up in a non-corrupt court of law.530
Ironically, while Elizabeth – among other women – was helping to create false evidence to condemn her queen and friend, Anne was in prison worrying about the health of Elizabeth’s unborn baby, which she hadn’t felt move in a while.531
Next up, scraping the barrel of reliable witnesses, was Lady Bridget Wingfield, who had been dead for two years by the time of Anne’s trial; and yet evidence was provided on her behalf against the queen. Bridget was Anne’s former lady of the bedchamber, who, after her death in 1534, had left in her belongings a personal letter from Anne Boleyn. Bridget’s family then produced the letter as evidence of Anne having had an affair not long before she married Henry.
OK, so this must have been pretty serious. Written evidence: just what Cromwell needed. So what incriminating admission of adultery did Anne write in the letter? ‘I pray you leave your indiscrete trouble, both for displeasing of God and also for displeasing of me.’532
That was it. The sole offending line. No context. No suggestion as to what this ‘indiscrete trouble’ had been. Anne literally could have been referring to anything, and yet this one line was interpreted by Cromwell as, ‘Your indiscrete trouble [regarding the fact I’m having an affair] is upsetting God and upsetting me.’
A slight stretch of the imagination. Particularly when we take into account that this letter was written in 1532, the year before Anne married Henry, when she wouldn’t have risked the crown for an affair with anyone, let alone commit an admission of guilt to paper.
But why would Lady Bridget Wingfield’s family try to incriminate Anne? Perhaps it was because Bridget was once married to Charles Brandon’s cousin Sir Richard Wingfield.533 Brandon’s biographer, Steven Gunn, goes on to report that the whole Wingfield family often asked Brandon for help in advancing their various causes to the king, and so it’s safe to say the family owed him.534 But when Bridget’s husband died in 1525, she and Anne fell out over her choice of new husband, Robert of Kettleby – who was a close friend of . . . guess who?
That’s right: Charles Brandon.
Not that this was Anne’s main cause for concern. The real problem she had with Robert was that he was fighting for that old Tudor classic, stamping out Lutheranism; his own father went on to have close links to the later Catholic rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace.535 He, in turn, did not appear to be a huge fan of the Boleyn family, having been an envoy with Anne’s father at the beginning of his career, where Thomas repeatedly upstaged him during their missions.536 And suddenly we have plenty of motives for the family to have handed Anne’s letter over to Cromwell to be twisted into evidence.
It was Henry VIII himself who admitted, almost ten years after Anne’s murder, that no prisoner in the Tower stood a chance against false evidence.537
Alexander Alesius gave further insight into how they convinced Anne’s household to work against her: tempting her ladies with bribes, while reassuring them that the king hated Anne for her failure to provide an heir. ‘There is nothing which they do not promise the ladies of her bedchamber.’538
The one thing these false statements from Anne’s disloyal ladies highlights is why she and George became so close, her brother being the only person she felt she could completely trust and confide in. So it’s easy to see why George’s wife, Jane Rochford, would have grown to resent the amount of time he spent with his sister, especially following her own banishment from court in 1534. This incident, two years earlier, would have illustrated to Jane that being on Anne’s side did her no favours. There was no protection or preferential treatment that came with being sister-in-law to the queen of England – aside from being let out of prison without charge when arrested for protesting in favour of the opposition.
It has long been suspected that Jane was recruited in the framing of Anne Boleyn and was eager to chip in with lurid accusations of incest between Anne and her brother, George. Even Wyatt believed the accusations stemmed from George’s wife wanting to be rid of her husband, rather than from any real fact.539 It will also come as no surprise that it’s been suggested Charles Brandon had influence over this witness too, apparently encouraging the incest claims as payback for Anne’s own accusations of Brandon’s alleged incestuous abuse of his daughter.
It is his wife we presume George is talking about when he stated at his trial that ‘on the evidence of only one woman you are willing to believe this great evil of me, and on the basis of her allegations you are deciding my judgement’.540
Some argue that this ‘one woman’ could have been one of Anne’s ladies, given that John Husse speculated it was ‘Nan Cobham and another maid’541 who had given evidence and, as historians have rightly pointed out, Jane Rochford was no maid. However, this doesn’t rule out her involvement; and indeed, the situation appears increasingly suspicious when we discover that Jane’s own father, Henry Parker, sat on the jury at George’s trial.542
Not only that, but it is considered that only Jane could have provided the private letter written by Anne to George that further condemned the siblings. This letter was said to have proved beyond reasonable doubt that brother and sister had been having an incestuous relationship, because in it Anne wrote to George informing him she was pregnant.
No, you’re not missing anything. Anne sharing the happy news of her pregnancy with her closest family member was successfully interpreted by Cromwell to mean ‘SISTER TELLS BROTHER SHE IS PREGNANT . . . WITH HIS BABY!’543
Hard to argue with that kind of irrefutable evidence. Case closed. We can all go home.
But would Charles Brandon really want Anne and her faction dead? He had already bounced back from the incest slur, so was murder really called for? Divorce, perhaps, but death?
Though it’s said he didn’t care much for the reformist movement, he was apparently tolerant of it. So, religion doesn’t appear to be at the heart of his hatred. We know that Brandon served in the powerful role of high steward and constable at Anne’s coronation in 1533, but almost immediately he was ousted by her family, with Norfolk requesting Brandon give up the office of earl marshal to him – something he was said to have done reluctantly and with ill grace.544 Not only that, but he was increasingly eclipsed in the king’s inner circle by Anne’s faction, with the king only visiting his ‘friend’ three times between 1531 and 1535, their jolly jousts becoming few and far between. Therefore, we can perhaps start to understand why Brandon had no qualms about the men who replaced him becoming collateral damage in his takedown of Anne.
But if you’re still in need of a more convincing reason as to why Brandon would want to conspire to kill the queen and in turn bastardise her innocent daughter, then look no further than this: with both the king’s children deemed illegitimate, Brandon’s children with Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor would have a stronger claim to the throne. No, his own daughters were never going to take the crown themselves, but that wasn’t his end game. As his biographer, Professor Steven Gunn of Oxford University points out, the closer they were in line to the throne, the greater chance they had of a diplomatic marriage, hence the higher the dowry Brandon could demand.545
Kerrr-ching! You can almost hear the cash rolling in.
And so it starts to make sense as to why the ever financially unstable Brandon would want to permanently delete Anne Boleyn. It also explains why, for all those years, he was so heavy-handed and keen in helping the king to get Princess Mary to accept her own illegitimacy.546
Yes, it seems money motivated his entire co-conspiracy with Cromwell, because not only did Brandon benefit directly from Anne’s death – he was given three manors from her estate, which brought him an income of £100 (just under £50,000 in today’s currency547) – but he also sued for a share in the lesser monasteries. Oh yes, the very same smaller monasteries that Anne was fighting to save at the time of her arrest.548 And when you consider that the money raised from only the first phase of the dissolution of the monasteries was the equivalent of £32 million, as well as an additional £10.3 million in annual income, it’s suddenly all too clear why Cromwell and Brandon were willing to kill Anne for a slice of that pie.549
Lo and behold, after Anne’s death, Brandon’s attendance at court started to pick up again, and he became a regular fixture at Parliament, frequently sitting in council.550
Cromwell sent what became the official version of events to the English ambassadors Stephen Gardiner and John Wallop in France on 14 May 1536. He revealed that the queen was living such a debauched lifestyle, her offences towards the king were so ‘rank and common’ that her ladies of the privy chamber could no longer cover for their depraved and sinful queen . . . but that he wouldn’t go into details because it was ‘so abominable’ that he couldn’t bring himself to repeat it551 (i.e., he was making the whole thing up).
But if it was all an invention, why couldn’t the king see through it? Surely it wouldn’t have taken much to realise it was a set-up?
Anne was the love of his life . . . so she must have done something pretty devastating for him to order her death. It couldn’t all have been fabricated. There must be at least some truth in the rumours . . . Right?
So, now we are out of the murky waters of ‘When a man cheats, what did the woman do to cause it?’ and wading into the oil slick of ‘When a man murders his wife, what did she do to deserve it?’
Sounds ridiculous and mildly disturbing, but this is pretty much what I have found repeatedly during my research: the view that there must have been more to it, to drive a man to kill his wife. Not so for a sociopath, but psychological analysis aside for a moment – could any of the affairs actually have taken place?
Well, firstly, the time frame given for these affairs makes it completely unrealistic that Anne had been able to keep every one of them a secret until all five were exposed at once – conveniently, just at the time when her enemies needed incriminating evidence against her. Anne knew that the imperial faction at court were constantly spying on her, looking for anything to accuse her of – Chapuys’s constant stream of tell-tale letters to Charles V is proof of that. As we’ve seen, any little phrase she said that could be taken out of turn, any action that could be misconstrued, was jumped on with the schadenfreude of a tabloid editor. Anne would not have dared attempt an affair for fear of being found out.552 Even Wyatt points out that it would have been ‘impossible’ for Anne to conduct one affair, let alone several, given that she was surrounded at all times by ‘the necessary and no small attendance of ladies’.553
Which brings us to another obvious point: if Anne had conducted just one of these alleged affairs, she would have needed the help of her ladies to get away with it. Case in point – when Henry VIII’s later wife Katherine Howard was caught cheating, George Boleyn’s widow, Jane Rochford, was executed along with her new mistress for helping her get away with it. Yet not one of Anne’s ladies went down with their queen. Each of them who provided statements of having apparently witnessed and concealed Anne having these illicit affairs escaped any charges of aiding and abetting, and went on to serve her replacement, Jane Seymour.554
Yet why Anne would risk having sex with anyone other than Henry is beyond me. No one could help her cause better than the king; certainly no one was more powerful than him, and it’s not as if she hadn’t proved she could go for years without having her personal needs satisfied – lest we forget, with the lack of pregnancies before her marriage, it appears she was a virgin until the age of thirty-one. And if that male heir came out and he wasn’t a redhead like his dad . . . Awkward!
But couldn’t there have been a good reason for Anne to have an affair? Perhaps more out of desperation than wanton sexual desire?
Oh, you mean the rumour that she wanted to get pregnant by her brother, the only man she trusted, in order to save herself and pretend it was Henry’s?
I’ll admit that in a warped way this accusation seems vaguely plausible. If Anne’s life rested upon her giving birth to a male heir, and if the king seemed unable to get her pregnant, then she might have taken drastic action to get pregnant by another man. But the crucial evidence ruining this theory is that the king was getting her pregnant. It was she who was struggling to carry to full term, so she could have been equally laying the blame on her own health, rather than Henry’s. In which case, what would make her think she could carry another man’s baby more successfully to make such a dangerous strategy worth the risk? As for sleeping with her brother, like we’ve already discussed, George and his wife never had a child in all their years together – hardly a ringing endorsement for his virility. And do I really need to point out that for a deeply religious woman like Anne, even if her husband never discovered her adultery, God would have been deathly aware of her sins. If Leviticus condemned you to the fiery pits of purgatory for ‘laying with your brother’s wife’, then I imagine laying with your brother would result in eternal damnation – and there’s not one piece of evidence to suggest that Anne valued the fleeting cheap thrills of life on earth over salvation and God’s grace in the afterlife.
And so, I’ll leave the final word on Anne’s false charges to, of all people, Chapuys. For the mere fact that it came from the man who hated her the most accentuates just how ridiculous the charges were. Chapuys said Anne was ‘condemned upon presumption and certain indications without valid proof or confession’.555
Of course, this may seem somewhat rich, considering Chapuys had fought so hard to get rid of Anne for years. But he was only ever pushing for an annulment. That Anne should be set up on such extreme false charges that resulted in her murder must have left a bad taste for the Spanish ambassador. Chapuys only wanted to ruin Anne’s life, not end it.
This is evident when he repeated the age-old accusation that Anne had indeed married Henry Percy years earlier and the two had consummated their relationship, an accusation that would conveniently render Anne’s subsequent marriage to the king invalid. However, Percy continued to strenuously deny these accusations. As we’ve already seen, there was no evidence of a pre-contract, no former admission of guilt they could draw on from Percy or Anne, hence the attempt now to interrogate and bully him into a false confession. But the fact that in the end, not only was Percy not one of the men arrested or accused but was asked to sit in on Anne’s trial and pass judgement on her is really all the evidence we need to close the lid on this once and for all.556
When George Boleyn was arrested at Whitehall following the May Day jousts, historians believe he was there having gone to find his brother-in-law the king and talk some sense into the man who had become a close and trusted family member. But all access to Henry was denied.557 This has been repeatedly blamed on Cromwell, yet for all his scheming, I don’t think we can pin this particular incident on him. If we’ve learned anything by now, it’s that no one tells Henry Tudor what to do, and, more to the point, who he can and can’t see.
What we have here is the archetypal sociopathic response of cutting everyone off once it’s been decided they are out. Henry didn’t want to see any weeping or begging. (All these people with their boring emotions.) Cromwell had presented him with the ‘facts’ and Henry had made up his mind: they were all guilty. Now can we move on?
If Henry truly loved Anne in the way those who sell us ‘The Most Tragic Love Story of all Time’ say he did, then he could have stopped her murder at any point. He was sitting beside her at the May Day jousts when he was delivered news of Smeaton’s confession.
So did he question her?
Did he ask her how she could possibly break his heart in such a cruel and flippant way?
He did not. He stood and left without a word, never to see her again. He froze her out, erasing his wife and partner of ten years from his mind with chilling ease. This was the final stage in Henry’s sociopathic relationship with Anne: discard. This is why he was able to accept her guilt without challenge. Even his pal of the privy chamber, Henry Norris, got the privilege of an interrogation as they rode from the joust to Whitehall. Yet Anne, the supposed love of his life, got nothing.
What do we make, then, of Chapuys’s story about the following night? That after Anne’s arrest, Henry apparently sobbed to his illegitimate son, the duke of Richmond, after hearing that Anne had planned to poison Richmond and Mary so that her daughter, Elizabeth, would take the throne. Aside from the fact that both Richmond and Mary were illegitimate and not a threat anyway, with Henry lacking the capacity to feel this kind of emotion and Chapuys’s obsession with poison, alarm bells start ringing immediately. However, not to dismiss the report, it could easily have been a case of Henry taking every and any ridiculous accusation about Anne seriously, in order to create a compelling case against her and rationalise his disposal of her to the people around him – paired, once again, with him mimicking the right emotions for those who expected him to be distraught.
Indeed, according to Chapuys, Henry wrote down all his apparent heartbreak at being deceived by Anne in a little book that he would show to anyone and everyone who would stop and read it. Chapuys, then, seems to confirm Henry’s actions as being sociopathic by stating, ‘You never saw prince nor man who made greater show of his [misfortune] or bore them more pleasantly.’558
That’s putting it mildly.
Chapuys was appalled to hear further reports of Henry partying through the night in the days following Anne’s arrest and later her death sentence. One evening he even filled a royal barge with women and minstrels for a boat party on the Thames.559 This may be how a man might react after breaking up with his troublesome girlfriend, but not after condemning his wife to death.
So, if Henry’s sociopathy allowed him to cut Anne off without a second thought, what then politically justified this sudden change? How did he go from using their marriage as a bargaining tool with the leaders of Europe to disposing of her within days?
Scottish reformer Alexander Alesius provides the answer.
Remember how Anne had been pushing the king to pursue an alliance with the Lutheran princes of Germany? Crucially, in autumn 1535 her chaplains Nicholas Heath and Edward Foxe went on a royal envoy to Wittenberg to meet them. The German princes had been building a defensive Protestant union called the Schmalkaldic League, with its own officials, treasury and troops; this made them an increasingly powerful alliance, which Henry proposed that England should now join.560 Foxe and Heath finally came to a preliminary agreement between England and the princes on their differing religious beliefs and how their faith should be practised, this being a deal-breaker for the alliance.561
But, as Alesius explained to Elizabeth I years later, Henry was infuriated that not only did the princes suddenly want more money than he had offered, but they still refused to send Martin Luther’s right-hand man, Melanchthon, over to England to meet him.
Cromwell has always been credited as the one pushing for an alliance with the princes, but as we’ve seen, he was working with Chapuys and pushing Henry towards a reconciliation with Charles V at that time. Logically, Cromwell would only have been backing an alliance with one ruler, given they were at odds with each other; so it seems more likely that Cromwell wanted an alliance with Charles V via Chapuys, while Anne was pushing the king to pursue an alliance with the Lutheran princes. We can’t overlook the possibility, however, that Cromwell was hedging his bets and romancing both leaders at the same time, which his biographer Diarmaid MacCulloch does not put past the slick minister.562
However, once word of the Lutheran negotiations got back to Charles V in the midst of his blackmailing Henry VIII, it’s safe to say he was not best pleased at being two-timed. He subsequently threatened the German princes and prepared to retaliate with his brother, various nobles of Europe and the pope.563 You see, the princes were a bit of a sore point for Charles, as back in 1530 he too had tried and failed to settle the dust with them at the Diet of Augsburg.
So, we can suddenly understand how Henry would have been horrified at the thought of angering Charles at this most crucial and precarious time, when the emperor was the only one standing in the way of the papal decree that could remove Henry from the throne.
Did this mean he held Anne responsible for giving him bad advice and pushing such a controversial alliance? Was this yet another reason for Cromwell to want Anne gone, her political interests clashing once again with his own? That’s certainly how it looked to courtiers, with sixteenth-century sources John Foxe and Alexander Alesius stating it was Anne’s involvement in the attempted alliance with the German princes that triggered Henry’s decision to kill her.
This claim becomes all the more conclusive when we discover Alesius was no mere outsider commenting on events from afar, but was a vital part of the German negotiations. He had in fact come to the Tudor court on envoy from the very man Henry was trying to woo: Melanchthon.564 So, his is an insider account of Anne’s final political work that confirms, at last, her involvement in the Lutheran alliance and pinpoints it as the final straw that killed the queen of England. An account that has been brushed over for centuries in favour of tales of sex scandals and flirting as being at the root of Anne’s murder.
Of course, even if Cromwell had been double-dealing by supporting Anne’s Lutheran alliance as well his own imperial partnership, once it became clear that the former had angered Charles V, it seems he was quick to pass all blame on to Anne.
This suited Henry, because he needed someone to blame for this new threat of war, and it most definitely could not be himself. As Dr Kevin Dutton explains:
One of the few things sociopaths can experience is something called Blame Externalisation, where they don’t believe they are ever to blame; everyone else is. People are against you and out to get you. This paranoia isn’t an emotion, it’s faulty reasoning; you’ve got to get them before they get you.
So it was while Henry was trapped in the midst of this threat of potentially losing the throne, all because of Anne Boleyn’s political and religious agenda, that Cromwell chose to present him with the ‘evidence’ that she had cheated on him.565 With nerves frayed and tensions high, it suddenly makes sense that this was why Henry made the sociopathically impulsive decision that Anne was a liability and no longer worth the fight. This is why he asked no questions, and is yet another reason he accepted her guilt without challenge. It was an easy way out for him. Indeed, it was. Before Anne’s men returned from negotiations in Wittenberg, she was dead.
So as the evidence mounts up, it looks increasingly likely that no one individual killed Anne Boleyn. Instead, it was the result of a spectacular group effort, timed to perfection.
Hey, teamwork makes the dream work.
But there is one person we have overlooked. One person whose unforgiving and relentless work triggered this whole plot, and we can no longer brush over it. That is Anne Boleyn herself. Knowing just how perilous her situation was in those final months, she could have scaled things back. Toed the line on controversial government policies. Not challenged the Dissolution Act until she was safely pregnant again. But time was of the essence, and Anne was a woman on a mission. So, let me end this chapter by asking one question – and know that I don’t ask it to make a martyr of Anne Boleyn, but only to understand her psyche. Were her final missions of 1536 in fact suicide missions?
The fact that only days before her arrest, she was making plans for her daughter’s care tells us that she knew her political activism was putting her life in danger. But had she already come to accept the possible consequences? After all, Anne had grown up watching men and women die for the greater good. She knew she couldn’t cause shockwaves in the Church, Parliament and royal courts of Europe without making real enemies. The title of queen protected her to some degree, but did she realise that fighting as strongly as she did could end up getting her killed?
During Anne’s imprisonment, the constable of the Tower of London reported that ‘this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death’,566 almost as if a part of her had made peace with the inevitable outcome some time before. Which leads me to suspect that the real cause for her shock and horror at her arrest was more due to the fact that, when it came down to it, unlike those whose amnesty she herself had campaigned for, she wasn’t actually imprisoned for her political work or religious cause. The reasons given for her eventual condemnation were so underhand that the people of England would never know she had been taken down for fighting for their human rights and religious freedom.
Instead, her name was being blackened, her character systematically ruined and her memory soiled. The cause was not even a talking point, and I fear this may have been the hardest part of all for Anne to come to terms with.
