1536: The Year that Changed Henry VIII

by Lipscomb, Suzannah

  For, if the source of the intelligence is under any doubt, what happened next is not. Mark Smeaton was arrested by Cromwell on Sunday 30 April, and taken to his house in Stepney for questioning. Smeaton is variously described as an organist or player of the virginals or spinet in the queen’s household; as a commoner, he was a relatively easy target. He was interrogated, possibly under torture or under the threat of torture, and confessed to having had sexual intercourse with the queen three times. It was a confession he never retracted. The next day, he was moved to the Tower, and there held in irons.15

  To understand why he might have done this, it is worth considering the only evidence we have of the nature of Anne and Smeaton’s relationship – evidence freely supplied by Anne herself. The greatest insight into Anne’s heart and mind at this time is found in the letters written by Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower, to Cromwell, detailing Anne’s remarks and reflections during her imprisonment. Among other things, she anxiously reflected on which conversations between her and the other suspects could be rendered incriminating. She recalled having sent for Smeaton once while at Winchester to play on the virginals, but not speaking to him again until during a strange incident a few days before her imprisonment. On the Saturday before May Day, she had come across him standing in the round window in her presence chamber and asked him why he was so sad. He replied that it was no matter. She reprimanded him with the words, ‘You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do a noble man, because you be an inferior person’. Mark replied, ‘No, no, madam, a look sufficed me; and thus, fare you well.’

  This exchange has been variously interpreted, but perhaps what best illuminates it is the recognition of how improper, ill-mannered and transgressive Smeaton’s responses were when addressed to his queen. It was not for a commoner to disregard her question in this way, nor then to dismiss himself from her presence. Anne’s tart reminder to him of the nature of hierarchy is a reaction to this and contrasts greatly with her kindly opening question. Nevertheless, there is still something indefinably odd about the encounter. Anne’s statement, which one historian has considered to show ‘remarkable familiarity’, another has deemed ‘belittling’. The bizarre nature of the exchange reflects something odd about Smeaton himself. It is he who behaved familiarly with Anne, and the abrupt, inappropriate and slightly disturbing nature of his remarks (‘a look sufficed me’) suggests the sort of imaginative fantasy one currently associates with the stalkers of celebrities. Perhaps it was this sense that Smeaton was reaching too high that informed Thomas Wyatt’s characterization of Smeaton in his poem ‘In mourning wise’:

  Ah, Mark, what moan should I for thee make more Since that thy death thou hast deserved best, Save only that mine eye is forced sore With piteous plaint to moan thee with the rest? A time thou hadst above thy poor degree, The fall whereof thy friends may well bemoan. A rotten twig upon so high a tree Hath slipped thy hold and thou art dead and gone.

  For if Smeaton shared a mentality with modern-day stalkers, then confessing to adultery with the queen might, in his mind, have conferred kudos and associated glory on him. He would have been only too pleased to admit to it, especially if he had been instrumental in circulating rumours to that effect. It was a confession that had devastating effects.16

  Wyatt was right that Smeaton, of all those accused, best deserved his death, for his confession was absolutely key to everything that followed. It catapulted the investigation into a different order of magnitude. Suddenly rumour became fact; everything was believable. All subsequent evidence was tainted with an irresistible presumption of guilt.17

  We can hypothesize that Smeaton’s confession was reported back to Henry that Sunday afternoon. Henry then made two decisions: to postpone for a week his planned trip to Calais with Anne, which was due to leave on 2 May, and to continue with the May Day jousts as planned. At this stage, Henry did not know what to believe, but he began to suspect that Anne might be guilty. This is evident from a glimpse of a charged encounter between Henry and Anne at Greenwich that day, which was recorded by Scottish theologian Alexander Alesius. He had seen Anne, carrying the little Elizabeth in her arms, piteously entreating Henry as he looked out of an open window down into a courtyard. The king’s face and gestures conveyed his fury, and Alesius reported ‘it was most obvious to everyone that some deep and difficult question was being discussed’. This was made all the more apparent by the fact that the council had talked long and hard on some matter until it was dark.18

  Another thing also happened that Sunday, involving Henry Norris, a much more important person at court. The popular Norris was a gentleman of the privy chamber, keeper of the privy purse and groom of the stool. These were positions which allowed him right of entry to the king’s privy chambers. Since at least 1515, he had been one of Henry VIII’s closest companions, ‘the best friend of the king’. On Sunday 30 April 1536, Anne Boleyn had asked Norris to swear before John Skyp, her chaplain, that she ‘was a good woman’. Such bizarre behaviour can only be explained as an exercise in damage-limitation after an indiscreet altercation between Anne and Norris, which had occurred at some point over this May Day weekend, the facts of which came spilling out as Anne sat and wondered in the Tower. Anne had asked Norris why he had not yet gone through with his marriage, and he had replied that ‘he would tarry a time’. Anne had rashly taunted him with the words, ‘you look for dead men’s shoes; for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me’. Norris’ flustered response – that ‘if he should have any such thought, he would his head were off’ – provoked her further, and she retorted, ‘she could undo him if she would’. The nature of this encounter is hard to quantify. As Greg Walker has pointed out, what we do not know is Anne’s tone here – ‘is she merely flirting, chiding, petulant, angry?’ What did Anne mean when she said she could undo him? We also don’t know what this represents – the reckless public exposure of an established situation, the voicing of something long tacitly understood or a dreadful and embarrassing misunderstanding on Anne’s part. Two things are clear: flirtation had transgressed the boundaries of courtly love, and Anne and Norris had mentioned the possibility of the king’s death – something treasonous under the Treason Act of 1534, which held that even words that wished harm to the king were unlawful. What happened next suggests that rumours about this scandalous tiff had reached Henry’s ears, and his knowledge of it may even have prompted the angry scene observed by Alesius, and the back-tracking of Norris’ oath to Skyp.19

  The next day, Henry attended the May Day jousts at Greenwich as planned; watched Rochford and Norris leading the challengers and defenders and, according to one source, presented Norris with his own horse when Norris’ horse recoiled from the lists. What was striking was that Henry then suddenly left with a small group of six people, at which ‘many men mused’, and travelled to Whitehall by horseback rather than by royal barge. One of the six travelling in this intimate group with him was Norris. According to George Constantyne, who was Norris’ servant at the time, Henry ‘had Mr Norris in examination and promised him his pardon in case he would utter the truth’. In the course of this conversation with his close friend, Norris maintained his innocence: ‘whatsoever could be said or done, Mr Norris would confess no thing to the King’, although Constantyne had heard from Norris’ chaplain that Norris later confessed something to Sir William Fitzwilliam, which he retracted again at his arraigning, saying he had been deceived into confessing it. Here we have the fullest flourish of Henry’s personal role in the investigation of Anne’s offences. Up until this point, he may have ordered Cromwell to question Smeaton and had made decisions about their immediate schedule awaiting the outcome of the inquiry, but at the implication of one so close to him in this affair, Henry now decided to take the process of examination upon himself. Whatever Norris said or didn’t say, it was enough to convince Henry of his guilt and to damn him and Anne. The next day, 2 May, Norris, Anne and her brother, Rochford, were arrested and taken
to join Smeaton in the Tower. A couple of days later, William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston, Richard Page and Sir Thomas Wyatt were also arrested and put in the Tower. Sir Francis Bryan, a courtier and gentleman of the king’s privy chamber, was interrogated by Cromwell and released.20

  All those arrested for suspected adultery with Anne were members of Henry’s privy chamber and part of the intimate circle around the king and queen. The evidence we have for Weston and Rochford suggests that all were judged guilty by association and because of their careless talk with Anne. Just as she had for Norris, while in the Tower Anne recalled her conversations with Weston, and feared their revelation. A year earlier, ‘on Whitsun Tuesday last Weston told her that Norris came more unto her chamber for her than for Madge (Shelton)’, whom Norris was due to marry: sentiments which if exposed would make her exchange with Norris even more dangerous. Not only this, but Weston had said that he ‘loved one in her house’ better than either his wife or Madge Shelton. When Anne had fished, ‘Who is that?’ Weston had replied, ‘It is yourself,’ at which, Anne said, she ‘defied him’ – that is, rebuked him. Such talk was a heavily loaded version of the usual banter of courtly love, the convention being that a gentleman would faithfully serve and love a lady of the court, pre-eminently the queen, and woo her with words and gifts. Courtly love demanded that such relationships remained platonic – it was a way of sublimating eroticism and desire – but the beauty of the game lay in its inherent ambiguity. Given Smeaton’s confession and Norris’ possible slip of admission, the fact that these remarks skirted, and sometimes crossed, the acceptable boundaries of such courtly interchanges, now put them into a very different light. An assumption of the queen’s guilt made such flirtation deadly. On 12 May 1536, the commoners were tried before oyer and terminer commissioners (commissions authorized to ‘hear and determine’ treasons, felonies and other criminal cases at the assizes). Smeaton pleaded guilty to violation and carnal knowledge of the queen; the others pleaded not guilty. The jury returned a verdict of guilty against all four, and the judgment was a traitor’s execution – hanging, drawing and quartering.21

  What of Rochford? Anne and Rochford’s trial was held on 15 May, before a crowd of 2,000 in the Tower. They were judged by twenty-six peers of the realm, with Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the high steward of England, and uncle of the siblings, ‘in the King’s place and judge’. The indictment detailed the exact carnal nature of Anne’s relationship with her brother, but as to the substance of it, Chapuys summarized it as ‘by presumption, because he had been once a long while with her, and with certain other little follies’. Both Chapuys and George Constantyne noted that the odds for those betting on it were greatly in favour of Rochford being acquitted. That he was not perhaps suggests that his real crime lay elsewhere. Chapuys noted that Anne and her brother were charged with ‘having ridiculed the King, and laughed at his manner of dressing’ and his poetry, and for the various other ways in which Anne ‘showed… she did not love the King, but was tired of him’. One of the things they had probably laughed about was what Anne was accused of telling her sister-in-law, Rochford’s wife, that the king ‘was not skilful in copulating with a woman, and he had neither virtue nor potency’. Perhaps it was his knowledge of Anne’s judgment on Henry’s talents in bed that had led Rochford to doubt openly whether Princess Elizabeth was Henry’s child, another accusation levelled at him and one he did not deny. In his trial, these accusations were given to Rochford in written form, with specific instructions not to read them aloud – which Rochford flagrantly disobeyed. It has been suggested that it was this arrogant, ungentlemanly behaviour that sealed his fate, and certainly Constantyne wrote that he had heard, ‘he had escaped had it not been for a letter’, while Wyatt, in his poem ‘In mourning wise’, rued Rochford’s pride. The pair pleaded not guilty, but when the peers were called on to make their judgment, one by one each and every one of them, from the most junior to the senior, declared Anne, and then Rochford, guilty. Norfolk pronounced the sentence with tears in his eyes: Anne would be beheaded or burned at the king’s pleasure; Rochford would be hanged, drawn and quartered.22

  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.23

  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.24

  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 fir
st 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.25