by Jones, Nigel
Fisher’s fate – and probably that of More, too – was sealed when the new Pope, Paul III, hearing of his suffering, made him a cardinal. An enraged Henry vowed furiously that he would send Fisher’s head to Rome for its red hat. At dawn on 22 June 1535, the lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edward Walsingham, climbed the wooden staircase that connected his luxurious lodgings with Fisher’s spartan cell. He told the old bishop that he was to die that day. Fisher begged for a few more hours’ rest ‘by reason of my great weakness and infirmity’ and Walsingham promised to return at 9 a.m. At the appointed hour, helped by an attendant, Fisher dressed for the last time and walked unaided beneath the arch of the Bloody Tower and along the causeway to the Bulwark Gateway, where he collapsed and apologised for being too weak to go further – and for being unable to give his escorts their customary tip, on account of having ‘nothing left’.
The old man faced his end with dignity and quiet courage, asking the crowd on Tower Hill to help him with their prayers so that he did not weaken in his allegiance to his Catholic faith as he received his ‘stroke of death’. After the axe fell, people marvelled that Fisher’s emaciated body could produce such fountains of blood, but the way his remains were treated after his head was struck off reflected no credit on his killers. His corpse was stripped, impaled on spears, and flung into a common grave at the nearby church of All Hallows by the Tower – only to be dug up a fortnight later and reburied within the Tower walls at St Peter ad Vincula.
By then More, too, lay under the shadow of death. After another confrontation with the council in which all Cromwell’s subtlety had failed to draw an incriminating denial of the king’s spiritual authority from More, harsher pressure was applied: he was denied the use of the books and writing materials that had sustained him in the Tower for more than a year. Withdrawing such a privilege from a man whose whole life had been devoted to letters was tantamount to stepping on More’s oxygen tube. It was also the means by which his long travail in the Tower was ended. The man who came to More’s cell to take away his books was a former protégé of his, an unscrupulous lawyer named Sir Richard Rich who, insatiably ambitious, had risen to be Solicitor General.
Rich had already used his black arts in interrogating Fisher to provoke the old cleric into making fatally damaging admissions. Now, as he supervised the strapping up and packing into a sack of More’s books by two lesser officials, Sir Richard Southwell and William Palmer, Rich engaged his former mentor in seemingly casual conversation. Devastated by the loss of his spiritual food, a despairing More pulled the blinds against the strong summer light streaming through the slit windows into his cell and sat despondently in darkness. When Rich asked him why, More replied, ‘Now that the goods and implements are taken away the shop must be closed.’ More apparently let down his guard as Rich continued to badger him. According to Rich’s account – which was used in the indictment that finally sent More to the scaffold – the two lawyers engaged in legal banter, batting forth absurd scenarios. What if Parliament made Rich king – would More accept that? Marry, More batted back, what if Parliament declared that God was not God, what would Rich say then?
Rich then posed another question and, fatally, More answered it. Parliament had voted to accept the king as Supreme Head of the Church. If, as More said, he accepted Parliament’s decisions, why did he not accept this one? More agreed that Parliament had passed the Act of Supremacy. But, he added, ‘Most foreign countries do not accept the same,’ meaning that that particular law was against the universal law of Christendom. This was treason. Rich wrote a memo of his conversation for his master Cromwell who used it to frame More. The amoral Rich was easily induced to ‘sex up’ his conversation with More to have Sir Thomas specifically deny Henry’s right to head the Church – a piece of perjury which More scornfully rejected at his trial in Westminster Hall. Was it likely, he asked, that he would entrust not just his life but his immortal soul to a rogue like Rich whom he had always despised as a liar? Although Southwell and Palmer both declined to back Rich up, claiming that they had been too far away to hear the fatal conversation, Rich’s perjured word was enough. More was condemned to death.
More welcomed his martyrdom and used his last speech to caution his judges that they too stood near death. He was confident of going to heaven, he said, but warned his judges that he would only meet them ‘merrily’ there if they renounced their impious heresy and returned to the old faith. An axe turned towards him as a mark of condemnation, More then returned to the Tower by river. The Tower’s constable, Sir William Kingston, a gnarled old soldier, had come to know and love More during his long detention and burst into tears when they disembarked at the fortress. More comforted him. They would, he assured Kingston, ‘meet merrily’ in heaven thereafter. On the Tower’s wharf there was an affecting scene as More’s children, led by his favourite daughter Margaret, pushed through the thicket of spearmen guarding him to tearfully embrace their father. That night – again reduced to writing in charcoal – More penned his last letter to Margaret. Sending her his hair shirt and a final blessing, More told Margaret that he ‘longed to go to God’.
At dawn on Thursday, 6 July 1535, Sir Thomas Pope, a former friend and privy councillor, was sent to tell More that he would die that day. More thanked him for his ‘good tidings’ and asked him to pass greetings to the king who was killing him, together with his thanks for letting him live long enough in the Tower to reconcile himself to God. More was, he told Pope, beholden to Henry for ‘ridding me out of the miseries of this wretched world. And therefore will I not fail earnestly to pray for his grace, both here and in another world.’
In readiness for making a grand exit, More donned his finest clothes. But when Pope pointed out that the executioner got to keep his victim’s clothing as part of his fee, More swapped the costly garments for a simple grey smock belonging to his faithful servant, John Wood. To make sure that the headsman made a clean cut, though, he generously tipped him with a gold angel coin. In the clear light of the summer morning, More trod steadily up the gentle slope of Tower Hill, clutching a small red cross. When he reached the scaffold, he saw that the wooden structure was old and tottering. He turned to the Tower’s lieutenant, Sir Edward Walsingham, and spoke a magnificent exit jest: ‘I pray you, Master Lieutenant, see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself.’
More slowly mounted the creaking structure and was greeted at the top by the executioner who knelt to ask his forgiveness. The prisoner graciously granted it and briefly addressed the crowd gathered below. (Henry, fearing the power of More’s eloquence, had sent him a message commanding him not to say much. More, as ever an obedient servant of the Crown, obeyed.) He blessed the crowd, and affirmed that he died a good Catholic and a faithful servant of the king, adding significantly, ‘but God’s servant first’. Then, only pausing to ask the executioner to strike straight, he tied a linen bandage around his own eyes with a steady hand and lay full length, stretching his neck out over the low block. He carefully lifted his beard clear, remarking that it should not be cut as it had not committed treason. Then the axe fell.
Less than a year after More’s head had replaced that of his fellow martyr John Fisher on the spikes of London Bridge, the woman who had been their nemesis fell too. The capricious Henry had already tired of Anne well before More’s head was taken off, and when the news of the execution was brought to him at Greenwich as he was playing dice, he turned to the queen and viciously hissed, ‘It is because of you that the honestest man in my kingdom is dead,’ before stalking angrily away. Henry’s disdain for Anne was compounded of several factors: the familiar psychological pattern of long pent-up lust turning sour as soon as it is satisfied; resentment of the time and trouble Anne’s reluctance to become his mistress had caused; guilt over the deaths of More and the other martyrs; annoyance at the queen’s headstrong, arrogant and domineering behaviour; and the fact that he was already involved with the woman who would succeed Anne in his affections – a demure maid of honour to
the queen called Jane Seymour.
But the most pressing reason of state behind the king’s brutal decision to rid himself of the woman for whom he had changed the kingdom’s religion was her failure to produce a male heir. After giving birth to the Lady Elizabeth in 1533, she had rapidly conceived again – only to suffer a miscarriage in March 1534. Anne miscarried again in 1535, just after hearing that the king had been hurt in a jousting fall; and in January 1536, following another shock – the death of her old rival Katherine of Aragon – she gave birth to a stillborn premature male child. At that, Henry finally gave up. ‘You shall have no more sons from me,’ he pointedly told her.
Anne had no shortage of enemies at court. Ever since Henry had first conceived his passion for her, wagging tongues had accused Anne of sorcery, spreading stories that the queen had such infallible signs of a witch as six fingers on one hand. The Catholic faction loyal to Katherine, encouraged by the imperial ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, worked tirelessly for her downfall. Henry – his paranoia, possibly exacerbated by his chronic endocrinal condition, Cushing’s syndrome – ever increasing, eagerly jumped to the conclusion that his union with Anne, as with Katherine, was a sin against God, cursed by the lack of a live male heir. And once again he reached for the same solution as before: finding a new bride among his queen’s ladies.
Henry’s rage against the woman he had once lusted after could only be slaked with blood. His loyal servant, Thomas Cromwell, constructed a case against Anne. Her unpopularity, the rumours that she was a witch and her reputation as a teasing flirt with a circle of adoring young men combined to give Cromwell the weapons to ensure Anne’s destruction. With a wolf’s nose for the weakest animal in her pack, he picked on Mark Smeaton, a low-born musician favoured by Anne for his skill at the lute and virginals.
Smeaton, an effeminate, timid youth, was an unlikely candidate for the role Cromwell had cast him for – that of Anne’s lover – but he would serve as the instrument to bring her down. On 30 April 1536 the unsuspecting musician was invited to dinner at Cromwell’s riverside London town house in Stepney, just east of the Tower. Bursting with pride at this unexpected favour from the kingdom’s most prominent statesman, Smeaton arrived, only to be immediately arrested. Preliminary torture was applied in Cromwell’s presence. It did not take much to break the young man’s will. A knotted rope was wound round his skull and steadily tightened with a stick as Cromwell’s voice penetrated through the fog of pain.
Under the intolerable pressure – his eyes felt as though they were being forced out of their sockets and his skull seemed like an eggshell about to be crushed – Smeaton crumbled. Ready to say anything to stop the agony, he confessed that he had been the queen’s lover, along with more elevated courtiers in her circle. Perhaps hoping that the sheer number would demonstrate the absurdity of the charges, he agreed to every name that Cromwell spat at him: Henry Norris, yes; William Brereton, yes; Francis Weston also. Thomas Wyatt, too, and Richard Page, and not forgetting the queen’s own brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, with whom, said Smeaton, she had committed incest.
By the time that Smeaton, bruised, battered, his head ringing and aching, and scared out of his wits, was locked into an attic room in Cromwell’s house for the night, he had accused half a dozen men closest to the queen of being her lovers. The charges were almost certainly lies, but that was beside the point – Cromwell had enough evidence to rid Henry of his inconvenient queen. Cleverly, he ensured that the men he accused all had reputations for sexual laxity. The atmosphere of flirtatiousness and the air of sin that hung around the queen’s circle like a bad odour lent Cromwell’s charges some credence. It is significant, however, that the only man who actually admitted them was the only one who was subjected to torture (and doubtless to promises of lenient treatment if he told his tormentors what they wanted to hear): young Smeaton. As aristocrats, the other accused were not subjected to the Tower’s grosser forms of pressure – a privilege not enjoyed by the humbly born musician.
By 1 May, Smeaton was in the Tower, fettered by iron manacles in an underground dungeon. Henry was at Greenwich watching a tournament when Cromwell’s report reached him. Anne was with him, although by now the royal pair were barely on speaking terms. Immediately, without bothering to bid his wife a final farewell, the king summoned a knot of courtiers, including Sir Henry Norris. Riding through the spring countryside which then separated Greenwich from London, Henry told Norris that he was accused of adultery with the queen – an act of treason punishable by death.
Norris indignantly denied the charge, and protested the innocence of the queen too. With the jousting they had witnessed fresh in his mind, he offered to face the king in a trial by tournament to establish his innocence. Henry dispatched him to the Tower instead. There he was joined by Sir Francis Weston, one of those dubbed a Knight of the Bath at the Tower ceremony honouring Anne’s coronation. The party was completed by William Brereton, a wealthy Cheshire landowner, and by the queen’s brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford, accused of incest with his sister. Although married – his wife Jane would play a dishonourable part in the downfall of Henry’s fifth wife, Katherine Howard – Boleyn was said to be both a fornicator and a sodomite, and thus was another easy target for Cromwell’s malice. Perhaps Boleyn’s biggest crime in the king’s eyes, however, was to have heard Anne’s complaints about Henry’s inadequate performance in bed. Two more gentlemen in Anne’s circle, also accused of adultery by Smeaton, Sir Richard Page and the poet Thomas Wyatt, were hauled in for questioning but then released. The four remaining accused stoutly denied the charges but were detained in the Martin Tower in the north-east corner of the fortress’s inner ward.
The next day, 2 May 1536, nemesis knocked for Anne. It came in the shape of a four-man delegation from the Privy Council, headed by Cromwell and her own uncle, Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, as she ate dinner at Greenwich. When she learned of what she was accused from Norfolk’s lips, Anne hotly protested her innocence.
She was the king’s faithful wife, she said, and only he had touched her body. To Norfolk, a vile crawler who would undergo any abasement to keep his power and privileges, the sacrifice of a close family member was barely a minor embarrassment. Without giving Anne the opportunity to change her clothes, he had her hustled into a barge, which retraced her coronation journey and delivered her to the same Tower that had been the scene of her triumph three short years before.
With dreadful irony, she was received by the same constable who had been her deferential host on that occasion – Sir William Kingston. Then, he had been all smiles, bows and flowery compliments. Now, he was cold, formal and grimly correct. Nervously, Anne asked if she was to be sent to a dungeon, to which Kingston replied, ‘No, Madam, to the lodging that you lay in at your coronation.’ Detaining Anne in the palace rooms where she had stayed at the height of her glory was itself, of course, an act of psychological cruelty.
Deprived of her usual ladies, and with the closest members of her male coterie also in the Tower, as Anne was escorted under the arch of the Bloody Tower she came close to despair, flinging herself on the ground and calling on God to bear witness to her innocence. She was under round-the-clock surveillance by a quartet of women – including her aunt, Lady Boleyn, and the constable’s wife Lady Kingston – under orders to report her most casual remarks. As her dire position sank in, Anne alternated between bouts of weeping and fits of laughter. One remark in her distracted talk, ‘Oh, Norris, hast thou betrayed me?’, was twisted by Cromwell when reported to him as a confession that she had slept with Norris. More likely, it was in reaction to the lie that Norfolk had told her when she was detained in an effort to unnerve her: that both Norris and Smeaton had confessed their guilt. This was true of Smeaton, but never of Norris, who maintained his and the queen’s innocence until the end.
Anne recovered some composure and wrote to her husband from the lodgings of the lieutenant where she was transferred while the palace was made ready for her trial. Her
letter, headed, ‘From my doleful prison in the Tower’, was a dignified plea, not for mercy (she knew Henry well enough to realise that that quality was in short supply) but for justice. Expecting to die, she pleaded with him not to involve wholly innocent men in her ruin. Most of all she was anxious to shield their daughter Elizabeth from his wrath. Anne begged Henry not to let ‘that unworthy stain of a disloyal heart towards your good Grace ever cast so foul a blot on me, or on the infant Princess, your daughter’.
Henry, however, could not wait to rid himself of the wife he now hated. So hasty was the preparation of the indictment against Anne and her co-accused, that of the twenty counts of adultery, she had cast-iron alibis for twelve. Ignoring such inconsistencies, the authorities pressed ahead with the trials with indecent speed. On 12 May, Norris, Weston, Brereton and Smeaton were taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall for their trial. The jury was presided over by none other than Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne and George. This disgusting man was even more eager than the Duke of Norfolk to distance himself from his own flesh and blood. All the accused save Smeaton continued indignantly to deny the charges. Their obvious innocence availed them nothing, and the patently rigged verdicts of ‘Guilty’ by the hand-picked jury were duly passed. The unfortunate quartet were all condemned to be beheaded on Tower Hill.
Anne and George, thanks to their high status, and also for fear that there would be popular demonstrations of sympathy, were tried within the Tower – in the great hall of the royal palace. The Duke of Norfolk presided, along with twenty-six other peers (the repulsive Thomas Boleyn’s eager offer to serve was politely refused). Anne, dressed in a black velvet gown over a kirtle of crimson brocade, a simple cap with a black and white feather on her famous raven-black hair, entered the hall, the eyes of 2,000 spectators upon her. Accompanied by her ‘minders’ Sir William and Lady Kingston, she was escorted to a chair on a raised dais covered with purple velvet in the middle of the room. She bore herself well under the fearful circumstances, one witness noting, ‘She made an entry as though she were going to a great triumph and sat down with elegance.’