After her first miscarriage in 1534, Anne knew she was in trouble. Two pregnancies and no son. Henry became impatient; his small eyes narrowed when he looked at her. She tried to revert back to the role of mistress which she had played so well— sexual, scintillating, witty, despite her worry, despite her exhaustion. Yet often she cracked under the strain, letting loose a torrent of vitriol against the very man who had moved heaven and earth to place her on the throne. She hacked away at him with her sharp cleaving tongue, something which patient Queen Catherine had never done.
Thin and worn, her eyes feverishly bright, she looked older than her age. At court her sharp desperation, nervous nastiness, and sense of impending doom contrasted unpleasantly with plump sweet young things buzzing around her. And Anne noticed the king’s eye roving to her ladies-in-waiting. These ladies no longer hoped only to become the king’s mistress; they wanted to become queen. Anne had proven that a queen could easily be replaced; in her greatest victory were the seeds of her ultimate defeat.
But it was the men, after all, who proved more dangerous. On her scramble to the top Anne had alienated powerful courtiers. Sensing Henry’s growing dislike of his queen, political factions sprang into action against her. Anne was a religious reformer; there were many at court who yearned to go back to the bosom of the old church and thought that with Anne removed, the king would be so inclined. Politically, Anne was pro-French; she had been raised at the French court and hated Spain, the native land and staunch supporter of Henry’s first wife, Queen Catherine. But many at court wanted to drop the French alliance and form one with Spain.
There were those who wanted to remove Anne for reasons of pure personal greed. The cunning Seymour brothers, knowing of the king’s increasing interest in their plain sister Jane, saw riches and power coming their way as soon as Anne was gone. Those who had been displaced from lucrative court positions by Anne’s powerful family joined the fracas.
Henry, who had waited seven years in a messy divorce from his first wife to marry Anne, was now heartily sick of her and impatient to marry Jane Seymour. He wouldn’t tolerate another protracted divorce that raised questions about the legitimacy of future children. The easiest way to disencumber himself from Anne would be to charge her with a capital offense—adultery was always a good missile to sling at a queen—and have her executed. The newly minted widower could then remarry immediately.
Possibly there were more sinister forces at work than just Henry’s longing for an heir combined with Anne’s political enemies. Some modern scholars believe that the fetus she delivered in January 1536 was deformed, the surest sign of God’s displeasure in the sixteenth century. If this was true, Henry must have felt the accusing finger of God pointing straight at him. The king refused to accept the verdict; the deformed child could not have been his. Anne must have had a lover. Moreover, such abominations were Satan’s spawn. Anne must have been dabbling in witchcraft.
That theory explains why some courtiers saw Anne holding Elizabeth, a perfectly formed child, up to Henry on the day before her arrest, and arguing emotionally, perhaps trying to prove to him that she brought one well-formed child into the world and could produce another.
Accusations of adultery must always include the name of the lover, preferably a political enemy. Two Boleyn supporters controlled access to the king and would have to be neutralized immediately: Henry Norris—groom of the stool and gentleman of the privy chamber; and William Brereton—a leading gentleman of the privy chamber. While their titles sound humble, these men who handed the king his clothes or tidied up his rooms were immensely powerful. They had the royal ear and permitted or forbade entrée to the king’s apartments; it was, indeed, the highest honor to obtain such a position.
George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, Anne’s influential brother, would also have to be removed at the same fell stroke. His wife, Lady Jane Rochford—perhaps revenging herself for his sexual neglect of her—helped the king’s case by testifying that she had seen indications of George’s sexual involvement with his sister. Two other men—the young musician Mark Smeaton and Sir Francis Weston—had good looks to recommend them as proof of the queen’s lasciviousness.
But perhaps there was another reason to choose this particular group of five. If the goal was to remove the Boleyn faction, why were the leaders, her uncle and father, not charged with incest as well? They were far more powerful than any of the five accused. Some scholars think that all of the accused may have been homosexual, a sin considered worthy of death and eternal damnation, and indeed there may be evidence that Anne’s brother and Mark Smeaton were involved with each other. Still in existence today is a book from the 1530s attacking the institution of marriage with the names of George Boleyn and Mark S. inscribed in the front. An expensive book, it may have been an unusual and somewhat inappropriate gift from the viscount to the musician.
On May Day 1536, the day when virgins danced around an ancient phallic symbol, decorating it with colored ribbons, when witches were thought to fly through the night sky on brooms, Anne’s alleged lovers were arrested. The following day, May 2, Anne herself was arrested. After a brief trial, all five men were found guilty of adultery with the queen and condemned to die.
While most people of the time readily admitted that they were hopeless sinners, the last statements made by the accused men on the scaffold seemed to indicate sins more grievous than usual. Since they were not guilty of adultery, what sins were they referring to? At his death, George Boleyn confessed that he was a great sinner whose sins had deserved death many times over. Brereton implied his innocence of the charge of adultery with the queen but guilt for some other heinous offense. “I have deserved to die if it were a thousand deaths. But the cause whereof I die, judge not,” he said.19
Weston said his fate was a warning to others not to count on this mortal life, for “I had thought to have lived in abomination yet this twenty or thirty years and then to have made amends.”20 Poor little Smeaton had admitted under torture that he had been the queen’s lover. Nor did he deny it on the scaffold, perhaps because such a crime would have been less sinful than his homosexuality. “Masters, I pray you all pray for me for I have deserved this death,” he said.21 Norris said nothing.
Henry, trying hard to believe the allegations which would enable him to marry his sweetheart Jane Seymour in a matter of days, wallowed in self-pity. Most kings with unfaithful wives— truly unfaithful wives—went to great efforts to obtain a divorce without mention of the word adultery, which cast suspicion on children of the marriage a well as the king’s virility. The Spanish ambassador wrote that no man ever paraded with such frequency the fact that his wife had betrayed him, and with so little sign that he minded. Henry multiplied the number of Anne’s lovers until he was convinced she had had no less than a hundred of them.
At her adultery trial on May 15, the queen was accused with dates and places. Yet many are clearly impossible. Two of the dates are October 6 and 12, 1533, at Westminster Palace when Anne was still recuperating from the September birth of Princess Elizabeth. Locked in a darkened room, surrounded by clucking ladies, the queen was not permitted to leave until her “churching” ceremony later in the month. Her supposed rendezvous with Mark Smeaton at Greenwich Palace on May 13, 1535, was also untrue; the queen was then residing at Richmond Palace. Out of twenty encounters, eleven were clearly fabricated.
Oddly, none of Anne’s ladies was charged along with her as accessory to her adultery. And surely Henry, in his sweeping capture of knights, pawns, and the queen on his chessboard, would have captured errant ladies-in-waiting. Yet none was ever mentioned—further proof of her innocence.
One eyewitness of the queen’s trial reported, “She made so wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her, excusing herself with her words so clearly as though she had never been faulty to the same.”22
And yet it was clear that Anne had enjoyed flirtations with handsome young courtiers; numerous witnesses attested to it. Before a tribun
al of cold-faced judges, jollity of any nature sounds sinful. And particularly for a queen accused of adultery, reports of laughing, flirting, and dancing seemed damning evidence of her sins. It would have been harder to accuse a dull, plodding queen who spent most of her time in church.
Evidently Anne’s vivacity was enough to condemn her. The court found, “Because thou has offended our sovereign the king’s grace in committing treason against his person and here attainted of the same, the law of the realm is this, that thou hast deserved death, and thy judgment is this: that thou shalt be burned here within the Tower of London, or on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off, as the king’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.”23 An odd thing happened when Anne’s puppet strings were cut—the puppets remained standing; it was the puppeteer who fell down limp.
Anne was only twenty-nine when she emerged pale and dry-eyed from her long night’s vigil in the Tower of London to walk to the scaffold prepared for her. Eyewitnesses reported that on that day, May 19, 1536, she was breathtakingly beautiful. Underneath her white ermine cloak, she wore a black velvet gown edged with pearls over a red quilted petticoat—colors chosen, perhaps, to conceal the blood that would soon wash over them. Anne’s behavior had rarely if ever been queenly; but on this day she was truly regal.
The scaffold was three or four feet high, draped in black, surrounded by a crowd, the Lord Mayor and alderman and hundreds of ordinary Englishmen; no foreigners were permitted to see an English queen die. She was given four loyal ladies-in-waiting to accompany her to the edge of eternity.
Witnesses said that on her walk to the scaffold—a walk all too long, all too short—she kept turning around looking perhaps for a messenger to come bearing a royal pardon. She must have hoped that in the last moment, the king, who had once so loved her, would not let her die. Perhaps he would exile her to France, arrange for her to take nun’s vows and become an abbess. But after she climbed the scaffold and took one last look around, there was still no messenger.
In the sixteenth century a condemned person was supposed to humbly accept God’s will and show courage in the concluding scene that would define an entire life. Ranting against injustice, protesting one’s innocence, or trembling with fear was considered to be in very poor taste. Knowing her part, Anne strode front and center for her address. “Good Christian people, I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die,” she began. “For according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it.
“I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die, but I pray God save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never, and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle in my cause, I require them to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.”24
Anne spoke “with a goodly smiling countenance.”25 We can picture her low clear voice carrying over the crowd as the spectators bent forward to catch each word. After her speech, her ladies, weeping, removed her ermine mantle. Anne took off her headdress, showing for a moment the shining raven’s wing hair that had bewitched a king, then tucked it up under a cap. This and her low neckline would avoid dulling the sharp stroke of the blade.
She bade farewell to her attendants. One of them tied a handkerchief around her eyes so she would not see the blow coming. She knelt down and repeated the words, “Jesu, receive my soul; O Lord God, have pity on my soul. To Christ I commend my soul!”26 Suddenly, with one swift blow, it was over, her head rolling on the scaffold. The executioner held it up by the hair. The lips were still moving in prayer.
Her ladies covered the bleeding torso, the bleeding head, in white drapes that all too soon became red, a seething growing inundating red. Neither Henry nor the Tower constable had thought about a coffin for the queen, and so she was placed in a box used to ship bow-staves from the Tower Armory to Ireland. But the box was too short. Only the torso would fit, and her head was tucked underneath her arm. Indeed, it was by this story that nineteenth-century workmen identified her body when they repaved the church in which she had been buried. It was a poor resting place for a queen executed for adultery she did not commit.
CATHERINE HOWARD, QUEEN OF ENGLAND
“Rose without a Thorn”
After Anne Boleyn’s death, the religious reform party was stymied at the advent of her successor, the Catholic Jane Seymour. Important positions at court were taken away from the disgraced Boleyn supporters and given to the Seymour family and their friends. But Jane died in childbirth barely a year after her marriage, and Henry chose as his fourth queen the Protestant Anne of Cleves. Suddenly the reformers were in power, and the Catholics in despair.
Catholics at court hoped to find a young mistress for the king whom they could use to balance the scales in their favor. Anne Boleyn’s uncle, Lord Thomas Howard, duke of Norfolk, who had obtained royal permission to remain Catholic throughout the English reformation, was now itching to throw one of his numerous attractive nieces into the royal bed. He was delighted when nineteen-year-old Catherine Howard, a new maid of honor to Anne of Cleves, came to court and immediately won the king’s favor. One Howard relative reported that the “King’s Highness did cast a fantasy to Catherine Howard the first time that ever his Grace saw her.”27
It would be a meteoric rise in the fortunes of a neglected girl. As a daughter of an impoverished younger son of the Howard clan, her mother dead, Catherine was sent at about the age of ten to live with the crusty old matriarch of the Howards, Agnes, dowager duchess of Norfolk. Catherine slept with other girls and servants in a dormitory on the top floor of the house. As the years passed she grew into a beautiful voluptuous teenager, but her mind remained that of a child, empty-headed, thoughtless, and impetuous.
If we are to judge by Catherine’s only extant letter, she could barely write. The dowager duchess believed a girl’s education consisted mainly of housekeeping, good manners, spinning, embroidery, and a little music. In 1536 the grande dame asked Henry Manox, the son of a neighbor, to instruct the girls on the lute and the virginals. Manox fell in love with the fifteen-year-old Catherine who, though not in love herself, was interested in his advances.
Knowing that Manox inhabited too low an orbit to marry, Catherine wisely refused him intercourse. But he pressured her to at least let him feel her private parts. “I am content,” Catherine replied, “so as you will desire no more but that.”28 The two met in a dark and empty chapel, and so the thing was done. The dowager duchess, catching the two of them fondling each other, boxed the young man’s ears and sent him on his way.
Having won this much from Catherine, Manox boasted to the other servants that he would marry her. Mary Lassells, the duchess’s maid, upbraided Manox for daring to marry a Howard. But he told her to hold her peace. “I know her well enough for I have had her by the cunt, and I know it among a hundred,” he affirmed. “And she loves me and I love her, and she hath said to me that I shall have her maidenhead, though it be painful to her, and not doubting but I will be good to her hereafter.”29
But by now Catherine had a better prospect than Manox the music master. Francis Dereham, of good birth and some wealth, was a gentleman-pensioner of the duke of Norfolk and visited the duchess’s household regularly. Dereham possessed the exquisite manners of a young courtier; he was extremely handsome and well-dressed. Catherine nearly toppled over with love for him at first sight.
The girls’ dormitory was locked every night but the ardent swains intent upon visiting their sweethearts had several options. They could climb up the lattice to an upstairs window. Some of them could pick the lock of the dormitory door. If all else failed, one of the girls could steal the key from the duchess’s chamber after she had fallen sound asleep. From 1537 to 1539 Catherine made merry with Francis Dereham in the dormitory at night. Dereham and the othe
r visiting suitors brought with them “wine, strawberries, apples, and other things to make good cheer.”30
It was here, then, if not before with Manox, that Catherine lost her virginity with Francis Dereham. She would later acknowledge that they had become “carnal lovers.”31 Later, one witness said that Mistress Catherine “was so far in love” with Dereham that they embraced “after a wonderful manner, for they would kiss and hang their bellies together as they were two sparrows.”32
Catherine would draw her heavy bed curtains when Dereham came to call, yet many dormitory residents not so fortunate to have lovers complained about the noise. One of them, Alice Restwold, protested that “she was a married woman and wist what matrimony meant and what belonged to that puffing and blowing” that went on in bed.33
Catherine knew something of primitive means of birth control. At one point, when warned that she could get pregnant, she replied that “a woman might meddle with a man and yet conceive no child unless she would herself.”34
Catherine and Dereham considered themselves married and, indeed, in the eyes of the Church, they could have been, if they privately exchanged vows of their intention to marry and had sexual relations. When acquaintances suggested that Dereham show less affection for Catherine in public, he retorted, “Who should hinder him from kissing his own wife?”35 Though from a better family than Manox, even Dereham was no match for a Howard and Catherine must have known it. Dereham pushed her for marriage, and she toyed with him. But Fate had a grander marriage in store for Catherine Howard.
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