Anne Boleyn: Henry VIII's Obsession (15 page)

16. Anne Boleyn’s falcon badge carved as graffiti into the wall of the Beauchamp Tower at the Tower of London.

17. Westminster Abbey. The site of Anne’s greatest triumph when she was crowned queen of England.

18. The Jewel Tower at Westminster Palace. Little else remains of the palace that Anne knew.

19. Thomas Cranmer on his memorial at Oxford. Anne always considered Cranmer to be ‘her’ archbishop but at her fall he hurried to disassociate himself from her.

20. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire. The childhood home of Anne’s daughter, Elizabeth and the place where, in 1558, she was informed that she had become queen.

21. Hampton Court. The great palace which passed to Henry following the fall of Wolsey.

22. Decoration outside the Chapel Royal at Hampton Court showing the entwined initials of Anne’s successor, Jane Seymour with Henry’s. Anne may never have recognised just how formidable a rival she had in Jane.

23. Traitor’s Gate, under which Anne passed on her way into the Tower.

24. Catherine Howard, Anne’s cousin and successor as Henry’s wife shown as the Queen of Sheba in a window at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. Catherine would follow her cousin to the block less than six years after Anne’s death.

25. The Tower of London. The formidable fortress in which Anne was imprisoned and spent her last days.

26. The chapel of St Peter ad Vincula on Tower Green with the scaffold site where Anne died in the foreground.

Anne’s unpopularity probably took her by surprise. Catherine had been queen of England for nearly twenty years by the time the king first raised the issue of divorce and both she and Mary were loved. Anne, on the other hand, was seen as an upstart and an immoral woman. Even as early as December 1528, when Henry began to try to condition the people to accept Anne, the French ambassador reported that ‘the people remain quite hardened, and I think they would do more if they had more power’. Throughout the divorce there were mutterings against Anne Boleyn and the majority of people in England never came to love her. Anne was angered by the hostility towards her, and furious at the rumours that surrounded her. She was widely reputed to be the king’s mistress, with regular reports that she was pregnant or already the mother of the king’s child. Anne always adopted a public facade of indifference to the hostility and rumours, but some rumours were difficult to ignore.

John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, had spoken in defence of Catherine’s marriage at the Blackfriars trial and he remained a passionate supporter of the queen, much to both Anne and Henry’s anger. Fisher was in his London house one day in February 1531 when he decided not to eat his dinner as he was too engrossed in studying. The rest of his household sat down to dinner, eating the same meal that had been prepared for Fisher. Soon after the meal, all those who had eaten the pottage prepared fell ill and two members of the household died. It was clear to everyone that the pottage had been poisoned and the cook confessed that he had thrown a mysterious white powder into the food as it cooked. Henry immediately ordered that the cook was boiled alive as an example to all poisoners. According to Chapuys, ‘the king has done well to show dissatisfaction at this; nevertheless he cannot wholly avoid suspicion, if not against himself, whom I think too good to do such a thing, at least against the lady and her father’. Chapuys’ view was widely held across England and Fisher believed that the Boleyns were behind the attempt on his life. According to Fisher’s biographer, it was also not the only attempt to murder Fisher and a canon was shot at his house soon after the attempt to poison him. The shot narrowly missed him, damaging the roof of his house. A search was made and the gun was found to have been shot from a house belonging to Thomas Boleyn. Two attempts on his life were enough for Fisher and perceiving ‘that great malice was ment towards him’ he left London for Rochester. Anne, for all her bluster, was no murderess. There is no evidence that she ever attempted to murder Wolsey or Catherine or Mary and she would certainly not have risked her position merely to bring down John Fisher. The story does show just how poorly Anne was perceived by the people of England and that anything could be believed of her.