Henry VIII's Last Victim (19 page)

Anne’s case had already been prejudiced by the legal guilt of her ‘lovers’, but the actual evidence against her was sparse. Cromwell had the gossip of some of Anne’s ladies, her own remembrances and Smeaton’s confession, but it was all circumstantial. To get round this he had literally sexed up the charges into a sensational dossier that, he hoped, would shock the jury into a guilty verdict. The indictment stated that Anne,

following daily her frail and carnal lust, did falsely and traitorously procure by base conversations and kisses, touchings, gifts and other infamous incitations, diverse of the King’s daily and familiar servants to be her adulterers and concubines, so that several of the King’s servants yielded to her vile provocations.
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As Surrey watched his cousin, he listened to a catalogue of sordid details. Anne, he was told, had ‘procured and incited her own natural brother, George Boleyn . . . to violate her, alluring him with her tongue in the said George’s mouth, and the said George’s tongue in hers.’ It was too much for Justice Spelman. ‘All the evidence,’ he stated, ‘was of bawdry and lechery, so that there was no such whore in the realm.’
⁶⁷
Once the jurors were convinced of Anne’s sexual perversity, they found it easy to believe the other charges levelled against her: that she had conspired to assassinate the King, that she had promised to each of her lovers that she would marry him once Henry was dead, that she claimed never to have loved Henry, that she had poisoned Catherine of Aragon and planned to do the same to Princess Mary.

Anne defended herself with dignity. She admitted that she had occasionally presented her suitors with gifts in accordance with the convention of courtly love, but denied every other charge. According to one chronicler, ‘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.’
⁶⁸
Eustace Chapuys, the Imperial ambassador who had laboured so tirelessly for Catherine of Aragon, conceded that Anne answered the charges ‘satisfactorily enough’. To
him Anne had always been a ‘concubine’ and yet even he was doubtful of her guilt.
⁶⁹

Every peer in the jury knew his duty. One by one, beginning with the most junior and concluding with the most senior, each placed his hand on his heart and proclaimed Anne guilty. She was to be ‘burned or beheaded as shall please the King,’ announced the old crocodile, Norfolk, with tears streaming down his face.
⁷⁰
Anne received her sentence with serenity. She was, she said, ready to die, but she was truly sorry that innocent and loyal men had to perish with her. Then she was led out of the courtroom with the axe borne before her, its blade now facing her in recognition of her fate. A minor commotion distracted Surrey for a moment. The Earl of Northumberland, the man who had once loved Anne dearly,
^fn4
but who had just pronounced her guilty, collapsed under the strain and had to be carried out.

Lord Rochford was then marched to the bar. His sister’s guilt presupposed his own, but as no witnesses had been called to testify, many wagered that he would get off. He raised a spirited defence and when one of the charges, too sensitive to be read in open court, was handed to him in writing, he stunned onlookers by reading it aloud. It revealed that Anne had branded Henry a flop in bed, possessing ‘neither potency or force’.
⁷¹
This was a minor triumph that succeeded in raising official hackles, but it proved short-lived. Rochford was declared guilty by a unanimous verdict and, once again, Norfolk pronounced the death sentence.

On 17 May 1536 Smeaton, Norris, Weston, Brereton and Rochford went to the block. Across the river at Lambeth Palace, Archbishop Cranmer declared Princess Elizabeth illegitimate.
^fn5
Two days later it was Anne’s turn to die. She was dispatched not by a clumsy executioner with a rusty axe, but by an expert swordsman shipped in from Calais. We do not know if Surrey was there that May morning at Tower Green, but his father was and so was Richmond and, according to one source, a thousand others.
⁷²

Many suspected foul play; some even muttered darkly against the proceedings, but most were reputedly glad of the execution.
⁷³
According
to Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands and sister of Emperor Charles V, Anne suffered ‘no great wrong’. The crimes may not have fitted, but the punishment did as ‘she is known to have been a worthless person’. And yet, Mary concluded with black humour, ‘our sex will not be too well satisfied if these practices come into vogue; and though I have no fancy to expose myself to danger, yet being a woman I will pray with the rest that God will have mercy on us.’
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Surrey’s reaction to his cousin’s judicial murder is nowhere recorded. For his fellow poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, who had himself been briefly imprisoned under suspicion of being one of Anne’s lovers, the events were unbearable. Having watched the executions through the grate of his cell in the Bell Tower, he penned a prophetic warning:

These bloody days have broken my heart.

My lust, my youth did then depart,

And blind desire of estate.

Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.

Of truth, circa Regna tonat.
^fn6
,
⁷⁵

^fn1
drab
and
quean
are both sixteenth-century terms for a prostitute.

^fn2
Harris, ‘Marriage Sixteenth-Century Style’, note 55: ‘Divorce in the [modern] sense – i.e. the end of a marriage and right of each party to remarry – did not exist in Tudor England. The term referred to the separation of a couple – “of bed and board” in the contemporary phrase. The separation left the husband free to do virtually everything but remarry. The wife received an allowance for her support. It is not clear why the Duke of Norfolk was willing to pay his wife for a divorce of this type since they were, in fact, living in this situation de facto. He may have wanted a legal separation to clarify and limit Duchess Elizabeth’s financial claims on him. There is an outside chance he sought an annulment of the type Henry VIII secured against Catherine of Aragon, but this is unlikely since it would have illegitimized his children.’

^fn3
Henry felt no need to relinquish this title when he broke with Rome and the initials
F.D.
for
Fidei Defensor
can still be seen on English coins today.

^fn4
Henry Percy (Earl of Northumberland from 1527) had been romantically linked to Anne in the early 1520s and, according to Wolsey’s gentleman usher, an engagement had followed, only to be broken off at the King’s behest.

^fn5
This was done by invalidating Henry VIII’s marriage to Anne Boleyn on the basis of ‘entirely just, true and lawful impediments’. Cranmer’s pronouncement was patently absurd. Had Anne never been Henry’s lawful wife, then she could not have committed adultery.

^fn6
It thunders around thrones.

7

SO CRUEL PRISON

LESS THAN A
fortnight after the execution of his second wife, Henry VIII married his third. According to ambassador Chapuys, many likened his pre-nuptial excitement ‘to the joy and pleasure a man feels in getting rid of a thin, old and vicious hack in the hope of getting soon a fine horse to ride’. On 3 June 1536 Sir John Russell wrote that Jane ‘is as gentle a lady as ever I knew, and as fair a Queen as any in Christendom. The King hath come out of hell into heaven,’ he added, ‘for the gentleness in this, and the cursedness and the unhappines in the other.’
¹

Carew, Exeter and their faction revelled in their triumph, but their chief goal – the restitution of Mary Tudor to the succession – was thwarted by Cromwell. In a masterful demonstration of machiavellian deception, the King’s minister now turned the tables on his former allies. According to the Act of Succession, Mary was a bastard and it was treason to declare otherwise. Despite relentless pressure to acknowledge her illegitimacy, Mary had always held out. But now, under the very real threat that her dear friends would otherwise go to the block for supporting her claim, Mary finally submitted and put her hand to the document that declared the invalidity of her parents’ marriage and her own bastardy. The lives of Exeter, Carew and their allies were saved, if only temporarily, by Mary’s sacrifice, but their political influence had been shot. Thomas Cromwell dominated both Court and Council. On 2 July he replaced Anne Boleyn’s father as Lord Privy Seal; a week later he was raised to the peerage as Baron Cromwell and the following year his son Gregory married Queen Jane’s sister Elizabeth.

The nobility attempted to close ranks on 3 July 1536 with a stupendous triple wedding that reinforced the ties between some of England’s
oldest families. Surrey’s brother-in-law Lord John de Vere married Surrey’s cousin Lady Dorothy Neville, the daughter of the Earl of Westmorland, who had been Surrey’s mother’s childhood sweetheart and had subsequently married her sister. Another of Westmorland’s daughters, Lady Margaret Neville, wed Lord Henry Manners, heir to the Earl of Rutland, who had strong links with the Howards, while Rutland’s daughter Lady Anne Manners married Westmorland’s heir Lord Henry Neville. Surrey played his part in the ceremony as Lady Margaret’s escort from the church to the reception at the Earl of Rutland’s mansion in Shoreditch.

The hosts had prepared meticulously. The Rutland household accounts reveal payments for dozens of rushes to be spread over the floor, for sacks of coal and yards of black satin, velvet and cloth of silver. Money was also paid to dressmakers and to three separate barbers for the ‘washing and trimming’ and ‘rounding’ of Lord Henry Manners’ hair. The reception included dancing, masquerading and a late-night banquet, and was an exclusive society event, attended by ‘all the great estates of the realm’. Henry VIII even made the trip from Whitehall. Still in the first flushes of his new marriage, his
joie de vivre
seemed to have been resurrected for the night and he made a suitably stunning entrance dressed as a Turk.
²
The event was an impressive show of solidarity, but the real power lay at Court, where Cromwell’s influence was pervasive. Just how much was made obvious by Norfolk’s powerlessness in the face of his half-brother’s arrest for treason just five days after the festivities.

Lord Thomas Howard, the son of the Flodden Duke by his second wife Agnes, had been a regular visitor at Tendring Hall and Kenninghall during Surrey’s early years. Although he was Surrey’s half-uncle, he was, in fact, only five years older than the Earl and it is likely that the two boys would have played together as children. When Surrey was at Court he sometimes joined his sister Mary, and Thomas, and their circle of lyricists and enthusiasts – a sort of mutual appreciation society whose members wrote down their favourite poems (including one ascribed to Surrey) in a courtly anthology that has survived to this day and is known as the Devonshire Manuscript. One contributor was Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece.
^fn1
Some time in 1535 she and Lord
Thomas fell in love and over the Easter of 1536 they secretly plighted their troths.

Thomas had fallen for the wrong girl. As the King’s niece, Lady Margaret was a protected asset. The fall of Anne Boleyn and the subsequent bastardisation of Elizabeth meant that Henry VIII was temporarily without an heir. A second Act of Succession, announcing Henry’s right to nominate his own successor in case Jane Seymour could not give him an heir, was introduced to Parliament in June 1536. The Duke of Richmond was the name on everyone’s lips,
³
but Lady Margaret, born and bought up in England, was a possible candidate.

Henry VIII was paranoid about anything that touched the succession, but the fact that Thomas Howard was a member of the family that had already placed Anne Boleyn in his bed and assimilated the Duke of Richmond into their ranks, made him doubly suspicious. To their friends, into whose manuscript the couple’s love poems were inscribed, Margaret and Thomas’ clandestine match was clearly a matter of the heart. To Henry VIII, it was evidence that Thomas aimed for the Crown. Henry once described Margaret as ‘furnished with virtues and womanly demeanours after such sort that it would relent and mollify a heart of steel.’
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On 8 July 1536 he had her and her lover imprisoned in the Tower of London.

Neither separation nor the physical hardship of their confinement could dampen the couple’s ardour and they continued to pen lyrical love letters to each other:

Alas that ever prison strong

Should such two lovers separate!

Yet though our bodies sufferth wrong

Our hearts shall be of one estate.
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Margaret was too precious to be prosecuted, but on 18 July Thomas was charged with treason. Cromwell knew that a jury would be hard-pressed to find him guilty. There was no evidence of malicious intent, nor was the ‘crime’ of an unauthorised marriage to the King’s niece covered by the Treason Statute of 1352 or the 1534 Act of Succession, which had been formulated to deal with Henry’s heirs by Anne Boleyn. The Second Succession Act stated that any word or deed that imperilled the succession was potentially treasonous, but a jury might object to its application in the case of Thomas and Margaret as the act had
only been introduced to Parliament in June, that is,
after
the couple’s Easter betrothal. Thomas was therefore condemned by an act of attainder – a particularly nasty instrument that declared him a traitor by statute rather than by trial.
⁶