CHAPTER 7

To the Tower

Anne spent part of the morning of May 2, watching a game of tennis. Her champion won, and she was regretting not having placed a bet on him¹ when a gentleman messenger came and bade her, “by order of the King,” present herself before the Privy Council at once.² For a queen to be thus summoned was strange and portentous indeed, and Anne must have felt deep trepidation as she entered the council chamber, especially as her most powerful protector, the King her husband, had gone to Westminster. Contrary to the traditional version of her story, which shows her as being taken completely unawares by the events of May 2, it is more than likely that she had been half expecting something like this to happen. Why else would she have entrusted Elizabeth to Matthew Parker’s care, or tackled Henry with Elizabeth in her arms? If the crowds of courtiers who had huddled in speculation at Greenwich the night before were aware that something momentous was afoot, Anne must have been too, and she surely had cause to suspect that it concerned herself.

There were three grave-faced men present in that council chamber, who all respectfully rose to their feet. They were her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk; Sir William FitzWilliam, who had that morning returned to Greenwich from London, after committing Norris to the Tower; and Sir William Paulet, the King’s comptroller. Norfolk, as we have seen, had long since fallen out with Anne, and she could not expect him to be sympathetic toward her now. Even so, in the days to come the duke would betray his private distress at her plight. Nevertheless, his overriding sense of self-preservation, and his relentless ambition, were forcing him to be complicit in her destruction.

Without preamble these lords informed Anne of the powers granted to the royal commissioners, accused her of “evil behavior,” formally charged her with having committed adultery with Sir Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton, and one other whom they did not name, and told her that both the named men had already admitted their guilt.³

Anne denied the charges,⁴ but it did her no good. Cavendish says she protested that she was the King’s true wife and that no other man had ever touched her. She would have realized that the crimes laid against her were grave, and it must have been immediately obvious that her enemies were determined to destroy her. Worst of all, she can have been in no doubt that the King her husband had ordered her arrest.

The lords were very severe with her. Four days later she was to complain, “I was cruelly handled at Greenwich with the King’s Council, with my lord of Norfolk, that he said, ‘Tut, tut, tut.’ As for Master Treasurer,” she went on, “he was in the forest of Windsor.” Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, was later to comment to Cromwell, “You know what she means by that,” from which we may infer that “the forest of Windsor” was a euphemism for something else. It has erroneously been assumed that “Master Treasurer” was the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne’s father, and that he was hunting at Windsor,⁵ but FitzWilliam had replaced him in that office in 1525, and was clearly present at the Queen’s interrogation and arrest. Her remark may have been a reference to Sir Brastius, one of the knights in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, a book that was very popular at this time, and well known at court. Sir Brastius became a hermit in the forest of Windsor, and because hermits lived silent, solitary lives, Anne may have been implying that FitzWilliam was uncommunicative when she was before the council. There is no evidence that she was “cruelly handled” physically by Norfolk and FitzWilliam;⁶ their cruelty, as she saw it, was probably verbal. She received better treatment from “Master Comptroller,” Sir William Paulet, whom she called “a very gentleman.”⁷

After charging her, the lords had her escorted back to her apartments and left her there under guard while her dinner was served. The meal was a dismal affair,⁸ with Anne distressed when the King’s waiter did not arrive to wish her, on her husband’s behalf, “Much good may it do you,” as he customarily did. She also noticed the ominous silence of her ladies, and her servants struggling to conceal tears, which further unnerved her. The cloth had only just been removed, and she was still at table, seated under her canopy of estate, and wearing a sumptuous gown of crimson velvet and cloth of gold, when Norfolk returned at two o’clock with Cromwell; Lord Chancellor Audley; John de Vere, Earl of Oxford; William, Lord Sandys, the Lord Chamberlain; and several lords of the Council. With them, according to the “Spanish Chronicle,” was the captain of the King’s guard, who had come to Greenwich “with a hundred halberdiers in the King’s great barge.” The writer of this chronicle could not have been an eyewitness to many of the events he describes, and his account of Anne’s fall is often inaccurate, melodramatic, and mostly fabricated, but he lived in London and may well have seen those halberdiers going to Greenwich in that barge. He also had contacts in the Tower itself, and may have gotten some of his information from them.

Norfolk had in his hand a scroll of parchment—the warrant for the Queen’s arrest. Anne rose to her feet and asked the lords “why they came.” Norfolk replied that “they came by the King’s command to conduct her to the Tower, there to abide during His Highness’s pleasure.” (This gives the lie to the “Spanish Chronicle” editor’s assertion that Anne at first believed she was being taken to York Place to see the King.) She could have been in no doubt that her situation was serious, but at that time the Tower cannot have appeared quite as menacing a place as it would later, for no royal personage had as yet been executed there.

“If it be His Majesty’s pleasure, I am ready to obey,” Anne answered, calmly enough, and then, “without change of habit, or anything necessary for her removal, she committed herself to them.”⁹ She was not given time to pack clothes or personal possessions, say good-bye to her child, or summon her women, but was informed that money would be provided for her needs while she was in the Tower; the fact that the constable would be allocated £25.4s.6d (£8,800) for her food shows that she was served as befit a queen during her imprisonment.¹⁰ Her household, however, was left behind at Greenwich.¹¹

The councillors conducted Anne to the waiting barge.¹² It was usual for state prisoners to be conveyed to the Tower under cover of darkness, but Anne Boleyn made the journey “in full daylight,”¹³ under guard, accompanied by Audley, Norfolk, Cromwell, Sandys, Oxford, and Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower.¹⁴

Kingston, who was to have custody of the Queen during her imprisonment, was now, as he put it that year, “in the midst of mine age”¹⁵ (he was to die in 1540), but he had been “a very tall, strong knight” in his triumphant jousting days, when he tilted against the King.¹⁶ He was a soldier courtier who had served as a yeoman of the chamber as far back as 1497, being promoted to gentleman usher by 1504. Since then he had enjoyed a distinguished military and diplomatic career, as well as the King’s favor over many years, and had held the office of Constable of the Tower since 1524.

Described by a Venetian ambassador in 1519 as a “creature” of Wolsey’s, Kingston had supported Henry VIII’s nullity suit against Katherine of Aragon and played an official role at Anne Boleyn’s coronation in 1533. Yet Chapuys thought him wholly devoted to the late Queen Katherine and her daughter, and he may indeed secretly have sympathized with them, for he once referred to Anne as being “unjustly called Queen.”¹⁷ Yet whatever his private opinion, and for all his professed belief in her guilt, while she was in his charge he was to behave toward her with courtesy and humanity—as he had to Cardinal Wolsey at the time of his arrest in 1530—and would come to feel admiration for her courage.

As they sat in the barge, Norfolk repeated to Anne, with a good deal more sanctimonious tut-tutting, that “her paramours had confessed their guilt,” but he got no satisfaction from it, for she disdained to reply. Strickland says she passionately protested her innocence and begged to see the King, but Norfolk just replied, “Tut, tut.” Anne thereupon declared with desperate bravado that “they could not prevent her from dying their queen,” and made a gesture toward her neck. Again the tale comes from one of the later sources consulted by Strickland, and may be apocryphal. But the news of Anne’s arrest had certainly spread rapidly, and large crowds were to be seen flocking to the riverbanks to see her conveyed to prison.

“About five of the clock at night, the Queen, Anne Boleyn, was brought to the Tower of London.”¹⁸ Today, it takes thirty minutes by river bus to get there from Greenwich; Anne had been arrested around two o’clock and been made to leave her lodgings immediately,¹⁹ so even allowing time for walking through the palace to where the barge was waiting at the privy stairs, which were flanked by stone statues of heraldic beasts, three hours seems a long time for such a short journey. It is possible that the Queen had to be held under guard at Greenwich until the tide changed.

The oarsmen steered the vessel toward the Byward Tower, then known as the Tower by the Gate,²⁰ and Anne “came to the Court Gate.”²¹ It is often incorrectly stated that she entered the Tower through the water gate below St. Thomas’s Tower, which later became known as Traitors’ Gate, but in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was usual for kings and queens to use the Court Gate in the Byward Tower, the private entrance to the Tower of London from Tower Wharf, this entrance having been originally built by Edward I in the thirteenth century, although the gate through which Anne passed (which survives today) had been constructed in the fifteenth century. The Court Gate led on to Water Lane, the thoroughfare in the Outer Ward that runs parallel with the River Thames, and it was just a short walk along there, past the rear of the Lieutenant’s House on the left, to the entrance to the palace, where the Queen was to be lodged.

Alexander Aless, returning home from Greenwich, had scarcely crossed the Thames and reached London when the cannon on Tower Wharf “thundered out,” announcing to the world the incarceration of a “person of high rank.” He was told that “such is the custom when any of the nobility of the realm are conveyed to that fortress, there to be imprisoned.”²² The cannon fire must have given rise to much excited speculation in London.

Waiting to greet the Queen at the Court Gate was Kingston’s deputy, the Lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Edmund Walsingham, he who famously reminded the imprisoned Sir Thomas More that “orders is orders,” and who infamously consigned one of his own servants to the notorious Little Ease—a cell so small that anyone confined in it could neither stand up nor lie down—for attempting to help a prisoner escape. Anne was to be fortunate, insofar as her dealings with the Tower officials were limited to the more sympathetic constable.

Faced with the stark reality of her situation, the Queen’s composure was disintegrating; there is no evidence that she started screaming, as at least one historian has asserted, although she seems already to have been in a fragile state: it was only three months since she had miscarried,²³ and during that time she had suffered increasing anxiety and fear, culminating in her arrest. After disembarking at the privy steps at the Court Gate and “entering in” the Tower, she “fell down on her knees before the lords” on the cobblestones, “beseeching God to help her as she was not guilty of her accusement.”²⁴ She must have looked a pitiful sight, “her soul beaten down with afflictions to the earth,”²⁵ for she would have been aware that it was rare for anyone accused of treason to escape condemnation and death. The councillors made no comment but formally committed her to the custody of the constable. As they made to depart, Anne got to her feet and “desired the said lords to beseech the King’s grace to be good unto her; and so they left her there, prisoner.”²⁶

Kingston reported to Cromwell the next day that, after Norfolk and the councillors had departed to their barge, he “went before the Queen into her lodging.” The “Spanish Chronicle” has him taking her by the arm, and her saying to him, “I was received with greater ceremony the last time I entered here,” recalling how she had come in triumph before her crowning in 1533. The constable himself later reported that she asked fearfully, “Mr. Kingston, do I go into a dungeon?”

“No, madam, you shall go into your lodging that you lay in at your coronation,” the constable told her. He was referring to the Queen’s apartments in the royal palace, which had been refurbished for her at great expense three years earlier.

“It is too good for me!” Anne cried. “Jesu, have mercy on me!”

This was a strange observation for a woman who had just protested that she was not guilty of the crimes of which she was accused. If she were indeed innocent—and that had to be presumed until she was condemned—then she deserved to be accorded the respect due to her rank and to be comfortably housed as queen. Moreover, the news that she was to be held in such state, and not in a dungeon, might have been cause for optimism and an uplifting of spirits. Anne’s assertion that it was too good for her might suggest that she knew herself to be guilty of something. But maybe she was just too hysterical to know what she was saying, for after uttering these strange words, Kingston reported, she “kneeled down weeping a great pace, and in the same sorrow fell into a great laughing, and she hath done [so] many times since.”

Kingston must have applauded the decision to lodge Anne in the Queen’s apartments, since his wife was to be in attendance on her, and it would make things easier for that lady to be housed in comfort. It is unlikely that this decision had been made by the constable;²⁷ the orders had probably been relayed through Cromwell. Anne was still the Queen of England, and not as yet convicted of any crime, and even when she was, she would still be honorably housed in the Tower. She was never treated as a common prisoner.

Kingston now conducted her to her lodgings, which lay on the east side of the inner ward between the Lanthorn Tower and the Wardrobe Tower, and had been rebuilt three or four years earlier.²⁸ Although the Tower palace was a favored royal residence for centuries, it had become outdated by the Tudor period, and Anne only stayed there once, with the King, on the two nights before her coronation. In 1532-33, in anticipation of that triumph, Cromwell, on Henry’s orders, spent £3,500 (£1,276,000) on repairs and improvements, so Anne might be accommodated in suitable splendor. The walls and ceilings were decorated in the “antick” Renaissance style, and the luxurious apartments comprised a “great” (presence) chamber, a closet leading off that appears to have been used by Anne as a private oratory, a dining chamber embellished with a novel “mantel of wainscot with antick,” and a bedchamber with a privy. Since Anne left these rooms for her coronation in June 1533, they had lain deserted. By the end of the sixteenth century they would be uninhabitable,²⁹ and at the end of the eighteenth, they would be dismantled.³⁰

Kingston had instructions from Cromwell to record anything of significance that Anne said. For this reason, those appointed to wait on her were to be forbidden to speak with her unless Lady Kingston was present.³¹ Master Secretary was evidently hoping that she would incriminate herself out of her own mouth, and thus bolster the case being drawn up against her. Kingston was faithfully to obey his orders, and his reports are preserved in the Cotton manuscripts in the British Library; they were damaged in the fire that swept through the Cottonian Library in 1731, but were seen and largely transcribed before then by the antiquary John Strype who printed them in his Ecclesiastical Memorials of the Church of England under King Henry VIII in the eighteenth century. These letters give vivid insights into Anne’s imprisonment and her state of mind while she was in the Tower.³²

The ladies and servants who had been chosen to attend the Queen were waiting to greet her in the presence chamber. Anne’s old nurse, Mrs. Mary Orchard, had been chosen as one of her two chamberers (domestic servants)—an unexpected kindness, this—along with the “Mother of the Maids,” Mrs. Stonor, the former Margaret (or Anne) Foliot, who was married to Sir Walter Stonor, he being the King’s sergeant-at-arms and a prominent courtier; Mrs. Stonor later became a maid-of-honor to Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife.

Anne had also been allocated two menservants (probably grooms or ushers) and a boy. But the Queen could not have been pleased to see the other four ladies, who were clearly spies chosen by Cromwell to watch and report on the prisoner. There was her aunt, Elizabeth Wood, Lady Boleyn, the wife of her father’s younger brother, Sir James Boleyn of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, who, despite being chancellor of Anne’s household, had—perhaps pragmatically, seeing his niece heading for ruin—switched his allegiance to Lady Mary.³³ Another aunt had also been set to spy on Anne: her father’s sister, Lady Shelton, she who had helped make life a misery for Lady Mary.

We might pause here to consider if Lady Shelton was more willing to spy on Anne and work for the downfall of Norris and Weston on account of their cavalier treatment of her daughter Madge. In February 1535, reasoning that if the King had to have a mistress it should be someone sympathetic to herself, Anne had maneuvered Madge Shelton into his path. The brief affair that ensued soon petered out, but not before it caused Anne bitter pangs of jealousy and sullied the Shelton girl’s reputation; by 1536, Madge Shelton was betrothed to Sir Henry Norris, but clearly (as will be seen) Sir Francis Weston thought she was fair game. Anger at the compromising of her daughter may well have turned Lady Shelton against Anne and her faction.

Yet Lady Shelton had perhaps been nursing another grievance against Anne for some time. As we have seen, she was forced to follow the Queen’s instructions and make Lady Mary’s life a misery, which ill-treatment only served to reinforce the girl’s suspicion that the Boleyn faction was trying to do away with her. Yet although Anne’s letters to Lady Shelton reveal that she placed great trust in her, and there is no hint of any falling out between them, it is possible, even likely, that Lady Shelton resented the role she was forced to play, and that remorse had bred in her a desire to be revenged on the niece who had driven her to such cruelties, and to distance herself from them.

There may also have been a third reason for Lady Shelton’s defection. Her son, John Shelton, was married to Margery Parker, the sister of Lady Rochford,³⁴ and it is possible that the Sheltons were disposed to be sympathetic to Jane Rochford’s complaints against her husband, even to the extent of believing in her allegations of his incest with the Queen, and viewing Jane as a deeply wronged woman. If so, it is hardly surprising that Lady Shelton was willing to cooperate with Cromwell. On the other hand, she—and Lady Boleyn—may well have felt that, above all other considerations, it was politic to do so, since the Boleyn faction was hurtling headlong to destruction. Whatever her motives, Lady Shelton had learned from Anne how to treat a disgraced royal lady, and she now had the opportunity of putting that knowledge into practice once more.

The other two chief attendants who were to be employed as spies were Mary Scrope, Lady Kingston, Sir William’s second wife, who perhaps was not enjoying good health at this time, for her husband had described her as “my sick wife” the previous January;³⁵she had served Katherine of Aragon and was a friend of Lady Mary, so cannot have been sympathetic toward Anne. Lastly, there was Margaret Dymoke, Mrs. Coffin (or Cosyn), the wife of William Coffin, who was the Queen’s Master of Horse and one of the King’s long-favored Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, and resided—when not at court—at Haddon Hall in Derbyshire. He would be knighted the following year, by which time his wife was in the service of Jane Seymour.³⁶ The Coffins were related by marriage to the Boleyns. Mrs. Coffin was “a gentlewoman appointed to wait upon the Queen here, and that lay on her pallet bed;”³⁷ it was normal practice for a servant to share a royal bedchamber and attend to any needs of their master or mistress during the night.

Anne viewed these ladies with dismay; by her own later admission, she had never liked any of them, and she was perhaps aware that the feeling was mutual; above all, she was angry with Henry for appointing them,³⁸ and she must surely have guessed why they were there. Cromwell was no doubt hoping that, with a little baiting and pressure, she would give rein to her notoriously indiscreet tongue and incriminate herself.

As was customary with prisoners of rank, Anne was to take her meals with her custodian, Sir William Kingston. That first evening in the Tower—Kingston wrote on May 3 that “all these sayings was yesternight”—Anne, who was evidently aware of her peril, and of the need to proclaim her innocence, desired Kingston, perhaps while they were at table, “to move the King’s Highness that she might have the sacrament in the closet by her chamber, that she might pray for mercy.” Certainly arrangements were immediately made for her to take Holy Communion that evening, because on May 7 she would recall, “I knew of Mark’s coming to the Tower that night I received the sacrament; it was ten of the clock ere he were well lodged, and I knew of Norris going to the Tower.” Evidently this was the first she had heard of these arrests. She did not as yet know that her brother had been taken.

She was anxious to make it clear to the constable that there was no reason why she should not receive the sacrament. “My God, bear witness there is no truth in these charges,” she declared to him, “for I am as clear from the company of man as from sin, [and] as I am clear from you; and am the King’s true wedded wife! Master Kingston, do you know wherefore I am here?”

“Nay,” Kingston replied, doubtless as he had been told to do. Cromwell was no doubt working on the premise that the less Anne knew, the more she might reveal.

“When saw you the King?” Anne persisted.

“I saw him not since I saw him in the tiltyard [on May Day],” he told her.

“Master Kingston, I pray you tell me where my lord my father is,” Anne demanded to know.

“I saw him afore dinner in the court,” Kingston replied.

Working herself up into what Cavendish called “the storms of deep desperation,”³⁹ she cried, “Oh, where is my sweet brother?”—which, in the circumstances, probably sounded pretty damning.

“I said I left him at York Place,” Kingston reported, “and so I did.” Anne did not at this stage know of the shameful charge that was soon to be made against her and her brother, and she was perhaps hoping that Rochford would speak to the King on her behalf and stoutly defend her. She must also have imagined his distress when he heard of her arrest—and, of course, there is always the remote possibility that she had indeed committed incest with him, and knew there was much to fear. Her next words, coming immediately after her question about her brother, suggest that the awful truth might have been dawning on her.

“I hear say that I should be accused with three men,” Anne said, “and I can say no more but nay, without I should open my body.” And so saying, “she opened her gown,” spreading her skirts in a dramatic and symbolic gesture, saying, “Oh, Norris, hast thou accused me? Thou art in the Tower with me, and thou and I shall die together.” Her words reveal her awareness of the fate that might well await her, and her reference to dying together supports the theory that she was close to Sir Henry, but not necessarily in an intimate way, although her enemies would see it in that light.

Then her thoughts turned to the other named man accused with her. “And Mark, thou art here too,” she said, becoming agitated again. “Oh, my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow,” she wept, “with much compassion,” as it struck her how badly the news of her arrest, with all its dread and shocking implications, would affect that lady, for just two weeks earlier Elizabeth Howard, Countess of Wiltshire, had been described by one of Lady Lisle’s correspondents as being “sore diseased with the cough, which grieves her sore”⁴⁰—and indeed, she was to die just two years later. Anne would have been aware of how ill she was.

Maybe the thought of her mother was too much to bear, for she quickly changed the subject and “much lamented my lady of Worcester, because her child did not stir in her body.” The Countess of Worcester, of course, had been the first person to lay evidence against Anne.

“What should be the cause?” Lady Kingston asked.

“It was for the sorrow she took for me,” Anne told her, referring perhaps to her miscarriage, or to the fear and misery she had suffered over the intervening weeks, which she had perhaps confided to the countess. It might also have been remorse over being pressured into betraying her mistress; and as a consequence of that, there would be even more cause for Elizabeth Browne to feel sorrow and guilt, because her sister-in-law, Elizabeth Somerset, was married to William Brereton,⁴¹ who had apparently been named by Smeaton as one of the Queen’s lovers.

Then the Queen turned to the constable. “Master Kingston, shall I die without justice?” she asked.

“The poorest subject of the King hath justice,” he replied, provoking bitter laughter in the Queen, who knew very well that persons accused of high treason were rarely acquitted, especially if it were known that the King wanted them condemned. She must have been aware that her enemies were out for her blood—and she knew that her husband was the most suggestible of men. She would have known also that her protestations of innocence would avail her little, for the law did not allow her access to any lawyer or adviser, or any legal representative who could speak for her in court.⁴²

Henry was by now resolved to be rid of Anne, in every respect. On the day of her arrest, he ordered Archbishop Cranmer to find grounds for annulling their marriage and declaring their daughter a bastard. There must be no impediment to any children he might have by Jane Seymour taking precedence in the order of succession to the throne.

Anne was already doomed. There was no way Henry VIII or his advisers were going to risk a repeat performance of what had happened when the King tried to set aside Katherine of Aragon. She had not gone quietly, but held her ground and stood up for her rights for nine tortuous years, maintaining—even after he had their marriage annulled and married Anne—that she was the King’s true wife and her daughter his lawful heir. Anne might be unpopular, but she still had a considerable number of powerful relatives and supporters of the reformist persuasion, who might make trouble on her behalf. The way had to be cleared for the King to make a third, undisputed marriage, and that could only be achieved literally over Anne’s dead body.⁴³

By nightfall on May 2, most people at court had learned of the Queen’s arrest. Never before had a queen of England been charged with adultery and imprisoned in the Tower. Chapuys was almost jubilant, and at once penned a somewhat self-congratulatory letter to the Emperor:

Your Majesty will be pleased to recollect what I wrote to you early in the last month touching the conversation between Cromwell and myself about the divorce of this King from the Concubine. I accordingly used several means to promote the matter, both with Cromwell and with others, of which I have not hitherto written, awaiting some certain issue of the affair, which in my opinion has come to pass much better than anybody could have believed, to the great disgrace of the Concubine, who, by the judgment of God, has been brought in full daylight from Greenwich to the Tower of London, conducted by the Duke of Norfolk, the two chamberlains of the realm and of the Chamber, and only four women have been left to her.

Chapuys was convinced that the Almighty had ordained Anne’s fall in vengeance for the wrongs she had inflicted on the late Queen Katherine and Lady Mary, and he felt no pity whatsoever for her. He went on:

The report is that it is for adultery, in which she has long continued with a player on the spinet of her chamber, who has been this morning lodged in the Tower, [along with] Master Norris, the most private and familiar body servant of the King, for not having revealed these matters.

Chapuys obviously did not as yet know that Norris had also been accused of adultery with the Queen, but he had heard that:

… the brother of the Concubine, called Rochford, has also been taken to the Tower, but more than six hours after the others, and three or four hours before his sister.⁴⁴

The ambassador had no doubt at this stage that Anne was guilty as charged; this dramatic—and fortuitous—new development only served to confirm his low opinion of her. He had known already that her days as queen were numbered.

Even if the said crime of adultery had not been discovered, this King, as I have been for some days informed by good authority, had determined to abandon her.

He then went on to inform the Emperor of the abortive plan to have the union annulled on the grounds that Anne had secretly married the Earl of Northumberland some years earlier.

These news are indeed new, but it is still more wonderful to think of the sudden change from yesterday to today, and the manner of [Anne’s] departure from Greenwich to come hither [to the City of London, where Chapuys had his house], but I forbear particulars, not to delay the bearer, by whom you will be amply informed.⁴⁵

This dispatch shows that Chapuys, for all his connections at court and his efforts to further Imperialist interests and befriend Cromwell, was not quite at the center of affairs, and was certainly not privy to everything going on in the privy apartments and the council chamber. Yet he had been able to discover, or had been fed, certain information, such as that concerning Northumberland’s possible precontract with Anne.

Sir Francis Bryan was to reveal in June that, “upon the disclosing of the matter of the Queen,” Sir Nicholas Carew, Sir Anthony Browne, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Knight of the Body to the King, “and the rest of his fellows of the Privy Chamber [were heard] saying that they rejoiced that the King had escaped this great peril and danger, and that the issue the King might have, if he took another wife, should be out of all doubt.”⁴⁶ Out of all doubt also, in their minds, was the Queen’s fate.

Most people appear to have agreed with Chapuys and Bryan that Anne was guilty, including the populace at large. Her dismal progress along the river had not passed unnoticed, while Cromwell’s agents may have been at work spreading the official version of events, and very soon—within a matter of hours—the sensational news of her arrest and imprisonment was all around London. “The City rejoiced on hearing the report, hoping that the princess would be restored.”⁴⁷

That the reports became somewhat garbled and embroidered in the process, and that there was little doubt of what the outcome would be, is clear from a letter written from London on May 2 by a panic-stricken Roland Buckley (or Bulkeley), a poor lawyer of Gray’s Inn, to his brother, Sir Richard Buckley, Norris’s friend, who enjoyed some influence with the King, but who, in his capacity as Knight Chamberlain of North Wales and deputy to Norris, had made an enemy of the powerful Brereton:

Sir, ye shall understand that the Queen is in the Tower, the Earl of Wiltshire, her father, my Lord Rochford, her brother, Master Norris of the King’s Privy Chamber, one Master Mark of the King’s Privy Chamber, with divers other sundry ladies. The cause of their committing there is of certain high treason committed concerning their Prince, that is to say that Master Norris should have ado with the Queen, and Mark and the other [be] accessories to the same. They are like to suffer, all there, more is the pity, if it pleased God. Otherwise I pray you make you ready in all the haste that can be, and come down to your Prince, for you yourself may do more [to intercede for the accused] than twenty men in your absence; therefore make haste, for ye may be there ere only a word be of their death. When it is once known that they shall have died, all will be too late, therefore make haste!

Some details reported by Buckley were incorrect: Anne’s father had not been arrested, nor had any ladies. It is often assumed that Buckley, anticipating that rich pickings would be had in the wake of the arrests, wanted to ensure that Sir Richard got his share, but it is more likely that he was urging Sir Richard to hasten to London in order to use his influence on behalf of those who had been arrested; Cromwell evidently thought that was his purpose, for Buckley’s courier was halted at Shrewsbury, relieved of his letter and clapped into gaol. The letter was forwarded to Cromwell, and Sir Richard never knew how nearly he was embroiled in the political drama being acted out in London. Within three months he would have attached himself to the Seymours.⁴⁸

Had Roland Buckley been obeying a chivalrous impulse to champion Anne’s cause, or that of the men accused with her, his would have been virtually a lone voice, for Anne had never been popular; she had few powerful friends in England or abroad to speak up for her, and now hardly anyone was prepared to make any protest at her arrest. Most people appear to have believed—or to have affected to believe—that Anne was capable of the crimes of which she had been accused, and even that it had been her “full intent lineally to succeed to this imperial crown.”⁴⁹

From the time of Anne’s committal to the Tower, Henry VIII’s behavior was typical of a man confronted with appalling evidence of his wife’s infidelity, and whose masculine pride has been deeply wounded. He avoided parading his humiliation in public, and remained incommunicado until all was over.⁵⁰

Henry was apparently ready to believe anything of Anne. He would shortly manifest the conviction that she was a monster not only of lechery but also of cruelty. The latter was, to him, probably entirely credible. She had hounded Wolsey nigh unto death; repeatedly urged Henry to send Katherine of Aragon and Mary, his own daughter, to the scaffold; been ruthless against her enemies. Five years earlier, rumor had placed her faction behind an attempt to poison John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, an outspoken and upright opponent of the Boleyns; and only a couple of months ago it was bruited that Katherine of Aragon had been poisoned, and that Anne was the culprit. Now it appeared she had plotted to do away with the King himself, her own husband. That certainly gave Henry a jolt, and his imagination began to run riot. When his bastard son, the seventeen-year-old Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond, came on the evening of May 2 to receive his father’s blessing before retiring for the night, “the King began to weep, saying that he and his sister [Lady Mary] were greatly bound to God for having escaped the hands of that accursed whore, who had determined to poison them.”⁵¹ These tears were the only ones Henry is known to have shed in connection with Anne Boleyn’s fall,⁵² while his tirade betrayed his conviction that she was guilty of far worse than adultery, and the sharp-minded Chapuys picked up on this: “From these words, it would appear the King knows something about it.”⁵³

When Richmond unexpectedly died the following month of what was probably a suppurating pulmonary infection (rather than the tuberculosis that has traditionally been blamed for his demise), that would no doubt have reinforced the opinions of Henry and others, who “thought he was privily poisoned by the means of Queen Anne and her brother, Lord Rochford, for he pined inwardly in his body long before he died. God knoweth the truth thereof.”⁵⁴ In fact, Richmond’s final illness was short and unexpected.