CHAPTER 14

When Death Hath Played His Part

As Anne’s head fell in the straw, with her body tumbling beside it, a signal was given and the guns on the Tower wharf were fired, announcing her end to the world. She had been one of the most powerful women ever to occupy the consort’s throne, yet her rapid and cataclysmic overthrow illustrates just how fragile was the balance of power at the English court.

There had been no precedent for the trial and execution of an English queen, and Anne Boleyn’s fall, with its attendant purge of the Privy Chamber, had been nothing less than sensational. At a stroke, Cromwell had eliminated or neutralized a whole faction, and many were touched by the tragedy.

Anne had never been popular; the common people always disliked her. Just hours after her execution, Chapuys wrote from London, “I cannot well describe the great joy the inhabitants of this city have lately experienced and manifested at the fall and ruin of the Concubine.” He added that many were elated at the prospect of Lady Mary—whom they still regarded as the King’s lawful heiress—being restored to favor,¹ for Anne’s enmity toward her had been well known.

It is evident from Chapuys’s dispatch that, at the time of Anne’s beheading, people were ready to believe anything of her. The parson of Freshwater, Dorset, who was hostile to Henry VIII, was nevertheless in no doubt of her guilt: “Lo, whilst the King and his council were busy to put down abbeys and pull away the right of Holy Church, he was made a cuckold at home.”² Nicholas Shaxton Bishop of Salisbury, spoke for many when he wrote to Cromwell on May 23 of “the late Queen,” declaring that she had “sore slandered” the cause of reform, while “that vice that she was found faulty of hath not the like in Christendom.” The bishop did, in charity, pray that God would have mercy on her soul and pardon all her offenses.³

It was a credulous and superstitious age. One of Cromwell’s agents, John de Ponti, reported that the Master of Maison Dieu at Dover was telling people “that the day before the Lady Anne Boleyn was beheaded, the tapers that stood about Queen Katherine’s sepulcher kindled of themselves; and after Matins were done to Deo gratias, the said tapers quenched of themselves.” The King is said to have “sent thirty men to [Peterborough] abbey,” and they could see for themselves that “it was true of this light continuing from day to day.”⁴

The ignorant folk who observed this phenomenon would have regarded it as a sign that the Deity approved of the King’s punishment of the evil woman who had supplanted his true wife—Katherine of Aragon’s cause had not been so soon forgotten.

In Catholic Europe, most people shared the view of the Emperor that, in destroying Anne, God had revealed His will. Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, one of Charles V’s chief advisers, wrote rather callously to Chapuys that the news was good music to his ears, and a subject for joyful mirth.⁵ The papal nuncio in Lyons believed the Queen’s fate to be the judgment of the Almighty. At the court of James V in Edinburgh, Lord William Howard, Anne’s uncle, was shocked to see everyone so jubilant, and wrote urging Cromwell to tell him “the truth” so he should know how to deal with this.⁶ A week after the execution, the merchant and diplomat, Edmund Harvel, wrote from Venice to Dr. Thomas Starkey:

The news of the Queen’s case made a great tragedy, which was celebrated by all men’s voices with admiration and great infamy to that woman to have betrayed that noble prince after such manner, who had exalted her so high and put himself to peril, not without perturbation of all the world, for her cause. God showed Himself a rightful judge to discover such high treason and iniquity. But all is for the best, and I reckon this the King’s great fortune, that God would give him grace to see and touch with the hand what enemies and traitors he lived withal, of the which inconvenience his Grace is fair delivered, for with time there might have followed damage to his Grace inestimable.⁷

These were comparatively conservative reactions, for ever wilder rumors were now proliferating. Even Chapuys, the archdetractor of reform, did not swallow whole all he heard: “Although the matter is not much to be relied on, many think that most of the new bishops ont d’avoir leur Sainte Martin [meaning, perhaps, that there was a globe of fire suspended above their heads, as appeared in popular representations of the saint], because, having persuaded the Concubine that she had no need to confess, she grew more audacious in vice; and moreover, they persuaded her that, according to the said [Lutheran] sect, it was lawful to seek aid elsewhere, even from her own relations, when her husband was not capable of satisfying her.” Reflecting on Anne’s fate, the ambassador recalled how “the Concubine, before her marriage with the King, said, to increase his love, that there was a prophecy that about this time, a queen of England would be burnt, but, to please the King, she [said she] did not care. After her marriage she boasted that the events mentioned in the prophecy had already been accomplished, and yet she was not condemned. But they might well have said to her, as was said to Caesar, ‘The ides have come, but not gone.’”⁸ In the Privy Chamber, Sir Francis Bryan and his “fellows” rejoiced at Anne’s fall.⁹

Yet after her execution, increasingly, there emerged a strong sense that justice had been subverted, while reports of her dignity and courage on the scaffold gradually won her the latent admiration and sympathy of some who had previously reviled her. Even the unsympathetic George Constantine had “never heard of queens that they should be thus handled, but I promise you there was much muttering of Queen Anne’s death.” Alexander Aless, whose landlord had witnessed her execution, wrote that she had “exhibited such constancy, patience, and faith toward God that all the spectators, even her enemies and those persons who had previously rejoiced at her misfortune, testified and proclaimed her innocence and chastity.”

Aless’s landlord invited some of those spectators to dinner a day or so later, and when these guests “were thus talking at table in my hearing, without being questioned, they themselves answered the accusations brought against the Queen. It is no new thing, said they, that the King’s chamberlains should dance with the ladies in the bedchamber. Nor can any proof of adultery be collected from the fact that the Queen’s brother took her by the hand and led her into the dance among the other ladies, or handed her to another. It is a usual custom throughout the whole of Britain that ladies married and unmarried, even the most coy, kiss not only a brother, but any honorable person, even in public. It is also the custom with young women to write to their near relatives when they become pregnant, in order to receive their congratulations. The King also was most anxious for an heir, and longed for nothing more than to know that the Queen was pregnant.” Some of these views must have been those of people associated with the court, who knew how things were conducted there.

“From such arguments as these, they affirmed that no probable suspicion of adultery could be collected, and that therefore there must have been some other reason which moved the King.” Aless thought it could have been “the desire for an heir” and his being “further strengthened in his desire for a new marriage by perceiving that all the male children to which the Queen gave birth came into this world dead. And further, the King was angry with the Queen because of the want of success which attended the embassy, which, at her instigation, he had dispatched into Germany.” People were also speculating that Henry had gotten rid of Anne out of fear that the Emperor, the Pope, and the Catholic princes of Europe would band together against him, and because he was “in danger from them on account of the change in religion.” There followed much speculation on what would happen to religion in England now that Anne was gone.

While Aless and his landlord’s guests were talking, “a servant of Cromwell’s arrived from the court and, sitting down at the table, asked the landlord if he could let him have something to eat, for he was exceedingly hungry. While the food was being got ready, the other guests asked him what were his news? Where was the King? What was he doing? Was he sorry for the Queen? He answered by asking why should he be sorry for her? She had already betrayed him in secrecy, so now was he openly insulting her. For just as she, while the King was oppressed with the heavy cares of state, was enjoying herself with others, so he, while the Queen was being beheaded, was enjoying himself with another woman.”

His words provoked outrage. “While we were all astonished and ordered him to hold his tongue, for he was saying what no one would believe, and he would bring himself into peril if others heard him talking thus, he answered, ‘You yourselves will speedily learn from other persons the truth of what I have been saying.’” He was referring to the fact that the King was already betrothed to Jane Seymour. The landlord intervened, saying it was not fitting to discuss such things, and that he himself would “go carefully into these matters” when he next went to court. Cromwell’s servant retorted that “he had the King’s orders that none but that the councillors and secretaries should be admitted, and that the gate of the country house in which the King had secluded himself should be kept shut.” Undeterred, the landlord did go to court, and on his return he was able to tell Aless that the King would shortly afterward be married.

Aless, a Protestant recounting these events for Elizabeth I, was biased and probably exaggerating public opinion, yet his is not the only evidence for the small but growing swell of sympathy for Anne Boleyn. “Although everybody rejoices at the execution of the Concubine,” Chapuys reported, “there are some who murmur at the mode of procedure against her and the others, and people speak variously of the King, and it will not pacify the world when it is known what has passed, and is passing, between him and Mistress Jane Seymour. Already it sounds ill, in the ears of the people, that the King, having received such ignominy, has shown himself more glad than ever since the arrest of the Concubine.”¹⁰ So soon, a legend was in the making.

As the murmuring spread, Anne began to be seen as a victim done away with on a flimsy pretext, particularly in the wake of Henry marrying Jane ten days after her beheading. That view was openly expressed in England just over a month after Anne Boleyn’s execution, when an Oxfordshire man, John Hill of Eynsham, was brought before the local justices for saying that “the King caused Mr. Norris, Mr. Weston, and such as were put of late unto execution to be put to death only of pleasure,” and that “the King, for a fraud and a guile, caused Master Norris, Master Weston, and the Queen to be put to death because he was made sure unto the Queen’s Grace that now is half a year before.” Master Hill pleaded guilty and was thrown into prison. Another man, William Saunders, who had said much the same thing, was examined with him.¹¹

It would surely have occurred to those who privately thought the same as John Hill that it could well have been the King, and not Cromwell, who resolved to be rid not only of Anne but also of her powerful faction in the Privy Chamber, in order to clear the way for the rising stars, the Seymours.¹²

Although Chapuys famously referred to Anne in 1536 as “the English Messalina or Agrippina,” and Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s cousin and a stern Catholic, that same year called her “a Jezebel and a sorceress,” the reformer Philip Melanchthon was horrified at news of her death and its disastrous implications for any Protestant alliance with England: “The reports from England are more than tragic. The Queen, accused rather than convicted of adultery, has suffered the penalty of death, and that catastrophe has wrought great changes in our plans. How dreadfully this calamity will dishonor the King. What a great change has suddenly been made.” As a Protestant, he was in no doubt “that blow came from Rome. In Rome, all these tricks and plots are contrived.”¹³ In France, poems were written honoring Anne’s memory,¹⁴ while one French reformist, Étienne Dolet, raged that Anne had been condemned “on a false charge of adultery.”¹⁵

Even the Emperor’s sister, the politically acute Mary of Hungary, did not believe in Anne’s guilt and was dismayed to hear of her fate: As none but the organist confessed, nor herself either, people think [the King] invented this device to get rid of her. Anyhow, no great wrong can be done to her, even in being suspected as wicked, for she is known to have been a worthless person. It is to be hoped, if hope be a right thing to entertain about such acts, that when he is tired of this one, he will find some occasion of getting rid of her. I think wives will hardly be well-contented if such customs become general,” she added dryly. “Although I have no desire to put myself in this danger, yet, being of the feminine gender, I will pray with the others that God may keep us from it.”¹⁶ By 1538 the young Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, a niece of Charles V—who, when Henry VIII later sued for her hand, was pertly to reply that if she had two heads, one would be at His Majesty’s disposal—was voicing the kinder view that Anne Boleyn had been “innocently put to death”;¹⁷ later still, in 1544, Jean de Luxembourg, Abbot of Ivry, asserted that Henry VIII had “murdered” her.¹⁸

Although he had done so when Katherine of Aragon died, Henry VIII did not mark Anne’s death with celebrations and feasting. The royal household accounts for May 19, 1536, show the lowest expenditure for any day that year: £44.12s. (£15,600).¹⁹ That was probably because, after hearing the guns signaling that he was a widower, Henry VIII left Whitehall in the morning to join Jane at Chelsea. “The people will certainly be displeased at what has been told me, if it be true,” Chapuys wrote on May 20, “that yesterday, the King, immediately on receiving news of the decapitation of the Concubine, boarded his barge and went to [Mistress] Seymour, whom he has lodged a mile from him in a house by the river.”²⁰ By then Sir Francis Bryan had already brought Jane the news that Anne was dead.

Henry did not, as legends have it, go hunting and wait in Richmond Park or Epping Forest for the Tower cannon to be fired,²¹ and Chapuys’s report belies the crude assertion made by Cromwell’s servant to Aless that the King was “enjoying himself with another woman” as Anne faced the executioner, although he might well have done so later on, as he spent the day quietly with Jane at Chelsea, and dined with her there in the evening.

Henry had still not appeared in public. John Husee, in his letter of May 19 that detailed the executions to Lord Lisle, stated apologetically that despite having “waited diligently and made all the friendship that I can make,” he could “find no ways to come to the King’s presence. His Grace came not abroad these fourteen days, so that I have been, and yet am, at bay. I trust it be ere long, seeing that these matters of execution are past, to speak with His Grace, and then deliver your [gift of] spurs.” In the end, after all the frustrating delays, Lisle’s request “to have something of what came to his hands by these gentlemen’s deaths” reached the King (as Henry was to explain a week later) “too late, because all things were disposed long since, and there was nothing worth giving Your Lordship.”²²

By the time Anne died, preparations were already in train for the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour. In the royal palaces, an army of carpenters, stonemasons, glaziers, and seamstresses were busily removing Anne’s initials, mottoes, and falcon badge, and replacing them with Jane’s initials and her emblem of a phoenix arising from a flaming castle;²³ that this was done in a hurry is evident from the fact that in some places Anne’s devices are still visible underneath; in others they were clearly inaccessible or just overlooked. At Hampton Court, for example, her initials, entwined with Henry’s, can still be seen adorning the vaulted ceiling of Anne Boleyn’s Gateway, and her initials and badges are to be seen in the roof timbers of the great hall and in the Great Watching Chamber, while her falcon badge survives in the rood screen in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. On Henry’s orders, a stained-glass window depicting St. Anne, the fallen Queen’s patron saint, was removed from the chapel royal at Hampton Court.²⁴ Portraits of Anne were probably taken down and hidden away, or destroyed, which would explain why hardly any contemporary likenesses survive.

At Dover Castle the King’s master glazier, Galyon Hone, had just added “the Queen’s badge” to windows in the royal lodgings, for which he was paid £200 (£69,850); more money was wasted when the King had to pay him to replace the badges with those of Jane Seymour, in time for the summer’s royal visit to Dover. Galyon Hone is also known to have replaced Anne’s badges in the windows at Ampthill and Greenwich.²⁵ With stone emblems, Anne’s heraldic device of a leopard was more easily remodeled to look like Jane’s panther “by new making of the heads and tails.”²⁶ When news of Anne’s fate reached Zurich, where Miles Coverdale’s English Bible with its dedication to Henry and his “dearest wife and most virtuous princess, Queen Anne” was being reprinted, Jane’s name was hastily superimposed on the frontispiece.²⁷ Anne’s name, and her image, were being thoroughly erased from view: it was as if she had never existed.

At Hever Castle, her family home, there is a posthumous reminder of her fate: on the stone newel of the spiral staircase leading to the Long Gallery, there is incised the cipher that appears in Henry VIII’s love letters to her, and below it—at some unknown date—someone has carved an axe.

During the night after Anne’s execution, Henry left Whitehall and was rowed upriver to Hampton Court; at six o’clock the following morning, May 20, Jane Seymour was conveyed from Chelsea “secretly by river to the King’s lodgings” and they were betrothed there at nine o’clock. “The King means it to be kept secret till Whitsuntide,” Chapuys added, “but everybody begins already to murmur by suspicion, and several affirm that, long before the death of the other, there was some arrangement, which sounds ill in the ears of the people.”²⁸ Jane, Agnes Strickland sternly observed, had “given her hand to the regal ruffian before his wife’s corpse was cold. Yes, four-and-twenty hours had not elapsed since the sword was reddened with the blood of her mistress.”

News of the betrothal could not be kept secret for long. “It is presumed that there shall be by midsummer a new coronation,” the perceptive Husee wrote on May 24.²⁹ Six days earlier Chapuys had expressed his doubts about Jane’s virginity. “Perhaps the King will be only too glad to be so far relieved of that difficulty,” he added mischievously. “According to the account of the Concubine, he has neither vigor nor competence, and besides, he may marry her on condition that she is a maid, and when he wants a divorce, there will be plenty of witnesses ready to testify that she was not.”

Although Jane had proved useful to him and his friends, Chapuys was unimpressed by her: “The said Seymour is not a woman of great wit, but she may have good understanding. It is said she inclines to be proud and haughty. She bears great love and reverence to the princess. I know not if honors will make her change hereafter.”³⁰

On the Sunday after Anne’s execution, which was Ascension Day, “the King wore white for mourning.”³¹ That weekend, he ordered the settlement of an account submitted by Sir William Kingston in respect of expenses incurred in connection with the imprisonment of “the late Queen”: £100 (£34,900) “for [the redeeming of] such jewels and apparel as [she] had in the Tower;” £25.4s.6d (£8,800) for her “diet;” £23.6s.8d (£7,800) “to the executioner of Calais for his reward and apparel;” and £20 (£7,000) for the alms Anne had distributed on the day of her death.³² That came to the princely total of £168.11s.2d (£58,500), which would be paid in August. Some of Anne’s outstanding debts were also settled by the King’s comptroller—the rest would not be paid by Cromwell until February 1538—and moneys owing to her totaling £1,073.6s.8d (£374,850) called in.³³ Meanwhile, Cromwell, on May 20, had drawn up a list of “Remembrances,” and made a note to himself “To remember… Sir William Kingston.”³⁴ He also remembered George Constantine, and how he had been a friend to Norris and sent details of the events in the Tower to John Barlow, once chaplain to the Boleyns. Constantine was briefly arrested, which suggests that Master Secretary was still anxious to control and censor information about Anne’s fall.³⁵

The news of Anne’s execution had spread like wildfire through Europe. In Rome, the Pope, in the false hope that the English Reformation had been halted, suspended the excommunication process against Henry VIII. There was a virtual stampede to find a bride for the eligible royal widower. Charles V, on May 18, before Anne Boleyn’s death, had proposed that “since the case [against Anne] is so manifest, as we suppose, by the divine will, and the King takes it to heart as he ought,” a marriage for Henry VIII with the Infanta of Portugal, “as he is of amorous complexion and always desires to have a male child”;³⁶ while on May 24, the Bishop of Faenza reported that “the Imperialists have offered the King of England the Queen of Hungary for a wife, but it is thought he will not take her as she is in bad health and not fit to bear children.”³⁷ The French were also keen to seize the advantage: Chapuys says that on the day after Anne Boleyn’s execution, their ambassadors offered the King the hand of Madeleine of Valois, a daughter of Francis I. But Henry replied “that she was too young for him, and he had too much experience of French upbringing in the case of the Concubine.”³⁸

Of course, he was entertaining no thoughts of taking another foreign bride, and on May 29, “incontinent after the suffering of Queen Anne,”³⁹ and before people in far-flung parts of the kingdom had even heard of Anne’s death, he married Jane Seymour at Hampton Court.⁴⁰ It was thought strange by some that “within one and the same month that saw Queen Anne flourishing, accused, condemned and executed,” another was “assumed into her place, both of bed and honor.”⁴¹ A courier from England informed the Bishop of Faenza that Henry had “showed the greatest preference for [Jane], even during the life of the other.”⁴² It is easy to see why people were beginning to take a cynical view. By June 4, Henry VIII had emerged from seclusion and was again presiding over “a great and triumphant court,”⁴³ and on June 5 the Queen’s brother, Sir Edward Seymour, was created Viscount Beauchamp⁴⁴ and launched on the glittering path to power and, ultimately, tragedy.

On June 7 the King brought Queen Jane by barge from Greenwich to Whitehall. London was en fête, and crowds lined the riverbanks. As the royal couple were rowed past the Tower, they could see that it was bedecked with fluttering pennants and streamers in honor of the occasion⁴⁵—in stark contrast to the grim drama that had been played out within its walls not three weeks before. We might wonder if either Jane or Henry allowed their thoughts to dwell on the woman who had been its central player, and whose body was now decomposing beneath the pavement of the Tower chapel.

When Henry VIII reopened Parliament on June 8, 1536, Lord Chancellor Audley, in his speech to the King and both Houses, spoke of Anne Boleyn’s crimes and the need to settle the succession on the issue of Queen Jane. “Your Majesty, not knowing of any lawful impediments, entered into the bonds of the said unlawful marriage and advanced the Lady Anne to the sovereign state. Yet she, nevertheless, inflamed with pride and carnal desires of her body, confederated herself with her natural brother” and the other men accused with her, “to the utter loss, disherison, and desolation of this realm; and so, being confederate, she and they most traitorously committed and perpetrated diverse detestable and abominable treasons, to the fearful peril and danger of your royal person, and to the fearful peril and danger of this realm, if God of His goodness had not in due time brought their said treasons to light. For the which, being plainly and manifestly proved, they were convict[ed] and attainted by due course and order of your common law of this realm, and have suffered according to the merits.”

Lord Chancellor read out to both Houses the King’s speech, in which Henry—possibly mounting a damage-limitation exercise to quell the rumors—publicly lamented that, having been so disappointed in his first two marriages, he was obliged, for the welfare of his realm, to enter upon a third, “a personal sacrifice not required of any ordinary man.”⁴⁶ Here the Lord Chancellor paused, then asked, “What man in middle life would not this deter from marrying a third time? Yet this, our most excellent prince, not in any carnal concupiscence, but at the humble entreaty of his nobility, again condescended to contract matrimony, and hath, on the humble petition of the nobility, taken to himself a wife this time whose age and fine form give promise of issue.” There was resounding applause, and Audley, on behalf of the Lords and Commons, thanked the King for his selflessness and the care he had shown for his subjects. After that, the King left smiling benignly, confident that he had emerged from the whole tragic affair as the innocent party—as indeed those close to him made plain their conviction that he was. “The King hath come out of hell into heaven for the gentleness in this [Queen] and the cursedness and unhappiness in the other,” Sir John Russell observed.⁴⁷

The chief business of this Parliament was to ratify the condemnation of Anne Boleyn, as well as Cranmer’s annulment of her marriage, which was sealed on June 10 and approved by the bishops in convocation on June 21 and by both Houses of Parliament on June 28.⁴⁸ Parliament’s other priority—as Chapuys predicted on May 19—was to exclude “the Concubine’s little bastard” from ever succeeding to the throne,⁴⁹ and it now passed a new Act of Succession, declaring that the King’s marriage to Anne was unlawful and that its issue, Elizabeth, was to be “taken, reputed, and accepted to be illegitimate, and utterly excluded and barred to claim, challenge, or demand any inheritance as lawful heir to Your Highness by lineal descent.” Instead the crown was to pass to the heirs of Jane Seymour.⁵⁰

A general pardon was thereupon issued to those persons who had been cast into prison for slandering Anne or calling her daughter a bastard.⁵¹ Four years later, when French ambassadors showed themselves reluctant to consider Elizabeth as a bride for the French King’s son, her great-uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, openly agreed with them that it would not be an “honorable” match, and explained that “the opinion of Queen Anne, her mother, was such that it was quite decided to consider her illegitimate.”⁵²

No longer were the Boleyns a force to be reckoned with: their power and spirit had been crushed, their faction toppled and discredited in less than three weeks. Those who survived the purge, like the Howards and the late Queen’s reformist protégés, had to keep their heads down in order to save themselves. Although Anne’s parents had escaped being sent to the Tower, her father, Wiltshire—who had made no protest, nor expressed regret or grief at the fate of his son and daughter—was deprived of his lucrative office of Lord Privy Seal on June 24, to be replaced by Cromwell on July 2,⁵³ around the time when—had Anne’s child gone to term—he would have become grandfather to the future king.

Nevertheless, Wiltshire retained his place at court and on the King’s Council. He attended the christening of Prince Edward, the son whom Jane Seymour finally bore Henry VIII, in October 1537, helped to suppress the Pilgrimage of Grace that year, and even, on one occasion, lent Cromwell his Garter insignia. In January 1538 we find him being “well-entertained” at court.⁵⁴ After his wife, Elizabeth Howard, passed away in April that year,⁵⁵ there was talk of a marriage between him and the Lady Margaret Douglas, the King’s niece.⁵⁶

Clearly Wiltshire had not fallen far from favor, and when he died in March 1539, the King ordered masses to be said for his soul.⁵⁷ There is no evidence to support Sander’s assertion that he “died of grief,” yet it would not be surprising if grief had been a factor in hastening his end. His fine tomb brass may be seen in St. Peter’s Church at Hever. Neither he nor his wife lived to see the triumphant accession of their granddaughter, Elizabeth I, in 1558. In 1540, Hever Castle, the family seat in Kent, was given to Anne of Cleves, Henry VIII’s fourth wife, as part of her nullity settlement.

Mary Boleyn, Anne’s sister, lived until 1543, dying in obscurity at Rochford Hall in Essex, a Boleyn property. Having incurred the wrath of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1534 for secretly marrying the impecunious William Stafford without their consent, she was banished from court and is not recorded there again. Hence she probably had no further contact with her niece Elizabeth.

There has been speculation that George Boleyn perhaps left one son, his namesake, who became Dean of Lichfield under Elizabeth I and who described himself in his will as the kinsman of her cousin, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon, who was Mary Boleyn’s grandson and Anne Boleyn’s great-nephew. It is unlikely that was the son of George Boleyn and Jane Parker, since Thomas Boleyn’s heir at his death was his daughter Mary. The name George—unusual in the Boleyn family—suggests he was Rochford’s bastard. Barred from inheriting, and fatherless, with his Boleyn grandparents dead, it is entirely credible that, in November 1544, he should have entered Trinity Hall, Cambridge, as a sizar—a student of limited means who was charged reduced fees and given assistance with food and lodging while at the university. A career in the Church was always the best option for gentlemen without independent means, and it was later claimed (by the antiquarian Browne Willis in his survey of Lichfield Cathedral, published in 1727 and based on original records and registers) that Elizabeth I wanted to appoint this kinsman Bishop of Worcester, but that he turned it down. But he was grateful for what she had done for him, and in his will he stated, “Her Majesty gave me all that ever I have.”⁵⁸

Lady Rochford, “a widow in black full woebegone,”⁵⁹ retired from court after her husband’s fall. After his execution, his confiscated assets, which had been inventoried, and now reverted to the Crown, were distributed among loyal courtiers such as the Earl of Sussex and Sir Thomas Cheyney; on May 31, 1536, no doubt to reward his willingness to condemn his son-in-law, Lady Rochford’s father, Henry Parker, Lord Morley, was granted the lucrative office of chief steward of the manor of Hatfield Regis, which was part of the honor of Beaulieu in Essex, a royal palace that had been given to Lord Rochford and had also reverted to the Crown; in addition, he was appointed master of the deer in the forest there, and keeper of the park.⁶⁰

Lady Rochford, however, was left in serious financial difficulties; even her rich court attire had been seized.⁶¹ It was probably in late May that she was reduced to sending a begging letter to Cromwell, in whom, she declared, “her special trust” reposed after God and the King, for he was well known for his “gentle manner to all them that be in such lamentable case.” She implored him “to obtain from the King for her the stuff and plate of her husband,” saying it was “nothing to be regarded” by Henry, but would be to her “a most high help and succor.” She reminded him that “the King and her father paid 2,000 marks [£232,800] for her jointure to the Earl of Wiltshire, and she is only assured of 100 marks [£11,650] during the earl’s life,” which, she wrote, “is very hard for me to shift the world withal.” She prayed Master Secretary “to inform the King of this” and make him think “more tenderly” of her, assuring him of her “prayers and service” for the rest of her life, and signing her letter as “a poor desolate widow, without comfort, Jane Rochford.”⁶² It seems that despite the fact that she furnished evidence that had helped their case, Jane was overlooked by Henry and Cromwell in the hectic aftermath of Anne Boleyn’s fall. Cromwell did see that she was well provided for:⁶³ he and the King acted immediately, Henry forcing her father-in-law, Wiltshire (who had control of her income), to increase her allowance to £100 (£34,900); understandably, the earl did so reluctantly, bitterly insisting that Cromwell “inform the King that I do this alonely for his pleasure.”⁶⁴ This was on July 2, 1536. However, Jane’s jointure, the part of her marriage settlement allocated for her security in widowhood (which included Blickling Hall in Norfolk, where Anne Boleyn had probably been born), was not restored to her until after Wiltshire’s death and that of his mother, Margaret Butler, in 1539.⁶⁵

Lady Rochford perhaps sought refuge at her father’s house, for it is unlikely that she was welcome at her father-in-law’s castle at Hever; but she was back at court, as a lady-in-waiting to Jane Seymour, by the end of 1536. Her reappearance at court so soon after the fall of the Boleyns, and within months of her husband’s death, suggests she was being rewarded for her complicity, while other evidence implies that she was to go on being rewarded. In 1539 she obtained, probably through Cromwell’s good offices, the passing of an act of Parliament confirming her jointure and protecting her interest in certain Boleyn manors; this bill was passed after its three readings were rushed through on the same day, and it was signed by Henry VIII himself, who granted her two manors in Warwickshire at the same time.⁶⁶

Jane continued to enjoy royal favor, and was to serve two of Henry’s subsequent wives, Anne of Cleves and Katherine Howard. But in 1541 she rashly and “traitorously” became a “go-between” in Katherine’s extramarital trysts with the courtier Thomas Culpeper; for which, when these were discovered, she was arrested after the Queen, whom she betrayed under questioning. The theory that she abetted Katherine’s adultery in order to wreak vengeance on Henry VIII for executing her husband is hardly convincing, given that her own evidence had brought George Boleyn to the block. Lacey Baldwin Smith’s description of Lady Rochford as “a pathological meddler with the instincts of a procuress who achieves a vicarious pleasure from arranging assignations”⁶⁷ may not be far wide of the mark. Katherine Howard herself accused Jane of having a “wicked imagination,”⁶⁸ and of acting as agent provocateur for her own purposes; both behaved with “unbelievable imbecility.”⁶⁹

Taken to the Tower, “that bawd the Lady Jane Rochford”⁷⁰ suffered a nervous collapse so severe that it was thought she had gone mad.⁷¹ It did not save her. Parliament passed an Act of Attainder condemning her to death, and she followed Katherine Howard to the block on February 13, 1542. By the time Jane reached the scaffold, she was calm and resigned, although one bystander thought she spent too long a time dwelling on the “several faults she had committed in her life.”⁷² “Good Christians,” she said, “God has permitted me to suffer this shameful doom as punishment for having contributed to my husband’s death. I falsely accused him of loving, in an incestuous manner, his sister, Queen Anne Boleyn. For this I deserve to die. But I am guilty of no other crime.”⁷³ Her end, George Wyatt later observed, was “a just punishment by law after her naughtiness.”

Less than twenty years later George Cavendish observed that her “slander forever shall be rife” and that as a result of her deeds “both early and late” in her life—which implies that her testimony against her husband was notorious—she would be called “the woman of vice insatiate.” And so she has gone down in history, there having been just one not very convincing attempt, in 2007, to rehabilitate her memory.⁷⁴

On the day of Anne’s execution, Chapuys had reported that “there are still two English gentlemen detained on her account, and it is suspected that there will be many more, because the King has said he believed that more than a hundred had had to do with her.”⁷⁵

But there would be no more arrests. Corroborating Chapuys’s account, John Husee informed Lord Lisle that “Mr. Page and Mr. Wyatt remain still in the Tower. What shall become of them, God knoweth best.”⁷⁶ Cromwell secured their release on June 14, Wyatt upon his father’s surety for his good behavior, and Page on condition that he never again came near the King or the court. The King soon made it clear that he was ready to receive Page back into favor, but Page decided that it was safer to stay away from court for the time being,⁷⁷ later in 1536, however, he was appointed Sheriff of Surrey, and around this time resolved to become “a daily courtier” again. The King was as good as his word, and in 1537 appointed Page chamberlain to the newborn Prince Edward. In September 1539, Henry personally granted him the dissolved priory of St. Giles-in-the-Wood (later Beechwood Park) at Flamstead, Hertfordshire. After receiving various other grants and offices, including the property of the Knights of St. John in Kilburn, north of London, and being honored by a visit by the young King Edward VI, Sir Richard died in prosperity in February 1548, leaving an only daughter and heiress, Elizabeth, the wife of Sir William Skipwith.

Henry was soon ready to welcome Wyatt back too. The “Spanish Chronicle,” referring to the letter Wyatt had supposedly sent to him from the Tower, has the King saying, “I am sorry I did not listen to thee when I was angry, but I was blinded by that bad woman.” This too is probably apocryphal. But Wyatt had been deeply affected, not only by his own plight, but also by that of the other accused, and during his imprisonment had written another poem reflecting upon the fate of those who rose high at court only to experience the bitter reversal of fortune. Entitled “Innocentia Veritas Viat Fides Circumdederunt me intimici me” (the Latin title is based on Psalm 16, verse 9: “My enemies surround my soul,” and Wyatt’s name—Viat—is surrounded by Innocence, Truth, and Faith), each verse ends in a Latin phrase that aptly translates as “Thunder rolls around the Throne” (which is based on a line in Seneca’s Phaedra, “It thunders through the realms”), and reads:

V. Innocentia [the v stands for Wyatt; Innocence]
Veritas Viat Fides [Truth, Wyatt, faith]
Circumdederunt me inimici mei [My enemies have surrounded me]

Who list his wealth and ease retain,
Himself let him unknown contain.
Press not too fast in at that gate
Where the return stands by disdain,
For sure, circa Regna tonat.

The high mountains are blasted oft
When the low valley is mild and soft.
Fortune with Health stands at debate;
The fall is grievous from aloft,
And sure, circa Regna tonat.

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.

The Bell Tower showed me such a sight
That in my head sticks day and night.
There did I lean out of a grate,
For all favour, glory or might,
That yet circa Regna tonat.

By proof, I say, there did I learn:
Wit helpeth not defence too yern [eager],
Of innocency to plead or prate.
Bear low, therefore, give God the stern,
For sure, circa Regna tonat.

Bitterly disillusioned with a courtier’s existence, Wyatt seems to have spent only a brief time at court before returning to his father’s castle at Allington for a time. It was probably then that he wrote (or completed) another, longer poem, in which he poured out the shock and deep sorrow he still felt at the brutal deaths of his friends; the immediacy of his misery suggests that it was begun soon afterward, and completed later when he had had a chance to judge public opinion. The content of the poem shows that the executions were still very much the news of the moment, and speculation still rife when it was written. Anne, the woman Wyatt had once loved, is not mentioned; no doubt—as with his other poems about her—he felt it was too dangerous to do so. And because of this, he made it clear in his verse that he dared not speak his feelings aloud, but that he knew they would be with him always:

In mourning wise since daily I increase,
Thus should I cloak the cause of all my grief;
So pensive mind with tongue to hold his peace,
My reason sayeth there can be no release;
Wherefore, give ear, I humbly you require,
The effects to know that this doth make me moan.
The cause is great of all my doleful cheer,
For those that were, and now be dead and gone.

What thought to death dessert be now their call,
As by their thoughts it doth appear right plain,
Of force, I must lament that such a fall
Should light on those so wealthy did reign;
Though some perchance will say, of cruel heart,
“A traitor’s death why should we thus bemoan?”
But I, alas—set this offence apart—
Must needs bewail the death of some begone.

As for them all, I do not thus lament,
But as of right, my reason doth me bind;
But as the most doth all their deaths repent,
Even so do I by force of moaning mind …

He went on to mention each of the condemned men in turn, saying of Rochford that “many cry aloud, ‘It is great loss that thou art dead and gone.’” It seems he thought that, of them all, Norris and Brereton at least were guilty:

Ah! Norris, Norris, my tears begin to run,
To think what hap did thee so lead or guide,
Whereby thou hast both these and thine undone,
That is bewailed in court on every side,
In place also where thou hast never been,
Both man and child doth piteously thee moan;
They say, “Alas, thou art for ever seen
By their offences to be both dead and gone.”

As for Weston,

… we that now in court doth lead our life
Most part in mind dost thee lament and moan;
But that thy faults we daily hear so rife,
All we should weep that thou art dead and gone.

Brereton, farewell, as one that least I knew.
Great was thy love with divers, as I hear,
But common voice doth not so sore thee rue
As other twain that doth before appear.
But yet no doubt but thy friends lament
And other hear their piteous cry and moan,
So doth each heart for the like wise relent,
That thou givest cause thus to be dead and gone.

…

Smeaton, who had openly confessed and betrayed Anne, merited only Wyatt’s begrudging regret:

Ah, Mark! What moan should I for thee make more,
Since that thy death thou hast deserved best,
Save only that mine eye is forced sore
With piteous plaint to moan thee with the rest?
A time thou hadst above thy poor degree,
The fall whereof thy friends may well bemoan;
A rotten twig upon so high a tree
Hath slipped thy hold, and thou art dead and gone.

Wyatt concluded:

And thus farewell, each one in hearty wise,
The axe is home, your heads be in the street;
The trickling tears doth fall so from mine eyes,
I scarce may write, my paper is so wet.
But what can hope, when death hath played his part,
Though Nature’s course will thus lament and moan?
Leave sobs, therefore, and every Christian heart
Pray for the souls of those be dead and gone.

Wyatt was to acquire the Lefèvre manuscript, which had been owned by Rochford and Smeaton. Among the proverbs he wrote on the flyleaves is one that reads: “He that is an ass and thinks himself an hind, on leaping the ditch will realize the truth.” This was probably a comment on the fate of Mark Smeaton.⁷⁸

By October 1536, Wyatt was serving with the royal forces that had been sent to suppress the northern uprising known as the Pilgrimage of Grace. He was back at court by March 18, 1537, when Henry VIII knighted him. For the rest of his life he would serve as ambassador to Charles V, before dying of pneumonia in the autumn of 1542. His poems were first published in 1557.

Despite his affinity with the Boleyns, Archbishop Cranmer survived the purge and continued to promote the cause of religious reform. He was burned at the stake for heresy, on the orders of Henry’s daughter, Mary I, in 1556.

The Duke of Norfolk retained his post as Lord Treasurer, but deemed it politic, in the wake of the fall of his “false, traitorous niece,”⁷⁹ to retire from court for a time to his house at Kenninghall, and was not recalled until later in 1536, when he was needed to help put down the Pilgrimage of Grace. His absence from court enabled the Seymours to establish political ascendancy there, and thus was initiated the bitter rivalry between them and the Howards that was to endure for the rest of the reign.

After the arrest and disgrace of another allegedly adulterous niece, Queen Katherine Howard, in 1541, Norfolk again hastened to distance himself, writing to the King how he was in “the greatest perplexity” because of “the most abominable deeds done by two of my nieces.”⁸⁰ Late in 1546, Norfolk and his son Surrey were accused of treason and sent to the Tower. Surrey was executed, but the King, who died on January 28, 1547, held back from signing Norfolk’s death warrant. The duke spent the six years of Edward VI’s reign in prison before being released by Mary I on her accession in 1553. He died in 1554.

Lady Mary’s supporters had good reason to believe they had triumphed when Anne Boleyn was executed, but Mary’s restoration to favor was not won so easily. Cromwell hastened to dissociate himself from the conservative faction after Anne’s fall, and Mary and her friends found themselves isolated once more. Only after an acknowledgment that her mother’s marriage had been incestuous and unlawful was wrung out of Mary—a capitulation to haunt her for the rest of her days—would the King agree to be reconciled to her. Thereafter, however, she was welcomed back to court and given one half of “the Boleyn’s” jewels, some of which had once belonged to Katherine of Aragon; these were a gift from her father.⁸¹ (Interestingly, along with twenty-seven diamond rings set with the letters HJ that were recorded among the King’s effects late in 1537, after Jane Seymour’s death, there were two rings with the initials HA, for Henry and Anne.)⁸² In 1544, Mary and her half sister Elizabeth were restored to the succession after Prince Edward and his heirs.

Cromwell was raised to the peerage as Lord Cromwell of Wimbledon on July 9, and that same month was knighted and appointed Lord Privy Seal and “Vicar General and Vice-Regent of the King in Spirituals;” he was also the recipient of several royal grants, no doubt by way of reward for his zeal in uncovering Anne Boleyn’s alleged treason. In 1537 he secured as a bride for his son, Gregory, the great prize of Jane Seymour’s sister Elizabeth.

Four years after the death of Anne, the woman he had brought to the scaffold, Cromwell himself fell victim to his enemies, who persuaded the King to have him arrested and attainted for treason and heresy. His desperate plea to Henry VIII—“Most gracious Prince, I cry for mercy, mercy, mercy!”—went unheeded, and he met his end on July 28, 1540, on Tower Hill, where an inexperienced executioner took his head off with two strokes.

Cromwell’s man, Sir Ralph Sadler—who was to serve as a diplomat under four Tudor monarchs—was granted Brereton’s estate near Greenwich. An undated document of 1536 lists a considerable number of valuable grants made to Sir William FitzWilliam, who had been assiduous in bringing Anne down, and whose family connections were instrumental in her downfall. Sir Nicholas Carew, Sir Thomas Cheyney, and Lord Chancellor Audley were all similarly rewarded for their support in ridding the King of his treacherous wife.⁸³

The Duke of Richmond was appointed Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle in place of Rochford,⁸⁴ and Chancellor and Chamberlain of North Wales in place of Sir Henry Norris. Norris’s house at Kew was given to Edward Seymour, Lord Beauchamp, while the office of park keeper at Windsor that he had held was bestowed on his brother John, a gentleman usher of the King’s Chamber.⁸⁵ Weston’s widow, Anne, remarried quickly; her second husband was Sir Henry Knyvett Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, who had helped her to fight for Francis’s life. She bore him six children before his death in 1547, after which she married one John Vaughn, and died a very old lady in 1582. Her son by Weston was not restored in blood until 1549. Seymour’s brother Henry replaced Smeaton in the Privy Chamber.⁸⁶

Those who had supported Mary also got some of the spoils of the Boleyn purge, and other rewards. Sir Francis Bryan, who had hoped to be made Groom of the Stool and Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in place of Sir Henry Norris, had to be content merely with the latter office, since Cromwell secured the more important post of Groom of the Stool—the most influential position in the Privy Chamber—for his own man, Thomas Heneage,⁸⁷ a sure sign that the brief, uneasy coalition between Cromwell and the Imperialists was already breaking up. Both Bryan and Carew received a number of offices in June 1536. Carew remained in favor until 1538, when Cromwell engineered his arrest for involvement in the Duke of Exeter’s supposed conspiracy against the King. Exeter and Lord Montagu, another alleged conspirator, were beheaded in 1538, Carew in 1539.

In June 1536, Urian Brereton, page of the Privy Chamber, was granted four properties and two hundred acres of land in Cheshire that had belonged to his late brother, William; while on June 30, William Brereton’s widow, Elizabeth Somerset, was generously granted “all the goods, chattels, rents, fees, and annuities belonging to the said William at the time of his attainder,” with all debts and obligations then due to him.⁸⁸ The stampede for Brereton’s many offices is ample evidence of the void his death had left in the marches and his influence there.⁸⁹