CHAPTER 5

Unlawful Lechery

Meanwhile, Cromwell and his colleagues had been carrying out their master’s orders. Spies were already at work in the Queen’s household, “watching her privy apartments night and day” and “tempting her porter and serving men with bribes; there is nothing which they do not promise the ladies of her bedchamber. They affirm that the King hates the Queen because she has not presented him with an heir to the realm, nor was there any prospect of her so doing.”¹

“In most secret sort, certain persons of the Privy Chamber and others of [the Queen’s] side were examined.”² The inquiries that were made in the Queen’s household must by now have alerted several of those questioned to what was going on, and it may be that some of those who served Anne had old scores to settle.

In the course of these investigations, the councillors questioned “many other witnesses,”³ including Lady Rochford, Anne’s sister-in-law; “in which examination[s],” Cromwell later wrote, “the matter appeared so evident, that besides that crime with the accidents, there broke out a certain conspiracy of the King’s death, which extended so far that all we that had the examination of it quaked at the danger His Grace was in.”⁴ Anne, it was alleged, had not only taken lovers, but conspired with them to murder Henry VIII so she could marry one of them and rule England in her infant daughter’s name.

Plotting the death of the King was high treason, the most heinous of all crimes, for the sovereign was the Lord’s anointed, divinely appointed to rule. “Kings of England,” Henry VIII once told his judges, “never had any superior but God.” The royal prerogative was regarded as the will of God expressing itself through the will of the King. Thus anyone who offended against the King was punished with the greatest severity. Here was the capital charge that Cromwell needed, yet its very incongruity argues that it was merely a device for getting rid of Anne. For it is patently clear that Anne reveled in being a queen, a rank she had aspired to for many years, and it is therefore highly unlikely that she would ever have contemplated throwing away her status, her greatness, and her power, in order to marry a man who was far below her in rank and could give her nothing on a par with what the King had to bestow. Never mind the fact that the unpopular Anne was hardly likely to have intrigued to murder the King, who was her chief protector and defender—the death of Henry would have been “absolutely fatal” to her.⁵

Since 1536 there has always been a strong suspicion that Cromwell threw everything he could against Anne Boleyn, including the useful ploy of character assassination, in order to get rid of her. It is probably no coincidence that her alleged crimes were so heinous as to inspire universal shock and revulsion, which would preclude anyone taking up her cause. That way, the King would emerge from this the victim of a woman’s wickedness rather than a man who changed wives at a whim; and as such, he would earn the sympathy of all.

Master Secretary now constructed what was almost certainly a convincing case against the Queen, in which she was to be charged with adultery with five men—one her own brother, another a lowly musician—and conspiring regicide.

The five men who over the next few days would be arrested for committing treason with the Queen were George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford; Sir Henry Norris; Sir Francis Weston; Sir William Brereton; and Mark Smeaton.

George Boleyn was probably the youngest of the three surviving Boleyn siblings, having been no older than twenty-seven when he was preferred to the Privy Council in 1529, the year his father was created Earl of Wiltshire and he himself was given the courtesy title Viscount Rochford.⁶ His sister’s connection with the King had brought him royal favor, rapid preferment, lucrative offices—including Gentleman of the Privy Chamber (1528), Constable of Dover, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, and Master of the Buckhounds—and a career as a leading diplomat, as well as the palace of New Hall, which Henry VIII had renamed Beaulieu, in Essex; and he was not only one of the two noblemen of the King’s Privy Chamber, but also the foremost member of Queen Anne’s court. Both before and after her marriage, she had gathered around her young people with wit, charm, and intelligence, who could be relied upon to ensure that life was never dull, and Lord Rochford was at the core of this inner circle. There was a close bond between Anne and George, who shared—among other things—a love of poetry, George having “the art in meter and verse to make pleasant ditties.”⁷ The poet Richard Smith wrote admiringly that “Rochford clamb the stately throne which muses hold in Helicon.”⁸

Brother and sister were also fervent for religious reform—George’s views, inferred from the French literature he imported, were bordering on the heretical—and both hated and despised Lady Mary. When Katherine of Aragon died, George said “it was a pity” that she “did not keep company with her mother.”⁹

George Boleyn had been at court since his early teens, if not before. He married Jane Parker, daughter of Henry, Lord Morley, late in 1524. In looks he was an Adonis,¹⁰ in character promiscuous. George Cavendish, Wolsey’s former usher, who had no love for the Boleyn faction that brought his master to ruin, wrote candidly of Rochford’s “sensual appetite”:¹¹

My life not chaste, my living bestial;
I forced widows, maidens I did deflower.
All was one to me, I spared none at all,
My appetite was all women to devour,
My study was both day and hour,
My unlawful lechery, how I might it fulfil,
Sparing no woman to have on her my will.

This strongly implies that Rochford omitted even to stop at rape, and—there is no other interpretation that can be placed on Cavendish’s use of the word “bestial”—that he indulged in buggery too.¹² Cavendish also refers to Rochford being unable to resist “this unlawful deed,” while:

… to declare my life in every effect,
Shame restraineth me the plains to confess,
Lest the abomination would all the world infect:
It is so vile, so detestable in words to express,
For which by the law condemned I am doubtless,
And for my desert, justly judged to be dead.

This points at something far worse to contemporary eyes than the lechery to which Rochford, as personified in these verses, had openly confessed, or the crime of treasonable incest for which he would publicly be condemned. It may of course refer to the “lewd adultery” that Cavendish’s Rochford asks people to take example from, yet it is also likely that Cavendish is alluding to illegal sexual practices such as buggery (with women or men) and even homosexuality, then regarded as odious sins against God, with both being capital crimes.¹³ Rochford himself, in his dying speech, was to confess he had sinned more shamefully than could be imagined, and that he had known no man so evil.¹⁴ As he had stoutly denied charges of incest, it is likely that he was referring to other sexual practices then regarded as perversions.

Rochford’s reputation—and possible unlawful sexual predilections—made him an easy target for Cromwell, who would have realized that any accusations of criminal congress would appear entirely credible, and who was well aware that it would take more serious charges to bring down the formidably powerful Rochford.¹⁵

Rochford’s other notorious vice was his insufferable pride. “Hadst thou not been so proud,” the poet Wyatt would write after George Boleyn’s fall, “for thy great wit, each man would thee bemoan.”

Sir Henry Norris was the second son of Sir Edward Norris by Frideswide, daughter of Francis, Viscount Lovell, a close friend of Richard III, the last Yorkist king. Sir Henry, a discreet, level-headed man of proven integrity, was Groom of the Stool to the King, and had held this office since before 1529. In this capacity, he was not only the Chief Gentleman of Henry’s Privy Chamber, which was the King’s private household, but its most trusted member and the “best-beloved of the King,”¹⁶ whom he had served faithfully for twenty years.¹⁷

There were just twelve Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, and there was rampant competition for places, for these men were closer to the monarch than any other. They had the right of entry to his private chambers, attended on him in shifts, and provided him with daily companionship. They were in a highly privileged and powerful position, able to advise and influence the King, control access to his presence, and exercise patronage. Some were in office simply because Henry liked them, some because of their usefulness, but all were expected to be loyal and trustworthy. Norris’s office of Groom of the Stool obliged him to be present when the King performed his basic natural functions, so he was unavoidably more intimate with his master than most. Yet there was more to his role than that, for any who wished to present a petition to the King had to lay their request before Norris, rather than Cromwell, something that Cromwell may have resented.

Norris’s other posts reflected Henry’s confidence in his abilities. The King “extended his benignity with wealth, worship, and huge abundance”;¹⁸ in 1531 he had made Norris Chamberlain of North Wales, and since then, thanks to the favor of Henry and Anne, Norris had been appointed Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse, Master of the Hart Hounds and of the Hawks, Black Rod in the Parliament House, “graver” of the Tower of London, collector of subsidy in the City of London, weigher of goods in the port of Southampton, High Steward of the University of Oxford, and keeper or steward of many castles, manors, and parks. His modest annual Privy Chamber income of £33. 6s. 8d (£11,650) was boosted by fees and annuities of £400 (£139,700) from other offices, and rents from lands he had been granted or leased.¹⁹

Norris was not only “a man in very great favor with the King,”²⁰ but had also been a supporter of the Boleyn faction since at least 1530. So trustworthy was he considered that he had been one of the few witnesses to the secret marriage of the King and Anne Boleyn in 1533.²¹

Norris’s first wife, Mary Fiennes, the daughter of Lord Dacre, died before 1530, leaving behind three young children, and he had recently become betrothed to the Queen’s cousin, Madge Shelton, who had briefly been the King’s mistress in 1535. Norris owned a house at Greenwich, which Henry VIII generously maintained.

That Anne should have betrayed the King with someone so close to him would have appeared shocking in the extreme. Cavendish believed that ambition blinded Norris and drove him to commit a grave “misdemeanor” against the master whose bounty had been so generous:

My chance was such I had all thing at will,
And in my wealth I was to him unkind,
That thus to me did all my mind fulfil,
All his benevolence was clean out of mind:
Oh, alas, alas, in my heart how could I find
Against my sovereign so secretly to conspire,
That so gently gave me all that I desire?²²

Cavendish is here referring to the treasonable crimes of which Norris would shortly be accused.

Sir Francis Weston was twenty-five, and also—since 1532—a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber; he had served Henry VIII there as a page since at least 1525. The son of Sir Richard Weston, former Under-Treasurer of the Exchequer, by Anne Sandys, one of Queen Katherine’s gentlewomen, he came from an old and honorable family whose seat was Sutton Place, a beautiful Tudor house near Guildford in Surrey; it had been granted to Sir Richard by Henry VIII in 1521.

Francis was a talented lute player and a first-class athlete—“in active things, who might with thee compare?”²³—who was described by the poet Wyatt as a “pleasant” young man, and “well-esteemed.” He had been “daintily nourished under the King’s wing,”²⁴and over the years had received a number of grants and pensions.²⁵ In 1533, at Anne Boleyn’s coronation, he was dubbed a Knight Companion of the Order of the Bath. He was much liked by the King (“who highly favored me and loved me so well”),²⁶the Queen, and Lord Rochford; he played cards with them all, beating the King at nearly every game, and partnered Henry at tennis and bowls.²⁷ At night the King often chose him as one of those gentlemen who would sleep in his bedchamber and be on call to attend to his needs.²⁸

When Weston married Anne, the daughter and heiress of Sir Christopher Pickering, in May 1530,²⁹ Henry presented him with ten marks (£1,200) and wished him better fortune than he himself had found in marriage. A fine oak marriage cupboard, bearing the carved portraits of Francis and Anne in relief, is now in the museum at Saffron Walden, Essex. A sixteenth-century portrait at Parham Park in Sussex, of one “Weston Esq. of Sutton [Place], Surrey,” may be a likeness of Francis. He and his wife now had an infant son, Henry, born in 1535.

Despite this apparent marital felicity, the biased Cavendish refers to “Weston the wanton … that wantonly lived without fear or dread … following his fantasy and his wanton lust;” he castigates Weston for his “unkindness against my sovereign lord,” he who, thanks to Henry’s favor, had his “will and lust in every thing.” In this young man, Cavendish avers, willfulness and “hot lust kindled the fire of filthy concupiscence,” and, “having no regard to princely disdain,” finally that “lust presumed to the Queen.”³⁰ Yet Weston seems to have been generally popular prior to that, for he “was young, and of old lineage and high accomplishments.”³¹

Sir William Brereton (or Bryerton) of Aldford, who came from a leading Cheshire family, was clearly another member of Anne Boleyn’s inner circle, and, like Norris and Weston, a Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber, who had been promoted from groom, a position he held since at least 1521.³² In 1531 there is a record of him delivering jewels to Anne Boleyn.³³ Brereton, like Norris, was so trusted and liked by Henry and the Boleyn faction, whose staunch adherent he became, that he had been invited to witness Henry’s secret wedding to Anne in January 1533.³⁴ That same year, he was involved in some dealings with Lord Rochford.³⁵

Despite being a noted seducer of women,³⁶ Brereton was married to the King’s cousin, Elizabeth Somerset, sister of the Earl of Worcester, and was thus highly placed at court and “flourishing in favor.”³⁷ He had given Anne her beloved greyhound, Urian, who was named after Brereton’s brother, a groom of the Privy Chamber. William often accompanied the King and Anne on hunting expeditions, and enjoyed the patronage both of Henry’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond, whose steward he was in the Welsh Marches,³⁸ and of Anne’s uncle, the Duke of Norfolk.³⁹

Thanks to royal grants of extensive estates and Crown offices worth £1,200 (£401,850) a year,⁴⁰ and the backing of Richmond, Norfolk, and Queen Anne, Brereton exercised virtually autonomous territorial power in Cheshire and North Wales, where he served as Richmond’s deputy, becoming notorious as an overmighty subject “both in town and field, readily furnished with horse, spear, and shield.”⁴¹ Cromwell seems to have viewed Brereton’s power in the marches as a threat to his planned administrative reforms, through which he intended to replace feudal control in Wales by the establishment of English-style shires; these plans were well-advanced by March 1536.⁴² The elimination of Brereton, and the breaking of his alliance with Richmond and Norfolk, would certainly remove significant barriers to these reforms.⁴³

At nearly fifty, Brereton could hardly be cast in the guise of court gallant,⁴⁴ but his reputation was such that people would not find it difficult to believe him a villain. He was a constant irritant to the Privy Council.⁴⁵ George Cavendish paints a picture of him as a persecutor of the innocent, an administrator whose justice was rigorous and driven by personal animosity. He refers to the shameful hanging in 1534 of a Flintshire gentleman, John ap Griffith Eyton, whose death Brereton had contrived through sheer malice, “by color of justice,” and in defiance of Cromwell’s attempts to save the man. Brereton believed that Eyton had killed one of his own retainers, and it made no difference to him that Eyton had already been acquitted of that by a court in London.⁴⁶ The contemporary Welsh chronicler, Ellis Gruffydd, states that Anne Boleyn helped Brereton to secure Eyton’s rearrest, which would not be surprising, given the growing rift between Anne and Cromwell, and it may have been one of the things that caused them to fall out. Later, Cavendish has Brereton lamenting his own ruin, reflecting that he “who striketh with the sword, the sword will overthrow,” and seeing his fall as divine punishment for his multitude of crimes and sins:

Lo, here is the end of murder and tyranny!
Lo, here is the end of envious affection!
Lo, here is the end of false conspiracy!
Lo, here is the end of false detection
Done to the innocent by cruel correction!
Although in office I thought myself strong,
Yet here is mine end for ministering wrong.⁴⁷

Brereton’s disregard for the niceties of the law had become apparent as far back as 1518, when Cardinal Wolsey and other councillors had examined him in the Star Chamber court about “maintaining and comforting” the murderers of a Master Swettenham, whose brains had been spilled while playing bowls. Brereton and two other men had been accused of preventing Swettenham’s family from obtaining justice and helping the killers—one of whom was Brereton’s relative, another his servant—to escape arrest. For this, Brereton got off relatively lightly with a fine of 500 marks (£52,150), and suffered no loss of office or influence, which might explain why he was still disturbing the peace in Cheshire in the 1530s.⁴⁸

In 1534, Brereton was supposed to be investigating bribery and corruption at Valle Crucis Abbey, near Llangollen in North Wales, but was himself probably as compromisingly involved as the abbot.⁴⁹ The next year, Cromwell’s agent in the area, Rowland Lee, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, alluding to Brereton’s dubious activities as Richmond’s steward, disapprovingly remarked that it was not to the young duke’s honor to have his badge and livery “worn upon strong thieves’ backs.” Again, Brereton was suspected of protecting murderers from trial and execution, this time, somewhat audaciously, in Richmond’s name.⁵⁰ In May 1536, only days before his arrest, and evidently blithely unaware of Cromwell’s hostility, Brereton was pressing Master Secretary to grant him the spoils of dissolved abbeys in Cheshire.⁵¹ There were therefore several good reasons why Cromwell should have plotted his elimination. Even so, Brereton clearly had no idea what was imminently in store for him.

Brereton’s wife happened to be sister-in-law to the Countess of Worcester, the first person allegedly to lay evidence against the Queen, and there has been speculation that the relationship between these ladies was too close for coincidence,⁵² and that the countess may have got her information from Lady Brereton. However, that is unlikely, for, as will become clear, there can be no doubt that Elizabeth Somerset believed in her husband’s innocence.

These four gentlemen—Rochford, Norris, Weston, and Brereton—had all been members of the powerful Boleyn faction for some years. Yet the humble Mark Smeaton, the most remarkable inclusion among those accused of criminal association with the Queen, was to be the subject of greater scandal and comment than all the rest put together, for few were able to comprehend how Anne could so far have forgotten herself as to take this lowly musician to her bed.

Mark, a “very handsome” young man,⁵³ and “one of the prettiest monochord players,”⁵⁴ had been appointed a Groom of the Privy Chamber in 1529,⁵⁵ so the suggestion that he was perhaps little older than twenty in 1536 cannot be correct.⁵⁶ He was not of gentle birth, for his father was a carpenter:

… and laboured with his hand,
With the sweat of his face he purchased his living,
For small was his rent, much less his land;
My mother in a cottage used daily spinning.
Lo, in what misery was my beginning.⁵⁷

A sixteenth-century Italian chronicler, Lodovico Guicciardini, who spent many years in the Low Countries and wrote a history of Europe covering the period 1529 to 1560, referred to Smeaton, when writing about Anne Boleyn’s fall, as “Mark the Fleming, her keyboard player.”⁵⁸ But Smeaton was not Anne’s keyboard player; he was employed by the King. His Flemish surname may have been de Smet or de Smedt, and he probably changed it to Smeaton (or Smeton) when he came to England;⁵⁹ this would explain how he knew French. It is possible that he was talent-spotted by, and came to England under, the auspices of Philip van Wilder, the celebrated Dutch lutenist, who was in charge of all the musicians of the Privy Chamber.⁶⁰ It was perhaps Wilder who brought him to the attention of Cardinal Wolsey.

Mark owed his position at court to his musical talent, for he was skilled at playing the lute, the virginals, and the portable organ, as well as being a gifted singer and “the deftest dancer in the land”⁶¹—abilities that were all rated highly at Henry’s court, and which were admired by Cardinal Wolsey, himself of lowly parentage, who recruited the young Smeaton for his choir. Cavendish knew him in those days as “a singing boy.”⁶²

After the cardinal’s fall from favor in 1529, the youth transferred to the Chapel Royal, a preferment that would not have come his way unless he had an outstanding voice. “Being but a boy, [he] clamb up the high stage, that bred was of nought, and brought to felicity.”⁶³ Yet not everyone was full of praise for his talents. The French reformist scholar and poet, Nicholas Bourbon, who admired Anne Boleyn and spent two years at the English court, “granted” that Mark wrote good songs, but complained that he rendered them tedious by “so assiduously singing them; anything overdone is unwelcome. Even honey, if taken too much, becomes bitter.”

Despite Smeaton’s promotion to the Privy Chamber, where his duties would have included entertaining the King, he was still low down in the court pecking order, which is apparent from people addressing him only as “Mark.” But Henry VIII obviously thought highly of him: his privy purse expenses show that he supported Smeaton financially, gave him special rewards each Easter and Christmas, and, from 1529, provided him with shirts, hose, shoes, and bonnets, so he could present himself smartly. “Young Master Weston,” described as a lutenist, was given festive gifts along with Smeaton,⁶⁴ which reveals that Francis Weston was one of his colleagues and played music with him in the Privy Chamber, all members of which were expected to turn their hands, when required by the King, to music-making, singing, dancing, or acting.

It was not long before the musician was befriended by Lord Rochford, who drew him further into the Boleyn circle. Rochford owned a manuscript of two poems, “Les Lamentations de Matheolus” and “Le Livre de Leesce” (or “Le Résolu en Mariage”), by the fifteenth-century French writer Jean Lefèvre. It is inscribed above the text in his own hand, This book is mine. George Boleyn 1526, but Smeaton’s signature, A moy, M. Marc S. à moi meaning literally “to me,” but effectively “mine”)—appears at the bottom. The emphatic inscription suggests that Rochford had given the manuscript to Smeaton.⁶⁵ It has recently been suggested by Retha Warnicke that Smeaton was one of Rochford’s homosexual lovers. In fact, Warnicke suggests that all the men accused with Anne had indulged in illegal sexual practices and were thus easily framed, but the evidence is purely inferential, and her theory has been dismissed by most historians.⁶⁶ However, she may have had a point where Rochford was concerned, as has been discussed.

A choir book now in the collection of the Royal College of Music in London was probably once owned by Anne Boleyn, and it has been suggested that it was perhaps compiled by Smeaton.⁶⁷ This theory rests on the grounds that the handwriting on it is similar to his signature on the Lefèvre manuscript. This book contains a collection of motets and chansons, and bears an initial letter illustrating what is supposed to be a falcon, Anne’s armorial badge, attacking a pomegranate, the badge of Katherine of Aragon; however, the badge in the picture is very unlike Anne’s. Nevertheless, the music book does carry the motto of her father, Thomas Boleyn, and her name, “Mres. A. Bolleyne,” but the use of the title “Mistress” dates the book to the period prior to Thomas Boleyn being created Earl of Wiltshire in 1529 (after which Anne used the courtesy title Lady Anne Rochford)—too early for it to have had any connection with Smeaton.⁶⁸

Despite Smeaton’s “poor degree,”⁶⁹ he appears to have enjoyed enviable status, to have kept horses at court and had servants who wore his livery. He had also become very grand—“I knew not myself, waxed proud in my courage, disdained my father, and would not him see,”⁷⁰ which may have prompted him to discourage the use of his surname, for he is frequently referred to in the sources as Mark, Marc, or Marks.⁷¹ A contemporary life of Henry VIII known as the “Spanish Chronicle”—not always a reliable source—speaks of his overbearing manner and his insolence to his fellow courtiers. His comfortable financial status is attested to in a list of prisoners in the Tower of London in May 1536, detailing the charges of their maintenance, which shows that all, including Smeaton—the only one who was not of gentle birth—“had lands and goods sufficient of their own”⁷² to pay for their keep.

That Smeaton’s career had advanced steadily is obvious from the fact that at Christmas 1530 he received 40s (£750) from the King, yet on October 6, 1532, he got £3. 6s. 8d (£1,250).⁷³ He may have been in Henry’s suite for the state visit to Calais that began five days later. Sadly, the King’s privy purse accounts for the years 1533-36 are lost, so we have few means of charting Smeaton’s later career.⁷⁴

Of all the men who would be accused with Anne, Smeaton would be the only one to persist in his admission of guilt, which proved to some appalled contemporaries that he was no gentleman. Cavendish, of course, thought him guilty, and that he died “like a wretch” for his “presumption”:

Lo, what it is, frail youth to advance
And to set him up in wealthy estate,
Ere sad discretion had him in governance
To bridle his lust, which now comes too late.⁷⁵

Other Catholic writers would make much of Anne’s supposed intrigues with Smeaton, which proved to be rich fodder for the scandalmongers of Europe.

…

If Cromwell contrived this plot against the Queen—and on his own admission he did—why did he select these particular men to be her partners in crime? One obvious answer is that he had good reason to believe they were guilty of treasonable misconduct with Anne because they had been identified by witnesses as men who were suspiciously close to her.⁷⁶ Yet the surviving evidence, both documentary and circumstantial, does not generally support that contention.

Certainly he chose them for shock value. Just one accomplice should have been enough to make a charge of adultery stick,⁷⁷ but Cromwell wanted Anne’s reputation irrevocably ruined, and for this and other reasons he chose to accuse her of criminal intercourse with five lovers.

Rochford was Anne’s brother, and incest was probably as great a taboo then as it is now, although it was not illegal in Tudor times and did not become a misdemeanor until 1908, when the Incest Act was passed. Nevertheless, Strickland, writing before then, called it “a crime of the most revolting nature,” which was probably how most people viewed it in the sixteenth century. Norris, Brereton, and Weston were long-standing intimates of the King, so to betray him with them rendered Anne’s infidelity all the more heinous. Smeaton was of humble birth: that the Queen of England could have brought herself to stoop so low to satisfy her lusts only served further to blacken her reputation.

It is almost certain that Professor Eric Ives’s theory that these men were “victims of a faction battle” at court is correct.⁷⁸ Certainly, Anne, with Rochford and Norris, by virtue of their influential positions in the Privy Chamber, “made a formidable trio.”⁷⁹ The “Spanish Chronicle” has Anne declaring that her brother’s fall was plotted alongside hers “so that none should be left to take my part,” and although these words are probably apocryphal, they are apposite, for Rochford was a very powerful man. Norris also had the King’s ear, and could be counted upon to defend her. Brereton and Weston, being close to Henry, enjoyed considerable influence too.

Retha Warnicke at one time shared Professor Ives’s view on the faction battle,⁸⁰ but later developed the theory that all the men were closet sodomites and homosexuals and therefore obvious and vulnerable targets, homosexuality being a capital offense. The evidence for this is purely inferential. All we can say for certain is that these men were known to be promiscuous—they themselves admitted to leading sinful lives—so people would have found it credible that they could rashly commit criminal intercourse with the Queen.

Certainly, if Anne were to be removed, influential members of her faction would have to perish with her, to eliminate all opposition. The powerful Rochford was her staunch supporter. Norris and Weston were known to be close to her, and when Cromwell uncovered useful, if insubstantial, evidence that could be used to link them to her criminally, he did not shrink from sacrificing them. He also wanted his own man in Norris’s prominent place in the Privy Chamber, in order to extend his influence into the inner sanctum of power. The removal of Brereton, another of the Queen’s affinity group, would excise a long-chafing thorn in Master Secretary’s side. It is possible that Sir Anthony Browne, who was active behind the scenes in destroying Anne, also found it convenient to have Brereton removed, for Brereton held in receivership lands belonging to Browne.⁸¹ As Cavendish later observed, Brereton was brought down “shamefully, only of old rancor.” Smeaton was of little account and expendable anyway.

Others, like Bryan and Carew, who had once supported Anne, were not targeted because they had become disaffected and worked to bring about her fall. Her father, Wiltshire, was spared: he was now fifty-nine, an old man in Tudor terms, who was probably expected to be sufficiently intimidated by the proceedings against his children to connive at their fate, which is just what he did. The purge would be extensive and terrifying enough to deter anyone else from speaking out for the Queen.

What is surprising is that no woman was arrested for aiding and abetting the Queen in her alleged crimes.⁸² When Katherine Howard was accused of adultery in 1541, Lady Rochford was arrested for acting as go-between, and lost her head for it. Yet, as the Katherine Howard affair would prove, it would have been impossible for Anne to conduct a succession of liaisons with courtiers without the collusion of at the very least one trusted female attendant; perhaps significantly, however, none were targeted, which might in itself argue that the case against her was spurious. On the other hand, they may simply have turned King’s evidence.⁸³

It has often been argued, in Anne’s favor, that there is very little evidence of her being especially close to any of these men, apart from her brother Rochford; that there is hardly anything to connect her with Brereton, in particular. Unfortunately, we cannot rely on that lack of evidence as proof of her innocence, because there is so little surviving information about what went on in her chamber, and in the court, on a daily basis.

Anne was certainly close to her brother, and she knew all the other men, with the exception of Mark Smeaton, very well, yet prior to April 1536, there is no evidence to suggest that she knew them too well. Nor is there any evidence to support the assertion that, in order to win Henry back after her miscarriage, she began “flaunting her sexuality”;⁸⁴ significantly, in this respect, none of the charges that would be brought relate to 1536.

For Cromwell, speed and surprise were now requisite. The Boleyn faction was not to be permitted any chance of regrouping and fighting back. In less than three weeks it would be utterly annihilated.

The evidence against Lord Rochford was said to have been laid solely by his wife of twelve years, Jane Parker; she is described by Henry VIII’s seventeenth-century biographer, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, as the “particular instrument” in the ruin of her husband and his sister;⁸⁵ Cherbury based his account on the lost journal of Anthony Anthony, a witness at the trials of George and Anne Boleyn.

Jane was the daughter of the erudite humanist scholar Henry Parker, Lord Morley; her mother, Alice St. John, was a distant cousin of the King through his Beaufort connections. Jane had been “brought up in the court” from a “young age,”⁸⁶ accompanied it to the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520 as one of Queen Katherine’s gentlewomen,⁸⁷ and had become one of its youthful stars by 1522 when—inappropriately, as it proved—she danced the role of “Constancy” in a pageant with Anne Boleyn and others.⁸⁸ She was for years a prominent member of Anne’s circle, and had served her as a lady-in-waiting from 1533. At Anne’s coronation, Jane was assigned a prominent place in the proceedings, in the company of the Countess of Worcester and other great ladies.⁸⁹

George Cavendish, who knew Jane personally⁹⁰ but had no love for the Boleyns and wrote with the benefit of hindsight, had no great opinion of her character. She was reared, he asserted, speaking as Jane:

Withouten bridle of honest measure,
Following my lust and filthy pleasure,
Without respect of any wifely truth,
Dreadless of God, from grace also exempt,
Viciously consuming the time of this my youth.⁹¹

We know that Lady Rochford had a talent for intrigue, for she was complicit in Katherine Howard’s adulterous affairs in 1541, acting as facilitator and lookout. She was not new to the game. Chapuys reported, in October 1534, that Anne Boleyn had involved her in “a conspiracy” to get one of the King’s mistresses replaced by Madge Shelton, the Queen’s cousin. But Henry found out, and Jane was dismissed from her post of lady-in-waiting and banished from court. We do not know when she returned.

In October 1535, while the King and Queen were away on a progress, the Bishop of Tarbes (who had just returned to France) reported to the Bailly of Troyes that, when Lady Mary had lately removed from Greenwich, “a vast crowd of women, wives of citizens and others, unknown to their husbands, presented themselves before her, weeping and crying that she was princess, notwithstanding all that had been done. Some of them, the chiefest, were placed in the Tower, constantly persisting in their opinion.”⁹² In the margin by that sentence, the words “Millor de Rochesfort and milord de Guillaume” (Lord Rochford and Lord William Howard) appear, and from this it has been credibly inferred that their wives, Lady Rochford, and her aunt-by-marriage, Lady William Howard (the former Margaret Gamage, who had only recently married Lord William), were among the demonstrators who ended up in the Tower.⁹³ Both these ladies would be arrested with Lord William Howard some years hence, in November 1541, for abetting and concealing the adultery of Katherine Howard, Henry VIII’s fifth wife, and the Howards were found guilty of misprision of treason, while Jane Rochford was convicted of treason. Their later collusion suggests that Lady Rochford and Lady William Howard might have intrigued together on that earlier occasion.

It is naive to claim that speaking out in favor of Mary would be uncharacteristic of Jane, and that she knew her destiny lay with the Boleyns.⁹⁴ As we have seen, quite a few movers and shakers attached to their party—Bryan, Carew, Norfolk, and, most notably, Cromwell—had become disaffected, alienated by Anne’s overbearing influence; and if—as the evidence strongly suggests—Jane was jealous of her husband’s closeness to his sister the Queen, then her defection is explicable. If you were not for the Boleyns, then you had to be against them, batting for the opposition—Lady Mary.

Sir Francis Bryan’s visit to Jane’s father, Lord Morley, at the time when he and his allies were working to destroy Anne Boleyn, and his employment of Morley’s kinsman, has already been noted. Bryan’s private visit to Morley may have had a dual purpose, for by then the investigations against the Queen were well advanced, and the well-informed “Vicar of Hell” may have gone to inform Morley of his daughter’s allegations against her husband and the Queen, and in the hope of enlisting the support of the outraged father on behalf of Lady Mary and Jane Seymour. In fact, Bryan probably already knew or suspected that Morley’s sympathies lay with Mary.

It may be significant that Morley, despite his overriding loyalty to the King, his friendly relations with Cromwell, and his avoidance of embroilment in political matters (which was probably the reason why Bryan had visited him at home), had by Whitsunday, June 4, 1536, become on close and friendly terms with Lady Mary. With his wife and one of his two daughters—possibly Lady Rochford herself—he was to visit her at Hunsdon on that date, when they discussed only “things touching to virtue.”⁹⁵ It is significant that Morley’s family visited the princess with Anne, Lady Hussey, the partisan wife of Mary’s chamberlain; Lady Hussey had managed to smuggle several gifts with coded messages to Mary during the years in which the latter was out of favor, and the fact that Lord Morley came in her company suggests that he shared her devotion and faithfulness.

Morley was to praise Mary most chivalrously in various manuscripts he gave her in the two decades that followed. After her accession in 1553, he spoke of “the love and truth that I have borne to Your Highness from your childhood.”⁹⁶ This proves that his loyalty to Mary long predated that visit in June 1536.

Maybe Jane Rochford had in some way been influenced by her father’s sympathetic attitude toward the princess. It has been convincingly argued that she was in fact Mary’s friend and hoped to see her restored to the succession.⁹⁷ Having been brought up at court in the household of Katherine of Aragon, she would have known the princess well. According to one of the manuscripts Morley gave to Mary, he had held up Mary as a model of virtue and learning to his family.⁹⁸ It is easy to see how Jane Parker could have grown up revering Mary Tudor.

There is a credible reason why Jane Rochford switched her allegiance to Mary Tudor in 1535.⁹⁹ Her father had spent some years in the household of Mary’s great-grandmother, the Lady Margaret Beaufort, who had acted as regent for her seventeen-year-old grandson, Henry VIII, for a short time after his accession in 1509, until he attained his majority. On June 22, 1535, Lady Margaret’s great friend, John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, was publicly beheaded for refusing to acknowledge either the King as Supreme Head of the Church of England or his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Sir Thomas More suffered a similar fate early in July, but apart from the outrage that these executions provoked, Morley and his family had special reason to be grieved, for Fisher had been Lady Margaret’s confessor, and Morley was present in 1509 when she died during a mass celebrated by the bishop. Public opinion laid the blame for Fisher’s execution firmly at the door of the Boleyn faction, and it is likely that Lord Morley and his family did too. Morley was to tell Mary Tudor that he had been with Fisher—“so good a man and so divine a clerk”—shortly before the old man went to the block.¹⁰⁰ It seems that the Parkers, like so many who had been of the Queen’s party, became disaffected and decided to distance themselves from Anne and place their hopes for the future in Lady Mary.

Julia Fox, Jane Parker’s recent apologist, is almost certainly overstating her case when she claims that the Rochfords’ marriage was successful and that there is no reason to suppose it anything but happy; romantically, she imagines George and Jane “snuggling up” in bed together. The traditional—and sounder—view is that the marriage was an unhappy one; it may be significant that it produced no children—George Boleyn, Dean of Lichfield in Elizabeth I’s reign, is more likely to have been Rochford’s bastard than his son by Jane. But, sadly for romantics, the surviving evidence convincingly shows that Jane did testify to her husband having committed incest with his sister, and that she also confided to her interrogators some highly sensitive—and probably false—information.¹⁰¹

Possibly the marriage had foundered early on. Rochford’s possession of “Les Lamentations de Matheolus,” Lefèvre’s cynical satire on women and wedlock, perhaps mirrored his own views on his wife and their marriage; he acquired it, according to his own inscription, in 1526, within two years of their wedding. It is hardly likely that such a book was a wedding gift, as has been suggested,¹⁰² for the writer dates the beginning of his nuptial torments to the day he was wed.

It may be that Rochford had subjected Jane to sexual practices that outraged her—cause enough for enmity. Another, less convincing, theory is that Jane sought revenge on her husband after discovering that he was involved in a homosexual liaison with Mark Smeaton.¹⁰³ If that was true, why take it out on Anne, her sister-in-law?

Primary evidence for Jane’s testimony appears in a dispatch of Chapuys and in the anonymous Portuguese account of June 10, 1536, which refers to “that person who, more out of envy and jealousy than out of love toward the King, did betray this accursed secret, and together with it the names of those who had joined in the evil doings of the unchaste Queen.”¹⁰⁴ George Wyatt states that in “this principal matter [of incest] between the Queen and her brother, there was brought forth, indeed, witness, his wicked wife, accuser of her own husband, even to the seeking of his blood. What she did was more to be rid of him than of true ground against him.” There is no reason to dismiss this just because it is a later account, since much of Wyatt’s exhaustively researched information came from people like Anne Gainsford, who had been in Anne Boleyn’s household, or others who had known her.

Bishop Burnet, writing 150 years later, and basing his work on extensive original sources, wrote that Lady Rochford “carried many stories to the King, or some about him, that there was a familiarity between the Queen and her brother beyond what so near a relationship could justify.” Peter Heylin, the seventeenth-century Oxford academic historian, also asserted that Jane was jealous of Rochford. That may be very near the truth: perhaps she was inordinately jealous of the close bond between her husband and her sister-in-law, or of Anne’s influence over Rochford, who must have spent far more time at court with his sister than at home with his wife during the months of Jane’s banishment. Possibly Jane was also bitterly resentful of Anne for involving her in the plot that led to her disgrace; she is even more likely to have been alienated by the latter’s perceived responsibility for Fisher’s death.

Maybe Jane, realizing that the Boleyns were on a headlong course to disaster, pragmatically followed the example of the other ladies of the Queen’s household in laying evidence against their mistress. And she had more cause than they, for she would have needed to do something radical to distance herself from the crumbling Boleyn faction to which she was so closely attached, in order to avoid being sucked into the maelstrom of their destruction. Weighed against the prospect of future penury, with her husband convicted of treason and his life and goods declared forfeit, saving her own skin might have seemed the preferable option. This way, she might salvage something through the gratitude of the King and Cromwell.

A third possibility, perhaps the most likely, was that Cromwell, knowing that Jane stood in a precipitous position, put pressure on her to lay evidence against the Boleyns, and that she had no choice but to cooperate in the hope of saving her own neck.

A letter that Lady Rochford wrote to Cromwell later in 1536, in which, after referring to her late husband, she added, “whom God pardon,” has been seen as proof that Jane believed George was guilty of incest.¹⁰⁵ Yet this was no more than a customary form used in those days when speaking of the departed, and alludes only to the general sinfulness of mankind and the hope of redemption.

Whatever Lady Rochford’s involvement, the charge of incest—“undue familiarity”—was no doubt laid in the knowledge that it would irretrievably malign Anne’s reputation and create a scandal of epic proportions.