Two days after the trial of the Queen and Rochford, the five gentlemen suffered on Tower Hill. The Concubine, wrote Chapuys, saw them executed from the windows of the Tower, to enhance her misery. The Lord Rochford declared himself innocent of everything with which he was charged, although he confessed that he had deserved death for having contaminated himself with the new sects of religion, and for having infected many others. For this he said that God had justly punished him. He prayed all the world to keep clear of heresy, and his words would cause the recovery and conversion of innumerable souls.[416] This is a good instance of Chapuys’s manner, and is a warning against an easy acceptance of his various stories. It is false that Rochford declared himself innocent of the adultery. It is false that he said that he deserved death for heresy. He said nothing—not a word—about heresy. What he did say is correctly given in Wriothesley’s Chronicle, which confirms the report sent from London to the Regent of the Netherlands.[417] The Spanish writer says that his address was “muy bien Catolica,” but it will be seen that he carefully avoided a denial of the crime for which he suffered.
“Masters all, I am come hither not to preach a sermon, but to die, as the law hath found me, and to the law I submit me, desiring you all, and specially my masters of the Court, that you will trust in God specially, and not in the vanities of the world; for if I had so done I think I had been alive as ye be now. Also I desire you to help to the setting forth of the true Word of God; I have been diligent to read it and set it forth truly; but if I had been as diligent to observe it and done and lived thereafter as I was to read it and set it forth, I had not come hereto. Wherefore I beseech you all to be workers and live thereafter, and not to read it and live not thereafter. As for my offences, it cannot avail you to hear them that I die here for; but I beseech God that I may be an example to you all, and that all you may beware by me, and heartily I require you all to pray for me and to forgive me if I have offended you, and I forgive you all, and God save the king.”[418]
Of the other four, Smeton and Brereton admitted the justice of their sentence, Brereton adding that, if he had to die a thousand deaths, he deserved them all. Norris was almost silent. Weston lamented in general terms the wickedness of his past life. From not one of the five came the indignant repudiation of a false accusation which might have been surely looked for from innocent men, and especially to be looked for when the Queen’s honour was compromised along with theirs.
A Protestant spectator of the execution, a follower of Sir H. Norris, and a friend and schoolfellow of Brereton, said that at first he and all other friends of the Gospel had been unable to believe that the Queen had behaved so abominably. “As he might be saved before God, he could not believe it, till he heard them speak at their death; but in a manner all confessed but Mr. Norris, who said almost nothing at all.”[419]
Dying men hesitate to leave the world with a lie on their lips. It appears to me, therefore, that these five gentlemen did not deny their guilt, because they knew that they were guilty. The unfortunate Anne was still alive; and while there was life there was hope. A direct confession on their part would have been a confession for her as well as themselves, and they did not make it; but, if they were really innocent, that they should have suffered as they did without an effort to clear themselves or her is one more inexplicable mystery in this extraordinary story.
Something even more strange was to follow.
At her trial Anne had been “unmoved as a stone, and had carried herself as if she was receiving some great honour.” She had been allowed a chair, and had bowed to the Peers as she took her seat. She said little, “but her face spoke more than words, and no one to look on her would have thought her guilty.” “She protested that she had not misconducted herself.” When Norfolk delivered sentence her face did not change. She said merely that she would not dispute the judgment, but appealed to God.[420] Smeton had repeated his own confession on the scaffold. She turned pale when she was told of it. “Did he not acquit me of the infamy he has laid on me?” she said. “Alas, I fear his soul will suffer for it!”[421]
But she had asked for time to prepare her conscience and for spiritual help; she called herself a Lutheran, and on the Tuesday, the day after her trial, Cranmer went to the Tower to hear her confession. She then told the Archbishop something which, if true, invalidated her marriage with the King; if she had not been his wife, her intrigues were not technically treason, and Cranmer perhaps gave her hope that this confession might save her, for she said afterwards to Sir William Kingston that she expected to be spared and would retire into a nunnery.[422] The confession, whatever it might be, was produced on the following day by the Archbishop sitting judicially at Lambeth,[423] and was there considered by three ecclesiastical lawyers, who gave as their opinion that she had never been the King’s lawful wife, and this opinion was confirmed by the Chancellor, the Duke of Suffolk, the Earl of Oxford, and a committee of bishops. The confession itself belonged to the secrets which Cromwell described as “too abominable to be made known,” and was never published. The judgment of the Archbishop itself was ratified on the 28th of June by the two Houses of Convocation. It was laid before Parliament and was made the basis of a new arrangement of the succession. But the Statute merely says “that God, from whom no secret things could be hid, had caused to be brought to light evident and open knowledge of certain impediments unknown at the making of the previous Act, and since that time confessed by the Lady Anne before the Archbishop of Canterbury, sitting judicially for the same, whereby it appeared that the marriage was never good nor consonant to the laws.”
Conjecture was, of course, busy over so singular a mystery. Some said that the Archbishop had declared Elizabeth to have been Norris’s bastard, and not the daughter of the King. Others revived the story of Henry’s supposed intrigue with Anne’s sister, Mary, and Chapuys added a story which even he did not affect to believe, agreeable as it must have been to him. “Many think,” he said, “that the Concubine had become so audacious in vice, because most of the new bishops had persuaded her that she need not go to confession; and that, according to the new sect, it was lawful to seek aid elsewhere, even from her own relations, when her husband was not able to satisfy her.”[424] The Wriothesley Chronicle says positively that, on the 17th of May, in the afternoon, at a solemn court kept at Lambeth by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the doctors of the law, the King was divorced from his wife, Queen Anne; and there at the same court was a privy contract approved that she had made to the Earl of Northumberland, afore the King’s time, and so she was discharged, and was never lawful Queen of England.[425]
There are difficulties in accepting either of these conjectures. Chapuys, like Dr. Lingard after him, decided naturally for the hypothesis most disgraceful to the King. The Mary Boleyn story, authoritatively confirmed, at once covered Henry’s divorce process with shame, and established the superior claim of Mary to the succession.[426] But in the Act of Parliament the cause is described as something unknown in 1533, when the first Statute was passed: and the alleged intrigue had then been the common subject of talk in Catholic circles and among the Opposition members of Parliament. The Act says that the cause was a fact confessed by the Lady Anne. The Lady Anne might confess her own sins, but her confession of the sins of others was not a confession at all, and could have carried no validity unless supported by other evidence. Chapuys’s assertion requires us to suppose that Henry, being informed of Anne’s allegation, consented to the establishment of his own disgrace by making it the subject of a legal investigation; that he thus himself allowed a crime to be substantiated against him which covered him with infamy, and which no other attempt was ever made to prove. How did Chapuys know that this was the cause of the divorce of Anne? If it was communicated to Parliament, it must have become the common property of the realm, and have been no longer open to question. If it was not communicated, but was accepted by Parliament, itself on the authority of the Council, who were Chapuys’s informants, and how did they know? Under Chapuys’s hypothesis the conduct of King, Council, Parliament, and Convocation becomes gratuitous folly—folly to which there was no temptation and for which there was no necessity. The King had only to deny the truth of the story, and nothing further would have been made of it. The real evidence for the liaison with Mary Boleyn is the ineradicable conviction of a certain class of minds that the most probable interpretation of every act of Henry is that which most combines stupidity and wickedness. To argue such a matter is useless. Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.