When all was over, one of the ladies took up her head, the others the body, and covering them with a sheet, placed them in a chest which was ready for the purpose, and carried the remains to St Peter’s Chapel, “where they say she lieth buried.”
“Such,” writes Lord de Ros in his “Memorials of the Tower,” “was the end of this most unfortunate lady, who but three years before had entered the Tower in triumph as the idol of the King, and the admiration of all around her. Levities, which even now would be thought slight and pardonable, but which in that coarse and licentious Court could hardly deserve a moderate censure, were the only offences found against her, unless the extorted accusation of Smeaton was to be regarded as proof of any deeper guilt.” At about the time of Anne’s execution, her brother, Lord Rochford, and three gentlemen of the Court, Brereton, Western, and Norris, were sentenced to death as accomplices in the crime of which she was accused. Mark Smeaton, a musician who, on the promise of pardon, had confessed his and the Queen’s guilt whilst under torture, was hanged. The accusation against Anne Boleyn and her brother, Lord Rochford, consisted only of the charge that he had one morning entered his sister’s chamber, and, whilst conversing with her in the presence of her attendants, had rested his hand upon the bed. Rochford died declaring his innocence, as did the other gentlemen who died with him. They were all buried in the churchyard of the Chapel of St Peter.
The day after Anne Boleyn’s execution, Henry married Jane Seymour. There is a tradition that the King had ordered a gun to be fired from the roof of the White Tower, then mounted with cannon, which he could see from his palace, as a signal that Anne Boleyn had ceased to live.
When Queen Victoria visited the Tower for the first time, and was shown the place on the Green on which the scaffold had stood where Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn had been executed, and where the grass, tradition said, never grew, Her Majesty ordered the brass tablet that now records those tragic events, to be placed on the spot, with the words, “Site of the ancient scaffold: on this spot Queen Anne Boleyn was beheaded on the 19th May 1536.”
The year 1537 saw the Tower full of prisoners, the result of the rising in the North, called the Pilgrimage of Grace. Thomas Cromwell’s crusade against the religious endowments of the country, his spoliation of the monasteries, his wholesale butchery of the monks and friars, had stirred up a violent feeling of resistance in the north of England. A report had been spread that as soon as the monasteries had been ruined and destroyed, it would be the turn of the parish churches, and the people of Lincoln and Yorkshire took instant alarm. A zealous Roman Catholic, named Robert Aske, headed the rebellion, bearing a banner emblazoned with the five wounds of Christ. The peril became so great that Henry found it necessary to send an army against the insurgents, the Duke of Norfolk being appointed its general. But Norfolk hesitated to bring matters to a crisis, and temporised. He promised that the grievances of the people should be heard, and a Parliament was summoned in the North to consider their complaints, and mend or end them. However, in 1537, Henry, breaking faith with the Pilgrimage of Grace, seized the ring-leaders, and established a Council in the North, which was a precursor, in cruelty and bloodshed, of Jeffreys’ Bloody Assize in Devonshire, a century and a half later. Cromwell instituted a reign of terror. His commissioners tore down, among others, such incomparable buildings as Fountains, Rievaulx, and Jervaulx Abbeys; the sacred fanes were gutted, their roofs torn off, and the holy shrines abandoned to the bats and owls, serving as quarries for anyone who cared to cart away the materials. The Abbots and heads of these, and many other religious houses, were either hanged out of hand, or sent in droves to London, and placed in the Tower. Among many others, the Abbots of Rievaulx, Fountains, and Jervaulx, and the Prior of Bridlington, after being imprisoned in the Tower, were hanged as traitors at Tyburn. Two peers, Lord Darcey and Lord Hussey, who had taken part in the Pilgrimage of Grace, were beheaded, the former on Tower Hill, and the latter at Lincoln; Sir Robert Constable, Sir Francis Bagot, Sir Thomas Percy, the brother of the Earl of Northumberland, Sir Stephen Hamilton, William Lumley, Nicholas Tempest, Robert Aske, and Sir John Bulwer, also suffered death, and, horrible to relate, the wife of the last was burnt at Smithfield.
The Block and Axe
Thomas Cromwell, in his treatment of women, resembled Judge Jeffreys, and, monstrous as is the fact of a woman being burnt to death in the reign of Henry VIII. for a political offence, it is not quite so revolting as the case of Elizabeth Gaunt, executed in the reign of the second James for sheltering one of the followers of Monmouth after the Battle of Sedgemoor. Both Cromwell and Jeffreys were the obedient tools of their masters, who, to quote the great Duke of Marlborough’s remark when describing James II., “This marble,” he said, laying his hand on a marble chimney-piece, “is not harder than the King’s heart.”
Secretary Cromwell, having put down the rising in the North of the country in this ruthless fashion, turned his attention to the West, where there yet lingered, amongst the descendants of the great houses of de la Pole and Courtenay, the last hopes of the Yorkists. In order to accomplish his object of exterminating them, Cromwell required the services of a traitor; and this he soon found in the person of Sir Geoffrey de la Pole, brother of Viscount Montagu. How it was that Geoffrey turned traitor, and denounced his own kith and kin to Cromwell is not known, but his treachery threw into the Secretary’s power not only his own brother, Montagu, but also Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, together with Sir Edward Nevill and Sir Nicholas Carew. They were charged with maintaining a traitorous correspondence with Cardinal Pole; and all perished on Tower Hill on 9th January 1539. Geoffrey’s brother, Henry de la Pole, Lord Montagu, was the son of Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, and the brother of Cardinal Pole. Born in 1492, he was consequently about fifty when he was executed. He had served in the Army, had fought in France, and had been one of the most conspicuous of Henry’s followers on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. He had married Jane Nevill, a daughter of Lord Abergavenny, but had no son to succeed him. Another of Geoffrey de la Pole’s victims, Henry Courtenay, was one of the most distinguished of Henry’s nobles. Three years previously he had commanded the Royal army, and only a few months before his own trial he had presided as High Steward of England at the proceedings which had resulted in the condemnation to death of Lords Darcey and Hussey. He was son of the tenth Earl of Devonshire, and head of the great house of Courtenay, whose descent from the Eastern Emperors has been so eloquently set forth by Gibbon. His mother was imprisoned in the Tower at the same time as himself; she shortly afterwards died there. Courtenay was forty-five at the time of his execution. Geoffrey de la Pole’s treachery brought him little good, for shortly after the death of his kinsmen we find him a prisoner in the Beauchamp Tower, where his name can still be seen carved with the date, 1562. He died there after Elizabeth’s accession.
There is in the possession of Lord Donnington, an interesting portrait of a stately young lady in the costume of the days of Henry VII. The face is handsome and refined, although somewhat too long; the neck is finely formed, but this, too, is unusually long. In her jewelled left hand she holds a sprig of honeysuckle, or it may have been the intention of the artist to represent the broom flower, the French genet (Planta Genesta), the badge and origin of the name Plantagenet. This portrait represents Margaret Plantagenet, Countess of Salisbury, the daughter of the murdered Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV.; her mother was a daughter of the great Earl of Warwick, the King-maker. Thus, as the representative of the Plantagenets and of the Nevills, her position was second only to that of the reigning family. She had married Sir Richard Pole, and was the mother of Lord Montagu, of the distinguished prelate, Reginald Pole, who had fled to Rome, where a Cardinal’s red hat awaited him, as well as of the traitor Sir Geoffrey. Born in 1470, Lady Salisbury was nearly seventy years old when, by Henry’s orders, she was imprisoned in the Tower. There was no charge which could possibly be brought against the aged noblewoman, and she was kept more as a hostage on her son, the Cardinal’s, account, than for any alleged cause of offence. Her close relationship to the late dynasty was in reality her only crime, but this was sufficient to bring her grey head to the block.