On the 1st of May following the king suddenly broke up a tournament at Greenwich, leaving the company in bewilderment and consternation. The cause was soon known. Inquiries had been made on reports of the queen’s ill-conduct, and several of her reputed lovers had been arrested. On the 2nd Anne herself was committed to the Tower on a charge of adultery with various persons, including her own brother, Lord Rochford. On the 12th Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton were declared guilty of high treason, while Anne herself and Lord Rochford were condemned unanimously by an assembly of twenty-six peers on the 15th. Her uncle, the duke of Norfolk, presided as lord steward, and gave sentence, weeping, that his niece was to be burned or beheaded as pleased the king. Her former lover, the earl of Northumberland, left the court seized with sudden illness. Her father, who was excused attendance, had, however, been present at the trial of the other offenders, and had there declared his conviction of his daughter’s guilt. On the 16th, hoping probably to save herself by these means, she informed Cranmer of a certain supposed impediment to her marriage with the king—according to some accounts a previous marriage with Northumberland, though the latter solemnly and positively denied it—which was never disclosed, but which, having been considered by the archbishop and a committee of ecclesiastical lawyers, was pronounced, on the 17th, sufficient to invalidate her marriage. The same day all her reputed lovers were executed; and on the 19th she herself suffered death on Tower Green, her head being struck off with a sword by the executioner of Calais brought to England for the purpose.[7] She had regarded the prospect of death with courage and almost with levity, laughing heartily as she put her hands about her “little neck” and recalled the skill of the executioner. “I have seen many men” (wrote Sir William Kingston, governor of the Tower) “and also women executed, and all they have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady has much joy and pleasure in death.” On the following day Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour.
Amidst the vituperations of the adherents of the papacy and the later Elizabethan eulogies, and in the absence of the records on which her sentence was pronounced, Anne Boleyn’s guilt remains unproved. To Sir William Kingston she protested her entire innocence, and on the scaffold while expressing her submission she made no confession.[8] Smeaton alone of her supposed lovers made a full confession, and it is possible that his statement was drawn from him by threats of torture or hopes of pardon. Norris, according to one account,[9] also confessed, but subsequently declared that he had been betrayed into making his statement. The others were all said to have “confessed in a manner” on the scaffold, but much weight cannot be placed on these general confessions, which were, according to the custom of the time, a declaration of submission to the king’s will and of general repentance rather than acknowledgment of the special crime. “I pray God save the king,” Anne herself is reported to have said on the scaffold, “and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never; and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord.” A principal witness for the charge of incest was Rochford’s own wife, a woman of infamous character, afterwards executed for complicity in the intrigues of Catherine Howard. The discovery of Anne’s misdeeds coincided in an extraordinary manner with Henry’s disappointment in not obtaining by her a male heir, while the king’s despotic power and the universal unpopularity of Anne both tended to hinder the administration of pure justice. Nevertheless, though unproved, Anne’s guilt is more than probable. It is almost incredible that two grand juries, a petty jury, and a tribunal consisting of nearly all the lay peers of England, with the evidence before them which we do not now possess, should have all unanimously passed a sentence of guilt contrary to the facts and their convictions, and that such a sentence should have been supported by Anne’s own father and uncle. Every year since her marriage Anne had given birth to a child, and Henry had no reason to despair of more; while, if Henry’s state of health was such as was reported, the desire for children, which Anne shared with him, may be urged as an argument for her guilt. Sir Francis Weston in a letter to his family almost acknowledges his guilt in praying for pardon, especially for offences against his wife;[10] Anne’s own conduct and character almost prepare us for some catastrophe. Whether innocent or guilty, however, her fate caused no regrets and her misfortunes did not raise a single champion or defender. The sordid incidents of her rise, and the insolence with which she used her triumph, had alienated all hearts from the unhappy woman. Among the people she had always been intensely disliked; the love of justice, and the fear of trade losses imminent upon a breach with Charles V., combined to render her unpopular. She appealed to the king’s less refined instincts, and Henry’s deterioration of character may be dated from his connexion with her. She is described as “not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of a middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the English king’s great appetite, and her eyes which are black and beautiful, and take great effect.”[11] Cranmer admired her—“sitting in her hair” (i.e. with her hair falling over her shoulders, which seems to have been her custom on great occasions), “upon a horse litter, richly apparelled,” at her coronation.[12]
Bibliography.—Art. in the Dict. of Nat. Biographyand authorities cited; Henry VIII. by A.F. Pollard (1905); Anne Boleyn, by P. Friedman (1884); The Early Life of Anne Boleyn, by J.H. Round (1886); The Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, by J.A. Froude (1891); “Der Ursprung der Ehescheidung König Heinrichs VIII.” and “Der Sturz des Cardinals Wolsey,” by W. Busch (Historisches Taschenbuch, vi. Folge viii. 273 and ix. 41, 1889 and 1890); Lives, by Miss E.O. Benger (1821); and Miss A. Strickland, Lives of the Queens of England (1851), vol. ii.; Notices of Historic Persons Buried in the Tower of London, by D.C. Bell (1877); The Wives of Henry VIII. by M.A.S. Hume (1905); Excerpta Historica, by N.H. Nicolas (1831), p. 260; Spanish Chronicle of Henry VIII. tr. by M.A.S. Hume (1889); Records of the Reformation, by N. Pocock (1870); Harleian Miscellany (1808), iii. 47 (the love letters); Archaeologia, xxiii. 64 (memorial of G. Constantyne); Eng. Hist. Rev. v. 544, viii. 53, 299, x. 104; State Trials, i. 410; History of Henry VIII. by Lord Herbert of Cherbury; E. Hall’s Chronicle: Original Letters, ed. by Sir H. Ellis, i. ser., ii. 37, 53 et seq., ii. ser., ii. 10; Extracts from the Life of Queen Anne Boleigne, by G. Wyat (1817); The Negotiations of Thomas Wolsey, by Sir W. Cavendish (1641, rep. Harleian Misc. 1810 v.); C. Wriothesley’s Chronicle (Camden Soc., 1875-1877); Notes and Queries, 8 ser., viii. 141, 189, 313, 350; Il Successo de la Morte de la Regina de Inghilterra (1536); The Maner of the Tryumphe of Caleys and Bullen, and the Noble Tryumphaunt Coronacyon of Queen Anne (1533, rep. 1884); State Papers Henry VIII.; Letters and Papers of Henry VIII., by Brewer and Gardiner, esp. the prefaces; Cal. of State Pap. England and Spain, Venetian and Foreign (1558-1559), p. 525 (an account full of obvious errors); Colton MSS. (Brit. Mus.), Otho C. 10; “Baga de secretis” in Rep. iii., App. ii. of Dep. Keeper of Public Records, p. 242; “Römische Dokumente,” v., M.S. Ehses (Gorres-gesellschaft, Bd. ii., 1893). See also articles on [Catherine of Aragon] and [Henry VIII].
(P. C. Y.)
[1] See Anne Boleyn, by P. Friedman; The Early Life of Anne Boleyn, by J.H. Round; and J. Gairdner in Eng. Hist. Review, viii. 53, 299, and x. 104.
[2] According to the Chronicle of King Henry VIII., tr. by M.A.S. Hume, p. 68, she was his mistress.
[3] Of this there is no direct proof, but the statement rests upon contemporary belief and chiefly upon the extraordinary terms of the dispensation granted to Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, which included the suspension of all canons relating to impediments created by “affinity rising ex illicito coitu in any degree even in the first.” Froude rejects the whole story, Divorce of Catherine of Aragon, p. 54; and see Friedman’s Anne Boleyn, ii. 323.
[4] Cat. of St. Pap. England and Spain, iii. pt. ii. p. 327.
[5] According to Cranmer, Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. vi. p. 300, the only authority; and Cranmer himself only knew of it a fortnight after. The marriage was commonly antedated to the 14th of November 1532.