On hearing the news of her death the king rejoiced. ‘God be praised,’ he said, ‘we are free from all suspicion of war!’ He had been concerned that her nephew, Charles V, might form a Catholic league with France and the pope against the infidel of England. On the following day he and Anne Boleyn appeared at a ball, both of them dressed in brilliant yellow.
It is not known how Mary learned of the death of her mother, but the news provoked another bout of illness. She was once more threatened by Anne Boleyn. ‘If I have a son, as I hope shortly,’ Anne wrote, ‘I know what will happen to her.’ ‘She is my death,’ Anne had once said, ‘and I am hers.’ Mary was now alone in the world, and her thoughts turned to the prospect of escape to her mother’s imperial family in Brussels. She spoke to the imperial ambassador about the possibility of fleeing across the Channel, but he advised caution and circumspection. In the meantime, he said ‘she is daily preparing herself for death’. She was in a most invidious position. In certain circumstances she might be considered a pretender to the throne. Those who wished to rebel against the new order of religion, for example, would welcome her at their head. She was surrounded by perils.
On the day of Katherine’s burial in the abbey church of Peterborough, 29 January, Anne Boleyn miscarried a male child; it was one more link in the chain of fate that bound together the two women. Anne blamed the accident on the shock she had received, five days before, on hearing the news that the king had fallen from his horse during a jousting match at the tiltyard in Greenwich; he had lain unconscious on the ground for two hours. Yet the king believed, or chose to believe, that the hand of divine providence lay behind the event. ‘I see,’ he is reported to have said, ‘that God will not give me male children.’
The king’s attentions were already wandering once more. Thomas Cromwell had told the imperial ambassador that ‘in future he was to lead a more moral life than hitherto – a chaste and marital one with his present queen’. Yet the minister had put a hand to his mouth in order to hide his smile, so the ambassador concluded that he was not necessarily telling the truth. Henry was in fact pursuing Jane Seymour, a young lady in the household of Anne Boleyn herself, whose rather sharp features were later bequeathed to her son. It was reported that Anne Boleyn found the girl on her husband’s knee and flew into a rage, but this may just be later gossip.
The ambassador also tells another story that hints at the complications of the court. While speaking to ‘the brother of the damsel the king is now courting’, he witnessed an argument when ‘angry words seemed to be passing between the king and Cromwell for, after a considerable interval of time, the latter came out of the embrasure of the window where the king was standing, on the excuse that he was so thirsty he could go on no longer, and this he really was, from sheer annoyance, for he went to sit on a chest, out of the king’s sight, and asked for something to drink’. Eventually Henry came looking for him.
A courtier once described how ‘the king beknaveth him [Cromwell] twice a week, and sometimes knocks him well about the pate; and yet when he hath been well pummelled about the head and shaken up as it were a dog, he will come out of the Great Chamber … with as merry a countenance as though he might rule all the roost’. This is the human aspect of court life, rarely observed, where we are able to glimpse the constant personal tensions that fashioned the decisions we now call history.
Great and malign changes, indeed, were soon to occur at the court. It was reported that the king had expressed his horror of Anne Boleyn to an intimate in the privy chamber, and accused her of luring him into marriage through the use of witchcraft. That is why he had been abandoned by God. So the story goes. Yet in practice he still behaved to her with every courtesy and attention, and the records show that she was spending a great deal of money on fine garments for herself and her daughter. There was every reason to suppose, despite the fears of the king, that she might bear another child. Anne Boleyn herself professed to believe so.
But then the calamity struck. On 24 April two separate commissions, under the conditions of utmost secrecy, were established to search into occasions and suspicions of treason. On one of them sat Thomas Cromwell and the duke of Norfolk, Anne Boleyn’s uncle but no longer her friend. Three days later it was suggested that the king might wish for a divorce. What had happened? One of the ladies at the court had spoken unwisely about the queen’s affairs and had mentioned a certain ‘Mark’. Once it had been spoken, it could not be unsaid. To conceal or to attempt to suppress information about the queen’s alleged infidelity would be equivalent to treason – or, in the phrase of the time, misprision or concealment of treason. The rumour or report had immediately taken on a life of its own.
On 30 April Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a groom of the privy chamber, was taken from Greenwich to the Tower where he confessed to having been Anne’s lover; that confession may have smelled of the rack, but it might have been a true account prompted by terror. He never retracted it and repeated it at the foot of the gallows. On the following day at the May Day jousts Anne’s brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, rode against Sir Henry Norris; Norris was the intimate friend of the sovereign and the chief gentleman of the privy chamber. They were both soon to die for the suspicion of having lain with Anne Boleyn.
After the joust was over the king rode from Greenwich to Whitehall, taking Norris with him as one of a small company. During the journey he turned on Norris and accused him of pursuing an affair with his wife. To meddle with the queen of England was treason. The king promised him a pardon if he confessed the truth, but Norris vehemently denied the charge. He was taken to the Tower at dawn on the following day. George Boleyn had already been arrested, and charged with having sexual relations with his own sister. The evidence for the incest came from his wife, Lady Rochford, who may have spoken out of malice towards her promiscuous husband. The ladies of the queen’s household had also been interrogated and may have revealed interesting information. Some five men were accused of having slept with her – Mark Smeaton, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, William Brereton, Francis Weston – and were executed. Three others, including Thomas Wyatt the poet, were acquitted. These commissions of inquiry were not necessarily show trials.
The queen herself was interrogated by the king’s council. At one point Anne Boleyn was seen entreating the king in Greenwich Palace, with her baby daughter in her arms; but this was not enough. The cannon was soon fired, as a token that a noble or a royal had been taken to the Tower. When she arrived at that place she fell on her knees and prayed ‘God to help her, as she was not guilty of the thing for which she was accused’. When she was told that Smeaton and Norris were among those incarcerated she cried out: ‘Oh Norris have you accused me? You are in the Tower with me, and you and I will die together; and Mark, so will you.’