Within hours of Catherine of Aragon’s death, the king and council had been informed. Steps were taken to begin the preparations for burial and for permanently disbanding the household. None of these things were as straightforward as they would normally have been, had Catherine died the king’s full wife and queen of England. Where, for instance, should a princess dowager be buried, and with what honour? The king had absolutely no intention of allowing her to be commemorated as a queen, no matter the Imperial ambassador’s protestations or the risk of diplomatic consequences with Spain; Chapuys was left to write ominously to the emperor, ‘Your Majesty will consider to what state things have come.’1 Nor could she be buried in an Observant friary as she had asked, since, as Cromwell explained, there were now none left.2 A new burial place must be chosen, mourners and attendees appointed, black cloth sourced, distributed and made into clothing. There were goods to requisition and a will to enact.
The indomitable María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby remained at Kimbolton through the month of January 1536, listening to these debates unfold and watching the king’s officers trying to maintain a semblance of order while they waited for firm directions from London.3 Only eight hours after Catherine’s death, her body was secretly ‘opened’ for disembowelling by a few of her servants – not, apparently, ones with any experience or right thereof, since they consisted of a candlemaker and two others. If María heard the servants’ confidential report that Catherine’s heart was ‘black and hideous’, and that they feared poison, no doubt she was appalled.4 Nothing was proceeding as she and the others felt that it should. Catherine’s body was not encased in a lead coffin until 15 January, eight days after her death, by which time keeping vigil over it must have been a singularly unpleasant task despite the deep winter cold.5 The women were not even able to get their black mourning clothes made in a timely manner. They were forced to make do with ‘kerchiefs on their heads and old robes’ for almost three weeks after Catherine’s death.6 At least there were mourners. As January progressed, a trickle of noblewomen joined María at Kimbolton, including her own daughter, Katherine, Duchess of Suffolk, to perform the role of chief mourner for the masses that must be held in the following days.7
Gradually, arrangements were made. Catherine was to be interred in the church of Peterborough Abbey, as the nearest religious house befitting the status of a princess dowager, but she was not to be buried with the honour that would be due to a queen, and she was not to be buried in London.8 The king wanted to seize all of her goods, but others were not comfortable with this. Even the famously grasping Sir Richard Rich, solicitor-general, wrote that ‘it would not be honourable to take the things given in her lifetime’.9 He explained to the king that Catherine, as a royal woman, had in fact been a femme sole, not subject to coverture, which meant that the will she had made should be allowed to stand.
We don’t know whether the king allowed all of Catherine’s bequests to be enacted, but her will is a testament to the bond between the former queen and her ladies-in-waiting. Those mentioned were most likely in her service at her death – and had therefore not, after all, been dismissed the previous year. They were the first individuals listed.10 Most were given money, even life-changing sums. For Elizabeth Darrell, orphaned daughter of a knight, the £200 ‘for her marriage’ was as much again as she might expect to receive from her father’s estate.11 Mistress Blanche – Blanche Twyford, who had served Catherine among her chamberers for many years – was given £100, over fifteen times her yearly salary; Margery Otwell, also a chamberer, and Dorothea Wheler had £40 each. Mary, the wife of Catherine’s Spanish physician Fernán López de Escoriaza, was also given £40, as was Isabel Otwell, daughter of Margery above.12 The ‘little maidens’ – unfortunately unnamed – had £10 each. Near the end was the only Spanish woman named as an individual rather than as somebody’s wife: ‘Isabel of Vergas’, who received £20. This is almost certainly the ‘Elizabeth Vergus, Gentlewoman of the Queen, native of Spain’ who received English denization in 1517, and this suggests either that she had stayed in Catherine’s service or that she had at least remained in England and in contact with her mistress.13 María de Salinas, Lady Willoughby was not mentioned in Catherine’s will. This doesn’t mean that she had been forgotten. Noble and royal women often used their wills to help those who needed it most; María, a widowed baroness with a sizeable estate in Lincolnshire, needed no financial assistance.
The corpse remained at Kimbolton for another twelve days, lying in state in the chapel ringed with candles and torches, servants standing vigil at all hours of the day and night. Banners of crimson and gold were brought, showing the arms of Spain and England, and the symbols of the holy Trinity, of the Virgin Mary, St Katherine and St George. The whole house was hung with black fabric, and in the winter darkness María must have felt as though she and the rest of the queen’s servants had somehow been entombed alongside her. On Thursday, 27 January the coffin was carried from the chapel to a wagon outside, covered in black velvet. Priests, gentlemen, household officers and heralds rode ahead of it, and María and the other women came behind it on horseback, themselves and their horses likewise dressed in black. In sombre silence they rode nine miles to Sawtry Abbey to rest overnight, and the next day on to Peterborough Abbey. Once there, the coffin was conducted to the abbey church and placed onto ‘eight pillars of beautiful fashion and roundness’ under a canopy of estate. Catherine’s crimson and gold banners were set about the chapel, and the whole was illuminated by the light of a thousand candles.14
On 29 January the funeral itself began. María, dressed in black and standing with the rest of the ladies, could read Catherine’s motto emblazoned in large gold letters all around the chapel: humble et loyale. She might have been forgiven for thinking that this had hardly served her mistress well. During the Bishop of Rochester’s sermon indignation must have risen in almost tangible waves from all of those listening; not only did he preach against the Pope and against Catherine’s marriage with the king, but he invented a new and cruel twist. He alleged that on her deathbed Catherine had acknowledged that she had not been queen of England.15 One can imagine the ripple of surprise and anger that must have gone around the church. The bishop had not been at Catherine’s deathbed; he could not have known what she said or didn’t say. This was pure invention, a rewriting of Catherine’s life and death, in the face of those who had been there and who knew better. But there was nothing they could do except go on with the service and weep with fury as much as with grief. The heralds present made offerings of gold cloth on behalf of María and the other mourners, to be made into vestments for the church, and then Catherine’s coffin was lowered into its resting place ‘at the lowest step of the high altar’, the place covered with a cloth of black velvet.16 She was gone, and now they must move forward in this new world without her.
While Catherine’s erstwhile ladies-in-waiting saw their mistress into the ground, Queen Anne’s fluttered about her in concern. Within days of Catherine’s burial – possibly even the very same day – Anne had a miscarriage.17 She claimed that it was the result of stress undergone some days previously, when her uncle the Duke of Norfolk had come to tell her that the king had taken a bad fall from his horse while tilting at the ring. If the king died, would Queen Anne still be secure, with only a daughter living and a baby in her belly?
Much has been made of these events. Henry’s fall was indeed serious. He was ‘two hours without speaking’ – probably unconscious – during which time his council must have undergone considerable stress.18 Prior to this, the king’s death had not been much thought about, or at least not much written about. He was forty-four – no longer young, perhaps, but hardly old, and in good health. Such an accident could not help but create concerns for the future, in both his own and others’ minds. It also spelled the end of his jousting career, and appears to have re-inflamed, or perhaps burst, an existing ulcer on his leg that now stubbornly refused to heal, causing him continual and often severe pain. He became increasingly irritable, his behaviour more irrational, and for the queen and her household the royal court became an environment of extreme stress.19
Queen Anne’s women, like Catherine’s, had shared her sorrow over her miscarriage. Anne herself had allegedly consoled them when they wept and told them that ‘it was for the best, because she would be the sooner with child again’, and this time there could be no doubt about its legitimacy.20 The king said bitterly that he saw God would not grant him male children, and that he would speak to Anne when she was up. Grieving and fearful, she snapped that it had happened not only because she had been made so anxious by his fall, but because her heart had been broken when she saw he loved others.21
By this she probably meant Jane Seymour, one of her own maids, for by March 1536 Jane was firmly on the king’s mind. The eldest daughter of Sir John Seymour and Margery Wentworth of Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, Jane’s eldest brother Edward was already climbing the greasy pole of royal service. Jane’s own career is difficult to pin down. Chronicler Charles Wriothesley later wrote that she had been in Catherine of Aragon’s service before Anne Boleyn’s, and she was definitely at court by 1534 when she is mentioned on a New Year gift list.22 It’s likely that her transfer to Queen Anne happened in 1533 when Catherine’s household was reduced, perhaps because the king had already noticed her from afar, or even because Queen Anne herself selected Jane. If the latter, Anne must soon have regretted this. In many ways Jane appeared to be the queen’s opposite. She was fair-skinned, with light hair and eyes, a direct contrast to Anne’s brunette colouring. Where Anne’s dark eyes mesmerised many an ambassador, Jane kept her gaze modestly downturned, her pale, thin lips closed tight. It was easy to think her meek and mild, a sweet and gentle antidote to Anne’s sharp-tongued charisma, but Jane was no innocent young girl; she was over twenty-five, and it soon became clear that her wits and determination matched her queen’s.23
Keeping a close eye on these events was the wily Gertrude Blount, Marchioness of Exeter. Gertrude remained in close proximity to the royal court, and though she was not in ‘ordinary’, daily service with Queen Anne she was certainly there frequently in ‘extraordinary’ by dint of her husband’s position close to the king. Gertrude’s views had not changed with the death of Catherine of Aragon, and she was no more reconciled to the reign of Queen Anne. She was one of several courtiers and nobles who wanted to see the return of Princess Mary to the succession. They assumed that the way to achieve this was to remove Queen Anne and bastardise her daughter Princess Elizabeth, and they thought that the king’s preference for Jane Seymour might be a means to this end. Thus Gertrude kept her ear to the ground and reported all the rumours that she could garner to Imperial ambassador Chapuys, for now that Catherine of Aragon was dead he was Princess Mary’s greatest champion.
King Henry showered Jane with gifts as he would a potential mistress; she returned them unopened, as might a future wife. In March 1536 Gertrude heard that Jane had refused a gift of money from the king, claiming that such attention was inappropriate to an unmarried woman of her station, that all she had was her honour, ‘which she would not injure for a thousand deaths’.24 If the court had thought Anne Boleyn prone to drama, Jane proved that she could match her. As Gertrude reported cynically, Jane had been ‘well taught’ by her kin to accept nothing less than marriage from the king, a remark that suggests that such machinations on the part of a courtier family were thought eminently plausible. In response, the king declared he loved her all the more, but that he would show his love by only speaking to Jane in the presence of her family as chaperones. To make this easier, and more difficult for anybody to police, he promptly turfed Thomas Cromwell out of his rooms at Greenwich Palace so that he might install Jane there along with her brother and sister-in-law. These rooms communicated secretly with the king’s own chambers, and thus he could visit Jane in privacy, yet – theoretically – without judgement.
Gertrude passed all of this information to Chapuys, and asked him to ‘assist in the matter’ – presumably to try to encourage the king to favour Jane at the expense of Queen Anne.25 Whether Gertrude was really part of a coherent ‘faction’ plotting to overthrow Queen Anne is a matter of conjecture. While there certainly were people who wanted to see Anne brought low, there’s little evidence of cohesive political action. Gertrude and her friends might hope that Queen Anne would fall and Jane step into her place, restoring Princess Mary to the succession, but they could do little to actively bring this about.26
Something that Gertrude had not heard was that it was not only the king who was rumoured to ‘love others’. Around the beginning of 1536, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister, was told a story. In the French king’s court, he was informed, rumours about Queen Anne’s sexual fidelity were flying: letters had been obtained in which she was accused of adultery. This story reached England by means of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who had been Henry VIII’s resident ambassador at the French court since the previous September. Gardiner had written to his man Thomas Wriothesley, who then passed it to Cromwell. Such talk had been treasonous in England since the passing of the Treason Act in 1534. In France, though, they could say and write what they liked about the English queen. Somehow, the story reached the king. Perhaps Cromwell thought it safer to share it personally rather than wait for it to break via another source; Gardiner was not known for his discretion or, indeed, for his love for the queen. The king was furious, but, as ever, well able to dissemble his rage, and a discreet investigation was ordered. Of course, he could not publicly announce that he doubted his wife after he had rearranged the religious and political framework of Europe in order to marry her. Even while her behaviour was under investigation he continued to push for European recognition of his annulment and remarriage, and for Anne’s status as Queen of England. Politics was ever thus.
The source for the January investigation into Queen Anne’s fidelity is Alexander Ales, a Scottish theologian who was in London around this time. He later recounted these events in a letter to Queen Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I in September 1559.27 Ales had close relations with a number of English bishops and courtiers, including Thomas Cromwell. An evangelical and later Protestant, he had travelled through many European courts and was used to sifting the dross of rumour to pick out the gold. Above all, he was an eyewitness to the events he narrates.28 Ales tells us that Cromwell, Wriothesley and others who ‘hated’ the queen were set to finding the truth of the matter. Her chambers were watched day and night; they bribed her porter and her servants; and, crucially, ‘there is nothing which they do not promise the ladies of her bedchamber’.29 They told those they questioned that the king ‘hated’ the queen because she had not borne him an heir, and that ‘nor was there any prospect of her doing so’, a remark that most likely places this investigation after Queen Anne’s miscarriage in January 1536.30 If information about the queen’s sexual behaviour was required, what better source than her female attendants, who were with her every moment of the day, even on the close stool, even as she slept at night?
On some level, then, Gertrude, Marchioness of Exeter was right to wonder whether the king was seeking more than a mistress in Jane Seymour. It does indeed look as though the king was contemplating ways to end his marriage to Queen Anne in the early months of 1536, and that examining rumours about her sexual behaviour was part of this. Such an investigation presented difficulties for the investigators. If secrecy was important, care had to be taken. They needed to know who would be safe to question without giving the game away to others, or to the queen herself; they needed to be sufficiently sure about existing loyalties and networks before they began asking questions. That probably ruled out women like Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, Jane Parker, Viscountess Rochford or the Shelton sisters, all of whom were Anne’s close relations. There were, though, those whose connections to certain of the investigators were perhaps stronger than their loyalty to the queen. At least one Wriothesley woman was in Queen Anne’s service, and Thomas Wriothesley was part of the investigation.31 Margery Horsman, one of the queen’s gentlewomen, came from a family with strong connections to Thomas Cromwell, and was noted as behaving strangely at this time. Queen Anne’s vice-chamberlain Sir Edward Baynton wrote that he had ‘mused much at the conduct of Mrs Margery, who hath used herself strangely towards me of late, being her friend as I have been’.32 Perhaps Mistress Horsman sought to distance herself from anybody too close to Queen Anne.
Nothing immediately came of this investigation. Nothing was made public; no records survive. But this does not mean that it did not occur. Thomas Cromwell’s papers were later deliberately ‘thinned’ over the period covering Anne’s arrest and execution. Any evidence provided in writing or taken at dictation from Anne’s women would no doubt have been among the papers that were culled. Somebody was asking questions about Queen Anne’s fidelity as early as January 1536, and her ladies-in-waiting needed to be on their guard.
The Countess of Worcester was in a tight spot. Her brother had pulled her into a secluded corner and demanded to know the truth of rumours he had heard: had she been showing undue favour to men who were not her husband? Had she – God forbid – committed adultery? Was the baby in her womb the fruit of another man’s seed? Had she no care to her own and her family’s honour? Perhaps she winced. Perhaps she protested and tried to turn his questions. What she did not do, apparently, was deny the accusations outright. Instead – out of panic? – she responded defensively. Her own fault was small, she claimed, in the light of one far larger; for real infamy he should look to the queen. And he needn’t take her word for it. ‘Mark’ could tell the whole tale.33
This is the story told by Lancelot de Carle, then in London as secretary to the French ambassador. He doesn’t tell us when, or where, this occurred; he does not even give the names of those involved. But, placed alongside other sources, he helps us to unravel the events of spring 1536 and he reveals the centrality of the queen’s women to the story. De Carle, a budding poet, was an eyewitness to the events of May 1536 and wrote them out, probably soon afterwards, as a lengthy poem. His lady with questionable morals has indeed been plausibly identified as Elizabeth Browne, Countess of Worcester.34 Elizabeth came from a family of courtiers. Her older half-sister Anne Browne had served Elizabeth of York until her somewhat scandalous marriage to Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk.35 Her mother, Lucy Montague, is probably the ‘Lady Lucy’ mentioned frequently in court records throughout the 1520s and early 1530s until her death in 1534.36 Elizabeth had married Henry Somerset, 2nd Earl of Worcester, in 1527, as his second wife, and was known at the royal court from at least 1530, when the nurse and midwife of her recently delivered child were rewarded by the king.37 By 1533 she was in Anne Boleyn’s service, taking a position of honour next to the queen at her coronation banquet.38 That she borrowed £100 from Anne early in 1536 without her husband’s knowledge suggests that the two may have had a close relationship; Elizabeth, pregnant during the spring, named her baby Anne.39
Elizabeth had two brothers who were ‘close advisors’ to the king, as de Carle describes. Sir Anthony Browne was one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber, and her half-brother William Fitzwilliam, later Earl of Southampton, was treasurer of the royal household. Either could have been responsible for questioning Elizabeth; either could have been involved along with Cromwell and Wriothesley in the general investigation of the queen’s behaviour, the more so since both held a general distaste for Queen Anne and her followers.40 Many contemporary sources tell us that it was a lady-in-waiting who first revealed Queen Anne’s indiscretions; that it was Elizabeth specifically is corroborated by several.41 In May 1536 she was described twice as Anne’s first accuser by John Husee, London agent of the Lisle family, who was in town throughout and reported events back to his employers in Calais.42
De Carle’s poem and Ales’s letter are not usually set alongside one another as sources for Anne’s fall, but in fact their respective narratives reinforce one another. Ales tells us that an investigation into the queen’s behaviour had been quietly ongoing since January. The conversation that de Carle describes between the Countess of Worcester and her brother makes sense in the context of that investigation. The countess was one of Queen Anne’s women, and it was natural for her brother to ask her quietly if there was anything amiss, perhaps even to ask about her own conduct and to warn her to steer clear of trouble. The brother in question was left with a conundrum, as de Carle himself explained. If he did not share his sister’s revelations he was failing in his duty to the king, and could expect to suffer if they later became known. On the other hand, if he reported his sister’s shocking words to the king and they were disbelieved or proven to be false, he would ‘open himself up to the serious penalties promised / To the queen’s detractors, as provided by the law’.43
He decided – perhaps in light of the existing investigation – that the former risk was the greater and that he must disclose his sister’s words, but that he did not want to do it alone. He approached two others close to the king, and between them they informed Henry, probably around the middle of April while the court was at Greenwich, the king’s favourite palace.44 Much as Ales related, the king allegedly changed colour, and ordered a full, though still covert, investigation. Plans for the court’s imminent trip to Dover to view the coastal defences continued, but on 24 April two special commissions of oyer and terminer, juries charged with considering the most serious of crimes, were called. From the 25th, Cromwell began spending an undue amount of time with various bishops who were former canon lawyers, at least one of whom was asked how one might go about getting rid of Anne.45
The atmosphere in Queen Anne’s household must have been tense, as it had no doubt been since January. The strain under which the queen and her ladies-in-waiting were operating became particularly evident over the emotionally charged weekend of 29 and 30 April. By this point, Anne and those around her were most likely aware that something was very wrong. Poignantly, around Wednesday 26th, Anne had made her chaplain Matthew Parker promise to look after her daughter Elizabeth for the future.46
The queen’s apartments at Greenwich were spacious and fashionable, like the palace itself. Built of red brick with large mullioned windows, it overlooked the River Thames to the front and parkland to the rear, and was built around a central courtyard, the royal lodgings mirroring one another on the first floor for the best views. Queen Anne, always with an eye to trends, had her ceilings decorated in the latest ‘antique’ fashion, with gold bullions set on white painted battens. Her presence chamber contained a vast cupboard built specifically to house the expensive, shining plate that she did not need to use and a great bed of state that she did not need to sleep in, all marks of her status as queen of England.47 Most did not need the reminder. On Saturday, 29 April, however, Anne found one of her musicians, Mark Smeaton – the ‘Mark’ of the Countess of Worcester’s story – ‘standing in the round window [in] my chamber of presence’. She asked why he looked so sad, and he replied that it was ‘no matter’. Affronted by his abrupt shutting down of a social superior’s inquiry, she told him haughtily, ‘You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do to a noble man, because you be an inferior person.’ ‘No no, madam,’ he replied, ‘a look sufficed me, and thus fare you well.’48 This was doubly rude: it was not for him to dismiss her. At the least, this was overstepping the boundaries of social hierarchy, whether or not anything inappropriate had ever passed between them.
Queen Anne’s exchange with Smeaton must have been overheard. Within hours Smeaton had been apprehended and was undergoing questioning at Thomas Cromwell’s house in Stepney. On Sunday 30th the court’s Dover visit was postponed, and Anne had another strange altercation with a different man: Henry Norris, the king’s groom of the stool. She had asked him why he hadn’t yet gone through with his marriage, and he told her that ‘he would tarry a time’. She – jokingly? Flirtatiously? Warningly? We do not know – told him, ‘You look for dead men’s shoes, for if ought came to the king but good, you would look to have me.’ Immediately they both knew she had gone too far. To suggest that anything might happen to the king was, by law, as good as threatening to accomplish his demise. Norris, alarmed, replied immediately that if he were to have any such thought, ‘he would his head were off’. Anne warned him that she could undo him, and they ‘fell out’. At some point after this she marched him to her almoner, John Skip, and insisted that he swear on the holy Bible that she was ‘a good woman’, a virtuous woman.49
None of these conversations could have happened privately. The queen would at least have had another woman there as chaperone, and this may be how the king heard of her conversation with Norris. And yet the May Day jousts went ahead as usual. Greenwich, the ‘pleasure palace’, boasted its own tiltyard complete with towers from which the entertainment could be viewed. Queen Anne’s brother George, Viscount Rochford, led the challengers and Henry Norris the defenders. Norris, ready to go, found that his horse would not run; the king offered his own, a gesture of friendship to a comrade-in-arms.50 But partway through the king abruptly stood and left, departing shortly for Whitehall Palace on horseback with only six attendants, a move that everybody, including the queen, thought was odd.51 At roughly the same time, Jane Seymour also left – a fact that Anne surely noticed – and went to Sir Nicholas Carew’s house at Beddington in Surrey, some miles to the south of the city.52
Anne and her women retired to her chambers at Greenwich. It must have been a terrible night. It was impossible not to know that something was gravely wrong, but equally impossible to know what would happen next. On the morning of 2 May, Smeaton was taken from Cromwell’s house at Stepney to the Tower and placed in chains. He had confessed to having slept with Anne on three separate occasions. Anne’s brother George, Viscount Rochford followed the king to Whitehall, and was taken to the Tower in the afternoon. Norris was also arrested.
They did not come for the queen until the afternoon. For Anne herself and at least some of her women, it must have been an agony of waiting for something, anything, to happen. Queen Anne’s chambers at Greenwich were set at the back of the palace, across the courtyard from the king’s, which overlooked the river.53 All morning they could see the tiltyard, the scene of yesterday’s strange departure; all morning they must have wondered what was happening on the river, at the front of the palace, straining to hear any sound of arrival. Greenwich, being a pleasure palace, had no moat. Such things were considered out of date, old-fashioned, unnecessary in this golden age of peace. Queen Anne had never thought to need defence in her own palace, but now she must have been frighteningly aware that there was no escape and no way to prevent whatever was going to happen.
Some of the queen’s women may already have had an idea of what that was going to be. The queen was arrested in the afternoon by several of the king’s leading councillors, and held in her chambers until the tide turned to allow the river journey to the Tower.54 It was a journey of some two or three hours. A queen went nowhere without ladies-in-waiting, even to prison, and Queen Anne was to be accompanied by five women. Wives of her own and the king’s officers, these women probably lived at court, may nominally have been in Queen Anne’s service and may, therefore, have been briefed; they may have known about the arrest before it occurred and have had to dissemble that fact all morning. Two hours was a long time to sit in a river barge in silence, but there is no record of any words passed between those on board.
It was still ‘full daylight’ when they arrived.55 Ascending the Queen’s Stairs, she and her ladies entered through the Court Gate into what was then known as the Tower by the Gate – the Byward Tower, close to the constable’s lodging. There Anne fell to her knees. She called on God to help her ‘as she was not guilty of her accusement’, asking the councillors to beseech the king for mercy.56 The servants of a queen, even a queen under arrest, were not usually supposed to be physically higher than she was. Did the women with her sink to the ground as well, a startled beat behind?
On the wharf, the cannons boomed for the fourth time that day, and the city knew that another prisoner had been committed.