As the noise of the cannons faded Queen Anne rose, and the little cavalcade of women and councillors entered the Tower of London. Anne and her women were conducted to a room in which to rest and gather themselves while the councillors withdrew to talk with the constable, Sir William Kingston, and to pass on the king’s instructions. Once the men had departed, Kingston returned to the queen and her ladies. ‘Shall I go into a dungeon?’ Anne asked him. ‘No, Madam,’ he replied, ‘you shall go into the lodging you lay in at your coronation.’1 Though the queen fell to her knees again and wept that it was too good for her, no doubt her ladies-in-waiting were relieved to hear that they would at least be physically comfortable. It was usual for elite prisoners to be housed according to their status and so the queen of England was unlikely to be thrown into a dungeon, but these days one never knew which way the king’s mood might swing – or his anger.
Kingston led them back out of the Byward Tower and to the right, along a walkway bordered by high walls on both sides. Everywhere there were reminders of others who had entered and never left. Did the women look up at the Bell Tower, where Thomas More and John Fisher had been imprisoned until their deaths the year before? A little further and Kingston directed them left through the gates of the Garden Tower. A burst of colour from the lieutenant’s garden in full spring bloom on the left, and then the sudden chill of thick stone walls as they turned to enter Coldharbour Tower, where Anne’s maids of honour had been lodged in 1533.2 The White Tower loomed behind them as Anne and her women crossed the courtyard to enter the great hall. This was familiar ground. The royal apartments had been remodelled in time for Anne’s coronation in June 1533. It had taken a year, but the results had been worth it. Domes had been added on all four corners of the White Tower’s roof, topped with gilded weathervanes that glinted brightly even on dark days. On all sides of the courtyard there were whitewashed buildings with timber framing picked out in yellow ochre, a sunshiny effect that had been of a piece with the joy of the coronation but now seemed jarringly optimistic.3
The Tower had not been much used as a palace in the intervening years. As the women followed Kingston into the great hall, they couldn’t have missed the racks of bowstaves that had been stored there in place of the usual trestle tables and wooden forms.4 Walking the length of the hall in its silent, empty state was a far cry from the coronation feast, when the room had been full of courtiers, the smell of roasted meat issuing from the service doors at one end, the king atop his chair of estate on the dais at the other. Behind his chair was the flight of stone steps that led upwards to the royal lodgings. Climbing these, they entered the outermost room of the king’s suite, and at the far end Kingston produced the key that unlocked the door to the queen’s watching chamber. Here the women turned left to walk through the series of rooms that made up the queen’s apartments, from watching chamber to ‘great’ or ‘presence’ chamber, to dining chamber, to privy chamber, with access increasingly restricted as one moved through the suite. To the right, her windows overlooked the privy garden; to the left, the inner ward in front of the White Tower.
The rooms were large, and the women’s voices must have sounded abnormally loud as Kingston escorted them through the complex. The bright yellow-ochre timbers continued inside as well as out. The rooms were likely wood-panelled and adorned with ‘antique-work’, a decorative style referencing the classical art of ancient Rome, often fantastical beasts and figures painted or sculpted in wood or plaster relief.5 There might also have been costly hangings on the walls – the king’s collection of tapestries was worth more than anything else he owned – or luxury fabric, like cloth of gold or silver. Monarchs usually took their furniture and textiles with them when they travelled, but there had hardly been time for Queen Anne’s staff to arrange for this. The rooms must have felt oddly empty, left only with the odds and ends of the sumptuous hangings, cushions, chairs and beds that would normally have filled the space.
Neither the women nor Queen Anne herself, nor, indeed, the constable knew how long they would be there. Imprisonment at this time wasn’t a sentence in and of itself. Prisons were used as holding pens for those waiting to be charged, and there was no time limit on how long that could take. It wasn’t unusual for imprisonment to be deliberately dragged out and for prisoners to be repeatedly, exhaustingly questioned in the hope that they would trip up and incriminate themselves.6 While it was unlikely that Anne would simply be left there indefinitely – the king could neither marry a new wife, nor conceive a legitimate heir while she was imprisoned – there was no way to know how long she might have to hold out. A queen’s chambers were usually filled with people, not only her own servants but musicians, visitors, dignitaries and often members of the king’s household. Now, as Kingston shut the door behind him, there were only five women and Anne.
Who were they, these women who were confined with their queen? Four of the five are revealed to us in the letters that Kingston wrote to the king or to Thomas Cromwell each day. This, indeed, was why the women were there. Their job was not only to attend to Queen Anne’s daily needs but to relay her words, her behaviour and her demeanour back to Kingston for him to report to the authorities. They weren’t there to comfort her but to spy on her, and both she and they knew it. Perhaps the most important of the five was Kingston’s own wife, Mary Scrope, Lady Kingston. Lady Kingston had a long history of court service. She’d served the king’s sister Mary Tudor in the early 1500s before moving to Queen Catherine of Aragon’s household.7 She’d been married and widowed, raised her children at court, and we have met her once already at the Duke of Suffolk’s house in 1517, trying to covertly engineer a wedding between her stepdaughter and the duke’s wealthy ward. If there was advantage to be had, Lady Kingston sought it. In 1536 she was in her early fifties.8 Experienced, self-assured and pious, she no doubt had her own opinions about what was and was not appropriate behaviour for women at the royal court, and Queen Anne does not seem to have considered her a friend. The king, perhaps for this reason, thought her trustworthy; a safe pair of hands in which to place his own interests. She was not a Howard or a Boleyn client. In fact, both she and her husband had close links to, and sympathy for, the Lady Mary, as Chapuys had noted back in 1535, and when in London they were neighbours of Thomas Cromwell at Blackfriars.9 Likely, the king thought that she and Kingston would be reliable informants and would not treat Anne with overmuch kindness.
The rest were all linked to the king’s own household through their husbands. Margaret Dymoke, Mistress Coffin, was the wife of William Coffin, who was the queen’s master of the horse but had previously served in Henry’s privy chamber.10 ‘Lady Boleyn’ was most likely Anne’s aunt Elizabeth Wood, wife of Sir James Boleyn, who was chancellor of Anne’s household but also a knight of the body to the king.11 The fourth woman mentioned by Kingston, ‘Mrs Stonor’, was most likely Isabel Agard, wife of John Stonor, one of the king’s sergeants-at-arms; she served as mother-of-the-maids to successive queens.12 The fifth, unfortunately, was never named.13
They were not the queen’s friends. She herself made this clear when she told Kingston that if she’d had the choice, ‘I would have had [those] of my own privy chamber which I favour most.’14 While no doubt all of the five women had spent time at court during Queen Anne’s tenure and may have been nominally attached to her household, they may not have had access to her privy chamber, and were probably not her regular daily attendants. This made sense. It was no good choosing the queen’s friends, who might already know her secrets and protect them. Queen Anne also thought, probably correctly, that her five attendants were specifically selected by the king. She said plaintively, ‘I think much unkindness in the King to put such about me as I never loved’, and later commented bitterly that ‘the King wist [knew] what he did’ when he put Lady Boleyn and Mistress Coffin with her, ‘for they could tell her nothing’.15 Kingston’s letters show that the queen was deliberately kept in the dark as events unfolded, for he would not tell her why she was imprisoned, and told her only lies about the whereabouts of her brother, who was also in the Tower. It would not have been out of character for Henry to deliberately choose women whom he could trust to keep silence, and whom he knew his wife did not like.
It’s likely that age and reputation also fed into his choice. Kingston told Anne that the king ‘took them to be honest and good women’, and there is an echo here of the ‘juries of matrons’ selected by law courts to physically examine women who claimed pregnancy as a reason to postpone a death sentence.16 Those ‘matrons’ were typically married or widowed, mature women of good community standing and spotless sexual reputation who could be trusted to uphold standards of moral judgement and behaviour on behalf of the state.17 Rather grimly, the same logic applied here. Each of the five women was well into middle age, married and experienced; each might be expected to react with horror to the queen’s alleged infidelities.
Immediately, they were put to work. Lady Kingston was their leader; Kingston had been ordered to tell the women that ‘they should have no communication with her [Anne] unless my wife were present’.18 This, though, was impossible to maintain through the night, as he pointed out to Thomas Cromwell. Only Lady Boleyn and Mistress Coffin slept in the queen’s bedchamber. He and his wife slept in the next room along, and the two other gentlewomen one more room beyond.19 He wrote as though this were not only normal, but absolutely immutable. Perhaps it was standard practice for only two women ever to sleep in the same room as the queen; perhaps even now Kingston did not feel as though he could override the queen’s wishes in this regard. Kingston reassured Cromwell that Mistress Coffin nevertheless told him ‘everything she thinks meet for you to know’.20 The trust placed in Coffin’s judgement is extraordinary in such unprecedented circumstances and her agency to withhold information, to protect the queen or to misrepresent her was considerable. It may be that the women operated in pairs for this reason, so that there might always be another individual to hear what Anne said. Perhaps it was simply too risky for them to misreport her or each other.
The queen’s women were not ordinarily permitted to leave the court without her permission. Now, though, the tables were turned: it was Queen Anne who could not leave, and her women were her guards. They were supposed to get her to talk, and she needed little encouragement. From the beginning, the queen spoke of the men imprisoned alongside her, of the strange encounters she had had with the musician Mark Smeaton and groom of the stool Henry Norris only the weekend before, and relayed old conversations in a way that suggests she was trying to work out what accusations she faced, what gossip might come to light and how it might be spun. Her ladies asked leading questions. When Queen Anne told of how she had made Norris swear to her virtue, Mistress Coffin asked, ‘Madam, why should there be any such matters spoken of?’ Without any more prompting, the queen described the conversation that had led to the secret oath before her almoner: how she had teased Norris about putting off his marriage, and then told him that if the king died and the queen were widowed, Norris would look to have her, a statement so close to treasonous speech that it was no wonder that Anne had had him swear that nothing untoward had taken place between them.21 Mistress Coffin duly relayed the story to Kingston, who reported it to Cromwell: fuel for the fire with which they hoped to burn her.
If Queen Anne knew that the women around her in the Tower were spies, why did she tell them things like this, things that were potentially so incriminating? Perhaps she thought that the stories she related were already known because of the arrests that had already occurred. More likely, her mental state made her careless about what she revealed. Kingston reported that the queen, a woman on a knife edge, ricocheted from weeping to laughter many times. At points, she was prepared to die; at other times, she was desperate to prove herself innocent and to survive.22 She engaged in the same kind of ‘magical thinking’ that anyone might under such circumstances. Soon after her arrival, she told Kingston that if she should die, ‘you shall see the greatest punishment for me within this seven years, that ever came to England’, and a little later she predicted that the country would see no rain until she was freed.23 One can imagine her desperately seeking signs and omens in the smallest happenings, or silently asking the yellow-ochred walls or the trees outside her window whether things would be all right.
To spend time incarcerated with a person facing the spectre of their own death was to walk a knife edge of a different kind. Lady Kingston and the other ladies-in-waiting had to give Queen Anne personal service – help her to get dressed, brush her hair, sleep next to her – and yet spy on her, report her words and keep some sort of mental distance between themselves and the queen. This must have been incredibly difficult. Though Kingston didn’t write about anyone’s mental state but the queen’s, the five women waiting upon her must have been just as drained. How were they to serve a woman in such straits without developing sympathy for her, even if they had been previously briefed against this? No doubt they were worried that any show of compassion might implicate them alongside her, and perhaps they were even concerned about appearing complicit in front of one another, afraid that a fellow lady-in-waiting might take it upon herself to report her colleagues for overfamiliarity.
Only Lady Boleyn was actively unkind. When the queen complained that neither Lady Boleyn nor Mistress Coffin could tell her anything of what was happening outside her apartments, Lady Boleyn commented tartly, ‘Such desire as you have had for such tales hath brought you to this.’24 Perhaps the long days were wearing Boleyn’s patience thin, or perhaps she was genuinely appalled by the stories Queen Anne had revealed. Nonetheless there was hardly any need for such a caustic remark. The others seem to have refrained from making unhelpful observations but, not surprisingly, they were not recorded as being particularly compassionate or comforting either. There was no sense in Kingston relaying kindnesses between the queen and her five attendants. Not only would such acts of care be poorly received by Cromwell and the king, but they weren’t relevant to the investigation.
Though the queen complained that she received no news, the Tower was not a hermetically sealed entity for all the women who attended her – or at least not in terms of getting information out. One of the five women was reporting to Imperial ambassador Chapuys. He referred to this woman only as ‘the lady who had charge of her [Anne]’, and said that this lady had sent to tell him ‘in great secrecy’ how Queen Anne had affirmed both before and after taking the sacrament that she had never been unfaithful to the king.25 He was confident that his informant had not concealed anything from him, and indeed she seems to have kept a weather eye out for danger to Chapuys himself, rushing to warn him that Queen Anne had blamed the ambassador for poisoning the king against her, because from the moment of his arrival at court ‘the King no longer looked on her with the same eyes as before’.26 Chapuys never identified his source, but Lady Kingston appears the most likely. A few years previously, when considering plans to spirit the Lady Mary out of the country, Chapuys had noted that it would be easy to do so from the Tower because Constable Kingston appeared to be a supporter of the emperor and to Mary.27 Lady Kingston was also a friend to Mary, and therefore known to Chapuys, which was not the case with any of the other women there.
Lady Kingston may not have been the only woman sharing titbits of information with outsiders. The account of Queen Anne’s imprisonment given in poetic form by the French ambassador’s secretary Lancelot de Carle bears a strong similarity to William Kingston’s descriptions in his letters to Cromwell. Perhaps the French ambassador was also party to confidential information. One wonders whether the women were ever explicitly warned to report only to Kingston. Surely neither the king nor Thomas Cromwell would have wanted foreign ambassadors to know that Anne had sworn to her innocence on the Eucharist itself. That her women were never called to account for this, though, suggests that their actions were understood in the context of the usual currency of information that was the lifeblood of any court.
While Queen Anne and her five ladies languished in the Tower, much was going on outside. By the end of 4 May, two days after the queen’s imprisonment, courtiers Sir Francis Weston, Sir William Brereton, Sir Henry Norris, musician Mark Smeaton and the queen’s brother George, Viscount Rochford were also under arrest in the Tower. This put Rochford’s wife Jane Parker in a particularly difficult position. On 4 May, Jane sent a message to her husband in the Tower to ask how he did, and to tell him that she would ‘humbly suit unto the King’s highness’ for him.28 This was the duty of a wife, the least that was expected of any noblewoman. George, though, seems to have had little hope of her success. Though he sent her his thanks, he then asked Kingston when he would be brought before the council, and wept as he spoke of his judgment.29
By 12 May, ten days after the queen’s arrest, the investigation was largely complete. Four of the men in the Tower alongside the queen were brought to trial: Smeaton, Norris, Weston and Brereton. They were accused of adulterous liaisons with the queen that were spun as treason.30 Adultery itself was a matter for the Church courts, not the secular law, but it gained a new dimension when it involved a queen. For her to conceive a child by a man who was not the king was to endanger his royal lineage, the ‘body politic’ itself, and it could therefore be made to count, at a stretch, as ‘compassing or imagining the death of the king’ under treason law.31 All were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Events continued to snowball, and there is a strong sense of pieces being moved into place for a final denouement. On 13 May the queen’s household was formally broken up.32 This meant that her women at court were dismissed, to return to their husbands and families at home, and it would have been understood as a sign that Anne was not expected to remain queen regardless of the result of the legal process. On the next day, Thomas Cromwell wrote to the various English ambassadors stationed abroad: ‘the Queen’s abomination both in incontinent living, and other offences towards the King’s highness was so rank and common, that her ladies of her privy chamber and her chamberers could not contain it within their breasts’.33 He went on to say that ‘it came so plainly to the ears of some of his grace’s council that with their duty to his Majesty they could not conceal it from him’.34 This is precisely the sequence of events given by de Carle in his poem, describing the Countess of Worcester’s unguarded speech with her brother about the queen’s behaviour. De Carle, employed by the French embassy in London, evidently repeated the official line given out by Cromwell.
Women’s words had their uses. Cromwell’s, though, imply that the Countess of Worcester was not the only woman who had provided evidence against the queen. He noted that ‘certain persons of the privy chamber and others of her side were examined’ and that this had made the whole matter so evident that they could not do otherwise than proceed.35 No depositions relating to any of these trials have survived, but there is little doubt that Queen Anne’s ladies-in-waiting were among those who were questioned and, willingly or otherwise, gave information. Only they could have witnessed the ‘frail and carnal lust’, ‘base conversations and kisses’ and ‘vile provocations’ that the queen was alleged to have shared with the men now condemned.36 If she was guilty, her women knew it. If this was a conspiracy fabricated against her, it could not have been executed without their connivance. In either case, their testimony could not but carry weight.
On Monday, 15 May, Lady Kingston and the other four women dressed Queen Anne with care. A knock on the door revealed Constable Kingston and his lieutenant, Edmund Walsingham; they had come to take the queen to her trial in the great hall. Lady Kingston and Lady Boleyn, her two highest-status attendants, were to accompany her.37 Even if they were prepared for the sight, the changes wrought in the hall over the past week must have been a shock. Gone were the racks of bowstaves. A great wooden ‘scaffold’ had been made to function as the ‘bar’ in a courtroom, with benches and seats for the jurors and spectators.38 The queen’s uncle the Duke of Norfolk was in the chair of estate on the dais, his son, Queen Anne’s cousin Henry, Earl of Surrey at his feet. The queen was conducted to a seat at the bar. We don’t know where Ladies Kingston and Boleyn sat while the trial took place, but it may have been close to the queen in case she needed anything, in an odd distortion of her coronation banquet when two countesses had sat at her feet ready to proffer water to wash her hands, or a napkin.
The trial began. The indictment that was read accused the queen of seducing five men, including her brother, and of ‘entertaining malice’ against the king.39 The official records of the queen’s trial are no longer extant. What we do know is that the most noteworthy pieces of evidence – the snippets thought worthy of comment by contemporary chroniclers – were those provided by women, and this is a fact often overlooked. Sir John Spelman, one of the judges present, wrote briefly that ‘all the evidence was of bawdery and lechery’, and then noted specifically that ‘this matter’ had been disclosed by ‘a woman called Lady Wingfield, who had been a servant to the said queen and of the same qualities’.40 Wingfield had become sick, and before she died had told of the queen’s behaviour.
Lady Wingfield’s evidence is a tantalising glimpse into the fruits of Cromwell’s investigation in the early months of 1536. Lady Wingfield was Bridget Wiltshire, known by her first and highest-status marriage to Sir Richard Wingfield, though she had since been married twice more. Bridget had attended Queen Catherine of Aragon at the Field of Cloth of Gold in 1520, and had apparently become close to Anne Boleyn in the decade after this.41 Sometime between 1525 and 1529 Bridget left court, and then received a letter from Anne. In it Anne apologised for not having ‘showed the love that I bear you as much as it was in deed’ and made reference to some ‘indiscreet trouble’ that had befallen Bridget.42 Was this salacious, or could it simply have been an exhortation to Bridget to school herself to acceptance of her recent widowhood? Perhaps it was effective; in 1530 Chapuys noted that Bridget had married Sir Nicholas Harvey, a diplomat like her first husband, and had entered Anne’s service at court.43
That the queen’s letter to Bridget is preserved among Cromwell’s papers strongly suggests that it was seized as part of the investigation against Queen Anne in 1536. It’s usually assumed that Bridget’s testimony against the queen and her death shortly after occurred in 1534, because the New Year gift list of 1534 is the last known reference to her at court.44 This, though, is not a reason to assume her death in the same year. There are no more surviving lists of New Year gifts or rewards until 1538, and no other comprehensive lists of women in court service until Jane Seymour’s funeral in November 1537, so it’s hardly surprising that there are no references to Bridget after 1534.45 It’s eminently plausible that she was questioned as part of Cromwell’s investigation in the early months of 1536, and had then died before Queen Anne’s arrest in May, meaning that she could not be brought to the trial as a witness. In fact, no witnesses were called at all; but this was not unusual in a Tudor treason trial, which operated by written testimony and not live questioning.46 Arguably Lady Wingfield’s death was extremely convenient for the prosecution. She could not be harmed by any evidence attached to her name, and nor could such evidence be disputed.47
So it proved. Queen Anne defended herself well – chronicler Wriothesley wrote that she ‘made so wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her, excusing herself with her words so clearly as though she had never been faulty to the same’, and even her arch-enemy ambassador Chapuys allowed that she had answered the charges ‘satisfactorily enough’.48 Yet, one by one, the jury of peers declared the queen guilty, and sentence was pronounced. Queen Anne, her uncle Norfolk declared, was to die a traitor’s death. Lady Kingston and Lady Boleyn had to stand and escort Anne back to her lodging, and somehow help her prepare herself for her death.
There was a short break, and then Queen Anne’s brother George, Viscount Rochford was brought to the hall for his own trial. The same format was followed, and George likewise defended himself well, with particular rhetorical flair and eloquence. It was thought that he would be acquitted.49 Nothing in his indictment was sufficient to secure a conviction. Again, we have no official record of the evidence presented; again, what made it into contemporary accounts was female testimony. One of the jurors handed George a folded note. Its contents made it clear that George’s wife Jane had given evidence against him. Not only that, but what she had said was enough to condemn him.
So much for suing to the king on his behalf, he must have thought. Though he was told not to read it aloud, defying the courtroom, he did so. The note related how George and the queen had laughed together about the king’s poor sexual prowess, and that the queen had told her that the king ‘was not skilful in copulating with a woman, and had neither virtue nor potency’. Jane also said that George had questioned the paternity of Queen Anne’s daughter Princess Elizabeth.50 Of course King Henry did not want this picked over by the courtroom. Early modern Europe held that if a wife looked elsewhere for sex, her husband bore the blame for failing to satisfy her at home.51 This may even have been part of the reason why Queen Anne was accused of straying with so many men. Just one liaison, and people would ask why the king had failed. Five, and attention turned to the queen’s insatiable appetite, her carnal sickness, and the king became a victim of a wicked woman, not an example of failed masculinity. Jane’s testimony ruined this tidy picture. Not only had the queen and her ladies-in-waiting been discussing Henry’s abilities in the bedroom – something to make any man wince – but, far worse, they had been laughing at him, and now everybody knew it.
Jane was judged harshly for what was read as a wife’s betrayal, both in her own time and by us since.52 It has been suggested that when Jane told her husband that she would sue to the king for him, she tried to do so. The king, though, was seeing nobody but Thomas Cromwell and his immediate body servants, and so she had to go to Cromwell instead. At that point, very likely, she was interrogated herself, and gave up what she knew.53 Many of Queen Anne’s later apologists claimed that Jane’s accusations were false, that she made them up out of spite or jealousy.54 If Jane had truly, actively sought the deaths of her husband and sister-in-law at this time, it would have been far easier to follow the path of least resistance and agree that the queen had, indeed, slept with the men imprisoned in the Tower alongside her, rather than create the story about the king’s impotence. Some sources claimed that Jane was in fact the origin of the charge of incest between Queen Anne and George, but this cannot now be substantiated.55
We will never know just what happened to Jane during this time. The fear factor of an interrogation by Thomas Cromwell should not be underestimated, and it’s likely that she knew the rumours flying around and that she thought George and Anne were already condemned regardless of what she said or didn’t say. Few people left the Tower alive in 1530s England. Jane also had her own position to consider. Traitors lost their goods, lands and titles to the Crown. While the widows of traitors were sometimes allowed to claim their jointure and goods, this was at the king’s discretion. If George was to die a traitor, there was nothing in the law to help Jane.56 It would have been a smart move on Thomas Cromwell’s part to promise her his assistance for the future if she would tell him what she knew – and Thomas Cromwell was always smart.
It was only at the introduction of Jane’s evidence that George’s trial began to unravel. Like his sister, he was condemned to death. Jane’s testimony had been crucial. Queen Anne’s fall could not have happened without the co-operation of her ladies-in-waiting, and their evidence suggests that there had indeed been some suspect exchanges going on in the queen’s household during these years, even if those events did not wholly amount to the five charges of adultery that were presented at the trials in the Tower’s great hall. Over two thousand people attended these.57 Every man who heard Lady Wingfield’s evidence, Jane’s evidence and the evidence presented from other ladies-in-waiting must have thought of the women in his own life and feared anew the danger and ubiquity of female gossip.
Two days later, on Wednesday, 17 May, Lady Kingston and the others in attendance on the queen would listen from her chambers next to the White Tower as the roar of a distant crowd rose and fell five times, marking the deaths of the five men accused of adultery with the queen. They would have heard the sound of hammering and sawing that would mean that the queen’s scaffold was being built. Queen Anne’s mood continued to veer wildly. One evening, Constable Kingston reported that she had said she would go to a nunnery, and was ‘in hope of life’.58 By the evening of 17 May, though, the day that her brother and friends died, she had confessed and received absolution and was said to be resigned to her death, having been told that this would happen the next day. The allotted hour came and went, and Anne’s fragile calm was cruelly upset: the execution had, apparently, been put off until the next day.59
The five women with her must also have been emotionally and mentally at the end of their endurance. Now, French poet de Carle wrote, they too were ‘plagued by great anguish’, and the queen had to console them, exhorting them not to lament her death.60 De Carle may simply have been following a trope of grieving attendants here, but it’s equally possible that the five women who were not Anne’s friends had come to feel grief for her after seventeen days of close, tense confinement.
The scaffold was erected not on the public site of Tower Hill but within the Tower complex itself, to the north-east of the White Tower. The queen was called at eight in the morning on 19 May. She – and therefore no doubt some of her women – had been awake since two, when her almoner had arrived to pray with her, and together they waited the long hours until dawn.61 Constable Kingston arrived to escort her to the scaffold, and sources agree that four of the five women accompanied her.62 These must have been four of the same women who had attended her throughout her imprisonment. Though one source describes them as ‘young’ women, it made no sense for four different women to have been drafted in for this occasion, and one did not send teenagers to accompany a queen to her death. Nor was the king likely to have sought to honour his condemned wife by providing higher-status attendants on her scaffold.
Queen Anne made a short, traditional speech in which she acknowledged her fault and asked for prayers, and then the women took off her furred cape and she passed her hood to one of them. Another handed her a linen cap to hold her hair free of her neck. She knelt upright before the block, and one of the women – perhaps Lady Kingston – bandaged her eyes; de Carle wrote shortly afterwards that this woman was ‘pouring forth continuous tears’.63 This last duty done, the four women withdrew from the scaffold and knelt, presumably still clutching Anne’s clothing, ‘bewailing bitterly and shedding many tears’.64 Anne remained kneeling upright, and was killed with one stroke of the executioner’s sword. Her women then returned to the scaffold and collected her head and her body, wrapping them in white cloth and carrying them to a chapel within the Tower nearby.65
Such accounts of open grief may well be exaggerated. De Carle himself did not watch the execution. The site within the Tower was deliberately chosen as a means to limit the audience, and foreigners were not permitted. There are, however, several accounts that tell us that the queen’s four attendants were in tears as they watched her die, and one can well imagine it. They had spent seventeen days incarcerated with the queen. They had watched her fall apart and put some semblance of herself back together over and over. They had seen her in grief and in terror. Like any lady-in-waiting, their loyalties and emotions could not always align, and we need not assume that political allegiance had removed their capacity for empathy.
Queen Anne was buried in St Peter ad Vincula, the public church within the Tower grounds. The five women – Ladies Kingston and Boleyn, Mistress Coffin, Mistress Stonor and the final, unnamed woman – were free to go.
There was no time to draw breath after Queen Anne’s execution. The king married Jane Seymour almost immediately, and many of Anne’s former servants were drafted into her household, including Mistress Coffin and Mistress Stonor, and the newly widowed Jane Parker, Viscountess Rochford. Jane, as she had no doubt expected, found life financially difficult. Her jointure, the settlement assured to her by George’s family when they had married, allowed her only 100 marks a year, or £66 13s 4d. Though this was as much as six years’ wages to a skilled tradesman, it wasn’t much for a lady-in-waiting. Elizabeth, Duchess of Norfolk had been married with a dowry of 2,000 marks, just as Jane had, but her jointure was set to be five times Jane’s.66 The dowager Duchess of Norfolk had £308; her daughter Lady Daubeney had £196 from her first marriage.67 Crown officers had ransacked and inventoried every room in every house that George Boleyn owned, for the goods of a convicted traitor belonged to the Crown. The biggest and best of Jane’s homes was Beaulieu Palace in Essex, and it may have been there, in the chamber over the kitchen, that a chest of Jane’s possessions was emptied and listed, the contents bundled up and taken away. Old clothes from court masques; white silk hose wrought with gold, ten pairs of sleeves in velvet, satin, damask and tinsel, broken beads of gold and pearl. Even if Jane no longer wore them, there was value in the fabric and the gold. Two books – clearly Jane enjoyed reading – and a prayer book, a primer ‘boarded with silver and gilt’.68 These, and other things, Jane wanted back.
Thus she wrote to Thomas Cromwell, and played the part of the ‘poor desolate widow’ in full. She asked him to speak to the king for ‘such poor stuff and plate as my husband had, that of his gracious liberality I might have it to help me’. She laid out her financial situation and complained that it was ‘very hard for me to shift the world withal’.69 Sure enough, both Cromwell and the king wrote to her father-in-law, Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, asking him to allow Jane more money – a concession, perhaps, to her co-operation with the trial process. Wiltshire was not at all willing to do this, but after grumbling that he and his own wife had lived on far less in their day, he allowed Jane fifty marks more per year, insisting that he did this only ‘to satisfy the King’s desire and pleasure’.70 Jane was also allowed to reclaim some of her husband’s goods.71
As he had with Queen Catherine of Aragon, King Henry soon ordered his craftsmen to obliterate any material sign of his second queen. Anne’s memory was not supposed to be preserved. Her arms, mottoes, badges and colours were physically removed from wood, stone, plaster and brick and replaced with those of Queen Jane. Some women, though, quietly kept her memory alive regardless of the royal will. A book of hours once belonging to Anne survives at Hever Castle, and has been found by Kate McCaffrey to contain the vestiges of inscriptions: a list of names, three out of four of which are female, linked by kinship and locality to Anne, and with connections to the royal court.72 Two of the names, Elizabeth Shirley and Philippa Gage, were sisters. Both had court connections: they were daughters of Sir Richard Guildford, who had been one of Henry VII’s councillors. Philippa had been at court while her husband, Sir John Gage, was lord chamberlain of the royal household in the late 1520s, and her children also had court careers.73 The third name in the book was Mary West, who was the Guildford sisters’ great-niece. This suggests that the book of hours was passed quietly between female relations as the sixteenth century wore on, a dangerous thing to do at a time when to deliberately preserve Queen Anne’s memory in this way was to subvert the thrust of royal policy.
But how did the book reach the Guildford sisters’ custody in the first place? There is a long oral tradition that on the scaffold Anne passed her prayer book to one of the ladies with her there. None of those women were connected to the Guildfords or their close relations. The Guildford women did, though, have family members at court at that time. It’s been suggested that at some stage Queen Anne herself passed it to Elizabeth Shirley’s daughter, another Elizabeth, who was married to the king’s sergeant of the cellar, Richard Hill. However, the Guildford sisters also had connections even closer to the queen, and to the investigation against her. Philippa Gage’s daughter Alice Gage was married to Sir Anthony Browne, the king’s master of the horse. She was therefore the sister-in-law of the Countess of Worcester, who had been Queen Anne’s first accuser. Did Alice’s husband tell her what he feared, before he dared share it with the king? Alice’s marriage gave her a higher status than her cousin Elizabeth Hill enjoyed, and Alice was therefore a fixture in more elevated court circles.74 It’s entirely possible that Queen Anne had in fact given Alice her book of hours, and that Alice had sent it home to her mother and aunt. Certainly it was safer there. Alice continued to live and serve at court until her death in 1540, and could not have risked such a book being found in her possession.75 Regardless of the precise route into these Kent families, the book’s existence shows that loyalties for women were complicated, and not always binary. Philippa Gage had served Catherine of Aragon, and yet inscribed her name in Anne Boleyn’s book. While some branches of these families took up reformist religion in the vein of Anne Boleyn herself, others would later be classed as Catholic recusants, enemies of the Crown. No matter their religious opinions, some ladies-in-waiting thought of this as separate to their loyalty to their late queen. Without these women, Queen Anne’s memory would not have been preserved for us to find.
While the Guildford women took steps to preserve Queen Anne’s memory, and Jane, Viscountess Rochford begged Cromwell for financial assistance, life in Queen Jane Seymour’s new household went on. Among those living at court was the king’s niece, Lady Margaret Douglas. One of Lady Margaret’s closest friends was Mary Howard, Duchess of Richmond, who was the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, wife of the king’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, and cousin to the late Queen Anne. Mary was undoubtedly involved in the investigation around Queen Anne’s morals, but there’s no evidence she had had anything to add to the explosive evidence of the trial. In any case, she had something else on her mind. Around Easter of 1536, before Anne’s execution, Lady Margaret had confided a secret to Mary. Mary’s kinsman Lord Thomas Howard, youngest half-brother of the Duke of Norfolk, had been making eyes at Margaret for some months, with Mary’s connivance. Finally, he had asked Lady Margaret to marry him, and she had agreed.76
A clandestine marriage was risky indeed. Lady Margaret was royal. She could not marry without the king’s permission, and he was hardly likely to allow her to marry a younger son of no title or fortune, even if Lord Thomas was related to the queen. Mary knew this, and yet she supported her friend. She helped them to meet, waiting for Lady Boleyn to leave the room and sneaking Lord Thomas in with one of his servants.77 It must have seemed a little like a game. Or perhaps Mary reasoned that she was serving her own family’s interest, for though she was young she was intelligent and politically aware. A marriage made could not easily be undone. Longer-term, it could be no bad thing for the Howards to have made another marriage into royalty, and surely Queen Anne herself would support the match.
Quite what plans were ever made to reveal it and to go ahead with the marriage is not clear. The secret was kept through April and into May, and it stayed a secret even as the court and the queen’s household crumbled around them. The ladies-in-waiting were formally dismissed from service on 13 May, Queen Anne died on the 19th, Queen Jane stepped into her shoes, and still nobody knew that the king’s niece had agreed to marry a Howard boy. But the house of cards was too precarious. How the matter came to light remains a mystery, but come to light it did in early July. Predictably, the king was absolutely furious. Parliament had just passed the Second Act of Succession, which made both of his daughters illegitimate, and Lady Margaret’s position in the succession had correspondingly risen.78 To find that she had thrown herself away on a nobody was yet another stunning blow in this year of terrible happenings.
On 14 July, Lord Thomas and several male servants of his were hauled in for questioning. The couple had been careful. All that the servants knew was that for a quarter of a year there had been ‘love betwixt them’.79 One of the servants did, however, incriminate Mary, Duchess of Richmond beyond all doubt. Thomas Smyth, one of Lord Thomas’s men, reported that he had seen the couple meet in Mary’s chamber.80 Panicked over the succession and enraged at this calm disregarding of royal protocol under his very nose, the king sent both Lord Thomas and Lady Margaret to the Tower and had Lord Thomas attainted for high treason, claiming – preposterously – that seeking to marry Lady Margaret had constituted an attempt on the throne itself.81 The king was unlikely to execute his own niece, given her new significance to the succession, and in the event he did not execute Lord Thomas either, simply leaving him to languish in the Tower.82 Perhaps it was too soon for more traitors’ deaths.
Mary, Duchess of Richmond, as their accomplice, must nevertheless have been frightened. In theory, Lord Thomas’s attainder for treason opened Mary to a charge of misprision of treason, a crime introduced in 1534: knowing of treasonous activity but keeping it secret. If the Crown chose to see her behaviour in this light, she would be facing lifetime imprisonment and confiscation of goods and property. The all-important matter of the succession, however, saved her, even as it condemned her friends. Mary’s husband was Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, the king’s illegitimate and only son. As Queen Anne fell, wily commentators kept an eye on Richmond: now that both princesses were illegitimate, they wondered aloud whether the king might make his bastard son his heir, to inherit the crown of England.83 It was not beyond the bounds. The Act of Succession rendering Princess Elizabeth illegitimate included a clause that allowed the king to appoint his own heir, and it was widely rumoured that this was specifically for Richmond’s benefit.84 It would have been extremely inconvenient to attaint Richmond’s wife for misprision of treason at the same time as effectively naming her queen-in-waiting, and this is probably the reason why she walked free.
Such a glittering future, though, was not to be. Richmond had been in London during Anne’s fall and had attended her execution, but in early July he fell suddenly ill. By 8 July the illness had become serious, and Chapuys was reporting that he did not have long left to live.85 On 23 July he died at St James’s Palace, and Mary was a widow at the age of sixteen. Rather poignantly, Richmond had just been granted Baynard’s Castle to use as a London home, a move that suggests that their married life was set to begin as both turned seventeen.86 Now, Mary’s future disappeared amid the funereal incense and prayers for the dead, and her best friend was under house arrest and unavailable for succour; 1536 was a dark year indeed.