By March, the breach between the Queen and the King had been followed by another, between the Queen and the minister. There has been much speculation about Cromwell’s personal motives. He and Anne had come to disagree about foreign policy, where Cromwell, with his strong links to the London merchant community, was viscerally pro-Imperial just as much as Anne was instinctively pro-French. There was also, as we shall see, a widening rift over the direction that religious policy should take.
But, essentially, the question about Cromwell’s motives is mal posé. It was not Cromwell’s business to have motives of his own. Instead, it was his job to do what the King wanted. In breaking with Anne, therefore, Cromwell was acting as jackal to Henry’s lion. Which is not to say that he did not extract the maximum personal advantage from his change of sides. And it is hard to blame him: he was merely earning high interest on what, to begin with, was a very high-risk investment.
For Anne might be tottering. But she had not fallen. And she was a brutal and effective politician who had been more than a match for Cromwell’s old master, the great Cardinal Wolsey himself.
Chapuys was kept abreast of developments by his friends at Court, who were drawn from the highest, the most conservative and the most Catholic elements of the aristocracy. As well as the Exeters, they included Henry Pole, Lord Montague. He was the eldest son of Mary’s old governess, the Countess of Salisbury, and the brother of Reginald Pole, who was then in Venice, half way through writing the book In Defence of the Unity of the Church, which would turn him from Henry’s protégé into his bitterest enemy. Finally Montague, as he never forgot, was also the great-nephew of King Edward IV, and therefore, it could be argued, the person through whose veins coursed the purest Yorkist royal blood, free from the taint of illegitimacy, which, thanks to the slanders of Richard III, clung to Henry’s own mother, Elizabeth of York.1
With these contacts, Chapuys found it easy to assemble an impressive guest-list at his London residence. But, even by his standards, the company that sat down to dinner one day in late March was spectacular: it included two peers of the blood royal, Exeter and Montague, as well as the Dowager Countess of Kildare, née Elizabeth Grey, who was also the King’s cousin of the half blood. The conversation began with a general lament that the country was going to the dogs. Then Montague became interestingly specific. ‘[Anne] and Cromwell were on bad terms’, he revealed, ‘and…some new marriage for the King was spoken of.’2
Chapuys made good use of the information in his next meeting with Cromwell. He had deliberately refrained from seeking him out, he informed Cromwell, so as to avoid arousing Anne’s suspicions. Then he became even more confidential. He spoke ‘for the love’ he bore him. He wished him ‘a more gracious mistress, and one more grateful for the inestimable services he had done the King’. Finally came the warning. ‘He must beware of enraging her, else he must never expect perfect reconciliation.’ She had destroyed Wolsey: Cromwell would have ‘to see to it better than the Cardinal’ if he were to survive.
In his reply, Cromwell, who, like many vulpine politicians, had a good line in sanctimoniousness when required, took the appropriate tone of resigned other-worldliness. ‘Only now’, he said, ‘had [he] known the frailty of human affairs, especially those of the Court…and [he trusted] that if fate fell upon him as upon his predecessors, he would arm himself with patience, and leave the rest to God.’3
There would come a moment when Cromwell’s resolution to ‘leave [it] to God’ would be put to the test. But it was not yet.
Nevertheless, Anne struck back forcefully.
Her instrument, unsurprisingly, was one of the many clergy she patronised, John Skip, who had succeeded Shaxton as her Almoner. Skip was the preacher for the day in the Chapel Royal at Greenwich on Passion Sunday, 2 April 1536. His congregation included the King and Queen and the cream of the Court and Council. And he spared none of them.
Henry was reminded of Solomon, who, ‘in the latter end of his reign…became very unnoble and defamed himself sore by sensual and carnal appetite in taking of many wives and concubines’. Cromwell (for there could be no doubt that he was the target) was roundly compared to the evil councillor Haman. Members of the Council were warned against Reform for its own sake: ‘[they] have need to take good heed what counsel they give…in altering of any ancient things’. Finally the entire political establishment was the preacher’s victim in his satirical picture of Parliament:
There is no unquietness, no tumultuous fashion; there is no checking or taunting of any man for showing his mind…there speaketh not past one at once…There no man speaketh for any carnal affection or lucre of the promotions of this world. But all thing is done for zeal of the Commonwealth.
‘This think I’, the preacher concluded with his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘and other men ought to think the same.’4
Just as striking was Skip’s defence of the position of the clergy. His text was ‘Which of you convicteth me of sin?’ (John 8.46). Nowadays, he pointed out, it was fashionable to attack the clergy, and the fault of one was treated as though it were the fault of all: ‘if they [the laity] may spy a great or notable vice or fault in one priest…then they will infame and rebuke all the whole clergy for the same’. This was the technique of Cromwell’s visitors, and it had just been used to stampede Parliament into agreeing to the Act for the Dissolution of the Smaller Monasteries. The Bill had been passed on 18 March and it was even then awaiting the Royal Assent.5
But what, Skip wanted to know at this crucial juncture, was the motive? Was it really to reform the lives of the clergy? Or was it malice and covetousness: ‘because they [the laity] would have from the clergy their possessions’?
Clearly, Skip’s sermon was designed to put pure Holy Water between Cromwell and Anne on religious policy. Cromwell, he argued, was using Reform as a cloak for expropriation. Anne, on the other hand, meant it.
Latymer’s Life offers precise corroboration. When Anne heard that the Dissolution of the Smaller Monasteries was mooted, he writes: ‘she commanded that godly preacher of England, Mr Latimer, to take some occasion in his next sermon to be made before the King to dissuade the utter subversion of the said houses and to induce the King’s Grace…to convert them to some better use’.6
And the ‘better use’ was education. Some houses could be turned into Bible-based educational foundations, like Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk where she appointed her Chaplain, Matthew Parker, as Master with a mandate to carry out the reform. And all could be required to direct part of their wealth to fund university bursaries and scholarships to train future clergymen to be more effective preachers of the ‘Word of God’. Skip touched on this theme as well when he lamented ‘the great decay of the Universities in this realm and how necessary the maintenance of them is for the continuance of Christ’s faith and his religion’. And Anne had already made a major contribution to their revival, when she sued to Henry to exempt the universities from the payment of First Fruits and Tenths. If the charge had been levied, as the university of Cambridge explained in its letter of thanks to the Queen, ‘[it] would [have] greatly diminish[ed] the number of scholars in every College’.7
Anne’s attitude naturally gave the smaller monasteries hope and, again according to Latymer, their heads petitioned Anne in a body. She sent them away with fleas in their ears, however. Their degenerate manner of living, which was so different from that of their founders, meant, she said, that the dissolution was God’s judgement on them. Nevertheless, she dropped heavy hints that moves to increase their educational endowments would win her favour.8
Skip’s boldest stroke, however, was his treatment of the Haman story. In the Book of Esther, Haman, the councillor of King Ahasuerus, persuades his master to order a pogrom of the Jews, ‘because their laws are diverse from all people, neither keep they the King’s laws’ (Esther 3.8). For Skip, as we have seen, Haman was Cromwell, while the persecuted Jews were the clergy and, more particularly, the about-to-be dispossessed monastic clergy, who had indeed been accused of obeying the Pope’s laws and not Henry’s. The parallels were clear enough. But Skip deliberately altered his text to drive the point home. In the original story, Haman offered Ahasuerus the gift of 10,000 talents of silver as an inducement to agree to the pogrom; in Skip’s adaptation, Haman promised the King 10,000 talents to be taken from the Jews (just as Cromwell was proposing to fill the royal coffers from the dissolution).
But Haman met his come-uppance at the hands of Ahasuerus’s Queen Esther, who was a secret Jewess and intervened to protect her people. We have already encountered the parallel between Anne and Esther, which had been alluded to in her coronation entrée. But that was in respect of her displacement of Catherine, who was identified with Ahasuerus’s first Queen, the proud and unyielding Vashti. Now, in Skip’s sermon, Anne/Esther appeared in her more heroic role as the destroyer of the evil and overweening minister.
It was a role, however, that dared not quite to speak its name. For not even Skip was rash enough to describe Esther as Queen or even to mention her name. Instead, overcome by an uncharacteristic fit of discretion, he referred to her as ‘a good woman (which this gentle King Ahasuerus loved very well and put his trust in because he knew she was ever his friend) and she gave unto the King contrary counsel’. But, this necessary caution over, Skip returned with relish to the conclusion of his tale. Thanks to this ‘good woman’, he explained, the pogrom was cancelled; the Jews were saved and Haman, the evil councillor, was hanged on a gallows fifty cubits high.9
After such a performance, Skip inevitably found himself hauled before the Council on charges of slandering ‘the King’s Highness, his councillors, his lords and nobles, and his whole Parliament’. Interrogatories were prepared. But he survived unscathed. Anne was still able to protect her own.
But was she able to protect herself?
Earlier, Cromwell had told Chapuys that Anne wanted his head. Now, before the whole Court, her Almoner had threatened him with being hanged as high as Haman. It is little wonder that he decided to strike first.
He may have made his first move too quickly, however. Over the Easter holidays, 14–17 April, Chapuys, with Cromwell’s enthusiastic backing, made an overture for a settlement of the outstanding differences between Henry and Charles V and a renewal of their former friendship. He put forward four specific proposals, which Henry himself summarised as follows. First, that Charles would broker a reconciliation between him and the Pope. Second, that ‘for as much as there is great likelihood and appearance that God will send unto Us heirs male to succeed Us…We would vouchsafe, at his contemplation, to legitimate our daughter Mary, in such degree, as in default of issue by our most dear and most entirely beloved wife the Queen, she might not be reputed unable to some place in our succession.’ Third, that Henry would help the Emperor against the Turk. And fourth, that he would also help him against the anticipated French attack on Milan.10
Henry apparently reacted favourably and Chapuys was summoned to Court on Tuesday, 18 April. He was asked if he would go and kiss Anne’s hand. As usual, he refused. He was then conducted to mass in the Chapel Royal by Rochford. The ambassador, along with the rest of the Court, was below, in the body of the Chapel, while Henry and Anne, with their immediate suites, were above in their first-floor pews or ‘Holiday Closets’. But, at the moment of the offering in the mass, the demarcation was broken down as the King and Queen descended from their pews by staircases on either side of the Chapel to make their way to the altar.
Anne and Chapuys would come face to face. This was the first personal confrontation between them since Anne had become Henry’s wife and Queen. What would happen? The Court crowded round. ‘There was a great concourse of people’, Chapuys reported, ‘to see how [Anne] and I behaved to each other.’ ‘She was courteous enough’, he continued, ‘for when I was behind the door by which she entered, she turned back, merely to do me reverence, as I did to her.’11
For the first time, whether he fully realised it or not, Chapuys had acknowledged Anne as Queen. Mary was furious when she heard.
With this gesture, one major achievement from Chapuys’s visit had been notched up by Henry. But, typically, Henry saw no need to give anything in return. He had an acrimonious exchange with Cromwell and then turned to deal with Chapuys. One by one he dismissed his four proposals out of hand. He was at his most outrageous over the last. ‘He was not a child’, he said, ‘and that they must not give him the stick, and then caress him.’ Then, to drive home the point, he enacted a dumb-show, ‘playing with his fingers on his knees, and doing as if he were calling a child to pacify it’.12
Many things have been read into the events of this day. It was, Cromwell later told Chapuys, the moment he decided Anne had to go. He would never again accept such a rebuff on foreign policy; it was either her or him.13
The remark comes from the horse’s mouth and it is tempting to take it at face value. But the temptation should be resisted. Cromwell was an adept flatterer, and in this case he was trying to persuade Chapuys that the concerns of the Emperor and his ambassador had come first. In fact, the concerns of the King of England and his minister had come first. And, as we have seen, these concerns point to a different timetable, with wider areas of dispute and a significantly earlier breaking-point between Anne and Cromwell; if the events of 18 April mattered at all, it was as the last straw in their relationship.
The day has also been seen as victory for Anne. She had at last got Chapuys to bow and doff his cap. And Henry had made an emphatic restatement of his commitment to the Boleyn marriage. But this last is doubtful, also. In the circular report of his exchange with Chapuys which the King sent to his main ambassadors abroad, Henry mentions ‘our most dear and most entirely beloved wife the Queen’ only in his summary of Chapuys’s proposals. She does not figure at all in his reply to the ambassador and nowhere is she referred to by name. If this is a ringing endorsement of his marriage, it has a distinctly hollow tone.
But most extraordinary of all is the interpretation foisted on the words ‘for as much as there is great likelihood and appearance that God will send unto Us heirs male to succeed Us’. These words mean, it has recently been claimed, that Anne was pregnant again; and, furthermore, since Henry persuaded himself that the child was not his, that they offer a clue to the tragedy which was to follow.
If this were true, it would indeed be a major insight. But it is not. For the statement ‘for as much as there is great likelihood and appearance that God will send unto Us heirs male to succeed Us’ is followed immediately by the proviso: ‘in default of issue by our most dear and most entirely beloved wife the Queen’. The statement thus refers to Henry’s potency, not to Anne’s fecundity, and the qualifying proviso indeed presumes her to be barren, at least of male issue. Finally, of course, the words are not Henry’s own, but the King’s summary of Chapuys’s proposal.14
The notion of Anne’s pregnancy and all that has been deduced from it is therefore, alas, a case of much ado about nothing. Whatever drove Henry forward, it was not this.
The Feast of Easter was followed by the Feast of St George. And on St George’s Day, 23 April, a Chapter of the Order of the Garter was held at Greenwich, with Henry himself presiding.15
The Garter was the oldest and most prestigious Order of Chivalry in Christendom and there was hot competition for appointment to it. This year there were two front-runner candidates, Anne’s brother Rochford and her cousin, Sir Nicholas Carew, the Master of the Horse. And one of them would have to be disappointed as there was only a single vacancy. Both candidates had powerful support. There had been heavy French pressure, going back over a number of years, for Carew’s election; while Anne herself was pushing equally strongly for her brother. The voting in the Chapter was inconclusive and Henry, ‘having perused’ the list of names, ‘put it in his bosom’ and, most unusually, postponed his decision to the following day.16
Then, before the requiem mass for the Knight who had died in the previous year, the King announced his choice. There were many of the nominees, he said, ‘who were indeed most exceeding worthy’. ‘But at that time’, he continued, ‘he thought good that Sir Nicholas Carew should be preferred in the election.’ Carew was summoned, fell on his knees and delivered an oleaginous disabling speech. He owed his appointment, he protested, not to his own merits or actions, but only to Henry’s ‘most excellent goodness’.17
He also owed it, indirectly, to Anne since, in her decline, her opposition had become a recommendation to Henry.
Anne, naturally, was furious, especially since Henry’s decision made her fall from the King’s favour public knowledge. ‘[She] has not…sufficient influence to get it for her brother,’ Chapuys noted gleefully. But Anne was also afraid, because Carew was the leading supporter of her rival, Jane Seymour. Still worse, he made little effort to conceal the fact. Indeed, Chapuys learned, he was boasting to anyone who would listen that he would soon pitch Anne out of the saddle.18
Also on 24 April, as the drama and pageantry of the Garter was unrolling at Greenwich, a judicial commission of ‘Oyer and Terminer’ was issued at Westminster. Such commissions–‘to hear and to determine’ a wide list of offences, including treason and the misprision of treason–were routine. But was this one intended for routine purposes?
And three days after that, on the 27th, writs were issued for a new Parliament. The old Parliament, the ‘Reformation’, which had legislated the break with Rome, enabled Anne’s marriage and protected it with the penalties of treason, had only been dissolved on 14 April. To summon another so quickly was without precedent. What was it intended to do?19
Probably the truth is that no one, not even the ruling triumvirate of Henry, Cromwell and Lord Chancellor Audley, quite knew. Meanwhile, Carew and his friends were floating a variety of schemes. One would divorce Anne on the grounds that her precontract with Northumberland amounted to a valid marriage. And another would legitimate Mary because she had been born bona fide parentum. Bona fide parentum (during the good faith of her parents) was a technicality of canon law which nicely squared the circle. By it, Henry’s first marriage was acknowledged to be null (for Henry would never accept anything else); but, equally, because Catherine and Henry had thought that they were married, their offspring, Mary, was presumed to be legitimate despite the invalidity of her parents’ marriage.
Stokesley, the Bishop of London, and a leading canonist, was consulted on the legal situation. But, wisely, he declared ‘that he would not give any opinion to anyone but the King himself ’.20
There is, in short, the powerful impression that Anne’s opponents were flailing around. They had her on the defensive. But they had not come up with an open-and-shut case against her. She might easily escape and turn the tables.
But then, over the weekend of 29–30 April, there took place two incidents which delivered Anne into her enemies’ hands. Or rather, perhaps, she delivered herself.
For Anne the religious Reformer was only one side of the Queen. The other is glimpsed in Baynton’s description of the goings-on among the Queen’s ladies in the weeks after her coronation. Absent lovers and husbands, he had said, were forgotten, as the women rejoiced in their new conquests. For life in the Queen’s Chamber was not all Bibles, sermons and politics. There was dancing, singing and poetry. There were word-games and acrostics, gossip and jokes. Above all, there was love. Sometimes it was real. Sometimes it was a game. And often it was difficult to tell the two apart.21
Anne in her days as a maiden in the Queen’s Chamber had been mistress of this game of Courtly Love: it was how she had attracted and won Henry in the first place. But now that she was Queen, her expected role changed from practitioner to president. As Queen, she was the focus of the sighs of musicians, poets and Court gallants. But the sighs were supposed to be ceremonious and chaste. As was she.
She was also expected to preserve discipline among her ladies and maids and their male suitors. This was a tall order. For the Court, as Kingston’s wry remarks show, was the kingdom of youth. It was filled with young men and young women who were attractive, athletic and ambitious. They were on the make and had time on their hands. In the circumstances, constant virtue, on the part of either sex, must have been something of a miracle. And miracles were no more common in the sixteenth century than in the twenty-first. Nor was it only the young. For even the middle aged, as Kingston admits against himself, caught the prevailing ethos and behaved as though they too were young. Likewise the married were tempted to act as though they were not.22
Anne’s relationship to all this was ambiguous. She had the character, intelligence and presence to keep control. But she also had a shrewish side, and was tempted to bandy words, which was undignified and could easily escalate. There was a fundamental issue as well. She was the most successful poacher of her age or any preceding one. This might make her an equally effective gamekeeper. On the other hand, her life story was a testament to the fact that, while virtue may be its own reward, vice really pays.
Anne, in short, might command: ‘Do as I say.’ But the temptation was to reply: ‘Why? I am only doing what you did.’ And, as we shall see, many found it hard to resist temptation.
The first incident of that fatal weekend took place on the Saturday. And it shows Anne in a proper, if rather snobbish, light. When she went into her Presence Chamber or Throne Room she found Mark Smeaton, a favourite young musician of the King’s Privy Chamber, standing in the bay-window.
What happened next was a scene from tragicomedy, which Anne later described in her own words. Smeaton was pensive, probably extravagantly so, in the manner of a romantic poet smitten with love. ‘Why are you so sad?’ she asked. He replied, ‘It was no matter’. And then he sighed. Her patience snapped. Not only was Smeaton making an exhibition of himself, he was getting above himself as well. A cat may look at a Queen, but a mere musician should not make love to her.
So, ruthlessly, she slapped him down. ‘You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do to a nobleman’, she said, ‘because you be an inferior person.’
‘No, no, Madam,’ he replied, ‘a look sufficed me; and thus fare you well!’
He had swallowed the reproof. It was his place to do so. And he had the memory of those coal-black eyes, that had bewitched many a greater man.23
On the following day, Sunday, 30 April, Anne had another exchange. This time her interlocutor was indeed ‘a nobleman’ and the tone was strikingly different.
Henry Norris, the Groom of the Stool and Chief Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, was the head of the King’s private service and Henry’s principal personal favourite. He had also become close, personally and politically, to Anne. He had spent most of the spring away from Court on his estates in Oxfordshire, where he was a beneficiary of Suffolk’s fall from grace the previous summer.
There was only one fly in the ointment. For it was a truth, universally acknowledged in the sixteenth as much as in the nineteenth century, that a single man, in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. And Norris was both rich and unmarried. Or rather, he was between marriages. His first wife, the daughter of Thomas Fiennes, Lord Dacre of the South, had died before 1530. He had subsequently had an on-off relationship with Anne’s cousin, Margaret Shelton, the daughter of Mary’s custodians, Sir John and Lady Shelton. But he had made no commitments.
‘Madge’ Shelton was a bit of a goer. She was vivacious and attractive and had for a time been the King’s mistress. She also had a string of other conquests. Maybe Norris delayed tying the knot because she was shop-soiled goods. Maybe he was worried that her Boleyn blood was turning into a liability. Or, most likely, he hesitated because he was not sure he loved her.
Anne, however, was determined to force the issue. ‘I asked him’, she recalled later, ‘why he went not through with his marriage?’ He replied ‘he would tarry a time’. Irritated by his prevarication Anne snapped back: ‘You look for dead men’s shoes. For if aught came to the King but good, you would look to have me.’ Norris was appalled. ‘If he should have any such thought’, he said, ‘he would his head were off.’ Anne then became openly threatening: ‘She could undo him if she would.’ And the two had a violent quarrel.
Anne’s words were unutterably foolish. And they can be explained only by the nervous strain she was under. Cromwell had deserted her. Now it seemed that Norris was abandoning her as well. In her fear, she lashed out.
Quickly, of course, both realised their folly and, that same day at Anne’s command, Norris informed Almoner Skip ‘that he would swear for the Queen that she was a good woman’. But this was a remedy that was almost worse than the disease.24
And, in any case, the damage was done. For some of Anne’s ladies had high-powered brothers and husbands and, in the echo-chamber of the Court, such an incident could not be kept quiet. By the afternoon, Henry himself knew. He confronted Anne directly. She said what she could. But her words seemed damning and Henry, in disgust, thrust her away and retreated to sulk alone in the bay-window.
In this extremity, the Queen played her trump card.
Elizabeth had spent the spring with her parents. Probably she had stayed at Eltham, Greenwich’s satellite palace. Anne lavished attention on her. She bought her beautiful caps, made out of rich fabrics and exquisitely trimmed with gold nets and laces. She even paid for a craftsman to come from London only ‘to take measure of caps for my Lady Princess’.25
Henry, as his behaviour after Catherine’s death shows, was fond of his pretty auburn-haired daughter. Would the child speak to Henry as Anne’s words could not?
The resulting scene was witnessed by the Scottish Reformer, Alexander Alane (‘Alesius’). And he claimed to remember it vividly–though it was by then over twenty years later, and the child was Queen herself.
Never shall I forget [he wrote] the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene Queen your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King, your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard, when she brought you to him.
‘I did not perfectly understand what had been going on’, Alane continued, ‘but the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry, although he could conceal his anger wonderfully well.’26
For the moment, however, Anne’s gesture worked and Henry seemed pacified. Or perhaps he was merely biding his time. For the signals were mixed. The decision was taken that the May Day jousts should proceed as planned the next day. On the other hand, very late at night (at about 11 o’clock), the forthcoming Progress to inspect the new harbour and fortifications at Dover was cancelled.27
For a new front had opened up. Somehow, and again probably through Anne’s ladies, Cromwell had heard about the Queen’s conversation with Smeaton on Saturday. The young musician was seized and was taken to Cromwell’s house at Stepney, where he was ‘in examination on May Even’. Maybe it was the results of this preliminary examination, without the use of torture, which led to the last-minute decision to cancel the Progress.28
Nevertheless, the tournament went ahead in the presence of the King and Queen. Both behaved as though nothing had happened. Henry, indeed, with that mastery of self-control to which Alane referred, went out of his way to be gracious and even lent Norris a horse when his own mount refused to charge. Anne, too, put up a good show and appeared as her radiant self, presiding over the jousts from her viewing-box hung with cloth of gold and encouraging the combatants with smiles and gestures.29
It was a final triumph in a familiar arena. For Henry and Anne never saw each other again. Just as he had done with Catherine, Henry slipped away without a word.
The moment the jousts were over, Henry returned to York Place. He was in such a hurry that he did not wait for the tide to turn. Instead, he rode. And riding at his side was Norris.
But instead of the usual easy banter between master and favourite attendant, Norris was talking for his life. ‘All the way’, George Constantine, Norris’s servant, reported, ‘[the King] had Mr Norris in examination and promised him his pardon in case he would utter the truth.’ The pressure was intense: ‘but whatsoever could be said or done, Mr Norris would confess nothing to the King’.
Norris was held overnight at York Place and committed to the Tower at dawn the following morning. During this second journey, according to his own chaplain, a confession of sorts was wrung out of him by Treasurer Fitzwilliam. But Norris later claimed ‘that he was deceived to do the same’.30
Meanwhile, Smeaton had been admitted to the Tower at 6 p.m. on May Day. Constantine later heard that ‘he was…grievously racked’. Probably he was put to the torture as soon as he arrived. His ordeal lasted almost four hours, as ‘it was 10 of the clock or he were well lodged [in his cell]’.31
The time taken shows that he put up impressive resistance. But finally the pain and Cromwell’s brutal questions broke him, and he confessed to adultery with the Queen.
Cromwell had his first breakthrough.