Borrow transcribes a document dated May 6, 1536, which he presents as a letter from Anne Boleyn to the King. The text represents her as demanding an open trial and the opportunity to answer before judges who were not already her declared enemies; therein she likewise implores that the gentlemen imprisoned alongside her might not be dragged down in her fall. Four days after her arrest, she knew full well that her life would hang upon the words gathered at court.
Anne had been queen for three years. She had given birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, whose future remained suspended upon that of the royal union, and had miscarried of a son early in 1536. Henry VIII had drawn close to Jane Seymour. Henceforth, the men of the court scrutinized the queen’s every glance and conversation. An ancient familiarity became potential proof; a jest might be construed as the confession of illicit desire. When her intimates were first subjected to examination, Anne was not straightway brought before a tribunal: she was separated from her household and conveyed by water to the Tower.
On May 2, she arrived at the fortress’s private water-gate. Upon the river, councillors made known to her the accusations. She denied the charges and asked to see the King. This audience was denied her. Once within, she fell upon her knees and prayed that God would succour her, according to Borrow. The queen who had received ambassadors and dispensed royal favours was left to await a visit from her accusers in a chamber where the most indifferent word threatened to outrun her to the court.
Her brother George, Lord Rochford, was arrested, as were four gentlemen of the royal household: Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton, and Mark Smeaton. All were accused of having had adulterous commerce with Anne; her brother was further charged with incest. To this was added the allegation that they had compassed the King’s death. The men returned different answers. Borrow reports that Smeaton acknowledged an intimacy, whilst the others denied it. The accusations circulated swifter than verifiable facts, and the queen had no free access to the witnesses whose utterances formed the body of the indictment.
At first, she could scarce bring herself to believe that the King truly sought her destruction. Then word reached her that the men arrested with her were held fast in the Tower, and she understood that she might follow them to the block. The court letters transcribed by Borrow depict a woman passing from prayer to weeping, and thence to laughter; the nineteenth-century chronicler perceives therein a disorder of the nerves. One may rather discern, beneath his judgments, the extreme distress of a prisoner who knew neither what her kinsmen had been made to say nor whether she would ever see her daughter again.
The queen protested that she was the King’s lawful wife and innocent of the intimacies imputed to her. When led to believe that Norris had accused her, she recalled their past discourses. She had asked him why he delayed in marrying; he had replied that he would bide his time. Anne had retuned that he waited perchance for the King’s death to take his place. In another conversation, Smeaton had remarked that a look sufficed him. These retorts, repeated after the fact, possessed the brutal lightness of courtly banter; wrenched from their circumstance, they were readily fashioned into articles of charge. Anne did not pretend she had never spoken with these men: she denied that such words constituted proof of adultery.
The letter of May 6 petitioned for a lawful and open trial. It did not merely plead, “I am innocent”: it insisted upon the manner by which innocence ought to be established. Anne knew that her accusers would prevail if the King’s mind were already resolved. She petitioned that her sworn adversaries should not sit as her judges and that the truth might be tried publicly. The petition did not save her. Yet it lays bare what she dreaded above all: that disgrace, reported conversations, and capital crime should be confounded together, without her being suffered to examine the testimonies.
On May 12, the four gentlemen appeared before a commission at Westminster. Borrow states that Smeaton alone had confessed; Norris, Weston, and Brereton pleaded not guilty. He relates that Norris was offered his life if he would accuse the queen, and that he refused to do so. The chronicler adduces this refusal as proof of loyalty. Whether one accepts his relation or no, one circumstance remains: the men were tried before Anne, and Mark Smeaton, the sole individual to have acknowledged an intimacy, was already condemned when she appeared in her turn. He was not called to repeat his accusation to her face.
On May 15, Anne and her brother were tried in the Great Hall of the Tower before their peers. Their father, Thomas Boleyn, did not sit among the judges, notwithstanding an error Borrow observes in other chroniclers. Anne pleaded not guilty. The indictment assembled the alleged intimacies with the gentlemen of the court, the injury to the royal succession, and a plot to compass the King’s death. Yet Borrow observes that he found no detailed record of the interrogatories put to the queen nor of her replies. He records only that she defended her cause with measured temper and appeared to put the charges from her.
The infirmity of this prosecution does not lie in our inability to reconstruct every minute of the trial; that is precisely what the documents cited by Borrow forbid us to do. It lies equally in the fact that the sole confession proceeded from a man absent from the confrontation and already condemned. The peers pronounced Anne and George guilty. The sentence left to the King the choice between the stake and the block. Borrow records that on May 17, the court pronounced the nullity of the royal marriage upon the ground of an alleged pre-contract between Anne and Henry Percy, notwithstanding Percy’s denial upon oath that any marriage contract had ever existed. These two decrees struck Anne and her daughter in distinct manners: the one condemned the queen to die, the other stripped Elizabeth of her legitimacy.
On the eve of her death, Anne recalled having used Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, with harshness. She caused the wife of the Lieutenant of the Tower to sit in a chair of state, fell upon her knees before her, and charged her to bear her excuses to Mary. The queen who had had her share in putting Catherine and her daughter aside acknowledged, in her final days, the wrong she had done the child. She had not always been generous toward those whom statecraft set against her; her dying petition did not efface that truth. It rendered her more difficult to reduce to that spotless victim whom her apologists would fain celebrate.
On May 19, Anne mounted the scaffold on Tower Green, within the precincts of the fortress. She told the people that she was come to die according to the law, and desired them to pray for her. She rehearsed none of the accusations and named no guilty party; she prayed for the King, calling him her sovereign and lord. Thereupon the headsman from Calais struck off her head. Her body was laid in a plain chest of wood and buried in the chapel of the Tower. Following the annulment of the marriage, Elizabeth, yet a child, was held illegitimate; yet she would in time become queen in her own right. Anne had petitioned that her cause be judged in the light of day. She was heard by her peers, but the verdict restored neither her life nor her place beside her daughter; her final words were powerless to alter the course of events.