History of England from the fall of Wolsey to the death of Elizabeth Volume II Part 47

It may be thought that the evidence was pieced together in the secrets of the cabinet; that the juries found their bills on a case presented to them by the council. This would transfer the infamy to a higher stage; but if we try to imagine how the council proceeded in such a business, we shall not find it an easy task. The council, at least, could not have been deceived. The evidence, whatever it was, must have been examined by them; and though we stretch our belief in the complacency of statesmen to the furthest limit of credulity, can we believe that Cromwell would have invented that dark indictment,--Cromwell who was, and who remained till his death, the dearest friend of Latimer? Or the Duke of Norfolk, the veteran who had won his spurs at Flodden? Or the Duke of Suffolk and Sir William Fitzwilliam, the Wellington and the Nelson of the sixteenth century? Scarcely among the picked scoundrels of Newgate could men be found for such work; and shall we believe it of men like these? It is to me impossible. Yet, if it was done at all, it was done by those four ministers.

[Sidenote: To what purpose the multiplication of offences, and the number of offenders?]

Even if we could believe that they forged the accusations, yet they would at least limit the dimensions of them. The most audacious villain will not extend his crimes beyond what he requires for his object; and if the king desired only to rid himself of his wife, to what purpose the multiplication of offenders, and the long list of acts or guilt, when a single offence with the one accomplice who was ready to abide by a confession would have sufficed? The four gentlemen gratuitously, on this hypothesis, entangled in the indictment, were n.o.bly connected: one of them, Lord Rochfort, was himself a peer; they had lived, all four, several years at the court, and were personally known to every member of the council. Are we to suppose that evidence was invented with no imaginable purpose, for wanton and needless murders?--that the council risked the success of their scheme, by multiplying charges which only increased difficulty of proof, and provoked the interference of the powerful relations of the accused?[587]

Such are the difficulties in which, at this early stage of the transaction, we are already implicated. They will not diminish as we proceed.

[Sidenote: Friday, May 12. The court opens.]

[Sidenote: The four commoners are brought to the bar.]

[Sidenote: A petty jury return a verdict of guilty.]

Friday, the 12th of May, was fixed for the opening of the court. On that day, a petty jury was returned at Westminster, for the trial of Sir Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, Sir William Brereton, and Mark Smeton.

The commission sat,--the Earl of Wilts.h.i.+re sitting with them,[588]--and the four prisoners were brought to the bar. On their arraignment, Mark Smeton, we are told, pleaded guilty of adultery with the queen; not guilty of the other charges. Norris, Weston, and Brereton severally pleaded not guilty. Verdict, guilty. The king's sergeant and attorney pray judgment. Judgment upon Smeton, Norris, Weston, and Brereton as usual in cases of high treason. This is all which the record contains.

The nature of the evidence is not mentioned. But again there was a jury; and if we have not the evidence which convinced that jury, we have the evidence that they were, or professed to be, convinced.

[Sidenote: The Duke of Norfolk is named Lord High Steward.]

The queen and her brother were to be tried on the following Monday.

Their crime was not adultery only, but was coloured with the deeper stain of incest. On the Friday, while the other prisoners were at the bar, "Letters patent were addressed to Thomas, Duke of Norfolk, Treasurer and Earl Marshal of England, setting forth that the Lady Anne, Queen of England, and Sir George Boleyn, knight, Lord Rochfort, had been indicted of certain capital crimes; and that the king, considering that justice was a most excellent virtue, and pleasing to the Most Highest; and inasmuch as the office of High Steward of England, whose presence for the administration of the law in this case is required, was vacant, the king therefore appointed the said duke Lord High Steward of England, with full powers to receive the indictments found against Queen Anne and the Lord Rochfort, and calling them before him, for the purpose of hearing and examining them, and compelling them to answer thereto." The duke was to collect also "such and so many lords, peers, and magnates of the kingdom of England, peers of the said Queen Anne and Lord Rochfort, by whom the truth could be better known; and the truth being known, to give judgment according to the laws and customs of England, and to give sentence and judgment, and to direct execution, with the other usual powers."[589] As a certain number only of the peers were summoned, it may be imagined that some fraud was practised in the selection, and that those only were admitted whose subserviency could be relied upon. I will therefore give the names as before.

[Sidenote: List of peers summoned to try the queen and her brother.]

The two English Dukes, of Norfolk and Suffolk.[590] The one English Marquis, of Exeter. The Earls of Arundel, Oxford, Northumberland (the queen's early lover), Westmoreland, Derby, Worcester, Rutland, Suss.e.x, and Huntingdon all the earls in the peerage except four--those of Shrewsbury, Ess.e.x, c.u.mberland, and Wilts.h.i.+re. Why the first three were omitted I do not know. Lord Wilts.h.i.+re had already fulfilled his share of the miserable duty; he was not compelled to play the part of Brutus, and condemn, in person, his two children. The remaining peers were the Lords Audeley, De la Ware, Montague, Morley, Dacre, Cobham, Maltravers, Powis, Mounteagle, Clinton, Sandys, Windsor, Wentworth, Burgh, and Mordaunt: twenty-seven in all: men hitherto of unblemished honour--the n.o.blest blood in the realm.

[Sidenote: Monday, May 15. Account of the trial in the Baga de Secretis.]

These n.o.blemen a.s.sembled in the Tower on the 15th of May. The queen was brought before them; and the record in the Baga de Secretis relates the proceeding as follows:--

"Before the Lord High Steward at the Tower, Anne, Queen of England, comes in the custody of Sir William Kingston, Constable of the Tower, and is brought to the bar. Being arraigned of the before-mentioned treasons, she pleads not guilty, and puts herself upon her peers; whereupon the Duke of Suffolk, Marquis of Exeter, and others the before-mentioned earls and barons, peers of the said queen, being charged by the said Lord High Steward to say the truth, and afterwards being examined severally by the Lord High Steward, from the lowest peer to the highest, each of them severally saith that she is guilty.

[Sidenote: The queen is found guilty, and sentenced to be burned or beheaded at the king's pleasure.]

"Judgment--that the queen be taken by the said Constable back to the king's prison within the Tower; and then, as the king shall command, be brought to the green within the said Tower, and there burned or beheaded, as shall please the king."[591]

In such cold lines is the story of this tragedy unrolling itself to its close. The course which it followed, however, was less hard in the actual life; and men's hearts, even in those stern times, could beat with human emotions. The Duke of Norfolk was in tears as he pa.s.sed sentence.[592] The Earl of Northumberland "was obliged by a sudden illness to leave the court."[593] The sight of the woman whom he had once loved, and to whom he was perhaps married, in that dreadful position, had been more than he could bear; and the remainder of the work of the day went forward without him.

[Sidenote: Lord Rochfort found guilty also.]

The queen withdrew. Her brother took his place at the bar. Like Anne, he declared himself innocent. Like Anne, he was found guilty, and sentenced to die.[594]

We can form no estimate of the evidence; for we do not know what it was.

We cannot especially accuse the form of the trial; for it was the form which was always observed. But the fact remains to us, that these twenty-seven peers, who were not ignorant, as we are, but were fully acquainted with the grounds of the prosecution, did deliberately, after hearing the queen's defence, p.r.o.nounce against her a unanimous verdict.

If there was foul play, they had advantages infinitely greater than any to which we can pretend for detecting it. The Boleyns were unpopular, and Anne herself was obnoxious to the imperialists and Catholics; but all parties, Catholic and Protestant alike, united in the sentence.

[Sidenote: The popular interpretation is not credible.]

Looking at the case, then, as it now stands, we have the report for some time current, that the queen was out of favour, and that the king's affection was turned in another direction,--a report, be it observed, which had arisen before the catastrophe, and was not, therefore, an afterthought, or legend; we have also the antecedent improbability, which is very great, that a lady in the queen's position could have been guilty of the offences with which the indictment charges her. We have also the improbability, which is great, that the king, now forty-four years old, who in his earlier years had been distinguished for the absence of those vices in which contemporary princes indulged themselves, in wanton weariness of a woman for whom he had revolutionized the kingdom, and quarrelled with half Christendom, suddenly resolved to murder her; that, instead of resorting to poison, or to the less obtrusive methods of criminality, he invented, and persuaded his council to a.s.sist him in inventing, a series of accusations which reflected dishonour on himself, and which involved the gratuitous death of five persons with whom he had no quarrel, who were attached to his court and person. To maintain these accusations, he would have to overawe into an active partic.i.p.ation in his crime, judges, juries, peers, the dearest relations of those whom he was destroying, and this with no standing army, no praetorians or janissaries at his back, with no force but the yeomen of the guard, who could be scattered by a rising of the apprentices. He had gone out of his way, moreover, to call a parliament; and the summons had been so hasty that no time was left to control the elections; while again to fail was ruin; and the generation of Englishmen to whom we owe the Reformation were not so wholly lost to all principles of honour, that Henry could have counted beforehand upon success in so desperate a scheme with that absolute certainty without which he would scarcely have risked the experiment. I think that there is some improbability here. Unlikely as it is that queens should disgrace themselves, history contains unfortunately more than one instance that it is not impossible. That queens in that very age were capable of profligacy was proved, but a few years later, by the confessions of Catherine Howard. I believe history will be ransacked vainly to find a parallel for conduct at once so dastardly, so audacious, and so foolishly wicked as that which the popular hypothesis attributes to Henry VIII.

[Sidenote: The facts in favour of the queen.]

[Sidenote: The facts against her.]

This is a fair statement of the probabilities; not, I believe, exaggerated on either side. Turning to the positive facts which are known to us, we have amongst those which make for the queen her own denial of her guilt; her supposed letter to the king, which wears the complexion of innocence; the a.s.sertions of three out of the five other persons who were accused, up to the moment of their execution; and the sympathizing story of a Flemish gentleman who believed her innocent, and who says that many other people in England believed the same. On the other side, we have the judicial verdict of more than seventy n.o.blemen and gentlemen,[595] no one of whom had any interest in the deaths of the accused, and some of whom had interests the most tender in their acquittal; we have the a.s.sent of the judges who sat on the commission, and who pa.s.sed sentence, after full opportunities of examination, with all the evidence before their eyes; the partial confession of one of the prisoners, though afterwards withdrawn; and the complete confession of another, maintained till the end, and not withdrawn upon the scaffold.

Mr. Hallam must pardon me for saying that this is not a matter in which doubt is unpermitted.

[Sidenote: Wednesday, May 17. The execution of the five gentlemen.]

A brief interval only was allowed between the judgment and the final close. On Wednesday, the 17th, the five gentlemen were taken to execution. Smeton was hanged; the others were beheaded. Smeton and Brereton acknowledged the justice of their sentence. Brereton said that if he had to die a thousand deaths, he deserved them all; and Brereton was the only one of the five whose guilt at the time was doubted.[596]

Norris died silent; Weston, with a few general lamentations on the wickedness of his past life. None denied the crime for which they suffered; all but one were considered by the spectators to have confessed. Rochfort had shown some feeling while in the Tower. Kingston on one occasion found him weeping bitterly. The day of the trial he sent a pet.i.tion to the king, to what effect I do not learn; and on the Tuesday he begged to see Cromwell, having something on his conscience, as he said, which he wished to tell him.[597] His desire, however, does not seem to have been complied with; he spoke sorrowfully on the scaffold of the shame which he had brought upon the gospel, and died with words which appeared to the spectators, if not a confession, yet something very nearly resembling it, "This said lord," wrote a spectator to the court at Brussels, "made a good Catholic address to the people.

He said that he had not come there to preach to them, but rather to serve as a mirror and an example. He acknowledged the crimes which he had committed against G.o.d, and against the king his sovereign; there was no occasion for him, he said, to repeat the cause for which he was condemned; they would have little pleasure in hearing him tell it. He prayed G.o.d, and he prayed the king, to pardon his offences; and all others whom he might have injured he also prayed to forgive him as heartily as he forgave every one. He bade his hearers avoid the vanities of the world, and the flatteries of the court which had brought him to the shameful end which had overtaken him. Had he obeyed the lessons of that gospel which he had so often read, he said he should not have fallen so far; it was worth more to be a good doer than a good reader.

Finally, he forgave those who had adjudged him to die, and he desired them to pray G.o.d for his soul."[598]

[Sidenote: Anne Boleyn confesses to Cranmer that she has never been lawfully married to the king.]

The queen was left till a further mystery had perplexed yet deeper the disgraceful exposure. Henry had desired Cranmer to be her confessor. The archbishop was with her on the day after her trial,[599] and she then made an extraordinary avowal,[600] either that she had been married or contracted in early life, or had been entangled in some connexion which invalidated her marriage with the king. The letter to the emperor, which I have already quoted,[601] furnishes the solitary explanation of the mystery which remains. Some one, apparently the imperial amba.s.sador, informed Charles that she was discovered to have been nine years before married to Lord Percy, not formally only, but really and completely. If this be true, her fate need scarcely excite further sympathy.

[Sidenote: The queen is p.r.o.nounced divorced.]

On Wednesday she was taken to Lambeth, where she made her confession in form, and the archbishop, sitting judicially, p.r.o.nounced her marriage with the king to have been null and void. The supposition, that this business was a freak of caprice or pa.s.sion, is too puerile to be considered. It is certain that she acknowledged something; and it is certain also that Lord Northumberland was examined upon the subject before the archbishop. In person upon oath indeed, and also in, a letter to Cromwell, Northumberland denied that he had ever been legally connected with her; but perhaps Northumberland was afraid to make an admission so dangerous to himself, or perhaps the confession itself was a vague effort which she made to save her life.[602] But whatever she said, and whether she spoke truth or falsehood, she was p.r.o.nounced divorced, and the divorce did not save her.[603] Friday, the 19th, was fixed for her death; and when she found that there was no hope she recovered her spirits. The last scene was to be on the green inside the Tower. The public were to be admitted; but Kingston suggested that to avoid a crowd it was desirable not to fix the hour, since it was supposed that she would make no further confession.

[Sidenote: Thursday, May 18. Kingston's tribute to her conduct in the Tower.]

"This morning she sent for me," he added, "that I might be with her at such time as she received the good Lord, to the intent that I should hear her speak as touching her innocency always to be clear. 'Mr.

Kingston,' she said, 'I hear say I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time, and past my pain.' I told her it should be no pain, it was so subtle; and then she said, 'I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,' and put her hands about it, laughing heartily. I have seen many men, and also women, executed, and they have been in great sorrow; and to my knowledge, this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death."[604]

[Sidenote: Friday, May 19. Tower Green at noon.]

We are very near the termination of the tragedy. A little before noon on the 19th of May, Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, was led down to the green. A single cannon stood loaded on the battlements; the motionless cannoneer was ready, with smoking linstock, to tell London that all was over. The yeomen of the guard were there, and a crowd of citizens; the lord mayor in his robes, the deputies of the guilds, the sheriffs, and the aldermen; they were come to see a spectacle which England had never seen before--a head which had worn the crown falling under the sword of an executioner.

[Sidenote: The scaffold, and the persons present upon it.]

On the scaffold, by the king's desire, there were present Cromwell, the Lord Chancellor, the Duke of Suffolk, and lastly, the Duke of Richmond, who might now, when both his sisters were illegitimized, be considered heir presumptive to the throne. As in the choice of the commission, as in the conduct of the trial, as in the summons of parliament, as in every detail through which the cause was pa.s.sed, Henry had shown outwardly but one desire to do all which the most strict equity prescribed, so around this last scene he had placed those who were nearest in blood to himself, and nearest in rank to the crown. If she who was to suffer was falling under a forged charge, he acted his part with horrible completeness.

[Sidenote: The queen's last words.]

The queen appeared walking feebly, supported by the Lieutenant of the Tower. She seemed half stupified and looked back from time to time at the ladies by whom she was followed. On reaching the platform, she asked if she might say a few words;[605] and permission being granted, she turned to the spectators and said: "Christian people, I am come to die.

And according to law, and by law, I am judged to death; and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die. But I pray G.o.d save the king, and send him long to reign over you; for a gentler and more merciful prince was there never; and to me he was ever a good, a gentle, and sovereign lord. If any person will meddle of my cause, I require him to judge the best. And thus I take my leave of the world and of you; and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. Oh, Lord, have mercy on me. To G.o.d I commend my soul."[606] "These words,"

says Stow, "she spoke with a smiling countenance." She wore an ermine cloak which was then taken off. She herself removed her headdress, and one of her attendants gave her a cap into which she gathered her hair.

She then knelt, and breathing faintly a commendation of her soul to Christ, the executioner with a single blow struck off her head. A white handkerchief was thrown over it as it fell, and one of the ladies took it up and carried it away. The other women lifted the body and bore it into the Chapel of the Tower, where it was buried in the choir.[607]

Thus she too died without denying the crime for which she suffered.

Smeton confessed from the first. Brereton, Weston, Rochfort, virtually confessed on the scaffold. Norris said nothing. Of all the sufferers not one ventured to declare that he or she was innocent,--and that six human beings should leave the world with the undeserved stain of so odious a charge on them, without attempting to clear themselves, is credible only to those who form opinions by their wills, and believe or disbelieve as they choose.

To this end the queen had come at last, and silence is the best comment which charity has to offer upon it. Better far it would have been if the dust had been allowed to settle down over the grave of Anne Boleyn, and her remembrance buried in forgetfulness. Strange it is that a spot which ought to have been sacred to pity, should have been made the arena for the blind wrestling of controversial duellists. Blind, I call it; for there has been little clearness of judgment, little even of common prudence in the choice of sides. If the Catholics could have fastened the stain of murder on the king and the statesmen of England, they would have struck the faith of the establishment a harder blow than by a poor tale of scandal against a weak, erring, suffering woman: and the Protestants, in mistaken generosity, have courted an infamy for the names of those to whom they owe their being, which, staining the fountain, must stain for ever the stream which flows from it. It has been no pleasure to me to rake among the evil memories of the past, to prove a human being sinful whom the world has ruled to have been innocent. Let the blame rest with those who have forced upon our history the alternative of a rea.s.sertion of the truth, or the shame of n.o.ble names which have not deserved it at our hands.

[Sidenote: Fresh perplexity in the succession.]