A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [109]
England was shocked. No one in the kingdom believed the former lord chancellor even capable of betraying crown and country. Erasmus mourned his friend, “whose soul was more pure than any snow, whose genius was such that England never had and never again will have its like.” The Vatican proclaimed him a Christian martyr. In time the papacy beatified and then canonized him.
LESS THAN A YEAR later Anne Boleyn followed him to the block. Her thousand-day reign had been a disaster, so calamitous that the prestige of the papacy was enhanced; only divine intervention, men reasoned, could have visited such punishment upon the rebel monarch in London. His conviction that she would present him with an heir had been wrong. Her first baby, like Catherine’s, was female. No one could blame her for that, but the failure of her womb was the least of it. Once on the throne she seemed to change personality. Her gaiety vanished and was replaced by temper tantrums, sharp-tongued imperiousness, and innumerable petty demands which left the king exasperated. Catherine at least had been gentle, and he began to miss that; when she died, he wept, and ordered the court to go into mourning. Anne refused. After she presented him with a second, dead child—a boy, born prematurely and badly deformed—he no longer desired her. He told friends Anne had bewitched him, and cited the baby’s deformities as evidence of her sorcery. To her fury, he began sliding his hand under the skirts of one of her maids, the nobly born Jane Seymour. *
If the evidence later arrayed against her is to be believed, Anne was the last wife in England entitled to protest her husband’s dalliance. According to sworn testimony, she had scarcely recovered from her daughter’s birth when she began taking lovers, and her intrigues continued through her three-year marriage. If a youth aroused her desire, witnesses declared, she would invite him to her bedchamber by dropping a handkerchief at his feet; if he picked it up and wiped his face, her proposition had been accepted, and her personal maid would be alerted to his arrival that evening at midnight.
These charges may have been trumped up—later it was said that several of the men accused of sleeping with the queen were homosexuals—but this was not apparent at the time. Henry, according to the record, learned that he was being cuckolded. Told of the handkerchief signal, he watched it happen, moved in that night with armed yeomen, and struck hard. The new lord chancellor took Anne to the Tower and read out the charges against her. She fell to her knees, sobbing and protesting her innocence.
In the preliminary hearing three knighted gentlemen of the privy chamber and a court musician confessed to “criminal intercourse with the queen.” Then the earl of Northumberland, as he now was, testified that he, too, had been intimate with her. The greatest sensation came at the end, when Lord Rochford, Anne’s brother—who had found Sir Thomas More guilty—was led into the dock and accused of coupling with his own sister, a charge supported, by what is said to have been convincing evidence, by Rochford’s wife. Tried by a jury which included Anne’s father, the musician pleaded guilty and, as a commoner, was merely hanged. The knights then were beheaded.
Three days later, twenty-six peers, chaired by Anne’s uncle, the duke of Norfolk, sat in judgment of her and her brother. Both were found guilty of adultery and incest and condemned to death by their uncle. Violent death being commonplace and a life hereafter assumed, the condemned in that age often accepted their fate with an insouciance which would be astonishing today. After praying that she be forgiven her crimes, Anne, still only twenty-nine, asked that her head be struck off as soon as possible. She remarked wryly that she drew comfort from the thought that “the executioner I have heard to be very