Nothing is more lethal in politics than a sex scandal. Anne Boleyn, Henry
VIII’s second queen, was executed on May 19, 1536 after a sensational trial.
The main charge, conspiring to bring about Henry’s death so that she could
marry one of her lovers, was spiced up with accusations of adultery with
four courtiers and incest with her brother George. After the guilty verdict,
Anne’s head was struck off with the single blow of a sword: it fell to the
ground with her lips and eyes still moving. One of the trial judges wrote:
“And all the evidence was of bawdry and lechery.” Anne had supposedly
“allured” her brother with her tongue in his mouth and his in hers.
Everything happened at terrifying speed. Anne was overheard quarrelling with
one of the courtiers on April 29 and with Henry the next day. The king made
up his mind to ditch her during the May Day jousts, and arrests swiftly
followed. The courtiers were tried and condemned on May 12, Anne and George
on May 15. According to one account, Anne had had her toy boys lined up at
night: “Her brother is by no means last in the queue.” She’d even allegedly
said Henry was no good in bed, casting doubt on the legitimacy of their
daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth.
Was Anne guilty, and if not, who wanted her dead? Solving the riddle is, for
historians, what climbing Everest is to mountaineers — you attempt it
because it’s there.
Alison Weir, the popular medieval and Tudor historian and novelist who has
tackled some of the knottier problems of the period, has taken up the
challenge in The Lady in the Tower. The book has two aims. One is to rewrite
the story, the other to show her readers how answers that are as definitive
as possible can be quarried from sources that aren’t. She’s in a dialogue
with the evidence — it’s something done all too infrequently — beckoning us
to join her behind the scenes of a historian’s world. The flipside is that
we also get to see her working methods at close quarters.
Three significant theories exist to explain Anne’s fall. One is that Henry,
already lusting after Jane Seymour, was sorely disappointed by Anne’s
failure to produce a son. He told his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, to
oust her, and Cromwell obliged. Alternatively, Anne brought disaster on
herself through sexual indiscretions or (far more plausibly) by overstepping
the conventional limits of courtly banter. The third theory — the one Weir
largely believes to be correct — is that Cromwell, after quarrelling with
Anne and putting his career in grave jeopardy, decided to stage a coup. He
devised the charges based on whatever information was to hand, rigged the
trials and later claimed that some of the evidence was “so abominable” it
couldn’t be given in court.
In unmasking Cromwell, Weir agrees with Eric Ives, Anne’s most recent
biographer, but the two historians tell the story differently. Weir more
often cites the earliest literary account of Anne’s fall: a long and
colourful poem by Lancelot de Carles, especially important for its account
of Anne’s defiant speech at her trial. Ives thinks the poem often peddles
moonshine, but, while sometimes sceptical herself, Weir believes that a
separate poem by another Frenchman, an “eyewitness” at Anne’s trial, one
Crispin de Miherve, corroborates de Carles and adds extra details.
Unfortunately, “Crispin” is a phantom. A French scholar proved in 1844 that
the text Weir is using had been doctored, and in 1927 it was shown by
comparing all the genuine manuscripts that the two poems are identical and
by de Carles. Weir has been duped.
Weir’s most arresting conclusion is that Cromwell’s best informant was
George’s own wife, Jane. De Carles reports that “a single woman” supplied
the most damaging material and hints at Lady Worcester, but Weir thinks he
got confused. Now it’s true that Jane was among several women interrogated,
but no direct record of what took place survives. Weir suggests that Jane
perhaps denounced her husband because he might have been homosexual and
maybe sexually abused her. It’s pure speculation, but Weir produces what
we’re led to believe are killer facts to help us guess the informant’s
identity. I must declare my interest. I’m married to a historian who’s had a
crack at this problem. But it’s all up for grabs because nothing has yet
been proved. We desperately need new facts.
Step forward Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador at Henry’s court, and a
visiting Portuguese gentleman. Weir says these two men provide the primary
evidence of Jane’s testimony. Chapuys, she says, tells us that Jane had
divulged the “accursed secret” in a letter. The Portuguese gentleman, she
says, also identified Jane. Knowing sensational discoveries when I see
them, I went to check for myself. Chapuys said no such thing. Only the
Portuguese gentleman mentions an “accursed secret”, and he merely talks of
“that person” who disclosed it: he doesn’t name anyone.
Confirmation of Weir’s line would appear to come when she claims that Jane,
who was herself executed after Catherine Howard’s fall in 1542, confessed on
the scaffold to falsely accusing her husband, George. But the speech Weir
quotes is a forgery, the much later work of Gregorio Leti who (says
historian Patrick Collinson after investigating many such stories) “invented
some of his sources and made things up”. And when you check Weir’s reference
(a daunting task in itself since her source citations are usually
incomplete) it refers to quite a different version of Jane’s speech: utterly
genuine, written by an eyewitness to her death and saying nothing of the
kind.
Weir makes much of the fact that Lord Herbert of Cherbury wrote in his Life
and Reign of King Henry VIII in 1649 that “the wife of Lord Rochford [ie
Jane] was a particular instrument in the death of Queen Anne”. She thinks he
was quoting from a lost chronicle of Henry’s reign and cites the notes left
by a late-17th-century don who’d been mugging up on Anne’s fall. But Weir is
mistaken, although I had to go to Oxford to be sure. Like all good
historians, the don cites his sources, so we know that he’d been reading a
dozen or so works, among which were the now lost chronicle and Herbert’s own
book. His note about Jane is taken from the latter — it even comes complete
with the page number.
Looking at the bigger picture, one also has to question why Weir devotes so
much space to a blow-by-blow account of the events of a few months, but
rarely pauses to reflect on the values and expectations of the society that
allowed it all to happen. Understanding the setting for the drama is
fundamental: rumour and gossip often played a key part in events at Henry’s
court. The backstairs of his palaces were hotbeds of intrigue and
dissimulation. Power was focused around those who had the king’s ear: those
who could best play that game were the ones who could gain the most power.
But by their very nature, rumour and gossip will hardly ever be true. What
kind of society is that? Weir’s book is certainly encyclopedic, but has she
conquered Everest? I think not.
The Lady in the Tower by Alison Weir
Cape £20 pp416
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