A.D. 1536. CH. II. to murder her; that, instead of resorting to poison, or to the less obtrusive methods of criminality, he invented, and persuaded his council to assist 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 participation in his crime, judges, juries, peers, the dearest relations of those whom he was destroying. 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 lar inter- 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. The popu pretation is not credible. This is a fair statement of the probabilities; A.D. 1536. queen in favour queen. not, I believe, exaggerated on either side. Turn- CH. 11. ing to the positive facts which are known to us, we have amongst those which make for the her own denial of her guilt; her supposed letter of the to the king, which wears the complexion of innocence; the assertions 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 noblemen and gentlemen,* 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 as- The facts sent of the judges who sat on the commission, and who passed 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. against her. day, A brief interval only was allowed between the judgment and the final close. On Wednesday, the Wednes17th, the five gentlemen were taken to execution. May 17. Smeton was hanged; the others were beheaded. The exeSmeton and Brereton acknowledged the justice of the five their sentence. Brereton said that if he had to *Two grand juries, the petty jury, and the twenty-seven peers. cution of gentlemen. A.D. 1536. CH. II. die a thousand deaths, he deserved them all; and Brereton was the only one of the five whose guilt at the time was doubted.* 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 petition 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.† 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.‡ Anne Boleyn confesses to Cranmer The queen was left till a further mystery had perplexed yet deeper the disgraceful exposure. Henry had desired Cranmer to be her confessor. has never The archbishop was with her on the day after her that she been law fully married to the king. *CONSTANTYNE'S Memor., be saved before God,' he says, Archæol., vol. xxiii. pp. 63–66. I could not believe it, afore I heard them speak at their death.' ... But on the scaffold, he adds, 'In a manner all confessed but Mr. Norris, who said almost nothing at all.' Kingston to Cromwell: SINGER, p. 459. CONSTANTYNE'S Memoirs. A.D. 1536. riage laws church. trial,* and she then made an extraordinary avowal,† CH. 11. 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. What it was which she confessed is unknown. The marriage laws were infinitely complicated. The church was ready to dispense with its im- The marpediments on receipts of moneys; but in default of the of a dispensation, the offspring of marriages contracted in violation of the most trifling regulations was held to be illegitimate. England, especially, had suffered bitterly from the consequences of these intricacies. The Wars of the Roses were attributed by the Act of Succession distinctly to this one cause; and such an avowal made at such a time was no common thing which might lightly be neglected. On Wednesday the queen was taken to Lambeth, where she made her confession in form, and the archbishop, sitting judicially, pronounced her marriage with the king to have been null and void. The supposition, that this business was a freak of caprice or passion, is too puerile to be considered. It is said that she acknowledged a pre-contract; and it is certain that Lord North : * Kingston to Cromwell which the marriage had been CONSTANTYNE's Memoirs. declared legitimate), and since Now of late, God, of his that time confessed by the Lady infinite goodness, from whom no Anne, by the which it plainly secret things can be hid, hath appeareth that the said marriage caused to be brought to light, was never good nor consonant to evident and open knowledge of the laws.' 28 Henry VIII. certain just true, and lawful cap. 7. See also the appendix impediments, unknown at the to the fourth volume of this making of the said acts (by work. A.D. 1536. is pro person. CH. 11. umberland was examined upon the subject before the archbishop. But in person upon oath, and also in a letter to Cromwell, Northumberland denied that with him the queen had ever stood in any such relation; and if a pre-contract was the cause of the divorce it was with some other Perhaps a clue may be furnished by the letter which I quoted in the second chapter of this book. Perhaps the confession itself was only a vague effort which she made to save her life.* But whatever The queen she said, and whether she spoke truth or falsenounced hood, she was pronounced divorced, and the divorce did not save her.† 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. Thursday, "This morning she sent for me,' he added, Kingston's that I might be with her at such time as she received the good Lord, to the intent that I divorced. May 18. tribute to her con duct in เ the Tower. 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 *On the day on which she first saw the archbishop, she said, at dinner, that she expected to be spared, and that she would retire to Antwerp.-Kingston to Cromwell: SINGER, p. 460. + Burnet raises a dilemma here. If, he says, the queen was not married to the king, there was no adultery; and the sentence of death and the sentence of divorce mutually neutralize each other. It is possible that in the general horror at so complicated a delinquency, the technical defence was overlooked. |