fancy or bad counsel of mine enemies withdraw your princely favour from me. Neither let that stain-that unworthy stain of a disloyal heart towards your good grace, ever cast so foul a blot on your most dutiful wife and the infant princess your daughter. Try me, good king, but let me have a lawful trial; and let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and judges; yea, let me receive an open trial, for my truth shall fear no open shames. Then shall you see either mine innocency cleared, your suspicion and conscience satisfied, the ignominy and slander of the world stopt, or my guilt openly declared. So that whatsoever God or you may determine of me, your grace may be freed from an open censure; and, mine offence being so lawfully proved, your grace is at liberty, both before God and man, not only to execute worthy punishment on me as an unfaithful wife, but to follow your affection, already settled upon that party for whose sake I am now as I amwhose name I could some good while since have pointed unto, your grace not being ignorant of my suspicion therein.

"But if you have already determined of me, and that not only my death, but an infamous slander, must bring you the enjoyment of your desired happiness, then I desire of God that he will pardon your great sin therein, and likewise mine enemies, the instruments thereof, and that he will not call you to a strict account of your unprincely and cruel usage of me, at his general judgment-seat, where both you and I myself must shortly appear, and in whose judgment I doubt not, whatsoever the world may think of me, mine innocence shall be openly known and sufficiently cleared. My last and only request shall be, that myself may only bear the burden of your grace's displeasure, and that it may not touch the innocent souls of those poor gentlemen who, as I understand, are likewise in strait imprisonment for my sake. If ever I have found favour in your sight,-if ever the name of Anne Boleyn hath been pleasing in your ears, then let me obtain this request. And so I will leave to trouble your grace any farther. With mine earnest prayers to the Trinity, to have your grace in his good keeping, and to direct you in all your actions, from my doleful prison in the Tower, this 6th May, your most loyal and ever faithful wife,

"ANNE BOLEYN."

Henry paid as little attention to this touching appeal as he had formerly done to those made by Catherine, his whole soul was bent upon marrying another woman! Anne was sent back to Greenwich to be examined by the privy council, where she found her most determined enemy in her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. On her return to the Tower she told Kingston that she had been cruelly handled by the council. She was, however, very merry, and made a great dinner. She asked the lieutenant where he had been all the day, and Kingston replied that he had been with prisoners. This hard-hearted and stern man had

been, no doubt, engaged with the Viscount Rochford, Norris, Brereton, and Smeaton; and there was much to do with them, in order to intimidate them or otherwise prepare them for examination.

When brought before the council they all maintained their innocence, and the innocence of the queen, and were recommitted; but upon being brought up a second time, Mark Smeaton, the musician, who had been loaded with irons, and in all probability put to the torture, confessed his guilt. Edward Baynton wrote from Greenwich to tell the treasurer "that no man will confess anything against her, but only Mark, of any actual thing." "Wherefore," he continues, in my foolish conceit, it should much touch the king's honour if it should no farther appear: and I cannot believe but that the other two be as culpable as ever was he; and I think assuredly the one keepeth the other's counsel." On the 10th of May a bill of indictment of high treason against the Lady Anne, Queen of England, Henry Norris, Weston, Brereton, and Smeaton was laid before the grand juries of Kent and Middlesex, because, as it was stated, the acts of adultery had been committed in both counties; and because it was the usual character of this court to invest the most illegal proceedings with all the forms and niceties of law. The indictment charged the queen with treason and adultery of three years standing, stating that, inflamed with pride and the lusts of the flesh, she had confederated with her brother the Viscount Rochford, and with Norris, Brereton, Weston, and Smeaton, to perpetrate divers abominable treasons; that she had lain with each of the five, not excepting her own brother, several times; that she had told each of them that she loved him better than the king or than any other man, which was slander of the issue begotten between her and the king; and finally, to end with the most improbable clause of all,-that she and her paramours had been engaged in various plots for murdering the king. On the 12th of May, Norris, Weston, Brereton, and Smeaton, as commoners, were arraigned in the Court of King's Bench. As before the council, all pleaded not guilty, except Mark Smeaton the musician; all, however, were convicted, and were sentenced as traitors to be hanged, drawn, and quartered. Bishop Godwin relates that the king greatly favoured Norris, and was reported to be much grieved that he should die with the rest. "Whereupon he offered pardon to him, conditionally that he would confess that whereof he was accused. But he answered resolutely, and as it became the progenitor of so many valiant heroes,* that in his conscience he thought her guiltless of the objected crime; but whether she were or no, he could not accuse her of anything; and that he had rather undergo a thousand deaths than betray the innocent: upon re

The son of Norris was ennobled in the reign of Elizabeth by the title of Baron Norris, which is still borne by his descendant the present Earl of Abingdon. Sir John Norris, a grandson of the first Baron Norris, greatly distinguished himself in the wars of Elizabeth's reign in Ireland, the Low Countries, and elsewhere.

lation whereof the king cried out, "Hang him up, | then; hang him up, then!"

Accord

There was no precedent for the trial of a queen, and Rochford, her brother, could claim the privilege as a peer of a trial before the House of Lords; but these impediments were trifles in the eyes of the absolute king, and it was determined that they should both be arraigned before a commission of lords chosen by himself, as had been practised with the late Duke of Buckingham. The Duke of Norfolk, Anne's uncle and enemy, was named High Steward, and there were twentysix other noble peers equally ready to do the king's pleasure. On the 15th of May the unhappy queen was led by the constable and lieutenant to the King's Hall, in the Tower, where a scaffolding was erected, upon which, under a cloth of state, as High Steward of England, sate the Duke of Norfolk, with the Lord Chancellor on his right hand, and the Duke of Suffolk on his left, with other marquesses and lords about him,-the highestsounding names of the English aristocracy! She was followed by her female attendants," and whether in regard of some infirmity or out of honour permitted to the wife of their sovereign," she was allowed to sit down on a chair. ing to an old writer whose assertion is supported by all Protestant authors of the time, "having an excellent quick wit, and being a ready speaker, she did so answer to all objections that, had the peers given in their verdict according to the expectation of the assembly, she had been acquitted." As, however, all records of the trial were carefully destroyed soon after, we have no sure guide as to what passed; nor, indeed, were those records preserved and entire, could we consider them in the light of fair and impartial evidence. It is the curse of all such men and measures, and properly that they are suspected even when they have truth and right on their side. On an impartial consideration of such facts as are before us, we cannot, however, believe that Anne Boleyn was guilty of any part of the crimes laid to her charge by the depraved imagination of Henry; and the plot to murder him seems too absurd to arrest attention for a single moment. In regard to the most revolting charge of all, it appears that Lord Rochford had been seen lolling over his sister's bed. But Henry had not a monopoly of vice and malignancy, the nobility were becoming worthy of the king; and Rochford's own wife, a woman of infamous character, bore witness against her husband and the queen. There was also a death-bed deposition made by the Lady Wingfield, but we have no means of judging how it was procured, or whether it was not a forgery; and the document itself has been destroyed with the exception of the first lines.

But the peers, among whom the Duke of Suffolk, the king's brother-in-law, was chief,—as one wholly applying himself to the king's humour,pronounced her guilty. Whereupon the Duke of Norfolk, bound to proceed according to the verdict of the peers, condemned her to death, either by

VOL. II.

being burned on the Green in the Tower or beheaded, as his majesty in his pleasure should think fit.* When she was removed from the bar, her brother, Lord Rochford, was put in her place,was convicted on the same evidence,-and sentenced to lose his head and to be quartered as a traitor. On the following day (the 16th of May) Kingston, the lieutenant of the Tower, wrote impatiently to Secretary Cromwell to know the king's pleasure touching the queen, as well for her comfort as for the preparation of scaffolds and other necessaries, adding, "I pray you have good remembrance in all this for us to do, for we shall be ready to do always to our knowledge." He also informs Cromwell that the king's grace had showed him that my Lord of Canterbury should be her confessor, and that he, Cranmer, had been with the queen in the Tower that day. The willing instrument of the tyrant finishes this strange letter by saying, "This day at dinner the queen said that she should go to Antwerp, and is in hope of life." The mind of the wretched prisoner was evidently upset from the moment of her first committal; fits of anguish and despair were mixed with bright hopes and with bursts of levity, -the most melancholy proof of her derangement. One hour she would say that she was ready to die -the next she would talk confidently of being allowed to live. If in her saner moments she really entertained any such hopes they were soon put an end to; and as the crisis approached she looked on death without terror. On the 18th of May Kingston again addressed Cromwell, telling him that she had sent for him early in the morning to speak touching her innocence (apparently in the presence of Cranmer), and that she had again sent for him while he was writing this same letter, and at his coming had exclaimed, "Mr. Kingston, I hear say I shall not die before noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain." "I told her, continues the lieutenant of the Tower, that 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 she put her hands about it, laughing heartily. Truly this lady has much joy and pleasure in death.” But she did not die that day. On the morrow, the 19th of May, a little before the hour of noon, the queen was brought to the place of execution on the Green within the Tower, some of the nobility and companies of the city being admitted, rather to be witnesses than spectators of her death. From the scaffold Anne thus addressed them,-" Good Christian people, I am come hither to die according to law; by the law I am judged to die, 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. I pray God save the king, and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler or more merciful prince was there never. To me he was ever a good, gentle,

* Godwin,

3 E

and sovereign lord; and if any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge the best; and thus I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me." After these words she bared her beautiful neck, and, kneeling down, kept repeating"Christ have mercy on my soul!-Lord Jesus receive my soul!" until the executioner of Calais, at one blow, struck off her head. Thus perished Anne Boleyn within four months of Catherine, and in little more than three years after her marriage, for which the passionate Henry had moved heaven and earth. An old tradition strongly depicts the

O Original letters (printed by Sir Henry Ellis) as written at the moment by Kingston the lieutenant of the Tower, Baynton, &c.Hall.-Stow.-Godwin.

impatience with which he now expected her death. On the fatal morning he went to hunt in Epping Forest, and while he was at breakfast his attendants observed that he was anxious and impatient. But at length they heard the report of a distant gun, a preconcerted signal. "Ah! it is done!" cried he, starting up,-" the business is done! Uncouple the dogs and let us follow the sport." In the evening he returned gaily from the chase, and on the following morning he married Anne's maid of honour, Jane Seymour, who, on Whitsunday, the 29th of May, clad in royal habiliments, appeared in public as queen, without any coronation, however, for Henry never indulged

Dr. Nott's Life of Surrey.

any of his wives with that expensive ceremony after Anne Boleyn.*

Smeaton, the musician, who is supposed to have been bribed and tortured into his confession, seems to have expected that his life would be spared, and so much, no doubt, was promised to him; but, as it was thought not fit to let him live to tell tales," he was hanged. Rochford and the rest were beheaded.

Archbishop Cranmer, who had made Anne

"So that the court of England was now like a stage, whereon are represented the vicissitudes of ever-various fortune; for within one and the same month it saw Queen Anne flourishing, accused, condemned, executed, and another assumed into her place, both of bed and honour. The 1st of May (it seemeth) she was informed against, the 2nd imprisoned, the 15th condemned, and the 17th deprived of her brother and friends, who suffered in her cause, and the 19th executed. On the 20th the king married Jane Seymour, who, on the 29th, was publicly showed as queen."-Godwin.

Boleyn queen, who had lived in the most perfect friendship with her and her family, both before and after, had not heroic courage sufficient to resist the will of the king; and he certainly made no bold and generous effort to save her or her honour. To avoid his interference, Henry, on the day after her arrest at Greenwich, ordered Cranmer to keep to his palace at Lambeth, and on no account to venture to court. The archbishop evidently fancied that he was to be involved in her ruin. His fears, however, did not wholly overcome his gratitude and affection, and he wrote a curious letter to the king. He began by exhorting his grace to bear this bitter affliction with resignation. As for himself, his "mind was clean amazed;" the good opinion he had formerly entertained of

A

the queen, who had been the best of his benefactors, prompted him to believe her innocent; but as this was a dangerous assertion, he subjoined immediately, that his knowledge of the king's justice and prudence induced him to believe her guilty; and he went on to say that he hoped that it might be permitted him to pray that she might prove her innocence; but, still cautious, he here again added, that if she could not do so, he would deem that man a traitor who did not call for the severest punishment. He had loved her formerly because he had thought that she loved the gospel; but if found guilty, men ought to hate her in proportion to their love of the gospel. He ventured, however, to hope that no misconduct on her part would arrest the important work of church reformation which (he did not blush to write) the king had begun, not through his affection for her, but solely out of his love for the truth. On the very day on which he wrote this letter Cranmer was summoned to the Star Chamber, where the king's commissioners declared unto him "such things as his grace's pleasure was they should make him privy | to," and acquainted him with certain other things which the king expected him to do forthwith. brave good man would have laid his head on the block rather than consent to this new duty, which was nothing less than to declare the marriage which he had pronounced good and valid to be illegal, and to dissolve it, as he had done the marriage with Catherine. Cranmer may have been convinced of the queen's delinquency (though she had not yet been brought to any trial) by depositions shown to him in the Star Chamber, and if he believed her guilty he might consider himself justified in declaring that the marriage was dissolved by her adultery; but this was not enough for the king, who exacted from him that he should declare that the marriage had been unlawful from the beginning, and consequently that the Princess Elizabeth was as illegitimate as her half-sister the Princess Mary. No doubt it was to save his head that the archbishop set to work vigorously, for Henry was not likely to be pleased unless he did the business in a solemn manner. He sent copies of articles of objection to the validity of the marriage to the king in his palace and to the queen in the Tower, "that it might be for the salvation of their souls ;" and he summoned each to appear in his Ecclesiastical Court at Lambeth, to show cause why a sentence of divorce should not be passed. Dr. Sampson appeared for the king, and Drs. Wotton and Barbour for the queen, of course all three were appointed by the king. The objections were read in the court, and the doctors and divines soon joined in opinion. On the 17th of May, the day on which her brother and friends were executed, and two days after she herself had received sentence of death, Cranmer, having "God alone before his eyes," pronounced that the marriage of Anne Boleyn was, and always had been, utterly null and void, in consequence of certain just and lawful impediments which, it was said, were un

known at the time of the union, but had lately been confessed to the archbishop by the lady herself. The process after Anne's death was submitted to the members of the convocation and the two houses of parliament; and the church, commons, and lords fully confirmed it, thus cutting Elizabeth off from the succession. No parliamentary or other records of that kind remain to cast a dubious light upon these proceedings; but it is understood that the previous obstacle which afforded a pretext for declaring the marriage null from the beginning, was a sort of precontract with the Lord Percy, now Earl of Northumberland, which the queen was induced to confess either, as Burnet thinks it probable, by some hope given to her of having her life spared, or at least by the assurance that the judgment condemning her to the stake should be changed into the milder punishment of death by the axe. If this supposition is rejected, the imagination is compelled to refer to the fact of Henry having cohabited with Mary, the sister of Anne, a fact which must have been better known to the king than to Anne Boleyn.*

In the month of June the king caused parliament to agree to a new act of succession, entailing the crown on such issue as he might have by Jane Seymour. Having some doubt or misgiving as to these children to be begotten, he proposed that he should be allowed to bequeath the crown by letters patent, or by his last will, to any person whom he might think proper; and the obsequious parliament passed a bill accordingly! It was understood that the king hereby contemplated the appointing of his natural son, the Duke of Richmond, to be his successor; but at this very moment the duke died, in the eighteenth year of his age, to the great grief of Henry, who, like a very Turk, had no affection for his daughters, but a great deal for his son. The Lady Mary, who had been living in seclusion at Hunsden under the displeasure of her father for her attachment to her mother, and to the discipline of the Romish church, made her peace with the court a few weeks before the Duke of Richmond's death, being obliged by Cromwell to subscribe to certain most humiliating articles of submission and acknowledgment.† She received a

Lord Herbert.-Journals.-Godwin.-Wilkins.-Burnet. Burnet gives the whole of Cranmer's strange letter to the king.

After imploring the king's merciful heart and fatherly pity, Mary acknowledged that she had most unkindly and most unnaturally offended his most excellent highness, in that she had not been sufficiently obedient to his just, wise, and most virtuous laws. She vowed that henceforward she would obey him in all things, and that, knowing his learning, virtue, wisdom, and knowledge, she would put her soul, conscience, and body under his direction. Then followed the confession "of me, the Lady Mary." First she confessed and acknowledged the king's majesty to be her sovereign lord and king, to whose laws, statutes, &c., she was bound to yield implicit obedience. In the second place she agreed to recognise, accept, take, repute, and acknowledge the king's highness to be supreme head of the church of England; and she utterly renounced all manner of remedy which she by any means might claim of the Bishop of Rome, whose pretended authority and jurisdiction she utterly refused and renounced for now and for ever. But the last clause is by far the most striking of all:-" Item, I do freely, frankly, and for the discharge of my duty towards God, the king's highness, and his laws, without other respect, recognise and acknowledge that the marriage heretofore had between his majesty and my mother, the late Princess Dowager, was, by God's law and man's law, incestuous and unlawful."-Letter, with Deed, from the Princess Mary to the King in State Papers.

suitable establishment, but was not restored in blood, still remaining by law a bastard. For a moment, however, the king thought of marrying her to the Duke of Orleans, and of declaring them his heirs; but this project fell to the ground as soon as Jane Seymour gave signs of becoming a mother.

Meanwhile Cromwell, as the king's vicar general in affairs ecclesiastical, carried on the work of suppression and reformation with a vigour that astonished men's minds. But never was there any exploit seemingly so full of hazard and danger more easily achieved than was the subversion of our English monasteries.* The church commissioners presented a startling report of the vices and deceptions of the monks and nuns, and, what was of equal weight in the condemnation, they sent in the title-deeds of their estates, and the inventory of their plate, jewels, and ready money. Upon this a bill was introduced, giving to the king and his heirs all monastic establishments the revenues of which did not exceed 200l. a-year, with every kind of property attached to them, whether real or personal. Three hundred and eighty of the lesser houses fell within this category, and were suppressed, whereby the king was enriched by 32,000l. a-year, in addition to 100,000l. in ready money, plate, and jewels. According to one writer, the bill was not passed through the House of Commons without some difficulty; but Henry, sending for the members, told them that he would have the bill or their heads,-and so they passed it.

He

The

The parliament, which by successive prorogations had sate for the unprecedented term of six years, was now dissolved; and Henry, after all their passive obedience, seems to have been disgusted at this their last and feeble effort at opposition. now named other commissioners to take possession of the suppressed monasteries, and to prepare measures for the seizure of others. If these men, mostly the friends of Cromwell or of Cranmer, had a better religion before their eyes, they certainly were not blind to the charms of lucre, and the temptations of fair houses and fat glebes; and most of them made a very rich harvest for themselves out of the spoils of the monks and nuns. superiors of the suppressed houses were promised small pensions for life, which were very irregularly paid. All the monks not twenty-four years of age were absolved from their vows, and turned loose on the world without any kind of provision: the rest, if they wished to continue in the profession, were divided among the greater houses that were still left standing. The poor nuns were turned adrift to beg or starve, having nothing given to them save one common gown for each. These things of themselves were distasteful to the vulgar sort, of whom each one did, as it were, claim a share in the goods of the church, for many, being neither monks nor allied to monks, did, notwithstanding, conceive that it might hereafter come to

• Godwin.

pass, that either their children, friends, or kindred might obtain their share, whereas, when all this property was once confiscated, they could never hope for any such advantages. But the popular commiseration for the thousands of monks and nuns who were, almost without warning given, thrust out of doors and committed to the mercy of the world, became a more forcible cause of discontent. There were not wanting desperate men to take advantage of this state of the public feeling, and it was diligently rumoured in all parts that this was but the beginning of greater evils and more general spoliations,-only a trial of their patience, -that as yet the shrubs and underwood were but touched, but, unless a speedy remedy were applied, the end would be with the fall of the lofty oaks."* At the same time the crowds of poor, who, by a defective but ancient system, had derived their support from the monastic establishments, became furious at finding their resources cut off, and at seeing the monks who had fed them now begging like themselves by the road-side. In the midst of these general discontents Cranmer and Cromwell issued certain doctrinal injunctions to the clergy, which were too novel to find immediate favour with the multitude; and certain Protestant reformers, who had more courage than they, ventured to print books against image-worship, auricular confession, transubstantiation, and other fundamental tenets and practices of the Roman church. The king, who assumed all the authority in matters of dogmas that had ever been claimed by the popes, and much more than they had ever put in practice in England, pronounced awards and sentences which irritated both parties alike, and all these questions were referred to him,-thus occupying a good deal of his time, and keeping in dangerous activity his old polemical bile. We find the Lord Chancellor Audley writing in great perturbation to Cromwell, telling him that there is a book come forth in print touching the taking away of images, and begging to know whether he was privy to the publishing thereof, which Cranmer probably was, though, had such a fact been known to his master at that moment, his neck would have been in jeopardy. The chancellor goes on to say, "I assure you, in the parts where I have been, some discord there is, and diversity of opinions among the people, touching worshipping saints and images, and for creeping (kneeling) at cross, and such like ceremonies heretofore used in the church, which discord were good should be put to silence; and this book will make much business in the same if it should go forth. Wherefore I pray you I may be advertised whether ye know it or no, for I intend to send for the printers and stop them; but there may be many abroad. It were good that the preachers and the people abstained from opinions of such things till such time as, by the report of such as the king's highness hath appointed for searching and ordering of laws of the church, his grace may put a final order in such things, how his people

⚫ Godwin.