Volume II Part 47 (1/2)
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.]