Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens. Jane Dunn

that Henry and Anne’s son was more a miscarriage than a stillbirth. Anne blamed this untimely birth on the shock to her nervous system caused by news that Henry had fallen heavily while jousting and, it was rumoured, lain unconscious for two hours. She also said that her husband’s blatant flirtations, particularly with one of her own ladies in waiting, Jane Seymour, had added to her upset and strain during this precarious time. Anne was desperate to absolve herself from some of the blame for the failure of this last pregnancy. But the tragedy was possibly even graver than the loss of a prince, for Henry articulated the chilling accusation that Anne’s powers sprang from a sinister and supernatural source, and this miscarriage of the longed-for son was her punishment alone, relieving him from responsibility. Chapuys, the busy and hostile Spanish ambassador, reported something the king had said in confidence to one of his courtiers in a serious and confessional tone: ‘that he [the king] had made this marriage seduced by witchcraft, and for that reason he considered it null; and that this was evident, because God did not permit them to have male issue’.¹⁷ The fact that it was assumed that Anne was now incapable of producing a healthy male heir could be an expression of the fear that Anne was somehow tainted by her involvement with unnatural practices, like sorcery.^* Her many detractors now had a powerful weapon to use against her.

      Accusations of witchcraft were easily made and impossible to disprove. The existence of witches was accepted even by the learned and rational. It was self-evident that their powers were malignant and destructive, the result of a supposed secret pact with the devil. They often bore the brunt of the everyday struggle to manage and understand the natural world. It was generally believed that with a few incantations and a sacrifice or two a witch could blight the harvest, turn milk sour, make bonny children sicken and die. She could create a flash flood out of nothing, dry up the wells, invoke a freak storm, kill lambs with a glance and strike land, animals and women barren.

      It was in the area of sex that the activities of witches were most feared and decried. A witch was represented as the embodiment of the inverted qualities of womankind: where natural women were weaker than men and submissive, witches were harsh, with access to forbidden power; where women had kindness and charm, witches were full of vengeance and the will to harm; where women were sexually passive, witches were voracious in their appetites and depraved. Witches were privy to recipes for aphrodisiacs and could make men fall helplessly in love with the most unlikely of women – even with their own benighted selves.

      Lust was the domain of witchcraft. Incest and sodomy were intercourse with the devil and witches invariably gave birth to deformed children as a result of these deviant practices. Certainly it was believed that just as a man could be bewitched into illicit sex so he could also be rendered impotent. It was rumoured witches would even sacrifice babies in the pursuit of their terrible power.

      The fact that proof of witchcraft was spurious was no obstacle to the accusation. It was a powerful and ancient belief which gave a meaning to misfortune in a world of suffering, and a cathartic focus for blame and revenge. Any woman who was somehow eccentric to her immediate society, difficult, lonely, odd in her behaviour, unbridled in her speech – even just the possessor of a cat – was at risk of becoming the scapegoat for her community, her perceived malevolence responsible for all the ills that befell it. Witchcraft was established as a crime in the parliamentary acts of 1542 and 1563 and evidence was a congeries of hearsay, superstition, malice and fear. There were periods when witch-hunts were instigated as a manifestation of the spiritual war between God and the devil. Likely women were sought out and prosecuted, their confessions often extracted under torture. Many were executed as witches, often on the vaguest anecdotes of a neighbour’s ill fortune and a run of unlucky coincidences.

      Accusations of witchcraft were largely made against poor rural women. But it was a charge that could be levelled against any woman (men were rarely charged) and there were cases of aristocratic women accused of weaving malevolent spells, with mysterious powers to do harm, the crime being maleficium. Anne Boleyn’s confidence and sense of power had been noted as unbecoming in a woman. Now, in her failure for a third time to present the king and his people with the necessary male heir, Anne’s downfall was inevitable. This was all the more brutally so if the failure of her last pregnancy could be used to intimate her gross malevolence and unnatural appetites.

      The speed and ruthlessness of Queen Anne’s destruction suggest fear of her power amongst the king’s closest advisers, most notably Cromwell, and a growing animus towards her, disgust even, on Henry’s part. Henry was susceptible to his own propaganda, and it was only a small matter to transform convenient surmise into cold reality. There was a widespread belief that a witch bore a mark on her face or body which revealed her true nature: either hidden peculiarities like a third nipple, a hairy birthmark, an odd lump, indentation or discoloration, or outright deformities. In the attempt to defame Anne as a witch, stories gained momentum after her death of an extra finger or some grotesque mole-like growth on her neck.

      The main published source for details of her disfigurement came from a Catholic priest who never knew or even saw her. Nicholas Sander’s tract De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani, posthumously published in 1585, described her fantastically libidinous life, labelled her marriage with the king as incestuous (claiming Anne was Henry’s daughter) and listed her physical imperfections thus: ‘Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair and an oval face of a sallowish complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. She had a projecting tooth under the top lip, and on her right hand six fingers. There was a large wen under her chin, and therefore to hide its ugliness she wore a high dress covering her throat.’¹⁸ Despite being under the closest scrutiny during her life as consort and queen, none of the contemporary chroniclers of the time mentioned any abnormalities in Anne’s appearance. In fact, the Venetian ambassador who, like his fellow hostile ambassadors, was avid for any disparaging detail to report home, thought her ‘of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised … and eyes, which are black and beautiful’.¹⁹

      Unable initially to find any legal reason to invalidate Anne and Henry’s marriage, her accusers sought another way to destroy her. Anne was a natural flirt and an accomplished social creature. Emotionally expressive and thin-skinned, her education in the French court had added to her manner a gloss of worldliness and wit that her more stolid compatriots regarded with some suspicion. To charge her with adultery of the most depraved kind seemed an obvious and usefully double-barrelled weapon: if it could be suggested that this last abortive pregnancy was the result of Anne’s moral turpitude with another man (or the devil) then Henry was absolved of any responsibility. The baby was then a punishment of Anne’s behaviour, not of his.

      The Tudor state could act with expedient ruthlessness. Within only three months of Anne’s miscarriage she and seven men were arrested and sent to the Tower. Of the two who were released one was the poet Thomas Wyatt, an admirer of Anne’s from before her marriage. The remaining five, however, including her own brother George Rochford, were accused of fornication with the queen. Only one, Mark Smeaton, a court musician and a gentle and artistic man, confessed, probably under torture, to this dangerous adultery: ‘The saying is he confessed, but he was first grievously racked,’ it was reported to Cromwell.²⁰

      The charges worked up to ensnare the queen and destroy the power of her family, by implicating her brother, involved Anne’s incitement of these men to commit adultery with her. A second charge of conspiring the king’s death was also brought. Again it was Anne’s malignancy, her powers of bewitchment, which were implied in the wording: ‘The said Queen and these other traitors … conspired the King’s death and destruction … And the King having a short time since become aware of the said abominable crimes and treasons against him took such inward displeasure and heaviness, especially from the said Queen’s malice and adultery, that certain harms and perils have befallen the royal body.’²¹ The evidence brought against the defendants was so tenuous as to be merely a gesture, an incoherent ragbag of gossip, innuendo