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Westminster
    October 31, 1535, compassing the King’s death, at Westminster
    November 2 and 5, 1535, with Rochford, at Westminster
    November 27, 1535, inveigling the men to treason, at Westminster
    December 22 and 29, 1535, with Rochford, at Eltham
    January 8, 1536, compassing the King’s death, at Greenwich

    It seems barely credible that with all these intrigues going on over a period of nearly three years, evidence of them had only just come to light. As Ives says, “quadruple adultery plus incest invites disbelief,” 32 while not even the ever watchful Chapuys, Anne’s enemy, who would have relishedany opportunity to discredit her, ever hinted at any infidelities on her part, although he gleefully reported gossip that the King was unfaithful to her. 33 If the charges relating to adultery were based on fact, then for the greater part of her marriage Anne had not scrupled to hop from bed to bed, slaking her lust with five men, one her own brother.
    It has been said that the word “violate,” as used in the indictments, could not have applied to Anne, because she was the seductress, and that since only the rape of the Queen was treason under the 1351 statute, none of the men should have been indicted for treason on this count. 34 Yet in the sixteenth century the word “violation” had a broader meaning (as it does now), and did not just mean rape, but dishonor, transgression, desecration, irreverence, or infraction. It is clear that the word is used in these senses in the indictment, while adultery with the King’s consort was treason under the 1534 Act of Succession because it impugned his issue; the very words of the act were used in the indictments to allege the “slander, danger, detriment, and derogation” of Henry’s heirs, and the royal justices ruled that the Queen’s offenses were treason under that act. 35
    Anne’s conduct was made out to be all the more disgraceful, given that she had been pregnant four times during this period and presumably hopeful of presenting Henry VIII with a living son. The accusation of adultery with Norris in October 1533 might well have been leveled to imply that Norris was responsible for Anne’s second pregnancy, which became evident in December that year, and that the guilty pair had compromised the succession; it even prompted some people to wonder if Norris was in fact Elizabeth’s father, even though there is no suggestion of this in the indictments.
    Similarly, charging Rochford with committing incest with Anne in November 1535 may have been intended to suggest that he fathered the son of which she miscarried. Warnicke believes that were the fetus normal, there would have been no cause to go to such lengths to show that the King could not have been its father, and that the salacious details of Anne inciting her brother and the other men were intended to prove that she was a witch. Yet there is no mention of witchcraft in the indictment, nor of a deformed fetus. These shocking and damning factors would surely have been exploited by Anne’s accusers, rather than kept secret, and made the case against her more convincing to contemporary eyes.
    The final charge—of conspiring the death of the King—was the mostheinous, for it was high treason of the first order. There could be no doubt that if guilty, this woman deserved to die.
    Certainly the charges were shocking—Strickland was horrified by their “extravagant and unverified coarseness, which cannot be permitted to sully the pages of any work intended for family reading”—but it would be wrong to take them at face value, especially that of plotting regicide. Such folly would have been barely understandable were it driven by a grand passion, but Anne could not even have been motivated by love, given that she was allegedly bent on marrying any one of her supposed lovers and sleeping with them all at different times.
    Jane Dormer later opined that Anne, “much wanting to have a man-child to succeed, and