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discovery had angered the king, especially after her long refusal to become his mistress. Together with Norfolk, for once his ally, Cromwell planted misgivings about her fidelity in the perennially suspicious mind of Henry, who in April set up an official commission to investigate Anne’s private life. Cromwell seized the opportunity to fabricate a list of scabrous accusations.

    On 2 May Queen Anne was sent to the Tower, and that evening, bathed in tears, Henry told the Duke of Richmond and the Lady Mary that she had been planning to poison them. Later, he claimed that since her marriage Anne must have committed adultery with at least a hundred men. His lack of balance is apparent from Chapuys’s description of how, after giving vent to frenzied outbursts about being betrayed, he passed his evenings in joyous musical parties on the river in a gilded barge filled with ladies, returning to Greenwich or York House during the small hours of the morning, in an age when most men and women rose at 4 a.m.
    A fortnight later, Anne was tried at the Tower before an audience of over 2,000, to be found guilty of preposterous charges of adultery with four lovers and of incest with her brother, despite her convincing rebuttals. She was even accused of plotting her husband’s death, together with her alleged paramours. (The five unfortunate men had already gone to the scaffold.) Her sentence was burning or beheading, at the king’s pleasure. Henry graciously settled for the latter. She went to the block on 19 May, less than three weeks after her arrest, dying under the sword instead of the axe with admirable courage.
    Within under a fortnight her husband had married her former lady-in-waiting Jane Seymour. A pale, gentle, mouselike blonde from an old but undistinguished family of Wiltshire knights, not very clever, the new queen was a tranquil-tempered, good-natured and kindly young woman, who upset nobody.
    England rejoiced for days on end at ‘the ruin of the concubine’. Everybody believed that now both Anne and Katherine were dead, Henry would return to Rome, while they were delighted by the prospect of the Lady Mary recovering her position. If Chapuys is to be believed, even Queen Jane suggested to Henry that Mary should be reinstated, only to be told she was a fool for asking such a favour. But it was clear that ‘the concubine’s little bastard’ (the future Queen Elizabeth) would also be excluded from the succession.

    Even so, Lord Hussey and his wife remained convinced that Mary was going to regain her position as heir to the throne. Had Lady Hussey known about the dreams of the White Rose party, devoted to the Lady Mary as she was, she would certainly have been in sympathy with them. Visiting her in June, she was heard referring to Mary as ‘the princess’, by which she meant Princess of Wales, and was promptly arrested, while her husband was dismissed from his post as the girl’s chamberlain. Sent to the Tower for interrogation, Lady Hussey was not released until the end of September, her health seriously damaged. The king thought she had been encouraging his daughter’s refusal to accept the Act which disinherited her.
    By now Henry was so infuriated by his daughter’s obstinacy that he threatened to have her executed. In the end, Chapuys persuaded the isolated, humiliated, girl – who was suffering from constant bouts of painful ill health – to give in and to acknowledge her father as head of the Church. Finally, she accepted that she had become a bastard, even if it meant renouncing her loyalty to Rome and her mother’s memory. Otherwise she would have gone to the scaffold – some of the council were urging the king to put her to death.
    In the ambassador’s view, her treatment was intended as a warning to her supporters. Besides Lady Hussey, others who had hoped for Mary’s reinstatement were questioned, among them Lord Exeter and the Treasurer Sir William FitzWilliam, who for a time were not allowed to