Free The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown by Claire Ridgway Page A

of misprision, treason, rebellion, felonies, murder, homicide, rioting, plotting, insurrection, extortion, oppression, contempt, concealment, ignorance, negligence, falsities, deception, conspiracy and being an accessory to these crimes. 2 The job of the commission was to investigate alleged crimes and to determine if there was indeed a case. These commissions were not common-place; in fact, there were only seventeen set up during the whole of Henry VIII's reign. 3 The fact that these commissions were so rare, combined with the fact that they were set up to judge offences in the counties of Middlesex and Kent – the counties of the grand juries which would later investigate the alleged offences of Anne Boleyn – suggest that the plot against Anne Boleyn was well underway at this time. These commissions surely could not have been a coincidence. 4
    Historian Eric Ives notes that Henry VIII's signature was not on the patent of the oyer and terminer. This may suggest that the commissions were ordered not by the King, but by Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Audley. Both Ives and Alison Weir explain how these commissions were usually only ordered after an arrest. For example, in the case of Sir Thomas More, an oyer was only issued after he had been interrogated for eight weeks. Nobody had been arrested for treason in April 1536, so why the commissions? Could it be that Cromwell and Audley wanted to move quickly before the King could change his mind? Before Anne could talk him round?
    Did the setting up of these commissions signal the end for Anne Boleyn? Was this event "virtually a death warrant for Anne"? 5 I believe so. I think it is too much of a coincidence; these commissions in 1536 were certainly only used in the case of the coup against the Boleyns. No other case of treason was investigated at this time. However, G W Bernard 6 believes that Henry VIII was fully committed to Anne Boleyn right up until her arrest and that the commissions need not have been set up to deal with Anne. He notes that as late as 25th April Henry VIII was sending instructions to Richard Pate, his ambassador in Rome, regarding his divorce from Catherine of Aragon. But was Henry just keeping up appearances or were Cromwell and Audley acting alone at this point? It's impossible to know, but something was amiss.

25th April 1536 – Most Entirely Beloved Wife
    On 25th April 1536, a day after the commissions of oyer and terminer had been appointed, King Henry VIII wrote letters to his ambassadors abroad: Richard Pate 1 in Rome, and Stephen Gardiner and John Wallop 2 in Paris. In these letters, the King referred to Anne Boleyn as "our most dear and most entirely beloved wife the Queen" and wrote of his hope for a son:
"For as much as there is great likelihood and appearance that God will send unto Us heirs male to succeed Us." 3
    If we did not know with hindsight that trouble was brewing then we would think that all was rosy with the royal couple, that Henry had high hopes for the future and had no intention of setting Anne aside. What we will never know is whether these words were part of an act or whether Henry VIII was unaware of Cromwell's plans at this point. Henry still seemed to have been committed to Anne on 25th April 1536 and was still pushing for the rest of Europe to recognise her as his rightful wife and queen.

26th April 1536 – Anne Boleyn and Matthew Parker
    Around the 26th April 1536, Queen Anne Boleyn met with her chaplain of two years, her "countryman", 32 year old Matthew Parker. Parker 1 recorded later that Anne had asked him to watch over her daughter, the two year-old Princess Elizabeth, if anything happened to her. 2 She was entrusting him with her daughter's spiritual care.
    Historian Eric Ives 3 writes that this was a request that Parker never forgot and something which stayed with him for ever. Parker obviously came to be important to Elizabeth because she made him her Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559. It was a post which Parker