Mark Smeaton

• 1. Introduction

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  Mark Smeaton was around 23 years old on the 17th of May 1536. That morning he was led to his execution near the Tower of London. Before the assembled crowd, he said: "Masters, I pray you all pray for me, for I have deserved the death." Of all five men executed that day for alleged adultery with Queen Anne Boleyn, Smeaton alone made no claim of innocence. That admission has troubled historians for nearly five centuries. Had he genuinely been the queen's lover? Had he confessed under duress? Or had he been destroyed by a man with the power to make any charge stick?

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• 2. A Carpenter's Son

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  The surname Smeaton may derive from the Flemish-French names "de Smet" or "de Smedt," suggesting a family with roots outside England. Little else about his origins is recorded. It is believed his father worked as a carpenter and his mother as a seamstress. That modest background would matter enormously once he entered the royal court.

  Smeaton first found his place in the choir of Cardinal Wolsey. When Wolsey fell from favor, Smeaton was transferred to Henry VIII's Chapel Royal, where his musical ability caught the attention of Queen Anne Boleyn. In 1532 he was named a Groom of the Privy Chamber. He could play the lute, the viol, the virginals, and the organ. At court he was also noted as a handsome dancer.

  Yet Smeaton's low birth marked a ceiling he could not cross. He was never admitted to the Queen's intimate circle of companions. Anne had already made clear she would not address him as she would a nobleman. Thomas Cromwell, the king's most powerful minister, would soon find in Smeaton a useful pawn.

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• 3. A Window at Winchester

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  Anne noticed Smeaton standing miserable at a round window in her chamber of presence at Winchester. As Anne herself described the encounter, it happened "on Saturday before May Day," when she had summoned him to play the virginals. She asked why he was so sad; he gave a vague reply. Anne said: "You may not look to have me speak to you as I should do to a nobleman, because you are an inferior person." Smeaton answered: "No, no, Madam. A look sufficeth, thus fare you well." Within days, this exchange had been relayed to Thomas Cromwell.

  Cromwell was looking for evidence that Anne had committed adultery and treason. It is generally accepted that the charges against Anne were designed to free Henry VIII so he could marry Jane Seymour. On the 30th of April 1536, on Cromwell's orders, Smeaton was arrested. Cromwell brought him to his own house in Stepney. According to the Spanish Chronicle, Cromwell had Smeaton tortured there with a knotted cord twisted around his eyes.

  At 6 pm on the 1st of May 1536, Smeaton was transferred to the Tower of London. Anne had not been told of his arrest and had not noticed his disappearance. Before his arrest, Smeaton had been observed spending lavishly on horses and liveries, yet he earned only £100 a year. That discrepancy was taken as evidence the Queen had paid him for his services as her lover. Henry VIII married Jane Seymour less than two weeks after Anne's execution.

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• 4. A Confession and Four Names

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  Smeaton's confession at the Tower named four members of the Queen's circle as her alleged lovers. He stated he had been with Anne at Greenwich on the 13th of May 1535. Records place her not at Greenwich that day but at Richmond. The confession did not align with the facts.

  Sir Francis Weston, Henry Norris, William Brereton, and George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, were all subsequently arrested. None of the four had been tortured, as Smeaton had been. All four maintained their innocence until the end. Of all those charged, Smeaton's case attracted the greatest public scandal. People who knew of the charges were shocked that the Queen would allegedly have taken a lover of such low social standing.

  A 19th-century English writer, Agnes Strickland, gave a somewhat different account of how Smeaton came to confess. Strickland maintained he was not tortured but coaxed into signing an incriminating deposition by Sir William Fitzwilliam, 1st Earl of Southampton. Fitzwilliam, noticing Smeaton's terror, said: "Subscribe, Mark, and you will see what will come of it." However the confession was obtained, observers drew a grim conclusion. It was generally said that he had his life promised him, but it was not fit to let him live to tell tales. All those arrested would be tried before the month of May was out.

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• 5. The Scaffold

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  Elizabeth Browne, Countess of Worcester, was thought to be the lady-in-waiting who alleged the Queen admitted her court to her chamber at undue hours. The formal case against Smeaton at Westminster Hall rested on his expenditure and the one reported conversation. It was generally believed that no verdict other than guilty was ever in question.

  On hearing that Smeaton was clapped in irons, Anne replied: "He was a person of mean birth and the others were all gentlemen." Later, when she learned that Smeaton had failed to retract his confession in fully explicit terms, she expressed anger. Their relationship, whatever it had been, offered her no protection.

  On the day of his execution, Smeaton stumbled back from the bloody scaffold before collecting himself. He gave no last-minute retraction. His form of execution was beheading rather than the quartering typically reserved for commoners. The reason was thought to be his cooperation with those who had built the case against the Queen. His body was buried in a common grave with William Brereton, one of the other condemned men.

  Years later, Queen Mary convinced herself that her sister Elizabeth was the illegitimate daughter of Smeaton and Anne Boleyn. Mary repeated on more than one occasion that Elizabeth had the "face and countenance" of Smeaton. Elizabeth's resemblance to Henry VIII was, however, so plain that Mary found few people willing to agree. A poem written within Smeaton's own lifetime had already cast him in a more considered light.

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• 6. A Rotten Twig

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  Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, who had known Smeaton at court, wrote a verse for those condemned alongside Anne Boleyn. Of Smeaton, Wyatt wrote: "A rotten twig upon so high a tree / Hath slipped thy hold, and thou art dead and gone." The image was unsparing. Wyatt acknowledged Smeaton's ambition but offered him no absolution, and left the question of his innocence pointedly open.

  Gaetano Donizetti placed Smeaton at the center of his opera Anna Bolena, assigning the character to a trouser role traditionally sung by a contralto. Screen portrayals arrived in 1969, when Gary Bond depicted him being tortured by Cromwell's henchmen in Anne of the Thousand Days. Michael Osborne played the role in 1971 in The Six Wives of Henry VIII, with one scene recreating the knotted rope. The 1972 film Henry VIII and His Six Wives gave the role to Damien Thomas. Its depiction of his torture was more explicit than the 1971 television version. Jack Benny gave the character a comic treatment on The Jack Benny Program. The episode, titled "Jack Locked in the Tower of London," first aired on the 2nd of December 1956.

  Hilary Mantel's novels Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies offered the fullest fictional account of Smeaton's final months. In Mantel's telling, the executions were the result of a deliberate vendetta by Cromwell, taken in revenge for the mockery of Cardinal Wolsey's downfall. Max Fowler played him in the television adaptation; Joey Batey played him in the Royal Shakespeare Company stage productions. Showtime's The Tudors, in its second season, depicted Smeaton, played by David Alpay, as having a sexual relationship with George Boleyn. That interpretation drew on the theories of scholar Retha Warnicke, who argued the two had been sexually intimate. Chris Clynes played the role in a 2016 BBC documentary drama, The Six Queens of Henry VIII. In 2024, Nitai Levi played Smeaton in Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, directed by Lucy Bailey at the Chichester Festival Theatre.

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