On 13th May 1536, two days before her trial, Queen Anne Boleyn’s household was broken up.
On the same day, her former sweetheart, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, denied once more having been precontracted to marry the queen…
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I wonder if Anne was informed that her household had been disbanded, it would have added more to her misery and the king had sent several of these women to attend her but they were not her friends, , mean whilst Sir Edmund Baynton Anne’s vice chamberlain was in discussion with her old love Henry Percy the Earl of Northumberland trying to get him to agree he had a pre contract with the queen, therefore making her marriage null and void, Henry V111’s marital affairs were becoming more farcical every day, now he wanted Percy to back track on his previous statement he had made several years earlier, when he had been forced to deny there was any pre contract as the king wished to marry Anne, fast forward to the once eager bridegroom being replaced by a disgruntled husband, and here was the king now trying to get out of his marriage to the same lady, so he wanted Percy’s help would he agree there had been a pre contract? Percy must have looked on aghast at Baynton it must have seemed to him that Anne was in a sense the bane of his life, they had been separated when young, he had had a most unhappy marriage with the woman his father had forced him to marry, he must have recalled the big figure of the Cardinal brow beating him into submission when he berated him for daring to fall in love with Anne Boleyn, that foolish girl, he had wept and his father had been sent for, where he to continued to bully his unhappy son, Anne had been sent back to Hever and Percy had gone onto marry Lady Mary Talbot but they hated each other, now years later he was no longer a timid boy but an Earl and he told Baynton he could not do what the king requested, he wrote Cromwell a letter reminding him he had sworn on oath there had been no pre contract, to renage on that now meant he was in peril of his soul, he must have silently been furious at the way the king played roughshod with his subjects feelings and also at the way the woman who he had wanted to marry, had been cruelly taken from him to become mistress of the king, only for her now to be abandoned by him, Percy must have felt he would never have abandoned Anne Boleyn and his life had been tainted with sadness, sadly Percy was suffering from some unknown illness which later was to claim his life, it could well have been consumption as at the queens trial later he was known to collapse after declaring the guilty verdict, it is easy to say his was another life ruined by King Henry V111.