The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (50 page)

On the morning of May 18, a little before nine o’clock, the time appointed for the execution, Kingston received orders from Cromwell to “have strangers [foreigners] conveyed out of the Tower.” There seems to have been official concern that foreign ambassadors would send home sympathetic reports of Anne’s end that could reflect badly on the King. The constable duly sent Richard Gresham, the Sheriff of London (and future Lord Mayor), and one William Cooke to see that this was done. This obliged him to delay the execution until midday, and he sent to inform Anne of this; the bringer of the difficult news was probably his wife.

It was not long before Anne summoned him, “and at my coming, she said, ‘Master Kingston, I hear say I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought then to be dead and past my pain.’ I told her it should be no pain, it was so subtle; and then she said, ‘I have heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck.’ And she put her hand about it, laughing heartily.” Kingston observed to Cromwell, “I have seen many men and also women executed, and all they have been in great sorrow, but to my knowledge, this lady has much joy and pleasure in death. Sir, her almoner is continually with her, and has been since two of the clock after midnight.”
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Both Chapuys and Kingston testified to Anne’s readiness to die, and there can be little doubt that it was genuine. She had been accused, probably falsely, of the vilest of crimes, and lost nearly everything that mattered: her husband, her brother, her power, her married status, her friends, her possessions, and her reputation. Her daughter had been branded a bastard, and there was nothing she could do about it. Five men had died on her account. Her father had abandoned her. Her mother’s grief was unimaginable. Barely recovered from a miscarriage, she herself had suffered three weeks of unthinkable anxiety and dread, and now she faced a violent death. The husband who won her so dearly, but utterly abandoned her, had carried out his threat to lower her as much as he’d raised her. There was little left to live for, so it is small wonder that she wanted her wretched existence to end. She had only her strong will and her faith to sustain her through these terrible final hours.

It had hardly seemed worth the effort to clear the Tower of foreigners, for “the number of strangers passed not thirty,” as Kingston informed Master Secretary, “and not many of those armed; and the ambassador of the Emperor had a servant there, and [he was] honestly put out. Sir, if we have not an hour certain [for the execution], as it may be known in London, I think here will be but few, and I think a reasonable number were best, for I suppose she will declare herself to be a good woman for all but the King at the hour of her death.”
¹⁵

It is often claimed that Cromwell and Kingston kept postponing Anne’s execution because they wished to preempt crowds gathering and the risk of demonstrations in her favor—both Chapuys and Constantine attest to the growing belief of the people that she had been unjustly condemned.
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But it is clear from Kingston’s letter that both he and Cromwell wanted a reasonable number of witnesses, so that justice could be seen to be properly done.
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Chapuys was ill at this time, but could only deplore the fact that “strangers were not to be admitted” to witness the execution,
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since he would be obliged to rely on the testimony of Englishmen for his reports. He would have been vexed to learn that the author of the “Spanish Chronicle,” who had friends living within the Tower walls, managed to get into the fortress overnight, in defiance of the authorities, and “took good note of all that passed.”

“Expecting her end,” Anne had “desired that no one would trouble her devotions that morning.” But when noon came, there was no dread summons, for sufficient time had to be allowed for spectators to gather. The fact that at least a thousand people found out when the execution was finally to take place, and would be present, indicates that news of its deferral spread quickly, and that there was never any determined attempt at a last-minute postponement to outfox would-be spectators. Had there been, it follows that only official visitors would have been admitted to the Tower.

But the delay was torture for Anne. “When the appointed hour passed, she was disappointed.”
¹⁹
Kingston now had to inform her that her execution would be postponed until nine o’clock the following morning. Chapuys learned from his lady spy that “when the command came to put off the execution till today, she appeared very sorry, praying the Constable of the Tower that, for the honor of God, he would beg the King that, since she was in a good state and disposed for death, she might be dispatched immediately.”
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It was “not that she desired death, but she had thought herself prepared to die, and feared that the delay might weaken her resolve.”
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But Kingston was powerless to change the arrangements.

In the hours that remained to her, Anne sought fortitude in prayer and in “consoling her ladies several times, telling them that [death] was not a thing to be regretted by Christians, and she hoped to be quit of all unhappiness, with various other good counsels.”
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She also reflected on the causes of her plight. “The woman who has charge of her,” who did “not conceal anything” from Chapuys, sent to tell him “that the said Messalina” could not imagine that anyone but Chapuys had gotten her in disgrace with the King, for “from the moment of my arrival at this court [not, obviously, in 1529, the date of his original arrival at the English
court, but on the previous April 18,
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the King no longer looked upon her with the same eyes as before.”] This was surely misquoted, or an exaggeration, and there is plenty of eyewitness evidence to prove it. Chapuys was gratified that Anne held him accountable for her doom: “I was flattered by the compliment, but it is well for me she did not escape, because with her humanity, she would have cast me to the dogs!”
²⁴

Henry, meanwhile, was preparing for his wedding to Jane Seymour. His conduct in the days leading up to Anne’s execution astonished all who witnessed it. Chapuys noted that “His Majesty has been gayer since the arrest than ever before. He is going out to dinner here, there, and everywhere with the ladies. Sometimes he returns along the river after midnight to the sound of many instruments or the voices of the singers of his chamber, who do their utmost to interpret his delight at being rid of that thin old woman.” On the evening of May 18, Henry had himself rowed to Chelsea, where he visited Jane Seymour, who was carrying herself as if she were queen already, and her family.

Chapuys thought Jane’s discretion at this time “very commendable.”
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In contrast, Strickland, writing in Queen Victoria’s reign, thought her conduct “shameless,” asserting that her willingness to entertain Henry VIII’s courtship “was the commencement of the severe calamities that befell her mistress. Scripture points out as an especial odium the circumstances of a handmaid taking the place of her mistress. A sickening sense of horror must pervade every right-feeling mind when the proceedings of the discreet Jane Seymour are considered. She received the addresses of her mistress’s husband, she passively beheld the mortal anguish of Anne Boleyn, she saw a series of murderous accusations got up against the Queen, which finally brought her to the scaffold.” Strickland conveniently forgot that Anne, only a decade earlier, had begun scheming to supplant
her
royal mistress, and later tried to compass that lady’s death.

There is no record of Jane’s feelings about the woman she had supplanted, who was awaiting death on the morrow a mile or so downriver, and whose crown she would shortly wear. In refusing the King’s advances without removing herself from his presence, and accepting her role as his wife’s replacement (which is just what Anne, in her day, had done), she behaved discreditably.
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Probably she had had little choice in the matter, with the King ardently pursuing her and her family vigorously maneuvering
her into the most advantageous marriage a girl of her rank could ever make. Yet Jane was probably happy to comply: her championing of the cause of Lady Mary shows her to have been Anne’s enemy and implies that she did not accept Anne as Henry’s true wife; she did not personally compass her end, although she was willing to exploit the situation to her own advantage, even when it became clear that her marriage to the King would be achieved literally over Anne’s dead body. Her tacit—and chilling—complicity in Anne’s destruction strongly suggests that she believed her former mistress deserving of the fate that lay in store for her.

Sleep eluded Anne on her last night. She spent the hours of darkness on her knees in prayer, or in conversation with her attendants. Chapuys was told that “the night before she was beheaded, she talked and jested, saying, among other things, that those bragging, clever people who had invented an unheard-of name for the good Queen who would not be hard put to it to invent one for her, for they would call her “la Royne Anne Sans Tête” [Queen Anne Lackhead]. And then she laughed heartily, knowing she must die the next day.”
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In a more sober moment, on “the day before she was executed, she said she did not consider that she was condemned by Divine Judgment, except for having caused the ill-treatment of the princess, and for having conspired her death.”
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The cartographer and historian John Speed, who was born about sixteen years after these events, and whose book
The History of Great Britain
was published in 1611, recounts how, at the last, Anne tried to make her peace with Lady Mary. He claimed that his story was “a nobleman’s relation,” but omitted to name the nobleman concerned. Speed states that Anne:

Speed was highly respected as a historian in his day, and was elected a member of the Society of Antiquaries of London. By this means he became acquainted with the greatest scholars of the time, including William Camden, Elizabeth I’s first biographer, Camden being one of several historians who contributed to Speed’s great work. Speed had access to sources now lost to us; he himself says he consulted “many manuscripts, notes, and records” and that he had free access to the vast library of Sir Robert Cotton. His credentials are seemingly impeccable, and on the surface it sounds plausible that Anne, facing eternity, wished to make amends to the stepdaughter she had treated so unkindly, and perhaps hoped that Mary, in return, would look sympathetically on Anne’s motherless daughter.

Apart from Anne’s statement that her title was gone, the details sound authentic, and Lady Kingston is known to have visited Mary at Hunsdon on or before May 26, a week after Anne’s death; her visit is recorded in a letter of that date from Mary to Cromwell. It is surprising, though, that Chapuys—who, on May 20, reported Anne’s observation that her execution was a divine judgment on her for her treatment of Mary—did not get to hear anything about Lady Kingston repeating Anne’s words to Mary. We know he had an informant among Anne’s ladies, and it may not have been Lady Kingston herself; yet if the latter had been charged by Anne with this mission, then surely she or Mary would have told Chapuys about it. For this reason, and the fact that it comes from such a vague source, most historians dismiss Speed’s story as apocryphal. It appears that the chief purpose of Lady Kingston’s visit was to advise Mary on how best to approach her
father with a view to a reconciliation between them. She would also have been able to give Mary a firsthand account of Anne’s last days and execution. But Chapuys states only that, in her final hours, Anne was adamant that her condemnation was a judgment of God. Full of remorse for her cruel treatment of Mary, and for plotting her death, she spoke often of her, her guilt clearly weighing heavily upon her conscience.
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Tradition once had it that Anne Boleyn composed two poems shortly before her execution.
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Both express poignantly the kind of thoughts that must have been in her head at this time. Her authorship of them was attested to by Sir John Hawkins (1719-89): in his five-volume work
A History of Music
, a repository of valuable scholarly information, he states that these verses were communicated to him by “a very judicious antiquary, lately deceased.” However, one of the poems, “Queen Anne’s Lament,” was probably written by the composer Robert Johnson
(ca
. 1583-1633); it is a polemic protesting her innocence: