CHAPTER 12

Just, True, and Lawful Impediments

At some point between May 15 and 17—Strickland asserts it was on May 16—Henry VIII signed the death warrants of the Queen and the men who were to perish on her account. Six years later, when his fifth wife, Katherine Howard, was condemned to death by Act of Attainder, a wooden stamp bearing his signature was impressed on the document, sparing him the pain of signing away the life of a woman he had once loved. But in the case of Anne Boleyn, he had personally to put pen to parchment. In so doing, he was merely obeying the law.¹ There is no contemporary evidence that he took “a positive delight” in planning her execution, as one historian has written;² on the contrary, as will be seen, he was anxious to get it over with, and moved by pity—and pragmatism—to commute the sentence.

On the morning after the trials, Kingston went to York Place to see the King, one of the few privileged persons allowed to do so at this time. Later that day, back at the Tower, he wrote another letter to Cromwell: “This day I was with the King’s Grace, and declared the petitions of my lord of Rochford, wherein I was answered. Sir, the said lord much desireth to speak with you, which touched his conscience much, as he sayest, wherein I pray you I may know your pleasure, for because of my promise made unto my said lord to do the same.” Rochford was fretting about some debts of his that had not been settled, and Kingston had undertaken to raise the matter with Master Secretary.

One of the prisoners was spending his final hours carving Anne’s falcon badge on the wall of his cell in the Beauchamp Tower. This carving, which still survives, must date to the days after her condemnation, as the falcon is without its customary crown.

Although the King informed Kingston that the male prisoners were to die the next day, the Constable had not yet been given a date for Anne’s execution, nor been told if she was to be burned or beheaded, and had perhaps not liked to ask Henry face-to-face. Instead he raised the matter with Cromwell: “I shall desire you further to know the King’s pleasure touching the Queen, as well for her comfort as for the preparation of scaffolds and other necessaries concerning. The King’s Grace showed me that my lord of Canterbury should be her confessor, and [he] was here this day with the Queen, and not in that matter.”

Appointing no less a personage than the Archbishop of Canterbury, who knew her well, to look after Anne’s spiritual needs was another kindness on the King’s part, but there was an ulterior motive involved. Cranmer, perhaps advised by Dr. Sampson, had now found grounds for annulling Anne’s marriage to the King, but there is no record of what they were, as the case papers documenting his deliberations have disappeared, which has given rise to much speculation. He certainly did not argue—as the Imperialists wanted—that Henry’s union with Katherine of Aragon had after all been lawful, not after all the trouble Henry had gone to in having it dissolved and insisting he had been right to do so; moreover, to have acknowledged that union as valid would automatically have restored Lady Mary to the succession.

Charles Wriothesley states that the archbishop declared Anne’s marriage invalid on the supposition of a precontract with her former suitor, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and initially Cranmer did consider those grounds. Bishop Burnet asserts—without citing his source—that Anne would willingly have confessed to such a precontract in the hope of saving her life or, if worse came to worst, suffering the kinder death. But Percy himself thwarted her.

In the summer of 1523, according to the account of George Cavendish, Cardinal Wolsey’s gentleman-usher, Henry Percy and Anne Boleyn, headstrong young lovers, had secretly contracted to wed in the presence of witnesses, which was sufficient to create an impediment to any subsequent marriage with other partners. But by law such a precontract per verba de praesenti would have been invalid because Percy had been betrothed since 1516 to Lady Mary Talbot, whom he married in September 1523 after being forced by Cardinal Wolsey, on the King’s orders, to part from Anne. In the summer of 1532 the Countess of Northumberland had applied to Parliament for a divorce on the grounds that her husband had been precontracted to Anne at the time of their marriage, but the earl had that July sworn on oath that he had not been (see his letter below), whereupon Parliament turned down his wife’s petition.³

Undaunted, after Anne’s arrest Cranmer again approached Northumberland on the subject of the precontract, and again Percy denied its existence. A week later Cranmer was forced to admit to Cromwell that he had as yet found no grounds for the desired annulment, at which Cromwell sent Sir Reynold Carnaby, one of the King’s officers in the North and a man who would have known Percy well, to visit the earl at Brook House, his residence in Newington Green, Hackney, northeast of London, and put pressure on him to confess that he had indeed been precontracted to Anne. But Northumberland would not allow himself to be bullied, and on May 13, he sent an exasperated letter to Cromwell:

Mr. Secretary,

This shall be to signify unto you that I perceive by Sir Reynold Carnaby that there is a supposed precontract between the Queen and me; whereupon I was not only heretofore examined upon my oath before the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, but also received the Blessed Sacrament upon the same before the Duke of Norfolk and other the King’s Highness’s Council learned in the spiritual law; assuring you, Master Secretary, by the said oath and Blessed Body which afore I received, and hereafter intend to receive, that the same may be to my damnation if ever there were any contract or promise of marriage between her and me.⁴

Cromwell knew when he was beaten, and he directed Cranmer to find other grounds for the annulment of the royal marriage. In the end, according to Chapuys, the archbishop found a solution that was somewhat embarrassing and damaging to the King’s honor, which may account for the proceedings being held in camera. He cited the impediment raised by Henry’s sexual liaison with Mary Boleyn, which had placed him within the forbidden degrees of affinity to her sister Anne.⁵ In January 1528 the Pope, anxious to do anything to please the King but grant him the annulment he so desperately desired, had dealt with this impediment in a dispensation permitting Henry to marry anyone within the forbidden degrees (so long as it were not his brother’s widow) as soon as he was free to do so; in 1533, after Henry had broken with Rome, an Act of Parliament was passed permitting marriage with the sister of a discarded mistress, but that was followed by the Dispensations Act of March 1534, which decreed that existing papal dispensations would not be held as valid if they were contrary to “Holy Scripture and the laws of God.”⁶ In the end, in declaring Anne’s marriage null and void, Cranmer chose to follow the old canon law.

The preamble to a new Act of Succession that would be passed by Parliament in July 1536 was to be suitably discreet: the union had been dissolved because of “certain entirely just, true, and lawful impediments hitherto not publicly known” and “confessed by the Lady Anne before the most reverend father in God, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury,”⁷ presumably when he visited her on May 16, and by the King, the other party, probably days before that, because at some stage the Archbishop had forwarded copies of articles of objection to the validity of the marriage to both Henry and Anne, “that it might be for the salvation of their souls,” and summoned them to appear before his ecclesiastical court at Lambeth Palace to show why a sentence of nullity should not be passed.⁸

What exactly did Anne—and Henry—confess to Cranmer? It has been suggested that another possible ground for annulment was Anne’s having used witchcraft to render Henry impotent, recognized as an impediment since the twelfth century under canon law.⁹Yet while this construction may be placed on the evidence produced at George Boleyn’s trial, it is clear that both Henry and Anne confessed to knowing of a bar to their union, and that both their souls were in peril as a result, not just Anne’s. Thus we should conclude that the true cause confessed to Cranmer was that Henry and Anne knew their union was incestuous and invalid due to the existence of the impediment created by Henry’s liaison with Mary Boleyn, and were aware that the Dispensations Act had rendered their marriage unlawful. What amounts effectively to confirmation of this can be found in the 1536 Act of Succession, which banned marriages between people who came within this particular degree of consanguinity.¹⁰

Certainly the impediment of consanguinity was known by both Anne and Henry when they entered into their illicit union. But they had married in good faith, because in 1533 the Pope’s dispensation of 1528 could still have been cited. It was the Act of 1534 that rendered both the dispensation and the marriage invalid. Strictly speaking, the legitimacy of Princess Elizabeth, born before that date, of a marriage entered into in good faith, should never have been denied, but evidently Cranmer, Cromwell, and the King were not interested in such legal niceties.

When Cranmer saw Anne at the Tower on May 16, the purpose of his visit was not—as Kingston’s letter makes clear—to provide spiritual consolation and administer the Holy Sacrament, but to obtain her admission of the impediment to her marriage, and her consent to the dissolution of that marriage and the disinheriting and bastardizing of her child; and also to apprise her of the proctors whom the King had appointed to act for her, and to seek her approval of them.¹¹ It is more than likely, as will become apparent, that the archbishop had instructions to offer her the kinder death by decapitation by the sword (as historians have long suspected), or even the hope of mercy, in return for her cooperation. He certainly discussed the possibility of her being spared the extreme penalty, probably as an inducement, and probably without committing himself, for after he left, Anne was much more cheerful, and in his letter to Cromwell, Kingston reported that “this day at dinner, the Queen said she should go to a nunnery, and is in hope of life;”¹² her entering religion would render her marriage null and void.¹³ It might be concluded, therefore, that she had agreed to the annulment without undue protest.

But it was a cruel deception. There would be no question of Anne being banished to a nunnery, which would have had to be abroad anyway, since those in England were scheduled for dissolution. The only reward she would get for her cooperation was a mercifully quick end.

Weston’s family were still making frantic efforts to save him, offering the King 100,000 marks (over £11 million) in return for his life,¹⁴ but Henry either was not told of this or remained impervious to bribery. Chapuys reported on May 19 that the French ambassadors—Antoine de Castelnau, Bishop of Tarbes, and Jean, Sieur de Dinteville—had done their best to plead for Weston.¹⁵ It is frustrating to discover that Jean de Dinteville’s correspondence is missing for the two months covering Anne Boleyn’s fall and its aftermath. Froude speculated that all his letters on that subject had been either set apart and lost, or destroyed. The latter is a distinct possibility, since Dinteville found Henry VIII so terrifying that he begged to be recalled after his first audience in 1533, from which he emerged visibly shaking.¹⁶ He would not have wanted such sensitive letters falling into the wrong hands.

“Notwithstanding [the ambassadors’] intercession on Weston’s behalf,”¹⁷ there was no hope of liberation for any of the condemned men. All were to be executed. It was after Kingston returned from seeing the King that he informed them they must prepare to die the next day, and that it would not be at Tyburn after all, or within the Tower, as John Husee had speculated, but on the public scaffold on Tower Hill; an anonymous account in the Vienna Archives confirms that they were executed “on a scaffold in front of the Tower.”¹⁸

Kingston had been given very little notice to prepare for the coming executions. In his letter of May 16 (quoted above), he reminded Cromwell that:

… the time is short, for the King supposeth the gentlemen to die tomorrow, and my lord of Rochford with the residue of gentlemen, and are yet without Dr. Allryge, which I look for [Dr. Allryge presumably being the chaplain who was to hear their final confessions and shrive them]; but I have told my lord of Rochford that he is to be in readiness tomorrow to suffer execution, and so he accepts it very well, and will do his best to be ready, notwithstanding he would have received his rights, which hath not been used, and in especial here.¹⁹

It was traditional—and indeed was perceived as a right and a privilege—for royal or noble persons condemned to death for treason to have the customary brutal sentence commuted by the King to beheading, which was seen as a more honorable way to die. But Kingston had as yet received no such instructions. He urged Cromwell: “Sir, I shall desire you that we may know the King’s pleasure here as shortly as may be, that we here may prepare for the same which is necessary, for the same we here have now may for to do execution. Sir, I pray you have good remembrance in all this for us to do, for we shall be ready always to our knowledge.”

Kingston’s letter to Cromwell was dispatched after dinner on May 16, probably in the afternoon, so the condemned men had several agonizing hours to wait to hear how they would die. At length—and it may not have been until the next morning—word came that the King had been pleased graciously to commute the dread sentences to decapitation. Despite Bishop Burnet’s later assertion that Smeaton was hanged, the contemporary Lisle Letters confirm that all five, including the lowborn musician, “suffered with the axe,” as do Wriothesley (who says they “were all beheaded”), Edward Hall, the anonymous Imperialist account,²⁰ the Grey Friars’ Chronicle, the Histoire de la Royne Anne de Boullant, and Cavendish, who refers to the great clemency extended by the King to Smeaton:

And though by great favour I lose but my pate,
Yet deserved have I cruelly to be martyred,
As I am judged to be hanged, drawn and quartered.²¹

The musician was lucky. Such mercy on the part of the King whom the lowly Smeaton was said to have cuckolded was extraordinary. Pure logistics may have been a factor, for there was no gallows on Tower Hill; prisoners who were to suffer hanging were taken to Tyburn,²² but it was more convenient to have the men all executed together, near the Tower. It is also possible that Henry commuted all the sentences because he knew the men personally.²³

Yet there could have been a deeply personal reason why Henry showed mercy. If he truly believed that these men had been Anne’s lovers, he might not have wished to expose their bodies to the public gaze for castration and evisceration, perhaps feeling that might only serve to underline their shameful crimes. He seems to have been concerned all along to minimize the scandal arising from the fall of the Queen, and to maintain discretion: witness his withdrawal into seclusion, his concern to observe all due ceremony at every stage of the legal process, his granting to all the accused the most honorable form of execution, his concern that foreigners should not witness Anne’s end his permitting her to be treated as a queen throughout, and his erasing of all reminders of her afterward. Gruesome scenes on the public scaffold would only have given rise to more scandal, and had a more lasting impact; and they would have been at variance with the efforts the King and his ministers were making to deal with this scandal as discreetly as possible.

Young Weston spent his last evening writing out a list of his debts, “as more plainly appeareth by a bill of the particulars written with his own hand.” They reveal insights into the glamorous and luxurious life that he had so recently led, and into the members of his circle and those whose company he frequented. He owed money to many people: the King—two amounts of 40s. (£700) and 50 marks (£4,050); his father; his father’s cook, Barnarde; his cousin Dingley; Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire; Browne the draper; Jennings, a page of the Privy Chamber; three “broderers” (embroiderers), the King’s own, Bradby and William, the latter being owed the substantial sum of £35 (£12,200), “whereon he has a gown, a coat, and a doublet of cloth of gold”—this alone shows how grand Weston had become through royal favor, since the sumptuary laws permitted only those of the rank of earl or above to wear embroidery, while only dukes and marquesses could wear cloth of gold. The fact that Weston owed money to Cornelius Heyss (or Hayes), the King’s goldsmith, is further evidence of the status he had enjoyed. Other creditors included Peter the hosier; Bridges “my tailor;” “a poor woman that Hannesley of the tennis play had married, [in payment] for balls, I cannot tell how much;” Harde Derman “at the gate;” Henry Seymour, a younger brother of Jane; Sir Francis Bryan; Sir Henry Parker, Lady Rochford’s brother, then a page at court; Weston’s saddler, shoemaker, and barber; “Jocelyne that was Mr. Norris’s servant;” John Norris; “Secheper that playeth at the dice;” and Temple the fletcher. Altogether the debts totaled a staggering £925.7s.2d (£323,150), enough to ruin Weston’s family.

This list the condemned man enclosed with a farewell letter to his parents:

Father and Mother,

I shall humbly desire you, for the salvation of my soul, to discharge me of this bill, and to forgive me of all my offences that I have done to you, and in especial to my wife, which I desire for the love of God to forgive me and to pray for me, for I believe prayer will do me good. God’s blessing have my children and mine.

By me, a great offender to God.²⁴

It should be emphasized that such sentiments reflected the sixteenth-century view of the sinfulness of all human beings, and that in this context, Weston’s words did not necessarily constitute an admission that he was guilty of the crimes for which he was to die. Brereton’s wife Elizabeth certainly believed her husband to be innocent, and cherished a “bracelet of gold, the which was the last token [he] sent me,” bequeathing it to their son Thomas on her own death nine years later.²⁵

It must have been later on May 16 that Kingston had another conversation with Anne’s brother and again had occasion to write to Cromwell. Rochford was troubled in his conscience about a monk he had preferred, with Cromwell’s help, to be abbot of Valle Crucis Abbey; he was worried that, the abbey being suppressed, the abbot would lose the pensions awarded him, and wanted the King, whose responsibility this now was, reminded of it. He had apparently asked Kingston to solicit Cromwell’s help, and also raised the matter with the tardy Dr. Allryge, who had since arrived to offer spiritual consolation to the condemned men. That evening, Kingston went to see Rochford and:

. … showed him the clause of your letter. He answered that he had sent you word by Dr. Allryge. Notwithstanding, he says that he made suit to you for the promotion of a white monk of the Tower Hill, and with your help he was promoted to the abbey of Valle Saint Crucis in Cheshire, and he had for his promotion £100, and at Whitsuntide next should receive £100 more, but for this the King has the obligations. He supposes the said abbey is suppressed and the Abbot undone, and his sureties also.

Kingston was hoping that Cromwell would put his prisoner’s mind at rest, and added a postscript to his letter:

You must help my lord of Rochford’s conscience for the monk; and also he spake unto me for the Bishop of Dublin, for he must have of the said Bishop £250.

Kingston’s letter was probably written late on May 16, because he goes on to say that “as yet, I have heard nothing of my lord of Canterbury, and the Queen much desires to be shriven.”²⁶ Cranmer had already visited her earlier that day and evidently promised to return to hear her last confession, but he would not come again until early in the morning of May 18. Aless states that Cranmer, “to whom [Anne] was in the habit of confessing when she went to the Lord’s table,” was the one for “whom she sent when she was in prison and knew that she should shortly die.”

Arrangements were by now in hand for the Queen’s execution. Henry VIII had gone to the extraordinary trouble of sending for “the hangman of Calais,” Calais then being an English possession.²⁷ Decapitation by the sword was very rare in England but widely used in Europe;²⁸ it was a much cleaner, kinder, and more precise method of execution than death by the axe. Evidently “the sword of Calais”²⁹ was of some renown, being an expert executioner known for his swiftness and skill in cutting off heads.

Several authors, among them Winston Churchill, have asserted that at the end of her trial, Anne requested that, if the King would permit it, she wished to be beheaded with a sword, like the French nobility, and not, like the English nobility, with an axe. Friedmann says it is unknown why the King sent for a swordsman, but that because of Anne’s French education, she probably thought it more honorable to be beheaded by a sword. Yet there is no contemporary record of her requesting this method of execution.

Since burning was the penalty for women who committed treason, why did Henry VIII not only opt for the method of execution reserved for male traitors of gentle or noble birth, but also decide to spare Anne the axe? George Wyatt says that “the King’s conscience no doubt moved him to appointing the more honorable death;” not only was it the death reserved for the highborn, but it was less demeaning than being burned at the stake, for the flames, apart from inflicting sheer agony on the victim, could quickly burn away clothing and leave their nudity exposed to the public gaze, as had happened with Joan of Arc. It may be that Henry’s conscience was troubling him—George Wyatt spoke with people who had known him—but this was to be the first time ever that an English queen would be executed, so the official approach may have been that, condemned traitor though she now was, Anne was still the Queen of England, had been Henry’s consort, and was the mother of his daughter, and that therefore fitting treatment was called for, in line with her being royally lodged in the Tower, attended by ladies and servants, confessed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and richly garbed and bejeweled.³⁰ It may be that, considering Anne’s rank—and the possibility of the tide of public sympathy turning in her favor—no one wanted a horrific scene on the scaffold, so steps were taken to minimize the risk of that happening.³¹

According to Charles V’s sister, Mary of Hungary, who was Regent of the Netherlands, the King had sent for this headsman “that the vengeance might be executed by [one of] the Emperor’s subjects, as there were none in England skillful enough.”³² This supports the claim in the “Spanish Chronicle” that the headsman came from St. Omer, which was then in Spanish-ruled Flanders. But perhaps Henry simply wanted Anne killed as humanely as possible; the warrant for her execution states that the King, moved by pity, was unwilling to send her to the stake,³³ which is substantiated by him securing the headsman’s services at the handsome sum of £23.6s.8d (£7,800), which was for his “rewards and apparel.”³⁴

But there was probably another, more pragmatic reason for the King’s decision. Given that Kingston was informed on May 16, only the day after Anne’s condemnation, that the headsman was on his way, and Chapuys learned on May 17 that Anne was due to be executed the next morning, there can be no doubt that this executioner had been summoned before her trial. In the Tudor period it took a fast rider four days to cover the two hundred miles from London to York, while in 1483 it had taken nearly two days for the news of Edward IV’s death to be urgently conveyed from Westminster to Calais, probably using a relay system of messengers.³⁵ Thus, allowing for a quick Channel crossing—although that could take anything from a few hours to several days, depending on the wind and weather conditions—it would have taken a royal messenger, or relays of messengers, the best part of forty-eight hours to travel from London to Dover (a distance of seventy miles) and then make the twenty-mile boat trip to Calais; the journey would, of course, have been longer if, as tradition has long had it, the headsman actually resided at St. Omer, twenty-two miles further on. Then it would take another two or three days for him to make his slower way to England. Thus, if he was expected to arrive by May 18 (which he probably did, as there is no mention of him being delayed), he must have been sent for in advance of Anne’s trial—even as early as May 12, the day on which her coaccused were condemned, or May 13, when her household was broken up, or—allowing for the fastest journey—on May 14, at the latest. These calculations are supported by the account in the “Spanish Chronicle,” which states that the King “sent a week before to St. Omer for a headsman, and nine days after they sent, he arrived.” This suggests that, if he arrived on May 18, or even early on the next day, he had been summoned on May 9 or 10. The dates may be incorrect, but these precise calculations show that people were aware that the executioner had been summoned well before the trial.

Thus the King had intended all along that Anne should be beheaded, and this not only preempted the verdict given at her trial, but also inflicted an added refinement of cruelty in keeping her in suspense for a whole day as to whether she would suffer the agony of burning. Since the executioner had already been sent for when Anne was sentenced to be burned or beheaded, there can be little doubt that the promise of a swifter death by the sword was used as a bargaining tool in securing her agreement to the annulment of her marriage.

Kingston was gratified to hear about the headsman. “I am very glad of the executioner of Calais, for he can handle the matter,” he wrote to Cromwell. Indeed, he was to handle it exceptionally well, showing unexpected compassion and thoughtfulness toward his victim.

“For the gentlemen, the sheriffs [of London] must make provision,” Kingston added, referring to an executioner; not for them the sword of Calais, but the public hangman. “As yet I hear of no writ, but they are all ready and, I trust, clean to God. They shall have warning in the morning.” As for his other prisoner, “I shall send at once for carpenters to make a scaffold of such a height that all present may see it. If you wish more to be done, let me know.”³⁶

The “Spanish Chronicle” states that Wyatt was told on May 16 that no proceedings would be taken against him, and that immediately after hearing this welcome news he wrote to the King to remind him that he had warned him not to marry Anne Boleyn because she was a bad woman. That a prisoner in the Tower should have written such a letter to Henry at this time is utterly incredible; given the mood of the times, it would have been taking an enormous risk. Wyatt, a diplomat and seasoned courtier, would hardly have been so rash.

“Meanwhile, the [other] prisoners prepared to die, and took the sacrament.”³⁷

…

Apprised only a short time beforehand of the time set for their executions, the condemned men were “led out of the Tower, all closely guarded,”³⁸ and beheaded early in the morning of Wednesday, May 17, on a high scaffold “at the Tower Hill,”³⁹ before large crowds, with a number of courtiers standing prominently to the front.

Chapuys, who got his information from one of the ladies in attendance on Anne, says that “the Concubine saw them executed, from the Tower, to aggravate her grief.”⁴⁰ It sounds as if she was made to do so. Wyatt was also a witness. According to the “Spanish Chronicle,” he was watching “from a window in the Tower, and all the people thought that he also was to be brought out and executed.” The window was in the Bell Tower, as Wyatt makes clear in a poem about “these bloody days” written probably later that summer:

The Bell Tower showed me such sight
That in my head sticks day and night;
There did I lean out of a grate …⁴¹

It is unlikely that Anne was allowed to watch with Wyatt, so she may have been looking out from another room in the Bell Tower, or from high up in the Byward Tower, which also afforded a view of Tower Hill.

According to John Husee, the men all “died very charitably.”⁴² In the sixteenth century, great store was set by the way one met one’s death. Redemption could be implicit in confession, repentance, and resignation. There was also a code of etiquette to be observed on the scaffold, and it was customary for those about to die to make a pious farewell speech for the edification of those watching, in which they confessed their fault, acknowledged the justness of their fate, and made their final peace with God before making a Christian end. Their words were meant to serve as a warning to others. This was not the place to deny one’s guilt, or to criticize the King’s justice; to do so might have led to a severer penalty being imposed, or could have rebounded on the often destitute relatives who were left behind, while those rash enough to plead innocence, such as the fourth Duke of Norfolk in 1572, would find the sheriff intervening to stop them.⁴³

On this day, George Constantine was in the crowd, within earshot of the condemned men, and would tell Cromwell that he watched them die and “heard them, and wrote every word they spake.” He added that “in a manner” every one of them confessed, although clearly it was not necessarily to the crimes they were to suffer for. All admitted that they had deserved to die for having led sinful lives, but none alluded to the specific offenses for which they had been condemned. They could have been acknowledging only the general sins of a lifetime.

Rochford, as the highest in rank, mounted the scaffold first and “with a loud voice”⁴⁴ made a long and pious speech, of which several versions survive. Crispin de Milherve says that Rochford “exhorted those who suffered with him to die without fear; and [he] said to those that were about him that he came to die since it was the King’s pleasure that it should be so. He exhorted all persons not to trust to courts, states, and kings, but in God only” and prayed that he “might be forgiven by all whom he had injured.” He admitted “he deserved a heavier punishment for his other sins, but not from the King, whom he had never offended. Yet he prayed God to give him a long and good life.” If these were truly his words, then this was as close to sniping at the King as a prisoner on a scaffold dared get, but Rochford would have realized that Henry could hardly take vengeance on his widow, since it was her evidence that had secured his death. In affirming that he had never offended the King, Rochford was, with his dying breath, proclaiming himself innocent of the charge of incest.

Another, similar version of this speech is in the Chronicle of Calais, which has Rochford stating:

Christian men, I am born under the law, and judged under the law, and die under the law, and the law has condemned me. Masters all, I am not come hither for to preach, but for to die, for I have deserved to die if I had twenty lives, more shamefully than can be devised, for I am a wretched sinner, and I have sinned shamefully. I have known no man so evil, and to rehearse my sins openly, it were no pleasure to you to hear them, nor yet for me to rehearse them, for God knoweth all. Therefore, masters all, I pray you take heed by me, and especially my lords and gentlemen of the court, the which I have been among, take heed by me and beware of such a fall, and I pray to God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, three persons and one God, that my death may be an example unto you all. And beware, trust not in the vanity of the world, and especially in the flattering of the court. And I cry God mercy, and ask all the world forgiveness, as willingly as I would have forgiveness of God. And if I have offended any man that is not here now, either in thought, word, or deed, and if ye here any such, I pray you heartily in my behalf, pray them to forgive me for God’s sake. And yet, my masters all, I have one thing for to say to you: men do common and say that I have been a setter forth of the Word of God, and one that have favoured the Gospel of Christ; and because I would not that God’s word should be slandered by me, I say unto you all, that if I had followed God’s word in deed as I did read it and set it forth to my power, I had not come to this. I did read the Gospel of Christ, but I did not follow it. If I had, I had been a liv[ing] man among you. Therefore I pray you, masters all, for God’s sake stick to the truth and follow it, for one good follower is worth three readers, as God knoweth.

Rochford’s description of his sinfulness in this reliable account of his speech went way beyond what was normally required of a last confession, and goes a long way toward confirming the theory that he had indulged in what were then regarded as unnatural sexual practices.

There are many reported versions of Rochford’s scaffold speech, and great similarities in all of them: he acknowledged his sinful life, regretted he had not followed the teachings of the Gospel he had preached, exhorted the people to beware the flatteries of the court, and submitted to the law that had condemned him. But there are a few significant discrepancies. Milherve and Chapuys both assert that Rochford denied he had offended against the King, while the Portuguese account claims that he did acknowledge his crimes against God and his sovereign, and prayed Henry to pardon him. These discrepancies may have arisen from his words becoming garbled in the telling, or because different observers reported the passages that impressed them, while some either misheard what was said or elaborated in order to make a political or moral point.⁴⁵

Certainly Rochford spoke at some length before he submitted to the axe and died bravely as befit a gentleman, and we cannot begin to imagine the thoughts of the men who were awaiting their turn to die. Even if the axe hit home cleanly, on the nape, it was a brutal death, for it did not so much as slice neatly through the neck as hew through flesh and bone. And because beheadings were rare in England, hanging being the customary form of judicial execution, executioners were often unpracticed in the art. There was no guarantee of a swift end, and when Rochford “lay upon the ground with his head on the block, the headsman gave three strokes.”⁴⁶

According to Lancelot de Carles, when the other three gentlemen came to die, “they said nothing, as if they had commissioned Rochford to speak for them”—or maybe they were appalled at the butchery they had just witnessed. The Imperialist account also claims that the four men who followed Rochford to the block “said nothing except to pray for God’s and the King’s forgiveness, and to bid us pray for their souls.”⁴⁷ None spoke at length, yet obviously they did say more than Carles and the Imperialist—who may not have been able to hear everything—would have us believe, as the gist of their words was written down by other witnesses.

The Portuguese asserted that, after Rochford, “Norris was beheaded, then Weston and Brereton, and Mark”;⁴⁸ against this is the statement in the Histoire de la Royne Anne de Boullant, which also gives the order of the executions, that Weston was next to mount the scaffold. Yet it is more likely that Norris, who was next in rank and importance after Rochford, came second. According to his man Constantine, “the others confessed [he does not say to what], all but Mr. Norris, who said almost nothing at all.” However, Burnet has him stating, “I do not think that any gentleman of the court owes more to [the King] than I do, and hath been more ungrateful and regardless of it than I have.” The crowd might well have thought this to be an admission of guilt, but then he fearlessly spoke out in Anne’s defense, and “loyally averred that in his conscience, he thought the Queen innocent of these things laid to her charge; but whether she was or not, he would not accuse her of anything, and he would die a thousand times rather than ruin an innocent person.” Constantine does not mention this brave and provocative declaration, but then his account of Rochford’s speech is greatly truncated. The “Spanish Chronicle” states that Norris “made a great long prayer” and said he had been ungrateful to the King and deserved death, but again, this source is unreliable.

Weston followed. “I had thought to live in abomination yet this twenty or thirty years, and then to have made amends,” he said mournfully. “I thought little I would come to this.” His mention of a life of “abomination” might be understood to refer to illicit sexual acts, although there must have been those among his hearers who took it to mean his adultery with the Queen or just his general sinfulness. His last words were an exhortation to learn “by example of him.”

Brereton was beheaded next. “I have deserved to die if it were a thousand deaths,” he declared, probably referring to his nefarious activities in Wales, “but the cause whereof I die judge ye not. But if ye judge, judge the best.” Hearing him repeat this last sentence “three or four times,” and remembering that no witnesses had testified against Brereton at his trial, Constantine clearly was inclined to judge the best. “If any of them was innocent, it was he,” he wrote, “for if he were guilty, I say therefore that he died worst of them all.” He meant by the latter that Brereton, if guilty, should have made a less ambiguous speech, confessing his crimes and calling on God’s forgiveness, for dying with a sin unconfessed would have been seen as inviting eternal damnation.⁴⁹ Brereton’s admission that he deserved to die a thousand deaths seems a rather overstated confession of human frailty, and may suggest that he, like Rochford and Weston, was guilty of indulging in forbidden sexual practices.⁵⁰ The “Spanish Chronicle” contradicts Constantine’s evidence, and (probably falsely) asserts that Brereton said nothing but “I have offended God and the King; pray for me.”

Finally it came to Smeaton’s turn; being of low degree, he was obliged to wait until last. By now the block and the scaffold would have been awash with blood and piled with butchered bodies, so it is hardly surprising that he faltered when making his speech, which was brief and damning, and in which he declared “he was justly punished for his misdeeds.”⁵¹ “Masters,” he cried, “I pray you all pray for me, for I have deserved the death.”⁵² Possibly he feared, even at this late stage, that he might be made to suffer the full horrors of a traitor’s end if he protested his innocence, for the privilege of dying by the axe was not normally accorded to a “varlet”⁵³ such as he. Milherve says that his confession of guilt gave rise to “many reflections.” Maybe some wondered if he felt he deserved death for betraying Anne, rather than for having betrayed the King.⁵⁴

The Imperialist commentator, who was certainly watching, reported that “Brereton and Mark were afterward quartered,”⁵⁵ and on June 2, Jean Hannaert of Lyons was to inform the Empress how “the bodies were quartered.”⁵⁶ Yet it is possible that this eyewitness left immediately after the beheadings and merely assumed that the bodies were quartered, for no other witness makes any mention of quartering, and it was usually done so the quarters could be displayed on spikes as a warning to would-be traitors. In this case, there is ample evidence that the “bodies” and heads of all the men were buried that same day.

The executions sparked much comment. The conventional references to sinfulness in the scaffold speeches were clearly seen by some as confessions of guilt, thus further tarnishing Anne’s reputation. George Constantine wrote that to begin with, he himself and all true friends of the Gospel—that is, the reformists whom Anne had championed over the years—had found it impossible to credit what they had heard of the Queen. “Now because she was a favorer of God’s Word, at the leastwise so taken, I tell you few men would believe that she was so abominable. As I may be saved, before God, I could not believe it.” That was “afore I heard them speak at their death. But on the scaffold, in a manner all confessed except Mr Norris,” and Constantine found himself convinced that all were guilty as charged.

Milherve, more sympathetic, was of the opinion that all the men “suffered a death which they had no way deserved.” Even the executioner “shed tears, but the bloody corpses were allowed to lie on the scaffold for hours, half dressed,”⁵⁷ after he and the Tower officials stripped them of the clothing that was their perquisite. When Wyatt wrote, “The axe is home, your heads be in the street” (in a poem he composed during or soon after his captivity), he was not referring to the heads being displayed on pikes above London Bridge, as was customary after traitors had been beheaded, for both Chapuys and Wriothesley make it clear that the condemned men’s “bodies, with their heads, were buried in the Tower of London”;⁵⁸ instead, Wyatt’s words may be taken to mean that the heads had been lifted or rolled off the scaffold as each new victim mounted it, and then left on the ground before being finally laden on to the cart that would trundle the remains of the five men back into the Tower.

Because he had been a nobleman, “the lord of Rochford’s body and head” were interred before the high altar⁵⁹ in the royal chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower, which had been founded in the twelfth century and largely rebuilt by Henry VIII in 1532, after a disastrous fire in 1512; the rest were laid to rest in the adjacent churchyard, with “Mr. Weston and Mr. Norris in one grave” and “Mr. Brereton and Mark in another.”⁶⁰ Wriothesley states that “the bodies with the heads” were placed in the graves, but Norris’s family are said to have obtained permission to claim his head, which they later buried in the private chapel of Ockwells Manor, their house near Maidenhead, Berkshire.⁶¹ That house still stands, but only parts of the chapel survive, with no clue as to where the head—if it was ever there at all—might rest.

The churchyard of St. Peter ad Vincula surrounded the chapel, and in those days extended into the area now covered by the Waterloo Block and the Jewel House. In 1841, when the foundations of the Waterloo Block were being dug, and during further excavation in 1964, many coffins and bones were found; these were buried in the crypt of the chapel.⁶² We have no means of knowing if the remains of Anne Boleyn’s alleged lovers were among them.

At court, people were still expecting “many more” of the Queen’s rumored army of lovers to be arrested and beheaded,⁶³ while Trahitur et sitspensus was written in the margin of the official record of the dead men’s trials and convictions, to show that the sentence had been carried out.

“The Concubine will certainly be beheaded tomorrow, or on Friday at the latest,” Chapuys wrote on May 17, “and I think the King feels the time long that it is not done already.”⁶⁴ Whatever Chapuys had heard, it was not from Henry himself, but he would not have written this without some information on which to base it, and we might glean from his words some sense of Henry wanting everything all over and done with. It was customary for condemned prisoners to be executed with the minimum delay, but this was his queen and the mother of his child, whatever he believed she had done. Did he fear he might waver? Was this the reason for the frightening speed with which Anne had been arrested and condemned? It may be that Henry was “persuaded to destroy her before he could change his mind.”⁶⁵

Anne, meanwhile, had been escorted back to the Queen’s lodgings, no doubt grievously shaken and distressed at witnessing the bloody deaths of her brother and her friends. It had been an all-too-brutal reminder of what she herself must face not many hours hence, for these executions would have left her in no doubt that she would imminently share the men’s fate, and that hints about her being sent abroad to a convent had been merely a cruel ploy to gain her consent to the annulment. And she was right, for Kingston, having returned from discharging his grim duty on Tower Hill, now came to inform her that she was to die the following morning.

Kingston was surely relieved to be able to tell Anne that she was not to suffer the agony and horror of the flames but the kinder death by beheading, and that the King’s mercy had extended to arranging for her to be dispatched by the sword. Whatever her sense of betrayal, Anne received the news calmly. When “the day of her death was announced to her, she was more joyful than before.”⁶⁶ Her mind was apparently more exercised about what the men had said about her on the scaffold. She “asked about the endurance of her brother and the others”⁶⁷ and wanted to know if any of them had protested her innocence, and when Kingston told “how her brother and the other gentlemen had suffered and had sealed her innocence with their own blood, but that Mark had confessed he deserved to die, her face changed somewhat and she broke out into some passion, saying, ‘Has he not then cleared me of the public infamy he has brought me to? Alas, I fear his soul suffers for it, and that he is now punished for his false accusations! But for my brother and those others, I doubt not but they are now in the presence of that great King before whom I am to be tomorrow.’” She was well aware that Smeaton’s confession would give rise to “many reflections.”⁶⁸

Between nine and eleven in the morning of May 17⁶⁹ “having only God before his eyes,” Archbishop Cranmer convened “a solemn court” in “a certain low chapel” (or crypt, perhaps the undercroft) at Lambeth Palace, where “the doctors of the law” gathered for the purpose of annulling Anne’s marriage.⁷⁰ Neither she nor Henry was present, despite both having received the summons to appear; they were represented by proctors. Strickland, followed by other writers, asserted that Anne was conveyed in privacy to Lambeth Palace, and that she attended the hearing, but there is no contemporary evidence for this.

The Queen was represented in court by her proctors, John Barbour and a rising diplomat, Dr. Nicholas Wotton, both of whom had perhaps visited her at the Tower and obtained her formal consent to the dissolution of her marriage, although there is no evidence for their having done so; certainly they did not contest the annulment on her behalf.⁷¹ Dr. Richard Sampson, who would be rewarded with the bishopric of Chich ester the following month, represented the King, alongside Thomas Bedyll, a royal chaplain and clerk to the Privy Council, and John Tregonwell, a lawyer, judge, and privy councillor.

Also present were Cromwell, the Lord Chancellor, the Duke of Suffolk, the earls of Oxford and Sussex, and other members of the King’s Council,⁷² while the formal witnesses were Richard Gwent, another royal chaplain who was Archdeacon of London; Edmund Bonner, Archdeacon of Leicester, who would in time become Bishop of London and gain notoriety as the “Bloody Bonner” of the Marian persecutions of the 1550s; and Thomas Legh, a lawyer and diplomat. In the afternoon,⁷³ these persons heard Cranmer pronounce that “on the basis of some true, just, and legitimate causes recently brought to our attention,” the marriage that Henry VIII had schemed for six years to make was “null and void, and had always been so,” which made Anne’s daughter—henceforth to be known as Lady Elizabeth—a bastard. “And so she was discharged, and was never lawful Queen of England, and there it was approved,” Wriothesley observed, not understanding Anne’s true legal position with regard to her title.⁷⁴

Cranmer’s grounds for annulling the marriage were not cited in his decree of nullity,⁷⁵ but it took Chapuys only two days to discover the grounds for the annulment: reliable informants told him that the Archbishop had pronounced Henry and Anne’s marriage invalid “on account of the King having had connection with her sister, and that, as both parties knew of this, the good faith of the parents cannot make the bastard [Elizabeth] legitimate [sic].”⁷⁶ Such a judgment would only have been possible after Anne was safely condemned, because, given that she was aware of the impediment to her marriage, she could not technically have been guilty of adultery.⁷⁷

On May 19, Cranmer was to issue a dispensation for the King to marry Jane Seymour without prior publication of banns, even though both parties were within “the third and third degrees of affinity.”⁷⁸ No such blood relationship existed between Henry and Jane Seymour, who were far more distant cousins, and Jane was not third cousin to either of his previous wives, so it is possible that Henry had at one time been involved in an unrecorded sexual affair with someone who was related within those degrees to Jane, or that Jane herself had been the mistress of a kinsman of the King; or Henry was perhaps a godparent to the child of one of Jane’s cousins, which would have created compaternity with the relevant parent and been as effective a barrier to marriage within the forbidden degrees of consanguinity as a blood relationship. Whatever the technicalities of the matter, the King was now a free man.