CHAPTER 13

For Now I Die

On the night of May 17–18 carpenters were set to work to build a “new scaffold”¹ “of such a height that all may see it,”² “having four or five steps.”³ Wriothesley states that this was erected on “the green within the Tower of London, by the White Tower,” while theLisle Letters and Anthony Anthony describe it as being put up “before the house of Ordnance,” a long, crumbling building (soon to be replaced) that stood on the north side of the Inner Ward, facing the White Tower; today, the Waterloo Barracks occupy the site of the House of Ordnance.⁴

In 2000 the Royal Armories acquired a hitherto unknown contemporary manuscript account of the execution of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, in 1601, possibly written as an official report for the Privy Council and perhaps even for Elizabeth I herself. According to this document, Essex’s scaffold was “placed in the high court above Caesar’s Tower;” in those days, people believed that Julius Caesar had built the White Tower. Thus it was almost certainly on the same site as Anne Boleyn’s scaffold had stood, and probably all the other scaffolds erected for private executions in the Tudor period. This “high court” was the largest open space in the Tower precincts, where tournaments had once been held, and it could accommodate large crowds of spectators.⁵ The author of the “Spanish Chronicle” corroborates this location, stating that “they erected the scaffold in the great courtyard of the Tower.”

Dr. Geoffrey Parnell, Keeper of Tower History at the Royal Armories Museum, has established that the present Tower Green was adopted as the scaffold site in 1864 because Queen Victoria wished to mark the place where Anne Boleyn had been beheaded, and it was assumed that the green before St. Peter ad Vincula was the correct location for executions, since three mutineers had been shot there in 1743.⁶ This mistaken assumption was seemingly confirmed when Charles Wriothesley’s chronicle was published in 1875, with its assertion that Anne met her end on “the green” within the Tower. This was understood in the nineteenth century to refer only to the green before the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula. However, “East Smithfield Green,” as it was known in the sixteenth century, extended farther east in Anne Boleyn’s time.⁷

Thus, Anne’s scaffold was erected on the present parade ground north of the White Tower,⁸ and the grim prophecy of the Abbot of Garadon was about to be fulfilled, at least in part, for even if the Queen was not to be burned, she was to meet her doom “where the tower is white and another place green.”⁹ Lancelot de Carles would observe of her end: “Nothing notable has happened which has not been foretold.”

It is unlikely that Anne would have heard the builders hammering away from the Queen’s apartments, as is traditionally supposed, although she was certainly up at two o’clock in the morning of May 18, when her almoner, John Skip, arrived to offer spiritual support in her last hours. She spent the rest of the night in prayer with him until soon after dawn, when Cranmer came again, as he had promised, to hear her final confession and to celebrate mass and give her holy communion. In these, her dying hours, she showed herself a devout Catholic with a pious devotion to the Eucharist, despite her reformist views.

“The Queen, in expectation of her last day, took the sacrament.”¹⁰ She insisted that Kingston be present. “This morning,” he reported to Cromwell, “she sent for me that I might be with her at such time as she received the good Lord, to the intent I should hear her speak as touching her innocency always to be clear.” Chapuys reported on the May 19: “She confessed herself yesterday, and communicated, expecting to be executed. She requested it of those who had charge of it, and expressed the desire to be executed. No person ever showed greater willingness to die.”¹¹ Dr. Ortiz, basing his account (written on June 11) on information sent him by Chapuys, says “she complained that she had not been executed on Wednesday with her brother, saying that she hoped to have gone to Paradise with him.”¹²

But before Anne could go to her rest, she was determined to protest her innocence in the most effective way possible; to the sixteenth-century mind, the prospect of divine judgment was a chastening reality, and the fear of eternal perdition very real. Chapuys wrote: “The lady who had charge of her”—either Lady Kingston or Lady Boleyn, who were both presumably present—“has sent to tell me in great secrecy, that the Concubine, before and after receiving the sacrament, affirmed to her, on the damnation of her soul, that she had never offended with her body against the King.”¹³

Anne’s protestations of innocence, made when she believed her execution was imminent, should surely be regarded as genuine. It is barely conceivable that she would have risked her immortal soul, on the brink of death and divine judgment as she believed herself to be, by lying, and hardly likely that she would have taken such a spiritual gamble in the interests of retrieving her earthly reputation. This was a time for confessing sins and making a final peace with God, not for bearing false witness.

Nonetheless, the wording of her confession is interesting. It may be that she merely wished to emphasize that she had been faithful to the King, but from her insistence that “she had never offended with her body” against him, it might be inferred that she had offended in other ways, perhaps with her heart or her thoughts, and that she had perhaps secretly loved another, possibly Norris, but never went so far as to consummate that love.

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.”¹⁴

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.¹⁶ 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.¹⁷ Chapuys was ill at this time, but could only deplore the fact that “strangers were not to be admitted” to witness the execution,¹⁸ 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.”²⁰It was “not that she desired death, but she had thought herself prepared to die, and feared that the delay might weaken her resolve.”²¹ 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.”²²She 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 18,²³ 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.”²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.”²⁷ 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.”²⁸

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:

…. took the Lady Kingston into her presence chamber, and there, locking the door upon them, willed her to sit down in the chair of estate. Lady Kingston answered that it was her duty to stand, and not to sit at all in her presence, much less upon the seat of state of her, the Queen.

Ah, Madam,” replied Anne, “that title is gone [sic]. I am a condemned person, and by law have no estate left me in this life, but for clearing of my conscience. I pray you sit down.”

“Well,” said Lady Kingston, “I have often played the fool in my youth, and to fulfil your command I will do it once more in mine age.” And thereupon [she] sat down under the cloth of estate on the throne. Then the Queen most humbly fell on her knees before her and, holding up her hands, with tearful eyes beseeched her, as in the presence of God and His angels, and as she would answer to her before them when all should appear to judgement, that she would so fall down before the Lady Mary’s Grace and in like manner ask her forgiveness for the wrongs she had done her; for, till that was accomplished, she said, her conscience could not be quiet.

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.²⁹

Tradition once had it that Anne Boleyn composed two poems shortly before her execution.³⁰ 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:

Defiled is my name full sore,
Through cruel spite and false report,
That I may say for ever more,
Farewell my joy, adieu comfort.

For wrongfully ye judge of me,
Unto my fame a mortal wound.
Seek what ye list, it will not be;
Ye seek for that can not be found.

The other poem, which is to be found in Additional MS. XV, f.117 in the British Library, is earlier in date, and was set to music by Robert Jordan, a former chaplain to Anne Boleyn. It is therefore possible that it was composed by Anne herself, for the lyrics reveal how its author welcomes and embraces death, and the style is in keeping with Anne’s letters and mode of speech.

Oh Death, rock me asleep,
Bring on my quiet rest,
Let pass my very guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast.
Toll on thou passing bell,
Ring out my doleful knell,
Let thy sound my death tell,
Death doth draw nigh,
There is no remedy.

My pains who can express?
Alas, they are so strong.
My dolour will not suffer strength
My life for to prolong.
Toll on thou passing bell,
Ring out my doleful knell,
Let thy sound my death tell,
Death doth draw nigh,
There is no remedy.

Alone in prison strange,
I wail my destiny:
Well worth this cruel hap that
I Should taste this misery.
Toll on thou passing bell,
Ring out my doleful knell,
Let thy sound my death tell,
Death doth draw nigh,
There is no remedy.

Farewell, my pleasures past,
Welcome, my present pain,
I feel my torments so increase
That life cannot remain.
Cease now, thou passing bell,
Rung is my doleful knell,
For its sound my death doth tell.
Death doth draw nigh;
Sound the knell dolefully, for now I die.

The Scotsman Alexander Aless had not had occasion to leave his London house for some days, so heard nothing of the outcome of Anne’s trial, but in the small hours of May 19 he had a grim nightmare. He recounted it thus to Elizabeth I in 1559:

I take to witness Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead, that I am about to speak the truth. On the day on which the Queen was beheaded, at sunrise, between two and three o’clock, there was revealed to me (whether I was asleep or awake I know not) the Queen’s neck, after her head had been cut off, and this so plainly that I could count the nerves, the veins, and the arteries. Terrified by this dream, or vision, I immediately arose and, crossing the River Thames, I came to Lambeth, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s palace, and I entered the garden in which he was walking. Evidently Cranmer too had trouble sleeping and was also disturbed in his mind.

When the Archbishop saw me, he enquired why I had come so early, for the clock had not yet struck four. I answered that I had been horrified in my sleep, and I told him the whole occurrence. He continued in silent wonder for a while.

“Do you not know what is to happen today?” Cranmer asked. [Aless] “answered that I had remained at home since the date of the Queen’s imprisonment and knew nothing of what was going on.” The Archbishop then raised his eyes to Heaven and said, “She who has been the Queen of England upon Earth will today become a queen in Heaven.” So great was his grief that he could say nothing more, and then he burst into tears. Terrified at this announcement, I returned to London, sorrowing.

Cranmer, of course, had heard Anne’s last confession only the morning before, and knew the truth about her innocence, so his observation is highly significant.³¹ He also knew that the reformist cause was about to lose its greatest patroness.

“The execution of the Concubine took place at nine o’clock this morning in the Tower,” Chapuys reported to the Emperor on Friday, May 19.³² At seven o’clock, after hearing mass after dawn and receiving the sacrament from her almoner, Anne had eaten a little breakfast;³³ an hour later, “at eight of the clock,”³⁴ Kingston had appeared at the door.

“When the constable came to tell her the hour approached and that she should make ready,”³⁵ Anne was waiting for him. According to a letter dated June 10, 1536, which was written by a Portuguese observer who managed to circumvent the ban on foreigners in order to witness the execution, she was “wholly habited in a robe of black damask, made in such guise that the cape, which was white, did fall on the outer side thereof.” Elsewhere, he refers to the cape being “a short mantle furred with ermines,”³⁶ while Lancelot de Carles has it as a “white collar.” An Imperialist observer states she was wearing a “hood, which was in the English fashion”³⁷—in other words, a gable hood. The “Spanish Chronicle” describes the “night robe of damask with a red damask skirt,” but states that Anne wore “a netted coif over her hair.” This was presumably under the gable hood, and was exposed when she later took it off.

The Histoire de la Royne Anne de Boullant describes this outfit slightly differently, as “a beautiful night robe of heavy gray damask trimmed with fur, showing a crimson kirtle beneath, with a low neckline.” A night robe at that time would have been a loose garment that either fell in folds from the shoulders or neckline, or was high-necked; sometimes worn open in the front, and lined or trimmed with fur, it was worn as a dressing gown would be today. Such garments were often made of rich materials such as velvet or damask, and examples may be seen in several contemporary portraits by Hans Holbein, notably the full-length of Christina of Denmark painted in 1538 (now in the National Gallery, London). In 1532, the year before their marriage, Henry VIII had ordered a sumptuous night robe for Anne: it comprised thirteen yards of black satin, lined with eight yards of black taffeta, with a border of black velvet, the sleeves being lined with buckram to stiffen them.³⁸ Clearly, this was not the same nightgown as the one of damask lined with fur that Anne wore on the scaffold, but it would have been of a similar style, and because it had a low neckline, she would not need to take it off for her beheading.

The Histoire makes no mention of the cape. From medieval times through to the Elizabethan period, capes were usually garments such as the Portuguese described, deep collars of fur—ermine for royalty—worn over gowns or state robes. We might conjecture that Anne wore this garment to underline her royal status, and perhaps bring home to spectators the enormity of her fate.

The red kirtle that Anne wore beneath the nightgown would also have had a low square neck. The word “kirtle” was then used to mean a fitted, sleeved jacket and wide-skirted petticoat (a full kirtle), or just a petticoat (a half kirtle). In this case it may have been the former, given that the night robe might have been open in the front. A noblewoman might wear several petticoats beneath her kirtle, depending on the weather, but the outer one would be of a rich fabric.

In choosing her attire for her last public appearance, Anne was probably making two statements: in the wearing of ermine, as has been noted, she was emphasizing her queenly rank; and in vesting herself—like Mary, Queen of Scots, at the latter’s execution fifty years later—in a kirtle of red, the liturgical color of Catholic martyrdom, she was effectively proclaiming her innocence. The significance would not have been lost on any observers, or on Kingston.

“Acquit yourself of your charge,” Anne told him calmly, “for I have been long prepared.”³⁹ In 1530, Chapuys had observed that Anne was “braver than a lion,” and it was never more true of her than on this last day of her life. And this when she must have been exhausted, having had very little sleep for two nights, as well as having endured the unimaginable stresses and fears of the past days.

Kingston gave her a purse containing £20 (£7,000) “to give in alms before her death,”⁴⁰ which would be her last queenly act. It was customary for a condemned person to pay the executioner his fee as well, but this seems to have been settled separately on this occasion. Chapuys says that, “when they came to lead her to the scaffold,” Anne reiterated what she had said the previous day, about her death being a divine judgment on her only on account of her ill-treatment of Lady Mary.⁴¹

Sir Francis Bacon, in his History of Henry the Eighth, published in 1612, relates another of the probably apocryphal tales that have become part of the legend of Anne Boleyn’s final days. He says that before leaving her lodgings for that last short walk, she asked “one of [her] privy chamber, faithful and generous, as she supposed,” to take a message from her to the King, saying, “Commend me to His Majesty, and tell him that he hath been ever constant in his career of advancing me. From a private gentlewoman, he made me a marchioness; from a marchioness to a queen; and now he hath left no higher degree of honor, he gives my innocency the crown of martyrdom as a saint in Heaven.” Unsurprisingly, the lady chosen as messenger “durst not carry this to the King;” yet, says Bacon, who believed Anne to be innocent, “tradition has truly transmitted it to posterity.”

Several eyewitness accounts of the execution refer to Anne being attended by “four young ladies.”⁴² Their identity is uncertain. Several historians have assumed that all four of the ladies who had waited—and spied—on Anne from her first day in the Tower were impressed to attend her to the scaffold,⁴³ but the Wriothesley and Harleian manuscript accounts of her trial both make it clear that only two of those ladies—Lady Kingston and Lady Boleyn—waited on her after her condemnation. Neither could be described as a “young” lady: Lady Kingston’s first husband had died in 1515, and Lady Boleyn had probably been married by 1518. Lady Shelton was over fifty, and Mrs. Coffin was probably in her mid-thirties; both had probably been dismissed four days earlier. Not by any stretch of the imagination could any of these matrons have been the “maids” referred to both by Crispin de Milherve and the anonymous Portuguese witness in their accounts of Anne’s execution.⁴⁴ Moreover, Lancelot de Carles makes it clear that at her trial, Anne was attended by Lady Kingston, Lady Boleyn, “and her young ladies.”

There has long been a tradition that Margaret Wyatt, Lady Lee, sister of the poet Wyatt, attended Anne to the scaffold. In the eighteenth century, Thomas Gray copied a life of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder from one of the unpublished Harleian manuscripts;⁴⁵ in this, it was asserted that Margaret Wyatt⁴⁶ attended Anne at her execution. Margaret Wyatt perhaps knew Anne fairly well, for the Boleyns were neighbors in Kent, and Anne was certainly on familiar terms with Margaret’s brother Thomas. Margaret was the wife of Sir Anthony Lee of Borston, Buckinghamshire. Her portrait by Holbein, depicting her at the age of thirty-four, is said to have been painted around 1540, and shows a middle-aged woman, too old to be referred to as a young lady or a maid.

It was Agnes Strickland who claimed in the nineteenth century that Anne was assigned two ladies who were sympathetic to her to serve her in her last hours. In fact, there were four of them, but there is no evidence in any contemporary source to support the claim that Margaret Wyatt was one of them and accompanied Anne to the scaffold. There was also a strong Wyatt family tradition that Anne gave Lady Lee a prayer book just before she was beheaded, but this dates only from the eighteenth century and is unlikely to have been based on fact (see note 89).

For more than a century a tale has circulated that one of the “young ladies” was Katherine Carey, the twelve-year-old daughter of Anne’s sister Mary by her first husband, William Carey.⁴⁷ Katherine grew up to marry Sir Francis Knollys, and became a great favorite with Elizabeth I, Anne’s daughter. There is, however, no contemporary evidence for Katherine Carey attending on Anne in the Tower—she would perhaps have been considered too young—and she is first recorded as a maid-of-honor in 1540, when she served Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

Anne would thank the four young ladies who attended her to the scaffold for their diligent, faithful, and true service;⁴⁸ at her end, they were “weeping” and “bewailing bitterly, shedding many tears,” and appeared “weak with anguish”⁴⁹ when they were performing the last offices for her. Yet none of the four ladies who waited on her in the Tower had been kind to, or approving of, Anne, and not one seems to have been sympathetic, so it is therefore unlikely that they would have shown themselves so grieved at her passing. Although the Queen’s household had been disbanded six days before, we can be almost certain that four of her former maids-of-honor had been summoned to attend her at her trial and in her last days and were a great support to her at this time. It seems the King had been moved by pity not only to grant Anne the more humane method of execution, but also to extend to her this last kindness.

“The unhappy Queen, assisted by the Captain [Constable] of the Tower, came forth,”⁵⁰ with those “four young ladies” following,⁵¹ down the stairs that led from the Queen’s lodgings and out into the courtyard that lay between the Jewel House and the King’s Hall. A grim procession was waiting there, ready to conduct the prisoner to her execution. It set off immediately, led by a contingent of two hundred Yeomen of the King’s Guard. Later tales erroneously had the executioner following next, traditionally garbed in a tight-fitting black doublet and hose, with the upper part of his face masked and a high, horn-shaped cap on his head,⁵² but he and his assistant were actually waiting on the scaffold, and were dressed quite differently. Behind the Yeomen of the Guard came the officers of the Tower, and after them, Anne, Kingston, and possibly John Skip, Anne’s almoner, bringing up the rear, although the presence of a priest at the execution is not recorded; it has been claimed—without any contemporary source being cited—that Anne was not allowed a priest on the scaffold since she had not confessed her guilt,⁵³ but that may not have been the case.

Anne was escorted across the palace courtyard and through the massive twin towers of the Coldharbor Gate, which stood to the west of the White Tower and led to the Inner Ward of the fortress.⁵⁴ Ahead was the scaffold. The Queen “went to her execution with an untroubled countenance,”⁵⁵ although the hostile author of the “Spanish Chronicle” interpreted this as “a devilish spirit.”

Waiting for her was a vast crowd of “a thousand people,”⁵⁶ all come to watch her die. Dr. Ortiz, who again got his information from Chapuys, wrote that “La Ana was beheaded before many people.”⁵⁷ There is no record of any stands being erected for the onlookers at the execution, as has been claimed.⁵⁸ “There were present the chancellor [Audley] and Master Cromwell [accompanied by his son Gregory] and many other of the King’s Council, and quite a large number of other subjects.”⁵⁹ Also present was Henry VIII’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond,⁶⁰ doubtless there at his father’s command,⁶¹ as his representative, and who may have wanted to watch because he believed that Anne had tried to poison him; he came with his friend, the Earl of Surrey.⁶²According to a later account, “a malign smile seemed to pass over the features of the young duke” at some point during the proceedings.⁶³

Wiltshire was not present to see his daughter die, but the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk were there, along with “earls, lords, and nobles of this realm, the Mayor of London with the aldermen and sheriffs, and certain of the best crafts [guilds] of London.”⁶⁴ “Some of the nobility and company of the city [were] admitted rather to be witnesses than spectators of [Anne’s] death.”⁶⁵ It is unlikely that Wyatt was watching from a window, as he had done two days earlier. The poem he wrote mentions only the men who were executed, not the Queen, and he could not have seen their executions on Tower Hill, and Anne’s on Tower Green, from the same window. Mercifully, the crowds around the scaffold probably obscured Anne’s view of the newly dug graves in the burial ground of St. Peter ad Vincula behind it.

The Imperialist observer⁶⁶ reveals that, despite Kingston’s restrictions on foreigners, the gates of the Tower had been left open. Presumably there were guards posted to control admittance, but no one could say that the execution had been conducted in secrecy. Aless, a Scot, who would have been denied entry, seems to have been relieved: “Although my lodging was not far distant from the place of execution, yet I could not become a witness of the butchery of such an illustrious lady.” Although interested, he evidently could not have borne to watch Anne’s end, or those of “the exalted personages” whom he mistakenly believed were to be “beheaded along with her.” However, his landlord, “who was a servant of Cromwell’s,” was among the witnesses, and after he returned home at noon, he was able to impart to Aless the information that the latter later imparted to Elizabeth I, much of which the landlord had picked up from other spectators.

A great murmur rose from the crowd as Anne appeared. “Never had the Queen looked so beautiful,” reported the Portuguese witness.⁶⁷ “Her face and complexion never were so beautiful,” echoed Lancelot de Carles. She walked slowly toward the scaffold, “looking frequently behind her at her ladies,”⁶⁸ or as if she perhaps expected at any moment to see a royal messenger come galloping into the Tower with a reprieve bearing the King’s seal. As she walked past the crowd, Anne would have distributed the alms she had been given to the poorest-looking spectators. There is no record of her progress to the scaffold being accompanied by drum rolls, as is so often portrayed in modern films.

In the nineteenth century, Agnes Strickland recorded a tradition handed down in the family of an officer of a guard supposedly on duty that day, escorting Anne to the scaffold. His name was Captain Gwyn, and she is said, in acknowledgment of his “respectful conduct” to her, to have given him a small gold pendant in the form of a pistol chased with scrolls of foliage, the barrel being a miniature whistle and containing a set of toothpicks.⁶⁹ She told him it had been “the first token the King gave her,” and added “that a serpent formed part of the device, and a serpent the giver had proved to her.” Strickland discovered that a Captain Gwyn did hold extensive property in Swansea in the reign of Henry VIII. The Gwyn family still had the trinket in their possession in the 1840s, but the tale does not ring true, for Anne’s words are not in keeping with those she was shortly to utter on the scaffold, and it would have been sheer folly for a condemned traitor publicly to have denigrated the King in this way. The pendant is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is thought to have been made around 1520.

The scaffold, “no more than four or five feet high,”⁷⁰ was draped with black cloth and strewn with straw. On it, according to the “Spanish Chronicle,” waited “many gentlemen, amongst them the headsman, who was dressed like the rest, and not as executioner,” and his assistant. New clothes had been provided for the headsman, paid for by the constable, who would be reimbursed in due course by the King. It seems that a conscious effort had been made to spare the Queen the starker aspects of execution, with the headsman unidentifiable and his sword concealed. There was no block: prisoners being decapitated with a sword were required to kneel upright.

Anne was composed when Kingston assisted her up the few wooden steps, the four ladies following.⁷¹ Although the anonymous Imperialist account states that she looked “feeble and stupefied,”⁷² as well she might have after a sleepless night, Lord Milherve says that “when she was brought to the place of execution, her looks were cheerful,” a word used also by Hall, while Wriothesley states that she showed to the people “a goodly smiling countenance;” the author of the “Spanish Chronicle,” whose account of the execution is detailed and clearly that of an eyewitness, asserts that she was “as gay as if she were not going to die.”

As soon as she mounted the scaffold, Anne “looked around her on all sides to see the great number of people present,” then turned to Kingston and “begged leave to speak to the people, promising she would not speak a word that was not good.”⁷³ She asked him “not to hasten the signal for her death till she had spoken that which she had a mind to say.” He “gave her leave” and indicated that she should proceed; whereupon, with a “loving countenance,”⁷⁴ she faced the crowd and “gracefully addressed the people from the scaffold with a voice somewhat overcome by weakness, but which gathered strength as she went on.”⁷⁵ There are various versions of her speech, and most of them had her acknowledging, as Dr. Ortiz learned from Chapuys, that “she died by the laws of the kingdom.”⁷⁶

In the Histoire de la Royne Anne de Boullant, Anne is recorded as saying that “she was come to die, as she was judged by the law; she would accuse none, nor say anything of the ground upon which she was judged. She prayed heartily for the King, and called him a most merciful and gentle prince, and [said] that he had been always to her a good, gentle sovereign lord, and if any would meddle with her cause, she required them to judge the best. And so she took her leave of them, and of the world, and heartily desired they would pray for her.”

Hall gives a similar version of this speech, which suggests that it was substantially what Anne really said:

Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, according to law, for by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I come here only to die, and thus to yield myself humbly to the will of the King, my lord. And if, in my life, I did ever offend the King’s Grace, surely with my death I do now atone. I come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused, as I know full well that aught I say in my defence doth not appertain to you. I pray and beseech you all, good friends, to pray for the life of the King, my sovereign lord and yours, who is one of the best princes on the face of the earth, who has always treated me so well that better could not be, wherefore I submit to death with good will, humbly asking pardon of all the world. If any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge the best. Thus I take my leave of the world, and of you, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me. Oh Lord, have mercy on me! To God I commend my soul.

Wriothesley has Anne saying something similar: “Masters, I here humbly submit me to the law as the law hath judged me, and as for mine offenses, I here accuse no man; God knoweth them. I remit them to God, beseeching Him to have mercy on my soul, and I beseech Jesus save my sovereign and master the King, the most godly, noble, and gentle prince that is, and long to reign over you.”

Lancelot de Carles gives another version, in which Anne “begged her hearers to forgive her if she had not used them all with becoming gentleness, and asked for their prayers. It was needless, she said, to relate why she was there, but she prayed the Judge of all the world to have compassion on those who had condemned her, and she begged them to pray for the King, in whom she had always found great kindness, fear of God, and love of his subjects.” According to Milherve, Anne also said: “Be not sorry to see me die thus, but pardon me from your hearts that I have not expressed to all about me that mildness that became me; and that I have not done that good that was in my power to do.” He adds that she prayed for those who were the procurers of her death.

The Imperialist source wrote that “raising her eyes to Heaven, she begged God and the King to forgive her offenses, and she bade the people pray God to protect the King, for he was a good, kind, gracious, and loving prince.”⁷⁷ Given that this was tantamount to an admission of guilt, he may have misheard her.

The Portuguese bystander had Anne blaming the cruelty of the law for her fate in a speech that echoes Hall’s version:

Good friends, I am not come here to excuse or to justify myself, forasmuch as I know full well that aught that I could say in my defence doth not appertain to you, and that I could draw no hope of life from the same. But I come here only to die, and thus to yield myself humbly to the will of the King, my lord. And if in my life I did ever offend the King’s Grace, surely with my death I do now atone for the same. And I blame not my judges, nor any other manner of person, nor anything save the cruel law of the land by which I die. But be this, and my faults, as they may, I beseech you all, good friends, to pray for the life of the King, my sovereign lord and yours, who is one of the best princes on the face of the Earth, and who hath always treated me so well that better could not be; wherefore I submit to death with a good will, humbly asking pardon of all the world.⁷⁸

Anthony Anthony, another eyewitness, recorded Anne’s speech as follows:

You shall understand that I have submitted me unto the law, and so I am come hither to obey and fulfil the law. And so I can say no more, but I desire you all to be just and true unto the King, your sovereign, for he is a good, virtuous king and a goodly king, a victorious king, a bountiful king, for I have found his Grace always very good and loving unto me, and [he] has done much for me. Wherefore I pray God reward his Grace, praying you all to pray God for his life, that his Grace may reign long with you, and I pray you all for God’s sake to pray for me.

George Wyatt’s version of Anne’s words, probably taken from John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the Church, echoes Hall’s. This speech, Wyatt later observed, showed that Anne’s love for the King was such that she chose “to acquit and defend him by her words at her death.” Yet, as has been stated already, it was customary for condemned traitors to refrain from criticizing the King’s justice on the scaffold, and Anne would have been aware not only that her father’s political survival and future at court depended on her, but also that her husband’s anger might be visited upon their innocent child, whose future was now painfully uncertain.⁷⁹ Hence her refusal to say anything about her case, and her fulsome praise of the King—which, one would like to think, might have been delivered with just a touch of irony.

The author of the “Spanish Chronicle,” while initially fairly accurate in his version of Anne’s speech, seems, as usual, to have embellished it, claiming that she said, “Do not think, good people, that I am sorry to die, or that I have done anything to deserve this death. My fault has been my great pride, and the great crime I committed in getting the King to leave my mistress, Queen Katherine, for my sake, and I pray God to pardon me for it. I say to you all that everything they have accused me of is false, and the principal reason I am to die is Jane Seymour, as I was the cause of the ill that befell my mistress.” At this, supposedly, the gentlemen standing by “would not let her say any more.”⁸⁰

John Husee aptly summed up Anne’s dying speech, and those of the men executed two days earlier, in a letter sent to Lady Lisle on May 24: “As to the confession of the Queen and others, they said little or nothing, but what was said was wondrously discreetly spoken.”⁸¹ Anne’s words were certainly moving, for “the spectators could not refrain from tears.”⁸² Her failure to admit her guilt would surely have been glaring—this was what Husee meant when he said that the Queen died “boldly”⁸³—and it certainly gave rise to much speculation.

Anne must have realized by now that there was no hope of a reprieve and that she had only minutes left to her. The “Spanish Chronicle” states that she asked which gentleman was the headsman, and was told—by whom, it is not clear—“that he would come presently, but that in the meanwhile it would be better for her to confess the truth and not be so obstinate, for she could not hope for pardon.” Anne replied, “I know I shall have no pardon, but they shall know no more from me.”

“With the aid of her maids, she undressed her neck with great courage,”⁸⁴ standing there as they “stripped [her] of her short mantle furred with ermines. She herself took off her headdress,” and “a young lady presented her with a linen cap, into which she gathered her long hair,”⁸⁵ “so that the blow might not be impeded.”⁸⁶ According to the Portuguese account, which may have been embroidered somewhat, Anne was now heard to whisper, “Alas, poor head. In a very brief space, thou wilt roll in the dust on the scaffold; and as in life you did not merit the crown of a queen, so in death you deserve not better doom than this.”⁸⁷ However, these words have something of a ring of truth, since the hurriedly built scaffold may well have been dusted with sawdust.

As the Queen prepared for death, she was “saying to her ladies that she asked them to pray for her.”⁸⁸ The Portuguese witness says she expressed her gratitude to them, declaring, “And ye, my maids, who, whilst I lived, ever showed yourselves so diligent in my service, and who are now to be present at my last hour and mortal agony; as in good fortune ye were faithful to me, so even at this, my miserable death, ye do not forsake me. And as I cannot reward you for your true service to me, I pray you take comfort for my loss.” She told them not to be sorry to see her die, and begged their pardon for any harshness she had shown toward them. “Howbeit, forget me not, and be always faithful to the King’s Grace and to her whom with happier fortune ye may look to have as your queen and mistress. And esteem your honor far beyond your life, and in your prayers to the Lord Jesu, forget not to pray for my soul.”⁸⁹

The end was very near. Seeing that Anne was not going to confess and that it was time to perform his office, the executioner came forward and knelt before her, saying, “Madam, I crave Your Majesty’s pardon, for I am ordered to do this duty.” She gave it “willingly.”

“I beg you to kneel and say your prayers,” he told her.⁹⁰

This was the moment. She had perhaps been warned that she must remain very still if she wanted to avoid being horrifically injured by the sword.⁹¹ Again, “she appeared dazed” as she kneeled down, upright on both knees in the straw,⁹² “fastening her clothes about her feet,”⁹³ a detail noted decades later by George Wyatt, who says she “prepared to receive the stroke of death with resolution, so sedately as to cover her feet with her nether garments.” “She asked that time for prayer should be granted her,”⁹⁴ repeating, “several times, ‘O Christ, receive my spirit,’”⁹⁵ but her fear was evident. “The poor lady kept looking about her. The headsman, being still in front of her, said in French, ‘Madam, do not fear. I will wait till you tell me.’” Anne seemed fearful that her coif would be in the way of the blow, and told him, “You will have to take this coif off,” pointing to it with her left hand.⁹⁶ Although he declined, presumably indicating that he did not need to, she kept her hand on the coif.

Eyewitness accounts of the execution differ; presumably some spectators were closer than others, or had a less restricted view. The “Spanish Chronicle” asserts that Anne refused to have her eyes bandaged, and that her gaze disturbed the executioner, but three other witnesses state that one of her ladies, weeping, “came forward to do the last office” and blindfolded her with “a linen cloth.”⁹⁷ Aless, whose landlord related the details, says that Anne herself “covered her eyes.” She was repeatedly saying “with a fervent spirit,”⁹⁸ over and over, “Jesu, have pity on my soul! My God, have pity on my soul.”⁹⁹ “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul.”¹⁰⁰ “The four ladies knelt in silent prayer”;¹⁰¹ the Portuguese says “they withdrew themselves some little space, and knelt down over against the scaffold, bewailing bitterly and shedding many tears.” According to Aless, Anne now “commanded the executioner to strike.”

As she knelt there and “awaited the blow,”¹⁰² most of those present followed the example of the Lord Mayor, Sir John Aleyn, and sank to their knees, out of respect for the passing of a soul; only the Dukes of Suffolk and Richmond remained resolutely standing.¹⁰³ Anne was still praying aloud, “making no confession of her fault, but saying, ‘O Lord God, have pity on my soul! To Christ I commend my soul!’”¹⁰⁴ Strickland cites an unnamed source that gives her last words as “In manuas tuas”—Into Thy hands.

What happened next happened “suddenly”:¹⁰⁵ “immediately, the executioner did his office.”¹⁰⁶ “The Queen was beheaded according to the manner and custom of Paris, that is to say, with a sword,”¹⁰⁷ which was probably of the finest Flemish steel,¹⁰⁸ and had been “hidden under a heap of straw.”¹⁰⁹ It would have been blunt-tipped, around three or four feet in length, with a two-inch-wide double-edged blade and a leather-bound handle long enough to be gripped by both hands. A groove or “fuller” was normally scored the whole length of the blade on either side of an execution sword, its purpose being to channel the blood away from the razor-sharp edge of the blade and so prevent it being blunted.¹¹⁰

The intention plainly was to distract Anne at the final moment. The executioner’s English assistant had been “told beforehand what to do,” and as the headsman turned to the scaffold steps and called to the assistant, “Bring me the sword,” Anne blindly moved her head “toward the steps, still with her hand on her coif, and the headsman made a sign with his right hand for them to give him the sword.”¹¹¹ She was aware neither of him taking it, nor of his approach, for he had removed his shoes and come up stealthily behind her.¹¹² With his hand trembling,¹¹³ for he was “himself distressed,”¹¹⁴ he raised the sharp, heavy sword aloft, grasping it with both hands, and swung it in a circling motion around his head once or twice to gain the necessary momentum,¹¹⁵ then “without being noticed by the lady.”¹¹⁶ who was expecting the blow to descend from the other direction and “not so much as shrinking at it,”¹¹⁷ he brought it down and swiftly “divided her neck at a blow,”¹¹⁸ that “fair neck” that the poet Wyatt had once praised in his admiring verse. Smitten “off at a stroke,”¹¹⁹ her head was struck straight into the straw.¹²⁰

“He did his office very well, before you could say a paternoster,” reported Sir John Spelman, who was among the watching crowd. He added that as the Queen’s head “fell to the ground,” he and other horrified onlookers witnessed “her lips moving and her eyes moving,” while Gregorio Leti, writing in the late seventeenth century, rather dramatically claims that those eyes seemed mournfully to look down on the broken body on the scaffold before glazing over in death, although his account presupposes that the executioner held up the head in the customary manner and cried, “So perish all the King’s enemies!” There is no record of that happening at Anne Boleyn’s execution.

It may be that some sentient feeling briefly remained, although the movements Spelman witnessed could possibly have been a convulsive response of the body’s reflexes to the shock of decapitation, rather than the last flickerings of consciousness, and they have been observed in various other victims of beheading down the centuries, particularly during the Terror in the French Revolution. Research undertaken in the late nineteenth century suggested that most die within two seconds, while a more modern estimate would be an average of thirteen seconds. Severing the spinal cord causes death, but not until the brain has been completely deprived, through massive hemorrhaging, of the oxygen in the blood that nourishes it. While that is happening, neurons are firing off in a vain attempt to counteract the blow that has precipitated the adrenaline rush and repair the damage done to the body, and the brain uses the oxygen that remains in the head.

In 1905 a French doctor observed that a decapitated criminal’s eyelids and lips worked for five seconds before the face relaxed and the eyes rolled back, at which point he called out the man’s name, only to see the eyes fixing themselves on him and the pupils focusing before the lids fell and the pupils glazed over. The whole process had taken twenty-five to thirty seconds. In 1989 the face of a man decapitated in a car accident registered shock, then terror, then grief, as the living eyes looked directly at the witness before dimming. In 1956 two French doctors concluded: “Death is not instantaneous: every element survives decapitation. It is a savage vivisection.” In 1983 another medical study found that “no matter how efficient the method of execution, at least two to three seconds of intense pain cannot be avoided.” However, once the spine is severed, the perception of pain recedes. Some victims have not responded at all to stimuli, so it must therefore be concluded that they were knocked unconscious by the impact of the blow, or fainted due to the dramatic loss in blood pressure, and felt virtually nothing, while others—including perhaps Anne Boleyn—did experience a few dreadful moments of awareness of what was happening.

“When the head fell, a white handkerchief was thrown over it” by one of the Queen’s ladies.¹²¹ The body lay slumped beside it. At a given signal, the cannon along Tower Wharf were fired, announcing Anne’s death to the world.

The Queen was dead. Justice had to all intents and purposes been done. “It is said that, although the bodies and heads of those executed the day before yesterday have been buried, her head will be put upon the bridge [London Bridge], at least for some time,” Chapuys wrote later that day,¹²² but Anne was to be spared that final indignity. Immediately, “at the moment the poor lady expired,” her women made haste decently to dispose of her remains,¹²³ refusing to allow any man to touch her.¹²⁴ An oft-repeated popular tale has old women rushing forward from the crowd to catch drops of Anne’s blood for their charms and potions, the blood of the condemned being regarded as especially potent,¹²⁵ but again, there is no mention of this in contemporary sources.

As the spectators began to disperse, the Portuguese stayed and watched as “one of the four ladies” took up the severed head, still covered with the white cloth, “and carried it away. The other three lifted the bleeding body of the dead woman, which had for so long been the object of the King’s ardent desire, and, having reverently “wrapped [it] in a white covering,”¹²⁶ placed the remains “in a chest which stood here ready, and carried them to the chapel that is within the Tower”;¹²⁷ Spelman says this was an old elm chest that had been used for storing bow staves, and it would have been just long enough to take a headless corpse; no provision had been made for a proper coffin, so this chest had probably been fetched at the last minute from the Tower armories, and left lying ready beside the scaffold.¹²⁸

“The head and body were taken up by the ladies, whom you would have thought bereft of their souls, so languid and weak were they with anguish, but, fearing that their mistress might be handled unworthily by inhuman men, they forced themselves to do this duty.”¹²⁹

Jean Hannaert of Lyons also reported that “the Queen’s head and body were taken to a church in the Tower, accompanied by four ladies.”¹³⁰ That church was the royal chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula, where Anne Boleyn was buried in the earth beneath the chancel pavement “the same day at afternoon,”¹³¹ in the presence of her ladies, who were “sobbing woefully;” as it was gone noon, after which time mass could not be celebrated, one of Anne’s chaplains, Father Thirlwall, merely pronounced a blessing over the chest before it was interred.¹³²

Since the execution was over by nine o’clock in the morning, and Anne’s body was taken immediately into the chapel, we might wonder why there was at least a three-hour delay before it was buried. Perhaps Kingston had been expected to attend but was busy all morning in the aftermath of the execution. What is most likely is that someone had to be found to lift the paving stones in the chancel and dig a shallow grave; Kingston, being very busy with his state prisoners and the arrangements for their executions, may have neglected to make provision for this earlier, just as he neglected to provide Anne with a proper coffin.

What is certain is that Anne’s attendants were made to strip the body of its expensive—and probably bloodstained—garments and jewelry, which were then distributed to the Tower officials as perquisites, as was customary after executions.¹³³ Later, these items would be redeemed by the King for a substantial sum. Possibly Henry did not want people cherishing mementoes of his dead wife. The sumptuary laws banned the lower orders from wearing such attire anyway—rich materials, furs, and embroideries being reserved for those of high rank—so cash was probably very welcome in exchange.

Lancelot de Carles states that Anne was buried beside her brother; his evidence may not be entirely accurate, as will be seen, and the authorities surely would not have thought it fitting for an incestuous brother and sister to lie together in death. Other evidence suggests they were buried some distance apart, before the altar, and as theirs were the first bodies to be buried in the chancel, there was plenty of space. “God provided for her corpse sacred burial, even in [a] place as it were consecrate to innocence,” pronounced George Wyatt.

After the burial, observed Lancelot de Carles, Anne’s ladies “were as sheep without a shepherd,” but they would not be left in that state for long because “already the King has taken a fancy to a choice lady. Other great things are predicted, of which the people are assured. If I see them take place, I will let you know, for never were such news. People say it is the year of marvels.”

“The Queen,” Husee reported only hours afterward, “suffered with sword this day … and died boldly.”¹³⁴ Referring to all who had died, he added, “Jesu take them to His mercy.” Even Cromwell was impressed by Anne’s bravery, and that of Rochford, and “greatly praised the intelligence, wit, and courage of the Concubine and her brother.”¹³⁵ “She had reigned as queen three years lacking fourteen days, from her coronation to her death,” Wriothesley observed. The Imperialist witness believed that he had “seen the prophecy of Merlin fulfilled.”¹³⁶

Sometime after Anne’s execution, in his prison in the Byward Tower, a distressed Thomas Wyatt again put pen to paper to write of the woman he had once passionately courted, his verses an outpouring of woe at the unforeseen twists of fortune to which all human beings were subject, Anne more dramatically than most. It was a popular contemporary theme, and Wyatt—who had been so closely caught up in this tragedy—expressed it very movingly, and captured the horror of Anne’s situation:

So freely wooed, so dearly bought,
So soon a queen, so soon low brought,
Hath not been seen, could not be thought.
               O! What is Fortune?

As slipper as ice, as fading as snow,
Like unto dice that a man doth throw,
Until it arises he shall not know
               What shall be his fortune!

They did her conduct to a tower of stone,
Wherein she would wail and lament her alone,
And condemned be, for help there was none.
               Lo! Such was her fortune.¹³⁷

Writing on the day of her execution, Anne’s chaplain, Matthew Parker, was in no doubt that her soul was in “blessed felicity with God.” Her body, however, had been consigned to oblivion, for no provision was made for any stone or memorial tablet to mark the place where she lay.¹³⁸