The Creation of Anne Boleyn (20 page)

The clarity and confidence of Anne’s declaration here, her insight into her lack of humility, and her reference to “bewilderment” of mind are all, I believe, support for the theory, which many scholars have challenged, that a purported “last letter” to Henry written by Anne on May 6 is indeed authentic. The letter was found among Cromwell’s possessions after his death, apparently undelivered to the king. The handwriting doesn’t correspond exactly (although it is not radically dissimilar) to Anne’s other letters, but it could easily have been transcribed by someone else or written in Anne’s own hand, which could have been altered by the distress of her situation. On May 5 Anne
did
ask Kingston to “bear a letter from me to Master Secretary.”
³⁹
Kingston then said to her, “Madam, tell it me by word of mouth and I will do it.”
⁴⁰
She thanked him, and after that, we hear no more of it in Kingston’s reports, so we don’t know if the letter was ever written or dictated. But the one found among Cromwell’s papers, dated May 6, begins with a statement that is so startlingly precise in its depiction of Anne’s state of mind at the time that it’s hard to imagine anyone else, in the decades following her death, writing it.

Your Grace’s displeasure and my imprisonment are things so strange to me, that what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether ignorant. Whereas you send to me (willing me to confess a truth and so obtain your favour), by such a one, whom you know to be mine ancient professed enemy [Cromwell]; I no sooner received this message by him, than I rightly conceived your meaning; and if as you say, confessing a truth indeed may procure my safety, I shall, with willingness and duty, perform your command.

But let not your grace ever imagine your poor wife will ever be brought to acknowledge a fault, where not so much as a thought ever proceeded. And to speak a truth, never a prince had a wife more loyal in all duty, and in all true affection, than you have ever found in Anne Bulen—with which name and place I could willingly have contented myself if God and your grace’s pleasure had so been pleased. Neither did I at any time so far forget myself in my exaltation, or received queenship, but I always looked for such alteration as I now find; for the ground of my preferment being on no surer foundation than your grace’s fancy, the least alteration was fit and sufficient (I knew) to draw that fancy to some other subject.

You have chosen me from a low estate to be your queen and companion, far beyond my just desert or desire; if then you found me worthy of such honour, good your grace, let not any light fancy or bad counsel of my enemies withdraw your princely favour from me, neither let that stain—that unworthy stain—of a disloyal heart toward your good grace ever cast so foul a blot on me and on the infant princess, your daughter [Elizabeth].

Try me, good king, but let me have a lawful trial, and let not my sworn enemies sit as my accusers and as my judges; yea, let me receive an open trial, for my truth shall fear no open shames; then shall you see either mine innocency cleared, your suspicions and conscience satisfied, the ignominy and slander of the world stopped, or my guilt openly declared. So that whatever God and you may determine of, your grace may be at liberty, both before God and man, not only to execute worthy punishment on me, as an unfaithful wife, but to follow your affection already settled on that party [Anne knew of Henry’s affection for Jane Seymour], for whose sake I am now as I am; whose name I could some good while since, have pointed unto: Your Grace being not ignorant of my suspicions therein.

But if you have already determined of me, and that not only my death, but an infamous slander, must bring you to the enjoying of your desired happiness, then I desire of God that He will pardon your great sin herein, and, likewise, my enemies, the instruments thereof, and that he will not call you to a strait account for your unprincely and cruel usage of me at his general judgment-seat, where both you and myself must shortly appear; and in whose just judgment, I doubt not (whatsoever the world think of me) mine innocency shall be openly known and sufficiently cleared.

My last and only request shall be, that myself may only bear the burden of your grace’s displeasure, and that it may not touch the innocent souls of those poor gentlemen, whom, as I understand, are likewise in strait imprisonment for my sake.

If ever I have found favour in your sight—if ever the name of Anne Bulen have been pleasing in your ears—then let me obtain this request; and so I will leave to trouble your grace no further: with mine earnest prayers to the Trinity to have your grace in his good keeping, and to direct you in all your actions.

From my doleful prison in the Tower, the 6th of May.

Ann Bulen
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Most of Anne’s modern biographers believe this letter to be a forgery, in part because it is so daringly accusatory of Henry and in part because the “style” is not like Anne’s. “Its ‘elegance,’” writes Ives, “has always inspired suspicion.”
⁴²
Well, not always. Henry Ellis and other nineteenth-century commentators believed it was authentic. And the “style” argument is an odd one, because we have so few existing letters of Anne’s and they are such businesslike affairs that it’s hard to see how anyone could determine a “style” from them. If Henry had saved her responses to his love letters, we might have a better idea of what Anne was like as a writer, but they were destroyed. As it stands, though, we do have the account of her speech at her trial, and it exhibits many of the same qualities as this letter. In both, Anne stands her ground bravely and articulately, but more striking, goes beyond the conventions of the time to venture into deeper “psychological” and political territory: the insight into her lack of humility, the inference that this might have had something to do with her fall from grace, her reference to the “bewilderment” and “strangeness” of finding herself accused of adultery and treason.

As to the letter’s bold attitude toward Henry, this was characteristic of Anne, and (as she acknowledged in her trial speech) she was aware that it overstepped the borders of what was acceptable. Her refusal to contain herself safely within those borders was what had drawn Henry to her; she could not simply turn the switch off when it began to get her in trouble. To do that would have been to relinquish the only thing left to her at this point: her selfhood. Ives says that it would “appear to be wholly improbable” for a Tudor prisoner to warn the king “that he is in imminent danger from the judgment of God.”
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But Anne was no ordinary prisoner; she had shared Henry’s bed, advised and conspired with him in the divorce strategies, debated theology with him, given birth to his daughter, protested against his infidelities, and dared to challenge Cromwell’s use of confiscated monastery money. Arguably, it was her failure to be “appropriate” that contributed to her downfall. Now, condemned to death by her own husband, to stop “being Anne” would have been to shatter the one constancy left in the terrible “strangeness” of her situation.

I don’t know for certain, of course, that this letter is authentic. But I have to wonder whether skeptics have been influenced by Anne’s reputation as a woman known for her “feminine” vivacity, emotionality, and sexuality. Henry Ellis called this letter “one of the finest compositions in the English Language.”
⁴⁴
Ellis lived at a time when women writers had begun to come into their own. But perhaps not every historian has been as ready to acknowledge that Anne could possibly have written “one of the finest compositions in the English language.”

Approaching the Scaffold

Expecting to die on May 18, Anne took the Sacrament at two
A.M,
having prepared her soul for many hours. She had insisted that Kingston be present when she took confession so her assertion of innocence of the charges would be public record. Even her old enemy Chapuys was impressed by the fact that Anne, before and after receiving the Sacrament, affirmed to those who had charge of her “on peril of her soul’s damnation, that she had not misconducted herself so far as her husband the King was concerned.”
⁴⁵
In the sixteenth century, to speak anything other than the truth at such a time would be to invite the utter condemnation of God. Anne had nothing to gain and her salvation to lose by lying. By now all who were in close contact with her must have been convinced of her innocence, whatever their politics.

She was prepared to die. Yet, cruelly, the execution was delayed twice, once in order to clear the Tower of possible sympathetic observers, the second time because the executioner had been delayed. The first delay dismayed Anne, who thought that at the newly appointed hour she would already “be dead and past my pain.”
⁴⁶
Kingston, who seems to have been an absurdly literal man, took her to be referring to the physical pain of the execution itself and reassured her that “there should be no pain, it was so subtle.”
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Anne replied with her most famous line: “I heard say the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.”
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And then, according to Kingston, “she put her hand about [her neck] laughing heartily.”
⁴⁹
Kingston flat-footedly interpreted this to mean that Anne had “much joy and pleasure in death.”
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He apparently did not “get” Anne’s irony or that she was probably becoming a bit unhinged at this point. At the news of the second delay, she was distraught. But “It was not that she desired death,” as she told Kingston (or perhaps she told one of the ladies, who then told him), “but she had thought herself prepared to die, and feared that the delay would weaken her resolve.”
⁵¹
So much for Kingston’s theory that Anne felt “joy and pleasure” at the prospect of death.

What she may have felt was something closer to what psychologist James Hillman describes as the state of mind that often precedes an attempt at suicide: a desperate desire to shed an old self whose suffering has become unbearable and thus must be “reborn” in the act of dying. This imagined rebirth, for Hillman, has nothing to do with belief in reincarnation or even in heaven, but with the perception, ironically, that the soul cannot survive under existing conditions. What Anne had been through was certainly enough to shatter any hold her previous life may have exerted on her. She had been discarded by the man who had pursued her for six years, fathered her daughter, and seemingly adored her for much of their time together. The person she was closest to in the world—her brother—had been executed on the most hideous and shameful of charges. The rest of her family, as far as we can tell, had either abandoned her or—as Anne believed of her mother—was awash with despair and grief over what was happening. Still recovering from a miscarriage, her body and mind undoubtedly assaulted by hormonal changes and unstable moods, she had been sent to prison on absurd, concocted charges and “cared for” there by women who were hostile spies. She knew she would never see her daughter again, and—unlike the fictional Anne of
Anne of the Thousand Days,
who predicts that “Elizabeth will be queen!”—she had no hope, after Cranmer’s visit, that her child would ever be anything more than what she had seen Mary reduced to: a bastardized ex-princess forced to bow down to any children the new wife might produce for Henry. She had been given reason to hope that she would be allowed to live, only to have those hopes crushed at her sentencing. In a sense, she had already been through dozens of dyings. Nothing was left but the withered skin of her old life, which she was ready to shed.

As she mounted the scaffold, wearing a robe of dark damask (black in some reports, gray in others) trimmed with white fur, with a red kirtle (petticoat) underneath—red being the liturgical color of Catholic martyrdom—political and national affiliations continued, as they had through her reign and would for centuries to come, to shape the descriptions of her appearance and behavior. To an author of the
Spanish Chronicle
, she exhibited “a devilish spirit.”
⁵²
A French witness who had sneaked in despite the ban on strangers wrote that “never had she looked so beautiful.”
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An anonymous observer described her as “feeble and half-stupefied”
⁵⁴
(which would be understandable, and not incompatible with her looking beautiful as well). Thomas Wriothesley says she showed “a goodly smiling countenance.”
⁵⁵
Frenchman de Carles commented on the beauty of her complexion, pure and clear as though cleansed by all the suffering. For all, the spectacle of a queen, wearing the white ermine of royalty and mounting the stairs to the scaffold, was unnerving.

Unlike her trial speech and her “last letter,” Anne’s remarks on the scaffold made the more conventional bows to the goodness and mercy of the king—in this highly public context, it was virtually required, if only to prevent any retribution against surviving relatives—and asked the people to pray for her. She did not admit to guilt for the offenses with which she was charged or accuse the judges of malice, but she did make reference to the “cruel law of the land by which I die.”
⁵⁶
By now, the four young ladies who had accompanied her to the scaffold (clearly not the hostile spies who had lived with her in the Tower, but others, more intimate with her, whom she had been allowed to have with her in these last moments) were weeping. Anne, having helped them take off her robe—an act that in itself must have demanded great composure and courage—“appeared dazed” as she kneeled down, modestly covering her feet with her dress, and asked the executioner to remove her coif lest it interfere with his stroke. The executioner realized that she was afraid of the pain of an impeded blow; she kept looking around her, her hand on her coif, anticipating the moment. Clearly “distressed” at the task he was to perform, he told her that he would wait until she gave the signal. “With a fervent spirit” she began to pray, and the Portuguese contingent, unable to bear it, huddled together and knelt down against the scaffold, wailing loudly.
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