The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (49 page)

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 17
⁶⁹
“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.

For Now I Die

O
n 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 the
Lisle 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.
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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.