The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (52 page)

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.
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Ahead was the scaffold. The Queen “went to her execution with an untroubled countenance,”
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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,”
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all come to watch her die. Dr. Ortiz, who again got his information from Chapuys, wrote that “La Ana was beheaded before many people.”
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There is no record of any stands being erected for the onlookers at the execution, as has been claimed.
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“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.”
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Also present was Henry VIII’s bastard son, the Duke of Richmond,
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doubtless there at his father’s command,
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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.
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According to a later account, “a malign smile seemed to pass over the features of the young duke” at some point during the proceedings.
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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.”
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“Some of the nobility and company of the city [were] admitted rather to be witnesses than spectators of [Anne’s] death.”
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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 observer
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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.
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“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,”
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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.
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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,”
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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.
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Although the anonymous Imperialist account states that she looked “feeble and stupefied,”
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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.”
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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:

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

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Anne’s words were certainly moving, for “the spectators could not refrain from tears.”
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Her failure to admit her guilt would surely have been glaring—this was what Husee meant when he said that the Queen died “boldly”
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—and it certainly gave rise to much speculation.