The Lady in the Tower: The Fall of Anne Boleyn (53 page)

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,”
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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,”
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“so that the blow might not be impeded.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Again, “she appeared dazed” as she kneeled down, upright on both knees in the straw,
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“fastening her clothes about her feet,”
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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,”
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repeating, “several times, ‘O Christ, receive my spirit,’”
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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.
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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.”
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Aless, whose landlord related the details, says that Anne herself “covered her eyes.” She was repeatedly saying “with a fervent spirit,”
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over and over, “Jesu, have pity on my soul! My God, have pity on my soul.”
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“To Jesus Christ I commend my soul.”
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“The four ladies knelt in silent prayer”;
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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,”
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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.
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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!’”
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Strickland cites an unnamed source that gives her last words as
“In manuas tuas”
—Into Thy hands.

What happened next happened “suddenly”:
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“immediately, the executioner did his office.”
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“The Queen was beheaded according to the manner and custom of Paris, that is to say, with a sword,”
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which was probably of the finest Flemish steel,
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and had been “hidden under a heap of straw.”
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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.
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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.”
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She was aware neither of him taking it, nor of his approach, for he had removed his shoes and come up stealthily behind her.
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With his hand trembling,
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for he was “himself distressed,”
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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,
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then “without being noticed by the lady.”
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who was expecting the blow to descend from the other direction and “not so much as shrinking at it,”
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he brought it down and swiftly “divided her neck at a blow,”
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that “fair neck” that the poet Wyatt had once praised in his admiring verse. Smitten “off at a stroke,”
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her head was struck straight into the straw.
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“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.
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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,
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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,
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refusing to allow any man to touch her.
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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,
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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,”
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placed the remains “in a chest which stood here ready, and carried them to the chapel that is within the Tower”;
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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.
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“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.”
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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.”
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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,”
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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.
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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.