Looking at the case, then, as it now stands, we have the report for some time current, that the queen was out of favour, and that the king's affection was turned in another direction,—a report, be it observed, which had arisen before the catastrophe, and was not, therefore, an afterthought, or legend; we have also the antecedent improbability, which is very great, that a lady in the queen's position could have been guilty of the offences with which the indictment charges her. We have also the improbability, which is great, that the king, now forty-four years old, who in his earlier years had been distinguished for the absence of those vices in which contemporary princes indulged themselves, in wanton weariness of a woman for whom he had revolutionized the kingdom, and quarrelled with half Christendom, suddenly resolved to murder her; that, instead of resorting to poison, or to the less obtrusive methods of criminality, he invented, and persuaded his council to assist him in inventing, a series of accusations which reflected dishonour on himself, and which involved the gratuitous death of five persons with whom he had no quarrel, who were attached to his court and person. To maintain these accusations, he would have to overawe into an active participation in his crime, judges, juries, peers, the dearest relations of those whom he was destroying, and this with no standing army, no prætorians or janissaries at his back, with no force but the yeomen of the guard, who could be scattered by a rising of the apprentices. He had gone out of his way, moreover, to call a parliament; and the summons had been so hasty that no time was left to control the The popular interpretation is not credible. elections; while again to fail was ruin; and the generation of Englishmen to whom we owe the Reformation were not so wholly lost to all principles of honour, that Henry could have counted beforehand upon success in so desperate a scheme with that absolute certainty without which he would scarcely have risked the experiment. I think that there is some improbability here. Unlikely as it is that queens should disgrace themselves, history contains unfortunately more than one instance that it is not impossible. That queens in that very age were capable of profligacy was proved, but a few years later, by the confessions of Catherine Howard. I believe history will be ransacked vainly to find a parallel for conduct at once so dastardly, so audacious, and so foolishly wicked as that which the popular hypothesis attributes to Henry VIII.
The facts in favour of the queen.
This is a fair statement of the probabilities; not, I believe, exaggerated on either side. Turning to the positive facts which are known to us, we have amongst those which make for the queen her own denial of her guilt; her supposed letter to the king, which wears the complexion of innocence; the assertions of three out of the five other persons who were accused, up to the moment of their execution; and the sympathizing story of a Flemish gentleman who believed her innocent, and who says that many other people in England believed the same. On the other side, we have the judicial verdict of more than seventy noblemen and gentlemen,[595] no one of whom had any The facts against her. interest in the deaths of the accused, and some of whom had interests the most tender in their acquittal; we have the assent of the judges who sat on the commission, and who passed sentence, after full opportunities of examination, with all the evidence before their eyes; the partial confession of one of the prisoners, though afterwards withdrawn; and the complete confession of another, maintained till the end, and not withdrawn upon the scaffold. Mr. Hallam must pardon me for saying that this is not a matter in which doubt is unpermitted.
Wednesday, May 17. The execution of the five gentlemen.
A brief interval only was allowed between the judgment and the final close. On Wednesday, the 17th, the five gentlemen were taken to execution. Smeton was hanged; the others were beheaded. Smeton and Brereton acknowledged the justice of their sentence. Brereton said that if he had to die a thousand deaths, he deserved them all; and Brereton was the only one of the five whose guilt at the time was doubted.[596] Norris died silent; Weston, with a few general lamentations on the wickedness of his past life. None denied the crime for which they suffered; all but one were considered by the spectators to have confessed. Rochfort had shown some feeling while in the Tower. Kingston on one occasion found him weeping bitterly. The day of the trial he sent a petition to the king, to what effect I do not learn; and on the Tuesday he begged to see Cromwell, having something on his conscience, as he said, which he wished to tell him.[597] His desire, however, does not seem to have been complied with; he spoke sorrowfully on the scaffold of the shame which he had brought upon the gospel, and died with words which appeared to the spectators, if not a confession, yet something very nearly resembling it, "This said lord," wrote a spectator to the court at Brussels, "made a good Catholic address to the people. He said that he had not come there to preach to them, but rather to serve as a mirror and an example. He acknowledged the crimes which he had committed against God, and against the king his sovereign; there was no occasion for him, he said, to repeat the cause for which he was condemned; they would have little pleasure in hearing him tell it. He prayed God, and he prayed the king, to pardon his offences; and all others whom he might have injured he also prayed to forgive him as heartily as he forgave every one. He bade his hearers avoid the vanities of the world, and the flatteries of the court which had brought him to the shameful end which had overtaken him. Had he obeyed the lessons of that gospel which he had so often read, he said he should not have fallen so far; it was worth more to be a good doer than a good reader. Finally, he forgave those who had adjudged him to die, and he desired them to pray God for his soul."[598]
Anne Boleyn confesses to Cranmer that she has never been lawfully married to the king.
The queen was left till a further mystery had perplexed yet deeper the disgraceful exposure. Henry had desired Cranmer to be her confessor. The archbishop was with her on the day after her trial,[599] and she then made an extraordinary avowal,[600] either that she had been married or contracted in early life, or had been entangled in some connexion which invalidated her marriage with the king. The letter to the emperor, which I have already quoted,[601] furnishes the solitary explanation of the mystery which remains. Some one, apparently the imperial ambassador, informed Charles that she was discovered to have been nine years before married to Lord Percy, not formally only, but really and completely. If this be true, her fate need scarcely excite further sympathy.
On Wednesday she was taken to Lambeth, where she made her confession in form, and the archbishop, sitting judicially, pronounced her marriage with the king to have been null and void. The supposition, that this business was a freak of caprice or passion, is too puerile to be considered. It is certain that she acknowledged something; and it is certain also that Lord Northumberland was examined upon the subject before the archbishop. In person upon oath indeed, and also in, a letter to Cromwell, Northumberland denied that he had ever been legally connected with her; but perhaps Northumberland was afraid to make an admission so dangerous to himself, or perhaps the confession itself was a vague effort which she made to save her The queen is pronounced divorced. life.[602] But whatever she said, and whether she spoke truth or falsehood, she was pronounced divorced, and the divorce did not save her.[603] Friday, the 19th, was fixed for her death; and when she found that there was no hope she recovered her spirits. The last scene was to be on the green inside the Tower. The public were to be admitted; but Kingston suggested that to avoid a crowd it was desirable not to fix the hour, since it was supposed that she would make no further confession.
Thursday, May 18. Kingston's tribute to her conduct in the Tower.
"This morning she sent for me," he added, "that I might be with her at such time as she received the good Lord, to the intent that I should hear her speak as touching her innocency always to be clear. 'Mr. Kingston,' she said, 'I hear say I shall not die afore noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time, and past my pain.' I told her it should be no pain, it was so subtle; and then she said, 'I heard say the executioner was very good, and I have a little neck,' and put her hands about it, laughing heartily. I have seen many men, and also women, executed, and they have been in great sorrow; and to my knowledge, this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death."[604]