“Then was the Duke brought to the bar to hear his sentence. For a few moments he was overpowered by his situation. In the extremity of his agony, he chafed and sweat violently.[8] Recovering himself after a while, he made his obeisance to the court. After a short pause, a death-like silence! ‘Sir Edward,’ said the Duke of Norfolk, ‘you hear how you be indicted of high treason, you pleaded thereto not guilty, putting yourself to the judgment of your peers, the which have found you guilty.’ Then bursting into tears (he was an old man, and had faced death unmoved in the field of Flodden), he faltered out: ‘Your sentence is, that you be led back to prison; laid on a hurdle, and so drawn to the place of execution; there to be hanged, to be cut down alive, your members cut off and cast into the fire, your bowels burnt before your eyes, your head smitten off, your body quartered and divided at the King’s will. God have mercy on your soul. Amen.’ The Duke heard this horrible sentence with proud dignity and composure. Turning to the Duke of Norfolk, he quietly replied, ‘You have said, my lord, as a traitor should be said unto; but I was never one.’ Then addressing the court, he requested that those present would pray for him, assuring them that he forgave them his death, and expressing his determination not to sue for mercy. In compliance with the custom of the time he entered his barge at Westminster stairs, and was delivered, on landing at the Temple, to Sir Nicholas Vaux and Sir William Sandys, by whom he was conducted through the city to the Tower. This was about 4 P.M. The trial had lasted some days, having commenced on a Monday, and on the following Friday (17th of May), between eleven and twelve in the forenoon, when the hills of Surrey were cloathed in their freshest verdure, and the then unoccupied banks of the Thames, steeped to the water’s edge with the tender green and delicate blossom of the white thorn, the Duke’s favourite flower, the sombre procession threaded its way through the dark passages of the Tower, and emerged upon the Green. Amidst the sobs and tears of the spectators, the Duke, led by the Sheriffs, mounted the scaffold with a firm and composed step. Turning himself to the crowd, he requested all men to pray for him, ‘trusting,’ he said, ‘to die the King’s true man; whom through his own negligence and lack of grace he had offended.’ With this brief request, he kneeled at the block. There was a sudden glimmer for an instant in the air, then a dull thud, and the head rolled heavily from the body. The headsman wiped his axe; the attendants threw a cloak over the headless trunk, to conceal the blood which streamed in a torrent over the scaffold and dripped through the platform on the grass beneath. In rough frieze, barefooted and bareheaded, six poor Augustinian friars, shouldering a rude coffin, emerged from the shuddering and receding crowd. Gathering up the remains of the once mighty Duke of Buckingham, for the King, satisfied with his condemnation, had commuted the last extremities of the sentence, they carried the corpse to the church of the Austin Friars. The Duke in his lifetime had been kind to poor religious men, and this was the last and only office they could render him.”

Queen Anne Boleyn
(From an Engraving after a portrait of the time.)

Thus closed the life of Edward Bohun, Duke of Buckingham, Earl of Hereford, Stafford, and Northampton.

Lords Montague and Abergavenny, and Sir Edward Nevil, were also committed to the Tower with Buckingham, being charged with having concealed their knowledge of his so-called treason; but they were all three liberated after an imprisonment of some months duration.

In the fifth volume of “Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic,” in the reign of Henry VIII. is the following memorandum of repairs made in the Tower during the summer of 1532:—“Work done by carpenters and taking down old timber, etc., at St Thomas’s Tower; and for alteration in the Palace.” “There has also been taken down the old timber in the four turrets of the White Tower; and the old timber of Robyn the Devil’s Tower—that is, Julius Cæsar’s Tower; and of the tower near the King’s Wardrobe. Half of the White Tower is new embattled, coped, indented, and cressed with Caen stone to the extent of 500 feet.” The return to this memorandum estimates the total expense of the alteration at £3593, 14s. 10d.

The Tower was again the scene of festivities when, in the month of May 1533, Anne Boleyn—to whom Henry had been secretly married on January 25 of the previous year—was taken there in state. Again, as five-and-twenty years previously, the old fortress put on its gala apparel and became splendid for the new Queen’s coronation. The old chronicler Hall describes the wondrous scene of “marvellous cunning pageants,” of the fountains running wine, “Apollo and the Muses, the Graces and all the Virtues, Mary, the wife of Cleophas, and her children” welcoming the beautiful Queen, coming in all the glory of youth and loveliness from Greenwich to the Tower, where she landed at “five of the clocke, where also was such a pele of gonnes as hathe not byn harde lyke a great while before, and on her landing was met by the Kyng, who received her with loving countenance, at the Posterne by the Water syde, and kyssed her.”

The next day, through streets strewn with gravel and gay with tapestry, silks, and velvets, Anne wended her triumphal way to the old Abbey at Westminster. The order of Anne’s coronation has been given at full length by Shakespeare in the scene in the Abbey in Henry VIII.:

“At length her grace, and with modest paces

Came to the altar; where she kneel’d, and saintlike