At intervals during Anne’s career her alleged betrothal to the Earl of Northumberland before her marriage (see p. 126) had been brought up to her detriment; and the poor hare-brained earl had foresworn himself more than once on the subject. He was dying now, but he was again pressed to say that a regular betrothal had taken place with Anne. But he was past earthly fear, and finally asserted that no contract had been made. Foiled in this attempt, Henry—or rather Cromwell—sent Cranmer to the Tower on the 16th May on his shameful errand: to lure the poor woman by hopes of pardon to confess the existence of an impediment to her marriage with the King. What the impediment was was never made public, but Anne’s latest biographer, Mr. Friedmann, adduces excellent reasons for arriving at the conclusions that I have drawn, namely, that Mary Boleyn having been Henry’s mistress, he and Anne were within the prohibited degrees of affinity for husband and wife; the fact that no marriage had taken place between Henry and Mary Boleyn being regarded as canonically immaterial.[164] In any case, the admission of a known impediment having been made by Anne, no time was lost. The next day, the 17th May, Cranmer sat, with Cromwell and other members of the Council, in his Primate’s court at Lambeth to condemn the marriage that he himself had made. Anne was formally represented, but nothing was said on her behalf; and sentence was hurriedly pronounced that the King’s marriage with Anne Boleyn had never been a marriage at all. At the same time order was sent to Sir William Kingston that the “concubine” was to suffer the last penalty on the following morning. When the sleepless night for Anne had passed, mostly in prayer, she took the sacrament with the utmost devotion, and in that most solemn moment swore before the Host, on her hopes of eternal life, that she had never misused her body to the King’s dishonour.[165]
In the meanwhile her execution had been deferred until the next day, and Anne again lost her nerve. It was cruel, she said, to keep her so long in suspense: pray, she petitioned, put her out of her misery now that she was prepared. The operation would not be painful, Kingston assured her. “My neck is small enough,” she said, spanning it with her fingers, and again burst into hysterics. Soon she became calm once more; and thenceforward only yearned for despatch. “No one ever had a better will for death than she,” wrote Chapuys to his master: and Kingston, hardened as he was to the sight of the condemned in their last hours, expressed surprise to Cromwell that instead of sorrow “this lady has much joy and pleasure in death.” Remorse for her ungenerous treatment of the Princess Mary principally troubled her. She herself, she said, was not going to execution by the divine judgment for what she had been accused of, but for having planned the death of the Princess. And so, in alternate prayer and light chatter, passed Anne’s last night on earth, and at nine o’clock on the spring morning of the 19th May she was led forth to the courtyard within the Tower, where a group of gentlemen, including Cromwell and the Dukes of Richmond and Suffolk, stood on or close to a low scaffold or staging reached by four steps from the ground. Anne was dressed in grey damask trimmed with fur, over a crimson petticoat, and cut low at the neck, so as to offer no impediment to the executioner’s steel; and for the same reason the brown hair was dressed high in a net under the pearl-bordered coif. Kept back by guards to some little distance from the platform stood a large crowd of spectators, who had flocked in at the heels of the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs; though foreigners had been rigidly excluded.[166]
When Anne had ascended the steps she received permission to say a few words; and followed the tradition of not complaining against the King’s justice which had condemned her. She had not come thither to preach, she said, but to die, though she was not guilty of the particular crimes for which she had been condemned. When, however, she began to speak of Jane Seymour being the cause of her fall, those on the scaffold stopped her, and she said no more. A headsman of St. Omer had been brought over from Calais, in order that the broadsword instead of the axe might be used; and this man, who was undistinguishable by his garb from the other bystanders, now came forward, and, kneeling, asked the doomed woman’s pardon, which granted, Anne herself knelt in a distraught way, as if to pray, but really gazed around her in mute appeal from one pitiless face to another. The headsman, taking compassion upon her, assured her that he would not strike until she gave the signal. “You will have to take this coif off,” said the poor woman, and one of the ladies who attended her did so, and partially bound her eyes with a handkerchief; but Anne still imagined that her headdress was in the way, and kept her hand upon her hair, straining her eyes and ears towards the steps where from the headsman’s words she expected the sword to be handed to him. Whilst she was thus kneeling erect in suspense, the sword which was hidden in the straw behind her was deftly seized by the French executioner, who, swinging the heavy blade around, in an instant cut through the erect, slender neck; and the head of Anne Boleyn jerked from the shoulders and rolled upon the cloth that covered the platform.
Katharine in her neglected tomb at Peterborough was avenged, but the fissure that had been opened up between England and the Papacy for the sake of this woman had widened now past bridging. Politicians might, and did, make up their differences now that the “concubine” was dead, and form alliances regardless of religious affinities; but submission to the Papacy in future might mean that the most powerful people in England would be deprived of the fat spoils of the Church with which Cromwell had bought them, and that the vainest king on earth must humbly confess himself in the wrong. Anne herself was a mere straw upon a whirlpool, though her abilities, as Cromwell confessed, were not to be despised. She did not plan or make the Reformation, though she was forced by her circumstances to patronise it. The real author of the great schism of England was not Anne or Cranmer, but Luther’s enemy, Charles V., the champion of Catholicism. But for the pressure he put upon the Pope to refuse Henry’s divorce, in order to prevent a coalition of England and France, Cranmer’s defiance of the Papacy would not have been needed, and Henry might have come back to Rome again easily. But with Cranmer to provide him with plausible pretexts for the repeated indulgence of his self-will, and Cromwell to feed his pride and cupidity by the plunder of the Church, Henry had already been drawn too far to go back. Greed and vanity of the ruling powers thus conspired to make permanent in England the influence of evanescent Anne Boleyn.
JANE SEYMOUR
From a painting by Holbein in the Imperial Collection at Vienna