[163] Froude says Smeaton was hanged; but the evidence that he was beheaded like the rest is the stronger.
[164] The whole question is exhaustively discussed by Mr. Friedmann in his Anne Boleyn, to which I am indebted for several references on the subject.
[165] Lady Kingston, who was present, hastened to send this news secretly to Chapuys, who, bitter enemy as he was to Anne, to do him justice seems to have been shocked at the disregard of legality in the procedure against her.
[166] The curious gossip, Antonio de Guaras, a Spaniard, says that he got into the fortress overnight. Constantine gives also a good account of the execution, varying little from that of Guaras. The Portuguese account used by Lingard and Froude confirms them.
[167] Chapuys to the Emperor, 19th May 1536. (Spanish Calendar.)
[168] This was Cromwell’s version as sent to the English agents in foreign Courts. He speaks of a conspiracy to kill the King which “made them all quake at the danger he was in.”
[169] Chapuys to the Emperor, 19th May. (Spanish Calendar.)
[170] Chapuys to Granvelle, 20th May. (Spanish Calendar.)
[171] The local story that the marriage took place at Wolf Hall, the seat of the Seymours in Wiltshire, and that a barn now standing on the estate was the scene of the wedding feast, may be dismissed. That festivities would take place there in celebration of the wedding is certain; and on more than one occasion Henry was entertained at Wolf Hall, and probably feasted in the barn itself; but the royal couple were not there on the occasion of their marriage. The romantic account given by Nott in his Life of Surrey, of Henry’s waiting with straining ears, either in Epping Forest or elsewhere in hunting garb, to hear the signal gun announcing Anne’s death before galloping off to be married at Tottenham Church, near Wolf Hall, is equally unsupported, and, indeed, impossible. Henry’s private marriage undoubtedly took place, as related in the text, at Hampton Court, and the public ceremony on the 30th May at Whitehall.
[172] Henry’s apologists have found decent explanations for his hurry to marry Jane. Mr. Froude pointed to the urgent petition of the Privy Council and the peers that the King would marry at once, and opined that it could hardly be disregarded; and another writer reminds us that if Henry had not married Jane privately on the day he did, 20th May, the ceremony would have had to be postponed—as, in fact, the full ceremony was—until after the Rogation days preceding Whitsuntide. But nothing but callous concupiscence can really explain the unwillingness of Henry to wait even a week before his remarriage.