Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London (31 page)

The Bell tower showed me such sight

That in my head sticks day and night
;

There did I lean out of a grate
…

George Boleyn was the first to die. He, like the others, trod a careful course in his last words to the crowd. Had the prisoners publicly denied the charges they would have been stopped from speaking by the watchful attendant sheriff, and their families might have suffered after their deaths. So, without explicitly admitting anything, they accepted that they deserved to die for their general sins rather than for the specific adultery for which they were condemned. Boleyn came closest to displaying his scorn for Henry when he exhorted the watching crowd not to place their ‘trust in states and kings but only in God’. He added that he himself had never offended the king, despite the sinful life that he had led. The queen’s brother then knelt in the straw around the block, and the executioner severed his head with a single blow.

Norris was next to mount the scaffold, followed by Weston, Brereton and finally the luckless Mark Smeaton. Norris, as he had done when first arrested, spoke up for the queen’s innocence – thus, by implication,
asserting his own. Weston also admitted he had committed ‘abominations’ and beseeched the witnesses to learn by his fate.

Brereton bewailed the wretched sinfulness of his life (he had been guilty of extortion from the tenants of his Welsh estates) but hinted that he was guiltless of the sin for which he was dying, by repeating, ‘If ye judge, judge the best,’ before kneeling at the block. Finally Smeaton, the only one to have admitted adultery, albeit under torture, climbed on to a scaffold by now slippery with the blood of the others. The poor musician merely declared that he was being justly punished for his misdeeds. ‘Masters,’ he added, ‘I pray you all pray for me for I have deserved the death.’

The busy William Kingston hurried back to the Tower, as a cart piled high with the butchered bodies rumbled back for their burial in the churchyard of St Peter ad Vincula. He told Anne to prepare for her death the next day – 18 May. Anne anxiously questioned the constable on what the doomed men had said. She was dismayed that Smeaton had failed to retract his allegation of adultery, expressing the belief that his soul was already being punished in hell for his dishonesty. By contrast, she said, George Boleyn and the others were already with Christ in heaven where she herself soon hoped to appear.

Anne did not get much sleep on what she thought would be her last night on earth. Her mind was full of the ordeal she would have to endure in the morning, a prospect she was unable to forget since the Tower was loud with hammering and sawing as a scaffold was constructed on the green on the north side of the White Tower for the event. (The site of the scaffold at the Tower today outside the Church of St Peter is a nineteenth-century mistake. Recently discovered documents relating to the execution of the Earl of Essex for rebelling against Anne’s daughter Elizabeth I confirm that the scaffold was sited between the White Tower and a derelict house of ordnance – part of the Tower armoury – today occupied by the Waterloo Barracks.)

During that night, mainly spent on her knees in prayer, Anne received a final visit from Cranmer. The archbishop heard her confession and gave her the Sacraments. Even her sworn enemy, the imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, who habitually called her ‘the Concubine’, was impressed by the cool courage displayed by the queen, and wrote, ‘No person ever showed a greater willingness to die.’ Chapuys added that he had
personally heard from Lady Kingston that ‘before and after receiving the Sacrament, [the Concubine] affirmed … on the damnation of her soul, that she had never offended with her body against the King’. Since Anne died believing in heaven and hell, this final affirmation of her innocence as she stood on death’s threshold weighs heavily in favour of her innocence. It is unlikely that she would have endangered her immortal soul by dying with a lie on her lips.

Anne was to have died at 9 a.m., but the execution was delayed until noon by Cromwell who ordered Kingston to clear the Tower of all unauthorised persons. Anne sent for the constable, now moved to pity by her long-drawn-out ordeal, and complained of the delay. On being assured by Kingston that she would feel only a quick and ‘subtle’ pain, Anne circled her neck with her hands and laughingly remarked that she had a ‘very little neck’ and that she hoped the executioner would be as skilled as his reputation suggested. But agonisingly, for reasons unknown, the execution was then delayed yet again – to 9 a.m. the following day, 19 May. Yet another sleepless night followed for the anguished woman. Her mood of gallows humour persisted, for she jested grimly with her attendants that after her death she would be nicknamed ‘Queen Anne Lackhead’. She also, via Lady Kingston, sent a message to Princess Mary, begging her forgiveness for any wrongs she had done her and adding that these were the only sins that lay on her conscience.

Two hours before the time appointed for her death, Anne heard a dawn Mass said by her almoner, John Skip, and, after again receiving the Sacrament, managed to get down some breakfast. At 8 a.m. the dread figure of William Kingston, like the Grim Reaper himself, once more darkened her door. With her black hair coiled under a cap, leaving her narrow neck exposed, Anne dressed in a gown of dark damask, with a white collar trimmed with ermine and a scarlet kirtle (a colour traditionally symbolising martyrdom). She sternly encouraged the nervous constable to pull himself together and do his duty, ‘for I have been long prepared’. Then, accompanied by Kingston who slipped a purse of £20 into her hand to ‘tip’ the executioner and distribute alms, and also by John Skip and four unidentified young ladies, all weeping softly, she left the lieutenant’s lodging.

According to Sir Francis Bacon, before stepping into the bright spring
sunshine Anne murmured to an attendant that she had one last message for the man responsible for her death:

Commend me to His Majesty and tell him that he hath ever been constant in his career of advancing me. From a private gentlewoman he made me a marchionesss; from a marchioness to a queen; and now he hath left no higher degree of honour, he gives my innocence the crown of martyrdom as a saint in Heaven.

Apocryphal as the story may be – and the terrified attendant would certainly have been too fearful actually to pass the message on to Henry – it has the authentic ring of Anne Boleyn: proud, teasing, defiant and arrogant. She had the last word.

A gasp, speedily hushed, went up from the crowd as the doomed woman appeared. Among those assembled to watch her die were her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk; his son, the Earl of Surrey; and Thomas Cromwell. All three were not to know – though as courtiers in the murderous court of Henry VIII they might well have guessed – that they too would enter the Tower as the king’s prisoners before ten years were out. And two of the three would share Anne’s fate at the headsman’s hands.

It took several minutes for the little procession, watched by 1,000 spectators, and guarded by 200 Yeoman Warders, to cross the courtyard and reach the scaffold steps. Anne distributed alms to the crowd, glancing behind her to ensure that her ladies were still with her. The scaffold was draped in black crêpe and strewn with straw. Among the officials standing on it was the French executioner, who, as a foreigner, was not clad in the black suit and mask of the English state executioner. It was, therefore, not until Anne had climbed the four or five steps on to the low structure that the executioner – speaking French, a language Anne knew well – identified himself, and, as was traditional, knelt to beg his victim’s forgiveness.

Anne asked Kingston’s leave to say a few words to the crowd. In a quiet voice that gathered strength as she spoke, she said:

Good Christian people, I am come hither to die, according to the law, for by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. But I pray God save the King and send him long to reign over you. For a gentler nor a more merciful prince was there never; and to me he was
ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord. And if any person will meddle of my cause I require them to judge the best. And thus I take leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.

With these gentle, dignified, if slightly ambiguous words, Anne removed her headdress and collar, handed them to one of her ladies, and knelt in the straw. Her eyes closed and her lips moved in a final prayer as behind her the executioner picked up the heavy sword in both hands.

To Christ I commend my soul. Jesu accept my soul.

The sword, flashing in the sun, swept through the air. The king’s great matter was finally over.

CHAPTER NINE

THE HENRICIAN TERROR

NO SOONER WERE
Anne’s head and body bundled unceremoniously into a narrow chest built to store arrows for the Tower’s armoury and carried off to St Peter ad Vincula for burial near the men accused of being her lovers, than Henry married her supplanter, Jane Seymour. But Anne’s execution seems to have unleashed dark forces in the king’s character which were to cost many more lives in the final, bloody decade of Henry’s reign.

Charles Dickens succinctly summed up Henry as ‘a blot of blood and grease on the pages of English history’ and this seems a fair judgement. Henry had more English people executed than any other monarch. His victims ranged from priests, monks, friars and ordinary folk who resisted his war on the Church to Protestant heretics; from the highest in the land – men as different as More and Cromwell – to his own nearest and once dearest – his second and fifth wives, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. The Tower was often choking with crowds of those imprisoned at the king’s whim, and it is from Henry’s reign that it first acquired the sinister reputation of jail, torture chamber and scaffold that stickily clings to its walls to this day.

Anne’s execution was the watershed marking the transformation of Henry from the admired, learned and powerful Renaissance prince of his early years, to the Henry familiar to us today: gross, obese, cruel, paranoid. Modern medical opinion ascribes the most likely cause of these changes to Henry suffering from a chronic condition – most probably Cushing’s syndrome. For centuries it was thought that Henry’s irrational rages, his moon-faced features, the unexplained sores and ulcers on his legs and nose, and the onset of his abnormal obesity which saw his chest and abdominal mass balloon to some fifty-three inches, were the result of syphilis. However, the fact that neither his wives nor his children were
infected rules this diagnosis out. Cushing’s syndrome is the condition that best fits Henry’s known symptoms – possibly exacerbated by brain and leg injuries caused by frequent falls while jousting in his youth before his ulcers and weight made this pastime impossible.

Henry’s health problems and his diminishing libido became an acute crisis of state during the last decade of his reign, as competing Catholic conservative and radical Protestant factions battled for power – their principle weapons the unfortunate women whom Henry made his queens. After the piously Catholic Katherine of Aragon, the short reign of the reform-minded Anne Boleyn coincided with Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries masterminded by Thomas Cromwell. When he perceived that the king’s affections had shifted, Cromwell was happy to engineer Anne’s downfall to make room for Henry to marry Jane Seymour, an orthodox Catholic.

However, in October 1537, Jane, a fortnight after giving birth to Henry’s longed-for male heir, Prince Edward, contracted puerperal sepsis and died. Cromwell, charged with finding a replacement, produced, as wife number four, a Lutheran princesss from the small statelet of Cleves in north-west Germany. Hans Holbein, the German-born court painter, was dispatched to Cleves and returned with a flattering portrait. But the reality, when Anne of Cleves arrived in 1540, did not meet Henry’s eager expectations. He may not have called her a ‘Flanders mare’ but privately poor Anne was called far worse, and Cromwell had his ears boxed for bringing the mismatch about.

Catholic conservatives at court, who had long hated Cromwell for being a base-born upstart, and for having ruthlessly pillaged the houses of religion to fill the king’s empty coffers, saw their chance to bring the hated minister down. They dangled yet another young woman before Henry’s porcine features as a temptation he would not resist. The chosen victim was eighteen-year-old Katherine Howard, like her cousin Anne Boleyn a niece of the Duke of Norfolk who led the anti-Cromwell faction at court. The times were propitious for the conservatives to strike. Norfolk had recently put down a dangerous religious rising directed against Cromwell’s spoilation of the religious houses: the Pilgrimage of Grace.

The Pilgrimage of Grace broke out in Lincolnshire in October 1536, five months after Anne Boleyn’s death. The revolt, supported by the ancient aristocratic families who had long held sway in the north – the Percys, the Nevilles, the Dacres and the Darcys – although suppressed in Lincolnshire, spread to Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. The uprisings
were triggered by Cromwell’s assault on the monasteries which were the mainstay of the social and economic fabric of northern life. The great Yorkshire abbeys – Fountains, Jervaulx, Rievaulx and Byland – were forcibly closed, along with scores of smaller houses, their clergy turned out and their goods and lands confiscated or sold. Stirred by secret funds and encouragement from the imperial ambassador, Chapuys, the northern peasants, led by their lords and priests, rose under the banner of the five wounds of Christ, demanding Cromwell’s head, a return to Rome, a revival of tradition, and the reversal of the Henrician Reformation.

To the Tudors, rebellion was the one unforgivable sin, and Henry was determined to wreak a terrible revenge on the rebels. He was, however, cunning enough to string them along with false promises of pardon until their formidable armies dissolved, and he was able to punish them at leisure. The Pilgrimage of Grace was the most serious threat to the Crown between the Peasants’ Revolt and the Civil War of the 1640s. With considerable cunning, Henry put the Duke of Norfolk, a Catholic and a known enemy of Cromwell, in charge of negotiating with the rebels whose army had seized Pontefract Castle, traditional key to the north.