Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [40]
On May 2, Anne and her brother, George, Viscount Rochford, were taken by river to the Tower. To Henry, Anne was now an “accursed and poisoning whore” who had conspired to kill Katherine and Mary, Henry Fitzroy, and the king himself.15 Two days later there were further arrests of members of the Privy Chamber: Sir William Brereton, Sir Francis Weston, and Sir Richard Page, together with the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt. A grand jury indicted all the accused, except Wyatt and Page, on charges of having committed adultery with the queen. At their trial days later, all except Smeaton pleaded innocent, yet all were found guilty and sentenced to death for high treason “upon presumption and certain indications,” but, Chapuys noted, “without valid proof and confession.”16
Two days later Anne and Rochford stood trial in the Tower before a crowd of two thousand spectators. Anne was “principally charged with … having cohabited with her brother and other accomplices,” that there was “a promise between her and Norris to marry after the King’s death, which it thus appeared they hoped for,” and that she “had poisoned [Katherine] and intrigued to do the same to [Mary].” The ambassador continued, “These things, she totally denied, and had a plausible answer to each.”17 It made little difference; each member of the jury declared her guilty, and the duke of Norfolk, Anne’s uncle, who was presiding as lord high steward, pronounced the sentence. The usual punishment for a traitoress was being burned alive, yet, “because she was Queen, Norfolk gave judgement that she should be burnt or beheaded at the King’s pleasure.”18
On Monday, May 17, the men condemned to death for high treason were executed. On the nineteenth, at eight in the morning, Anne was led out to the scaffold on Tower Green. Henry had decreed that she should be beheaded, not burned, and granted her one final “mercy”: that she be beheaded by a French executioner’s sword rather than an ax, as was the English fashion. Foreigners were prevented from attending the execution, and large crowds were discouraged by the delaying of the death from the usual hour. Anne begged the people to pray for the king, “for he was a good, gentle, gracious and amiable prince.”19 With one swing of the sword she was dead. She was buried in the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula within the Tower.
The day before her execution, Anne asked Lady Kingston, the wife of the lieutenant of the Tower, to go to Hunsdon and on her behalf kneel before Mary and beg her pardon for all the wrongs she had done her.20 On her way to the scaffold, as Antoine Perrenot, Cardinal Granvelle wrote to Chapuys, “the Concubine declared that she did not consider herself condemned by divine judgement, except for being the cause of the ill-treatment of the Princess, and for having conspired her death.”21 Two days after Anne’s execution, Thomas Cranmer pronounced her marriage with Henry to have been invalid. Elizabeth, like Mary, now became a bastard. The love affair that had wreaked such havoc was over.
The joy shown by this people every day, not only at the ruin of the Concubine, but at the hope of the Princess Mary’s restoration, is inconceivable, but as yet, the King shows no great disposition towards the latter; indeed he has twice shown himself obstinate, when spoken to on the subject by his Council.22
On the day of Anne Boleyn’s death, Henry VIII was