The Autobiography of Henry VIII_ With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers - Margaret George [167]
We saw the clever Frenchman signal to his accomplices on Anne’s left. They moved, and shuffled forward.
“—on my soul. O God—” She started up toward her left, and saw the assistants moving toward her. While she stared at them, her head turned toward the left, the swordsman struck. His thin blade flashed in an arc behind Anne’s line of vision. It cut through her slender neck like a cleaver through a rose stem: some initial resistance, a crunching, then a clean sever.
Her head dropped from her shoulders like a piece of sliced sausage, and landed, plop! in the straw. I saw the cut neck: a cross-section of tubes, about six or seven of them, like a geometrical drawing. Then two or three of the tubes began to spurt blood, for Anne’s heart was still pumping. Bright red gushes of blood squirted like milk from an obscene cow’s udder—even the sound was the same. The squirting kept on and on. Why was there still so much blood left in her?
The hands hung down, trailing, beside the block. The suave French swordsman strode forward and felt in the straw for the round object that was Anne’s head. It had landed some two or three feet to the left. He held it up by its long, glossy hair.
The cannon boomed, once, upon the battlements.
It still had her appearance, as in life. Her eyes moved, and seemed to look mournfully at the bleeding body still kneeling at the block. The lips moved. She was saying something....
The witnesses broke ranks and sought to remove themselves from this incomprehensible horror. There was no one who would dare tell the King of these last moments; certainly I would not, either.
Everyone scattered, leaving the severed head (the swordsman had departed) and the blood-drained trunk slumped on the scaffold.
The King had not provided a coffin.
In the end, her ladies found an empty arrow-chest in the cellar of the royal apartments. It was too short for a normal person, but it would serve for a decapitated trunk, with the head tucked inside. They wrapped the cooling body with its congealing bloody neck-stump in the black cloth so courteously provided by the Frenchman, and insisted that the sexton of the Tower chapel of St. Peter-ad-Vincula reopen the fresh grave of George Boleyn and lower the makeshift coffin on top of his.
There was no service, no funeral. Anne’s remains were left literally to shift for themselves.
HENRY VIII:
Beyond the environs of London, the wildness of the country was the same as that which must have greeted Julius Caesar. It was all pristine, new, untouched. I took my horse up the wooded hills which, even in the shade, were recreating themselves in green. I tried not to think of what was taking place in the Tower and its grounds. The world was recreating itself; could I not do the same?
Behind me the Thames wound in the low areas, a happy ribbon, reflecting the sun. Across from Greenwich lay my ships at anchor, their masts bristling, making splinters against the rippling waters, downstream from the Tower ... the Tower....
I heard the cannon: a small, faraway sound.
Anne was dead. The Witch was no more, not upon this earth.
I should have felt elated, delivered, safe. But this heaviness of spirit was not to be removed, ever. There was to be no rebirth in green. I was permanently changed, never again to return to my former self. Outwardly I might retain my original appearance, like a rotting melon: all ribbed and rounded on the outside, all fallen and decayed in the secret inward parts.
The cannon spoke of her death. What of mine?
It is not all or none, I told myself. There is a vast tract stretching between the beginning, in health and simplicity, and the end, in disease and convoluted compromises. I tread it now; that unsung territory is my challenge, my making, my own private landscape.
“Jane,” I called, from the courtyard. “Jane.” It was not a command but a cry.
Jane appeared in the upper window, above the doorway of Nicholas Carew