The Autobiography Of Henry VIII

by Margaret George

  It took some few minutes to remove the body and head, lay fresh straw, and wipe clean the block and axe. The dead man was taken down by steps on the opposite side of the scaffold.

  Next came Henry Norris. He said little, but what he did say was flattering to the King.

  “I do not think that any gentleman of the court owes more to the King than I do, and has been more ungrateful and regardless of it than I have. I pray God to have mercy on my soul.” Then he cooperatively laid his head on the block. The headsman struck, and it was over in the time it takes to draw a good breath.

  Sir Francis Weston, that pretty boy whose wife and mother had offered a ransom of one hundred thousand crowns to redeem his life, stood fresh-faced on the scaffold, the blue May skies no clearer than his eyes.

  “I had thought to have lived in abomination these twenty or thirty years, and then to have made amends. I thought little it had come to this,” he said, seeking to be clever and fashionably lighthearted right up to the end. When the headsman held up his severed head, though, the eyes were no longer a sweet blue but glazed-over grey.

  Overhead, black shapes were gathering. The buzzards had scented blood and seen moving creatures suddenly cease to move.

  Mark Smeaton stood proudly on the scaffold. “Masters, I pray you all pray for me—for I have deserved the death.” The lovelorn lute-player fell eagerly upon the block, as if afraid he might be contradicted or denied his death.

  Last was Lord Rochford, George Boleyn. He could not help but see the stacked coffins to his right, and the shadows of the buzzards circling overhead, making spots on the scaffold. He looked out at the crowd, then over across the moat to his sister’s apartments.

  Everyone was silent, awaiting his speech. But, strangely, he began speaking of Lutheranism (he had long been suspected of leaning toward heresy). “I desire you that no man will be discouraged from the Gospel at my fall. For if I had lived according to the Gospel—as I loved it and spake of it—I had never come to this.” He went on at length exhorting his hearers to live according to the Gospel.

  The hearers were not interested in a sermon, which they could hear from any friar or court preacher. It was not religion that they wanted, but blood and sins.

  “I never offended the King,” he suddenly said, defiantly. “There is no occasion for me to repeat the cause for which I am condemned. You would have little pleasure in hearing me tell it,” he said petulantly, cheating them of their fun. “I forgive you all. And God save the King.” He might as well have stuck out his tongue. The nasty salute was his farewell to the world. The axe struck, and his head was disconnected.

  The five coffins were borne away in the warm May sunshine, and the disgruntled buzzards flapped away.

  Anne was to die the next day. But Henry’s “surprise,” the French swordsman, had not yet arrived, so the execution was postponed. The original day proved to be windy, and full of thunderstorms, so it was just as well.

  Anne was to be executed within the precincts of the Tower, on the little green outside the Queen’s lodgings. No more than thirty people were allowed to witness it, and the legs of the scaffold were lowered so that no one standing beyond the Tower walls could glimpse the proceedings inside. Invitations to the event were eagerly coveted. The Chancellor, the three Dukes (Norfolk, Suffolk, and Richmond), Cromwell, and the Privy Councillors were called upon to be witnesses, as well as the Lord Mayor of London, with the sheriffs and aldermen. A cannoneer would be stationed on the battlements, to fire the cannon the instant the Queen was dead.

  The King would not attend. Nor would Cranmer. Nor any of the Seymours.

  All the night before, Anne kept awake, praying and singing. She composed a long dirge-ballad for her lute, as if in defiance of the fact that her brother could no longer do it. She was determined to be celebrated; and distractedly, on her last night on earth, she wrote these verses, and set them to music:

  Oh death, rock me asleep

  Bring on my quiet rest

  Let pass my very guiltless ghost

  Out of my careful breast.

  Ring out the doleful knell,

  Let its sound my death tell;

  For I must die,

  There is no remedy,

  For now I die!

  My pains who can express

  Alas! they are so strong!

  My dolour will not suffer strength

  My life for to prolong

  Alone in prison strange!

  I wail my destiny;

  Woe worth this cruel hap, that I

  Should taste this misery.

  Farewell my pleasures past,

  Welcome my present pain

  I feel my torments so increase

  That life cannot remain.

  Sound now the passing bell,

  Rung is my doleful knell,

  For its sound my death doth tell,

  Death doth draw nigh

  Sound the knell dolefully,

  For now I die!

  Defiled is my name, full sore

  Through cruel spite and false report,

  That I may say forevermore

  Farewell to joy, adieu comfort,

  For wrongfully he judge of me;

  Unto my fame a mortal wound,

  Say what ye list, it may not be,

  You seek for that shall not be found.

  Besides her praying and composing her ballad, she had one other bit of earthly business to attend to. She asked one of her women attendants to seek Mary’s forgiveness for the wrongs she, Anne, had done her and for the severity with which she had treated her, for, until that was accomplished, her conscience could not be quiet. The woman promised to do this in Anne’s name.

  Dawn came before five, and Master Kingston was already exhausted from the tasks of the day ahead. As host for the execution of a Queen, he naturally had many details of both practicality and protocol to attend to. The witnessing dignitaries must be properly received and grouped about the scaffold according to rank; the twenty pounds in gold alms, provided by the King, to be distributed by Anne before her death, must be got up in little velvet bags; black drapery must be hung about the scaffold; and all chronicles mentioning the execution of a King or Queen must be consulted for the last time, in hopes of finding some overlooked detail that would provide the proper embellishment for the hideous occasion.

  In addition, there was the matter of meeting the French headsman and giving him instructions; having the grave already dug and waiting; and procuring a coffin. Kingston was all in a dither, as he had received no instructions from King Henry about either the grave or the coffin, and yet the Queen’s body would have to be disposed of somehow.

  He was running late. And then came the welcome news: the King had postponed the hour of the execution from nine o’clock until noon. But still no word about the coffin!

  Kingston sought out Anne to tell her of the delay. She was disappointed. “I had thought by noon to be past my pain,” she said sadly. Rushing toward her gaoler, she whispered, “I am innocent!” She grabbed Kingston’s arm, gripping it painfully. “I am innocent!” Then, in one of her characteristic mood shifts, she suddenly cried, “Is it painful?”

  “No,” said the Constable. “It is over too quickly. There should be no pain, it is so subtle.”

  She circled her neck with her hands. “I have a little neck,” she said. “But the axe is so thick, and rough.”

  “Have you not heard? The King seeks to spare you that. He has sent to France for a swordsman to perform the duty.”

  “Ah!” She smiled, a little sliver of a smile. “He was ever a good and gentle sovereign lord to me.” She began to laugh, that hideous, raucous laughter which cut itself off as abruptly as it began. “Will you carry a message to His Majesty on my behalf?”

  Kingston nodded.

  “Tell him he has ever been constant in his career of advancing me: from a private gentlewoman he made me a Marquess, from a Marquess a Queen, and now he hath left no higher degree of honour, he
gives my innocency the crown of martyrdom.” She gestured sweetly. “Will you tell my Lord that?”

  “Never have I seen one to be executed who has such joy and pleasure in death,” he said, to himself rather than to her, in wonder at her spirits. He went to take his leave, but she called after him.

  “Master Kingston! Master Kingston! The people will have no difficulty finding a nickname for me. I shall be la Reine Anne sans tête . . . Queen Anne Lack-Head!”

  Frightened, he slammed the thick oak door on her shrieking laughter, but it carried right through the wood.

  All this I heard later from the Constable himself. As for the actual execution, I witnessed it in the King’s stead. As the hour approached, Henry dressed himself all in white. I dared not ask him why, but there was a dreadful deliberateness in his choice of clothing, as if he were performing a secret ritual. He had kept entirely to himself for the past three days: beginning with the executions of the five men, then on the next day, wild and windy, when he had awaited the arrival of the ship from Calais carrying the swordsman from St. Omer. Now he made ready to go out, ponderously and methodically. His face was expressionless, but I was shocked when I beheld it. The three days had aged him a decade.

  “Go there for me,” he said. (No need to ask where “there” was.) “Watch it all. Tell me of it later. I shall be at Westminster. Outside. Perhaps I shall ride.”

  Yes, outside was the place of choice, this sweet May morning, when all the meadows were springing mint and violets. A warm wind had come up out of the south.

  To die on such a morning would require extraordinary courage.

  It was just noon when the door from the Queen’s lodgings opened and Anne emerged, escorted by her only known women friends, Thomas Wyatt’s sister and Margaret Lee. She was exquisitely dressed, reminding us all of her extraordinary ability to radiate beauty when she so chose. We were all struck by the high colour in her cheeks, the glitter in her eyes; she was more alive than any other person on the green.

  Her neckline was low, to expose her neck and make it easier for her executioner.

  She mounted the scaffold carefully, holding up her skirts, then presided over the proceedings as if she addressed Parliament.

  Before her was the great wooden execution block, with a cupped indentation for her chin, and a four-inch span for her neck to stretch across. Around its base was enough straw to soak up the blood.

  The Frenchman, slender and athletic, stood to her right, his steel sword pointed downward. To her left stood his assistants; their grisly duty was to tend to her headless trunk. A length of black cloth was at the ready, to cover her with. They smiled at her.

  Overhead the sky was clear, and no cloud was visible. The damnable birds, lately returned from the winter, insisted on chirping and singing, flaunting their freedom and careless disregard.

  “Good Christian people,” she spoke, “I am come hither to die, according to law, for by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it.” Her words rose, and her eyes seemed to fasten on each of us individually. She looked directly into mine, and in an instant I recalled—nay, relived—every meeting we had ever had.

  “I come here only to die,” she repeated. “And thus to yield myself humbly unto the will of my lord the King.” She looked at each of us, dolourously. “I pray God to save the King, and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler or more merciful Prince was there never. To me he was ever a good and gentle sovereign lord.”

  Her words were respectful, but there was irony and mockery in them. The message was the same as that which Kingston had not dared to carry. Anne would make sure it reached Henry’s ears.

  She closed her eyes for a moment and fell silent, as if she had finished. “If any person will meddle with my cause, I require them to judge the best. Thus I take my leave of the world and of you, and heartily desire you all to pray for me.”

  Her words were ended. There had been no protestations of innocence, no mention of her daughter, no pious exhortations, no jests. Anne had arranged her exquisite death as she had arranged her fêtes and masques: out of the bare materials she had fashioned something of memorable, fragile beauty.

  She turned to her ladies and gave them their farewell remembrances—a gold and black enamelled book of devotions, a few private words.

  Then she calmly removed her headpiece and collar to ready herself for the swordsman. Refusing any blindfold, she closed her eyes and knelt down beside the block.

  Then, suddenly, her courage deserted her. She heard rustling on her right, and, terror-stricken, looked up to see the swordsman advancing on her. Her eye froze him, and he retreated. Trembling, she lowered her head again, squeezing her eyes shut.

  “O Jesu have mercy on my soul O Jesu have mercy on my soul—” she rattled on. Again her head jerked up, and she caught her executioner as he raised his sword.

  She forced her head back onto the block, her whole body straining to hear her executioner move. “To Jesus Christ I commend my soul, to Jesus Christ I commend my soul, O God have pity on my soul; O God have pity—”

  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’s house. She had sought the cleanness of the open country once Anne had been arrested and there was no more Queen to serve, no need to remain at court.

  “I am here,” she said. She left the window, came down the stairs, and walked slowly out the front door. I dismounted and stood waiting, weary, yet accepting that weariness as something that would never go away, would only have to be shared.

  She came to me silently, extending her hands. Her face shone with an otherworldly love and kindness. She understood, without being contaminated by her knowledge.

  “Jane,” I said, making no move to touch her. “Will you be my wife?”

  “With all my heart,” she answered. “And all my soul and body, too.”

  This is what heaven is, then: to come home from a long exile.