Tower: An Epic History of the Tower of London

by Jones, Nigel

  Impassively, she listened as Cromwell listed the monstrous charges. In addition to her adultery, she was also supposed to have supplied poison to Norris which had killed her predecessor, Queen Katherine, and was intended to kill Princess Mary and the king’s illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, too. There were no witnesses to this or to the supposed ‘adultery’; because neither offence had ever been committed. The only thing she had ever given Norris, said Anne, were a few trinkets from her jewel box. She also owned up to dancing with her own brother, but fiercely denied charges that they had exchanged ‘French’ kisses. Perhaps the most judicious verdict on this farce was pronounced by an eye witness, London’s lord mayor, who as a magistrate had witnessed many trials. He remarked, ‘I could not see anything in the proceedings against her, but that they were resolved to make an occasion to get rid of her.’

  Despite the lack of evidence, the kangaroo court, whose verdict had been decided in advance – Henry had told Jane Seymour that morning that Anne would be condemned – lost no time in returning a unanimous vote of ‘Guilty’. Only Anne’s sometime suitor, the Earl of Northumberland, after casting his ballot in line with the other twenty-five judges, was overcome by remorse and collapsed. After he was removed to lie at an open window, the Duke of Norfolk, weeping copious crocodile tears, passed the terrible sentence on his niece: ‘Thou hast deserved death and thy judgment is this: That thou shalt be burned here within the Tower of London on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off as the King’s pleasure shall be further known.’

  As the savage sentence was pronounced, an inhuman shriek split the silence. Mrs Orchard, Anne’s childhood nurse, was led wailing from the court. Anne herself retained her icy composure. Calmly she addressed her judges:

  ‘I think you know well the reason why you have condemned me to be other than that which led you to this judgment. My only sin against the King has been my jealousy and lack of humility. But I am prepared to die. What I regret most deeply is that men who were innocent and loyal to the king must lose their lives because of me.’

  As she was led from the court by the ever attendant Kingstons, her face was deathly pale beneath her now dishevelled hair.

  Economically, the same court and jury sat for the trial of George Boleyn which followed immediately. Lord Rochford shared his sister’s fiery spirit, and during his initial interrogations had defended himself with such wit and conviction that those who heard him bet each other odds of ten to one that he would be acquitted. They underestimated Henry’s vindictiveness. George Boleyn had apparently spread rumours of the increasingly obese Henry’s near-impotence with his sister. Reports so sensitive were not referred to in open court, but were written down and shown to the accused before George, too, was condemned to death.

  Anne still hoped against hope for a reprieve – according to Kingston offering to enter a nunnery if it would save her. But the only concession Henry made was to commute her sentence to beheading rather than burning, the traditional punishment for a witch. Granting this ‘mercy’ was probably his intention all along, but it was offered to Anne as an inducement by Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, when he visited her in the Tower the day after her trial. Cranmer – who sympathised with Anne as a fellow reformer – told her that in exchange for her agreement that her marriage to Henry had been invalid because the king had been the lover of her elder sister Mary, she would be offered the swift death of decapitation. She consented to this diplomatic discretion – thereby giving Cranmer convenient grounds to annul her marriage the next day, without the huge embarrassment of declaring Henry’s marriage to Katherine legal after all.

  Having agreed to this face-saving deal, Anne was told that she would die four days later, on 19 May – the first ever English queen to be executed. In a mood of fatalistic resignation, the doomed woman – like Smeaton an accomplished player of the lute – put her feelings into a sad song:

  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.

  So resigned was Anne to her fate that Kingston wrote that his prisoner ‘hath much pleasure and joy in death’. In fact, it was not dying that Anne minded, so much as the false accusations she would take to the grave. In a cell elsewhere in the Tower, George Boleyn was also taking leave of the music-making that had been his joy:

  Farewell my lute, this is the last

  Labour that thou and I shall waste,

  For ended is that we began,

  Now is the song both sung and past,

  My lute be still, for I have done.

  The king’s chief concern was to dispose of both Boleyns as cleanly and covertly as possible. He wanted to ensure that there would be no public demonstrations, no embarrassing speeches from the scaffold, and no long-drawn-out messy deaths. In keeping with his desire to get things over as discreetly as possible, he commuted George’s sentence from hanging to beheading; and confirmed that Anne would be executed by a swordsman weilding a two-handed broadsword, rather than the usual headsman hacking with an axe. Finding no one in the kingdom with the necessary lethal skills, Henry had sent for a French swordsman from St Omer with a reputation for performing quick, clean decapitations. This is further evidence that the queen’s trial was rigged in advance, since the swordsman had been summoned to London even before she had appeared in court.

  Anne’s five alleged lovers were executed together on Tower Hill early on Wednesday 17 May. In a piece of refined cruelty, a reluctant queen was brought to the window of her room in the Lieutenant’s Lodgings to see them cross the great courtyard on their way to their deaths. The men were brought from separate cells in the Martin and Beauchamp Towers, and were also watched from his cell in the Bell Tower by Thomas Wyatt, who had only just learned that he was to be reprieved. The poet remembered the moment in doggerel verse when he wrote:

  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 C
ushing’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.