When Henry married Anne Boleyn, he was passionately in love with her. At a banquet on 1 December 1534, Anne was talking to the French Ambassador, when she suddenly burst out laughing. The Frenchman was annoyed and asked, ‘How now, Madam, are you amusing yourself at my expense?’ Anne then explained that Henry had gone to bring another guest for her to entertain, and an important one, but on the way he had met a lady and the errand had gone completely out of his head. Now she was his wife and about to give birth to his child, Anne could find his interest in other women amusing. Henry and Anne were two proud and passionate individuals, always fighting and reconciling.1
In the summer of 1533 Anne awaited the birth of the longed-for prince. Chapuys wrote that Henry and Anne had an argument when she showed herself jealous of his affair(s), ‘and not without legitimate cause.’ Henry had been unfaithful to Catherine of Aragon when she was pregnant, and he seems to have behaved in the same way with Anne. When she learned that Henry was having an affair, Anne let him know that she was hurt and angry. According to Chapuys, the King replied, ‘that she must shut her eyes and endure as those who were better than herself had done, and that she ought to know that he could at any time lower her as much as he had raised her up.’2 When she demanded that the other woman be sent away, he told her, ‘she ought to be satisfied with what he had done for her; for, were he to begin again, he would certainly not do as much.’3
This might refer to Joanna Dingley, Mary Perrot or Jane Stukeley. It may, indeed, be another lady altogether. Henry seems to have fallen into the habit of enjoying brief and light affairs during his wives’ pregnancies. The answer was simple for Anne: ignore the meaningless dalliance – and produce a living prince.
Casual affairs aside, Anne was triumphant, but at her moment of greatness, she failed in the one thing that she most needed to succeed at. The longed-for child, whose conception had caused such havoc in England, was a girl. Anne had a difficult pregnancy, but an easy labour and birth. Elizabeth (named after Henry’s mother) was born at 3 a.m. on Sunday 7 September 1533. Chapuys wrote, ‘The King’s mistress was delivered of a girl, to the great disappointment and sorrow of the King, of the Lady herself, and of others of her party, and to the great shame and confusion of physicians, astrologers, wizards and witches, all of whom affirmed it would be a boy.’4 Yet, Henry ordered Te Deums (a Catholic ceremony of thanksgiving to God) and a magnificent christening.
After Anne Boleyn became queen, she saw a change in Henry’s attitude towards her. He had given up so much to make her his wife, and the birth of another daughter made all the national upheaval seem for nothing. What Henry would put up with in an adored and unattainable mistress, could not be countenanced in a wife. What had been pure love was now entangled with loyalty and duty. In fact, Anne Boleyn was rapidly becoming a liability in so many ways. She had produced a daughter when the birth of a legitimate, living son was so desperately needed. Her temperament was sometimes abrasive. Marriage to Anne had also prevented Henry from making a valuable foreign alliance by taking a French, Spanish or German princess as his wife. Anne and her faction had also given their support to aspects of the Reformation far more radical than Henry liked. He was less speedy to abandon the religion of his upbringing; he was, after all, older than Anne, and more set in his ways. He recognised that he had given up a lot for her, and all he had to show for it was another daughter. Anne needed to get pregnant again quickly, and to have a son.
The people of England felt cheated as well. They had had an unpopular nobody foisted on them for the main purpose of providing an heir to the throne. Amongst the learned men of England, the Abbot of Whitby commented, ‘the king’s grace was ruled by one common stewed whore, Anne Bullan, [sic] who made all the spirituality to be beggared and the temporality also.’5
Anne had the political support of her immediate faction – her father, brother, relatives and friends – but she had powerful enemies in the nobles who found themselves denied access to the King by the Boleyn faction. The nobility who resented Anne’s meteoric rise to power was always on the lookout to place some other lady in Henry’s orbit to distract him from his new wife.
Margaret (also known as ‘Madge’) was Anne Boleyn’s cousin, the daughter of Sir Thomas Boleyn’s sister, Anne, who was married to Sir John Shelton. The Sheltons had a large family: Margaret, John, Anne, Mary, Ralph, Thomas, Elizabeth, Emma and Gabrielle.
After she became queen, Anne initially seems to have favoured the Sheltons, appointing Lady Shelton to the post of governess to the young Princess Elizabeth. This job carried an additional duty; Lady Shelton was to be as spiteful as possible to Princess Mary, to put her in her place. Mary had also been ordered to attend her new half-sister as a lady-in-waiting, and the Queen is supposed to have advised Lady Shelton to box Mary’s ears ‘for a cursed bastard’.
In February 1534, Chapuys wrote to the Emperor that Mary was living in poverty with hardly any clothes. She had also been refused permission to attend Catholic Mass. He reported that she was ‘kept close at hand’ and was forbidden to do anything without the permission of Lady Shelton. Norfolk and Rochford, he wrote, spoke to Lady Shelton about being less pleasant to Princess Mary, and that she had replied that even if Mary were the bastard of some poor gentleman, she deserved respect and kindness because of her ‘goodness and virtues’. That apart, Mary was threatened with beatings and Lady Shelton told her that if she remained stubborn and refused to take the oath relating to the Act of Succession, she would be beheaded for treason.
The baby Elizabeth, ‘My Lady Princess’, was given her own household at Hatfield, Hertfordshire, and Lady Shelton and Alice Clere, another of Anne’s aunts, were to run it. Margaret Bryan (related to the Norfolks and thus to Anne’s mother) was appointed ‘Lady Mistress’, directly responsible for the baby’s personal wellbeing. Mary was forced to join the household and told to call the baby ‘Princess’. Mary replied that she would call her ‘sister’ as she called Richmond, ‘brother’, but she would not call Anne Boleyn’s child ‘Princess’ as she was Henry’s only lawfully born daughter. Mary was forced to sit at the common table to eat and had to give precedence to the baby. She furthermore was not allowed to leave the house to attend Mass. When the King visited, Mary was also kept out of his sight.6 Lady Shelton told Mary that if she had been the King she would have thrown her out of the house for her stubbornness and disobedience to her father’s wishes. However, Henry had no real intention of harming his eldest daughter. After his affair in 1534 with Joanna Dingley he softened towards Mary, and Lady Shelton’s behaviour reflected this. Early in 1535 Mary fell ill and Lady Shelton took some pains to care for her. Chapuys wrote to Lady Shelton and sent her gifts, complimenting her on her actions but hinting that, should Mary die, she would have to answer for her previous treatment of the young Princess.
Anne Boleyn’s attitude to Mary can best be explained by her feelings of insecurity over Catherine of Aragon, and her feelings of inferiority when she compared her own daughter’s position in the world with Mary’s. Anne was loathed by the people, whereas Catherine was remembered with love, respect and admiration. No matter how many of Catherine’s jewels Anne wore, and no matter how much she pretended it didn’t matter, Anne Boleyn was ‘the goggle-eyed whore’ not the true queen to many of the ordinary people of England.
Since the King’s infatuation with Anne was no longer an all-consuming passion, some of the courtiers decided to introduce him to other ladies who might catch his fancy. With Anne’s example to look to, noble ladies now realised that, far from just accepting a place as a mistress as Bessie Blount had done, they might aspire to actually be queen. Members of the Boleyn faction introduced Margaret Shelton to Henry, who made her his mistress for a time. Presumably they did so to weaken the authority of Anne – they may even have hoped that Margaret could replace her as queen. Margaret may have had a gentler disposition than Anne, one that could be better managed so that the Boleyns and their supporters could hold on to power. This may also have been a safety net; if Henry were to discard Anne in favour of Margaret, his new queen would still represent the Boleyn–Howard interests and they could continue to enjoy the wealth and power that they wielded. It has even been suggested that Anne herself chose her cousin to engage the King’s affections to prevent someone else from a rival faction taking the position.
It is not known when Margaret Shelton was born, although it is likely to have been after 1505. This would have made her close in age to Anne Boleyn, perhaps even a little younger. Since she caught the King’s eye, it can be assumed that Margaret was a beauty (an ambassador wrote that the lovely Christina of Denmark looked a little like Margaret Shelton). She was certainly the kind of lady whom Henry found attractive – possibly fair, and quite possibly quieter and more subservient than her forceful cousin. The difference in temperament may account for the briefness of the affair and explain why the King eventually returned to Anne. He still found her wit, learning and beauty exhilarating.
Anne undoubtedly knew about the affair and may have known that her own family was behind it. She now knew enough to keep quiet and not annoy the King, but she could certainly do her best to punish Margaret. According to one of Anne’s chaplains, William Latimer, Anne severely reprimanded Margaret Shelton for jotting ‘idle poesies’ in her prayer book.7 This was, of course, rank hypocrisy as Henry’s Book of Hours had romantic margin notes by both him and Anne, written during their courtship. However, while Anne the lover might write her beloved a note in a prayer book, Anne the queen would not countenance such behaviour in one of her ladies.
Margaret Shelton’s name was also linked with Henry Norris, later also accused of being one of Anne Boleyn’s lovers. As a young man, Henry Norris had come to Court as a gentleman of the King’s chamber. He was friendly with the King and received lavish awards of posts, including Keeper of the King’s Privy Purse. Norris was one of Anne’s circle and was involved in the plot against Cardinal Wolsey; he was present on 25 October 1529 when Wolsey was forced to resign as Chancellor. In that same year, he became Groom of the Stole, a post once held by Sir William Compton. There was talk of Norris’s marriage to Margaret Shelton but any attraction between the two came to nothing – rumours of an affair with Anne led to his arrest. Although he pleaded his innocence, Norris was subsequently found guilty and executed.
In 1535 Anne accused Francis Weston of spending too much time flirting with Margaret Shelton, and not only ignoring his own wife, but also keeping Margaret away from Henry Norris. Weston countered by saying that Norris was more interested in Anne herself than in Margaret. He continued that he loved a lady much more than either his wife or Margaret Shelton. When Anne asked who it was, Weston replied: ‘It is yourself ’, at which Anne ‘defied’ him, denying such a love. This kind of flirting was part of a romantic chivalric game that Anne had herself introduced to Court. Her old mentor, Margaret of Austria, had been highly adept at such things, but Anne seems to have been far less successful. While such behaviour might work for a single, widowed princess of high rank and impeccable reputation, it did not work for a flirtatious, lowborn queen with a jealous husband.8
As for Margaret Shelton, she always seemed to be in competition with her cousin. In 1535, she was the object of the attention of Henry Norris, Francis Weston and Henry VIII, all also supposedly in love with Anne. It was in that year that Chapuys wrote to his master that the King was enamoured of the daughter of Sir John Shelton, ‘first cousin of the concubine [Anne Boleyn], daughter of the new governess of the princess [Mary]’ and most scholars agree that it was Margaret who was Henry’s mistress. She was certainly part of the circle that surrounded the King, but another Shelton, her younger sister, Mary, could also have been the mistress.
Some research argues that the name ‘Marg’ (Margaret) should be read as ‘Mary’, as the Tudor ‘g’ and ‘y’ were similar, and therefore Henry’s mistress was Mary, not Margaret Shelton. Another piece of evidence presented is that there is a Holbein sketch entitled ‘Mary Lady Heveningham’ (Mary Shelton’s married name); however, it is not definitely Mary.9 A lot of the Holbein sketches were attributed years later and are therefore not credible. The argument that a portrait exists of Mary and not Margaret, which shows that Mary was more important, fails to take into account the number of sketches that have not survived and the number of unattributed sketches held in collections, any of which could be Margaret.
Margaret eventually married Sir Thomas Wodehouse, son of Sir Roger Wodehouse and Lady Elizabeth Ratcliff. Margaret provided her husband with a good number of children: Roger, John, Thomas, Elizabeth, Mary, Anne, Loy and Henry. Margaret’s husband and son Thomas, both died at the Battle of Musselborough in Scotland on 10 September 1547. Margaret’s eldest son, Sir Roger Wodehouse, acted as host to Elizabeth I on one of her progresses at their house, Kimberley Tower in Norfolk. The family owned a valance that had been made for Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, with the initials ‘H’ and ‘A’ entwined and they placed this relic of Elizabeth I’s parents at her disposal, along with other household furnishings. Margaret survived her husband by many years. The Wodehouse line carried on, and one of Margaret’s direct descendents was P. G. Wodehouse, the author of the Jeeves and Wooster, and Blandings novels.
Before Anne Boleyn’s fall from grace, in early September 1535 Henry and Anne stayed at Wolf Hall, Savernake, near Marlborough. This was the home of Sir John Seymour and his family. Sir John’s wife had been born Margaret Wentworth, a distant connection of the Tudor family. One of Seymour’s daughters, Jane (born in 1509, eldest of his eight children), had been a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Jane left her service when her staff was reduced in 1533, but now she served Queen Anne. On New Year’s Day 1534, Jane was one of the Queen’s ladies who received a gift from the King. Henry, therefore, knew her quite well.
Between 1534 and 1535, Henry seems to have become attracted to Jane Seymour. She is described as being ‘full of goodness … not a woman of great wit, but she may have good understanding.’10 She may well have reminded Henry of his mother. It is also tempting to see her pale goodness as an antidote to Anne’s dark liveliness, and that Henry just wanted some peace. In early 1536 the Bishop of Tarbes, also the French Ambassador, noted that Henry seemed interested in Jane. On 10 February 1536 Chapuys also commented on Henry’s behaviour: ‘… towards a damsel of the Court, named Mistress Seymour, to whom he has latterly made very valuable presents.’11 Anne was about five months pregnant at this time.
Jane’s family and its supporters were on hand to coach her. Anne Boleyn had shown what was at stake and what could be achieved if a woman was ambitious enough. Henry had set a precedent in divorce that meant that an English lady of nobility, who might previously have aspired only to be a mistress, could now become queen. The people of England disliked Anne; only the King’s love and the support of Anne’s own faction kept her in her position as queen.
Jane was also an adherent to the New Religion, as were her brothers, Edward and Thomas. She was, however, less extreme than Anne Boleyn. Indeed, she does not appear to have had very strong views about anything.
The needs of the Crown overcame any scruples the King might have had about damaging the Roman Catholic Church. In 1535 the movement to separate the English Church from the Papacy in Rome continued. Henry’s ministers and advisers began inspecting religious houses around the country, looking for corruption, false relics, loose morals – anything that made them unsuitable to continue. Starting with the smaller houses, monasteries were disolved and destroyed with the whole matter culminating in 1540 with the closure of the last great religious house, Waltham Abbey in Essex. The reason for the dissolution was principally twofold – to destroy the Papacy’s powerbase in England and so that the Crown could appropriate all the lands, buildings, goods and precious artefacts that the Church held.
In that same year, Anne Boleyn became pregnant a second time, but lost the child early on. However, she fell pregnant again late in 1535, and waited in hope for a longed-for son to be born. In January 1536 Catherine of Aragon died, and Anne’s case became desperate. If Henry were to rid himself of Anne, he would once again be able to join the European political marriage arena.
On 29 January 1536 Anne miscarried. The lost baby was clearly a boy. Several tales are associated with this event: Henry had been injured at a joust at Greenwich, when his horse fell on him and the King was knocked unconscious. Chapuys reported that Anne blamed Norfolk for her miscarriage, saying that he had burst in on her with news of Henry’s injuries. Also according to Chapuys, Henry told his friends that he saw the hand of God again, that witchcraft had been used to persuade him to marry Anne. Henry is supposed to have said, ‘I see that God will not give me male children.’12 Anne is also rumoured to have told Henry that his affair with Jane had precipitated the miscarriage. George Wyatt, Nicholas Sander and Jane Dormer all reported the latter version, and Sander stated that Anne said, ‘See, how well I must be since the day I caught that abandoned woman Jane sitting on your knees.’ Dormer claimed ‘there was often much scratching and bye-blows between the Queen and her maid.’14 It was even said that Anne cut her hand when she ripped a necklace that Henry had given her from Jane’s neck.13
Henry began making serious overtures to Jane Seymour. He had decided in his own mind that the marriage with Anne was over; it was up to his Privy Council to come up with a sustainable reason. He was busy looking for another wife, and Jane Seymour was the lady he had chosen. She was the opposite of Anne, fair where Anne was dark, shy where Anne was outspoken, gentle where Anne was acerbic, meek where Anne was opinionated.
According to a Spanish account, ‘… the lady Mistress Semel [Seymour] … besought the king … to consider carefully that she was a gentlewoman, born of good and honorable parents and with an unsullied reputation. She had no greater treasure in the world than her honour which she would rather die a thousand times than tarnish, and if he wanted to give her money she begged that he would do so once God had sent her a good match.’14 Henry then said that he would only see Jane in the company of her family. He took Cromwell’s rooms at Greenwich and installed Edward Seymour and his wife there; the apartment connected with the King’s. A faction grew supporting Jane and pushing her to work against Anne. The group included Lord Montagu, the Earl of Exeter; Sir Nicholas Carew, Sir Thomas Elyot and Jane’s own brothers.
Chapuys reported to the Spanish King on the wooing of Jane by the King, ‘To cover the affection he has for the said Seymour he has lodged her seven miles away in the house of a grand esquire, and says publicly that he has no desire in the world to marry again, unless he is constrained by his subjects to do so.’15 Jane moved to Sir Nicholas Carew’s house at Beddington, near Croydon, supposedly for propriety, but probably more so that Henry would have to make an effort to see her, riding or going by boat to Carew’s, and thereby taking his mind off Anne and making Jane the focus of his attention. It also made it almost impossible for any members of the Boleyn faction to get to Henry, surrounded as he now was by the Seymours and their supporters.
Cromwell moved the final plot against Anne, because he believed she was the major block to his plans of an Imperial alliance, which was impossible while Anne remained queen. Anne and her supporters were pro-French, and the Emperor also hated her. On 24 April, Henry gave his approval for a routine assize court, to discuss all and any treasonable activities in Middlesex and Kent. This was a cloak for a secret Commission to look into how Henry could divorce Anne. The King saw, once again, the hand of God in his failure to have a living son. Henry’s ministers eventually came up with the reason of Anne’s multiple adultery – with Henry Norris, Frances Weston, William Brereton and Mark Smeaton as named partners – and Anne was also accused of having an incestuous relationship with her brother George. The Commission also suggested that Anne had poisoned Catherine of Aragon, and planned to do the same to Henry’s children, Princess Mary and the Duke of Richmond.
The very fact that Anne had miscarried a son may have given weight to the belief, expressed by his courtiers, that the King had been the victim of witchcraft and that Anne Boleyn had cast a love spell on him. This explained why the King had abandoned the saintly Catherine of Aragon and married an unworthy woman, and still failed to have a living son. If Anne had had sex with other men while she was married to the King this was treason, a crime punishable by death. Anne’s familiarity with the young men of the Court only gave colour to the story.
The inclusion of Anne’s brother amongst her supposed lovers originated, in part, from their close relationship. Even George Boleyn’s wife was supposed to be jealous of Anne, a sister who held so great a place in his affection. George was also famous as a womaniser, and so the jump from women in general to his sister in particular was made. It also supported the charge of witchcraft – a witch would be prepared to ignore the sacred laws of God and man, such as incest.
It was George’s wife, Jane Parker, who raised the old story of the ‘poisoning’ of the Duke of Richmond, while he had been in France with the Earl of Surrey in July 1533. Jane Parker said that George, under orders from Anne, had tried to poison Richmond, a rival to the throne for any child she might bear. It was added that Richmond remained in France until he heard that Anne had had a daughter and not a son.
Mark Smeaton was arrested for questioning on 30 April. Henry and Anne also had a public quarrel on the same day. Alexander Ales, a Scottish clergyman, was visiting London and was present at Greenwich. He later wrote to Elizabeth I in 1559 of his recollection of that day:
‘Never shall I forget the sorrow which I felt when I saw the most serene Queen, your most religious mother, carrying you, still a little baby, in her arms and entreating the most serene King your father, in Greenwich Palace, from the open window of which he was looking into the courtyard, when she brought you to him. I did not perfectly understand what had been going on, but the faces and gestures of the speakers plainly showed that the King was angry, although he could conceal his anger wonderfully well …’
What seems to have happened earlier in the day was that Norris had gone to the Queen’s almoner to take an oath that Anne was ‘a good woman’. This was the result of a flirtatious exchange either that morning or the previous day that had got out of hand. Anne had been teasing Norris, asking why he was taking so long to sort out his marriage to Margaret Shelton. Norris was noncommittal and Anne erupted. She accused him of being too fond of her, ‘you look for dead men’s shoes; for if ought came to the King but good, you would look to have me.’ Norris denied this (to wish for the King’s death was treason), but Anne kept on and a quarrel ensued. In the end, they realised what had been said, and tried to minimise the damage.16
On May Day Henry and Anne were at Greenwich, but that evening Henry travelled with a handful of servants to Westminster. The following day, Anne was arrested and charged with adultery. She was moved to the Tower of London that afternoon. Cromwell’s first batch of arrests were Henry Norris, Mark Smeaton and George Boleyn. Two days later, Sir Francis Weston and William Brereton were also taken into custody. On 5 May, it was the turn of Sir Richard Page and Thomas Wyatt. The Queen was accused of adultery with the first five, affairs that started directly after Elizabeth’s birth. She was said to have promised marriage to one of them after Henry was dead and also to have said that she had never loved the King. On 17 May all five were executed; Page and Wyatt were released.
Another of the detainees was Sir Francis Bryan, Anne Boleyn’s cousin, who had been the King’s Cupbearer in 1516 and Master of Toyles (driven deer provided for hunting) in Greenwich Park in 1518. When Anne was queen, but was falling out of favour, Bryan set up an argument with George Boleyn so that he could distance himself – just in time it seems. Cromwell, however, disliked Bryan enough to have him arrested, but he was freed almost immediately.
Mark Smeaton was ‘one of the prettiest monochord players and deftest dancers in the land’.17 He was also the only one of the accused who was not a ‘gentleman’. Smeaton eventually admitted, after torture, that he had slept with the Queen three times, claiming that she had seduced him.
The Wyatts and Boleyns were neighbours – Sir Thomas Boleyn at Hever and Sir Henry Wyatt at Allington Castle, near Maidstone, about 20 miles apart. Thomas Wyatt wrote a poem that encapsulated his relationship with Anne, stating that he had been one of her many admirers, but not the foremost; that he lost interest or withdrew since he saw no hope of winning her and that once she was Henry’s mistress, she had become ‘off limits’ to all men.
Anne had several fits of hysterics, recorded by Sir William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower. One of Anne’s ladies, Mistress Cofyn, who, along with Jane Parker shared the Queen’s bed, was also Kingston’s spy, and reported all Anne’s conversations to him.18 The charges against Anne were very detailed, specifying dates, times and even the locations of her acts of adultery, although many of the dates were quite obviously fabricated. On 20 May, she was allegedly with Weston at Westminster but from 17 May onwards, Anne and Henry were at Richmond together for Whitson. On 20 June, Anne was accused of being with Weston at Greenwich but from 3 to 26 June Anne and Henry were at Hampton Court. On 26 April, she was said to have been with Smeaton at Westminster yet Anne and Henry spent Easter at Greenwich, arriving on 14 April.19 According to Chapuys, Cromwell confessed that he had himself invented these dates and times.
Almost until the end, Anne believed that Henry would reprieve her, either sending her into exile or to a nunnery. According to Anne, ‘The king does this to prove me’ – that is, that he was testing her love and faithfulness. Once in the Tower, Anne said, ‘I hear say the executioner is very good and expeditious and I have such a little neck’, at which she put her hands round her neck and laughed. Kingston wrote, ‘I told her it should be no pain, it was so subtle.’20
In fact, the King’s visits to his latest mistress, while his wife was under arrest and sentence of death for adultery on spurious charges, caused a good deal of public comment. Even Chapuys, who did not like Anne, commented that the situation of her condemnation and Henry’s subsequent behaviour had aroused some public sympathy for her. It transpired that many of those people, who had condemned Anne when she displaced Catherine, were not happy with Henry’s affair with Jane. Henry wrote to Jane, ‘… there is a ballad made lately of great derision against us, which if it go abroad and is seen by you, I pray you to pay no manner of regard to it. I am not at present informed who is the setter forth of this malignant writing; but if he is found, he shall be straitly punished for it’21
Two days before Anne’s death, on 17 May 1536, Henry had his second marriage declared null and void on the grounds of consanguinity established by his earlier affair with her sister Mary, thereby making his daughter Elizabeth a bastard.
On the morning of her execution Anne said to the Constable of the Tower. ‘I hear I shall not die before noon, and I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain.’ Anne went to the scaffold dressed in a grey damask gown with a crimson underskirt, attended by four of her ladies (one of whom was Margaret Shelton) and a small crowd of onlookers. She took off her ermine-trimmed cloak and white hood and put on a white cap to hold her hair. Blindfolded, she knelt down and arranged her skirts modestly to cover her feet. Anne then gave a scaffold speech:
‘Good Christian people, I have not come here to preach a sermon; I have come here to die, for according to the law and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak of that whereof I am accused and condemned to die, 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 my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray for me.’22
Anne was beheaded at 8 a.m. on Friday 19 May. According to a Spanish eye-witness account:
‘… the poor lady kept looking about her. The headsman, being still in front of her, said in French, “Madam, do not fear, I will wait till you tell me” …The sword was hidden under a heap of straw, and the man who was to give it to the headsman was told beforehand what to do; so, in order that she should not suspect, the headsman turned to the steps by which they had mounted, and called out, “Bring me the sword”. The lady looked towards the steps to watch for the coming of the sword, still with her hand on the coif; and the headsman made a sign with his right hand for them to give him the sword, and then without being noticed by the lady, he struck off her head to the ground. Three of her four ladies carried her body in a sheet; the fourth carried her head in a white cloth. They passed the two new graves outside St Peter ad Vincula; one contained Norris and Weston, the other, Brereton and Smeaton. Inside, her body was put in an elm chest that should have been used to store bow-staves for Ireland, and she was buried in the chancel, near her brother.’23
Anne Boleyn was buried in St Peter ad Vincula, the church within the Tower of London, but there is a legend that she was secretly exhumed and reburied in the church at Salle, Norfolk, near her home. Her heart is also said to be buried at All Saints Church, East Horndon, near Billericay, Essex (altar tomb, south transept), or SS Andrew and Patrick Church, Elveden Park, near Thetford, Norfolk (south wall, found and moved to site beneath the organ 1836).24
On the day of Anne’s execution, Henry went to meet Jane Seymour, whom he had moved to a house in Whitehall after Anne’s arrest. The next day, on 20 May, Henry became formally betrothed to Jane, and they were married 10 days later. In the following week, Jane’s brothers Edward and Henry Seymour were made Earl of Hertford and a groom of the privy chamber respectively (although Henry Seymour left Court shortly after to live a private life).
This time, the King was not taking any chances. He passed a law stating that he could nominate his successor. If he had Richmond in mind (in lieu of a legitimate son), he was unlucky. Richmond died two weeks after the bill was passed. In 1536, Henry advised his daughter, Mary, once again that her marriage was of the utmost importance. As the eldest of his surviving bastards, Mary was told that she should marry and give Henry a lawful grandson who could then inherit the throne. However, all these plans were set aside when Jane gave birth to a boy, Edward, on 12 October 1537 at Hampton Court. By 24 October the rejoicing was cut short by Jane’s death from puerperal fever, a complication in childbirth that was untreatable at that time.
