The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (59 page)
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Authors: Margaret George
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“I beg you, good people, pray for me.”
She rises wearily, and Kingston leads her out of the Hall and back to her imprisonment.
Her uncle is crying openly">The charges are read. They consist of the incest and adultery with his sister, the Queen. He denies it. Of plotting the King’s death. He denies it. Of implying that he is the father of the Princess Elizabeth.
At this he smirks and keeps silent, raising one eyebrow mockingly.
A last charge, written on paper, is presented to the peers, then shown to Lord Rochford; it is forbidden to speak the charges aloud before the people. The information has been supplied by Rochford’s own wife, Jane.
“Ah, yes,” George Boleyn says loudly, and reads the paper word for word. ‘My sister Queen Anne has told me that the King is impotent. He no longer has either vigour or virtue in his private parts.’” He laughs, jarringly. Cromwell protests, scolding like an angry jaybird. Boleyn smiles, saying, ”But I will not create suspicion in a manner likely to prejudice the issue the King might have from a second marriage.”
In one sentence, the King is now the accused. The next marriage has been mentioned, the unspoken thing the people are wondering about. Is it true the King has already chosen a successor? Could it be that all this is arranged merely to facilitate a new marriage?
But Cromwell has a higher trump: yet another statement by Jane Boleyn, Lady Rochford. She swears that there is an incestuous relationship between her husband and his sister the Queen. The “accursed secret,” known heretofore only to herself, she must in conscience reveal.
Now the accuser is discredited by his own wife, shown for the foul thing he is.
The twenty-six peers pronounce him guilty, and the Duke reads the sentence:
“You shall now go again to the Tower from whence you came, and be drawn from the said Tower of London through the City of London, there to be hanged and then, being alive, cut down—and then your members cut off and your bowels taken out of your body and burnt before you, and then your head cut off and your body divided into four pieces, and your head and body to be set at such places as the King shall assign. ”
A cruel hush descended on London after the trials, a breath-holding until the executions. Those who passed by the Tower could hear hammering, and knew the scaffolds were being reassembled, dragged out of storage where they had lain since More’s execution last summer.
It was said that the King passed these spring nights on his barge, courting Jane, and that the sound of music and the glow of lanterns carried across the water. They said he was rowed back and forth under the shadow of the Tower. They said a great deal of nonsense, but it made a striking story and painted a picture of the King as a satyr. The truth is that he went out on his barge only once, and not to “the shadow of the Tower,” but to visit Jane at Nicholas Carew’s house on the Thames.
LXXIV
HENRY VIII:
It was over, then. The trial was over and the Witch had not escaped her just sentence. Crum reported it all to me—even, sadly, the personal attacks on me. I was not affected by that; my only fear was that somehow, even yet, Anne w>To be burnt or beheaded at the King’s pleasure—I remembered her horror of fire. Would it not be revenge for my “pleasure” to inflict that on her? For her to meet her death, bound and screaming, for her flesh to be roasted, her blood boiled in her veins? I could smell the charred flesh, the stench of her hair aflame....
But I could not. I could not do that, knowing that she was bound for hell as soon as her soul quitted her body—where there would be fire aplenty, the everlasting fire that burns but does not consume. I would not imitate or mock the Devil in providing an earthly substitute. Let Anne quit this earth without bodily pain.
But there was one thing I would have of her, one thing that only she could give: information, a confession that our marriage had been false all along. I would send Cranmer to her, to receive her confession, holding out the promise to spare her the flames if she only admitted it, admitted that she had brought this marriage about by witchcraft, and now abjured it. For I would be freed of her before her death. She would not breathe her last as my wife. I would not be linked to her!
“Go to her,” I commissioned Cranmer, “to her suite in the Tower, and extract an oath from her regarding this matter.” I noted the questioning look on his face. “Yes, she still keeps state, under my express command. She has her royal quarters, her jewels and gowns.” I remembered More in his bookless cell. “They were what she sold her soul for, were they not? Let her enjoy them to the end.”
She would keep everything to the end (except her title as my wife), and suddenly I envisioned the fitting way for her to depart this life. I would send for a French swordsman, and he would perform the execution deftly and with style. She had always loved the “French way”; doubtless a good English axe would be too crude for her sensibilities. I wrote out the order for the Lieutenant of Calais. What a surprise I was giving her, right up to the last....
I began to laugh—first a little, then hysterically.
WILL:
We heard the screams of laughter coming from the King’s private chamber, but dared not enter. It sounded as if a madman were within, and we feared that somehow an intruder had gained entrance. The laughter was not recognizable as the King’s; that was the reason why at length a guard opened the door and checked inside.
There was no one there but King Henry, seated before his writing desk, and red in the face, looking apoplectic.
I approached him—I was the only one who dared—and stood ready to summon the physician. He had suffered a seizure, I was sure.
“Now, good my Lord, help is coming,” I said, in what I meant to be my most reassuring tone.
“Help?” he said, in a quiet voice. The red was draining from his face. “Nay, there’s no help for it. ‘Tis done, ’tis done.” He indicated a letter, ready to be sent. “A pretty French death,” he said. “One’s death should be consistent with one’s life, should it not? Only we seldom can arrange it. Well, I shall oblige.”
Had the strain, tarted to rise, then shook his head. “One thing more. I must give them an easy death as well. Commute the sentence to a simple beheading. There, that’ll do.” He began scribbling orders on parchment. “But they must content themselves with a local headsman and a regular axe.
On the morning of May seventeenth, with Anne watching from her window, her five lovers and co-conspirators were marched out to the hill beyond the Tower moat, there to mount the scaffold. It was a fine high one, so that all the onlookers (and the crowd was vast) could have a clear view.
Sir William Brereton was the first to stand upon the platform. He whined like a coward and shook bodily.
“I have deserved to die, if it were a thousand deaths,” he cried. Then, at the motioning of the headsman to lay his head upon the block, he protested, “But the cause whereof I judge not—but if you judge, judge the best.” Seeking further delay, he repeated himself three or four more times.
But at length his voice failed, and he was forced to put his head down. The headsman raised his great axe and chopped clean through Brereton’s neck. The head rolled in the straw, and the headsman held it up, as was customary.
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 wentroudly "3">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 reportl,
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.
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