The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers (60 page)

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Authors: Margaret George

BOOK: The Autobiography of Henry VIII: With Notes by His Fool, Will Somers
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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, 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 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.
“0 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.

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