The Creation of Anne Boleyn (21 page)

Anne gave the signal. But either the executioner or someone else in charge had devised a scheme to distract Anne at the last moment, so the fatal blow would come when she wasn’t expecting it; the executioner turned toward the scaffold steps and called for the sword, and when Anne blindly turned her head in that direction, he brought the sword down from the other side and swiftly “divided her neck at a blow.”
⁵⁸
As these things went—others had died only after multiple clumsy hackings—it was an easy death. If the naturalist Lewis Thomas has it right, it was far easier than her weeks of suffering in the Tower. “Pain,” he writes, “is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there’s time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick. If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensable part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage.”
⁵⁹
He quotes Montaigne, who nearly died in a riding accident and later described the “letting go” that he experienced at what could have easily been the very end.

It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who have let themselves slide into sleep. I believe this is the same state in which people find themselves whom we see fainting in the agony of death, and maintain that we pity them without cause . . . If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care with it.
⁶⁰

Dostoevsky, too, had experienced a close brush with death—by the czar’s firing squad, a sentence from which he was reprieved at the last moment—and fictionalizes his experience through a character in
The Idiot.
His account, though very different from Montaigne’s or mine, nonetheless describes a radically altered state of consciousness, not characterized by pain but by a sense of the infinity of time, stretching his final moments into an extended reflection culminating in the “melting” of oneself with nature.

About twenty paces from the scaffold, where he had stood to hear the sentence, were three posts, fixed in the ground, to which to fasten the criminals (of whom there were several). The first three criminals were taken to the posts, dressed in long white tunics, with white caps drawn over their faces, so that they could not see the rifles pointed at them. Then a group of soldiers took their stand opposite to each post. My friend was the eighth on the list, and therefore he would have been among the third lot to go up. A priest went about among them with a cross; and there was about five minutes of time left for him to live.

He said that those five minutes seemed to him to be a most interminable period, an enormous wealth of time; he seemed to be living, in these minutes, so many lives that there was no need as yet to think of that last moment, so that he made several arrangements, dividing up the time into portions—one for saying farewell to his companions, two minutes for that; then a couple more for thinking over his own life and career and all about himself; and another minute for a last look around. He remembered having divided his time like this quite well. While saying good-bye to his friends he recollected asking one of them some very usual everyday question, and being much interested in the answer. Then having bade farewell, he embarked upon those two minutes which he had allotted to looking into himself; he knew beforehand what he was going to think about. He wished to put it to himself as quickly and clearly as possible, that here was he, a living, thinking man, and that in three minutes he would be nobody; or if somebody or something, then what and where? He thought he would decide this question once and for all in these last three minutes. A little way off there stood a church, and its gilded spire glittered in the sun. He remembered staring stubbornly at this spire, and at the rays of light sparkling from it. He could not tear his eyes from these rays of light; he got the idea that these rays were his new nature, and that in three minutes he would become one of them, amalgamated somehow with them.
⁶¹

Anne’s preparations for dying, facing the inevitability of her execution, may also have been filled with internal good-byes, existential confrontations with the mystery of “being” and “nothingness,” and imaginings of becoming one with nature. I like to think of her final hours as immensely rich, in a way that I cannot comprehend but that were sustaining to her even beyond her more conventional—but extremely deep, for Anne—religious faith. And then, at the end, I hope that nature or God (it makes no difference) gave her no more to figure out, no more to regret, no more to say good-bye to, no more work to do, and took care of her dying.

The Executioner’s Sword and the Red Bus

While I was in London conducting interviews for this book and visiting sites of importance, I had an experience that reminded me of Lewis Thomas’s essay. Returning to my hotel from a daylong visit to the Tower, I was obediently following the crowd across a busy intersection when I heard a voice call out, “Watch out!” and, struck on my lower back, I was knocked to the ground. The impact was forceful and disorienting; I had no idea what had happened. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the red of a London bus.
I’m about to be run over by a bus!
I thought, disbelieving but sure; it seemed impossible, on my innocent little research trip, that I should die in this arbitrary, unexpected way, but that was clearly what was about to happen. I tried to lift myself up and realized that although I was hurt, I wasn’t about to be crushed, for I’d been hit not by the bus I’d seen out of the corner of my eye, but by an impatient bicyclist; the bus had slowed to a stop by the time I was on the ground.

I was bleeding from a bad scrape on my arm, and sharp darts of pain in my back and side accompanied every breath in a way that I recognized from a hairline rib fracture I’d once received in an auto accident. I suppose I ought to have gone to the hospital just to be sure everything was okay, but I didn’t. And eventually, everything did heal. The only injury that remained was existential: the memory of that moment when I was sure that I was about to be extinguished, just like that, without warning. I had felt terror, yes, but then, when the fatal blow seemed inevitable, an eerie calm overcame me. It seemed useless to struggle—a feeling that I had never before experienced in a life devoted to making things happen, protecting myself and those I love, and constantly moving forward. For a moment, when I thought I was about to be struck by that bus, I relaxed into the unfamiliar sense of “letting go.” It was only for an instant, and then, when I realized that the bus had stopped and escape from the traffic was still possible, the self-protective fear returned, and I scrambled to my feet and hobbled across the street to the sidewalk where my husband was standing, looking alarmed.

Sometimes we know when our death is coming—when we are desperately ill, say. But we
all
“know”—although we rarely allow the knowledge to seep in—that even if we are in perfect health, even if we occupy the most privileged position in the world, even if we believe ourselves to be protected through prayer, good works, or youth, that, without warning, with a blind eye and an unhearing ear, the back of the universe can turn, the earth can tilt, and death can take you. This was how it happened to Anne—and it is why the image of the red bus, out of the corner of my eye, wouldn’t leave me for weeks after the incident. My accident had not been fatal; it was not even serious. But my turning head had channeled the moment when Anne’s life, anxiously turned toward an imagined death, was struck down by the executioner’s sword coming at her—kindly, cruelly, unexpectedly, and irrevocably—to command the reality of her death.

6

Henry: How Could He Do It?

T
HE NIGHT OF
Anne’s execution, Henry returned to Hampton Court, the magnificent palace that Henry had refurbished for Anne after appropriating it from his longtime mentor and (at the time Henry took possession, soon to be former) Lord Chancellor, Thomas Wolsey. Jane Seymour followed Henry at six the next morning. They were betrothed at nine o’clock. The palace had been divested of all the emblems and other evidence of Anne’s queenship (save the ones missed by the furiously scrambling revisionist carpenters and stonemasons). Soon it would be renovated, once again, to accommodate Prince Edward, the long-prayed-for male heir.

The execution of a queen was unprecedented, extreme, and shocking, even to Anne’s enemies. Henry had invested six years of time, energy, intellect, money, and blood in making the marriage happen. They were married less than three years. There is no evidence of an unbridgeable emotional estrangement between them. His earlier love letters to her, admittedly written in the bloom of fresh passion, portray a solicitous, tender suitor whom it is impossible to imagine coldly ordering a wife’s death. There are plenty of explanations for Henry’s desire for a new marriage—Anne’s failure to provide a male heir; Jane Seymour, waiting in the wings, fresh and fertile; Henry’s recognition that Anne was creating problems with his image; and perhaps the need to reaffirm his declining masculinity with a new, more pliant bride. There are also plenty of theories, as we’ve seen, as to whether or not he believed Anne guilty of adultery and treason. Retha Warnicke argues that Anne’s miscarriage of a deformed fetus convinced Henry that Anne was indeed a witch. G. W. Bernard (going on nothing more than a “hunch”) believes that Anne was, in fact, guilty of at least some of the charges laid against her. Alison Weir, while herself maintaining Anne’s innocence, considers that the charges were “more than enough to arouse fury in any husband, let alone an egotistical monarch” and that from the moment the Privy Council reported the charges to him, Henry was “convinced that he had nourished a viper in his bosom, and that Anne had betrayed and humiliated him, both as a husband and a king.”
¹
In the end, whichever account you find most convincing, it still takes a leap of comprehension to find any of them sufficient to explain Henry’s willingness—seeming eagerness, in fact—to sign the order for Anne’s
execution.
We are still left asking ourselves: How could he do it?

The answer to that question requires going deeper into Henry’s character, both as a man and as a king, in search of precisely that piece of his being that made the order to execute Anne possible for him. And here, too, there are plenty of theories. David Starkey sees him as a once “virtuous prince,” full of high ideals and generosity of spirit, who became a ruthless tyrant as his equanimity was assaulted by years of battle with the Church, declining health, and a disastrous domestic life. Others argue that from the first he was cold-bloodedly “devoted to his own interests and inclinations” and “inherently cruel.”
²
Some historians, as well as the fictional
Wolf Hall,
have viewed Henry as impressionable and dependent, intimidated by Anne, and easily manipulated by those, such as Wolsey and then Cromwell, with a clearer plan of action. On this view, Henry didn’t “act” with full agency when he signed the order for the execution, but instead passively surrendered himself to the more dominant Cromwell. Suzannah Lipscomb sees Henry, in the year Anne was executed, as having undergone a crisis of masculine honor, brought on by a bad fall from his horse that left him with a permanently disabled leg, unable to joust, and vulnerable to any rumors—such as those that Cromwell whispered in his ear about Anne—that questioned his manhood. She points to the “exaggerated, tragicomic manner” in which Henry complained of Anne’s having bewitched him, then betrayed him with more than one hundred men.
³
Henry’s motivation: to convince others—and himself—that he had not been cuckolded due to his own lack of sexual competence, but because Anne was the embodiment of feminine voraciousness and evil. As such, he was not killing an ordinary woman, but destroying a succubus who was eating away at his ability to perform as a king and as a man.

At the other end of the spectrum from Lipscomb is the hypothesis that Henry had a rare genetic disorder that was responsible both for Katherine’s and Anne’s frequent miscarriages
and
Henry’s own physical and mental problems after middle age. Announced by headlines such as
KING HENRY VIII’S MADNESS EXPLAINED
, the theory is wonderfully embracing of virtually everything that went bad in Henry’s life.