The Creation of Anne Boleyn

by Susan Bordo

  Approaching the Scaffold

  Expecting to die on May 18, Anne took the Sacrament at two A.M, having prepared her soul for many hours. She had insisted that Kingston be present when she took confession so her assertion of innocence of the charges would be public record. Even her old enemy Chapuys was impressed by the fact that Anne, before and after receiving the Sacrament, affirmed to those who had charge of her “on peril of her soul’s damnation, that she had not misconducted herself so far as her husband the King was concerned.”45 In the sixteenth century, to speak anything other than the truth at such a time would be to invite the utter condemnation of God. Anne had nothing to gain and her salvation to lose by lying. By now all who were in close contact with her must have been convinced of her innocence, whatever their politics.

  She was prepared to die. Yet, cruelly, the execution was delayed twice, once in order to clear the Tower of possible sympathetic observers, the second time because the executioner had been delayed. The first delay dismayed Anne, who thought that at the newly appointed hour she would already “be dead and past my pain.”46 Kingston, who seems to have been an absurdly literal man, took her to be referring to the physical pain of the execution itself and reassured her that “there should be no pain, it was so subtle.”47 Anne replied with her most famous line: “I heard say the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck.”48 And then, according to Kingston, “she put her hand about [her neck] laughing heartily.”49 Kingston flat-footedly interpreted this to mean that Anne had “much joy and pleasure in death.”50 He apparently did not “get” Anne’s irony or that she was probably becoming a bit unhinged at this point. At the news of the second delay, she was distraught. But “It was not that she desired death,” as she told Kingston (or perhaps she told one of the ladies, who then told him), “but she had thought herself prepared to die, and feared that the delay would weaken her resolve.”51 So much for Kingston’s theory that Anne felt “joy and pleasure” at the prospect of death.

  What she may have felt was something closer to what psychologist James Hillman describes as the state of mind that often precedes an attempt at suicide: a desperate desire to shed an old self whose suffering has become unbearable and thus must be “reborn” in the act of dying. This imagined rebirth, for Hillman, has nothing to do with belief in reincarnation or even in heaven, but with the perception, ironically, that the soul cannot survive under existing conditions. What Anne had been through was certainly enough to shatter any hold her previous life may have exerted on her. She had been discarded by the man who had pursued her for six years, fathered her daughter, and seemingly adored her for much of their time together. The person she was closest to in the world—her brother—had been executed on the most hideous and shameful of charges. The rest of her family, as far as we can tell, had either abandoned her or—as Anne believed of her mother—was awash with despair and grief over what was happening. Still recovering from a miscarriage, her body and mind undoubtedly assaulted by hormonal changes and unstable moods, she had been sent to prison on absurd, concocted charges and “cared for” there by women who were hostile spies. She knew she would never see her daughter again, and—unlike the fictional Anne of Anne of the Thousand Days, who predicts that “Elizabeth will be queen!”—she had no hope, after Cranmer’s visit, that her child would ever be anything more than what she had seen Mary reduced to: a bastardized ex-princess forced to bow down to any children the new wife might produce for Henry. She had been given reason to hope that she would be allowed to live, only to have those hopes crushed at her sentencing. In a sense, she had already been through dozens of dyings. Nothing was left but the withered skin of her old life, which she was ready to shed.

  As she mounted the scaffold, wearing a robe of dark damask (black in some reports, gray in others) trimmed with white fur, with a red kirtle (petticoat) underneath—red being the liturgical color of Catholic martyrdom—political and national affiliations continued, as they had through her reign and would for centuries to come, to shape the descriptions of her appearance and behavior. To an author of the Spanish Chronicle, she exhibited “a devilish spirit.”52 A French witness who had sneaked in despite the ban on strangers wrote that “never had she looked so beautiful.”53 An anonymous observer described her as “feeble and half-stupefied”54 (which would be understandable, and not incompatible with her looking beautiful as well). Thomas Wriothesley says she showed “a goodly smiling countenance.”55 Frenchman de Carles commented on the beauty of her complexion, pure and clear as though cleansed by all the suffering. For all, the spectacle of a queen, wearing the white ermine of royalty and mounting the stairs to the scaffold, was unnerving.

  Unlike her trial speech and her “last letter,” Anne’s remarks on the scaffold made the more conventional bows to the goodness and mercy of the king—in this highly public context, it was virtually required, if only to prevent any retribution against surviving relatives—and asked the people to pray for her. She did not admit to guilt for the offenses with which she was charged or accuse the judges of malice, but she did make reference to the “cruel law of the land by which I die.”56 By now, the four young ladies who had accompanied her to the scaffold (clearly not the hostile spies who had lived with her in the Tower, but others, more intimate with her, whom she had been allowed to have with her in these last moments) were weeping. Anne, having helped them take off her robe—an act that in itself must have demanded great composure and courage—“appeared dazed” as she kneeled down, modestly covering her feet with her dress, and asked the executioner to remove her coif lest it interfere with his stroke. The executioner realized that she was afraid of the pain of an impeded blow; she kept looking around her, her hand on her coif, anticipating the moment. Clearly “distressed” at the task he was to perform, he told her that he would wait until she gave the signal. “With a fervent spirit” she began to pray, and the Portuguese contingent, unable to bear it, huddled together and knelt down against the scaffold, wailing loudly.57

  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 o
f 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?

  THE 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 tha
t 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.