land; but the earl himself four days before had solemnly denied this, declaring that he had already attested his denial by receiving the sacrament, and was ready to do so again. We may, perhaps, suspect that this was just a little too much protesting, and that the earl, on cross-examination afterwards, confessed enough of his former intimacy with her to enable ecclesiastical lawyers to make out a case of precontract. On Friday, the 19th, Anne was brought to execution on Tower Green in presence of the principal nobility and of the mayor and aldermen of London. On the scaffold she made a brief address to the bystanders, not acknowledging the crimes with which she was charged, but expressing perfect submission to the law and declaring that she accused no one on account of her death. Her head was then smitten off with a sword by the executioner of Calais, whose services were engaged for the occasion, the manner of death being one at that time practised in France but wholly unknown in England.
The evidence on which she was condemned, however it may have satisfied public opinion at the time, would probably not have impressed men in our day even with a general belief in her guilt, much less have justified her execution. No one of her alleged accomplices except Smeaton appears to have made any confession; and the queen herself, even when desiring earnestly the consolations of religion to enable her to prepare for death, protested in the most emphatic terms to Kingston, the constable of the Tower, that she was innocent of criminal intercourse with any man whomsoever. The charges, we may presume, derived their plausibility from certain acts of indecorous familiarity which the loose conventionalities of the court must have for a long time condoned, and which in the case of her brother were positively not a little revolting. But her conduct in the days of her prosperity had been so arrogant and overbearing that few men in those days pitied her fate or doubted that it had been righteously decreed. Her own uncle, the Duke of Norfolk, sat in judgment upon her and pronounced her sentence. Her own father even was one of the peers who found a verdict of guilty against her alleged paramours, thereby admitting by implication that he considered her guilty too. No one after her fall seems to have felt the smallest sympathy. Yet her conduct in prison, as described in the letters of Sir William Kingston, sadly mutilated as they are and illegible from the Cottonian fire, can hardly but be considered to afford strong presumption of her innocence. As for the often quoted letter supposed to have been written by herself from the Tower, it is a manifest fabrication of the time of Queen Elizabeth. But there is no doubt that she met her fate with singular cheerfulness and courage; insomuch that Sir William Kingston was moved to write of her, 'This lady has much joy and pleasure in death' (see also Meteren, f. 21, who follows a contemporary account). It is commonly held that the king's estrangement from her was due mainly, if not entirely, to a newly developed passion for another woman; and it is a fact that he married Jane Seymour with most indecent haste immediately after Anne's execution. But the revulsion of feeling which he manifested with regard to Anne seems to have been far more vehement than a man might be expected to show who had simply got tired of one mistress and taken up with another. His passion, in fact, had been declining from the very moment that he married her, and he only sought consolation in a new attachment for a bondage that was becoming more and more intolerable.
Of her personal beauty the opinion of the time was not altogether unanimous. 'Madame Anne,' says one writer, 'is not one of the handsomest women in the world. She is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, bosom not much raised, and in fact has nothing but the king's great appetite, and her eyes, which are black and beautiful' (Venetian Calendar, iv. No. 824). But besides her eyes her long flowing hair, which she allowed to fall down her shoulders, thick set with jewels, commanded general admiration (ib., Nos. 802, 912); and Cranmer himself was struck with her at her coronation, 'sitting in her hair upon a horse litter' (Ellis's Letters, 1st ser. ii. 37). That she knew how to make the most of her personal attractions we may very well believe. According to George Wyatt, the grandson of the poet, there was even a slight personal defect in one of her finger-nails, which she generally contrived to hide with the tip of another finger.
