Cranmer of a certain supposed impediment to her marriage with
the king--according to some accounts a previous marriage with
Northumberland, though the latter solemnly and positively denied
it--which was never disclosed, but which, having been considered by the
archbishop and a committee of ecclesiastical lawyers, was pronounced, on
the 17th, sufficient to invalidate her marriage. The same day all her
reputed lovers were executed; and on the 19th she herself suffered death
on Tower Green, her head being struck off with a sword by the
executioner of Calais brought to England for the purpose.[7] She had
regarded the prospect of death with courage and almost with levity,
laughing heartily as she put her hands about her "little neck" and
recalled the skill of the executioner. "I have seen many men" (wrote Sir
William Kingston, governor of the Tower) "and also women executed, and
all they have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady has
much joy and pleasure in death." On the following day Henry was
betrothed to Jane Seymour.

Amidst the vituperations of the adherents of the papacy and the later
Elizabethan eulogies, and in the absence of the records on which her
sentence was pronounced, Anne Boleyn's guilt remains unproved. To Sir
William Kingston she protested her entire innocence, and on the scaffold
while expressing her submission she made no confession.[8] Smeaton alone
of her supposed lovers made a full confession, and it is possible that
his statement was drawn from him by threats of torture or hopes of
pardon. Norris, according to one account,[9] also confessed, but
subsequently declared that he had been betrayed into making his
statement. The others were all said to have "confessed in a manner" on
the scaffold, but much weight cannot be placed on these general
confessions, which were, according to the custom of the time, a
declaration of submission to the king's will and of general repentance
rather than acknowledgment of the special crime. "I pray God save the
king," Anne herself is reported to have said on the scaffold, "and send
him long to reign over you, for a gentler nor a more merciful prince was
there never; and to me he was ever a good, a gentle and sovereign lord."
A principal witness for the charge of incest was Rochford's own wife, a
woman of infamous character, afterwards executed for complicity in the
intrigues of Catherine Howard. The discovery of Anne's misdeeds
coincided in an extraordina