onclusions that I have drawn, namely, that Mary Boleyn having been
Henry's mistress, he and Anne were within the prohibited degrees of
affinity for husband and wife; the fact that no marriage had taken place
between Henry and Mary Boleyn being regarded as canonically
immaterial.[164] In any case, the admission of a known impediment having
been made by Anne, no time was lost. The next day, the 17th May, Cranmer
sat, with Cromwell and other members of the Council, in his Primate's
court at Lambeth to condemn the marriage that he himself had made. Anne
was formally represented, but nothing was said on her behalf; and sentence
was hurriedly pronounced that the King's marriage with Anne Boleyn had
never been a marriage at all. At the same time order was sent to Sir
William Kingston that the "concubine" was to suffer the last penalty on
the following morning. When the sleepless night for Anne had passed,
mostly in prayer, she took the sacrament with the utmost devotion, and in
that most solemn moment swore before the Host, on her hopes of eternal
life, that she had never misused her body to the King's dishonour.[165]

In the meanwhile her execution had been deferred until the next day, and
Anne again lost her nerve. It was cruel, she said, to keep her so long in
suspense: pray, she petitioned, put her out of her misery now that she was
prepared. The operation would not be painful, Kingston assured her. "My
neck is small enough," she said, spanning it with her fingers, and again
burst into hysterics. Soon she became calm once more; and thenceforward
only yearned for despatch. "No one ever had a better will for death than
she," wrote Chapuys to his master: and Kingston, hardened as he was to the
sight of the condemned in their last hours, expressed surprise to Cromwell
that instead of sorrow "this lady has much joy and pleasure in death."
Remorse for her ungenerous treatment of the Princess Mary principally
troubled her. She herself, she said, was not going to execution by the
divine judgment for what she had been accused of, but for having planned
the death of the Princess. And so, in alternate prayer and light chatter,
passed Anne's last night on earth, and at nine o'clock on the spring
morning of the 19th May she was led forth to the courtyard within the
Tower, where a group of gentlemen, including Cromwell and the Dukes of
Richmond and Suffolk, stood on or close to a low scaffold or staging
reached by four steps from the grou