unfeeling and unnatural part, and several other members of council ane on board, and produced an order for her arrest. "It is his majesty's pleasure," said Norfolk, "that you should go to the Tower." A: the announcement she blanched and was unnerved for a moment; at, regaining her self-possession, she replied, "If it is his majesty's asure, I am ready to obey." On arriving about five o'clock in the

afernoon at the gate of the Tower-that Tower which had once been her palace-falling down upon her knees, she uttered with great in the prayer, "O Lord, help me, as I am guiltless of this reof I am accused." With a shudder of horror, she asked Sir Wa Kingston, lieutenant of the Tower, "Mr. Kingston, do I go ato a dungeon?" Kingston, who was a man of a stern unfeeling character, but who affected great courtesy towards prisoners of dis

According to others they produced their order to her before she left Greenwich. Herbert's Henry VIII, p. 194.

tinction,' replied softly, as if he had been her guardian angel, "No, Madam, you shall go into your lodging, that you lay in at your coronation." This was indeed true, for instead of being shut up in a cell, she was allowed to occupy the royal apartments in the Tower. usually appropriated to the queens of England, a portion of which was called the Marten Tower. But the answer awakened painful recollections. The thought that within the building where the crown of England had been placed upon her brow, she was now to be imprisoned, the contrast of the imposing splendour of her coronation day, when she felt as if the happiest of human beings, with her present wretched condition, almost overwhelmed her, and she cried out, "It is too good for me- -Jesus have mercy on me." She then kneeled down, weeping bitterly, and in the midst of this sorrow fell into a fit of laughing, as she frequently did afterwards-the laughter of anguish, and not the effect merely of strong nervous agitation. Anguish venting itself in laughter is indeed the most terrible of all. It is anguish, in the delirium of agony or despair, betaking itself to opposites, when its natural forms of expression by tears and cries are felt to be inadequate. She desired Kingston to petition his majesty "that she might have the sacrament in the closet by her chamber, that she might pray for mercy; for," she added, "I am as clear from

1 Cardinal Wolsey well knew the character of this cold-hearted but smooth-tongued jailer. Upon Wolsey's fall, when the Earl of Northumberland-Anne's old lover-had received orders to arrest him for high treason, and to bring him to London, to undergo his trial, Cavendish, the cardinal's gentleman-usher, having told his master that Mr. Kingston and twenty-four of the guards had been sent to conduct him to his majesty, "Mr. Kingston!" replied the cardinal, repeating the name several times, and then clasping his hand on his thigh, he gave a deep sigh. And when Kingston treated him with all the marks of respect which had been paid to him in the pride of his glory, and to revive his dejected spirits, reminded him of the generosity of his noble-hearted master, Wolsey, in whose ears all this sounded very like mockery, knowing that he had fallen, never to rise again, simply said, "Mr. Kingston, all the comfortable words ye have spoken to me, be spoken but for a purpose to bring me into a fool's paradise: I know what is provided for me."-Cavendish's Life of Wolsey.

2 The autograph of her name is still to be seen in the wall of the Marten Tower, The part where it appears is now a lobby, and represented in the annexed engraving.See a facsimile of the autograph, on the last page of this life.

the company of men, as for sin, as I am clear from you, and am the king's true wedded wife." She expressed much anxiety about her brother, and also evinced the tenderest solicitude about her motherb-haw, with whom she was on terms of endeared affection, exclaiming, "O my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow." 1

The fallest accounts of the last days of her life, from her imprisonment in the Tower to her death, is contained in a series of letters written by Sir William Kingston to Cromwell. From these letters

Ber own mother died in 1512.

1 These letters of Kingston, which are preserved in MS., Cotton, Otho, c. x., fol. 225, Brian Museum, were in part mutilated by the ravages of the fire of 1731. They are peted in Ellis's Original Letters, first series, vol. ii, pp. 52-65; and in vol. ii. of Corendsh's Life of Wolsey, edited by Singer, who has filled up the blanks from Strype, who had seen the letters before their being damaged by fire.

tendants. Jane Parker,' a wicked and profligate woman, to whom Lord Rochford, Anne's brother, was unhappily married, and who mortally hated Anne, was the most zealously active of these talebearers. She had told the king, with every aggravating circumstance malice could invent, the story of an alleged declaration made by Lady Wingfield upon oath on her death-bed, prejudicial to Anne's chastity; which is said to have made a deep impression on the mind of Henry, for he was naturally jealous, and jealousy is always credulous. His eager desire to be released from the nuptial ties, that he might exalt another, to whom he had now transferred his heart, to his bed and throne, would give strength to his credulity. These various passions combined, under the strong, irresistible, overmastering influence of which men will harden themselves against every feeling of compassion, and commit crimes of the blackest dye, easily account for his haste in adopting measures against Anne, and for his unrelenting cruelty in at length bringing her to that dreadful end which has imparted such a tragic interest to her history.

Before the queen had fully recovered from the sorrow of mind and feebleness of frame caused by her premature confinement and the loss of her boy, investigations into her conduct had been set on foot, with the sanction of Henry. On the 24th of April, a secret commission was formally appointed, consisting of certain peers and judges, expressly for this purpose; but previous to the formal appointment of this commission, scandalous matter against her must have been collected, and various deliberations must have taken place in regard to it, and its consequences as to her honour, station, and

1 The daughter of Sir Henry Parker, Lord Morley. She was a blinded devotee of Popery, which may partly account for her hatred of the queen, whose principles she held in detestation.

2 Lady Wingfield was Anne's intimate friend; but who the person was to whom she made this solemn dying declaration, and what was her state of mind when she made it, if she made it at all, is not known. "The safest sort of forgery," says Burnet, "to one whose conscience can swallow it, is to lay a thing on a dead person's name, where there is no fear of discovery before the great day."-History of the Reformation, vol. i., p. 360.