enfeeling and unnatural part, and several other members of council ne on board, and produced an order for her arrest.' "It is his Easty's pleasure," said Norfolk, " that you should go to the Tower." A: the announcement she blanched and was unnerved for a moment; bat regaining her self-possession, she replied, "If it is his majesty's paeasure, 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 tion the prayer, "O Lord, help me, as I am guiltless of this whereof I am accused." With a shudder of horror, she asked Sir Wan Kingston, lieutenant of the Tower, "Mr. Kingston, do I go into 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. 1 Herbert's Henry VIII, p. 194.

in

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 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 motherin-law, with whom she was on terms of endeared affection, exclaiming, "O my mother, thou wilt die for sorrow."

The fullest 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

Her own mother died in 1512.

These letters of Kingston, which are preserved in MS., Cotton, Otho, c. x., fol. 225, Ban Museum, were in part mutilated by the ravages of the fire of 1731. They are pr. ted in Elias's Original Letters, first series, vol. ii, pp. 52-65; and in vol. ii. of Cavendish'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.

we learn that female attendants, in whom she had no confidence, and of whom she bitterly complained, Lady Boleyn' and Mrs. Cosyns, attended her by day and by night, sleeping on the pallet at the foot of her bed; that these heartless and faithless women triumphed over her misfortunes, insulted her by their unfeeling remarks, were on the watch to catch and report every word she uttered, in the wild frenzy of grief; and that, with the view of extorting from her own lips a confession of criminality, they artfully questioned and cross-questioned her, but that she persevered to the last in avowing her innocence. Kingston and his wife slept at the outside of her chamber door. Two other ladies, who, it would appear, were truly friendly to her, one of whom Miss Strickland supposes was Mary Wyatt, sister of her early and devoted friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt, were permitted to attend her, though under such restrictions, that they were not allowed to have any communication with her except in the presence of Kingston and his wife; and they slept in an adjoining apartment. During her imprisonment, she sometimes thought that Henry was only trying her; at other times she believed that her doom was sealed. But she gradually disciplined her mind to submission, whatever might happen.

Cranmer had not been made privy to what had been secretly going on against the queen; yet as his official services would be afterwards needed in some of the measures contemplated, he was summoned by Cromwell, in obedience to the king's orders, from the country, where he was then residing, to Lambeth. Only a week before the May-day scene, namely, on the 22d of April, he was residing at Knole, in Kent, as appears from the date of a letter which he then wrote to Cromwell, and he was probably still there when he received Cromwell's letters requiring him to return to Lambeth, but forbidding him to come into the royal presence until he should receive further orders; a prohibition which, on the part of the king, looked very like the shrinking of a self-condemned

1 This lady was the wife of Aune's uncle, Sir Edward Boleyn.