will confess.]

[Sidenote: She persists in maintaining her innocence,]

[Sidenote: Being satisfied that there was no witness of her guilt.]

We return to the prisoners in the Tower. Mark Smeton, who had confessed
his guilt, was ironed.[575] The other gentlemen, not in consideration of
their silence, but of their rank, were treated more leniently. To the
queen, with an object which may be variously interpreted, Henry wrote
the Friday succeeding her arrest, holding out hopes of forgiveness if
she would be honest and open with him. Persons who assume that the whole
transaction was the scheme of a wicked husband to dispose of a wife of
whom he was weary, will believe that he was practising upon her terror
to obtain his freedom by a lighter crime than murder. Those who consider
that he possessed the ordinary qualities of humanity, and that he was
really convinced of her guilt, may explain his offer as the result of
natural feeling. But in whatever motive his conduct originated, it was
ineffectual. Anne, either knowing that she was innocent, or trusting
that her guilt could not be proved, trusting, as Sir Edmund Baynton
thought, to the constancy of Weston and Norris,[576] declined to confess
anything. "_If any man accuse me_," she said to Kingston, "_I can but
say nay, and they can bring no witness_."[577] Instead of acknowledging
any guilt in herself, she perhaps retaliated upon the king in the
celebrated letter which has been thought a proof both of her own
innocence, and of the conspiracy by which she was destroyed.[578] This
letter also, although at once so well known and of so dubious authority,
it is fair to give entire.

[Sidenote: Saturday, May 6. Her letter to the king.]

"Sir,--Your Grace's displeasure and my imprisonment are things so
strange unto me, as what to write, or what to excuse, I am altogether
ignorant. Whereas you send unto me (willing [me] to confess a truth, and
to obtain your favour) by such an one whom you know to be mine antient
professed enemy, I no sooner conceived this message by him, than I
rightly conceived your meaning; and if, as you say, confessing a truth
indeed may procure my safety, I shall with all willingness and duty
perform your command.

[Sidenote: Never prince had more loyal wife.]

[Sidenote: She, however, always looked for what now she finds.]

"But let not your Grace ever imagine that your poor wife will ever be
brought to acknowledge a fault where not so much as a though