d; all but one were considered by the spectators to have
confessed. Rochfort had shown some feeling while in the Tower. Kingston
on one occasion found him weeping bitterly. The day of the trial he sent
a petition to the king, to what effect I do not learn; and on the
Tuesday he begged to see Cromwell, having something on his conscience,
as he said, which he wished to tell him.[597] His desire, however, does
not seem to have been complied with; he spoke sorrowfully on the
scaffold of the shame which he had brought upon the gospel, and died
with words which appeared to the spectators, if not a confession, yet
something very nearly resembling it, "This said lord," wrote a spectator
to the court at Brussels, "made a good Catholic address to the people.
He said that he had not come there to preach to them, but rather to
serve as a mirror and an example. He acknowledged the crimes which he
had committed against God, and against the king his sovereign; there was
no occasion for him, he said, to repeat the cause for which he was
condemned; they would have little pleasure in hearing him tell it. He
prayed God, and he prayed the king, to pardon his offences; and all
others whom he might have injured he also prayed to forgive him as
heartily as he forgave every one. He bade his hearers avoid the vanities
of the world, and the flatteries of the court which had brought him to
the shameful end which had overtaken him. Had he obeyed the lessons of
that gospel which he had so often read, he said he should not have
fallen so far; it was worth more to be a good doer than a good reader.
Finally, he forgave those who had adjudged him to die, and he desired
them to pray God for his soul."[598]

[Sidenote: Anne Boleyn confesses to Cranmer that she has never been
lawfully married to the king.]

The queen was left till a further mystery had perplexed yet deeper the
disgraceful exposure. Henry had desired Cranmer to be her confessor. The
archbishop was with her on the day after her trial,[599] and she then
made an extraordinary avowal,[600] either that she had been married or
contracted in early life, or had been entangled in some connexion which
invalidated her marriage with the king. The letter to the emperor, which
I have already quoted,[601] furnishes the solitary explanation of the
mystery which remains. Some one, apparently the imperial ambassador,
informed Charles that she was discovered to have been nine years before
married to Lord Pe