nd. Anne was dressed in grey damask
trimmed with fur, over a crimson petticoat, and cut low at the neck, so as
to offer no impediment to the executioner's steel; and for the same reason
the brown hair was dressed high in a net under the pearl-bordered coif.
Kept back by guards to some little distance from the platform stood a
large crowd of spectators, who had flocked in at the heels of the Lord
Mayor and Sheriffs; though foreigners had been rigidly excluded.[166]

When Anne had ascended the steps she received permission to say a few
words; and followed the tradition of not complaining against the King's
justice which had condemned her. She had not come thither to preach, she
said, but to die, though she was not guilty of the particular crimes for
which she had been condemned. When, however, she began to speak of Jane
Seymour being the cause of her fall, those on the scaffold stopped her,
and she said no more. A headsman of St. Omer had been brought over from
Calais, in order that the broadsword instead of the axe might be used; and
this man, who was undistinguishable by his garb from the other bystanders,
now came forward, and, kneeling, asked the doomed woman's pardon, which
granted, Anne herself knelt in a distraught way, as if to pray, but really
gazed around her in mute appeal from one pitiless face to another. The
headsman, taking compassion upon her, assured her that he would not strike
until she gave the signal. "You will have to take this coif off," said the
poor woman, and one of the ladies who attended her did so, and partially
bound her eyes with a handkerchief; but Anne still imagined that her
headdress was in the way, and kept her hand upon her hair, straining her
eyes and ears towards the steps where from the headsman's words she
expected the sword to be handed to him. Whilst she was thus kneeling erect
in suspense, the sword which was hidden in the straw behind her was deftly
seized by the French executioner, who, swinging the heavy blade around, in
an instant cut through the erect, slender neck; and the head of Anne
Boleyn jerked from the shoulders and rolled upon the cloth that covered
the platform.

Katharine in her neglected tomb at Peterborough was avenged, but the
fissure that had been opened up between England and the Papacy for the
sake of this woman had widened now past bridging. Politicians might, and
did, make up their differences now that the "concubine" was dead, and form
alliances regardles