“As Anne waited for the executioner to strike, she started praying, "O Lord have mercy on me, to God I commend my soul. To Jesus Christ I commend my soul; Lord Jesu receive my soul. "As Anne prayed, the executioner called out to his assistant to pass him his sword. As Anne moved her head to follow what the assistant was doing, the executioner came up unnoticed behind her and beheaded her with one stroke of his sword. It was over.
As the shocked crowd dispersed, Anne’s ladies, who were described as "bereft of their souls, such was their weakness”, wrapped her head and body in white cloth and took them to the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula for burial. No casket had been provided, so a yeoman warder fetched an old elm chest which had once contained bow staves from the Tower armoury. Anne Boleyn, Queen of England and mother of Elizabeth I, was then buried as a traitor in an unmarked grave. The Tower cannons fired to tell London that its Queen was dead.
Scottish theologian Alexander Alesius had woken up in the early hours of 19th May from a nightmare about the Queen’s severed neck in which he “could count the nerves, the veins, and the arteries”. He went to visit his friend Archbishop Cranmer in his garden at Lambeth. Alesius was unaware of Anne’s imminent execution, having remained at home since the day of Anne’s imprisonment, but as he told the Archbishop of his dream, Cranmer “raised his eyes to heaven and said, ‘She who has been the Queen of England upon earth will today become a Queen in heaven.’ So great was his grief that he could say nothing more, and then he burst into tears.” The Archbishop who owed his rise to the patronage of the Queen and her family was a broken man, and perhaps he felt some guilt for his part in recent events. It is hard to imagine how he would have felt on hearing the cannons ring out over London, announcing the Queen’s death. Queen Anne Boleyn was gone, gone to a better place.“
Source: "The Fall of Anne Boleyn: A Countdown”, Claire Ridgway, MadeGlobal Publishing, UK, April 2012.
“Deserted, cut off and disoriented in time, Anne became avid for news. She built great castles of imagination - that it would not rain until she was released, that the evangelical bishops would intervene on her behalf, that most English people were praying for her, that a disaster from heaven would follow her execution. She harked back to the happy time with Margaret of Austria. Sometimes her hope ran high - the king was doing it all to test her, she would be sent to a nunnery; at others she would be determined to die, and would discuss the technical details with Kingston as if it was the most amusing subject in the world. There would, she said, be no difficulty in finding her a nickname: ‘Queen Anne the Headless’. Then her mind would run over details of her treatment or she would recall a promising bet on the game of tennis she had been watching when first summoned before the commissioners - ‘if it [the chase] had been laid she had won.’ But, increasingly, preparation for death occupied her thoughts, hours spent with her almoner and before the blessed sacrament until her spirit reached the exaltation of the martyr. Kingston wrote towards the end: ‘I have seen many men and also women executed and that they have been in great sorrow, and to my knowledge this lady hath much joy and pleasure in death. ” - Eric Ives, ‘The life and death of Anne Boleyn’
