For six years Henry had sought a legal method of freeing himself from his matrimonial chains. Then he took matters into his own hands. On the twenty-fifth of January, 1533, the barge bearing Anne Boleyn, now acknowledged as queen, attended by fifty others reached the Tower, and she climbed the Queen's Stairway, where her impatient husband awaited her. Three years later a barge again bore her along the stream, this time attended by armed men, but now she was landed at the Traitors' Gate, a prisoner charged with adultery, and destined to lose her head upon Tower Green. We know that she bore herself well, protesting her innocence to the last, and winning the pity of all. The story goes that no coffin had been prepared for her and that her body was jammed into an elm chest which happened to be conveniently empty. A few years ago, in restoring St. Peter's chapel, her bones were found jumbled together, apparently confirming the story that she had not been permitted to lie decently buried at full length. Only a few years later another queen of England came a prisoner to the Tower and a victim of the axeman on the Green. Katherine Howard's hold upon the affections of her fickle lord was no stronger than Anne Boleyn's, and also charged with misconduct she was beheaded Feb. 15, 1542. With her died her companion and alleged accomplice, Jane, Viscountess Rochford. But the block on Tower Hill outside the walls where the public executions took place was not idle. Wolsey's death of chagrin saved him from the Tower and perhaps from the axe, but Thomas Cromwell, whose devotion to his king had humbled so many, was not so fortunate as Wolsey. Many things combined to lose him the favour of his royal master, but nothing perhaps more than his recommendation of Anne of Cleves as a wife for the fastidious, fickle king. She was so plain and so awkward that the king was disgusted, and in 1540 Cromwell went to the Tower and the block as Edward Stafford, the great Duke of Buckingham, had done twenty years before. The death of Henry made a delicate boy of nine years king, as Edward VI. If, as seemed probable, he should die without descendants, where would the crown go? Both of his sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, had in turn been declared illegitimate and out of the succession. Mary was Spanish in blood on her mother's side, and entirely so in education and feeling. The young Elizabeth was an unknown quantity.