The Chapel has at least one memory which will always cling to it. Within
its dark and gloomy crypt Anne Boleyn, brought from the Tower, stood to
hear her sentence. She was to be burned to death as an adulteress. I am
not qualified by study of the case or by education in the weighing of
evidence to pronounce an opinion as to her innocence. I believe that
those who have examined into the case are of opinion that Anne Boleyn
fell a victim to the King's jealousy: to his change of mind towards her:
and to her own foolish frivolity. However, in the crypt she was
persuaded into making some sort of avowal of a previous betrothal, in
return for which she was spared the agonies of the stake. I have
sometimes thought that the King must have thought her guilty, otherwise
he would have divorced her on a charge of adultery, and suffered her to
live. If he did not believe her guilty, how could he, being, above all
things, a man of human passions, have sentenced the woman whom he had
once loved to so horrible a death?
Let us note, however, that our ancestors did not regard death by burning
with quite the same horror as is now common. There is a story of
Rogers--or Bradford--the martyr. Some one once begged his intercession
to save a woman from burning. 'It is a gentle mode of death,' he
replied. 'Then,' said the other, 'I hope that you yourself will some day
have your hands full of this gentle death.' Punishment was meant to be
painful: the least painful form of death was that accorded to the
noble--to be beheaded. If a man died by the executioner, it was expected
that he should suffer. Death, in all forms, meant suffering. In disease
and in old age men suffered torture as bad as any inflicted by the
executioner.
I am not excusing Henry. I am only pleading that he must have believed
in Anne's guilt or he could not possibly have allowed such a sentence;
and that cruel as it seems to us, it did not seem so cruel at that time.
There is, however, no more sorrowful story in the whole long History of
England, which is, alas! so full of sorrow and of tragedy, than that of
Anne Boleyn.
Lambeth Palace, the only palace in the whole of South London, is a
monument of English History from the twelfth century downwards.
Kennington appears at intervals; Eltham is a holiday house; Greenwich
practically begins with the Tudors. Lambeth, like Westminster or St.
Paul's, belongs to the long history of the English people. It is a place
little known: of the millions now, in the circle of the Greater London,
how many, I should like to ask, have ever seen the interior? Of the vast
population of Lambeth, Battersea, and Kennington, of which it is the
centre, how many, I wonder, know anything at all about its history or
its buildings?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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