Knighton’s wife, whose husband was the Constable of the Tower, was set to watch the Queen, and repeat all she said to her husband, who was in correspondence with Cromwell. In writing to the latter, Knighton says that Lady Boleyn (Anne’s aunt) and a “Mestrys Cosyn” were kept in the same room with the Queen; both of these ladies were Anne’s bitter enemies, and they acted as spies upon the unhappy prisoner. “I have,” writes Knighton, “everything told me by Mestrys Cosyn that she thynks mete for me to knowe.” The trial was held in the large room, called at that time the King’s Hall, which is on the second floor of the White Tower, adjoining the Chapel of St John’s. Here a gallery had been erected for the judges, and seats and benches for the Lords. The Duke of Norfolk, who presided, sat under the “clothe of estate,” and represented the King as High Steward of England. By a singular coincidence Norfolk was uncle to both Anne Boleyn and the second wife whom Henry beheaded, Catherine Howard. At Norfolk’s feet sat his son, the Earl of Surrey, both holding staffs in their hands—Norfolk that of the Lord High Steward, Surrey that of Earl Marshal. On the Duke’s right hand sat the Lord Chancellor, and on his left the Duke of Suffolk, the peers occupying seats on either side of the chamber, in the order of their degree. Led by the Constable of the Tower and the Lieutenant (Sir Edmund Walsingham), the Queen was brought to the bar. Anne Boleyn’s defence was admirable, and must have greatly disconcerted her judges, who knew that no defence, however convincing, could avail her; she was already sentenced by the King. Not one of these men, with their high-sounding names and titles, dared to give their vote in her favour. All, to a man, declared on their consciences that the Queen was guilty. Surely some of the innocent blood counted against these noble cowards as well as against their master, when their day of reckoning arrived. Norfolk, whose tears appear always to have been at command, wept “so that the water,” writes Constantyne in his Memorial, “roune in his eyes,” when he pronounced the sentence, which ran thus: “Because thou hast offended our Sovereign the King’s Grace, in committing treason against his person, and here attainted of the same, the law of the realm is this; that thou shalt be burnt here within the Tower of London, on the Green, else to have thy head smitten off as the King’s pleasure shall be further known of the same.”[9] According to Froude, Anne Boleyn’s trial was conducted “with a scrupulousness without a parallel in the criminal history of the time.” One can only wonder what kind of a trial that would be which was not conducted with the “scrupulousness” that characterised the proceedings in the King’s Hall, under the Duke of Norfolk, when Anne Boleyn was condemned to die.