Anne had been cordially hated by the people. Her rise had meant the destruction of the ancient religious foundations, the shaking of the ecclesiastical bases of English society; but the sense of justice was not dead, and the procedure at the trial shocked the public conscience. Already men and women murmured that the King's goings on with Mistress Seymour whilst his wife was under trial for adultery were a scandal, and Anne in her death had more friends than in her life. On all sides in London now, from the Lord Mayor downwards, it was said that Anne had been condemned, not because she was guilty, but because the King was tired of her: at all events, wrote Chapuys to Granvelle, there was surely never a man who wore the horns so gaily as he.[162] On the 17th May the five condemned men were led to their death upon Tower Hill, all of them, including Smeaton, being beheaded.[163] As usual in such cases, they acknowledged general guilt, but not one (except perhaps Smeaton) admitted the particular crimes for which they died, for their kin might have suffered in property, if not in person, if the King's justice had been too strongly impugned. Anne, in alternate hope and despair, still remained in the Tower, but mostly longing for the rapid death she felt in her heart must come. Little knew she, however, why her sacrifice was deferred yet from day to day. In one of her excited, nervous outbursts she had cried that, no matter what they did, no one could prevent her from dying Queen of England. She had reckoned without Henry's meanness, Cromwell's cunning, and Cranmer's suppleness. Her death warrant had been signed by the King on the 16th May, and Cranmer was sent to receive her last confession. The coming of the archbishop--_her_ archbishop, as she called him--gave her fresh hope. She was not to be killed after all, but to be banished, and Cranmer was to bring her the good news. Alas! poor soul, she little knew her Cranmer even yet. He had been primed by Cromwell for a very different purpose, that of worming out of Anne some admission that would give him a pretext for pronouncing her marriage with the King invalid from the first. The task was a repulsive one for the Primate, whose act alone had made the marriage possible; but Cranmer was--Cranmer. The position was a complicated one. Henry, as he invariably did, wished to save his face and seem in the right before the world, consequently he could not confess that he had been mistaken in the divorce from Katharine, and get rid of Anne's marriage in that way, nor did he wish to restore Mary to the position of heiress to the crown. What he needed Cranmer's help for was to render Elizabeth also illegitimate, but still his daughter, in order that any child he might have by Jane Seymour, or failing that, his natural son, the Duke of Richmond, might be acknowledged his successor.