In the meanwhile her execution had been deferred until the next day, and Anne again lost her nerve. It was cruel, she said, to keep her so long in suspense: pray, she petitioned, put her out of her misery now that she was prepared. The operation would not be painful, Kingston assured her. "My neck is small enough," she said, spanning it with her fingers, and again burst into hysterics. Soon she became calm once more; and thenceforward only yearned for despatch. "No one ever had a better will for death than she," wrote Chapuys to his master: and Kingston, hardened as he was to the sight of the condemned in their last hours, expressed surprise to Cromwell that instead of sorrow "this lady has much joy and pleasure in death." Remorse for her ungenerous treatment of the Princess Mary principally troubled her. She herself, she said, was not going to execution by the divine judgment for what she had been accused of, but for having planned the death of the Princess. And so, in alternate prayer and light chatter, passed Anne's last night on earth, and at nine o'clock on the spring morning of the 19th May she was led forth to the courtyard within the Tower, where a group of gentlemen, including Cromwell and the Dukes of Richmond and Suffolk, stood on or close to a low scaffold or staging reached by four steps from the ground. Anne was dressed in grey damask trimmed with fur, over a crimson petticoat, and cut low at the neck, so as to offer no impediment to the executioner's steel; and for the same reason the brown hair was dressed high in a net under the pearl-bordered coif. Kept back by guards to some little distance from the platform stood a large crowd of spectators, who had flocked in at the heels of the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs; though foreigners had been rigidly excluded.[166]