Anne Boleyn spent 18 May 1536 preparing for death.
Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys, a man who hated her and refered to her as ‘the concubine’ and worse, reported one of the ladies who attended Anne in the Tower had sent him, “word, in great secrecy, that before and after [Anne] receiving the Holy Sacrament, she affirmed, on peril of her soul’s damnation, that she had not misconducted herself so far as her husband the King was concerned.” Even Chapuys seemed shaken by this revelation. Regardless of how much he disliked her, she was clearly dying for a crime she had not committed.
Chapuys further reported to Emperor Charles V that, “No one ever shewed more courage or greater readiness to meet death than she did, having, as the report goes, begged and solicited those under whose keeping she was to hasten the execution.” When Anne was informed that her beheading would not take place on the 18th, but would be put off until the next day, “she seemed sorry, and begged and entreated the governor of the Tower (Sir William Kingston), for God’s sake, to go to the King, and beg of him that, since she was well disposed and prepared for death, she should be dispatched immediately.”
Anne was also reported to have been ‘merry’ the day before her death, joking that she had “heard say the executioner was very good and I have but a little neck.” When she made this jest, according to Kingston, “she put her hand around [her neck], laughing heartily.” Kingston saw this as evidence that Anne had “much joy and pleasure in death” rather than that Anne was employing gallows humor to prevent herself from falling into hysteria.
There is a possible double edge to her self-mockery as well. It wasn’t just that she was a fine-boned, slender woman with delicate features. The word ‘neck’ was also Tudor slang for the vagina. Was this a pointed remark she wanted to get back to King Henry VIII? In the Tudor era even the most religious of couples were allowed to be as naughty as they needed to be in marriage bed – it was believed conception wouldn’t occur unless both partners had an orgasm. Had the king mentioned her ‘little neck’ in foreplay or dirty/sexy talk during lovemaking? Since a ‘little neck’ was supposed to be ‘evidence’ of virginity or monogamy, was this the queen’s way of hitting back? Was she being sly when she said she had heard the executioner was “very good”?
Was is almost certainly true is that Anne just wanted the whole ordeal to be OVER. She was tired of waiting to die at the behest of the man who had pursued her so unrelentingly for so long. She wanted, as she said, to be beyond her pain.
It wasn’t long before her desperate hope for respite would be granted …