Anne had been queen for barely three years. Her failure to give Henry a surviving son, and her enemies at court, left her exposed, and in May 1536 she was arrested, tried and condemned along with five men accused as her lovers, including her own brother. Henry commuted her sentence from burning to beheading and, rather than use the common axe, brought an expert swordsman from Saint-Omer in France. She was executed on a scaffold beside the White Tower on the morning of Friday, May 19.
Most historians dispute the charges, which included adultery, incest with her brother George and plotting to kill the king. By March 1536, after Anne had suffered several miscarriages, Henry was already courting Jane Seymour. Anne was arrested on May 2 and tried before a jury that included her former suitor Henry Percy and her uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. The men accused with her, George Boleyn, Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton and the musician Mark Smeaton, were executed two days before her.
In her final days Anne swung between despair and calm. William Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, reported that she seemed ready to be done with life. On the scaffold she made a short speech, careful not to criticise the king: "I am come hither to die, for according to the law, and by the law I am judged to die, and therefore I will speak nothing against it."
Henry was betrothed to Jane Seymour the day after the execution and married her on May 30. Anne's daughter, Elizabeth, not yet three, was declared illegitimate, yet she would take the throne in 1558 and reign for 44 years.
Key people: Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII, Jane Seymour