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Cibot paints the desolation; the jailer recorded the other half, a queen laughing with her hands around her own neck.

The charges were adultery with five men, one of them her brother, and plotting the king's death, and almost nobody, then or since, has believed them. Anne Boleyn's real offenses were slower ones: a daughter instead of a son, a miscarriage in January on the day of her predecessor's funeral, a temper that had been captivating in a mistress and was insubordination in a wife, and a king already writing letters to Jane Seymour. Thomas Cromwell assembled the case in three weeks. Of the five accused men only the musician Mark Smeaton confessed, after a night in Cromwell's house that no one describes, and the court that condemned her sat under the presidency of her own uncle. A jury of peers found her guilty in unanimity, several of them weeping, and the man who had emptied England's monasteries arranged for an expert swordsman to be sent for from Calais before the trial had even opened, the verdict being, evidently, not in suspense. In the Tower she swung, her jailer William Kingston wrote, between desolation and a strange lightness. His letters preserve her best line. Told that the executioner was very good, and that the pain would be little, she answered that she had heard he was excellent, and I have a little neck, and put her hands around it, laughing. Kingston, a professional in these matters, wrote to Cromwell that he had seen many men and also women executed, and that all of them had been in great sorrow, but this lady had much joy and pleasure in death. On the morning of 19 May 1536 she made the conventional speech on the scaffold, praising the king as a gentle and sovereign lord, convention being the last shield of a mother whose daughter remained in his power. She knelt upright in the French fashion; the swordsman from Calais, by a professional's mercy, called out to his assistant as if the sword were elsewhere, and took the head while she was still listening for footsteps. No coffin had been ordered. She was buried in an arrow chest under the chapel floor a few yards away. The king was betrothed to Jane Seymour the next morning and married inside a fortnight, and the daughter with the disappointing sex ruled England for 44 years. Cibot painted her in 1835 in the Tower with her attendant, all satin and collapse, the romantic century's favorite kind of queen: young, wronged, and about to be interesting to painters forever.