however, by authorizing an experiment to be tried upon her person. He ordered the headsman of Calais-a man renowned for his address-to be brought to London, that Anne might be decollated with a sword, after the French fashion, instead of being decapitated by the traditional axe of English executions. All strangers were excluded from the Tower that the hideous spectacle might be witnessed by as few persons as possible-the cruel monarch's single acknowledgment of the power of public opinion. Cromwell, the successor of Wolsey in his confidence, had advised him not to fix the hour, in order to lessen the chances of a concourse of people and of a forcible rescue.

Anne rose at two o'clock on the morning of Friday, the 19th. She partook of the sacrament, and while engaged in this supreme devotional act of her life, solemnly protested to the lieutenant of the Tower her innocence of the crimes for which she was to die. As she had never deigned to sue for mercy to the king, and as, so far from desiring a reprieve or pardon, she was now impatient for a release from her sufferings, the reader will see in this solemn declaration, not an act of deliberate perjury, which could not help her here and would endanger her hereafter, but an assertion of innocence, intended to clear her character rather than to prolong her life. She was a personage in history and had occupied the throne: nothing could have been more natural than that she should seek, while not compromising her eternity in heaven, to vindicate her good name with posterity on earth.

While she was making her preparations for the fatal moment, Kingston, the lieutenant, was writing to Cromwell an account of every event which transpired in the Tower. Anne sent for him to say that she had heard "she should not die before noon, and was very sorry therefor, for she had thought to be dead by this time, and past her pain." Kingston replied that the pain would be little, "it was so subtle." Anne returned, laughing, "I have heard say the executioner is very good, and I have a little neck." It was probably about eleven o'clock that Anne sent to the king.

by a messenger whom she thought trustworthy, but who dared not deliver them, the memorable words which Lord Bacon has transmitted to posterity: "Commend me to his majesty," she said, "and tell him he hath ever been constant in his career of advancing me. From a private gentlewoman he made me a marchioness; from a marchioness, a queen; and now that he hath left no higher degree of honor, he gives my innocency the crown of martyrdom."

At twelve o'clock the portals opening upon the church-green were thrown open, and Anne Boleyn appeared, led by the lieutenant of the Tower, and accompanied by her four maids of honor. She was dressed in black damask, with a deep white cape at the neck. Her cheeks were flushed, while her eyes gleamed with unusual lustre. She ascended the scaffold, with the aid of the lieutenant, and saw there, assembled to witness her death, her implacable uncle the Duke of Norfolk, the lord mayor, and other civic functionaries, Henry's natural son, the Duke of Richmond, and Cromwell, whom she had aided in his aspiring aims, and who had deserted her in her adversity. To none of these truculent personages did she condescend to speak. With the permission of Kingston, however, she thus addressed the sparse assemblage of spectators: "Good Christian people, I am come hither to die according to law, for by the law I am judged to die, and therefore will speak nothing against it. I am come hither to accuse no man, nor to speak anything of that whereof I am accused, as I know full well that aught that I could say in my defence doth not appertain unto you, and that I could draw no hope of life from the same. But I come here only to die, and thus to yield myself humbly unto the will of my lord the king. I pray God to save the king and send him long to reign over you, for a gentler or more merciful prince was there never. To me he was ever a good and gentle sovereign lord. If any person will meddle with my cause, I require him to judge the best. Thus I take my leave of the world and of you, and I

heartily desire you all to pray for me." She then, without the assistance of her ladies, removed her hat, and, placing a linen cap over her hair, said: "Alas! poor head, in a very brief space thou wilt roll in the dust upon the scaffold; and as in life thou didst not merit to wear the crown of a queen, so in death thou deservest not better doom than this." She gave her prayer-book to her faithful friend, Mary Wyatt, the sister of the poet, who had steadfastly clung to her in every reverse, and then suffering her eyes to be bandaged by another of her ladies, she knelt down upon both knees. Uttering a hasty prayer, "O Lord God, have pity upon my soul!" she received upon her neck the sturdy yet skillful blow, dealt by the headsman of Calais.

A signal gun was fired to announce the consummation of the tragedy to the impatient king, who, gaily attired for the chase, was awaiting the joyful tidings in Richmond Park. When the echoes of the distant report reached his ear, the relieved widower exclaimed: "Ha! ha! the deed is done! Uncouple the hounds and away!" He then dashed off at lightning pace for the scene of his bloody nuptials at Wolf Hall, where Jane Seymour, in the full knowledge that her queen and mistress was at that hour undergoing her mortal agony at the Tower of London, was preparing to wed the remorseless tyrant who had slain her.

The mangled remains of the hapless Anne, having been covered with a sheet by the attendant ladies, were placed by them in an elm chest which had been used for storing arrows; they were then conveyed to the church within the Tower, and hastily buried in a trench beside the coffins of her brother and friends. No funeral rites were performed over the grave, except, doubtless, a hurried prayer whispered by the trembling lips of gentle Mary Wyatt.

During the following night, according to a tradition now for three centuries uncontradicted, the old elm chest was secretly conveyed to Salle Church in Norfolk, where it was committed to consecrated ground. A black marble slab, devoid of inscription

or date, is pointed out to this day as the funereal monument of Anne Boleyn. The following passage would hardly have been written by Wyatt, in his pathetic account of Queen Anne's death, had not her remains been honored by other ceremonies than those which immediately followed her execution: "God," he says, "provided for her corpse sacred burial, even in a place, as it were, consecrate to innocence."

Anne Boleyn having been the recognized cause of the separation of England from the Romish communion, her character has been from that time to this the subject of fierce denunciation on the part of Catholic polemical writers. They have striven elaborately to prove her unchaste before marriage and adulterous afterwards. Protestant authors, on the other hand, urge the fact of her marriage with Henry as conclusive proof of her virtue, and repel the charges upon which the cruel monarch caused her to be condemned to death as slanderous and futile. That she was ambitious and unscrupulous after she had resolved to obtain the crown, will hardly be contested; but it will not be denied either, that had not the king interfered, she would have amply gratified her tastes, her feelings and her ambition, by an unostentatious union with Lord Percy. After her trial, her conduct was in every way admirable; and she seems to have been absorbed in indignation at the baseness of her oppressors and anxiety for her posthumous fame. Anne Boleyn enabled Henry VIII.—whom the pope had once in flattery called the Defender of the Faith-to become the unworthy instrument of the introduction of the Reformation into England; and as such, her history would always be interesting, even if she were not also remarkable as the victim of a monarch's heartlessness, and as an illustration of the state of English jurisprudence in her time. That she lent her influence to aid William Tyndal, Miles Coverdale and John Rogers, the martyr, in their translation—the first attempted of the Scriptures into the English tongue, is not her least title to respect and grateful remembrance.

MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS.

MARY STUART, celebrated above all other women for her beauty and her misfortunes, was the third child of James V. of Scotland, and was born on the 7th of December, 1542. By her father's death, seven days afterwards-his two sons having died in infancy-Mary succeeded, when but a week old, to the throne of a kingdom torn asunder by political and religious dissensions, and suffering from the consequences of a calamitous war with England. Henry VIII., then upon the English throne, conceived the idea, upon Mary's birth, of marrying her to his son Edward by Jane Seymour, and thus peacefully annexing Scotland to his crown; he lost no time, therefore, in making the proposal, but it was received with little favor by the Scottish nobles. The young queen, when nine months old, was crowned by Cardinal Beaton; after the ceremony, the queen-mother, informed of a report that the infant was sickly, caused her to be unswaddled in the presence of the English ambassador, who wrote home that she was as goodly a child as he had seen of her age.

Mary spent the two first years of her life in the palace of Linlithgow, in which she was born; here she had the small pox, but in a mild form probably, as it left no trace. Her three following years were passed in Stirling Castle; in her sixth year she