Why Henry VIII Orchestrated Every Detail of Anne Boleyn's Execution
Tudor history is littered with tales of executions gone wrong. In 1541, an inexperienced axman butchered Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, taking upward of ten blows to dispatch the elderly noblewoman. Four decades later, Mary, Queen of Scots—executed on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I—required three strikes of the ax before she lost her head.
Comparatively, Anne Boleyn’s execution was a relatively straightforward, albeit unprecedented, affair. On the morning of May 19, 1536, Henry VIII’s fallen queen ascended the scaffold, delivered a conventional speech praising the king as a “gentle and sovereign lord,” and knelt to receive the death blow. The executioner struck Anne’s head off with a single swing of his sword.
Anne’s actual “crimes” were merely failing to produce a male heir and refusing to rein in her headstrong personality. Found guilty of treason, the queen was sentenced to “be burnt here within the Tower of London on the Green, [or] else to have thy head smitten off [per] the King’s pleasure.”
According to the document reported on by Alberge, Henry, who claimed to be “moved by pity,” opted against the harsher sentence of burning at the stake. But he commanded that “the head of the same Anne shall be … cut off” and proceeded to map out every aspect of the execution, urging Sir William Kingston, constable of the Tower, to “omit nothing” from his orders.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-henry-viii-orchestrated-every-detail-anne-boleyns-execution-180976135/
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