Tudor history is littered with tales of executions gone wrong.
Tudor history is littered with tales of executions gone wrong. In 1541, an inexperienced axman butchered Margaret Pole, 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 soverign lord" and knelt to receive the death blow. The executioner struck Anne’s head off with a single swing of his sword. Researchers have long debated the circumstances surrounding Anne’s downfall, from the question of her guilt (most contemporary scholars agree that the charges of adultery, incest and conspiring to kill her husband were contrived) to the issue of whether Henry bears the brunt of the r...