On the morning of 19 May 1536, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became the first English queen to be publicly executed.



On the morning of 19 May 1536, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became the first English queen to be publicly executed. Charged with adultery, incest and conspiring the king’s death, Anne was beheaded on a scaffold erected on Tower Green, within the walls of the Tower of London. Her death, says historian Suzannah Lipscomb, “is so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine how shocking it would have been”.



Anne and Henry had been married for little more than three years at the time of her death. For her, Henry had left his wife of nearly 24 years and the mother of his child (the future Mary I), and broken with the Catholic Church. By the spring of 1536, however, Henry’s affection had waned and he was hotly pursuing Anne’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour.


Along with five courtiers, including Anne’s brother, George, Anne was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London in early May 1536. Mark Smeaton, William Brereton, Francis Weston and Henry Norris were tried and found guilty of adultery with the queen, and of conspiring the king’s death, while Anne and her brother were found guilty of high treason. By 19 May, all six convicted had been executed


Reporting on Anne’s execution in 1536, Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador to Henry’s court, wrote: “No one ever shewed more courage or greater readiness to meet death than she did”.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Video footage In 2017, Reza Aslan visited a cannibalistic Hindu group as part of a TV show. The group gave him human brain to eat, covered his face with cremated remains

Image
Video footage In 2017, Reza Aslan visited a cannibalistic Hindu group as part of a TV show. The group gave him human brain to eat, covered his face with cremated remains, and made him wear headgear decorated with human teeth.  One of the members of the group even threatened to cut off his head.  Aslan later posted on social media saying: “Want to know what a dead guy’s brain tastes like? Charcoal. It was burnt to a crisp!” The Aghori sect, which Aslan visited, is a fringe group within Hinduism. They are known for their extreme rituals, which include residing in cremation grounds, meditating naked, and even consuming human flesh as part of their spiritual practices. The Aghori are often feared and misunderstood, even within India, due to their unconventional and shocking practices. The episode featuring the Aghori was part of Aslan's CNN series, "Believers," which aimed to explore the world's most fascinating faith-based groups. However, the ep...
Read more

This is the last image of Uruguayan Flight 571, before it crashed in The Andes on October 13, 1972. 27 out of 45 people survived the initial crash

Image
This is the last image of Uruguayan Flight 571, before it crashed in The Andes on October 13, 1972. 27 out of 45 people survived the initial crash. Survivors were eventually forced to cannibalize the dead to stay alive. Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 , flight of an airplane charted by a Uruguayan amateur rugby team that crashed in the Andes Mountains in Argentina on October 13, 1972, the wreckage of which was not located for more than two months. 16 people were rescued 72 days later. Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 , flight of an airplane charted by a Uruguayan amateur rugby team that crashed in the Andes Mountains in Argentina on October 13, 1972, the wreckage of which was not located for more than two months. Of the 45 people aboard the plane, only 16 survived the ordeal. The incident garnered international attention, especially after it was revealed that the survivors had resorted to canni...
Read more

In 2018, 6-month-old Jaxon Hunter died in 2018 at a daycare after a 10-year-old girl allegedly dropped him.

Image
In 2018, 6-month-old Jaxon Hunter died in 2018 at a daycare after a 10-year-old girl allegedly dropped him.  The girl told authorities she panicked after dropping Jaxon, and then she began stomping on his head when he began to cry. Initially, the girl faced charges of first-degree intentional homicide, as per the guidelines for individuals aged 10 or older, and was placed in a secure detention center.  Subsequently, the case was transferred from adult court to juvenile court and results of future rulings were not made public. The mother of the accused girl came forward in defense of her daughter, stating that the incident was an accident. She expressed her belief in her daughter's innocence and stated that the incident was not intentional. WATCH THE SADDEST VIDEO HERE The accused girl was held in an adult unit at the Winnebago Mental Health Institute. This raised concerns about the treatment of juvenile offenders in the just...
Read more

Popular posts from this blog

German women were r*ped by all armies at the end of the second world war. From the archive, 17 June 1955:

Image
  German women were r*ped by all armies at the end of the second world war. From the archive, 17 June 1955: Two years after the end of the war Berlin still smelled of death. Each street contained dozens of ruins and every ruin, especially after rain had fallen and there was still a dampness in the air, retained the same sickly smell. It may have been, as some Germans honestly believed, corpses buried beneath them, or it may have been the state of the drains. It may simply have been the projection of a short but stormy past into the greyness of that particularly uninviting present. Here are some images containing Graphic content visual material that is considered disturbing, offensive, or inappropriate. images from Execution of torturers and violence. 
Read more

An unauthorized photo of Stalin: the moment he was informed that the Germans were about to take Kiev, 1941

Image
 An unauthorized photo of Stalin: the moment he was informed that the Germans were about to take Kiev, 1941 An unauthorized photo of Stalin inside of the Kremlin shows the very moment he was informed that the German armies had advanced in Kyiv (August 1941). What you see here is a man who up until a few weeks before had absolute confidence in Plan A, and who now has no Plan B. The picture was taken by Komsomolskaya Pravda’s editor-in-chief. The photographer secretly defied orders to destroy it as it was deemed not to show Stalin in a positive light. Operation Barbarossa, the German attack on the Soviet Union, was the greatest military operation of World War II. It deployed thousands of aircraft, tanks, artillery guns, and more than six million soldiers. Furthermore, it brought two of probably the most totalitarian regimes in history against one another. However, in the first few weeks of the operation, it didn’t look like the clash of two giants. The German a...
Read more

Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, 48, was stoned to death by militants from the Hizb Al-Islam group in Afgoye, district Somalia, in 2009

Image
Mohamed Abukar Ibrahim, 48, was stoned to death by militants from the Hizb Al-Islam group in Afgoye, district Somalia, in 2009 Stoning is a form of execution by torture where the individual who throws the deadly stone cannot be identified. In some countries, those sentenced to stoning, or “lapidation” as it is also called, are buried in a hole and covered with soil (men up to their waists; women to a line above their breasts), according to Article 102 of the Islamic Penal Code. A selected group then executes the alleged adulterers using rocks and sticks. Those able to escape the hole during stoning can be freed, according to Islamic law, a feat that is much more difficult for women than for men because so much more of their body is covered during lapidation. Stoning is considered a form of community justice and has its fair share of critics both among human rights groups and Islamic clerics. In Somalia, a 48-year old man was buried up to his waist and stoned...
Read more