Anne Boleyn is executed at the Tower of London

On 19 May 1536, Anne Boleyn climbed a scaffold on Tower Green and was beheaded, just three years after the marriage for which Henry VIII had broken with Rome. Convicted of adultery, incest, and high treason on charges most historians now read as engineered, she died inside the Tower of London where she had been held since her arrest seventeen days earlier.

The killing was meticulously stage-managed. A warrant book held at the United Kingdom’s National Archives preserves Henry’s own instructions, sentencing his “lately wife” to death by fire or decapitation “according to the King’s will,” and ordering that nothing be omitted.

Anne was the only Tudor figure beheaded with a sword rather than an ax.

Henry summoned a skilled headsman from Calais to wield that sword, a continental refinement over the English block and axe. The blade fell in one clean blow. Eleven days later the king was betrothed to Jane Seymour.