Leanda De-Lisle

Anne Boleyn’s last secret

Why was the queen executed with a sword, rather than an axe?

Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images
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With his wife, Anne Boleyn, in the Tower, Henry VIII considered every detail of her coming death, poring over plans for the scaffold. As he did so he made a unique decision. Anne, alone among all victims of the Tudors, was to be beheaded with a sword and not the traditional axe.

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