Life was cheap in 16 th century Britain. If it didn’t end with a swift bout of dysentery, you could wind up on the chopping block for no reason at all.
Just ask historians Dan Snow and Suzannah Lipscomb, the hosts of new show How The Tudors Lost Their Heads. Here they tell Meg Jorsh how they tracked down the truth about the era’s most gruesome and controversial executions…
If you’ve ever thought history was boring, you clearly haven’t paid much attention to the Tudors. As dynasties go, that bloodthirsty bunch were like a cross between EastEnders and Game of Thrones.
And for the big names of the 16 th century court, political power – or an aristocratic pedigree – were no guarantee of safety. They might even have put a target on your head.
Now a new miniseries from National Geographic looks at how the Tudor monarchs came to bump off so many former favourites. Every episode of How The Tudors Lost Their Heads starts with the “monstrous” moment of a beheading, co-host Dan Snow explains.
“Then it’s like a kind of crime scene investigation,” he adds. “It’s a way of getting people in and saying ‘trust me, this is going to be exciting.’ It has to be exciting, because it ends with someone getting their head chopped off.”
The TV historian teams up with expert Suzannah Lipscomb for a journey through the era, framed by six of its most famous deaths. We see the final moments of 30-year-old Anne Boleyn, the spurned second wife of Henry VIII, accused of cheating on him with her own brother. And Mary, Queen of Scots, faces the axe after decades of imprisonment by her sister, Elizabeth I.
Even for a Tudor public used to witnessing death, Suzannah explains, these high-profile killings were seen as intriguing and shocking.
“You’re at quite a high risk of death just being an ordinary person,” she adds. “If you steal a loaf of bread or anything, they’re like ‘hanging is the penalty.’ There is no other. There’s no police force, so a lot of people die.
“If you’re trying to make your mark, or you’re trying to achieve something, the place to be is the court. And then the chances of death are quite high, because you’re making enemies all along the way.”
If anyone knew about that, it was Robert Devereux. We see the charismatic Earl of Essex, once a favourite of Elizabeth I, executed in episode three over claims he was trying to take over the crown.
But, as we soon discover, he fell victim to a smear campaign by jealous court rivals. They might even have tampered with the evidence against him.
Suzannah adds: “We’ve got these examples of people who are absolutely seeking to reach the highest points, and it just means that they’ve got people waiting in the wings to cut them down.”
The popular noble’s execution may not have gone down well with the public. But others, like Anne Boleyn’s in 1536, were met with near-universal outrage.
Dan and Suzannah explore how supporters pushed back at allegations against her – including a visit to a famous portrait which, new analysis shows, was altered to include an image of her hands.
Suzannah says: “It’s significant because under the reign of her daughter, Elizabeth I, Catholic sympathisers are saying that Anne Boleyn was the product of incest, and had six fingers on one hand. There were connections made to witchcraft.
“So to show her with, clearly, only five digits on each hand is a way of refuting that.”
The series concludes with perhaps the most shocking execution of Henry VIII’s reign. Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, was 67 years old when she was led to the chopping block in 1541.
Despite a lifetime of service to the Crown, she was condemned in an act of political retaliation against her son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, who denounced the King’s break with the Catholic church. And accounts of her death make difficult reading.
According to one, the axeman chased her around the block, hacking at her neck, and it took 11 blows to sever her head.
“It’s one thing to execute people,” says Dan. “But an elderly woman who clearly has just lived with great rectitude all her life, and there she is just dragged to the execution block and killed in her twilight years – that’s deranged.
“I think we can all accept that’s very, very strange behaviour indeed. It’s cruel, it’s tyrannical, it’s deviant. Of all the stains on Henry VIII’s character, I think it’s one of the greatest.”
Already in declining health, the monarch – who died six years later, aged 55 – was obese and suffering from mood swings and pus-filled ulcers on both legs. And according to Suzannah, he would not go unpunished for his brutal decision.
She says: “I think people were genuinely horrified across England, across Europe, that this had happened. It’s around this time that the Pope issues an order that says anyone can take Henry’s throne, excommunicate Henry.
“And the fact that he’s been doing things like this, I think, just makes Henry seem so much more culpable.”
- How The Tudors Lost Their Heads premieres on National Geographic on Sunday, September 6 at 8pm, with all episodes streaming on Disney+ the same day.