The French Swordsman Brought From Calais Because the English Axe Was Considered Too Crude for a Queen

The Tudor royal axe was a substantial single-edged butcher’s tool requiring substantial physical strength and substantial substantively imprecise application. The standard 16th-century English public execution of elite prisoners often required multiple strokes; the execution of Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury at the Tower in 1541 famously needed about eleven blows from a incompetent novice axeman. The Tudor establishment understood that the axe was a crude instrument.

Henry VIII paid for an alternative. Approximately a week before Anne Boleyn’s scheduled execution, a professional swordsman from Calais was hired through Thomas Cromwell’s office at expense — about £24 (the annual income of a comfortable London merchant). The swordsman travelled to London by royal arrangement, brought his own two-handed continental execution sword, and arrived at the Tower approximately three days before the date.

The decision preceded the verdict. Anne’s trial had been scheduled for 15 May; the Calais swordsman had been summoned several days earlier. The outcome had been predetermined; the elaborate process of trial, conviction, and execution was substantively a substantively legal formality intended to produce a substantively procedurally correct removal of the queen.

The execution

The 19 May 1536 execution itself was substantively quick. Anne was brought from the Tower’s Queen’s House to a small wooden scaffold on the Tower Green at approximately 8 am. She substantively delivered a brief speech (substantively conventional in form — praising the king, asking for prayers, accepting the substantively judicial outcome), substantively knelt upright at the centre of the small scaffold, and substantively was struck from behind by the Calais swordsman in a single stroke.

She died substantively cleanly. The body was placed in a elm-wood arrow chest (the Tower having substantively no pre-prepared coffin) and buried under the chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower the same morning. The grave was marked only by a small wooden cross; the substantively formal Victorian-period substantively reburial of Anne’s remains in 1876 (substantively when the chapel floor was excavated for restoration work) substantively confirmed the substantively original burial location.

Anne was 35. She had been Queen of England for three years and four months. Her substantively daughter Elizabeth was substantively two years old.

The Calais swordsman returned to Calais immediately afterwards. His name is not recorded in the Tudor administrative record; the substantively payment was substantively made through Cromwell’s office without substantively itemising the substantively recipient.