The last beheading execution in Britain took place on Tower Hill, London, on the 9th of April 1747 AD, but as things are going at the moment, King Charles III is mulling over bringing beheading back. Earl Spencer, to be more specific, would certainly be up for the chopping block if these were the Olde days.
It was thanks to the Normans that beheading as an execution technique was introduced, and this way of chopping orf heads was essentially the preferred method for those of high birth. The ‘oik scum’ were usually given the hangman’s noose, which offered a slow and gruesome death, whereas a good beheading was swift and relatively painless unless the executioner fucked it up and had to hack twice or thrice. Sword or axe, everything depended on how good the executioner had honed his art and how sharp his implement was in delivering a clean severed head into the basket.
Henry VIII, of course, was the most prolific of beheaders and went on a beheading frenzy during his reign.
Funnily enough, monarchs were not themselves immune to the chopper and Charles I had his noggin plopped into a basket on the 30th of January 1649 after losing the civil war.
As for Earl Spencer, because of his ‘high birth’, he too would be afforded the joy of being beheaded for his indiscretions if he were around hundreds of years ago. As we are now living in a so-called civilised age, unfortunately there would be no public beheadings of aristos or monarchs…that is unless King Charles III somehow gets parliament to bring it back.
