London, England, the month of May 1536.
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of the blood-thirsty King Henry VIII, has been accused of adultery,
incest, and treason.
The accusations were no doubt made up so Henry could be done with her and remarry, but justice
in those days was in short supply.
In prison, Anne is at times hysterical, but sometimes calm, waiting for the word.
Will she lose her head, or be burned at the stake?
Her friend and ally, Archbishop Thomas Cramner, informs her that it will be the former, the
lesser of two evils.
May 19, 8.00 am, dressed in a dark grey robe of damask and covered by a mantle of white
ermine fur, she is led to the scaffold.
“I take my leave of the world and of you all, and I heartily desire you all to pray
for me,” she says at the end of a moving speech.
She is blindfolded.
She waits, kneeling, facing the floor.
Her head is severed from her body by a swift blow of a Frenchman’s sword.
Did she die in an instant, or for a few seconds did she remain conscious?
Did she make a face and try to speak, after her head was no longer attached to her body?
That’s what some witnesses said.
Could it be possible?
Today we’re going to talk about all kinds of forms of decapitation, but we’ll start
with the express version, such as the way that 35-36-year old Boleyn went.
Ok, so we need to tell you about Mike, aka Miracle Mike.
He lost his head in the USA in 1945 and he lived for another 18 months...
Mike was a chicken, a chicken whose brain stem remained intact and whose blood clotted
after his beheading.
He survived due to the position of the brain in a chicken’s head and the fact his executor
sliced his head at a certain angle.
Because of that remaining brain, he could control his movements, and his breathing and
heartbeat were regulated.
This could never, ever, happen to a human, but we thought we’d tell you about the animal,
on record, that has survived the longest after being decapitated.
In view of today’s show, we might ask how long a human is conscious after the act.
Has a head ever fallen into a basket or landed on a scaffold and looked up at the blue sky
and thought, “Damn, I won’t see that again.”
It’s hard to say of course, because it’s not as if scientists are presently doing decapitation
tests on humans.
They have, however, tested on rats in labs.
They’ve cut off rodents’ heads and then measured the electrical activity in their
brain.
It turns out that the rats might think for a few seconds while their head is not connected
to their body.
In one study, the brain signals were lost after 17 seconds, although the researchers
said consciousness was gone around the four second mark.
They also noticed something else.
That was one last surge of activity after about a minute.
They called this the “wave of death.”
It’s generally thought that brain activity also may last three to four seconds after
a human is decapitated, but there have been instances when people have reported that the
headless person seemed alive for longer.
Take the case of a French man who was a convicted murderer and guillotined in 1905.
This is what a doctor wrote: “I was able to note immediately after the
decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic
contractions for about five or six seconds … I waited for several seconds.
The spasmodic movements ceased.
The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs.”
The doctor, shocked, shouted the man’s name, “Languille!”, only to see his eyelids
open once again and look right at him for a few seconds.
The question is, was that the wave of death?
There are other reports of so-called “lucid decapitation.”
One involved a car crash in the US that happened in 1989.
An Army veteran saw his friend die, and not only that, his buddy had been decapitated.
He later remarked, “My friend’s head came to rest face up, and (from my angle) upside-down.
As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times.
The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror
or grief.”
If this is true.
If humans can think after they lose their head, then being decapitated has to be one
of the weirdest ways to die.
Being beheaded by an executioner at the top of his game, someone with the right tools,
may not actually be the worst way to die.
But the fact is, beheading can be a very messy business.
We might take for instance the execution of Mary Queen of Scots on February 7, 1587.
She was taken to the scaffold, and while knelt down, the executioner asked for her forgiveness
for what he was about to do.
She said to him, “I forgive you with all my heart, for now, I hope, you shall make
an end of all my troubles.”
He did, but his form was off that day.
After she uttered her final words, “Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit”,
he struck with his axe.
He missed his mark – her slender neck – and instead hit her in the head.
She was certainly not dead since she moaned in pain.
The second blow was on target and killed her, except bits of stubborn sinew hung on and
he had to cut through that.
Finally, he grabbed her head, held it aloft, and shouted to the crowd, “God save the
queen.”
To make the spectacle even worse, the beautiful auburn hair he was holding turned out to be
a wig, and Mary’s head fell with an unceremonious plop to the floor.
Her head, adorned only with short grey hair, rolled onto the ground in front of shocked
witnesses.
One of them swore that he saw her lips move.
We don’t know exactly how long she lasted after that first wayward blow, but you can
understand that being beheaded by a bad executioner was a pretty unpleasant experience.
It gets worse, a lot worse.
It would be an understatement to say that the beheading of Margaret Pole, the Countess
of Salisbury, was a bit of a botch job.
Margaret was accused of being a traitor and was locked up in the Tower of London by the
prolific lady killer Henry VIII.
She denied she’d done anything wrong and even scribbled a poem on her cell wall.
It started, “For traitors on the block should die.
I am no traitor, no, not I!”
The poem fell on deaf ears and off to the chopping block she went.
He hacked and hacked at her neck, missing most times, sometimes hitting her back and
sometimes her head.
It’s said it took eleven blows to finish her off.
One witness later said that the person with the axe was “a wretched and blundering youth
who literally hacked her head and shoulders to pieces in the most pitiful manner.”
Maybe it was hard to get the staff in those days, maybe he was an intern, or maybe Margaret
just made his job difficult.
Another account says that she refused to lay her head in the block and that she moved around
during the blows while telling the executioner to do his best in the circumstances.
It states, “She ran about the scaffold; and the executioner followed her with his
axe, aiming many fruitless blows at her neck before he was able to give the fatal stroke.”
In any case, it was a brutal death.
Beheading shouldn’t have lasted too long if the executioner’s tool was sharp and
he had a good aim.
The tools back then were usually a heavy sword, but bearded axes were also at times the weapon
of choice.
As you’ve now heard, not all beheadings went as planned.
This is why new technologies were created.
We tend to think that the French invented the guillotine in the 18th century, but very
similar devices were around for a long time before that.
The Halifax Gibbet, named after a town in northern England, was used the last time in
1650.
On that occasion, one man had stolen some cloth and another man had stolen two horses.
Harsh, but such were the times.
The Halifax Gibbet worked in a similar way to the guillotine, in that a heavy axe was
fastened to a wooden block and raised in the air by rope.
When the rope was cut, the block and the blade would fall down and decapitate the prisoner.
That block was so heavy that one witness once wrote that it could have decapitated a bull.
It was certainly better than the axe, and a lot better than a knife.
But we’ll get to that later.
First let’s talk about someone named Joseph-Ignace Guillotin.
He didn’t invent the guillotine and was even against the death sentence.
What he did do is call for a more humane form of executing a person than chopping off their
head with a sword or axe or breaking them on the wheel.
He wanted executions to be painless, once remarking about a machine that would, “cut
off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it!”
Indeed, the machine invented that would get a lot of use in France had a blade and connecting
weight that weighed around 176 pounds (80 kilograms).
This fell from a height of 14 feet (4.3 meters) and the person it fell on had his head secured
by a round frame called a “lunette.”
It was so good at what it did that it was hailed as the execution that never fails.
Only a century or so earlier, executions were supposed to be a long, drawn out spectacle
that crowds could enjoy.
People were slowly broken or wheels or they were pulled limb from limb by horses, and
they were supposed to suffer unimaginable pain.
The guillotine, or the “national razor’ as it would be called during the French Revolution,
was reliable, fast and more humane.
Believe it or not, in the 21st century there have been people that have called for the
introduction of the guillotine in the U.S. Jay Chapman, who created the three-drug protocol
in 1977 that is now used for lethal injection, said in 2007 that the guillotine was the simplest
form of execution.
He said, “I’m not at all opposed to bringing it back.
The person’s head is cut off and that’s the end of it.”
Before that, in 1996, a Georgia state legislator named Doug Tepe tried to bring the guillotine
back but to no avail.
So, if you’re ever in the unenviable position of having to choose between methods of decapitation,
it seems the guillotine would be the way to go.
There’s not much chance of that, though, since it was last used in France in 1977 and
has never been used again anywhere else.
This now brings us to the very worst form of decapitation, that of being decapitated
by a knife.
This much slower and way more painful process happened in Spain centuries ago and was thought
to be a more noble way to die than having your throat slit.
Today such a gruesome act would not be carried out legally as a form of capital punishment
– although people can still be decapitated by sword under the law in the country of Saudi
Arabia.
If it happens these days – and it has – the criminals doing the act are usually insurgents
in the Middle East and Asia, members of organized crime, or certifiably insane people that have
lost their minds and attacked innocent folks.
A few years back it happened to a woman in Mexico, with her executioner announcing, “Well,
gentleman, this is what happens to all those in the Gulf Cartel.
On behalf of Los Zetas.”
The fighting over drug turf in Mexico has actually resulted in quite a lot of people
losing their heads, sometimes when they were alive and sometimes after they were killed
another way.
The scary truth is, since the message can be spread using social media, these groups
at times have used decapitation to induce fear in their opponents or the public.
It can also create terror for governments and citizens of the world, if we’re talking
about insurgent groups.
In such grizzly murders, the decapitation is not over when a heavy blade falls, but
it is slow and painful.
Soft tissues are first cut, but then ligaments and bones that hold the neck together have
to be cut with much more effort.
When it happens this way, we can certainly say it’s one of the worst ways to die.
Now you need to watch this, “Strangest Ways People Died.”
Or, have a look at this, “What Happens When You Die?”