The British Execution: 1500–1964 (Shire Library) by Stephen Banks Page B

cook, Richard Rice, attempted to poison the Bishop of Rochester’s household. Two people died and Rice was slowly plunged up and down into a cauldron of boiling water until he expired. Boiling thereafter was rarely employed, although a female poisoner was executed in this way in 1542.
    It is doubtful that Henry was much motivated by concern for the Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher. Henry had already decided to break with Rome so that he could marry Anne Boleyn and Fisher was one of his most prominent opponents. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, was more compliant. He declared that Henry’s previous marriage to Catherine of Aragon was null and void and Henry married Anne on 25 January 1533. Thus began a period of English history in which both Protestants and Catholics freely employed the charges of both treason and heresy against their opponents. One of the early victims was Fisher, attainted for treason for refusing to take the oath acknowledging Henry as Supreme Head of the Church of England. Although sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, Henry commuted the sentence to beheading, probably for fear of arousing popular sympathy for Fisher. The sentence was carried out on Tower Hill on 22 June 1535, Fisher meeting his death calmly. The body was abandoned naked on the scaffold but eventually it was laid to rest in the churchyard of All Hallows-by-the-Tower. The head adorned a pole on London Bridge until it was thrown into the Thames. The head of Thomas More, beheaded on 6 July, took Fisher’s place on display.
    Henry, of course, was not above employing charges of treason against unsatisfactory wives and Anne did not last long. She was aged about thirty-two when she married him, rather old by the standards of the time. Crowned Queen on 1 June 1533, she gave birth to the future Elizabeth I on 7 September. Her rapid downfall, however, was occasioned by a number of miscarriages, notably that of a male child in 1536. Henry despaired of an heir by Anne and she was soon accused of adultery, incest and high treason. Although she and her alleged lovers were executed, the evidence against them was actually very slight. It mostly depended upon the confession, obtained under torture, of Mark Smeaton, her musician. She died on 19 May 1536 on a scaffold erected on the White Tower, part of the Tower of London, under the sword of an executioner specially brought from France. According to Anthony Kingston, the Constable of the Tower, on the final day she fretted that the time of her death had not been set until midday: ‘I am very sorry therefore, for I thought to be dead by this time and past my pain’. The Annals of John Stow reported her final words:
    ‘I beseech Jesu save my Sovereign and master the King, the most goodliest, and gentlest Prince that is, and long to reign over you’, which words she spake with a smiling countenance: which done, she kneeled down on both her knees, and said, ‘To Jesu Christ I commend my soul’ and with that word suddenly the hangman of Calais smote off her head at one stroke with a sword.

    Portrait of Henry VIII (1491–1547) at the age of 49, painted in 1540 by Hans Holbein theYounger. Henry reintroduced boiling as the penalty for poisoners.

    John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, is beheaded in 1535 for opposing the break with Rome. (Review of Fox’s Book of Martyrs by William Andrews, 1826.)
    Catherine Howard, Henry’s fifth wife, proved similarly unsatisfactory and lasted only two years before she lost her head in the Tower on 13 February 1542. She too was convicted of adultery and attainted for treason. The evidence against her was perhaps somewhat stronger and she may well have had an affair with a courtier, Thomas Culpeper, and her personal secretary Francis Dereham. She was dispatched with the axe.
    The next victim, Lady Jane Grey, was, however, entirely innocent. It was her misfortune to be the great-granddaughter of Henry VII. When Henry VIII died in 1547, his only son Edward VI