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CONCLUSION

The beheading cases on this website span two and a half centuries.  A summary of the cases discussed can be found on the next page entitled, “Reason for Beheading and Source of Power”.  Each of these beheading cases provide insight into state administration and culture of that particular time, “Beheadings everyone recognizes as violent, but they repel with greater force because they are symbolic, a work of human culture, not animal culture.”1  The removal of a head was the most powerful sign to advise ones friends and foes who was in charge. Three of the fourteen cases on this site represent attempted or actual regicide; two threats to the throne, which can also be read as take over; four were directly or indirectly related to religious issues; three for adultery (real or imagined) and lastly one each for extortion, and King Charles I was simply a tyrant.

One of the interesting characteristics about this group of cases is that beheadings occurred under the orders of Parliament and Monarchs.  One would think that when the state was controlled by a Parliament, that royalty and nobles were more apt to keep their heads.  England had a strong court system rather than the disbursed court system found in Continental Europe and their legal system was based on precedent rather than Cannon law. Regardless of courts and legal systems in the case of King Charles I, Parliament actually made the decision not only to remove him from the throne, but also to decapitate him.  This is one of the most striking examples of irony and reversal in authority in which the new source of power, Parliament, used the monarchy’s historic form of capital punishment on the monarch himself. Parliament only had to do that one time to advise all royalty, nobles and commoners that they were in charge.  Whether used by Parliament or the monarchy, “Mounted heads had served in their horror as a sign of the horrid crime imagined by the head, their mutilation symbolizing the mutilation they had proposed to inflict on the body politic.”2

Use of beheading by a monarch was not only a way to demonstrate his/her authority and dispose of a problematic individual but certainly, “Aristocrats’ decapitations diminished not pain, but humiliation, the visible loss of control over one’s head intrinsic to decollation.”3  Sir Thomas More is a fine example of all three conditions mentioned above.  By decapitating More, King Henry VIII was again challenging the power of the Catholic Church, disposing of an individual who cast a dark cloud over his marriage to Anne Boleyn and humiliating More and his family.

It is said that Simon Fraser, 11th Lord Lovat, was the last person beheaded by the English.  He was tried and convicted of treason and publically beheaded on Tower Hill in London in 1747.  About mid-eighteenth century with John Locke’s theory of mind circulating, “The disappearance of severed human heads from public places seems indisputably progressive, a sign of improved manners, increased humanitarianism, heightened sensibility or sensitivity, and responsiveness to public opinion in an enlarging public sphere.”4