Are these the worst botched executions in history?

The definitive downfall of Henry VIII's advisor Thomas Cromwell is chronicled in the anticipated final novel in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light. Cromwell meets a sticky end, but his execution – like those of so many others – didn't go to plan. Emma Slattery Williams explores some other death sentences and capital punishments that have gone gruesomely wrong

Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, suffered the misfortune of an inexperienced executioner. The daughter of George, Duke of Clarence (himself the brother of Kings Edward IV and Richard III) she was one of the few surviving Plantagenets at the end of the War of the Roses. At the beginning of Henry VIII’s reign Margaret was in favour, yet the winds swiftly changed when her son, Reginald, spoke out against the King’s separation from Catherine of Aragon. The Poles’ Plantagenet blood was suddenly seen as a threat and various members of the family were taken to the Tower of London, charged with treason.

The 65-year-old Margaret – elderly by Tudor standards – was arrested in November 1538. All of her titles were stripped from her, and evidence was produced that appeared to show Margaret’s support for Catholicism. She was held in the Tower for two years before her execution on 27 May 1541 – conducted away from the populace, on account of her noble birth, though it was ghastly all the same. The inexperienced axeman missed her neck on the first blow; ten further blows were needed to finally remove her head, making a hideous mess of her torso.

Being the right-hand man of Henry VIII was a dangerous position to be in – something Thomas Cromwell, the King’s chief minister from 1532-40 knew all too well. It was Henry’s marriage to his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, that proved Cromwell’s downfall – Cromwell himself had been the mastermind behind the disastrous match, which was annulled six months after the January 1540 wedding. By June of the same year, Cromwell’s enemies had persuaded the King that he was a traitor.

Cromwell was executed on Tower Hill on 28 July. “[He] patiently suffered the stroke of the axe, by a ragged and butcherly miser, who very ungoodly [sic] performed the office,” wrote contemporary historian Edward Hall, whose description has led many to believe that the beheading was neither swift nor merciful, and that Cromwell may have suffered multiple unsteady blows as a reportedly unskilled executioner hacked away at him.