Retro Series

Between June and September 1692, some 19 men and women were found guilty of witchcraft and executed in the small religious community of Salem, Massachusetts, in northeastern America.

A horror that shocked the world, the Salem witch trials have spawned hundreds of films, books, scholarly articles and plays, including Arthur Miller’s acclaimed 1953 work The Crucible.

The executed men and women were convicted on the spurious evidence of a group of young village girls who claimed to have been bewitched.

Paranoia, fed by ongoing family feuds and attacks by Native Americans, developed into a wave of hysteria that quickly spread throughout colonial Massachusetts. Another 150 men, women and children were accused in the spring of 1692, and were only spared the gallows by confessing.

Source - https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/11-shocking-moments-in-history/

On the morning of 19 May 1536, Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, became the first English queen to be publicly executed. Charged with adultery, incest and conspiring the king’s death, Anne was beheaded on a scaffold erected on Tower Green, within the walls of the Tower of London. Her death, says historian Suzannah Lipscomb, “is so familiar to us that it is hard to imagine how shocking it would have been”.

Anne and Henry had been married for little more than three years at the time of her death. For her, Henry had left his wife of nearly 24 years and the mother of his child (the future Mary I), and broken with the Catholic Church. By the spring of 1536, however, Henry’s affection had waned and he was hotly pursuing Anne’s lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour.

Along with five courtiers, including Anne’s brother, George, Anne was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London in early May 1536. Mark Smeaton, William Brereton, Francis Weston and Henry Norris were tried and found guilty of adultery with the queen, and of conspiring the king’s death, while Anne and her brother were found guilty of high treason. By 19 May, all six convicted had been executed.

Reporting on Anne’s execution in 1536, Eustace Chapuys, the Spanish ambassador to Henry’s court, wrote: “No one ever shewed more courage or greater readiness to meet death than she did”.

Today, nearly 500 years after her execution, historians cannot agree why Anne had to die. This episode of Witness explores Anne’s final hours and considers why she was executed…

Source - https://www.historyextra.com/period/victorian/11-shocking-moments-in-history/