Off with Your Head: The Last Plantagenet

Colorful is a good adjective to describe England's King Henry VIII and the color that comes most easily to mind is red, blood red. His reign was marked with shocking executions, dramatic mood swings and nasty tempers. Henry's Yorkist cousins paid the ultimate price for their Plantagenet lineage.

Perhaps the most grisly execution ordered was that of the nearly 70-year-old Countess of Salisbury, Margaret Plantagenet. The daughter of George, Duke of Clarence; cousin of Henry's mother, Elizabeth of York and niece to two Yorkist kings, Edward IV and Richard III counted for naught with the king. Possibly her pedigree merely urged Henry forward. "The last of the Plantagenets" she was executed by Henry for supposedly political reasons.

Margaret's son, Cardinal Reginald Pole, vilified Henry VIII in religious doctrine denouncing his marriage to Anne Boleyn. The cardinal, however, launched his campaign from the safety of France. And Henry not able to strike out at his foe instead acted out his vindictiveness like a man possessed on the Pole family residing in England. Men, women and children alike were imprisoned at the Tower on charges of treason and conspiring to overthrow him. Most never to leave again.

When the aging Countess of Salisbury was informed of her doom and led out to the block she didn't demurely submit to the executioner's axe. She refused to put her head on the block like a common traitor and, running from the executioner, was pursued around the scaffold by the axeman and his hacking axe which inflicted hideous wounds until at last she died. According to Tower legend her ghost has reportedly been seen in a reenactment of this gruesome act. At other times, the shadow of a great axe is said to fall across the scene of her murder.