City Famous For Beheadings Horrified At Beheading Plot

London, October 10 – The city most closely associated with monarchs ordering people’s heads severed from the rest of their bodies expressed shock and horror this week after authorities allegedly uncovered an Islamist plot to perform the same act on residents of that city.

The London police took into custody a number of suspects who, they charge, were planning to select random people in the British capital and behead them, in keeping with the brutal, attention-getting method of execution employed by Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria. The suspects, each of whom is alleged to have participated in the fighting there, intended to spread the horror of beheading directly to the West, specifically in the city where Henry VIII made the phrase, “Off with her head” a household expression, and where one later monarch suffered a similar fate.

Henry VIII married six women in total, the second and fifth of whom he had executed for various political or sexual offenses. The first to receive the ax was Anne Boleyn, whose souring marriage with the king led him to have her framed for adultery, incest, and high treason. He had their marriage annulled, as he had his first, and subsequently ordered Boleyn killed. Catherine Howard, his fifth, came to the same end, in her case as a result of her adulterous relationship with a royal official, Thomas Culpeper, who also lost his head to the executioner’s ax. A second official involved in the scandal was drawn and quartered instead.

About a century later an actual king, Charles I, was beheaded; his death featured prominently in the English Civil War that gave rise to the reign of “Lord Protector” Oliver Cromwell, soon after which the monarchy was restored. While later English kings were deposed, from the seventeenth century onward, all those who died on the throne did so from natural causes.

The newest beheading plot departs from the precedents in that it does not specifically involve royalty, or evidence of wrongdoing on the part of those to be killed. Other differences involve the method: whereas the beheadings for which London is known were carried out with a single stroke of the sword or ax, the suspects in the current plot are not known to have intended that the executions follow the same more or less humane insistence. However, as a beheading produces the same result regardless of the number of strokes, historians and social commentators find curious the current London expressions of shock and horror at the plot.

“It’s something we should be proud of, really,” says Sir Cephal Ectomy, who has written extensively on the executions of Anne and Catherine. “We English should really be reveling in this legacy, not shying away from it. Embrace what Henry made us famous for.”

Others were more circumspect. “I understand that appropriateness of making London the centerpiece of a beheading campaign in the West, considering the city’s contribution to the history of the behavior,” says Gil O’Teen, a social critic. “However, if justice is really what the plotters are after, Paris would be a far more fitting venue.”