As a King, Charles I was disastrous; as a man, he faced his death with courage and dignity. His trial and execution were the first of their kind.
On this day King Louis XVI was executed at the guillotine, the first and only monarch to be executed in French history.
Marie-Antoinette was guillotined in 1793 after the Revolutionary Tribunal found her guilty of crimes against the state.
Louis was tried by the National Convention (self-instituted as a tribunal for the occasion), found guilty of high treason and executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793. Louis XVI was the only king of France ever to be executed, and his death brought an end to more than a thousand years of continuous French monarchy.
During Charles' reign, his actions frustrated his Parliament and resulted in the wars of the English Civil War, eventually leading to his execution in 1649.
Charles I remains the only English monarch to have been tried and executed for treason. In the years after his death, the muddle of Parliament, sober life under the Puritans and ultimately failure to establish a functioning government meant people started viewing Charles I differently.
On 30 January 1649, King Charles I was beheaded outside Banqueting House in Whitehall. The assembled crowd is reported to have groaned as the axe came down. Although the monarchy was later restored in 1660, the execution of Charles I destroyed the idea of an all-powerful and unquestionable monarch.
Whether these unfortunates were once adored royal wives, close friends, respected advisors or simply perceived as enemies of the state, they all contribute to a tally of death that makes Henry VIII the most prolific serial killer England has known.
France . On the 22nd of April 1949 Germaine Leloy-Godefroy (age 31) became the last woman executed in France , when she was guillotined at Angers for murdering her husband, Albert Leloy, with an axe while he slept at Baugé on December the 10th 1947.
Marie Antoinette's head was chopped off by a guillotine during the French Revolution on October 16, 1793, in Paris. After her head was cut off, it was shown to the public watching the executions and buried with her body in an unmarked grave at Madeleine cemetery in the 8th arrondissement of Paris.
The machine was judged successful because it was considered a humane form of execution in contrast with more cruel methods used in the pre-revolutionary Ancien Régime.
Born at Versailles, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte de France, otherwise known as “Madame Royale”, was the eldest child of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. She spent her childhood in the court and was one of the few royal children to survive the French Revolution.
Louis XII died in 1515 without a male heir. He was succeeded by his cousin and son-in-law Francis from the Angoulême cadet branch of the House of Valois.
The monarchy was formally abolished, and “Year I” of the French Republic was declared. Louis XVI died at the guillotine on 21 January 1793.
Louis III died on 5 August 882, aged around 17, at Saint-Denis in the centre of his realm. He was chasing after a girl, who was retreating to her father's house, when he hit his head on the lintel of a low door and later died.
Ronald Ryan was the last man hanged in Australia, 50 years ago on 3 February 1967. Ryan and his accomplice Peter Walker escaped from Pentridge Prison on 19 December 1965.
In 1793, King Louis XVI was sentenced to death by the guillotine after he was found to have been conspiring with other countries and engaging in counter-revolutionary acts. He was found guilty of treason and later executed. Nine months later, Marie Antoinette, the former Queen of France, was executed by the guillotine.
According to Badinter, it is the last intact guillotine in mainland France. Two others, both from overseas territories, are housed in the National Prisons Museum in Fontainebleau.
But even those royals might have been aghast at the actions of Russian czar Peter the Great, who in 1718 had his eldest son tortured to death for allegedly conspiring against him. Peter I, better known as Peter the Great, is generally credited with bringing Russia into the modern age.
Of his six wives, Henry VIII had two killed: Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. He accused Anne of adultery, and she was convicted and beheaded on May 19, 1536; that she had not given birth to a male heir was, however, Henry's primary motive for having her executed.
When Anne failed to produce a male heir the King grew weary of her, and she was imprisoned in the Tower of London accused of incest with her brother, adultery with several gentlemen from Court, witchcraft and treason. She was found guilty and became the first English queen to be publicly executed.
Including Scottish monarchy, a total of 17 monarchs in the British Isles have been murdered, assassinated or executed away from the battlefield, making it a very dangerous job indeed.
16 October 1793 Marie Antoinette, the deposed queen, is executed on the Place de la Concorde in Paris after a shambolic summary trial.
The beheaded queens
The most well known among those executed on or near Tower Green were three former queens of England. Two of those queens were wives of Henry VIII. Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII, was in her early 30s and Catherine Howard, Henry's fifth wife, was barely in her 20s.