While most of the condemned died in public, in front of huge crowds on Tower Hill, six prisoners were given the privilege of a private execution on Tower Green.

• The first was Queen Anne Boleyn, whose crime was her failure to produce a male heir for Henry VIII. Falsely accused of adultery, she was executed in 1536. Henry felt some remorse at her death, and hired a skilled swordsman from Calais, who sliced off her head with one blow.
  

• In 1541, it was the turn of the 71-year-old Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, whose offence was being the last surviving member of the Plantagenet dynasty, overthrown by the Tudors. The Countess refused to place her head on the block, and had to be chased around the green by the executioner, who hacked her to death.
  
  
• Henry's fourth wife, the 19-year-old Katherine Howard, really was guilty of adultery. She was the next to be executed here, in 1542. As she was brought to the Tower, Katherine saw the heads of her two executed lovers mounted on spikes on Tower Bridge. She spent the night before her execution practising kneeling and laying her head on the block. Katherine made a dignified speech, and was killed with a single axe blow.
  

• Immediately afterwards, the Viscountess of Rochford, who had helped Katherine meet her lovers, was beheaded on the same block.
  
  
• The fifth private execution was of Lady Jane Grey, who was nominal queen for just nine days in 1553, during a power struggle in which leading Protestant nobles tried to prevent the Catholic Mary Tudor coming to the throne. Mary's supporters rallied while Jane's melted away, and she was executed here in 1554.
  
  
• Queen Elizabeth I's fallen favourite, Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, was the only man to have a private execution on Tower Green, in 1601. Convicted of treason, his last request was for a private death. Elizabeth, who feared an uprising in support of the Earl, was happy to grant the request.

Public executions

From 1485, a permanent scaffold stood on Tower Hill, whose marked location can be seen as you walk by the underground station. It was 4ft high with a 9ft-square platform, made of rough planks, with a railing all around it. On an execution day, the platform was draped with black cloth, scattered with straw to soak up the blood. By the block - made of oak - stood a basket half-filled with sawdust to receive the head.

The prisoner climbed up a short flight of stairs and was allowed to make a final speech to the public. He was not restrained in any way, for he was supposed to know how to behave at his execution. It was like a piece of theatre in which he was expected to play his part with courage and dignity. He then knelt and waited for the axe to strike.

After chopping off the head, the executioner held it up to show the crowd, crying, "Behold the head of a traitor!"

Bungling Jack Ketch

The executioner was usually the public hangman and, because of the rarity of the sentence, he was often inexperienced at beheading. Since the muscles and vertebrae of the neck are tough, it could take more than one blow to sever the head - a prospect every condemned person dreaded. The victim was offered a blindfold, to prevent him seeing the axe and moving his head at the crucial moment.

The most badly botched execution was that of James, Duke of Monmouth, in 1685. Monmouth, the illegitimate son of Charles II, had led an unsuccessful rebellion against his uncle, King James II. His executioner was the hangman, Jack Ketch, a notorious bungler with an axe. On climbing the scaffold, Monmouth picked up the axe and ran his fingers along the blade, asking Ketch if he thought it was sharp enough for the job. He handed Ketch six guineas, promising him six more if he did a clean job: "Pray do not serve me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard you struck him four or five times; If you strike me twice, I cannot promise you not to stir."

Ketch had an attack of nerves and his first blow only grazed the back of the duke's head. Monmouth, who had refused the blindfold, turned his head around and gazed directly at Ketch, further unnerving him. When two more blows failed to sever the head, Ketch threw the axe down and offered 40 guineas to anyone in the crowd who could do better. At this the Sheriff of Middlesex, who was in charge of the execution, threatened to have him killed if he did not finish his job. When two more blows failed, Ketch had to use his knife, butchering the Duke like a pig.

Monmouth's family then retrieved the body, and had his head sewn back on so that he could have his portrait painted.

Jack Ketch lives on today as the hangman in Punch and Judy shows

The last beheading

The final Tower Hill beheading took place in 1747, when the 80-year-old Lord Fraser of Lovat was executed for his part in Bonnie Prince Charlie's rising. Lovat was so overweight and unfit that he needed two men to help him climb the steps of the scaffold. Turning to the crowd, he said, "God save us, why should there be such a bustle about taking off an old grey head that cannot get up three steps without three bodies to support it?"

George Selwyn, an eyewitness, wrote that Lovat "died extremely well, without passion, affectation, buffoonery or timidity... He lay down quietly, gave the sign soon, and was dispatched at a blow."

Final resting place

The bodies of the executed were all buried within the Tower, at the Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula. In the words of the Victorian historian, Lord Macaulay, to this sad place were "carried, through successive ages, by the rude hands of gaolers, without one mourner following, the bleeding relics of men who had been the captains of armies, the leaders of parties, the oracles of senates, and the ornaments of courts."