On a cold morning on Wednesday 19 January 1547, Tudor courtier, soldier and poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, was taken to the scaffold on Tower Hill, where he was beheaded, following his conviction for high treason one week earlier. With his death, Surrey, the eldest son and heir of the recently deposed and co-accused Lord High Treasurer, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, would be the last man to be executed during the reign of Henry VIII.

In medieval London, there were multiple public places of execution, places where death sentences which had been given to prisoners convicted of serious crimes against the monarch or the state, including treason and heresy, were carried out. These locations included Tyburn (the location of the city's primary public gallows), Smithfield marketplace and the churchyard of St-Giles-in-the-Field. In 1464, another site was established on a raised plot of land, overlooking the Tower

On 26 December 1605, an intimate ceremony took place at Wanstead Hall, Essex, the home of Charles Blount, 1st Earl of Devonshire: the exchanging of marriage vows between the Earl and his long-time lover and recently legally-separated, Penelope Devereux, Lady Rich.

"Upon Christmas Day in the morning", 25 December 1634, the thrice-widowed 91-year-old Lettice Knollys, Dowager Countess of Essex and Leicester, died at her home at Drayton Bassett, Staffordshire.

At the beginning of December 1608, Elizabethan courtier Douglas Howard, Lady Sheffield, died, at approximately sixty-five years old. On 11 December 1608, she was buried at St Margaret's Church, Westminster, as requested in her will, "by my sister Dudley".