So it's tit for tat, is it? That's also adolescent. Bloody Henry gave rise to Mary Tudor, not the other way around. Why didn't Henry go down in history as Bloody Henry? I'm sorry Cranmer was burned. But without his enabling, the whole bloody business might have been avoided--though to do that it might have required him to have enough spine to stand up to Henry and thus cost him his innards. I'm not blaming him alone--the other bishops were equally cowardly and the roots of Henry's absolutism were laid in the preceding century.
A pox on all the depredations of kings against bishops, a pox on all the corrupt bishops before and after Henry. They were all wrong when they did wrong. But that doesn't change the fact that the Church of England originated in a huge power grab by the king, a power-grab that created a coercive state church. The King of Spain was doing the same thing de facto, not de jure, at the same time. A pox on Phillip II. But the English Black Legend according to which all the evil was in Spain and under Philip's wife, Mary Tudor in England, while whitewashing the great tyrants Elizabeth and Henry, that Black Legend has to be confronted by its heirs as much as Catholcs have to confront(and have, in the 2000 Jubilee confronted) their own sorry history. I have yet to see any comparable willingness on the part of Anglicans to confront their own predecessors' complicity in the crimes of Elizabeth and Henry. Perhaps I just missed it when it took place.
American and English history books denounce "Bloody Mary" and lionize Elizabeth, who disembowelled just as many as Mary burned. I never encountered the story of the 1535 Carthusian martyrs until after I had a PhD in Reformation history. It's entirely absent from the standard textbook histories of this period. The same thing goes for the castration of Carthusian monks by Calvinists in France, the scalding of a Carthusian monk like a slaughtered pig in Belgium, again by Calvinist anarchists. Everyone knows about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Calvinists by Catholics, but very few know about the equivalent violence by Calvinists against Catholics in the French religious wars. Castration of a Carthusian monk, then stuffing his testicles in his mouth as he lay dying--all because he refused to eat meat, was a Catholic monk, and refused to take off the monastic habit that signified his solemn vow to God. Huguenot women defecating on the altar of a monastery church in Castres that the Calvinists had just sacked, ripping the Tabernacle from the wall and scattering the Blessed Sacrament in the filth. None of that's in the textbooks, but Bloody Mary and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre sure are. That a civil war took place is in the textbooks, but that the violence was not onesided Catholic against Protestant but pretty well evenly distributed--that's not in the standard Anglo-American textbooks, and I've read an awful lot of them.
Your very choice to use the Black Legend Anglophile terminology ("Bloody Mary") already puts you on one side of a very sad and sorry story. Why not admit that the Church of England was born in a travesty of justice which spawned a lot more travesties in its wake? Then we can begin to pick up the pieces.
"Your very choice to use the Black Legend Anglophile terminology ("Bloody Mary") already puts you on one side of a very sad and sorry story."
You don't know what side I'm on. For the record, I'm Catholic and I know the Church of England was founded by the ba!!$ of Henry. I used the term Bloody Mary because I like that drink;-)
OK, now that I know this about you, may I call on you by way of ping in defense of the faith if your knowledge and education is needed on future threads?