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To: AnalogReigns
Do you have a record, from a reliable source, as to Cranmer causing any executions at all?

The official Acts and records of the reign of Henry VIII show that while Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury and Vice-gerent of the Realm for Visitation (i.e. overseeing, or in his case despoiling and stealing, monasteries) he presided at the trials and sentencing of the Carthusian Martyrs - Roman Catholic monks.

Eighteen of them are recorded as being executed by hanging, disemboweling, drawing and quartering and enforced starvation.

Brother Thomas Johnson took almost three weeks to die. It was rumored that a jailer with subversive catholic sympathies had been sneaking him rainwater.

And these particular Carthusians were just some examples - they happen to be an especially well-documented case since they were particularly beloved by the local communities.

In the mid 1500s many thousands of Protestants were executed this way all over Europe, especially on the Continent, where in France the numbers topped tens of thousands.

Your numbers are off.

As many Catholics died at the hands of Protestants as Protestants did at the hands of Catholics in the days before the Peace of Westphalia.

One can play all sorts of games with the French numbers if one decides to count the Huguenots who took up arms against their king and died in battle as "martyrs" instead of military casualties.

And the issue of civil authority vs. ecclesiastical authority is relevant.

In Spain, where the King reigned, a conviction of heresy could get you burned - just like in Calvinist Geneva.

In the Papal States, where the Pope reigned much of the time as both civil and ecclesiastical authority, you were more likely to end up under hosue arrest like Galileo.

It was a real distinction - except in Protestant countries like England and Saxony and Sweden where the civil authority was the ecclesiastical authority and the King was the head of the Church.

The Catholic martyrs of England were killed directly by the Church of England at the order of the head of the Church of England.

The Pope ordered no executions in Spain and allowed convicted Spaniards to appeal over the King's head to the canonical courts in Rome.

Quite a few such cases were overturned on appeal.

To whom could an English Catholic appeal over the King's head when he had been caught saying a Paternoster in Latin instead of English? No one.

131 posted on 10/15/2008 9:18:56 PM PDT by wideawake (Why is it that those who like to be called Constitutionalists know the least about the Constitution?)
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To: wideawake

Well done, good historical legwork.

Boettner has Joan of Arc condemned to the stake by the Pope....wasn’t it a Burgundian bishop who presided over her trial?


136 posted on 10/15/2008 9:34:49 PM PDT by Claud
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