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"Just keep looking to the inquisition to see what he had every reason to fear from the power hungry Roman church"

At your urging I've looked at the inquisition and have found the following disturbing accounts observations of the Protestant Inquisition"

"Historically nothing is more incorrect than the assertion that the Reformation was a movement in favour of intellectual freedom. The exact contrary is the truth. For themselves, it is true, Lutherans and Calvinists claimed liberty of conscience . . . but to grant it to others never occurred to them so long as they were the stronger side. The complete extirpation of the Catholic Church, and in fact of everything that stood in their way, was regarded by the reformers as something entirely natural." (Johann von Dollinger)

"If any one still harbors the traditional prejudice that the early Protestants were more liberal, he must be undeceived. Save for a few splendid sayings of Luther, confined to the early years when he was powerless, there is hardly anything to be found among the leading reformers in favor of freedom of conscience. As soon as they had the power to persecute they did." (Preserved Smith)

"At Zurich, Zwingli's State-Church grew up much as Luther's did . . . Oecolampadius at Basle and Zwingli's successor, Bullinger, were strong compulsionists. Calvin's name is even more closely bound up with the idea of religious absolutism, while the task of handing down to posterity his harsh doctrine of religious compulsion was undertaken by Beza in his notorious work, On the Duty of Civil Magistrates to Punish Heretics. The annals of the Established Church of England were likewise at the outset written in blood." (Hartmann Grisar)

"The Reform was brought about by intemperate and calumnious abuse, by outrages of an excited populace or by the tyranny of princes . . . it instantly withdrew . . . liberty of judgment and devoted all who presumed to swerve from the line drawn by law to virulent obloquy, and sometimes to bonds and death. These reproaches, it may be a shame to us to own, can be uttered and cannot be refuted." (Henry Hallam)

"The Reformation of the 16th century was not aware of the true principles of intellectual liberty . . . At the very moment it was demanding these rights for itself it was violating them towards others." (Francois Guizot)

"What shall we say of a church . . . that had as yet no services to show, no claims upon the gratitude of mankind . . . which nevertheless suppressed by force a worship that multitudes deemed necessary to salvation? . . . So strong and so general was its intolerance that for some time it may, I believe, be truly said that there were more instances of partial toleration being advocated by Roman Catholics than by orthodox Protestants. " (William Lecky)

"This fact is forgotten by Protestants. They read blood-curdling stories of the Inquisition and of atrocities committed by Catholics, but what does the average Protestant know of Protestant atrocities in the centuries succeeding the Reformation? Nothing, unless he makes a special study of the subject . . . Yet they are perfectly well known to every scholar . . . If I do not enumerate here the persecutions carried on by Catholics in the past, it is because it is not necessary in this book to do so. This volume is addressed especially to Protestants, and Catholic persecutions are to them sufficiently well known . (John Stoddard)

"It is unquestionable . . . that the champions of Protestantism - Luther, Calvin, Beza, Knox, Cranmer and Ridley - advocated the right of the civil authorities to punish the `crime' of heresy . (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

"The Reformation was intolerant from its cradle, and its authors were universal persecutors”. (John Stoddard)

"The intolerance of Protestantism was certainly not less tyrannical than that with which Catholicism is so much reproached.” (Auguste Comte).

"Luther's intolerance is very much at variance with the Protestant view still current to some extent in erudite circles, but more particularly in popular literature. Luther, for all the harshness of his disposition, is yet regarded as having in principle advocated leniency, as having been a champion of personal religious freedom . . . Below we shall, however, quote a series of statements from Protestant writers who have risen superior to such party prejudice” (Hartmann Grisar)

"In Luther's case it is impossible to speak of liberty of conscience or religious freedom . . . The death-penalty for heresy rested on the highest Lutheran authority . . . The views of the other reformers on the persecution and bringing to justice of heretics were merely the outgrowth of Luther's plan; they contributed nothing fresh." (Walther Kohler)

"Even contempt of the outward Word, carelessness about going to church and contempt of Scripture - in this in-stance . . . the Bible as interpreted by Luther - was now regarded as `rank blasphemy,' which it was the duty of the authorities to punish as such. To such lengths had the vaunted freedom of the Gospel now gone." (Karl Wappler)

"[Luther's views] would justify all sorts of oppression on the part of the State, and all kinds of intellectual tyranny, and were in fact the same as those on which the Roman Emperors acted when they persecuted Christianity." (Johann Neander) "It is an altogether one-sided view, one, indeed, which willfully disregards the facts, to hail in Luther the man of the new age, the hero of enlightenment and the creator of the modern spirit. If we wish to contemplate such heroes we must turn to Erasmus [a Catholic] and his associates . . . In the periphery of his existence Luther was an Old Catholic, a medieval phenomenon." (Adolf von Harnack) 'If we wish to find a scapegoat on whose shoulders we may lay the miseries which Germany has brought on the world, I am more and more convinced that the worst evil genius of that country, is not Hitler or Bismarck or Frederick the Great, but Martin Luther.' (Dean William Inge - The Anglican Dean Inge, of St. Paul's Cathedral, London) "Calvin was as thorough as any pope in rejecting individualism of belief; this greatest legislator of Protestantism completely repudiated that principle of private judgment with which the new religion had begun. He had seen the fragmentation of the Reformation into a hundred sects, and foresaw more; in Geneva he would have none of them." (Will Durant) "There was little political liberty in Geneva under Calvin's regime, and still less of religious liberty. His practical influence was on the side of an autocratic state and complete conformity of the individual to the established powers." (Georgia Harkness)

This an a lot more information can be found at http://www.catholicapologetics.info/apologetics/protestantism/protin.htm. if you care to do some investigation for yourself.