The purpose of this blog piece is to highlight the state-sponsored terror that was doled out to the populace during the seemingly eventful decades during which the Tudor family sat on the throne. It is not a mere recital of Foxe’s Book Of Martyrs nor intended as a chronology of Catholic martyrdom. Instead, I feel it necessary to demonstrate just how vengeful and murderous Henry VIII was, whilst also drawing your attention to the misery, pain, torture and worse that was inflicted by Henry’s two daughters upon a whole host of brave souls whose religious convictions were at variance with that of the reigning monarch. Good old Harry of England may have his fan club, but was he far removed from being an early version of Joe Stalin?
Anyhow I would quickly like to emphasise that the Tudors did not enjoy the monopoly on inflicting suffering upon their naughty subjects. There was widespread barbarity visited upon the peoples of the British Isles long before and indeed long after the last of the Tudor monarchs exited the stage in 1603. Why is it then that I and many others have always been drawn to the soap opera of the sixteenth century? I would venture to suggest that the callous cruelty that we associate particularly with the reigns of Henry VIII and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth owes itself to the religious upheaval that Martin Luther instigated around 1517 when he unwittingly founded the Protestant Reformation, a fact all the more absurd when one considers that this pioneer was himself a Catholic monk. Ever since Luther’s rebellion against Rome, Europe was plunged into turmoil. What renders the situation a matter of life and death is that the two respective camps had a clear sense of black and white on matters spiritual. Anyone who dared to oppose or reform the old religion was an enemy of Rome and had to be literally extinguished. By the same token, once Protestantism took hold, those who steadfastly clung to the old religion were regarded as equally too dangerous to tolerate. The concepts of compromise and tolerance and mutual respect and understanding were anathema to the religious fanatics and devout worshippers of the sixteenth century. In many respects, the so-called Christians of this epoch were fighting their very own Jihad, but against each other. It is against these unfolding circumstances that the Tudor monarchs were confronted with all manner of heretics and perceived traitors. In such unenlightened times, it was reckoned that the only means of killing an idea was to exterminate every last soul who possessed such an idea or faith. The modern-day perpetrators of genocide still entertain the naive notion that a belief can be killed off by removing everyone who holds that belief. Easier said than done.
Before we pour over the list of over seven hundred wretched souls who paid the ultimate price during the tumultuous Tudor years, I would like to enlighten you with the following items of trivia, which you may or may not already be familiar with.
Firstly, did you know that the lucky victims of a beheading who were spared the prolonged agony of a hung, drawn, and quartered ordeal could potentially remain conscious for several seconds after they had been decapitated? This is a medical fact.
Secondly, it was customary to pay the executioner in a beheading in order to bribe the axeman to complete his gruesome task to the best of his peculiar talent. However, not all victims received value for money. The dastardly ex-Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex were two such notable persons whose heads refused to exit the rest of their body at the first attempt, leaving them and others in such circumstances in considerable pain for longer than their wages to the executioner had bargained for.
Thirdly, the executioner was expected to ask the imminent victim for his or her forgiveness ahead of the fatal blow. It is also worth pointing out that if there was an unenviable queue of ‘offenders’ awaiting their fate on the block, they were dealt with in decreasing ‘order of importance’. The individual of highest rank and noble birth was permitted the extra privilege of being decapitated first. So what? Well, if you consider the five unfortunates who were each falsely accused of being in an adulterous relationship with Queen Anne Boleyn, then you can imagine the amount of blood flowing literally on the block and the scaffold by the time that victim number five, the wretched Mark Smeaton was required to die. Going first and getting the ordeal over with was something to wish for!
Fourthly, although the victim was usually granted an opportunity for a pre-execution oration atop the scaffold, some offenders deemed it prudent not to condemn their accusers for fear of retribution being meted out against their bereaved families.
Fifthly, the hung, drawn, and quartered punishment is slightly inaccurately named. Initially, the wretch was drawn by horse through the streets to their place of execution, then he would have been half-hanged, but cruelly kept alive, and then the ritual culminated in a disembowelling, before the corpse would be sliced into four and distributed to vantage points in the vicinity as a reminder of what awaited anyone who contemplated a treasonable act. Therefore, strictly speaking, the punishment was actually drawn, partially hung, and quartered.
It is also worth pointing out that the victims who were burnt at the stake were being ‘purged’ of their sinful heresy in order to render them worthy of eternal salvation. This peculiar practice was widespread at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. It became commonplace in England in the 1550s on account of the fact that Queen Mary was effectively a Spanish monarch, given that her mother and her new spouse both hailed from Spain. Anyhow, it was deemed to be infinitely more preferable to burn for a few hours on earth than supposedly to burn forever in Hell. Thus the torture of being fried alive in a town or village square was an act of generosity!
[Mary I (reigned from 1553-1558) was a hate-figure among Protestants!]
Did you also know that the remarkable Anne Askew [see below] is believed to be the only female who was subjected to the gruesome torture of the rack, an interrogation method which became commonplace decades later for Catholic priests during the Elizabethan era when the threat from Spain heightened a sense of anti-papist hysteria. Every individual listed below has a remarkable story to tell beyond the grave. One person who escaped martyrdom was the exceptionally fortunate Robert Benet, a Mayor of Windsor, who was condemned to be burnt at the stake, but who was peculiarly excused by dint of the fact that he was unwell!
Also of interest, thinks me, is the fact that some individuals who were transported to the Tower of London by barge along the River Thames would have had to wait the turning of the tide before he or she could proceed with their potentially final journey. Never has the ominous phrase ‘the turning of the tide’ seemed quite so poignant.
On the subject of the imposing royal fortress in central London, it ought to be pointed out that for all its horrible dungeons, such as the pit and the infamous tiny cell dubbed ‘Little Ease’, the Tower of London was relatively palatial in contrast to almost any other prison or municipal jail up and down the country, in an age when the notion of prison reform was but a foreign language. Special mention also ought to be assigned to the chief tormentor of Catholics in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, Richard Topcliffe. Old Topcliffe thrived on inflicting torture and even installed a customised rack in his own house for those of a papist inclination. To those who still regard Catholicism as a manifestation of the devil, then Topcliffe is presumably a hero. For the rest of humanity, this gent ranks very highly [or lowly] amongst the most sadistic and barbaric of interrogators.
Did you also know that one of Anne Boleyn’s favourite Bible stories, derived from the middle of the Old Testament, relates to how Queen Esther saved her people and fellow-believers from extermination at the hands of the evil anti-Semitic Haman? However, Thomas Cromwell managed to postpone the same fate as Haman by striking first against Queen Anne Boleyn in the spring of 1536.
Furthermore, en route to a trial, the accused would be preceded by an individual who carried an axe facing away from he or she. However, when a guilty verdict was conferred on the accused, he or she would leave the court proceedings with an axe pointed towards them to inform bystanders of the death sentence. Such procedure was reportedly enacted upon the likes of Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey.
Finally, there are a number of myths about Tudor history which I will briefly address here. In the first instance, Henry VIII may be the founder of the Church of England but he remained staunchly Catholic until his dying day in 1547. Also, although Anne Boleyn is heralded as a champion of the English reformation, she too remained a Catholic until she breathed her last in May 1536. It was indeed Edward VI, the ill-fated male heir of Henry VIII who was England’s first Protestant sovereign. It is also worth noting that King Henry’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr actually came perilously close to joining two of her predecessors on the scaffold. An ageing Henry was growing tired of Catherine’s reformist tendencies. Fortunately for Mrs Henry VIII, she was tipped off about the sovereign’s concerns and she had the presence of mind to row back from her theological sermonising. It almost certainly spared her, though she did not long survive her ailing husband. Furthermore, although Mary and her estranged younger sister Elizabeth merit much scorn for their own reigns of terror, they did feel varying degrees of regret and sorrow for approving respectively the executions of Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots.
Before we pour over the list of over seven hundred wretched souls who paid the ultimate price during the tumultuous Tudor years, I would like to enlighten you with the following items of trivia, which you may or may not already be familiar with.
Firstly, did you know that the lucky victims of a beheading who were spared the prolonged agony of a hung, drawn, and quartered ordeal could potentially remain conscious for several seconds after they had been decapitated? This is a medical fact.
Secondly, it was customary to pay the executioner in a beheading in order to bribe the axeman to complete his gruesome task to the best of his peculiar talent. However, not all victims received value for money. The dastardly ex-Lord Chancellor Thomas Cromwell and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex were two such notable persons whose heads refused to exit the rest of their body at the first attempt, leaving them and others in such circumstances in considerable pain for longer than their wages to the executioner had bargained for.
Thirdly, the executioner was expected to ask the imminent victim for his or her forgiveness ahead of the fatal blow. It is also worth pointing out that if there was an unenviable queue of ‘offenders’ awaiting their fate on the block, they were dealt with in decreasing ‘order of importance’. The individual of highest rank and noble birth was permitted the extra privilege of being decapitated first. So what? Well, if you consider the five unfortunates who were each falsely accused of being in an adulterous relationship with Queen Anne Boleyn, then you can imagine the amount of blood flowing literally on the block and the scaffold by the time that victim number five, the wretched Mark Smeaton was required to die. Going first and getting the ordeal over with was something to wish for!
Fourthly, although the victim was usually granted an opportunity for a pre-execution oration atop the scaffold, some offenders deemed it prudent not to condemn their accusers for fear of retribution being meted out against their bereaved families.
Fifthly, the hung, drawn, and quartered punishment is slightly inaccurately named. Initially, the wretch was drawn by horse through the streets to their place of execution, then he would have been half-hanged, but cruelly kept alive, and then the ritual culminated in a disembowelling, before the corpse would be sliced into four and distributed to vantage points in the vicinity as a reminder of what awaited anyone who contemplated a treasonable act. Therefore, strictly speaking, the punishment was actually drawn, partially hung, and quartered.
It is also worth pointing out that the victims who were burnt at the stake were being ‘purged’ of their sinful heresy in order to render them worthy of eternal salvation. This peculiar practice was widespread at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. It became commonplace in England in the 1550s on account of the fact that Queen Mary was effectively a Spanish monarch, given that her mother and her new spouse both hailed from Spain. Anyhow, it was deemed to be infinitely more preferable to burn for a few hours on earth than supposedly to burn forever in Hell. Thus the torture of being fried alive in a town or village square was an act of generosity!
[Mary I (reigned from 1553-1558) was a hate-figure among Protestants!]
Did you also know that the remarkable Anne Askew [see below] is believed to be the only female who was subjected to the gruesome torture of the rack, an interrogation method which became commonplace decades later for Catholic priests during the Elizabethan era when the threat from Spain heightened a sense of anti-papist hysteria. Every individual listed below has a remarkable story to tell beyond the grave. One person who escaped martyrdom was the exceptionally fortunate Robert Benet, a Mayor of Windsor, who was condemned to be burnt at the stake, but who was peculiarly excused by dint of the fact that he was unwell!
Also of interest, thinks me, is the fact that some individuals who were transported to the Tower of London by barge along the River Thames would have had to wait the turning of the tide before he or she could proceed with their potentially final journey. Never has the ominous phrase ‘the turning of the tide’ seemed quite so poignant.
On the subject of the imposing royal fortress in central London, it ought to be pointed out that for all its horrible dungeons, such as the pit and the infamous tiny cell dubbed ‘Little Ease’, the Tower of London was relatively palatial in contrast to almost any other prison or municipal jail up and down the country, in an age when the notion of prison reform was but a foreign language. Special mention also ought to be assigned to the chief tormentor of Catholics in the last two decades of the sixteenth century, Richard Topcliffe. Old Topcliffe thrived on inflicting torture and even installed a customised rack in his own house for those of a papist inclination. To those who still regard Catholicism as a manifestation of the devil, then Topcliffe is presumably a hero. For the rest of humanity, this gent ranks very highly [or lowly] amongst the most sadistic and barbaric of interrogators.
Did you also know that one of Anne Boleyn’s favourite Bible stories, derived from the middle of the Old Testament, relates to how Queen Esther saved her people and fellow-believers from extermination at the hands of the evil anti-Semitic Haman? However, Thomas Cromwell managed to postpone the same fate as Haman by striking first against Queen Anne Boleyn in the spring of 1536.
Furthermore, en route to a trial, the accused would be preceded by an individual who carried an axe facing away from he or she. However, when a guilty verdict was conferred on the accused, he or she would leave the court proceedings with an axe pointed towards them to inform bystanders of the death sentence. Such procedure was reportedly enacted upon the likes of Anne Boleyn and Lady Jane Grey.
Finally, there are a number of myths about Tudor history which I will briefly address here. In the first instance, Henry VIII may be the founder of the Church of England but he remained staunchly Catholic until his dying day in 1547. Also, although Anne Boleyn is heralded as a champion of the English reformation, she too remained a Catholic until she breathed her last in May 1536. It was indeed Edward VI, the ill-fated male heir of Henry VIII who was England’s first Protestant sovereign. It is also worth noting that King Henry’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr actually came perilously close to joining two of her predecessors on the scaffold. An ageing Henry was growing tired of Catherine’s reformist tendencies. Fortunately for Mrs Henry VIII, she was tipped off about the sovereign’s concerns and she had the presence of mind to row back from her theological sermonising. It almost certainly spared her, though she did not long survive her ailing husband. Furthermore, although Mary and her estranged younger sister Elizabeth merit much scorn for their own reigns of terror, they did feel varying degrees of regret and sorrow for approving respectively the executions of Lady Jane Grey and Mary Queen of Scots.
[Elizabeth I was equally 'bloody' towards the Catholic clergy]
Okay, that’s enough bits and pieces of dead bodies for thee. Let us now solemnly browse through the list of high-profile victims of a Tudor tyranny which perhaps collectively cast the shadow of holocaust over the history of Britain. Pedants will correctly point out that a holocaust constitutes a widespread massacre of a large volume of people. Also, a catalogue of over seven hundred executions, spanning a little over a century scarcely merits the word massacre. However, I did insert a question mark in the title, thereby allowing the reader to decide whether there is a case for arguing that the Tudor terror amounts to a holocaust. Nevertheless, it almost goes without saying, but I shall say it anyhow, but these are effectively the ‘celebrity deaths’. The recorded executions below are but the tip of the Tudor iceberg. Indeed, it has been estimated that perhaps as many as seventy-two thousand souls were on the receiving end of capital punishment during the reign of Henry VIII. Maybe the word holocaust is not entirely misplaced after all.
The litany of victims below paid with their life in almost every instance for either heresy or treason. In fact, one could argue that heretics were traitors and traitors were heretics. In the days of ‘the divine right of Kings’, defying the monarch was tantamount to defying God, while declining to submit to the church of state was equally akin to refusing allegiance to the sovereign. Oh, and if you were given the choice between being hung, drawn, and quartered, or being burnt at the stake, well it is a tad like being between a rock and a hard place. For me, I would opt for the burning, if only because many of the victims were strangled before the flames took hold. Oh such Christian compassion!
Many more poor souls were executed during the Tudor era. There is simply not enough space to chronicle all such misfortunes. Oh and I would also like to state that irrespective of one’s religious allegiances [or lack of them], there should not be any hierarchy of victims. The list underneath is by no means exhaustive, but perhaps exhausting!
*THE LIST CAN BE FOUND AT THE FOLLOWING SITE: http://gw930.blog.com/the-tudor-tyranny/
The litany of victims below paid with their life in almost every instance for either heresy or treason. In fact, one could argue that heretics were traitors and traitors were heretics. In the days of ‘the divine right of Kings’, defying the monarch was tantamount to defying God, while declining to submit to the church of state was equally akin to refusing allegiance to the sovereign. Oh, and if you were given the choice between being hung, drawn, and quartered, or being burnt at the stake, well it is a tad like being between a rock and a hard place. For me, I would opt for the burning, if only because many of the victims were strangled before the flames took hold. Oh such Christian compassion!
Many more poor souls were executed during the Tudor era. There is simply not enough space to chronicle all such misfortunes. Oh and I would also like to state that irrespective of one’s religious allegiances [or lack of them], there should not be any hierarchy of victims. The list underneath is by no means exhaustive, but perhaps exhausting!
*THE LIST CAN BE FOUND AT THE FOLLOWING SITE: http://gw930.blog.com/the-tudor-tyranny/
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