Themed Set: The English Reformation
January 29th, 2008 Headsman
Simultaneous with — but in many senses outside — the Protestant Reformation sweeping continental Europe, England in the 16th and early 17th centuries shook with the day’s fatal upheaval.
If the transition from Catholicism proposed by Henry VIII appears theologically mild in retrospect, it wrought earth-shattering changes: desperate conflict between faiths in shifting dynastic alliances; the germ of a vast middle class seeded with confiscation of the Church’s enormous estates; the evolution of governmental forms — and political theory — to comport with a landscape of redistributed power.
Many thousands suffered the ultimate penalty in those days for reasons godly, venal, or a little of both. The next three dates frame the contest over a century’s time, the violent birth of modern England.
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12 Comments Add your own
1. Fiz (UK) | January 29th, 2008 at 4:08 am
Thomas Howard was a horrible man who caused the death and downfall of many others during the reign of Fat Harry! He even voted for Anne’s death! If anyone should have be executed, it was him! I suppose the Devil looks after his own…
2. Headsman | January 29th, 2008 at 10:46 am
Yeah, if you had to make a list of everyone Henry had executed and pick one to receive the get-off-the-scaffold golden ticket … well, who knows if he was the least deserving: there was a lot of competition. But it doesn’t exactly make you feel all tingly with the presence of an underlying force for good in the universe that this old bastard got to hang on a few more years.
Thanks for the reminder about his role in Anne’s trial. I updated the entry with that bit.
3. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 13th, 2008 at 2:36 am
[...] For all More’s greatness — as intellectual, polemicist, lawyer, statesman, father — none of his many gifts at the end could avail him beside his commitment to Catholicism at the dawn of the English Reformation. [...]
4. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 15th, 2008 at 1:06 am
[...] throne of England was the echo of the decades-old struggles straining the English polity — the Reformation and the reach of royal [...]
5. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | November 22nd, 2008 at 1:49 am
[...] possible way to read the early progress of the English Reformation is as an initial flowering of Protestantism followed — after the execution of Anne Boleyn [...]
6. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | January 12th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
[...] Part of the Themed Set: The English Reformation. [...]
7. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | February 13th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
[...] of long-forgotten dynasts, which seems a shockingly parochial proximate cause — the English Reformation, and through the Reformation was born the crown’s decisive triumph over the nobility, the [...]
8. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | March 31st, 2009 at 8:24 am
[...] very (still-standing) Arden house was obtained through the English Reformation’s dissolution of the monasteries; the London transplant Arden apparently used his (some must [...]
9. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 12th, 2009 at 6:37 am
[...] and when Henry VIII began shuttering Catholic monasteries, many an egg that would comprise the English Reformation’s omelette would be [...]
10. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 16th, 2009 at 1:30 am
[...] prefiguring of the factional political dispute that would see her to a Smithfield stake: the Reformation that rent England was itself contested within, with more aggressively reformist Protestant types [...]
11. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | July 28th, 2009 at 12:12 pm
[...] Henry strove to get his end away, Thomas Cromwell made the Reformation, setting his energetic hand to the needfully violent reordering of [...]
12. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip | November 5th, 2009 at 9:26 am
[...] Part of the Themed Set: The English Reformation. [...]
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