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.
On this day..
- 1733: Henry Neal, for shoes and breeches
- 1726: Thomas Craven and William Anderson, reluctant autobiographers
- 1696: Thomas Randal, obstinate
- 2015: Robert Ladd, "let's ride"
- 1802: Joseph Wall
- 1745: Eve, her smoke visible throughout the country
- 1879: John Achey and William Merrick, the first hanged in Indianapolis
- 1253: P. Morret, poor guesser
- 1913: Edward Hopwood, clumsy suicide
- Daily Double: Century-Old English Legal Novelties
- 1912: Albert Wolter, white slaver
- 1869: Chauncey W. Millard, candy man
- 1810: Pedro Domingo Murillo, for Bolivian independence
- 2006: A female spy by al Qaeda
- 1547: Not Thomas Howard, because Henry VIII died first
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1534: Elizabeth Barton, the Holy Maid of Kent
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » Themed Set: Resistance and Rebellion in the Restoration
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1606: Guy Fawkes and other Gunpowder Plot conspirators
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1540: Thomas Cromwell
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1546: Anne Askew, the only woman tortured in the Tower
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1537: Robert Aske, for the Pilgrimage of Grace
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1551: Alice Arden, husband killer
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1536: Anne Boleyn
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1649: Charles I
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1538: John Lambert, “none but Christ”
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1685: James Scott, Duke of Monmouth
Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1535: Thomas More, the king’s good servant but God’s first
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.
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…