Category Archives: 16th Century

1599: Beatrice Cenci and her family, for parricide

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On the morning this day in 1599, the Cenci family — mother Lucrezia, son Giacomo, and immortal tragic heartthrob Beatrice — were put to death at Sant’Angelo Bridge for murdering the clan’s tyrannous father.

Francesco Cenci, the victim, was more accustomed to making victims of his own: detested around the Eternal City, he indulged his violent temper and fleshy lusts with the impunity of a wealthy cardinal’s son. By all accounts, he enjoyed pushing around his family, too.

This much is stipulated. What lies beyond is legend.

But the legend is why we’re dallying with Beatrice today, so we might as well begin there: in fear that her father would rape her, it goes, Beatrice tried to turn to the authorities, who let mean old dad walk on account of his connections. Desperate to protect herself from incest, Beatrice and family arrange to batter his gulliver and toss him over a balcony to make it look like suicide.

Slight problem: it didn’t look very much like suicide.

So the family was hauled in and tortured, and eventually Lucrezia and Beatrice (both beheaded) and Giacomo (quartered after suffering the mazzolatura of an incapacitating hammer blow to the head followed by gory lethal knifework by the executioner) all paid the price while the youngest child watched, spared death but condemned to life in the galleys.

(The papacy gobbled up the patricides’ estate, which puts a fine point on the ironically-named Pope Clement VIII‘s law-and-order stance on the appeal for mercy, and his subsequent edicts to quash public comment on the affair.)

Then Beatrice’s body — the part below the neck — contrived to disrobe when fumbled by the brethren taking it away for burial.

You’ve got to admit it’s pretty romantic. Some versions even hold that the responsible executioners died violently themselves within a month, or that a ghostly Beatrice returns to the scene of her demise on this anniversary.

And not a word of Italian fluency will be necessary to catch the gist of this excerpt from this 1969 Lucio Fulci film:

It’s a little too Romantic, as in capital-R.

While the case was a true sensation Rome at the turn of the 17th century, the legend as we know it was heavily constructed in the 19th century … and specifically Percy Bysshe Shelley, who heard the story in Italy* where it had persevered as local folklore. A girl who killed her despot-father, executed by the despotic agents of the Divine Father? You don’t get into the canon without knowing what to do with that kind of material.

And he had this charming painting of her to boot:

Shelley amped up the menaced-virginal-purity theme, made the bloodshed a lot more demure, and turned it into a long poem, “The Cenci” (available on Google Books, and on Bartleby.com) which in Melville’s description proceeds from putting its protagonist between the “two most horrible crimes possible to civilized humanity — incest and parricide.”

This doesn’t all actually turn out to be well supported: at a minimum, Shelley inflated an incest allegation of doubtful lineage into accomplished fact. Beatrice’s camp did not raise this claim until just before her execution, when it needed a high card for clemency. The loutish victim eventually got his own biographer, who strongly disputed the incest charges. (Francesco also sports his own Italian Wikipedia page.)

From Shelley’s influential quill** into the DNA of western literature: Stendahl tapped the vein, as did Artaud, and risorgimento figure Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi; both Melville and Hawthorne used that painting so captivating to Shelley as plot devices (Dickens loved the painting, too). American sculptor Harriet Hosmer worked Cenci’s complex sensuality in marble.

Remarkable how the tradition in its modern incarnation proceeds root and branch from Shelley’s apprehension of a single painting, and how his reading stamped itself upon the canvas for later observers — like Hawthorne, writing in his journal:

It is the very saddest picture that ever was painted, or conceived; there is an unfathomable depth and sorrow in the eyes; the sense of it comes to you by a sort of intuition. … It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, or could do it again. Guido may have held the brush, but he painted better than he knew. I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of the subject or history; for no doubt we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of the picture.

He wrote better than he knew: the painting is no longer attributed to Guido Reni, and it’s doubtful whether it’s a portrait of Beatrice at all. One wonders if it would retain its place in Hawthorne’s estimation as a local washer-woman modeling for an allegory.

* Apparently you can still crash at the same place Shelley first got hep to Cenci.

** Kick back with some polysyllabic literary analysis of Shelley’s Cenci stuff.

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1538: Cratwell, a hangman

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This yere, the first daye of September, beinge Sondaye, at Clerkenwell, where the wrestlinge is kept, after the wrestlinge was done, there was hanged on a payre of gallowes, newe made, in the same place, the hangman of London and two more for robbinge a bouth in Bartlemewe fayre, which sayd hangman had done execution in London since the Holy Mayde of Kent was hanged, and was a conninge butcher in quarteringe of men.

A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559

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1593: Pierre Barrière, undeterringly

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On this date in 1593, a would-be assassin of France’s King Henri IV was broken on the wheel.

An Orleans boatman turned Catholic League soldier in France’s internecine Catholic-Huguenot wars, he was among the numerous Catholics who looked askance at victorious Huguenot Henri IV‘s expeditious conversion to Catholicism.

In the months while Henri IV still held Paris under siege, the Jesuit father Jacques Commolet had called for his assassination from the pulpit. The Bourbon’s (nominal) switch to Catholicism with the words “Paris is worth a mass” had not persuaded hard-core Catholic partisans of the king’s sincerity.

Henri was a practical guy. And with civil slaughter afoot for most of the late 16th century, he took a dim view to loose talk about assassinations, especially his.

The safety of the king’s person was a paramount consideration of magistrates during this period. Thirty years of political assassinations during which the rule of law proved largely ineffective in bringing the guilty to justice had ultimately left a fundamental law of France, the inviolability of the king’s person, subverted. Magistrates … focused their attention on re-establishing the enforcement of this law …

Pierre Barriere was nabbed for planning to subvert that inviolability — arrested August 27, tried August 30, horribly broken on the wheel August 31.

Henri would keep the throne 17 more years, laying the basis for French absolutism. But continual assassination bids — nearly 20 documented — would pursue him throughout his reign … until one finally got him.

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1571: Marco Antonio Bragadin, flayed Venetian

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On this date in 1571, the commander of a Venetian garrison was flayed by the Turks.

Marco Antonio Bragadin (English Wikipedia entry | Italian) — or Marcantonio Bragadin — was the captain of Famagusta as an Ottoman Empire near the peak of its power began to wrest Cyprus from eight decades of Venetian control.

The Turks sacked the wealthy Cypriot capital Nicosia in September 1570, slaughtering or enslaving the inhabitants. Bragadin thereupon received an inducement from the invaders to surrender the last Venetian outpost still remaining in Cyprus: the severed head of Nicosia’s general.

Bragadin was having none of it.

Milord pasha of Carmania,

I have seen your letter. I have also received the head of the lord lieutenant of Nicosia, and I tell you herewith that even if you have so easily taken the city of Nicosia, with your own blood you will have to purchase this city, which with God’s help will give you so much to do that you will always regret having encamped here.

The Famagustans didn’t get quite that much help from God, but they forced a dear purchase in blood. For nearly a year, they repelled the siege; starving and exhausted, they at last accepted a merciful surrender only to have the entire garrison slain (the link is in Italian) at the beginning of this month.

The entire garrison, save Bragadin.

Special torments were reserved for the general who had given them such trouble. Executed Today friend Melisende’s Historic Biography post on Bragadin recounts the nauseating Calvary of the Venetian: mutilated, dragged around his fallen fortress, then exposed on the docks for flaying alive. The skin was stuffed with straw and sailed back to Istanbul as a war trophy for the Sultan Selim II.

One can see here, of course, the narrative of East vs. West in a war for civilization itself, although one should observe that the overthrow of Catholic hegemony on Cyprus restored the privileges of the Orthodox church. But the fall of Cyprus was itself the backstory for one of the pivotal naval battles of the age two months later, the Battle of Lepanto, at which a league of Mediterranean powers including Venice decisively checked Ottoman influence at sea, pre-empting a likely invasion of Italy.

Bragadin, for his part, became a potent symbol blending civic and religious martyrdom in what turns out to be (post-Lepanto) a victorious cause. One might say that he fulfilled a need.

Cultures which have drawn nourishment from their legendary martyrs feel a need to prolong the spectacle of their suffering. They hark back to the desire to keep the dying man with them; and the memory of this desire strengthens their tales of holy victimhood, dramatizes them, keeps them alive. Bragadin’s torture was long-drawn-out, and it must be constantly remembered as such.

… Christians’ preoccupation with relics has been complex, enduring and, at times, feverishly obsessive. It has reached high points in moments when Catholic doctrines and practices have felt most dramatically threatened. During Marcantonio Bragadin’s lifetime, and during the period immediately following, Christendom trembled before the encroaching Muslims. In this context, the story of Bragadin’s martyrdom acquired particular potency: not because the Church proclaimed him a saint, but because by analogy, he seemed to bring the ancient Christian matrydoms up to the present. He seemed to make those sufferings real and explicit, lifting them out of their legendary fogginess. Step-by-step, piece-by-piece, he “demonstrates” the martyr’s ordeal, almost as in a manual of suffering.

Nor was the fulfillment merely conceptual. According to this page on Rome tourist destinations, the painting of St. Bartholomew‘s flaying executed for the ancient basilica of Santi Nereo e Achilleo in the 1600 Jubilee alludes directly to the more contemporary event — notice the dark, turban-clad figure on the left.

In 1596, one of the few survivors of Cyprus nicked Bragadin’s hide from Istanbul and returned it to Venice, where it remains today entombed as a relic at the Basilica di San Zanipolo.

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1514: György Dózsa, Transylvanian Braveheart

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On this date in 1514, the leader of a Hungarian peasant uprising that scared the ermine robes off the feudal nobles met a punishment from the unspeakable depths of their medieval imaginations.

While Marki Sandor’s 1913 biographical treatment of this character — also rendered Georghe Doja or Dosa, or as György Székely for his native soil — is available online, it seems to be available only in Hungarian.

Since readily-accessible non-Magyar sources such as Dozsa’s Wikipedia page all appear to spring root and branch from the public domain edition of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica … well, who is Executed Today to buck the trend? (Some paragraph breaks added for readability.)

GYORGY DOZSA (d. 1514), Hungarian revolutionist, was a Szekler squire and soldier of fortune, who won such a reputation for valour in the Turkish wars that the Hungarian chancellor, Tamas Bakocz, on his return from Rome in 1514 with a papal bull preaching a holy war in Hungary against the Moslems, appointed him to organize and direct the movement.

In a few weeks he collected thousands of so-called Kuruczok (a corruption of Cruciati), consisting for the most part of small yeomen, peasants, wandering students, friars and parish priests, the humblest and most oppressed portion of the community, to whom alone a crusade against the Turk could have the slightest attraction.

They assembled in their counties, and by the time Dozsa had drilled them into some sort of discipline and self-confidence, they began to air the grievances of their class. No measures had been taken to supply these voluntary crusaders with food or clothing; as harvest-time approached, the landlords commanded them to return to reap the fields, and on their refusing to do so, proceeded to maltreat their wives and families and set their armed retainers upon the half-starved multitudes. Instantly the movement was diverted from its original object, and the peasants and their leaders began a war of extermination against the landlords.

By this time Dozsa was losing control of the rabble, which had fallen under the influence of the socialist parson of Czegled, Lorincz Meszaros. The rebellion was the more dangerous as the town rabble was on the side of the peasants, and in Buda and other places the cavalry sent against the Kuruczok were unhorsed as they passed through the gates. The rebellion spread like lightning, principally in the central or purely Magyar provinces, where hundreds of manor-houses and castles were burnt and thousands of the gentry done to death by impalement, crucifixion and other unspeakable methods.

Dozsa’s camp at Czegled was the centre of the jacquerie, and from thence he sent out his bands in every direction, pillaging and burning. In vain the papal bull was revoked, in vain the king issued a proclamation commanding the peasantry to return to their homes under pain of death. By this time the rising had attained the dimensions of a revolution; all the feudal levies of the kingdom were called out against it; and mercenaries were hired in haste from Venice, Bohemia and the emperor.

Meanwhile Dozsa had captured the city and fortress of Csanad, and signalized his victory by impaling the bishop and the castellan. Subsequently, at Arad, the lord treasurer, Istvan Telegdy, was seized and tortured to death with satanic ingenuity. It should, however, in fairness be added that only notorious bloodsuckers, or obstinately resisting noblemen, were destroyed in this way. Those who freely submitted were always released on parole, and Dozsa not only never broke his given word, but frequently assisted the escape of fugitives. But he could not always control his followers when their blood was up, and infinite damage was done before he could stop it.

At first, too, it seemed as if the government were incapable of coping with him.

In the course of the summer he took the fortresses of Arad, Lippa and Vilagos; provided himself with guns and trained gunners; and one of his bands advanced to within five leagues of the capital. But his halfnaked, ill-armed ploughboys were at last overmatched by the mailclad chivalry of the nobles. Dozsa, too, had become demoralized by success. After Csánad, he issued proclamations which can only be described as nihilistic. His suppression had become a political necessity.

He was finally routed at Temesvar* by the combined forces of Janos Zapolya and Istvan Bathory.

The radicalism of this revolt is not to be downplayed; Friedrich Engels’ The Peasant War in Germany, reports that Dozsa declared a republic and abolished nobility.

As with his French predecessor Guillaume Cale, his punishment would demarcate the feudal order by horrifically mocking its victim’s pretension to political authority. This description of Dozsa’s unenviable end comes from The History of Hungary and the Magyars, a 19th century text available free at Google Books, beginning with :

[After hearing his sentence, Dozsa] exclaimed — addressing the crowd whom he saw shuddering at his approaching doom — “Come back tomorrow, you miserable slaves, and see if I shrink in the midst of my sufferings! If a single groan escapes my lips, may my name be covered with eternal infamy!”

On the following day, he was placed almost naked on a burning throne, and his head was encircled by a crown of red-hot iron. Fourteen of his followers had been kept without food for several days, and were then brought into his presence, and while he was yet living the flesh was torn from his bones and cast to them that they might satiate their hunger. “To it hounds!” was his bitter exclamation, “ye are of my own rearing!”

This insurrectionist’s confrontation with backward power structures would offer plentiful fodder for those lands’ now-fallen Communist regimes; his name adorns many streets and monuments in Hungary and Romania.

However, Dozsa was well on his way into the nationalist pantheon before Communist ascendancy. Nineteenth-century composer Ferenc Erkel, for instance,** wrote an opera about him, and poet/nationalist revolutionary Petofi Sandor saluted him in verse in 1847.

The latter text is available in Hungarian on Dozsa’s Hungarian Wikipedia page, which also attributes at least two plays about him to the Interwar period.

* aka Timisoara — in modern-day Romania, where the execution actually took place.

** Dozsa was actually captured in a fortress constructed by John Hunyadi, whose executed son is a fellow nationalist martyr (playing for the traditional-authority team), and the subject of one of Erkel’s more famous operas.


Sculpture of Gyorgy Dozsa burned on his throne, from Budapest’s Hungarian National Museum. (cc) image from redteam.

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1573: Wigbolt Ripperda, Haarlem city governor

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On this date in 1573, Wigbolt Ripperda was beheaded in Haarlem’s Grote Markt for having led a stubborn seven-month resistance to a Spanish siege.

Ripperda had been a Calvinist with a hand in the iconoclastic spasm against Catholic churches that had led to the beheadings of Counts Egmont and Hoorn a few years prior.

In the intervening years, relations between the Low Countries and the Spanish crown that ruled them had deteriorated into outright revolt — the germ of the decades-long struggle that would result in Dutch independence.

Haarlem had initially tried to keep its head down in the conflict, but had declared against Spain in 1572. That brought it into the sights of a vengeful Spanish army that greatly outnumbered Haarlem’s 4,000 defenders. Spurning any talk of compromise or capitulation, city governor Ripperda rallied his garrison and held out against the Spanish siege throughout the winter and spring.

In the end, starvation did the work that engines of war could not. Haarlem fell on July 12, 1573.*

Ripperda was beheaded with a lieutenant a few days later, but in winning the battle, Spain had suffered a setback in the war: besides the seven-month delay, other Calvinist strongholds took heart from the effective resistance and got a lot less cowed by the royal army.

While this day’s martyrdom made “Ripperda” a fixture in Haarlem place names, and despite a somewhat illustrious family tree that also includes a signatory of the Peace of Munster and a fascinatingly disreputable 18th century politician, actual Ripperdas are apparently hard to find in present-day Holland. According to American Tom Ripperda, who runs the family site ripperda.org, the name lives on only in the U.S. and Germany.

“In the 1830s the last of the Dutch Ripperdas died,” Ripperda told me. “There are no Ripperdas in the Netherlands since they moved to Germany (about 200 or so) and on to America (about 600 or so).”

* As to the vengeful mass executions visited on Haarlem, John Lothrop Motley conveys this anecdote.

Instead of Peter Hasselaer, a young officer who had displayed remarkable bravery throughout the siege, the Spaniards by mistake arrested his cousin Nicholas. The prisoner was suffering himself to be led away to the inevitable scaffold without remonstrance, when Peter Hasselaer pushed his way violently through the ranks of the captors. “If you want Ensign Hasselaer, I am the man. Let this innocent person depart,” he cried. Before the sun set his head had fallen.

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1535: Thomas More, the king’s good servant but God’s first

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On this date in 1535, Sir — later Saint — Thomas More kept his conscience at the expense of his head on Tower Hill.

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.

Yet it is for those gifts that he cut such a commanding presence in his times, for those very reasons that his sovereign hounded his first citizen to assent to the divorce and remarriage he was fixed upon.

A devotee and friend of Erasmus from years before, More was in Henry’s more orthodox youth the king’s very scourge of Protestantism. His scatological invective against Martin Luther in Responsio ad Lutherum — much in the impolite tenor of Catholic-Protestant rhetoric continent-wide, it should be noted — is of the sort to crimson the cheeks of the milquetoast modern:

Since he has written that he already has a prior right to bespatter and besmirch the royal crown with shit, will we not have the posterior right to proclaim the beshitted tongue of this practitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule until he shall have learned more correctly to infer posterior conclusions from prior premises?

Over that hairshirt, he wore the robes of state. But his engagement with the world had a selective bent that must have exasperated his colleague and predecessor as Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey. Orson Welles and Paul Scofield spar here in the definitive More hagiography A Man for All Seasons over the intellectual’s delicate refusal to dirty his gloves with the great matter of state before them — the annulment the king demanded of his marriage to the Queen (and More’s friend) Catherine of Aragon:

Peas in a pod, these two: Wolsey, the cleric grounded in realpolitik; More, the barrister who trusts to God. (More considered holy orders as a young man.)

Our man’s reputation for honesty in a den of hypocrites has certainly outrun Wolsey’s. Still, all More’s disdain for the deal-making that invests the sovereign majesty and all his foreboding for the relationship he had with his dangerous king were not quite enough to stop him accepting the Chancellorship and the opportunity to stamp out Lutheranism … knowing perfectly well the simultaneous thrust of Henry’s boudoir policy.

It all cuts quite a contrast to More’s (barely) pre-Reformation text, Utopia (available free from Project Gutenberg), which named a literary genre and described an imagined society of tolerant primitive communism that surely would have blanched at its inventor’s coming role in the state’s machinations:

I can have no other notion of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they please

…

[E]very man might be of what religion he pleased, and might endeavour to draw others to it by the force of argument and by amicable and modest ways, but without bitterness against those of other opinions; but that he ought to use no other force but that of persuasion, and was neither to mix with it reproaches nor violence* …

It’s not a given that More himself agrees with every (or even any) sentiment expressed in Utopia, but his most famous work’s criticism of the death penalty too liberally applied makes interesting reading.

[E]xtreme justice is an extreme injury: for we ought not to approve of those terrible laws that make the smallest offences capital … God has commanded us not to kill, and shall we kill so easily for a little money [i.e., execute petty thieves]? But if one shall say, that by that law we are only forbid to kill any except when the laws of the land allow of it, upon the same grounds, laws may be made, in some cases, to allow of adultery and perjury: for God having taken from us the right of disposing either of our own or of other people’s lives, if it is pretended that the mutual consent of men in making laws can authorise man-slaughter in cases in which God has given us no example, that it frees people from the obligation of the divine law, and so makes murder a lawful action, what is this, but to give a preference to human laws before the divine? and, if this is once admitted, by the same rule men may, in all other things, put what restrictions they please upon the laws of God.

This insistence on the supremacy of divine law over human institutions forms the basis of his objection to parliament’s overthrowing the papacy — which he expressed openly only after he was convicted by obviously perjured “jailhouse snitch” testimony

[Y]ou have no authority, without the common consent of all Christians, to make a law or Act of Parliament or Council against the union of Christendom.

Paul Scofield bears enjoying in the role in A Man for All Seasons:

More is sometimes suspected of desiring martyrdom since he marched so unerringly into it, but he also made every attempt to survive Henry’s demand the he affirm the royal remarriage and the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy by withdrawing silently from the public sphere rather than openly opposing it. More had by every account an enviable, downright happy life at his own hearth, and a tender and intellectual relationship with his favorite daughter Meg. (Meg corresponded with her father in prison, collected his works, and retrieved his head from London Bridge.)

But by his way of thinking — Meg tried to talk him out of it — he couldn’t swear to the Act of Succession acknowledging the king’s right to divorce Queen Catherine and disinherit her daughter Mary if Henry decided to force the choice. And in the king’s eyes, there was no middle ground for someone of the ex-Chancellor’s stature.

Henry could see to it, though, to cut his old friend a break and commute the sentence from drawing and quartering to “mere” beheading, here depicted in the past season of the Showtime series The Tudors.

More’s last moments as rendered here — the ironic remark at the foot of the scaffold, “See me safe up: for my coming down, I can shift for myself”;** his generous answer to the headsman’s plea for forgiveness — are well-documented. Undoubtedly, his sturdy martyr’s bearing, the extension of a life of joyful piety, helped cement for posterity the fame he held in life.

And that dying address — “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first” — gathers in one sentiment free of bombast or self-pity the irreconcilable demands of conscience that would lead many thousands besides More to Henry VIII’s scaffolds, and rings equally true to less lethal challenges to the conscience in every land and time since.

Anne Boleyn, who caused More’s fate, shared it less than a year afterwards.

Thomas More was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935 — the patron saint of politicians. Rather bizarrely, July 6 is also his feast day on the Anglican calendar, a tribute to the nearly universal regard his memory enjoys.

Thomas More's statue at the Chelsea Old Church

Chelsea resident Thomas More’s statue at the (Anglican) Chelsea Old Church.

* Despite its religious tolerance, More’s Utopia — anticipating Dostoyevsky — maintains:

a solemn and severe law against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature, as to think that our souls died with our bodies, or that the world was governed by chance, without a wise overruling Providence … since a man of such principles must needs, as oft as he dares do it, despise all their laws and customs: for there is no doubt to be made, that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law, and apprehends nothing after death, will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country, either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetites.

** According to the biography published by More’s son-in-law — who married More’s favorite, Margaret — the jest was occasioned by the rickety look of the scaffold. The Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly Greatness; Or, The Life of Sir Thomas More is available free on Google Books.

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1570: Aonio Paleario, Italian religious reformer

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On this date, Antonio della Pagliara was hanged across the Tiber from the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome for heresy.

The present-day view from the square where Paleario is thought to have been put to death, over the Ponte Sant’Angelo’s span across the Tiber to the Vatican’s imposing citadel.

Better known as Aonio Paleario (English Wikipedia entry | the considerably deeper Italian), the humanist scholar grew into his intellectual career just as Martin Luther’s doctrine was shaking Christendom.

Paleario’s positions were dangerously — and at length, fatally — close to Protestantism. He counted himself a humanist, a great admirer of Erasmus, who from the Low Countries managed to hold his critical positions without running afoul of the Catholic Church.

This would prove an increasingly difficult trick as the century unfolded … especially in the pope’s back yard.

Paleario’s most particular offenses were to take what amounts to the Lutheran side on the primacy of scriptural text over ecclesiastical tradition, and of salvation through Christ alone without the Church’s intermediation. (He also denied Purgatory.)

Since the Italian academic also cottoned to the Protestant-humanist critique of clerical corruption, he pitched Martin Luther and John Calvin on the notion of convening a Christendom-wide ecclesiastical council to reconcile competing sects. He seems to have wanted to reconcile the reformist current of humanism still within the Catholic tradition, and that of those critics who had broken, perhaps not yet irrevocably, with Rome.

The effort ultimately foundered. Instead, the curia-approved Council of Trent formulated a Roman Catholic doctrine that insured the permanent schism with Protestantism.

The Counter-Reformation was on. Still, with contending theologies — and contending polities — afoot in the Italian quiltwork plus his own towering reputation as the greatest orator in Italy, Paleario was able to find protectors and carry on. He taught in Siena, Lucca and Milan for more than three decades, surviving two bouts with the Inquisition before a Rome in crackdown mode finally pinned a heresy rap on him.

By that time, the septuagenarian didn’t much bother to fight it.

If your Eminences have so many credible witnesses against me, there is no need to give yourselves or me any further trouble … Judge, therefore, and condemn Aonio; satisfy my adversaries, and fulfil your office.

The office was fulfilled consuming the old man in flames, but they did extend the favor of hanging him (and apparently exposing the corpse for several days) first.

A book uncertainly attributed to Paleario, Beneficio di Criso (The Benefit of Christ’s Death) is available free at Google Books.

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1568: The Counts of Egmont and Hoorn, insufficiently Inquisitorial

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On this date in 1568, two Flemish nobles were beheaded at Brussels’ Grand Place for treason to the Spanish crown that then ruled the Low Countries.

Lamoral, Count of Egmont and Philip de Montmorency, Count of Hoorn had a beef with the introduction of the Inquisition into the Netherlands by Egmont’s cousin, King Philip II, and got to hanging around with dubious characters like William of Orange.

Unluckily for this day’s duo, William didn’t teach them to read the writing on the wall.

After the Counts went easy on an outbreak of Protestant Iconoclasm, the Catholic king sent the hammer in the person of the Duke of Alba (or Alva).

Let this long-expired generation counsel posterity to find itself elsewhere when one’s door is darkened by a man known as “the Iron Duke”. William had the wit to get out of town. Egmont and Hoorn hung around, depending on their (professedly) clean consciences.

Oops.

Count Egmont Before His Death, by Louis Gallait

The beheadings were widely protested both locally and abroad, and festered as a grievance against the empire — a grievance that, as the nascent conflict evolved into a revolution that would detach the Netherlands from Spain, elevated these distinctly non-revolutionary wealthy nobles into freethinking martyrs of independence.

Two centuries later, Goethe put the story on the stage with his play Egmont (original German | English translation), a production for which Beethoven subsequently composed gorgeous orchestral companion pieces.

Here’s the lovely, lovely Ludwig Van’s beloved (including by Goethe himself) Overture to Egmont, Op. 84:

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1593: John Penry, Shakespeare’s midwife?

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On this date in 1593, a Welsh divine with a poor impression of the Church of England was hustled off from dinner to be strung up for sedition.

Dismayed by the poor quality of pastors in his native Wales — men of poor character, poor education, and poor command of Welsh — John Penry was one of many calling for a reformed Episcopal clergy. Critiques of his type formed the germ of the Puritan movement already underway, which would blossom after his death.

Penry would have been around to see all that if he hadn’t hacked off the realm’s chief vicar by running a salty underground press, most notably publishing the pseudonymous Martin Marprelate.

(These satiric treats can be savored here. The identity of their author(s) has always been debated — Penry himself is one candidate, though not a fashionable one today, as his attributed writing seems too earnest to have come from the same pen as Martin Marprelate.)

Hold the Dessert

The Oxford man dodged the law for a good three years in the Scottish reaches, until he couldn’t resist moving to London, where (fittingly) a local clergyman recognized him.

The mere draft — nasty, but uncirculated — of a petition sufficed for the condemnation on grounds of sedition, and the annoyed Archbishop had the pleasure of inking his John Hancock on the Welshman’s death warrant.

Penry seems to have had a few friends in high places and some hope of cheating the executioner; he must have been taken by surprise when the sheriff burst in during the late afternoon this day to haul him immediately to a gallows at St. Thomas a Watering — unannounced, the better to keep attendance down,* with the prisoner denied the customary parting speech.

“Hang him with his pen”

But was Penry’s ill turn a boon to the world of literature?

The day after Penry’s execution, star English playwright Christopher Marlowe was killed in a fray whose timing some find a bit suspicious.

Some enthusiasts think Marlowe faked his death and went on to write Shakespeare under a pen name. And if he did that, his confederates would have needed a body to pass off as Marlowe’s … the body, perhaps, of a man of Marlowe’s age and class who’d just been hanged a couple of miles up the road.

The Welsh Martyr

Shakespeare aside, Penry remains “the Welsh martyr” to this day, reckoned the greatest Protestant martyr of his land. (For more about him, a sympathetic 19th century tract, John Penry, the Pilgrim Martyr, is available free from Google books.)

The injury of his draconian sentence is so far from forgotten in Wales that — hot off the presses — the 21st century Archbishop of Canterbury is being asked for a mea culpa on behalf of his 16th century predecessor.

Coincidentally, John Penry is also the name of a murderer and longtime death row prisoner in the USA, once the subject of a landmark decision** permitting the execution of the mentally retarded. That modern Penry is now serving a life sentence.

* Penry’s family and friends didn’t know about the hanging until it had already happened.

** Since reversed.

On this day..