1555: John Hooper
Add comment February 9th, 2012 Headsman
On this date in 1555, English Calvinist John Hooper fell victim to Mary Tudor’s abortive bid for Catholic restoration.
A onetime monk on the receiving end of the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Hooper got the evangelical bug by reading Zwingli and became more un-Catholic than the anti-pope.
That meant that in quasi-Catholic Anglican England, he had to hot-foot it over to the continent a couple of times to keep out of trouble.
Even when more aggressive reformers took the lead after Henry VIII died, Hooper proved a gadfly; he’s noted for setting off the decades-long “vestments controversy” with his denunciation of the “Aaronic” ceremonial garb donned by priests.
(Hooper himself had to work out a compromise just to be ordained in garb sufficiently modest to satisfy his conscience.)
He survived the fall of his patron Edward Seymour, but the death of Edward VI and the ensuing succession of the Catholic Queen Mary Tudor was Hooper’s demise. Historians may debate whether “Bloody Mary” really deserves her unkind nickname, but had she left a proto-Puritan loose cannon like Hooper unmolested, she would have indeed been a little lamb.
Hooper — naturally — took solace from the Word, “as St. Paul that loved the policy, laws, order, and wisdom of the Romans, yet disliked very much the vice and naughtiness of Nero, unto whom he submitted, and willingly brought into servitude both his body and goods, and rebelled not, though Nero was a naughty emperor, for his office sake, which was the ordinance of God.”
A large collection of Hooper’s writings (including the foregoing) is available at this Google books freebie.
On this day..
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- 1768: Quamino (Dubois) - 2019
- 1866: Dr. John Hughes, Cleveland bigamist - 2018
- 1883: Milton Yarberry, Marshal of Albuquerque - 2017
- 2015: Liu Han, former tycoon - 2016
- 1887: Clement Arthur Day - 2015
- 1943: The last five Young Guards shot in Krasnodon - 2015
- c. 415 B.C.E.: The men of Melos - 2014
- Podcast: One For Ten - 2013
- 2013: Afzal Guru, India parliament attack terrorist - 2013
- 2011: Martin Link - 2011
- 1619: Lucilio Vanini, aka Giulio Cesare - 2010
- 1929: José de León Toral, assassin of Álvaro Obregón - 2009
- 1963: Abd al-Karim Qasim, Iraqi Prime Minister - 2008
Entry Filed under: 16th Century,Burned,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,England,Execution,God,Heresy,History,Martyrs,Public Executions,Religious Figures
Tags: 1550s, 1555, february 9, john hooper, mary tudor, tudor england
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