halfacanuck: Holy capriciousness

January 19, 2007 - 01:30 AM

Holy capriciousness

Thomas Cranmer ... had believed, with a fervor that many people today will find hard to understand, that it is the duty of every Christian to obey the monarch, and that "the powers that be are ordained of God" (Romans 13).
As long as the monarch was ordering things that Cranmer thought good, it was easy for Cranmer to believe that the king was sent by God's providence to guide the people in the path of true religion, and that disobedience to the king was disobedience to God. Now Mary was Queen, and commanding him to return to the Roman obedience.

Cranmer five times wrote a letter of submission to the Pope and to Roman Catholic doctrines, and four times he tore it up. In the end, he submitted. However, Mary was unwilling to believe that the submission was sincere, and he was ordered to be burned at Oxford on 21 March 1556.

At the very end, he repudiated his final letter of submission, and announced that he died a Protestant. He said, "I have sinned, in that I signed with my hand what I did not believe with my heart. When the flames are lit, this hand shall be the first to burn." And when the fire was lit around his feet, he leaned forward and held his right hand in the fire until it was charred to a stump. Aside from this, he did not speak or move, except that once he raised his left hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

From Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley, & Thomas Cranmer.

Comments and trackbacks

Here are the erudite, piercing and profoundly arousing comments and trackbacks left so far by my alert readers regarding this entry (you too can make me tumescent by leaving a comment of your own):

Hey Ross,
Long time no talk. Don't be stranger.

Dave Smith – January 27, 2007 03:15 PM

Be a stranger. Be one of those strange, incoherently rambling, and inappropriately groping kinds of strangers.

Conflicted yet?

Marina – January 29, 2007 06:24 PM

I said don't be stranger, and this certainly has.

dave – January 30, 2007 02:30 PM

Hey, remember that one time, when you actually regularly updated your blog? Man, that was pretty sweet.

And remember that other time you suddenly stopped the updates, as if you found more important things to do? That was damn lame.

Jess – February 8, 2007 01:24 AM

And remember that time I left a comment in your blog, and the only supposed humor was poorly written, intentionally false nostalgia? Man, that wasn't very funny.

JEss – February 8, 2007 01:25 AM