Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth centuryGriffiths, Arthur
History
Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1: From the twelfth to the eighteenth century
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
Henry, was, however, impartial in his severity. In 1533 he suffered
John Frith, Andrew Hewett, and other Protestants, to the number of
twenty-seven, to be burned for heresy. The years immediately following
he hunted to death all who refused to acknowledge him as the head of
the Church. Besides such imposing victims as Sir Thomas More, and
Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, many priests suffered. In 1534 the prior
of the London Carthusians, the prior of Hexham, Benase, a monk of Sion
College, and John Haite, vicar of Isleworth, together with others, were
sentenced to be hanged and quartered at Tyburn. In 1538 a friar, by
name Forrest, was hanged in Smithfield upon a gallows, quick, by the
middle and the arm-holes, and burned to death for denying the king's
supremacy and teaching the same in confession to many of the king's
subjects. Upon the pile by which Forrest was consumed was also a wooden
image, brought out of Wales, called "Darvell Gatheren," which the
Welshmen "much worshipped, and had a prophecy amongst them that this
image would set a whole forest on fire, which prophecy took effect."
The greatest trials were reserved for the religious dissidents who
dared to differ with the king. Henry was vain of his learning and of
his polemical powers. No true follower of Luther, he was a Protestant
by policy rather than conviction, and he still held many tenets of the
Church he had disavowed. These were embodied and promulgated in the
notorious Six Articles, otherwise "the whip with six tails," or the
Bloody Statute, so called from its sanguinary results. The doctrines
enunciated were such that many could not possibly subscribe to them;
the penalties were "strait and bloody," and very soon they were widely
inflicted. Foxe, in a dozen or more pages, recounts the various
presentments against individuals, lay and clerical, for transgressing
one or more of the principles of the Six Articles; and adds to the
aforesaid, "Dr. Taylor, parson of St. Peter's, in Cornhill; South,
parish priest of Allhallows, in Lombard Street; Some, a priest; Giles,
the king's beer-brewer, at the Red Lion, in St. Katherine's; Thomas
Lancaster, priest; all which were imprisoned likewise for the Six
Articles." "To be short," he adds, "such a number out of all parishes
in London, and out of Calais, and divers other quarters, were then
apprehended through the said inquisition, that all prisons in London,
including Newgate, were too little to hold them, insomuch that they
were fain to lay them in the halls. At last, by the means of good
Lord Audeley, such pardon was obtained of the king that the said Lord
Audeley, then Lord Chancellor, being content that one should be bound
for another, they were all discharged, being bound only to appear in
the Star Chamber the next day after All Souls, there to answer if they
were called; but neither was there any person called, neither did any
appear."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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