“Oh, that our Right Reverend Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more kings of England to put them to death!”[856] This he wrote in 1535, after the execution of Thomas More and John Fisher by Henry VIII. As early as 1520 he had exclaimed against Prierias: If thieves are punished by the rope, murderers by the sword and heretics by fire, why not proceed against “these noxious teachers of destruction—these Cardinals, Popes and the whole swarm of the Roman Sodom, who are ever ceaselessly destroying the Church of God—with every kind of weapon, and wash our hands in their blood?”[857] Towards the end of his life, in 1545, he showed that he was still faithful to such views in spite of all the changes which had come over some of his other leading ideas. Let “the Pope, the Cardinals and the whole scoundrelly train of his idolatrous, Popish Holiness be seized,” so he declares in “Das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” and put to the death they deserve, either on the gallows to which their tongues may be nailed, or by drowning the “blasphemous knaves” in the Sea at Ostia.[858] “It pleases me,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1536, to King Christian of Denmark, “that Your Majesty has extirpated the bishops who never cease to persecute God’s Word and to worry the secular power; I shall do my best to explain and vindicate your action.”[859] At Wittenberg, as we see from a letter of a Wittenberg theologian, the report was current that the Danish king had “struck off the heads of six bishops.”[860] This false account “seems to have been credited by Luther.”[861] If this be so, then it seems that he was perfectly ready to justify so cruel a deed. The truth is, that, King Christian, after having had the bishops arrested (Aug. 20, 1536), released them as soon as they had promised to resign their bishoprics. In the summer of 1540 Luther had it that the Pope and the monks were to blame for the many fires in Northern and Central Germany. “If this turns out true, then there will be nothing left for us but to take up arms in common against all the monks and shavelings; I too shall join in, for it is right to slay the miscreants like mad dogs.”[862] The worst of the lot, according to him, were the Franciscans. “If I had all the Franciscan friars in one house,” he said a few days later, “I would set fire to it, for, in the monks the good seed is gone, and only the chaff is left. To the fire with them!”[863]