Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion.
Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the 16th century of Tudor rule to keep the fires of Smithfield at bay. In the reign of Henry VIII, orthodox Catholicism was temporarily set aside to allow the monarch a divorce, in order to get his thigh across the reform-minded Anne Boleyn. Henry himself, however, remained resistant to the new faith.
Not so his son and successor Edward VI, who, though a child, was a cold fanatic in the cause of a more extreme evangelical order than England had ever know. Things changed again in the reign of Edward’s half-sister Mary, as fanatical in her Catholicism as Edward had been in his Protestantism.
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