Thomas Hawkes was an English protestant martyr who burned to death in 1555 during the Marian Persecutions rather than allow his son to be baptised into the Roman Catholic Church.
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Responding to Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, who urged him to return to Catholicism, he is reported to have said: "No my Lord, that I will not, for if I had a hundred bodies I would suffer them all to be torn in pieces rather than I will abjure and recant." He was sentenced to be burnt at the stake in Coggeshall, Essex.
As he burned, Hawkes threw up his hands and clapped them three times, a sign to his friends that the pain could be endured.[1]
Hawkes' death and the circumstances leading up to it are recorded in detail in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
References
edit- ^ Foxe, John (1810). "The life and martyrdom of Thomas Hawkes". An abridgement of the Book of Martyrs. pp. 284–290. Retrieved 16 July 2010.