Who Were the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales?
A new series
I should start this piece by addressing the subtitle: some of you (though not many) may be wondering what happened to the Church Fathers series, given that I’d only made it through the four great Latin Fathers. When I started that one following the Not Many Mighty series, I was excited about it. With so many Church Fathers to choose from surely the topic would keep me energized for at least ten installments or more.
Well, to quote John Mellencamp from his vastly underrated Big Daddy album: “sometimes a great notion…” The first four were great fun to write; after that, not so much, and I just cannot bring myself to write a thousand words on something in the “not so much” category. I may return to it someday, like I recently resurrected (no pun intended) the Three Minutes with the Saints series, but for now it’s on hiatus.
That hiatus was hastened considerably by the area of both Church and world history I have found myself far more interested in lately: the English Reformation, and in particular the Catholic martyrs of that era (a period from roughly 1533 to 1679). This was during the time that old rascal King Henry VIII broke with Rome (naming himself head of the Church in England), when his daughter Elizabeth I took the persecution of dissenting Catholics to a whole new level, and into…
