Teresa was watching Wolfe Hall, The Mirror & The Light.
This got me interested in learning more about John Lambert – who is depicted in the episode we saw today – and that lead me to this post, on a blog called apuritansmind.
Lambert appears to have been one of those ‘simple souls’ that combine a fierce native intelligence (albeit of a very limited parochial sort) with an ornery conscience. The kind who dares speak their mind, and may even be willing to die for their beliefs, or ‘Faith’.
In the context of the febrile politics of Henry ‘Mad Butcher’ VIII’s Reformation period, such independent thinking, allied with sufficient conviction to stand by one’s beliefs, could and did bring those espousing them to rather nasty ends.
Reading the admittedly very obviously jaundiced account of a modern day Yankee Puritan makes Lambert’s trial look – and it most likely was – like a Nazi or Stalinist show trial.
One is reminded of the pathetic figure of General Field Marshall Erwin von Witzleben (no religious innocent, like Lambert, admittedly), holding up beltless trousers, as Judge Roland Freisler and the assembled Nazi jackals jeer at and mock him. Truly awful!
But, as Bl’Adder wittily remarks, in Ink & Incapability, ‘Sir Thomas More, for instance, burned alive for refusing to recant his Catholicism, must have been kicking himself, as the flames* licked higher.’
*Actually beheaded, not burned.