Mary I (above), the first-ever Queen of England to rule in her own right, died today in 1558. She spent her five-year reign trying to return England to Roman Catholicism (after her predecessor, Edward VI, son of Henry VIII, had turned England Protestant), but the pendulum swung back again when she died as the throne passed to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I. Mary was given the nickname ‘Bloody Mary’ by Protestants, because her crackdown on religious dissenters sent some 288 of them to burn at the stake. But the name is more than a little hypocritical, as some 5,500 people were massacred by Edward VI when they protested against the introduction of the Church of England Prayer Book.
‘She restored to the church such ornaments as in the time of schism were taken away and spoiled. She found the realm poisoned with heresy, and purged it; and remembring herself to be a member of Christ’s Church, refused to write herself head thereof. Which title, never no prince, a thousand and five hundred years after Christ, usurped; and she was herself by learning able to render a cause why.’ Funeral sermon for Queen Mary I by the Bishop of Winchester
Reginald Pole, a Cardinal and the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, died today in 1558, the same day as the Queen he served, Mary I, which was a shrewd move. He was almost elected Pope in 1550, but at the conclave, his belief in justification by faith led to a whispering campaign among the French cardinals that he was a closet Lutheran and a heretic. Pole died 12 hours after the Queen and was buried in Canterbury Cathedral.
Eric Gill died of cancer at the age of 58, today in 1940. An English sculptor and designer, his name has been most frequently invoked since his death in the beautiful typeface Gill Sans, which he created in 1928. He was a lifelong Catholic, creating many prints, carvings and inscriptions which express Christian themes, but his sexual exploitation of others, including his daughters, was uncovered in the 1980s.
Gregory the Wonderworker has his feast day today. A 3rd century Bishop of Neocaesarea in what is now northern Turkey, he came to the town as a missionary, when only 17 Christians lived there, but by the end of his life (according to an improbably neat legend) only 17 pagans remained to be converted. His thaumaturgy (wonderworking) was a marvel of the early church, with stories about how he stopped a plague, drove demons from a temple, commanded a huge stone to move on its own, and diverted the floodwaters of a river. He is also the first known person to report seeing a vision of the Virgin Mary.
‘Look on the martyrs disporting themselves in the presence of death, and taking up the jubilant strain of the victory of Christ. O the marvel! Since the hour when Christ despoiled Hades, men have danced in triumph over death.’ Gregory the Wonderworker, ‘On All the Saints’
Roque Gonzalez, a Jesuit missionary in Paraguay and Brazil, was stoned to death on the instigation of a local shaman today in 1628. Gonzalez had been working among the indigenous people, helping them form self-sufficient ‘reductions’, which were communities of about 3,000 people who lived in freedom and supported themselves with communal agriculture. The reductions were intended to protect the people from being enslaved and exploited by the Spanish conqusitadors.