Religious Persecution - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1536: The Price of an English Bible: William Tyndale Strangled and Burned for Heresy

William Tyndale committed one crime: he translated the New Testament into English so ordinary readers could understand it for themselves, defying a Church that insisted scripture remain in Latin and under clerical control. Hunted across Europe by agents loyal to Henry VIII’s government, he was finally betrayed and arrested in Antwerp.

Tried for heresy, he was condemned and taken to the fortress town of Vilvorde, where in October 1536 he was strangled at the stake and his body then burned. Within a few years, an English Bible drawing heavily on his translation was being placed in every parish church in the kingdom that had killed him.

According to tradition, his final words were a prayer rather than a protest: “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.”

Portrait of William Tyndale from Foxes Book of Martyrs

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1572: The Red Wedding in St Bartholomew

On August 18, 1572, Protestant Henry of Navarre married Catholic Margaret of Valois in Paris, a union designed to end the bloody civil war between France’s Catholics and Huguenots. The peace did not hold. Just days later, on August 24, King Charles IX, acting under the influence of Catherine de’ Medici, authorised a wave of targeted killings against Protestant leaders in Paris.

What began as a series of assassinations spread into mass mob violence across France. Estimates of the death toll range from thousands to as many as 50,000, as Catholic mobs hunted down Huguenots in city after city. The wedding that was meant to unite a fractured nation had become the prelude to one of the worst religious massacres in European history.