Protestantism in England From the Times of Henry VIII - James Aitken Wylie

up, and about to sweep over the land. Did he
therefore desist from his work of burning men or
did he counsel his royal mistress to abandon a
project which could be carried through only at the
cost of the destruction of the best of her subjects?
By no means. The device to which he had recourse
was to put forward a colleague, a man yet more
brutal than himself--Bonner, surnamed the Bloody-
-to do the chief part of the work, while he fell a
little into the background. Edmund Bonner was the
natural son of a richly beneficed priest in Cheshire,
named Savage; and the son ought never to have
borne another name than that which he inherited
from his father. Educated at Oxford, he was
appointed archdeacon at Leicester under Henry
VIII, by whom he was employed in several
embassies. In 1539 he was advanced to be Bishop
of London by Cromwell and Cranmer, who
believed him to be, as he pretended, a friend to the
Reformation.
Upon the enactment of the law of the Six
Articles, he immediately "erected his crest and
displayed his fangs and talons." He had the thirst of
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