Lentorama 2023: It Happened on Holy Saturday

Day 18: But was he a duck?

Edward Wightman grew up in what appears to have been relatively comfortable circumstances, was educated at a grammar school and went into the clothing business established by his mother's family. It was when he also became an Anabaptist minister that things started to take a turn.

As Wightman's status within his religious community grew, he became more comfortable voicing opinions on dogma that fell outside of orthodoxy. He believed in the mortality of the soul (saying it died with the body and was resurrected on Judgement Day), argued against infant baptism (saying that those being baptized should have an understanding of the sacrament), and rejected the Trinity. 

That last part is what really got him into trouble. He was charged with heresy and found guilty, not helped by a volume of theological arguments that he published to explain his views (a copy of which he sent to James I, maybe not the best thing to send the Defender of the Faith). Wightman was sentenced to burning at the stake, but when the time came he said he would recant, and was pulled from the flames.

Of course, he wound up not recanting, but repeated his beliefs even more passionately when he was brought back to court. Back to the fire he went, and on Saturday, April 11, 1612, Wightman became the last person to be burned at the stake in England for heresy. Not long afterwards James I decided that heretics should be locked away in prison, where they could be forgotten rather than become a public spectacle. It wasn't until 1677 that burning at the stake was legally proscribed as a punishment for heresy.