A most unpleasant surprise
Peter Cole was a tanner from Ipswich, although his year of birth is generally unknown. He found himself tried in Norwich for heresy and executed there, presumably in the Castle moat (below), which must have been something of a shock as it was 1587 and the heresy laws had been repealed again almost thirty years earlier. Cole was an Arian (1) and one of nine people burned during Elizabeth I’s reign, followed by another two under James I, as detailed here.
Just as we showed in this post, there was a distinct East Anglian emphasis to this smaller scale persecution, just as there had been in Mary I’s reign. Four of this nonet suffered in Norwich from 1579-89 and the others in London from 1575-93
. Two, or possibly three, were from the Netherlands. The cases of Matthew Hamont and Francis Kett, both Norfolk residents, are better documented than that of Cole and the latter was Robert Kett’s nephew. During this decade, Edmund Freke and then Edmund Scambler were Bishop of Norwich.
(1) As you can see, the Unitarians see themselves as heirs to the Arian tradition, whose followers in the centuries after the Norwich Four included Newton and Priestley.
Not all Unitarians had deep religious convictions. My grandmother chose to go to her local Unitarian church because she thought the hymn-singing was far better. That’s how my father grew up a Unitarian, not C of E! But then, burning was not a threat by then. At least…so I understand…
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