page_title: Thomas Hawkes
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Hawkes
caption_attribution_description: English: Scan of a woodcut from the Book of Martyrs showing Thomas Hawkes being burned to death on Market Hill, in Coggeshall. Image retrieved by AGGoH from the website of the Rare Books department of Kansas State University.
context_page_description: Thomas Hawkes was an English protestant martyr who burned to death in 1555 during the Marian Persecutions rather than allow his son to be baptised into the Roman Catholic Church.
  Responding to Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, who urged him to return to Catholicism, he is reported to have said: "No my lord, that I will not, for if I had a hundred bodies I would suffer them all to be torn in pieces rather than I will abjure and recant." He was sentenced to be burnt at the stake in Coggeshall, Essex.
  As he burned, Hawkes threw up his hands and clapped them three times, a sign to his friends that the pain could be endured.
  Hawkes' death and the circumstances leading up to it are recorded in detail in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
context_section_description: Thomas Hawkes was an English protestant martyr who burned to death in 1555 during the Marian Persecutions rather than allow his son to be baptised into the Roman Catholic Church. 
  Responding to Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, who urged him to return to Catholicism, he is reported to have said: "No my lord, that I will not, for if I had a hundred bodies I would suffer them all to be torn in pieces rather than I will abjure and recant."  He was sentenced to be burnt at the stake in Coggeshall, Essex.
  As he burned, Hawkes threw up his hands and clapped them three times, a sign to his friends that the pain could be endured.
  Hawkes' death and the circumstances leading up to it are recorded in detail in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
caption: Thomas Hawkes on Market Hill; he is saying "O Lord receive my Spirit"
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