ABSTRACT
On Trinity Sunday 1527, the reformer Thomas Arthur preached a sermon to his followers in which he told them: ‘think not that if these tyrants put a man to death … that he is an heretic therefore, but rather a martyr’.1 He was making a political statement as much as a religious one and he used a rhetoric which they easily understood. The English reformers believed that the true Church, as St Matthew’s Gospel had promised, would be identified by the suffering of those who endeavoured to follow the imitation of Christ in the face of persecution.2 The true Church, they believed, was a suffering community signified and legitimized by martyrdom.
