The burning of Derfel-Gadarn
Here’s a kinda long one to make up for lost time! It’s been a busy week. Lots of interesting threads for further research…
In the 16th century, Thomas Cromwell was a Rasputin-like figure for Henry VIII. He orchestrated the king’s marriages, annulments, and the Church of England’s infamous break from Rome. Cromwell made it a policy to publicly undermine the old Catholic faith of Englishmen by insulting and abusing what had previously been held in veneration.
One of his targets was a wooden statue of Derfel Gadarn, or Derfel the Strong, a Welsh hermit from 1,000 years prior who had come to the aid of King Arthur. Often, he was depicted in a wood statue as a mounted soldier; in the above example, his body has been sadly lost.
John Forest, meanwhile, was a confessor to Henry VIII’s wife Catherine of Aragon, but condemned to die for refusing to acknowledge the King as head of the church.
In jarringly plain language, in the 1914 Lives of English Martyrs, here is how these men came together:
As [Cromwell] had lately destroyed the Rood of Boxley and other holy images before a heretical mob, so he now had the statue of St. Derfel sent up to London, and decided that it should be publicly burnt along with Forest, as in fact it was.
(Incidentally, the Rood of Boxley sounds really cool — it was a crucifix with a mechanized likeness of Jesus on it, whose eyes moved as if they were alive and could even shed tears. Cromwell’s idiotic claim was that audiences believed the marionette was actually alive, rather than what it clearly was: a worshipful engineering marvel.)