Wednesday, Jun. 24, 2009
Making a Punishment Fit the Crime
He's known for ordering the execution of several of his political opponents and former wives, but Henry helped usher in another major legal punishment in 1531. After an incident where two of Bishop John Fisher's servants got food poisoning and died, and friend of the cook admitted to executing the stunt, Henry went to the House of Lords with a bill that would consider murder by poison high treason, making the guilty be boiled to death as punishment. The bill was eventually repealed in 1547; ironically, Fisher himself had been executed twelve years earlier for denying that Henry was the legitimate head of the Church of England.