A Lad for God - William Hunter

"......a young man named William Hunter. 

William was only 19 years old when he was chained to a wooden stake and burned alive at the age of 19 on 27 March 1555.

Q: His crime? 

A: Reading the Bible.

By the time William was apprenticed to a silk weaver in London, he was aware that, contrary to the claims of the Roman Catholic

Church, the wafer used during the Mass did not turn into the actual body of Christ. Consequently, when a royal edict went throughout the City of London requiring everyone to attend the weekly Mass, William refused. 

 

Because of this, he lost his job and returned to his parents’ home.

William longed to read more from God’s Word, so he sometimes slipped into the old medieval chapel where he quietly read from the “Great Bible” that was chained there. 

One day the servant of the Bishop caught William reading the forbidden book. 

 

...Then the bishop, calling William, asked him if he would recant, and finding he was unchangeable, pronounced sentence upon him, that he should go from that place to Newgate for a time, and thence to Brentwood, there to be burned..... he was condemned with five others in the consistory of St Paul's on 9th February 1555.

 
About a month afterward, William was sent down to Brentwood, where he was to be executed. On coming to the stake, he knelt down and read the Fifty-first Psalm, until he came to these words, "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise." Steadfast in refusing the queen's pardon, if he would become an apostate, at length one Richard Ponde, a bailiff, came, and made the chain fast about him.

 

On Sabbath, March 26, 1555, William Hunter was burned at the

stake because he loved God’s Word and refused to relinquish the truths he had found in the Bible.

 

The site is now Brentwood School, which was founded by Antony Browne in 1558. The Martyr's Elm was grown on the spot of Hunter's incineration."

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