Sir William Sautre
SIR WILLIAM SAUTRE
Richard II was deposed in 1399 and succeeded by Henry IV. In 1400, during a meeting of Parliament at Westminster, Sir William Sautre, a good man and faithful priest, asked permission to speak for the good of the kingdom. The bishop present, suspecting that he wanted to address the subject of religion, convinced Parliament that the matter should be referred to the church convocation; so on February 12, 1400, Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, and his provincial council held a hearing with Sautre.
They charged that he had previously renounced several heretical opinions but continued to teach and preach them. The charges against Sautre, the parish priest of St. Scithe the Virgin in London, were as follows:
He would not worship the cross on which Christ suffered.
He would rather worship a temporal king, the bodies of the saints, or a contrite man than the cross.
He thought it was more important for a priest to teach the Word of God than say the canonical hours.
He believed that the consecrated bread of Communion remains bread and is not physically the body of Christ.
Sautre was given time to prepare an answer to these charges, reappearing before the convocation the following Friday, February 18. He refused to abandon his beliefs and was given one more day to consider his position. Still adamant on the nineteenth, Sautre was ordered stripped of all his church offices: priest, deacon, subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, reader, sexton, and even doorkeeper. Reduced to the state of layman, Sautre was then handed over to the secular legal authorities, and the church petitioned the king to execute him—something it could not do itself. King Henry readily agreed, becoming the first English king to ever put a heretic to death; Sir William Sautre became the first Englishman to suffer martyrdom in Henry’s reign.
After Sautre’s death, others who believed as he did took pains to conceal themselves while the unpopular king gathered what support he could by doing the will of the church, legally condemning the books of Protestantism, and making the burning of anyone convicted of heresy legal in England.