Our fathers, chained in prisons dark
Were still in heart and conscience free;
And blest would be their children's fate,
If they, like them, should die for thee.
-----Hymn, Faith of Our Fathers
John Rogers was born about 1500 near Birmingham, England. He graduated from Cambridge in 1526 and served as a priest. This was a time of change and Rogers was in the middle of it. Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses to the Wittenberg church door in 1517. Europe was experiencing religious upheaval. People were thinking in new ways as old rules and bonds were being thrown away. William Tyndale’s English New Testament was printed in Germany in 1525 and smuggled into England. Reading the Scripture in their own language caused many Englishmen to question Catholic doctrines.
Rogers resigned his parish position in late 1534 and accepted a post as chaplain to English merchants in Antwerp. The Low Countries were in the crossroads of the Reformation and soon he met William Tyndale. Under his influence Rogers abandoned Catholic doctrine and became a Protestant. Their friendship was short lived for Tyndale was arrested in 1535 and burned at the stake for his religious views. After Tyndale’s death Rogers continued the work by preparing Tyndale’s translations along with notes and prefaces for a complete English Bible. The work was finished in 1537 and printed by Jacob Van Meteren in Antwerp. Rogers used the pseudonym, Thomas Matthew, no doubt, to try to protect himself from Tyndale’s fate, and the work is called “Matthew’s Bible.”
In the meantime, Rogers married Adriana de Weyden, the niece of Jacob Van Meteren. “She was more richly endowed with virtue and soberness of life than with worldly treasure.” Rogers accepted a post as a protestant pastor in Wittenberg. He continued to work on Bible translations and then moved back to England in 1548. The country had become Protestant under Henry VIII and moved farther from Catholic practices under his son Edward VI. But the new king died in 1553 and his Catholic half-sister Mary came to the throne. The country held its breath as it waited to see how she would lead.
Rogers didn’t wait. Three days after Mary arrived in London he preached a sermon reminding listeners of “such true doctrine as he and others had there taught in King Edward’s days, exhorting the people constantly to remain in the same, and to beware of all pestilent Popery, idolatry and superstition. ” He was brought before the Queen’s council, removed from his pulpit, and told to confine himself to his own house. He was registered as “John Rogers alias Matthew” so his work with the English Bible was known to them. He was soon in Newgate Prison with other Protestant ministers. After a year of imprisonment his trial was only a formality and he was sentenced to death. His request to talk to his wife was denied on the basis that as a former priest his marriage vows were invalid.
On February 4, 1555 Rogers was taken from his cell. He recited Psalm 51 as he was marched to his place of execution. His wife and eleven children, unable to visit him in prison, stood along the road. His wife held up their youngest, a baby that Rogers had never seen.
He was given one last chance to recant. He refused saying “that which I have preached I will seal with my blood.” The fire was lit and it is said that Rogers ‘washed his hands in the flames as though he did not feel them.’
John Rogers was the first Protestant martyr to be executed for his religious beliefs during Mary I’s reign. She would only live three more years, but by then she had executed 283 Protestants, most of them by burning, earning her the name ‘Bloody Mary.’
Connections: John Rogers married Adriana de Weyden, my first cousin 13x removed.
Jacob Van Meteren, printer of the Matthew Bible was my 12th great grandfather.
Jacob’s great grandson Jan Joost Van Meteren emigrated to America in 1662 and one of his descendants married into the Cook line and thence into the Strange-Horlacher family.
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