Page "Joan Bocher" Paragraph 3

Bocher developed an interest in Anabaptist ideas, and took up the idea of Christ's celestial flesh, " not incarnate of the Virgin Mary ".. She was arrested as a heretic in 1548 and convicted in April 1549.

Then followed a year's imprisonment during which various well-known religious figures were enlisted to try to persuade her to recant.

She was unmoved, and Cranmer was involved in bringing her to the stake on 2 May 1550, though accounts of him forcing Edward VI to sanction this-with Edward " driven to pen the mandates ", as Wordsworth put it-may be inaccurate.

John Foxe approached royal chaplain John Rogers to intervene to save Joan, but Rogers refused with the comment that burning was “ sufficiently mild ” for a crime as grave as heresy.

Rogers himself was later burnt during the Marian persecutions.