Well, not really. He preached a sermon at the Charterhouse, where in 1538, 14 Carthusian monks who refused to submit to Henry’s reforms, most importantly the Act of Supremacy and the dissolution of the monasteries. In 1611, the Charterhouse became the site of an Almshouse, which it remains. In recent years, there has been an annual commemoration of the martyrs’ and an effort to use the event as rapprochement between Catholics and Protestants. Williams’ sermon explores the connection between the suffering of Christ on the cross and the suffering of martyrs. He argues that as long as there is suffering in the world, Christ is in agony as well.

Williams points out that rulers more ruthless than Henry sought to destroy Christianity, but that they have been unsuccessful. The cross stands as a witness to the brutality of evil, but it also is a symbol of God’s ultimate triumph, the triumph of justice.

The money quote:

We treasure with perhaps a particular intensity the martyrdom of the contemplative, because the contemplative who knows how to enter into the silence and stillness of things is, above all, the one who knows how to resist to resist fashion and power, to stand in God while the world turns. In that discovery of stillness lies all our hope of reconciliation, the reconciliation of which John Houghton spoke in this place, this place where we are met to worship, before the community gave its answer to the King’s agents.  A reconciliation of which he spoke (as do so many martyrs) on the scaffold, a reconciliation which is not vanquished, defeated, or rendered meaningless by any level of suffering or death. If Henry VIII is saved (an open question perhaps) it will be at the prayers of John Houghton.  If any persecutor is saved it is at the prayers of their victim. If humanity is saved, it is by the grace of the cross of Jesus Christ and all those martyrs who have followed in his path.

It’s difficult to face the very human and fallible origins of Anglicanism, in the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth. But as hard as that is, we also need to face the same in our present church. The last two sentences of the quotation above remind us of our complicity in persecution, in every age.

The full sermon is here.