Tough Crowd

On May 30, 1582, [Thomas Cottam] was executed in the grisly way designed to demonstrate the full rage of the state: he was dragged on a hurdle through the muddy streets to Tyburn, past jeering crowds, and then hanged, taken down while he was still alive, and castrated; his stomach was then slit open and his intestines pulled out to be burned before his dying eyes, whereupon he was beheaded and his body cut in quarters, the pieces displayed as a warning.

-Stephen Greenblatt, from Will in the World

Cottam's crime, by the way, was being an undercover catholic priest in protestant England under the reign of Elizabeth I. More of a political thing than religous--Elizabeth didn't start seriously oppressing Catholics until the Pope issued a papal bull declaring that it would not be a sin to assassinate the Queen! The idea of an "undercover priest" is kind of cool, though, don't you think? Elizabethan England should be the setting for more genre films. Undercover priests roaming the countryside to excorcise demons. Shadowy conspiracies. Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistfull of Dollars scenarios with a protagonist playing Catholic conspirators and Protestant enforcers against each other. There's a lot of good shit there. I assume that most screenwriters were English majors, so you'd think they'd jump at the chance to write some iambic pentameter dialogue...