Samuel Johnson Quotes
If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.
Boswell, James. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Vol. 2, Charles Dilly, 1791, p. 37.
Hamilton had studied with Martin Luther at Wittenberg and returned to Scotland where he converted many from the Catholic Church. He was offered a chance to recant and spare his life but he refused. He became the first Protestant Martyr in Scotland and his death brought many new converts.
Plunckett was the last Roman Catholic martyr to be executed in Britain. He was accused of conspiring against the state by allegedly plotting to bring 20,000 French soldiers into the country, and for levying a tax on his clergy to support 70,000 men for rebellion. The English have always feared ever since Henry VIII severed England from the Roman Catholic Church, that the Papacy was plotting to restore Catholicism to England and sponsor an invasion of Ireland. And indeed that was true in several cases, but nowhere near as many as the English imagined. In this case, paranoia prevailed, and the trial was pretty much a farce, but he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered which he was.
Samuel Johnson, often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, playwright, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor, and lexicographer. Religiously, he was a devout Anglican, and politically a committed Tory. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes Johnson as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is the subject of James Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson, described by Walter Jackson Bate as "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature".
