Ada: A crowd gathered in the open ground between the castle and the city gate. They bound him to a high wooden post with an iron chain around his body.
Theo: If the sentence was strangling first, why the stake at all?
Ada: The post held him upright. The executioner looped a hemp cord through holes in the stake and around his neck — the strangling came first, the fire after, so he'd be dead before he burned.
Theo: That was considered a mercy.
Ada: It was. Now, tradition — and the martyrologist John Foxe — records the date as the sixth of October, fifteen thirty-six. But the surviving Brabant records only say early October, without the precise day.
Theo: So we're not even certain of the date of one of the most important executions in English history.
Ada: We're not. And here is the moment everyone remembers. Before the cord tightened, Tyndale called out, in a loud voice — Lord, open the King of England's eyes.
Theo: The king who outlawed his Bible. He prayed for him.
Ada: He did. Then the executioner twisted the cord to strangle him. And here accounts differ — some martyrologist traditions say the strangling failed and he was burned still half-conscious, while the official Flemish procedure recorded him dead before the flames.
Theo: Which do historians lean toward?
Ada: We honestly can't resolve it. What's certain is the torch came down, bags of gunpowder detonated, and his body was consumed. They swept the ashes into the River Senne.
Theo: So they tried to erase him completely. No grave, no body, no book.
Ada: That was the whole intent — Habsburg church and civil authorities wanted his voice and his text gone without a trace. But an executioner can burn a man. He can't burn a smuggling network. The ashes drifted down the Senne, but the manuscripts had already crossed the channel.