Thomas Hawkes

Thomas Hawkes was an English protestant martyr who burned to death in 1555 during the Marian Persecutions rather than allow his son to be baptised into the Roman [Catholic Church].
Responding to Edmund Bonner, the Bishop of London, who urged him to return to Catholicism, he is reported to have said: "No my Lord, that I will not, for if I had a hundred bodies I would suffer them all to be torn in pieces rather than I will abjure and recant." He was sentenced to be burnt at the stake in Coggeshall, Essex.
As he burned, Hawkes threw up his hands and clapped them three times, a sign to his friends that the pain could be endured.
Hawkes' death and the circumstances leading up to it are recorded in detail in John Foxe's Book of Martyrs.