Tudors (History of England Vol 2) (41 page)

The importance of Scripture was also reaffirmed in a marked departure from the practice of medieval Catholicism; the cardinal, for example, ordered an English translation of the New Testament. The power of preaching was also recognized, and an array of preachers were brought out to refute the errors of the reformed faith. A crowd of 20,000 gathered to hear the Spital sermons, held at the pulpit cross in Spitalfields during Easter week. Bishop
Bonner aided the preachers in their task by supervising a set of instructions entitled
A Profitable and Necessary Doctrine
as well as a collection of thirteen model sermons. Everything was done to reacquaint the English people with their old religion, shorn now of its more superstitious features. It may be said in general that Mary tried to re-create the Catholic faith that had existed at the end of the reign of Henry VIII, and that in a real sense she was continuing her father’s work.

In a similar spirit the festivities and ceremonies associated with his rule were also revived. Church-ales, Plough Monday collections and Hocktide gatherings once more became popular; lavish church processions made their way through London on many sacred occasions. On the feast of Corpus Christi 1555, Bishop Bonner raised the sacrament in his hands at the head of a procession along Whitehall with many people ‘kneeling on their knees, weeping, and giving thanks to God’. The May games of the same year in Westminster were devoted to ‘giants, morris pikes, guns and drums and devils, and three morris dances, and bagpipes and viols, and many disguised, and the lady of the May rode gorgeously with minstrels’. The Lord of Misrule also returned ‘with his councillors and divers other officers, and there was a devil shouting of fire, and one was like Death, with a dart in hand’. So a Londoner, Henry Machyn, recorded in his diary.

Yet not all were merry. Two weeks after the Heresy Act was passed by parliament in the early days of 1555, a secret assembly of men and women was broken up; they were gathered, in a house in Bow Churchyard, for a service in English with prayers such as ‘God turn the heart of Queen Mary from idolatry, or else shorten her days’. The hunt was on.

The first to die in the course of the Marian campaign was John Rogers, a canon of St Paul’s who had preached against the Catholic reaction at the cross in the churchyard. It was he who was chosen, as it was put, to ‘break the ice’. He was taken the short distance from Newgate to Smithfield, and on his last journey was met by his wife and ten children, who welcomed him with cries of happiness as if he were on his way to a banquet. The
spectators along his route also cheered him. As he was being tied to the stake he was offered a pardon if he recanted, but he refused. The fire was lit. He did not seem to suffer but bathed his hands in the flame ‘as if it was cold water’. The burning time had come.

The bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper, was an early sacrifice. He was led from Newgate, his face muffled in a hood, and taken by his guards to his diocese where on 9 February he was tied to the stake. He suffered very badly since the green faggots were slow to burn; the fire reached only his legs and the lower part of his body; when it expired, the bishop called out ‘For God’s love, good people, let me have more fire!’, so a fiercer flame was kindled. A bystander wrote that ‘he smote his breast with his hands till one of his arms fell off; he continued knocking with the other, while the fat, water and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends . . .’ He suffered torment for another three-quarters of an hour, eventually ‘dying as quietly as a child in his bed’.

On the same day a weaver, a butcher, a barber, a priest, a gentleman and an apprentice were condemned to the fire by Bishop Bonner on the charge of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Soon enough the prisons of London were filled with other candidates for martyrdom. The legs of the priest had been crushed by irons after his conviction for heresy and so he was placed at the stake in a chair. It is reported by Foxe, in his account of the Marian fires, that ‘at his burning, he sitting in the fire, the young children came about and cried, as well as young children could speak, Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise – Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise’.

A young farmer was burned outside the north gate of Chester. A jar of tar and pitch was put on top of his head and, as the flames reached it, the combustible material poured down his face. At Stratford-le-Bow eleven men and two women died together in a single blaze; at Lewes ten were burned at the same time. Thomas Haukes, about to die, told his friends that if the flames were endurable he would show it by lifting up his hands. He clapped his hands three times in the fire before he expired. When a fire was lit on Jesus Green, Cambridge, books were thrown in to bolster the flames. One of them happened to be a communion book in English, and the suffering man picked it up and began to
read from it until the smoke and flame obscured the page. Another victim was said to ‘sleep sweetly’ in the fire. When a doctor of divinity proceeded on his walk to the stake he began to dance.

‘Why, master doctor,’ the sheriff asked him, ‘how do you now?’

‘Well, master sheriff, never better for I am now almost home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and am even now at my Father’s house.’

The manner of the execution may be described. A large stake or post was fixed in the ground with a step or ledge leading up to it. The victim was placed upon that ledge so that he or she might be visible to the crowd; the men were stripped to their shirts, and the women to their smocks. The victim was fastened to the stake with chains, but the arms were left free. Faggots of wood, and bundles of reed, were then piled about the stake. It was sometimes difficult to kindle or to control the fire. The wood might be too green, or the winds contrary. The friends of the victims sometimes tied little bags of gunpowder around the necks of those about to die, but on occasions they made too small an explosion and only increased the suffering.

It was customary for the victims to pray or sing before their execution. They knelt and prostrated themselves before the stake. Many of them then kissed the post or the wood piled about it. The spectators were not always or necessarily sympathetic to those who were about to die. On many occasions the victim was pelted with pieces of wood or rocks. When one dying man began to sing a psalm he was silenced by a blow to his head. ‘Truly,’ a religious commissioner amiably told the assailant, ‘you have marred a good old song.’ Street-sellers abounded and at a burning in Dartford ‘came diverse fruiterers with horse-loads of cherries, and sold them’. Anyone who brought a faggot to the fire was granted forty days’ ‘indulgence’ from the pains of purgatory; as a result parents instructed their children to bring wood for the flames.

Stephen Gardiner had believed that a few early burnings would suffice and that the terrible example would warn other heretics to be wary and remain silent. But his optimism was premature. The steadfast reaction of the martyrs, and the open sympathy of many who came to watch the proceedings, were enough to alarm him. It was said that one burning was worth more than a hundred sermons
against popery. He seems to have made some effort to call a halt, but it was already too late. In truth the campaign of terror may have worked; it is sometimes supposed that it was gradually curtailed because of mounting public opposition. It is more likely that there were in the end fewer heretics to burn.

The queen and Cardinal Pole, in particular, did not see any need to reverse their policy. Heretics were the breath of hell, a noxious danger to the health of the body politic. Anyone whom they corrupted would be damned eternally. In a pastoral letter to London, Pole wrote that ‘there is no kind of men so pernicious to the commonwealth as they be’. The queen herself considered them to be guilty of treason and of sedition, two of the greatest crimes imaginable to her. The tainted wether may infect the whole flock. She was, with this belief, in good company. The great reformer, Calvin, had declared that it was a Christian duty to destroy the preachers of false gods; he did indeed burn the Spanish theologian Servetus for his views concerning the Trinity. Cranmer had celebrated the burning of the Anabaptist Joan Bocher. Nobody really doubted the merit of burning, therefore, only its convenience in an already unsettled society.

In the four years of the stake almost 300 men and women perished, the preponderance coming from the south-east of England where religious reform had been most welcome. Under the auspices of Bishop Bonner 112 Londoners were killed, but only one man was burned in Yorkshire. This may be a sign of the incidence of the new faith in the north of England, but it may also reflect the unwillingness of the authorities there to persecute unto death. The majority of those who suffered were artisans and tradesmen, the independent workers of the community.

The great question put to them by their interrogators was ‘How say you to the sacrament of the altar?’ If they did not believe that Christ’s body and blood were physically as well as spiritually present in the bread and the wine, they were condemned for heresy. Bishop Bonner came to a judgment with the phrase, ‘for thou must needs be one of them’. To which the prisoner replied, ‘Yea, my lord,
I am one of them
.’ Another man spoke out with defiance: ‘Thought is free, my lord,’ he said. It was ordained that the more recalcitrant of them could be put to the torture. Three
months before her death the queen sent a letter of complaint to the sheriff of Hampshire; his offence was to cancel the burning of a man who had recanted at the first lick of the flame. It was thus that she earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’.

John Foxe, in
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs
, created a narrative of suffering that for centuries acted as a Protestant folk legend after its publication in 1563; he evoked a series of tableaux in which wicked priests and dissemblers destroyed the practitioners of the true religion. Yet these martyrs were not all of the same faith; among them were those who denied the divinity of Christ or who condemned the practice of infant baptism or who questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. When they were incarcerated in the same prison they often refused to pray together. It should be noted, in passing, that in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth some 200 Catholics were strangled or disembowelled. Many of those who died would also have been burned under the religious policy of Henry VIII.

Yet Foxe’s book effectively demonized Catholicism in England in the latter part of the sixteenth century; it would always after that date be fringed with fire.

Mary had not at the moment of the cardinal’s benediction. There was to be no blessed fruit. In April 1555, Elizabeth had been summoned under close guard from Woodstock to Whitehall, so that the heir presumptive might be present at the birth of the heir apparent. It was also a sensible precaution if the queen should die in the course of childbirth. Philip visited the princess two or three days after her arrival, and it was reported that subsequently he asked his wife to show forgiveness to her sister. The king also gave Elizabeth a diamond valued at 4,000 ducats. She claimed in later life that Philip had fallen in love with her, but it is more probable that he feared for his own safety in the event of his wife’s death. The people might rise up in revolt against him.

Mary was not in good health. The Venetian envoy reported that ‘she is not of strong constitution, and of late she suffers from headache and serious affection of the heart, so that she is often obliged to take medicine and also to be blooded. She is of very spare diet.’ He also reported that a young man had proclaimed himself to be the true Edward VI and thus ‘raised a tumult among the populace’; he was whipped through the streets and his ears cropped, but the incident could have done little for the queen’s serenity. Unrest was in the air. Any crowd that gathered in the
streets of London was dispersed. The summer of the year was bleak and wet; the crops failed and the fields were turned to mud. In the sixteenth century this was a natural disaster. The prices of staple commodities doubled and even tripled. There was the genuine prospect of death by starvation.

The happy moment of royal birth was supposed to arrive at the end of April. Mary retired to the relative peace of Hampton Court. The bells rang, and the Te Deum was sung in St Paul’s Cathedral; nothing transpired. Mary still professed herself to be confident, however, and said that she felt the motions of the child. The priests and choirboys continued to process through the streets of London, at the head of the poor men and women from the alms-houses who were telling their beads on behalf of their sovereign. The Holy Sacrament was paraded along Cheapside in a blaze of candlelight. Yet all the prayers were in vain. There was to be no child. She remained in seclusion throughout the month of May; she sat upon the floor, her knees drawn up to her face, in an agony of despair.

She wept and prayed. She believed that God had punished her. And her sin? She had failed in her duty to extirpate all the heretics in the realm; the beast of schism still endured. She came to believe that she would not safely be delivered of a child until all the heretics in prison were burned. On 24 May she directed a circular to her bishops urging them to show more speed and diligence in their pursuit of ‘disordered persons’. A holocaust of burnt offerings might bring fertility to her.