The Burning Time Read online

  VIRGINIA ROUNDING

  THE BURNING TIME

  Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and the

  Protestant Martyrs of London

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  FOR NICK AND SARAH,

  AND FOR BEATRICE,

  AND IN MEMORY OF ANTHONY

  Now we see in a glass even in a dark speaking, but then shall we see face to face. Now I know unperfectly, but then shall I know even as I am known.

  I Corinthians 13:12 [The Matthew Bible]

  The same cometh often to pass, when as men be of diverse opinions, concerning their faith and religion: for albeit that many other matters make one to hate another, yet nothing is there that breedeth so deadly hatred, as diversity of minds, touching religion.

  John Christopherson,

  An exhortation to … beware of rebellion, 1554

  How long has Western culture been identified with democracy, toleration and respect for individual human rights? A clear-eyed examination of the record will show that, a few centuries ago, we were all – as it were – Islamic fundamentalists.

  Thomas M. Franck,

  ‘Is Personal Freedom a Western Value?’, 1997

  A Note on Language

  When quoting from contemporary sources in this book, whether from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, Letters and Papers or various chroniclers, I have taken certain liberties in the interests of comprehensibility and immediacy. At times, particularly when recounting lively exchanges at trials or ‘examinations’ for heresy, I have chosen to paraphrase or use deliberately modern idioms when recounting, or re-imagining, conversations, in order to convey the spirit if not necessarily the letter of the discussion. At other times, I have retained the exact wording as recorded by contemporary (or near-contemporary) chroniclers, not wanting to detract from their characteristic vividness. At all times, I have used modern spelling. My choices throughout have been dictated by the desire to put no unnecessary obstacles between the twenty-first-century reader and the voices of their sixteenth-century forebears.

  List of Illustrations

  SECTION ONE

  here – A portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder c. 1532 © FineArt / Alamy Stock Photo

  here – A portrait of Cardinal Wolsey by Hans Holbein the Younger © Ipswich Borough Council Museums and Galleries, Suffolk, UK / Bridgeman Images

  here – A monument in West Smithfield to commemorate Protestant martyrs © Martin Dudley

  here – A portrait of William Warham who was Archbishop of Canterbury, England, from 1504 by Hans Holbein the Younger © Peter Horree / Alamy Stock Photo

  here – A portrait of Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger from the Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016 / Bridgeman Images

  here – A portrait of John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, c. 1532–4 from the Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2016 / Bridgeman Images

  here – A portrait of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of King Henry VIII by Gerlach Flicke © Ian Dagnall / Alamy Stock Photo

  here – A chalk-and-ink sketch of Richard Rich by Hans Holbein the Younger © Print Collector / Getty Images

  here – A drawing of Lady Elizabeth Rich c. 1532–43 by Hans Holbein the Younger © Print Collector / Getty Images

  here – An illustration of the martyrdom of Richard Bayfield from Acts and Monuments by John Foxe © Private Collection / The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images

  here – An illustration of the burning of Anne Askew, John Lascelles, John Adams and Nicholas Belenian at Smithfield © The Print Collector / Getty Images

  here – An illustration of the martyrdom of John Cardmaker, Preacher and John Warne, Upholsterer © Look and Learn / Peter Jackson Collection / Bridgeman Images

  SECTION TWO

  here – An illustration of the martyrdom of Thomas Haukes from Foxe’s Martyrs © The Stapleton Collection / Bridgeman Images

  here – A photograph of a Pompeii victim in the characteristic ‘pugilistic posture’ © Science Photo Library

  here – An engraving of John Rogers, the first Protestant martyr to be burnt under Mary I © Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo

  here – An engraving of Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London by R. Cooper © Wellcome Library, London

  here – An illustration of the martyrdom of John Philpot, Archdeacon of Winchester © Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo

  here – An illustration of John Bradford with four unknown bishops © National Portrait Gallery, London

  here – An illustration of seven martyrs burned at Smithfield © Look and Learn / Peter Jackson Collection / Bridgeman Images

  here – A portrait of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury after 1547 © Lambeth Palace, London, UK / Bridgeman Images

  here – An oil painting of Cardinal Reginald Pole © Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

  here – A monument to Richard Rich in Felsted Church © Martin Dudley

  here – A memorial slab to Sir John Deane at the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great © Martin Dudley

  here – A photograph of the sanctuary of the ancient Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great © Neil Walker

  Introduction

  SETTING THE SCENE

  The past cannot be changed but we are responsible for how we remember it. What we extract and carry forward from what has gone before creates possibilities for the future or closes them off. In a sense we remember the future.

  The Rt Hon. and Rt Revd Dr Richard Chartres,

  the 132nd Bishop of London*

  ‘UNDER ITEM 2, there are no resolutions. Under Item 3, the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor to report on his overseas visits. Under Item 4, there is no statement. Under Item 5, the book is on the table.’

  Such sentences, pronounced in the sonorous tones of the gowned and bewigged Town Clerk of the City of London Corporation, are a standard part of the ritual of the monthly meetings of the Court of Common Council, of which I am an elected member, and which take place in the Great Hall of Guildhall, a ten-minute walk from the site of the horrific events which are central to this book. Being a member of the Court is in certain respects much like being a local councillor anywhere else – we are elected by people who live (and unusually, in the City, though nowhere else in the United Kingdom, by people who work) in one of the twenty-five ‘Wards’ or small districts which make up the ‘Square Mile’ of the City of London to represent their interests, and some of our time is indeed taken up with matters of parking, late-night noise from licensed premises, and litter collection. Our wider interests – the City has responsibility for managing some of London’s most famous open spaces, for instance, including Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest – and our support for the UK’s business interests, both at home and abroad, may also sound fairly familiar, and we all spend a lot of time in committee meetings. But other aspects of being a Common Councilman (as we one hundr
ed ‘Commoners’ are resolutely called, irrespective of gender) bear no resemblance to anything you are likely to find elsewhere in the modern world. Our ceremonial resembles that of a royal court somewhere in eighteenth-century Europe, and is nowhere more striking than in the annual ‘Silent Ceremony’, when the new Lord Mayor (chosen from among the twenty-five Aldermen, one per Ward) takes office, the only sounds the measured pacing (backwards) by officials as they present the various symbols of office, the scratching of the pen as the Lord Mayor signs his (or, occasionally, her) name, and the swishing of the tricorne hat as that of the outgoing Lord Mayor is replaced by that of the incoming. Then there are the state banquets we get to attend, with the state trumpeters relaying their fanfares from one end of the Great Hall to the other, and the speeches from Prime Ministers, Lord Chancellors and visiting heads of state.

  But most of all, perhaps, there is the sense of history itself, the awareness of being part of a tradition that may appear, at least on the surface, barely to have changed since the Middle Ages, members of the Court of Common Council having been elected by Wards in the City since 1384. There are many differences, of course, in my experience of being a member of the Court from those of my predecessors in the sixteenth century who witnessed – and, indeed, participated in – the events described in this book, the principal one being that I, despite being a Councilman, am a woman, which would have been unthinkable for most of the City Corporation’s history – but when we Commoners don our mazarine-blue gowns, and the Aldermen their scarlet, to march off in procession to some civic occasion, it’s not so very hard to imagine we’re setting off to watch some poor heretic being burnt at the stake.

  Actually that is an imaginary scene – there are no records of Common Councilmen being ordered to attend burnings, though the Lord Mayor and Aldermen were frequently in attendance, and the two City Sheriffs were generally in charge of the proceedings. What is not imaginary, however, is the tablet on the wall of the Great Hall of Guildhall, more or less opposite where I sit every month (always on a Thursday, at one o’clock in the afternoon), headed: ‘A list of some important trials held in this hall’. The very first entry on the list commemorates ‘Anne Askew: a protestant martyr [who] was tried in 1546 for heresy. Afterwards she was tortured on the rack in the Tower of London, carried in a chair to Smithfield and burnt aged twenty-five.’

  There are many questions arising from these two brief sentences. The first must be: who was Anne Askew, and what had she done to bring such a horrible end on herself at the age of only twenty-five? Who else was involved in Anne’s story, and why were the beliefs of this young woman of such concern to her contemporaries that they were prepared to set her on fire for them, and she was prepared to embrace that fate? This book will attempt to answer these, and other, questions.

  Anne Askew was burnt at the stake along with John Lascelles (a lawyer and Gentleman of the King’s Privy Chamber), John Hadlam (a tailor from Essex) and John Hemsley (a former Franciscan friar), on 16 July 1546. A great stage was built at Smithfield for the convenience of Chancellor Wriothesley, other members of the Privy Council and City dignitaries, to watch the burning in comfort. Anne herself, having been broken on the rack, was unable to stand, and was chained to the stake in a sitting position. John Louth, the Archdeacon of Nottingham, who witnessed the execution, described Anne as smiling throughout her torment and looking like an angel, and insisted that, at the moment of her death, there was ‘a pleasant cracking from heaven’. Whether that was the sound of the flames, or summer lightning, or merely a figment of the imagination, cannot now be determined; nor can we know how, or if, the witnesses could actually have identified the precise moment of death.

  So what was the terrible crime that Anne was deemed to have committed and that led her to this appalling end? Why was being a ‘Protestant’ or ‘reformer’ considered so heinous, and what was this ‘heresy’ with which she was charged?

  A word deriving from the Greek, ‘heresy’ originally meant merely ‘choice’, but by the Middle Ages it had come to mean ‘wrong choice’, especially in matters of religion. In Europe, and particularly Spain, the ‘Inquisition’ had been set up to identify heretics, with the aim of their contaminating heresy being cut out of society, like a cancer. Heretics were given one chance to ‘abjure’ or ‘recant’ – effectively, to make a public confession that they had been wrong, to accept some kind of ‘shaming’ penance (such as standing in front of a church congregation wearing a white sheet or being paraded through the streets on a cart), and to agree to follow ‘orthodox’ belief (‘orthodoxy’ meaning both ‘right doctrine’ and ‘right worship’) from now on. If a heretic, having recanted, fell back into his or her old ways, there was to be no second chance. They were to be handed over by the Church to the civic authorities for punishment – which meant death by burning.

  But the nature of what constituted heresy kept changing, particularly in England during the tumultuous years of the mid-sixteenth century. There were several types of possible heretical belief under the respective reigns of the three monarchs which constitute the burning time (the period which saw the greatest number of burnings for heresy) in Tudor England – Henry VIII, Edward VI and Mary I. Some were based entirely upon interpretations of religious doctrine; some hinged on changes in society and questions of authority and were linked to the increased availability of the printed word; others were dictated by the whim of the individual monarch.

  Purely religious heresies were associated with the new doctrines of Protestantism, originating from the teachings of Martin Luther and others. Luther’s central doctrine was that of ‘justification by faith alone’, which implied that the whole paraphernalia of the traditional Church, with its pilgrimages, processions and prayers to saints, was at best unnecessary and at worst wicked and a form of idolatry. The nature of priesthood was also called into question, including whether or not priests should be celibate. But the most important issue in the religious disputes of the time – and the one on which the fate of Anne Askew hinged – concerned what was believed to take place during celebrations of the Eucharist, or the Mass (or what Protestants referred to as Holy Communion). In the mid-1540s, to declare in the wrong quarters that the Eucharist was a commemoration of the sacrifice of Christ, rather than a sacrifice in itself, was to risk one’s life.

  For the Protestant, or evangelical, reformers, the ‘word’ (that is, the Bible – rather than the Catholic emphasis on ‘the Word of God’ as Christ himself) took precedence over the Mass. One of the things which most disturbed the orthodox about the teaching of Luther and his followers was that it involved ordinary people being encouraged to read the Bible, in their own language, for themselves. Previously, the faithful would only have heard selected extracts from the Bible, in the context of church services, being said or chanted in Latin (though there was a move, in the late 1530s and under Henry VIII’s authority, for English versions of the lessons – or readings – at Mass to be read out after the Latin). It was for the priest to understand the content of the Bible, as interpreted by the traditions of the Church, and for him to convey that interpretation to his flock. It was not up to his flock to decide for themselves what the word of God meant: so at least the hierarchy thought, and this became one of the main strands of opposition to the ‘Gospellers’, as the Protestants were sometimes known.

  The centrality of the question of authority also helps to explain why heresy was often closely aligned with treason. If people were allowed to interpret the scriptures for themselves, without the mediation of legitimately authorized priests and theologians, anything could happen – or so it seemed to those desperate to preserve (for reasons either of power or of genuine belief, or of a combination of the two) the approved interpretation as the only possible truth. Sir Thomas More, for instance, was convinced that such a relaxation of ecclesiastical authority and of inherited systems of belief would unleash mayhem on the world and lead to the collapse of the entire social order.

  In the time of th
e Tudor monarchs and before, most people maintained an unquestioning belief in the virtue of obedience to authority, whereas we, especially in the Western hemisphere, have now become very unused to the idea of authority being exercised over us – particularly over elements of what we consider to be our personal lives, of which our religious or spiritual beliefs (or lack of them) are seen as the most personal and private. But for many people living under Henry, Edward or Mary (and later under Elizabeth), having to negotiate the changes and chances of each reign, the most natural reaction to religious laws was to obey them with as little question – but maybe with as much covert grumbling – as the laws dictating which classes of people could wear which sorts of dress. This was what it meant to be a subject, and obedience, at least in outward things (including speech), was the surest way to survive. If you are used to being told what to wear (and sumptuary laws, or ‘acts of apparel’, were still being rigorously enforced in the reign of Elizabeth), perhaps you will also accept being told what to believe – at least until you begin to discover for yourself that what you are being told may not be right, or at best may not present the complete picture. This is the kind of realization that came to Anne Askew and people like her, a realization fostered by their own reading.

  Of the three monarchs whose reigns span the burning time, it was at least possible to know where Edward and Mary stood and therefore, in theory at least, to avoid ending up on the wrong side. They were, however, diametrically opposed – Edward being a firm, some might say bigoted, Protestant, while his half-sister Mary was a correspondingly staunch Catholic. So to remain ‘orthodox’ when one reign succeeded the other, their subjects had to perform some extreme voltes-face. Henry was more of a problem. It could be argued that he was responsible for the initiation of the whole process of heresy-hunting in England, as it was he who split off the English Church from Rome. Though his motives were primarily bound up with his desire to have his marriage to Katherine of Aragon annulled so that he could marry Anne Boleyn and have an heir by her, he also had some sympathies with the ‘new men’ or Protestants, particularly during the years he was in love with Anne, as she was herself a Protestant sympathizer. But on the other hand, Henry remained largely faithful to most Catholic doctrine, and it was mainly for falling foul of traditional religious beliefs – as Anne Askew did – that ‘heretics’ were burnt during his reign.