The Burning Time Read online

  Richard Bayfield had been born at Hadleigh in Suffolk, took his monastic vows at the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds in 1514, and was ordained priest four years later. In the early 1520s he had the responsibility of looking after visitors to the Abbey (the provision of hospitality being an important aspect of Benedictine life) and this was how he came to be acquainted with the man who would change his life – Robert Barnes, who had come to the Abbey to meet with a former fellow student at Louvain (or Leuven) University in the Duchy of Brabant (now in Belgium). At the time of his meeting with Bayfield, Barnes was based at the University of Cambridge and was one of a group of scholars and preachers who used to gather informally at the town’s White Horse tavern to exchange ideas about biblical texts and the new doctrines coming out of Germany. Barnes gave Bayfield a copy of the Latin translation of the New Testament by the humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (whom Barnes would have encountered at Louvain). Erasmus’s text had been published in 1516, and comprised a new edition of the New Testament in Greek with his Latin translation printed on the facing pages. Conservative elements in the Church had been perturbed at the idea of this new translation presenting a challenge to the old and accepted Latin version by St Jerome, known as the Vulgate, and Erasmus’s annotations to his Greek text also at times differed from the tradition. But Bayfield seems to have been hungry for knowledge and soon found himself drawn to the new ideas espoused by Barnes and his friends. In addition to Erasmus’s Greek and Latin New Testament, Bayfield was given (by two ‘godly men of London’, who were travelling with Barnes) William Tyndale’s translation of the same text into English, along with two other books by Tyndale. These were The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (which comprised an argument in defence of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith) and The Obedience of a Christian Man.

  Such straying from the paths of orthodoxy did not go down well with Bayfield’s superiors, and two years later – two years during which he had spent much of his time reading and thinking – his abbot confined him to the abbey prison, in the hope that he would come to his senses. Instead, after about nine months (during which time Bayfield was allegedly whipped, gagged and placed in the stocks), Robert Barnes managed to negotiate his release from the prison (Barnes was clearly skilled in the art of persuasion) and took him back with him to Cambridge. In the atmosphere of learning, discussion and enthusiasm which he encountered there, Bayfield became ever more convinced of the rightness of the new teachings.

  One year after Bayfield had been ordained to the priesthood in 1518, another young man – John Deane, the future Rector of St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield – went through the same process (though he had chosen the secular, rather than the monastic, route). Both men were probably aged around twenty-four at the time of their ordination, this being the earliest age at which men could be ordained priest in the early sixteenth century. John Deane came from a family of yeomen farmers who owned a small amount of land in Shurlach, near the village of Davenham. The town of Northwich, where Deane states in his will that he was born, was just under two miles away and was itself about eighteen miles east of Chester, close to the border between England and Wales.

  Nothing is known for sure about John Deane’s education, but any man presenting himself for ordination was likely to have received elementary education as a boy. He would have learnt how to read and particularly how to say his prayers, in both Latin and English. Prior to putting himself forward for ordination to the lowest of the main, or holy, orders – that of subdeacon – he may have been admitted to the minor orders, and served as an acolyte in his local parish church (St Wilfrid’s, Davenham, in the young Deane’s case). The next step would be to prepare for his ‘examinations’, at which he would have to demonstrate that he fulfilled a number of criteria. He had to be of legitimate birth, at least eighteen years old, and unmarried. He must never have murdered anyone, be able to demonstrate that he was not seeking a clerical position through simony (that is, through having bought the position) or fraud, and he must also not be suffering from any physical disability. (Readers of C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels will recall the hunchbacked lawyer’s bitterness at having had his early vocation to the priesthood rejected on these grounds.) It was possible to apply for a papal dispensation in the case of disability, but this could be a costly business, with no guarantee of success. These ‘examinations’ into the candidate’s personal circumstances and suitability generally took place a few days before the ordination to the subdiaconate.

  A further examination would be required before a subdeacon could proceed to ordination as a deacon (for which the minimum age requirement was nineteen). This time a sound knowledge of scripture, music (at least such musical skill and knowledge as were necessary to sing the services) and liturgy was expected of the candidate. By the time the deacon was ready to become a priest (at the age of twenty-four), he would need to be able to demonstrate his competence in Latin. (In a report on the archdeaconry of London in 1561–2, towards the end of his ministry, Deane was described in the following terms: ‘latine aliquid intelligit’ – ‘he has some understanding of Latin’.) In practice, men were often not ordained as subdeacon until they had reached, or nearly reached, the age at which they could also become a priest, so that the whole process – that is, the three ordinations – might take place over the course of eighteen months or so.

  In addition to passing the various tests of eligibility, it was at the first of these stages – at the point of ordination as a subdeacon – that a man had to provide evidence of his ability to support himself financially; this meant he had to prove either that he had the ‘title’ to a benefice – that he had, in modern parlance, a church job already lined up – or that he had a private income, deriving from his family. Once all these hurdles had been overcome, the young men seeking ordination would appear before the bishop of their diocese, at a ceremony advertised in advance by archdeacons and rural deans. Ordinations generally took place four times a year on the so-called Ember Days – that is, on the Saturdays in the third week of Advent (December), the first week of Lent (February or March), immediately before Trinity Sunday (May or June) and closest to the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin (September). The ceremony of ordination involved the laying on of hands by the bishop; a new priest would also be invested with a chasuble, paten and chalice, symbolic of the fact that he was now able to celebrate the Mass.

  At no point did most candidates for the priesthood have to demonstrate an ability to preach, and only those who attended university (not the majority) or who were members of a preaching order such as the Dominicans received any training in how to do so. Preaching sermons was of less importance to the ordinary parish priest than celebrating the Mass and, when such a priest was called upon to preach, there were collections of homilies he could use – either as a basis for his own words or as a straightforward text to be read out verbatim. There were plenty of such texts available for use, one of the principal aids to preaching being the Festial compiled by John Mirk, an Augustinian canon, in 1508 which gathered together improving stories about the saints, many of them drawn from the medieval Golden Legend. Collections of sermons were also produced by various learned men of the Church, including Bishop Fisher of Rochester and Bishop Longland of Lincoln, with the intention of helping priests combat the spread of Lutheran ideas in their parishes.

  At the time John Deane and his contemporaries were seeking ordination, there was an insufficient supply of benefices to meet the demand, and consequently it often fell to a religious house – a priory, convent or monastery – to act as a patron to a young man by providing him with a ‘title’. Deane, who was ordained priest by the Bishop of Lichfield on 18 June 1519, was sponsored by Vale Royal Abbey, a Cistercian foundation situated between Northwich and Winsford.

  Given the sponsorship of Vale Royal, which was local to his home, it is likely that John Deane began his priestly ministry in Cheshire, though there are no records of his having done so. By 1535 he had moved south, to Middlesex, wh
ere he was Rector of Little Stanmore, the largest single estate of St Bartholomew’s Priory; his parishioners would not have numbered more than a couple of hundred (in 1547 the number of communicants in Little Stanmore totalled 127, of whom 91 were adult males). His stipend was £6 13s 4d.

  The connection between John Deane and St Bartholomew’s, offering an explanation as to how he came by this fairly lucrative rectory, so far from his origins in Northwich, is to be found in Sir Robert Blagge, near whose chapel in the quire of the Priory Church John Deane requested to be (and is) buried. Blagge was also born in Northwich, and Deane’s request to be buried near him, along with the age gap between the two men (Blagge was considerably older than Deane), suggests that Blagge may have acted as Deane’s patron and mentor.

  At the time of Deane’s ordination to the priesthood, Sir Robert Blagge was a long-standing inhabitant of the parish of St Bartholomew and one of its most influential parishioners. He had served as Remembrancer to King Henry VII, was listed as a baron of the exchequer in 1511 and held various other Crown appointments. From 1515 he had been joint Surveyor of Crown Lands and in 1519 was Surveyor General in the counties of Chester and Flint. He died in 1522, and his funeral was held at St Bartholomew’s, with Prior William Bolton officiating (Sir Robert having made this particular request in his will). It is tempting to imagine the young priest John Deane in attendance, making his first acquaintance with the Priory Church which was to play such a large part in his life, then still in its glorious days as part of a great monastic complex. Sir Robert may also have been instrumental in furthering Prior Bolton’s career, Bolton having taken over the responsibilities of Master of the King’s Works in 1504, when Sir Robert was the King’s Remembrancer. The connection between the Blagges and St Bartholomew’s extends to Stanmore, for it was here that Sir Robert’s son George died a somewhat untimely death in 1551. There is therefore strong circumstantial evidence to support the suggestion that Sir Robert, between Deane’s ordination in 1519 and his own death in 1522, persuaded his friend Prior Bolton to award the living at Little Stanmore to his young protégé from Northwich.

  The acquisition of an influential patron was of prime importance in sixteenth-century England, in all walks of life, particularly for young men whose own families were not wealthy or well placed. The fortunes of Richard Rich, whose life we are tracing in parallel with that of John Deane, improved considerably once he had identified and secured a useful patron. It is entirely in keeping with Rich’s character that a degree of uncertainty exists as to his origins. There were a number of branches of the Rich family, and Richard appears to have laid claim to various relatives throughout his life as and when it suited him. Though the evidence is not definitive, it is generally agreed that he was born in Basingstoke in 1496 or 1497 to John Rich of Penton Mewsey, Hampshire, and his wife Agnes. The family may have been prominent in the Mercers’ Company (the foremost livery company of the City of London), a succession of men called Richard, Thomas or John Riche having been Master Mercer in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Our Richard’s father John owned a house in Islington, Middlesex, which he left to his son in 1509, and the young Richard may have grown up in, or at least near, the City (Thomas More, definitely a Londoner, claimed at his trial to have known him in his youth) and he may have been educated at Cambridge University. (He is listed in Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigiensis as ‘probably sometime a member of the university’.) What is certain is that he was admitted to the Middle Temple as a lawyer in February 1516.

  The Middle Temple and the other three Inns of Court (the Inner Temple, Gray’s Inn and Lincoln’s Inn) were established by the middle of the fourteenth century, with the exclusive right of calling their members to the English Bar as barristers. The name ‘Temple’ derives from the Knights Templar who had been in possession of the Temple site for over 150 years, until they were dissolved in 1312. Middle Temple (along with its neighbouring Inner Temple – there is, confusingly, no ‘Outer Temple’) was – and still is – a so-called liberty, an area independent of any parish and consequently outside the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Bishop of London; neither was it, historically, governed by the City of London Corporation. So, though it falls geographically within the boundaries of the City, it can be thought of as an independent enclave.

  The young Rich does not appear to have done anything in particular to distinguish himself from the other young lawyers at Middle Temple, beyond being very ambitious. In his Records of St Bartholomew’s Priory, E. A. Webb expressed the opinion that Rich ‘does not seem to have been a deeply read lawyer, but such knowledge as he had, added to great astuteness, carried him a long way’. John Lord Campbell, in his Lives of the Lord Chancellors of 1846, had little good to say about Rich, describing him as ‘through life a very consistent character in all that was base and profligate’. He also considered that Rich ‘early displayed an aspiring genius, and a determination to have all the pleasures of life without patient industry, or being very scrupulous about the means employed by him to gain his objects’.

  Rich demonstrated his ambition in 1526 by standing for election for the common serjeantship of the City of London, a senior legal position, but unsurprisingly he lost to the Crown’s nominee, William Walsingham. Two years later he was appointed a Commissioner of the Peace (or magistrate) for Essex and Hertfordshire, and it was through contacts in Essex that he found the breakthrough he had been looking for. Two significant men now appear among Rich’s close acquaintance. One was John de Vere, an Essex magnate and the 15th Earl of Oxford, a member of whose council Rich had become by 1529. The earls of Oxford, in common with other members of the nobility, used their councils to conduct administrative matters, particularly when they themselves had to be absent from their estates, and to provide legal advice over such business as the sale or purchase of land, the management of trusts and the arrangement of marriages. The second man of importance to Rich was born in the village where the earls of Oxford had their manor, Earls Colne: the barrister and judge Thomas Audley. Rich would already have known Audley by sight, as he too was a Middle Temple lawyer, but it was with his appointment as a magistrate for Essex that he came into closer contact with him, as Audley had been appointed to the same role in 1521. It is likely that it was Audley who introduced him to John de Vere – but Audley himself was the real prize for Rich. Once the connection had been made, where Audley went, Rich was never far behind.

  In 1523 Audley had become the Member of Parliament for Essex and he continued to represent this constituency in subsequent parliaments. In 1527 he held a position at Henry VIII’s court as Groom of the Chamber and also became a member of the household of Cardinal Wolsey. On Wolsey’s fall in 1529, Audley was made Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and the same year became Speaker of the House of Commons, presiding over the famous assembly which came to be known as the Reformation Parliament (lasting from 1529 to 1536) and which included among its achievements the abolition of papal jurisdiction over the Church of England. Audley was joined in that parliament by Richard Rich, who was returned as the member for the borough of Colchester, a seat in the virtual control of Rich’s other patron, the Earl of Oxford.

  A central figure during the early years of the Reformation Parliament was the Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, whose intensity, concentration and unwavering focus are conveyed clearly in the portrait painted of him in 1527 (two years before he became Lord Chancellor) by Hans Holbein the Younger. One of More’s principal preoccupations – alongside his ultimately unwinnable struggle to maintain his loyalty to both King and Pope – was the battle against heresy, and against Lutheranism in particular. A man on whom he had his eye in this regard was Thomas Bilney, a graduate fellow of the University of Cambridge, a priest, and one of the ‘new men’ encountered in that town by the Benedictine monk Richard Bayfield, after he had been rescued by Robert Barnes from incarceration in his abbey.

  Bilney, often referred to as ‘Little Bilney’ on account of his diminutive stature (though it has
been pointed out that a more fitting description might have been ‘aggressive’ or ‘tough-minded’ Bilney), was an adherent of the central Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone. Though he condemned superstition and corruption in the Church, he did not view himself as a ‘Protestant’ and did not depart from many traditional teachings, including the headship of the Pope. Bilney had himself been converted to the cause of evangelical reform by reading Erasmus’s Latin New Testament. In 1527 he had embarked on a preaching tour around the country, though he was licensed to preach only in the diocese of Ely, and he also distributed copies of Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament which, having gone on sale in London early in 1526, had been banned by Thomas More’s friend Cuthbert Tunstall, then Bishop of London. Such activities led to Bilney’s arrest and questioning by Bishop Tunstall, who persuaded him to recant. He was imprisoned for a year in the Tower, and subsequently returned to Cambridge full of remorse at having betrayed his beliefs under pressure.

  Despite King Henry’s desire to be free of the constraints of Rome and the Pope, he was himself no supporter of Martin Luther or of those identified by More as heretics. Though he was influenced by Erasmus and believed the Church to be in need of reform, he was bound to be wary of any movement that threatened to undermine the authority of hierarchies and princes. He was also very devout and heard Mass several times daily, though he was not particularly interested in pilgrimages and was never enamoured of monasteries. He had vigorously defended the Mass in 1521 in a polemic he had written (possibly with the help of Bishop Fisher) against Luther, entitled the Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (‘Defence of the Seven Sacraments’), for which work Pope Leo X, to whom it was dedicated, rewarded him with the title Fidei Defensor (‘Defender of the Faith’). In the Assertio Henry defended the traditional understanding of the Mass and of transubstantiation, while not insisting on the use of this specific word. ‘No one would trouble Luther to believe in transubstantiation,’ the King declared, ‘as long as he believes that the bread is changed into flesh and the wine into the blood.’