The Burning Time Page 4

  Broadly speaking and for the purposes of understanding what the argument was about, the Catholic doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’ affirms that the bread and wine really do become the flesh and blood of Christ – the change is one of ‘substance’ in the Aristotelian sense (‘substance’ meaning a thing’s deepest being, what it is in and of itself, which is not necessarily the same as how a thing appears to the senses). Though after the words of consecration, there may appear to have been no change – the elements still look, taste and feel like bread and wine, as Protestants so frequently pointed out under interrogation – this outward appearance constitutes only the ‘accidents’ of the elements and not their substance.

  Luther’s attitude towards this doctrine was not actually as negative as Henry seems to have thought, Luther’s principal objection focusing on its being made into a dogma demanding adherence, rather than on the concept in itself – so this particular attack on Henry’s part may have been unnecessary, but he also attacked Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone. This was the doctrine which appeared most to undermine the authority of the Church and to threaten social order – if both priests and ‘good works’ were unnecessary for salvation, what was to prevent people doing whatever they liked?

  To Thomas More, both Martin Luther and William Tyndale were disciples of the Antichrist. There was no time to lose in combating them, and nothing less than complete eradication of heresy was an option. But he made a distinction between the ‘simple’ man or woman who had been led astray through ignorance, to whom ‘little rigor and much mercy’ should be shown in setting them right, and the educated man who was defiantly and persistently heretical in his beliefs and, worst of all, determined to persuade others into error. Of heretical books he wrote: ‘when they be drunken down [they] infect the reader and corrupt the soul unto everlasting death’. This is why someone like Little Bilney, a university man who had been instrumental in converting other educated men to the evangelical cause, including Robert Barnes, John Lambert and the future Bishop of Worcester Hugh Latimer (all of whom would die for their beliefs), was of such concern to him.

  In 1529, More published the first of several works against heresy, entitled A dyaloge of sir Thomas More knyghte, in which he set out an imaginary conversation between ‘Master Chancellor’ (a thinly disguised version of himself) and ‘A Messenger’, who had been sent by his master to discuss his questions about various doctrinal matters. Not mentioned by name, but present by implication within this conversation, is the case of Little Bilney, whose public trial two years previously had aroused much interest and a fair degree of sympathy, especially in London. The words More puts into the mouth of ‘Master Chancellor’ stress the danger of the slippery slope involved in listening to, and being influenced by, the initially innocuous-sounding ideas propounded by Bilney. For More, ‘every heretic was related to every other heretic, and to oppose one was to oppose all, just as to accept one was to accept all. Thus, to hold even the most minor of heretical opinions risked a total destruction of the edifice of faith.’

  London’s first heretical community had been that of the so-called Lollards, the name (coming from an old word meaning ‘to mumble’) their enemies gave to the followers of the teachings of the fourteenth-century John Wycliffe, a philosopher and theologian of some distinction, who had been profoundly concerned by the failings of the contemporary Church. Wycliffe was a committed evangelical reformer who reached two conclusions, both firmly based on the logic of his own philosophy and his reverence for the Bible as ‘the mirror of eternal truth’: that all human beings are predestined either to salvation or to damnation, and that therefore their own actions, however meritorious they may appear, cannot affect their fate; and that the bread and wine of the Mass are not annihilated and transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Wycliffe did not intend to devalue the Eucharist, but held that its significance had been perverted. By the time he had been condemned as a heretic in 1382, he had attracted many followers. Knowledge of the scriptures, and in English, was the touchstone of the Lollard faith, an attitude shared by the sixteenth-century reformers. ‘At the heart of both faiths lay the conviction that Scripture alone enshrined all religious truth, and that to every layman belonged the right to find that truth for himself.’ Lollardy had reared its head in England at various times since the death of Wycliffe, and Bishop Tunstall had been closely involved in its repression in the early 1500s in the county of Kent, when he was acting as chief commissary of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Warham.

  Thomas Bilney came to feel such remorse at having been persuaded in 1527 by the same Bishop Tunstall to renounce his dearest beliefs that, four years later, he felt obliged to set off on another unlicensed preaching tour. Thomas More in his Dyaloge had characterized the policy of persuasion exercised by Tunstall at Bilney’s trial as ‘charity’; the implication in what he wrote, however, was that if ‘charity’ did not work – if, in particular, it did not succeed in silencing the educated (and educating) heretic – then stronger measures would have to be taken, in the interests of protecting others from heresy. Furthermore, certain heretical ideas might lead to disorder in society and, should that be the case, then the civil authorities had not only the right, but the duty, to take action to stamp them out. And if the only way to stamp out heretical ideas was to put to death those who propounded them, then so be it. The justification for the death of one heretic was the stability of society and the salvation of many innocent Christians, who might otherwise have been led astray. In his last extant letter to his friend Erasmus, written around June 1533, More confirmed his attitude towards heretics: ‘I find that breed of men absolutely loathsome, so much so that, unless they regain their senses, I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be; for my increasing experience with those men frightens me with the thought of what the world will suffer at their hands.’

  This, briefly, is the theoretical background to the second trial and sentencing of Thomas Bilney who, in 1531, having demonstrated that ‘charity’ had indeed proved ineffective in silencing him, was convicted of heresy and burnt in Norwich, the first university-educated heretic in England to suffer this fate for propounding the ‘new learning’.

  Having been inspired to devote himself to that ‘new learning’ by Bilney and fellow scholars in Cambridge, the priest Richard Bayfield had moved to London where he was sheltered by other sympathizers – for he was still technically a monk, now absent without leave from his monastery. In the meantime his first mentor Robert Barnes had been arrested and was being held in the Fleet prison. It seems likely that Bayfield left England for a time and, on his return, became involved in smuggling prohibited books into the country.

  A fundamental element of the dispute surrounding the ‘new learning’ centred on the act of reading – what was allowed to be read, and by whom. As not everyone could read for themselves, the act of reading was supplemented by that of preaching, with, again, the authorities seeking to control both who might preach and what they might say. While he was in London, in 1527, it was Bayfield’s declared intention to preach every day in a City church (St Vedast, Foster Lane, was his chosen venue, very close to St Paul’s and known then as ‘St Foster’s church’), and it was on account of his preaching – and his declaration that a priest should be permitted to preach without having to obtain a licence to do so – that he was arrested for the first time, early in 1528.

  At his trial before Bishop Tunstall, Bayfield – like Bilney – was persuaded to abjure (or recant), and for penance was instructed to take part in a procession in the church of St Botolph’s Billingsgate, walking in front of the cross and carrying a faggot of wood on his shoulder as a symbol of the fate he had avoided through his recantation. He was also ordered to appear again before the bishop on 25 April, to receive the rest of his penance, but instead he fled abroad for a brief period. He was back before Bishop Tunstall on 20 June, when he was instructed to don his monk’s habit again and return to the abbey at Bury
St Edmunds. He did so, but only briefly, before again absconding abroad.

  In June 1530 a proclamation was promulgated against heretical or ‘pestiferous’ books, printed abroad in English, and confirming the Bishop of London’s order of 1524 that no new books were to be imported without episcopal licence. The banned books included Tyndale’s Wicked Mammon and The Obedience of a Christian Man, the very books which had been among the first to be given to Bayfield and which he was now enthusiastically engaged in helping to distribute. Anyone in possession of these texts was ordered to surrender them to their bishop or parish priest. The proclamation also made clear the authorities’ position on access to the scriptures by lay people. The King, according to the proclamation, had considered the question of whether the scriptures should be available in English and had consulted on the matter with the church hierarchy and ‘a body of divines from Oxford and Cambridge’. The conclusion reached had been that:

  it is not necessary to have the Scriptures in English in the hands of the common people, but that the permission or denial thereof should depend upon the discretion of the superiors; and, considering the malignity of the present time, a translation into English would tend to the increase of error. It is, therefore, more expedient that the people have the Scripture expounded to them by preachers in their sermons as heretofore.

  But there was no holding back a zealous reformer like Bayfield who, having discovered what he believed to be an urgent truth about the need for change, felt compelled to share his discovery with others. He would not take the easy option of staying in hiding once out of the country, but instead took it upon himself to become the main supplier of forbidden books, obtaining them in the Low Countries and particularly in the major trading city and port of Antwerp, and getting them shipped back to England. He sent three major consignments, the first routed via Colchester in 1530, a second via St Katharine by the Tower in London later that same year, and a third via Norfolk in 1531. At least one of these consignments was intercepted by Sir Thomas More. In addition to texts by Luther and copies of Tyndale’s New Testament, Bayfield was intent on supplying English Christians with works by the German theologian Oecolampadius, John Lambert (later a fellow victim of burning) and Zwingli, a leader of the Reformation in Switzerland.

  Andrew Hope, the compiler of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s entry on Richard Bayfield, remarks that he ‘showed signs of not always appreciating the extreme danger he was in’, being inclined to indulge in indiscreet conversations with people who did not necessarily share his views. He was arrested at a bookbinder’s establishment in London sometime around October 1531, imprisoned, and interrogated by More. The latter appears to have believed that Bayfield had two wives, thereby compounding his guilt (one wife would have been too many for a monk), but there is no evidence to support this allegation. Bayfield was held before trial in the Bishop of London’s coalhouse (a small, windowless dwelling which served as the bishop’s prison and a frequent place of confinement for those on their way to Smithfield, as it turned out) in very unpleasant conditions, forced to remain standing, shackled to the wall by his neck, waist and legs, in the hope that he would name people to whom he had delivered his consignments of prohibited books. But he gave nothing and no one away. At his appearance before Bishop Stokesley and a number of other high-ranking officials and clerics in November he was convicted of being a lapsed heretic, and had the ‘sentence definitive’ declared against him, as detailed earlier in this chapter.

  A few weeks after the execution of Richard Bayfield it was the turn of John Tewkesbury to suffer in Smithfield. Tewkesbury was a leatherseller and haberdasher by trade who lived in the City, by the entrance to St Martin’s-le-Grand in the parish of St Michael-le-Quern, and he had been found in possession of two banned books: Luther’s Liberty of a Christian Man and Tyndale’s Wicked Mammon. Like Bayfield, Tewkesbury had previously abjured but subsequently returned to his heretical ways. Unlike Bayfield, Tewkesbury was a layman, and he told Bishop Tunstall at his trial in 1529 that he had been reading the scriptures in translation for seventeen years. Foxe commented that he was ‘in the doctrine of justification and all other articles of his faith … very expert, and prompt in his answers, in such sort as Tunstall and all his learned men were ashamed, that a leather seller should so dispute with them’. He was able to hold his own under hostile questioning by the bishop in the presence of a number of senior clerics and professors of divinity, defending Wicked Mammon and retorting: ‘I pray you reform yourself, and if there be any error in the book, let it be reformed. I think it is good enough.’ When the bishop criticized this and the other books Tewkesbury had been reading, Tewkesbury suggested that the bishop should read them for himself and thereby discover that there was nothing wrong with them. He seemed to be attempting to dispute with Bishop Tunstall as with an equal, intellectually and morally, and Tunstall was clearly both annoyed and frustrated by Tewkesbury’s stubborn insistence on thinking for himself: ‘the Bishop of London declared that he had at divers times exhorted him to recant the errors and heresies, which he held and defended, even as he did then again exhort him, not to trust too much to his own wit and learning, but unto the doctrine of the holy mother the Church’.

  Tewkesbury was then questioned on the doctrine of justification by faith alone and the concomitant rejection of ‘works’ as necessary for salvation – perceived as a dangerous doctrine for the preservation of order and authority. His answer was that good works should be done for the love of God alone, and not in the hope of attaining a reward in heaven. One can almost see the church dignitaries spluttering with indignation at some of Tewkesbury’s answers, especially when he expressed the view that preaching was no more pleasing to God as an activity than was the washing of dishes. The bishop, declaring himself to be speaking more in sorrow than in anger, and sounding rather bewildered before the obstinacy of this self-educated layman, insisted that the beliefs he was espousing were ‘false, erroneous, damnable and heretical’. He was also at pains to express to all those present that ‘he had often and very gently exhorted the said John Tewkesbury, that he would revoke and renounce his errors, otherwise if he did intend to persevere in them, he must declare him a heretic, which he would be very sorry to do’. This was very much in line with More’s expressed belief that ‘charity’ was the first route to take with a heretic, but that firmer measures would have to follow if such charity met with no success.

  Eventually, on the occasion of this first series of interrogations, Tewkesbury, like both Bilney and Bayfield, seems to have been worn down by the persuasive Bishop Tunstall and abjured on 8 May. He was given the penance of carrying a faggot in the procession at St Paul’s Cathedral on the following Sunday morning and then standing with it at Paul’s Cross, the open-air pulpit outside the cathedral. He was also to appear in public as a penitent at other places during the week, with faggots embroidered on his sleeve. On the Wednesday he had to carry the faggot around Newgate market and Cheapside, the main thoroughfare in the City, and on Friday at the church of St Peter Cornhill and then in Leadenhall market.

  Despite all this public shaming, Tewkesbury’s abjuration did not ‘stick’ and about eighteen months later he was back on trial, this time the trial taking place at Thomas More’s house in Chelsea – which was an unusual, though not illegal, proceeding. It did, however, give rise to (unsubstantiated) rumours that the Lord Chancellor was in the habit of torturing heretics in his house. At this second trial, Tewkesbury attempted to deny ever having held the views that he was said to have abjured at his first. Only now did he seem to be coming to the realization that he could not engage in these intellectual and doctrinal arguments with the hierarchy without their leading to the most serious consequences for himself, and he did not know what he could say to get himself out of trouble. He nevertheless admitted that he had continued to read forbidden books since his so-called abjuration, and he refused to accept various Catholic doctrines, including the efficacy of prayer to the saints and the V
irgin Mary, and the existence of purgatory. Finally, and most damningly, he declared his belief that ‘the sacrament, of the flesh and blood of Christ, is not the very body of Christ, in flesh and blood as it was born of the Virgin Mary’.

  Bishop Stokesley pronounced sentence against Tewkesbury in More’s house on 16 December 1531, using a similar form of words to that used against Richard Bayfield, minus the degradation of a priest. Tewkesbury was excommunicated, and turned over by the bishop to the ‘secular power and to their judgment, beseeching them earnestly in the bowels of Jesus Christ, that such severe punishment and execution as in this behalf is to be done against thee, may be so moderated that no rigorous rigour be used, but to the health and salvation of thy soul, and to the terror, fear, and rooting out of heretics and their conversion to the Catholic faith and unity’. Tewkesbury was burnt four days later, ‘terror’ and ‘fear’ playing a rather larger part in his fate than a lack of ‘rigorous rigour’. True to his conviction that the death of an obstinate heretic was preferable to his infecting others, Lord Chancellor More commented: ‘There was never a wretch … better worthy [to be burnt].’