The Burning Time Read online

  First let us turn to the stories of three men burnt in Smithfield in the early 1530s – James Bainham, John Frith and Andrew Huet.

  James Bainham, who spent some time in prison with the leatherseller John Tewkesbury, was, like Richard Rich, a lawyer of the Middle Temple. He came from a higher social class than Rich, being the youngest son of Sir Alexander Bainham and Elizabeth Langley, née Tracy, of Westbury-on-Severn in Gloucestershire, and he was not alone in his family in subscribing to the new ideas emerging in the Church, his uncle Sir William Tracy, a local landowner, having had his will refused probate on account of its ‘heretical’ content. It is not known where James received his education as a child, but it is likely that he attended a grammar school as he knew both Latin and Greek. His training and progress as a young lawyer went smoothly, and he was well respected in his profession, until he came to the notice of the authorities for his espousal of reformist ideas.

  Suspicion first alighted on Bainham when he married the widow of a man called Simon Fish, who had been a lawyer of Gray’s Inn, and whom Thomas More had accused of heresy for having written and published in 1529 a short address to the King, entitled A Supplication for the Beggars. (More’s response to this work, published later the same year, had been a much longer piece, entitled The Supplication of Souls.) A Supplication for the Beggars had attacked the behaviour of monks, friars and secular clergy, accusing them of living off the poor through the exaction of tithes and the selling of indulgences (and of having invented the non-scriptural doctrine of purgatory in order to justify the latter).

  Fish’s short work was dedicated to ‘the King, our Sovereign Lord’, and it began with a vivid description of the plight of beggars:

  Most lamentably complaineth their woeful misery unto your Highness your poor daily bedesmen the wretched hideous monsters (on whom scarcely for horror any ye dare look) the foul unhappy sort of lepers, and other sore people, needy, impotent, blind, lame, and sick, that live only by alms, how that their number is daily so sore increased that all the alms of all the well disposed people of this your realm is not half enough for to sustain them, but that for very constraint they die for hunger.

  He went on to refer to ‘Abbots, Priors, Deacons, Archdeacons, Suffragans, Priests, Monks, Canons, Friars, Pardoners and Sumners’ as ‘ravenous wolves going in [shep]herds’ clothing, devouring the flock’. Characterizing this whole catalogue of church dignitaries as ‘these greedy sort of sturdy, idle, holy thieves’, Fish accused them of extorting money from the poor, with such accusations as:

  Every man and child that is buried must pay somewhat for masses and dirges to be sung for him or else they will accuse the dead’s friends and executors of heresy. What money get they by mortuaries, by hearing of confessions (and yet they will keep thereof no counsel), by hallowing of churches, altars, superaltars, chapels and bells, by cursing of men and absolving them again for money?

  A particularly interesting accusation by Fish against the varied sorts of clergy, in the light of what was to follow, was that they had ‘translate[d] all rule, power, lordship, authority, obedience and dignity from your Grace unto them[selves]’. Such an accusation was also very much in line with what the King had already laid at the clergy’s feet in the form of praemunire and the fine that had been imposed as a penalty for this alleged offence. So in the words of Fish, the cause of early Protestant reform of the Church and the interests of the King appeared to be going hand in hand.

  Fish had escaped being sent to the stake, first by recanting but secondly – and more permanently – by dying of the plague in 1531. Bainham had married his widow Joan only a few months later. She was also committed to the evangelical cause, so this second partnership may have been viewed by herself and James as a way of carrying forward the work of the first (as well as a means of providing material support for the widow).

  When Bainham was arrested at his lodgings in the Middle Temple in 1531 by a serjeant-at-arms, he was taken, like John Tewkesbury, to Sir Thomas More’s house at Chelsea, where the porter’s lodge had become a sort of unofficial prison for the ‘sure keeping’ of alleged heretics pending their official trials and affording More an opportunity to exercise ‘charity’ in the form of persuasion. One of More’s persuasive techniques was to try to wear his prisoner down psychologically by telling him of Tewkesbury’s recantation at his first trial. When such ‘gentle’ methods did not succeed in getting Bainham either to renounce his heretical views or to name his Temple colleagues who shared them, he was sent to the Tower to be racked.

  Leonard Parry, in The History of Torture in England, describes the rack as:

  a large oak frame raised some three feet from the ground. The prisoner was placed under it on his back, with wrists and ankles fixed by cords to two rollers at the end of the frame. By means of levers worked in opposite directions, the body of the prisoner was pulled up level with the frame and left thus suspended by ankles and wrists. If the prisoner did not then give the required information, the levers were moved. The cords pulled on the joints until the bones started from their sockets. There was the danger of the fingers being pulled from the hands, the toes from the feet, the hands from the arms, the feet from the legs, the forearms from the upper arms, the legs from the thighs, and the thighs and upper arms from the trunk. Every ligament was strained, and every joint loosened in its socket, and sometimes even dislocated.

  It was later alleged – the most likely source for the allegations being Bainham’s wife – that More was present at the racking; it was further alleged that he ‘ordered the rack to be worked so violently, that Mr Bainham was lamed by it’. It has been remarked that: ‘Given the source, and [Joan Bainham’s] considerable animus against More, the stories of his torturing her husband should be treated with caution.’ More himself always denied contemporary allegations that accused heretics were beaten in his garden, and there is no evidence that he personally used anything other than psychological and mental force (which he possessed in abundance). Joan Bainham was instructed to hand over the prohibited books her husband had been reading, but she denied that there were any of them in their house; she herself was then sent to the Fleet prison and the couple’s goods confiscated.

  On 15 December 1531, back at Chancellor More’s house, Bainham was brought before the Bishop of London, John Stokesley, and examined about his beliefs. Bainham’s responses, as recorded by Foxe, are based on the language of the Bible – of English translations of the Bible, that is. So, for instance, he is quoted as saying: ‘If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just, and will forgive us our sins, and will purge us from all our iniquities …’ Most of this is word for word what still appears in the Book of Common Prayer in the opening sentences of Morning and Evening Prayer, quoting in turn English translations of verses from the first chapter of the First Letter of John in the New Testament. Bainham again quotes from the Bible when asked whether the saints are to be honoured and prayed to (that they may pray for us); his answer is: ‘My little children, I write this to you, that you sin not. If any man does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the just, and he is the propitiation for our sins.’ This is a direct quote again from the First Letter of John, this time from the opening of the second chapter. Those who created the records of Bainham’s trial may of course have been putting these precise words (which also came to be part of the Book of Common Prayer) into his mouth retrospectively, but if they were doing so they were underlining very specific points – that is, the great value of having the scriptures available, in English, and of the familiarity of Bainham (and other martyrs) with those scriptures, a familiarity greater than the knowledge of the ‘learned’ men leading the interrogations, who knew the texts only in Latin and Greek, and not very well at that.

  In other answers, Bainham denied the necessity of making confession to a priest, saying that it was lawful to confess one’s sins to any other Christian, but suggesting that tha
t person did not need to be ordained. Further, he said that God would forgive him if he was moved to repentance by a sermon or the word of God being preached, without the need for any formal confession. He also declared that the truth of the scriptures had been hidden for the last 800 years – because, it was implied, they had not during that time been translated into the vernacular. Only in the last six years (that is, since 1525, the year in which Tyndale had published his first, partial, edition of the New Testament), he asserted, had the word of God been ‘plainly and expressly declared to the people’. It was not until such translations had appeared, continued Bainham, that men like ‘Mr Crome and Mr Latimer’ had come forward to preach the word of God ‘sincerely and purely’; previously, people had been told to believe only what the Church believed and, if the Church was mistaken, then the people were instructed to believe the mistakes. But in fact, Bainham argued, the true Church of Christ could not be mistaken and there must therefore be two churches – the true one (to which, implicitly, he and fellow reformers belonged) and the one in error – the ‘Church of Antichrist’ (to which, implicitly, his questioners belonged). This concept of the opposition of the true and false churches had previously been espoused by the Lollards, and it assisted those accused of heresy to stand firm against their accusers. In doing so, Bainham also aligned himself with the convicted and executed heretic Richard Bayfield, affirming that he believed he had died ‘in the true faith of Christ’. When asked for his opinion of Martin Luther’s behaviour in marrying a nun, Bainham refused to answer, saying that he ‘thought nothing’ about it, and could not say whether such an action constituted ‘lechery’.

  Bainham clearly underwent a psychological struggle during this first trial between, on the one hand, a desire to be true to himself and his new-found beliefs and, on the other, the fear of an imminent and excruciating death. His struggle was exacerbated by the pressure being put on him by the bishop and his other interrogators, on the second day of his examination (16 December), as they endeavoured to persuade him away from his reformist beliefs, offering him either the ‘gentle’ or the hard way. The ‘bosom of his mother [the Church] was open for him’, they told him, but otherwise – ‘if he would continue stubborn, there was no remedy’. ‘Wavering in a doubtful perplexity between life on the one hand and death on the other’, he weakened and capitulated, pleading ignorance and agreeing to submit himself to those who knew better – this, of course, after he had already been tortured. He now backtracked on his brave statement about Richard Bayfield, saying that he ‘could not judge’ whether he had died in the true faith. He agreed that a priest, having once been vowed to celibacy, could not marry without committing ‘deadly sin’, and that Luther had been wrong to marry a nun. He also agreed that it was an offence to God to keep books prohibited by ‘the Church, the Pope, the Bishop, or the King’, and averred that his main fault consisted in not having thought about these matters carefully enough and that ‘he pondered those points more now than he did before’.

  Bainham officially abjured his beliefs on 8 February 1532, declaring that he held ‘the faith of his holy mother the Catholic Church’, and he was released from imprisonment nine days later. Nevertheless, he could not bring himself to read out the prepared abjuration in full, unable to assent to the idea that some of his formerly professed beliefs constituted heresy, and he pleaded with the bishop’s chancellor, Richard Foxford, to ‘be good to him’ and not force him to recite the complete abjuration or pronounce sentence against him as a heretic. Bainham’s insistence that he did hold the Catholic faith, including assenting to the doctrine of purgatory, seems on this occasion to have been sufficiently persuasive, and Chancellor Foxford stopped midway through reading out the sentence against him and asserted that he would accept Bainham’s confession as sufficient, though adding, rather ominously – ‘at least for the time being’.

  And so Bainham was let go. But almost at once, like both Thomas Bilney and John Tewkesbury before him, he found that the pain of his conscience, the sense of having let down himself, his fellow believers and his God, was stronger than the fear and anticipated pain of being burnt to death. A few weeks later he publicly took back his (incomplete) abjuration, beseeching God and all his fellow believers to forgive him, making this confession in front of a congregation who used to meet in a warehouse in Bow Lane, just off Cheapside in the middle of the City. ‘And there he prayed everybody rather to die by and by, than to do as he did; for he would not feel such a hell again as he had felt, for all the world’s good.’

  More than just confessing to the congregation of his fellow believers, Bainham wrote letters, including to the bishop, renouncing his recantation – which amounted to asking to be rearrested. He was imprisoned first in the bishop’s coalhouse ‘in the stocks, with irons upon his legs’, and then found himself back at the Lord Chancellor’s house where, it is alleged, he was ‘chained to a post two nights’. Next he spent a week being ‘cruelly used’ in Fulham (again under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London), and then he was sent to the Tower – ‘where he lay a fortnight, and was scourged with whips, to make him revoke his opinions’. After that he was taken to Barking, and then back again to Thomas More’s house in Chelsea where the trial and condemnation took place. Though the stories of Bainham’s ill-treatment while imprisoned may be exaggerated, the way in which he was moved around from one place to another does suggest that the authorities, and specifically both Bishop Stokesley and Chancellor More, were still desperately attempting to get him to change his mind and not relapse into his heresies. There is no sense of them wanting to make a martyr of him, no thirst to burn him if it could be avoided; this may have been principally to do with wanting to avoid the scandal of a public execution, desiring instead the potentially more useful spectacle of a prominent member of a reformist congregation renouncing his heretical beliefs. But it is also noticeable that, at this stage, there does not seem to have been an automatic assumption that a relapsed heretic would inevitably burn, and there is a suggestion that the arbiters of his fate still wanted to save him from himself. Alternatively, however, all they were trying to do was to get him to divulge the names of other so-called heretics, particularly within the legal profession. Or perhaps – and this may be the most likely motive of all – they desired him to recant for the sake of his immortal soul, not for the survival of his earthly body.

  Whatever the motives of his would-be persuaders, Bainham could not this time be persuaded. On 19 April, he was back before his judges, appearing again before Richard Foxford and a number of senior clergy. As with Bayfield and Tewkesbury, the central point at issue was that of the ‘sacrament of the altar’. Did Bainham believe, Foxford asked him, what ‘our holy mother, the Catholic Church’, determined and taught – ‘That in the sacrament of the altar, after the words of consecration, there remains no bread?’ Bainham seems by now to have become reconciled to his likely fate (to prefer that fate, in fact, to the torments of his conscience) and, in consequence, he threw caution to the winds. ‘The bread is not Jesus Christ,’ he replied, ‘for Christ’s body is not chewed with teeth, therefore it is but bread; yet he is there, very God and man, in the form of bread.’

  So what precisely was Bainham saying in the expressions that he chose to use? By declaring that ‘Christ’s body is not chewed with teeth’, he is stating that the bread, after consecration by a priest, remains bread. Of course, the orthodox Catholic leaders with whom he was arguing could not dispute that the bread continued to look, feel and taste like bread. But the point was that these characteristics of bread were only the ‘accidents’, and that the ‘substance’ of the bread after the consecration was the body of Christ. Bainham’s flippant remark about chewing – though offensive to his hearers, not in itself necessarily heretical – is actually less to the point than his words ‘in the form of bread’. These were the words that constituted the denial of the bread itself being transformed. He was not, however, denying what was (and is) known as the ‘real presence’ –
that Christ is indeed present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist – his words ‘yet he is there’ making this clear. Bainham’s interpretation is very much that espoused by Martin Luther, a fact which would not have escaped his interrogators.

  Bainham was further accused of having said that St Thomas Becket was ‘a thief and murderer’ and he did not deny this, elaborating on his opinion that ‘St Thomas of Canterbury was a murderer, and if he did not repent him of his murder, he was rather a devil in hell, than a saint in heaven’. This part of the indictment against Bainham is but one example of how religious policies were suddenly reversed during this period of Henry’s reign for, only six years later, far from it being heresy to inveigh against Thomas Becket, the twelfth-century Archbishop of Canterbury who had fallen foul of Henry II and been assassinated for his pains, it would become compulsory to do so. This example of an archbishop who in life had resisted his monarch’s authority and in death had continued to triumph over him could hardly be expected to find favour with Henry VIII after his split from Rome (not least because Archbishop Warham, in the stand he was preparing to take against Henry in the weeks before his death, had overtly drawn inspiration from his saintly predecessor). In June 1538 Thomas Becket was posthumously put on trial, judgement being given against him that ‘in his life time he disturbed the realm, and his crimes were the cause of his death’. No longer was he to be called a martyr (‘although the people hold him’ for one), his relics were to be publicly burnt, and ‘the treasures of his shrine confiscated to the King’. Now, however, in 1532, Bainham’s low opinion of this popular London saint only constituted another nail in his own coffin.