The Burning Time Page 7

  On the following day, 20 April (or, according to some sources, on 26 April), Bainham was condemned as a relapsed heretic, ‘damnably fallen into sundry heresies’, and therefore deserving of death at the hands of the civil authorities. He was given into the custody of Sir Richard Gresham, one of that year’s sheriffs (who was present at the hearing), who committed him to Newgate prison. He remained in Newgate – lodged in one of the dark, damp dungeons reserved for those suspected of serious crimes such as heresy – for only a few days, being burnt in Smithfield on 30 April, at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  While in the dungeon at Newgate, Bainham received some visitors; four men – Edward Isaac of Well in Kent, the brothers William and Ralph Morice from Chipping Ongar in Essex, and the Cambridge academic and future bishop Hugh Latimer – came to see him, apparently with the intention of finding out whether his death sentence was inevitable, or whether he could legitimately have avoided it. Wilful martyrdom was not something to be sought; there is a clear sense that Bainham’s supporters and detractors alike wished to avoid his burning if possible, but that both equally found it inevitable in the end. His visitors discovered Bainham ‘sitting on a couch of straw with a book and a wax candle in his hand’. During this conversation, Latimer asked whether Bainham had a wife (more, perhaps, to test his state of mind than out of concern for his wife – or, at least, a combination of the two) and the latter became distressed, weeping, worrying about what his wife would live on after his death and what her position would be as the widow of an executed heretic. But Latimer rebuked him for this lack of trust in God, asserting that ‘if he committed her with a strong faith to the governance of God, he was sure that she would be better provided for than he could do if he were still alive’. Bainham appears to have been comforted by this rather tough advice.

  According to the original 1563 edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, when Bainham was tied to the stake he declared: ‘I come hither, good people, accused and condemned for a heretic, Sir Thomas More being my accuser and my judge.’ But in later editions Foxe deleted this speech, which would suggest that he doubted its authenticity. Bainham then read aloud the articles of his faith, and the citizens (notable among whom, joining in the abuse with particular vigour, was the Town Clerk of London, William Pavier) cried out: ‘Set fire to him and burn him!’ to which the condemned man replied, addressing Pavier with his first words: ‘God forgive thee, and show thee more mercy than thou showest to me; the Lord forgive Sir Thomas More; and pray for me, all good people.’ Then he himself prayed ‘till the fire took his bowels, and his head’.

  In the second edition of Acts and Monuments Foxe adds the edifying detail that, as the flames began to consume his limbs, the victim declared: ‘Behold … a miracle: for in this fire I feel no more pain than if I were in a bed of down: but it is to me as a bed of roses.’ While this sounds like wishful thinking, we cannot rule out the possibility of Bainham being in such a state of exaltation that it affected his perception of pain – or, alternatively, of his nerve endings having been deadened as a result of third-degree burns.

  In the summer of the following year, 1533, a further two men were burnt in Smithfield, as briefly recorded by the chronicler and Windsor Herald, Charles Wriothesley: ‘This year, in July, on a Friday, one Frith, a serving man, a great clerk in the Greek and Latin tongue, was burnt in Smithfield, and a tailor of London with him, for heresy.’ The ‘serving man’ (a rather inaccurate description) was John Frith, aged thirty, and his fellow sufferer was Andrew Huet, an apprentice tailor, aged only twenty-four.

  John Frith had been born in 1503 at Westerham in Kent, his family subsequently moving to Sevenoaks where his father, Richard, became an innkeeper. As a boy John was sent to Eton College (as one of the seventy King’s Scholars educated there) and then studied at Cambridge, taking his BA degree at King’s College in 1525. His tutor there was Stephen Gardiner, later Bishop of Winchester. Frith was an outstanding scholar and attracted the attention of Cardinal Wolsey, who summoned him to Oxford as one of the junior scholars at his new Cardinal College. This establishment, founded by Wolsey in 1525 on the site of the suppressed Priory of St Frideswide, was, for the brief period of its existence, enormously ambitious, quickly achieving an academic and musical splendour to match its magnificent architecture. The academic body planned by Wolsey, and attracting some of the finest minds in England, consisted of a dean, sixty fellows, forty junior scholars and six public professors. But Frith’s promising career here came to an abrupt end in March 1528 when he, along with several of his fellow scholars, was declared to be a heretic and cast into a makeshift prison within the college – in a place where salted fish, rather than prisoners, was usually stored – for having attended an illegal ceremony.

  One of the men on the periphery of this outbreak of Lutheranism in Cardinal Wolsey’s own college was the composer John Taverner who, like Frith, had been hand-picked by the cardinal to become part of his establishment, taking up the post of choirmaster, or informator, there in 1526. His duties involved training the sixteen boy choristers, and preparing and directing the numerous daily choral services (in addition to the boys there were thirteen lay clerks in the choir) in the chapel. Despite this full and demanding schedule, Taverner found the time – and the intellectual curiosity – to become mixed up with the small group of fewer than twenty men whose activities centred on the reading and dissemination of imported heretical books, including Tyndale’s recent translation of the New Testament. Taverner, however, escaped serious trouble over his involvement, Cardinal Wolsey taking the view, as expressed in a letter from John Higden, the dean of the college, to one of his chaplains, that Taverner was ‘unlearned, and not to be regarded’ (in other words, that he was ‘just’ a musician). He had, it seems, known about some books being hidden and about a letter being sent to Thomas Garrett, another of the miscreants, who had managed to escape, but that was believed to be the extent of Taverner’s knowledge. And so he was allowed to continue as choirmaster at Cardinal College – until he resigned shortly after Wolsey’s own fall from grace and before the subsequent suppression of the college and its glorious choir.

  By midsummer John Frith, along with the other prisoners, had on Wolsey’s orders been released from the salted-fish store, on the condition that he stay within a ten-mile radius of Oxford. He realized he would not be safe indefinitely, however (having heard of some fellow reformers being examined and forced to recant and perform penance), so instead he fled to Antwerp, where he put his learning to use by assisting William Tyndale in his translation of the Old Testament. He also spent some time in Amsterdam and was married there. He devoted most of his time while abroad to studying, writing and disseminating reformist literature, including translating theological works by Luther and his fellow German reformer, Philipp Melanchthon.

  In 1529 Frith attended the colloquy between Luther and the Swiss reformer and theologian Huldrych Zwingli in Marburg over the nature of the presence of Christ in the sacraments, a colloquy at which no agreement was reached, the leaders of the Reformation proving no more able to tolerate one another’s opposing views on this central subject than were the representatives of the officially opposing ‘sides’ of reformers versus orthodox. Zwingli was in support of viewing the words ‘this is my body, this is my blood’ as symbolic statements, with ‘is’ being taken to mean ‘signifies’, a position labelled ‘sacramentarian’ and which Luther condemned as blasphemous. John Frith tended towards the Zwinglian position. From a letter William Tyndale wrote to Frith two years later, while the latter was being held prisoner in the Tower of London, it is clear that not only did the various reformers not agree on the interpretation of the sacrament of the altar, but they recognized their lack of agreement as a point of weakness waiting to be exploited by their opponents. Tyndale advised Frith to steer clear of the subject during his interrogations if he could: ‘Of the presence of Christ’s body in the Sacrament meddle as little as you can, that there appear no division among us.’


  In Lent 1531 Frith paid a short visit to England, where he was now more than ever in danger, after the publication in Antwerp during that same year of his Disputation of Purgatory, which was an answer to various writings of William Rastell (Sir Thomas More’s nephew), More himself and Bishop Fisher; in it, he set out to show the lack of biblical authority for the doctrine of purgatory. More, in particular, was outraged by the presumption of this young scholar in taking on the combined authority of this illustrious trio, complaining about ‘good young Father Frith who now suddenly comes forth so sagely that 3 old men, my brother Rastell, the Bishop of Rochester and I, matched with Father Frith alone, be now but very babies’. Always a risk-taker, Frith made a further visit to England a few months later and this time found himself put in the stocks in Reading, on suspicion of being a rogue and a vagabond. He managed to get himself released, despite nearly fainting from hunger, by engaging in lively and learned conversation, in Latin and Greek, with Leonard Cox, a humanist writer who was working as a schoolteacher in the town. Cox went off to the magistrates to plead for his new friend, who was duly released from the stocks. John Frith was clearly a man full of intellectual energy, and of considerable charisma. And he had, as yet, no desire for martyrdom.

  On Sir Thomas More’s issuing a warrant for his arrest on a charge of heresy, Frith tried to hide and disguise himself, but was seized on the shore at Milton in Essex, near Southend-on-Sea, in October 1532 (by which time More had resigned as Lord Chancellor – but not as a heresy-hunter), while he was on his way to rejoin his wife and family in Antwerp. He was taken to the Tower. Later that month the Lieutenant of the Tower, Edmund Walsingham, wrote to Thomas Cromwell about the conditions of various of the prisoners in his charge, commenting particularly favourably on Frith who once again had managed to exercise his charm and who, Walsingham noted, was not being kept in irons: ‘Although he lacks irons, he lacks not wit nor pleasant tongue. His learning passes my judgment. As you said, it were great pity to lose him if he may be reconciled.’ It is clear from this that Cromwell also had a high opinion of Frith’s abilities and hoped he might be persuaded to come into line. No one, it seems, wanted Frith to die. And yet, caught up in the inexorable, if faulty, logic of their own positions, unable to give an inch without fearing the collapse of a whole edifice of faith, and bound by conscience (at least in the cases of Frith and More), neither side – neither that of officialdom nor that of Frith himself – was able to escape.

  The somewhat lenient treatment to which Walsingham alluded did not last, Frith eventually being chained up so extensively that he could neither lie nor stand. And yet all this time he continued to write. Some of what he produced in prison was written down against his better judgement, he having been persuaded to put his incriminating views – ‘his faith and opinion in the Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ’ – into material form by an incautious friend. This friend was then tricked by a tailor called William Holt, an infiltrator spying on reformist groups on behalf of the authorities, into handing over Frith’s writings. Holt then duly passed them on to his masters.

  By 9 May 1533, William Tyndale was resigned to the expectation that Frith would be put to death for his faith, and warned him against recanting as Bilney had done at first, thereby only increasing his grief and falling short of the full ‘glory’ of martyrdom. Tyndale’s short, exhortatory sentences sound almost biblical, as though written by St Paul in one of his letters to congregations of the early Church, Tyndale having imbibed the language and style of the apostle in his work of translation: ‘The will of God be fulfilled. Commit yourself only to Him. Your cause is Christ’s Gospel. Be of good courage. Stick at necessary things. The death of them that come again after they have once denied, though it be accepted of God, is not glorious. Seek no help from man. Let Bilney be a warning to you.’ He seeks to encourage Frith by listing other reformers who have already suffered his likely fate – two in Antwerp, four in Brussels, five in Paris – ‘See, you are not alone.’ He also assures Frith that his wife (back in Antwerp, where Tyndale was too) is fully supportive of his anticipated martyrdom: ‘Sir, your wife is well content with the will of God, and would not for her sake have the glory of God hindered.’

  Frith’s situation was exacerbated and his death drew closer when one of the royal chaplains, Dr Richard Curwen, was persuaded by Frith’s former tutor, Stephen Gardiner, into attacking Frith’s views on Christ’s body in the sacrament during a sermon preached before the King (further involving Frith in the very subject which Tyndale had warned him to avoid). As a consequence, King Henry ordered Frith to recant or be condemned. This led to an examination before a number of bishops in the market town of Croydon (about nine and a half miles from the centre of London and chosen in order to avoid a large crowd of Londoners turning up). On the way Frith was actually given the opportunity to escape. He was brought by wherry from the Tower to Lambeth, accompanied by one of Archbishop Cranmer’s gentlemen and a porter. Cranmer’s man attempted to make Frith change his mind about his views (this was presumably the task he had been set), and then they carried on to Croydon on foot. During the walk Cranmer’s man (apparently more persuaded by his charge than vice versa, or at least seduced by his personality) and the porter worked out a plan to help Frith escape into the woods on the way and disappear into Kent. They then told Frith what they had worked out. He reacted with some amusement, telling them that if they were to try to carry out their plan and report in Croydon to the expectant bishops that they had lost him en route, it would be a wasted effort as he would only follow them and turn himself in. ‘Do you think that I am afraid to declare my opinion to the Bishops of England?’ he demanded; in short, Frith refused to run away.

  During June, Cranmer himself reported trying three or four times to persuade Frith back to the path of orthodoxy, but having no more success than anyone else. (It is ironic that Archbishop Cranmer would become one of the most famous Protestant martyrs during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Mary; at this time, though he was aware of and interested in the religious debates raging in the continent of Europe, and would be favourable towards the doctrine of justification by faith alone, there was nothing to indicate his future path – apart, that is, from his working with the King to extricate the Church in England from the authority of Rome.) As Frith refused to recant in Croydon, he was held for examination by the bishops of London (John Stokesley), Winchester (Stephen Gardiner) and Chichester (Robert Sherborne), which took place on 20 June 1533 at St Paul’s. He was questioned about his beliefs concerning the sacrament of the altar and purgatory, and put his name to what he said, confirming that he held reformist opinions. Three days later he wrote his own account: ‘The Articles wherefore John Frith died which he wrote in Newgate the 23 day of June the year of Our Lord 1533’. Sentence was pronounced on him as ‘guilty of most detestable heresies’ and so to be punished ‘for the salvation of thy soul’. On 3 July Bishop Stokesley handed him over, along with the apprentice tailor Andrew Huet, to the Lord Mayor (Stephen Peacock) and sheriffs of London as ‘obstinate heretics’, and both were taken to Smithfield and burnt. They were tied back to back at the stake; Frith’s suffering lasted longer than Huet’s, the wind driving the flames away from him and towards his companion.

  The faggots for this and other fires would have been in a consignment brought into the City, as part of its usual supply of firewood, either by road from, for instance, the manor of Hampstead or by river from further away. The Ward of Castle Baynard, not far from that of Farringdon Without which included Smithfield, had been the centre of the London firewood trade since the twelfth century. Significant numbers of woodmongers lived and worked there, and it was at one of the wharves in Castle Baynard, or in the neighbouring Ward of Queenhithe, that firewood and charcoal would arrive from cultivated woodlands spread over large parts of many of the counties surrounding London. Woodlands closer at hand, such as those at Hornsey (owned by the Bishop of London and originally a portion of the great forest of Middlesex) and Ha
mpstead (belonging to the Abbey of Westminster) could not satisfy all the capital’s demand for fuel, though they certainly supplied much of it. Manors employed their own workforces to cut underwood and make the faggots and other types of firewood, such as bavins (small faggots) and talwood (made of beech and oak). Faggots produced one year were often sold in the next, suggesting that the firewood would generally be well dried before use – particularly important when it was being used to set fire to people.

  Andrew Huet, Frith’s ‘fellow that was tied to his back’, had earlier been hidden at a house belonging to one John Chapman, in Hosier Lane near Smithfield. Huet, like Frith, was a Kentish man, having been born in Faversham, and was apprenticed to a master tailor in Watling Street in the City. Many of the apprentices working in London came from outside the capital which experienced a vast rise in population in the early sixteenth century, made up partly by an influx of young people in search of their fortunes. Once they had arrived, life was not easy for many of the apprentices, particularly as their increased numbers meant that a smooth career progression to master craftsman could by no means be assured. The restlessness of youth and the hardship of their working lives combined to make apprentices particularly receptive to the currents of new thought. Huet’s brief tale has a sad inevitability about it; described in Hall’s Chronicle as ‘a very simple and unlearned young man’, he had no resources with which to defend himself – or even, it appears, the desire to do so. Foxe relates that, after his first escape from imprisonment in the bishop’s house – an escape engineered by a group of fellow evangelicals – he did not know where to go. Wandering into Smithfield (perhaps drawn there by a premonition of his ultimate fate), he happened to meet ‘one Withers, who was a hypocrite as Holt was’, and it was Withers who took him to John Chapman’s house. By this unlucky meeting, Huet – along with his host, Chapman – was drawn back into the net spread across London by Sir Thomas More’s spies – and he soon found himself imprisoned again, this time in the Lollards’ Tower, the Bishop of London’s prison in the precincts of St Paul’s. (There were two prison towers of this name in London, the other being at Lambeth Palace.) The grounds for Huet’s arrest were that he had been in possession of heretical books. He was examined by Bishops Stokesley, Gardiner and Longland. According to the account provided by Foxe, the learned bishops derived some amusement from getting the young apprentice tailor to incriminate himself by admitting to more heretical beliefs than the one that got him dubbed a ‘sacramentarian’. Though he gave evidence during his interrogation of personal knowledge of the scriptures, quoting from the Gospel according to St Matthew, he also fell back upon the authority of his more educated fellow prisoner, answering the question concerning what he thought ‘as touching the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper’ with the affirmation: ‘Even as John Frith does.’ And to this affirmation he held, despite the consequences being made clear to him: