Tales From the Tower of London

by Donnelly, Mark P.

  With degrees in both secular and church law, Bonner was Cromwell’s ideal choice to serve as ambassador to the Vatican. And when Henry’s religious upheavals brought down an order of excommunication from the Pope in 1533, it was Bonner who tried to have the order reversed. His attempt failed, but his efforts did not go unrequited. Between 1532 and 1543 Edmund Bonner served in various ambassadorial capacities throughout Europe, but in almost every post his crude, overbearing, dictatorial manner alienated him from foreign counterparts and English associates alike. Consistently, Cromwell protected his protégé from all criticism. This man would eventually have his use.

  In 1539 Bonner was made Bishop of London, where his first assignment was as head of the London Ecclesiastical Court. Here he would bring to trial anyone who refused to acknowledge Henry VIII as the supreme head of the new Church of England or who spoke out against the ‘Six Articles of Faith’, which established Henry’s church as England’s official religion. Almost immediately he was accused of excessive cruelty and both religious and political bias. Ultimately, Bonner proved no more popular at home than he had in foreign courts. But when Henry VIII died in 1547, Bonner refused to support the religious policies of the new king, Edward VI. As a result, he was imprisoned in the Tower in 1549 where he remained until Mary came to the throne four years later.

  Where Bonner had once willingly persecuted Catholics who rejected Henry VIII’s new Church of England, he was now just as happy to ferret out anyone unwilling to reject Henry’s reforms and convert back to Roman Catholicism. Edmund Bonner had no beliefs of his own; whichever way the political wind blew was the direction Bonner’s ship would sail. Bonner was now saying ‘Hail Mary’ in more ways than one.

  By 1553 England was undergoing the third imposed reversal of religion in a quarter of a century. The upheaval had already cost the lives of hundreds of devout Christians on both sides of the argument and now it was starting all over again. Religious paranoia swept across England as tolerance was replaced by suspicion and fanaticism. The only thing people now had in common with their neighbours was a shared sense of hysteria. As Mary’s religious reforms split the kingdom, both Protestants and Catholics turned militant in a desperate effort to retain their religious freedom. Then, four months after Mary took the throne, things worsened.

  In December 1553 Queen Mary announced that she would marry Prince Philip of Spain – a devout and hard-line Roman Catholic. Those who were initially frightened of Mary and her reforms now feared that the spectre of the Spanish Inquisition was about to spread across England. Religious panic swept the kingdom. Knives were thrown at preachers and priests while they delivered sermons and churches were ransacked and desecrated by mobs bent on destroying everyone who did not believe as they did. Street brawls and riots in favour of, or in opposition to, both the Church of England and Roman Catholicism became almost daily occurrences.

  Mary, of course, could not understand that she was the root of the problem. Even at this point she could have diffused the situation by allowing the civil courts to deal with the problem. But to Mary this was a religious matter; anyone opposed to her reforms was at best a heretic and, at worst, probably in league with the devil. Even pleas from the staunchly Catholic Spanish Ambassador to slow the pace of her reforms were rejected. As civil order deteriorated, Mary hardened her position. Those who supported her were protecting the ‘true’ church and therefore innocent of wrongdoing. But all those who refused to renounce the Church of England would be arrested and tried by ecclesiastical courts; and in London the ecclesiastical and civil courts were both firmly in the hands of Bishop Edmund Bonner.

  Once re-established in his former office of bishop, Bonner had quickly been appointed a Royal Commissioner and charged with carrying out the civil side of the religious reforms. In this dual capacity it became almost impossible to tell when he was acting as a civil authority and when as an ecclesiastic, and Mary’s government provided the legal framework within which charges of heresy would be judged.

  To add legal weight to the inquisition, Bishop Bonner compiled a list of ‘Articles’ – an exhaustive series of questions, which the accused were required to answer satisfactorily if they hoped to escape the creative horrors of the Tower’s torture chamber. In all there were 133 questions, 37 specifically for the clergy, 11 for deacons and 16 concerning church ornaments and religious objects. There were also 41 general questions for laymen along with questions specifically designed for those in a variety of professions, including 8 for schoolmasters, 6 for midwives and 5 for old people. The list went on and on. For everyone there were questions on the nature of Holy Communion and the Eucharist (mostly dealing with the mystery of Transubstantiation) and queries on how often people made confession, attended church services and whether they took part in religious processions during Lent. How well an individual scored on the test determined whether they would go free, be offered a chance to reform their wayward life, or be sent to trial as a heretic.

  Bishop Bonner dutifully involved himself in every aspect of each case that came before his bench. From the first examination on the Articles through any necessary torture, the trial itself, the order of excommunication and final sentencing by the civil court to death at the stake. In simpler cases, to avoid lengthy and costly trials, Bonner personally acted as judge, jury and prosecution. The nicety of an advocate was dispensed with entirely.

  Sometimes it took relatively little persuasion to get people to reveal whether a person was simply misled or was an actual heretic. When a man named James Tomkins appeared before Bonner he at first refused to accept reintegration into the Catholic faith. To demonstrate what awaited him if he remained obstinate the burly Bonner seized Tomkins’ wrist and pulled his hand over a lighted candle, holding it there until the flesh on his palm blistered and burnt. The strong-willed Tomkins refused to recant, but Bonner had all the confession he needed. Tomkins was a heretic and would be dealt with accordingly.

  On one occasion a teenager named Thomas Hindshaw was brought to Bonner’s court for some minor religious offence. Not wanting to seem too harsh on the first examination of a young offender, Bonner simply had Hindshaw hauled to the cells and locked in the stocks for a day and a night. Stocks were leg immobilisers made of two boards with cut-outs large enough to receive a person’s ankles. These, in turn, were mounted on a frame fixed into the ground. A person locked in the stocks was forced to sit on a bench with their legs extended and knees straight, making it nearly impossible to change position. Even over short periods they could cause excruciating pain, but they did no permanent damage.

  The day after Hindshaw was sent to the stocks, Bonner’s archdeacon, Dr Harpsfield, went to question the boy. When Harpsfield asked him if his experience had persuaded him of anything, Hindshaw replied, ‘I am persuaded that you labour to promote the dark kingdom of the devil, not for the love of truth.’ Angry and frustrated, Harpsfield reported the boy’s insolence to Bonner who, in a fury, took personal charge of the questioning. In what was described by a witness as ‘a passion almost preventing articulation’, Bonner screamed at the boy, ‘Dost thou answer my archdeacon thus, thou naughty boy? . . . I’ll soon handle thee well enough for it, be assured.’ Taking up two stout willow branches, he then forced the boy to kneel against a bench and proceeded to whip him until sheer exhaustion forced him to stop.

  Sometimes, more persuasive methods were required to extract confessions. For these occasions there were red-hot irons and thumbscrews, which could shatter the knuckle in a victim’s thumb. There were bilboes, which compressed the ankle joint until the bone shattered. There were iron collars and the ‘breaks’, which snapped off a victim’s teeth one at a time. But the most popular was always the rack.

  Eventually almost anyone subjected to torture would confess to anything so long as it made the pain stop. Once a confession was forthcoming, the accused was returned to court and tried based on their confession. The severity of the sentence was determined by the offence. If it were a minor offence, li
ke failure to attend church regularly, the penance might be no more than a public admitting of their ‘crime’, the promise never to sin again and a reaffirmation of their belief in the supremacy of the Catholic Church. For more serious charges, such as ministering to a Protestant congregation or reading the Bible in English, the sentence was likely to be far more severe. For anyone who refused to recant, or for those charged with a second offence, there was only one sentence: death by burning.

  To Edmund Bonner, it all made little difference who was on trial or the accusations levelled against them. All were hounded with merciless vindictiveness. In at least one instance a witness so infuriated Bonner with a less than forthcoming answer that he hit him over the head with a heavy stick. Like all diligent workers, Bonner burned large quantities of midnight oil in pursuit of his job, and frequently this meant taking his work home with him. When witnesses proved reluctant to confess their sins, but their offences were not great enough to have them condemned to full-scale torture, Bonner would have them transferred from public prisons to the coal shed behind his home. There, locked in the stocks and chained to the wall, they could be visited at all hours of the night where their questioning could continue at the bishop’s pleasure. In one instance, he recorded in his diary ‘six obstinate heretics that do remain in my house’.

  In the first two years, Bonner held the dual office of Royal Commissioner and Bishop of London, around four hundred and fifty people in the Archdiocese of London passed through his court, more than one hundred of them simply for having failed to attend church. Of those accused of more serious offences, eighty-nine were burned alive for their religious beliefs. Bonner obviously enjoyed the torments he inflicted on his victims and before long everyone in London knew his name and spoke it with fear. Since it was Queen Mary’s decision that only Protestants would be charged as heretics, Bonner, as her enforcer, became a particular target for the hatred of Protestants. Political and religious tracts referred to him as ‘the bloody sheep bite [i.e. sheep dog] of London’ and ‘Bloody Bonner’. The Protestant writer Foxe referred to him as a cannibal and to his victims as ‘his food’. But the nickname that stuck was ‘the Devil’s Dancing Bear’, undoubtedly a reference to his massive size and huge, hairy, paw-like hands.

  If Bonner brought on the hatred of the rapidly shrinking Protestant community he did nothing to endear himself to right-thinking Catholics, either. One Catholic who appeared in his court on purely civil charges told the judge,’You have lost the hearts of twenty-thousand that were rank papists within these [last] twelve months.’

  Despite the growing furore over his unbridled cruelty, Bonner insisted he was actually a gentle man who only desired to show people the error of their ways. He once said, ‘God knoweth I never sought any man’s blood in all my life’, even insisting that his sadism was actually an act of Christian charity. ‘Charity’, he wrote, ‘commands that all governors should correct offenders within their jurisdiction . . . those that be evil, [out] of love, we ought to procure them into correction.’ How and why this correction would be accomplished, he explained as ‘he who is in authority must be as a good surgeon [who] cutteth away a putrefied and festered member, for the love he hath to the whole body, least it infect other members adjoining it’. To prove his good intentions, Bishop Bonner even wrote and published a tract on the nature of Christian love. Thanks to Bonner’s peculiar brand of Christian love, by the beginning of 1555 there were fewer than two hundred practising Protestants left in London. The rest had converted, fled, been imprisoned or burned.

  But even Bonner’s brutal tactics were not enough to satisfy the bloodthirsty queen. When Mary discovered that only eight heretics were burnt between 20 January and 24 May 1555, she was incensed that more progress was not being made to root out the heretics she firmly believed were overrunning her kingdom. At the end of May she and her council sent a remonstrative letter to Bonner ordering him to proceed ‘with greater diligence’. As a result of these urgings, in June and July a backlog of sixteen condemned heretics were sent to the stake and thirteen more men and women had been condemned to death and awaited execution.

  By the middle of summer 1556, a Bonner spy named Roger Sergeant infiltrated one of the last active Protestant congregations in London. In the parish of St Edmonds in the Limehouse district, a small group of Protestants continued to meet, usually at the Swan Tavern or the King’s Head Inn. The minister of this small group was John Rough, a Scotsman who had fled to the continent at the beginning of Mary’s persecutions, but returned to take up the ministry despite the ever-present threat of arrest and almost certain death. When Roger Sergeant discovered the group, John Rough had been back in England less than a month. After attending only two services, and collecting as many names and descriptions as he could, Sergeant reported his findings to Bonner. Immediately a warrant was issued for the arrest of John Rough. Seized from his bed in the middle of the night while his terrified wife pleaded with the soldiers to release her husband, Rough simply disappeared until he turned up several months later tied to a stake, surrounded by wood and kindling.

  Left without a pastor, the terrified congregation was in imminent danger of falling apart. The job of calming their fears, keeping them together and finding safe places to worship fell on the congregation’s only deacon, Cuthbert Symson. For more than a year Symson did his best to keep his friends true to their faith and his own frayed nerves from shattering. A respected member of society, Symson was a relatively wealthy man with a high-profile job. He was paymaster to all the London prisons, including the Tower. If he thought his social position would help deflect any possible charges of heresy, he was wrong. On 12 December 1557, Cuthbert Symson (along with two other members of the congregation, Hugh Foxe and John Devinish) was arrested on charges of attending church services in English and denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation. The following day the three were committed to the Tower for pre-trial questioning.

  Somehow, Symson managed to chronicle his ordeal and later his wife smuggled the manuscript out of prison. The following paragraphs are predominantly in Symson’s own words:

  On the thirteenth of December I was committed by the Council to the Tower of London. On the Thursday after, I was called to the wardroom, before the Constable of the Tower and the Recorder of the Tower, master Cholmley; who commanded me to tell whom I did will to come to the English service. I answered [that] I would declare nothing. Whereupon I was set in a rack of iron, [for] the space of three hours as I judged.

  As the ropes on Symson’s hands and feet pulled tight, his arm and leg muscles were stretched and pulled nearly to the breaking point. When he fainted from the pain, he was revived. Then the process began again: ‘Then they asked me [again] if I would tell them. I answered as before.’ After three hours of this torture, Symson was no longer able to stand, let alone walk.

  Then I was unbound and carried to my lodging again. On the Sunday after, I was brought into the same place again, before the lieutenant and the Recorder of London and they did examine me. As before I had said, so I answered [again]. Then the lieutenant did swear by God I should tell. They did bind my two forefingers together and put a small arrow betwixt them and drew it through so fast that the blood flowed and that the arrow brake. Then they racked me twice. Then I was carried to my lodgings again and ten days after [that] the lieutenant asked me if I would confess that which before they had asked me. I said I had said as much as I would.

  Over the next few weeks Cuthbert Symson was taken to the rack twice more. Still he refused to divulge the names of his congregation: ‘Three weeks after [my last time on the rack] I was sent to the priest, where I was greatly assaulted, and at whose hand I received the pope’s curse for bearing witness to the resurrection of Christ. I forgive all the world, and thus I leave the world in the hope of a joyful resurrection.’

  The priest mentioned here was undoubtedly Bishop Bonner and, based on the reference to ‘the pope’s curse’, the occasion was probably the ecclesiastical court where
sentence of excommunication was pronounced. Frustrated at Symson’s continued refusal to divulge the names of his fellow Protestants, Bonner ordered him to be transferred from the Tower to the makeshift prison in his coal shed.

  Here, locked in the stocks for more than three weeks and kept on a diet of bread and water, Symson was continually questioned along with several other ‘guests’. It was probably while he was here that Symson’s wife managed to smuggle the account of his ordeal to the outside world. Attached to the short diary was a note to his wife telling her to be brave and remain strong in her faith. Finally, on 19 March 1558, Cuthbert Symson and his fellow parishioners Hugh Foxe and John Devinish were taken for their civil trial where final sentence would be handed down.

  Over the months even Edmund Bonner had gained a grudging admiration for the man who had withstood so much pain and still refused to surrender the names of his friends. In a statement to the court Bonner said, ‘Ye see this man, what a personable man he is. And furthermore, concerning his patience, I affirm that if he were not a heretic, he is a man of the greatest patience that yet ever came before me: for I tell you, he hath been thrice racked upon one day in the Tower. Also in my house he hath felt some sorrow, and yet I never saw his patience broken.’ Of course, Symson’s patience was not enough to save him from a horrible death. Nine days after their trial, Symson, Foxe and Devinish were committed to the flames at Smithfield.

  While no account of Symson’s martyrdom survives, there is a contemporary account of another burning that took place on the order of Edmund Bonner. The following is a portion of that account:

  his nether parts did burn first . . . but the flame only singed his upper parts. . . . In this fire he said with a loud voice, ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me! Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ And these were the last words he was heard to utter. But when he was [burnt] black in the mouth, and his tongue so swollen that he could not speak, yet his lips [moved] until they were shrunk to the gums: and he knocked his breast with his hands until one of his arms fell off, and then knocked still with the other, while the fat, water and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends, until his strength was gone and his hand clave fast upon his breast. Then . . . bowing forwards, he yielded up his spirit. Thus was he there three quarters of an hour or more in the fire.