by Linda Porter
Mary now handed over to Pole the task of dealing with Cranmer, but, like the queen, the cardinal was not willing to meet his foe face to face. Instead, he pleaded with Cranmer in writing to save himself:‘I say if you be not plucked out by the ear, you be utterly undone in body and soul.’13 For a while, it seemed that he might prevail. Isolated and despairing, terrified of being burned alive, ceaselessly pressured by attempts to convert him, Cranmer suffered a complete collapse on 28 January 1556. Two of his sisters, one Catholic, the other Protestant, had been fighting a war for his soul, and he could not bear the strain any more. He signed a recantation, hoping to the last for clemency from Mary. As with the duke of Northumberland, the man Mary hated as much as Cranmer, none came. When the news was brought to him on 17 March, he collapsed again. Ghastly dreams, in which he saw himself rejected by both God and man, left alone to face the abyss of hell, tormented him. He wrote (or had written for him) an abject acknowledgement of his crimes: the divorce, the betrayal of the spiritual welfare of Henry VIII, the injury done to Katherine of Aragon, the introduction of heresies, denial of the real presence and abolition of the requiem mass - all were imputed to his evil influence.The original author of this list could have been Mary herself, so close to her own experience does it read.
On the drizzly morning of 21 March, a much calmer man prepared for death. Those around him were convinced he would die a good Catholic. But he had one last scene to play. As he stood to speak in the university church, expected to uphold what he had written, he began to diverge from the script. At first, some of those present did not even notice. But it was, he said, ‘contrary to the truth I had in my heart, and written for fear of death’. But now, that fear had gone and he disavowed ‘all such bills and papers which I have written or signed with my hand since my degradation’.14 It was a devastating volte-face, depriving the government of the moral and public relations victory they had fully expected. Commotion raged in the church, and Cranmer kept on shouting, refusing the pope ‘with all his false doctrine’. He was about to reiterate his views on the sacrament when he was bodily pulled from the pulpit and bundled through the damp streets to the stake, in the ditch for rubbish which surrounded the town of Oxford.
There, in a historic gesture that has lost none of its power and pathos over the centuries, he thrust his right hand, the hand that had signed the recantation, into the flames and asked, as Anne Boleyn and Jane Grey had done before him, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ An observer described him as ‘very soon dead’.
In the end, this very private, learned, emotional man of 67 had won a great public victory. The government hastily sought to negate the damage done by Cranmer’s sensational abjuration of Catholicism. It rushed into print his recantations, of course omitting the fact that he had withdrawn them in his final minutes of life. The day after his death, Reginald Pole was finally ordained a priest and consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury. Mary was rid of the man she seems to have regarded as the epitome of the snares and wickedness of the new religion. She could not, however, stamp out the beliefs he embodied.Today his sublime liturgy, one of the glories of the English language, is seldom heard more than once a month in English churches, having given way to a more ‘accessible’ modern version. Perhaps Cranmer, who believed in bringing the word of God in comprehensible form to all men, would not have disapproved.
Whether Cranmer’s death became an immediate inspiration to others to stand firm is not so easy to discern. The ‘Marian persecution’, the burning of nearly three hundred people condemned as heretics in the three years between 1555 and 1558, is the best-known, but by no means the best-understood, aspect of Mary Tudor’s life. While this most famously negative aspect of Marian religious policy has, for centuries, stolen all the headlines, more recent attempts to put it in perspective risk being classed as evasion. As Eamon Duffy has said in his monumental work about traditional religion in England between 1400 and 1680, ‘England had never experienced the hounding down of so many religious deviants over so wide an area in so short a period of time.’15 Chillingly, in our own time, the idea of religious terrorism has, once again, become familiar.The belief that those who hold a different faith should suffer a horrible death sits deep in the human psyche. It is nothing new.
The basic facts of the drive to destroy heresy in Mary’s reign can be given in terms of numbers, geography and social background. Nearly three hundred people died at the stake.The majority were in south-east England (Kent especially) and London, though some of those who died at Smithfield were brought in from neighbouring areas like Essex. Most were not grandees of the Edwardian Church, like Cranmer, but ordinary people - pewterers, housewives, millers. Many were young and had grown up with the new ideas, with no memory of papal authority over England. In Kent, one in three were women, but overall female victims were a minority, no more than 17 per cent nationally. The majority of them died with great bravery, having fortified themselves by reciting scriptures and psalms, but their beliefs were far from uniform. For it should be remembered that there was little that could be called a Protestant orthodoxy in England at this point; the Edwardian regime had legislated religious change but it had not taken root. Among those who died were upholders of ideas that Cranmer and his bishops found extreme and unacceptable: Anabaptists, Freewillers and those who denied the Holy Trinity.These people were anathema to Mary and her government, to supporters of the Edwardian Church settlement and often to their neighbours and families as well.
But the question remains, why institute a policy of religious terror at all? What was to be gained from it, and could it have succeeded without popular support? Mary came to the throne with the determination to free her country from the grave errors of practice and doctrine that had characterised her brother’s reign and to repair the schism with Rome that was her father’s doing. But this does not mean she wanted to turn the clock back to 1529 or wage a limitless campaign against religious opponents; neither was the inevitable corollary of her ascending the throne. It might be tempting to depict her as an embittered woman whose soul was shrunken and her personality changed by the loss of her hopes of a child and departure of her husband. But this would not be true.The decision to begin the burnings was made while Philip was still in England, at a time when Mary believed that she was carrying an heir to the throne. Philip’s political advisers, and especially Simon Renard, took the view that encouraging martyrdom was likely to be a mistake. So did some of the Spanish friars who had come with Philip to England. Alfonso de Castro, preaching in front of Mary and Philip shortly after the burning of John Rogers in February 1555, issued what seemed to constitute a rebuke: he ‘did earnestly inveigh against the bishops for burning of men, saying plainly that they learned it not in scripture to burn any for conscience sake; but the contrary, that they should live and be converted’.16 Philip’s own thoughts on the subject, at this time, were kept to himself. His main concern was to keep England tranquil, but that does not mean that he personally disapproved of the moral aspects of his wife’s policy. If he ever made a serious attempt to dissuade her, he was unsuccessful.
Castro’s belief was based on scripture, but the politicians’ reservations were more pragmatic - the public spectacle that was part of the ritual of death by burning would foster unrest, they feared, not suppress it. And here was the rub for Mary’s council.Where did the balance of advantage in this approach to a serious problem lie? Opposition to the queen’s religious policy was, by definition, seditious. Those who opposed the restoration of Catholicism were challenging the state and royal authority. Their boldness was fed by a stream of material from the printing presses of Protestant exiles in Strasbourg and Germany, exhorting them to stand firm and defy the crown.‘Popish prelates’ practices’, wrote John Ponet in 1556, ‘are no warrant to discharge a Christian man’s conscience. He must seek what God will have him do’.17 For a regime already threatened by rebellion, this was alarming stuff. Mary knew that something must be done to make an example of heretics who threaten
ed the rule of law.They must be dealt with promptly,‘so as … both God’s glory may be better advanced and the commonwealth more quietly governed’.18 There was no fixed intention to burn hundreds of people, but there was a conviction that only this extreme form of punishment would send a powerful message concerning the dreadful implications of religious dissent.
As a deterrent, it was ineffective. Feelings on both sides were hardened, and so what had long been regarded as an exemplary punishment for a few became more widespread.The responsibility for the continuance of such a policy has been widely debated. John Foxe, writing in Elizabeth’s time, tended to exonerate Mary herself. He laid the blame for the inception of the idea with Gardiner and believed that its continuance, after Gardiner’s death, was the work of Pole and Bishop Edmund Bonner of London. In this reading of events, the queen is sincere but ill advised; terrible things are being done in her name, but she is not directly involved.Yet though the business of government placed many demands on Mary’s time and attention, the fact remains that she could have stopped the burnings with a simple order to desist. She did not do so because of the nature of the crime. Mary could never condone heresy. It was an affront to her conscience and that conscience had guided her actions since she was 17 years old. For her, extending any kind of mercy to these deluded sinners was unthinkable. Many of them wanted her dead, or, at least, dethroned. The queen understood well the power of the written and spoken word, but not the even greater propaganda victory that came with martyrdom. There could be no middle course, no bargaining with such error. She would have seen this as negotiating with the devil. In mid—16th—century Europe the idea of respecting another person’s beliefs would have provoked incredulity. Such certainties bred oppressors and those who were willing to be sacrificed. Mary herself had said she would die for her faith during Edward VI’s reign. There is no reason to doubt her.
How, then, did contemporaries regard the burnings? Policy-making lay with the queen and her lay and religious advisers, but its implementation was the responsibility of local authorities. With the exception of the early and well-known victims, the Crown did not single out individuals for prosecution.The executions had a very local face, and it is not a pleasant one at all. Here was an opportunity to settle many old scores in the name of religion. Neighbours accused each other of a range of derelictions: of non-attendance at church, of missing processions, or of insufficient attention to the sacrament during services. In Canterbury, Thomasine Asshendon began a civil suit for slander against one Richard Baker, who had claimed: ‘Well, Asshendon’s wife, thou wast an heretic before that thou camest hither, and will be an heretic still … You would have been burnt for your heresy seven years ago.’19 The implication of this threat was very plain - Mrs Asshendon might not escape this time.
The persecution split families and divided communities.The earl of Oxford, whose last-minute military support for Mary was crucial in the accession crisis, handed over one of his own servants to the authorities. In Suffolk, many local people gathered to lament the burning of Dr Rowland Taylor were enraged at his cruel treatment by the sheriff ’s escort who accompanied him to the stake. Alice Benden of Staplehurst in Kent was reported to the authorities by her own husband and disowned by her father. She had refused to attend church, because, she said, much idolatry was practised there.This does not tell us much about the detail of her beliefs, but she must have known the almost certain outcome of her absence from regular worship. She was burned at Canterbury with six others in June 1557. And at Maidstone, well into the 1570s, parishioners did not allow their priest to forget that he had preached against heretics the same year that Alice Benden died.
Some local administrators and justices were as zealous as individuals in pursuing heretics. Most notable, again in Kent, was Sir John Baker, a member of Mary’s privy council, who indefatigably rounded up offenders, keeping them in a jail he set up above the parish porch in Cranbrook. This former speaker of the House of Commons under Henry VIII was already in his mid-sixties and otherwise regarded as serious and learned. Age had evidently not made him merciful. Foxe called him ‘Butcher Baker’ and regarded him as one of the worst of all of those who had hunted down Protestants during Mary’s reign.
Kent, however, was not typical of Mary’s England. It had a long tradition of opposition to the Crown and the capital, witnessed in different form in Wyatt’s rebellion, and a considerable number of those who were put to the flames there were of extreme opinions. And they were still a minority in the county itself, as they were nationally.Their deaths, often regarded as an excuse for a day out by the crowds of friends and foes who came to witness, acquired the same entertainment value as hangings at Tyburn in the 18th century. This may seem obscene to us but death was more visible then and executions were part of a ritual that everyone - including the victims - expected.
The Marian burnings did not give rise to a wave of revulsion in England. In fact, they might have become a mere footnote to history were it not for the Protestant reformer and historian John Foxe.There is no indication that Mary knew anything about this man who was to contribute so much to the blackening of her reputation. But if she ever spoke to the old duke of Norfolk about his grandchildren, the offspring of the ill-fated earl of Surrey, she may have been told that their education was in the hands of Master Foxe. It was, on the face of it, an unlikely combination, a reformer instructing the heir of a conservative Catholic duke, but Surrey’s children seem to have greatly respected Foxe.
Their tutor left them in early 1554; he could not live with the restoration of Catholicism. So he journeyed, as did many others, to the Continent, living in Strasbourg and Frankfurt before settling in Basle. In Europe he inhabited the alternative world of Protestant dissent that was to feed the commitment of like-minded believers at home, those who were unable or unwilling to follow in his footsteps and leave England altogether. He had begun work on a general book of Christian martyrs before his departure, but the Marian regime’s methods of extirpating heresy provided him with a sharper focus for his study. It was Foxe’s determination to gather information about those who died which created a national martyrology. For over twenty years, through several editions of his Acts and Monuments, he collected and revised material. Much of what had happened in the 1550s was fading in popular memory; the details of the martyrs’ passing, their last words and deportment had gone largely unrecorded. But memories, especially of the young who had witnessed these events in Kent and East Anglia, were still there 30 years later, as was a residual resentment for the regime that had inflicted such awful punishment.Those who were haunted by what they had seen poured out their descriptions.Their recollections brought forth an astonishing eight-volume work (not all of it on the Marian martyrs, admittedly), which became a kind of bible for the Protestant Church, and a powerful tool in the hands of those who wished to attack Catholicism and discredit Mary. The positive aspects of her religious programme, not to mention the achievements of the reign, all but disappeared from public view. Foxe’s publications, however, have been continuously in print since the year 1563.
Yet there was a positive programme of religious reconstruction, in all aspects of the word. Mary and her bishops knew that there was a great task ahead. It went far beyond the restoration of damaged, deserted churches and religious institutions. The reintroduction of the mass was straightforward, on one level; it had been, since time out of mind, the centrepiece of life for everyone, rich and poor, educated or ignorant. Daily mass was probably not observed by the majority, but the Sunday service was the focal point of the week. It is easy to assume that the sudden reversion to the Latin mass left people adrift in incomprehension. This was not so. Parts of the service, prayers both public and private, for the monarch, for the pope, even for pregnant women, had been spoken in English since its widespread adoption as the language of the ruling classes in the mid—14th century. Primers, such as The Lay Folks Mass Book, a rhyming work in Chaucerian English, were long-established sources for guiding the fai
thful as they worshipped. Most of the population shared with Mary the view that the mass was not something alien and distant, arbitrarily imposed on them. Rather, it was easily accepted because of its familiarity.
For many, the silent majority, perhaps, this was so. But by no means all. Mary accepted that a battle needed to be waged for the hearts and minds of those deluded or bewildered by the changes of the preceding 20 years. As reprehensible as the content of Protestant literature was, its potential for further damage was never underestimated. Cranmer had demurred on matters of belief, but acknowledged Mary’s earthly authority. The exiles in Europe were not afraid to challenge her throne and to condone attacks on her life. This threat must be addressed. A complete programme of education, both of people and priesthood, was needed. And it was not to be a rarefied, academic exercise.The populace needed to engage with Catholicism - and their queen - in ways that ordinary people, in a pre-literate age, could understand. Only recently has the effectiveness of Mary’s policy in this respect re-emerged.
The truth was that the return of Catholicism enjoyed widespread popular support, even in London. John Foxe’s lurid accounts of a country suffering religious repression find no echo in the account of the Marian period given by London cloth merchant Henry Machyn.This is generally referred to as a ‘diary’ but it is, more accurately, a chronicle of events written by a London businessman. As such, it provides fascinating insights into the religious culture of Mary’s reign. There is nothing here that fits with preconceptions of a dismayed, cowed populace ruled by a dour monarch unfit (as many historians have claimed) to bear the name of Tudor. Machyn did, indeed, chronicle, in his succinct and matter-of-fact way, a number of burnings in London, but he also listed many other judgements against criminals. On his pages are catalogued the full range of miscreants: murderers, pirates, young ladies who have committed ‘shameful deeds’. Hangings and nailings to the pillory are frequently mentioned, the witness of a violent age where summary justice was the norm.
