Bloody Mary

by Carolly Erickson

  Among the offenders was John Hooper, bishop of Worcester, an outspoken critic of both Catholics and conservative Protestants who wrote and preached on the “absurdities” of the teaching that Christ was physically present in the eucharistic wafer. Hooper had been deprived of his bishopric on the grounds that he was married and would not put his wife aside, and because of his opinions on the corporeal presence in the sacrament. He had been imprisoned in the Fleet on September i, 1553, and kept there for a little over seventeen months. At first he was allowed the liberty of the prison, but within a week the warden, an intimate of Gardiner’s named Babington, saw to it that he was committed to close prison in the Tower chamber of the Fleet, and “used very extremely.” Hooper himself wrote a record of his imprisonment, telling how Babington and his wife picked quarrels with him and had him transferred from the pleasanter quarters for the privileged prisoners to the wards where common criminals were kept. Confined there with only “a wicked man and woman” for company, Hooper wrote, he was given “but a little pad of straw and a rotten covering, with a tick and a few feathers therein” for a bed. Charitable friends later sent him better bedding, but could do nothing to change the “vile and stinking” room in which he lay. The “sink and filth” of the prison itself ran along one side of the room, and the common sewer of the city along the other. The stench and foulness made him sick. He lay in his own filth, calling for help and moaning in agony, but the warden ordered the doors of his cell kept barred and chained. Within six weeks of his confinement he was so ill he prepared himself for death, and the poor men in neighboring cells begged the guards to ease Hooper in his last hours. But according to the bishop Babington forbade them to come near him, saying “Let him alone; it were a good riddance of him.”

  At the end of January, 1555, Hooper was brought before Gardiner and several other bishops and urged to give up his “evil and corrupt doctrine” and to confess himself conformed to the Catholic church and a faithful son of the pope. If he did, the chancellor assured him, he would have the queen’s mercy. Hooper refused. The church of Rome was not the catholic church of Christ, nor was the pope head of Christ’s followers. As for the queen’s mercy, he would submit to it gladly, “if mercy may be had with safety of conscience, and without the displeasure of God.”

  Hooper was brought out to be burned on February 9, “a lowering and cold morning.” He stood on a high stool and looked out over the crowd that gathered to watch him, and “in every corner there was nothing to be seen but weeping and sorrowful people.” He prayed for a time, until interrupted by a man asking his forgiveness. Hooper said he knew of nothing to forgive. “O sir!” the man said, “I am appointed to make the fire.”

  “Therein thou dost nothing offend me,” said Hooper. “God forgive thee thy sins, and do thine office, I pray thee.”

  Two small loads of green faggots were laid about the stool, and reeds laid on top of them reaching up to the victim’s legs. Hooper took two bundles of reeds in his hands and hugged them to him, kissing them, and putting one under his arms he showed the man who was building the fire where the rest were needed to make the circle complete. The torch was then put to the faggots, but because they were green they were slow to kindle, and the reeds took even longer to catch fire. After a time the flame reached Hooper’s legs, “but the wind having full strength in that place, it blew the flame from him,” and the fire only teased at his feet and ankles. More faggots were brought—there were no more reeds—and a new fire kindled, but because of the wind and the heavy overcast it did no more than burn his hair and scorch his skin a little. “O Jesus, the Son of David,” he prayed, “have mercy upon me, and receive my soul!” By this time Hooper’s legs were being consumed, but the fire was going out, leaving his upper body unharmed. “For God’s love, good people,” he was heard to say, “let me have more fire!”

  A third time kindling was brought and embedded in the smoking ashes, and this time the flames were strong enough to reach the two bladders of gunpowder which had been tied between the sufferer’s legs. But instead of exploding upward and killing him as they were meant to do, to spare him the excruciating pain of having his torso burned away while he remained conscious, the wind blew them out away from him so that they exploded in the air, and “did him small good.” He was now heard to repeat “with a somewhat loud voice,” “Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me; Lord Jesus, have mercy upon me: Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!” His lips continued to move after his throat was so scorched he could make no sound, not even a scream, and onlookers noticed that even “when he was black in the mouth, and his tongue swollen, that he could not speak, yet his lips went till they were shrunk to the gums.” In the end he could move nothing but his arms, yet he knocked them against his breast in the gesture of contrition until one of them fell off and the other, with “fat, water, and blood” dropping out at his fingers’ ends, stuck fast to the remains of his chest. In this position he bowed his head forward and died.24

  Hooper had been burning alive for nearly three quarters of an hour. “Even as a lamb, patiently he abode the extremity thereof,” the mar-tyrologist Foxe recorded from the accounts sent him of the victim’s final moments, “neither moving forwards, backwards, nor to any side. But, having his nether parts burned, and his bowels fallen out, he died as quietly as a child in his bed. And he now reigneth as a blessed martyr, in the joys of heaven prepared for the faithful in Christ, before the foundations of the world: for whose constancy all Christians are bound to praise God.”

  XLI

  When raging reign of tyrants stout,

  Causeless, did cruelly conspire

  To rend and root the Simple out,

  With furious force of sword and fire;

  When man and wife were put to death:

  We wished for our Queen Elizabeth.

  Hooper was one of several men burned for heresy in February 1555. Their sufferings are often taken to be a watershed in the story of Mary’s reign, but at the time their deaths were seen not as the beginning of a bloody campaign against the Protestants but as merited punishments long overdue. Bishop Gardiner, who tried Hooper and his companions in his episcopal court late in January, had been accused of being “too mild and too gentle” toward those guilty of the “great atrocity and consummate contumely” of heresy. For heretics were uncommon criminals, not to be classed with ordinary arsonists or murderers or traitors; their crime was not merely against man, but against God as well. By maintaining lies about the nature of God and his sacraments they made themselves as loathsome to the community of true believers as lepers or victims of the sweat. They were carriers of the plague of error, a plague that brought spiritual death and denial of eternal life.

  Gardiner fully shared this view of the almost inhuman evil of heresy but he realized the political danger of moving too harshly against an opposing group. “I take heresies in the church to be like boils in a man’s body, which oversoon lanced wax sorer and in time putrefy their matter,” he said, and though Paget and his friends in the Council repeatedly spoke of the chancellor as a “man of blood” his restraint belies the label.1

  In fact there was no one, at Mary’s court or outside it, who did notfavor the burning of heretics. Mary’s Council had been discussing the question since the summer of 1554, and the treasurer, Paulet, was said to be a persistent advocate of the extreme penalty for Protestants who would not recant. Pole, a man whose thoughts ran easily to martyrdoms, had for twenty years and more been closely associated with reforming cardinals determined to fight heresy with every weapon at the church’s command. Among his intimates was Cardinal Caraffa, who as head of the Theatine Order showed no mercy to Protestants and as the future pope Paul IV was to oversee personally the torture and pitiless repression carried out by the papal Inquisition. Pole had been at the forefront of the militant Catholic Reformation on the continent, and he carried that militant philosophy with him into England.

  According to Renard, who had unmatched respect for the Protestants’ strength a
nd threat to the throne, the bishops were eager to bring heretics to justice at the stake, and if left unrestrained would go far beyond their authority in ordering executions. Articles published by Bonner, bishop of London, in the fall of 1554 created alarm because they contained the term “inquisition,” and in justifying their publication without approval from the king or queen or the Council Bonner remarked that “in religious matters it was meet to proceed firmly and without fear.” Like Renard, Bonner recognized the danger of a Protestant rising out of reaction to the burnings, but he saw no reason to stop them; instead he recommended carrying them out in secret.2

  Though he feared the rash zeal of the bishops Renard believed that Philip could control them if he chose to. That the king did not use his authority in this way was in keeping with his deep personal revulsion for even the smallest taint of heresy. To be sure, Philip ordered his chaplain to preach a sermon opposing the burnings soon after they began, in order to dissociate himself and the other Spaniards from a practice that might lead to rebellion. But he had lived most of his life in the land of the Spanish Inquisition, where the extermination of religious error had been looked on as a pious duty for centuries. His great-grandmother (and Mary’s grandmother) Queen Isabella had brought the great inquisitorial machine into being and inspired its divine work. Philip’s principal mentor in statecraft, his father Charles V, had by one estimate burned or beheaded or buried alive at least thirty thousand Lutherans and Anabaptists in his Flemish domains, and was in this year of 1555 ordering executions for heresy at the rate of seventy to eighty every month. Philip’s chaplain in England, Alfonso y Castro, was famous as a determined persecutor of heretics whose treatise on the subject was dedicated to the Spanish prince.3

  Philip was careful to keep his own feelings to himself, but in a revealing letter he wrote four months after he came to England heremarked that, as for the English appointed to be his personal servants in his bedchamber, “I am not satisfied that they are good enough Catholics to be constantly about my person.”4 Philip’s fastidious orthodoxy showed itself not long afterward when, as king of Spain, he put new vigor into the Inquisition and presided in person over a vast auto da fé in the public square of Valladolid. Asked by one of the gasping victims why he had to undergo such a horrible death, the king is traditionally said to have answered, “Had I a son as obstinate as you I would eagerly carry faggots to burn him.”

  The records are oddly silent about Mary’s attitude toward the deaths of Hooper and the others in February. In discussing the hazards of the venture Renard put the emphasis on Philip rather than Mary. He stressed Philip’s pre-eminence in general, of course, but if Mary had been among the most outspoken supporters of the burnings his dispatches would surely have reflected this. Like all those around her Mary believed that heretics deserved the ultimate punishment, and that the combating of false beliefs was part of the preordained purpose of her reign. Yet the one statement she wrote “with her own hand” about the policy makes it clear that she saw it as a temporary measure only, to be carried out neither vindictively nor hesitantly but judiciously.

  To prevent any one official from going about his work with a heavy hand she ordered that a Council member be present to supervise each burning in London. Throughout the statement her attention was less on the dying heretics than on the effect of their example on the living witnesses to their deaths. For if Philip found heretics physically offensive Mary found them despicable for misleading others too ignorant to understand the truth and robbing them of their salvation. “Touching the punishment of heretics,” she wrote, “I believe it would be well to inflict punishment at this beginning, without much cruelty or passion, but without however omitting to do such justice on those who choose by their false doctrines to deceive simple persons, that the people may clearly comprehend that they have not been condemned without just cause, whereby others will be brought to know the truth, and will beware of letting themselves be induced to relapse into such new and false opinions. And above all, I should wish that no one be burned in London, save in the presence of some member of the Council; and that during such executions, both here and elsewhere, some good and pious sermons be preached.”5

  No groups espoused burning for the crime of religious error with greater vehemence than the congregations of Protestants. Here they differed from the Catholics only in their judgments of truth and error. John Knox was if anything more eager to see Gardiner, Tunstal and Bonner burned than any of those Catholics were to burn him. “It is notonly lawful to punish to the death such as labor to subvert the true religion,” he wrote, “but the magistrates and people are bound so to do.” Here he echoed John Calvin, who argued that anyone who thought it unjust to execute heretics was as guilty as the heretics themselves. In Edward’s reign Calvin had given Somerset advice on how to carry forward the work of religion. “Of all things, let there be no moderation,” he counseled the duke. “It is the bane of genuine improvement.” Nearly every Protestant leader on the continent shared this view—Melanchthon, Beza, Farel and Luther, whose followers in Germany refused to allow the Marian exiles to enter their lands because the latter denied the physical presence of Jesus in the sacrament. In England, John Philpot denounced one group of his fellow Protestants as “flaming firebrands of hell” whom the devil “shat out in these days to defile the gospel.” Such wretches, he wrote, deserved to be burned without mercy.

  If the burning of the first Protestants in February of 1555 caused no moral outrage it did intensify the angry opposition of their coreligionists to the queen and her government. The numbers of men and women set in the pillory for speaking “horrible lies and seditious words against the queen’s majesty and her Council” rose, and the ballad-makers who had written songs in praise of the new reign now put out ballads against the queen’s “misproceedings” and the brutality of the bishops. A minstrel’s apprentice from Colchester went to the village of Rough Hedge to sing at a country wedding. He sang the old anti-popish songs of Henry’s reign and Edward’s, and a new ballad, “News out of London.” The latter ridiculed the mass and the queen, and the next day the parson of Rough Hedge denounced him to the local officials, who punished him.

  In Henry’s reign the forces of popular mysticism had gathered against him in the utterances of visionaries and in folk prophecies. Now these occult weapons were turned against Mary.

  When boughs and branches begin to bud

  Two Marys shall go out of the Tower

  And make sacrifice with their own blood

  ran one of these vague prognostications; others foretold Mary’s death un-equivocably, and predicted Elizabeth’s accession. There were persistent rumors that Edward was not really dead, and would come to the throne again, and so great was the power of the folk imagination that this hope was sustained for many years. Mary tried to stop these tales from spreading, sending letters to her justices of the peace ordering them to “use all the best means and ways ye can, in the diligent examining and searching out, from Man to Man, the Authors and Publishers of these vain Prophesies, and untrue Bruits, the very foundation of all Rebellions,” but the stories persisted.8

  As Mary went into the final months of her pregnancy another kind of rumor was put about. It was said that the queen was conspiring to pass off another child as her own. Alice Perwick, wife of a London merchant tailor, was indicted for saying “The queen’s grace is not with child, and another lady should be with child and that lady’s child when she is brought in bed should be named the queen’s child.”7 French agents helped to make this report better known, and rebels in Hampshire planned to use it to persuade the country people to rise against the queen and put Elizabeth and Courtenay on the throne.8

  At court the Christmas festivities brought Spaniards and English together with predictable results. There were banquets and plays, displays of magnanimity and of short temper on both sides. There were masques of Venetian senators and galley slaves, and of “Venuses or amorous ladies” and cupids. The Venuses wore buskins “cu
t out of old garments” for economy’s sake, but their headpieces were tall, costly helmetlike structures fitted out with hair and spangles and netting, and decorated with colored silk flowers. The cupids wore shirts of white sarcenet and carried bows strung with “twisted lace of silk,” and had wings specially made by a London feathermaker.9

  In the afternoons Philip’s men took on the English nobles in tournaments, no longer the tame cane play of the Spaniards but rough tilting on foot with spears and swords. On several occasions the king and his company held the barriers against English opponents, proving they could withstand the force of the larger Englishmen’s strength, but the tilting easily led to grudges and quarrels. One Spaniard was branded on the forehead and lost an ear for wounding another man in a church, and later, at the court gate at Westminster, another of Philip’s household ran an Englishman through with a rapier while two Spaniards held him by the arms. The murderer was hanged at Charing Cross, but Mary pardoned his two accomplices.10 And in the vicinity of the court a bear-baiting ended badly when the “great blind bear,” maddened by the dogs that were tormenting him, broke loose from his chains and ran headlong into the crowd. He caught a servingman by the calf of the leg and bit away a huge chunk of his flesh down to the anklebone, and the man died three days later of his infected wound. The chronicler did not record the recapture of the bear.11

  The tournaments continued throughout the winter, and by the first week of March it was evident that Philip had decided to postpone his departure for the continent until after the birth of Mary’s child. By now he had acquired a taste for English-style tilting, and the tournament held on Lady Day of 1555 was the most elaborate yet seen. The challengers, one Spaniard and one Englishman, were all in white, while the king and his retinue wore blue jerkins trimmed in yellow, with great plumes of blueand yellow feathers in their helmets. Their whifflers and footmen and armorers were turned out in satin gowns and caps, and another company, dressed like Turks, were all in red, with falchions in their hands and carrying great targets. As the queen and court looked on the challengers and defenders rode course after course, tiring many mounts and not stopping until more than a hundred staves had been broken.12