A Brief History of the Tudor Age

by Ridley, Jasper

  The accepted doctrine was that it was the duty of the subject to obey the King, not only from fear of punishment in this world if he did not, but also because failure to do so would be sinful, against the law of God, and would lead to eternal damnation. This doctrine was taught assiduously by the Church to the people, particularly under Henry VIII. It was a very convenient doctrine for all the bishops, noblemen, country gentlemen, mayors and justices of the peace who were expected to enforce the King’s religious policy. When there was a Catholic sovereign, they could supervise the burning of Protestant martyrs; then, when the King changed his policy, or was succeeded by a new King who made England Protestant and suppressed the Pope’s supporters, the mayors and JPs could arrest and torture the Papists, and revert once again to burning Protestants if a Catholic sovereign came to the throne. They could do it with a perfectly clear conscience, for on each occasion they did their duty to God by obeying the King.

  Nearly everyone believed this. Even among the minority of Protestants and Catholics who decided to disobey the King and submit to martyrdom, there was very little criticism of the government officials who were the King’s instruments in carrying out the persecution. When John Knox, in his books in 1558, reminded his readers that God, in the Old Testament, had not merely punished Pharaoh himself for persecuting Moses and the children of Israel, but had also drowned Pharaoh’s soldiers in the Red Sea to punish them for their sin in obeying Pharaoh’s wicked orders, he was putting forward a new and revolutionary doctrine which, even by the end of the Tudor Age, had been accepted by only a small section of the people of England.

  At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the service of the Mass was governed by one of five prayer books. Over most of the country the church service followed the rules of the Sarum Use, which had been first adopted in the diocese of Salisbury; but in other areas, the York Use, the Lincoln Use, the Hereford Use and the Bangor Use were followed. There were only small differences in the form of service prescribed in these five Uses; but as religion became more and more regimented under Henry VIII, the King and the authorities decided that even this very small degree of differentiation and regional independence was dangerous, and in 1543 Henry abolished the other four Uses and ordered that only the Sarum Use should be adopted throughout the realm.

  When Somerset and Cranmer introduced Protestantism in the reign of Edward VI, the Sarum Use was replaced by the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, which prescribed in every detail the service to be used in ‘the Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass’, reducing the number of times when the priest crossed himself from twenty-seven to two, and abolishing the elevation of the Host. Three years later, the Second Book of Common Prayer of 1552 expressed the more radical and Protestant doctrines which had in the meantime been accepted by the government. Under Mary, the Book of Common Prayer was abolished, and the Sarum Use restored; but within a year of Elizabeth’s accession, the Third Book of Common Prayer had been issued. It was less radical than the 1552 Book.

  A small minority of the people did not believe that the subject must always accept the King’s religious doctrines, and thought that the duty to obey the King was qualified by the overriding duty to obey God. The King should be obeyed except when he ordered the subject to offend against the law of God; in that case, it was the subject’s duty to refuse to obey the King, and to offer himself for martyrdom.

  By 1525 the numbers and activity of the Protestants in England had increased, after the country felt the repercussions of Luther’s defiance of the Papal authority in Germany and the popular fervour which it produced there; but the Protestants continued to be a small minority of the people. They were strongest in south-east England – in Norfolk, Essex and Sussex, and particularly in Kent and London. There were hardly any in the west and the north. Of the 280 Protestant martyrs who were burned in Mary’s reign, only one was burned north of the Trent (in Chester); one was burned in the diocese of Exeter (in the city); and three in Wales (Cardiff, Carmarthen and Haverfordwest); while 48 were burned in London (including Westminster and Southwark), 47 in Kent, 43 in Essex, 23 in Sussex, 18 in Suffolk and 14 in Norfolk.

  Even at the time of Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558, after thirty years of religious turmoil and persecution, the majority of the English people were Catholics; but the situation changed after forty years of official Protestant propaganda during her reign. Devon and Cornwall had been staunchly Catholic at the time of the rebellion there against the introduction of the Protestant Book of Common Prayer in 1549; but these counties provided most of Elizabeth I’s sailors who fought so valiantly for the Protestant cause against Philip of Spain and his Armada.

  The Protestants and their martyrs came from every social class and age group, but chiefly from the young artisans of south-east England and from the intellectuals, especially from the divinity students of Cambridge University. Protestant doctrines became increasingly attractive to the younger generation; at the height of the persecution in Mary’s reign, the Venetian ambassador reported that hardly anyone under thirty-five was a Catholic at heart.

  The Protestants attached great importance to reading the Bible, appealing from the authority of the Church to the authority of the Word of God. The Protestant William Tyndale, who in 1525 translated the Bible into English, stated that his aim was to make every ploughboy as knowledgeable in Scripture as the most learned clerk; but to the Catholic Church this was encouraging the common people to question the doctrines of the Church, to argue about theology, to rebel against their superiors, and was seditious. A royal proclamation of 1530 made it a criminal offence to possess or read the English Bible, and every copy was to be publicly burned; but those who were found with the English Bible risked more than this, for it was often held to be sufficient proof of heresy to send them to the stake.

  Tyndale and his supporters printed an English translation of the Bible illegally in the Netherlands and smuggled copies into England hidden under bales of straw. Several of the Protestants who secretly distributed them were caught and burned. Thomas Hitton had bad luck. He was walking through the fields near Gravesend on his way to take ship for the Netherlands after a successful mission in England when he was stopped by some local people who suspected him of stealing some clothes. When they searched him, they did not find the clothes, but they found copies of the English Bible. He was burned at Maidstone in 1530 at the instigation of Sir Thomas More, who described him as ‘the Devil’s stinking martyr’.

  In 1537 Cromwell and Cranmer persuaded Henry VIII to permit the publication of an English translation of the Bible; but after the fall of Cromwell and the Catholic reaction in 1540, new measures were taken against the English Bible. An Act of 1543 made it an offence for anyone to read it aloud to another person, and for anyone under the rank of a gentleman to read it privately to himself.

  The reading of the English Bible was permitted under Edward VI, and after being forbidden under Mary, was again allowed and encouraged by Elizabeth. By this time, many Englishmen and women were reading the English translation of the Bible which John Knox and his colleagues had written, and which was published in Geneva in 1560. It contained footnotes, which were as long as the text of the Bible itself, which were printed at the top and bottom and the sides of every page, in which Knox’s revolutionary interpretation of Scripture was set forth.

  The Protestants challenged the dogmas of the Catholic Church on many issues, and in every case the Protestant doctrine had the effect of weakening the position of the priest and minimizing his part in the relationship between the individual layman and God. But in England throughout the whole of the Tudor Age the main issue between the Catholics and the Protestants was belief in transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the sacramental bread and wine after they had been consecrated by the priest at Mass. Nearly all the Protestants who were burned were condemned for denying the Real Presence, even if they were sometimes also accused of other heresies.

  The arguments between
the theologians in the sixteenth century about the Real Presence can only be understood by someone who has been educated in the principles of Aristotle’s philosophy, which distinguished between the true reality of an object and its ‘accidents’, such as its shape, its smell, its appearance, and so on. It seems extraordinary to us today that people could condemn their opponents to be burned, and be prepared to suffer death in the fire, because of their differing views about this question. Even if the Protestant divines, who understood the theological arguments involved, were prepared to die for their beliefs, how could it happen that uneducated labourers felt so strongly about this? But in the Tudor Age, religion was the arena in which the revolutionary youth and the conservative Establishment fought out the political and psychological struggle between them which takes place in every century in one form or other. The young artisan might not understand Aristotelian philosophy; but once he had been told that there were learned divines who taught that the consecrated Host, which officialdom ordered him to venerate as the Body of Christ, was in fact only a piece of bread, and that it was idolatry to worship it, he was eager to defy authority by desecrating the Host, with a complete disregard both of the religious feelings of the majority of his neighbours and of the terrible punishments which would be inflicted on him for his conduct.

  When a suspect was accused of heresy, he was arrested and brought before the court of his diocesan bishop, where he was tried and examined, either by the bishop himself or by the bishop’s Ordinary – a judicial officer who was a skilled canon lawyer. After Henry VIII repudiated Papal supremacy, the bishops’ jurisdiction in heresy cases was abolished; but as Henry was determined to suppress any Protestants who advocated doctrines which he had not yet authorized, he appointed commissioners to try cases of suspected heresy. The defendants would normally be tried by a number of commissioners, some of whom were bishops and divines, and others lawyers who were laymen.

  In the last years of Henry’s reign, most heresy trials took place in London and Westminster. Under Edward VI, the Protestant government in general discontinued the practice of burning heretics; but two Protestant extremists who denied the doctrine of the Trinity were burned in London after being tried by commissioners. In Mary’s reign, the bishops’ jurisdiction to try cases of heresy was restored, and heresy trials took place all over south-east England. Four Protestant extremists, who were denounced as Arians or Anabaptists, were burned in the reign of Elizabeth I.

  When an ignorant, uneducated labourer was accused of heresy, he usually merely asserted his beliefs and stated that he would not recant because he knew that his doctrine was God’s truth. His judges pointed out to him that he was uneducated and unlearned, and that it was presumptuous of him to challenge the doctrines which learned divines had shown were the true doctrines of the Church. But when the suspected heretic was himself a learned doctor of divinity, he and the judges engaged in lengthy arguments about the nature of Christ’s Presence in the bread and wine, exchanging quotations from Scripture and from the works of Chrysostom, Origen and other early fathers of the third and fourth centuries. The judge would accuse the earned heretic, not of presumption in challenging the opinions of men more learned than himself, but of prostituting the great gifts of intelligence and learning with which God had endowed him, by using them to argue against, and not in favour of, the doctrine of Christ’s Church.

  These arguments at heresy trials were conducted according to the strict rules of medieval disputations, with a major and minor proposition, an answer, an explication, and the ensuing discussion. But the detached academic atmosphere of the university divinity schools was not always maintained. When, at the beginning of Mary’s reign, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were brought as prisoners to Oxford to take part in a great propaganda disputation with Catholic divines in the presence of a thousand spectators, they were constantly interrupted by the insults of the indignant Catholics in the audience who had come to show their detestation of the heretics. As they all knew, the disputation was the first step in the proceedings which ultimately led to the burning of Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer for their heresy.

  The defendant at a heresy trial was given every opportunity to recant his heresies. If he did, he was not burned, but was sentenced to some lesser punishment, such as a few months’ imprisonment, or incarceration in a monastery, where he was subjected to a strict regime of penance and hardship. He was sometimes also required, after his release from prison, or the monastery, to wear a badge of a faggot on his arm for the rest of his life, as a mark of shame. If he was a prominent figure, such as a learned divine, he was usually required to preach a sermon at Paul’s Cross expressing his repentance and denouncing his past heresies. He arrived at the ceremony with a faggot on his shoulder, as a reminder that he deserved to be burned for his heresy; and the heretic who was sentenced to take part in these proceedings was said, in popular parlance, to have ‘carried his faggot’.

  A heretic who recanted, and was released after carrying his faggot, was not spared if he was guilty of heresy a second time. He was then condemned as a relapsed heretic, and this time he was sentenced to be burned even if he again recanted. A new precedent was established in 1556 when Cranmer, who had never previously been condemned as a heretic, was burned, despite the fact that he recanted. This marked a new stage in the intensification of the persecution.

  If a heretic refused to recant, he was excommunicated by the judges who heard his case. By an Act of Parliament of 1401, a heretic who had been excommunicated by the ecclesiastical court could be burned without any further legal process under a writ issued by the King, though the King was entitled to pardon the offender. At this stage, further efforts were sometimes made to induce the heretic to recant; but if he remained obdurate, the writ for his burning was issued, and sent by the King’s Council to the sheriff of the county.

  The sheriff and his subordinate officers – or in London the Lord Mayor and the city corporation – had to make the arrangements for the burning. They fixed the time and place, arranged for a supply of the necessary faggots to be available, and saw to it that the timber-merchants supplying the faggots did not overcharge the King for them. They ensured that men-at-arms were available to keep order at the execution, and prevent an escape or rescue; but Englishmen in Tudor England had a deep respect for law and the duty of obedience to the royal authority, and there is not a single recorded case in England of an attempted escape, or of an attempt to rescue a condemned heretic from the stake, such as occurred on several occasions at the burning of heretics in the sixteenth century in Scotland and the Netherlands.

  Heretics were always burned in public. The burning of a heretic was an unusual, but not a very rare, occurrence. Twenty-four heretics were burned in the twenty-four years of Henry VII’s reign; eighty-one during the thirty-eight years of Henry VIII; two in the six years of Edward VI; 280 in Mary’s five-year reign – all within the space of three and three-quarter years – and four in Elizabeth I’s forty-four years. The last heretics to be burned in England died at the stake seven years after the end of the Tudor Age in 1610. In the years between 1485 and 1589, when the last heretic of Elizabeth I’s reign suffered, burnings took place in more than sixty towns, most of them in south-east England. Many people in this part of the country had an opportunity to watch the burning of a heretic, and thousands of them must have done so.

  In London, where more heretics were burned than in any other single town, the burnings usually took place at Smithfield, just outside the wall at the north-west corner of the city, beyond Newgate. In the provincial towns, they were normally held on some waste land very near the town, and often on market day, when the largest number of persons would be in town to witness this salutary punishment of heresy. When Christopher Wade, a linen-weaver of Dartford, was burned there in July 1555, the execution took place at ten o’clock in the morning in a gravel pit about a quarter of a mile outside the town, where felons were usually hanged. The people from the surrounding villages came in large nu
mbers to see it, and the local fruiterers, realizing that there would be many onlookers there, brought horse-loads of cherries to sell to the people while they waited for the burning to begin. It was not only idle curiosity which made people come to see a heretic burned. His family, friends and sympathizers usually made a point of coming to give him moral support. Towards the end of Mary’s reign, there were sometimes open demonstrations in favour of the heretic, and in the summer of 1558 the Queen issued an order that anyone who showed sympathy for a heretic at an execution was to be arrested and would be flogged.

  When the heretic had been brought to the place of execution, the proceedings began with a sermon preached by some suitable preacher selected by the government. When Catherine of Aragon’s former confessor, Friar Forest, was burned as a heretic in 1538 – he was the only Catholic during the whole of the Tudor Age to be burned as a heretic for supporting the old Catholic doctrines – the sermon was preached by the Bishop of Worcester, Latimer, who seventeen years later was himself burned as a Protestant heretic in Mary’s reign; but it was unusual for a bishop to be appointed to preach the sermon at a burning, and this duty was usually performed by a rising churchman of a slightly inferior rank. After the sermon, the heretic said goodbye to his friends, and often gave them his gown or some other parting gift. Sometimes he drank a last cup of wine. He could choose whether he preferred to be burned in his outer garments, or to remove them and be burned in his underclothes. He was then fastened to the stake and surrounded by the faggots; and at a sign from the sheriff, the faggots were lit.