The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  Then certain of the Bishops smiled at him, and Stokesley, the Bishop of London, said:

  ‘Why, Frith is a heretic, and already judged to be burned, and unless you revoke your opinion, you shall burn also with him.’

  ‘Truly,’ says he, ‘I am content therewithal.’

  Then the Bishop asked him if he would forsake his opinions, to which he answered that he would do as Frith did.

  Clearly John Frith had been capable of inspiring great loyalty, and it was not only his fellow sufferer Andrew Huet who was devoted to him. He was widely mourned as a young man – he was only thirty when he died – of much talent, wit and charm (the latter a characteristic which could be in short supply among both the reformers and their opponents). Frith’s life, though short, was influential, particularly through his writing, the articles he compiled shortly before his execution being adopted almost word for word by the reformed Church under Edward VI for the English prayer book of 1552. He is reported by John Foxe as having foretold as much in his conversation with Cranmer’s gentleman who had tried to persuade him to escape:

  ‘I know very well that this doctrine of the Sacrament of the Altar which I hold and have opened contrary to the opinion of this realm is very hard meat to be digested both of the clergy and laity thereof. But this I will say to you,’ taking the gentleman by the hand, ‘that if you live but twenty years more, whatsoever become of me, you shall see this whole realm of my opinion concerning this Sacrament of the Altar.’

  Frith was by no means universally mourned, however, and the burning of these two young men provided an occasion for the profound hostility between the opposing factions around the questions of doctrinal and liturgical reform – and the overriding question of authority and where it was to be placed – to be publicly rehearsed. Many in the crowd who attended the burning were there to support the suffering men, but this display of sympathy aroused the ire of those who believed they had been justly condemned. Among these supporters of the status quo were ‘one Doctor Cooke, who was parson of Honey Lane, and one that was the Master of the Temple, [who] willed the people to pray no more for them than they would pray for dogs’. Frith’s reaction was to smile and ask God to forgive his abuser. The onlookers reacted less charitably, with anger.

  Another vocal supporter of the authorities, both by virtue of his office and by personal conviction, was the Town Clerk of London (the most important paid official of the City Corporation), William Pavier, who had held the post since 1514. He had officiated at the burning of James Bainham and, far from acting as an impassive official carrying out a prescribed duty, he had lambasted the victim, calling him ‘thou heretic’.

  But Pavier was not present at the burning of Frith and Huet, for he was already dead himself. Highly conservative in his religious beliefs, and Warden of the Guild of the Name of Jesus at St Paul’s, he had become horrified at the direction royal policy appeared to be taking soon after the burning of Bainham, and swore that he would cut his own throat if he thought there was any possibility of King Henry having the Gospels printed in English. He did not in fact cut his throat, but hanged himself in his chamber, before an image of the crucified Christ, in May 1533. His reasons for taking the grave act of committing suicide, thereby depriving himself not only of life on earth but of any possibility of salvation in the life to come (according to the beliefs of the time), are unclear. (As a suicide, his corpse would be buried in unconsecrated ground and his goods confiscated by the state.) He must, however, have realized that Henry – who had indeed held out a promise that an official English translation would eventually be produced, partly to combat the spread of unofficial ones such as that of Tyndale – was proving sympathetic to certain reformist ideas; but also his official position as overseer of the burnings seems to have unhinged him.

  The account of Pavier’s death by the nineteenth-century historian James Anthony Froude is derived both from Foxe and from Hall’s Chronicle and he also offers some reflections of his own, suggesting that the Town Clerk was far more conflicted in his attitude towards the punishment of heretics than his public performance attested. On the day of his death, Pavier’s servant girl entered his room to find him weeping in front of the large crucifix hanging on his wall. Clearly wanting to be left alone, he told her to go and clean his rusty sword. She took the sword and left; when she returned a little later, she found him hanging from a beam. ‘God, into whose hands he threw himself, self-condemned in his wretchedness,’ wrote Froude, ‘only knows the agony of that hour. Let the secret rest where it lies, and let us be thankful for ourselves that we live in a changed world.’

  Pavier’s death is not mentioned in the records of the City Corporation which is perhaps not surprising, given the circumstances of his suicide. The only reference to his having ceased to be Town Clerk is the entry recording his successor on 13 May 1533, which reads: ‘Item moreover it is agreed at the same Common Council that Master Thomas Ryshton shall be the Common Clerk of the said City of London and was then and there admitted to the same and sworn accordingly.’

  Whether or not Pavier was tormented, as Froude suggests, by the inherent contradiction between worshipping Christ crucified and participating in the execution of men who believed themselves to be his followers, his suicide offers a poignant demonstration of the confusion engendered in many of the King’s subjects (and further afield) by his religious policy in the 1530s. Determined to free himself from his marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and having reached the conclusion that the major obstacle to his attaining this goal was Pope Clement VII, Henry was devoting all his energies, and those of his ecclesiastical advisers, to extricating himself – and, by extension, ‘his’ Church – from the authority of Rome. As this personal and political impulse to sever the connection between Canterbury and Rome happened to coincide with the rise of Protestantism in Europe, and following the adage that ‘your enemies’ enemies are your friends’, Henry and his advisers inevitably found some common cause with the reformers who were also seeking to challenge the authority of Rome – but on very different grounds and with very different ends in view. One of the results was bewilderment all round.

  As early as 1524, Henry had given up all hope of Katherine bearing another child (their only surviving offspring being a daughter, Mary), and by the time he became infatuated with Anne Boleyn two years later, he had already begun to convince himself that his wife’s failure to give birth to a son who survived infancy was a sign that his marriage to his brother’s widow (Katherine having been first married to Henry’s elder brother, Arthur) was sinful, in that it had broken the laws concerning affinity laid down in the Old Testament Book of Leviticus: ‘And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.’

  In his initial attempts to remedy the situation by obtaining an annulment of his first marriage, Henry was shocked to discover that he could not bend the papacy to his will. His surprise was not at all unreasonable, for this lack of compliancy with the desire of an English monarch was more or less unprecedented – and Rome’s refusal to assist had more to do with international politics and the need to keep on good terms with Katherine’s nephew, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, than with moral strictures concerning the indissolubility of marriage.

  As Henry came to see that he could not solve the dynastic problem of the succession to the throne with the agreement of the papacy, he and his advisers increasingly realized that a solution could be found only by doing without such agreement. Nevertheless, the decision to try to dispense with papal authority was neither sudden nor the first solution to be tested. In the immediate aftermath of Wolsey’s fall from power (largely provoked by his failure to deliver the desired outcome), Henry’s advisers offered him a range of options on how to obtain the annulment and Henry responded by trying a number of different schemes. Then in 1531 or 1532 (opinions differ as to precisely when) the idea came to predominate, in both Henry’s mind and those of his advisers, that
there were valid precedents for the English monarch to exercise absolute authority over the English Church and hence altogether dispense with the need for the Pope.

  In seeking justification to extricate the Church in England from papal jurisdiction, the King’s advisers considered both historical developments – how the role of the papacy had changed over time – and arguments as to the prescribed functions of secular and religious rulers, respectively. As David Loades puts it:

  The functional argument was derived mainly from the Defensor Pacis of Marsilius of Padua, and claimed that the task of the clergy in the world was to preach and teach, not to bear rule. Since Christ’s Kingdom is not of this world, those who claim to be Christ’s vicars and representatives should not exercise jurisdiction over laymen, or hold property, let alone presume to direct the policies of kings. The historical argument was simply that the authority of the papacy had never been recognized in the early church in anything like its high medieval form, and that its development, especially since the days of Gregory VII, was rank usurpation.

  The process of gaining – or, arguably, regaining – royal control over the Church began with a process which came to be known as ‘the submission of the clergy’, by which the Church was forced to give up its right to make church law (canons) without royal assent. This action of the King, which presaged more changes and weakening of ecclesiastical authority to come, was the immediate reason behind the resignation of Sir Thomas More as Lord Chancellor in May 1532. More had been fighting a losing battle for some time in his support of papal authority and opposition to the attempt to annul Henry’s marriage to Katherine. He gave ill-health as the official reason for his resignation, but no one was fooled. Opposition to the King’s will was further weakened a few months later, in August, with the death of Archbishop Warham.

  The elderly Warham, who had been Archbishop of Canterbury since 1504 and also Lord Chancellor from that year until December 1515, had long been one of Henry’s trusted advisers in the case of his ‘great matter’. He was also a long-term patron of Erasmus, and had succeeded in forming a mutually respectful working relationship with Thomas Wolsey, his successor as Lord Chancellor who, as Archbishop of York and a cardinal, might have been expected to be a rival. Despite Warham presiding over the convocation on 15 May 1532 which surrendered the Church’s legislative independence to the Crown and having been one of only three bishops to give apparently unqualified assent to the ‘submission of the clergy’, he had two months previously publicly rebuked the King in the House of Lords for his conduct in seeking to assert his authority over that of Rome. In consequence he had been accused of misprision of treason on trumped-up charges, and had prepared an eloquent speech in his defence – which he never got to deliver. He was clearly now set on a collision course with Henry and only his death from natural causes on 22 August prevented a showdown. In the event, his death opened the way for the appointment to the see of Canterbury of Thomas Cranmer, who had already been involved in the making of the King’s case.

  Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn in his private chapel at Westminster on 25 January 1533, although the divorce from Katherine had not yet been obtained. Thomas Cromwell was given the task of making the marriage legitimate – and to do so as soon as possible, as Anne was already pregnant, with what Henry was convinced would be a son. Cromwell ‘therefore ensured that the new parliament would be filled with men known to be favourable to the divorce. He also had his confederate, Sir Thomas Audley, appointed Lord Chancellor, which meant he would now officiate over the House of Lords.’ Alongside Audley was, as we have seen, Richard Rich.

  In the course of 1533, a number of acts were introduced into Parliament which would lead by degrees to the severance of the English Church from Rome. First, in March, Parliament passed the Act in Restraint of Appeals. This prohibited the taking of ecclesiastical appeals outside the jurisdiction of the English courts and so made it possible for Henry’s case for a divorce to be tried and concluded by Cranmer in England, with no one, including Katherine of Aragon, having the right to appeal to Rome as a higher authority. Drawn up by Cromwell, the Act contained a preamble setting out the position that England was an empire, with the King in sole charge and subject to no external authority.

  Concerning the laws of affinity as set out in Leviticus, which Henry had cited to justify his disquiet over his first marriage, in April the upper house of convocation (that is, the archbishops, bishops and abbots of the English Church) voted by 197 to 19 that the Pope did not have the power to issue a dispensation allowing a man to marry his deceased brother’s widow (the implication being that Henry could not have legitimately married Katherine, and hence that their marriage was invalid). Forty-four canon lawyers (experts in ecclesiastical law) were also present at this meeting of convocation and the great majority of them determined that consummation between Katherine and her first husband had been sufficiently proved. (Part of Katherine’s line of defence against the assertion that her marriage to Henry was illegitimate was that she had not in fact ever been Arthur’s actual wife in the terms implied by Leviticus – that is, that she had never had sex with him, and so Henry could not have been ‘uncovering his brother’s nakedness’ when their own union was consummated.)

  Archbishop Cranmer then held a special session of his court to pronounce on the King’s first marriage, having previously sought and obtained permission from the King to determine the matter. Katherine was asked to appear before the court but refused to do so. The trial began at Dunstable on 10 May 1533. On 23 May Cranmer gave sentence that the Pope could not license such marriages. This was tantamount to declaring that the marriage between Henry and Katherine had not been a marriage at all, but merely an adulterous liaison – leaving the King free to marry the woman of his choice. Katherine had already been relegated to the status of Princess Dowager of Wales, with the further consequence that her daughter Mary had ceased officially to be a princess and had become, to her great chagrin, merely the Lady Mary.

  The theoretical and theological hoops through which Henry’s advisers were jumping in order to legitimize the King’s desires were noticed by various of his subjects – not least by John Frith who had alluded to them during his interrogation by Thomas More, when the subject under discussion was the infallibility of the Church (upheld by More and questioned by Frith). ‘The clergy say,’ commented Frith, ‘that they be the Church, and cannot err: And this is the ground of all their doctrine. But the truth of this article is now sufficiently known. For if Queen Katherine be King Henry’s wife, then they do err, and if she be not, then they have erred, to speak no more cruelly.’ In other words, if the marriage between Henry and Katherine was valid, the clergy were erring now in supporting the attempt to have it annulled; whereas if it never had been valid, as was now being claimed, they had erred years ago in allowing it to proceed. If they are right now, they were wrong before, and vice versa: so much, implied Frith, for the so-called infallibility of the Church, as represented by her clergy.

  The definitive Act of Supremacy was passed in November 1534, confirming the King as supreme head of the Church of England. This was followed by the Treason Act which came into force on 1 February 1535. This latter Act ‘extended the definition of that crime to include treason by word, and specifically such speech as might “maliciously” deprive the King of any of his “dignities or titles”‘. In consequence of the passing of this Act, anyone who denied, or who even refused to acknowledge, that the King was supreme head on earth of the Church in England, could be charged with high treason. In the spring of 1535, commissioners were appointed to administer an oath upon the Gospels by which subjects were to declare acceptance of the King’s headship of the Church. All religious houses were to be visited for this purpose.

  In London, it was Bishop John Stokesley, who hoped always for a ‘happy day’ when the old ways would return, who was expected by Henry and Cromwell to be at the forefront in enforcing the royal supremacy. Stokesley was not in a strong position to object to wh
at Cromwell wanted of him, for he appeared to have a skeleton in his own cupboard, in the shape of the abbess of the Benedictine abbey of Wherwell in Hampshire, who was accused of having been his mistress – and even of being the mother of his child. The abbess was interrogated in 1534: ‘was she not too familiar with the bishop when she was a nun; had not the late Bishop Foxe of Winchester prohibited him [Stokesley] from entering her monastery and from her company in order to avoid suspicion; had not the abbess, after she had a baby, come from her house to the bishop’s palace at Fulham to be merry with the bishop; was she not lodged in his chamber?’ Though these allegations may have helped to ensure Stokesley’s obedience to royal policy, the primary target was the abbess herself, as she had not proved compliant to requests over the granting of property to one John Cooke, a confidential servant of the Crown, whose interests were being promoted by both the King and Cromwell. This particular abbess was duly forced out (albeit with a pension and somewhere to live), and was replaced by someone more likely to bend to the political will. The charges of her liaison with Bishop Stokesley were never substantiated.