Forest’s execution took place at Smithfield on 22 May, in the presence of a crowd of thousands, including the Lord Chancellor, Cromwell, Archbishop Cranmer, the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk, the Earls of Essex and Hertford, the Bishop of London, the Lord Mayor and the sheriffs. The elderly friar was dragged the short distance from Newgate prison to Smithfield on a hurdle, dressed in his Franciscan habit which by now was in tatters, and bound hand and foot. Wriothesley describes how ‘the place of execution where the gallows and fire were made was railed round about; and there was a scaffold made to set the pulpit on where the preacher stood, and another against it where the friar stood all the sermon-time, and a long scaffold next to St Bartholomew’s Hospital gate, where the Lords of the Privy Council sat with the Mayor and Aldermen and other gentlemen and commons of the City’. At the scene and prior to the burning, Bishop Hugh Latimer preached a sermon for the edification of the watching crowds – or, more particularly, for Friar Forest himself. Latimer does seem to have entertained a genuine hope that, even at this last moment, Forest might listen to what he had to say and be converted. He wrote to Cromwell that, if Forest would again – and genuinely this time – abjure his heresy, he would ‘wish his pardon, such is my foolishness’. The sermon lasted for about an hour, the whole ceremony taking place between eight and eleven o’clock in the morning. Wriothesley’s account continues:
And being asked by the said Bishop in what state he would die, he openly declaring there with a loud voice to the Bishop as follows: That if an angel should come down from heaven and show him any other thing than that he had believed all his lifetime past he would not believe him, and that if his body should be cut joint after joint or member after member, burnt, hanged, or what pain soever might be done to his body, he would never turn from his old sect of this Bishop of Rome; and also seven years ago he [Latimer] dare not have made such a sermon for his life.
What lends particular credence to this description is that Wriothesley was not himself a supporter of this position, as is clear from his use of such phrases as ‘his old sect of this Bishop of Rome’. Forest’s remark to Latimer that seven years ago he would never have preached such a reformist sermon is justifiable – it was Latimer, not Forest, who had changed his opinions. If his, Forest’s, views were now to be taken as heretical, it should not be forgotten that Latimer (and, by implication, all the other bishops and doctors of the Church) had espoused those same views not so many years ago.
To bring matters to a conclusion, either Latimer or Cromwell cried out (or so it is reported): ‘Burn him! Burn him!’ There are various versions of Forest’s death, during which he appears more or less heroic and saintly or abject and frightened, depending on the viewpoint of the reporter. Possibly he was all of these things at once. According to the Spanish chronicler Garzias, Forest crossed himself and said, ‘Gentlemen, deal with my body as you wish.’ He was then removed from the platform where he had been standing and led to where he was to be burnt. His habit was pulled off, a chain was tied around his waist, and he was hoisted up, suspended by the middle, pushed into a swinging position by soldiers with halberds. He had asked for his hands to be untied, and they were. Before being heaved into position, he is reported to have said: ‘Neither fire, nor faggot, nor scaffold shall separate me from thee, O Lord.’
Extra fuel for the fire was provided by the ‘abused image’ of Dderfel Gadarn (Derfel the Mighty, a warrior-saint of the sixth century), a great wooden statue from the pilgrimage site of Llanderfel (where the parish church is still dedicated to St Dervel) in north Wales. The claim has often been made that a Welsh prophecy stating that Dderfel Gadarn would one day set a forest on fire prompted the authorities to burn Forest. However, heresy proceedings against Forest had begun before Cromwell knew of the existence of the image, while the earliest reference to any prophecy comes in Edward Hall’s Chronicle, published in 1548.
Cromwell had been made aware of the image of Dderfel Gadarn from a letter dated 6 April 1538 from Dr Elis Price, Commissary General of the diocese of St Asaph, who had been busy ‘taking away … abusions, superstitions and hypocrisies used there’. He reported that there remained this image to which people came in pilgrimage every day, bringing offerings of cows, oxen, horses or money, and that as many as 600 people had done this only the day before. ‘There is a belief,’ wrote Price, ‘that the image has power to fetch persons out of hell that be damned,’ and he asked Cromwell for instructions on how to deal with this situation. Cromwell seems to have instructed that the image be brought to London, for by the end of April Dr Price was reporting that it had been taken down and would shortly be conveyed to the Lord Privy Seal himself, despite pleas from the priest and parishioners who were prepared to pay the not inconsiderable sum of £40 to keep it.
Wriothesley describes the image as being a wooden idol ‘like a man of arms in his harness, having a little spear in his hand and a casket of iron about his neck hanging with a ribbon’. According to Garzias, the ‘great wooden saint’ was ‘so big that it looked like a giant’ and had to be carried by eight men who ‘hoisted it on to the platform where Dr Forest was’.
Mocking verses were also on display at the site of execution, linking the fates and the illusions of ‘Forest the Friar, that obstinate liar’ with the image of Dderfel Gadarn – the latter proved to be a false and useless idol by the fact that it had been brought from Wales to be burnt in Smithfield, and the former ‘wilfully’ burning on account of his obstinacy. The actual burning was indescribably excruciating, even those chroniclers wishing to emphasize Friar Forest’s courage and sanctity unable to disguise the fear and contortions of the old man, his instinctive attempts to avoid the flames. ‘Then,’ wrote Garzias, ‘they began to set fire underneath him, and as it reached his feet he drew them up a little, but directly afterwards let them down again, and he began to burn. The holy man beat his breast with his right hand, and then raised both his hands to heaven and said many prayers in Latin, his last spoken words being ‘Domine, miserere mei’ [‘Lord, have mercy upon me’]: and when the fire reached his breast he spoke no more and gave up his soul to God.’ The great wooden image of the ‘giant’ had been cast into the flames below the friar as soon as they began to take hold. A strong wind kept blowing the flames to one side, and the fire kept dying down. In the end the chain may have been lowered, so that the poor sufferer fell into the flames along with the idol and finally died.
John Foxe, who was concerned throughout his Acts and Monuments to demonstrate the sanctity and courage of the Protestant martyrs, was predictably scornful about the demeanour of this sole Catholic victim of execution by burning, giving the following account of Forest’s end (which he took word for word from Hall’s Chronicle): ‘The Friar when he saw the fire come, and that present death was at hand, he caught hold upon the ladder, and would not let it go, but so unpatiently took his death, as never any man that put his trust in God at any time, so ungodly or unquietly ended his life.’
Friar Forest’s remains, such as they were, were gathered up and buried somewhere in St Bartholomew’s Hospital (perhaps by some of the Augustinian canons who lived at the priory outside which this horrific scene was enacted, and who looked after the hospital). That night, perhaps inflamed by seeing the image of Dderfel Gadarn burn and looking for more ‘idols’ to attack, unidentified persons damaged the famous rood (or great crucifix) outside the City church of St Margaret Pattens.
A psychological change can be seen developing in all of the characters whose deaths have been recounted in this chapter, a change that took place in them gradually as they began to perceive that death at the hands of executioners – or, in William Pavier’s case – by his own hand – was inevitable. William Roper wrote of how, between his father-in-law Thomas More’s resignation in 1532 and his imprisonment in April 1534, More ‘would talk with his wife and children of the joys of heaven and the pains of hell, of the lives of holy martyrs, of their grievous martyrdoms, of their marvellous patience, and of their passions
and deaths that they suffered rather than they would offend God; and what happy and blessed thing it was, for the love of God, to suffer loss of goods, imprisonment, loss of lands and life also’. Nevertheless, More was also firmly of the view that it was wrong to seek martyrdom – which, he considered, would be tantamount to suicide – and his refusal to be drawn into speech and thereby incriminate himself (whatever Rich said to the contrary) is indicative of his desire to avoid execution if possible. Yet such a desire went hand in hand with the acceptance of that fate, if it indeed proved unavoidable. Similar attitudes can be seen in Bishop John Fisher; in the prior and monks of the Charterhouse (who swore, with reservations, to the first oath demanded of them, but resigned themselves to death on realizing the implications of the second); in James Bainham (and in Latimer when he came to visit him in prison); and in John Frith – who initially tried to flee back to Antwerp but later, once he was imprisoned and realized that the only escape would involve renouncing his beliefs, refused to take the chance of running away when it was offered to him. And once the inevitability of death was accepted, then these men embraced their fate and began to seek the ‘glory’ that could be found in martyrdom.
Not the least ironic aspect of this whole unhappy episode in English history is that the people on opposite ‘sides’ who met their death – Fisher, More, Forest, the Carthusians on one side, Bainham, Frith, Huet on the other, with Pavier perhaps somewhere in between – all took their inspiration and courage from the same example: that of Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying, before his arrest and crucifixion, ‘Let this cup pass from me – but yet not my will, but thine, be done.’ More wrote his Treatise upon the Passion during the years he was coming to terms with his likely fate; Pavier contemplated the dying Christ as he prepared to take his own life; Bainham, Frith and Huet – and the struggling Father Forest – commended their souls to him as they burned.
Chapter Three
THE MAKING OF MARTYRS
Crown him, ye martyrs of your God,
who from his altar call;
praise him whose way of pain ye trod,
and crown him Lord of all.
SINGING THE ABOVE VERSE (verse three of the hymn ‘All hail the power of Jesu’s name’) in the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great – the former conventual church of the great monastery – on an August Sunday in 2014, I could not help wondering to which particular martyrs the hymn-writer (Edward Perronet, 1726–92) was referring, and which we mean when we sing it now. Perronet, the son of an Anglican priest but himself an early Methodist and later an Independent minister, turns out to have had a connection with St Bartholomew the Great, having been married there (to Duriah Clarke) on 10 September 1748, so he may well have had the men and women burnt at the stake outside its gates in mind when he composed his hymn. Given his aversion to the established Church and his claim that celebrating the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper should not be confined to ordained priests (a question over which he fell out with the Wesley brothers, John and Charles), Perronet is very unlikely to have included Thomas More in his list of martyrs – but should we do so, along with the Protestants he pursued, or does awarding the martyr label to one set of those who died for their faith preclude awarding it to another? How does one approach the memory of ‘martyrs’? How does one decide who was and who was not a martyr, when over such a short period of time there were so many conflicting beliefs, or conflicting interpretations of fundamental beliefs – for all of which some people would be found who were prepared to stake their lives on them – people from opposing ‘sides’ each sincerely believing in the causes for which they died, each venerated by their own supporters?
For John Foxe, the hagiographer of Protestants, Friar John Forest was not really a martyr at all, his lack of saintly credentials only underscored by his instinctive attempts to avoid the flames. The opposite view is taken by the Roman Catholic Church, who beatified Father Forest, together with fifty-three other English martyrs, in 1886. Sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Catholic martyrologists, such as Johannes Molanus (a Flemish theologian of Louvain University), Caesar Baronius (an Italian cardinal and ecclesiastical historian) and Heribert Rosweyde (a professor of philosophy at the Jesuit college at Douai), were as keen to extol ‘their’ martyrs at the expense of the ‘false’ Protestant ones as Foxe was to do the reverse. And both Protestants and Catholics denounced the ‘Anabaptist’ martyrs, the most persecuted Christians of the sixteenth century, regarded as beyond the pale by both major persuasions. First emerging in the 1520s, the Anabaptists believed that true Christians should be re-baptized as adults, were in favour of holding property in common, and were opposed to war and to the swearing of oaths. In the highly ordered society of sixteenth-century Europe, they were bound to be viewed with mistrust, as subversive. Erasmus was not alone in thinking of them as anarchists who were not to be tolerated.
Would it perhaps be best not to call anyone a martyr, and consign the word to history – particularly in view of its having been commandeered in recent years by the suicide bomber? ‘We rejoice for him whom God has chosen for martyrdom in the ranks of the people of faith,’ writes the al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Bakr Naji in The Management of Savagery,* basing his triumphalism on a very different interpretation of martyrdom in the twenty-first century from any that would have been recognized in the sixteenth. None of the martyrs whose stories are related in this book set out to terrorize, maim and kill by means of their own immolation.
It is idle, but inviting, to speculate on the heavenly conversations of all those awarded martyrs’ crowns when they meet each other after death (assuming they are all let into heaven, where differences dissolve in ‘one equal music’). Perhaps some of them will first have to experience the pains of purgatory (if such a place, or state, exists – another point of contention over which opposing martyrs argued), there to learn that killing for the sake of ideas is not the way of Christian love (though some of them sincerely believed it was). There were certainly men and women from all the competing doctrinal positions of the sixteenth century who were prepared to lay down their lives for their beliefs. They did not constitute the majority of believers, but neither did they believe anything different from their fellow believers in each ‘camp’; it was the seriousness with which they took their faith, their lack of willingness to compromise, that distinguished them from the majority. And as Brad Gregory has succinctly put it: ‘The martyrs died for their fidelity to Christ, but they disagreed about what it meant to be Christian. They died for God’s truth, but they disputed what this truth was.’
In determining who could justly be called martyrs, sixteenth-century thinkers considered there was more to it than how the individual bore his or her death (despite Foxe’s scorn for Friar Forest’s lack of stoicism). Patience under affliction could as easily be demonstrated by a ‘false’ martyr as by a ‘true’ one. What was of more importance was the rightness of the cause for which the alleged martyr suffered. St Augustine had presented this point very clearly in his treatise De Correctione Donatistarum (A Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists), written in around 400:
Accordingly, in the psalm [Psalm 43:1], we must interpret of the true martyrs, who wish to be distinguished from false martyrs, the verse in which it is said, ‘Judge me, O Lord, and distinguish my cause from an ungodly nation.’ He does not say, Distinguish my punishment, but ‘Distinguish my cause.’ For the punishment of the impious may be the same; but the cause of the martyrs is always different.
Both Catholic and Protestant apologists expressed the view that it was perfectly possible to combine a willingness to endure torment and a horrible death with being deluded. In other words, being prepared to die for an idea did nothing to lend credence to that idea (at least in theory; in practice, the stoicism of the martyrs – of either ‘side’ – could impress onlookers sufficiently to make new disciples, or at least to sway opinion). But for the theorists – and very often for the interrogators and judges – ‘death for
true Christianity was steadfastness, death for erroneous beliefs was stubbornness’. Again and again in the trials of the unorthodox we see this attitude contributing to their conviction as heretics – their refusal to recant was interpreted as obstinacy which, according to Gregory the Great, was the ‘daughter of vainglory’ (another derogatory term often thrown at heretics) and in itself evidence of a heretical frame of mind. The Jesuit priest Robert Parsons, the author of a Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603), drew the parallels explicitly, arguing that obstinacy was ‘so nearly conjoined in blood and kindred to heresy herself, as they cannot be separated’. (It is worth noting that heresy is here given a feminine persona – she is a temptress, a harlot, come to lure the faithful away from the true path.) It followed that ‘dying for opinions in religion, without other consideration, is not sufficient to make martyrs, for that it may be pertinacity and not constancy, sin and not virtue, instigation of the devil, and not inspiration of the spirit of God’. Hugh Latimer pointed out that even Jesus feared death, so consequently the fear of death cannot prove that a man is dying for an unjust cause; neither then can the contrary argument be upheld – that if a man does not fear death, his cause must be righteous. A completely stoical acceptance of pain was not a prerequisite for martyrdom either, for had not Jesus himself cried out from the cross: ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’
Seeking to explain the courage of ‘martyrs’ deemed to be mistaken, their opponents would identify the devil as the source of both their delusion and their bravery. The Catholic John Christopherson, chaplain and confessor to Mary I, wrote that if someone saw a heretic ‘gladly go to the fire, and patiently suffer it’, he should ‘be right sorry in his heart and lament, that the devil was so great with him that he could make him suffer the hot flames of fire for his wicked opinion, and sold him straight to the fervent flames of everlasting fire’. Both Protestant and Catholic writers ‘noted that if Satan could transform himself into an angel of light, then in his envy of God’s martyrs, he could inspire heretics to die for false doctrines’.
The Burning Time Page 11