The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  The eyewitness account of Lambert’s execution given by Foxe in the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments suggests that Henry’s intention to make an example of this obstinate radical did indeed come to fruition:

  When breakfast was ended, he was taken to Smithfield, where he was very cruelly treated. For after his legs were consumed and burnt up to the stumps, the wretched tormenters withdrew the fire, leaving but very little under him. Then two men, that stood on each side of him, thrust their halberts into his body, and raised him up as high as the chain would permit. Then Lambert, lifting up such hands as he had, his finger ends flaming with fire, cried unto the people in these words ‘None but Christ, none but Christ’; and being let down again from their halberts, he fell into the fire, and ended his mortal life.

  One of those responsible for the trial and death of John Lambert was Robert Barnes, a character closely allied for much of his life with Thomas Cromwell. Less than two years later, in July 1540, it was his turn to be one of the victims in what was a particularly macabre and intentionally awe-inspiring event:

  And the 30th day of the same month was Doctor Barnes, Jerome and Garrard drawn from the Tower into Smithfield, and there burned for their heresies. And that same day also was drawn from the Tower with them Doctor Powell with two other priests, and there was a gallows set up at St Bartholomew’s gate, and there were hanged, beheaded, and quartered the same day, and their quarters set about the city.

  These deaths occurred two days after the execution of Thomas Cromwell, and the events were not unconnected. The fate of all six men – and of Cromwell himself – furnishes the clearest possible illustration that religion and politics could not be separated under Henry VIII, heresy shading into treachery, and vice versa. At the time, Cromwell’s downfall was being imputed partly to his alleged complicity in a heretical movement, and the burning of the three heretics Robert Barnes, William Jerome (the Vicar of St Dunstan’s, Stepney, the church where Cromwell and his family worshipped) and Thomas Garrett (or Garrard, or occasionally Garratt) could be presented to the people as corroboration of such an allegation – particularly as Barnes had actually been in Cromwell’s employment since 1532.

  Robert Barnes was born in Bishop’s Lynn in Norfolk in about 1495 and entered the house of the Austin Friars in Cambridge while still a boy. He subsequently studied under Erasmus at the University of Louvain, which was at that time a distinguished centre of academic humanism and where Barnes developed humanist sympathies. He returned to Cambridge in the mid-1520s, where he became prior of the Austin Friars and, as a result of his studies at Louvain, initiated a series of educational reforms in the house, including the introduction of various classical Latin authors into the curriculum. One of his pupils was Miles Coverdale, who would go on to produce the first complete translation of the Bible into English. Barnes played a significant role in the meetings of young intellectuals that took place at the White Horse tavern in St Edward’s parish in Cambridge – where he, like many other subsequent reformers (including John Lambert), met and was influenced by Thomas Bilney. And in turn, just about everyone who was anyone in the church reform movement seems to have encountered and been influenced by Robert Barnes (we have already seen the effect he had on the life of the former monk, Richard Bayfield). The conservative Stephen Gardiner, who knew Barnes well and had himself been a devotee of Erasmus from an early age, does not seem to have been overly impressed, thinking of him as a typical friar of his period, albeit a very entertaining one – ‘a trim minion friar Augustine, one of a merry scoffing wit, friarlike, and as a good fellow in company was beloved of many’.

  Barnes received the degree of Bachelor of Theology in 1522 and a doctoral degree a year later. He first attracted adverse attention from the wider authorities towards the end of 1525 when he preached a Christmas Eve sermon in the Cambridge church of St Edward King and Martyr, in which he criticized various aspects of traditional religion, decried the way festivals were observed and condemned the ostentatious splendour of Cardinal Wolsey. The sermon had been planned in advance, Barnes being encouraged to deliver it by Bilney and his other friends. Once in the pulpit, however, he departed from his prepared discourse, based on Luther’s sermon on the epistle for the day, and went further than any of his friends had anticipated, particularly in lashing out at the cardinal himself. On this first occasion of his getting into trouble, Barnes was brought to London where he was examined before Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall and Wolsey himself and persuaded, though not without protest, to recant his opinions. He was assisted in his trial by Miles Coverdale, who subsequently abandoned his monastic vows and went abroad.

  Barnes’s recantation was a public event. It took place at Paul’s Cross on Sunday 11 February 1526; Barnes was made to perform public penance by processing around the cathedral bearing a faggot and kneeling while Bishop Fisher preached a sermon. The service was presided over by Cardinal Wolsey himself who, with thirty-six bishops and mitred abbots, sat on a platform specially constructed for the occasion. Bishop Fisher based his sermon on the day’s Gospel reading (Luke 18:31–43), concerning the healing of a blind man; he likened the blind man to a heretic and declared: ‘Heresy is a perilous weed, it is the seed of the devil, the inspiration of the wicked spirits, the corruption of our hearts, the blinding of our sight, the quenching of our faith, the destruction of all good fruit, and finally the murder of our souls.’ And he continued:

  My duty is to endeavour me after my poor power, to resist these heretics, the which cease not to subvert the church of Christ. If we shall sit still and let them in every place sow their ungracious heresies, and everywhere destroy souls, which were so dearly bought with that most precious blood of our saviour Christ Jesu, how terribly shall he lay this until our charge, when we shall be called until a reckoning for this matter!

  In addition to the performing of Barnes’s penance, the service featured a book-burning – which may have been the original point of the ceremony, with Barnes’s humiliation thrown in as a lastminute addition for extra effect. Wolsey had recently instituted a commission to round up heretical books, and the members of the commission were the same men who had examined Barnes and persuaded him to recant. The round-up of books had not been entirely successful, a search of the rooms of thirty suspects in Cambridge having yielded nothing (the master of Queens’ College having got wind of the search and, being sympathetic to reform himself, having tipped off the scholars involved). The drama of Barnes’s recantation saved the ceremony from being a damp squib, with just a little pile of books to be burnt.

  Following his recantation Barnes was imprisoned in the Fleet prison for a time, and subsequently placed under what amounted to house arrest in the monastery of the Austin Friars in London. But he did not spend his days in silent contemplation and repentance, as intended; instead he used his time in London to arrange the sale and distribution of William Tyndale’s New Testament (one of the books Wolsey had been trying to get hold of to burn). When it became apparent in 1528 what he was up to, Bishop Tunstall had him moved to the Austin Friars’ house in Northampton, where he was kept under close guard.

  The next stage in Barnes’s life reads like a spy drama. Determined to break free from surveillance, he left a suicide note for Cardinal Wolsey, along with a pile of friar’s clothes on a river bank. He then disguised himself as a pauper and made his way back to London, from where he managed to sail to Antwerp and then travelled on to Wittenberg. There he became acquainted with Martin Luther, and devoted himself to study and writing in the Protestant cause.

  The chief work for which Barnes is remembered is A Supplication unto King Henry the Eighth, the original edition of which was printed, probably in Antwerp, in 1531. In all, four editions were published during the sixteenth century. It was written with the intention of its being smuggled into England and – if possible – presented to the King, while Barnes was a fugitive in Germany. Cromwell’s confidant and informant, Stephen Vaughan, wrote to his master about the work on 14 November 1531, advi
sing him: ‘Look well upon Dr Barnes’s book. It is such a piece of work as I have not yet seen any like it. I think he shall seal it with his blood.’

  The contents of the book were divided into three sections, the first being the actual ‘supplication’ to the King, in which Barnes argued why he should be acquitted of the charges of heresy which had been brought against him by Wolsey and Tunstall. The second section, entitled ‘Dr Barnes Articles condemned for heresy’, gives an account of the twenty-five allegedly heretical propositions which had formed part of his infamous Christmas Eve sermon, and the third section comprised eight theses or commonplaces covering the main points of Protestant doctrine. These eight theses, all of which apart from the fifth had already been summarized in an earlier work by Barnes, entitled Sententiae ex Doctoribus Collectae, were:

  i. ‘Only faith justifieth before God.’

  ii. ‘What is holy church, and who be thereof and whereby men may know her.’

  iii. ‘What the keys of the church are and to whom they shall be given.’

  iv. ‘Freewill of man, after the fall of Adam, of his natural strength, can do nothing but sin.’

  v. ‘It is lawful for all manner of men to read holy scripture.’

  vi. ‘Men’s constitutions which be not grounded in scripture bind not the conscience of man under the pain of deadly sin.’

  vii. ‘All manner of Christian men, both spiritual and temporal, are bounded when they will be housled to receive the sacrament in both kinds under the pain of deadly sin.’

  viii. ‘It is against scripture to honour images and to pray to saints.’

  Being ‘housled’ meant to receive communion, so in thesis vii Barnes is insisting that all those receiving the sacrament must receive both the bread and the wine, and not just the bread, as was (and still largely is) the Catholic practice.

  Notwithstanding Barnes’s uncompromising Protestantism, very clearly expressed in A Supplication, both his eloquence and his network of contacts led to him being perceived as potentially useful to Cromwell and the King, at a time when Henry was anxious to secure support in Lutheran parts of Europe over his dealings with the Pope. And so, in the summer of 1531, Barnes was asked to find out Luther’s opinion about the matter of Henry’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. Luther’s attitude was not in fact particularly favourable towards the King, but Barnes nevertheless seems to have profited from this commission, and it paved the way for him to return to at least a limited favour in England, particularly as he was full of praise for Henry and prepared to assert the King’s authority against that of the Pope. Barnes was clearly hopeful that, under Henry, the Church of England would be reformed into something approaching fully fledged Protestantism and, in order to support the King in what he imagined to be their shared endeavour, he was prepared to accept a wider remit for royal authority than was Luther.

  Towards the end of 1531 Barnes was able to return to England with royal approval, despite the continuing antagonism of the then Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More. He did not stay long on this occasion, returning to the Continent in 1532 and going to live in Hamburg, from where he conducted a correspondence with More, defending himself against charges of sacramentarianism. After the execution of More, Barnes became ever more closely associated with Thomas Cromwell, being frequently used by him on diplomatic missions to the Protestant princes and cities of the Holy Roman Empire, particularly in support of the royal supremacy. He nevertheless struggled financially, as he was not paid properly, or on time, for these efforts. As for the King, he never really approved of Barnes, despite appearing to be on the side of such reformers when it was politically expedient.

  In November 1534 a second edition of Barnes’s A Supplication had been published in London. This edition begins, like that of 1531, with a section entitled ‘A supplication unto the most gracious prince H. the viii’, but most of this section was in fact new material, comprising an attack on the loyalty of the clergy, particularly lambasting the bishops who had previously taken oaths of allegiance to the Pope. Henry was bound to find this useful, whatever his private views of Barnes’s religious opinions. In 1535 the latter was appointed as a royal chaplain, but the role brought him little advantage. In May 1536 he requested Cromwell to arrange for him to be appointed master of ‘Bedlam’, or the Bethlem Hospital for the insane, a post which had recently fallen vacant and which he had heard was worth £40 a year. One benefit of being appointed to the post, Barnes asserted, was that he would then be near Cromwell (Bedlam being located just outside the walls of the City of London and within easy walking distance of Cromwell’s home), but he also stressed that he was making the request out of need, as he had ‘nothing and nobody to care for him’. He made a further plea to Cromwell in the following month: ‘I beg you to remember me with some small living, as you have often promised me.’ But no such living ever materialized, and Barnes had to struggle on, scraping together some earnings through his occasional diplomatic forays and his writing.

  As the 1530s drew to a close, so Barnes’s fortunes declined. He was involved in the negotiations which culminated in Henry’s illfated fourth marriage, to Anne of Cleves, and he was increasingly finding himself on the wrong side of the religious debate as it began to be clear that the King was no supporter of doctrinal reform. Barnes’s betrayal of John Lambert must have come to be a bitter memory to him, once he realized that the attempt to steer Henry towards moderate reform had been in vain. In 1539 the so-called Act of Six Articles was published by the King’s authority and passed in Parliament. It confirmed the doctrines of: i) transubstantiation; ii) communion in one kind only; iii) the compulsory celibacy of the clergy (Archbishop Cranmer had to take the step of sending his wife and children to safety out of England in the months leading up to the passing of the Act; until then he had just been keeping them hidden); iv) the perpetual obligation of vows of chastity; v) the use of private masses (masses said for souls in purgatory); vi) auricular confession. Whoever spoke against the first article was to be burnt (without even being given the opportunity to recant), while anyone convicted of speaking for the second time against any of the other articles was to be hanged.

  While the Act of Six Articles was making its way through Parliament, Barnes was undertaking a diplomatic mission to the Elector of Saxony and the King of Denmark. Realizing that the passing of the Act spelt failure for his mission, Barnes returned to England where Henry, annoyed that he had not waited to be recalled, refused to see him. In the autumn of the same year, and despite this evidence of the King’s displeasure, Cromwell arranged for Barnes to be appointed to the prebend (a type of canonry) of Llanbedye in St David’s Cathedral (perhaps hoping to keep him out of harm’s way in Wales, now that the tide was turning very much against the reformers in London). If such was Cromwell’s motivation, it came far too late. In any event, Barnes did not go to Wales.

  Instead, in 1540 he, along with William Jerome and Thomas Garrett, was appointed as a Lenten preacher at Paul’s Cross. Such a commission inevitably constituted a test of doctrinal conformity; the occasions would draw large crowds and whatever was said at Paul’s Cross would be heard in the highest quarters. The first sermon that Lent was preached (on Sunday 14 February) by Bishop Stephen Gardiner, who used the opportunity to attack the doctrine of justification by faith, arguing that those who said good works were not necessary for salvation were guilty of misinterpreting the scriptures. Barnes rose to the bait, taking issue with Gardiner and accompanying his argument with personal insults in his own sermon, preached a fortnight later. Gardiner complained to the King, who ordered both preachers to be examined before him. Cromwell realized it would be impolitic, and probably useless, to intervene and so did nothing.

  The French ambassador, Charles de Marillac, was following – and reporting on – these events with interest, not least because Bishop Gardiner was well known to the French court:

  A private matter, which might become of public consequence, has occurred in the shape of a great contention about rel
igion between the Bishop of Winchester, formerly ambassador in France, and a great doctor of the law, called Barnes, principal preacher of these new doctrines. The Bishop, one of these Sundays in Lent, did marvels of preaching in St Paul’s Cathedral against the said doctrines, confirming wisely the old and sharply refuting the new. This Barnes could not endure, so that, some days after, although another was appointed to preach, he mounted the pulpit and, after long insisting on the contrary of what the Bishop had said, angrily threw his glove upon the people, as a defiance to the Bishop, against whom he would maintain what he said to the death. The King, much scandalized by this farce, has ordered both to dispute before him and the Council, in order that it may be seen who is right and who is to suffer punishment.

  Gardiner and Barnes both appeared before Henry on 5 March, when the King declared Barnes to have lost the theological argument (there can never have been much doubt as to whose side he would come down on). He ordered him to apologize to Gardiner and preach a recantation sermon, which order Barnes initially complied with, again at Paul’s Cross, on 12 March. Eighteen days later, however, unable to live with his conscience, he publicly withdrew his recantation – despite also begging Gardiner for forgiveness – in another sermon, preached at St Mary Spital in the presence of the Lord Mayor and members of the Court of Common Council. (The ‘Spital sermon’ is a civic tradition that continues to this day, though it rarely generates such excitement as in 1540.) Barnes seems to have wished to distinguish the personal insults he had made to Gardiner, for which he was sorry, from the statements of his faith, for which he could not apologize. Gardiner, his actions almost as ambiguous as Barnes’s words at this point, was slow to respond to the request to indicate his forgiveness and, after hesitating, held up a finger rather than the hand Barnes had asked for. He explained later that he had been taken aback by the request and embarrassed, though also rather put out. His apparent lack of generosity, along with his whole role in the undoing of Barnes – with whom he was reported actually to have been friendly in their younger days in Cambridge – contributed to the reputation for treacherous cruelty he acquired among Protestants as one of their chief persecutors, to be forever remembered (by the name of his see) as ‘Wily Winchester’. In the most frequently reproduced portrait of him by an unknown artist, Gardiner looks guardedly out at the viewer, as though himself suspecting treachery. Whatever the personal animosities at play, Henry was furious at Barnes’s withdrawal of his recantation – particularly as he felt he had attempted to broker peace between Barnes and Gardiner, and so the refusal of Barnes to comply could be read as a challenge to royal authority. In consequence Barnes, along with Thomas Garrett and William Jerome who had also been preaching dubious sermons, was committed to the Tower on 3 April.