The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  William Jerome had preached at Paul’s Cross on 7 March. In his sermon, in which he was perhaps testing the water to see how far he could go, he had denied that magistrates had the power ‘to make not indifferent that which was indifferent’ (that is, an officer of the law could not determine what was and was not a necessary doctrine for a Christian to believe) and he taught that justification was unconditional (that is, not dependent on ‘works’). From his subsequent recantation, it would also appear that he had referred in an earlier sermon to Members of Parliament as ‘butterflies, fools [or dissemblers] and knaves’. Jerome, like Barnes, was ordered to appear before the King, who was prepared to forgive him – on condition that he recant and ‘make a full and open refusal of these pestilent doctrines’. He agreed to do so, preaching his recantation sermon at St Mary Spital on 29 March, though not without some soul-searching, as recorded in an account given to Cromwell’s son Gregory by his former tutor, Henry Dowes, who wrote that though Jerome was ‘perplexed, he was not confounded. He was compelled to deny himself, but was not the first that had so done; it was only a form of adversity, and he wished some men would learn to do the same.’ And, like Barnes on the following day, he gave a double message, preceding his recantation sermon with another, in which he affirmed the very doctrines he went on to ‘recant’.

  These various voltes-face, the heartfelt sermons followed by apologies and recantations, succeeded by yet more passionate outbursts in defence of the evangelical position, suggest the confusion these men must have felt when faced with a King who had initially appeared to encourage them, in whose royal supremacy they had believed – or which they had at least wholeheartedly supported – as being a significant step on the road to reform and away from Catholic doctrines, and who now seemed to be backtracking as fast as he could go. It was as though they could not really believe that the King – and his first minister – would allow them to be condemned.

  The third member of this trio of passionate preachers was Thomas Garrett, who was forty-two years old at the time of his death. (Robert Barnes was about forty-five when he was executed, and William Jerome presumed to have been around the same age.) At the age of nineteen, Garrett had been admitted to Corpus Christi College in Oxford, two years later becoming a fellow of Magdalen. After obtaining further degrees, he became curate in 1526 of All Hallows, Honey Lane (a City of London church already embracing reform), of which church he eventually, in June 1537, became rector.

  Garrett had made use of his contacts in both Oxford and London to participate heavily in a book-smuggling enterprise, involving supplying the universities with Lutheran texts and distributing small (and therefore easily hidden) copies of Tyndale’s New Testament. He even sold over sixty books to the prior of the monastery of Reading. In February 1528 he was apprehended in these activities by the commissary of the conservative Bishop John Longland of Lincoln, in whose diocese Oxford then was, probably on a tip-off from Cardinal Wolsey, who knew of the Oxford trade in heretical books. This was part of the same incident that John Frith and John Taverner were involved in at Cardinal College, when Frith was locked up in the fish-store and Taverner was let off. Garrett was locked in a room in Lincoln College, but managed to escape by picking the lock and dressing himself in a friend’s coat. (It was a letter sent to Garrett after this escape that Taverner had known about.) He was hoping to be able to reach Wales and sail from there to Germany, but ports were being watched and he was captured at Bedminster near Bristol on the last day of the month. He was examined by Bishops Longland and Tunstall, and agreed to recant.

  Like Barnes, Garrett seems to have benefited in the first half of the 1530s from the King’s need for supporters of the changes he was making in the Church, and was in fact more successful than Barnes in obtaining church positions. A few years after his arrest and examination he became chaplain to Sir Francis Bigod, a Yorkshire landowner who himself supported the royal supremacy. Bigod obtained a licence for Garrett to preach throughout the country. By June 1536 Garrett had become chaplain to Hugh Latimer, then the Bishop of Worcester, and he soon also became his diocesan chancellor, in which role he assisted Latimer in attempting to implement evangelical reform and in successfully stirring up controversy. This work did not make him very popular, but it certainly kept him busy. John Foxe remarked that he was always ‘flying from place to place’, preaching throughout the diocese and southern England as well as working directly for Latimer. In his sermons he emphasized Christ’s passion as the only means of salvation, and criticized the doctrine of purgatory and the practices of saying masses for the dead, making offerings to saints and going on pilgrimage. The evangelical polemicist John Bale wrote approvingly of him: ‘he taught Christ here for an only saviour without the mangy merits of men’.

  By the middle of 1539, in addition to being Rector of All Hallows, Honey Lane, Garrett had become chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, who sent him to preach in Calais. His erstwhile boss, Latimer, was forced to resign his see when he refused to work for the passage of the Act of Six Articles in Parliament. When Garrett was ordered to recant in 1540, his recantation sermon was as sincere as those of his fellows.

  The initial imprisonment in the Tower of Barnes, Jerome and Garrett, on 3 April, was only brief, as for a few weeks Cromwell (whom, on 10 April, Ambassador Marillac had described as ‘tottering’) appeared to be back in control and was able to get them released. But with his own arrest on 10 June, their fates were sealed. The attainder against the three men described them as ‘detestable heretics [who] have openly preached erroneous opinions and perverted many texts of Scripture (for which heresies Barnes and Garrard have been before this abjured), and who are to suffer death as heretics by burning or otherwise, and forfeit all possessions’. Yet there was no real evidence that any of them had contravened the first clause of the Act of Six Articles, the only doctrinal offence to carry an automatic death penalty.

  The religious radical and member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company Richard Hilles wrote to the Zürich reformer Heinrich Bullinger in February 1541, recalling the burning of Barnes, Garrett and Jerome the previous summer: ‘They were brought from the Tower on a sledge to Smithfield, tied to one stake and burned … They remained in the fire as quiet as if they had felt no pain.’ At the stake, the three men maintained that they did not know why they were being burnt, and that they were innocent. With nothing left to lose, they used the moments before the fire was lit to preach their final sermons. Barnes, in particular, played to the crowd and was certainly the ultimate victor as far as public opinion was concerned. He began by asserting his Protestant conviction in the saving power of the death of Christ and went on to mock Catholic teachings, telling the sheriff (waiting to set his torch to the pyre) that, if it were true that the saints in heaven prayed for human beings still on earth, then he, Barnes, would be praying for him in half an hour or so. Declaring his loyalty to the King, he nevertheless went so far as to request he ensure ‘that matrimony be had in more reverence than it is; and that men, for every light cause invented, cast not off their wives’ (this in the very month that Henry’s marriage to Anne of Cleves was dissolved – Richard Rich being one of the officials who witnessed Anne’s signature of consent – and Henry married his fifth wife, Katherine Howard). Barnes also had the temerity to insist that the proceeds from the sale of monastic and other church possessions should be used to benefit the poor, rather than to line the pockets of the rich. This was a plea that would have resonated with many of his contemporaries. For his part, Jerome demanded at the stake that ‘all Christians put no trust nor confidence in their works, but in the blood of Christ’. According to Foxe, Garrett declared he had never knowingly preached anything ‘against God’s holy word, or contrary to the true faith’.

  The bewilderment this execution caused, the three men never having been formally charged with anything but condemned only by attainder, is eloquently captured in Edward Hall’s Chronicle. Hall reports that he has attempted to ‘search out the truth’ but to no ava
il:

  And as I said before, thus much I find in their attainder, that they were detestable and abominable heretics, and that they had taught many heresies, the number whereof was too great in the attainder to be recited, so that there is not one alleged, which I have often wondered at, that their heresies were so many, and not one there alleged, as special cause of their death. And indeed at their death, they asked the sheriffs why they were condemned, who answered, they could not tell; but if I may say the truth, most men said it was for preaching against the doctrine of Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, who chiefly procured this their death, God and he know, but great pity it was, that such learned men should so be cast away, without examination, neither knowing what was laid to their charge, nor never called to answer.

  The burning of these three feisty and determined Protestants, which came at the end of a sultry, pestilence-laden month in which hundreds of Londoners had been arrested on suspicion of having contravened the Act of Six Articles, was carried out alongside the putting to death of three equally uncompromising Catholic priests:

  This year, the thirtieth day of July, 1540, were drawn from the Tower of London into Smithfield these persons following, that is to say: Doctor Barnes, Richard Fetherston, William Jerome, Vicar of Stepney, Doctor Edward Powell, Thomas Garratt, Parson of Honey Lane, and Thomas Abel, priests, of which three of them, that is to say, Barnes, Jerome, and Garratt, were burnt for heresy, condemned by the whole body of Parliament, and Fetherston, Powell and Abel were hanged, their bowels burnt, beheaded and quartered, in the said place of Smithfield, for treason against the King’s Majesty, and condemned for the same by the whole Parliament.

  There could be no clearer indication than this two-sided wholesale execution that the prime mover in repression was the King, coupled with the King’s interests. These were no matters of principle – or else how could these two sets of ideologically opposed people have been executed together, in deliberate display, as though on a stage set? This was the doing of the King, designed to demonstrate his majesty, his omnipotence, his refusal to brook opposition – from whichever direction it came.

  Henry had also just agreed to the execution of his own first servant, newly created Earl of Essex and Lord Great Chamberlain, Thomas Cromwell. Charged with heretical opinions and licensing known heretics to preach, as well as with treason, he had been beheaded two days before the deaths of Barnes and his companions.

  And, playing his accustomed role of providing damaging testimony if it helped to advance his own position, we find Richard Rich who, having been a protégé of Cromwell’s during the latter part of the 1530s, hastily abandoned his former patron in the summer of 1540 (by which time he was himself a member of the Privy Council) and gave ‘evidence’ against Cromwell. A hint of Rich’s treachery can be discerned in Cromwell’s desperate letter to the King, written on 12 June:

  Your Grace knows my accusers, God forgive them. If it were in my power to make you live for ever, God knows I would; or to make you so rich that you should enrich all men, or so powerful that all the world should obey you. For your Majesty has been most bountiful to me, and more like a father than a master. I ask you mercy where I have offended. I never spoke with the Chancellor of the Augmentations and Throgmorton together at a time; but if I did, I never spoke of any such matter. Your Grace knows what manner of man Throgmorton has ever been towards you and your proceedings. What Master Chancellor has been to me, God and he know best; what I have been to him your Majesty knows. If I had obeyed your often most gracious counsels, it would not have been with me as now it is.

  Is it reading too much into this to wonder whether Henry had at some time warned Cromwell of the danger of trusting in Richard Rich? And, as in the case of Thomas More, here is a man about to be condemned, with part of the evidence appearing to hinge on an alleged conversation with Rich – a conversation the accused denied had ever taken place.

  The three Catholics executed at the same time as the three Protestants were Thomas Abel, Richard Fetherston and Edward Powell. All were men who had openly defied the King when he had first set out to rid himself of Katherine of Aragon, and they had never been reconciled to his assumption of authority over the English Church.

  Abel (who generally spelt his name Abell) had been educated at the University of Oxford, taking the degree of Master of Arts in 1516 and subsequently becoming a Doctor of Theology. He was also known to be a linguist and to have had some musical training. He became deeply involved in supporting Katherine of Aragon’s cause against the King, being sent by Queen Katherine to Spain in January 1529, ostensibly to deliver a letter from her to Emperor Charles V (a letter which the King had forced her to write) asking for the original of the dispensation issued by the Pope when Katherine married Henry, but at the same time conveying the message that the Emperor should not accede to this request, as the document might be used to injure the Queen’s cause. Abel was rewarded by Katherine for the success of his mission by being granted the benefice of Bradwell in Essex in 1530. Some two years later Abel wrote a book against the divorce, entitled Invicta Veritas, An answer to the determinations of the most famous Universities, that by no manner of law it may be lawful for King Henry to be divorced from the Queen’s grace, his lawful and very wife. This book, though ostensibly produced in Lüneburg, was secretly printed in London. Its uncompromising and defiant tone inevitably infuriated the King, and Abel was thrown into the Tower. He was released on Christmas Eve, on condition that he would not write again or preach until after Easter, and he returned to live in Katherine’s household. A few months later he was once more in trouble, this time over what Katherine should be called. She was being required to drop the title of ‘Queen’, but was refusing to do so, and Abel was implicated in the drawing up of two warrants in which the title had continued to be used. It would seem from the letter that Sir Thomas Audley wrote to Thomas Cromwell about these two warrants that Abel could not rely on the loyalty of his own family, for it was his brother, one of Audley’s servants, who had shown the warrants to his master. After the break-up of Katherine’s household, Abel was consigned again to the Tower, in December 1534 (just a year after his earlier release), on suspicion of having encouraged her servants to refuse to be sworn to her as princess only (as they had previously been sworn to her as queen).

  Richard Fetherston was about fifteen years older than Abel, having received his BA from Cambridge in 1499 or 1500 and his MA from Oxford in 1505. He was Rector of Sulhampstead Abbots in Hampshire until 1519 and then Rector of Newnham, also in Hampshire. He became Archdeacon of Brecon in April 1523 and seems to have held that post until January 1535. He first attracted Henry’s attention when the household of the King’s nine-year-old daughter Mary was established in the Welsh Marches in 1525 and Fetherston was appointed as her schoolmaster. In that post he was accountable to Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, who was appointed mistress of Mary’s household, numbering over 300 people (and who was herself executed for alleged treason in 1541). Fetherston taught Latin to Princess Mary until at least 1533 and had earlier collaborated with the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives in producing an educational work, De rationis studii puerilis (‘A plan of childish studies’) for Mary’s use. This set out the texts that Mary should study (according to Vives and Fetherston), which included the New Testament and selected extracts from the Old, along with works by various Fathers of the Church and approved classical authors, such as parts of Plato and selections from Horace. She was also encouraged to read the works of Erasmus and Thomas More.

  During the same month that Thomas Abel was committed to the Tower for the second time (December 1534), Fetherston was sent there too. He had been one of the few clerics in the convocation of the province of Canterbury to have signed a protest in 1531 against the King’s assumption of the title of supreme head of the Church. He is also believed to have written a treatise against the royal divorce and the break with Rome, unequivocally called Contra divortium Henrici et Catherinae (‘Against the divorce of
Henry and Katherine’), but no copy survives. His imprisonment in the Tower was intended to coerce him into taking the Oath of Supremacy. He continued to refuse, and was in consequence deprived of his benefices in January 1535.