The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  preaching false lies and men’s additions of ashes, candles, palms, water, bread, bells, herbs, dead saints, rotten bones, the Pope’s poison and destruction of souls, rocking us all in blindness, with Latin abominable masses, processions and other services, ringing, singing, blessing, yea, and cursing and burning as well (for who can reckon up all their trim toys, foul treachery, false feigned fantasies, loud lies, hypocrisy, and idolatry?) – these, these things will bring the realm to utter ruin.

  And then Rogers creates an imaginary scene (following the legal convention of ‘putting a case’ which we have previously encountered with Sir Thomas More) which would put his persecutors to rout. He imagines Henry VIII ‘rising again’, and coming to the next Parliament. And there, if Henry were to see how his acts had been overturned, ‘there would be no small hurly-burly’ and ‘what would the Bishop of Winchester say then, and the rest of the rocheted rout, with the whole swarm of deans, archdeacons, prebendaries, and dignities in the convocation house?’* Inevitably, he declares, they would beg the King’s pardon and ‘change the act again, or repeal the newly passed act, and away with the Pope again, and so on’. And even though ‘this merry case’ which Rogers puts ‘in the midst of his sorrow’ is fanciful and Henry will not return from the dead, another monarch of at least equal zeal to Henry’s may succeed to the throne, and then the type of bishop who is now sitting in judgement upon him will once again spurn the Bishop of Rome and all his practices. And now Rogers utters his great cry against the current church hierarchy: ‘Turn, and turn, and turn again, is the very life and property of our popish prelates, and of the whole crown-shaven clergy!’ (He refers here to the practice of Catholic priests being tonsured.) The end result of such ‘turning’, he argues, is that ‘the simple lay people’ as well as ‘many worldly wise men’ now have no idea ‘whom they should believe, or whereunto they should trust’.

  On Monday 4 February Bishop Bonner went to Newgate, along with other high-ranking clergy, to carry out the ceremony of degradation against Hooper and Rogers, stripping them of their clerical orders. On the same day, between ten and eleven o’clock in the morning, Rogers was conveyed, in a cart, the short distance from Newgate to Smithfield, passing his old church of St Sepulchre. (Hooper was sent back to Gloucester, where he had formerly been the bishop, and was burnt there on 9 February. The choice of these sites for execution – Hooper in his former diocese, Rogers just a few hundred yards away from the church of which he had been vicar – suggests that the executions were deliberately staged as an example to the people who had been led by these prominent figures of the Edwardian reformation; they were intended as a lesson to bring the rank and file into line.)

  Rogers was about fifty-five years old when he died. As the cart rolled along, he prepared himself by reciting psalms, particularly the ‘Miserere’ which begins: ‘Have mercy on me, O God.’ Many people lined the route, including members of his own family – his wife and their now eleven children, one of whom was still a baby and being seen by Rogers for the first, and last, time. A path was cleared so that his wife and children could come to say goodbye to him, but one of the sheriffs – Thomas Woodroffe – was furious with the cart driver for stopping to allow this. So it was the briefest of farewells. Among the dignitaries present was the imperial ambassador, Simon Renard, who reported to King Philip: ‘Some of the onlookers wept, others prayed to God to give him strength, perseverance and patience to bear the pain and not to recant, others gathered the ashes and bones and wrapped them up in paper to preserve them, yet others threatening the bishops.’ There was also ‘a great company of the guard’ present, to keep the large crowd under control. Not all of the crowd were supporters; some would be there to jeer, or just to watch, drawn by curiosity and the apparently irresistible human urge to witness horror (there had, after all, not been such a spectacle for several years).

  Tied to the stake, Rogers was offered one last chance to recant, being offered a pardon if he would do so. He refused, and instead told the onlookers – many of whom must have been his former parishioners – to stand firm in the faith he had taught them. When the fire was lit and the flames took hold of his body, he made no protest or attempt to struggle; it seemed to the spectators that he ‘washed his hands in the flame, as though it had been in cold water’. His melting muscles contracting into the characteristic pugilistic pose, he appeared to be ‘lifting up his hands to heaven’ and he did not move them again ‘until they were consumed in the devouring fire’. His prayer that he might endure to the end with steadfastness and faith had been answered. In terms of reputation, he was undoubtedly the victor.

  *A rochet was (and is) an item of episcopal dress, so the phrase ‘rocheted rout’ was directed at all the Catholic bishops.

  Chapter Ten

  DOMINICANS IN SMITHFIELD

  Grant me, good Lord, grace earnestly to consider oftentimes from whence I came, what I am, where I am, and whither I go. First from whence I came, plainly I came from vile and sinful flesh, begotten in filthy concupiscence and beastly lust, in the stinking vileness of original sin, fed in my mother’s womb with foul menstruous vility. And where thou (most merciful Lord God) created the planets and the stars of the fire, the fishes and fowls of the water, thou hast created me and all other beasts of the foul and vile earth, so that as touching my body I am no better than a beast, created of the earth and unto the earth I shall again. What I am I may soon perceive, I am nought else but dross and dirt, rotten earthworms’ meat, and much less perceiving how I shall depart, subject unto many necessities, full of misery, born in sin, living in wretchedness and labour and must die in pain and agony. And if I should earnestly and deeply consider I may perceive and see, that the trees’ herbs bring forth leaves, flowers and fruits, and my body brings nothing else, than foul worms, stinking sweat and corruption.

  Fr William Peryn,

  Spiritual Exercises and Ghostly Meditations, 1557

  THE ABOVE WORDS vividly convey a particular sixteenth-century Catholic view of the human body which may go some way towards explaining why bodily torture and execution may have appeared less inimical to the human condition to our sixteenth-century forebears than to ourselves. Their writer, Father William Peryn, was the head of the community of Dominicans (or Black Friars, so called because of the black cappa or cloak they wore over their white habits) established at St Bartholomew’s in Smithfield in the reign of Queen Mary. Peryn had readopted the Dominican habit early in that reign, along with at least fifteen other English Dominicans. As a young man he had been associated with the Dominicans at Oxford and had become a zealous member of their order, being ordained in 1531 and soon acquiring a reputation for vigorous preaching against heresy. Following the declaration of the royal supremacy in 1534 he went into exile, but returned in 1543 to undertake further theological studies in Oxford as well as becoming a chantry priest at St Paul’s Cathedral. We last encountered him early in the reign of Edward VI, when he had preached about the benefits of praying before images of Christ and the saints, an opinion he had subsequently recanted, declaring that he had been deceived and expressing regret for having taught such doctrines. The insincerity (or Nicodemitism – saying one thing, while meaning another) of his recantation was demonstrated both by his renewed self-imposed exile in Louvain, and by his return to England and engagement in preaching and writing as soon as Edward and his Protestant supporters were no longer in control.

  The person who had helped make it possible for the small community of Black Friars to be established at St Bartholomew’s was the patron and current owner of the site, Lord Rich, who thereby showed both his probable Catholic sympathies (despite his compliance with the Protestant modus vivendi under Edward) and his unfailing instinct for survival. He did, after all, have some ground to make up with Queen Mary, having been the one to bring her unwelcome instructions during the reign of her half-brother and having initially, along with the other members of the Privy Council, supported her rival for the throne, Lady Jane Grey. Once he
had adopted Mary’s cause, however, he did so wholeheartedly and she in fact stayed at his (and his wife’s) house at Wanstead, prior to her entry into London on 3 August 1553. On 28 August Rich was named as one of Mary’s privy councillors. It was an astute political move on his part to continue to demonstrate his support by making the church and what other buildings remained of the priory over to the Crown in December 1555. In addition to the former monastic buildings, Rich also surrendered the rectory, the advowson (the right to appoint clergy to the benefice) and the six tenements which he had previously granted to augment John Deane’s stipend. That this move was not purely political but that Rich had a genuine attachment to the old form of religion is also suggested by his marking the death of his eldest son in April 1554 by endowing a chantry to sing masses and dirges for the dead in Felsted parish church. According to the chronicler Wriothesley, the Queen officially revived the monastery at St Bartholomew’s at Easter 1556, installing there a number of English, Spanish and Dutch Dominicans, with William Peryn at their head, their own priory formerly located between the River Thames and Ludgate Hill, in the area which still bears the name ‘Blackfriars’, having been demolished after the dissolution. It is likely that they had taken up residence in Smithfield before the official date of the resuscitation, and possibly even before Rich had completed the paperwork.

  Deane was necessarily affected by this change – perhaps personally affected more by the moving in of the Black Friars than by the persecution of Protestants going on around him. There can have been no greater contrast in style between the self-effacing Sir John, quietly going about his pastoral work, spending time with friends and neighbours, and the orotund if ascetic Father Peryn, whose reputation as a flamboyant preacher was considerable. Yet for the space of about two years they shared a building and, as with every ‘turn, and turn, and turn again’ of this period, they could not have known at the outset that this cohabitation would be fairly short-lived. The Dominicans took over the old monastic quire, which had become the parish church, for their services, and Deane had to accommodate them as best he could, reverting to using part of the old parish chapel for the celebrations of Mass for his lay parishioners. He also suffered a loss in income through the six tenements reverting to the Crown.

  William Peryn published three books of his writings, one of which, entitled Three Godly and Notable Sermons of the Most Honourable and Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, sermons that had originally been preached in the Hospital of St Anthony in London in the mid-1540s, was dedicated to Bishop Edmund Bonner. In these sermons Peryn took a very literal approach to the words Hoc est corpus meum (‘This is my body’), showing himself completely antagonistic to any more ‘spiritual’ or ‘receptionist’ interpretations (in which the receiver of the sacrament is the locus for transformation, not the thing in itself) proffered by such as Anne Askew and her successors in the 1550s. His writing and preaching style was very ornate, full of rhetorical flourishes such as word-pairs, alliteration and repetitive devices, as in the following passage from one of his sermons:

  Yet such is the untowardness, of our reckless nature, prone and proclive, unto blind ignorance, that notwithstanding that both, within us, and also without us, there is almost nothing void, of God’s singular power and miracles, (the whole world filled full with wonders) yet negligent ignorance, and ignorant negligence, doth grow so fast upon us, that the admirable wonder of the creation, consecration, and administration of all the broad world is almost (as saint Augustine saith) by assiduity and cotidian custom, out of all estimation and marvel, and the power of God herein wiped out of memory.

  Another of Peryn’s works, Spiritual Exercises and Ghostly Meditations, was published during his time in Smithfield, in 1557, and was dedicated to two English nuns, one the abbess of the nuns of Syon at Isleworth (another community revived under Mary) and the other a Poor Clare at Louvain. The book was also aimed at a more general readership, at anyone who desired ‘to come to the perfect love of God’. It was based on the work of the Dutch theologian and mystical writer Nicolaus van Esch, and incorporated elements of the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. No copy survives of Peryn’s third recorded work, De frequenter celebranda missa.

  When Peryn writes in his Spiritual Exercises of fire and of sacrificing one’s body to the flames, he does so in a metaphorical sense and also makes a connection to the sacrament of the altar, advising his reader:

  Thou shalt also make a sacrifice and a lively host unto God of thy body, as they did in the Old Testament laying wood upon the altar and put thereon the sacrifice or host and so with fire put thereunder they burnt it upon the altar. In like manner must thou gather together, by contrite remembrance, thy sins upon the altar of thy heart, and thy body must be the sacrifice, for it must be mortified specially from all vices and sinful work and pleasure, and be slain with discreet penance and with the fire of charity. For thou must lament thy sins, for the very love of God, and thou must do penance and punish thy body and mortify it for the pure love of God. And if it be thus consumed and offered unto God with this fire then shall it be a sweet and a savoury sacrifice in the sight of God.

  The Dominicans, also known as the Order of Preachers, had been instrumental in pioneering the original Inquisition, having been founded in order to combat heresy. Their presence in Smithfield, at a time when so many ‘heretics’ were consigned to the flames there, seems almost fateful. There is no record of the Smithfield Dominicans having directly participated in the burnings, or in the trials of heretics, but there is circumstantial evidence that the policy of persecution received support from them, through a connection with the important Spanish Dominican, Fray (friar) Bartolomé Carranza de Miranda.

  When Philip II of Spain arrived in England in July 1554 to marry Mary, he brought with him a very large retinue which included a group of Spanish churchmen whose brief was to advise him and the Queen on the reform and ‘purification’ of the English Church and its eventual resubmission to Rome. One of the central figures in this group was Bartolomé Carranza, who had been specifically commissioned by the head of the Dominicans with restoring the Dominican order in England. He did not, however, limit his activities to the Dominicans, but played a very active role in encouraging the return of Catholic ritual in the Church in general, being particularly keen to restore the outdoor processions that had traditionally accompanied the festival of Corpus Christi. There were liturgical processions on other feast days too, including on the feast of the Annunciation (25 March) in 1555, when a protestor ‘delivered a pudding’ at one of the prebendaries as he processed. The pudding-thrower was duly whipped at the pillar in Cheap two days later. Carranza was also closely involved with the preparations for Cardinal Pole’s arrival in England (he having not set foot in his native country since 1532), and with negotiations over the restitution of monastic property, so is very likely to have worked with Richard Rich in sorting out the arrangements for the Dominicans’ installation at St Bartholomew’s.

  A portrait of Carranza from a later period when he was Archbishop of Toledo shows him in full pontificals, coped and mitred, white-gloved, holding a crozier. Swarthy of complexion, he has a greying beard, but full dark eyebrows over wide-set eyes; he appears sure of himself, and yet slightly wary. Our knowledge of Carranza’s activities in England comes mainly from the records of his own trial in Spain many years later for, despite having worked for the Spanish Inquisition since 1539, he himself eventually fell foul of it, being suspected of Lutheran sympathies for which he was tried in 1562. His defence, presented in the form of a hundred questions to be answered by witnesses lined up by Carranza for the purpose, included testimony that he had actively pursued Protestant heretics during his time in London, twenty-three of the hundred questions concerning his stay in England and his activities there. Among the witnesses called was Philip II himself.

  One case in which Carranza was involved concerned the stabbing of a priest by a ‘sacramentarian’
at the church of St Margaret’s, Westminster. The offender was Thomas alias William Flower, or Branche, a former monk of Ely, who had become a radical Protestant, and who had worked as both a schoolmaster and a surgeon (as Wriothesley put it, he ‘ran about the country using the art of surgery’). The return of the traditional rite of the Mass seemed to have been just too much for him (he may have been mentally disturbed, claiming to hear a ‘voice’ which told him to attack a minister of what he regarded as the evil idolatry of the Mass) and, on Easter Day (14 April) 1555, while the congregation was receiving communion, he walked into St Margaret’s wearing a placard containing the words ‘Deum time, Idolum fuge’ (‘Fear God, flee from the Idol’). Inside the church he took out a large machete-like wood-knife and started hacking at the head and arms of one of the Abbey clergy assisting with the distribution of communion. According to Machyn, the attacker had first said to the minister: ‘What dost thou give them?’ and had then drawn his wood-knife, ‘and hit the priest on the head and struck him a great blow, and after ran after him and struck him on the hand, and cleft his hand a great way, and after on the arm a great wound’. Blood was everywhere, including all over the consecrated hosts, which, in the eyes of the faithful, made the offence all the more heinous.