The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  ‘My Lord, I believe Christ is present there to the faith of the due receiver,’ affirmed Bradford. ‘As for transubstantiation, I plainly and flatly tell you, I believe it not.’

  ‘We were not asking you about transubstantiation,’ Gardiner cavilled, ‘but about Christ’s presence.’

  Whatever the precise terms to be used, after all this, there was no genuine reason to delay the conviction of Bradford for heresy, and it was duly pronounced. The Lord Chancellor proceeded to read out the words of excommunication, and appeared surprised in doing so to find Bradford described as a layman, having imagined him to be a priest, whereas in fact he had only ever been ordained deacon (an understandable misapprehension, given that Bradford had been conducting illicit services of Holy Communion while in prison). On his conviction, Bradford – who, of all the martyrs of this period, seemed most willing to embrace his fate – ‘fell down on his knees, and heartily thanked God, that he counted him worthy to suffer for his sake’.

  After his conviction he was sent first to the Clink and then to the Counter in Poultry, where he was held in solitude in what was known as the Grocers’ Hall court. He expected to be executed in short order, as Rogers had been, but was instead held for nearly five more months, while the authorities sought to find ways to diminish his influence, particularly in his native Lancashire – either by arranging to have him executed there or, preferably, by securing his recantation, even at this late stage. If Bradford could be persuaded to recant, it would have a very demoralizing effect indeed on the Protestants. The attempt to persuade him began as early as 4 February, the day of John Rogers’s execution, when Bishop Bonner himself spoke to Bradford in the Counter, greeting him by doffing his cap and giving him his hand. He had heard, he said, that Bradford wished to converse with some learned men, so he had brought Archdeacon Harpsfield to talk with him.

  ‘Do like a wise man,’ Bonner urged, ‘but I pray you, go roundly to work: for the time is but short.’

  Bradford denied having requested to speak to anyone, but said he had no objection to doing so.

  ‘What?’ said the bishop ‘in a fume’ to the prison keeper, ‘did you not tell me this man wanted to talk?’

  ‘No,’ replied the keeper, ‘I just said he wouldn’t refuse to talk, not that he wanted to.’

  Concluding from this that there were people – including the keeper – who cared about Bradford sufficiently to want to help him stay alive, Bonner remarked: ‘Well, Mr Bradford, you are well beloved, I pray you consider yourself, and refuse not charity when it is offered.’

  On 19 February the writ for Bradford’s execution was withdrawn and he was subjected to further attempts to get him to change his mind, a number of eminent churchmen and theologians, including Nicholas Heath (who would be ‘translated’ from the bishopric of Worcester to the archbishopric of York later that year), the Bishop of Chichester (George Day) and two Spanish divines, being enlisted in the exercise. With the Spaniards, one of whom was Alfonso de Castro, the Franciscan theologian who was highly respected by King Philip and who had recently preached a sermon urging caution over the burning of heretics, Bradford discussed the question of how Christ could be present both in heaven and in the bread on the altar, deliberately poking fun at the Catholic position.

  ‘How does this hang together?’ he demanded. ‘It is as if you should say because you are here, you must therefore be in Rome. And so you reason that because Christ’s body is in heaven, it must therefore be in the sacrament in the form of bread. No wise man will agree with that.’

  Alfonso got to the heart of the matter when he asked: ‘So will you believe nothing that is not expressly said in the Scriptures?’

  ‘I will believe anything you like,’ responded Bradford, ‘provided you can demonstrate it through the Scriptures.’

  On 21 March it was the turn of Dr Hugh Weston, the Dean of Westminster, to try his luck with Bradford. Weston had been one of the City clergy during Henry’s reign, having been made Rector of St Nicholas Olave in 1541 and of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate in 1544 and, as an orthodox Catholic, he had spent some time in the Fleet prison under Edward. There was unlikely to be much common ground between him and Bradford. But Weston began in conciliatory mood, taking Bradford ‘very gently by the hand’ and clearing the room of everyone but themselves and a few companions, including the Subdean of Westminster, the keeper of the Counter and the priest in whose parish the Counter was located. Before beginning their conversation, Weston wanted to lay down certain principles for how it should be conducted, including that Bradford should ‘put away all vainglory, and not hold anything for the praise of the world’. Bradford responded that, though ‘a spice’ of vainglory remained in all human beings, he hoped ‘by the grace of God’ not to yield to it. Weston then asked him to write down and send to him the main points of his views on the sacrament, so that he could return and discuss them with him. And until then, he promised, Bradford could be assured that he was ‘without all peril of death’.

  As might have been expected, notwithstanding the best efforts of Dr Weston and others, Bradford proved unbending. Yet despite his firmness and resistance to every effort to persuade him to recant and so be spared, it is evident, even from Foxe’s at times hagiographic account, that he was afraid, even desperately afraid, of the ordeal before him. The waiting, the not knowing when he was to be burnt, contributed to his fear, his wakeful, nightmare-laden nights. On the eve of his being taken to Newgate to await execution, he had particularly disrupted sleep, plagued by many anxious dreams, including one of the chain that was to fasten him to the stake being brought to the gate of the Counter. Such dreams were a frequent occurrence throughout his imprisonment and, unable to sleep, he would often get up to read and pray at about three o’clock in the morning. During the day he was his normal self, even appearing ‘very merry’; only those who saw him at night knew of his fear.

  In the afternoon after this premonitory dream, the keeper’s wife came running into the room where Bradford had been taking what exercise he could by walking up and down with a friend and, upset and out of breath, cried, ‘Oh, Mr Bradford, I come to bring you heavy news!’ She then told him she had heard he was to be burnt the next day, that the chain for his burning was now being brought, and that he would shortly be transferred to Newgate. The news seems to have come almost as a relief to Bradford, after his having been expecting it, hour by hour, for so many weeks. He went into his own room with his friend to go through his papers and ensure all preparations were made for his death, and later several other friends arrived and they all spent some time in prayer.

  On the morning of 30 June, the day he was taken to Newgate, Bradford’s preparations included putting on a new shirt or shift (that is, a long white garment underneath his outer clothes; those outer garments would then be removed prior to the victim being chained to the stake), which had been especially made for his burning by a Mrs Marler, one of the wives among the Protestant faithful, who had earlier been the recipient of advice from Bradford – he had written a devotional work for her to help her bear her labour pains. Bradford made a ceremony of donning the shirt: ‘when he shifted himself with a clean shirt that was made for his burning … he made such a prayer of the wedding garment, that some of those who were present, were in such great admiration, that their eyes were as thoroughly occupied in looking at him, as their ears gave place to hear his prayer’. This clothing with a new white shirt to wear at the stake became a common feature of the burnings, a way of signalling support for and honouring the victim, as though he were being dressed as a bridegroom for his wedding. The white shirt was also a symbol of martyrdom, a deliberate allusion to verses from the Book of Revelation:

  After this I beheld, and lo a great multitude (which no man could number) of all nations and people, and tongues, stood before the seat, and before the lamb, clothed with long white garments, and palms in their hands … And one of the elders answered, saying unto me: what are these, which are arrayed in long white g
arments, and whence came they? … And he said unto me; these are they which came out of great tribulation, and made their garments large and made them white, in the blood of the lamb.

  It was a reminder of the belief that those who endured martyrdom would be received in heaven by Christ as his faithful servants, for the passage from Revelation concludes: ‘They shall hunger no more neither thirst, neither shall the sun light on them, neither any heat: For the lamb, which is in the midst of the seat shall feed them, and shall lead them unto fountains of living water, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.’ The ritualized actions which accompanied the clothing with the shirt recalled those of a priest donning his vestments before making the sacrifice of the Mass (for now the victim, like Christ, was himself both priest and sacrificial offering), and so the martyr might pray over and kiss the shirt before putting it on, as a priest kisses the stole before placing it around his neck. The Protestant martyrs, in these preparations they made for their deaths, can be seen as subverting Catholic ritual, adopting and remaking it to serve their own myth and interpretation of what they were doing, underlining their oneness with Christ and the fact that they were choosing to die, embracing their deaths willingly, as a holy sacrifice, becoming themselves the anamnesis – the recalling and re-enactment of the sacrificial death of Christ. While rejecting the idea of ‘transubstantiation’ – of bread being made into the body of Christ – they enact instead their own transformation, of their own flesh and blood becoming Christlike. Finally, and on a very different level, the white shirt served the practical purpose of shortening the time it would take for the flames to reach the body and thus for the sufferer to die.

  Having dressed, Bradford emerged from his cell – like a vested priest emerging from the sacristy – said a prayer, and distributed money to the servants and officers who had been with him in the Counter for so many weeks. He then turned to the wall to utter another fervent prayer, all his energy now going into the desire to acquit himself well in the ordeal by fire that lay ahead – like an athlete preparing himself for the most challenging and fearful race of his life. Many people in the Counter wept to see him go.

  It was towards midnight when Bradford was conveyed from the Counter to Newgate, the assumption being that there would be no one about on the streets to witness the transfer of the prisoner. But his friends had been busy during the previous few hours, and the authorities were disappointed to find ‘a great multitude of people’ lining Cheapside and other parts of the short route. A rumour was circulating that he was to be burnt as early as four o’clock in the morning – again with the supposed aim of keeping the event as hushed up as possible – and the crowd consequently grew over the next few hours, Smithfield being packed by the early hours of 1 July.

  In fact, Bradford did not appear in Smithfield until nine o’clock, by which time the atmosphere among the crowd must have been electric with tension. The nervousness of the authorities can be detected in the reactions of Sheriff Woodroffe who, on seeing one of Bradford’s brothers-in-law, Roger Beswick, among a number of friends taking it in turns to have a ‘little secret talk’ with Bradford as he was moved along the route, beat Beswick over the head with his staff, inflicting serious injury. No further conversation was permitted, and Bradford was accompanied the rest of the short walk to Smithfield by ‘a great company of weaponed men’. The crowd was so great, with so much pushing and shoving going on to get a glimpse of the condemned man, that at least one woman, a Protestant supporter called Mary Honeywood, lost her shoes in the crush and had to go home barefoot.

  Bradford was burnt alongside a young man of nineteen called John Leaf, originally from Yorkshire but now an apprentice tallow chandler who lived and worked in the parish of Christ Church, Newgate. In his working life, Leaf would have been learning how to make candles out of tallow, or animal fats, a more affordable way of illuminating houses, shops and streets than using candles of beeswax, the preserve of the wealthy. In his small amount of free time, he had been listening to sermons and joining in prayers, led by men like Bradford. Leaf was illiterate, and had had two documents read out to him in prison (he had been kept in the Bread Street Counter, having been committed there by the Alderman of his Ward) – one a confession of heresy, the other a recantation that would have set him free. He chose the confession, by (so it was said) sprinkling his blood over it. When examined by Bonner, he had used the words he would have heard in the sermons he had been listening to (including some by John Rogers), denying ‘the very true and natural body and blood of Christ in substance’ to be in the sacrament of the altar and declaring that sacrament, ‘as it is now called, used, and believed in this realm of England’ to be ‘idolatrous and abominable’. When asked by Bonner whether he was a scholar of Rogers’s, he replied in the affirmative and with pride, firmly stating that ‘he the same John did believe in the doctrine of the said Rogers, and in the doctrine of Bishop Hooper, Cardmaker, and others of their opinion, which of late were burned for the testimony of Christ, and that he would die in that doctrine that they died for’.

  To his interrogators John Leaf embodied the justification for men like Rogers, Cardmaker and Bradford being taken out of circulation; he was – or so he appeared to them – precisely the kind of impressionable, uneducated young man likely to be easy prey for the ‘heretics’. They also hoped that setting fire to him now, alongside one of his mentors, would dissuade other impetuous and impressionable apprentices from following his example. He was sentenced on Monday 10 June.

  The courage with which Bradford, and others like him, went to their deaths – despite their night-fears – is partly explained by the attitude they took, and which they deliberately cultivated, towards death, and nowhere is this more clearly expressed than in ‘A Meditation on Death, and the advantages it brings’, composed by Bradford himself. ‘What is this life,’ he writes:

  but a smoke, a vapour, a shadow, a warfare, a bubble of water, a word, a grass, a flower? Thou shalt die is most certain, but the time when no man can tell. The longer thou dost remain in this life, the more thou sinnest, which will turn to thy more pain. By thinking upon death, our minds are often in manner oppressed with darkness, because we do but remember the night of the body, forgetting the light of the mind, and of the resurrection. Thereto remember the good things that shall ensue after this life, and without wavering, in certainty of faith – so shall the passage of death be more desired. It is like sailing over the sea to thy home and country; it is like a medicine to the health of soul and body; it is the best physician; it is like to a woman’s travail, for so thy soul, being delivered out of the body, comes into a much more large and fair place, even into heaven!

  The ceremonial of martyrdom continued at the site of the burning, with both Bradford and Leaf prostrating themselves on the ground – like a priest at the beginning of the most solemn liturgy of the year, that of Good Friday, and therefore again recalling the sacrifice of Christ – before removing their outer garments and, on being urged to hurry up by one of the sheriffs, approaching the stake. There Bradford, in a further ceremonial act, kissed one of the branches heaped around the stake and the stake itself. He then raised his hands in prayer – Bradford certainly had a highly developed sense of the dramatic, and was performing in the expectation that his words and gestures now would be recorded for posterity – and declaimed: ‘Oh England, England, repent of your sins! Beware of idolatry, beware of false Antichrists, take heed they do not deceive you.’ The sheriffs, increasingly restive and wanting the job completed before the crowd got out of control, threatened to bind his hands if he wouldn’t be quiet. He spoke some encouraging words to his young companion – ‘Be of good comfort, Brother, for we shall have a merry supper with the Lord this night’ – and then spoke no more.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘I WILL PAY MY VOWS TO THEE, OH SMITHFIELD’

  The bishop’s task is, as far as he may, to teach, correct and cure. What sort of a bishop is he who can do nothing more than constrain,
torture and commit to the flames?

  Desiderius Erasmus,

  from ‘Supputatio Errorum’ in ‘Censuris Beddae’, Opera Omnia IX

  NEARLY SIX MONTHS AFTER the burning of Bradford and Leaf, on 18 December 1555, John Philpot, formerly Archdeacon of Winchester, traipsed through a very muddy Smithfield to reach the stake, where he was burnt. In prison, where he had been supplied with food by supporters among the City apprentices, he had signed letters to his friends with the words: ‘dead to the world and living to Christ, your own brother, sealed up in the verity of Christ for ever’. Here he and his fellow Protestant prisoners were finally allowed to enjoy freedom of worship, and they made the most of it, spending their time in prayer, psalm-singing and preaching. During his imprisonment Philpot was even more prolific in his writing than Bradford had been, producing and smuggling out to his supporters letters of encouragement, treatises and accounts of his trials and examinations. Philpot, like Bradford, was a very prominent figure among the Protestants and a recantation from him might have been even more influential in quenching the zeal of the rebels, so the authorities believed, than his conviction and execution. As a consequence, immense time and effort went into trying to persuade him to recant, to the annoyance of many hardliners. Their annoyance was only increased by the fact that there was nothing Philpot liked more than a good argument and, equally, that he was always and entirely convinced he was right.