The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  Green’s final examination before Bonner took place on 15 January 1556, when he also had a lengthy and ultimately fruitless debate with John Feckenham, Dean of St Paul’s and abbot of the restored Abbey of Westminster, and other leading theologians, before being condemned to death and taken to Newgate. Feckenham, like Dr Bartlett, tried to persuade Green not to ‘wilfully cast himself away’ but to be ‘conformable to reason’, but the young lawyer was placing his trust in another authority than that of either the ecclesiastical hierarchy or his grandfather.

  Bartlet Green not only had a loving family but was also popular among his erstwhile colleagues at the Temple, several of them coming to visit him in prison. Two of his closest friends had intended to offer him some comfort after his condemnation but when they encountered him on his way to Newgate, they broke down in tears, so that he was forced instead to comfort them. His own relief came from the sense that he was being true to his conscience, which gave him a ‘most quiet and peaceable mind’ and enabled him to be cheerful, even joyful. Some of his friends asked for a token to remember him by, and for one of them, Thomas Hussey, a future Member of Parliament, he inscribed an album with an epitaph popular in the period:

  Behold thyself by me, such one was I, as thou:

  And thou in time shall be, even dust as I am now.

  Green’s final letter to various of his friends is full of concern for his fellow prisoners, including a number of common criminals he had encountered in Newgate, and requests that his friends help to secure their release. In the case of some other prisoners whose release appears unlikely, or perhaps undeserved, he still asks his friends to provide them with what relief they can. The recipients of his letter share his own religious beliefs, as is clear from his opening injunction: ‘if we keep Christ’s commandment in loving each other, as he loved us, then should our love be everlasting’. Throughout he is motivated by his reading and understanding of the gospel – that what Christians are called to do is ‘help to clothe Christ, visit the afflicted, comfort the sorrowful, and relieve the needy’. His final words are of the hope of eternal life: ‘This present Monday, when I look to die, and live for ever.’

  Six others were burnt alongside Bartlet Green, on the morning of 27 January 1556, bound in pairs to three stakes: four men, Thomas Whittle, John Tudson, John Went, Thomas Browne; and two women, Isobel Foster and Joan Lashford. The married priest Thomas Whittle was another of those encountered by John Philpot during his imprisonment – he it was who had had part of his beard ‘plucked away’ by the infuriated bishop. Whittle was from Essex, but had lost his living there on Mary’s accession and had subsequently become a wandering preacher – until he was denounced and brought before Stephen Gardiner. By this time, Gardiner was ailing and seems to have had no appetite for dealing with miscreants such as Whittle – particularly when he could see that the person apprehending him (in this case, someone called Edmund Alabaster) had done so in the hope of personal gain – and so Alabaster delivered Whittle to Bishop Bonner instead. As with Philpot, one of the tests Bonner administered to Whittle was to ask him to attend Mass; Whittle refused, which led to Bonner’s first physical attack on him – as the hapless priest related it: ‘he turned back and beat me with his fist, first on the one cheek, and then on the other’. Ground down by such treatment, Whittle was initially persuaded to recant but, as he had related to Philpot when they first met, his conscience had troubled him so deeply that he had later insisted on withdrawing his recantation – thereby laying himself open to further abuse from the frustrated bishop.

  John Tudson, born in Ipswich, and John Went, initially from Langham in Essex, were both twenty-seven years old. Tudson was an apprentice, and Went a shearman. Both had been sent to Bonner by his diocesan chancellor, Dr Story, on suspicion of holding heretical views on the sacrament. Thomas Browne was a married man of thirty-seven, living in the parish of St Bride’s Fleet Street, and he had been reported to Bonner by the constables of that parish for non-attendance at church. Initially imprisoned at the bishop’s palace in Fulham, he had also been subjected to the test of being summoned to hear Mass on 16 September 1555; refusing, he had gone into the grounds of the palace and knelt to say his prayers among the trees. He remained obdurate throughout his imprisonment and examinations, accusing Bonner of being a ‘bloodsucker’.

  Isobel Foster was a married woman of fifty-five; her husband was a member of the Worshipful Company of Cutlers and they lived in the parish of St Bride’s Fleet Street. She, like Thomas Browne, had initially come to the attention of the authorities through non-attendance at church.

  Thomas Whittle’s short-lived recantation had been used by Archdeacon Harpsfield to try to persuade Joan Lashford to recant as well, but she had proved resilient, refusing to write or sign anything. Joan, of the parish of Little Hallows in Thames Street, was the daughter of another (deceased) cutler, Robert Lashford, and of his wife Elizabeth who, after the death of Robert, had married the (much younger) upholsterer John Warne – who was burnt in Smithfield along with John Cardmaker on 30 May 1555. Elizabeth herself was burnt in Stratford-atte-Bow on 23 August. Joan was made of as stern stuff as her mother and stepfather (the latter being only about nine years her senior). She had come to the attention of the authorities during the course of visiting her mother and stepfather in prison, suspected of harbouring the same views and beliefs as them, and consequently sent to Bonner, again by Dr Story. She was initially imprisoned for a few weeks in the Counter in Poultry, and then sent to Newgate, where she spent several months.

  On the morning of the burnings, a curfew was placed on servants and young people, the beadle of every Ward in the City being ordered to stand guard to prevent any such persons appearing on the City’s streets before eleven o’clock. And what of the elderly Dr Bartlett, whom no one would have prevented from venturing out that day? Was he standing in Smithfield, in front of his own parish church, to witness the burning of his beloved grandson in the company of six others, or did he stay away, shutting himself up in his house in Bartholomew Close? Did he perhaps seek solace in the company of his parish priest, John Deane, on that dreadful morning? Were the two men perhaps praying inside the church, or listening to the Dominican friars intoning the psalms, while the fires were being lit beyond the gates of the Priory Church? Could they smell the smoke, the scent of roasting human flesh? It is impossible to know, and we can hardly begin to imagine the pain of having one’s gifted, lively, but unbearably stubborn young grandson being publicly executed, in indescribable torment – and for reasons that one considered either incomprehensible or deeply misguided. We may imagine that Dr Bartlett remonstrated with his grandson not only to consider his own position, but also not to inflict such pain on his mother and sisters. Whether or not any of Bartlet Green’s family were there to witness the burning, by nine o’clock it was all over.

  Within a year Dr Bartlett was also dead – of old age and natural causes, among which must be included grief. His funeral took place at St Bartholomew’s, where he was also buried, on 22 January 1557, ‘with a dozen of scutcheons of arms, and 2 white branches [of white wax, carried at the head of the procession of acolytes and clergy] and 2 torches, and 4 great tapers’. Dr Bartlett had been the first fellow admitted to the College of Physicians after its foundation in 1518, and had four times been its President – and the whole College, including its then President, John Caius, attended the funeral. Caius described him as ‘a good and venerable old man, very famous for his learning, great knowledge, and experience in physic’. In addition to his bequest to the Black Friars of St Bartholomew’s, Richard Bartlett left twenty shillings to ‘the making of the church wall’ and, to John Deane, his worsted gown, furred, on condition that the rector take no money for breaking the ground in the church for his burial, and arranging to have a stone laid over his grave. It was a solemn, impressive and Catholic funeral, a fitting end to a long and distinguished career. But no amount of honour, wealth or learning had been able to deflect Dr Bartlett’s grandson f
rom following the dictates of his own conscience to their inevitable conclusion at a stake in Smithfield.

  Item, that you … have of late, that is to say, within these past two years, within the City and diocese of London, swerved at the least way from some part of the said Catholic faith and religion: and among other things you have misliked and earnestly spoken against the sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrament of the altar, and the unity of the Church, railing at and maligning the authority of the See of Rome, and the faith observed in the same.

  The question which must often have been asked by eminent churchmen such as Bishops Gardiner and Bonner, Archdeacon Harpsfield and Dr Chedsey, as well as by men of great standing in other professions such as medicine and the law, like Dr Bartlett and indeed Lord Rich, was: why will these Protestant zealots not listen to us? It was a question specifically asked of Bartlet Green by one of his examiners, Mr Welch, who took Bartlet into a separate room, clearly wanting to help him get out of the trouble he was in. Welch ‘marvelled’, Bartlet reported in his letter to Philpot, that ‘I being a young man, would stand against all the learned men of the realm, yea, and contrary to the whole determination of the Catholic Church from Christ’s time, in a matter in which I could have no great learning. I ought not to think my own wit better than all men’s, but should believe those who were learned.’ Bartlet’s answer to this included the assertion that, to God, it does not matter how learned, or important in a worldly sense, people are: ‘There is no respect of persons with God, whether it be old or young, rich, or poor, wise, or foolish, fisher, or basket maker.’ Welch still thought it unreasonable that Bartlet should suppose his ‘own wit and learning’ better than those of all the experts ranged against him, but Bartlet was ‘persuaded’ and could not be moved. For him it was his conscience that was the final arbiter, as was explicitly stated in a draft of his confession, taken down by the bishop’s registrar: ‘he cannot be persuaded, in his conscience, that the sacrifice pretended to be in the same [i.e. in the sacrament of the altar], is agreeable to God’s word, or maintainable by the same: or that without deadly offence, he cannot worship the body and blood of Christ, that is pretended to be there’.

  This sense of the dictates of personal conscience outweighing other, external, considerations is shared by many of the martyrs of the 1550s. The priest Thomas Whittle, for instance, having signed his initial recantation, almost immediately reported that ‘Satan in the night-time appeared to him, and said that he was damned, for that he had done against his conscience in subscribing the said submission.’ The nightmarish awareness of having violated his own conscience was so strong that Whittle was impelled to tear up his signature, in full awareness of the consequences. Those questioning Whittle and Green found this emphasis on personal conscience perplexing, and it certainly represents a shift – from a patriarchal authoritarian society, where beliefs were expected to be taken on trust, handed down from above, towards a fundamentally different society, one made up of individuals who, whatever their class or educational background, expected to take personal responsibility for their beliefs and actions. At this period of change, the proponents of these very different ways of thinking and perceiving were frequently unable to understand one another; they might as well have been speaking in different languages, while yet appearing to be using the same words. ‘In the end I was asked what conscience was,’ Green reported to Philpot, ‘and I said, the certifying of the truth.’

  Even more striking than a man like Thomas Whittle, educated in theology and trained as a priest, or than Bartlet Green, with his experience of having attended lectures in theology at Oxford and coming from a background of intellectual thought, standing up for their own beliefs against accepted authority, are cases of the apprentices, artisans and women who were prepared to take on the might of the Establishment. The twenty-seven-year-old shearman, John Went, told his interrogators that since about the age of twenty he had ‘misliked’ the way certain things were done in the Church of England, and that this ‘misliking’ was sufficiently strong for him to reject what his godparents had promised on his behalf when he was baptized as a child. The apprentice John Tudson said much the same thing: once he had begun to think for himself, at the age of about eighteen, he had found he ‘did mislike the doctrine and religion then taught and set forth in the Church of England’, only being prepared to accept the way things had been done during the reign of King Edward – ‘in whose time the Gospel was truly set forth’. Both these young men had come to maturity during Edward’s reign, and that is partly why the Protestant ideas they encountered then had such force for them – they were associated with the first time they had begun to think for themselves rather than just doing what their elders had told them to do. And they were able to back up what they had been taught by their Protestant leaders with their own reading of the Bible – something they had not been able to do with the faith they were taught as children, when they had been expected to accept everything they were told on the basis of priestly authority – so that Tudson could now boldly assert that ‘the doctrine set forth in the Queen’s reign was not agreeable to God’s word, nor yet to the true Catholic Church that Christ speaks of’. He challenged Bonner to tell him ‘wherein I have offended’.

  ‘In your answers,’ replied the bishop.

  ‘No, I have not,’ said Tudson, and went on to accuse the bishop of lacking in charity. Both young men also insisted that ‘the sacrament of the altar as it is used is an idol and no sacrament at all’. John Went admitted he had accidentally been present at a celebration of the Mass, but was sorry to have been so, believing the Mass to be ‘against God’s word’.

  Isobel Foster, considerably older than these two men, asserted that for most of her adulthood, when she conformed to expectations, she was doing so ‘blindly and without knowledge’; everything changed for her when, during Edward’s reign, she heard ‘the Gospel truly preached and opened to the people’. Whereas previously she had given little thought to what she had been taught about religion, she was convinced by ‘the preachers in the time of King Edward’ whom she believed ‘to have preached the truth’. Whatever else this had done for her, it had completely revolutionized her attitude towards herself, giving her – a middle-aged woman who would previously have been subservient to husband and other (male) authority figures – the confidence to stand up to the mightiest in the land. The importance of having faith as an individual had made her aware for the first time that she actually was an individual – and it was an awareness literally ‘to die for’.

  The young woman, Joan Lashford, who had been brought up by parents who had themselves been converted to Protestantism, had ‘seen the light’ much earlier; she announced that, from the age of about eleven, ‘she had misliked the sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrament of the altar, and the authority of the See of Rome, with the doctrine thereof, because they are against Christ’s Catholic Church, and the right faith of the same’. The bishop, old enough to be her grandfather, could get nowhere with her, whether by flattery or threats; on the contrary, she felt she was able to hold him to account: ‘If you will leave off your abomination,’ she declared, ‘so I will return, and otherwise I will not.’ For her, as for her fellow defendants, her own conscience was supreme, and she was sure that she had understood ‘Christ’s words and institution’ and therefore knew that ‘confession, absolution, and the Mass, with all their other superfluous sacraments, ceremonies and divine service as then used in this realm of England’, were contrary to them. The thirty-seven-year-old Thomas Browne was also quite prepared to contradict Bishop Bonner, to whom he replied, when Bonner told him his opinions were heresies: ‘How will you prove it? – for I will not go from my answers, unless you can prove them to be heresies, which you shall never do. For that which you call heresy is no heresy.’

  Three months after Bartlet Green and his six fellow sufferers were burnt, it was the turn of six more – Robert Drakes (a minister), William Tyms (a curate), Richard Spurge (a shearman), Thomas Spurge (
a fuller), John Cavell (a weaver) and George Ambrose (another fuller) – who were executed in Smithfield on 24 April. These men were all from Essex, and several of them had been apprehended during the previous year on the authority of Lord Rich, who had received complaints about their non-attendance at their parish church and had arranged for them to be sent before Stephen Gardiner, in March 1555. They had afterwards been sent either to the King’s Bench or the Marshalsea, where they had spent nearly a year without anything being done about them, the delay exacerbated by the illness and subsequent death of Bishop Gardiner. When Dr Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, was appointed to succeed Gardiner as Lord Chancellor, George Ambrose, John Cavell and the two Spurge brothers wrote to him, asking to be brought before him – either to prove their innocence of any charges that might be laid against them or to submit to judgement, if it could be proved they had done anything wrong. Their confinement in the Marshalsea had led, they claimed, to their ‘utter undoing’, and to that of their wives and children – for while they were there they could not of course work to support their families, but on the contrary incurred expenses which they could not afford. The letter seems to have had the desired effect as not long after it had been sent, Sir Richard Read, one of the officers of the Court of Chancery, was sent to the Marshalsea to examine the four prisoners.