The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  The answers which they made to Read were similar in content and attitude to those given by the group burnt in January. Richard Spurge said that he had stopped going to church when services in Latin had been resumed, and that he ‘misliked’ these services and the Mass as they did not, in his opinion, agree with ‘God’s holy word’. His brother Thomas concurred, adding that the word of God was no longer truly taught in church, nor were the sacraments administered there in the way they ought to be.

  A remark made by another of the prisoners, George Ambrose, is illuminating as to why the accused set so little store by what their ecclesiastical judges told them. Ambrose mentioned having read Stephen Gardiner’s De vera obedientia and its preface by Edmund Bonner – in which both these bishops who were now enforcing obedience to the Pope had, under a different regime, argued against papal authority. This inevitably undermined their credibility with the Protestant rebels, and no amount of sophistry on the part of the bishops could redeem them in the eyes of those who came before them. Inconsistency was also the charge levelled at his parish priest by another of the prisoners, John Cavell, who had given up going to church when ‘the parson there had preached two contrary doctrines’. Again, what is noteworthy here and what must have come as a surprise to their questioners is that these men, all craftsmen and manual workers rather than university-educated professional men, felt able to rely on their own judgement in determining whether or not to believe what they had been told.

  The other two men in the group who were executed in April were ministers of the Church. Robert Drakes had been the Rector of Thundersley in Essex for three years, having been recommended for ordination by Cranmer, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury. And so, as a relative newcomer, he had been ordained into what was in effect a Protestant church – and he was now being expected to play the role of a Catholic priest. He had been presented to the benefice of Thundersley by Lord Rich – but it was also Rich who had sent him up to Bishop Gardiner when he refused to conform to the changed practice under Mary. (This would suggest that had John Deane, another priest ‘presented’ by Rich, ever stepped out of line, his patron would have had no compunction about reporting him. But, in any event, both Deane and Rich appear to have been content with the return to the old ways. Certainly there is no suggestion of anything negative having come to light about the parish of Great St Bartholomew when Bishop Bonner conducted the visitation of his diocese, which commenced in the autumn of 1554. The questions drawn up by him for the inquiries he made of every parish included queries about clerical residence, dress, diligence and morals, as well as wanting assurances that no heretical doctrines were being preached, or lay people being allowed to behave in a less than reverential manner towards the sacraments or showing nonconformity in any way; John Deane came under no suspicion of any kind, under any of these headings.)

  The other clerical member of this group, William Tyms, was a deacon and the curate of Hockley, also in Essex. Tyms was allegedly involved in the holding of illegal, Protestant, services in some woods belonging to a Master Tyrrell. (One of these was Beeches Wood, which still exists as part of Hockley Woods, the largest remaining area of the ancient woodland that once covered Essex.) Master Tyrrell had been most put out at hearing that his woods were being ‘polluted with sermons’ – as well he might be, for fear of blame attaching to him over these unlawful assemblies being held on his land. He conducted inquiries into the matter, which resulted in Tyms being apprehended and sent up to Bishops Bonner and Gardiner, before being remanded in the King’s Bench prison.

  On 28 March 1556 all six men appeared before Bishop Bonner in the Consistory Court at St Paul’s. Bonner held the deacon Tyms responsible for having led many other people into heresy, including his fellow prisoners, but Tyms hotly contested this accusation, pointing out that all the defendants had been active dissenters well before they were arrested and, consequently, before he ever knew them. Tyms also articulated against Bonner and his fellow bishops the charge of inconsistency made by George Ambrose:

  My Lord, I doubt not but I am of the Catholic Church, whatever you judge of me. But as for your Church, you have before this day renounced it, and by corporal oath promised never to consent to the same. Contrary to the which, you have received into this realm the Pope’s authority, and therefore you are falsely perjured and forsworn, all the sort of you. Besides this, you have both spoken and written very earnestly against that usurped power, and now you burn men who will not acknowledge the Pope to be supreme head.

  Bonner appeared surprised at this, and had to be reminded of his preface to Gardiner’s treatise. He then gave as his reason for having written such opinions that he had had no choice at the time. ‘Thus did we because of the perilous world that then was,’ he said. ‘For then was it made treason by the laws of this realm to maintain the Pope’s authority, and great danger it was to be suspected a favourer of the See of Rome, and therefore fear compelled us to bear with the time, for otherwise there had been no way but one.’ The logic of Bonner’s position was that the present defendants should now themselves ‘bear with the time’ and recant their views – particularly as, he implied, they were wrong anyway.

  In levelling their charges of hypocrisy against Bonner, the Protestant faithful did tend to ignore the fact that he, and many others of his persuasion, had suffered for their convictions during the reign of Edward VI. These sufferings had, however, amounted to no more than deprivation and imprisonment. These had been bad enough in themselves – and the experience of long months of imprisonment certainly took its toll on Bonner, increasing his unpredictability and violent tendencies – but they did not include torture and death. The implication in Bonner’s words was that, had nonconformity during Edward’s reign carried a certain death sentence, he would not have considered it his duty to resist. And now, ‘Do you also as we have done,’ he urged the defendants. But Tyms and his fellows were moved by what they considered a higher authority than that of a turncoat bishop. ‘My Lord,’ said Tyms, ‘that which you have written against the supremacy of the Pope may be well approved by the scriptures. But that which you now do is against the word of God, as I can well prove.’

  How that word of God was to be interpreted was another major area of difficulty, with Bonner and his fellow learned divines insisting that these men – including the two clergymen in the group – did not understand what they were reading when they so gleefully quoted from ‘the scriptures’. ‘You brag much of knowledge, and yet you know nothing,’ the bishop accused Tyms; ‘you speak much of scripture, and you do not know what scripture is.’ He should not approach the Bible so literally, declared Bonner, but instead should rely on the interpretations of ‘the old Fathers’. His opponents’ view was that, despite the high esteem in which they held the early Church Fathers, particularly those who, like St Augustine, flourished around AD 400, the time after which men like Philpot judged the Church to have taken a wrong turn, they still believed that the Bible could, and should, be allowed to speak directly to believers, without the mediation of any other authority.

  In their desire to return to the roots of Christianity and be faithful to the vision of what they believed the Church to have been in its infancy, Catholic ceremonial represented for these ‘gospellers’ everything that this early, pure Church of their imagination was not. There had been so much accretion, so many things added on that they wanted to strip away, because there was no mention of such things in the Bible. As William Tyms wrote to two female fellow believers:

  Christ … never went on procession with a cope, cross or candlestick. He never censed an image, or sang a Latin service. He never sat in confession. He never preached of Purgatory, or of the Pope’s pardons. He never honoured saints, or prayed for the dead. He never said Mass, Mattins or Evensong. He never commanded to fast on Friday, or Vigil, Lent, or Advent. He never hallowed church or chalice, ashes, or palms, candles, or bells. He never made holy water or holy bread …

  This urge to ‘get back to basics’, to
strip away what are perceived as unnecessary occluding practices that always seem to build up around a clear, pure ideal, can be witnessed in the youthful challenge to so many traditions and institutions. The desire to jettison compromise, to cast away practices evolved by generations of elders, is very strong in the young – and that can be the young in faith rather than, or as well as, the young in chronological age. There are many examples from the world of politics, one being the ‘neo-Communists’ in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, who claimed that they were returning to the ideals of Marxism–Leninism which had, they said, been subverted as early as the late 1920s by a group of Stalin’s supporters, representing the interests of the petite bourgeoisie. And of particular resonance in the twenty-first century are the claims of IS to be returning to the roots of Islam, rejecting all innovations in the religion and aiming for the restoration of the caliphate of early Islam. The theological movement in Sunni Islam known as Salafism which is a contributing factor to the ideology of the ‘Islamic State’ is concerned with purifying the faith: ‘Salafism focuses on eliminating idolatry (shirk) and affirming God’s Oneness (tawhid). Salafis view themselves as the only true Muslims, considering those who practice so-called “major idolatry” to be outside the bounds of the Islamic faith. Those worshiping – or perceived to be worshiping – stones, saints, tombs, etc., are considered apostates, deserters of the religion.’ And the frustration of authority is as clearly expressed in these words from a letter addressed to ‘the fighters and followers of the self-declared “Islamic State”‘, signed by 126 Islamic scholars and clerics on 19 September 2014, as ever it was in the expostulations of Bishop Bonner and his colleagues:

  Oversimplification: It is not permissible to constantly speak of ‘simplifying matters’, or to cherry-pick an extract from the Qur’an without understanding it within its full context. It is also not permissible to say: ‘Islam is simple, and the Prophet and his noble Companions were simple, why complicate Islam?’ This is precisely what Abu Al-Baraa’ Al-Hindi did in his online video in July 2014. In it he says: ‘Open the Qur’an and read the verses on jihad and everything will become clear … all the scholars tell me: “This is a legal obligation (fard), or this isn’t a legal obligation, and this is not the time for jihad” … forget everyone and read the Qur’an and you will know what jihad is.’

  The same urge for a return to a hypothetical pure beginning, stripped of ‘idolatrous’ accretions, can be seen in William Tyms’s list of objections to practices that had grown up over centuries in the Church. And for scholars and religious leaders, perceived by outsiders as voices of reason but by those who believe themselves to be embracing pure truth as both compromising and compromised, the task of bringing about ‘recantation’ and reconciliation is as near-impossible in the twenty-first century as it was in the sixteenth. As Cole Bunzel, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, points out in an analysis paper written for the Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, the Islamic State relies on its own scholarly authorities, largely drawn from a younger generation. Chief among these is the thirty-year-old Bahraini Turki al-Bin’ali, for whom the Islamic State is the true keeper of the Salafi-Wahhabi heritage. ‘Confident in this role, it will never relinquish its divine mission,’ predicts Bunzel. ‘Jihadis who fail to support the Islamic State are simply on the wrong side of history.’

  A month after the group of men in April 1556, three women, also all from Essex, were burnt in Smithfield – Katherine Hutt from Bocking, Joan Horns from Billericay, and Elizabeth Thackwell from Great Burstead. Margaret Ellis, also from Billericay, was tried and condemned alongside them. Katherine was a widow, the other three all unmarried. Sir John Mordaunt, the son of the Mordaunt who refused to speak against Friar Forest, was instrumental in having these nonconformists ‘sent up’ to the authorities – ‘for that they could not affirm the presence of Christ’s body and blood to be truly and really in the sacrament, and for that they came not to their popish parish church’. His aim in doing so was to ensure that the parish of Great Burstead and Billericay should be brought into line; after the removal of these people, he thought, all would be well.

  The questions put to the defendants were now beginning to follow a set pattern. They included questions about how many sacraments there were. (The ‘correct’ answer was seven – baptism, confirmation, Eucharist or Holy Communion, penance, extreme unction, matrimony and holy orders; the usual Protestant reply was two – baptism and Holy Communion, or three if matrimony was included, as Katherine Hutt and Elizabeth Thackwell contended.) These women were less sure of themselves in certain respects than their male counterparts; a frequent response to the questions was that they ‘could not tell’. Margaret Ellis had heard that there was ‘one sacrament, but what it was she could not tell’. She was nevertheless convinced that, whatever it was, it was not what Bishop Bonner and his colleagues were telling her. Margaret was confident that she now knew more, and better, than had her godparents when she was baptized, and Katherine Hutt agreed – ‘but what her godfather and godmothers did then promise for her in her name, she could not tell’. They had all learnt to embrace the faith for themselves during King Edward’s reign, and this had made a strong impression on them – so strong that they were not prepared to relinquish it. Whatever they did or did not know, they retained a strong sense of identity, which was bolstered by the refusal to conform. Some of their replies were clearly influenced by what they had been told by their Protestant leaders, and they did not necessarily fully understand what their replies meant – but they were nevertheless sure that there was ‘no goodness’ in the Mass, and that ‘Christ’s natural body is in heaven, and not in the sacrament of the altar’. Belief in the see of Rome constituted no part of their experience – ‘they acknowledged no such supremacy in that See, neither have they anything to do with it’.

  The courage of these four women was beyond dispute. They were brought before the bishop for condemnation on 13 April, on which occasion the widow Katherine Hutt boldly told Bonner that the sacrament of the altar was not God – ‘because it is a dumb god and made with men’s hands’. Joan Horns said the same thing, as did the other two women. In the end, Margaret Ellis was saved from the flames by dying in Newgate before she could be executed. The other three were bound to the stake and burnt to death on 16 May.

  Throughout the reign of Philip and Mary, Lord Rich was particularly zealous in dealing with the cases of reported heretics in Essex, his name appearing often in connection with suspects sent to Bishop Bonner (in whose diocese of London the county of Essex then was) or among the witnesses to an execution. A disproportionate number of heretics condemned in London’s diocesan courts came from Essex (at least sixty, as compared with only thirty from London, and one each from Middlesex and Hertfordshire); this suggests how very diligent Rich and his fellow Essex magistrates were being. In addition, from the beginning of the burnings of lay people, Rich was among the local dignitaries whose presence was required by the Privy Council, following directions from the Queen, ‘at the burning of such obstinate persons as presently are sent down to be burned in diverse parts of the country’. The presence of local grandees and magistrates was intended to reinforce the policy of religious repression, demonstrating solidarity between monarchy, Church and secular authority. So Rich was heavily implicated, both in the trials and the executions of Protestants.

  One of the cases to come before him, as one of the Queen’s commissioners in Essex, was that of Thomas Watts, a linen draper from Billericay. Watts was summoned to appear before the Essex Justices sitting at Chelmsford in late April 1555, accused of refusing to go to church and attending illegal evangelical gatherings – or ‘conventicles’ – instead. Part of his defence was that he had learnt of the new religious teaching – or ‘this gear’, as it was referred to by Sir Anthony Browne, one of Rich’s fellow Justices – from the very people who were now presuming to sit in judgement on him. Sir Anthony himself had, according to Watts, dec
lared during the reign of Edward VI that the Mass was ‘abominable’ and had also made remarks that could now be construed as critical of the Queen’s decision to marry a Spanish prince – that ‘whoever should bring in any strange nation to rule here it was treason, and not to be suffered’. Sir Anthony was understandably perturbed at Watts’s accusations, and turned to Rich to say: ‘He belies me, my Lord. What a knave is this! He will soon belie me behind my back, when he does it before my face.’

  ‘I dare say he does,’ responded Rich. Watts continued unwisely to criticize the advent of King Philip, until the assembled Justices decided they had had enough and, muttering ‘Treason!’ to one another, resolved to send him off to Bonner. At his execution a few weeks later in Chelmsford, Watts specifically accused Rich of having switched religious allegiance with the change of reign. ‘My Lord, beware, beware!’ he exclaimed. ‘For you do against your own conscience herein, and unless you repent, the Lord will avenge it.’ As we know well by now, however, Lord Rich’s conscience was a flexible organ, and it is unlikely he lost much sleep over Watts’s allegation.

  Rich’s London rector Sir John Deane, meanwhile, carried on with his routine parish ministry, some aspects of which can be traced in the wills of parishioners, including, as we have seen, that of Richard Bartlett. Another parishioner whose will Deane witnessed in 1556 was John Garatt, ‘citizen and salter’. Garatt requested to be buried inside the Priory Church between the steps leading to the high altar and the chancel, and left various bequests, including to the Black Friars at St Bartholomew’s, requesting them to pray for his soul and for those of his first and second wives, yearly. His third wife, Ursula, was still living, and to her he left his house in Red Cross Street. He also left small sums of money, as many did, to the three main prisons – the King’s Bench, the Marshalsea and Newgate.