The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  On 15 August 1557 John Deane would have attended, with all the other City clergy, a service at St Paul’s to mark the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, specific instructions having been issued for marking this significant day in the Catholic liturgical calendar. All the clergy, vested in copes, were to take part in the procession, which moved from the cathedral along Cheapside, the assembled choirs singing ‘Salve festa dies’, and collecting the scarlet-robed Lord Mayor and Aldermen in the return procession to Paul’s Cross to hear Archdeacon Harpsfield preach ‘a goodly sermon’.

  A month after taking part in this festive procession, Deane acquired a second living when he was instituted as Rector of Coulsdon in Surrey (the parish church being that of St John the Evangelist, in what is now known as Old Coulsdon). Before the dissolution of the monasteries, this living had been in the gift of Chertsey Abbey, but in 1537 the abbot had conveyed the advowson to the King who subsequently granted it to the courtier and diplomat Sir Nicholas Carew. Sir Nicholas was executed for treason shortly afterwards and the advowson reverted to the Crown, with Archbishop Cranmer exercising it under Edward VI. But Mary restored the manor of Coulsdon and the advowson to the Carews – and it was Sir Nicholas’s son, Francis Carew, who presented Sir John Deane to the living, on the death of the previous incumbent. At first glance, there appears to be no connection between Carew and Deane, and so Sir John’s receipt of this rather lucrative living (in 1535 it had been valued at almost £22, twice the amount of the stipend he received from St Bartholomew’s) is something of a mystery. But where there is a mystery there is very often a Lord Rich, and he is indeed the most likely person to have had a hand in the appointment, his connections and influence spreading far and wide. Rich was aware that Deane’s income had been reduced by his decision to surrender a number of tenements at St Bartholomew’s to the Crown when the Black Friars took up residence, and he could well have been looking for a way of making this up to his protégé.

  The particular link between Francis Carew and Lord Rich can be found in the figure of Carew’s brother-in-law, Nicholas Throckmorton (he had married Anne Carew in about 1549), for whom the year 1557 was also pivotal. In January 1554 Throckmorton, who had Protestant sympathies (signalled, perhaps, by his luxuriant auburn beard which tapered to two points) and was known to oppose the idea of the Queen’s marriage to Philip of Spain, had been arrested on suspicion of complicity in the rebellion against Mary led by Sir Thomas Wyatt. He was tried at Guildhall on 17 April, the indictment alleging that he was ‘a principal, deviser, procurer and contriver of the late Rebellion’. But, using all his gifts of eloquence and learning, as well as appealing to the jury members’ own distaste for the Spanish marriage, Throckmorton, with his bright piercing eyes and razor-sharp wit, was able to run rings around the prosecutors and succeeded in persuading the jury of his innocence – to the fury of the judges. The upshot was that not only the defendant, but also the members of the jury, were imprisoned, Throckmorton being sent to the Tower.

  The following year, however, Throckmorton was released and, after initially retiring to his home in Northamptonshire, fled to France in June 1556, fearing accusations of involvement in further conspiracies. But then, despite there being some calls for him to be placed on trial again, he was rather unexpectedly pardoned and recalled by Mary – in May 1557. Is it too far-fetched to detect the hand of Richard Rich in this rehabilitation of Nicholas Throckmorton, with part of the pay-off being the living at Coulsdon for John Deane, which was about to become vacant and was in the gift of Throckmorton’s family by marriage? Both men – Rich and Throckmorton – had a reputation for wheeler-dealing, always tending to accomplish their purposes in a roundabout, conspiratorial manner.

  In addition to Lord Rich’s desire to ensure Deane was in receipt of a healthy income, he had another motive for making Throckmorton beholden to him – Throckmorton knew about certain aspects of his past, including what had happened to Anne Askew between her conviction for heresy and her execution. He had himself been a member of the evangelical circle connected to Queen Katherine Parr, and had visited Anne in prison, as well as being present at her burning. Though people with Anne’s views were once again being burnt at the stake, Lord Rich would not have wanted his involvement in the illegal torture of this young woman to become a matter of common currency, so he would always have had his eye on Nicholas Throckmorton, with a view to buying his silence. There was also the matter of the alleged conversation between Rich, Throckmorton (also spelt Throgmorton) and Thomas Cromwell, which had been instrumental in the latter’s downfall. However it was accomplished, by the autumn of 1557 both Nicholas Throckmorton and John Deane were in a better position than at the start of that year, and both may have had reason to be grateful to Lord Rich.

  As well as acquiring a second living, throughout this period of his life John Deane was increasing his property portfolio and transforming himself into a man of some consequence, particularly in relation to his place of origin in Cheshire. Between 1553 and 1557 he bought a number of properties in Chester, some of which had originally belonged to the great college of St John the Baptist while others had formed part of the estates of the dissolved fraternity of St Anne, and he used some of these properties to endow the grammar school he founded at Witton, close to his home town of Northwich, in late 1557. The statutes drawn up by Deane for his school stipulated that the master was to be a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, and that the scholars were to be taught ‘good literature, both Latin and Greek, and good authors such as have the very Roman eloquence, joined with wisdom especially Christian authors, that wrote their wisdom with clean and chaste Latin, either in verse or in prose for my intent is by founding of this school especially to increase knowledge and worship of God and our Lord Jesus Christ and good life and manners in the children’. Whatever Deane may have felt about the burnings taking place with such frequency outside his church at this period, he was clearly a man who believed in the future and, childless himself, he wanted to be able to influence the young and ensure that boys in his home town were given the opportunity to be both Christian and educated. His statutes and rules for the curriculum were very similar to those drawn up by Dean Colet for St Paul’s School, founded in 1518, and themselves based on an Erasmian conception of education, characterized by the combination of virtue with learning.

  Other parts of the statutes suggest not only that Deane was by nature attracted to tradition, but also that he rather hankered after the kind of ‘great school’ he had not himself had the opportunity to attend, for he particularly specified that his school should follow a number of ‘old orders and customs’, such as the ‘barring out’ of the schoolmaster in the weeks before Christmas and Easter – ‘in such sort as other scholars do in great schools’. This particular custom involved barricading the master out of the school until any offences committed by the boys during that term had been forgiven.

  The deed of the statutes of Witton Grammar School also provides us with a visual image, albeit conventional and idealized, of Sir John, the initial letter ‘I’ containing his illuminated portrait. In this illustration, as in life, he does nothing to offend, while maintaining his office and his calling. He wears a full-sleeved academic gown with a fur tippet, scarf and doctor’s cap, and his face bears the suggestion of a short beard. His right hand holds up a closed book, while from his left proceeds a banderole bearing a text from Psalm 51, in Latin, which translated means: ‘Have mercy on me, God, and turn thy face from my sins. Amen.’ (This is the same psalm his erstwhile neighbour, John Rogers, recited on his way to the stake.)

  The aspirations that went into the founding of Witton Grammar School are very much those of someone who wanted the future for Northwich boys to be brighter than it had been in the past. Deane is the opposite of someone who, having achieved a degree of prosperity in his life through a mixture of good luck, good judgement and an ability to stay out of trouble, wants to pull the ladder up after himself; on the contrary, he was determined
to leave a legacy that would enable others to improve their circumstances too. And, judging from his actions, he took the view that, whatever was happening in Smithfield, life goes on and must be lived wholeheartedly and with hope.

  Chapter Fourteen

  CONSTANCY AND CONFLAGRATION

  The martyr in his ‘shirt of flame’ may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the fall of a flower to one who is mowing down the grass with a scythe.

  Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

  DURING THE SECOND HALF of Mary’s reign, the burnings rose to a crescendo. On 12 April 1557, five people – again from Essex – were burnt in Smithfield: three men (Thomas Loseby, Henry Ramsey and Thomas Thyrtell) and two women (Margaret Hyde and Agnes Stanley). Three more men were burnt together on 30 November: William Sparrow, for selling blasphemous ballads and calling the Mass abominable; John Hallingdale, for christening his child according to the banned English service, from the time of King Edward; and Richard Gibson. This last was a gentleman, the scion of an established City family; his father was a royal serjeant-at-arms and the bailiff of Southwark, while his grandfather, William Bayley, had been Lord Mayor for 1524–5 and previously Master of the Worshipful Company of Drapers. Gibson was learned and witty, and quite prepared to taunt Bishop Bonner during their encounters. On 22 December John Rough, a beneficed priest at Hull under Edward VI, and the minister of the ‘London congregation’, a group of about twenty Protestants that met secretly in people’s houses and in taverns and included Dutch and French immigrants as well as native Londoners, was burnt. He was accused of having ministered according to the Edwardian Book of Common Prayer, and of knowing others who used the same book. That the horrors of death by burning were appreciated by the martyrs, and had to be prepared for psychologically, is demonstrated by a comment made by Rough a few months before his own ordeal. Meeting him in the street one day, a fellow Protestant asked him where he had been. ‘I have been where I would not for one of my eyes but I had been,’ he replied, adding in explanation: ‘To Austoo’s burning, to learn the way.’ (James Austoo and his wife Margery were burnt in Islington about 17 September.) Margaret Mearing, a member of the Islington congregation, died alongside Rough.

  Three men were burnt on 28 March 1558, among them Cuthbert Simpson, a wealthy tailor and the deacon of the London congregation. He had been tortured repeatedly on the rack in an attempt to get him to divulge the names of the members. Even Bishop Bonner came to admire his constancy and ‘patience’, while still abhorring his heresy and supporting his death sentence for ‘denial of the Mass’. Alongside Simpson died Hugh Foxe, a hosier, and John Devenish. A further seven were burnt on 27 June: Henry Pond, Reginald Eastland, Robert Southam, Matthew Ricarby, John Floyd, John Holiday and Roger Holland. This turned out to be the final group to suffer this terrible fate under Mary in Smithfield.

  Why was the Queen so attached to this policy of burning, even while it appeared to be having little or no success in eradicating the ‘contagion’ of heresy? We have seen that she was encouraged by Bartolomé Carranza, but he left England in the summer of 1557, when the burnings were at their peak (June that year saw the highest number of burnings in any one month throughout the country – twenty-eight in total), and they did not die down for more than a year. Part of the reason is that, for Mary, the sacrament of the altar, as understood by the Catholic Church, was of fundamental importance; for her to hear of it being traduced and scorned was almost more than she could bear. And she seemed to go on believing, even as others around her changed their minds, that eradication of heretics was the only option and the right thing to do. David Loades, who has devoted much of his scholarly life to trying to fathom this unhappy monarch, perhaps sums her up best with the line: ‘For all her humanist education, Mary was a woman whose convictions were stronger than her reason.’

  Some of the Essex five who were burnt on 12 April 1557 had been apprehended by Lord Rich, the rest by other magistrates or constables, for the usual misdemeanour of non-attendance at their parish church. They were initially examined by Bishop Bonner’s chancellor, Dr Thomas Darbyshire, on 27 January, with the bishop himself questioning them on 6 March. As with Bartlet Green, one of the criticisms directed at them concerned their reliance on their own consciences, instead of on what had been decreed by the Church. None of the accused were learned people, which made their unwillingness to listen to the established authorities seem all the more extraordinary to their judges. They were accused, among other things, of belief in predestination, or in the absence of free will: ‘you have thought that all things do chance of an absolute and precise mere necessity, so that whether man does well or evil, he could not choose but so do, and that therefore no man has any free will at all’. They were further charged with rejecting infant baptism, with not believing in purgatory, and with considering the heretics burnt under both King Henry and Queen Mary not to have been heretics at all. While admitting to the bulk of the charges – that they had not attended their parish churches, preferring the English service as it had been under King Edward, or participated in any of the required processions and other ceremonies, and that they did not believe in the necessity of making their confession to a priest – they denied belief in predestination and rejection of infant baptism.

  At the beginning of April they were asked if they stood by their earlier answers (they did), and on the morning of 3 April, in the Consistory Court, the bishop asked whether there was any reason why he should not condemn them. Thomas Loseby was the first to reply, declaring: ‘God give me grace and strength to stand against you, and your sentence, and also against your law, which is a devouring law, for it devours the flock of Christ. And I perceive there is no way for me but death, unless I consent to your devouring law, and believe in that idol, the Mass.’ Thomas Thyrtell cited the highest possible authority in support of his defiant stance: ‘My Lord, I say this, if you make me a heretic, then you make Christ and all the 12 Apostles heretics, for I am in the true faith and right belief, and I will stand in it, for I know full well I shall have eternal life therefore.’ Last to reply was one of the women, Agnes Stanley, who was quite as defiant as her male companions. ‘I had rather every hair of my head were burned,’ she declared, ‘than that I should forsake my faith and opinion which is the true faith.’

  In the afternoon each was called before the bishop in turn, to go over the articles and answers one last time, and to have the sentence of condemnation read against them. They were then turned over to the sheriffs and, nine days later, burnt together in one great fire.

  In view of the illustrious civic connections of Richard Gibson, one of those burnt on 30 November 1557, every effort was made to secure a recantation from him, the carrying out of the death sentence being delayed by twenty-four hours in order to allow Abbot Feckenham of Westminster to make one last attempt. Gibson had appeared before Bishop Bonner, alongside John Hallingdale and William Sparrow, on 5 November, in order to make answer to the usual ‘articles’. Hallingdale’s particular offence had been to have his new-born son baptized according to the English service, and he was now refusing to have the child confirmed by the bishop. William Sparrow was accused, despite having previously submitted to Bishop Bonner and renounced his heresies, of having lapsed and ‘willingly fallen into certain heresies and errors’ – and, worse, of having disseminated his ‘various unlawful opinions’, not only to the ‘right great hurt’ of his own soul, but also ‘to the great hindrance and loss of various others’. His method of dissemination involved the selling of ‘heretical, erroneous, and blasphemous ballads’; he had been found in possession of such ballads when he was arrested. Sparrow’s response to the charge that he had defaulted on his earlier promise was to admit that he had indeed made such a submission, but that ‘I am sorry that ever I made it, and it was the worse deed that ever I
did.’

  Richard Gibson’s travails had begun when he was imprisoned in the Counter in Poultry over a debt; he had been held there for two years, and came under suspicion as a dissenter because he had never gone to confession or Mass during that time. While still in the Counter, he was required in May 1557 to answer to a number of charges. As with Sparrow, one of the most serious aspects of the accusations laid against him was that he had sought to influence others to adopt his beliefs; this was particularly worrying to the authorities when it was someone of their own class of people who was presenting a ‘pernicious and evil example’ to ‘the inhabitants of the City of London, and the prisoners of the prison of the said Counter in the Poultry’. He was also accused of having encouraged other heretics, or those suspected of heresy, to persist in their wrong beliefs. In short, he was a very dangerous young man, apparently as pernicious in prison as out of it. He certainly showed little concern for his own safety, having been not at all discreet about his opinions and intentions, at least if the seventh of the charges laid against him was accurate:

  Seventhly, that the said Gibson has affirmed, that if he may once be out of prison and at liberty, he will not come to any parish church, or ecclesiastical place to hear Mattins, Mass, Evensong, or any divine service now used in this realm of England, nor come to procession upon times and days accustomed, nor carry at any time any taper or candle, nor receive at any time ashes, nor carry at any time palms, nor receive the Pax at Mass time, nor receive holy water, nor holy bread, nor observe the ceremonies or usages of the Catholic Church, here observed or kept commonly in this realm of England.