The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  Though June 1558 marked the end of the Smithfield fires, there were more yet to come in other parts of the country. Five were burnt in Canterbury just a week before the death of Queen Mary, and of Cardinal Pole, on the same day – 17 November 1558 – she predeceasing him by the space of a few hours.

  Epilogue

  ‘BY THE LIGHT OF BURNING MARTYRS’

  Ô vous, les boutefeux, ô vous, les bons apôtres,

  Mourez donc les premiers, nous vous cédons le pas.

  Mais, de grâce, morbleu! laissez vivre les autres!

  La vie est à peu près leur seul luxe ici-bas;

  Car, enfin, la Camarde est assez vigilante,

  Elle n’a pas besoin qu’on lui tienne la faux.

  Plus de danse macabre autour des échafauds!

  Mourons pour des idées, d’accord, mais de mort lente,

  D’accord, mais de mort lente.

  O all you firebreathers, o all you good apostles,

  Go and die first, we’ll just stand back and let you through.

  But please, I beg you, let the rest of us get on with living,

  Life is just about our only luxury down here.

  For after all, Death is sufficiently vigilant,

  He doesn’t need anyone to hold his scythe for him.

  Let’s have no more macabre dances around the scaffold.

  Let’s die for ideas, OK, if you want, but just make sure it’s

  a slow death,

  OK? just a slow death.

  Georges Brassens, ‘Mourir pour des idées’,

  translated by Ted Neather*

  BY AND LARGE, we – by which I mean the majority of twenty-first-century inhabitants of what we think of as our world, and leaving out the adherents of IS, ISIL, Daesh or whatever acronym the promoters of an Islamic caliphate are currently to be known by – would concur with the French chansonnier Georges Brassens that ideas are not really worth dying for, at least not by a premature, chosen death. This may be partly why we are despised by the so-called extremists who are more than willing both to die, and to kill, for ideas. W. B. Yeats captured our current dilemma well in his poem ‘The Second Coming’: ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.’

  Certainly the martyrs of the mid-sixteenth century were full of ‘passionate intensity’ – but they cannot be defined as ‘the worst’. That appellation perhaps belongs to more recent history – characters from our own, and the immediately preceding, centuries. And, perhaps, faced by people whose passionate intensity is unreservedly murderous, we are going to have to find some passion and intensity of our own, some ‘idea’ for which we are prepared to die if, paradoxically, we want our civilization to stay alive.

  What, then, might one be prepared to die for in this post-postmodern age? Not for nuances of definition of the doctrine of transubstantiation, that’s for sure (or perhaps it’s not as sure as all that). But for the right of people to disagree about it, perhaps? Do we really care that much about freedom of speech and freedom of thought? Certainly we care – but do we care enough to die for it? On the contrary, we seem to care rather less than we used to, given the way we allow our civil liberties to be eroded in the cause of an unattainable, elusive and illusory ‘security’.

  What if I, as a Christian – and a Catholic (Anglican, not Roman) Christian at that, to whom these things do matter – am one day confronted by a fanatic of another religion (and this is not such a far-fetched possibility as it might once – not so very long ago – have appeared) and told to stamp on the consecrated host, on pain of death? Would I do it? I don’t know – I don’t know how strong I am, or might be – but I hope I wouldn’t. I hope the grace of God would make me strong enough not to deny my faith in extremis – less for the thing in itself (whether, or in what sense, the host ‘is’ the body of Christ) as because I don’t want to allow force, bullying or violence to make me be different from how I want to be; I don’t want to allow someone else to define who I am and make me do something that contradicts that self-definition. I’m not averse to changing my mind, and my faith has waxed and waned frequently over the years, as has my adherence to particular practices – but it’s my mind, and my prerogative to change it. But when (fleetingly) imagining a heroic defiance, it’s salutary to reread George Orwell’s 1984 and to remember that I think he’s right about pain (having seen in my parents dying of cancer how pain can be all-absorbing, when the only thing that matters is that it should end): ‘Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, [Winston] thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.’

  So I have no idea whether I could really hold firm in the face of a violent challenge to what I want to stay true to, but it interests me that I can contemplate – even if it never gets beyond contemplation (and I earnestly hope my strength will never be tested in this way) – dying for something that’s not that far removed from the kind of thing the martyrs died for: dying pour des idées, in fact. Perhaps what has really changed is the weight society as a whole attaches to the importance of conformity. We still, as human beings, carry within us the potential to be martyrs, but if our society as a whole doesn’t really care what its individual components believe, then there’s no real opportunity for martyrdom; if I want to hang onto some weird outmoded idea about a piece of wafer being somehow holy, then the strongest penalty I’m likely to encounter in twenty-first-century Britain is derision. To state the obvious, however, when belief becomes a matter of life and death, individuals may have to choose one or the other. And in some parts of the world this is a very present reality. A media headline in February 2016 read: ‘Saudi Arabia sentences a man to 10 years in prison and 2,000 lashes for expressing his atheism on Twitter.’ (The message from sixteenth-century England to the twenty-first-century Saudis is that such methods won’t work.)

  Maybe it always has been, and always will be, a minority who care enough not to choose life over conscience. And maybe it’s insane, or at least evidence of hubris, not to do so, particularly in matters of faith. Why do we think ultimate reality, if there is such a thing, is affected by what we say and do? So what if we deny God, or what we take to be God? – it won’t affect God’s existence one way or the other.

  It does affect how we feel about ourselves, though, and perhaps that’s the real point. The martyrs couldn’t save themselves in this world because they would have been lost to themselves if they had. We see that in the torments of conscience suffered by those who did recant and then took back the recantation; they couldn’t live with themselves after they had uttered what seemed to them a denial of their faith – because it was a denial of their very selves. So the ‘luxury’ that is life, according to Georges Brassens, proved not to be worth as much as the integrity that meant embracing death.

  Dying for an idea is one thing; killing for ideological reasons quite another. There have been people throughout history who have been prepared to kill in defence of their beliefs – it’s an easy win for scorners of Christianity to point to the Crusades (Pope Urban II in 1095 having implied that the killing of ‘infidels’ in a ‘crusade’ to recapture the Holy Land was a work of Christian piety), and then there are the original ‘assassins’, the medieval Nizari Ismailis and their leader Hassan-i Sabbah – but it seems particularly urgent to try to understand the psychology of present-day jihadists, if only because they may be the current most significant threat to our society, even to civilization itself. I am writing this a few months after the murderous attacks on people just enjoying themselves during an evening out in Paris, scores of young people being shot down while doing nothing more harmful than attending a rock concert. What did the attackers think they were doing? What was (and is, because it’s not going to go away any time soon) the point? Knowing, as they must have done, that theirs w
as also a suicidal mission, did the motivation of the gunmen have any similarities with that of the sixteenth-century martyrs? Or with that of their persecutors?

  The most obvious answer to the first question must be ‘no’. The Smithfield martyrs did not anticipate their executions leading to the deaths of others, and they would certainly not have wished harm on an indiscriminate gathering of people whose views and beliefs they could not know; if encountering a group of young people eating, drinking and party-going, some of the martyrs might well have set about trying to convert them, but they certainly wouldn’t have thought of killing them. The answer is perhaps slightly less obvious when we consider those – both Catholic and Protestant – who believed the correct course of action to deal with an obstinate heretic was to kill him or her (and several of the martyrs themselves also fall into this category). They too would have been horrified at the idea of indiscriminate killing – they would have needed proof that each individual was irredeemably lost to heresy and consequently a danger to other Christian souls, and they would have wanted some legal formulation to help justify a death sentence before handing anyone over to die – but, nevertheless, the preparedness to accept judicial execution as an appropriate sanction for ‘wrong belief’ is somewhere on the spectrum that reaches its darkest point in the mass murder of people of a different, or no, religion. There is a kind of awful purity, an intransigence, a refusal to live with compromise or to accept and make allowance for human imperfection, that can be detected as much in the austere figure of Thomas More as in some of those drawn towards a world-denying version of Islam that wants to smash everything – and everyone – that stands in the way of a particular vision of the absolute.

  It must be underlined that there are many voices of ‘mainstream’ Islam anxious to stress that an approach to non-Muslims that involves killing them is not sanctioned by a right understanding of Islamic law, one of these voices being Shaykh Abdallah bin Bayyah, a Mauritanian professor of Islamic studies and President of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies. Addressing himself to young people tempted to go off and fight for IS, he writes:

  All forms of oppression and aggression against religious minorities are in direct contradiction to the values of our religion. In fact, Islam calls us to do well by religious minorities, to place them under our protection, and threatens those who harm them with punishment in the afterlife. This is evidenced by the track record of the Muslim world, which has no peer in history when it pertains to people living harmoniously with religious minorities, beyond what basic humanity demands of equal rights and responsibilities. Hence, any aggression of any kind or coercion to convert is unacceptable. Coerced conversion is invalid in Islamic law. Islam has nothing to do with this, as the Qur’an states, ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ (Qur’an, 2:256).

  One must also not forget about politics or be tempted to draw too easy a parallel between situations that may appear similar only on a very superficial level. The political element which is such a potent feature of current ‘Islamist extremism’ has no parallel with the sixteenth-century martyrs’ experience; they were not interested, and nor by and large were their accusers, in exercising political power and certainly not in forming a new ‘state’ – loyalty to the monarch was important to everyone involved (except, perhaps, to a few of the radical Anabaptists), even if that loyalty was interpreted and expressed in conflicting ways. What does remain the same, however, is the great difficulty in turning back a young ‘extremist’ from his (or her) path once it has been embarked upon. The old authority figures – be they Bishop Bonner or Shaykh bin Bayyah – find themselves frustrated at their lack of power to convince, while to the youthful ‘protestant’ the words and actions of their elders seem not only out of date, but contaminated – by compromise with error and by departure from a perceived original ‘pure’ source.

  Where there may also be a similarity between the martyrs of four and a half centuries ago and the suicidal ‘martyrs’ of today is in the firm belief in an afterlife, a conviction that heaven, or paradise, exists and that they are destined to reach it very soon, possibly immediately after death. Those who believe that they are martyrs (shahid) dying in battle for the sake of Allah – which is how they interpret what they are doing when they take part in terrorist attacks against those they perceive to be enemies of Islam – also believe that they will be rewarded with the pleasures of paradise, including food, drink and beautiful women, and that they will not have to wait for their reward.

  The distinction of martyrs, compared to other Muslims, lies primarily in the fact that they are guaranteed the privilege of Paradise: the act of falling in battle for the sake of Allah washes away every violation or sin they have committed during their lives. The shahid enters Paradise immediately, without enduring the ‘torments of the grave’, whereas an ordinary Muslim who does not have the privilege of dying as a martyr must wait for the Day of Judgment.

  A. J. Caschetta, a senior lecturer in English at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow of the Middle East Forum, asserts in his article ‘Does Islam Have a Role in Suicide Bombings?’: ‘The “vast reward” offered to the martyr is the single most important incentive for suicide bombers’, alluding specifically to the following verse from the Qur’an: ‘Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.’

  While the heaven awaited by the Smithfield martyrs was of a different order from the paradise envisaged by a twenty-first-century jihadist (beautiful women in particular playing little part in Christian views of the afterlife), an expectation that they were soon to arrive and be welcomed there is evident in the words reported to have been uttered at the stake by more than one of the victims. Nicholas Ridley encapsulated this view in his farewell letter from prison: ‘Let us not then fear death, which can do us no harm, otherwise than for a moment to make the flesh to smart; for that our faith, which is surely fastened and fixed unto the word of God, telleth us that we shall be anon after death in peace in the hands of God, in joy, in solace, and that from death we shall go straight unto life.’ A willingness to accept that the physical body was of far less importance than the immortal soul was shared by those, including Queen Mary, who consigned the martyrs to the flames and was one of the reasons that made the action possible. And such a belief contributed in no small part to the courage of many of the martyrs; indeed, without that belief – not only in the existence of an afterlife but in the granting of a greater significance to it than to our mortal, transient, earthly life – the willingness to give up that earthly life for the sake of holding firm to a particular doctrine or set of doctrines, ‘to die for ideas’, would surely have been less. People who are prepared to die for ideas are giving ultimate value to those ideas; they must be seen to transcend death, if the individual’s death is to have any meaning. If the ideas die with the person, what is the point in dying for them?

  With the accession of Queen Elizabeth I in November 1558 those characters in our story who had so far succeeded in not dying for ideas had to decide yet again what position to adopt, as what constituted orthodoxy was again subject to revision.

  In the first year of the new Queen’s reign, the church of St Bartholomew was restored to its use as a parish church and Sir John Deane to his official title of rector (he had signed himself as ‘curate’ during the period of the Black Friars’ residence). In 1559, under the terms of Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy, the clergy were required to take an oath recognizing the Queen’s supremacy in the Church, and Deane duly did so, signing his name at a ceremony in the church of St Lawrence Jewry. He would also now have had to return to celebrating Holy Communion in English, wearing only surplice and cope rather than full eucharistic vestments, and once again eschewing most processions, prayers to the saints and any sacred images that had been brought back into use under Mary.

  The Black Friars officially depart
ed on 14 July; the majority of them were Spanish or Dutch and they left the country. Friar Richard Hargrave, a priest from Dartford who had been elected Prior of Smithfield shortly before Mary’s death, refused to take the oath and escorted a group of Dominican nuns to exile in Seland, near Antwerp. About half of Deane’s fellow City clergy felt unable to embrace this latest reversal of ecclesiastical policy and resigned, or were removed. It must have been particularly difficult for those appointed during Mary’s reign who had been out of favour under Edward, while for those who had already proved their ability to adapt to change – such as John Deane and Alan Percy, the latter having served as priest at St Mary-at-Hill continuously from 1521 – the requirement to change yet again may have felt tiresome, but not unendurable.

  The beginning of the new reign was marked for Richard Rich by bereavement, his wife Elizabeth dying at their house in Bartholomew Close in December 1558. Her body was ‘carried in a chariot from St Bartholomew the Great unto Essex to be buried, with banners and banner-rolls about her’, and the funeral at Rochford in Essex, as recorded by Machyn, was accompanied with much pomp and markedly Catholic accoutrements: ‘The 18 day of December was buried my Lady Rich, the wife of Lord Rich, with a hearse of 5 principals and a 8 dozen pensells* and a 8 dozen escutcheons and a great banner of my Lord’s and my Lady’s arms and 4 banner-rolls, and 4 banners of saints; and great white branches and 6 dozen of torches; and 24 poor men had gowns; and the morrow mass and a great dinner, and 2 heralds and many mourners.’ Lord Rich actually turned out to be less flexible in his religion than John Deane, and in April 1559 he voted in the House of Lords with the Roman Catholic minority against the Act of Uniformity (which reintroduced the Book of Common Prayer and established the Church of England along broadly Protestant lines). Perhaps his participation in so many heresy trials under Mary had left their mark on him; he had not been merely playing a part when upholding Catholic doctrine and, after all he had witnessed and the zeal he had put into bringing people to condemnation – as well as on occasion trying to encourage them to avoid it – he could not in the end ‘turn, turn and turn again’, or not full circle, at least. The strength of his convictions was never unduly tested – and he did support the restoration of the royal supremacy, as might indeed be expected of someone who had played such a large part in bringing the Church in England under the monarch’s control, particularly as Chancellor of Augmentations. He was not appointed to Elizabeth’s Privy Council and he retired to Essex, but his services were still sought on occasion, as when he was summoned in 1566 to join a delegation of members of both Houses of Parliament who addressed the Queen on the delicate question of her marriage (or lack of one).