The Burning Time

by Virginia Rounding

  Lord Rich died at Rochford in Essex on 12 June 1567. He had spent his last years as a local magnate and magistrate, also becoming involved in education, converting the endowment he had used to set up a chantry at Felsted in 1554 to establish the ‘Free School of Richard Lord Rich’ there in May 1564. (The motto of Felsted School remains that of Richard Rich – ‘Garde Ta Foy’ or ‘Keep thy faith’ – an injunction which perhaps he finally embraced in the last years of his life. It nevertheless seems an ironic, even cynical, label to be attached, and in perpetuity, to this great survivor of an age in which many people who genuinely ‘kept their faith’ paid the ultimate price for doing so. But maybe another way of interpreting it, more fitting to Rich and suggesting one of the secrets of his survival, would be: ‘Keep your faith to yourself.’) Rich also founded almshouses at Felsted and funded the building of the tower of Rochford church.

  He was buried at Felsted on 8 July. His eldest son Robert succeeded him in the peerage and received his estates, and his nine surviving daughters and illegitimate son all received legacies. Rich’s descendants were patrons of the church of St Bartholomew the Great until the nineteenth century.

  In about 1620 his great-grandson had a monument erected to him in Felsted church, by the sculptor Epiphanius Evesham, celebrating Rich’s achievements as Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor. He lies in effigy, in what seems now a rather lonely corner of the church, infrequently visited and little remembered – except for his role in the trial of Sir Thomas More and as the villain in several fictional accounts of the period – gazing rather balefully at anyone who cares to meet his eye.

  John Deane died in October 1563, and was buried on the south side of the sanctuary in the church he had served for so long. He was about seventy years old when he died and, like the diarist Henry Machyn who died in the following month, he may well have succumbed to the plague which was ravaging London at that time. Nearly a quarter of the city’s population died in this major outbreak of bubonic plague which lasted from June to October, a more serious and deadly outbreak, with a higher percentage of the population killed, than the better-known one of 1665. Whether or not Sir John himself died of the plague, he must have spent much of the last few months of his life engaged in burying the dead of his parish and consoling the bereaved. According to one of Machyn’s final diary entries, the inhabitants of any house stricken by the plague were not to come to church for an allotted period, and so the parish priest would have to go to them, the house indicated by a blue cross painted on its door.

  Deane’s approximate burial place is marked by a memorial slab inlaid with brass, presented to St Bartholomew’s by the pupils of Witton Grammar School in 1893. The school is now a sixth-form college, and it bears his name: Sir John Deane’s College, or simply ‘SJD’.

  Throughout his ministry in London Deane had remained in touch with his family and acquaintances – and with the school he had founded – in Northwich, and had also made occasional visits there. He had many nephews and nieces, to several of whom he was also godfather. He died as a fairly wealthy man, having been judicious in his property dealings and not given to personal extravagance. He left money to his relatives and made numerous charitable legacies, including to the poor householders both in the parish of St Bartholomew and in Northwich, to those in need in St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and to prisoners in Newgate, the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea. One beneficiary under his will was instructed to distribute, every Christmas Eve, ten shillings’ worth of coal, wood or money among the poor householders of St Bartholomew’s, according to the advice of the churchwardens. In a time of mutability, John Deane must have been one of the few ‘still points in a turning world’ in the lives of the people who knew and depended on him, whatever the turns he had to make in his own head in order to preserve a sense of stability for his flock.

  Most of the bishops who had served under Mary were dismissed by the Elizabethan regime, and many spent years in prison; none of them, however, was executed and neither was any priest. (Executions of ‘recusant’ Catholic priests, on the grounds of treason, would come later in the reign, particularly after 1570, when the Pope excommunicated the Queen and authorized her subjects to depose her.) Most of the lower clergy agreed to take the Oath of Supremacy, only about three hundred being deprived of their livings for refusing to do so; seventy or eighty chose to go into exile, while just over one hundred were imprisoned. Bishop Edmund Bonner was still being used on diplomatic business at the start of Elizabeth’s reign, hosting the French ambassadors at his palace in late May 1559. Two days after they left, he was asked to swear the Oath of Supremacy; he refused, and was deprived of his bishopric, though not yet arrested.

  On 20 April 1560 Bonner found himself back in the Marshalsea, where he had spent most of Edward’s reign. Though the conditions of his imprisonment were less unpleasant than they had been ten years previously, it is unlikely they afforded him much comfort. He stayed in prison for the rest of his life, dying in the Marshalsea on 5 September 1569. His burial in the churchyard of St George’s, Southwark, took place at midnight, on the order of the then Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, for fear of disturbances – much as the burnings at Smithfield, so many of which were the result of Bonner’s condemnations, were held at ‘unsocial hours’ to try to avoid drawing crowds of onlookers. His body was later moved to Copford church, near Colchester, where it was rediscovered in 1810 when a grave was being dug for another priest.

  By the light of burning martyrs,

  Christ, thy bleeding feet we track,

  Toiling up new Calvaries ever

  With the Cross that turns not back.

  New occasions teach new duties;

  Time makes ancient good uncouth;

  They must upward still and onward

  Who would keep abreast of truth.

  J. Russell Lowell, 1819–91

  Though the mass burnings of heretics came to an end with Mary’s death, burning for the ‘crime’ of heresy continued sporadically, the last such burning to take place in England occurring in 1612, when Elizabeth’s successor, James I, had two Antitrinitarians burnt at the stake. During Elizabeth’s reign this form of execution was the fate of six Anabaptists and Antitrinitarians. Elizabeth is often (mis)-quoted as having declared that she did not wish to ‘make windows into men’s souls’ and, while this should not really be taken as an embracing of religious tolerance in any way that we would recognize today, what it does imply is a greater interest in outward conformity than inner conviction. What the Queen did demand was strict adherence to the concept of royal supremacy over the Church, so that conformity in religious observance was equated more strongly than ever with loyalty to the Crown – and the opposite, of course, was also true.

  In considering this period in our history, and in trying to understand the motivations both of those who died and of those who brought about their deaths, and how Western culture succeeded in moving from religious hatreds to religious toleration (in so far as it has), it is important to remember what might appear to be an obvious point made by Brad Gregory in his book Salvation at Stake: ‘The act of martyrdom makes no sense whatsoever unless we take religion seriously, on the terms of people who were willing to die for their convictions.’ It is likely that, for anyone who refuses to take religion seriously at all, or at least to accept that other people might legitimately take it seriously, the kinds of arguments waged between the proponents of different beliefs – the various ‘articles’ set out to the accused and their responses, as discussed in this book – are at best incomprehensible and very probably preposterous. Viewing the martyrs from the outside, so to speak, not just from the vantage point of the twenty-first century but even at the time, the fact that people of contradictory beliefs were prepared respectively to die, or kill, to defend them inevitably has the unintended consequence of calling the whole nature of religious truth, and its knowability, into question. The sixteenth-century defenders and critics of the real presence, or of papal auth
ority, or of seven sacraments as opposed to two, could not – presumably – both be right, yet there were people on both sides of the argument sufficiently convinced of their rightness to make it a matter of life and death. This has done little to recommend institutional religion to many, as it appears to demand adherence to beliefs that are not only incomprehensible in themselves but which other people, who also call themselves Christians, declare to be false. The mixture becomes even more toxic when the state is involved, and belief becomes a matter of the law. And the answer to the question of how we became a more tolerant society must appear obvious: because we gave up believing such ridiculous things. Religion is the source of all the inhumanity and suffering of ‘the burning time’ and the only sensible, enlightened option is to abandon it altogether. How can it even merit discussion?

  Well, that is one line to take. I don’t think it gets us very far, if only because religion and wars of religion have never gone away, even if they appear to die down in some parts of the world for quite lengthy periods. Now they are once again centre stage and, not least because of our own history, we cannot merely dismiss religious conviction and the willingness to die and kill for competing convictions as belonging to the ‘other’, something removed from our own civilization. This is a part of the human experience, and we have to grapple with it. I also find I don’t want to dismiss the feisty, principled and complex characters who have emerged in this book as merely ‘backward’, deluded or ignorant – and yet I cannot deny that some of the disagreements that were so fundamental to them appear like splitting doctrinal hairs to us, even when we are prepared to take religion seriously.

  It is the attitude to religion, rather than religion itself, that can lead to inhumanity – when adherence to a particular set of doctrines and practices acquires an ultimate significance that overcomes every other consideration, when I am so sure that I am right, and that there is an absolute, eternal meaning attached to the maintenance of my position, that I can hear or see or feel nothing else. There can then be no compromise, no backing down, no possibility that I might be wrong (or, even, that it might not matter all that much whether I am right or wrong). A very important factor in the move from intolerance to acceptance of diversity, in religion as in anything else, is doubt – the realization that I might, after all, not have all the answers. Sebastian Castellio, the sixteenth-century professor of Greek whose work on toleration we encountered in Chapter Three, named his final treatise De arte dubitandi (‘The Art of Doubting’) and in it he tackled the subjects of doubt, belief, ignorance and knowledge. It was left unfinished at the time of his death in 1563, surviving only in manuscript, and was finally published in 1981. It is a defence of both toleration and reason in religion and sets out to demonstrate how to distinguish between those things that should be believed and those that can reasonably be doubted. It is essential, according to Castellio, to exercise the ‘art’ of doubting ‘because men often sin owing to the fact that they believe where they should doubt, doubt where they should believe, are ignorant of what they should know, and think they know what is unknown’. Though Castellio, being a Western European of his time, assumed as givens that God exists and that Christianity is the best of all religions, he nevertheless emphasized the value of fair and open discussion of religious differences and severely criticized the intellectual rigidity that dismisses opposing views without a hearing.

  Alongside doubt on the path towards tolerance goes indifference; it is when we start to take religion less seriously, yet without dismissing it as a complete aberration, that there is more room for multiple discourses and far less inclination either to coerce others or to sacrifice oneself. Yet those who first promoted the values of tolerance, such as Castellio, were themselves profoundly religious, if unorthodox, so there is also evidence that religion can itself tolerate toleration. Here perhaps we return to the question of the parable of the wheat and the tares, looked at from a slightly different perspective: is the ‘truth’ of religion – which may be unknowable – really affected by allowing other versions, even contradictions, of itself to grow alongside it? There is a difference in the discussion as soon as we depersonalize it. When we see ‘wheat’ and ‘tares’ as code names for other human beings, we paradoxically dehumanize those ‘others’, the tares (we, of course, are always the wheat), and can begin to envisage them being uprooted and destroyed. When we see the wheat and tares as ideas or different systems of thought, then the most important thing becomes the necessity to articulate one’s own understanding of the truth, to persuade by spoken and written argument, rather than to coerce by physical force. The spread of education and of literacy, while initially causing disquiet and fear on the part of the authorities and violently repressive measures, may actually have opened the way to toleration, simply by virtue of more people being able to join in the debate, to persuade and be persuaded on an intellectual level.

  One cannot, however, work backwards and attempt to impose twenty-first-century Western values on a very different world and on people who would be utterly horrified by the levity with which we treat many of their most deeply held beliefs today. Brad Gregory offers a very clear and convincing summary as to why religious toleration would have been impossible as a solution to the characters caught up in the tragic turmoil of the burning time:

  For ecclesiastical and secular authorities to have forsaken altogether the willingness to kill, they would have had to abandon their profound paternalism in a culture saturated with a sense of hierarchy and responsibility of the higher for the lower. They would have had to renounce several centuries of legal precedent in a culture horrified by the notion of innovation. And they would have had to decriminalize heresy sufficiently to permit obstinate heretics to go free, even as they thought that doing so would have imperiled others’ eternal salvation.

  For martyrs to have been unwilling to die for their beliefs, they would have had to consider ambiguous the many biblical passages that stipulated steadfastness in suffering. Or they would have had to believe that the Bible was not God’s word … Or they would have had to reckon that the particular Christian group to which they belonged was merely one among others and that they might as well have belonged to another group. That is, they would have had to think that God’s teachings were not really so important after all.

  Gregory concludes: ‘To suggest that the course and character of early modern Christianity might have been completely different – with the divergences and intensity, but without the disagreements, conflict, and violence – is to imagine early modern Christians who never existed in a world that never was.’

  The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, first established in 1563, finalized in 1571 and still to be found at the back of the Book of Common Prayer, represented an attempt to define once and for all what members of the Church of England, under the authority of the sovereign, were supposed to believe, especially in all those areas of contention that had so dominated the reigns of Henry, Edward and Mary. It is interesting to look at them to see how the Anglican Church sought, and largely managed, to enshrine a degree of ambiguity in its doctrinal formulations, enabling the continuance of a ‘broad church’ in which, although there may be – and are – disagreements, different traditions by and large manage to rub along together. This is sometimes characterized as Anglicans having no idea what they believe, or not believing very much at all, and there may be some truth in both those flippant accusations. It used to be the case that all clergy of the Church of England were required to affirm their loyalty to the Thirty-Nine Articles; now the formula used at ordination does not use those actual words, though it does imply them. The archdeacon or registrar has to confirm to the bishop that those to be ordained ‘have affirmed and declared their belief in the faith which is revealed in the Holy Scriptures and set forth in the catholic creeds and to which the historic formularies of the Church of England bear witness’.

  Article VI of those ‘historic formularies’ is entitled Of the Sufficiency of the holy Scriptures
for salvation and it begins: ‘Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.’ One can almost imagine John Lambert cheering at this clear statement of an attitude that had landed him in trouble when on trial before Henry VIII. To be set alongside this is Article XX, Of the Authority of the Church, which declares: ‘The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written.’ That is also a dig at ‘the Church of Rome’ which, it is declared in the previous Article, has ‘erred’, not only in its ‘manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith’. Furthermore, General Councils of the Church are also to be approached with caution: ‘when they be gathered together, (forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the Spirit and Word of God,) they may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God. Wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.’