The bishop of Gloucester, John Hooper, was an early sacrifice. He was led from Newgate, his face muffled in a hood, and taken by his guards to his diocese where on 9 February he was tied to the stake. He suffered very badly since the green faggots were slow to burn; the fire reached only his legs and the lower part of his body; when it expired, the bishop called out ‘For God’s love, good people, let me have more fire!’, so a fiercer flame was kindled. A bystander wrote that ‘he smote his breast with his hands till one of his arms fell off; he continued knocking with the other, while the fat, water and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends . . .’ He suffered torment for another three-quarters of an hour, eventually ‘dying as quietly as a child in his bed’.
On the same day a weaver, a butcher, a barber, a priest, a gentleman and an apprentice were condemned to the fire by Bishop Bonner on the charge of denying the doctrine of transubstantiation. Soon enough the prisons of London were filled with other candidates for martyrdom. The legs of the priest had been crushed by irons after his conviction for heresy and so he was placed at the stake in a chair. It is reported by Foxe, in his account of the Marian fires, that ‘at his burning, he sitting in the fire, the young children came about and cried, as well as young children could speak, Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise – Lord strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise’.
A young farmer was burned outside the north gate of Chester. A jar of tar and pitch was put on top of his head and, as the flames reached it, the combustible material poured down his face. At Stratford-le-Bow eleven men and two women died together in a single blaze; at Lewes ten were burned at the same time. Thomas Haukes, about to die, told his friends that if the flames were endurable he would show it by lifting up his hands. He clapped his hands three times in the fire before he expired. When a fire was lit on Jesus Green, Cambridge, books were thrown in to bolster the flames. One of them happened to be a communion book in English, and the suffering man picked it up and began to read from it until the smoke and flame obscured the page. Another victim was said to ‘sleep sweetly’ in the fire. When a doctor of divinity proceeded on his walk to the stake he began to dance.
‘Why, master doctor,’ the sheriff asked him, ‘how do you now?’
‘Well, master sheriff, never better for I am now almost home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and am even now at my Father’s house.’
The manner of the execution may be described. A large stake or post was fixed in the ground with a step or ledge leading up to it. The victim was placed upon that ledge so that he or she might be visible to the crowd; the men were stripped to their shirts, and the women to their smocks. The victim was fastened to the stake with chains, but the arms were left free. Faggots of wood, and bundles of reed, were then piled about the stake. It was sometimes difficult to kindle or to control the fire. The wood might be too green, or the winds contrary. The friends of the victims sometimes tied little bags of gunpowder around the necks of those about to die, but on occasions they made too small an explosion and only increased the suffering.
It was customary for the victims to pray or sing before their execution. They knelt and prostrated themselves before the stake. Many of them then kissed the post or the wood piled about it. The spectators were not always or necessarily sympathetic to those who were about to die. On many occasions the victim was pelted with pieces of wood or rocks. When one dying man began to sing a psalm he was silenced by a blow to his head. ‘Truly,’ a religious commissioner amiably told the assailant, ‘you have marred a good old song.’ Street-sellers abounded and at a burning in Dartford ‘came diverse fruiterers with horse-loads of cherries, and sold them’. Anyone who brought a faggot to the fire was granted forty days’ ‘indulgence’ from the pains of purgatory; as a result parents instructed their children to bring wood for the flames.
Stephen Gardiner had believed that a few early burnings would suffice and that the terrible example would warn other heretics to be wary and remain silent. But his optimism was premature. The steadfast reaction of the martyrs, and the open sympathy of many who came to watch the proceedings, were enough to alarm him. It was said that one burning was worth more than a hundred sermons against popery. He seems to have made some effort to call a halt, but it was already too late. In truth the campaign of terror may have worked; it is sometimes supposed that it was gradually curtailed because of mounting public opposition. It is more likely that there were in the end fewer heretics to burn.
The queen and Cardinal Pole, in particular, did not see any need to reverse their policy. Heretics were the breath of hell, a noxious danger to the health of the body politic. Anyone whom they corrupted would be damned eternally. In a pastoral letter to London, Pole wrote that ‘there is no kind of men so pernicious to the commonwealth as they be’. The queen herself considered them to be guilty of treason and of sedition, two of the greatest crimes imaginable to her. The tainted wether may infect the whole flock. She was, with this belief, in good company. The great reformer, Calvin, had declared that it was a Christian duty to destroy the preachers of false gods; he did indeed burn the Spanish theologian Servetus for his views concerning the Trinity. Cranmer had celebrated the burning of the Anabaptist Joan Bocher. Nobody really doubted the merit of burning, therefore, only its convenience in an already unsettled society.
In the four years of the stake almost 300 men and women perished, the preponderance coming from the south-east of England where religious reform had been most welcome. Under the auspices of Bishop Bonner 112 Londoners were killed, but only one man was burned in Yorkshire. This may be a sign of the incidence of the new faith in the north of England, but it may also reflect the unwillingness of the authorities there to persecute unto death. The majority of those who suffered were artisans and tradesmen, the independent workers of the community.
The great question put to them by their interrogators was ‘How say you to the sacrament of the altar?’ If they did not believe that Christ’s body and blood were physically as well as spiritually present in the bread and the wine, they were condemned for heresy. Bishop Bonner came to a judgment with the phrase, ‘for thou must needs be one of them’. To which the prisoner replied, ‘Yea, my lord, I am one of them.’ Another man spoke out with defiance: ‘Thought is free, my lord,’ he said. It was ordained that the more recalcitrant of them could be put to the torture. Three months before her death the queen sent a letter of complaint to the sheriff of Hampshire; his offence was to cancel the burning of a man who had recanted at the first lick of the flame. It was thus that she earned the soubriquet of ‘Bloody Mary’.
John Foxe, in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, created a narrative of suffering that for centuries acted as a Protestant folk legend after its publication in 1563; he evoked a series of tableaux in which wicked priests and dissemblers destroyed the practitioners of the true religion. Yet these martyrs were not all of the same faith; among them were those who denied the divinity of Christ or who condemned the practice of infant baptism or who questioned the doctrine of the Trinity. When they were incarcerated in the same prison they often refused to pray together. It should be noted, in passing, that in the succeeding reign of Elizabeth some 200 Catholics were strangled or disembowelled. Many of those who died would also have been burned under the religious policy of Henry VIII.
Yet Foxe’s book effectively demonized Catholicism in England in the latter part of the sixteenth century; it would always after that date be fringed with fire.
24
An age of anxiety
Mary had not at the moment of the cardinal’s benediction. There was to be no blessed fruit. In April 1555, Elizabeth had been summoned under close guard from Woodstock to Whitehall, so that the heir presumptive might be present at the birth of the heir apparent. It was also a sensible precaution if the queen should die in the course of childbirth. Philip visited the princess two or three days after her arrival, and it was reported that subsequently he asked his wife to show forgiveness to her sister. The king also gav
e Elizabeth a diamond valued at 4,000 ducats. She claimed in later life that Philip had fallen in love with her, but it is more probable that he feared for his own safety in the event of his wife’s death. The people might rise up in revolt against him.
Mary was not in good health. The Venetian envoy reported that ‘she is not of strong constitution, and of late she suffers from headache and serious affection of the heart, so that she is often obliged to take medicine and also to be blooded. She is of very spare diet.’ He also reported that a young man had proclaimed himself to be the true Edward VI and thus ‘raised a tumult among the populace’; he was whipped through the streets and his ears cropped, but the incident could have done little for the queen’s serenity. Unrest was in the air. Any crowd that gathered in the streets of London was dispersed. The summer of the year was bleak and wet; the crops failed and the fields were turned to mud. In the sixteenth century this was a natural disaster. The prices of staple commodities doubled and even tripled. There was the genuine prospect of death by starvation.
The happy moment of royal birth was supposed to arrive at the end of April. Mary retired to the relative peace of Hampton Court. The bells rang, and the Te Deum was sung in St Paul’s Cathedral; nothing transpired. Mary still professed herself to be confident, however, and said that she felt the motions of the child. The priests and choirboys continued to process through the streets of London, at the head of the poor men and women from the alms-houses who were telling their beads on behalf of their sovereign. The Holy Sacrament was paraded along Cheapside in a blaze of candlelight. Yet all the prayers were in vain. There was to be no child. She remained in seclusion throughout the month of May; she sat upon the floor, her knees drawn up to her face, in an agony of despair.
She wept and prayed. She believed that God had punished her. And her sin? She had failed in her duty to extirpate all the heretics in the realm; the beast of schism still endured. She came to believe that she would not safely be delivered of a child until all the heretics in prison were burned. On 24 May she directed a circular to her bishops urging them to show more speed and diligence in their pursuit of ‘disordered persons’. A holocaust of burnt offerings might bring fertility to her.
The affairs of the realm were in suspense. The imperial ambassador wrote to his emperor that ‘I foresee convulsions and disturbances such as no pen can describe’. He also repeated the rumours that Mary had never been pregnant or, more damagingly, that a convenient newborn male child would be conveyed to her bed. There were also fears that the queen was in fact barren, and would never produce an heir. It was possible that a cyst or tumour had provoked this phantom pregnancy, in which case her condition might prove fatal.
Elizabeth was summoned to Hampton Court from Woodstock, where much to the displeasure of the queen the courtiers knelt and kissed her hand. She was pressed to ask for pardon from her sister, but she acknowledged no offence. A week later the two women met for the first time in almost two years. Two chroniclers, Foxe and Holinshed, have left reports of this encounter. ‘You will not confess,’ the queen told her, ‘you stand to your truth. I pray God it may so fall out.’
‘If it does not,’ Elizabeth replied, ‘I desire neither favour nor pardon at your hands.’
The queen asked her if she would spread reports that she had been wrongfully punished by her imprisonment at the Tower and at Woodstock. Elizabeth denied any intention of so doing. ‘I have borne the burden,’ she said, ‘and I must bear it.’
The queen merely muttered, in Spanish, ‘Dios sabe ’ – ‘God knows’. Her sister then withdrew from her presence. Yet Elizabeth now remained at liberty.
Philip could not endure a longer stay in England; his anxious and disheartened wife was for him a dead failure. No son of his would now ascend to the throne. ‘Let me know,’ he wrote to an adviser, ‘what line I am to take with the queen about leaving her and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me!’ His departure was made all the more urgent by the decision of his father, Charles V, to abdicate and to seek solace in a monastery. Philip informed his wife that he would leave her for only two or three weeks, but he was dissembling. At the end of August they parted at Greenwich, since the long journey to Dover would trouble the queen’s health.
The Venetian ambassador was, as always, in attendance. The queen was entirely composed as she accompanied her husband through all the halls and chambers of the palace just before his departure; she stood at the head of the staircase clothed ‘in royal state and dignity’ as he went out of the door towards the water. She then retired to her private chambers overlooking the Thames where ‘thinking she was not observed, she gave scope to her grief in floods of tears’. She watched as the barge slowly disappeared from sight, Philip raising his hat in farewell.
The weeks passed. The queen spent her evenings, after the work of government was done, writing long epistles to her absent husband. He tended to reply with short letters on matters of business. She even went to the trouble of writing to the emperor himself, expressing her ‘unspeakable sadness which I experience because of the absence of the king’. She may also have been receiving news of his dissipations at the imperial court of Brussels; he was feasting and dancing with a joy he had never shown in London. He was also visiting Madame d’Aler, a beautiful woman of whom he was much enamoured. He had other companions. He relished eating lumps of bacon fat, and it was said that his taste in courtesans was not much higher.
In the autumn of 1555 he assumed the leadership of the Spanish territory of the Netherlands and, when Mary wrote asking him to return to her, he replied that he could only come back to England if he were given some role in its governance. It was essentially a polite refusal. England had become for him an expensive distraction. Mary is reported to have told her ladies that she would now revert to the life she had led before her marriage. According to reports she looked ten years older.
The parlous situation of the queen of course encouraged the ambitions of others. Parliament was divided and obstinate, with the queen herself complaining of ‘many violent opposition members’; her advice, in the election of the autumn of 1555, for the return ‘of the wise, grave and Catholic sort’ had not necessarily been followed. No parliamentary parties or groups existed in the modern sense, only a shifting aggregate of discontented individuals. Mary’s administration suffered another blow with the death in November of the chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, from ‘suppression of urine’. The archdeacon of Winchester wrote, from his prison cell, that ‘although the cockatrice be dead, yet his pestilent chickens, with the whore of Babylon, still live’.
An armed conspiracy against the queen was detected at the end of 1555. ‘I am sure you hear,’ Sir Henry Dudley told a friend in confidence, ‘they go about a coronation.’ He was referring to the rumour that Mary was about to crown Philip as king, which would be an intolerable threat to the safety and independence of England. It was enough to stir the ‘western gentlemen’ who now, in secret conspiracy, proposed to march on London and give the crown to Elizabeth; Mary would be sent packing to Brussels and the arms of her husband.
A further refinement came from Sir Henry Dudley himself, who intended to bring in the French. The French king had promised to supply ships and money, with the crews made up of western privateers. The captain of the Isle of Wight was prepared to surrender his island and Dudley undertook to attack Portsmouth, where he would find the cannon out of action. At a midnight audience the French king, Henry II, handed a large sum of money to Dudley and advised him to reconnoitre the coast of Normandy in preparation for an invasion.
The walls of a royal court have ears and eyes. The English ambassador in Paris had been informed of the interview immediately after it had taken place, and he passed on the information to Mary in the form of a cipher. One of the conspirators, in panic fear, betrayed the names of his colleagues to the council. They were arrested and imprisoned; some of them were tortured.
Yet even after their execution Mary could not rest. The French
ambassador, recalled at this time of tension, described her ‘dreading every moment that her life might be attempted by her own attendants’. She was ‘deeply troubled’ and saw conspiracies in every corner. The palaces at Whitehall and Greenwich were filled with armed men. She did not appear in public, and slept no more than three hours each night.
The name of Elizabeth had been invoked by the Dudley conspirators, but there was no clear evidence that she was involved in the rebellion; nevertheless, the suspicion was there. The constable of France had written to the French ambassador ordering him to ‘restrain Madame Elizabeth from stirring at all in the affair of which you have written to me, for that would be to ruin everything’. Five of her household servants were arrested, and one of them was found guilty of treason; he was later pardoned. The princess was now heir apparent, and had to be treated with circumspection. Mary tried to dissemble her real feelings but in private she was said always to talk of Elizabeth with scorn and hatred. The atmosphere was further clouded by the persistent rumours that Philip was about to invade the country with an imperial army.
At the beginning of May 1556, a blazing comet appeared in the London sky; it was half the size of the moon and was ‘shooting out fire to great wonder and marvel to the people’. It could be seen flaring for the next seven days and seven nights, thus signifying great changes in the affairs in the world. A gang of twelve men went about the streets predicting the end of the world, but the tumult they caused was a screen for their robberies. More generally the rumours of riot and rebellion grew ever more numerous.
Tudors (History of England Vol 2) Page 31