CHAPTER 55
ON MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1555, JOHN ROGERS, CANON OF ST. PAUL’S, was led out to Smithfield, condemned as a heretic. Great crowds lined the streets to watch the procession, among them his wife and eleven children. As he stood at the stake, he was offered a pardon on condition that he recanted, but he refused. He exhorted the people to stand firm in the faith that he had taught them. When the fire took hold of his body, he “washed his hands in the flame as he was in burning.”1 As Renard related, “Some of the onlookers wept; others prayed God to give him strength, perseverance and patience to bear the pain and not to recant; others gathered the ashes and bones and wrapped them up to preserve them.”2
Rogers’s death was followed just days later by those of two country parsons—Laurence Saunders, the rector of All Hallows in Coventry, and Dr. Rowland Taylor, the rector of Hadleigh, Suffolk—and by the former bishop of Worcester and Gloucester, John Hooper. Each was burned in the district in which he had first officiated.
Hooper, like the other condemned martyrs, had denied papal supremacy over the Church and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. He was imprisoned in the Fleet on September 1, 1553, and remained there for more than seventeen months. At the end of January 1555, he was brought before Stephen Gardiner and a number of other bishops and urged to give up his “evil and corrupt doctrine” and to conform to the Catholic Church.3 If he recanted, he would have the queen’s mercy. He refused, and on February 9 he was burned. Standing on a high stool and looking over the crowd of several thousand that had gathered to watch him, he prayed.
An eyewitness described how “in every corner there was nothing to be seen but weeping and sorrowful people.”4 Faggots were laid around the stool and reeds placed in and between Hooper’s hands. Then the fire was lit. The wind at first blew the flames from him and, having burned his legs, the fires were almost extinguished. More faggots and reeds were brought, and finally the two bladders of gunpowder tied between his legs ignited. In the end he could move nothing but his arms; then one fell off and the other, with “fat, water and blood dropping out at his fingers’ ends,” stuck to what was left of his chest. It had taken forty-five minutes of excruciating agony to kill him.5 It was a horrific death and a sight that would be repeated nearly three hundred times during Mary’s reign.
A WEEK AFTER Hooper’s death, six other men—William Pygot, a butcher from Braintree; Stephen Knight, a barber at Malden; Thomas Haukes, a gentleman in Lord Oxford’s household; William Hunter, a nineteen-year-old apprentice; Thomas Tomkins, a weaver from Shoreditch; and John Laurence, a priest—were denounced to Bishop Bonner as Protestant heretics. Having been defrocked, Laurence was brought to Colchester on March 29. He had been shackled in prison with such heavy irons and so deprived of food that he was too weak to walk to the stake and had to be carried there and burned sitting on a chair. His young children went before the fire and cried out, “Lord, strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise.” Laurence and the other five men had been offered the chance to recant, but all remained defiant. As Thomas Haukes declared, “No, my Lord, that will I not; for if I had an hundred bodies I would suffer them all to be torn in pieces rather than recant.”6 He was condemned on February 9 and burned four months later.
At the request of his friends, who feared the extent of his pain in the fire, Haukes agreed that, if it were tolerable, he would lift his hand above his head before he died. Having been strapped to the stake and engulfed by the flames, he raised his hands and clapped them together to the cries and rejoicing of the crowd.7
IN EARLY 1555, the Privy Council sent a writ to Sir Nicholas Hare, master of the Rolls, and other justices of the peace in the county of Middlesex for the execution of William Flower, signifying to them that “For as much as the said Flower’s offence was so enormous and heinous, there further pleased for the most terrible example he should before he were executed have his right hand stricken off.”8
William Flower had been condemned for striking a priest with a wood knife in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. He was burned on April 24, 1555, as the Council’s letter had instructed. Most of the burnings in the summer were in London and Essex, in the diocese of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, who soon became synonymous with the persecution. Orders were sent to find anyone guilty of heresy and report them to the authorities. Towns and villages were searched to find those who held heretical opinions and refused to observe the Catholic faith. Many of the victims were agricultural laborers and artisans denounced by their neighbors or their families, the victims of private grievances or local disputes.
Margaret Polley, a woman living in Pembury near Tonbridge, was the first woman to be burned in Mary’s reign. She had maintained that there was no reference to the Roman Catholic Church in the Bible and denied the Real Presence in the Mass. She was burned on July 18, 1555, along with two other martyrs in a gravel pit just outside Dartford in Kent. The local farmers brought cartloads of cherries to sell to the spectators.9 Other women followed. Alice Benden of Staplehurst in Kent was reported to the authorities by her own husband and disowned by her father. She had refused to attend church as, she said, too much idolatry was practiced there. For nine weeks she was incarcerated in the bishop’s prison, living only on bread and water and with no change of clothes. In John Foxe’s description, she became “a most piteous and loathsome creature to behold.” When offered the chance of freedom if she reformed, she declared, “I am thoroughly persuaded by the extremity that you have already showed me, that you are not of God, neither can your doings be Godly.” She remained imprisoned and was burned with six others in Canterbury in June 1557.10
As the months went on, the persecution spread beyond Bonner’s diocese to Wales, East Anglia, and the North. In the diocese of Chester, George Marsh, a young widowed farmer from Cumberland, had been ordained as a priest during the reign of Edward VI. After Mary’s accession he returned from London to Lancashire, denounced the Mass and papal supremacy, and was subsequently arrested. He was condemned as a heretic and sentenced to be burned at Spittle Broughton, just outside the north gate of Chester, on April 24, 1555. Offered a pardon if he recanted, he refused, saying he loved life and wanted to live but not at the cost of betraying Christ. Having walked to the site of his execution in shackles, a chain was fastened around his waist. On his head was placed a jar filled with tar and pitch so that when the flames reached it the contents would pour down. It was a gusty day and a gradual death, as very slowly the flames engulfed his body.11
On the island of Guernsey, a woman named Katherine Cowchen lived with her two daughters, Perotine Massey and Guillemine Gilbert. Perotine had informed the authorities that a local woman, Vincent Gosset, had stolen a gold goblet. In revenge Gosset denounced Cowchen and her two daughters as heretics. All three were convicted of heresy and sentenced to death by burning. Perotine had not told the authorities she was pregnant. When the faggots were lit, the fire caused her to give birth to her baby son, who fell onto the burning faggots. One of the spectators rushed forward to save the baby and pulled him out of the fire, but the local sheriff ordered that the baby be thrown back. He was burned with his mother, grandmother, and aunt.12
NEITHER MARY NOR Pole had expected to burn so many; they wanted the heretics to be reconciled rather than die and for the burnings to be carried out judiciously and without vindictiveness. Mary ordered that a councillor be present to supervise each burning in London and that during each execution “some good and pious sermons be preached.” Writing in December 1554, she had declared:
Touching the punishment of heretics, I believe it would be well to inflict punishment at this beginning, without much cruelty and passion, but without however omitting to do such justice on those who choose by their false doctrines to deceive simple persons, that the people may clearly comprehend that they have not been condemned without just cause, whereby others will be brought to know the truth, and will beware of letting themselves be induced to relapse into such new and false opinions.13
However, willful disobedience to the Catholic Church—heresy—was the worst of sins and needed to be extirpated, lest it “infect” more.
But rather than extinguishing Protestant sentiment, as Mary intended, the burnings served only to define more clearly the Protestants as a dissident group. Moreover, the courage of the martyrs stirred the admiration of many of those who saw them die. Such was the “murmuring about the cruel enforcement of the recent acts of Parliament on heresy which had now begun, as shown publicly when Rogers was burnt,” reported Renard to Philip after the first London burnings, “I do not think it well that your Majesty should allow further executions to take place unless the reasons are overwhelmingly strong and the offences committed have been so scandalous as to render the course justifiable in the eyes of the people.”14 Four months later, Michieli made similar observations:
Two days ago, to the displeasure as usual of the population here, two Londoners were burnt alive, one of them having been a public lecturer in Scripture, a person sixty years of age, who was held in great esteem. In a few days the like will be done to four or five more; and thus from time to time to many others who are in prison for this cause and will not recant, although such severity is odious to many people.15
Increasingly, Protestantism was associated with resistance to Spanish domination and the defense of English liberty, with Philip being held responsible by many for the burnings. However, just days after John Rogers’s execution, Alfonso de Castro, Philip’s confessor, preached a sermon at court with the king’s sanction, attacking the burnings and “saying plainly that they learned it not in scripture, to burn any for conscience sake; but the contrary, that they should live and be converted.”16 Renard advised Philip that haste in religious matters should be avoided:
Religion is not yet firmly established and … the heretics are on the watch for every possible opportunity to revive error and compromise the good beginning that has been made. They use as an argument the cruel punishments which they assert are being applied, with recourse to fire rather than doctrine and good examples, to lead the country back [to Catholicism].17
Although Philip did not play the direct role many attributed to him, he did nothing to forestall the persecution, and the burnings continued. But for Mary, to halt the process would have been to condone heresy, and this she could never do. It was an affront to her conscience that had been forged in the fires of persecution in the years before she had become queen. As the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Soranzo, observed, during her brother’s reign Mary had not conformed to the new religious service, “her belief in that into which she was born being so strong that had the opportunity offered, she would have displayed it at the stake.”18