8

The Burnings

WHILE THE QUEEN was preoccupied with her phantom pregnancy and depressed in its aftermath, the fires of Smithfield were burning fiercely. The intention had been to burn a few heretics to deter the rest, but it quickly became apparent that the burnings were having quite the opposite effect, stiffening Protestant resolve. A policy that was inviting defiance and creating revulsion was not working, but Mary was locked into it, showing that lack of imagination and flexibility that were to be so characteristic of her regime. The burnings took on a momentum of their own and Mary was too lethargic to stop them. Her name would be for ever tarnished.

The reconciliation of England to Rome was not achieved without compromise and a great deal of fancy footwork by Philip. Mary and Pole, being idealists, wanted nothing less than the return of all confiscated ecclesiastical property, namely the monastic lands now largely in the hands of the lay aristocracy and gentry, to the Church. Pole begrudged absolving the English for their sins while they still held on to Church land, while Mary – despite the depleted state of the treasury – was only too eager to return what lands were still in the crown’s possession. The return of Church property was completely unrealistic and probably could not have been accomplished without the collapse of the regime.

It was Philip who broke the deadlock by convincing Pope Julius III to cut the Church’s losses over ecclesiastical property in England and forcing a reluctant Pole to accept this and agree to issue a general dispensation. Philip spent much time with the English counsellors, preparing the strategy whereby the crucial legislation was steered through Parliament, and he appeared three times in the House of Lords with Mary, who always dreaded her parliaments. It was Philip who was probably responsible for the bull of 20 June 1555, finally settling the legal issue by canonically extinguishing the former religious houses. Outside England, the reconciliation with Rome was seen as a personal triumph for Philip.

In Westminster Hall, in a torch-lit ceremony designed to impress the Lords and Commons present with the full ritual glory of the Catholic Church, Pole received the submission of King Philip and Queen Mary and the realm of England to the authority of the Pope. He granted England absolution for twenty-one years of separation from Rome, and proclaimed that the anniversary of the ceremony, 30 November, should be celebrated as a great religious festival, the Feast of the Reconciliation, perpetually. He was loudly applauded.

It was not so much the restoration of papal supremacy as what followed that ignited the horror of Catholicism in the English psyche which would never be extinguished. In January 1555 the heresy laws, which had first been used against the Lollards in the fifteenth century and abolished under Edward VI, were revived. Heresy had always been considered a danger to the moral fabric of society, a disease to be eradicated before it contaminated the whole community. A heretic was tried before the ecclesiastical courts and put under great psychological pressure to recant. If he did so, he received the lesser sentence of imprisonment, was forced to wear a badge showing that he had been a heretic, and underwent a ritual known as ‘burning the faggot’. He was taken to the place of execution holding a faggot, which he threw into the fire when it was lit, so that only the faggot was burned. A relapsed heretic was not given a second chance.

If the heretic proved unrepentant, the ecclesiastical court would ask the monarch to issue a warrant ordering the civil power to carry out the punishment. The law stipulated that a heretic be burned alive, just as he would writhe in the fires of hell for all eternity. Burning alive was not a punishment reserved for heretics alone; a queen could be burned alive for high treason – for committing adultery, for instance; a woman could be burned alive for murdering her husband or for witchcraft; and a man could be burned alive for committing sodomy or arson.

Later, the fires of Smithfield would be confused in the popular mind with the auto-da-fé in Spain, tales of whose cruelty were brought back by Elizabethan seamen. In fact, there was one important difference. In Spain, the heretic was strangled at the stake, so that he was already dead when the fire began to consume his body; in England, the death of a heretic was far more terrible, especially if it was prolonged because the faggots were damp and slow to burn. Many heretics were to suffer the fate of the former Bishop Ridley, who was tied to the same stake as Latimer. While the fire on Latimer’s side quickly took hold and greedily consumed him, it lazily licked the flesh of Ridley’s legs before fizzling out. He screamed in pain, shouting desperately, ‘I cannot burn,’ and begging God’s help.

On 5 February 1555 Renard wrote an admonitory letter to Philip after the first execution:

Sire: the people of this town of London are murmuring about the cruel enforcement of the recent acts of Parliament on heresy which has now begun, as shown publicly when a certain Rogers [a popular preacher] was burnt yesterday. Some of the onlookers wept, others prayed God to give them strength, perseverance, and patience to bear the pain and not to recant, others gathered the ashes and bones and wrapped them up in paper to preserve them, yet others threatening the bishops. The haste with which the bishops have proceeded in this matter may well cause a revolt. Although it may seem necessary to apply exemplary punishment during your Majesty’s presence here and under your authority, and to do so before winter is over [spring being a popular time for rebellion in England] to intimidate others, I do not think it well that your Majesty should allow further executions to take place unless the reasons are overwhelmingly strong and the offence committed hath been so scandalous as to render this course justifiable in the eyes of the people.

It was good advice. Of course, the persecution of heretics was cruel and pointless, but Mary was acting in the light of her own times. Heresy was a sin and, as she saw it, the duty of the Church was to persuade those in error to recant, to save their immortal souls. If they refused to do so, then they must be punished according to law. It was a barbaric age. Hitherto, the people had accepted the punishment for heresy without question. Henry VIII had put to death Catholics and Protestants with impunity, on one occasion on the same day at Smithfield. The crowd had applauded when one of his Protestant victims had been held on a pike and playfully lifted up and down into the flames to prolong his agony.

But now the mood had changed. The people’s attitude took the authorities by surprise and should have given them pause for thought. The large crowds of spectators came not to boo and heckle the heretic, but to sympathize and offer support, often building the fires higher so that the victim’s agony would end sooner. Friends might bribe the executioner to allow a bag of gunpowder to be fastened round the victim’s neck or waist, which would explode on contact with the flames, bringing a quick death.

The persecution of Protestants had become inextricably mixed up with resentment at foreign interference in English affairs. If the burnings continued, Renard warned, not only the future of the Church, but also the lives of Philip and Mary might be imperilled. It would give Elizabeth and other dangerous opponents the chance he imagined they wanted to overthrow the regime. Surely there were other means of chastising the obstinate, he urged.

The responsibility for the burnings has to rest with Mary, who as sovereign was head of the justice system that actually inflicted the punishment. She was initially supported by her Lord Chancellor, Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester. An intelligent man, he might have reconsidered when he saw the policy was not working, but he was mortally ill and died in November 1555. The greatest advocate was Bonner, Bishop of London, who, like that other enthusiastic persecutor of heretics, Sir Thomas More, would personally flog the victims in his garden. So great was the popular fear of Bonner that an invitation to visit him was enough to prompt the person to go into hasty, voluntary exile.

Although Philip enjoyed the auto-da-fé in his native Spain and once took his unstable young son to watch a day-long event, he was less than convinced of the wisdom of the burnings in England. He knew that he would be associated with them and that it would further exacerbate xenophobic sentiment against Spain. A few days after the execution of the first victim, one of Philip’s Spanish monks gave a vigorous sermon at court condemning the burnings. He would not have done this without Philip’s support, but still the burnings continued.

The more humanitarian Cardinal Pole was not in favour of the policy, focusing more on the Herculean task of reforming the Church from within and winning converts that way. Mary placed a unique confidence in Pole and he could have convinced her to stop the burnings, if he had troubled to exert his influence.

While many well-educated and articulate Protestants had fled the country, a strong core remained, including the most prominent, Archbishop Cranmer and the former Protestant Bishops Latimer and Ridley. Their policy of Christian obedience and non-resistance to their sovereign and the law of the realm encouraged others. They must hold firm to their religious convictions, refuse to recant, and submit to the flames if it was God’s will. Many who followed their example were the men and women, old and young, of the artisan class, mainly in London and the South-east, who had embraced Protestantism and now stood firm.

What was shocking was the number of victims in such a short time span: between 4 February 1555 and 10 November 1558, 283 Protestants – 227 men and 56 women – were burned alive. About 100 others died in custody.

Mary drew special opprobrium for her treatment of Cranmer, who had already been condemned for treason for his part in usurping the crown for Jane Grey. She was determined to have her revenge on the man who had destroyed her mother’s marriage by pronouncing the divorce, so that there was a large and ugly element of personal vindictiveness in this case, unworthy of a queen. Now Cranmer was also to be tried for heresy. When he wrote her a long letter and statement of his beliefs, she refused to read it, since it came from a heretic. The authorities toyed with Cranmer and treated him with gratuitous cruelty, forcing him to watch the double execution of Latimer and Ridley, leaving him in no doubt of the horror that awaited him. During his lengthy period of imprisonment harshness was alternated with leniency, diminishing his spirit of resistance. It would be a great propaganda coup to force Cranmer to recant, but so much more satisfactory to burn the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer was only human and did recant, to the dismay of the Protestants, who claimed the recantation must be a forgery.

Mary now took the unprecedented step of announcing that even though Cranmer had recanted – and therefore should be reprieved from execution – he was to burn anyway. Through his last night, Cranmer wrestled with his conscience. He wrote out a very different statement than the one the authorities were going to make him read next day, this time condemning the Pope as the Antichrist and denying the Real Presence. He secreted the paper in his clothes before he was taken from his cell to sit out the long sermon which traditionally preceded a burning. At the church, he began his statement as the ecclesiastical and lay spectators expected. When he suddenly switched tack, he was silenced and dragged to the stake.

The morning of the execution, 21 March 1556, was wet, meaning that the fire would probably burn slowly, prolonging his agony. Cranmer took the paper containing his statement from his bosom and threw it into the crowd. As the flames reached him, he thrust his right hand – the one he had used to sign the recantation – into the fire and held it there. ‘And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished.’

It was a propaganda disaster for Mary, one from which she never recovered. The burnings continued, almost to the day of her death.