The Marian Persecutions

I. The Accession of Mary I

Edward VI died on 6 July 1553 at the age of fifteen. During his short reign England had become a Protestant kingdom in its official religion. The Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and its revision of 1552 replaced the Latin mass with English services, the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 set out a Reformed doctrine, images were removed from churches, chantries were dissolved, and clergy were permitted to marry. Leading Continental reformers, among them Martin Bucer at Cambridge and Peter Martyr Vermigli at Oxford, held professorships in the English universities, and the English Bible was set up in every parish.

Edward had attempted, through his "device for the succession", to exclude his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth and to leave the crown to his cousin Lady Jane Grey, who was married to the son of the Duke of Northumberland, the leading figure in the government. Jane was proclaimed queen on 10 July, but Mary, the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, raised her standard in East Anglia and gathered wide support. Within nine days the council in London declared for her, and she entered London on 3 August 1553. Northumberland was executed, and Jane, her husband and others were later executed after the rising of Sir Thomas Wyatt in early 1554.

Mary had remained a Catholic throughout her father's and brother's reigns, and she regarded the restoration of the Catholic religion and of obedience to Rome as her duty. She moved cautiously at first. Her first Parliament, in October 1553, repealed the religious legislation of Edward VI, restoring the forms of worship of the last years of Henry VIII. Married clergy were deprived of their benefices. The return to papal obedience required the agreement of those who had acquired monastic lands, and it was not achieved until November 1554, when Cardinal Reginald Pole returned to England as papal legate and absolved the realm from schism. Parliament repealed the remaining anti-papal legislation, while the papacy agreed that the former monastic lands would remain with their owners.

II. The Revival of the Heresy Laws

In December 1554 Parliament revived the medieval heresy statutes, including the act De haeretico comburendo of 1401, which had been passed against the followers of John Wycliffe and which authorised the burning of obstinate heretics. These laws had been repealed under Edward VI. Their revival came into force on 20 January 1555, and within two weeks the first executions took place. The procedure provided for heresy to be tried by the bishops in their courts, and for those who refused to recant, or who relapsed after recanting, to be handed over to the secular authorities for burning.

The Wycliffite background of the statutes is significant for this site. The Lollards had been the first English movement to promote the reading of the Scriptures in English, and the laws passed against them had made the possession of English translations a mark of heresy. Under Mary the statutes were applied to Protestants whose views on the eucharist, the authority of Scripture and the papacy echoed some of the Lollard positions, although Protestant theology had developed independently on the Continent.

The decision to revive the heresy laws was made by the queen, the council and Parliament, with the support of the bishops. Historians have debated the relative responsibility of Mary, of Cardinal Pole, of Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor, and of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London. Gardiner seems to have expected that a few exemplary executions would cause the leaders of the Protestant party to recant or flee; when this did not happen he withdrew from active involvement before his death in November 1555. Bonner, in whose diocese more than a hundred people were burned, became in Protestant memory the chief agent of the persecution, though modern research has qualified this image.

III. The First Martyrs

The first person burned under the revived laws was John Rogers, a canon of St Paul's and the editor of the Matthew Bible of 1537, which had drawn heavily on William Tyndale's translations. Rogers was burned at Smithfield in London on 4 February 1555. According to Foxe he refused a pardon conditional on recantation, and his wife and children met him on the way to the stake. His death is significant in the history of the English Bible, since he had been responsible, with Tyndale and Coverdale, for one of the foundational English translations. The site's page on the Tyndale legacy describes the Matthew Bible and its place in the history of the English Bible.

In the following days Laurence Saunders was burned at Coventry, John Hooper, bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, at Gloucester, and Rowland Taylor, rector of Hadleigh, at Hadleigh in Suffolk. Hooper had been the leading advocate of a stricter Reformed practice under Edward VI, and his death at Gloucester, prolonged because the fire burned slowly in the wind, was described at length by Foxe. Taylor's death among his own parishioners became one of the most famous scenes of the persecution.

The executions continued throughout 1555, 1556, 1557 and 1558, ending only with the queen's death on 17 November 1558. The last burnings took place at Canterbury on 10 November 1558, a week before Mary died. In total about two hundred and eighty-four people were burned for heresy, and about thirty more died in prison. The executions were concentrated in the south-east of England, especially in London, Essex, Kent, Sussex and East Anglia, which were the regions where Protestantism had taken firmest hold.

IV. The Social Character of the Martyrs

The great majority of those burned were not clergy or scholars but ordinary men and women. Foxe's records and the bishops' registers show that they included weavers, shoemakers, carpenters, husbandmen, labourers, servants and their wives. About fifty-six were women. Many were young. Some had been influenced by the preaching of the Edwardian clergy, others by the reading of the English Bible, and some by older traditions of dissent in their localities, especially in Kent and Essex, where Lollardy had persisted into the sixteenth century.

The articles on which the martyrs were examined concerned principally the eucharist, the authority of the pope, the mass, the number of sacraments, auricular confession, and the invocation of saints. The decisive question in most cases was the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the altar. Those who denied transubstantiation, holding that the bread and wine remained bread and wine and that Christ was present spiritually or that the sacrament was a memorial, were condemned as heretics. The examinations recorded by Foxe show that many of the accused defended their views by reference to the words of institution in 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, emphasising the words "do this in remembrance of me", and to the teaching in John 6:63 that it is the spirit that is life-giving and the flesh is of no use at all.

The examiners in turn appealed to the literal sense of Matthew 26:26, "This is my body", and to the tradition of the Church. The disputes thus turned on the interpretation of Scripture and on the question of who had authority to interpret it. The martyrs frequently insisted that they would accept correction only from Scripture, while their examiners maintained that the Scriptures must be understood as the Church had always understood them.

V. The Oxford Martyrs

The most prominent victims of the persecution were the three bishops tried at Oxford. Hugh Latimer, former bishop of Worcester and the most famous preacher of the English Reformation, Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London under Edward VI, and Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, had been imprisoned since 1553. In April 1554 they were brought to Oxford for a public disputation with Catholic theologians on the eucharist, after which they were declared heretics.

Latimer and Ridley were tried again in September 1555 and burned together in a ditch outside the north wall of Oxford, in what is now Broad Street, on 16 October 1555. According to Foxe, Latimer said to Ridley at the stake: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." The words are not found in the earliest edition of Foxe and may reflect a later tradition, but they became among the most quoted in English Protestant history. Ridley, whose fire was slow to burn, suffered greatly before he died.

Cranmer's case was different. As archbishop he could be tried only by papal authority, and his trial was conducted before a papal delegate in September 1555. Rome declared him deprived of his see in December. Under pressure in prison Cranmer signed a series of recantations, the last of which repudiated all his Protestant writings and acknowledged the papal supremacy. Despite these recantations he was condemned to be burned. On 21 March 1556, at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, he was expected to make a final public recantation. Instead he withdrew his recantations, declared that he rejected the pope, and said that his hand, which had signed the recantations, would be burned first. At the stake he held his right hand in the flames.

The site's page on Bible scholarship in Oxford provides further context on the university and its scholars. The Martyrs' Memorial at the end of St Giles', erected in 1841–43, commemorates the three bishops.

VI. Cranmer and the English Bible

Cranmer's contribution to the English Bible and the English liturgy was considerable. As archbishop he had supported the publication of the English Bible under Henry VIII and wrote the preface to the second edition of the Great Bible in 1540, for which reason that edition was often called Cranmer's Bible. In the preface he argued that the Scriptures should be read by all people, of every age, condition and degree, and he quoted the Greek preacher John Chrysostom on the value of Bible reading for lay people. He also cautioned against contentious disputation over Scripture by the unlearned.

Cranmer was the principal author of the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and 1552, which incorporated extensive readings from Scripture into the daily services and arranged for the reading of most of the Bible in the course of a year. His homilies of 1547, especially the "Fruitful Exhortation to the Reading of Holy Scripture", encouraged the reading of the Bible in households. These works were suppressed under Mary but restored under Elizabeth, and they shaped the religious life of English Protestants for centuries.

VII. The Marian Exiles

About eight hundred English Protestants left England during Mary's reign and settled in Protestant cities on the Continent. The largest communities were at Frankfurt, Strasbourg, Zurich, Emden, Wesel, Basel and Geneva. They included clergy, scholars, gentry and merchants, among them several future bishops of the Elizabethan Church. The exiles maintained contact with Protestants in England and printed books for clandestine distribution there.

The exile community at Frankfurt became divided over the form of worship. One party, led by Richard Cox, wished to retain the Book of Common Prayer of 1552, while another, led by John Knox and William Whittingham, wished for a simpler order following the practice of Geneva. These "troubles at Frankfurt", as they were later called, anticipated the divisions between conformists and Puritans in the Elizabethan Church. Knox and his followers moved to Geneva, where they formed a congregation under the influence of John Calvin.

At Geneva the exiles undertook a new English translation of the Bible. The Greek Scriptures were published by Whittingham in 1557, and the complete Bible appeared in 1560, dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. The Geneva Bible was the first English Bible to divide the text into verses and to provide extensive marginal notes, and it became the most widely read English Bible of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its notes reflected the Reformed theology of Geneva and, in some places, a critical view of monarchs who opposed true religion. The site's page on Hampton Court and the Authorised Version describes how objections to these notes contributed to the commissioning of the King James Version in 1604.

VIII. John Foxe

John Foxe was born at Boston in Lincolnshire in 1516 or 1517 and was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became a fellow. He resigned his fellowship in 1545, probably because of his Protestant views, and served as a tutor in the household of the Duchess of Richmond. Under Mary he went into exile, first to Strasbourg and then to Frankfurt and Basel, where he worked as a proofreader for the printer Johannes Oporinus.

In exile Foxe began to compile a history of the persecution of the true Church. His first work, Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum, published at Strasbourg in 1554, was a Latin history of the persecutions of Wycliffe and Hus. After news of the burnings reached the exiles, he began to collect accounts of the English martyrs, and in 1559 he published at Basel an expanded Latin history, the Rerum in ecclesia gestarum commentarii, which included the Marian martyrs.

Foxe returned to England in 1559 and worked with the London printer John Day. In March 1563 Day published the first English edition, under the title Actes and Monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, a folio of about eighteen hundred pages illustrated with woodcuts. The book was immediately popular and controversial. Foxe revised and greatly enlarged it for the second edition of 1570, which ran to two volumes and about two thousand three hundred pages. Further editions appeared in 1576 and 1583 in Foxe's lifetime, and many more after his death in 1587.

IX. The Acts and Monuments

The Acts and Monuments, commonly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was much more than an account of the Marian persecutions. In its later editions it was a history of the Church from the apostolic age to the sixteenth century, presenting a continuous succession of true believers persecuted by false authorities. The early Christian martyrs under the Roman emperors, the Waldenses, the Lollards, the Hussites and the Protestants of the Reformation were all presented as members of this persecuted Church.

Foxe's historical scheme drew on an interpretation of the book of Revelation, especially the binding of Satan for a thousand years in Revelation 20:1-3 and his release thereafter. Foxe dated the binding from the end of the persecutions under Constantine and the release from about the year 1000 or later, when, in his view, the papacy had come under the influence of Satan and had begun to persecute true believers. This apocalyptic framework placed the Marian martyrs within the final stages of the conflict between the true and false churches described in Revelation.

The book's value as a historical source has been the subject of extensive debate. Catholic critics from the sixteenth century onwards, including Nicholas Harpsfield and Robert Persons, accused Foxe of falsehood and distortion. In the nineteenth century Samuel Maitland and others subjected the book to detailed criticism. More recent research, especially the work of the British Academy project led by David Loades, Thomas Freeman and others, which produced a complete online variorum edition of the four editions published in Foxe's lifetime, has shown that Foxe drew extensively on documents, including bishops' registers, letters and eyewitness accounts, and that his accounts of the Marian martyrs are generally reliable in their factual details, although his selection and presentation reflect his theological purposes.

X. The Influence of Foxe

The Acts and Monuments had a great influence on English Protestant identity. In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury ordered that copies be placed in cathedrals and in the houses of bishops and senior clergy, and many parish churches also acquired copies. The book was read in households alongside the Bible, and its stories and woodcuts became part of the common memory of English Protestants. It contributed to the conviction that England was a nation with a special role in the history of the true Church.

The image of Mary I as "Bloody Mary" derives in large part from Foxe and from the Protestant historiography that followed him. The anniversary of Elizabeth's accession, 17 November, was celebrated in England for centuries as a Protestant festival, and the memory of the Marian burnings was invoked in later political conflicts, including the Popish Plot of 1678 and the Exclusion Crisis, and in the opposition to Catholic emancipation in the early nineteenth century. Historians have noted that Foxe's work, by recording the deaths of ordinary men and women, also contributed to a tradition of commemorating religious conviction among people of humble status.

XI. Scripture and the Martyrs

The examinations and letters of the martyrs show the place of Scripture in their religious lives. Many had memorised large parts of the English Bible, and they defended their beliefs by quotation. Some, such as the Essex weaver William Hunter, who was burned at Brentwood in March 1555 at the age of nineteen, had been arrested for reading the Bible in church. Others were accused of possessing books by Tyndale, Frith or other reformers.

The martyrs and their supporters drew comfort from passages that described the persecution of the faithful. They cited the words of Jesus in Matthew 10:28, "Do not become fearful of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul", and Matthew 5:10-12, which pronounces happy those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake. They also found in Hebrews 11:35-38 a description of the faithful who were tortured, mocked and killed, of whom the world was not worthy. Their letters from prison, many of which Foxe printed, are composed largely of scriptural quotation.

The question of the vernacular Scriptures was central to the conflict. The Marian authorities did not prohibit the Bible as such, but they removed the English Bibles from churches and discouraged lay reading, and several of the men who had produced English translations, including Rogers and Cranmer, were among those executed. Coverdale was allowed to leave England in 1555 at the request of the king of Denmark. The return of the English Bible to the parish churches was among the first acts of Elizabeth's reign.

XII. Women among the Martyrs

About fifty-six of those burned under Mary were women, and their examinations and letters form a distinctive part of Foxe's record. Many were wives and widows of artisans and husbandmen, and several were burned together with their husbands or with other members of their families. Joan Waste, a blind woman of Derby who had saved to buy a copy of the Greek Scriptures in English and paid others to read it aloud to her because she could not read it herself, was burned in August 1556. Her case shows how the vernacular Scriptures reached people who could not read, through hearing them read aloud by others.

Elizabeth Young, a London woman who was arrested in 1558 for importing Protestant books from the Continent, was examined many times and eventually released. Her examinations, which Foxe printed at length, show the theological debates between the accused and their examiners and the pressure placed on women to recant. Alice Benden of Staplehurst in Kent, who was imprisoned in Canterbury castle and burned in June 1557, and Agnes Prest of Cornwall, burned at Exeter in November 1557, were among the women whose testimonies Foxe preserved.

The most notorious incident of the persecution concerned women. On the island of Guernsey in July 1556 a mother, Katherine Cauchés, and her two daughters, Perotine Massey and Guillemine Gilbert, were burned at St Peter Port. Perotine was pregnant, and when her body burst in the fire she gave birth to a son, who was thrown back into the flames on the bailiff's order. The account was disputed by Catholic writers, but Foxe defended it with documents from Guernsey, and modern research has generally accepted its substance.

XIII. The Burnings at Stratford-le-Bow, Lewes and Colchester

The persecution reached its greatest intensity in 1556 and 1557. On 27 June 1556 eleven men and two women from Essex were burned together at Stratford-le-Bow, east of London, the largest single execution of the reign. In 1557 ten people were burned at Lewes in Sussex on a single day, an event that has been commemorated in the town ever since. At Colchester, which had a strong Protestant community, twenty-three people were burned in the course of the reign, including ten in August 1557.

The concentration of burnings in particular places reflects the presence of Protestant communities, the zeal of particular bishops and officials, and the readiness of neighbours to report those who refused to attend mass. In some regions, such as the north and the west, there were very few executions, either because Protestantism was weaker there or because the authorities were less active. In the dioceses of London, Canterbury and Chichester the number of burnings was highest.

The public character of the burnings was intended to deter others, but there is evidence that they also aroused sympathy for the victims. Crowds gathered at the executions, and some spectators encouraged the condemned or prayed with them. In June 1558 the council issued a proclamation forbidding anyone to comfort, praise or pray for those being burned, on pain of arrest. The French ambassador Antoine de Noailles reported that the burnings were causing discontent in London. Historians have used such evidence to argue that the persecution was counter-productive, though others have stressed that it did succeed in suppressing open Protestant activity in many places.

XIV. The Woodcuts of the Acts and Monuments

The Acts and Monuments was among the most heavily illustrated books produced in England in the sixteenth century. The 1563 edition contained more than fifty woodcuts, and later editions added more. The illustrations depicted the burnings of individual martyrs, the examination of prisoners, the punishment of Lollards, and allegorical scenes such as the contrast between the true and the false churches. Some cuts were made specifically for particular martyrs, such as those showing Cranmer holding his hand in the fire and Latimer and Ridley at the stake, while others were used several times for different victims.

The woodcuts made the book accessible to readers of limited literacy and helped fix the images of the martyrs in popular memory. Several of them were reproduced in later abridgements and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were copied in engravings and popular prints. Modern scholars of the book, among them Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, have studied the illustrations as a central part of Foxe's argument, showing how images were used to support a Protestant culture that otherwise distrusted religious imagery.

XV. Catholic Reform under Mary

Recent historians have emphasised that the Marian regime was not merely repressive. Under Cardinal Pole, who became archbishop of Canterbury after Cranmer's death, the Marian Church undertook a programme of reform that anticipated the Council of Trent. The legatine synod of 1555–56 issued decrees on the residence of bishops, the preaching of sermons, the education of clergy in seminaries attached to cathedrals, and the provision of a new catechism and book of homilies. Bishop Bonner published a book of homilies and a catechism in English in 1555.

Eamon Duffy, in his book Fires of Faith, argued that the Marian Church was more effective than earlier historians had recognised, and that the persecution, though it horrified some contemporaries, was part of a coherent strategy to restore Catholic belief and practice. Duffy also emphasised the extent of popular support for the restoration of traditional religion in many parts of England. Other historians, such as Thomas Freeman, have stressed the extent of Protestant resistance and the counter-productive effect of the burnings, which created a body of martyrs whose memory sustained English Protestantism.

The persecution must also be seen in its European context. In the same years the Habsburg authorities were executing Protestants in the Netherlands, the French crown was prosecuting Protestants through the special court known as the chambre ardente, and the Spanish Inquisition was discovering Protestant circles in Seville and Valladolid, whose members were burned in 1559. Protestant authorities also executed people for heresy, including the burning of Michael Servetus at Geneva in 1553 and of Anabaptists in England under Edward VI and Elizabeth.

XVI. Philip of Spain and the Spanish Clergy

The role of Philip of Spain in the persecution has been debated since the sixteenth century. Protestant writers often attributed the burnings to Spanish influence, but the evidence suggests that Philip and his advisers were cautious about the political effects of the executions. In February 1555, shortly after the first burnings, Philip's confessor, the Franciscan Alfonso de Castro, preached a sermon at court criticising the executions and urging that heretics be instructed rather than killed. The sermon may have reflected Philip's concern that the persecution would make his position in England more difficult, though it did not lead to any change in policy.

Several Spanish theologians took part in the work of the Marian Church, among them Bartolomé Carranza, Philip's chaplain and later archbishop of Toledo, who was active in the examination of heretics and in the reform of the universities, and Pedro de Soto and Juan de Villagarcía, who taught at Oxford and were involved in the final examinations of Cranmer. Carranza was himself later arrested by the Spanish Inquisition in 1559, on charges arising from his catechism, and spent seventeen years in prison. His case illustrates the complexity of the religious politics of the period, in which the defenders of orthodoxy in one setting could become suspects in another.

XVII. The End of the Persecution

Mary's marriage to Philip of Spain in July 1554 and England's entry into the war between Spain and France led to the loss of Calais in January 1558, the last English possession in France. The queen's health declined during 1558, and she died on 17 November, the same day as Cardinal Pole. Her half-sister Elizabeth succeeded her. The Elizabethan settlement of 1559 restored the royal supremacy and the Book of Common Prayer, and the heresy statutes were again repealed.

The Marian bishops, all but one of whom refused to accept the new settlement, were deprived and many were imprisoned. Bonner died in the Marshalsea prison in 1569. Under Elizabeth Catholics were not burned for heresy, but after the papal bull of 1570 excommunicating the queen, and especially after the arrival of the seminary priests and Jesuits from 1574 onwards, Catholic priests were prosecuted for treason, and about one hundred and eighty-nine Catholics were executed during her reign. Both sides thus produced martyrologies, and the Catholic tradition of martyrs from this period was later commemorated by the canonisation of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales in 1970.

For summaries of the period, readers may consult the Grokipedia entries on Mary I of England, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, John Foxe, Thomas Cranmer and Hugh Latimer. The full text of the Acts and Monuments is available in The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online, published by the Digital Humanities Institute of the University of Sheffield.

XVIII. The Persecution in the History of Toleration

The Marian burnings occupy an important place in the later history of arguments for religious toleration in England. Writers of the seventeenth century, including John Milton and John Locke, lived in a culture shaped by Foxe and by the memory of the burnings, and the experience of persecution was frequently cited in arguments against the use of force in religion. At the same time, the memory of Mary's reign was used to justify the exclusion of Catholics from public life, so that the same events could support both arguments for toleration and arguments for the restriction of a particular religious minority.

The last executions for heresy in England took place in 1612, when Bartholomew Legate and Edward Wightman, who held anti-Trinitarian views, were burned at Smithfield and Lichfield. The writ for burning heretics was abolished in 1677. These later cases show that the practice of burning for heresy did not end with Mary, although it was never again used on the scale of her reign.

XIX. Chronology

On 6 July 1553 Edward VI died, and on 19 July Mary was proclaimed queen in London. In October 1553 the Edwardian religious legislation was repealed. In January and February 1554 Wyatt's rebellion was suppressed, and in April the Oxford disputation was held. In July 1554 Mary married Philip of Spain. On 30 November 1554 Pole absolved the realm from schism. In December 1554 the heresy laws were revived, coming into force on 20 January 1555. On 4 February 1555 John Rogers was burned at Smithfield, and on 9 February Hooper at Gloucester and Taylor at Hadleigh.

On 16 October 1555 Latimer and Ridley were burned at Oxford. In November 1555 Gardiner died. On 21 March 1556 Cranmer was burned at Oxford, and on 22 March Pole was consecrated archbishop of Canterbury. In June 1556 thirteen people were burned together at Stratford-le-Bow. In 1557 the Geneva Greek Scriptures were published. In January 1558 Calais was lost. On 10 November 1558 the last burnings took place at Canterbury, and on 17 November Mary and Pole died. In 1560 the Geneva Bible was published, and in 1563 the first English edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments appeared.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.