Mary Tudor and the ‘theatre of justice’
In our final extract from his new book Eamon Duffy argues that the queen's campaign against heresy wasn't as merciless as some claim

5 June 2009

A depiction of the execution of John Cardmaker, an ex-Franciscan, and John Warne, an upholsterer, at Smithfield on May 20 1555

In the early months of Mary's campaign against heretics the Imperial ambassador in London, Simon Renard, accused the bishops of being too "hot and hasty" against heresy, but the evidence suggests on the contrary that the relatively small numbers proceeded against in the spring of 1555 reflected episcopal caution, informed not only by worries about the likely public reaction to the burnings, but also by concern for the spiritual welfare of the accused. Even after episcopal determination hardened in the face of perhaps unexpectedly sustained Protestant resistance, a recurrent feature of the surviving examinations and trials throughout the reign was the manifestly sincere and sometimes long-drawn-out efforts made by bishops and their officers to convert rather than condemn the men and women before them.

Foxe himself drew attention to these attempts to persuade the victims to conformity. He of course took the worst possible view of them, either as bids to discredit Protestant constancy to the Gospel with "some forged example of a shrinking brother, to lay in the dish of the rest who were to be examined", or as devilish last-ditch attempts to seduce the victims from their allegiance to Christ, and so to damn them. The real motives were less lurid and, in part at least, more creditable. The judges were priests, charged with the salvation of souls, and they had for the most part a genuine horror of the eternity of torment they believed awaited unrepentant heretics. Their frequent pleadings with the accused to "cast not your selfe away" had eternal damnation in mind as well as the horror of the death sentence itself. In any case, a repentant heretic was a potent witness to the error and inconstancy of Protestantism: a dead one might be deemed a martyr.

Such concerns were evident from the very first trials, but there were also more pragmatic reasons for this reluctance to proceed to extremes. By 1555, after a generation of government-sponsored anti-clericalism, Bonner and other clergy involved were understandably nervous about the likely reaction of even Catholic-minded Tudor people to the spectacle of bishops and priests pronouncing excommunications which were in practical terms death sentences on lay people, especially when the victims were of gentry status.

When Thomas Causton and Thomas Higbed were arrested by magistrates at Colchester in March 1555 the bishop himself travelled to Colchester with a team of persuaders, including the gentle and golden-tongued dean of St Paul's, John Feckenham, in the vain hope of reconciling them to the Church, and so avoiding resort to the death sentence. But Bonner was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths with Protestants of humbler status too: he told the apprentice William Hunter: "if thou wilt recante thy sayinges, I will promise thee, that thou shalt not be putte to open shame: but speake the worde here nowe betwene me and thee, and I wil promise thee, it shal go no further, and thou shalt goe home againe without any hurt."

Bonner's attempts to win over this dissident apprentice certainly sprang in part from ordinary human compassion, the sense of the tragic waste of a young life - and an immortal soul - for persistence in what Bonner and his colleagues inevitably regarded as perverse and pernicious error. Even dedicated officials, convinced of the necessity of rooting out heresy, when faced not with the abstraction but men and women of flesh and blood, might feel the horror of the fate awaiting the condemned.

Dr Michael Dunning, chancellor of the Norwich diocese, showed himself a dedicated and tough-minded scourge of Protestants in Norfolk and Suffolk, eventually involved in more than two dozen of the 33 capital cases in the diocese. In May 1556, however, the first occasion on which he rather than Bishop Hopton had to pass sentence of condemnation, he was faced by three defendants, one of whom was a farm labourer only 19 years old. Unable to budge them from their fatal confession of Protestant beliefs, the seasoned chancellor "burst out in teares, intreatyng them to remember themselues, and to turne agayne to the holy mother church, for that they were deceiued and out of the truth, and that they should not wilfully cast away themselues".

Whatever considerations of compassion or personal compunction might give pause to those charged with the pursuit and punishment of heresy, in the spring of 1555 the likelihood of a public backlash against the campaign was an even more pressing concern. At the very start of the reign the Paul's Cross riot had signalled the volatility of public opinion in London and the ability of the city evangelicals to mobilise frightening forces of disorder against a regime conscious of its recent and perhaps precarious accession to power. Though the suppression of Wyatt's revolt and the steady consolidation of Catholic observance in the City of London as everywhere else encouraged the regime to firmness in dealing with dissent, the numerical weight and influence of evangelicalism remained an unknown quantity.

Gospellers were certainly present in strength in the crowds who flocked to see John Rogers burned at Smithfield on February 4 1555, and vociferous demonstrations of support for the condemned man alarmed onlookers like the Imperial ambassador, who told King Philip that "Some of the onlookers wept, others prayed to 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 in paper to preserve them, yet others threatening the bishops".

Renard feared that "the haste with which the bishops have proceeded in this matter may well cause a revolt", and urged Philip to suspend the burnings for the time being, and to consider carrying out any further executions for heresy in secret. Though such demonstrations remained a threat to the end of the reign, this was certainly an over-reaction. However volatile the City of London, with its entrenched and influential Protestant minority, and its specially strong support-base of rowdy apprentices, Protestantism was a minority faith everywhere in England except possibly one or two of the villages of the Stour valley.

After Wyatt, support for the victims was never likely to escalate into revolt. But however inflated, Renard's fears were, to begin with at least, widely shared.

For the regime, there was a delicate balance of advantage and danger to be weighed in the publicity surrounding the trials and burnings. Public executions of the Protestant hardcore were seen as an essential manifestation of the determination and irreversibility of government's commitment to the Catholic restoration, part of the "theatre of justice" which underpinned law and order in a society too thinly policed for force alone to suffice in the implementation of controversial policy. The Queen gave specific instructions that Bishop Hooper was to be burned in Gloucester, "for the example and terror of suche as he hath there seduced and mistaught, and bycause he hath done moste harme there". More generally, if the burnings were to fulfil their deterrent purpose fully, they had to be staged where Protestantism had established a hold. So, as we have seen, although in 1555 at the start of the campaign, Essex heretics were burned at a range of locations spread across the county, from 1556 onwards all the executions in the county were carried out in Colchester, not despite but because the opposition to the regime's religious policies was most vociferous there.

Gruesome deaths like the botched slow roastings of the wretched Hooper at Gloucester and of Ridley at Oxford certainly awakened pity among onlookers, as they harrow Foxe's modern reader. Moreover, burning was certainly the rarest and most spectacular, if not necessarily the most excruciating form of Tudor public execution. Those who witnessed a burning, and especially perhaps mass burnings like that of eleven men and two women at a single execution in Stratford-le-bow on June 27 1556, are unlikely ever to have forgotten it. But we need to bear in mind that public torment of condemned criminals was a hugely popular spectator entertainment in Tudor England, and we should not project modern sensibilities on to the people of the past.


This is an extract from Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor, published by Yale University Press, priced £19.99