The Burning of Protestants under Mary I

Mary I of England was proclaimed queen in London on 19 July 1553 (Machyn, Diary 19 July 1553). At the end of November 1554 the Lords and Commons declared themselves “very sorry and repentant of the schism” from Rome and asked to be received back into the unity of the church, and the pope’s legate, Cardinal Reginald Pole, absolved the realm (Second Act of Repeal, 1554, in Gee and Hardy, pp. 385–387) (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 6, pp. 568–572). The same Parliament revived three medieval statutes against heresy, to be in force from 20 January 1555 (Revival of the Heresy Acts, 1554, in Gee and Hardy, p. 384). Under the statute of 1401, a person convicted of heresy in a bishop’s court who refused to abjure, or who relapsed after abjuring, was handed to the sheriff to be burned in public (Statute of 1401 (2 Henry IV, c. 15), in Gee and Hardy, p. 137).

The first to die, Foxe says, was John Rogers, burned at Smithfield in London on 4 February 1555 (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 6, pp. 611–612); the diary of the Londoner Henry Machyn records the burning under the same day (Machyn, Diary 4 February 1555). In May the king and queen wrote to the bishop of London complaining that heretics sent to the bishops were being left in their errors. He was to try to win them back and, if they stayed obstinate, to proceed against them “according to the order of the laws” (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 7, p. 86).

On 16 October 1555 Nicholas Ridley, bishop of London under Edward VI, and Hugh Latimer, once bishop of Worcester, were burned together at Oxford (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 7, pp. 406–407). Foxe reports that when the fire was brought Latimer told Ridley to “play the man” and spoke of lighting “such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out”; Latimer died quickly, and Ridley, whose fire was badly laid, slowly (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 7, pp. 547–551). Thomas Cranmer, the former archbishop of Canterbury, signed a recantation in prison that acknowledged the pope as head of the church (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 8, pp. 82–84). On 21 March 1556, when he was to repeat it in public before his execution, he renounced what he had signed, and by Foxe’s account he held his right hand in the flame so that it burned first (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 8, pp. 88–90) (Machyn, Diary 21 and 22 March 1556).

The last to suffer, according to Foxe, were three men and two women burned at Canterbury about six days before the queen died (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 8, p. 504). Mary died on 17 November 1558, and Pole, who had been consecrated archbishop of Canterbury the day after Cranmer’s death, within days of her (Machyn, Diary 21 and 22 March 1556) (Machyn, Diary 17 and 19 November 1558).

The narratives of these deaths cited here come from Acts and Monuments, and it is the work of a partisan. Foxe calls the dead martyrs and their judges papists moved by “implacable despite” (Foxe, Acts and Monuments vol. 8, p. 504); Mary’s Parliament had called what they held “errors and heresies” (Revival of the Heresy Acts, 1554, in Gee and Hardy, p. 384). The first Parliament of Elizabeth I repealed the heresy statutes in 1559 (Act of Supremacy, 1559, in Gee and Hardy, p. 446).