Mary Tudor (50 page)

There had been no baby. Like her mother forty years before, Mary had been deluded into believing that she was pregnant. Wise after the event, Michieli described how “from her youth” she had suffered from the “retention of menstrual fluids” and the “strangulation of her womb.” Her body swelled, and her breasts enlarged and sent out milk. “It was this which had led to the empty rumour of her pregnancy.”
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THE OUTCOME OF
the pregnancy had been of central importance to the peace negotiations between the French king and emperor, held under English auspices at La Marque in May. The latest round of hostilities, which had erupted in 1551, had reached a stalemate. The birth of an heir to the English throne would have given the emperor immense benefit, but if the queen and child died, the advantage would be with the French.

For the English, a great deal was at stake: the revival of England’s prestige in continental politics, an improvement of relations with France, and, of greatest importance, the prevention of a new war in which Spain might try to involve England. But as the negotiations continued, it became clear that neither the Habsburgs nor the Valois were willing to give much ground. As the talks reached an impasse, news came at the beginning of June of Mary’s failed pregnancy and of
the election of Giovanni Pietro Carafa, a seventy-nine-year-old Neapolitan and great enemy of the Habsburgs, as pope. The conference came to an abrupt end: the French had lost their fear.

Now, with no immediate prospect of an heir, Philip prepared to depart England for the Low Countries. Nervous of informing Mary of his intentions, he rehearsed how he would tell her in a draft letter, sent probably to Ruy Gómez: “Let me know what line I am to take with the Queen about leaving her and about religion. I see I must say something, but God help me!”
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Philip decided to leave most of his household in the hope of convincing the queen that he would return quickly. Yet, as the Venetian ambassador reported, “it is said more than ever, that he will go to Spain, and remove thence his household and all the others by degrees.”
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Philip would be leaving England with the Catholic restoration achieved and the enforcement of Catholic obedience under way. Six months before, the medieval treason laws, repealed by Edward VI, had been restored. The secular authorities were empowered once more to deal ruthlessly with religious opponents: seditious words and activities would be punished. With the rising threat of disorder and rebellion, the restoration of Catholicism was to take on a ferocious edge: heretics would be burned alive.

O
N 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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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