A Brief History of the Tudor Age (12 page)

These arguments at heresy trials were conducted according to the strict rules of medieval disputations, with a major and minor proposition, an answer, an explication, and the ensuing discussion.
But the detached academic atmosphere of the university divinity schools was not always maintained. When, at the beginning of Mary’s reign, Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer were brought as
prisoners to Oxford to take part in a great propaganda disputation with Catholic divines in the presence of a thousand spectators, they were constantly interrupted by the insults of the indignant
Catholics in the audience who had come to show their detestation of the heretics. As they all knew, the disputation was the first step in the proceedings which ultimately led to the burning of
Ridley, Latimer and Cranmer for their heresy.

The defendant at a heresy trial was given every opportunity to recant his heresies. If he did, he was not burned, but was sentenced to some lesser punishment, such as a few months’
imprisonment, or incarceration in a monastery, where he was subjected to a strict regime of penance and hardship. He was sometimes also required, after his release from prison, or the
monastery, to wear a badge of a faggot on his arm for the rest of his life, as a mark of shame. If he was a prominent figure, such as a learned divine, he was usually required to
preach a sermon at Paul’s Cross expressing his repentance and denouncing his past heresies. He arrived at the ceremony with a faggot on his shoulder, as a reminder that he deserved to be
burned for his heresy; and the heretic who was sentenced to take part in these proceedings was said, in popular parlance, to have ‘carried his faggot’.

A heretic who recanted, and was released after carrying his faggot, was not spared if he was guilty of heresy a second time. He was then condemned as a relapsed heretic, and this time he was
sentenced to be burned even if he again recanted. A new precedent was established in 1556 when Cranmer, who had never previously been condemned as a heretic, was burned, despite the fact that he
recanted. This marked a new stage in the intensification of the persecution.

If a heretic refused to recant, he was excommunicated by the judges who heard his case. By an Act of Parliament of 1401, a heretic who had been excommunicated by the ecclesiastical court could
be burned without any further legal process under a writ issued by the King, though the King was entitled to pardon the offender. At this stage, further efforts were sometimes made to induce the
heretic to recant; but if he remained obdurate, the writ for his burning was issued, and sent by the King’s Council to the sheriff of the county.

The sheriff and his subordinate officers – or in London the Lord Mayor and the city corporation – had to make the arrangements for the burning. They fixed the time and place,
arranged for a supply of the necessary faggots to be available, and saw to it that the timber-merchants supplying the faggots did not overcharge the King for them. They ensured that men-at-arms
were available to keep order at the execution, and prevent an escape or rescue; but Englishmen in Tudor England had a deep respect for law and the duty of obedience to the royal authority, and
there is not a single recorded case in England of an attempted
escape, or of an attempt to rescue a condemned heretic from the stake, such as occurred on several occasions at
the burning of heretics in the sixteenth century in Scotland and the Netherlands.

Heretics were always burned in public. The burning of a heretic was an unusual, but not a very rare, occurrence. Twenty-four heretics were burned in the twenty-four years of Henry VII’s
reign; eighty-one during the thirty-eight years of Henry VIII; two in the six years of Edward VI; 280 in Mary’s five-year reign – all within the space of three and three-quarter years
– and four in Elizabeth I’s forty-four years. The last heretics to be burned in England died at the stake seven years after the end of the Tudor Age in 1610. In the years between 1485
and 1589, when the last heretic of Elizabeth I’s reign suffered, burnings took place in more than sixty towns, most of them in south-east England. Many people in this part of the country had
an opportunity to watch the burning of a heretic, and thousands of them must have done so.

In London, where more heretics were burned than in any other single town, the burnings usually took place at Smithfield, just outside the wall at the north-west corner of the city, beyond
Newgate. In the provincial towns, they were normally held on some waste land very near the town, and often on market day, when the largest number of persons would be in town to witness this
salutary punishment of heresy. When Christopher Wade, a linen-weaver of Dartford, was burned there in July 1555, the execution took place at ten o’clock in the morning in a gravel pit about a
quarter of a mile outside the town, where felons were usually hanged. The people from the surrounding villages came in large numbers to see it, and the local fruiterers, realizing that there would
be many onlookers there, brought horse-loads of cherries to sell to the people while they waited for the burning to begin. It was not only idle curiosity which made people come to see a heretic
burned. His family, friends and sympathizers usually made a point of coming to give him moral support. Towards the end of Mary’s reign, there were sometimes open demonstrations in favour of
the heretic, and in the summer of 1558 the Queen
issued an order that anyone who showed sympathy for a heretic at an execution was to be arrested and would be flogged.

When the heretic had been brought to the place of execution, the proceedings began with a sermon preached by some suitable preacher selected by the government. When Catherine of Aragon’s
former confessor, Friar Forest, was burned as a heretic in 1538 – he was the only Catholic during the whole of the Tudor Age to be burned as a heretic for supporting the old Catholic
doctrines – the sermon was preached by the Bishop of Worcester, Latimer, who seventeen years later was himself burned as a Protestant heretic in Mary’s reign; but it was unusual for a
bishop to be appointed to preach the sermon at a burning, and this duty was usually performed by a rising churchman of a slightly inferior rank. After the sermon, the heretic said goodbye to his
friends, and often gave them his gown or some other parting gift. Sometimes he drank a last cup of wine. He could choose whether he preferred to be burned in his outer garments, or to remove them
and be burned in his underclothes. He was then fastened to the stake and surrounded by the faggots; and at a sign from the sheriff, the faggots were lit.

How long the heretic suffered in the fire varied in every case. In England, the burnings were carried out more mercifully than in some countries, such as France and the Netherlands, where
additional tortures were sometimes inflicted as a further punishment on a heretic who refused to recant or who defied the authorities at the stake. In England, the heretic’s friends were
allowed to supply him with some gunpowder to hang around his neck, so that the gunpowder would explode when the flames reached it and cause the heretic to die instantaneously. Even without the
gunpowder, the heretic might die very quickly by being suffocated almost immediately by the smoke. But the burning could be horribly prolonged. The gunpowder sometimes failed to explode because it
was damp or defective; and sometimes the fire burned slowly, especially if the faggots were green or damp. There were some slow burnings of heretics in the
summer of 1556, after
the very rainy winter and spring had made the wood wet.

When Latimer and Ridley were burned at Oxford in October 1555, Latimer died almost immediately in the smoke; but Ridley suffered terribly from slow-burning faggots. His brother-in-law rushed
forward and piled on more wood, in the hopes of ending Ridley’s sufferings; but the effect was to dampen down the flames and to prolong the agony. When Hooper, the Protestant Bishop of
Gloucester and Worcester, was burned at Gloucester in February 1555, he took three-quarters of an hour to die. All the Catholics and Protestants who watched the heretics burn considered that
whether death was quick or prolonged was a manifestation of the will of God.

Occasionally a cruel executioner deliberately tried to prolong the heretic’s sufferings. When John Lambert was burned at Smithfield in 1538, the men-at-arms who carried out the burning
hoisted his burning body on to the point of a pike and lifted him out of the reach of the flames, before bringing him back into them again, in order to prolong the execution.

Heresy was not the only crime which was punishable by burning alive. It was also inflicted on women who were guilty of high treason, or who committed petty treason by murdering their husbands or
their employers; but witches, who were burned in Scotland and in most other countries, were hanged in England, where the fear of witches and the drive against them did not really get under way
until the seventeenth century, after James I, who had acquired a great dread of witches in Scotland, became King of England.

Male traitors who committed high treason against their highest overlord, the King, or petty treason against their immediate overlord by murdering their masters, were sentenced to be hanged,
drawn and quartered; but in the case of noblemen it was always commuted to beheading, and sometimes this mercy was extended to gentlemen and men of lower rank. High treason was regulated by the Act
of 1351, which is still in force in 1988, and which enacted that it should be high treason to attempt to kill
the King, to take part in a revolt against the King, or to aid the
King’s foreign enemies in wartime. Later Acts of Parliament were passed, particularly in the sixteenth century, which made other offences high treason. One of them enacted that it was high
treason to deny any of the King’s titles, and this Act was used to execute several Catholic supporters, including Bishop Fisher and Sir Thomas More, who denied that the King was the Supreme
Head of the Church of England. Another Act made it high treason to pretend to foretell the date of the King’s death. This was directed against those who prophesied that the King would die
within a few months, hoping that this prophecy would encourage the people to rebel. One result of this Act was that when Henry VIII was dying, his doctors, who realized that he had only a few hours
to live, did not dare to tell him this, in case they were accused of high treason for foretelling the time of the King’s death. Sir Anthony Denny, who was one of Henry’s most intimate
attendants, was prepared to take the risk, and warned the King to prepare for death.

When a man was found guilty of high treason, the sentence of the court was that he should be hanged by the neck, but cut down while still alive, castrated, and, being yet living, should be
disembowelled and his bowels burned before his eyes, before he was beheaded and his body cut into quarters. His head and four quarters were then fixed on a pole on London Bridge, or on the gates of
London, York and other cities.

The execution of traitors, like the burning of heretics, took place in public. Nine were hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, about three miles west of London on the northern edge of Hyde
Park, where Marble Arch is today. The traitors were brought to Tyburn from Newgate, or some other prison where they had been confined, tied face downwards on a hurdle drawn by horses. As with a
burning, how much and how long they suffered varied in every case. The traitor or his family usually paid money to the executioner to allow the traitor, contrary to the sentence of the court, to
hang until he was dead, or to dispatch him quickly with a stroke of the knife as soon as he was
cut down, and before his bowels were cut out. If the executioner was not paid
enough, or was vindictive towards the condemned man, he might deliberately prolong the execution.

As the international ideological struggle between Catholics and Protestants became increasingly bitter during the sixteenth century, a demand arose for more savage punishments of the traitors.
In 1584 the murderer of the Protestant leader, William the Silent, in the Netherlands was executed by prolonged torture, and after this had been widely publicized in London, the loyal English
Protestants wished to inflict similar punishments on Catholics who plotted to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. When Anthony Babington and his colleagues were convicted in 1586 of a conspiracy to murder
Elizabeth with the approval of Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth wished the judges to sentence the convicted traitors to be executed by such means as the Privy Council should determine, so that they
could be made to suffer a more painful death than hanging, drawing and quartering. She abandoned her demand when Lord Burghley convinced her that such a sentence would be illegal, and that if the
sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering was properly carried out, it would be very painful and prolonged. She soon changed her mind, as she so often did, and after she had been told of the
agony which Babington and three of the other traitors had suffered during their hanging, drawing and quartering, she ordered that the remaining traitors who were executed next day should be allowed
to hang until they were dead.

Noblemen, and other traitors who were allowed to be beheaded, were executed on Tower Hill, just outside the walls of the Tower on the western side. They had usually been imprisoned before their
execution in the Tower, and were allowed to walk the few yards to Tower Hill instead of being drawn there on a hurdle. The condemned traitor made a short speech to the crowd of spectators before he
was beheaded. He was expected, in this speech, to praise the King who had ordered his execution, to urge the people to be loyal subjects, and to acknowledge his
guilt; and the
great majority of condemned men made the speech that was expected of them. Most of them behaved with courage and dignity on the scaffold. They usually gave a small gift to the executioner, to
encourage him to do his job well and quickly. Sometimes the victim died at the first stroke of the axe, but sometimes two or three strokes were necessary.

Very occasionally, a condemned traitor was not beheaded on Tower Hill, but on the Tower Green within the Tower, in the presence of only a few selected officials, and not of the general public.
This privilege was extended to Henry VIII’s two Queens, Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard. Anne Boleyn was not beheaded by the public executioner with an axe, but with a stroke of a sword by
an executioner who had been specially brought from St Omer because he had experience of beheading with a sword. The old Countess of Salisbury, whose chief crime was to be the mother of Henry
VIII’s great enemy, the exiled Cardinal Pole, was beheaded on Tower Green in 1541, and so were Lady Jane Grey in 1554 and the Earl of Essex in 1601.