- It was for most people in England almost a miraculous deliverance. It was the sudden end
to a national adventure that had spent 20 years
curdling into a nightmare. It had started just as a row
between the king and the pope of the kind that was almost
routine in the Middle Ages. But for reasons that
were difficult to fathom for most English people, this had blown up into
an existential conflict. And within a few years Henry VIII's queen was being thrown out to
make way for a scheming girl from the French Court. And then it started to
bite in the parishes. Everyone in the country
was forced to swear an oath accepting the king's new marriage. Preachers started to insist
that the king was now head of something they were
calling the Church of England. Your parish priest started to mess with the order of service, so that the pope didn't get
mentioned in it anymore. Royal commissioners started nosing around asking how much money your church had. And then the monasteries were closed, and all their lands and
all their goods taken. And the shrines closed
and the relics smashed. And there was a new service in English, where suddenly you were supposed to pray against the detestable
enormities of the Bishop of Rome, and then the old king died. And you wondered if things
might go back to normal, but the new King Edward VI was just a boy, and there was no one to stop his council doing whatever they wanted. And so now the chanceries were closed down along with most of the
schools and the hospitals, and the commissioners were back,\ and they started stripping your church of everything of value, then
breaking down the rood lofts and the other statues. And they started messing with the coinage, so that suddenly your money seemed to be worth nothing at all. And then they replaced
the old service entirely with a new one in
English, where you mostly just had to sit and listen. And while a few fanatics and townspeople liked all of these changes, most of you were appalled and devastated, but what could you do? It's the king. And those who did speak
out, wound up in jail. And when the people in the North and then in Cornwall marched against it, they ended up with their heads in a noose. So all that you could do was endure it and pray that when the boy king grew up he'd put these heretics and
plunderers in their place. (sighs) But now the boy's turning 15, and it's starting to look like
he's one of the fanatics too. And there's gonna be no end to it. Old England is gone. And then come the new rumors. That the king's sick, that he's very sick, that the council have
declared that the throne isn't gonna pass to his sister, who anyone can see as the rightful heir, but it's gonna go to some cousin, who's married to the wicked
Duke of Northumberland's son, that when the king dies, God forgive him, The Lady Mary is standing up and isn't going to accept
this invented new queen. That crowds are coming
out for her everywhere. That even in London,
that Babylon of heresy, the people are turning on
the so-called Queen Jane. And before anyone knew
it, it was all over. The Lady Mary was queen. Bonfires were lit all over the country. And soon enough, the hopes were fulfilled, the mass was restored, the heretical bishops were driven out. Her cousin, Cardinal
Pole, came back to England after his 20 years in exile
as the pope's emissary and was soon made
archbishop of Canterbury. He led England back to where it should be at the heart of Europe,
reconciled to Rome, it's all over. And England's 20-year dalliance
with the horrors of heresy would surely teach her to be faithful to Mother Church forevermore. After all, it's not as
if England had ever shown any signs of this Romo-skepticism before. This was the country which
through the Middle Ages had been proudly, maybe
inordinately proud, that it'd been converted
to the Christian faith by the initiative of the
Pope Gregory the Great, who had famously seen blonde
English boys in a slave market and had been told that they were Angli, and said that they were not
Angli, but Angeli, angels. The English had been
Rome's angels ever since, or close enough. The pope had given William
the Conqueror his crown, had made Henry II Lord of Ireland, and English kings had been
famously loyal in return, from Richard the Lionheart on Crusades, to Richard II, standing
up for the pope in Rome, when the French set up their
own puppet alternative Avignon. Even Henry VII, as a young man, had fought for the pope's
League against his enemies and had written against
that heretic Martin Luther, none of the anti-papal nonsense that you heard from the French. The only English king who'd
ever fallen out with Rome was King John, and everybody knew that he was a wicked man
who'd murdered his cousin and was brought low in the end. It was in England's blood and soil to be loyal Catholic Christians, faithful sons and daughters of the pope and soldiers of Rome. And now, at last, the madness was over, and it could be so again. All of which is to say
that when Mary Tudor unexpectedly became queen
in the summer of 1553, she had a fair wind behind her. She was popular and she was legitimate. It was true, she was female. But then so would almost all of the serious alternative candidates. In fact, her gender was
going to be a serious, maybe even a fatal political weakness. The problem was not so much
being a queen in itself, but securing her succession. The only good route to do that was to marry and have a child. In a world where it was uniformly assumed that wives should be
obedient to their husbands, for a reigning queen
to marry was a problem. None of the queens who reigned in England or Scotland in the 16th century
found a good solution to it. But she probably found
the least bad solution, at least in principle. She married a foreigner, Philip of Spain, who took the title of King and has left us with coins like these. You can see the two
heads facing one another and the faded words, Phillip
and Mary, around the edge. But thanks to his absence
for much of the reign, he's not nearly as
dominant in political life, as he might've been. And a well-negotiated marriage treaty preserved England's independence
to an impressive degree. If it wasn't for the fact that
she was a 38-year-old woman with a history of gynecological ill health and a mostly absentee husband. It might all have worked out fine, but in fact, of course,
although she was twice convinced that she was pregnant, she was not. And she died childless,
most likely of a cancer that may well have been implicated in her fertility problems, a little over five years into her reign. And the bad news for those
who'd celebrated her accession with such joy and relief was that it was all about to start again, because her heir was her
surviving half-sister Elizabeth, a Protestant, and it was all reversed. The pope was thrown out. The churches once again stripped, the English service brought back, England's Catholic Restoration
hadn't been the end of a heretical nightmare,
it was a brief respite from what was going to be a new world. And so for a long time, these five years of Catholic England restored have been treated by historians as a curiosity, a
throwback, a doomed attempt to turn back the clock. But as the records have been re-examined over the past few decades, we've come to a rather different
view of Mary's short reign and of her doomed restoration. And in summary, that view is
that right up to the point when it was cut short by her death, the effort was going pretty well. The parish churches, ravaged
after the destruction under Henry and Edward,
were being rebuilt. There was a lot to do. There was a lot of make-do and mend, like this example from the parish church of Ludham in Norfolk. You can see how there
should be a life-size rood, a crucifix on top of that screen. Those take time, cost money,
so instead they've popped up this board across the chancel arch and just painted a
crucifixion scene onto it. This sort of thing testifies both to how much damage had been
done and to the pious ingenuity of the people who are doing their best to make it good in short order. And while the parishes are rebuilt, Cardinal Pole, the queen's
cousin, her right-hand man imposes new discipline on his clergy and is providing them
with training materials and preaching resources. And there's even an artistic
and aesthetic revival. One of the finest composers
of the day, Orlando di Lasso was brought over from Flanders. In 1554, he wrote a motet
in honor of Cardinal Pole and his work of bringing England to repentance and reconciliation, a motet that was sung
in St. Paul's Cathedral at the service of reconciliation between England and the papacy. Let's listen to it. (choir singing in Latin) The text speaks of England's
tears of repentance there at the end, but it also anticipates something that hadn't quite yet started, but which everybody knew at
this point was about to begin. I mean the auspicious fires. Because for all the creativity of Mary and Pole's Restoration, the vision that's
conjured up by that music, they had a problem. A vocal, committed and
well-placed minority of the queen's subjects had fervently embraced the heresies that her father and her
brother had promulgated. If a truly Catholic England
was going to be rebuilt, these people would have to be dealt with. And so Mary didn't merely
throw those bishops and preachers out of office. She had them arrested and she
restored the old heresy laws, which allowed unrepentant heretics to be executed by burning. Pursuing these people with
the full rigor of the law was not the only option open to her. Some of her Spanish advisors, despite their reputation
for inquisitorial cruelty, advocated caution. One of them said it
was better for heretics to live and to be converted, he feared that the persecution
might stir up trouble. It should be said that
that was not a moral stance against the persecution as such. It was a tactical preference, but as the motet indicates, burning heretics was a moral stance. This was a matter of principle,
indeed of public safety, something to be applauded,
not to be ashamed of. It was the lily-livered pragmatists who proposed turning a blind eye to the evils in their midst, who seemed like the political cynics. But in the end, pragmatism and principle pointed in the same direction. Committed Protestants
were a small minority of the English Church and
people, but they were energetic, they were vociferous
and they were implacable in their opposition to the regime. They simply had to be
silenced, and that was hard. They could be driven out of the country. The regime certainly
allowed people to escape, when it could've arrested them, but exile did no more
than muffle their voices. Being in exile was certainly very hard, but the exiles continued
to be able to draw income from their property in England. The regime tried to stop it and failed. They settled in half a dozen
German and Swiss cities and started to crank
out printed propaganda, which was smuggled back into the country. And if exile failed to silence them, imprisonment was not much better. Tudor prisons were notoriously porous, principally because they were funded by prisoners paying the costs
of their own incarceration, which meant that they virtually became their jailers' employers. It therefore only took a
little bribery to ensure that prisoners could
send and receive letters or receive visitors, or even
make short trips outside. Even the most closely guarded prisoners managed at times to
obtain writing materials and to smuggle out letters. The prison writings of
the Marian Protestants filled several volumes in
their modern additions. A testimony both to their quantity, and also to how their words were cherished by their fellow believers outside. So if neither exile nor prison
would shut these people up, what other option was there? Another line of reasoning
led in the same direction. English heretics had a long tradition of breaking under pressure. Medieval English people
arrested for heresy, of whom they were quite a few,
had generally been timorous, virtually never persisting
in their errors, when recantation could
have saved their lives. The Protestants who'd run ahead
of Henry VIII's Reformation, and had been arrested, had
been only a little braver. A few had stood firm, but many more, including some very prominent people, had tried to negotiate
their way out of trouble with varying degrees of
success and of principle. Mary's regime plainly expected that this pattern was gonna resume. King Edwards' chief minister,
the Duke of Northumberland, when he was facing death, at
the beginning of the reign, followed the script precisely, abjectly recanted his Protestantism in an attempt to save his
life vainly, as it happened, since in his case the charge was treason rather than heresy. Several others were more successful, including famously one
of King Edward's tutors. If a large number of
others had joined them, matters would've turned
out very differently. Recantation was the best
possible outcome for the regime. Purity of doctrine is preserved. It's a propaganda coup, it's a public humiliation
for the Protestants and not least a soul is
snatched from the jaws of hell. If you're one of the bishops who is leading the anti-heresy campaign, then you might agree that
a firm line is necessary, but there is no escaping for the fact that for you as a Christian minister, to consign one of your own
flock to death by burning, represents a pretty
disastrous pastoral failure. And so the regime expects recantations. It wants them, it works
hard to secure them. Very senior members of
the government spent days and weeks on end debating with prisoners, trying to win them round
or to wear them down. And yet, against all expectations, many, most Protestants held firm,
especially the leaders. Under Henry VIII things
had been different. The king's policy was ambiguous. The evangelicals' own
beliefs were ill-defined. Now things were plainer
and the divide was sharper. The exiles exhorted those
in England to stand firm, prisoners wrote to each
other with the same message. And of course, once the
executions had begun, they set a precedent which
provided another motive to remain steadfast. The regime would undoubtedly
have preferred it if Protestants had, as
their advisors said, lived and been converted. But in the end, they decided that those who would not convert could not be allowed to live. The first burning of the
Bible translator in London, Minister John Rogers took place
on the 4th of February '55, a series of others followed. In that first year of executions, almost all of those who died were the leading preachers,
ministers and theologians, amongst them four bishops. The Protestant cause
was being decapitated. The last of this wave of leaders was the most prominent of all. Thomas Cranmer, Pole's predecessor as Archbishop of Canterbury, who after a long and difficult process, which I'll be coming back to shortly, went to the fire in Oxford in March '56. The end of that first
phase of the persecution marked a further debate
within the government. Some wanted to leave it at
that, for a time at least, to see what happened now
that the head of the snake had been cut off, but Mary and Cardinal Pole, and their most energetic
enforcer Bishop Bonner of London, decided to press their advantage. The symbolic purge now
extended to the dead. German Protestants who'd
taken refuge in England under Edward VI and who died there, were exhumed and their bodies burned. And as for those who were still alive, the focus shifted to those
who gathered in secret to hear and spread the word. These conventicles were
correctly seen by the regime as critical to the Protestant resistance. The attack on these groups tended to produce mass executions, as whole groups were arrested. And so the rate of deaths climbed, peaking in the summer of 1557. And from then on, it began slowly to fall. But the burnings continued
until the very end of the reign. Three men and two women
were burned together in Canterbury on the
15th of November 1558, two days before the queen herself died. The exact total number of the victims of this purge is disputed. The best guess is something in the order of 290 people burned alive, plus another dozen or
two who died in prison. And it should be said, at
least 800 who went into exile. By modern standards of mass killing, that may sound positively
restrained, but in its own time, this was an unusually
sharp bout of persecution. Not off the scale, the numbers
executed in the Netherlands in the same period are comparable, but no one was doing much more than this. Still, atrocities are
never just about numbers. The question is what
these executions mean. And here we need to
confront an awkward truth, which is that as a matter of policy, there's every reason to
think that this was working. The dead preachers,
bishops and theologians may have been remembered as
martyrs, but there is no denying that they had been successfully silenced. There may have been more groups
of clandestine Protestants than the regime expected, but the fact that the numbers
are starting to tail off suggests that they're not unlimited. Religious persecution sometimes works, especially when it's part of a
wider program of Reformation. And that's what seems to be the case here. If Mary had lived longer, if
the policy had had more time, well, what would have happened? English Protestantism
wouldn't have been eradicated quickly or easily. They weren't numerous, but they were determined
and well-connected. The executions would've continued for the foreseeable future. The regime might have had
to become more ruthless. There's a number of
cases from Mary's reign of Protestants who were saved
from arrest or condemnation by legal niceties or the squeamishness of particular officials,
a little less due process and a little more inquisitorial zeal might have been necessary. But what we're talking about is how long the inevitable victory would have taken, and how complete it would have been. There would have been some bloodshed, but probably fewer deaths than in Elizabeth I's
campaign against Catholics and her suppression of
Catholic rebellions, certainly far fewer than
in the religious war which England's unfinished
Protestant Reformation plunged the country into in the 1640s. One sign of the coming victory
was that already in the 1550s the Protestants were
splintering under pressure. The exile communities fell out
viciously amongst themselves between moderates and hardliners. The hardliners themselves split between mere radicals and
actual revolutionaries. If everything had gone according to plan, that's the way that English Protestantism would have faded from view, with their hands on one another's throats. But, already in the '50s
there are also signs that not everything is working. The Protestants weren't going quietly. I've already mentioned
that dismaying insistence on standing firm and dying
rather than recanting. And what made this worse
was that executions were like most criminal
justice in this era, act of public theater, intended to have a salutary effect on the spectators. Trouble is if you put
your enemies on stage, it's hard to guard against the possibility of them stealing the show. And Protestants who were at the stake, and their supporters gathered for them, did their best to rest these
events to their own purposes. If prisoners, instead of being penitent or showing obvious fear, showed dignity, prayed for the queen and for one another, forgave their accusers, spoke calmly and
convincingly of their faith, died in apparent peace with
Christ's name on their lips, they could seize the moral high ground, even as the flames rose. It was certainly hard when you had seen a performance like that to deny that the Protestants
were at least sincere. And in some cases,
depending on the victims, this could be pretty effective. The English are used to
burning heretics occasionally. This has been happening
for 100 years or more, but they expected heretics
to be opinionated peasants with eccentric views. Bishops, scholars, priests in
a very hierarchical society, that's a different game. There's also a definite
squeamishness about burning women. Around a fifth of those
executed under Mary are women, especially when you
see whole congregations beginning to be rounded up. The execution of teenagers or old men is also liable to stir up on these. Don't get this out of proportion, what we have is worry about
some unrested executions. We don't have incidents like those in contemporary France or the Netherlands, where condemned heretics
were broken out of prison or even rescued from the stake by mobs. The worry seems to have been
much more about small groups of Protestant agitators
showing up to cause trouble, than the mass of the crowd being won over. That applied even to the most vividly theatrical execution of all. The event, which was probably Mary's single worst tactical mistake. Archbishop Cranmer, the architect of Edward VI's religious policy, creator of the "Book of Common Prayer" is the regime's prize prisoner. His trial for heresy is a
long, drawn out process. And during 1555 kept in isolation
under relentless pressure, Cranmer began to crumble. He'd never been as combative
as some of his co-religionists and his Protestantism
had always being built around his conviction of the
monarch's God-given authority. Now his queen is commanding him to return to Roman obedience. Over the winter of 1555-6 he
signed a series of documents, each one recanting more
unambiguously than before. The regime was on the verge
of a spectacular coup. Cranmer publicly renouncing his heresies. And the opportunity is thrown away. And it seems thrown away
by the queen herself. Mary is determined that
Cranmer should die. Her loathing for him is maybe
entirely understandable. It's Cranmer, who 20 years earlier had pronounced her parents' marriage void and had led England into schism. But as a penitent heretic,
as a strict master of law, his life ought to have been spared. The decision to kill him anyway looks unpleasantly like
personal vengeance. It may be that the manifest injustice of the sentence changed his mind. Maybe the knowledge that
his death was unavoidable removed the temptation to try to buy his life with recantations. Anyway, he returns to his Protestantism in the most decisive fashion possible, declaring at the stake
that his right hand, which had signed the
recantations would burn first. He held it steadily in the flames until the smoke overcame him. It was the single most vivid and most memorable
demonstration of sincerity at any of the executions. The regime's obvious confusion, as it tried and failed to come up with a
strategy to kill the story is matched only by the
relief and enthusiasm with which Protestant
propagandists seized on it. Because, of course, the battle for control of this theater of execution didn't end when the fire was put out. Since the beginning of the Reformation, Protestants had been claiming that executed heretics were martyrs, were witnesses to the faith, a momentous category that
put them in succession to the martyrs of the early church. Their propagandists celebrated,
burnished these stories. Images like this, this is the front cover of the first English Protestant
martyr book from 1546, shows this lady Anne Askew, dressed not in normal
16th century clothing, but in quasi-Roman robes and carrying a martyr's palm of victory. And notice, curled around her feet, the dragon with the human face and the pope's crown on his head. When Mary becomes queen, Orlande de Lassus wasn't the only one to anticipate that the fires would soon start up again. Protestants in exile were
celebrating their martyrs well before anyone was actually killed. In particular, a young
English scholar in exile, in the Swiss city of Basel, a man by the name of John Foxe, took up the mantle of
his mentor, John Bailey, or through the book we were
looking at a moment ago, and began planning a
much more ambitious work of martyrological history. The first versions he published in Latin, first in 1554, another one in '59, are just ancient history,
claiming the heretics to the Middle Ages for
the Protestant cause. With a Swiss friend, he was working on a giant Latin martyr book that would bring together
Protestant stories from across Europe. But then Mary's death
brings him back to England and changes the nature of his project. He was urged to produce a history specifically of England's
martyrs, and to do it in English. He's enough of a scholar to
feel that publishing in English is crass pandering to the mass market. When he sends the finished
book to his old Oxford college, he sends it with a covering
letter in Latin of course, apologizing for having dumbed-down. Still, he did it. This is the famous title page of the first edition from
1563, it's worth a closer look. So first, the title. The book is uniformly known
as "Foxe's Book of Martyrs", but he actually calls it "Acts and Monuments of These
Latter and Perilous Days." So, it's both remembering
that the danger has now passed for the time being, but with that phrase, latter and perilous days, implying that these executions are one
of the signs of the times, the nearing end of the world, and therefore, if there's a brief lull in the persecution now,
no one should imagine that their troubles are over. And specifically, if you
look further down the title, he's remembering the cruelties inflicted by the Romish prelates,
especially in this realm of England and Scotland. There's of course no such place as this realm of England and Scotland. There are two kingdoms
which are ancient enemies and have only very, very recently
been brought into alliance by their shared commitment to
the Protestant Reformation. In fact, there are very few
Scottish martyrs in his story. Foxe has some trouble making good on that part of his promise, but he's determined to
assert that united identity for the whole island. And he also, as you can
see, takes the story back to the year of our Lord, 1000. That's not an arbitrary round
number as a starting point. It's the date, according to one reading of the New Testament, when
the devil was unchained. Foxe and others linked that
to the longstanding tale of how Pope Sylvester II, who
was Pope in the year 1000, was a sorcerer who'd conjured the devil. And this gives rise to the notion that ever since then the Roman Church had in fact been controlled
and directed by Satan himself. That's just the title, but look at what's going on around it. At the top, of course,
you've got Christ in glory, emphasizing, as any good Protestant would, that God is absolutely sovereign, that nothing takes place
without His permission, that all the forces of evil
have only as much power as He chooses to allow
them, and that in the end, they will all be trampled
beneath His feet. And the angels on His
left and on His right proclaim His glory. But below that, the stories diverge. At His right hand is the true church who proclaim God's mercy. And at His left the false church, the church of Antichrist, whose
fate declares God's justice. And so on this side, you
have the martyrs in heaven, again with their trademark
palms, praising God. And here, the persecutors
in hell, tormented by demons are also praising Him, because the fact of their punishment demonstrates His justice. Now if we move down the page, we see again the same
parallel pair of stories, moving from the church
triumphant in heaven to the church militant on earth. The martyrs praise Him as
the flames lick around them. Whereas on this side,
amongst the false church, they're idolaters and blasphemers. And here they're praising not God, but this piece of bread in the Mass. They're worshiping the
bread, as if it were God. For Protestants, that's
the most extreme blasphemy. And then, at the bottom, we've got images of the two churches in their essence. So in the true church, the
preacher who, as you can see, is bearded like Cranmer himself, none of your shaven-headed
and tonsured priests here, leads his people in
understanding the word of God. The women have got their
Bibles open on their laps, so they can follow him. There are no idols. You do have the anti-idol in the corner. The Hebrew letters of the name of God. This is the closest Protestants
will let themselves come to a visual depiction of the sacred. Whereas in the false church, on this side, the women click clack on their rosaries, instead of reading anything. And most of the people are not listening to a preacher at all, but are going on this idolatrous
procession to the shrine. And the Bishop here in his lordliness, has his minions carry a canopy
over him to assert his pomp. So this book does much more than just assemble the stories of the martyrs of Mary's reign. It weaves them into a
narrative, a single sacred story of which all of them are examples. And it's a monumental book,
as the title suggests. It's deliberately vast, 1,800 folio pages in this first edition, including reams of original documents. Foxe was a careful and
a precise historian. He certainly selects his material, and he will deliberately suppress things that don't fit his story,
but he doesn't make stuff up. And he also doesn't accept
what he's told uncritically. His unpublished papers
are full of materials, which were sent to him, and
which he thought too dubious or problematic to include. There were, nevertheless,
quite a few mistakes in this first edition. Most of them pretty minor, one
or two more embarrassing ones like the tale of the
persecuting Catholic magistrate, who, as he says, by God's providence died a horrible death soon afterwards, but who, when the book was
published indignantly protested that he was alive and well
and living in Suffolk. (audience laughing) The criticism, which
these mistakes attracted led Foxe to redouble his efforts. The second edition, which
appeared seven years later in 1570 is a thorough rewrite, much
more meticulously researched. Now running to over 2,300 pages. And as you can see in the
ominous change to the title, it is now the First Volume. Two volumes of this
covering two million words, two and a half times
the length of the Bible. And now, instead of
starting at the year 1000, it's taken back to the
time of the first apostles and to the Roman persecutions. One continuous story of the
sufferings of Christ's people at the hands of Antichrist's minions. There is a bitter irony to this book, which is that John Foxe
himself was not in the business of fermenting nationalism
and religious war. He believed something which in this period was very unusual, eccentric even. He believed that killing people
for their religious beliefs, any religious beliefs, was wrong. He was very clear that
Catholicism was a demonic plot, but when Elizabeth I's government started executing Catholic priests, Foxe did his best to intervene to stop it, to no avail, of course. Having started as a
cheerleader for Elizabeth, he becomes increasingly disillusioned. The later additions of his book
are progressively more open about celebrating figures
who opposed priestly tyranny and even those who taught pacifism. And while his book is in English
and chiefly about England, he never lost the
international perspective of those years in Basel. The book always includes accounts of other parts of the world. England's story is presented
as part of that wider tale. He genuinely did not intend
his book to become a manifesto for violent religious nationalism, and yet that's what happened. The book itself is republished four times in Foxe's lifetime,
regularly thereafter, updated editions keep appearing at moments of hair-trigger
religious tension. In 1641, as England is teetering
on the brink of civil war. In 1684, awaiting the accession
of a Catholic King James II, publishers rush out new editions of Foxe, just in case anyone had
forgotten what Catholics do, and why good Englishman should fight them. But of course, these are huge books beyond most people's
means, prestige projects and printed in small numbers. The real achievement was
to get something like this into the nation's bloodstream. And that happens in two main ways. One of them is the cut-down versions, the miniature Foxes, Foxe's greatest hits, which summarize the most
famous and compelling stories and promise readers that
there was a great deal more where that came from. You didn't need to know
too much about the quality in order to feel the weight
of those two fat volumes. And the book itself is
a more public phenomenon than we might imagine. It's not the case that a
copy of it was made available in every parish church in England. You'll still sometimes
see that claim made. It can't have been, there
were never enough copies printed for that, but plenty of churches did acquire them. They're kept in the building, on chains, so that anyone can come and read them. The Bishop of London ordered that all 100 of the
city's parishes buy it, partly 'cause John Foxe
is an old friend of his and he's trying to help
him balance his books. Reading the book is a social,
not a private activity. There are some hints that parish ministers actually read Foxe's book
aloud during services in place of a sermon. Francis Drake took a copy with him on his circumnavigation in the late 1570s and read from it to his men on-board ship, reminding them when they're
on the other side of the world who and what the Spanish really were. Fathers read it to their families and to their servants
during household prayers, the full book, if they're wealthy, or one of these abridged
versions, if they're not. And even if you couldn't read, and there was no one
who could read to you, there's the most compelling
aspect of Foxe's book, the pictures. Jotted all through the book
are these little images, all of them very like, I needed to include that one on the right, because of the bit with the dog. All of these very much like each other. And in fact, sometimes there's repetition. You know, the same one is
reused to be somebody else. But generally they're distinct enough that their repetition is
like a set of hammer blows. Again and again and again, the saints lifting their
eyes and hands to heaven, as the flames take them. And occasionally, you
have these more sumptuous full-page illustrations. A lot of the surviving copies
don't have these anymore, because people cut them out
and stuck them on their walls, sometimes even colored them in. Some of them reinforced a
particularly striking tale, like maybe the most notorious
single atrocity of all. This is a case, not from England, but from the Island of Guernsey,
a separate jurisdiction, whose legal structures
were less well-developed. This would certainly have
been illegal in England. And I like to think it
wouldn't have happened. Anyway, according to the story Foxe told, and he seems not to have made this up. He certainly wasn't
challenged over it by people who would've been in a
position to prove him wrong. According to the story that we have, Perotine Massey was pregnant
when she was arrested and condemned for heresy in 1556. Her pleas to be allowed
to deliver her baby before execution were rejected. And she went into labor
at the stake itself, gave birth and tried to
pass the newborn baby out of the flames to
safety, only for the child to be thrown back into the
fire to die with its mother. But we also have illustrations of the major figures in the story. Bishop Bonner of London,
who becomes in Foxe's hands a pantomime villain of cruelty. Here lasciviously whipping
a suspect in his garden. This is so shocking that even his own men are hiding their faces in shame. Or Bonner, again, holding
a suspected heretic's hand in a candle flame to give him
a taste of the fire to come. And that's a deliberate nod ahead to the most iconic
story of all, of course, Cranmer holding his own hand in the fire. I don't intend to put
too much weight on Foxe. The persecution under Mary
would certainly have been seared onto Protestant England's memory anyway. The orders of service which
Elizabeth's Church issued at the beginning of the reign, avoid any kind of reference
to recent history, but increasingly they begin
to mention the horrible fires that England had been delivered from, look back to the sharp trial, which God made of us in
the reign of Queen Mary and praise God for how
Elizabeth's succession had saved her people from tyranny. By 1585 public prayers were recalling the late days of persecution, when the bodies of the saints
were burned in our streets. Foxe wasn't the only writer
to remember the martyrs. They left plenty of friends
and pupils behind them who were ready to treasure their memory. Foxe himself was involved in a project to collect and publish
their prison writings. Regardless of the source of the stories, they seeped into the
nation's consciousness. If not everybody could
have or had a copy of Foxe, those who did have it treasured it. One pious merchant from Exeter claimed that he'd read it
cover to cover seven times. A reading group in Essex in the 1580s met regularly to read
from Foxe to one another. Puritans did it, but so did advocates of the more ceremonial Protestantism that would eventually become Anglicanism. The famous community at Little
Gidding in Cambridgeshire heard Foxe's book read to them weekly. One preacher, recommending
Foxe's book to his flock, said that the very pictures
of the fires and martyrs cannot but warm thee. And it seems to have been true. It warmed people, of course, with indignation against Catholics. But, if you'll forgive the term, it also fired their imaginations. To read these stories in
a time of ease and safety was to engage in a kind
of pious fantasizing. To ask yourself if it were
me, would I stand firm? Would I really be faithful? Would I have the courage to
hold my hand in the fire? In the 17th century, one woman remembered how as a seven-year-old girl, "I began to examine myself on this manner. "What wouldst thou do if
thou shouldst be tempted "to deny Christ and be called on "to suffer for his sake as
some of thy kindred were "in Queen Mary's time?" Well, evidence we have suggests that she was by no means
alone in that thought. The burnings were real. The memories were authentic,
for the most part. The admiration for the martyrs heroism and the persecutor's cruelty was, with all the contextualization
in the world, justified. As so often with atrocity
stories, the damage came from how they shaped the
way that they saw the world around them in their own time. Because new stories kept coming, which could be made to
fit into the narrative. The Rebellion of the
Northern Earls in 1569, the pope's excommunication
of the queen in 1570, the St. Bartholomew's
Day massacre in 1572, the Sack of Antwerp by
Spanish troops in 1576, the Spanish Armada in 1588,
the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, the crushing of the
Protestants of Bohemia in 1620, the Irish Rebellion in 1641. It's all a single story once
viewed through this lens, a story of Catholic cruelty. And it tells you, as plain as
the pictures in Foxe's book, that this is what will befall England, if just one of this battalion
of plots is ever to succeed. In 1617, an eight-year-old
girl in Northamptonshire, heard her elders talk
about worrying foreign news and a possible invasion. "I will remember", she later recalled, "that at this time hearing
some talk of their cruelty "and hearing of the joys of those martyrs "that suffered for the
Protestant religion, "I was very apprehensive
of their blessedness." In a little girl that produces nothing worse than nightmares. In her elders, those sorts of fears, those convictions so firmly
rooted as to be truisms of what Catholics are, those things lead to preemptive actions. This is what draws England into wars in the Netherlands and in France, what drives Elizabeth I,
much against her instincts, to cut off her Scottish cousin's head. And they do more than anything
else to drive the wars, which engulf first Scotland, then Ireland, and lastly England in 1630s and '40s. It's only at that point
in the mid 17th century that Queen Mary I has given
the nickname Bloody Mary. Earlier generations were
as yet too respectful of their monarchs to openly blame her. But the name has stuck
and it's now indelible. So that is how the English
learn to hate Catholics. And it was a lesson well learned. Fear of Catholics was used to
justify systematic massacres and mass expulsion of Irish Catholics. It drove a decade long political crisis in the '60s, '70s and '80s, based on the fear of what another
Catholic monarch might do. It sparked a grimly farcical panic about an entirely invented
popish plot in 1678-81, which resulted in at least 22 executions. A century on, an attempt to
loosen anti-Catholic laws in 1778-80 led to mass demonstrations, the so-called Gordon Riots,
eventually put down by the army with a death toll almost
equaling Mary's body count. Further attempts to relax the laws caused paralyzing political
crises in 1801 and 1829, in both cases, bringing
down prime ministers. The restoration of the Catholic hierarchy, the bishops in England in 1850,
provoked a wave of protest including a grand anti-popish procession against the papal aggression. In Victorian times, there was
a rash of monuments erected to the Marian martyrs
like this one in Oxford, and this ironic one in my
old hometown of Gloucester to Bishop Hooper, who was burned there. Bishop Hooper regarded his bishop's robes as idolatrous rags, and he only wore them under excruciating pressure. But the evangelical Victorian Anglicans who wanted to commemorate him as a martyr did not share those prejudices. And as ever, memorialization
is about the needs of the people who are doing it, not the people who are being remembered. In the 20th and 21st centuries,
this legacy of prejudice has been at its most
explicit in Northern Ireland, where loyalists marching banners still regularly feature
the Marian burnings. But those of us on this side of the water shouldn't kid ourselves
that we're free of it. British law still requires the
monarch to be a Protestant. Until 2011, the monarch was
banned from marrying a Catholic. Britain has not yet had a
Catholic prime minister. Tony Blair converted to Catholicism shortly after he left office in 2007. His inclination to
convert was an open secret well before that, but he plainly felt that to convert while in office would risk stirring up
troubles best left to slumber. The sexual abuse scandals,
which have broken over the Catholic Church
in the 21st century are appalling in their own right. But to understand the
way in which that story has gripped the wider culture, while comparable scandals
in other religious or secular institutions have not, we need to appreciate that
this is still, even now, the way atrocity stories work. They take facts and they give them meaning by weaving them into a longer story. The abuse scandals have
fallen on still fertile soil. They fed long-established
patterns of anti-Catholicism in societies that are still primed to hear tales of a cruel hierarchy, whose religion is a cloak for
its authoritarian instincts and its brutal lusts. Of course, both the Marian persecution and the modern abuse crisis are real. And both of them are
appalling crimes in any age. We don't need to doubt
that to also recognize a centuries-old, only half
acknowledged fact of life that in much of the English-speaking world anti-Catholicism is the
last respectable prejudice. Thank you. (audience applauding)
