A Light to Live by

Late one summer afternoon, when I was perhaps 9 or 10, I found myself kneeling in the long grass of an Essex village common. It was towards the end of one of the chapel camping holidays we had each year, and with me were a dozen other children and those looking after us. I don’t recall the name of the village, only that we’d walked a long way, and fetched up there in the last of the day’s sun to remember the Colchester martyrs.

Hardly anyone thinks of them now, so that I find it hard to convey how significant a part of my youth was devoted to the commemoration of the 284 women and men burned alive during the reign of Mary Tudor. Essex saw so many pyres that it’s studded all over with modest granite memorials or blue plaques fixed to what are now cafés or shoe-shops, and I could often be found standing in my father’s shadow as he preached in their memory to Saturday shoppers passing by. There on the village green someone handed me a leaflet and asked me to read aloud. On the cover was a drawing of a slender wrist held by a gloved hand; beneath the wrist was a candle held close. I began to read a story familiar to me: the account given in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs of the torture of the Protestant Rose Allen. I remember how bright and still it was, and how relieved I felt that no one passing by wondered what we were doing, and drew near enough to hear the child reading how the young Rose, bringing a jug of water to her mother, was found by an interrogator in her own home; how he took her candle and moved it back and forth across her hand in the form of a cross until the tendons audibly cracked; and how later she thanked God she’d kept her temper, and not brought the jug down on her tormentor’s head. John Foxe was born in 1516, and after a studious youth took up a post as ‘Lecturer of Logic’ at Brasenose College, Oxford. He resigned on becoming a Protestant, pursuing his faith and conscience by writing in opposition to the death penalty for adultery, and on other contentious matters. On Mary Tudor’s accession to the throne, feeling his life under threat, he went into exile in Europe; by the time he returned to England many of his friends and companions had been burned at the stake. His Book of Martyrs stands alongside the King James Bible and the works of Shakespeare as among the most influential texts in the English language. Yet it also stands apart from any other, as being both a book and not a book; not quite history and not quite mere polemic. Even the title by which we know it is not its given name, and though it profoundly affected the development of the English consciousness, few – even among ardent bibliophiles – are familiar with its history. On its publication by John Day in 1563 it was the largest and most complex book yet to be produced in English. It was a single volume too large to be held in one hand, and contained 60 woodcut illustrations of appalling accuracy. Its title was long and sonorous after the fashion of the time: ‘The Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days, Touching Matters of the Church’ it begins, and continues for several clauses more. Dedicated to ‘Elizabeth I, Our Gracious Lady Now Reygning’, its purpose was to delineate the history of Christian martyrdom ‘from the yeare of our Lorde a thousand unto the tyme now present’. Church and public alike received the book with enthusiasm. Its ten-shilling price was roughly that of a month’s wages to an ordinary man, but nonetheless it sold; and the Church ordered that it should be chained beside the bible in cathedrals, and that Church officials should keep a copy at home for the betterment of servants. The source of its appeal is not difficult to discern. As a work of narrative it’s like nothing so much as the Canterbury Tales: Bishop Bonner, who carried out Mary Tudor’s orders with psychotic enthusiasm, is a villain to rival any found in literature, and its heroes – drawn largely from the labouring classes – are witty, brave, loving and lawed. There are moments of high drama and intense pathos, as friend is forced to turn on friend, or as illiterate spinners cheek their betters with memorized verses of scripture. The ghoulish appetite for horror narrative, and for all the diligent details of the torturer’s art, was never better satisfied than here. Foxe was unflinching in his recital of sufferings; in one account we learn how John Hooper ‘knocked his breast with his hands, until one of his arms fell off, then knocked still with the other, what time the fat, water, and blood dropped out at his fingers’ ends . . .’ For all its ghastly details the book was embraced as a devotional tool, inspiring a newly minted generation of Protestants to live more devoutly. The final words of the martyrs, often mingled with pleas for better wood to be brought to hasten the end, would have been especially moving: ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ That Foxe’s account includes those martyrs whose faith wavered as they saw sparks struck in the distance only intensifies their appeal. The moment Thomas Cranmer holds to the flames the hand that signed a recantation of his faith, so that the treacherous limb would burn before any other part of his body, rivals any scene in Shakespeare. The book was also an important political tool, and one enthusiastically employed by the Virgin Queen and her court. Here, in black and white, were the consequences of a Papist regime, from which all England had so narrowly escaped! If ever a book were to turn the citizenry in gratitude to its ruler, it was this. In response to its immediate popularity, Foxe produced a second and greatly expanded edition seven years later. The 1570 version ran to two volumes, and 2,300 folio pages. The politicization of the book may be traced in the gradual changing of its title: there was no mention of England in the first edition, but by the second readers were plainly informed they were to read of ‘thynges passed . . . specially in the Church of England’. By the third edition the intent to foment a loathing of the Catholic Church was still more plain, as the title refers explicitly to ‘tumults styred up by Romish prelates in the Church’. Foxe was exasperated by the public’s insistence on referring to his ‘Book of Martyrs’, whatever title he himself imposed. ‘I wrote no such booke bearying the title Booke of Martyrs,’ he wrote, but he was roundly ignored. The edition I have before me – a white paperback published by Oxford University Press, featuring exclusively the Marian martyrs – is of course entitled Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives. The reliability of the book as historical record is troublesome in the extreme, and a question unsettled despite centuries of academic consideration. Foxe was thorough in his use of sources, from Josephus and Bede to court transcripts, eyewitness testimony and letters in contemporary accounts. When challenged as to the truthfulness of his reports, he was not above removing whole portions of text from subsequent editions; at other times, convinced of his accuracy, he’d produce avalanches of supporting evidence with which to bury his accuser. Yet for all his evident attempts at compiling a historically accurate record, Foxe made not the least pretence at objectivity. He’s a decidedly present narrator, and his bitter loathing of the Catholic Church and his firm belief in what he considered Protestant truth is evident throughout. No wonder then that to English Catholics living under the restraints brought in by Elizabeth I – unable to hold public office, denied religious freedom, suffering punitive taxes – Foxe’s book was an act of devastating untruth. It was ‘a stinking dunghill’ of ‘a thousand lies’, despaired the priest Thomas Harding. Late into the eighteenth century it was credited with stirring anti-Catholic sentiment: the Catholic bishop John Milner in 1795 called it ‘that lying book’. It almost certainly played a role in developing that part of the English consciousness which even now seems to be permanently expecting the Spanish Inquisition: the suspicion that beyond the borders, on Europe’s rather more Papal shores, there wait ranks of purple-robed priests bent on persecuting the simple-hearted English peasantry. I’ve no way of knowing if UKIP’s headquarters conceals a copy of Foxe, but I would not be altogether surprised. Looking now at those iconic woodcuts – Rose Allen holding her jug of water; Cranmer putting his hand to the flame – it’s possible to conceive of Foxe’s work as having passed away in a merciful age of religious tolerance: a remarkable curiosity, but little more. But I remain in thrall to its stories, perhaps because – almost uniquely among the great works of British history – it dwells on the lives of the women and the common men. As a child, leafing with delicious horror through my father’s eighteenth-century edition, so big it barely fitted on my lap, I did not understand that I was reading not only about acts of profound religious faith, but of political radicalism. To defy the Church was to defy the State, and Foxe’s work provides a remarkable account of housewives and spinsters, illiterate boys and elderly men prepared to die rather than have their consciences dictated to by palace or parliament. When I think of Rose Allen now, she seems to me to stand beside Malala Yousafzai: an ordinary girl possessed of extraordinary courage in defiance of those who’d take away her right to freedom of thought, or to study in her own language. When I read of the poor illiterate woman known only as Prest’s wife, turned out of her home by her sons for failing to attend Mass and then burned for her scruples, I think of courageous women the world over moving quietly against repressive regimes. When the editor of a Paris satirical magazine was murdered with his staff, the fact that he was reported to have said ‘I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees’ made me think of the 19-year-old weaver’s apprentice from Brentwood, who died rather than give up the right to read the Bible in his own language, and work out his own faith. Foxe recounts the deaths of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, burned together in a ditch near Balliol College, Oxford. Wanting to give his friend courage as the wood was stacked around them, Latimer said: ‘Be of good comfort Master Ridley . . . we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ I hope it’s not too fanciful to think that the candle never did go out, not quite: perhaps it’s not wholly the flame they’d imagined, and perhaps it has at times burned low; but so long as we enjoy freedom of conscience, there’s enough light to live by.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 47 © Sarah Perry 2015