Análisis térmico de la envolvente

Mary’s Catholic Restoration is, understandably, best known for the burnings. The execution of nearly 300 Protestants between 1555 and 1558 has forever scarred the memory of her reign. The statute De heretico comburendo (‘on the burning of heretics’), originally passed in 1401 to provide for the punishment of Lollards, and used against Protestants by Henry VIII, had been repealed by the Duke of Somerset in 1547. It was restored to the statute book in 1554, after an initial defeat in the House of Lords, with effect from 20 January 1555. Throughout 1554, with the connivance and perhaps at times the encouragement of the government, diehard Protestants had been fleeing the country in their hundreds in order to practise their religion freely abroad. Now, those who had remained or had been kept behind were in peril of their lives, as the renewed law took immediate effect. The first victim was John Rogers, a leading Protestant preacher who had published an edition of the Bible back in 1537. Rogers had been in custody for most of Mary’s reign, and was now hurriedly tried, convicted and sentenced. He went to the stake at Smithfield on 4 February 1555. A series of high-profile victims later that year included the former bishops John Hooper (sent to die at Gloucester on 9 February), Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley (burned together at Oxford on 16 October).

Although it is arguable that the burnings made rather less of an impact at the time than they have done subsequently, the fact remains that they represented systematic repression on a scale unprecedented and unparalleled in English history.

Much is debated about this tragic episode, chiefly whether it did more harm or good to the Marian regime, and whether it was likely to achieve the destruction of English Protestantism. Perhaps the most interesting and obscure question about the burnings, though, is who was ultimately responsible for them. John Foxe, who singlehandedly shaped the historical image of the reign as we know it, had no doubts. Enthralled by that passionate devotion to monarchy which marks so much of the politics of Tudor England and the theology of early English Protestantism, Foxe exonerated Mary herself and placed the blame squarely on her bishops, men such as Reginald Pole of Canterbury, John Christopherson of Chichester, and above all Edmund Bonner of London. But whereas Foxe himself saw all those involved in the persecutions as equally guilty of shedding the blood of innocents, the evidence he himself provides shows that responsibility was by no means so evenly distributed. Those three dioceses of London, Canterbury and Chichester in fact witnessed by far the greater part of the burnings. Yet it is far from clear that this reflected the bloodthirstiness of their bishops. Reginald Pole was not, as far as can be ascertained, a vindictive man.

Even Foxe says very little against him. John Christopherson was a careful scholar, and although this is no guarantee against psychopathic cruelty, there is no reason to

Opposite: Title page from the 1570 edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (usually known as his ‘Book of Martyrs’), famous for its detailed accounts of the Protestant victims of Mary’s reign. On the left martyrs, burning at the stake, praise God while, on the right, monks kneel at the Mass – which Foxe believed to be idolatry.

conclude that he was any more or less keen on the execution of heretics than any of his episcopal colleagues.

In the case of Bonner, a vein of personal animus may have been present. Bonner had spent much of the previous reign in prison, and under Henry had been vexed for years by the advance of Protestantism in his diocese. He might well have rejoiced in the unexpected chance to repay his enemies, and Foxe relates a number of anecdotes which suggest that, in his case, it was often personal rather than merely judicial. Yet, as Eamon Duffy has recently shown from evidence reported by Foxe, even Bonner was driven on by orders from above. When a critical crowd gathered at one burning, Bonner produced a letter from the queen ordering him to stop procrastinating and get on with the job. The huge proportion of heretics burned in London reflects not simply the zeal of his diocesan staff, but the fact that many heretics were brought

The burning of Bishop John Hooper at Gloucester, 9 February 1555, from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.

to London for trial and execution. This was no doubt because, as London was manifestly the capital of English Protestantism, it was the place where the deterrent effect of the burnings would be maximised. If burning was largely pour encourager les autres, those others were more numerous in London than anywhere else.

In the end, the burnings were simply the execution of the law of the land. That law, reinstated by Mary, reflected the widespread sense that heresy was a heinous offence. The notion that national unity presupposed religious uniformity was a commonplace that hardly anyone thought to challenge. There seems no reason to doubt, however, that the chief responsibility for the vigour and intensity of the repression lay with Mary. Even her husband is reported to have advised more moderation, and to have been ignored. Mary displayed a common Tudor trait in her somewhat self-righteous, legalistic and implacable rigorism. Mercy was a rare virtue among the Tudors. Justice, or what passed for it, was more their line, and when their consciences were clear they were particularly dangerous. In this case, Mary’s sense of justice rested in turn upon a sense of duty: the sixteenth-century Catholic

Edmund Bonner (Bishop of London, 1539–59) as Protestants saw him thanks to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Here he is shown tormenting a captive Protestant by applying a candle to his hand. As around sixty out of nearly 300 Protestant martyrs under Queen Mary were burned in London, Bonner understandably held a prominent place in Protestant demonology. Yet he was also active in some of the more positive aspects of the restoration of Catholicism, and in 1559 he led Catholic resistance to Elizabeth’s alteration of religion. He was then consigned to the Marshalsea prison, where he died in 1569.

Church left monarchs in no doubt as to where their duty lay with regard to heresy.

We should see her policy as deriving from a sense of duty rather than from personal vindictiveness. Her reintroduction of the law against heresy was part and parcel of her generally conservative and restorationist policy. As things had been, so should they be once again.

Only in the case of Thomas Cranmer do we see Mary settling a personal score.

Cranmer, in pronouncing the sentence which annulled her mother’s marriage to Henry VIII, and later in drawing up the liturgy which had replaced the Mass under Edward VI, had done more than any other single individual to destroy Mary’s world.

His support for Jane Grey had left him wide open to a charge of treason, on which he was duly tried and convicted in November 1553. Perhaps a cannier monarch would have seized this opportunity to destroy him, but Mary spared him to await trial in

The burning of Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley at Oxford, 16 October 1555, from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The preacher, Dr Richard Smyth, now rejoicing in the discomfiture of his enemies, had been obliged to recant certain Catholic beliefs at almost the same spot eight years previously. He had fled the country in 1549, and in 1559 he hurriedly left once more.

due course for heresy – a decision which is probably testimony both to her sincerity and to her understandable desire for vengeance. In the long wait before the revival of the necessary statute, Cranmer, along with Latimer and Ridley, was next subjected to the ignominy of having to defend his doctrines against a team of skilled debaters in front of a hostile audience in Oxford University (April 1554). In 1555, Cranmer could not be dealt with as expeditiously as his colleagues because, as archbishop, he could be tried only under special authority from the Pope. Formal proceedings against Cranmer commenced in September 1555. His inevitable conviction also had to be notified to Rome for confirmation, which was forthcoming in December, so it was not until February that the prospect of the stake was absolutely unavoidable.

Under this pressure, Cranmer was relatively easily induced to recant his Protestant beliefs. He knew that in England a first offender who recanted was customarily let off with a penance (albeit often a humiliating and public penance). Burning was reserved for the obdurate and the relapsed. The decision to deprive him of the benefit of this custom can only have come from the very top.