EP 03 - Bloody Mary Tudor?

Bloody Mary Tudor?

- Episode 03 -

More interested in pirates than heretics

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More interested in pirates than heretics

Thursday 2 June 2022

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We're trying to understand why so many people were burned under Philip and Mary

Bartolomé Carranza, a moderate, reforming theologian from Spain actively involved in the English Church under Philip and Mary.

Was a Spanish Dominican friar behind the burnings under Philip and Mary?

Early on in our investigation we concluded that it was Philip’s select council that was primarily governing England from 1554-1558. But that makes the campaign to enforce the reestablishment of Catholicism through burning of heretics very difficult to understand, since most of the select council had been living and practising as Protestants.

We have discounted the traditional story, derived from the Protestant Elizabethan John Foxe, that Mary herself directly ran the campaign behind the council’s back, with or without her cousin Cardinal Pole for so many reasons it’s best to listen to the podcast. Basically he was hopeless at government, or confrontation and preferred to worry about petty things such as whether priests who had got married during Henry or Edward’s time were now living sufficiently far away from their erstwhile wives. Or whether this or that noble lady could eat meat in Lent. Or whether schoolboys fidgeted in services, or students stayed to the end of lectures.

It seems almost certain that the Spanish Dominican friar, Bartolomé Carranza was involved in some way with the campaign to burn heretics in England under Philip and Mary. For two decades before he had come to England, the moderate, reforming theologian Carranza had acted as an advisor to the Inquisition back in Valladolid and his experience was clearly listened to in England.

From what we now know about the numbers of people burned by the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions at this time we might guess that Carranza will have been - contrary to our expectations - a moderating influence. The hardline pope Paul IV would go on in fact to try Carranza for heresy a few years later for not burning enough people.

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Episode 03 - More interested in pirates than heretics

Thomas Cranmer, Henry VIII's archbishop through the break with Rome, who was burned under Philip and Mary

Witness at important trial in Rome confirms Mary’s reluctance to burn Archbishop Cranmer

The case of Thomas Cranmer has always been quoted as proof that Queen Mary interfered in the process of trying heretics, refusing to give Cranmer a pardon, however sorry he was. But this is just the story told by the Elizabethan Protestant writer John Foxe and it is nonsense.

Because Cranmer had been made Archbishop back in March 1533 by the pope, he was the one and only man in England whose case would be decided by the pope himself. Mary could not have pardoned Cranmer, had she wanted to.

Historian Jane Wickersham’s more recent study of the Roman Inquisition shows that the ignorant were shown more mercy than the educated. Those who had practised their heresy were given much heavier sentences than those who had only spoken about them. The accused were given a period of time, usually thirty or forty days, to recant before judgement was given. Those who did, and did so willingly, received lighter punishment. Cranmer, a highly educated man, had been given eighty days but had made no use of them. His recantations had only come after the end of the 80 days and after the pope’s verdict. In his case, his heretical practice – as Archbishop for 20 years - had been so public that only a public recantation before the pope’s verdict would have saved him. Paul IV, who would burn his mother if she stepped out of line, was never going to spare an apostate archbishop.

The Spanish friar Carranza had been at the English court during Cranmer’s long ordeal. Witnesses at his trial in Rome for heresy in the 1560s (everyone was getting accused!) stated that the English had dragged their feet over executing Cranmer and that Carranza had ‘insisted and worked hard for the sentence to be carried out.’ Among the papers of this trial in Rome is a statement by a Spanish chaplain, Cristóbal Becerra. He confirmed that he had himself witnessed Mary’s reluctance to burn Cranmer.

Unlike in Europe, heresy trials under Philip and Mary were uniquely public.

1550 'pirate' galleon

More interested in pirates than heretics

The mystery just doesn’t seem to go away. We have no evidence of anybody at the court setting out what the plan for persecuting heretics is or how it is to be done or how it is going.

Historian Gonzalo Velasco Berenguer, in his soon-to-be-published work, says that there’s little written evidence that the select council were involved in the burnings. However the problem is that there’s very little evidence that anyone else was either. In Pole’s letters there are just a couple of formal instructions for bishops and their officials to start trying heretics. Oh, and also one occasion when Pole has tried to prevent some heretics being burned.

All we have from Mary herself is one paragraph – in a much later copy – apparently written to her councillors sometime in the early autumn of 1554. Mary writes that ‘touching punishment of heretics me thinketh it ought to be done without rashness.’ The important thing, the queen says, was ‘that the people might well perceive them not to be condemned without just occasion.

As for the Privy council, we counted 15 or 16 references in its papers to heretics over four years. They’re all about organisational details, or sometimes telling officials to get on with trials. This is just the council going about its ordinary, everyday administrative business. They wrote exactly the same kinds of letters – far more of them in fact – about pirates or people forging coins.

There is just a loud documentary silence all round. It reminds us of the absence of evidence surrounding Ann Boleyn. Where there’s a void, invention has a free rein.

The burning of Thomas Haukes in Essex 10 June 1555, woodcut Foxe's 'Martyrs'

Unlike in Europe, heresy trials under Philip and Mary were uniquely public

There’s one thing that deserves greater investigation. When we look at the way the campaign was set up, it becomes clear that it was originally designed by the English. The clue lies in work done by the legal historian Philip Cavil and hardly noticed by other historians of the period.

The way the persecutions were set up under Philip and Mary was completely different from the Spanish Inquisition - as literally thousands of people at their court were perfectly aware. Philip brought 4000 courtiers with him! The Spanish Inquisition was actually funded by seizing heretics’ property. Property was taken, in fact, at the moment of arrest.

The English councillors however apparently decided that this would not be appropriate in England and Wales. It very much looks as if this was part of the delicate negotiations around the church lands that Henry VIII had stolen and redistributed to his cronies. Bringing back the medieval heresy laws, with all their careful control over property, would avoid any suspicion, any appearance at all, that the campaign against heresy could in any way be used to get that land back for the church.

Philip had already persuaded the pope that the land had been so widely distributed it would be impossible to get it back and the pope had accepted that. Nonetheless the possibility that accusations of heresy would be used to re-take the land had apparently been rumoured and gossiped about at court, or at least, so it was reported by the ambassador to Philip’s father, Charles V in May 1554. Philip and Mary and their councillors all agreed transparency was essential.

And we believe it was the very public nature of the trials – in contrast with the secrecy of the Inquisition trials - that pushed the numbers of victims up. In 60%+ cases we’re not talking Protestantism but heterodox anabaptism. We look into the difficulty of publicly renouncing long-proclaimed beliefs in our next podcast.

More info and photos here.

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