It was mainly the poor who were burned under Philip and Mary 1555-58

Burning of 3 witches in Derneburg, Germany, October 1555 by Granger

A striking parallel between the burnings for heresy and the later burnings for?witchcraft

The burning of over 300 heretics in England and Wales between 1555 and 1558 had much less to do with Queen Mary than we have been led to think. We’ve been using historian Thomas Freeman’s database of the English martyrs from the 1550s, published in 2005.

It doesn’t give much information about the?beliefs?of those who were burned. About 7% are listed as ‘religious radicals’. Over 80% of the total are simply down as ‘no evidence.’ But this may in itself be significant. The reason is that the evidence Freeman is using here comes almost entirely from the writing of the Elizabethan Protestant, John Foxe.

And Foxe, as historians who have been through his papers have discovered, was extremely reluctant to say anything about the beliefs of anyone among the victims who was not an orthodox Protestant like himself.

There is a striking parallel between the burnings for heresy and the later burnings for?witchcraft. Historian William Monter has pointed out that, after about 1560, the burning of heretics across the whole of Europe dies down – but was then apparently?replaced?by the burning of witches. In fact, ten times as many witches were burned as heretics.

In England, Essex was by far the worst place for the burning of witches, the Stour Valley being among the harshest areas. Kent was also bad, if not as bad as Essex. Exactly the same areas, in other words, as had suffered far more than their fair share of the burnings for heresy.

And we also know, from a very famous study by sociologist and historian Alan Macfarlane, originally completed in 1970, that the Essex witch burnings were very largely triggered by local feuds at the level of the village and the parish.

It seems to suggest that local 16th?century Essex society was?peculiarly?divided by local disputes that were so bitter that neighbours were willing to send each other to the stake.

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British Museum, list of Marian Martyrs

The English campaign uniquely held its hearings in public

Both the Inquisition and the English campaign under Philip and Mary tried not to burn people. Compromises were sought, multiple times, and in the case of Philip and Mary royal pardons offered. So why did the numbers keep mounting?

The one thing that made the English campaign against heresy in the 1550s different from everywhere else was that its hearings were in public. That looked right, fair and just to the lawyers, councillors, Mary and Philip.

But for many ordinary folk, confused and frightened, watching well-known preachers openly refuse pardons and compromises, it exposed them to the public shame of seeming to abandon their beliefs.

It looks as though many who might privately have agreed to the compromises they were offered, felt publicly compelled to go through with making a stand, even to being burned at the stake.

And this may also perhaps help explain why so many, having already accepted a compromise and gone home, within a few weeks disposed of their property, and openly began to court arrest and execution.

Perhaps the shame of having publicly seemed to disown their long-proclaimed beliefs was too much. If only the English had listened to the more experienced Spanish from the start, the numbers of poor folk who went to the stake just might have been far lower, as it was in other places in Europe.

In the unforgiving light of public hearings the illiterate poor insisted on standing up for their beliefs, often in very old heresies they had practised hidden in the marshy valleys and inaccessible woodlands for generations.?

Historian Thomas Freeman has described the result as ‘unanticipated and unforeseeable’ and we should agree. We should add that it was utterly, unspeakably tragic.

Episode?5 It was mainly the poor who burned?on?Apple podcast here?

Episode 5?It was mainly the poor who burned?on Soundcloud here?

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Elizabeth I, Coronation picture, 1558

A brief note on persecution of Catholics under Elizabeth I

We agree with the historians who don't want to play competitive games over the numbers killed by Mary or Elizabeth. However it's worth trying to set the record straight here:?

Elizabeth and her councillors executed more than twice as many for their Catholicism in one year – 1569 – as Philip and Mary had executed heretics in the entire reign.

They made it easier to seize Catholics’ property than it had ever been to take that of heretics under Philip and Mary.

They replaced the quiet process of discussions and compromises with brutal torture, iron shackles, forced starvation and excruciating racking that extended over many months.

And the terrible but usually mercifully quick burnings (they were often supplied with bags of gunpowder) they replaced with the merciless and deliberately prolonged agony of hanging, drawing and quartering. Remember it was common practice to burn women because it was less ghastly than hanging, drawing and quartering while still alive.

The English Catholic William Allen and the Spanish Catholic Diego de Yepes compiled contemporary, detailed, gruelling accounts of these terrible Catholic martyrdoms under Elizabeth. Allen’s last appeared in print in 1908. Yepes’s, listing a hundred cases of torture and gruesome execution, has?never?been translated. Its author does not even have a Wikipedia page. For centuries the English conveniently forgot the atrocities they committed against their Catholics.

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Louis XIV greets the exiled James II, after the landing by William of Orange at Brixham on an auspicious anti-Catholic date 5 November (!) 1688?

How the myth of Bloody Mary was created

The burning of over 300 heretics in England and Wales between 1555 and 1558 had much less to do with Queen Mary than we have been led to think. England was ruled by a joint monarchy in which her husband King Philip of Spain, was clearly in charge. He ruled through a?consejo cogido?– a select council – of highly experienced and able Englishmen, almost all of whom had been living and practising as protestants.

And across Europe, as the implications of the Protestant reformation sank in, the room for ambiguity and compromise disappeared. Governments everywhere assumed that religious uniformity was essential to civil order and in country after country took up the task of eradicating religious dissidence.

A hundred and twenty years after Mary’s death, in the 1670s, as another Catholic monarch, James II, looked set to take the throne, the old memory of the burnings was energetically whipped up by his political opponents.?It was only now that the glittering but tragic reign of Philip and Mary was transformed into the tyranny of ‘Bloody Mary’, an unhistorical insult that has never gone away.

Protestant Victorian historians, using the biased work of the Elizabethan Protestant author John Foxe, constructed the myth of the sick, crazed, bigoted and essentially Spanish woman, swayed by her over-pious emotions and needing to compensate for her infertility and what they saw as her lack of ability by a campaign of murder.

It is only in the last generation that historians have started to uncover what really happened.

In the end we owe it to the victims – bravely standing up for their beliefs, many perhaps bewildered at the suddenness with which traditional compromises had disappeared, some maybe pushed by their preachers into refusing every avenue for a face-saving way out - to get the story straight.

See our article 'Blood on her memory' in?The Tablet, 11 June 2022