I began researching martyrdom for my book because I wanted to understand why people were prepared to die for their beliefs.
In total 288 people were estimated to have burned for heresy in the reign of Bloody Mary. Several thousand died for their beliefs throughout Europe in the sixteenth century. Why? As I explored this topic, I realised that what people thought was as important as why they thought it.
To the sixteenth century mind, religion was at the centre of daily life. The hand of God was in everything – the harvest that failed, the sweating sickness that came on without warning, striking down some whilst sparing others, and the fire that purged and purified heretics.
It is essential to understand that the word religion means different things to different people. To some, it means worship and ritual, to others it is a set of moral ideas, and to others it is a personal commitment. To some it is all of these things.
Throughout the Middle Ages the Roman Catholic Church dominated Western Europe. The Pope ruled spiritually and temporally to a degree, as kings bowed-down to the Church. It was the richest and most powerful institution on earth. It had everything a Renaissance Prince had: palaces, great feasts, wild boar hunting, and a Papal army. Towering above the City of Rome, bristling with cannon, was the Castel Saint Angelo.
The Church taught doctrine and obedience, not spirituality, for it taught that through strict adherence to scripture, obedience, the practice of ritual and the purchase of indulgences, that a man could buy his way into the afterlife. The Bible was in Latin, a language ordinary man couldn’t read or understand. A German monk from Wittenburgh, called Martin Luther, couldn’t see any justification for this because there was no mention of a Pope, nuns, monks, purgatory, indulgences, penance, pilgrimages and prayers to saints in the Bible. This made Luther extremely concerned for the people who believed that they could buy their salvation. He realised that these things were man-made and not the word of God.
Martin Luther realised that salvation came not through the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church but through an individual’s relationship with God by faith alone. This was the beginning of the reformation.
It is important to understand that the Church’s story had been told for a thousand years. It was the only story people knew and it was what they had been taught to believe: if they followed its rules and performed its rituals, they would go to Heaven. Death was all around and this strengthened the Church’s power, which it exercised over people’s daily lives through Canon Law. It levied taxes called the tithe, and taught that non-payment of the tithe imperilled the soul. It taught that through persecution of the flesh – fasting, whipping, and abstaining from sex – that one could identify with the sufferings of Christ and be saved. Luther and other reformists of the day, who’d read the Bible, were appalled at the level of corruption and hypocrisy within the Church. In 1513 Pope Leo X succeed Pope Julias II. Within two years he’d emptied the papal treasury and was forced to halt work on his greatest extravagance yet, the St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. To re-fill his coffers he turned to one of Church’s proven methods for raising money, the selling of indulgences. This act amounted to charging people to enter heaven. It was a piece of paper, sold for money, that promised to pay the bearer on demand for the forgiveness of their sins, and it appalled Luther and the reformers of the day. To them the idea that salvation could be bought for a sum of money was hypocrisy at best and blasphemy at worse. The Bible said you cannot serve money and God, and the Church forbade money lending, citing that it was sinful, yet now it was charging for indulgences to raise money for its earthly pleasures. This was a step too far for the reformers and it made them evermore determined it their quest for enlightenment.
After a dark night of the soul, Luther began to translate the Bible into German so that the word of God would be available to everyone.
In England there was a growing discontent with the Church’s corruption. The people that mumbled dissatisfaction were called Lollards, the word meaning mumblings, hence the Lollards Tower in the west churchyard of St Paul’s, where heretics were held. Amongst this group of people were some Cambridge scholars, who in 1518 use to meet in the White Horse Tavern, where intellectuals have long met to debate the issues of the day. The tavern was nicknamed Germany and its entrants Germans for their Lutheran sympathies. Among them were Thomas Cranmer, who later became the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Tyndale would go onto translate the Bible into English, and Mathew Parker who would go on to become Anne Boleyn’s private chaplain and Archbishop of Canterbury to her daughter Elizabeth I. Both William Tyndale and Thomas Cramner died as martyrs for the protestant cause.
Cranmer and the others who met in the White Horse believed that a man could come to God through faith alone and not through the Church. They believed that no earthy institution could stand between a man and his inward relationship with God, and they preached and proclaimed this new truth. It was this belief that inspired me to write this line of dialogue: ‘A man who possesses faith is no longer one man, your majesty, but two. He is a man in life and a man aware of the internal life that lies within him.’
Like Luther, Tyndale translated the Bible into English, but before he could finish his work, he was strangled and burned to death.
The revolutionary invention of printing gave these men an audience throughout Europe and it meant that the word of God was available to anyone who could read.
Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s chief minister, Archbishop of York, and Papal Legate and Lord Chancellor Sir Thomas More ordered the burning of the English bibles.
In Germany, the former monk Martin Luther had married and had children, challenging the Church that these things of the flesh were the gift of God and the goodness of creation. Luther went on to have six children. He was quoted as saying that the woman washing nappies was doing something far more pleasing to God than the man saying his prayers. The idea that the activities of daily life were pleasing to God because they gave life meaning drastically altered people’s thinking.
In England, Henry VIII wanted to divorce the Catholic Katherine of Aragon and marry the Protestant Anne Boleyn. Luther’s marriage had secularised marriage, so when the Pope wouldn’t granted Henry a divorce, he turned to Protestant ideas. It was Thomas Cranmer and the men who’d debated reformists ideas in the White Horse Tavern who made the King’s case and secretly wed him to Anne Boleyn, and thus England became a Protestant nation for the first time.
In 1556, in the reign of Bloody Mary, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon’s daughter, Thomas Cranmer was burned as a martyr. He was offered the chance to recant and made to watch while his two fellow bishops, Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, were burned to death. Contemporary accounts report how Latimer said to Ridley, as the faggots were lit around him: ‘Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ Thomas Cranmer fainted.
Thomas Cranmer did in fact sign a recantation, and six months later was taken into the Church at Oxford to read it out to his congregation. Instead he revoked it, saying: ‘For as much as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished; for if I may come to the fire, it shall first be burned.’ When he did indeed come to the stake, he thrust his right hand into the flames and held it there, saying, repeatedly, ‘that unworthy right hand’.
So, why were these men willing to die for their beliefs? I think it was because their beliefs defined who they were from the inside out. To the sixteenth century mind, if you believed something strong enough, you should be prepared to die for it. These new men stated that they believed that the role of the Church was the to preach and teach, not to lay rule over peoples minds. What is clear is that through their death’s they demonstrated that they could not be bought. Each man knew the price for speaking out and they did it anyway and refused to recant.