The English Inquisition

FOXE'S BOOK OF MARTYRS edited by G. A. Williamson. 475 pages. Little, Brown. $7.50.

God was the gut issue of the 16th century. Modern social historians, eager to prove that the Protestant Reformation was a social upheaval portending the birth of industrial civilization, too often forget that in a deeper sense it was a spiritual earthquake that violently reorganized the religious basis of human beings in the Western world. To read this book is to experience that earthquake. First published in 1563, while the temblors of terror were still rolling across Europe, The Actes and Monuments of the Latter Perilous Dayes was the work of John Foxe, an industrious Anglican divine who described two centuries of Protestant persecution in a colossal chronicle that ran to more than 4,000,000 words and was instantly recognized as the first great epic of Protestantism. For more than 300 years, Foxe's Book of Martyrs, as it was popularly called, sold almost as well as the Bible and exerted a strong formative influence on the Protestant ethos in England and the U.S.

Out of print and out of mind since before World War I, Foxe has now been reissued in a one-volume recension that includes all the principal passages and restores to general readership a work that, at this distance of time, can be read without religious prejudice as a neglected and horrendously compelling Elizabethan masterpiece.

Maumetry & Martyrdom. Dr. Foxe intersperses political history ("the happy death and castlecomedown" of Bloody Mary), pulpiteering invective ("the

Pope and his maumetry"), and jolly sectarian scuttlebutt about such adulterous priests as the one who, "haunting to an honest man's wife, was subtly taken creeping through a window, and hanged out of the window in a gin laid for him of purpose." The body of his book recites in grisly detail and with respectable accuracy the martyrology of a mournful century in which as many as 84 Englishmen in a single year were burned as "filthye Hereticks."

Arrest and accusation were sanctioned on legal grounds that today seem shockingly un-British. Hearsay and secret denunciation were considered sufficient cause for arrest and even for condemnation. In 1519 a woman of

Coventry was burned alive for possessing a copy of the Lord's Prayer in English. In 1531 a man was sent to the stake for eating meat on Friday. In 1556 "three silly women of the Isle of Garnsey" were burned for failing to attend church with sufficient regularity.

Pomp & Pole-Axes. Interrogation and trial were cruel and cursory. The accused was haled before a bishop for a hearing at which little was heard, as a rule, but the bellowing of the bishop. Even so, the accused sometimes gave as good as he got. Cardinal Wolsey: "What, Mr. Doctor, do you think it more necessary that I should have golden shoes and golden cushions because I represent the king's person, or to sell all these things and give it to the poor, which will piss it against the wall?" Dr. Robert Barnes: "Give it to the poor. For the king's majesty is not maintained by pomp and pole-axes, but by God!"

After the first hearing, the accused was shut up in a pestilential prison, fed on sawdust and water, and confined in stocks or manacles for as much as two or three years before the bishop bothered to bring him to trial. Usually the prisoner was beaten by his jailers; often he was put to the rack. A nasty bishop named Boner once held a prisoner's hand over a candle flame "till the sin ews burst, and the water did spurt into the dean's face." Accused heretics not infrequently died of mistreatment before they could be executed, and quite often went insane. But according to Foxe they seldom recanted.

Horror & Rejoycing. Degradation and death followed swiftly upon conviction. The victim was led to the stake and the horror began. Foxe reports one execution in which a woman was forced to set fire to her own father, and others where the wood was green and burned so slowly that the victim, as in the case of Bishop John Hooper, was still conscious: "He was black in the mouth, and his tongue swoln that he could not speak, his lips shrunk to the gums; and he knocked his breast with his hands until one of his arms fell off, what time the fat, water, and blood dropped out at his finger ends." More hideous still was the burning of Perrotine Massey who, "being great with child, did fall on her side in the fire, where as the belly of the woman brast asunder, the infant fell into the fire, and being taken out was had to the bailiff, who gave censure that it should be carried back again."

All this horror was endured in most instances, Foxe declares, "with greate rejoycing, as one going to a bridal." Victims kissed the stake, and when the flames leaped up, some clapped their hands for joy and cried out: "Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit!"

Did the martyrs die in vain? Foxe thinks not. Great crowds gathered to see the burnings, and many were shaken to the depths by the shining faith of the victims and the bestial exertions of their executioners. As the century advanced, the crowds became more hostile to "the popish oppressours," and the cause of Protestantism so prospered that it became the state religion under Elizabeth, who at the suggestion of her bishops made a historic advance in the practice of religious toleration. The custom of burning heretics was abandoned in England. During the 17th century, most heretics were known as papists, and they were beheaded.

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