Set discreetly into a wall in Smithfield, amid the bustle and bars of this rapidly gentrifying part of London, is a memorial raised by the Protestant Alliance in 1870 commemorating the men and women who died agonisingly nearby, roasted alive for refusing to abjure their new-found reformed religion.
Nimble intellectual footwork was needed across the 16th century of Tudor rule to keep the fires of Smithfield at bay. In the reign of Henry VIII, orthodox Catholicism was temporarily set aside to allow the monarch a divorce, in order to get his thigh across the reform-minded Anne Boleyn. Henry himself, however, remained resistant to the new faith.
Not so his son and successor Edward VI, who, though a child, was a cold fanatic in the cause of a more extreme evangelical order than England had ever know. Things changed again in the reign of Edward’s half-sister Mary, as fanatical in her Catholicism as Edward had been in his Protestantism. Finally, the ship of state stabilised under Elizabeth, the last of Henry’s offspring, who, true to her policy of not making windows into men’s souls, established a moderate Protestant English Church, under which secret Catholicism was tolerated as long as those who clung to the old faith paid lip-service to the new order and refrained from plotting to kill the Queen.
The problem throughout this topsy-turvy time was the awkward squad of zealots who refused to hide their opinions to play the Vicar of Bray. It is these martyrs, and the nature of the beliefs that brought them to the flames, that are the subjects of Virginia Rounding’s sometimes repetitious, often excruciatingly grim, but always deeply researched and fascinating book.
Rounding writes knowledgeably about the arcane points of theology that separated these brave dissenters from traditional doctrine and led them inexorably towards the flames: did communion bread and wine change into the real presence of Christ? Was the Pope Christ’s representative on earth, and were his priests the sole mediators between men and God? Was it right to read the Bible in un-authorised translations? And should saints and images be worshipped? It may seem laughable in our godless age, but these matters led the martyrs to die in torment, their limbs blackening, curling skyward and dropping off as they expired.
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