Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [130]
An eyewitness described how “in every corner there was nothing to be seen but weeping and sorrowful people.”4 Faggots were laid around the stool and reeds placed in and between Hooper’s hands. Then the fire was lit. The wind at first blew the flames from him and, having burned his legs, the fires were almost extinguished. More faggots and reeds were brought, and finally the two bladders of gunpowder tied between his legs ignited. In the end he could move nothing but his arms; then one fell off and the other, with “fat, water and blood dropping out at his fingers’ ends,” stuck to what was left of his chest. It had taken forty-five minutes of excruciating agony to kill him.5 It was a horrific death and a sight that would be repeated nearly three hundred times during Mary’s reign.
A WEEK AFTER Hooper’s death, six other men—William Pygot, a butcher from Braintree; Stephen Knight, a barber at Malden; Thomas Haukes, a gentleman in Lord Oxford’s household; William Hunter, a nineteen-year-old apprentice; Thomas Tomkins, a weaver from Shoreditch; and John Laurence, a priest—were denounced to Bishop Bonner as Protestant heretics. Having been defrocked, Laurence was brought to Colchester on March 29. He had been shackled in prison with such heavy irons and so deprived of food that he was too weak to walk to the stake and had to be carried there and burned sitting on a chair. His young children went before the fire and cried out, “Lord, strengthen thy servant and keep thy promise.” Laurence and the other five men had been offered the chance to recant, but all remained defiant. As Thomas Haukes declared, “No, my Lord, that will I not; for if I had an hundred bodies I would suffer them all to be torn in pieces rather than recant.”6 He was condemned on February 9 and burned four months later.
At the request of his friends, who feared the extent of his pain in the fire, Haukes agreed that, if it were tolerable, he would lift his hand above his head before he died. Having been strapped to the stake and engulfed by the flames, he raised his hands and clapped them together to the cries and rejoicing of the crowd.7
IN EARLY 1555, the Privy Council sent a writ to Sir Nicholas Hare, master of the Rolls, and other justices of the peace in the county of Middlesex for the execution of William Flower, signifying to them that “For as much as the said Flower’s offence was so enormous and heinous, there further pleased for the most terrible example he should before he were executed have his right hand stricken off.”8
William Flower had been condemned for striking a priest with a wood knife in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster. He was burned on April 24, 1555, as the Council’s letter had instructed. Most of the burnings in the summer were in London and Essex, in the diocese of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, who soon became synonymous with the persecution. Orders were sent to find anyone guilty of heresy and report them to the authorities. Towns and villages were searched to find those who held heretical opinions and refused to observe the Catholic faith. Many of the victims were agricultural laborers and artisans denounced by their neighbors or their families, the victims of private grievances or local disputes.
Margaret Polley, a woman living in Pembury near Tonbridge, was the first woman to be burned in Mary’s reign. She had maintained that there was no reference to the Roman Catholic Church in the Bible and denied the Real Presence in the Mass. She was burned on July 18, 1555, along with two other martyrs in a gravel pit just outside Dartford in Kent. The local farmers brought cartloads of cherries to sell to the spectators.9 Other women followed. Alice Benden of Staplehurst in Kent was reported to the authorities by her own husband and disowned by her father. She had refused to attend church as, she said, too much idolatry was practiced there. For nine weeks she was incarcerated in the bishop’s prison, living only on bread and water and with no change of clothes. In John Foxe’s description, she became “a most piteous and loathsome creature