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The Power of Polemic: Catholic Responses to the Calendar in Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2010

THOMAS FREEMAN
THOMAS FREEMAN
Affiliation:
29 Mill Road, Cambridge CB1 2AB; E-mail: tsf21@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

Although scholars have come increasingly to recognise the considerable influence of early modern Catholic writers upon the historiography of the English Reformation, a crucial aspect of this influence has received scant attention: the impact of Catholic polemical writings upon perceptions of the Reformation. This article will examine a particularly striking and important example of the effects of Catholic polemic, the attacks on the calendar of martyrs included in editions of John Foxe's Acts and monuments. It will describe how these attacks merged with traditions of anti-Puritanism to create a stereotype of the Marian martyrs as being poor, from the lowest social classes, uneducated and disrespectful of authority to the point of rebellion. These attacks also laid the foundation for the myth, still prevalent today, that many of the Marian martyrs were guilty of Trinitarian or sacramentarian heresies which would have led to their condemnation as heretics even under a Protestant regime.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , July 2010 , pp. 475 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © 2010 Cambridge University Press
DS

Nicholas Harpsfield, Dialogi sex contra summi pontificatus, monasticae vitae, sanctorum, sacrarum imaginum oppugnatores, et pseudomartyres, Antwerp 1566, 638 [recte 739]–1002

1563

John Foxe, The actes and monuments of these latter and perillous dayes, London 1563 (RSTC 11222): the first edition of the Acts and monuments

1570

John Foxe, The ecclesiasticall history contayning the Actes and monuments, London 1570 (RSTC 11223): the second edition of the Acts and monuments

TC

Robert Persons, A treatise of three conversions of England, St Omer 1604 (RSTC 19416)

In recent years scholars have begun increasingly to emphasise the role of confessional controversies in shaping early modern English ideas about the past. The role of polemic has been emphasised when considering ideas about the past and concepts of history, which were formed by early modern English Christians. To give a few examples, Felicity Heal has shown how debates about episcopacy shaped scholarship over the earliest beginnings of the Church in England.Footnote 1 Daniel Woolf has examined the seismic controversy that shook historical studies with John Selden's profoundly learned and deeply partisan history of tithes.Footnote 2 And elsewhere I have described the ways in which anti-Catholicism and controversies over ecclesiology governed belief in the historical veracity of the legendary Pope Joan.Footnote 3

Yet the influence of English Catholic polemic upon the historiography of the English Reformation still remains a largely unexplored topic. Discussions of Catholic historiography of the English Reformation have tended either to focus on John Lingard and his successors or, when examining earlier work, have tended largely to concentrate on straightforward examples of historical writing such as Nicholas Sander's history of the ‘English schism’, Stapleton's translation of Bede, the various biographies of Thomas More, the first book of Robert Persons's Three conversions, Richard Verstegen's martyrology, and on Nicholas Harpsfield's history of the English Church.Footnote 4 Yet Catholic polemical writings played a very important role in moulding the historiography of the English Reformation and they deserve more study as historical sources than has hitherto been accorded to them. One particular controversy, in which Catholic polemic had a profound influence on the historiography of the English Reformation – that surrounding the calendar of martyrs affixed to John Foxe's Acts and monuments – has been relatively unexplored, and the study that has been devoted to it has exclusively focused on its role in Elizabethan and Jacobean religious disputes.Footnote 5

By its very nature, Foxe's ‘Book of Martyrs’ was an extremely controversial work. Martyrdoms are divisive; extreme acts of violence and of resistance in a confessional cause are inevitably bound to provoke sectarian passions. And a martyrology will arouse powerful emotions, particularly when many of the martyrs it describes were executed within recent memory. Within a few years Foxe's work had become the target of numerous fierce attacks by some of the leading Catholic writers of the period.Footnote 6 Religiously inspired attacks on Foxe continued throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. Over the centuries many of the narratives included by Foxe became the subject of bitter debate and careful scrutiny.Footnote 7 Yet no feature of the Acts and monuments (to give the ‘Book of Martyrs’ its formal title) has proved to be as controversial as the calendar placed at the beginning of the first edition of the book. Foxe's calendar, with its rubrication in red and black, was an obvious imitation of liturgical calendars. However, it replaced the traditional saints listed in calendars with martyrs and confessors from the first edition of Foxe's work.

Scholars have tended to assume that the calendar in the Acts and monuments was compiled by John Foxe.Footnote 8 In fact a number of considerations make this extremely unlikely. The calendar contains numerous errors and, worse still, lists people whom Foxe was anxious to airbrush out of the historical record.Footnote 9 Thus it is very difficult to imagine that Foxe played any role whatsoever in the compilation of the calendar. The person behind the calendar was probably John Day, the printer of the Acts and monuments. The idea of parodying traditional Catholic calendars was very probably a subsidiary one. His primary goals were to facilitate the placing of the ‘Book of Martyrs’ in parish churches, by giving it a quasi-liturgical appearance and also to challenge a rival printer in a dispute regarding the right to print calendars bound with metrical psalms.Footnote 10

In fact the calendar did not succeed in accomplishing these objectives. What it did succeed in doing, however, was to ignite a firestorm of criticism, which singed Foxe and had long-term consequences for the reception of his work. No matter what the commercial motives behind the calendar actually were, Catholics read ‘Foxe's’ calendar as a blasphemous perversion of the traditional calendar of saints. And whether or not Foxe was personally responsible for the calendar – something which he explicitly denied – it provided his numerous Catholic detractors with an invaluable opportunity for disparaging his work.Footnote 11

I

In 1566 Nicholas Harpsfield, the former archdeacon of Canterbury, now imprisoned, produced the most important contemporary criticism of Foxe's book. This appeared in Harpsfield's Dialogi sex, a work which was printed in Antwerp by Christopher Plantin. (In an attempt to conceal Harpsfield's authorship, the work was printed under the name of Harpsfield's friend, Alan Cope.) Five of the six dialogues in the book were largely attacks on the great Lutheran history, the Ecclesiastica historia (popularly known as the ‘Magdeburg Centuries’). The sixth – and by far and away the longest – of the dialogues (amounting to about a quarter of the entire book) is devoted to an attack on Foxe's martyrology.Footnote 12 Although Harpsfield's criticism ranged over a wide number of issues, including Foxe's accuracy, the essence of his attack was to insist that the martyrs whose stories Foxe recounted were not really martyrs, but rather pseudomartyrs. Essentially the distinction was a simple (and very circular) one. Those whom Foxe described as martyrs must be pseudomartyrs because they died for heretical beliefs rather than for Christ and the True Church. Nevertheless, Harpsfield produced a list of other ways in which these martyrs revealed themselves to be false: for example, they were insane, they were demon-possessed, they were drunk, they were suicides or they were criminals.Footnote 13

In a brilliant stroke of polemical strategy, Harpsfield used ‘Foxe's’ calendar as the organising principle for his condemnation of the pseudomartyrs. Harpsfield listed some of the figures in ‘Foxe's’ calendar and compared them to the figures that they were displacing in the traditional Sarum calendar. Thus, for example (out of a very long list), Harpsfield expressed outrage that John Hooper displaced the Apostle Matthew, Oldcastle and his Lollard followers replaced Paul's companion Timothy and such beloved saints as Dorothea, Lucian, Julian and Basillia, while St Maurice and the entire Theban legion had to be removed to make way for Robert Barnes.Footnote 14 The process of contrasting Foxe's martyrs with their illustrious predecessors gave Harpsfield the opportunity to elaborate on the vices and character flaws of the former. Thus, for example, Harpsfield's elaborate denunciations of Oldcastle's rebellion started out from a discussion of whether a rebel and traitor like Oldcastle deserved to be in ‘Foxe's’ calendar at all.Footnote 15

‘Foxe's’ calendar provided Harpsfield with an excellent platform for his contrasts between true and false martyrs. It allowed him to attack the martyrs in Foxe's book and at the same time to defend the martyrs of the traditional Church. These attacks had a considerable impact on the development of Foxe's martyrology, but that issue is outside the scope of this article. They also shaped Catholic responses to Foxe's martyrology as Harpsfield's polemical strategy allowed him to harness the emotive resonance of the time-honoured calendars of saints. These had been a key part of English religious and secular life for centuries, and, therefore, Harpsfield's defence of the traditional calendar clearly resonated among both lay Catholics and their clergy.Footnote 16 In 1582 the Jesuit Thomas Pound sent a poem to comfort an imprisoned Catholic (probably Francis Tregian). Tellingly, Pound believed that a poem that attacked Foxe's ‘pseudo-martyrs’ by repeating arguments from the Dialogi sex, would comfort a Catholic suffering for his faith. One of the stanzas of the poem denounced Foxe,

Who shufflinge saintes, from their invested dayes
Did make the blessed geve the cursed place
A practice of thine owne, of mickle praise
Unshriving saintes for sinners voyde of grace
Thus braunches shew the roote, from which th[ey] spring,
The bastard slippes good fruite do never bring.Footnote 17

About fifteen years later, the Catholic convert William Alabaster wrote a sonnet, which, in the course of contrasting martyrs and pseudomartyrs, contains an unmistakeable attack on ‘Foxe's’ calendar:

Tis not enough over the brook to stride
By scorn of fear and pleasures put to flight,
Unless we likewise follow Christ aright,
Up to Mount Olivet as he did guide,
For they whose spirits are not deified
In height of purest love and heaven's delight,
For Christ's sake with death to enter fight
Go not to die with him, but stray aside.
In vain they do that act and monument,
The death of heretics, with rubric red,
Whom just desert cut off by punishment
As barren branches from the vine are shred;
For though they seem beyond the brook to get,
Yet never come they to Mount Olivet.Footnote 18

Catholics were outraged by their perception that Foxe was taking it upon himself to declare who was a saint and who was not.Footnote 19 Thomas Stapleton, deriding Foxe for having mistaken a priest (who had been called, as was customary, ‘sir’) for a knight, shrewdly jabbed at Foxe's apparent presumption: ‘though M. Foxes authority be very large and ample in his canonisation, and such as never any pope durste take upon him, yea, and though he hath authority to make martyrs, yet I dowbte whether he hath authority to make [k]nights to[o]’.Footnote 20 Harpsfield made the same point, less wittily, but more vehemently, when he wrote that Foxe ‘inserts whom he wishes [and] removes whom he wishes from the roll of the saints and, in a monstrous inversion, he pulls the true martyrs of Christ down from heaven into Tartarus and, with a new wand of Mercury, leads that arrogant Lucifer, who wishes to be God, out of Tartarus into heaven’.Footnote 21

But Harpsfield used the calendar as a base for other attacks on the ‘Book of Martyrs’ as well. He observed that ‘Foxe's’ calendar contained Lollards, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvinists and even radical Protestants who could not agree on such fundamental issues as the nature of the eucharist. As a result, Harpsfield maintained, they could not all be martyrs – since martyrs, by definition, died defending the doctrines of the one true Church – and therefore some of them, at least, even by Foxe's standards, could not really be regarded as martyrs.Footnote 22 Apart from its logical force, this argument had the merit of emphasising the doctrinal divisions and disunity among Protestants; a key theme of Catholic polemic.

Finally, Harpsfield's focus on ‘Foxe's’ calendar allowed him to take advantage of what, to contemporaries, was an egregious weakness in Foxe's work: its inclusion of people of different social classes and of different levels of education. This feature had polemical advantages for Foxe. It allowed him to emphasise the ubiquity of God's faithful and the savagery of Antichristian persecution. But a polemical price was paid for it as well, as it opened the door for attacks on the lowly status and education of Foxe's martyrs. By comparing the martyrs of the early Church who were overwhelmingly clerics and theologians or – at least in medieval hagiography – people of elevated social backgrounds and educational attainment, with Foxe's less socially and intellectually distinguished figures, Harpsfield was able to score yet another significant polemical point.

II

At the beginning of James i's reign, the Jesuit author Robert Persons built on, extensively altered, and expanded Harpsfield's attack on ‘Foxe's’ calendar. For one thing, Harpsfield's criticisms were part (admittedly a considerable part) of a larger book, while Persons's onslaught formed two volumes of a monumental three-volume attack on Foxe entitled A treatise of three conversions of England.Footnote 23 The first volume of the Three conversions was devoted to showing that there had been a visible Catholic Church in England since the first century of the Christian era. The next two were structured around ‘Foxe's’ calendar. Each of these two volumes opened with a double calendar (the second volume contained one for the first six months of the year and the third volume one for the final six months of the year) placing the martyrs in the Sarum calendar (along with some non-canonised martyrs) opposite their Foxean counterparts.Footnote 24 The bulk of each of these two volumes is then devoted to an extended comparison and discussion of the martyrs in the Foxean and traditional calendars.

The inspiration for this approach clearly came from Harpsfield, as did many of the specific points raised in it. And although Persons was not particularly sedulous in listing his sources, nevertheless, he did cite Harpsfield's work a number of times.Footnote 25 On other occasions Persons definitely draws on Harpsfield (sometimes on a word-for-word basis), although he does not cite him.Footnote 26 Yet while it is easy to point out Persons's indebtedness to Harpsfield, the Three conversions contains more than simple repetition. For one thing, the systematic thoroughness of Persons's work sets it apart, as it deals with every figure in ‘Foxe's’ calendar. And at times Persons found imaginative ways of embellishing Harpsfield's basic themes. For example, the third volume of the Three conversions was dedicated ‘to the glorious company of English sainctes in heaven’. In this dedication Persons thoughtfully commiserates with these celestial inhabitants on the injury Foxe did to them in thrusting them out of their places of honour in the calendar, and also on how Foxe had insulted them by replacing them with thieves, fornicators, adulterers, rebels, murderers, sorcerers, witches and heretics.Footnote 27

More importantly, Persons extends Harpsfield's criticisms in novel ways. Persons lays a much greater emphasis on the ecclesiastical rank and education of the true martyrs and contrasts it with the more humble social status of many of Foxe's martyrs. He laments that Foxe expelled from the calendar ‘all the doctors of the ancient Church, Greeke and Latyn, with about 200 martyrs and virgins, as you may see in our calendar; and in place thereof hathe putt in such a multitude of artificers, labourers, sherman, weavers, cowherds, coblers, tailors, smithes, and spinsters as you may see in his calendar’.Footnote 28 Persons went even further than this and, on occasion, wilfully downgrades the status of Foxe's martyrs. John Bradford had been – before attending Cambridge, becoming a minister and then a canon of St Paul's – secretary to Sir John Harington. Persons describes him as Harington's ‘servingman’.Footnote 29 Thomas Hawkes, a gentleman in the household of the earl of Oxford, is also characterised as a ‘servingman’.Footnote 30 James Abbes was a shoemaker, who was given a small sum of money by Bishop John Hopton when he recanted. (He later retracted his abjuration and was burned for heresy.) Persons, seizing on the bishop's payment, characterised Abbes (described by Foxe as ‘a yong man’) as a ‘poore begginge boy’.Footnote 31

This denigration of the social status of the martyrs had been present in Harpsfield's attack on ‘Foxe's’ calendar, but Persons made the point much more dramatically and forcefully. This can be seen in a table (printed in both the second and third volumes of the Three conversions) breaking down the saints in the Sarum calendar into subgroups: twenty-seven martyrs and eight confessors who were popes, thirty-seven martyrs and sixty-three confessors who were bishops, seventy-six martyrs and eleven confessors who were virgins (not counting, as Persons notes, the 11,000 slain with St Ursula), and the three martyrs and eight confessors who were monarchs. Persons compares this with the ‘pseudomartyrs’ in ‘Foxe's’ calendar, of whom five ‘pseudomartyrs’ and confessors were bishops, none were virgins (although Persons lists three as ‘mayd-martyrs’), and only one monarch (Edward vi). In contrast, the list of ‘Foxe's’ martyrs consists largely of ‘husbandmen, weavers, sawyers, shomakers, curryers, smiths and otherlike such occupations 282. Poore weomen and spinsters 64. Apostata monks and Friars 25. Apostata priests 38. Ministers 10. Publicke malefactors, and condemned by the laws for such 19’.Footnote 32 Further underscoring the contrast between the theologically learned, Catholic martyrs and their ‘Foxian’ counterparts, Persons went on in the table to list as Foxe's ‘greatest disputers of this ranke against the Cath. bishops and other learned men’:

  • George Tankerfield a cooke. Aug. 13.

  • Iohn Maundrell a cowheard. Mar. 27.

  • Richard Crashfield a yong articifer. Mar. 28.

  • Raphe Allerton a taylour. Sept. 19.

  • Iohn Fortune a blacke smith. Sep. 30.

  • Richard Woodman an Iron-maker. Iun. 23.

  • Ellen Euring Millers wife. Aug. 23.

  • Ioane Lashford a married maid. Ian. 18.

  • Isabel Foster a Cutlers wife. Ian.17.

  • Anne Albright a poore woman of Canterbury. Ian 19.

  • Alice Potkins a Spinster. Nouem. 15.

  • Alice Driuer a famous doctrix. Nou. 22.Footnote 33

Anne Dillon has observed that, in the Three conversions, Persons makes little mention of lay Catholic martyrs, even those who had died recently in the reign of Elizabeth. A particularly glaring omission was Margaret Clitherow who, despite her inclusion in the great contemporary Jesuit martyrology, the Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia and in Richard Verstegan's Theatrum crudelitatem hereticorum nostri temporis, was completely overlooked by Persons. As Dillon comments, ‘Persons's true martyrs were exclusively male and clerical … [and] they were almost all university graduates.’Footnote 34 In contrast to Persons, Harpsfield had not made gender an issue in his attacks on Foxe, nor had he made it a basis for contrasting Foxe's martyrs (or Foxe's ‘pseudomartyrs’) with those of the True Church.

Persons disparaged the women martyrs in Foxe on two grounds: the first was that they were unlearned and, being women, of inferior intellect, and yet they presumed to debate theological issues with university-trained male clerics. (Note the flick of Persons's whip at Alice Driver, the ‘famous doctrix’ in his table, detailed above.)Footnote 35 Persons's dismissal of the Marian women martyrs is crystal clear in his comment on Agnes Potten, a brewer's wife, and Joan Trunchfield, a shoemaker's wife, both of whom were executed in Ipswich in 1556:

for what could these two simple women (I pray you), the brewer and shoomaker's wyves, tell what the word of God and truth was, or what the scripture could determine about so high questions? Or what comfortable words could these silly women speak to the people at the fireside but only fancyes and presumptions of their own?Footnote 36

Persons's deprecation of women also stemmed from the premium he placed upon clerical chastity.Footnote 37 This is why Persons pointedly listed the ‘apostata’ clergy (i.e., those who broke their vows of celibacy) in his table of Foxe's ‘pseudomartyrs’. He caustically claimed that most of Foxe's ‘principall saints were chiefly sanctified by breakinge their vows of virginity and constancy’.Footnote 38 Persons used every rhetorical trick to emphasise the sexual immorality of the women martyrs in Foxe.Footnote 39 An egregious example of this comes in Persons's treatment of his bête noire, Alice Driver. Persons notes that she and a fellow martyr, Alexander Gouch, tried to elude a search and were found hiding in a haystack, ‘no fitt place for such a couple to be conversant togeather’. From there being no mention of Alice's husband in Foxe's account, together with the ‘suspitious takinge’ of her and Gouch together in a haystack, Persons concluded ‘a man may easily ghess how light a ghospellinge sister she was’.Footnote 40

No matter how petty these ad feminam attacks may appear to modern readers, they were quite effective in early modern England. In a copy of the 1563 edition of the Acts and monuments (now held in the parish church of St Botolph's, in Foxe's home town of Boston), an early modern reader of the work wrote in the margins a tally of those ‘[marty]reyed in Mary's tyme’ which was clearly a response to Persons's tally. This anonymous reader agreed with Persons that there were five bishops but noted twenty-one doctors and eight gentlemen, and, while conceding that there were no virgins, made a point of noting that there were sixteen widows: ‘That a reader should take the trouble to check Persons's arithmetic, or at least to make a counter-tally, is good evidence of how the Jesuit's attack had struck home.’Footnote 41

The fundamental point in Persons's emphasis on the low social status, lack of education and the gender of many of Foxe's martyrs was his conviction that it was morally wrong for such people to challenge their social and educational superiors. Repeating Foxe's description of the Henrician martyr John Kirby denouncing the priest who preached at his execution, Persons then exclaims ‘Lo, is it not here a godly martyr, and the world turned up side downe, that so poore and ignorant a fellow shall judge the learned?’Footnote 42 Persons perceived this insistence on the autonomy of individual conscience, and the defiance of learned and social authority that stemmed from it, as inimical to all hierarchies, clerical and lay.

The act of pseudo-martyrdom, of dying in opposition to the teachings of the True Church, was an act of rebellion. And the more humble the status of the martyr, the greater the rebellion:

And to see these weavers and the fullers to go so desperately to death, rather they would relent in any one of their opinions … shewth well the spiritt of heresie, how dangerous and desperate a phrensy yt is, when yt taketh deep roote. Especially in ignoraunt people, who commonly are more incurable than others.Footnote 43

And the defiance of women, with their greater ignorance, was particularly grave, as it violated gender, as well as social and educational, hierarchies. Persons described Foxe's pseudo-martyrs as ‘both men and weomen, but especially weomen, who the lesse knowledge they had, the more obstinately did they rest themselves upon this persuasion of their inward spirit, which is the last refuge of any heretike whatsoever’.Footnote 44 But the horror at this presumption was hardly unique to Persons, and it was the fact that Persons's attitudes were widely shared, along with his shrewd assessment of the current religious situation in England, that inspired him to his most effective and enduring attack on the calendar.

III

One of Persons's key objectives in the Three conversions was to secure toleration for English Catholics. A theme that he stridently emphasised in a number of his works was that Puritans and Presbyterians were more dangerous enemies to both Church and Crown than were the Catholics.Footnote 45 In the Three conversions Persons mixed these two separate elements – ignorant presumptuous martyrs challenging authority and seditious Puritans challenging the government – into one enduring compound. Over and over again Persons not only followed in Harpsfield's footsteps by casting the figures in ‘Foxe's’ calendar as rebels, traitors and criminals, but went further and directly associated them with notorious radical Puritans, particularly the infamous William Hacket.Footnote 46

Thus Robert Persons compared Oldcastle to Hacket, he compared the Hussite leader Jan Zisca to Hacket, and he also compared three Henrician iconoclasts to Hacket and his accomplices, Henry Arthington and Edmund Coppinger.Footnote 47 After observing that a number of Foxe's martyrs defended their beliefs by claiming that their inward spirit guided them, Persons pointed out that Hacket had made exactly the same claim and took the opportunity to discuss his downfall in detail.Footnote 48 Unsurprisingly, Persons maintained that ‘Yf Hacket the puritan had been in John Fox his dayes, into his Calendar had he gone without further consultation.’Footnote 49

Yet it was not just the spectre of Hacket that Persons conjured; he also made great play with the fact that the Marian martyr Bartlet Green was a friend of Christopher Goodman, whose writings – as Persons gleefully pointed out – had been denounced by Richard Bancroft.Footnote 50 And Persons went on to claim that Goodman and Green (who was initially apprehended on suspicion of conspiring to kill the queen) were accomplices with William Thomas (who was executed on the same charge) in his plot to assassinate her.Footnote 51

And the fact that William Flower (who had stabbed a priest saying mass at St Margaret's Westminster in 1555) was included in the calendar inspired some of Persons's most choice anti-Puritan rhetoric. Persons claimed that Flower was animated by the ‘very same Evangelicall new spirit of fury’ that inspired Christopher Goodman, William Thomas, Peter Burchet (who had stabbed Sir John Hawkins in 1573), Edmund Coppinger, Henry Arthington and William Hacket. ‘And the like spiritt (no doubte) is not infrequent among the heatest sort of Puritans, who are the most dangerous sect to any quiett State, Commonwealth, or Prince that hitherto have risen: except Anabaptists or Circumcellians.’Footnote 52 Several times Persons disingenuously wondered if the ‘discreter sort’ of Protestants really wished to have such disreputable people in an ecclesiastical calendar.Footnote 53

Of course many of the ‘discreter sort’ did not wish to have radicals either in ‘Foxe's’ calendar or, for that matter, in England at all. What made this polemical tactic so successful was that it mined into deep veins of both learned and popular anti-Puritanism. Persons kept citing authors like Whitgift and Bancroft because they fundamentally agreed with him in his assessment of the Puritan threat, if in little else besides. A great deal of English conformist polemic did equate Puritanism with Catholicism as equivalent dangers to both Church and Crown.Footnote 54 For example, Lori Anne Ferrell has observed that Jacobean avant-garde conformists, in sermons about the Gunpowder Plot (usually favoured occasions for anti-Catholic diatribes), denounced Puritanism as well as Catholicism as twin seditious threats.Footnote 55

The stream that flowed from clerical denunciations of Puritans, and which adhered quite closely to Persons's attacks on the Marian martyrs, was to denounce Puritans as ignorant lay people who sought to overthrow and to despoil the Church for their own advantage.Footnote 56 A tributary flowing into this stream was that of the popular anti-Puritan stereotype (a stock character on stage) as hypocritical, legalistic, quarrelsome, insolent, licentious and lustful – all attributes Persons denounced in the Marian martyrs.Footnote 57 In fact, the stereotype appears (first appears?) in English literature in a contemporary attack on the Marian martyrs. Miles Hogarde, the Marian polemicist, wrote a vivid, caustic description of a radical Protestant, ‘Father Browne’, leading an illicit congregation in Islington. In an account that could have come from the pen of Ben Jonson, gullible apprentices and the wives of London merchants flock to Browne and shower him with gifts, receiving in return flattery and dubious moral instruction. For Browne's feigned piety is diaphanous hypocrisy that barely disguises his gluttony, greed and lechery.Footnote 58

Had Shakespeare given the name Oldcastle to the character of Falstaff, as he had originally intended to do, then the congruities between popular anti-Puritanism and Catholic polemic would have been even more apparent.Footnote 59 Moreover at least one contemporary perceived the connection between Falstaff and Persons's Oldcastle. The historian John Speed protested that the ‘author of the Three conversions hath made Ouldcastle a ruffian, a robber and a rebel, and his authority taken from the stage-plaiers’.Footnote 60 Whether Speed was correct in charging that Persons was drawing directly on Shakespeare and other anti-Puritan dramatists is ultimately unknowable. But there can be little doubt that Persons was drawing on the responses to the Martin Marprelate tracts. The creation of the stage Puritan was part of this response, but one that lasted far beyond the circumstances of its birth, becoming an enduring polemical stereotype from Ben Jonson to Samuel Butler.Footnote 61 The major response to the Puritans and Puritan satire, however, came from Bishop Richard Bancroft, either in works he penned himself or in works that he commissioned, first against William Hacket, and then against the Marprelate tracts. Persons pressed these works into service for the Catholic cause, merging the anti-Puritan tradition with what Anne Dillon has termed the ‘pseudo-martyr debate’, and, in effect, grafting Harpsfield on to Dangerous positions.

Laudian writers took up much of this conceptual framework and applied it to the Church in their own time, viewing Puritanism as part of ‘an addiction to popular forms of government in Church and state … almost always leading to dangerously popular appeals to the people’.Footnote 62 This paradigm, equating radical Protestantism with popular resistance, became a commonplace of conformist polemic from the reign of James i down to Thomas Edwards's denunciation of sectaries in Gangraena.Footnote 63 An interesting dichotomy developed between radical Protestants, who were uncomfortable with the concept of a calendar of Protestant martyrs and confessors but who warmly approved of the people listed in ‘Foxe's calendar’, and Laudian and Catholic writers, who had no objections to a calendar of saints but who took offence at ‘Foxe's’ choice of martyrs.

IV

In fact, ‘Foxe's’ calendar resurfaced in a controversy directly involving William Laud during his tenure as bishop of London. In 1630 an almanac was printed under the name of William Beale. Beale was the servant of Henry Gellibrand, professor of astronomy at Gresham College. Late in the year 1630 Gellibrand was hauled before the High Commission, on the orders of Laud, because of this almanac. Gellibrand's offence was in compiling a calendar at the beginning of the almanac that listed Lollard and Protestant martyrs. However, the bishop of London had over-reached himself. Gellibrand was acquitted by the High Commission when he pointed out that his calendar was not his own invention but, rather, based on the calendar printed in the Acts and monuments.Footnote 64 Clearly embarrassed, Laud blustered and accused Gellibrand of conducting conventicles at Gresham College and threatened to summon him again before the court.Footnote 65

Scholars have usually understood Gellibrand's arrest as an attack by Laud upon the Acts and monuments. Even Damian Nussbaum, who wishes to modify traditional views of the Gellibrand affair, still perceives it as stemming from the bishop's objections to aspects of Foxe's work.Footnote 66 In the broadest sense this is correct, yet it is also obvious from the contemporary accounts of the trial that Laud was caught by surprise on learning that Gellibrand's calendar was based on ‘Foxe's’ calendar. Moreover, these accounts suggest that Laud only initiated proceedings against Gellibrand at the behest of Queen Henrietta Maria.Footnote 67

The offence that the queen seems to have taken at Gellibrand's calendar probably had its roots in the popularity of John Cosin's collections of private devotions among the queen's ladies. Cosin's devotional work was written in response to the criticisms of some ladies at court – probably the circle about Lady Denbigh, the sister of the duke of Buckingham – who complained about the lack of breviaries and devotional works for them to read.Footnote 68 Cosin's work contained a calendar, which closely followed those drawn up by William Seres to be bound with psalters. These calendars listed traditional saints and confessors rather than Reformation heroes and Protestant martyrs. Significantly – before the Gellibrand trial took place – William Prynne, who admired Foxe's calendar and, indeed, all of Foxe's work, denounced Cosin's calendar for containing ‘notorious wicked men’.Footnote 69 It seems likely that Henrietta Maria, or one of her ladies, familiar with Cosin's calendar, contrasted it with that of Gellibrand. The difference between the two would have been as apparent as it was to Prynne and, although for different reasons, equally shocking.

Although the initial objections to the Gellibrand calendar may well have originated with Henrietta Maria, Laud would probably have had his own reasons for objecting to it. Not realising that Gellibrand's calendar followed ‘Foxe's’, Laud was probably aghast at its glorification of dissenters, especially when the dissenters were lay people defying the authority of clerics.Footnote 70 On this point, at least, Laud, along with those who shared his regard for the ecclesiastical hierarchy and the institutional Church, kept common ground with Robert Persons. (In an interesting example of this, the parishioners of Isleworth, Middlesex, denounced their vicar to the Long Parliament, for such offences as preferring organ music to psalm-singing, erecting images of the saints in church, denouncing John Williams and praising Peter Heylyn in the pulpit and for calling ‘the book of Martyrs, a book of lyes’.)Footnote 71

Although most Laudian writers were wary of attacking Foxe directly (an important indication of the authority of the ‘Book of Martyrs’), it was left to one of them, John Pocklington, to make the animus toward this aspect of Foxe's work manifest. Laudian writers, aware of the opposition to their views, tended to row towards their objective with muffled oars. However, Pocklington, as was his wont, nailed his colours to the mast and went in with guns blazing. He outspokenly attacked:

that list of persons censured by holy Church, called with some reprouch of truth, and Christian religion, Catalogus testium veritatis, and as unlike a Calendar that I have seene, wherein the holy martyrs and confessors of Christ … are rased out, and traitors murder[er]s, rebels and heretickes set in their roomes; that if Penry, Hacket or Legate had come in time, they might have challenged as Orient and scarlet coloured a die, as some of them.Footnote 72

Although even Pocklington refrained from criticising Foxe by name, and instead denounced Matthias Flacius' Catalogus testium veritatis (which does not contain a calendar), the true target of his attack is unmistakeable. Moreover, Pocklington's unacknowledged debt to Persons for this criticism, in particular the implicit linking of Foxe's martyrs with figures like Penry and Hacket, is also apparent. Peter Heylyn was equally vociferous in rejecting yet another set of Foxe's martyrs, when he wrote to Henry Burton, the outspoken Independent minister, ‘If you have any other pedegree, as perhaps you have, from Wicliffe, Hus, the Albigenses and the rest which you used to boast of, keepe it to your selfe.’Footnote 73 The reasons behind these attacks are clear: the fear that Foxe's calendar glorified and thus encouraged defiance of the established Church.Footnote 74

The events of the Civil War and Interregnum magnified these apprehensions, and Persons's accusations reverberated powerfully in the post-Restoration English Church. Catholic authors continued to echo Persons's attacks through the decades, framing them in language intended to stoke the fears of the Anglican establishment. For example, in 1737, the priest and historian, Charles Dodd, referred his readers to Persons's Three conversions on the subject of the ‘pretended martyrs’ who died in Mary's reign. Dodd summarised them: ‘some were notoriously scandalous and wicked persons; others distracted, and no better than enthusiasts’.Footnote 75 Writing in 1801, John Milner, the vicar apostolic of the midland district and a vigorous religious controversialist, cited Persons in support of his assertion that many of the Marian martyrs were Anabaptists or Arians ‘who would equally have been sent to the fire by Cranmer and the other Catholic prelates, had they continued in power’. Milner added that many of the martyrs were guilty of treason, sedition and other felonies and further revealed his indebtedness to Persons by claiming that Foxe's martyrs should not properly ‘be classed in the same calendar’ since they ‘notoriously varied from each other on the leading tenets of their faith’.Footnote 76 William Cobbett put these views in characteristically extreme form when he declared that ‘The real truth about these “Martyrs” is, that they were, generally, a set of the most wicked wretches who sought to destroy the queen and her government.’Footnote 77

The apparent consonance of these Catholic attacks with the fears of ‘enthusiastic’ and seditious sectaries, which were an enduring legacy of the Civil War, created an image of Foxe's martyrs as, at best, troublemakers, and, at worst, dangerous fanatics, which flourished within the Church of England for centuries.Footnote 78 The fears created by this image lay behind a great deal of the negative reception of Foxe's work by many scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. S. R. Maitland, the most influential of Foxe's nineteenth-century critics, clearly shared Persons's view of the Marian martyrs as insolent, unruly and motivated by base, irreligious passions. At one point Maitland asked, rhetorically, ‘what kindled and fanned the flames of Smithfield?’ and then answered

the bitter and provoking spirit of some of those who were very active and forward in promoting the progress of the Reformation … the fierce personal attacks which they made on those which they considered as enemies – and, to say the least, the little care which was taken by those who were really actuated by religious motives and seeking true reformation of the church, to shake off a lewd, ungodly, profane rabble, who joined the cause of Protestantism, thinking it in their depraved imaginations, or hoping to make it by their wicked devices, the cause of liberty against law, of the poor against the rich, of the laity against the clergy, of the people against their rulers.Footnote 79

James Gairdner, the eminent archivist and historian, not only shared Persons's views, he actually repeated them at length in his own history of the Reformation. After characterising those commemorated in ‘Foxe's calendar’ as ‘a host of fervid artisans who gave their lives to testify [to] their faith in a simple gospel’, Gairdner reiterated (and occasionally cited) the specific attacks of Harpsfield and Persons upon Foxe, the calendar attributed to Foxe and the people listed in it.Footnote 80 Admittedly, Maitland and Gairdner were both High Churchmen, but suspicion of the Marian martyrs spread far beyond Anglican circles; A. F. Pollard, for example, flatly dismissed some of Foxe's martyrs as ‘criminal fanatics’.Footnote 81 One of Persons's assertions that has been particularly influential is his claim that some of the people Foxe extolled as martyrs were egregious heretics who would have been burned by Protestant as well as Catholic regimes.Footnote 82 In the first half of the twentieth century, C. H. Smyth exaggerated this opinion beyond even Persons's claims, asserting ‘that at least two-thirds of the martyrs who were burned by Queen Mary would, almost undoubtedly, had Edward vi survived, have been burned in the normal course by the Church of England’.Footnote 83 The dubious, if not flatly erroneous, belief that many of the Marian martyrs were radical Protestants persists to this day.Footnote 84

Harpsfield and Persons have also distorted perceptions of the Martian martyrs in another respect. Following in the footsteps of both Catholic and High Church writers, scholars still tend to exaggerate the lowly social status of the Marian martyrs. William Monter's judgement that ‘socially they clustered at the lower end of the scale … [and] most were of very modest origins and very often illiterate’ is very typical.Footnote 85 More precisely, Gina Alexander has observed that artisans and craftsmen made up 60 per cent of those Marian martyrs whose occupation and status is known to us and who were convicted in the diocese of London.Footnote 86 These claims are not inaccurate but they have the potential to be misleading and very often they are an unreflective recycling of biases inherited from earlier generations. ‘Artisan’ and ‘craftsman’ are broad categories, which can obscure vast distinctions in wealth and status. Richard Woodman, for example, is characterised by Persons as an ‘ironworker’; in reality he owned a large ironworks and also property worth hundreds of pounds.Footnote 87 Roger Holland, a merchant tailor of London (often described, carelessly, as a tailor) was a member of a Lancashire gentry family whose trial was attended by numerous friends and family from Lancashire and Cheshire.Footnote 88 In many ways scholars have yet to exorcise the ghosts of ancient polemic about the Marian martyrs.

Modern scholars, probably because they find Persons's attacks on the status and gender of the martyrs obnoxious, have tended to underestimate their impact.Footnote 89 Persons was, in some ways, successful beyond his wildest dreams. He may not have seen the restoration of England to Catholicism or secured tolerance for English Catholics, but he did lasting harm to the reputation and standing of his adversary. He did this by capitalising on the fear and hatred, within the English Church, of first Puritans and then nonconforming Protestants in general. By yoking Foxe's martyrs to these later dissidents, Persons ensured that Foxe's work, although respected, indeed venerated by many readers for generations, would meet first with covert and then with overt hostility from certain circles of influential English Protestants.

The insidious, but pervasive, influence of Harpsfield and Persons upon modern perceptions of English Protestant martyrs should serve as a vivid reminder of the extent to which our understanding of the English Reformation is conditioned by its historiography. A surprisingly large proportion of this historiography remains unexplored, because it was formed in works that are not considered to be historical works per se. But if history is understood as the ways in which the past is interpreted and presented, then it encompasses a wide variety of literary and non-literary forms. Among these are works of religious polemic where history was often appropriated and debated. The relationship between these works and the content of later historical writing needs to be more intensively and systematically examined. If those who do not study the past are condemned to repeat it, those historians who do not study historiography are condemned to repeat each other.

References

1 Heal, Felicity, ‘What can King Lucius do for you? The Reformation and the early British Church’, EHR cx (2005), 593–614CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Daniel R. Woolf, The idea of history in early Stuart England, Toronto 1990, 200–42.

3 Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Joan of contention: the myth of the female pope in early modern England’, in Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (eds), Religious politics in Post-Reformation England: essays in honour of Nicholas Tyacke, Woodbridge 2006, 60–79.

4 See W. B. Patterson, ‘The recusant view of the English past’, in Derek Baker (ed.), The materials, sources and methods of ecclesiastical history (Studies in Church History xi, 1975), 249–62; Thomas Betteridge, Tudor histories of the English Reformation, 1530–83, Aldershot 1999, 120–60, 212–18; and Christopher Highley, ‘“A pestilent and seditious book”: Nicholas Sander's Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic histories of the Reformation’, in Paulina Kewes (ed.), The uses of history in early modern England, San Marino, Ca 2005, 151–71. The survey of authors in Felicity Heal, ‘Appropriating history: Catholic and Protestant polemics and the national past’, in Kewes, The uses of history, 109–32, is an exception to the almost exclusive focus on recognised historians.

5 The calendar itself has been discussed: Damian Nussbaum, ‘Reviling the saints or reforming the calendar? John Foxe and his “Kalendar” of martyrs’, in Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger (eds), Belief and practice in Reformation England, Aldershot 1998, 113–36; John N. King, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and early modern print culture, Cambridge 2006, 249–67. These two authors also briefly summarise some of the polemical responses to the calendar. Anne Dillon examines the controversies over the calendar and their role in shaping concepts of English Catholic martyrdom: The construction of martyrdom in the English Catholic community, 1535–1603, Aldershot 2002, 341–55. None of these authors, however, discusses the impact of this debate on the continuing reception of Foxe's work and on the historiography of the English Reformation.

6 In 1565 Thomas Harding initiated the attacks against ‘that huge dungehill of your stinking martyrs which ye have intituled the Actes and monumentes’: A confutation of a book intituled An apologie of the Church of England, Antwerp 1565 (RSTC 12762), fos 13v–14r. Sharp but desultory attacks on Foxe's work appeared in various works by Thomas Harding, Thomas Stapleton and Thomas Dorman. In particular, Foxe inspired two substantial ripostes. One was Thomas Stapleton's translation of Bede's history, as well as a companion work, A fortress of the faith; both were designed to provide a ‘true’ alternative history of the early English Church to the ‘false’ history of Foxe: The history of the Church of Englande, compiled by Venerable Bede, Englishman, trans. Thomas Stapleton, Antwerp 1565 (RSTC 1778). And the sixth and (at over 260 pages) longest, dialogue in Nicholas Harpsfield's massive Dialogi sex, was devoted to a thorough criticism of the Acts and monuments: DS, 638 [recte 739]–1002.

7 Some of these controversies have themselves been closely examined. James Mozley has discussed the attacks on the reliability of Foxe's account of the burning of a newborn baby, along with its mother, in Guernsey in 1556 in J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and his book, London 1940, 223–35. The controversy surrounding Foxe's account of the providential death of William Grimwood (which included a lawsuit) is analysed in Thomas Freeman, S., ‘Fate, faction and fiction in Foxe's “Book of Martyrs”’, HJ xliii (2000), 601–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 In his important article on the calendar, Daniel Nussbaum mentions (‘Reviling the saints’, 114 n. 3) that Foxe did not devise the calendar, yet then proceeds to assume throughout the rest of his article that the calendar was designed to serve Foxe's objectives. Nor does he suggest who else, apart from Foxe, might have devised the calendar or at least been responsible for it. John King, on the other hand, observes that Foxe denied responsibility for rubricating the calendar but does not observe that Foxe completely disclaimed responsibility for the calendar itself: Early modern print culture, 257.

9 For a detailed discussion of the errors and compromising materials which appeared in the calendar and also for the argument that the calendar was not compiled by Foxe see Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, ‘Red letter day: Protestant calendars and Foxe's “Book of Martyrs”’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (forthcoming 2010). Among the heterodox (by Foxe's standards) martyrs listed in this calendar is ‘Peter á Germane’ (Peter Frank), an Anabaptist, whom Foxe described as having been burned for denying transubstantation in 1539. Foxe, however, damningly added that Peter ‘defiled this good quarell with a nother foule erroure, touching that of Christ his mother’: 1563, 571. All mention of Peter Frank was dropped from subsequent editions of the Acts and monuments. It is inconceivable that Foxe would have included a person whom he regarded as a heretic in a calendar of martyrs – had he, in fact, compiled the calendar. The calendar was not reprinted in the second (1570) edition of the Acts and monuments. Perhaps this was a result of Harpsfield's criticisms of it, which will be discussed shortly. But it may also have been due to Foxe's disapproval of it.

10 For a detailed analysis of these issues see Evenden and Freeman, ‘Red letter day’.

11 For Foxe's flat denial that he had compiled the calendar see 1570, 831.

12 DS, 638 [recte 739]–1002.

13 DS, 745–9, 830–51, 853–60, 894–5, 933, 949–50, 959–63.

14 DS, 820–2, 836, 849–51.

15 DS, 832–3, 835–6, 953–4.

16 On the cult of the saints and the role of the traditional calendar of saints see Eamon Duffy, The stripping of the altars: traditional religion in England, c. 1400–1580, New Haven, Ct 1992, 51–2, 155–205.

17 TNA, SP 12/157, fo. 105v. Pound makes it clear (fo. 100r) that he was not the author of this poem but was simply transmitting a work that was circulating among Catholics.

18 The sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G. M. Stury and Helen Gardner, Oxford 1969, 3 (my emphases).

19 Interestingly, Foxe, in a preface to the 1563 edition, ‘Ad doctum Lectorem’, anticipated, and denied, the charge that he was taking upon himself the perogative of canonising saints: ‘Hanc ego apothosin mihi numquam sumpsi’: 1563, sig. B4r.

20 Thomas Stapleton, A counterblast to M. Hornes vayne blast, Louvain 1567 (RSTC 23231), fo. 60v.

21 ‘quos vult, infert, quis vult de fastis Divorum eximit, et portentosa conversione Christi Martyres & caelo ad Tarteram deturbat, et arrogantem illum Luciferum, nova quadam Mercurii vigula & Tartaris, velit nolit Deus, in caelo rursus subvehit’: DS, 861–2.

22 DS, 802–17, 861–4.

23 TC.

24 TC ii, sigs a3r-f7r; iii, sigs **6r-8*r.

25 For example, TC ii. 76–7, 267–7, 359–63; iii. 59–63, 195–7, 279–84.

26 Cf. TC ii. 199–200, 245–52 with DS, 953–4, 859–60. This has tended to mislead even modern scholars. For example, John King credits Persons with ‘compiling’ an attack on Sir John Oldcastle based on the Polychronicon and the chronicle attributed to Raphael Holinshed: Early modern print culture, 263. In actual fact, Persons was, in this instance, merely repeating Harpsfield.

27 TC iii. sigs *2r-*8v.

28 TC iii. 370.

29 TC iii. 64.

30 TC ii. 501–2.

31 TC iii. 109.

32 TC ii. sigs f7v–f8r. In his expanded edition of the Concertatio ecclesiae catholicae, John Bridgewater added a list of Catholic martyrs by occupation: Concertatio ecclesiae catholicae in Anglia adversus Calvino-papistas et puritanos sub Elizabetha regina, Trier 1588, sig.) (1v. I am grateful to Susannah Monta for pointing this out to me. Both calendars emphasise the high social and educational status of the Catholic martyrs and Bridgewater's table may well have inspired Persons's tables. But there are differences between the tables; one important and interesting one is that while Bridgewater's table lists woman martyrs, unlike Persons, he does not make a distinction between virgin and other woman martyrs.

33 TC ii. sig. F8r.

34 Dillon, Construction of martyrdom, 347.

35 Alice Driver was a Marian martyr who, although poor and relatively uneducated, was outspoken in her defiance of her interrogators. At one point she boasted to them that ‘you be not able to resist the spirite of God, in me, an honest poor mannes daughter, never brought up in the university as you have bene, but I have dryven the plough before my father many a time (I thank God), yet notwithstanding, in the defence of God's trueth and in the cause of my maister Christ, by hys grace, I wyl sette my fote against the foote of any of you all, in the maintenance and defense of the same’: 1563, 1672. Persons was clearly appalled at Driver's spirited replies during her examinations and peppers his account of her examinations with sneering marginal notes, such as ‘the arrogancy of Alice Driver’ and ‘mark the argument of a spincer against a doctor’: TC iii. 256–7. Later, when expiating on the presumptous resistance to learned authority of uneducated heretics, Persons added a marginal note: ‘see a notable example of Alice Dryver’: TC iii. 378.

36 TC ii. 339.

37 There were other agenda behind this polemical strategy which cannot be commented upon here for reasons of space. For the context of Persons's criticisms of the sexual immorality of Foxe's martyrs see the perceptive comments of Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The AntiChrist's lewd hat: Protestants, Papists and players in post-Reformation England, New Haven, Ct 2002, 282–92.

38 TC ii. 406. For examples of Persons's attacks on married clergy see TC ii. 216–17, 305, 317, 319–23, 330–2, 370–1, 379–80; iii. 119–20, 183, 247.

39 For a more detailed look at Persons's attacks on the chastity of women martyrs see Megan L. Hickerson, Making women martyrs in Tudor England, Basingstoke 2005, 82–95. In fact, Persons's attacks may have had greater popular impact than is generally recognised. In the early seventeenth century, a London apprentice got into trouble for declaring that the Acts and monuments contained ‘xx lyes’, that Foxe's martyrs had died for mere ‘vaine glorie’ and that Foxe himself was a ‘folysh fellowe’: Paul Griffiths, Youth and authority: formative experiences in England, 1560–1640, Oxford 1996, 124. These claims are obviously derived, whether directly or indirectly, from the Three conversions, particularly Persons's claim that he found more than 120 lies in three leaves of the Acts and monuments: TC iii. 412.

40 TC iii. 257.

41 Victor Houliston, ‘The martyr tallies: Robert Persons and his anonymous respondent’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe: at home and abroad, Aldershot 2004, 49.

42 TC iii. 245.

43 TC iii. 505.

44 TC iii. 378 (my emphasis).

45 See, for example, the dedicatory epistle in Robert Persons, A brief discours contayning certayne reasons why catholiques refuse to go to church, East Ham 1580 (RSTC 19394); The warn-word to Sir Francis Hastings wast-word, Antwerp 1602 (RSTC 19418), fos 53v–55v, 87v–88v, 116v–119r, 130v–131r; and Robert Persons, A treatise tending to mitigation, St Omer 1607 (RSTC 19417), 40–8, 112–30, 132–8. I would like to thank Victor Houliston for advice on this point.

46 On the Hacket affair and the way in which it was used to discredit Puritans see Walsham, Alexandra, ‘“Frantick Hacket”: prophesy, sorcery, insanity, and the Elizabethan Puritan movement’, HJ xli (1998), 27–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 TC ii. 251, 263; iii. 144.

48 TC iii. 378–81.

49 TC ii. 250–1.

50 TC ii. 220–1.

51 Ibid. The fact that Thomas was executed in 1554, while Green was not arrested until 1555, did not deter Persons from weaving these disparate strands into one large, albeit fictive, conspiracy theory.

52 TC ii. 430–1. And once again, Persons pointedly cited Bancroft's anti-Puritan treatise, Dangerous positions, in support of his claims. Peter Birchet (or Burchet), a zealous Puritan, stabbed John Hawkins, the privateer, in the mistaken belief that he was Christopher Hatton, a figure considered to be an enemy to the godly.

53 TC ii. sigs +2r–++5r; TC iii. 368–9.

54 Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker, London 1988, 111–13.

55 Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by polemic: James I, the king's preachers and the rhetoric of conformity, 1603–1625, Stanford, Ca 1998, 64–109.

56 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans, 114–19. See also Lake and Questier, AntiChrist's lewd hat, 530–5.

57 For Persons denouncing the covetousness of the pseudo-martyrs see TC ii. 384. On the construction of the stereotypical Puritan in popular culture, particularly in the theatre, see Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy (ed.), The reign of Elizabeth I: court and culture in the last decade, Cambridge 1995, 150–70, esp. pp. 167–8; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism: the structure of prejudice’, in Fincham and Lake, Religious politics, 80–97; and Kristen Poole, Radical religion from Shakespeare to Milton: figures of nonconformity in early modern England, Cambridge 2000, 16–73.

58 Miles Hogarde, The displaying of the Protestantes, London 1556 (RSTC 13558), fos 121r–125v.

59 On the disputes over the naming of Oldcastle/Falstaff see Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (eds), The Oldcastle controversy, Manchester 1991. On Falstaff as a caricature of a Puritan see Poole, Radical religion, 32–41.

60 John Speed, The history of Great Britaine, London 1611 (RSTC 23045), 637 (my emphasis).

61 Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical vitriol’, 166–9, and ‘The theatre constructs Puritanism’, in David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington (eds), The theatrical city: culture, theatre and politics in London, 1576–1649, Cambridge 1995, 157–69.

62 Lake, ‘Anti-Puritanism’, 94.

63 See Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the struggle for the English Revolution, Oxford 2004.

64 William Beale, An almanacke, for the yeere of our Lord God, 1631, London 1631 (RSTC 412). Apart from certain modifications to make it more practical – for example, term days, movable feasts and phases of the moon – and apart from the fact that, in order to conserve space, it listed only one martyr for each day, Beale's calendar was the same as that printed in the 1610 edition of the Acts and monuments.

65 No record survives of the High Commission's proceedings against Gellibrand. However, there was a fairly detailed discussion of the matter at William Laud's trial: William Prynne, Canterburies doome, London 1646 (Wing P.3917), 184 [recte 182]–3; William Laud, The works of William Laud, ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss, Oxford 1847–60, iv. 265; The manuscripts of the House of Lords: 1514–1714, ed. Maurice F. Bond (Historical Manuscripts Commission ns xi, 1962), 427–8.

66 Damian Nussbaum, ‘Laudian Foxe-hunting? William Laud and the status of John Foxe in the 1630s’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Church retrospective (Studies in Church History xxxiii, 1997), 329–42.

67 Prynne claimed that Laud declared at Gellibrand's trial that the queen had complained to him about the almanac and ordered him to prosecute its author: Canterburies doome, 184 [recte 182]. According to John Browne, the clerk of the House of Lords at the time of Laud's trial, the archbishop declared that he could not remember Henrietta Maria sending him such a message and that, if she had done so, he could not have prevented it: Manuscripts of the House of Lords, 428. Laud's own account of his trial is even more coy regarding the queen's alleged involvement. He maintained that he responded to Prynne's charge that Henrietta Maria was behind Gellibrand's prosecution with two questions: Was there any crime on Laud's part even if the queen had sent such a message? And how could he have prevented her from sending it in any case?: Works of William Laud, iv. 265. Laud's non-denial denials would seem to confirm Henrietta Maria's role in initiating the actions taken against Gellibrand.

68 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer, Oxford 1955, iii. 45–6, 635. See also Anthony Milton and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Richard Montagu: “Concerning recusancie of communion with the Church of England”’, in From Cranmer to Davidson: a Church of England miscellany, ed. Stephen Taylor, Woodbridge 1999, 79. I would like to thank Anthony Milton for pointing out to me the connection between the Gellibrand affair and Cosin's book of devotions.

69 William Prynne, A brief survay and censure of Mr Cozens his couzening disceptions, London 1628 (RSTC 20455), 34–5.

70 For the other side of the coin, Laud's veneration and respect for his episcopal predecessors (even the bitterly controversial Thomas Becket) see Milton, Catholic and reformed, 311–12.

71 The petition of the inhabitants of Isleworth, London 1641 (Wing P.1802), 4–5.

72 John Pocklington, Altare christianum, London 1637 (RSTC 20075), 92.

73 Peter Heylyn, A briefe and moderate answer, London 1637 (RSTC 13269), 72.

74 For more on the disdain and unease that Laudian writers felt towards Wyclif and other Lollards and early Protestants, whom they regarded as fractious and unruly, see Milton, Catholic and Reformed, 312–14.

75 Charles Dodd, The church history of England, Brussels 1737–42, i. 462–3. For an earlier example of this approach see the denunciation of the Marian martyrs as traitors and the censure of their ‘Insolence to Magistrates, their Disturbing Congregations and other strange misdeamonours’, in Roger Palmer and Robert Pugh, The catholique apology, Antwerp 1641. It is worth noting that Palmer and Pugh cite both Nicholas Harpsfield and Robert Persons (pp. 193–9).

76 John Milner, Letters to a prebendary, 2nd edn, London 1801, 149–50. The Catholic journalist William Eusebius Andrews similarly echoed Persons in claiming that many of Foxe's martyrs were ‘felons and traitors’ while others ‘would have been sent to the fire by Cranmer himself … which father Parsons pointed out in his Examination of Foxe's Calendar’: A critical and historical review of Foxe's Book of martyrs, London 1826, ii. 326. Similar sentiments were expressed by the great Catholic historian John Lingard: A history of England, 6th edn, London 1844–5, v. 485–6.

77 William Cobbett, A history of the Protestant Reformation, London 1824, letter 8, no. 249.

78 For a striking example example of this see Semper iidem or a paralell between the ancient and modern phanatics, London 1661 (Wing S.2493). This work lists Foxe's martyrs in parallel columns with such later radical or revolutionary figures as Oliver Cromwell, Hugh Peters, William Hacket, James Naylor and Praise-God Barebones.

79 S. R. Maitland, Essays on subjects connected with the Reformation in England, London 1849, 41–2.

80 James Gairdiner, Lollardy and the Reformation in England, London 1908–13, i. 336–42, 356–64; ii. 391.

81 A. F. Pollard, The history of England from the accession of Edward VI to the death of Elizabeth, 1547–1603, New York 1910, 138.

82 TC ii. 258.

83 C. H. Smyth, Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI, Cambridge 1926, 3.

84 G. R. Elton maintains that some of the martyrs were ‘manifestly extremists disliked by all the major denominations’: Reform and reformation, London 1977, 386. Andrew Pettegree also argues that the ranks of the Marian martyrs included ‘many whose beliefs strayed far beyond the orthodox’: Marian Protestantism: six studies, Aldershot 1996, 158. Neither Elton nor Pettegree identify these unorthodox extremists. In fact, less than a dozen of the Marian martyrs are known to have held truly radical beliefs, such as a denial of the Trinity or the incarnation of Christ. Admittedly Foxe may well have concealed heterodox beliefs for martyrs so successfully that we don't know about them, but even if the numbers of martyrs holding radical beliefs was tripled, they would still be a relatively small minority of the 285 people who were executed for heresy in Mary's reign.

85 William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: heresy trials by sixteenth century parlements, Cambridge, Ma 1999, 48. Elton describes the martyrs as ‘people of little standing’: Reform and reformation, 386; Anne Weikel claims that they came largely from the ‘lower classes’: ODNB, s.v. ‘Mary i’. John Guy has claimed that the ‘majority of martyrs were wage-labourers’: Tudor England, Oxford 1998, 238. The descriptions of Elton and Weikel are vague and, unless everyone who was not an aristocrat or a professional was lower class, disputable. Guy's claim is simply inaccurate – although labourers and servants were well-represented, the majority of the martyrs were artisans of widely varying degrees of affluence and local standing.

86 Gina Alexander, ‘Bonner and the Marian persecutions’, in Christopher Haigh (ed.), The English Reformation revised, Cambridge 1987, 166.

87 TC ii. 511. For Woodman's wealth see 1583, 1985.

88 1583, 2039-40.

89 For example Anne Dillon has dismissed Persons's Three conversions as relatively ineffective because it was written too late to check the influence of Foxe's martyrology and it ‘was too heavily invested with Persons's own unrealistic objectives’: Construction of martyrdom, 340.