Martyrs and Mystics

According to most modern histories there were no Jews in London, or even England, before the Norman Conquest. However, Jews had been coming to Britain since King Solomon sent tin traders from the Holy Land to negotiate with the miners of Cornwall some time around the year 960 BC. There were almost certainly Jews in London in Roman times: a brick recovered from the excavation of some Roman ruins on Mark Lane near the Tower in 1650 contained a relief of the story of Samson driving foxes into a field of corn – something which could not have been known to pagan, pre-Christian Romans.

Hostility to the Jews increased over the years, especially on anniversaries and celebrations that were particularly English in character. For instance, Jews were barred from attending the coronation of Richard I in 1189, but they sent a delegation to Westminster Hall nonetheless bearing gifts for the king, and a few sneaked into the hall to have a look at the proceedings. The palace guards threw them out, whereupon some onlookers started throwing stones. A rumour began circulating that the king had ordered the destruction of the Jews. In Jewry a mob set fire to Jewish houses and thirty people were killed. One Jew, Benedict of York, saved his life by converting to Christianity on the spot; he was rushed to St Margaret’s church and baptised (although he recanted his new views the next day). When the king learned what had happened he ordered the hanging of three of the ringleaders and announced that the Jews must not be so treated.

From that time the Jews were sent to the Tower for their own safety on such days. But soon excuses were being made to send the Jews to the Tower as a punishment for what were mostly fabricated accusations, usually involving coin clipping (chipping away at coins to use the metal), and allegations of murdering children to use their blood in religious sacrificial rituals.

King John treated the Jewish moneylenders well. He even granted them a charter and allowed them to choose a chief rabbi. But this détente didn’t last long. In 1210 the king levied a penalty of 66,000 marks on the Jews, and imprisoned, blinded and tortured those who would not pay.

Henry III compelled the Jews to wear two white tablets of linen or parchment on their breasts. Wherever Jews lived, burgesses were chosen to protect them from pilgrims’ insults about infidels. But in 1220 the Crown seized the Old Jewry synagogue and handed it to the brothers of St Anthony of Vienna for use as a church. In 1232 more pressure was put on the Jews to reject their religion when Henry built a House for Converted Jews on what is now Chancery Lane.

Jews were then expelled from Newcastle and Southampton. In London the status of the community began to deteriorate sharply after a dead Christian child was found in 1244, its arms and legs embroidered with Hebrew letters – a botched crucifixion, evidently. After a number of further tribulations the Jews asked King Henry if they could leave England officially. The king was outraged. Soon after, eighty-six of London’s richest Jews were hanged for supposedly crucifying a Christian child in Lincoln and there was a riot against London’s Jews. Five hundred were killed and the synagogue was burnt down. Only those who took refuge in the Tower survived.

Edward I, who came to the throne in 1272, forced the Jews to wear yellow badges so that everyone knew who they were (a symbol Hitler adopted nearly 700 years later). He also levied a tax of threepence on them every Easter. In 1288 all England’s Jews were imprisoned and held until they paid a £20,000 ransom, a handy sum to help finance the castles he was building in Wales. It came as no surprise when in 1290 Edward announced on 18 July – the anniversary of the sacking of the Temple in AD 70 – that he was expelling the Jews from England. All Jews (some 15,000) ‘with their wives, children and chattels’ had to leave the country, and they were given until 1 November, the feast of All Saints, to comply. Any Jew who remained behind after that date would face execution. Ships carrying Jews left St Katharine’s Dock near the Tower. When one vessel ran into a sandbank off Queensborough, Kent, the captain invited passengers to stretch their legs. But once they had disembarked he made off, leaving the party to drown as the tide rose.

The Crown seized all the Jews’ property and none of their buildings survive locally . . . above ground. Recent excavations of nearby sites during the building of the huge corporate blocks that dominate the area have unearthed well-preserved ritual baths and artefacts.

→ The Jews massacred in York, p. 207

ST DUNSTAN-IN-THE-WEST, Fleet Street at Hen and Chickens Court

Founded c. 1185 as St Dunstan’s Over Against the Temple, the church was known as St Dunstan-in-the-West from 1278 to differentiate it from St Dunstan-in-the-East in Stepney. It was here that William Tyndale, whose translations of the New Testament from the Greek provided the basis for the later King James Bible, preached in the 1520s. In the seventeenth century St Dunstan’s was a centre of Puritanism where Praise-God Barebones, the divinely named Roundhead leader, preached.

The church’s unusual-looking clock, the first in London to be marked with minutes, was erected in 1671 as a thanksgiving from parishioners relieved that a sudden burst of wind sent the Fire of London away from the building. The clock features two burly figures, Gog and Magog, biblical characters who appear cryptically in the Book of Revelation: ‘And ye shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.’ However, an ancient London legend tells of a character called Gogmagog – an Ancient Briton beaten in battle around the year 1000 BC by Brutus the Trojan, founder of London.

Today the church unites all major churches of Christendom: ‘Old Catholics, the Assyrian Church of the East, the Romanian Orthodox Church, the Anglican Church, the Oriental churches, the Lutheran and Reformed Churches and the Holy Roman and Catholic Church’.

ST LAWRENCE JEWRY

John Wilkins, mid-seventeenth-century vicar of this exquisitely designed Christopher Wren church, devised a new system of measurement in the 1660s based on biblical ‘sacred geometry’. He wanted the main unit length to be equal to the 2,000 cubits cited as holy in the Book of Numbers. To make calculations easier the length would be divided not into 2,000 parts but into 1,000 equal divisions, what in the nineteenth century was renamed the metre, now a standard measurement, used extensively throughout the world, but, ironically, not universally in London.

→ London, Sacred City, p. 11

ST PAUL’S CATHEDRAL, St Paul’s Churchyard

Britain’s major cathedral, the setting for state occasions as well as one of the capital’s leading tourist attractions, was founded in 604 by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and Mellitus, Bishop of the East Saxons. The church was destroyed by the Vikings in the ninth century and burnt down in 1087, but at the end of the eleventh century William I granted St Paul’s privileges: ‘Some lands I give to God and the church of St Paul’s, in London, and special franchises, because I wish that this church may be free in all things, as I wish my soul to be on the day of judgment.’

In the thirteenth century Maurice, Bishop of London, decided to build a new grand cathedral on a larger scale than anything witnessed outside central Europe. It was this building, completed in 1240, that is now known as Old St Paul’s, to differentiate it from the post-Fire of London cathedral.

Not all clerics have been hospitably received here. In 1093 Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, came to St Paul’s demanding his tithe of the fruit harvest, only to find the doors closed in his face. In 1259 a mob killed two canons in the papal party. In 1385 Robert Braybroke, Bishop of London, banned various frivolous activities from taking place at St Paul’s on Sundays, including barbers shaving customers, worshippers shooting arrows at the pigeons and children playing ball. Nine years later the Lollard reformers nailed a paper listing twelve complaints about the Catholic clergy on the door of the old church – a hundred years before Martin Luther famously posted his ninety-six theses on popish indulgences on the door of the church in Wittenberg.

During the Reformation of the 1530s the high altar was pulled down and replaced by a plain table. Many of the tombs were also destroyed, the reredos was smashed to pieces and St Paul’s became more of a social centre than a church. The nave, Paul’s Walk, was even used by prostitutes touting for business, and as a market for selling groceries and animals. In 1553 the Common Council of London passed an act forbidding people from carrying beer barrels, baskets of bread, fish, flesh or fruit into St Paul’s and from leading mules or horses through the cathedral. Evidently the law didn’t go far enough, for in 1558 Elizabeth had to issue a proclamation forbidding the drawing of swords in the church and the shooting of guns inside it or in the churchyard, under pain of two months’ imprisonment.

St Paul’s collection of holy relics was sold off during the Cromwellian Commonwealth of 1649–60, but there appeared to be an inexhaustible stock of these. The authorities were still selling portions of the Virgin Mary’s milk, the hair of Mary Magdalen, the hand of St John, pieces of Thomas à Becket’s skull and the blood of St Paul himself – all preserved in jewelled cases – 150 years later.

The Fire of London destroyed Old St Paul’s in 1666, but the building was spectacularly redesigned by Christopher Wren, who created what many believe to be the finest example of Renaissance architecture in Britain. Somehow St Paul’s escaped destruction during the Second World War Blitz.

PAUL’S CROSS

An open-air pulpit erected by the south wall of the pre-Fire of London St Paul’s was known as Paul’s Cross. Here papal bulls were broadcast, excommunications pronounced, royal proclamations made and heresies denounced at what was a kind of medieval Speakers’ Corner. It was also where the earliest English Bibles were burnt before the authorities decided to allow the people to hear the Scriptures in their native tongue.

In 1422 Richard Walker, a Worcester chaplain, appeared at Paul’s Cross on charges of sorcery. Two books on magic which he had been caught reading were then burnt before his eyes. In 1447 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, was made to kneel here before the Archbishop of Canterbury and around 20,000 onlookers to make a full confession of his ‘errors’. That was how his captors described his writings, which were then cast into the fire as a warning of the fate that might soon befall him.

Preacher Beal stirred up the crowd so passionately on May Day 1517 that riots broke out across London as the mob attacked foreign merchants on what came to be called Evil May Day. Troops managed to restore order and took 400 rioters as prisoners. The leaders of the riots were hanged, drawn and quartered.

On 12 May 1521 an unusual book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments), setting out Catholic arguments against the new Protestant creed being propounded by Martin Luther in Germany, was unveiled at Paul’s Cross. The author was supposedly none other than Henry VIII, the jousting, hunting, non-bookish king. Though few believed that Henry was capable of such writing, evidence shows that the king was indeed the author of the work, which he dedicated to the Pope and which earned him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.

Copies of William Tyndale’s pioneering English translation of the Bible were burnt here in 1526, shortly after they had been smuggled into the country. They were selling in London for three shillings, but those found with such a Bible were made to ride backward on a donkey and wear a pasteboard mitre emblazoned with some of the offending passages. Tied to their backs were symbolic faggots of wood which they had to hurl into a bonfire as a warning of what would happen to them soon at Smithfield if they continued with their heretical reading.

The Rood of Grace (→ p. 132), a wooden cross bearing an image that could supposedly move and speak if approached by one who had lived a pure life, was smashed to pieces under the king’s orders at Paul’s Cross in 1538. Two years later it was here that William Jerome, the vicar of St Dunstan and All Saints, was burnt alive for preaching an Anabaptist sermon (belittling infant baptism).

Crowds would gather at Paul’s Cross to hear contentious sermons, which often resulted in trouble. For instance in 1549 preachers incited the onlookers to sack the cathedral itself, and a mob tore inside, destroyed the altar and smashed several tombs. At the first sermon preached here following the death of the Protestant king, Edward VI, on 6 July 1553 Bishop Bourne provoked the crowd by denouncing the Protestant Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. A group of spectators began shouting: ‘He preaches damnation! Pull him down! Pull him down!’ Someone threw a dagger at Bourne. It stuck in one of the wooden side posts and the bishop was rushed into St Paul’s school for his own safety. In their desperation to exact revenge, the authorities arrested several people and imprisoned them in the Tower, while a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at Paul’s Cross.

Ridley himself soon made his stand here. On 16 July he denounced both royal princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of Henry VIII, as illegitimate and singled out Mary for special abuse as she was a papist. Ridley believed that Lady Jane Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII, should take the throne as the best way of preserving a Protestant succession – which she did but for only nine days.

In April 1584 the Bishop of London preached here against astrologers who were predicting the end of the world owing to an imminent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. On 7 February 1601 the Earl of Essex, at the conclusion of the sermon at Paul’s Cross, led a group of 300 rebels through the City shouting: ‘Murder, murder, God save the Queen!’ in protest at how England was supposedly about to be handed to the Spanish when Queen Elizabeth died. He was arrested and executed on Tower Hill a month later.

The Puritans pulled down Paul’s Cross in 1643.

ST PAUL’S CHURCHYARD

When Pope Pius V became pontiff in February 1570 he issued a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, urging Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth, ‘pretended Queen of England’. The Catholics believed Elizabeth was technically illegitimate as they did not recognise her mother, Anne Boleyn, the Protestant who had replaced the Catholic Catherine of Aragon in Henry’s favours, as being legitimately married to the king.

Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth, freeing her subjects from their allegiance to her. It was an absurd move as no Catholic European power was in a position to enforce his wishes. It also meant that from now on the queen would treat all Catholics as the enemy. A Catholic called John Felton pinned the papal bull to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace and was duly hanged in St Paul’s Churchyard. Cut down while still alive, he supposedly shouted out the holy name of Jesus as the hangman held his heart in his hand.

George Williams was one of a dozen men who established the Young Men’s Christian Association above a draper’s shop in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1844. Their aim was to unite and direct ‘the efforts of Christian young men for the spiritual welfare of their fellows in the various departments of commercial life’. Soon other branches were formed, first in London, and then throughout the world.

SMITHFIELD EXECUTION SITE, West Smithfield

Originally the Smooth Field, this was Britain’s major execution site for Protestant martyrs in medieval times, where hundreds lost their lives.

The method of execution used at Smithfield was nearly always burning at the stake before a large crowd. Though gruesome, it was carried out in a far more humane manner than on the continent, where heretics often had their tongues cut off before the pyre was lit. In England burning occurred only after a series of rigorous trials had taken place and the condemned had been given the chance of recanting their views.

A dramatic preamble to the grim fate was the ceremony known as ‘carrying the faggot’. The alleged heretic, carrying a faggot of wood, would be taken to the place of execution. There a fire had been lit, and the accused would throw the faggot on to the fire and watch it burn as a warning that if they remained steadfast in their views they would be next for the flames. Before the pyre was lit, the victim’s friends and family would try to bribe the executioner to place a bag of gunpowder by the body. That way, when the flames rose, the gunpowder would explode and kill the poor wretch quickly, sparing them the slow torture of burning. This could not happen of course if it had been raining.

The first martyr to meet his death here was William Sawtrey, a priest and follower of the Bible translator John Wycliffe, who went to the stake in 1401. Sawtrey’s card was marked when he announced ‘instead of adoring the cross on which Christ suffered, I adore Christ who suffered on it’. In 1399 the Bishop of Norwich questioned Sawtrey over his beliefs, and had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of heresy. Sawtrey recanted his views and was released but felt that he had betrayed Christ. Two years later Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, had Sawtrey arrested again. After questioning Sawtrey, the Church authorities deemed ‘unacceptable’ his views on transubstantiation and the adoration of the cross and declared him indeed a heretic, which meant only one thing – he had to be put to death by burning.

The list of Smithfield martyrs includes:

• John Badby, 1410

Badby, a Worcester tailor, got into trouble in 1410 after telling the local diocesan court that when Christ sat at the Last Supper with his disciples he did not have his body in his hand to distribute and that ‘if every host consecrated at the altar were the Lord’s body, then there be 20,000 Gods in England’. A court at St Paul’s sentenced him to be burnt to death. Just before Badby met his fate the watching Prince of Wales (the future Henry V) offered him his life and a pension if he would recant, but Badby would not do so. As the flames began to rise he cried out: ‘It is consecrated bread and not the body of God.’

• John Frith, 1533

A colleague of the Bible translator William Tyndale, Frith fled to the continent when the persecution of Protestants began in the 1520s. He later returned to England, travelling from congregation to congregation where Catholicism had been ousted following the Reformation. Frith was arrested in 1532 and sent to the Tower of London, where he was chained to a post. Things improved, though, and for a while Frith was allowed to have friends visit his cell. But the authorities soon decided to bring Frith before the bishops to repent his ‘heresies’, such as denying that the bread and wine at consecration actually turn into Jesus’ flesh and blood. When he refused to do so, he was taken to a dungeon under Newgate Prison and, according to Andersen, his biographer, ‘laden with irons, as many as he could bear, neither stand upright, nor stoop down’.

At least Frith had only one night of these horrors, for the next day he and a fellow sufferer, Hewett, were taken to Smithfield and bound to the stake to be burnt. ‘The wind made his death somewhat longer, as it bore away the flame from him to his fellow,’ Andersen explained, ‘but Frith’s mind was established with such patience, that, as though he had felt no pain, he seemed rather to rejoice for his fellow than to be careful for himself.’

• John Lambert, 1537

Lambert was summoned before a religious court on suspicion of having converted to Protestantism. He remained silent, like Jesus before his accusers, and in doing so was instrumental in bringing about a change in the law whereby it was decreed no man can accuse himself – nemo tenetur edere contra se. It didn’t save his life, and he was burnt at Smithfield in 1537. When Lambert’s legs had been charred to stumps, he was taken from the fire, but he cried out, ‘None but Christ, none but Christ,’ and was dropped into the flames again.

• John Forest, 1538

Forest, a preacher who opposed Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, was the only Catholic to be burnt at the stake at Smithfield for heresy. With Forest on a bed of chains suspended over the pyre, the executioner added a huge wooden holy relic as the martyr slowly roasted. When the flames reached his feet he lifted them up before lowering them again into the fire.

Another who lost his life that year was a man, recorded only as ‘Collins’, who was executed for mocking the Mass in church by lifting a dog above his head.

• Edward Powell and others, 1540

30 July 1540 was a busy day for the Smithfield executioners: that day three Catholics, Edward Powell, Thomas Abel and Richard Featherstone, went to their doom alongside three Protestants, Robert Barnes, Thomas Gerard and William Jerome.

Powell was that rarity, a Welsh Catholic. He was a rector in Somerset and a preacher favoured by Henry VIII. He was one of four clerics selected to defend the legality of the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the validity of which was questioned as she had been married to Henry’s late brother, Arthur. Powell later criticised Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn (Catherine’s replacement) and this resulted in his arraignment for high treason.

Abel had been a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and continued to support the queen when Henry began divorce proceedings. The king had Abel thrown into the Beauchamp Tower, where he spent six years before being taken to Smithfield and executed for denying royal supremacy over the Church.

Featherstone was also a chaplain to Catherine of Aragon and a tutor to Mary Tudor, her daughter. In 1534 he was asked to take the Oath of Supremacy but refused to do so and was imprisoned in the Tower. After Powell, Abel and Featherstone’s execution their limbs were fixed to the gates of the city and their heads displayed on poles on London Bridge.

Barnes, Gerard and Jerome, the Protestants, were prosecuted for supporting the doctrines of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli. Of the three, Barnes was the most interesting character. Henry VIII sent him to Germany in 1535 to encourage disciples of Martin Luther to give their approval to the king’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon. By the year of Barnes’s execution Henry had decided to oppose Luther’s reforms vehemently. Barnes had made a speech at Paul’s Cross attacking a rival cleric, which caused turmoil within the different factions of the king’s council. Barnes was forced to apologise but it wasn’t enough to save him.

• John Rogers, 1555

A Bible translator, Rogers became the first Protestant martyr to be executed during the reign of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, when he was burnt at Smithfield on 4 February 1555. Rogers had produced only the second complete English Bible (published 1537), the first to be translated into English from the original Hebrew and Greek. He printed it under the pseudonym Thomas Matthew, but much of it was the work of William Tyndale, whose pioneering English translation had caused the Church such distress.

Prior to his execution, Rogers was asked by Woodroofe, the Newgate Prison sheriff, if he would revoke his ‘evil opinion of the Sacrament of the altar’. Rogers replied: ‘That which I have preached I will seal with my blood.’ When Woodroofe responded, ‘Thou art an heretic,’ Rogers retorted, ‘That shall be known at the Day of Judgment’.

On the way to Smithfield Rogers saw his wife and eleven children in the crowd, but was not allowed to talk to them. He died quickly for the flames soon raged. Nevertheless he was courageous enough to pretend to be washing his hands in the fire as if it had been cold water. He then lifted them in the air and prayed. As he died a flock of doves flew above, leading one supporter to claim that one of the birds was the Holy Ghost himself.