Marian Persecutions (1555–1558): Mary I Burns Protestants

The Marian persecutions were the burning of around 280 Protestants for heresy in England between February 1555 and November 1558, under Queen Mary I. Intended to stamp out the Protestant faith introduced under Edward VI, the burnings instead created a generation of martyrs whose stories, told in John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, shaped English identity for centuries and gave the queen the name “Bloody Mary”.

Background

Mary I was the daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, and a committed Catholic. Her father had broken with Rome in the 1530s, as described in Henry VIII and the English Reformation, and under her half-brother Edward VI (1547–1553) England became much more firmly Protestant, with an English prayer book and the removal of images and altars.

Mary came to the throne in July 1553 after the failed attempt to make Lady Jane Grey queen. She set out to restore Catholic worship. The Latin Mass returned, married clergy were removed, and in July 1554 she married Philip of Spain, a match that had already provoked Wyatt’s Rebellion earlier that year.

On 30 November 1554 Cardinal Reginald Pole, the papal legate, formally absolved the realm and reconciled England with the papacy. Parliament then revived the medieval heresy laws, which came back into force on 20 January 1555. Heresy was now a crime punishable by burning, after trial in the church courts.

The procedure followed long-standing practice across Catholic Europe. Suspects were examined by a bishop or his officials, usually on their beliefs about the Mass, and urged to recant. Those who refused, or who relapsed after recanting, were declared obstinate heretics and handed to the secular authorities, the sheriffs and town officers, who carried out the burning. Burning was meant to purge the community of heresy and to give the condemned a last chance to repent before death.

What happened

The first victim was John Rogers, a clergyman who had helped produce the Matthew Bible, burned at Smithfield in London on 4 February 1555. Within days Laurence Saunders was burned at Coventry, and on 9 February John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester, was burned in his own cathedral city and Rowland Taylor at Hadleigh in Suffolk.

The leading Protestant bishops were tried at Oxford. Hugh Latimer, former Bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, were burned together outside Balliol College on 16 October 1555. According to Foxe, Latimer encouraged Ridley by saying that they would “light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.”

Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and Edward VI and author of the Book of Common Prayer, was condemned but signed several recantations. On the day of his execution, 21 March 1556, he withdrew them and, at the stake, held into the flames the right hand that had signed them.

Most of the victims, however, were not clergy. They were weavers, labourers, artisans, housewives and young people, mostly from London and the south-east, especially Essex, Kent and Sussex. About 50 of them were women. In July 1556 three women were burned on Guernsey, and a baby born to one of them during the execution also died, a case Foxe described in harrowing detail.

The burnings continued until the end of the reign. The last took place at Canterbury on 10 November 1558, a week before Mary died.

Key people

Mary I believed that restoring Catholicism was her religious duty, and she supported the use of the heresy laws. She died childless on 17 November 1558.

Cardinal Reginald Pole, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1556, led the Catholic restoration. Historians debate how far he drove the burnings or simply accepted them, alongside a broader programme of preaching and church reform.

Edmund Bonner, Bishop of London, presided over the largest number of trials, since his diocese contained London and Essex, where Protestants were most numerous. Protestant writers made him the chief villain of the persecution.

Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor, presided over some of the first trials but died in November 1555.

John Foxe, a Protestant exile during Mary’s reign, gathered accounts of the martyrs and published them after her death.

By the numbers

Exact totals vary slightly between historians because Foxe’s lists contain some errors and duplications, but the overall scale is not seriously disputed.

Consequences

The burnings failed in their purpose. Many Protestants went into exile in Frankfurt, Geneva, Strasbourg and Zurich, where they absorbed more radical Reformed ideas and later returned to lead the English church. Public executions, especially in London, often drew sympathetic crowds, and the government began to discourage large gatherings at the stake.

When Mary died in November 1558, on the same day as Cardinal Pole, her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I succeeded her. Elizabeth’s religious settlement of 1559 restored a Protestant Church of England, and Mary’s Catholic restoration was undone within months.

Many of the returning exiles became bishops and leading clergy in the Elizabethan church. Their experience of persecution, and of the Reformed churches of Switzerland and Germany, made them suspicious of anything that seemed to compromise with Rome. In this way the burnings helped shape the more radical wing of English Protestantism that later became known as Puritanism.

Legacy

In 1563 John Foxe published the first English edition of his Actes and Monuments, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs. Its woodcuts of burnings, including that of Latimer and Ridley, made the Marian martyrs household names. In 1571 church authorities ordered that copies be placed in cathedrals, and many parish churches acquired one.

The memory of the burnings fed English anti-Catholic feeling for centuries and helped make Protestantism part of national identity. In Oxford, the Martyrs’ Memorial, completed in the 1840s, commemorates Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, and a cross set in the road on Broad Street marks the site of the burnings.

Modern historians such as Eamon Duffy have argued that Mary’s church was more energetic and popular than Protestant tradition allowed, and that the burnings must be seen in a European context where heresy executions were common. Yet the persecution remains the defining memory of her reign.

Myths and facts

Myth: Mary was uniquely cruel among Tudor monarchs. The concentrated burning of around 280 people in under four years was without parallel in England, but Henry VIII and Elizabeth I also executed religious dissenters, usually Catholics under Elizabeth, prosecuted for treason rather than heresy.

Myth: the victims were mainly bishops and scholars. Only a handful were senior clergy. The great majority were ordinary lay men and women.

Timeline

• 1553, 19 July: Mary is proclaimed queen in London.
• 1554, 25 July: Mary marries Philip of Spain at Winchester Cathedral.
• 1554, 30 November: Cardinal Pole reconciles England with the papacy.
• 1555, 20 January: The revived heresy laws come into force.
• 1555, 4 February: John Rogers is burned at Smithfield, the first Marian martyr.
• 1555, 16 October: Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley are burned at Oxford.
• 1556, 21 March: Thomas Cranmer is burned at Oxford.
• 1558, 10 November: The last burnings take place at Canterbury.
• 1558, 17 November: Mary I and Cardinal Pole die; Elizabeth I succeeds.
• 1563: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments is published in English.

Why it matters

The Marian persecutions were the most intense religious persecution in English history. They failed to restore Catholicism, but they gave English Protestants a powerful story of martyrdom that shaped the nation’s religion, politics and sense of itself for generations.