THE
ACTS AND MONUMENTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH
by
JOHN FOXE (or FOX)
Introduction
The Times
There was never a worse
place or time to be religious than Europe in the 16th Century. These were cruel
times. There was the death penalty for all but the most petty offences, and
hangings were a popular spectator sport. Indeed, hanging was a lenient
punishment: flaying, impaling, breaking on the wheel, and being hung upside
down and sawn through from groin to scalp were alternatives. Lesser crimes such
as begging were punished with flogging, branding or mutilation. Torture was
widespread and trials, if held at all, often a travesty of justice. Warfare,
too, was conducted with the utmost brutality; massacre, rape and pillage of the
civilian population were standard practice, and the slaughter of enemy
prisoners was common, sometimes even including those who had been promised
their lives if they surrendered.
Religious hatred made
things even worse. Reading Foxe, or other authors of the time, whether
Protestant or Catholic, it is striking how absolutely certain everyone was that
not only were they right, but that their opponents were the agents of Satan.
(See here for a Catholic example and here for a Calvinist one). Foxe knew that the Pope was
the Antichrist predicted by the Bible in the same way as he knew that water was
wet or that the sun went round the earth. From this certainty sprang the
intolerance from which persecution arises. It was argued, that if a murderer,
who only slew the body, deserved death; how much more deserving of death was a
heretic, whose evil falsehoods could destroy the victim's soul. This being so,
it was clear that any means could and should be used to stamp out these devil's
spawn. Both sides believed that there was only one true religion and all
deviation from it was hellish; they only differed about which religion it was.
Catholics persecuted Protestants and vice versa; each side persecuted its own
heretics with equal vigour. In Eastern Europe, the Orthodox faith was both
perpetrator and victim. In England, the official religion changed four times in
less than thirty years, and each change was accompanied by persecution of those
who would not change with it. The division of Europe into Catholic and
Protestant powers, often at war with one another, meant that in some countries
(especially England) preaching the wrong religion was regarded as supporting
the enemy and punished as treason.
The Book
John Foxe or Fox
(1518-1587), a staunchly Protestant divine, wrote his book as this story seen
from the Protestant point of view. The Acts and Monuments of the Christian
Church, better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, was first published in
English in 1563. (see Bibliographic Note). In this
enormously long history of the Church from the death of Christ to the accession
of Queen Elizabeth I, he is anxious to prove firstly the complete hatefulness,
evil and corruption of the Catholic church, the papacy and the monastic orders,
and secondly to assert the right of the monarch to appoint bishops and clergy,
and to dispose of church property and income at will. Everything (and that
means everything) which supports this view goes in; everything which
does not is either left out, glossed over, or rejected as ipso facto
untrue because asserted by his opponents. For example, his treatment of
Savonarola is breathtaking in its omissions. To read Foxe's account, one would
think that Savonarola was a humble monk, plucked from his cell and burned for
preaching a few sermons -- there is not a word about his capture of the
government of Florence, theocratic rule (with bonfires of vanities,) nor of his
inciting a French army to invade Italy and occupy Florence; still less of his
claims to possess miraculous powers. If his sources support his prejudices,
however, his credulity knows no bounds; he is as ready to peddle the myth of Jewish blood-sacrifices of Christian children as he is to
believe in the foundation of the church in England
by Joseph of Arimathea. When he gets closer to his own times, however, his
accounts are in most cases taken from eye-witness evidence or official
documents and must be accepted as basically factual. There is no doubt that
Protestants were savagely persecuted by Henry VIII and especially by Mary I and
that this contributed to the fear and hatred which animates the book. The
gruesome and enormously detailed accounts of the martyrdoms of Cranmer, Ridley,
Latimer and all the other victims of Bloody Mary's tyranny are sober fact.
Nonetheless, any students tempted to regard the book as a work of history are
warned to check anything Foxe says with some more even-handed historian before
reproducing it. (We recommend Reformation:
Europe's House Divided by Diarmaid MacCulloch)
Influence
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
was very widely read and had a deep influence on English thinking for
centuries. In the Seventeenth century, it contributed to what historians have
called the "Catholic myth"; that is the belief that English
Catholics, in reality a powerless and beleaguered minority, were a vast
conspiracy ready to seize any opportunity to overthrow the state, enslave the
people, introduce the Inquisition etc. It is arguable that this belief was one
of the principal causes of the English Civil War, and quite certain that it was
a cause of the rebellion of Monmouth and the "Popish Plot"
conspiracy, not to mention the expulsion of James II in the "Glorious
Revolution". A century later, the Gordon riots of 1780 drew most of their
strength from it; in the words of Dickens in Barnaby Rudge:
. . . the air was filled with whispers of a
confederacy among the Popish powers to degrade and enslave England, establish
an inquisition in London, and turn the pens of Smithfield market into stakes
and cauldrons; when terrors and alarms which no man understood were perpetually
broached, both in and out of Parliament, by one enthusiast who did not
understand himself, and bygone bugbears which had lain quietly in their graves
for centuries, were raised again to haunt the ignorant and credulous.
Well into the Nineteenth
century these ideas were widespread. In vulgar form they were held among the
less educated. George Eliot refers to this often, though of course she was too
sensible to share them. Among the more educated and civilised, they were believed
in a more educated and civilised way - see the introduction
. William Cobbett, in his equally but oppositely biased History of the Protestant Reformation
(pub. 1826) devotes some space to refuting Foxe.
And today? Ian Paisley
and his followers certainly sleep with it under the pillow, as do some Scottish
Presbyterians and US Deep South fundamentalists, and the religion described in
Philip Pullman's Dark Materials series bears a close resemblance to the
Catholic church as imagined by Foxe. (Most modern opponents of the Catholic
church, however, have entirely different reasons for their views.) In his
splendid book The English, Jeremy Paxman makes the case that Foxe, more
than anyone else, is responsible for the half-fearful, half-contemptuous
attitude of many English people towards their fellow-Europeans:
This
sense of being uniquely persecuted and uniquely guarded must, obviously, be
connected with religious belief. But the relevant text is not in the Bible. It
is John Foxe's Book of Martyrs, a lurid piece of propaganda detailing
the suffering and death of Protestants executed during Queen Mary's attempt to
turn England back to Rome. It ought to be taken as the third Testament of the
English Church. The book first appeared in 1563. It had expanded by 1570, the
year of Elizabeth's excommunication, to 2,300 pages of often gory descriptions
of the oppression of English Protestants at the hands of the Roman Catholic
Church. Anglican authorities ordered it to be displayed in churches across the
country, and the illiterate had it read to them. It stayed on show in many
churches for centuries, a ready reference for anyone who doubted the
willingness of English-men and -women to die for their beliefs. By the end of
the seventeenth century, perhaps 10,000 copies were in circulation. Throughout
much of the following hundred years, new editions were produced, often in the
form of serializations: after the Bible, it was the most widely available book
in the land.
John
Foxe's purpose in describing the executions of the victims of persecution was
to demonstrate the Church of England as "the renewing of the ancient
church of Christ:" it was the church in Rome that was deviant.
Christianity, Foxe suggested, had arrived in England in the reign of King
Lucius of Colchester, and only later with missionaries from Rome. (Another
fable, the Glastonbury Legend, tells, of course, that Joseph of Arimathea
brought Christianity -- and the Holy Grail -- to England soon after the
crucifixion.) The accession of Mary to the throne, and the reign of terror that
followed as she tried to restore the supremacy of the Roman Catholic Church,
was, therefore, some mad aberration. . . . .
The
influence of this great tract must have been profound. At a religious level,
the historian Owen Chadwick believes that
"the
steadfastness of the victims, from Ridley and Latimer downwards, baptized the
English Reformation in blood and drove into English minds the fatal association
of ecclesiastical tyranny with the See of Rome ... Five years before, the
Protestant cause was identified with church robbery, destruction, irreverence,
religious anarchy. It was now beginning to be identified with virtue, honesty,
and loyal English resistance to a half-foreign government."
Not only did The Book of Martyrs
identify the Roman Catholic Church with tyranny, it associated the English with
valour. Any citizen could enter almost any church and discover for themselves
the ruthlessness of foreign powers. They learned at the same time of the
unbending courage of the English casualties. The effect of the book was not
merely to dignify English Protestantism and demonize Roman Catholicism, but to
hammer home the idea of themselves as a people alone. Being embattled had a
moral purpose.
It
sometimes seems that the English need to think of themselves like this . . . .
(Extract from pp. 89-91 of the 1st
edition, Michael Joseph, London, 1999. Copyright, and quoted by Mr. Paxman's permission,
which is gratefully acknowledged)
Downloads and further information
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PART 1 (A.D. 33-1360) |
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PART 2 (A.D. 1360-1512) |
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PART 3 (A.D. 1512-1540) |
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PART 4 (A.D. 1540-1555) |
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PART 5 (A.D. 1555) |
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PART 6 (1556-1559) |
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(VOLS 12-15 – in Preparation) |
(VOLS 12-15 – in Preparation) |
