Bloody Mary Tudor?

- Episode 04 -

Most who were burned were not Protestants

Most of those burned weren't Protestants
Wednesday 8 June 2022
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We're trying to understand why so many people were burned under Philip and Mary
Pseudocyesis is often caused by problems with the pituitary gland. Incidence may be higher in communities which put a higher priority on fertility in women

Everybody believed that Mary was pregnant
 
In January 1555 Mary was pregnant. Now we all know that Mary never went into labour and never had a child. The fact that she twice believed herself to be pregnant has been used by traditional protestant historians to prove that she was, well, stupid and bigoted.

Stupid to convince herself she was pregnant just because she so badly wanted to be and bigoted because she presumably believed that God wanted her to have a baby. After all, as everyone knew perfectly well, if Mary died without an heir, her Protestant half-sister, the Princess Elizabeth would come to the throne and take England back out of the Catholic Church.
 
Because no child was born, historians curiously overlook Mary’s pregnancy, as if it occurred only in her head. But at least until April of 1555, everybody believed that Mary was pregnant. All the evidence agrees. Her periods stopped, her belly and breasts swelled. She could in fact feel the baby moving inside her. In mid-April 1555 all the usual arrangements were made for Queen Mary to begin her long, six-week confinement. In May proclamations and diplomatic letters were prepared for the announcement of the birth.
 
Mary seems to have suffered from prolactinoma (a tumour of the pituitary gland at the base of the brain, which probably eventually killed her) and which caused, as we know medically it can do, a classic episode of pseudocyesis. 

Pseudocyesis is a medical condition documented since ancient times in which the body replicates pregnancy down to the most telling details, including the sensation of the baby’s movements. The only missing sign is the baby’s heartbeat, which would explain why, by late April, the physicians and midwives were becoming anxious.
 

There was huge pressure on Mary to produce a Catholic heir to the Anglo-Spanish dynasty. Her mother, Catherine of Aragon, initially arranged the engagement of 9yr old Mary to Charles V, Philip's father

Why did Mary’s pregnancy prompt the pursuit of heretics, early in 1555?
 
Why did Mary’s pregnancy in late 1554 make any difference to her government’s religious policy?

Well, if there was to be a Catholic heir to the joint Anglo-Spanish dynasty, then the threat of Protestant rebellion had to be headed off. There had already been one serious rebellion in 1554. Beginning in Kent, it had reached the gates of the city of London itself. [Mary, incidentally, had stayed in the capital and given a rousing speech to those defending it.]
 
The 1554 rebellion had ostensibly been in opposition to Mary’s forthcoming marriage to the Spanish Philip and not about religion but there had certainly been an element of protestant resistance among its small-time gentry leaders. Rumours of plots, including pretenders posing as Mary's late half-brother Edward VI, were regularly reaching the council and the possibility of French backing for them could not be ruled out. With a Catholic baby due, that threat would become more serious.

The king’s select council, responsible for good government really now had no alternative but to grasp the nettle of suppressing any potential causes of unrest – including any remaining shreds of die-hard Protestantism - and promptly.


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Episode 04 - Most of those burned were not Protestants!
The bishops tried to avoid burnings, and the majority who were burned were not Protestants.

Foxe in his 'Martyrs' depicted Bishop Bonner as deliberately hounding innocent men and women. The opposite was true.

'Bloody' Bishop Bonner 'approached the task of managing the burnings with the wariness of someone dismantling a bomb'
 
In 2005 the historian Thomas Freeman of the University of Sheffield published a searchable database of the 313 identified victims. Freeman’s table straightaway disproves one traditional explanation for the numbers who were arrested – which was that it was because of certain fanatical Catholic laymen who launched their own witchhunts. Edmund Tyrrel arrested the largest number, ten, and they were all either found on his own land or reported by villagers. He was not a heretic-hunter!
 
Another old explanation is that certain churchmen relished the chance to send people to the stake and condemned as many of people as possible. It’s true that two men do seem to stand out among those most responsible for condemning heretics to die – Bishop Edmund Bonner of London and Nicholas Harpsfield who was both archdeacon of Canterbury and Vicar General in London. But that’s because more people were arrested in those areas than elsewhere.

The Elizabeth writer, John Foxe, labelled the bishop ‘Bloudy Bonner’ and suggested the bishop was conducting a personal vendetta against honest protestants. But historian Vivienne Westbrook has analysed Foxe’s accounts of the heresy hearings and compared them with other sources. She shows that Foxe heavily edited them to make the inquisitors appear heartless and scornful.

In fact we know that Bonner, in particular, strained every theological possibility to find compromises by which the accused could walk free. The historian Thomas Freeman tells us that ‘Bonner approached the task of managing the burnings with the wariness of someone dismantling a bomb.’


More info and photos here.
Based on diocesan map of 1543, a long thin finger of the Canterbury diocese that stretched out from the Weald and ended up at Lewes. An area where county and diocesan boundaries were particularly tangled up.

Could it be that after the first few months, the persecution under Philip and Mary was not mainly directed at protestants at all?

Almost all of the victims burned under Philip and Mary between 1555 and 1558 in or near Essex and Kent, were poor English artisans from isolated rural settings. They lived miles from the ports. Remote areas like the Weald and the Stour always seem to have cultivated a sense of being on the edge of the law. And on the edge they certainly were.

What historians don’t seem to have spotted is that both of the main areas, the High Weald and the Stour Valley, straddled the borders of counties – Essex and Suffolk, Kent and Sussex. And both were also on the very edges of church dioceses, distant from their Cathedrals with all their administrative machinery. The Weald for example was a long, boggy ride from the cathedral of Canterbury to one side and even further from Chichester on the other.

In fact, on this Canterbury-Chichester border there was at this time a strange twist, a long thin finger of the Canterbury diocese that stretched out from the Weald and deep into the Chichester diocese. It ended up at a point just across the river Ouse from the little Sussex town of Lewes. So this was an area where county and diocesan boundaries were particularly tangled up.

Such remote areas, not only boggy and wooded, but also far from the centres of government and close to borders across which you might escape, always historically produced pockets of dissent. Here you would later find for example, Elizabethan puritans and Civil War Baptists.

The victims we’re discovering in these places were not apparently, as we’ve always been led to think, ordinary protestants who resented the return of Mary’s Catholicism. It looks as though, in these remote parishes, where most of the victims came from, we are stumbling across something very different. Something that is much older. These are isolated pockets of local, often rural religion, that long-predated Luther’s reformation.
 

 
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