A poena et culpa: penitence, confidence and the Miserere in Foxe's Actes and Monuments

Renaksance Studies Vol . 4 No. 3

A poena et culpa: penitence, confidence and the Miserere in Foxe’s

Actes and Monuments LYDIA WHITEHEAD

John Foxe’s religious chronicle, the Actes and Monuments, is better known as his ‘Book of Martyrs’, yet although this title is by no means descriptive of the complete work, it is at least indicative of its origins. The design was that of Edmund Grindal, who, exiled in Strasbourg during Mary’s reign, was intent on making a record of the persecutions in England. Grindal commissioned and collected accounts of the Pro- testants’ sufferings and Foxe (also a member of the Protestant exile community) was to prepare a Latin version to be published simultaneously with Grindal’s English work. The plan and designation altered con- siderably when, prompted by Elizabeth’s accession, Grindal returned to England, leaving Foxe to complete the work. The Latin version was published in 1559 and comprised Foxe’s earlier history of the beginnings of the Reformed Church in Europe along with the new accounts of the Henrician and Marian persecutions in England. An English version was published (in England) in 1563. I Subsequent editions (especially that of 1570) confirmed the work’s identity: it was not simply a catalogue of persecution and violent death, but a history of the religion of the Word. The Actes and Monuments swiftly acquired a central position in the Protestant-nationalist literature. In Foxe’s lifetime it went through four editions, being first published in 1563, with a fifth appearing in 1596. William Haller, in his classic study of the work, estimates that around 10,000 copies were in circulation by the end of the seventeenth century (the final, ninth edition, appeared in 1684).’

Yet even as a martyrology, a book of martyrs, it is distinctive, as it proposes a new style of living and dying. Following John Bale’s innovatory accounts of the lives of Sir John Oldcastle and Anne Askew, Foxe’s work describes qualities which are emphatically Protestant in spirit. This work, unlike the medieval martyrologies, or the miraculous stories of the Golden Legend, locates virtue in plain lives and undemonstrative piety. Eschewing the Roman Church’s rich tradition of hagiography, Foxe’s new Protestant saints are placed within the interpretative framework of the

‘ William Haller, Foxe’s Book ofMartyrs and the Elect Nation (London, 1963). 70-1. * Haller, 13. ’ Leslie P. Fairfield, ‘John Bale and the development of Protestant hagiography’,JEccl Hzst, 24

(1973), 154-6. Bale’s narratives were incorporated (heavily edited) by Foxe into his own work.

0 1990 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford University Press

288 Lydia Whitehead

Bible and, most importantly, the Bible in English. The plain vernacular text of the Scriptures is a guide for the martyrs’ actions; it is also, for Foxe, the recordist and collator of their stories, an interpretative tool. Foxe’s protagonists are linked into a network of allusion in such a proximity with the Bible: the Word confirms and ratifies action. These new martyrs are united in their sufferings not with the catalogue of names read out at the Mass, but with the earliest models of Christian suffering and, ultimately with Christ himself.

However, this Protestant view of the Bible, holding (as Tyndale puts it) the wisdom of ‘the plain text and literal sense’, is by no means the only available or prevalent manifestation of the Word. Foxe’s pattern of biblical reference and quotation is set against a background of dispute and opposition. As Foxe shows his martyrs’ actions to be authorized by the Word, he also reveals the Catholic authorities contesting that ratification. The Actes and Monuments is full of pointed biblical quotation and its role shows the author’s keen awareness of the many possible readings of the texts. Amongst this material, the fifty-first psalm, Miserere mei , stands out, in the frequency of its quotation and in the sophisticated network of allusion its placing generates. Ironically associated with criminal justice and a central text in Catholic theology and liturgy, the Miserere, as it appears in Foxe’s quotation of it, has become expressive of the new Protestant theology of repentance. And it is to be expected, in an en- vironment where the Bible and its interpretation is a matter of grave and popular concern, that such interpretations, as they are voiced by Foxe’s protagonists, should not go unnoticed. These allusions, which direct the reader to the theological heart of the matter, also bring the speakers into actual confrontations.

Foxe’s account of the execution of Lord Henry Gray shows the Duke much tried by the unwanted ministrations of a priest, one Dr. Weston. Even so, Gray’s death scene maintains poise and elegance, as Foxe focuses upon basic religious formulae, set against the interruptions of Weston and a bystander:

Then the Duke kneeled down vpon his knees, and said the Psalm Mise- rere me i Deus, vnto the end, holding vp his hands, and looking vp to heauen. And when he had ended the Psalme, he said I n manus tuas Domine comendo spiritum meum, Bc. Then he arose and stood vp, and deliuered his cap and his skarfe vnto the executioner . . . Then he knit a kercher about his face, and kneeled downe and said, Our father which art in heauen, Bc. vnto the end. And then he saide, Christ haue mercy vpon me, and laide down his head on the blocke, and the executioner took the axe, and at the first chop stroke off his head, and held it vp to the p e ~ p l e . ~

John Foxe, Actes and Monuments ofMatters Most Speczall and Memorable, Happenzng zn the Church, with a n Vnzuersall Hzstorze of the Same (London: Company of Stationers, 1610), 1334

A poena et culpa: Foxe’s Actes and Monuments 289

In most respects the death is in accordance with the conventions of the period: Gray asks forgiveness of the crowd (registering that the queen had already forgiven him); his piety is suitably penitential and he duly forgives his executioner. Finally, the execution itself is performed perfectly, with one blow.5 But there is a notable departure from the routine: it was usual for the condemned criminal to be accompanied by a member of the clergy, for whom there would also be a place on the scaffold.6 As Foxe describes it , the scene shows Gray rejecting Weston’s presence as if it were un- suitable, unnecessary. Weston’s attempts to fulfil his mission even after the duke has made it clear that he is unwanted, are presented as disrup- tive of the solemnity of the occasion. Foxe records a struggle between the duke and Dr Weston on the way up to the scaffold. Gray, refusing Weston’s help, pushed the priest back, but Weston clung on and prevented the duke himself from climbing the steps. On the second attempt, Weston ascended the scaffold with Gray only to be repulsed again. At this point, Weston protested that he was following the queen’s orders and Gray then abandoned his protest in a pertinent gesture of resignation, ‘casting his hands abroad’. The physical conflict, as it threatens the decorum of the execution, also confirms the significance of the duke’s actions. As a Protestant, Gray should not require the mediating services of a ‘ghostly father’, a confessor: instead, he addresses himself directly to his Heavenly Father. Although remaining clearly within the confines of orthodox behaviour, Gray asserts an independence which echoes the innovatory rites of the Protestant martyrs. The repetition of Psalm 51, Miserere mei , is a key element in several of these death scenes.

Psalm 51 has had a long association with criminal justice. At the time of Lord Gray’s repeating it, many would have recognized its opening lines, which were known as the ‘neck verse’. In claiming benefit of clergy, the reading of the first verse of this psalm (its penitential mood being con- sidered suitable for the occasion) was ‘regarded as competent proof of clerkship’ during the Middle Ages, when literacy ‘was virtuallf a clerical monopoly’. ’ The successful claiming of what William Blackstone called ‘a merciful mitigation of the general law’ did not, of course, certify that the claimant was either literate or pious (the verse could, after all, be learned by rote).8 Tyndale and other reformers took exception to the practice, seeing it as an example of the way the Catholic Church sheltered

Samuel Y . Edgerton, Jr, ‘Maniera and the Mannaia: decorum and decapitation in the sixteenth century’, in The Meaning of Mannerism, ed. Franklin W. Robinson and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (Hanover, NH, 1972), 87.

From the fourteenth century, the Church decreed that a priest should accompany the condemned criminal to the scaffold. Originally the role was assigned to the mendicant friars. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death (Harmondsworth, 1983), 6 , 308.

’ David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980), 16.

Cressy, 17. Blackstone’s defence of this loophole is quoted in J. A. Sharpe, Crime in Seven- teenth-Century England: A County Study (Cambridge, 1983), 145.

290 Lydia Whitehead

criminals from the just vengeance of the ~ t a t e . ~ By the eighteenth century, however, the psalm was sufficiently closely associated with the pro- cess of execution itself to have acquired another name: 'the hanging song'. In hi5 essay on seventeenth-century public execution in England, Dr Sharpe notes that the psalm was frequently sung at executions, and he cites the case of the Anabaptist, Francis Deane who, having 'warned the spectators . . . against human sinfulness', led them in the singing of the psalm." But from evidence in Foxe's Actes and Monuments, it seems clear that the tradition was current in the sixteenth century. Yet it did not always have the remorseful emphasis that is apparent in Francis Deane's case (or, indeed, that of Lord Henry Gray).

In the medieval liturgy, the Penitential Psalms occupied a central position. Within the pattern of the Office, the seven psalms would be recited as a unit, and appeared, too, in the Office for the Dead." Moreover, as the serial reading of psalms and lessons disappeared under the weight of festal obligations, these seven psalms, along with the fifteen Gradual Psalms and the Commendations (most of Psalm 119, recited in 48-verse sections at the end of each service) were most frequently used.12 These daily services, based on monastic practices, were not usually attended by a large section of the laity (the Mass being the central service for popular devotion), but the Penitential Psalms would also be familiar from such more sombre occasions as the services for the visitation of the sick and for funerals. l 3

The sixteenth century saw many alterations in this pattern and not exclusively from Protestant groups.14 In England, after the break with Rome, liturgical reform was largely unofficial and usually unacceptable. George Joye's primer-type work, the Hortulus animae, was banned, principally for its omission of the Litany and the Office for the Dead, and William Marshall's attempts to reissue the work as A Goodly Primer in English sufkred the same fate (though Marshall later compromised). I s

Further attgmpts at reform were halted in 1545 with the publication of The King's .$rimer, which contained all the traditional elements, but offered also Cranmer's new English Litany. On the accession of Edward VI, the experimentation recommenced, producing first a vernacular Order of Communion and then, in 1549, the first Book of Common Prayer.16

William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of the Holy Scriptures, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, vol. 32, 1848), 180.

lo J. A. Sharpe, 'Last dying speeches: religion, ideology and public execution in seventeenth- century England', Past and Present, 107 (1985), 151 .

" F. E. Brightman, The English Rite ( 2 vols, London, 1951), I, p. xxv. '' G . J. Cumipg. A History of Anglican Liturgy (London, 1969), 22. ' I Brightman, I , p. Ixiv; Cuming, 26-7. " Brightman, I , pp. xxvi-xxviii. " William Marshall, A Goodly Primer in English, in Three Primers Put Forth in the Reign of

'' Cuming, 59, 61. Henry VIII , ed. E. Burton (Oxford, 1834), 125-4, and Cuming, 49.


The Edwardine books (of 1549 and 1552) collate the services once found in the missal, breviary, processional and manual, and while often adapting the old Sarum rite, offer an emphatically Protestant system.” In these books, the Penitential Psalms figure only marginally: the service for the Burial of the Dead, a very brief affair, omits them entirely. The Visitation of the Sick in 1549 retains only Psalm 143 and this is cut out in the 1552 version. Only one service consistently maintains the traditional penitential mood: the ‘Commination agaynst synners’, usually a service for Ash Wednesday, though prescribed by the 1552 edition ‘to be used for dyvers tymes in the yere’.’’ Psalm 51 forms the Commination’s focal point. Its use here is an indication of the Edwardine reformers’ understanding of it: in this context, the psalm proposes a rhetorical self- abasement before a frightening deity.

Instead of the traditional penitential focus, these new funerary rites seem to proclaim a doctrine of consolation. The Visitation of the Sick remains rooted in the Sarum form, of confession and absolution, but it is a much less demonstrative service. l 9 The procession to the house has disappeared, the anointing is now perfunctory, no longer set apart in a form of its own, and is removed entirely from the 1552 book.20 The effect of these alterations is to place stress on the remaining psalm, 21, ‘In thee, 0 lord haue I put my trust’: extolling the strength of God, the confidence of this central psalm reflects the assurance of the individual or society for whom the art of dying has been replaced by the art of living.2’ This is clear also in the new funeral rites. Again cutting out the processional aspects, the 1549 service emphasizes trust in God, particularly in its use of psalms. Most of the material originates in the Sarum rite, but Cranmer’s collation of it reflects contemporary and, particularly, Protestant views of death. The terrible vision of judgement at the heart of the Requiem Mass is replaced by an uncluttered communion service: instead of attention on the dies irae, the services proposes a vision of calm and rest. The use of Psalm 42 (from the Sarum committal) stresses this: although constantly evoking pain and fear in its questions, the answers in this internal dialogue are confident: ‘0 put thy trust in god, for I will yet thank him which is the helpe of my countenaunce’.22 The 1552 form is simpler still, and is directed toward an apocalyptic vision of resurrection: the service is held entirely at the graveside, its ‘message’, entirely for the mourners, is hopeful. 23

I’ Cuming, 68. ‘’ The First and Second Prayer Books ofEdward V I , ed. E. C. Ratcliffe (London, 1949), 430. ’’ Cuming, 88. ” Ratcliffe, 257-68, and Cuming, 88-9. ” Ratcliffe, 263, 420. 2 2 Ratcliffe, 276, and Cuming, 90. ” Ratcliffe, 424-7, and Cuming, 113. This service is dominated by the lesson; the priest reads the

whole of the fifteenth chapter of the First Epistle to the Corinthians. It is a service of meditation and instruction: the opening sentence from the Book of Job, the Kyrie and the Our Father are all that is left of the original dramatic celebration of judgement and penitence.

292 Lydia Whitehead

The consolatory mode of services which were originally concerned with penance develops in response to a change in the attitude to penance itself. Late medieval confession had both a normative, disciplinarian intention and a consolatory aim. In his study of pre-Reformation penitential theology, Tentler notes that ‘sacramental confession provided a com- prehensive and organised system of social control’ in which the priest dominated (although he, in turn, was carefully supervised). 2 4 Compatible with the role of discipline was the element of consolation, in providing a system of forgiveness and reinteg~ation.’~ Luther, in his attack on sacramental confession, produced a doctrine of penance which is entirely consolatory. He suggested that complete confession is not possible, and contrition is passive: admitting their own worthlessness before God, contrite sinners need only ‘believe the promise of forgiveness’. 2 6 While main- taining the value of confession for those sins which damage the community (murder, theft, adultery, lying), Luther stressed that there were ‘the secret sins of the heart’ which ‘might well be left between the individual and Luther’s view did not urge detailed examination of con- science (on the contrary, he favoured an emphasis on new life rather than past sins), but instead concerned the inner life in terms of faith (believing the power of forgiveness rather than following prescribed procedures in order to obtain The shift is, effectively, from penance to repentance. Not that sacramental penance excluded a repentant attitude; the shift is rather based on Luther’s assertion of its primacy, and his rejection of more active and institutional ways to forgiveness.

As one may expect, along with new ideas of penitence come new readings of and uses for the Penitential Psalms. The general Protestant connection with translation and paraphrase holds true for the publication of the psalms in English. After Joye’s banned Psalter and Hortulus animae, Marshall’s Goodly Primer is one of the earliest Reformation works to in- clude vernacular psalms. As well as providing a translation of the seven Penitential Psalms, Marshall also includes a translation of Savonarola’s meditation on Psalm 51 . 2 9 This highly rhetorical acknowledgement of human sinfulness is not by any means Protestant in spirit, but it does draw attention to the psalms as texts for private reading and meditation, rather than public, liturgical repetition.-” This is of interest in the light of Luther’s later remarks on the psalm; he writes in a commentary of 1538:

*‘ Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve o f the Reformation (Princeton, NJ, 1977), 345.

*’ Tentler, 347-8. 26 Ibzd. 354. *’ Luther favoured private confession of such sins, but in practice this often occurred in public:

John Bossy, ‘The social history of confession in the age of reform’, Trans Roy Hzst Soc, 5th ser., 25 (1975), 26-7.

’* Tentler, 352, 360. *’ Burton, 130-66. ’O Ibl‘d. 165.


‘Est autem multis modis huius Psalmi c o p i t o tum necessaria tum utilis: Continet enim doctrinam de praecipius nostra Religionis capitibus, de Poenitentia, de Peccato, de Gratia, et Justificatione, Item de Cultu quem nos Deo praestare debemus.’” In Psalm 51, Luther reads ‘all the distinctive tenets of his faith’.32

Less institutional still is the use to which Coverdale suggests his Goostly Psalmes and Spiritual1 Songes be put: in the preface, Coverdale proposes that these songs take the place of popular and secular music: ‘Yea, would God that our minstrels had none other thing to play upon, neither our carters and ploughmen other thing to whistle upon, save psalms, hymns, and such godly songs as David is occupied withal.’” Coverdale’s book was heavily reliant upon Lutheran geistliche Leider: metrical versions of can- ticles as well as psalms and hymns are included, all with unharmonized

Coverdale’s reading of Psalm 51 (there are two versions, in fact) proclaims its Protestant status principally through marginal references. 3 5

While Coverdale’s reading of Psalm 51 is to some extent dependent upon its context (its setting to popular, albeit German tunes, its careful referencing to Scripture) for its Protestant emphasis, Wyatt’s version presents a more radical departure. His translation of the group, and Psalm 51 in particular, seems to reflect the great change in penitential theology. In line with the recession of the Penitential Psalms from their key positions in formal and public services, Wyatt’s translation intensifies the informal and individual tendency in interpretation. Nevertheless, his borrowing from Aretino does, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, place the psalms in the context of a world oriented around the values of domination and submission. 3 6 The penitent voice clearly demonstrates his surrender: like the convicted traitors of contemporary trials, he acknowledges his guilt in the divine court of law: ‘And I beknow my f f a ~ t . ’ ~ ’ The guilt, however, extends further than the immediate crime: it infects life, from the very beginning: ‘Ffor I my selff . . . /Am nowght but synn from my natyvite’ (11. 456-8).

Although clearly set in the context of the Tudor obedience cult, the psalm concerns itself primarily with the sort of inwardness which that

” Cited by H. A . Mason in Humanism and Poetry in the Early Tudor Period (London, 1959),

’’ Ibid. 217. ” Myles Coverdale, Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of E n t e r , ed. George Pearson (Cam-

bridge: Parker Society, vol. 21, 1846), 537. Here Coverdale draws on Erasmus’ vision of popular literacy from the Paraclesis. ’‘ Peter Le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England 1549-1660 (London, 1967), 371.

Coverdale, 546-7. In the first of the two versions, the text of the psalm is progressively referenced to the stages of conversion, from proper repentance (using the Luke 18 version of the parable of the pharisee and the publican) through original sin (Ephesians 2 .3) to an actual conversion, as Peter preaches to the crowds at Pentecost in Acts 2 .

l6 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), 120-1. ” Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘Penitential Psalms’ (1. 442), in The Collected Poems ofsir Thomas Wyatt ,

ed. Kenneth Muir and Patricia Thomson (Liverpool, 1969), 113-15.

217.

294 Lydia Whitehead

culture marginalizes. Interestingly, the crime which occasions penitence is more in keeping with the ‘secret sins of the heart’ which concerned Luther than the ‘bloodguiltiness’ usually confessed: the crime may have been hidden ‘from the sight of man’, but it does not escape the attention of the deity. This God is not so much implacable (as at times Coverdale’s reading suggests) as all-seeing: under his scrutiny, utter sinfulness must be acknowledged. The total submission, in abject confession, is typical of the ‘purely passive sorrow’ which characterizes Lutheran ideas of penitence, and this character is affirmed in employing an emphatically Protestant vocabulary (‘This know I and repent’, 1. 451).38 Later, when the penitent is forgiven, the intense inwardness, once claustrophobic, becomes a virtue and a source of strength. The primacy of inward values is asserted: true repentance does not require institutional gestures of penance, ‘the owtward dedes the owtward men disclose’ (1. 496). As a final affirmation of the importance of inwardness, Wyatt sets Zion as ‘inward Syon, the Syon of the ghost’, ‘hertes Hierusalem’ (11. 504-5); the historical city, traditionally interpreted as a vision of the Church, has become the citadel of the embattled soul. The refuge from the ‘locus of corruption’ which the ‘dark cave’ affords is superseded; in the landscape of the sequence and in Wyatt’s range of allusion, physical forms give way to an internal t ~ p o g r a p h y . ~ ~ As in the treason and heresy trials, the sin/crime is internalized, a thought crime; so also, and perhaps more importantly, forgiveness, thanksgiving and good conduct are focused in the inner life, with outward actions merely as symptoms.

It is in this developing interpretative tradition that Foxe registers the Psalm’s place in the martyrs’ art of dying. English Protestantism, in Foxe’s history, is an oppositional force: it is born of and finds its definiiton in persecution. A final sanction is given in the deaths of its martyrs. It is a suffering faith, in imitation of its suffering God. In distinguishing itself from the Catholic orthodoxy, which also embraces suffering, Protestan- tism subverts and redefines Catholic rituals of persecution. The relationship between the art of execution and the art of dying is further complicated: words and actions intended to humiliate are reinterpreted by the martyrs as signs of the new faith. The seizure of symbolic initiative, in the famous cases of Latimer and Cranmer, serves to claim the fire as a central element in the Protestant iconography. The Miserere can be seen to undergo a similar transformation and hold a similar place.

The Catholic authorities are shown to use Psalm 51 in its traditional, penitential sense. Foxe’s account of the Lollard priest, William Taylor (taken, like Sir John Oldcastle to be an early Protestant), records Taylor’s recantation, which included the antiphonal recitation of the psalm as

’’ Tentler, 354. ’’ Greenblatt, 127. The psalmist’s ‘dark cave’ (the setting for the whole psalm sequence) is not

merely a refuge: its effect is compared to a ‘pryson or grave’ (Wyatt, ‘Penitential Psalms’, 1. 62) and it moves David to fear and repentance.


part of the ritual.40 Although sentenced to life imprisonment, Taylor was released after having sworn the abjuration, as a penance. The psalm here is at the centre of a conventional penitential act.4’ That the later martyrs choose to focus on Psalm 51 is surely significant. Miserere mei does not assert the sense of victimization that is found in Psalm 22, or indeed, the call for vengeance which occurs elsewhere (Psalm 35, for example): there is no rejection of personal sinfulness, no denial of the validity of a system of punishment as such. The recitation of Psalm 51 places the martyrs firmly in the context of the obedience cult: the submission to God’s judgement is clear, unequivocal. However, this judgement is also connected with divine .mercy (a quality, by contrast, lacking in the earthly courts) and with grace: ‘Just I ame jugd by justice off thy grace’ (Wyatt, Psalm 51, 1. 455). The divine court of law, Wyatt’s translation asserts, has no need of the swift vindictiveness of Tudor justice whose effects Wyatt feels at the time of ~ r i t i n g . ~ ’ The comparison must surely have been clear to Foxe, as editor of the art of dying, if not to his actors. In the theatre of powerlessness which Foxe’s narrative creates, Wyatt’s redirection of submission is vitally important, as it redefines the penitent and relocates the court of law.

The Protestant connection with the vernacular is made apparent here also. During her last days of imprisonment, a priest is sent to Lady Jane Grey by the queen, hoping (according to Foxe) to reconcile Lady Jane to the Church. The attempt is unsuccessful, but gives rise to an interesting exchange. The priest, Dr Feckenham, accompanies Lady Jane to the scaffold, as is the custom: ‘And then kneeling downe shee turnes her to Fecknam, saying: shall I say this Psalme; and he saide, yea. Then saide she the Psalme of Miserere mei Deus in English, in most devout manner throughout to the end.’43 Lady Jane’s choice of the vernacular is a token, a public affirmation of the Protestant faith which she has professed privately in her interview with Feckenham. Although with respect to formal guidance she submits to the priest at her side, it is the watching crowd that is asked to take on the responsibility of spiritual companionship: ‘I pray you assist me in your prayers’, she asks the watchers.44 In the penitential drama, the priestly roles of confessor and mediator are performed not by the clergy, but by the community of faith, as it is represented by the spectators. As the priest is usurped, the victim is free to formulate her own ars morzendi. The symbolic value of the vernacular may be measured by the reaction to another martyr’s recitation of an English translation of Psalm 51. Dr Rowland Taylor, a priest from Hadleigh in Essex, was executed during Mary’s reign. Prevented from

‘’ Foxe, 1388. Taylor’s trial and recantation took place in 1422. “ Compare the example cited by Greenblatt, 1 1 7 . ‘* Mason, 204. *’ Foxe, 1293. ‘‘ Ibid.

296 Lydia Whitehead

addressing the crowd at his execution, Taylor made recourse to other gestures. As he recited the English version of the psalm, the sheriff, Sir John Shelton, ‘struck him on the lips. Ye knave, said hee, speake Latine, I will make thee.’4s The psalm, as it describes God’s merciful justice, offers an eloquent contrast with the crude injustice of the executioners (one of whom ‘cruelly cast a fagot at him, which light vpon his head and brake his face, that the bloud ran down his visage’) and Shelton’s reaction, presumably, registers that Taylor’s meaning has weight. 4 6

Psalm 51 also provides the martyrs with an alternative ceremonial element, as it is recited on the journey to the stake, in imitation of the antiphonal chanting of psalms by priests accompanying the condemned he~etic.~’John Rogers’ recitation of the psalm is offered as a confirmation of the truth of his beliefs, as he was brought ‘toward Smithfield saying the Psalm Miserere by the way, all the people wonderfully reioycing at his constancie, with great praises and thankes to God for the same’.48 Rogers, who was responsible for the publication of the Matthew Bible, was one of the first Marian martyrs. His death, in 1555, marked the beginning of the Marian persecution, according to Foxe, and his martyrdom set the pattern for many of his more celebrated followers: Foxe calls him ‘the proto- martyr’. A London apprentice, William Hunter, was also executed in the first year of Mary’s reign. In the night before his execution, Hunter dreamed of meeting his father on the journey to the stake. The dream was fulfilled the next morning, and Hunter kneeled in response to his father’s benediction and recited the Miserere. In this action, Hunter allies himself with the chain of obedience Tyndale describes: the power of his submission is set against the temptation of submitting to the queen. 4 9

As a key element in these improvised arts of dying, the Miserere stresses the primacy of the inner life and experience. This is vital in the context of a highly charged ritual which culminates in an execution of well-established symbolic value. Wyatt’s definitive reading of the psalm stresses as well as the character of God’s justification, the worthlessness of ‘owtward dede’, and the great vitality of inwardness, of the ‘Syon of the ghost’. Reciting this psalm (and especially in English), the martyrs confirm the insignificance and misguidedness of their coming punishment, in the face of the inviolability of ‘hertes Hierusalem’ and the hidden wisdom of God. The guilt which they confess bears no relation to the punishment which they are about to undergo: this is, most emphatically, not the ‘hanging

Foxe, 1388. d 6 Ibid. ‘’ Foxe, 1711: Cranmer was brought ‘betweene two friers, which mumbling to and fro certaine

‘* Foxe, 1356. Psalmes in the streetes, answered one another . . .’

[bid, 1398. Hunter, as became conventional, was given a final opportunity to recant, before starting the journey to the place of execution. Tyrrell showed him ‘papers’ from the queen, offering a pardon in exchange for Hunter’s renunciation of his Protestant faith.

49


song’. As it moves through the drama of repentance and forgiveness, the Psalm (in its new Protestant reading) proposes instead a different ‘triumphant confession’, and the psalm becomes ‘a Hym to Justification’: this is the difference between the Miserere of William Taylor’s recantation and the psalm sung by Rogers on the way to the stake.5o

In its insistence on the priority of attitude over performance, Psalm 51 occupies a pivotal position between the traditional sacrifices of the Old Testament and the ‘once for all’ sacrifice of Christ. Although Christ’s action is described in the terms of the older sacrifices, the preoccupations of Psalm 51 inform the ana10gy.~’ Wyatt’s translation confirms that tendency, through its access to hindsight (David’s prophetic views being affirmed in the life of Christ) and its Protestant insistence on the validity of repentance instead of penance. Once established, however, the allusive framework is subject to contortions, or even violent reversals. It is, perhaps, inevitable that the sufferings of the martyrs be described also as sacrifices of a more literal nature. As explained in the second chapter of Ephesians, Christ ‘hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour’. Foxe takes up that final phrase in describing the deaths of two martyrs and a fierce literalism lies behind the figurative treatment. His account of the death of Joan Hornes, who was martyred late in Mary’s reign, uses the quotation to achieve a formal, distanced relationship with the violence. The phrase here replaces a description of the actual burning: it mediates the suffering, distancing it and giving it a clear meaning. All that Foxe writes of Joan Hornes’ execution is enclosed in the biblical phrase: as she was ‘offered vp with her other fellowes a burnt sacrifice to the Lord in odorem bonae frugruntiue, in the savour of a sweet and pleasant The positive religious sym- bolism of the stake is contrasted in this brief account with the grotesque actions of the ecclesiastical and secular authorities. The metaphor of ritual sacrifice is contrasted with figurative references to butchery: the bishop (Bonner) ‘knockt her downe with butcherly axe of his sentence’ and Joan Hornes was ‘committed to the shambles of the secular sword’. 53 Sanctified by her beliefs and her willingness to die for them, Joan Hornes’ suffering is transformed from butchery to martyrdom. Here, the attention to outward actions is used to stress the importance of the inner life: the act is characterized by the spirit in which it is performed. Wyatt’s psalmist confirms that view: ‘Then shalt thou take for good these vttward dedes, / A s sacryfice thy pleasure to fullfyll’ (Psalm 51, 11. 506-7).

Another instance of the phrase offers a more disturbing perspective. Here, the text prefaces the account of John Lambert’s martyrdom, fram- ing the journey to the stake, where Lambert ‘should offer himself vnto the

Mason, 217. ” Compare Ephesians 5.2 with Numbers 28.13. ” Foxe, 1734.

Ibid.

298 Lydia Whitehead

Lord, a sacrifice of sweet s a v ~ u r ’ . ~ ~ The phrase (not marked as a quotation here) is followed by a description of the real physical suffering. This sequencing shifts attention from the significance of the execution (as the biblical phrase accounts for it) to the ‘fashion of the burning’. While the figurative language acts euphemistically in Foxe’s description of Joan Hornes’ death, containing and mediating the violence, in this case, the horror is intensified, as the formalism breaks down, failing to distance the awful spectacle. The planned allusion collapses into a hysterical irony, leaving only a scene of hellish torture:

For after that his legs were consumed and burned up to the stumps, and that the wretched tormentors and enemies of God had withdrawn the fire from him so that but a small fire and coles were left under him, then two that stood on each side of him with their halberds pitched him vpon their pikes as farre as the chain would reach.55

Returning to William Hunter’s recitation of Psalm 51, a vital aspect of the psalm’s role in the Actes and Monuments is revealed. Hunter has taken the symbolic initiative, controlling the meaning of the scene, im- provising the art of dying. His recitation of the psalm, spoken kneeling before his father, reaches the seventeenth verse, ‘The sacrifice of god is a troubled spirite, a broken and a contrite heart (0 god,) shalt thou not despise.’56 He is then interrupted by Edmund Tyrrell:

Then said M. Tirill . . . thou liest (said he) thou readest false, for the words are an humble spirite. But W. said, the translation sayth a contrite heart. Yea, quoth M. Tirell, the translation is false, ye translate bookes as ye list your selues, like heretikes. Wel, quoth Will, there is no great difference in those words.57

Such finely tuned disputes over phrasing are typical of and central to the confrontations between Protestants and Catholics in Foxe’s work. Hunter’s studied indifference is not, of course, without deliberate irony. There is between ‘a contrite heart’ and ‘an humble spirite’ the vast difference between those who suffer and those who orchestrate the suffering. Both Hunter and Tyrrell are conscious of such a divide. But they must also be aware of the closeness of being ‘broken in spirit’ and ‘having a low estimate of one’s importance, worthiness or merit’ (OED). Beyond the dictionary definitions of emotional states lies a huge framework of theology and allusion: beyond ‘humble’, attrition and the sacrament of penance, beyond ‘contrite’, repentance and justification by faith. These

5 4 Foxe, 1026. Ibzd. Foxe refers the reader to the woodcut illustration on the next page; the soldiers with their

halberds seem to echo the pitchfork wielding devils in earlier depictions of hell. 5 6 Ratcliffe, 434. ’’ Foxe, 1398.

See Tentler, ch. 5 on the working of the sacrament.


connections are reductive; the framework is far more subtle, but Foxe shows through such dialogues that it may still be compressed into the opposition of these two words.

Foxe’s readings, and his evocations of his subjects’ readings, of these and other key texts form the basis of his assertion of the Protestant martyrs’ integrity. Beyond the incessantly proliferating interpretations, there is the final sanction of ‘the plain text and literal sense’, the constant and con- scientious referencing to the speech and actions of Christ, the command to ‘try all doctrine’ by God’s word.59 As Foxe tries Catholic behaviour by this standard, he reveals a vindictive form of justice. By the same measure the Protestant martyrs are authorized, as their lives and deaths are shown to be conducted in a close proximity to the Word. Thus Robert Hunter’s final words to his brother, William: ‘William, think on the passion of Christ and be not afraid.’60

University of York

5 9 The touchstone is the ‘plain text and literal sense’, Tyndale’s assertion of the unity of meaning, as opposed to the ‘four senses’ of Catholic learning: in following the singular meaning, according to Tyndale, a true translation can be made.

6o Foxe. 1399.

A poena et culpa: penitence, confidence and the Miserere in Foxe's Actes and Monuments

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