In Our Time - Foxe's Book of Martyrs

Episode Date: November 18, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss John Foxe and his book Actes and Monuments, better known today as Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Born in 1517, John Foxe was an early Protestant who was forced to flee the persecutions which ensued when the Catholic Mary came to the English throne in 1553. He was a horrified observer on the Continent as more than three hundred of his countrymen were burnt at the stake. In exile he began work on a substantial work of scholarship, bringing together eyewitness accounts of these horrifying deaths.First published in 1563, Foxe's Book of Martyrs was one of the most elaborate early books produced, and thanks to vivid woodcut illustrations reached an audience far beyond the literate elite. Its stories of Protestant martyrdom became powerful Church propaganda in the late sixteenth century and were used by those who wished to banish Catholicism from England permanently. But despite its use as an instrument of religious factionalism, Foxe's work remains one of the key and most read books of the early modern period. With:Diarmaid MacCullochProfessor of Church History at the University of OxfordJustin ChampionProfessor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of LondonElizabeth EvendenLecturer in Book History at Brunel UniversityProducer: Thomas Morris.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in the early years of the Elizabethan age, the Protestant scholar, John Fox, published a work of religious history. He called it Acts and Monuments of these latter and perilous days,

touching matters of the church, wherein are comprehended and described the great people, persecutions and horrible troubles that have been wrought and practiced by the Romish prelates, especially in this realm of England and Scotland, from the Eur of All Order 1000, until the time now present. Today we know this book as Fox's Book of Martyrs. It describes vividly the torture and execution of hundreds of people put to death for their religious beliefs. It's a mighty volume, four times the length of the Bible, and illustrated with graphic woodcuts. It was hugely successful, and for many years, virtually every church in England owned a copy.

day, it's seen as one of the most important books of the Reformation. Its influence all over the British hours was immense. And for a long time afterwards, this viriantly anti-Catholic text was used as a tool of religious propaganda. With me to discuss Fox's Book of Martyrs are Demon McCulloch, Professor of the History of Oxford University, Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Elizabeth Evanden, lecturer in book history at Brunel University. Demand McCullough, can you give us the backdrop to this story of the mid-60th century, this struggle for supremacy between Protestants and Catholics?

Where are we when this, what we're going to talk about emerges? Well, the two things. This is the story of a family, and it's the story of an event. It's the story of the Tudors, Henry VIII and his children, and then it's the story of the Reformation, and these get tangled up. Henry the 8th broke with Rome, but was not exactly a Protestant. Then his young son, Edward of 6, brought a very, very strong. radical reformation along.

Then his next daughter, Mary, changed everything back and united with the Pope and brought back Catholicism. Then the second daughter Elizabeth brings Protestantism back. And this is also the life of John Fox. He spans this period and in his life really reflects on this extraordinary set of topsy-turvy events, things going backwards and forwards with the centrepiece being this reign of Mary, this time when Catholicism is brought back and Protestants suffer.

It's extraordinary, I mean, can you just give us because you're, I mean, you've written so well about this. You've got this country, which for centuries, has been told that the way to God is through the Roman Catholic Church. This, for dynastic, Tudor reasons, is taken away from them. No, it's no longer like that. Then it's taken even further. Then they're told, no, they were wrong,

we've got to go back to Catholicism. What is, I mean, it must be a maelstrom for people, in the 30s and 40s and 50s of the 16th century. It must be bewildering, and you'd think that most people would just be cynical and say, well, I don't care, this is just monarchs, but this isn't right. People took sides. As you say, there's a thousand years of Catholicism, and for many people, this is terribly disruptive,

and they hate the new world. But for a lot of people, the new world of the Reformation Protestantism is really exciting. It's a liberation. And so they join it, and Fox is one of these people who are converted from the old, world to the new. In his 20s it looks like when he was a young Oxford Don. So there is a real sort of existential

turnaround for people. It's about salvation. That's the most important thing you could talk about in the 16th century. It's the way to get to God which path you follow. Can you just tell us a little bit about Foxborough, the year that Luther pinned his thesis to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral? Just before that. So he really is a

reformation boy. Boston in Lincolnshire, bright from an early age. His parents hadn't much money but the local vicar who was also a fellow of an Oxford college took him up and got him to Oxford and he was then set up in Oxford first at Braysnose College then at Maudlin College and it looked as if he'd just go on being in Oxford Don as Oxford Don's do teach etc but he got the reformation bug and there was a row in Mordland and he left Mordland College along with various other Protestants the trouble was that the management so to speak in the college were Catholic

so he had to leave. And this is in the reign of Henry the 8th. And so he's let loose as a Protestant and a fairly radical Protestant, but in the 1540s, of course, Justin Chapman, Henry the 8 died, having gone veered back towards Catholicism.

He was starting to persecute Protestants again towards the end of his reign. But most importantly for this programme, his nine-year-old son, Edward, succeeded him. What happened in that transition? I think we need to think about the Hermitian Reformation. in two ways. A jurisdictional break with Rome, all of the technical stuff about who has the

authority to decide what a good church is, but also the evangelical trend. And Henry really steps back from that in the last years of his own reign. Edward, the young King Josiah, Old Testament reforming prophet, ambitious of destroying idolatry in the land, really extends and gives a platform for that evangelical reformation. And by a series of really very very very, very important, powerful state legislation, injunctions, visitations, new laws, acts of uniformities, new sort of set ways of worshipping in the books of Common Prayer, Part 1 and Part 2. We see the whole of the Catholic tradition destroyed. There is, in a terrible pun, but mass destruction.

All of the ornaments, vestments, vessels and practices of Roman Catholicism are taken away. The walls are whitewashed, the stained glass is broken. I don't like all that bit, actually. But you're talking about a nine-year-old boy who died when he was 15. So when you're saying he, he, he, you mean his advisors, I would guess. Who were they? I think people like Somerset, people like Kramner,

very powerful elite Protestants. And Dermud may know more about this than me. But Edward himself is trained as a godly prince. He has a very clear understanding of what his role is. He's purported to be enormously knowledgeable in all of the... this Old Testament language of the destruction of idolatry. But his sort of weak monarchy in one sense gives the opportunity to these radical reformers. And then in 1553 he dies, aged 15, and Mary Tudor comes.

He is the daughter of Henry the age of Catherine Aragon. By birth and by inclination, she's a rabid Catholic. She's at a very hard time during the Protestant reign, and particularly under Edwards reign. And she comes in like an avenging sort. frankly, doesn't she? Pretty much so. And I think, again, we need to think of those two projects.

Mary wants to re-establish formal, institutional, jurisdictional links with the Roman Catholic Church. And pretty soon we have Cardinal Paul, who is there making sure that happens. But at the same time, they need to roll back all of the iconoclasm. And just as King Edward is regarded as Josiah, reforming, anti-idolatrous monarch,

Mary uses Old Testament languages to say those who have touched the sacred objects must be punished. So there's a whole, again, legal set of laws passed to ensure the pursuit of heresy, to roll back all of that reformation achievement. One of the problems that very often, and Dermann's already referred to it, we forget, this must have been very confusing in the parish.

It's all right being in London, it's all right issuing visitation articles. But in the parish, and there are around 9,000 of them, your stained glass may have been removed. your saints may have been painted over with whitewash. And there's a lot of research that shows as soon as Mary's bag, all of these little icons and relics come out of the floorboards and are gently put back in the church.

So it's very difficult to know precisely the impact of these turbulent years. And part of the problem is that Fox writes so beautifully and so powerfully about them. So we very often buy into his narrative of godly reformation and disastrously martyed by a new. wicked papist. But just finally, before we move on, question I asked Dermard, because it fascinates me,

I'm sure it'll fascinate listeners. It's such a short period of time where the whole thing was thrown up. We're talking about the 1530s when Henry does his dynastic business and changes. It's only a few years later, by any count, that it's all bolversé against.

We turned again, and they said, no, no, we'll go back to being even more fierce Roman Catholics than we were, ignore Luther, ignore the Reformation. I mean, I think the bribulment must have been intense, And the fear, as Dermit said, which church do we go to in order to get salvation and go to God?

That is the big ideology of the 16th century. So the real fear there. And I think what we see happening in these sort of compressed turbulent decades is the invention of something called conscience. Because whether you're a Protestant or a Catholic, by 1558, you know if you get it wrong, you're going to suffer torture and pain in this earth. And if you get it really wrong, you're going to hell forever. Let's talk, Elizabeth Eminent. What did Fox... Mary came to the throne.

Fox is a radical Protestant. He's got in with, not got in with, he's a very unself-seeking man. But he's been taken up by the Protestant elite. And what did he do? I think the first thing to realise with Fox is that he immediately realizes he's in danger. He is a prominent Protestant.

He has been an outspoken prominent Protestant. And as Dermott was saying, he leaves Oxford. and he takes a job as a tutor. He doesn't take the usual route of going to be a priest because that would be a Catholic priest. And Fox famously says at one stage that's as good as castration. He's a full-blooded male and a Protestant.

That's not for him. So he takes a job as a tutor, tutoring the grandchildren of the 3rd Duke of Norfolk. Now, when Mary comes back to the throne, the Duke is released as a good Catholic, and so Fox finds himself out of the job. So he's in danger and he's pretty much panellous. So he writes to several of his friends talking about his fear and concerns about what is to come,

but also, most notably, about his reluctance to leave his homeland. He is not rushing to the nearest boat by any means to become any form of religious exile. Although others are. We might mention he's married at this day. Yes, yes. Not crastrated, married. but needless to say with a wife who incidentally is no pregnant by the spring of 1554 he does set sail for the continent

so he's really searching as Justin says he's conscious to plug it out a little bit just to make it and he thought he was being pursued by Bishop Stephen Gardner's men and he probably was I don't think he's one founded fears and so he made for Ipswich

and he knew that part of the war got on the boat and away went absolutely so he makes it to the continent continent and eventually by July he's in Strasbourg where there is already a growing exile community so he's you know these people are not going out on their own they are forming communities of fellow believers now it's interesting when he gets to Strasbourg because this is where we start to get evidence of he's clearly thinking about works to do with martyrology once he reaches that um um um um um um um exile community. Because he arrives in July and by August, so unless it's written very quickly, which one doubt, he writes a book about the history of the true church. And it is published in August 1554 under the name of the Commentary Rerum in Ecclesia Gestarum, which is a Latin history. This history is of persecution suffered by, as he sees, members of the true church during the 15th century.

And again, written in Latin, which is the language of learning. So he's on the continent, clearly targeting both a continental audience, but also the elite. It's the language of the elite. So he's talking about the persecution of the Lollards, Wickcliffe's followers. Yes, yes. And a few continental figures as well, but it's mainly England. So this is the sort of prototype of, as we're going to talk about, the book of Martyrs. It's not a big book, and everybody refers to Fox.

as a big book. This initial venture into this field is about the size of an average paperback today. So what we know is an octavo size. And it's around 212 leaves. But it's like I say, this is as soon as he's in Strasbourg,

you see the first wave of this sort of work coming from him. So he's on there, Dermot. So this is a pre, this looks like now a precursor, but it's probably written for different reasons altogether because that's what took. Are they getting reports when they're over there in Basel? Are they getting reports of what is happening and what is happening at that early stage?

Mary couldn't persecute straight away, and the legal framework wasn't in place. So it took a while to get that. I mean, it took a while to get England reunited with the Pope. But by early 1555, people who had already been arrested were being put on trial for heresy and burned, just as they'd been burned by the old church. in the medieval period in the 15th century. So those reports are coming in, and there are big fish here

who are being imprisoned, put on trial. The biggest fish of all is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, and he and the Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, these are sensational trials through 1555, and then Cranmer burned after Ridley had been burned in October 55, then to 1556. You say trials, do I mean, are they show trials? or trials?

They are show trials, yes. And everyone would have thought of them like that. These are set piece. Combats between two worlds. On the one side, you've got the old Catholic hierarchy, pressing these traitors, these Protestant traitors who deserted their clerical status. Cranmer and Ridley to join the new world.

And of course, they're trying to put their case before the world. These are really dramatic events. Justin, can we... Oh, sorry. Just finish on with you for a second. So he's now on the book of martyrs because he's reading about that. So that sets him off. He's motivated by that or whatever.

He's writing about it. He's doing sort of journalism then, isn't he? He's reporting on that. Well, yeah. What he's trying to do is save the case because the end of Ed with the Sixth reign had been slightly discreditable for Protestants, actually, because they tried to change the succession away from Mary Tudor to Lady Jane Gray. It had failed disastrously, which you might interpret as God saying this was about.

idea. So there is a sense in which Protestantism in England had to redeem itself and how better than to record heroic martyrdoms, which would be proofs that Protestantism was the real thing. It was the true religion. Justin, did this book, the Book of Martyrs have? What precursors did it have? I think that's a very important question to think about. We have all of this flammable material coming out of London with the pires and martyrdoms. But Fox is operating both against a continental tradition of Protestant historiography, people he may well have met when he's in exile

Slyden, the Magde-Bog centuries and various other works. But it also goes back to the early church and importantly the work of Eusebius that wants to see a pattern A was a third century Aeneer was not? Third century ADD, a pattern of true providential

happenings in history. So Eusabius inscribes a history of the church as God approving of the true church against the false church. And very explicitly, Fox is using all of that humanist scholarship. He wants to give witnesses and documentary evidence. So he has reported, but he's also very, very careful to bind in official records, oral testimonies, to prove the truth. And I think that's one of the key things.

He is a scholar, but he's also doing this for rhetorical and sort of ideological purposes. And trying to show Protestant providentialism that actually this country, his country, ought to be Protestant, was always really Protestant and now it's true, through its martyrs it is being revealed. Absolutely, and in one sense he's asking that fundamental question that nasty Catholics pose, where was your church before Luther?

You're all innovators. What Fox is doing, like many other Anglicans at the time, is thinking about how we can see little glimpses of the true Protestant church in the past and to create a narrative. So again, the historical imagination of Protestants in England is sort of given soccer. We'll come back to the term out of,

in one second, but just to take on the story of Fox himself, Elizabeth. Mary died in 58, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne. She's a Protestant. So how did this affect Fox? It's, I think with looking at how Elizabeth's rise to the phone affects Fox, we need to also take into account what's happening in the five years. years of the rain, of Mary's reign. The important thing to bear in mind is that they don't know that she's going to die in 1558. So Fox is very much working with a view to doing exactly

what Justin's saying, the idea of proving the true church and its lineage, but also that in tandem with proving that the Catholic Church is in effect representative of the Antichrist, and we should be where false prophets. So he is very busily moving along on the Catholic Church. this project under Elizabeth, under Mary moving to Basel in 1555 and joining a different community. And that's when he starts, as Dermott was saying, collecting

information of oral testimony. Being in Basel, and he's actually working in a printer's printing house at the time. He's at the heart. Wonderful printer. Ocarinus. He is at the heart of Protestant networks when he's there. So this information is flooding into him now,

It's also some of the information is coming under the auspices of Marian exiles, in particular Edmund Grindall, who later becomes Bishop of London, Archbishop of York, Archbishop Canterbury under Elizabeth. So he's becoming a focal point to send material to. And so he starts working on a history that now includes contemporary martyrs. This is a work that's becoming to have a very, very contemporary feel. he starts work on this work which is known as the rare and which we're going to come to and he's initially for the first book of this book he's starting in 56 he introduces the material that he'd first written in the commentary he makes a detailed discussion of the reigns of envy the 8th and Edward the 6th and then the bulk of the book

is dedicated to contemporary martyrs in particular reading reaching a high point with Kranma. But then of course Mary dies. So what was almost a leisurely activity, needed to get out. And so this book comes out in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair, Hot Place to Sell Your Wairs. The book comes out in 59. In Latin. It's very quickly available

and it's basically a gift to the Elizabethan regime. It comes out early in Elizabeth's reign. And that's in Latin? It's in Latin. Can you just tell us, Justin warmer before I go how this great printer worked in with it

and why it was in Latin and then it came out in English in 1563 you can just give us a bit of the printing because it's important Well I think the operinas is at the network

really of Protestant humanism around Europe and we need to think almost of a set of Protestant research institutes in different parts of Europe especially in Germany producing these

weighty learned authentic, credible, all of those languages of authority to show precisely one, how bad Roman Catholicism is and how bad it's been through history, but also to justify the martyrdoms and the sort of truth of Protestant religion. And we know Fox at some points, he's doing very dull stuff, he's proofreading,

but he's also receiving manuscripts from everybody, from English exiles like John Bale, from Grindle, from Matthew Parker, but also from a range of German, and French scholars. Crespin, I think, is another one. So we need to think of this. This is really taking historical knowledge

into a public sphere, because this is about winning the battle for the public mind. And we have to realise that this is a real success really quickly. I stumbled across a Hungarian epic poem on the death of Archbishop Cranmer written and published in Hungary

in the mid-1560s. So people are really reading this stuff because it's in Latin, because in otherwise you can read it anywhere in Europe that's the reason that this book's published in Latin. But in terms of English translation, that came out in 1563 as I understand. Dole it, can you give the listeners some idea of the size of this and the splendor of it to talk about the woodcuts,

which may have been one of the main attractions for a lot of people? Yeah, well, Liz reminded us that Fox's first book is like a little paperback. But this book is huge. I mean, it's the size of a lectern Bible and would have that sort of impression. And the great thing is that Fox's English, publisher of an man called John Day was really into this project. I mean, he backed it sacrificial and he paid for wonderful illustrations, these wonderful but terrifying pictures

of people being burned. I mean, you turn from picture to picture. It's all people being burned in nasty ways, ingenious ways. And so this book is better than the Bible in some ways because it has these great pictures in it. And yet it's also almost like journalism. It's like a vast Sunday supplement which gives you details that are all of the most pornographic details of violence and bravery of course. But let's have details.

And the centrepiece, let's talk about, you've mentioned Thomas Cranmer the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Great Show trial and how massively, dramatically, that must have played in London, in Britain and in Europe. The whole religious community must have watched this going on to the Great Cranmer.

How does Fox describe his execution. Well, with vivid detail which we can corroborate from other sources. I mean, this is an extraordinary dramatic occasion, which was meant to be a triumph for the Catholic Church, because Kranma had given way. He'd signed recantations of his Protestant faith. So they put him into the University Church in Oxford. He's in the pulpit. He's preaching a sermon which is there in print for the whole congregation. But he changed the ending. Instead of abject rejection of his Protestantism, he rejected his Catholicism. in the pulpit. They'd given him a pulpit.

And so chaos broke out in the church, and he's dragged to the funeral pyre, which is a street or two away in Oxford. And all the time, Fox says there is a Spanish friar muttering to him in fury. Fetius, did you say that? Did you do that? And Cranmer is sort of shouting at him, and then they put him on the fire. And as the fire is lit, he stuck his right hand into the flame. and he shouted his unworthy right hand. The point was that the right hand

had signed the recantations of his Protestant faith. So this is a story in Fox, and it's all true. I mean, it's there in other sources too. I mean, you can imagine what an impact this makes. Let's talk about a little more about the illustrations, Elizabeth. I'll come to more specific examples, but the illustrations, can you give us a little more detail? Dameter said burnings, burnings,

in different ways. I'm sorry, but what were he's doing? I'd feel like a bit of a butcher this week, as I did slightly last week, but there we go. Well, yeah, he's right. There are also pictures of torture, if you prefer to view a picture of torture instead of just straight burning. But what sort of torture? People having their wrists soldered with a candle, people having their hands cut off, you know, small stuff compared to burning, but nonetheless very varied.

But in terms of burnings, they are. exceptionally graphic. We have people being burned with what you'd call green wood, where they dampen the wood before they light it, so it takes longer to get heat. So these people will cook rather than just straight burn, and so it takes them a lot longer to die, and their visual features are looking stoic, and they are looking strong in the face of Christ, but they must have been dying in agony. There are pictures of people who have been... are so weak by the time they reach the pyre, they have to be burned in a chair

because they're in such a bad state beforehand. And some pictures have children witnessing such events. But if you want to go for all around really truly disgusting illustration, it's probably the one that most of us will always turn to is a burning ink actually in Guernsey, where there's a lady Peritine Massey who, to cut a very long,

story short, is accused of receiving stolen goods. Those don't stick as charges, but she's not been going to church, so perhaps we'll get her on heresy instead. The fact that she is heavily pregnant at this time doesn't cut any slack with the authorities, and a long and bizarre case and shoes, and initially they are going to strangle her and her mother and her sister for heresy under Guernsey law, but they don't, so she's supposed to be strangled and then drop into the flames once dead, but they don't take into account the fact that she's heavily pregnant. So initially they start to strangle her and then scaffold breaks, so she falls into the flames. So down they all go, at which point she gives birth in the flames.

And then somebody takes the newly born baby boy and throws the baby boy back in the flames. and this is very, very graphically illustrated in Fox. And, Justin, this seems to be what really happened. Yeah, I think, again, we've got to be careful about the sources. It's not just the great and the good that are represented as being destroyed and marty. It's also some very, very ordinary... But just this specific thing, I'm saying that, because it was heavily challenged by Roman Catholic commentators saying,

no, no, he's making this up. Then a lot of research has been done, and it says, right, this did happen. Absolutely, and I think one of the key things to reinforce is the humanist Fox has access to all sorts of historical records to build up that historical tradition. Let's talk about the record. Sorry to cut in there, just I really am, but the research I'm told from reading what you through Britain has been extraordinary. Can you just give, can we let me begin to talk about what stuff is getting, how much, how he tested it, what's going on here? Can we start with you, Justin? I mean, Fox is as much an editor as a historian. He is bringing together both classic historical records from the medieval period to give his long tradition.

But he's also absorbing legal records, local records of the Episcopal visitations. So he's being a historian in one sense in a very modern way. He's a social historian. He's bringing in oral testimonies. And we can see... When you say he's bringing in, are people sending this to him? got people looking for them? Has he got friends over in England

or around Norwich where he comes from? A lot of Norwich stuff comes in? Absolutely. And both when he's on the continent but when he's back in England, John Day's printing house becomes a sort of a clearing house for people just to turn up and say, oh by the way, I've read the first edition and this bit's wrong, you need

this. Here's the wife, here's another set of witnesses. People turn up to that printing shop and say, no, you've got this bit wrong. This is what actually happened. So Fox is actually very careful and cautious about constructing a credible in true account. And indeed, when Nicholas Harpsfield and various of the other Roman Catholic critics point out the mistakes, in certain circumstances

Fox will defend them and in others those corrections are silently absorbed in subsequent editions. I'll come to one second to him and I want more about this, but just before we go that, we haven't said anything about how the book was received as well. It's a huge book. as Dermann said, 2,000 pages, all the extraordinarily expensive book, and yet, I mean, despite the expense, that's why I say, and yet, it was an enormous success.

Absolutely. We don't have exact figures for the first edition. We need to bear in mind that there are multiple editions of this text. But it very clearly has an impact. Surviving through Fox's personal papers of various letters that he receives commending his work. he is very clearly being bought by elite readers because this is a pricey book

this is not a cheap book by any standards. Can you give us some idea? Can we translate it in the modern terms of all? I would say your average yeoman, not absolutely bottom of the scale working class, but not with a great income. It's probably about three months wages to buy this text. It's a serious thought goes into purchasing it.

But what is interesting is that immediately after the first edition, it is clearly popular enough and clearly moving enough waves to immediately think about a second edition. In part response to those who are buying it and clearly pleased to have this material disseminated, but also in terms of its popularity in bringing in material. Fox is now overwhelmed with more information, partly to correct some things as said,

but also there's a wealth of information out there that he hadn't even discovered. So straight away, there's a new edition plant. We have a Protestant queen who is extraordinarily careful and she's very, very aware of the Catholic Protestant, Catholic Protestant inheritance that's come her way. How does she take, do we, how does the court take this book? Do they embrace it?

Do they get behind it? What's going on there? It's very interesting in terms of how those are surrounding Elizabeth deal with it. We know that Elizabeth was almost certainly presented with a copy. There are copies that John Day produces that are targeted at key members of the court and of the church. And what is interesting is that these copies are turned into pretty much luxury items. They are superbly bound and they are coloured in. So if you want your torture and you're burning to look even more graphic,

nothing better than a few freehand blood splatters when people are having things like nipples removed and genitalia. removed. This is all, it actually includes in the second edition the first poster, which is of persecutions and tortures. So this is clearly popular. So the coloured copies go to the elite. They are far more graphic. And so this is clearly very well promoted within the court. What is interesting that when we start moving towards 1569 and so forth, in the lead up to there being a second edition about to be hit the market, the Privy Council back it.

Right. Dammit, so the Protestant elite take it up and then Protestantism use it as their book, their book to prove that Catholicism was as bad as they'd always said it was. It was terrible, as it had been. They had plenty of evidence then. We talked about the evidence.

We're talking about 300, at least, martyrdoms between 55 and 58. That's about two a week. And they're all spectacular, as we've describe one or two of them. The Catholics obviously wanted to attack this book. Can you give us some idea of when they started and how they got at it? Very quickly. Cardinal Paul had been Archbishop of Canterbury under Mary and his he died in 1558 but his sidekick, a man called Nicholas Harpsfield, went into exile and produced a very detailed refutation of Fox in a big book which attacked lots of other

Protestant books too. But Harpsfield, you know, sort of nailed lots of errors. and things which he said were simply wrong. And so from 1566, Fox has got this really quite formidable critique to deal with. And that's one of the motives for doing this second edition. And it's, of course, one thing you can say is not just that Fox is wrong, but the whole set of martyrs who he presents are wrong. It's not just good enough to suffer and die horribly. You've got to suffer and die horribly for the truth.

And so Catholic simply say, look, these are fanatics who do. died for the wrong reason. And so Protestants have got to deal with that one. It's back to which religion is true or not. Sorry, yeah, and Justin, then I'll go back to it. Just a very, very quick minute. Of course, one of the things that Fox includes is a calendar of martyrs, except booting out all of the old Roman Catholic saints and including all of these martyrs. And this, this, I think, generates huge hostility from the Roman Catholic.

A very, very cross about that, very, very cross. Can I just separate things down? Sorry, I just want to get this. When they challenged Fox on details, as I understood it, when they were right and he was wrong, he just corrected it, sometimes copiously, but it just took no, it didn't take any, it wasn't vain about that, he did it.

Absolutely, yeah. But this big thing was that they weren't really martyrs in a proper sense of the word. They were mere fanatics, therefore what they stand for is not worth standing for. That's right, and of course people have been saying that while the martyrdoms were going on. Catholic writers were saying,

look, these people are dying, and they should buy. And of course, the killer fact which they used was that the Protestants also burnt people. They burnt radicals, anabaptist, as they'd call them, and Catholics pointed gleefully at that. You haven't noticed that you've been burning people. And what about some of these people you describe as martyrs? They're in fact, actually heretics on your terms. And John Fox, you have not told us the truth about these people. That was a real problem for Fox, that he actually.

he did leave out these things. And he's quite embarrassed by the fact that people were burnt who were radicals. Overwhelmingly, though, you would say, Justin, that he was on the right track, he was on the right lines, it was treated as history. You tell me. John Fox is a very, very good historian, especially in early modern terms, because he's turning to documentary sources. He gives references to where he's got his materials from.

We know, for example, that his account of the Lollards in the Chiltern, comes from sources that are now lost, but we can verify from other sources that he gives a pretty good and accurate account. The reason why Roman Catholics get so upset by this truth is that, of course, it is a theological truth. Fox is giving a prophetical history of the church. He's using the book of Revelation

to give a historical narrative between true and false church. So for Fox, if you say there's a mistake and he can correct it, that's fine. But if you say that's not godly, he will change. challenge you. And I think we're right at the start of a massive tradition of historical production all the way into the 18th century, answering that precise question, where was the Protestant Church in England, in Germany, in France, before the Reformation? So Fox gives a very fantastically influential account. But later on, scholar clergymen like Bishop Burnett and Stillingfleet are doing slightly more moderated accounts of the historical past. I think the thing we haven't

really emphasises. This is rabidly anti-Catholic. This believes the Catholic Church, and every rag of popery, every vestment, is the work of the Antichrist. So Fox is writing to save the world. And he gives this sort of persecuting image of Catholicism, which persists into the 19th and 20th century.

Elizabeth, it went through, despite its size and expensively, it went through comparatively many editions quite quickly. Can you briefly tell us about its ease? evolution as an object? Very much so, because it's easy to think of the book as Martyrs as a stable text. It is not, certainly in Fox's Lifetime, there are four full editions during Fox's lifetime, the 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583. And each, in a way, is different from each other. The second edition is truly enormous. This is 2300 pages in folio, in two enormous, Three times as long as the Bible.

Three million words. It's not a quick read by any means. And again, this second edition comes in to take into these counter arguments and really force the idea of they're working against the forces of the Antichrist. So each edition brings in new material that has arrived with Fox and Day, like I say, turning up and get the printer's house. There are many eclips about these people who turn up. it's very popular

as I said earlier the second edition is backed by Privy Council Decree who write to key members in the church saying that this book should go into parishes in 1570 and in a beautiful moment of spin they actually write that it should

go into these parishes to bring Her Majesty's Good Subjects into the dear liking of this present government which reminds me of other people so it's very much becomes a politically backed text as well that carries on throughout Fox's lifetime continually being reproduced.

It's only afterwards that we then start to see the rise of abridged versions of Fox. But we have three books in the church, don't we? We have the Bible, we have the Book of Common Prayer, and we have Fox's Book of Martyr, which Fox's Book of Martyr is the biggest and probably the most popular. He died in 1587, celebrated famous, but not at all wealthy, very, very modestly in that sense. Can we just, in this last few minutes,

if you tell us what the influence was of his books. If we start with you, Dermann, go around. Well, I think he creates an image of what Englishness is. And you started by saying Englishness had been about being Catholic for a thousand years. And from now on, Englishness was about not being Catholic. And Fox gave the evidence for why you should not be Catholic. Catholics are cruel, they persecute, they persecute, they get people who are preaching the truth and they destroy them.

And this is reinforced as events go on, the gunpowder plot of 1605, the Irish rebellion which Protestants were massacred by Catholics in 1641. Event after event seems to sort of confirm that Fox is right. And Fox is actually reprinted at some of these key moments when the Irish rebelled in 1641, new edition of Fox. And so there's this constant picture right up to the 19th century that England is a Protestant country. Catholics are other, they're alien.

And I think it's also important to note that events like the gunpowder plot, like the Irish massacre, actually that included in Fox's book. It's not just simply a repeat. It's brought up to date. Here's your latest massacre. Here's your latest threat by the Catholics. These additions changed to add new threats from Catholicism. And there was the Amada and that was Philip who had been married to marry.

Absolutely, and I don't want to bang on about it, but Fox really is enormously responsible for the sort of default position within the English imagination about the fear of Roman Catholics under the bed, the fear of continental popery that persists arguably into the 21st century, but certainly is still alive and well in the 18th and 19th. And some of the most evocative anecdotes are about young children, whether it's in the 1630s or in the 18th, or in the 18th. 1860s being read these stories of martyrdom, almost being taught how possibly to become martyrs. And there's a late Victorian young woman who says, Daddy, daddy, can I be a martyr too? That sense of wanting to sacrifice yourself and your conscience to that Protestant truth is really remarkable. Just quickly to add is what is interesting about it being a woman wanting to be a martyr. If you look at wills from right across the period, it's often left to women. in Father's Wells.

Right. Well, I thought that was great. Thank you very much. So we have to finish. Where are we? Oh, we nearly finished. That's right. Next week, thank you very much to Devin McCulloch, Justin Champion and Elizabeth Evanden. Next week we'll be talking about metaphor. All the World's a Stage and all the men and women merely players.

Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.com. co.uk forward slash radio 4