Episode 3: Queen Mary's martyrs

At 7am on January 27, 1556, five men and two women were taken from Newgate Prison. They were walked the few hundred metres along Giltspur Street to Smithfield, the old “smooth field” that was used for the great annual St Bartholomew’s Fair, and a regular Friday cattle and horse market.

The seven prisoners were tied to four stakes with iron chains, which would hold their bodies upright even when their legs would no longer support them. The stakes were set in a giant pile of lumber and brushwood. More wood was packed around them. They stood then, while a sermon was read. The victims then said their last words. The whole ceremonial preparation had taken two hours.

Then the fire was lit; it was the first mass religious martyrdom in London.

The two women were Isobel Foster and Joan Warne. Isobel was a matron of about 55, from Carlisle originally. She'd been born comfortably into what was to be called the Catholic fold, and probably lived most of her life there. Joan was a maid of 19, who'd sharply told the Bishop of London how his theology was wrong.

Both of them could have saved their lives with a single word.

But their bravery - with that of Anne Askew, played a significant part in making England Protestant.The rest, as they say, is history.

The cast

Some of the other women martyrs in this tale

Anne Askew, reform martyr and author, from the circle of Catherine Parr, last wife of Henry VIII

Lollard Joan Broughton, the mother of the wife of a mayor of London, aged over 80 when martyred at Smithfield in 1494

Katherine Knight, aged widow, and Alice Snoth, a maid, burned at Canterbury as Queen Mary dying in 1558

Cicley Ormes, reformer, martyred at Norwich, 1557

Other key characters

Queen Mary, eldest daughter of Catherine of Aragon and Henry VIII, determined to keep England in the Catholic fold

Elizabeth, future Queen and daughter of Anne Boleyn and Henry VIII, Nicomedian

Rose Hickman, 85-year-old autobiographer, reformer and exile

Elizabeth Crawford,died aged 19 in London in 1617, Catholic recusant denied a burial service

Book of the Week

The Emperor's Babe: a novel, by Bernadine Evaristo

(Probably the review that led me to buy the book.)

Woman of the Week

Camilla Erculiani, 16th-century Italian philosopher and apothecary, author of Letters on Natural Philosophy, which contains a theory about human overconsumption and growth destroying the planet. Not quite Gaia theory, but not far off it. She faced the Inquisition in Rome for it, but didn't suffer a martyr's fate.

References and further reading

(If you're going to buy one, please use an independent bookseller - Hive is a good one in the UK, not the Great Parasite that is Amazon!)

London and the Reformation, Susan Brigden (stunningly brilliant, colourful and original. Where many of the anecdotes outside the main characters are drawn from)

Foxe's Book of Martyrs, John Foxe

C. Cross, “Great reasoners in scripture: the activities of women Lollards 1380-1530” in D. Baker (ed) Medieval Women

M. Dowling and J. Shakespeare, “Religion and Politics in mid Tudor England through the eyes of an English Protestant Woman: the recollections of Rose Hickman,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, Vol LV, No 131, May 1982

 E. Macek “The emergence of a feminine spirituality in The Book of Martyrs, Sixteenth Century Jour