Persecution of English religious reformers

Persecution of English religious reformers is presented as a conflict over the English scriptures and the authority to control religious belief. Illicit translations pass through ports and private networks; readers and preachers risk interrogation, imprisonment, torture, and execution. The policy is not a single act but a widening machinery of suppression, in which Thomas More’s investigations, royal authority, and debates over the Church’s jurisdiction collide with the reformers’ insistence that scripture must be available and intelligible to ordinary people.

Books, readers, and prohibited scripture

The conflict begins in the movement of texts. Thomas Cromwell follows what is written in German and what is smuggled across the Channel through ports and East Anglian inlets, keeping Thomas Wolsey informed. Wolsey burns books but, at this point, not their readers. The contrast makes the printed page both a material object that can be seized and destroyed and a source of ideas that cannot be contained simply by burning copies.

Among the books Cromwell keeps is William Tyndale’s New Testament, a pirated Antwerp edition printed on cheap paper in octavo. Its title page carries the invented imprint “PRINTED IN UTOPIA” instead of a printer’s address. The book is easier for Cromwell to obtain than the authorized German printing, and he considers whether Thomas More has seen a copy. Its clandestine production and circulation connect religious dissent to practical networks of translation, printing, merchants, and concealment.

Cromwell knows Tyndale personally: before leaving London, Tyndale lodged for six months with Humphrey Monmouth, a city draper. Tyndale is portrayed as principled and hard, driven from his homeland and regarded by More as a dangerous enemy. Cromwell recognizes that the English text cannot simply be circulated in Latin without further work; he considers finding someone to translate it, discreetly, for love or money. The struggle is thus not only about what scripture says, but who can make it available in a language its intended readers can use.

Investigation, torture, and imprisonment

The state of persecution becomes visible in the methods attributed to More. Reports say that he attends the torture of arrested heretics at the Tower and keeps suspects in the stocks at his Chelsea gatehouse while pressing them for the names of printers and shipmasters who brought books into England. The account describes the portable device known as Skeffington’s Daughter, used to restrain a prisoner while pressure is applied. Its purpose is not merely to punish: the interrogators seek information about the networks carrying prohibited books.

The attempted poisoning of John Fisher’s dinner brings this violence into a politically charged setting. After guests collapse from the broth, the cook says that a stranger supplied him with a white powder as a joke, but he offers no further account. Cromwell suspects that the questioning has been mishandled, while Dr Butts remarks that More should have been called if the authorities wanted the man to talk. The episode links the persecution of religious dissent to the broader climate of fear surrounding the king and to the use of interrogation as a means of extracting names and explanations.

Lucy Petyt’s account of the search for her husband, John, gives the machinery of enforcement a domestic scale. During the raid on Lion’s Quay, she distracts More with conversation while John hides papers behind a panel; a Testament is left beneath his desk. The search finds nothing, yet More orders John taken away. In the Tower, the older prisoner sleeps on straw laid over flagstones, and visits are allowed in part so that others can see how ill he appears. Lucy says that food and warm clothing sent to him have been refused on More’s orders. She comes to Cromwell seeking help, but Johane warns him not to intervene: More may not torture John, she says, yet imprisonment itself may prove fatal.

Mercy sought and denied

Cromwell’s response to the reformers is complicated by his position within the royal government. He speaks to Anne Boleyn about John Petyt and asks what can be done; he also approaches Henry VIII, who replies that More knows his own business. Anne says she has put Tyndale’s books into the king’s hands and asks whether Tyndale might return. Cromwell is therefore neither simply outside the system nor free to overrule it: he tries to use his access to the king and Anne to create room for reform, while remaining dependent on royal permission.

The negotiations with Tyndale make that limit explicit. In the spring, Stephen Vaughan arranges a meeting outside Antwerp, and Cromwell’s letter reaches the exiled translator. Tyndale says he wants to return to England and is willing for the king to choose the translator, provided the people can hear the gospel in their mother tongue. He offers to submit to whatever the king does to him, including torture or death, if that permission is granted. Henry has not explicitly refused, but no authorization follows. By summer, Cromwell recognizes the danger of pressing the matter further and tells Vaughan to abandon the attempt. Tyndale will not endorse Henry’s divorce, and Henry will not accept Tyndale’s judgment of him; the political opportunity closes at the point where each expects the other to yield on principle.

Cromwell’s visit to John Frith in the Tower shows another, narrower effort to mitigate persecution. At Cromwell’s request, Frith is kept above ground, with warm bedding, adequate food, wine, paper, and ink. Cromwell warns him to put away his writings if he hears the key in the lock, since they could be used against him. Frith has already endured confinement in a cellar during a plague, where he lay among the dead before anyone remembered to release him. Cromwell considers asking the king for an audience for Frith, but recognizes that More has influence with Henry and that Frith’s uncompromising beliefs make a reprieve unlikely.

Public punishment and contested memory

Execution makes the consequences of dissent public. Thomas Hitton, a priest accused by Fisher of smuggling Tyndale’s scriptures, is burned as February ends. Later, Thomas Bilney is captured preaching in open fields and distributing pages of Tyndale’s gospels; he is burned after having previously recanted and been released. Anne Boleyn questions the report that Bilney recanted again in the fire, saying that people may say what they must to stay alive until better times. Cromwell answers that Bilney had been given mercy once and could not be granted it again. The exchange reveals the difference between the official account of a condemned reformer and the uncertainty surrounding what he said under pressure.

The narrative returns to the spectacle of burning through Cromwell’s childhood memory of an elderly woman condemned for saying that saints were wooden posts. A woman in the crowd directs the boy to watch as the prisoner is chained to the stake and the execution proceeds before an assembled public. The crowd’s noise and reactions frame punishment as a collective event, but the child’s questions—whether the woman might be released if she changed her mind and whether anyone prays for her—leave the spectacle morally unsettled. The memory later informs his attention to the difference between a person’s death and the story others impose on it.

The reformers’ deaths also become entangled with disputes over the king’s authority. At James Bainham’s execution at Smithfield, a Venetian ambassador asks Cromwell whether he is present as a friend of the heretic or by virtue of his office, and what that office is. Bainham’s final words ask the Lord to forgive More. The episode places Cromwell among official witnesses while exposing the ambiguity of his position: he serves the government that permits the execution, yet he has sought ways to protect reformers and their texts.

From religious dissent to jurisdiction

The persecution belongs to a broader contest over whether church or crown holds authority in England. When Katherine of Aragon challenges laws directed against the Church, Cromwell explains that the clergy have been required to pay a large sum under the charge of praemunire. In the same exchange, he defends the formula that names the king head of the Church in England “as far as the law of Christ allows.” Katherine and Mary Tudor see that phrase as a threat to established religious authority; Cromwell presents it as a definition of a position the king already holds. Their disagreement shows how disputes over reform and heresy are also disputes over which legal and spiritual jurisdiction can decide what is binding.

Cromwell later presents Henry with ideas drawn from Marsiglio of Padua: Christ did not make popes or authorize churchmen to rule through independent lawmaking and taxation, and political authority comes through the legislative body acting on behalf of the people. In this account, priests are subjects and the prince governs the civil order, including questions of marriage and legitimacy. Henry’s interest in the argument turns quickly toward the Church’s wealth and the possibility of breaking shrines. Religious claims therefore help justify an expanding royal authority, even as the same authority prosecutes readers and preachers whose appeals to scripture challenge traditional teaching.

The novel does not resolve this contradiction by making official power uniformly hostile or reforming. Cromwell argues for the vernacular gospel and seeks to assist individual prisoners, yet he retreats when Henry will not support Tyndale’s return; the government he serves also permits public executions and the continuing imprisonment of dissenters. Persecution is consequently shown as both a struggle over belief and a means by which competing institutions claim the power to define lawful religion. The books survive through readers and networks, while the state answers their circulation with searches, confinement, interrogation, and exemplary punishment.