John Foxe

• 1. Introduction

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  John Foxe published a book on the 20th of March 1563 that would make him, in the words of one contemporary observer, England's first literary celebrity. It sold for more than ten shillings, the equivalent of three weeks' wages for a skilled craftsman. And yet Foxe himself remained as poor as ever, because there were no royalties in that era of publishing. The book was a gigantic folio of roughly 1,800 pages, a staggering catalogue of Christian martyrdom, and it would eventually be shelved in cathedral churches across England by official church order. It would shape how English Protestants thought about the Catholic Church for several centuries. How did a clergyman who once lived wretchedly poor on the continent, proofreading other people's manuscripts, produce what would become the second most widely read book in the English language after the Bible? And what does the life of John Foxe reveal about the violent collision of faith, politics, and scholarship in Tudor England?

• 2. A Mind Formed in Oxford

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  Foxe was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, the child of a middlingly prominent family. In about 1534, at around the age of sixteen, he entered Brasenose College, Oxford. His tutor there was John Hawarden, a fellow of the college. By the time Foxe was twenty-five, he had read the Latin and Greek fathers, the schoolmen, and the canon law, and had acquired what contemporaries described as no mean skill in the Hebrew language. He took his bachelor's degree on the 17th of July 1537 and his master's degree in July 1543, with a stint as lecturer in logic in the years 1539-1540. A series of letters in his handwriting dated 1544-45 captures him already fully formed: a man of friendly disposition and warm sympathies, deeply religious, an ardent student, zealous in making acquaintance with scholars. Foxe resigned from Magdalen College in 1545 after converting to Protestantism, a faith then condemned under Henry VIII. He had been due to take holy orders by Michaelmas of that year, but he opposed clerical celibacy, which he described in letters to friends with startling frankness as self-castration. Whether he was pushed out in a general purge of Protestant college members or left of his own accord, the college records say only that the departure was ex honesta causa, meaning for an honourable cause. Foxe had personally witnessed the burning of William Cowbridge in September 1538, a sight that seems to have sharpened his sense of the stakes involved in religious dissent. Abandoning a promising academic career, he entered a period of dire need, sustained initially by an invitation from Hugh Latimer to live in his household.

• 3. Patronage and the Protestant Elite

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  Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford-on-Avon, gave Foxe his footing as a tutor, and before leaving that household Foxe married Agnes Randall on the 3rd of February 1547. They would have six children. His prospects lifted sharply when Edward VI came to the throne in January 1547 and a Privy Council dominated by reform-minded Protestants took shape. Moving to London, Foxe attached himself to a grander household: that of Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, who employed him as tutor to the children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a Roman Catholic executed for treason in January 1547. Those children were Thomas, who would become the fourth Duke of Norfolk; Jane, later Countess of Westmorland; and Henry, later Earl of Northampton. The duchess was the widow of Henry VIII's illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy, making her, in a circuitous way, the sister-in-law of the new king. Her patronage, as one scholar noted, facilitated Foxe's entry into the ranks of England's Protestant elite. Living first at Mountjoy House and then at Reigate Castle, Foxe occupied himself with more than tutoring. He helped suppress a cult that had grown around a shrine of the Virgin Mary at Ouldsworth, said to possess miraculous healing powers. On another occasion he accompanied his young charges to Dorset, where he went aboard a pirate ship anchored at West Lulworth and kept a parcel of red and black velvet in safe-keeping for the captain. Nicholas Ridley ordained Foxe as a deacon on the 24th of June 1550, and his circle of friends widened to include John Hooper, William Turner, John Rogers, William Cecil, and most importantly John Bale, who almost certainly guided Foxe in composing his first martyrology.

• 4. Exile and the Book Taking Shape

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  Mary I came to the throne in July 1553, and Foxe's tutorship evaporated when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk, was released from prison. As the political climate darkened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner. He fled just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, sailing with his pregnant wife from Ipswich to Nieuwpoort. From there he made his way through Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Frankfurt, reaching Strasbourg by July 1554. It was in Strasbourg that Foxe published a Latin history of Christian persecutions, which would form, in the words of one reference work, the first outline of the Actes and Monuments. In Frankfurt, where he preached to English religious refugees, Foxe found himself drawn into a bitter dispute between two factions: one that favoured the Book of Common Prayer and another that preferred the Reformed models of John Calvin's Genevan church. John Knox led the latter faction and had Foxe's sympathy, while Richard Cox led the former. Knox was eventually expelled; Foxe and about twenty others left Frankfurt in the autumn of 1555. Though he sided with Knox, Foxe expressed disgust at what he called the violence of the warring factions. He was, by all accounts, irenic by temperament, a man who preferred persuasion to confrontation. Moving to Basel, he worked with John Bale and Lawrence Humphrey at the drudgery of proofreading and there completed a Latin religious drama, Christus Triumphans, printed in 1556. Despite occasional contributions from English merchants on the continent, Foxe lived very close to the margin throughout this period. He published the first true Latin edition of his great book at Basel in August 1559, writing contemporary English history while, as he later put it, living in the far parts of Germany, where few friends, no conference, and small information could be had.

• 5. The Book of Martyrs

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  On the 20th of March 1563, Foxe published the first English edition of the Actes and Monuments from the press of John Day. The volume ran to roughly 1,800 pages, about three times the length of the 1559 Latin edition. The full title was a paragraph long; scholars abbreviate it as Acts and Monuments, though the public has always called it Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Its immediate success made Foxe famous while leaving him poor, since no system of royalties yet existed. Attacked at once by Catholic controversialists including Thomas Harding, Thomas Stapleton, and Nicholas Harpsfield, Foxe set about strengthening the book. Harding called it, in the spirit of the age, that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs, full of a thousand lies. The flood of new material the first edition brought to light only enlarged the project. The second edition of 1570 ran to two gigantic folio volumes with 2,300 very large pages of double-columned text, nearly double the size of the first. The upper house of the convocation of Canterbury in 1571 ordered that a copy be placed in every cathedral church alongside the Bishop's Bible, and that church officials keep copies in their houses for servants and visitors. By the time Foxe produced the fourth and final edition in his lifetime in 1583, the book had grown to two volumes of about two thousand folio pages. It was nearly four times the length of the Bible and was described as the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era. The title page of that edition included the request that the author desireth thee, good reader, to help him with thy prayer.

• 6. Methods and Controversy

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  Foxe drew on a remarkable range of sources for the English martyrs of the Lollard period through Mary I's reign: episcopal registers, trial reports, and the testimony of eyewitnesses. For events before the early modern period, he relied on earlier writers including Eusebius, Bede, and Matthew Paris. His method of using sources was described by one scholar as proclaiming the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth. Yet any reader, as the same tradition of scholarship warns, must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies. Foxe made no pretense of neutrality. Marginal glosses on his own text read things like Mark the apish pageants of these popelings and This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica accused him of wilful falsification of evidence. Catholics disputed specific claims with incredulity; Robert Parsons, writing in 1603-04, questioned Foxe's assertion that seven people had been burnt for teaching their children the Pater Noster, Creed, and Ten Commandments in English. Samuel R. Maitland's critique in the early 19th century was so damaging that, in the words of one Catholic Victorian, no one with any literary pretensions ventured to quote Foxe as an authority. The full rehabilitation began only when J. F. Mozley published John Foxe and His Book in 1940. Modern scholarship has settled on a subtler verdict. Thomas S. Freeman, one of the leading Foxe scholars of recent decades, compared Foxe to a barrister pleading a case for a client he believes to be innocent: someone who had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge, but who would not present facts damaging to his client and had the skills to arrange that evidence in the most favourable light. Foxe, as J. F. Mozley observed, presented lifelike and vivid pictures of the manners and feelings of the day, full of details that could never have been invented by a forger.

• 7. Character and Later Life

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  Back in England after Mary's death in 1558, Foxe lived for about ten years in the London house of his former pupil, Thomas Howard, now the Fourth Duke of Norfolk. His close friend Edmund Grindal, now Bishop of London, ordained him a priest, but Foxe was something of a puritan and had scruples about wearing the clerical vestments the queen's injunctions of 1559 required. He was appointed prebend of Shipton in Salisbury Cathedral on the 22nd of May 1563, in recognition of his service to the English church, but he never once visited the cathedral or performed any duties beyond appointing a vicar. His extreme poverty and unworldliness made him reluctant to spare either time or money for such obligations. Foxe preached the Good Friday sermon at Paul's Cross in 1570 at Edmund Grindal's request, an extended attack on Catholic doctrine that was enlarged and published that year as A Sermon of Christ Crucified. A sermon he preached seven years later at the same venue drew a complaint from the French ambassador, who accused him of advocating that French Protestants take arms against their king. Foxe denied it. His reputation as a man of prayer was such that Francis Drake credited his victory at Cadiz in part to Foxe's prayers. When Elizabeth's government sentenced a group of Flemish Anabaptists to be burnt in 1572, Foxe wrote to the queen, to her council, and to the prisoners themselves, having his Latin draft translated into Flemish to plead with them to recant. The intercession failed; two were burnt at Smithfield. John Day's son Richard, who knew Foxe well, described him in 1607 as an excellent man, exceeding laborious in his pen, his learning inferior to none of his age and time, his integrity of life a bright light to as many as knew him. Foxe died on the 18th of April 1587 and was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate. His funeral drew crowds of mourners. His son Samuel, who lived from 1560 to 1630, preserved his father's manuscripts, which are now held in the British Library.