Introduction: six characters in search of a scaffold

On 30 July 1540, a peculiar procession ambled its way from the Tower of London to the gallows at Smithfield. In the centre, surrounded by soldiers, sheriffs and royal officials, six priests were carried on ‘hurdles’ – wooden sledges upon which, under English law, condemned felons were paraded through the streets to spare them ‘the extreme torment of being dragged on the ground’. Three of these priests – Robert Barnes, Thomas Garret and William Jerome – were evangelical reformers (soon to be known as Protestants) who had been condemned by parliament for heresy. The other three – Edward Powell, Richard Fetherston and Thomas Abel – were Roman Catholics who had been condemned by parliament for treason. Upon each hurdle two men were tied, one evangelical and one Catholic, in a grisly and calculated display of symmetry. When they reached Smithfield, the prisoners found a unique and ghastly sight awaiting them: two adjacent instruments of execution built within view of one another. On one side were three stakes surrounded by kindling, intended to burn men to death, the traditional penalty for heresy; on the other side was a large scaffold and three ropes, with knives close at hand to hack the strangled bodies to pieces, the traditional penalty for treason. Thus did six priests watch each other die, along with the throngs who gathered to observe the epitome of royal justice. The Tudor regime not only inflicted the law upon the bodies of its victims but viscerally imprinted it upon the senses of the crowd: smoke stinging their eyes, blood staining their clothes, the smell of burning flesh, the screams of dying men.

This event was undoubtedly a crucial, founding moment of the Church of England's self-proclaimed ‘middle way’ in the Reformation. In a public display of enormous symbolic significance, Henry VIII and his government defined the boundaries of acceptable religion and declared a whole series of beliefs and practices – on both sides of the emerging Reformation divide – beyond the pale of judicious, temperate English religion. Yet if this elaborate, six-way execution was the founding moment of the Anglican via media, it is worth noticing that it was not by every standard a particularly moderate way to behave. Even by the standards of Henry VIII, this was a bloodbath. Moreover, because the victims were condemned by bills of attainder rather than by juries of their peers, the whole process stank of extra-legality and arbitrary rule. So how can we understand this extraordinary incident? How should we interpret an act of self-conscious religious moderation based upon the public burning and dismembering of human beings?