In the middle years of the sixteenth century, heresy was not as clearly defined as it later became, particularly at the grass-roots level. Whereas the preacher who roundly asserted that salvation came by faith and not by good works was clearly (in that respect at least) a Lutheran, and he who asserted that the bread and wine remained in the Eucharistic elements was a reformer of a more radical kind, the much vaguer mutterings among their flocks were harder to pin down. The desire to reform the Church was pervasive. Cardinal Ximenes was a reformer, so were Cajetan, Morone and Pole. Erasmus was a reformer, so too was Cardinal Caraffa, later Pope Paul IV. Where the line should be drawn between the reformers' criticisms and the dissenters' heresy was largely a matter of judgement. Erasmus is a good case in point. Never condemned in his own lifetime, he considered himself to be a loyal son of the Church; yet twenty years later his works were put on the index of prohibited books. Cardinal Pole, a fierce enemy of heretics in England, was himself suspected by Paul IV, and his Legateship withdrawn. Cardinal Morone was imprisoned in Rome for the same reason and Bartolomé Carranza, Pole's right-hand man while in England, later spent seventeen years in the prisons of the Inquisition. Even Martin Luther considered himself to be an orthodox Augustinian, who had been condemned because of the ambiguities of the Church's teaching, and there were those in Rome in the 1530s who were inclined to agree with him. In other words, reform was nuanced. Ximenes, Pole and Morone were never condemned, while Carranza was, and Erasmus was by implication. A multitude of errors were found in the works of Luther, but his main heresy was justification by faith alone. Zwingli was guilty of far more serious deviation on the doctrine of the Eucharist, while Calvin was deemed responsible for spreading a whole raft of mistaken doctrine, from the Eucharist to predestination.

As a work of cultural propaganda, the Actes and Monuments was an unprecedented success. In spite of its enormous bulk (over 2,000 pages in the 1583 edition), and consequent expensiveness, its influence permeated down to the lowest social levels and helped to create that popular anti-Catholicism which was such a feature of the England of the 1580s. Its first edition, in 1563, was supported among others by Sir William Cecil, but it was never officially promoted, and indeed its second edition of 1570 was by implication highly critical of the Queen for failing to press on with the reform programme. What it did, most effectively, was to present the Catholic Church as a conspiracy of clerical pride and cruelty, anti-Christian and inspired by the devil.

Queen Mary herself was represented as a victim of this clerical conspiracy, the protagonists of which were Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner. She was guilty mainly by association for having married a Spaniard, who not only reintroduced the Pope, but brought in the ungodly ways of his own nation, so that Catholicism became not only cruel and unnatural, but also foreign.

The alliance between ecclesiastical and secular authority is almost as old as Christianity itself. What started as a purely spiritual commitment to a vision of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, had become by the fourth century inextricably entangled with the politics of the Empire. The support of Constantine and his successors converted bishops into imperial administrators, and the prayers of the faithful recognized and upheld the imperial authority. When the Empire in the West collapsed, the Church survived, and carried the concept of romanitas forward into a world of successor kingdoms, which often enough showed little political continuity, but were ambitious to preserve the ideal. The Pope was the Bishop of Rome, and based his claim to authority on that fact, an authority which was allowed to transcend that of the secular kingdoms and lordships because of what it symbolized. What these kingdoms sought above all else was authenticity, a validity which transcended the exploits of warlords and conferred upon their kings some echo of the imperial authority. It was this that the Church conferred. In creating dioceses and founding monasteries, rulers were entering into a compact with the Church, which in return for this material superstructure, recognized their power and interceded for them with God. The doctrine that this world is a mere antechamber to the next gave the Church an unchallenged cultural ascendancy which more than compensated for its lack of military muscle. Priests did not fight, they prayed, and prayer was as potent as the sword. As the Church expanded into hitherto pagan lands beyond the reach of the Empire, it was usually with the assistance of temporal lords who recognized the benefits which this alliance could confer upon themselves. It was by such means that the Roman Church embraced Anglo-Saxon England in the sixth and seventh centuries.

After the Norman conquest, relations between Rome and the Crown of England had fluctuated, but the one thing which no king could afford to do to the Church was to ignore it.

There is plenty of evidence for the faith of the laity in the century or so before the reformation, but most of it relates to the literate minority. Only those with property to bequeath left wills, and although the mystery plays were aimed at a wide audience, those who wrote them were, by definition, educated. Also, because of the way in which this evidence is slanted, it gives the impression of an obsession with death. The danse macabre was a pervasive image after it had been imported from France to St Paul's in the 1440s, and representations of death were commonplace in the ballad literature of the period. ‘With drede we dwellen, With drede we wenden’ as one writer put it. Life was short, medicine expensive (when obtainable at all) and death frequently sudden or unexpected. The Ars moriendi, or skill of dying, was thus a strategy designed to cope with this natural and inevitable anxiety, and designed, with its emphasis upon extreme unction, to cement the authority of the Church as the custodian of that grim portal. Stories of edifying deaths were numerous and circulated both in writing and by word of mouth, but always the outline of the story was the same: the sufferer, with the aid of the priest, coming to repentance and receiving the sacrament, thus baffling the army of fiends who lay in wait for the unwary or unrepentant soul. The deathbed struggle was a trope, in which saints, particularly the Blessed Virgin, and guardian angels figured prominently. This reality was eased by the Church in two ways. First by the concept of purgatory, that intermediate place where the redeemed but still sin-stained soul endured the punishments which would prepare it to enter heaven. Purgatory was accessible to the prayers and intercessions of the living, who were encouraged to help the deceased by shortening their stay. This led to the second palliative, the communion of the living with the dead.

Every day brought the ordinary man into contact with God. He lived his life in a liturgical context, which marked the seasons of the year and provided the kind of order and control which he needed, and which could not be provided in any other way. The Church could not control the weather, but it could provide explanations as to why the sunshine, rain and frost behaved in the way that they did. They were fulfilling God's purpose, and if they produced a bumper harvest one year, and dearth the next – that was part of His purpose as well; to reward the virtues or punish the sins of the community. It was all very intimate, and the natural and supernatural interpenetrated each other all the time and in all sorts of ways. The offices of the church, and the building itself, were parts of that context. All sorts of gatherings – sometimes for purposes far from sacred – took place in the church, and rituals such as the offertory reinforced the hierarchy of the community. The wife of Bath resented anyone who ventured to go before her to the offering! Young men went there to spy out likely girls (sometimes with unfortunate consequences), and young women used the rituals of St Agnes eve to discover the identities of their future partners. Major pagan festivals, such as the winter solstice and the spring rebirth, had long since been incorporated into the Church's calendar as Christmas and Easter, and several lesser celebrations had been similarly consecrated. The plough ceremonies, for example, which had originally been fertility rites, and which occurred just after the winter solstice, had by the later middle ages been absorbed into the calendar. Many churches kept a ‘plough light’ burning in front of the rood, and Cawston church in Norfolk even had a ‘plough gallery’.

In the same way, Christian commemorations could be colonized by pagan or ribald features.

This book has been too long in the writing. It arose originally out of two circumstances. The first was my involvement with the John Foxe Project, which was a British Academy sponsored project for the publication of an online edition of all four versions of the Acts and Monuments for which Foxe was personally responsible (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583). I put this idea to the Academy in 1992, and was its director from 1993 to 2004, when Professor Mark Greengrass took over that responsibility. It was completed in 2008. The second circumstance was a perception that existing histories of the persecution had all been written from an elite point of view, and that in any case much was happening in the Marian Church which had nothing to do with the persecution. These were points which I desired to emphasize.

The most obviously elite studies are Professor Mayer's numerous works on Reginald Pole. It is no criticism of Professor Mayer to point out that these are predominantly about the running of the Church, and to some extent about its spiritual direction. They tell us a great deal about policy and how it was implemented, but nothing very much about what was going on at the parish level. Cardinal Pole was a grandee, with a very keen theological perception and no time at all for ‘superstition’. It was just that his definition of the latter differed from that of his opponents. In so far as he dealt with the laity, it was at the highest political level, where, on the whole, men told him what he wanted to hear. His relationships with the Queen and with King Philip were essential to his role, and his understanding of Mary was profound, but his grasp of the religious mentality of the English was at best imperfect. It was not that they did not take their faith seriously, but that faith tended to be basic and they had been much confused by the different instructions which had been, and were being, issued in God's name.

The Church was well placed to coerce dissidents, both because of the legal structure of which it was a part and because of the pervasive culture of conformity. To some extent these forces had been pulling in different directions under Edward. The law required obedience to a magisterial form of Protestantism but most clergy, and most congregations, preferred something a great deal more conservative. These laws, of course, dated only from 1549, but the expectation that all parishioners would attend their parish church, and receive such sacraments as were available to them, went back to the origins of the parochial system in the eighth century. It was, first and foremost, the responsibility of the incumbent to see that this happened, and his eyes and ears in this respect were the churchwardens. However the sanctions available to him were limited. If the offender yielded to exhortation and reprimand, and came to confess his or her faults, then a suitable penance could be imposed. However, if any person failed to appear at all, or declined to submit to penance, then the incumbent had little option but to refer him to a higher jurisdiction, and that would mean the court of the archdeacon.

The archdeacon was a ubiquitous presence in late medieval society. He exercised the bishop's authority by delegation and intruded into every situation where the canon law reached. Matrimonial problems, illicit sexual relationships and the closely related issues of defamation and slander all came before him. Matters arising out of disputed wills and the prosecution of those who meddled with dead men's goods were equally his concern. He pursued the non-payment of tithes and other Church dues, and punished those who showed the slightest desire to question the teachings of the Church. His visitation was one of the most predictable features of Church life, and one of the few ways in which disputes between incumbents and their flocks could be resolved.

As the Reformation developed, the Protestant churches began to split apart, giving their Catholic opponents many polemical opportunities. Lutherans disagreed with Zwinglians over the Eucharist, and both were derided by radical sects which were given a new lease of life by the disputes.

The Catholic publicist Miles Huggarde commented ‘if these good fellows will needs be of Christ's church, as arrogantly they presume by their own confession, they must needs have one unity of doctrine as the church hath, which surely they have not’, adding that punishments were not so various in hell as were the doctrines of these same Protestants. However, the unity of the Catholic position was more established in Huggarde's imagination than it was in reality. Admittedly there were not the same rather obvious disagreements over the Eucharistic presence as divided Protestants, but the transmission of grace was almost equally contentious and the strictly Pauline position taken by Cardinal Pole caused him to be regarded in conservative circles as a crypto-Lutheran. It was this dispute, going back nearly twenty years, which prompted Pope Paul IV to regard the Cardinal as a heretic, and led to his summons to return to Rome for ‘investigation’.

It was the business of a General Council to resolve such issues, and such a council had met at Trent in 1545–7 and again in 1552–3. However, its decrees remained in draft, having never been confirmed, and it had not in any case approached the issue of the transmission of grace. What it had done was to repudiate most of the biblical scholarship of the last hundred years, and reaffirmed the sanctity of the Vulgate (Jerome) Bible, which was declared to be the only authentic text. This was a decision with which Pole was in profound disagreement, but as the decree was unratified, it did not greatly affect his mission. What was relevant was the Cardinal's attitude towards the English Bible which he found still installed in many parish churches.

On the eve of the Reformation the secular clergy formed a numerous constituency – some 12,000–15,000 altogether – and varied enormously in their standards of education and competence. Bishops were supposed to, and very often did, exercise great care in choosing those upon whom they would confer orders, but patrons were also influential and sometimes put forward candidates who were ill suited. Occasionally these were scholars who had little vocation to the ministry, but often they were clients of a more obvious kind – even serving men. Many of these men would never serve a parish cure, but would work all their lives as cantarists or domestic chaplains. Episcopal oversight varied with the background and personalities of the bishops, and there was no standard test, or set of tests, designed to determine suitability. A priest needed to be basically literate; that is to be able to read and write in English, and to know enough Latin to be able to read the services with some show of comprehension. Two or three years in a grammar school would be sufficient to meet this requirement, but beyond that there was no recognized scheme of training. Many had served as altar boys, and knew what to do by virtue of imitation, and others worked out the apprenticeship of their sub-diaconate for two or three years learning the ropes in the same fashion before presenting themselves to the bishop for priestly orders. Sometimes their examination was rigorous, but often it was perfunctory enough.

It may be that standards had relaxed during the 1520s. Many years later William Allen, defending his decision to establish a seminary at Douai, wrote of ‘the common sort of curates … in old time, as you may better than I remember their want then in manner even of necessary knowledge’, particularly their lack of theological understanding, which had left them so vulnerable to the attacks of the reformers.

On 17 November 1558, between five and six in the morning, and in the sixth year of her reign, Queen Mary died. The news came as no very great surprise, either to the court or to the citizens of London, because her health, never very robust, had been in visible decline for over a month. Elizabeth cannot have been very surprised either because although, according to the traditional story, she was walking in the park at Hatfield when the news reached her, she had in fact been preparing for this moment for some time. Her supporters had been quietly mobilized in case Mary should change her mind at the last minute, and she had been tormenting Philip's special envoy, the Count of Feria, with speculations about her intentions. Between eleven and twelve o'clock that same morning Elizabeth was proclaimed in Cheapside as Queen of England, France and Ireland, and Defender of the Faith by ‘dyvers haroldes of armes’, supported by the assembled nobility of England. The same day the bells of all the city churches rang out, and that night parties and bonfires were set in the streets ‘for the newe quen Elizabeth, quen Mare syster’. Feria had been rightly apprehensive about the Queen's attitude to religion, but for the time being nothing was said. On 19 November Te Deum Laudamus was sung in every church in London, and the following day William Bill, her chaplain, preached at Paul's Cross and made (according to Henry Machyn) a ‘godly sermon’, from which we may conclude that it was uncontroversial. There had been a great deal of anxiety abroad about what would, or might, happen when Queen Mary died. Elizabeth was illegitimate, and relations between the two women were notoriously bad. Would King Philip attempt to ignore his marriage treaty and secure the succession for himself, or would some other pretender emerge? When the new Queen was unchallenged, the country breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Persecution is a victim's word. None of the magistrates, parochial officials and good citizens who were described as ‘persecutors’ in the marginalia of Foxe's great work would have acknowledged such a description of themselves. They were just doing a job in the service of the Church and of the Queen, although some of them were not above enjoying themselves in the process. ‘Mr Justice Nine Holes’ who was later accused of having drilled holes in the sanctuary screen in order to observe those who slept during the sermon, or failed to adore the host at mass, admitted the fact but denied the motivation. He had been concerned, he claimed ‘to spy on pretty wenches’. He could equally have pleaded the specific instructions which the council issued from time to time, to commit to ward all seditious persons who absented themselves from divine service. How was he supposed to know who was there, without his peep-holes? Such instructions were sent to the justices of the peace of Norfolk in May 1554, and similar letters went to other counties. In a sense the persecution was very ‘top-down’, driven first by Gardiner and the Queen and latterly by Reginald Pole. It could hardly have been anything else, given the role of the courts, and ultimately of the Crown, in imposing penalties. Nevertheless there was also a sense in which it was community action; neighbour denounced neighbour, and even families reported their delinquent members to the authorities. Behind each story there was no doubt a different set of circumstances, and Foxe, upon whom we are reliant for most of this kind of information, often did not understand these himself.

Most of the early victims were clergy, and the nature of their beliefs was in the public domain. They were normally arrested for marriage, for preaching false doctrine or otherwise trying to discharge their usual functions. The story of Rowland Taylor, although not typical, may be taken as representative.