John Foxe
Encyclopedia
John Foxe was an English historian and martyrologist, the author of what is popularly known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs
, (properly The Acts and Monuments
), an account of Christian
martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants
and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the reign of Mary I
. Widely owned and read by English Puritans, the book helped mould British popular opinion
about the Catholic Church for several centuries.
, England
of a middlingly prominent family and seems to have been an unusually studious and devout child. In about 1534, when he was about sixteen, he entered Brasenose College, Oxford
, where he was the pupil of John Hawarden (or Harding), a fellow of the college. In 1535 Foxe was admitted to Magdalen College School
, where he may either have been improving his Latin or acting as a junior instructor. He became a probationer fellow in July 1538 and a full fellow
the following July.
Foxe took his bachelor's degree on 17 July 1537, his master's degree in July 1543, and was lecturer
of logic
, 1539–40. A series of letters in Foxe's handwriting dated to 1544–45, shows Foxe to be "a man of friendly disposition and warm sympathies, deeply religious, an ardent student, zealous in making acquaintance with scholars." By the time he was twenty-five, he had read the Latin and Greek fathers, the schoolmen, the canon law
, and had "acquired no mean skill in the Hebrew language."
under Henry VIII
. After a year of "obligatory regency" (public lecturing), Foxe would have been obliged to take holy orders
by Michaelmas
1545, and the primary reason for his resignation was probably his opposition to clerical celibacy
—which he described in letters to friends as self-castration. Foxe may have been forced from the college in a general purge of its Protestant members, although college records state that he resigned of his own accord and "ex honesta causa." Foxe's change of religious opinion may have temporarily broken his relationship with his stepfather and may even have put his life in danger. Foxe personally witnessed the burning of William Cowbridge in September 1538.
After being forced to abandon what might have been a promising academic career, Foxe experienced a period of dire need. Hugh Latimer
invited Foxe to live with him, but Foxe eventually became a tutor in the household of Thomas Lucy
of Charlecote, near Stratford-on-Avon. Before leaving the Lucys, Foxe married Agnes Randall on 3 February 1547. They had six children.
in January 1547, the accession of Edward VI
, and the formation of a Privy Council
dominated by pro-reform Protestants. In the middle or latter part of 1547, Foxe moved to London and probably lived in Stepney
. There he completed three translations of Protestant sermons published by the "stout Protestant" Hugh Singleton. During this period Foxe also found a patron in Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, who hired him as tutor to the orphan children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
, a Catholic who had been executed for treason in January 1547. (The children were Thomas
, who would become the fourth duke of Norfolk and a valuable friend of Foxe's; Jane
, later Countess of Westmorland; Henry
, later earl of Northampton
; and Charles
, who would later command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada
.) Foxe lived in the duchess's London household at Mountjoy House and later at Reigate Castle, and the duchess's patronage "facilitated Foxe's entry into the ranks of England's Protestant elite." During his stay at Reigate, Foxe helped suppress a cult that had arisen around the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Ouldsworth, which had been credited with miraculous healing powers.
Foxe was ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley
on 24 June 1550, and his circle of friends, associates, and supporters included John Hooper
, William Turner
, John Rogers, William Cecil
, and most importantly John Bale
, who was to become a close friend and "certainly encouraged, very probably guided, Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology
. From 1548 to 1551, Foxe brought out one tract opposing the death penalty for adultery and another supporting ecclesiastical excommunication of those who he thought "veiled ambition under the cloak of Protestantism." He also worked unsuccessfully to prevent the two burnings for religion that occurred during the reign of Edward VI.
in July 1553, Foxe lost his tutorship when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk
was released from prison. Foxe walked warily as befitted one who had published Protestant books in his own name. As the political climate worsened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner
. Just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, he sailed with his pregnant wife from Ipswich
to Nieuwpoort
. He then traveled to Antwerp, Rotterdam
, Frankfurt
and Strasbourg
, which he reached by July 1554. In Strasbourg Foxe published a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the draft of which he had brought from England and "which became the first shadowy draft of his Acts and Monuments."
In the fall of 1554 Foxe moved to Frankfurt, where he served as a preacher for the English church ministering to refugees in the city. There he was unwillingly drawn into a bitter theological controversy. One faction favored the church polity and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer
while the other advocated Reformed models promoted by John Calvin
's Genevan church. The latter group, led by John Knox
, was supported by Foxe; the former was led by Richard Cox
. (In other words, the exiles were divided into Knoxians and Coxians.) Eventually Knox—who seems to have acted with the greater magnanimity—was expelled, and in the fall of 1555, Foxe and about twenty others also left Frankfurt. Although Foxe clearly favored Knox, he was irenic by temperament and expressed his disgust at "the violence of the warring factions."
Moving to Basel
, Foxe worked with his fellow countrymen John Bale
and Lawrence Humphrey
at the drudgery of proofreading. (Educated Englishmen were noted for their learning, industry, and honesty and "would also be the last persons to quarrel with their bread and butter." No knowledge of German or French was required because the English tended to socialize with each other and could communicate with scholars in Latin.) Foxe also completed and had printed a religious drama, Christus Triumphans (1556), in Latin verse. Yet despite receiving occasional financial contributions from English merchants on the continent, Foxe seems to have lived very close to the margin and been "wretchedly poor."
When Foxe received reports from England about the ongoing religious persecution there, he wrote a pamphlet urging the English nobility to use their influence with the queen to halt it. Foxe feared that the appeal would be useless, and his fears proved correct. When his friend Knox attacked Mary Stuart in his now famous The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, Foxe apparently criticized Knox's "rude vehemency," although their friendship seems to have remained unimpaired.
, would take root. Foxe was also so poor that he was unable to travel with his family until money was sent to him. Back in England, he seems to have lived for ten years at Aldgate
, London, in the house of his former pupil, Thomas Howard
, now Fourth Duke of Norfolk
. Foxe quickly became associated with John Day
the printer and published works of religious controversy while working on a new martyrology that would eventually become the Actes and Monuments
.
Foxe was ordained a priest by his friend Edmund Grindal
, now Bishop of London
, but he "was something of a puritan, and like many of the exiles, had scruples about wearing the clerical vestments laid down in the queen's injunctions of 1559." Many of his friends eventually conformed, but Foxe was "more stubborn or single-minded." Some tried to find him preferments in the new regime, but it "was not easy to help a man of so singularly unworldly a nature, who scorned to use his powerful friendships to advance himself."
Foxe began his Book of Martyrs in 1552, during the reign of Edward VI, with the Marian Persecutions
still in the future. In 1554, while still in exile, Foxe published in Latin at Strasbourg the first shadow of his great book, emphasizing the persecution of the English Lollards during the fifteenth century. But as word of the contemporary English persecution made its way to the continent, Foxe began to collect materials to continue his story to the present. He published the first true Latin edition of his famous book at Basel in August 1559, although the segment dealing with the Marian martyrs was "no more than a fragment." Of course, it was difficult to write contemporary English history while living (as he later said) "in the far parts of Germany, where few friends, no conference, [and] small information could be had." Nevertheless, Foxe who had left England poor and unknown, returned only poor. He had gained "a substantial reputation" through his Latin work.
from the press of John Day
. It was a "gigantic folio volume" of about 1800 pages, about three times the length of the 1559 Latin book. As is typical for the period, the full title was a paragraph long and is abbreviated by scholars as Acts and Monuments, although the book was popularly known then, as it is now, as Foxe's Book of Martyrs
. Publication of the book made Foxe instantly famous—"England's first literary celebrity"—although because there were then no royalties, Foxe remained as poor as ever despite the fact that the book sold for more than ten shillings, three week's pay for a skilled craftsman.
, and Nicholas Harpsfield
. In the next generation, Robert Parsons
, an English Jesuit, also struck at Foxe in A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603–04). Harding, in the spirit of the age, called Actes and Monuments ' "that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs," full of a thousand lies'.
Intending to strengthen his book against his critics, and being flooded by new material brought to light by the publication of the first edition, Foxe put together a second edition in 1570 and where the charges of his critics had been reasonably accurate, Foxe removed the offending passages. Where he could rebut the charges, "he mounted a vigorous counter-attack, seeking to crush his opponent under piles of documents." Even though he deleted material that had been included in the first edition, the second edition was nearly double the size of the first, "two gigantic folio volumes, with 2300 very large pages" of double-columned text.
The edition was well received by the English church, and the upper house of the convocation of Canterbury meeting in 1571, ordered that a copy of the Bishop's Bible and "that full history entitled Monuments of Martyrs" be installed in every cathedral church and that church officials place copies in their houses for the use of servants and visitors. The decision was of certain benefit to Foxe's printer Day
because he had taken great financial risks printing such a mammoth work.
, Matthew Paris
, and many others; and his accounts of these early events were no more accurate than his sources.
Foxe's great contribution, however, was his compilation of the English martyrs from the period of the Lollards through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources of all kinds to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses, a remarkable range of sources for English historical writing of the period.
Foxe maintains a high standard of honesty in his work, although he often treated this material casually, and any reader "must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies." Furthermore, Foxe did not hold to later notions of neutrality or objectivity. He made unambiguous side glosses on his text, such as "Mark the apish pageants of these popelings" and "This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing"—although as J. F. Mozley argues in his defense, Foxe's age was not only one of strong language but of cruel deeds. Foxe was, after all, describing the burning of human beings for holding religious opinions disapproved by the state church.
Foxe's material is more accurate when he deals with his own period, although it is selectively presented, and the book is not an impartial account. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica went so far as to accuse Foxe of "wilful falsification of evidence." Nevertheless, Foxe is "factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere." And in the words of J. F. Mozley, Foxe 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."
Sometimes Foxe copied documents verbatim; sometimes he adapted them to his own use. Although both he and his contemporary readers were more credulous than most moderns, Foxe 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." Foxe's method of using his sources "proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth."
, in recognition of his championship of the English church. Foxe never visited the cathedral or performed any duties associated with the position except to appoint a vicar, William Masters, a highly educated fellow evangelical and former Marian exile. Foxe's inaction as a canon
of the cathedral led him to him being declared contumacious, and he was charged with failing to give a tithe
for repairs to the cathedral. Perhaps his poverty made him unwilling to spare the time or money to make visits or contributions. In any case, he retained the position until his death.
By 1565 Foxe had been caught up in the vestments controversy
led at that time by his associate Crowley
. Foxe's name was on a list of "godly preachers which have utterly forsaken Antichrist and all his Romish rags" that was presented to Lord Robert Dudley
some time between 1561 and 1564. He was also one of the twenty clergymen who on 20 March 1565 petitioned to be allowed to choose not to wear vestments; but unlike many of the others, Foxe did not have a London benefice
to lose when Archbishop Parker enforced conformity. Rather, when Crowley lost his position at St Giles-without-Cripplegate
, Foxe may have preached in his stead.
At some point before 1569, Foxe left Norfolk's
house and moved to his own on Grub Street
. Perhaps his move was motivated by his concerns about Norfolk's exceptionally poor judgment in attempting to marry Mary Stuart, which led to his imprisonment in the Tower
in 1569 and his condemnation in 1572 following the Ridolfi Plot
. Although Foxe had written Norfolk "a remarkably frank letter" about the injudiciousness of his course, after Norfolk's condemnation, he and Alexander Nowell
ministered to the prisoner until his execution, which Foxe attended, on 2 June 1572.
In 1570, at the request of Edmund Grindal
, Bishop of London, Foxe preached the Good Friday
sermon at Paul's Cross. This lofty exposition of the Protestant doctrine of redemption and attack on the doctrinal errors of the Roman Catholic Church was enlarged and published that year as A Sermon of Christ Crucified. Another sermon Foxe preached seven years later at Paul's Cross resulted in his denunciation to the Queen by the French ambassador on grounds that Foxe had advocated the right of the Huguenots to take arms against their king. Foxe replied he had been misunderstood, that he had argued only that if the French king permitted no foreign power (i.e. the Pope) to rule over him, the French Protestants would immediately lay down their arms.
In 1571, Foxe edited an edition of the Anglo-Saxon
gospels, in parallel with the Bishops' Bible
translation, under the patronage of Archbishop Parker
, who was interested in Anglo-Saxon and whose chaplain, John Jocelyn was an Anglo-Saxon scholar. Foxe's introduction argues that the vernacular scripture was an ancient custom in England.
. His widow, Agnes, probably died in 1605. Foxe's son, Samuel Foxe (1560–1630) prospered after his father's death and "accumulated a substantial estate." Fortunately for posterity, he also preserved his father's manuscripts, and they are now in the British Library
.
credited his victory at Cadiz
in part to Foxe's praying. Furthermore, Foxe's extreme unworldliness caused others to claim that he had prophetic powers and could heal the sick.
Certainly Foxe had a hatred of cruelty in advance of his age. When a number of Flemish
Anabaptists were taken by Elizabeth's government in 1572 and sentenced to be burnt, Foxe first wrote letters to the Queen and her council asking for their lives and then wrote the prisoners themselves (having his Latin draft translated into Flemish) pleading with them to abandon what he considered their theological errors. Foxe even visited the Anabaptists in prison. (The attempted intercession was in vain; two were burnt at Smithfield
"in great horror with roaring and crying.")
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; for his integrity of life a bright light to as many as knew him, beheld him, and lived with him." Foxe's funeral was accompanied "by crowds of mourners."
By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the work tended to be abbreviated to include only "the most sensational episodes of torture and death" thus giving to Foxe's work "a lurid quality which was certainly far from the author's intention." Because Foxe was used to attack Catholicism and a rising tide of high-church Anglicanism, the book's credibility was challenged in the early nineteenth century by a number of authors, most importantly, Samuel R. Maitland. In the words of one Catholic Victorian, after Maitland's critique, "no one with any literary pretensions...ventured to quote Foxe as an authority." Further analysis of Maitland's criticism in the twenty-first century has in the words of David Loades
, that Maitland "deserves to be treated with genuine, but limited, respect. His demolition of the martyrologist's history of the Waldenses, and of some of his other medieval reconstructions, was accurate up to a point, but he never addressed those parts of the Acts and Monuments where Foxe was at his strongest, and his general conclusion that the work was nothing but a tissue of fabrications and distortions is not supported by modern analysis."
It was not until J. F. Mozley published John Foxe and His Book in 1940 that Foxe's rehabilitation as a historian began, initiating a controversy that has continued to the present. Recently, renewed interest in Foxe as a seminal figure in early modern studies created a demand for a new critical edition of the Actes and Monuments, Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition.
In the words of Thomas S. Freeman, one of the most important living Foxe scholars, "current scholarship has formed a more complex and nuanced estimate of the accuracy of Acts and Monuments....Perhaps [Foxe] may be most profitably seen in the same light as a barrister pleading a case for a client he knows to be innocent and whom he is determined to save. Like the hypothetical barrister, Foxe had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells one side of a story which must be heard. But he should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind."
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Acts and Monuments, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology...
, (properly The Acts and Monuments
The Acts and Monuments
Acts and Monuments by John Foxe is a celebrated work of English church history and martyrology, first published in 1563 by John Day. The book was lavishly produced and illustrated with many woodcuts and was the largest publishing project undertaken in Britain up to that time...
), an account of Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...
martyrs throughout Western history but emphasizing the sufferings of English Protestants
Protestantism
Protestantism is one of the three major groupings within Christianity. It is a movement that began in Germany in the early 16th century as a reaction against medieval Roman Catholic doctrines and practices, especially in regards to salvation, justification, and ecclesiology.The doctrines of the...
and proto-Protestants from the fourteenth century through the reign of Mary I
Mary I of England
Mary I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death.She was the only surviving child born of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded Henry in 1547...
. Widely owned and read by English Puritans, the book helped mould British popular opinion
Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom
Institutional Anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom has its origins in the English and Irish Reformations under Henry VIII and the Scottish Reformation led by John Knox...
about the Catholic Church for several centuries.
Education
Foxe was born at Boston, in LincolnshireLincolnshire
Lincolnshire is a county in the east of England. It borders Norfolk to the south east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south west, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire to the west, South Yorkshire to the north west, and the East Riding of Yorkshire to the north. It also borders...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
of a middlingly prominent family and seems to have been an unusually studious and devout child. In about 1534, when he was about sixteen, he entered Brasenose College, Oxford
Brasenose College, Oxford
Brasenose College, originally Brazen Nose College , is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. As of 2006, it has an estimated financial endowment of £98m...
, where he was the pupil of John Hawarden (or Harding), a fellow of the college. In 1535 Foxe was admitted to Magdalen College School
Magdalen College School, Oxford
Magdalen College School is an independent school for boys aged 7 to 18 and girls in the sixth form, located on The Plain in Oxford, England. It was founded as part of Magdalen College, Oxford by William Waynflete in 1480....
, where he may either have been improving his Latin or acting as a junior instructor. He became a probationer fellow in July 1538 and a full fellow
Fellow
A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...
the following July.
Foxe took his bachelor's degree on 17 July 1537, his master's degree in July 1543, and was lecturer
Lecturer
Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
of logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, 1539–40. A series of letters in Foxe's handwriting dated to 1544–45, shows Foxe to be "a man of friendly disposition and warm sympathies, deeply religious, an ardent student, zealous in making acquaintance with scholars." By the time he was twenty-five, he had read the Latin and Greek fathers, the schoolmen, the canon law
Canon law
Canon law is the body of laws & regulations made or adopted by ecclesiastical authority, for the government of the Christian organization and its members. It is the internal ecclesiastical law governing the Catholic Church , the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches, and the Anglican Communion of...
, and had "acquired no mean skill in the Hebrew language."
Resignation from Oxford
Foxe resigned from his college in 1545 after becoming an evangelical and thereby subscribing to beliefs condemned by the Church of EnglandChurch of England
The Church of England is the officially established Christian church in England and the Mother Church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. The church considers itself within the tradition of Western Christianity and dates its formal establishment principally to the mission to England by St...
under Henry VIII
Henry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
. After a year of "obligatory regency" (public lecturing), Foxe would have been obliged to take holy orders
Holy Orders
The term Holy Orders is used by many Christian churches to refer to ordination or to those individuals ordained for a special role or ministry....
by Michaelmas
Michaelmas
Michaelmas, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel is a day in the Western Christian calendar which occurs on 29 September...
1545, and the primary reason for his resignation was probably his opposition to clerical celibacy
Celibacy
Celibacy is a personal commitment to avoiding sexual relations, in particular a vow from marriage. Typically celibacy involves avoiding all romantic relationships of any kind. An individual may choose celibacy for religious reasons, such as is the case for priests in some religions, for reasons of...
—which he described in letters to friends as self-castration. Foxe may have been forced from the college in a general purge of its Protestant members, although college records state that he resigned of his own accord and "ex honesta causa." Foxe's change of religious opinion may have temporarily broken his relationship with his stepfather and may even have put his life in danger. Foxe personally witnessed the burning of William Cowbridge in September 1538.
After being forced to abandon what might have been a promising academic career, Foxe experienced a period of dire need. Hugh Latimer
Hugh Latimer
Hugh Latimer was a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, Bishop of Worcester before the Reformation, and later Church of England chaplain to King Edward VI. In 1555, under Queen Mary, he was burnt at the stake, becoming one of the three Oxford Martyrs of Anglicanism.-Life:Latimer was born into a...
invited Foxe to live with him, but Foxe eventually became a tutor in the household of Thomas Lucy
Thomas Lucy
Sir Thomas Lucy was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons in 1571 and 1585. He was a magistrate in Warwickshire, but is best known for his links to William Shakespeare...
of Charlecote, near Stratford-on-Avon. Before leaving the Lucys, Foxe married Agnes Randall on 3 February 1547. They had six children.
In London under Edward VI
Foxe's prospects, and those of the evangelical cause generally, improved after the death of Henry VIIIHenry VIII of England
Henry VIII was King of England from 21 April 1509 until his death. He was Lord, and later King, of Ireland, as well as continuing the nominal claim by the English monarchs to the Kingdom of France...
in January 1547, the accession of Edward VI
Edward VI of England
Edward VI was the King of England and Ireland from 28 January 1547 until his death. He was crowned on 20 February at the age of nine. The son of Henry VIII and Jane Seymour, Edward was the third monarch of the Tudor dynasty and England's first monarch who was raised as a Protestant...
, and the formation of a Privy Council
Privy Council of the United Kingdom
Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, usually known simply as the Privy Council, is a formal body of advisers to the Sovereign in the United Kingdom...
dominated by pro-reform Protestants. In the middle or latter part of 1547, Foxe moved to London and probably lived in Stepney
Stepney (parish)
Stepney was an ancient civil and ecclesiastical parish in the historic county of Middlesex to the east and north east of the City of London, England.-Origins:...
. There he completed three translations of Protestant sermons published by the "stout Protestant" Hugh Singleton. During this period Foxe also found a patron in Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, who hired him as tutor to the orphan children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
Henry Howard, KG, , known as The Earl of Surrey although he never was a peer, was an English aristocrat, and one of the founders of English Renaissance poetry.-Life:...
, a Catholic who had been executed for treason in January 1547. (The children were Thomas
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, KG, Earl Marshal was an English nobleman.Norfolk was the son of the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He was taught as a child by John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist, who remained a lifelong recipient of Norfolk's patronage...
, who would become the fourth duke of Norfolk and a valuable friend of Foxe's; Jane
Jane Howard
Jane Neville , Countess of Westmorland , daughter of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and Frances de Vere....
, later Countess of Westmorland; Henry
Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton
Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton was a significant English aristocrat and courtier. He was suspect as a crypto-Catholic throughout his life, and went through periods of royal disfavour, in which his reputation suffered greatly. He was distinguished for learning, artistic culture and his...
, later earl of Northampton
Earl of Northampton
Earl of Northampton is a title that has been created five times.-Earls in for the Honour of Huntingdon, first Creation :*Waltheof *Maud, Countess of Huntingdon** m. Simon I de Senlis** m...
; and Charles
Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham
Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham , known as Howard of Effingham, was an English statesman and Lord High Admiral under Elizabeth I and James I...
, who would later command the English fleet against the Spanish Armada
Spanish Armada
This article refers to the Battle of Gravelines, for the modern navy of Spain, see Spanish NavyThe Spanish Armada was the Spanish fleet that sailed against England under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia in 1588, with the intention of overthrowing Elizabeth I of England to stop English...
.) Foxe lived in the duchess's London household at Mountjoy House and later at Reigate Castle, and the duchess's patronage "facilitated Foxe's entry into the ranks of England's Protestant elite." During his stay at Reigate, Foxe helped suppress a cult that had arisen around the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Ouldsworth, which had been credited with miraculous healing powers.
Foxe was ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley
Nicholas Ridley (martyr)
Nicholas Ridley was an English Bishop of London. Ridley was burned at the stake, as one of the Oxford Martyrs, during the Marian Persecutions, for his teachings and his support of Lady Jane Grey...
on 24 June 1550, and his circle of friends, associates, and supporters included John Hooper
John Hooper
John Hooper, Johan Hoper, was an English churchman, Anglican Bishop of Gloucester and Worcester. A Protestant Reformer, he was killed during the Marian Persecutions.-Biography:...
, William Turner
William Turner
William Turner MA was an English divine and reformer, a physician and a natural historian. He studied medicine in Italy, and was a friend of the great Swiss naturalist, Conrad Gessner...
, John Rogers, William Cecil
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley
William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley , KG was an English statesman, the chief advisor of Queen Elizabeth I for most of her reign, twice Secretary of State and Lord High Treasurer from 1572...
, and most importantly John Bale
John Bale
John Bale was an English churchman, historian and controversialist, and Bishop of Ossory. He wrote the oldest known historical verse drama in English , and developed and published a very extensive list of the works of British authors down to his own time, just as the monastic libraries were being...
, who was to become a close friend and "certainly encouraged, very probably guided, Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology
Martyrology
A martyrology is a catalogue or list of martyrs , arranged in the calendar order of their anniversaries or feasts. Local martyrologies record exclusively the custom of a particular Church. Local lists were enriched by names borrowed from neighbouring churches...
. From 1548 to 1551, Foxe brought out one tract opposing the death penalty for adultery and another supporting ecclesiastical excommunication of those who he thought "veiled ambition under the cloak of Protestantism." He also worked unsuccessfully to prevent the two burnings for religion that occurred during the reign of Edward VI.
Marian Exile
On the accession of Mary IMary I of England
Mary I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from July 1553 until her death.She was the only surviving child born of the ill-fated marriage of Henry VIII and his first wife Catherine of Aragon. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded Henry in 1547...
in July 1553, Foxe lost his tutorship when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk
Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, KG, Earl Marshal was a prominent Tudor politician. He was uncle to Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, two of the wives of King Henry VIII, and played a major role in the machinations behind these marriages...
was released from prison. Foxe walked warily as befitted one who had published Protestant books in his own name. As the political climate worsened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner
Stephen Gardiner
Stephen Gardiner was an English Roman Catholic bishop and politician during the English Reformation period who served as Lord Chancellor during the reign of Queen Mary I of England.-Early life:...
. Just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, he sailed with his pregnant wife from Ipswich
Ipswich
Ipswich is a large town and a non-metropolitan district. It is the county town of Suffolk, England. Ipswich is located on the estuary of the River Orwell...
to Nieuwpoort
Nieuwpoort, Belgium
Nieuwpoort is a municipality located in Flanders, one of the three regions of Belgium, and in the Flemish province of West Flanders. The municipality comprises the city of Nieuwpoort proper and the towns of Ramskapelle and Sint-Joris. On January 1, 2008 Nieuwpoort had a total population of 11,062....
. He then traveled to Antwerp, Rotterdam
Rotterdam
Rotterdam is the second-largest city in the Netherlands and one of the largest ports in the world. Starting as a dam on the Rotte river, Rotterdam has grown into a major international commercial centre...
, Frankfurt
Frankfurt
Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...
and Strasbourg
Strasbourg
Strasbourg is the capital and principal city of the Alsace region in eastern France and is the official seat of the European Parliament. Located close to the border with Germany, it is the capital of the Bas-Rhin département. The city and the region of Alsace are historically German-speaking,...
, which he reached by July 1554. In Strasbourg Foxe published a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the draft of which he had brought from England and "which became the first shadowy draft of his Acts and Monuments."
In the fall of 1554 Foxe moved to Frankfurt, where he served as a preacher for the English church ministering to refugees in the city. There he was unwillingly drawn into a bitter theological controversy. One faction favored the church polity and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer
Book of Common Prayer
The Book of Common Prayer is the short title of a number of related prayer books used in the Anglican Communion, as well as by the Continuing Anglican, "Anglican realignment" and other Anglican churches. The original book, published in 1549 , in the reign of Edward VI, was a product of the English...
while the other advocated Reformed models promoted by John Calvin
John Calvin
John Calvin was an influential French theologian and pastor during the Protestant Reformation. He was a principal figure in the development of the system of Christian theology later called Calvinism. Originally trained as a humanist lawyer, he broke from the Roman Catholic Church around 1530...
's Genevan church. The latter group, led by John Knox
John Knox
John Knox was a Scottish clergyman and a leader of the Protestant Reformation who brought reformation to the church in Scotland. He was educated at the University of St Andrews or possibly the University of Glasgow and was ordained to the Catholic priesthood in 1536...
, was supported by Foxe; the former was led by Richard Cox
Richard Cox (bishop)
Richard Cox was an English clergyman, who was Dean of Westminster and Bishop of Ely.-Biography:Cox was born of obscure parentage at Whaddon, Buckinghamshire, in 1499 or 1500....
. (In other words, the exiles were divided into Knoxians and Coxians.) Eventually Knox—who seems to have acted with the greater magnanimity—was expelled, and in the fall of 1555, Foxe and about twenty others also left Frankfurt. Although Foxe clearly favored Knox, he was irenic by temperament and expressed his disgust at "the violence of the warring factions."
Moving to Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
, Foxe worked with his fellow countrymen John Bale
John Bale
John Bale was an English churchman, historian and controversialist, and Bishop of Ossory. He wrote the oldest known historical verse drama in English , and developed and published a very extensive list of the works of British authors down to his own time, just as the monastic libraries were being...
and Lawrence Humphrey
Lawrence Humphrey
Lawrence Humphrey was an English theologian, who was president of Magdalen College, Oxford, and dean successively of Gloucester and Winchester.-Biography:...
at the drudgery of proofreading. (Educated Englishmen were noted for their learning, industry, and honesty and "would also be the last persons to quarrel with their bread and butter." No knowledge of German or French was required because the English tended to socialize with each other and could communicate with scholars in Latin.) Foxe also completed and had printed a religious drama, Christus Triumphans (1556), in Latin verse. Yet despite receiving occasional financial contributions from English merchants on the continent, Foxe seems to have lived very close to the margin and been "wretchedly poor."
When Foxe received reports from England about the ongoing religious persecution there, he wrote a pamphlet urging the English nobility to use their influence with the queen to halt it. Foxe feared that the appeal would be useless, and his fears proved correct. When his friend Knox attacked Mary Stuart in his now famous The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
The first blast of the trumpet against the monstruous regiment of women is a polemical work by the Scottish Reformer John Knox, published in 1558....
, Foxe apparently criticized Knox's "rude vehemency," although their friendship seems to have remained unimpaired.
Return to England
After the death of Mary I in 1558, Foxe was in no hurry to return home, and he waited to see if religious changes instituted by her successor, Elizabeth IElizabeth I of England
Elizabeth I was queen regnant of England and Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. Sometimes called The Virgin Queen, Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, Elizabeth was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty...
, would take root. Foxe was also so poor that he was unable to travel with his family until money was sent to him. Back in England, he seems to have lived for ten years at Aldgate
Aldgate
Aldgate was the eastern most gateway through London Wall leading from the City of London to Whitechapel and the east end of London. Aldgate gives its name to a ward of the City...
, London, in the house of his former pupil, Thomas Howard
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, KG, Earl Marshal was an English nobleman.Norfolk was the son of the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He was taught as a child by John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist, who remained a lifelong recipient of Norfolk's patronage...
, now Fourth Duke of Norfolk
Duke of Norfolk
The Duke of Norfolk is the premier duke in the peerage of England, and also, as Earl of Arundel, the premier earl. The Duke of Norfolk is, moreover, the Earl Marshal and hereditary Marshal of England. The seat of the Duke of Norfolk is Arundel Castle in Sussex, although the title refers to the...
. Foxe quickly became associated with John Day
John Day (printer)
John Day was an English Protestant printer. He specialised in printing and distributing Protestant literature and pamphlets, and produced many small-format religious books, such as ABCs, sermons, and translations of psalms...
the printer and published works of religious controversy while working on a new martyrology that would eventually become the Actes and Monuments
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Acts and Monuments, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology...
.
Foxe was ordained a priest by his friend Edmund Grindal
Edmund Grindal
Edmund Grindal was an English church leader who successively held the posts of Bishop of London, Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Elizabeth I of England.-Early life to the death of Edward VI:...
, now Bishop of London
Bishop of London
The Bishop of London is the ordinary of the Church of England Diocese of London in the Province of Canterbury.The diocese covers 458 km² of 17 boroughs of Greater London north of the River Thames and a small part of the County of Surrey...
, but he "was something of a puritan, and like many of the exiles, had scruples about wearing the clerical vestments laid down in the queen's injunctions of 1559." Many of his friends eventually conformed, but Foxe was "more stubborn or single-minded." Some tried to find him preferments in the new regime, but it "was not easy to help a man of so singularly unworldly a nature, who scorned to use his powerful friendships to advance himself."
Actes and Monuments
Marian Persecutions
The Marian Persecutions were carried out against religious reformers, Protestants, and other dissenters for their heretical beliefs during the reign of Mary I of England. The excesses of this period were mythologized in the historical record of Foxe's Book of Martyrs...
still in the future. In 1554, while still in exile, Foxe published in Latin at Strasbourg the first shadow of his great book, emphasizing the persecution of the English Lollards during the fifteenth century. But as word of the contemporary English persecution made its way to the continent, Foxe began to collect materials to continue his story to the present. He published the first true Latin edition of his famous book at Basel in August 1559, although the segment dealing with the Marian martyrs was "no more than a fragment." Of course, it was difficult to write contemporary English history while living (as he later said) "in the far parts of Germany, where few friends, no conference, [and] small information could be had." Nevertheless, Foxe who had left England poor and unknown, returned only poor. He had gained "a substantial reputation" through his Latin work.
First edition
On 20 March 1563, Foxe published the first English edition of the Actes and MonumentsFoxe's Book of Martyrs
The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Acts and Monuments, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology...
from the press of John Day
John Day (printer)
John Day was an English Protestant printer. He specialised in printing and distributing Protestant literature and pamphlets, and produced many small-format religious books, such as ABCs, sermons, and translations of psalms...
. It was a "gigantic folio volume" of about 1800 pages, about three times the length of the 1559 Latin book. As is typical for the period, the full title was a paragraph long and is abbreviated by scholars as Acts and Monuments, although the book was popularly known then, as it is now, as Foxe's Book of Martyrs
Foxe's Book of Martyrs
The Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Acts and Monuments, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology...
. Publication of the book made Foxe instantly famous—"England's first literary celebrity"—although because there were then no royalties, Foxe remained as poor as ever despite the fact that the book sold for more than ten shillings, three week's pay for a skilled craftsman.
Second edition
Actes and Monuments was immediately attacked by Catholics such as Thomas Harding, Thomas StapletonThomas Stapleton
Thomas Stapleton was an English Catholic controversialist.-Life:He was the son of William Stapleton, one of the Stapletons of Carlton, Yorkshire. He was educated at the Free School, Canterbury, at Winchester College, and at New College, Oxford, where he became a Fellow, 18 January 1553...
, and Nicholas Harpsfield
Nicholas Harpsfield
Nicholas Harpsfield was an English historian, Catholic apologist and priest.-Early life and exile:Harpsfield was educated at Winchester College and studied canon and civil law in New College, Oxford, receiving a BCL in 1543...
. In the next generation, Robert Parsons
Robert Parsons (priest)
Robert Persons , later known as Robert Parsons, was an English Jesuit priest.-Early life:...
, an English Jesuit, also struck at Foxe in A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603–04). Harding, in the spirit of the age, called Actes and Monuments ' "that huge dunghill of your stinking martyrs," full of a thousand lies'.
Intending to strengthen his book against his critics, and being flooded by new material brought to light by the publication of the first edition, Foxe put together a second edition in 1570 and where the charges of his critics had been reasonably accurate, Foxe removed the offending passages. Where he could rebut the charges, "he mounted a vigorous counter-attack, seeking to crush his opponent under piles of documents." Even though he deleted material that had been included in the first edition, the second edition was nearly double the size of the first, "two gigantic folio volumes, with 2300 very large pages" of double-columned text.
The edition was well received by the English church, and the upper house of the convocation of Canterbury meeting in 1571, ordered that a copy of the Bishop's Bible and "that full history entitled Monuments of Martyrs" be installed in every cathedral church and that church officials place copies in their houses for the use of servants and visitors. The decision was of certain benefit to Foxe's printer Day
John Day (printer)
John Day was an English Protestant printer. He specialised in printing and distributing Protestant literature and pamphlets, and produced many small-format religious books, such as ABCs, sermons, and translations of psalms...
because he had taken great financial risks printing such a mammoth work.
Third and fourth editions
Foxe published a third edition in 1576, but it was virtually a reprint of the second, although printed on inferior paper and in smaller type. The fourth edition, published in 1583, the last in Foxe's lifetime, had larger type and better paper and consisted of "two volumes of about two thousand folio pages in double columns." Nearly four times the length of the Bible, the fourth edition was "the most physically imposing, complicated, and technically demanding English book of its era. It seems safe to say that it is the largest and most complicated book to appear during the first two or three centuries of English printing history." The title page included the poignant request that the author "desireth thee, good reader, to help him with thy prayer."Accuracy
Foxe based his accounts of martyrs before the early modern period on previous writers, including Eusebius, BedeBede
Bede , also referred to as Saint Bede or the Venerable Bede , was a monk at the Northumbrian monastery of Saint Peter at Monkwearmouth, today part of Sunderland, England, and of its companion monastery, Saint Paul's, in modern Jarrow , both in the Kingdom of Northumbria...
, Matthew Paris
Matthew Paris
Matthew Paris was a Benedictine monk, English chronicler, artist in illuminated manuscripts and cartographer, based at St Albans Abbey in Hertfordshire...
, and many others; and his accounts of these early events were no more accurate than his sources.
Foxe's great contribution, however, was his compilation of the English martyrs from the period of the Lollards through the persecution of Mary I. Here Foxe had primary sources of all kinds to draw on: episcopal registers, reports of trials, and the testimony of eyewitnesses, a remarkable range of sources for English historical writing of the period.
Foxe maintains a high standard of honesty in his work, although he often treated this material casually, and any reader "must be prepared to meet plenty of small errors and inconsistencies." Furthermore, Foxe did not hold to later notions of neutrality or objectivity. He made unambiguous side glosses on his text, such as "Mark the apish pageants of these popelings" and "This answer smelleth of forging and crafty packing"—although as J. F. Mozley argues in his defense, Foxe's age was not only one of strong language but of cruel deeds. Foxe was, after all, describing the burning of human beings for holding religious opinions disapproved by the state church.
Foxe's material is more accurate when he deals with his own period, although it is selectively presented, and the book is not an impartial account. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica went so far as to accuse Foxe of "wilful falsification of evidence." Nevertheless, Foxe is "factually detailed and preserves much firsthand material on the English Reformation unobtainable elsewhere." And in the words of J. F. Mozley, Foxe 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."
Sometimes Foxe copied documents verbatim; sometimes he adapted them to his own use. Although both he and his contemporary readers were more credulous than most moderns, Foxe 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." Foxe's method of using his sources "proclaims the honest man, the sincere seeker after truth."
Salisbury and London
Foxe had dedicated Acts and Monuments to the queen, and on 22 May 1563, he was appointed prebend of Shipton in Salisbury CathedralSalisbury Cathedral
Salisbury Cathedral, formally known as the Cathedral Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, is an Anglican cathedral in Salisbury, England, considered one of the leading examples of Early English architecture....
, in recognition of his championship of the English church. Foxe never visited the cathedral or performed any duties associated with the position except to appoint a vicar, William Masters, a highly educated fellow evangelical and former Marian exile. Foxe's inaction as a canon
Canon (priest)
A canon is a priest or minister who is a member of certain bodies of the Christian clergy subject to an ecclesiastical rule ....
of the cathedral led him to him being declared contumacious, and he was charged with failing to give a tithe
Tithe
A tithe is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government. Today, tithes are normally voluntary and paid in cash, cheques, or stocks, whereas historically tithes were required and paid in kind, such as agricultural products...
for repairs to the cathedral. Perhaps his poverty made him unwilling to spare the time or money to make visits or contributions. In any case, he retained the position until his death.
By 1565 Foxe had been caught up in the vestments controversy
Vestments controversy
The vestments controversy arose in the English Reformation, ostensibly concerning vestments, but more fundamentally concerned with English Protestant identity, doctrine, and various church practices...
led at that time by his associate Crowley
Robert Crowley (printer)
Robert Crowley also Robertus Croleus, Roberto Croleo, Robart Crowleye, Robarte Crole, and Crule , was a stationer, poet, polemicist and Protestant clergyman who was among the Marian exiles at Frankfurt...
. Foxe's name was on a list of "godly preachers which have utterly forsaken Antichrist and all his Romish rags" that was presented to Lord Robert Dudley
Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester
Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester, KG was an English nobleman and the favourite and close friend of Elizabeth I from her first year on the throne until his death...
some time between 1561 and 1564. He was also one of the twenty clergymen who on 20 March 1565 petitioned to be allowed to choose not to wear vestments; but unlike many of the others, Foxe did not have a London benefice
Benefice
A benefice is a reward received in exchange for services rendered and as a retainer for future services. The term is now almost obsolete.-Church of England:...
to lose when Archbishop Parker enforced conformity. Rather, when Crowley lost his position at St Giles-without-Cripplegate
St Giles-without-Cripplegate
St Giles-without-Cripplegate is a Church of England church in the City of London, located within the modern Barbican complex. When built it stood without the city wall, near the Cripplegate. The church is dedicated to St Giles, patron saint of beggars and cripples...
, Foxe may have preached in his stead.
At some point before 1569, Foxe left Norfolk's
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk, KG, Earl Marshal was an English nobleman.Norfolk was the son of the poet Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. He was taught as a child by John Foxe, the Protestant martyrologist, who remained a lifelong recipient of Norfolk's patronage...
house and moved to his own on Grub Street
Grub Street
Until the early 19th century, Grub Street was a street close to London's impoverished Moorfields district that ran from Fore Street east of St Giles-without-Cripplegate north to Chiswell Street...
. Perhaps his move was motivated by his concerns about Norfolk's exceptionally poor judgment in attempting to marry Mary Stuart, which led to his imprisonment in the Tower
Tower of London
Her Majesty's Royal Palace and Fortress, more commonly known as the Tower of London, is a historic castle on the north bank of the River Thames in central London, England. It lies within the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, separated from the eastern edge of the City of London by the open space...
in 1569 and his condemnation in 1572 following the Ridolfi Plot
Ridolfi plot
The Ridolfi plot was a plot in 1570 to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I of England and replace her with Mary, Queen of Scots. The plot was hatched and planned by Roberto di Ridolfi, an international banker who was able to travel between Brussels, Rome and Madrid to gather support without attracting...
. Although Foxe had written Norfolk "a remarkably frank letter" about the injudiciousness of his course, after Norfolk's condemnation, he and Alexander Nowell
Alexander Nowell
Alexander Nowell was an English Puritan theologian and clergyman, who served as dean of St Paul's during much of Elizabeth I's reign.-Biography:...
ministered to the prisoner until his execution, which Foxe attended, on 2 June 1572.
In 1570, at the request of Edmund Grindal
Edmund Grindal
Edmund Grindal was an English church leader who successively held the posts of Bishop of London, Archbishop of York and Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of Elizabeth I of England.-Early life to the death of Edward VI:...
, Bishop of London, Foxe preached the Good Friday
Good Friday
Good Friday , is a religious holiday observed primarily by Christians commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary. The holiday is observed during Holy Week as part of the Paschal Triduum on the Friday preceding Easter Sunday, and may coincide with the Jewish observance of...
sermon at Paul's Cross. This lofty exposition of the Protestant doctrine of redemption and attack on the doctrinal errors of the Roman Catholic Church was enlarged and published that year as A Sermon of Christ Crucified. Another sermon Foxe preached seven years later at Paul's Cross resulted in his denunciation to the Queen by the French ambassador on grounds that Foxe had advocated the right of the Huguenots to take arms against their king. Foxe replied he had been misunderstood, that he had argued only that if the French king permitted no foreign power (i.e. the Pope) to rule over him, the French Protestants would immediately lay down their arms.
In 1571, Foxe edited an edition of the Anglo-Saxon
Old English language
Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
gospels, in parallel with the Bishops' Bible
Bishops' Bible
The Bishops' Bible is an English translation of the Bible which was produced under the authority of the established Church of England in 1568. It was substantially revised in 1572, and this revised edition was to be prescribed as the base text for the Authorized King James Version of...
translation, under the patronage of Archbishop Parker
Matthew Parker
Matthew Parker was Archbishop of Canterbury from 1559 until his death in 1575. He was also an influential theologian and arguably the co-founder of Anglican theological thought....
, who was interested in Anglo-Saxon and whose chaplain, John Jocelyn was an Anglo-Saxon scholar. Foxe's introduction argues that the vernacular scripture was an ancient custom in England.
Death and legacy
Foxe died on 18 April 1587 and was buried at St. Giles's, CripplegateSt Giles-without-Cripplegate
St Giles-without-Cripplegate is a Church of England church in the City of London, located within the modern Barbican complex. When built it stood without the city wall, near the Cripplegate. The church is dedicated to St Giles, patron saint of beggars and cripples...
. His widow, Agnes, probably died in 1605. Foxe's son, Samuel Foxe (1560–1630) prospered after his father's death and "accumulated a substantial estate." Fortunately for posterity, he also preserved his father's manuscripts, and they are now in the British Library
British Library
The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom, and is the world's largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library, holding over 150 million items from every country in the world, in virtually all known languages and in many formats,...
.
Personality
Foxe was so bookish that he ruined his health by his persistent study. Yet, he had "a genius for friendship," served as a spiritual counselor, and was a man of private charity. He even took part in matchmaking. Foxe was so well known as a man of prayer that Francis DrakeFrancis Drake
Sir Francis Drake, Vice Admiral was an English sea captain, privateer, navigator, slaver, and politician of the Elizabethan era. Elizabeth I of England awarded Drake a knighthood in 1581. He was second-in-command of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada in 1588. He also carried out the...
credited his victory at Cadiz
Cádiz
Cadiz is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the homonymous province, one of eight which make up the autonomous community of Andalusia....
in part to Foxe's praying. Furthermore, Foxe's extreme unworldliness caused others to claim that he had prophetic powers and could heal the sick.
Certainly Foxe had a hatred of cruelty in advance of his age. When a number of Flemish
Flanders
Flanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
Anabaptists were taken by Elizabeth's government in 1572 and sentenced to be burnt, Foxe first wrote letters to the Queen and her council asking for their lives and then wrote the prisoners themselves (having his Latin draft translated into Flemish) pleading with them to abandon what he considered their theological errors. Foxe even visited the Anabaptists in prison. (The attempted intercession was in vain; two were burnt at Smithfield
Smithfield, London
Smithfield is an area of the City of London, in the ward of Farringdon Without. It is located in the north-west part of the City, and is mostly known for its centuries-old meat market, today the last surviving historical wholesale market in Central London...
"in great horror with roaring and crying.")
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; for his integrity of life a bright light to as many as knew him, beheld him, and lived with him." Foxe's funeral was accompanied "by crowds of mourners."
Foxe's historical reputation
After his death, Foxe's Acts and Monuments continued to be published and appreciatively read. John Burrow refers to it as, after the Bible, "the greatest single influence on English Protestant thinking of the late Tudor and early Stuart period."By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the work tended to be abbreviated to include only "the most sensational episodes of torture and death" thus giving to Foxe's work "a lurid quality which was certainly far from the author's intention." Because Foxe was used to attack Catholicism and a rising tide of high-church Anglicanism, the book's credibility was challenged in the early nineteenth century by a number of authors, most importantly, Samuel R. Maitland. In the words of one Catholic Victorian, after Maitland's critique, "no one with any literary pretensions...ventured to quote Foxe as an authority." Further analysis of Maitland's criticism in the twenty-first century has in the words of David Loades
David Loades
David Michael Loades, FSA is a British historian and an expert on the Tudor era. He is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Wales, where he taught from 1980 until 1996, and was Honorary Research Professor at the University of Sheffield from 1996 until 2008. In the 1960s an1970s he...
, that Maitland "deserves to be treated with genuine, but limited, respect. His demolition of the martyrologist's history of the Waldenses, and of some of his other medieval reconstructions, was accurate up to a point, but he never addressed those parts of the Acts and Monuments where Foxe was at his strongest, and his general conclusion that the work was nothing but a tissue of fabrications and distortions is not supported by modern analysis."
It was not until J. F. Mozley published John Foxe and His Book in 1940 that Foxe's rehabilitation as a historian began, initiating a controversy that has continued to the present. Recently, renewed interest in Foxe as a seminal figure in early modern studies created a demand for a new critical edition of the Actes and Monuments, Foxe's Book of Martyrs Variorum Edition.
In the words of Thomas S. Freeman, one of the most important living Foxe scholars, "current scholarship has formed a more complex and nuanced estimate of the accuracy of Acts and Monuments....Perhaps [Foxe] may be most profitably seen in the same light as a barrister pleading a case for a client he knows to be innocent and whom he is determined to save. Like the hypothetical barrister, Foxe had to deal with the evidence of what actually happened, evidence that he was rarely in a position to forge. But he would not present facts damaging to his client, and he had the skills that enabled him to arrange the evidence so as to make it conform to what he wanted it to say. Like the barrister, Foxe presents crucial evidence and tells one side of a story which must be heard. But he should never be read uncritically, and his partisan objectives should always be kept in mind."
See also
- Foxe's Book of MartyrsFoxe's Book of MartyrsThe Book of Martyrs, by John Foxe, more accurately Acts and Monuments, is an account from a Protestant point of view of Christian church history and martyrology...
- Religion in the United KingdomReligion in the United KingdomReligion in the United Kingdom and the states that pre-dated the UK, was dominated by forms of Christianity for over 1,400 years. Although a majority of citizens still identify with Christianity in many surveys, regular church attendance has fallen dramatically since the middle of the 20th century,...
External links
- Foxe's Book of Martyrs (Actes and Monuments) Variorum Edition Online, from the Humanities Research Institute of The University of Sheffield
- Thomas Freeman, John Foxe: A Biography
- Complete e-book at Christian Classics Ethereal Library
- John Fox at Find A GraveFind A GraveFind a Grave is a commercial website providing free access and input to an online database of cemetery records. It was founded in 1998 as a DBA and incorporated in 2000.-History:...