The importance of dying earnestly: the metamorphosis of the account of James Bainham in ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’

Abstract

Readers of the second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or any of the subsequent editions of that massive history of the persecutions inflicted on the Church, popularly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, would have found a coherent, lucid description, filled with circumstantial and often dramatic details, of the ordeals of James Bainham. According to this account, James Bainham, a member of the Middle Temple and the son of a Gloucestershire knight, was accused of heresy in 1531, arrested, and transported to Lord Chancellor More’s house in Chelsea. There he was tied to a tree in More’s garden and whipped; subsequently he was taken to the Tower and racked in More’s presence. Eventually, after repeated interrogations and under the threat of burning, Bainham abjured and did penance at Paul’s Cross. Yet Bainham’s conscience tormented him and, a little over a month after his release, he prayed for God’s forgiveness before an evangelical congregation, meeting secretly in a warehouse in Bow Lane. A week later, Bainham stood up on his pew in St Austin’s church, clutching a vernacular New Testament and William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man to his chest and tearfully declared that he had denied God. He prayed for the congregation’s forgiveness and exhorted them to die rather than to submit as he had done. If this defiance was not sufficiently public, Bainham sent letters proclaiming his doctrinal convictions to the Bishop of London and others. Rearrested and re-examined, he was inevitably condemned to death as a relapsed heretic.