1 October 1549 A.D. "Bloody Edmund Bonner" Deprived—94th Bishop of London
1 October 1549 A.D. "Bloody Edmund Bonner" Deprived—94th Bishop of London; Formerly, Archdeacon of Leiceister (1535-1539); Bishop-Elect of Hereford (1538-1539); Elected Bishop of London, 20 Oct 1539, Consecrated 4 Apr 1540; Deprived of Office 1 Oct 1549
Edmund Bonner
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Right Reverend
Edmund Bonner |
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Church
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Diocese
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Elected
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1539; 1553
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Term ended
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1549; 1559 (twice deprived)
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Predecessor
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Successor
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Other posts
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Bishop
of Hereford
elected 27 November 1538 |
Orders
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Ordination
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c. 1519
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Consecration
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4 April 1540
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Personal details
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Born
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Died
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5 September 1569
The Marshalsea |
Buried
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Nationality
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Denomination
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Parents
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Edmund Bonner & Elizabeth Frodsham
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Edmund Bonner (also Boner;[1] c. 1500 – 5 September
1569), Bishop of London,
was an English bishop. Initially an instrumental figure in the schism of Henry VIII
from Rome, he was antagonized by the Protestant reforms introduced by Somerset and reconciled himself to Roman
Catholicism. He became notorious as Bloody Bonner for his role in the persecution of heretics under the Catholic government of Mary
I of England, and ended his life as a prisoner under Queen Elizabeth.
Contents
Early life
He was the son of Elizabeth Frodsham, who was married to
Edmund Bonner, a sawyer of Hanley in Worcestershire. John
Strype (Eccles. Mem. III. i.17 2-173) printed an
account, with many circumstantial details, stating that Bonner was the natural
son of George Savage, rector of Davenham, Cheshire, and that his mother married Bonner only after the future
bishop's birth. This account was disputed by Strype's contemporary, Sir Edmund
Lechmere, who asserted (ib. Annals, I.ii.300) that Bonner was of
legitimate birth.
He was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College,
Oxford, graduating bachelor of civil and canon law in June
1519. He was ordained about the same time, and admitted doctor of civil law
(DCL) in 1525.
An agent of royal supremacy
In 1529 he was Cardinal Thomas
Wolsey's chaplain, which brought him to the notice of the king
and Thomas Cromwell. After the fall of
Wolsey he remained faithful to him and was with him at the time of his arrest
at Cawood and death at Leicester in 1530. Subsequently he
was transferred, perhaps through Cromwell's influence, to the service of the
king, and in January 1532 he was sent to Rome as the king's agent when the question of the king's divorce was raised.
There he sought to obstruct the judicial proceedings against Henry in the papal
curia. In October 1533 he was entrusted with the task of
suggesting to Clement VII
(while he was the guest of Francis I at Marseille) Henry's appeal from the pope to a general council; but there seems to be
no good authority for Gilbert
Burnet's story that Clement threatened to have him burnt alive.
For these and other services Bonner had been rewarded by successive grants of
the livings of Cherry Burton (Yorks), Ripple (Worcester), Blaydon (Durham), and East
Dereham (Norfolk), and in 1535 he was made Archdeacon of
Leicester.
During the following years he was much employed on
important embassies in the king's interests, first to the pope to appeal
against the excommunication pronounced in July 1533, afterwards to the Emperor to dissuade him from attending the general council which the pope wished
to summon at Vicenza. Towards the end of 1535 he
was sent to further what he called "the cause of the Gospel" (Letters
and Papers, 1536, No. 469) in North Germany; and in 1536 he wrote a preface to Stephen
Gardiner's De vera Obedientia, which asserted the royal
and denied the papal supremacy, and was received with delight by the Lutherans. After a brief embassy to the Emperor in the spring of 1538, Bonner
succeeded Gardiner as
ambassador to the French Court in Paris. In this capacity he proved capable and successful, though irritation was
frequently caused by his overbearing and dictatorial manner. He began his
mission by sending Cromwell a long list of accusations against his predecessor.
He was almost as bitter against Wyatt and
Mason, whom he denounced as a "papist," and the violence of his
conduct led Francis I to
threaten him with a hundred strokes of the halberd. He seems, however, to have
pleased his patron, Cromwell, and perhaps Henry, by his energy in seeing the
king's "Great" Bible in English through the press in Paris. He was
already king's chaplain; his appointment at Paris had been accompanied by
promotion to the See of Hereford (27 November 1538)
but owing to his absence he could neither be consecrated nor take possession of
his see, and he was still abroad when he was translated to the Bishopric of
London (October, 1539). Bonner returned to England and was consecrated 4 April
1540.
Hitherto Bonner had had a reputation as a somewhat coarse
and unscrupulous tool of Cromwell – a sort of ecclesiastical Wriothesley, he is not known to have protested against any of the changes effected by
his masters; he professed to be no theologian, and was in the habit, when asked
technical questions, to refer his interrogators to the theologians. He had
graduated in law, and not in theology. There was nothing in the Reformation to
appeal to him, except the repudiation of papal control; and he was one of those
numerous Englishmen whose views were faithfully reflected in Henry's Act of the
Six
Articles. Indeed, almost his first duty as Bishop of London was
to try heretics under these articles; accusations of excessive cruelty and bias
against the accused were spread broadcast by his enemies, and from the first he
seems to have been unpopular in London. He became a staunch conservative.
During the years 1542-43 he was again abroad in Spain and Germany as ambassador to the emperor, at the end of which time he
returned to London.
The death of the king on 28 January 1547, proved the
turning point in Bonner's career. Hitherto he had shown himself entirely
subservient to the sovereign, supporting him in the matter of the divorce,
approving of the suppression of the religious houses, taking the oath
of Supremacy which Fisher and More refused at the cost of
their lives. But while accepting the schism from Rome, he had always resisted
the innovations of the Reformers, and held to the doctrines of the old
religion. Therefore from the first he put himself in opposition to the
religious changes introduced by Protector Somerset and Archbishop Cranmer.
Bonner began to doubt that supremacy when he saw to what uses it could be put
by a Protestant council, and either he or Gardiner evolved the theory that the
royal supremacy was in abeyance during a royal minority. The ground was
skillfully chosen, but it was not legally nor constitutionally tenable. Both he
and Gardiner had in fact sought fresh licences to exercise their ecclesiastical
jurisdiction from the young king Edward VI;
and, if he was supreme enough to confer jurisdiction, he was supreme enough to
issue the injunctions and order the visitation to which Bonner objected. It was
on this question that he came into conflict with Edward's government.
Realignment with Catholicism
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Under Edward VI
Bonner resisted the visitation of August 1547, and was
committed to the Fleet Prison; but he withdrew his
opposition, and was released in time to take an active part against the
government in the parliament of November 1547. In the next session, November
1548-March 1549, he was a leading opponent of the first Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. When these became law, he neglected to enforce them, and on 1 September
1549 he was required by the council to maintain at St
Paul's Cross that the royal authority was as great as if the king
were forty years of age. He did so, but with such significant omissions in the
matter which had been prescribed touching the king's authority, that after a
seven days' trial he was deprived of his bishopric by an ecclesiastical court
over which Cranmer presided, and sent as a
prisoner to the Marshalsea. The fall of Somerset in
the following month raised Bonner's hopes, and he appealed from Cranmer to the
council. After a struggle the Protestant faction gained the upper hand, and on
7 February 1550 Bonner's deprivation was confirmed by the council sitting in
the Star Chamber, and he was further condemned to perpetual imprisonment. Here
he remained until the accession of Mary in 1553.
Under Mary I
Bonner was at once restored to his see, his deprivation
being regarded as invalid and Ridley as an intruder. He vigorously restored Roman
Catholicism in his diocese, made no difficulty about submitting to
the papal jurisdiction which he had foresworn. During 1554 Bonner carried out a
visitation of his diocese, restoring the Mass and the manifold practices and
emblems of Catholic life, but the work was carried out slowly and with
difficulty. To help in the work, Bonner published a list of thirty-seven
"Articles to be enquired of", but these led to such disturbances that
they were temporarily withdrawn.
There was in London at this time a determined Reforming element which opposed in every way the restoration of Catholic worship;
although the Parliament in 1554 welcomed Pole as Papal Legate and sought
absolution and reconciliation from him with apparent unanimity, there was a
real hostility to the whole proceeding among a boisterous section of the
populace. Street brawls arising out of religious disputes were frequent, and
Bonner himself was physically attacked on at least two occasions.
Mary's administration thought that the Reformers would
best be dealt with by the ecclesiastical tribunals, rather than by the civil
power, and on Bonner, as Bishop of London, fell the chief burden to stamp out
religious dissent. Therefore, in 1555 began the persecution to which he owes
his notoriety among his detractors as Bloody Bonner. Besides his
judicial work in his own diocese, Bonner was appointed to degrade Cranmer at Oxford in February 1556. The part he took in these affairs gave rise to intense
hatred on the part of the rebels. Foxe in his "Book of Martyrs" summed up this view in two lines:
"This cannibal in three
years space three hundred martyrs slew
They were his food, he loved
so blood, he sparèd none he knew."
His apologists, including defenders of Catholicism in
England, contend that his action was merely "official", and that
"he had no control" over the fate of the accused "once they were
declared to be irreclaimable heretics and handed over to the secular power; but
he always strove by gentle suasion first to reconcile them to the Church"
(Mr Gairdner, qtd in Catholic
Encyclopedia). The Catholic
Encyclopedia estimates the number of persons
executed as heretics in his jurisdiction as about 120, rather than 300. Bonner
did not go out of his way to persecute; many of his victims were forced upon
him by the king and queen in Council, which at one point addressed a letter to
Bonner on the express ground that he was not proceeding with sufficient
severity. So completely had the state dominated the church that religious
persecutions had become state persecutions, and Bonner was acting as an
ecclesiastical sheriff in the most refractory district of the realm. Even John
Foxe records instances in which Bonner failed to persecute
those authorised for persecution.
Bonner's detractors, beginning with his Protestant
contemporaries John Foxe and John
Bale and continuing through most English historiography of
the period, paint a different picture. Bonner, they point out, was one of those
who brought it to pass that the condemnation of heretics to the fire should be
part of his ordinary official duties, and he was represented as hounding men
and women to death with merciless vindictiveness. Cuthbert
Tunstall, Bishop
of Durham, was as loyal a Roman Catholic as Bonner, but he left a
different reputation behind him. Bale, formerly a friar and ex-Bishop
of Ossory, published from his place of exile at Basle in 1554 an attack on the bishop, in which he speaks of him as "the
bloody sheep-bite of London", "bloody Bonner", and still coarser
epithets. Bonner is seen at his worst by many critics in his brutal jeers at
Cranmer, his former superior. Others contend that, in spite of his prominence,
neither Henry VIII nor
Mary should ever have admitted him to the Privy Council. He seems to have been
regarded by his own party as a useful instrument, especially in disagreeable
work, rather than as a desirable colleague.
Bonner's most important writings date from this time.
They include Responsum et Exhortatio in laudem Sacerdotii (1553); Articles
to be enquired of in the General Visitation of Edmund Bishop of London
(1554); and Homelies sette forth by Eddmune Byshop of London, . . . to be
read within his diocese of London of all Parsons, vycars and curates, unto
their parishioners upon Sondayes and holy days (1555). There was also
published under his name a catechism, probably written by his chaplains, Nicholas Harpsfield and Henry Pendleton, entitled "A
profitable and necessary doctrine" (1554, 2d ed. 1555).
Under Elizabeth
A man so regarded could expect small consideration when
the death of Mary (17 November 1558) placed Elizabeth on the throne. On her accession the new queen refused to allow him to kiss
her hand; but he sat and voted in the parliament and convocation of 1559. From
24 June 1559, the Mass was forbidden as well as all other services not in the
Book of Common Prayer, but long before that date the Mass ceased in most London
churches, though Bonner took care that in his cathedral at least it should
still be celebrated. In May he refused to take the oath of supremacy, acquiring
like his colleagues consistency with old age. According to an envoy from the
Court of Mantua, Bonner resisted orders to remove the service of the Mass by saying,
"I possess three things soul, body, and property. Of the two latter, you
can dispose at your pleasure, but as to the soul, God alone can command
me."
The Council ordered him to resign the bishopric, which he
refused to do, adding that he preferred death. He was sent again to the
Marshalsea on 20 April 1560. During the next two years representatives of the
Protestant party frequently clamored for the execution of Bonner and the other
imprisoned bishops. When the Parliament of 1563 met, a new Act was passed by
which the first refusal of the oath of royal
supremacy was praemunire, the second, high treason. The bishops had
refused the oath once, so that by this Act, which became law on 10 April 1563,
their next refusal of the oath might be followed by their death.
Thanks to the intervention of the Spanish ambassador,
action against the bishops was delayed; but a year later, on 29 April 1564,
Bonner was indicted on a charge of praemunire on refusing the oath when tendered him by his diocesan, Bishop Horne of Winchester. He challenged the legality of Horne's consecration, and a special act of
parliament was passed to meet the point, while the charge against Bonner was
withdrawn. Four times a year for three years he was forced to appear in the courts
at Westminster only to be further remanded. The last of these appearances took
place in the Michaelmas term of 1568, so that the last year of the bishop's
life was spent in prison. His demeanor during his long imprisonment was
remarkable for his cheerfulness, and even Jewel describes him in a letter as
"a most courteous man and gentlemanly both in his manners and
appearance" (Zurich Letters, I, 34).
Bonner never tired of trying to convert others to
Catholicism, and never repented of his crimes to Protestants. Bishop Jewel in a
letter to Peter Martyr related this event, "Being confined to the tower of
London upon accession of Queen Elizabeth, the highest punishement inflicted, he
went to visit some of the criminals kept in that prison, and wishing to encourage
them, called them his friends and neighbors." Upon this, one of them is
said to have answered, "Go beast, into hell, and find your friends there,
for we are none of them. I killed but one man upon a provocation, and do truly
repent of it; but you have killed many persons of all sorts, without any
provocation from them, and are hardened in your impenitence." He died in
the Marshalsea on 5 September 1569, and was buried in St George's, Southwark, secretly at midnight to avoid the risk of a hostile demonstration.
According to Catholic sources, the coffin was soon quietly removed to Copford, near Colchester, where it was buried under
the north side of the altar.
Bonner in historical memory
Contemporary Catholic writers attributed to Bonner
and the other bishops who died in prison the honour of martyrdom: in
vinculis obierunt martyres. On the walls of the English College, Rome, an
inscription recording the death of the eleven bishops, but without naming them,
found a place among the paintings of the martyrs. Bonner was attacked during
life with a rare hatred which has followed him into the grave, so that in
English history few names have been so execrated and vilified as his.
A more charitable assessment of Bonner's character was
made by an Anglican historian, S.
R. Maitland, who considers him,
"a man, straightforward and hearty, familiar and
humorous, sometimes rough, perhaps coarse, naturally hot tempered, but
obviously (by the testimony of his enemies) placable and easily intreated,
capable of bearing most patiently much intemperate and insolent language, much
reviling and low abuse directed against himself personally, against his order,
and against those peculiar doctrines and practices of his church for
maintaining which he had himself suffered the loss of all things, and borne
long imprisonment. [...] In short, we can scarcely read with attention any one
of the cases detailed by those who were no friends of Bonner, without seeing in
him a judge who (even if we grant that he was dispensing bad laws badly) was
obviously desirous to save the prisoner's life."
This verdict was generally followed by later historians.
The Catholic Lord Acton in the Cambridge Modern
History (1904) argued: "The number of those put to death in
his diocese of London was undoubtedly disproportionately large, but this would
seem to have been more the result of the strength of the reforming element in
the capital and in Essex than of the employment of exceptional rigour; while
the evidence also shows that he himself patiently dealt with many of the
Protestants, and did his best to induce them to renounce what he
conscientiously believed to be their errors."[2]
Twelve of Bonner's
Homelies to be read within his diocese of London of all Parsons, vycars and
curates (1555; nine of these were by John
Harpsfield) were translated into the Cornish
language by John Tregear, and are now the largest single work of traditional Cornish prose.
Two primary schools, a bridge and gate in Victoria Park and two streets are named after him in the East End of London.
Bonner also appeared in one of C.J.
Sansom's 'Shardlake' books frequently mentioned to be
persecuting Protestants in the streets of London.
References
1.
Jump up ^ "Edmund
Bonner - Britannica Online Encyclopedia". Britannica.com. 1944-06-06. Retrieved 2012-10-10.
·
This article incorporates text from a
publication now in the public
domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia
Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge
University Press.
·
This article incorporates text from a publication
now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Edmund
Bonner". Catholic
Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company.
Bishop of
Hereford
1538–1539 |
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Bishop of London
1539–1549 |
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Bishop of London
1553–1559 |
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