John Foxe Biography and Books

Most of the people in John Foxe's great book died young, and violently, and in public. Foxe himself lived to about seventy and died quietly in his own house in London. He was not a martyr and never claimed to be one. He was the man who sat at a desk for thirty years so that the martyrs would not be forgotten — gathering their letters, their trial records, the words of the people who had stood near the fire — and who, having written down more burnings than any Englishman before him, spent part of his old age begging his own queen not to burn anyone else.

A boy from Boston

He was born at Boston, in Lincolnshire, about 1516; the exact year is not certain. His father died while John was very young, and his mother married again, to Richard Melton, a prosperous yeoman of the nearby village of Coningsby. It seems to have been a kind home. Years later Foxe dedicated one of his early writings, An Instruccyon of Christen Fayth, to his stepfather, with every mark of affection.

He went up to Oxford, and in July 1538 he became a probationer fellow of Magdalen College, a full fellow a year later. He lectured in logic in 1539–40 and proceeded Master of Arts in July 1543. Somewhere in those Oxford years — the record does not tell us exactly when or how — he came over to the Reformed faith, and came over thoroughly.

Leaving Magdalen

It cost him his place. The college statutes required a fellow to attend chapel regularly and to take priest's orders within a set time, and priest's orders in the 1540s meant celibacy. Foxe would not conform to either rule, and he objected plainly to celibacy being forced on the fellows. In 1545 he resigned his fellowship.

It was a hard step for a poor scholar. A fellowship was a living, a roof and a future, and he walked away from it with nothing in hand. He found work as a tutor in the household of Sir William Lucy at Charlecote, in Warwickshire, teaching the young Thomas Lucy. There, on 3 February 1547, he married Agnes Randall, the daughter of a Coventry merchant. She would share every hardship that followed, and outlive him.

Then came London, and real want. The memoir of his life that his son Simeon wrote many years later tells how Foxe was sitting one day in St Paul's, worn out with long fasting, when a stranger he had never seen sat down beside him, pressed a sum of money into his hand, and bade him be of good cheer. Within a few days he was taken into the household of the Duchess of Richmond as tutor to the orphaned children of her brother, the poet Earl of Surrey, who had lately been executed. Foxe, the memoir says, never found out who the stranger was. Modern scholars treat the story with some caution — Simeon was born long afterwards and wrote from scattered recollections — and it was very likely through evangelical friends that the post came to him. But the post itself is certain, and so is the want that went before it. Foxe taught the Howard children from about 1547 to 1553; the eldest, Thomas, would one day be Duke of Norfolk. On 24 June 1550 Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, ordained him deacon.

Flight

In 1553 Mary came to the throne, and the Reformed faith that had been the law of the land under her brother Edward became a crime. The fires began. Foxe was a marked man, and in 1554 he fled.

It was a close thing. He and Agnes, who was expecting a child, took ship for the Continent. Officers of Bishop Stephen Gardiner came with a warrant for his arrest and broke down the door of the house where he had been hiding — but the ship had gone. Then a storm drove it back to port. To throw his pursuers off, Foxe hired a horse and made as though he were riding off into the country; that night he slipped back aboard, pleaded with the master to carry them to safety, and was away. Two days later they landed at Nieuport, in Flanders.

The exile was poor and unsettled. At Strasbourg he met Edmund Grindal and saw through the press, in 1554, a Latin history of the persecutions of the faithful from the days of Wycliffe onward — the seed of all his later work. At Frankfurt he found the English exiles quarrelling bitterly over how they ought to worship; he urged Peter Martyr to come and reconcile them, and in January 1555 sat with John Knox, William Whittingham, Anthony Gilby and Thomas Cole on a committee that drafted an order of service. It was rejected. Peacemaking was not always rewarded.

He moved on to Basel, and there poverty drove him to the printing house of Johannes Oporinus, where he worked as a reader of proofs. It was humble work, but it put him at the heart of the Protestant book trade. Oporinus printed his Latin drama Christus Triumphans in 1556. And all the while news came over from England, much of it by way of Grindal: names, dates, examinations, letters smuggled from prison, the last words of men and women burned at Smithfield and Oxford and Canterbury. Foxe gathered it all. In 1559 Oporinus published his great Latin folio of some 740 pages, running from Wycliffe to Cranmer, and Foxe dedicated it to his old pupil, now Duke of Norfolk.

The book

Mary died in November 1558, and Foxe came home under Elizabeth. For a time he lived in the Duke of Norfolk's house at Aldgate, and in 1560 Grindal, now Bishop of London, ordained him priest. He threw himself into turning the Latin work into something far larger, in English, for the ordinary reader — and he found in the London printer John Day a partner equal to the task.

In 1563 Day published the Actes and Monuments: a vast folio of 1,827 pages. Foxe told his readers plainly why he had written it:

I have addressed this present history, to the end, first, that the wonderful works of God in His Church might appear to His glory.

— John Foxe, Actes and Monuments

That is the key to the whole enormous book. It is not first a catalogue of cruelty, though it records cruelty without flinching. It is a history of the faithfulness of God — Christ's promise that the gates of hell should not prevail against His Church, tested and kept through fifteen centuries. The apostles and the Roman persecutions are there, and the Waldenses, and Huss, and Tyndale. But the heart of it is England under Mary: John Rogers, the first to burn; John Hooper; Rowland Taylor; Latimer and Ridley at Oxford — Ridley, who had made Foxe a deacon; Cranmer thrusting into the flame the hand that had signed his recantation; and scores of weavers, housewives, apprentices and labourers whom no one else would have remembered. Foxe gave the humble the same care he gave the bishops.

The book was loved and attacked in equal measure, and Foxe answered his critics by working harder. The second edition of 1570, in two volumes, ran to 2,354 pages, with the woodcuts increased from about sixty to some one hundred and fifty. In 1571 the Convocation of Canterbury ordered that a copy of "that full history entitled Monuments of Martyrs" be set up in every cathedral church, beside the Bible, and that church dignitaries keep copies in their houses for servants and visitors to read. Further editions followed in 1576 and 1583, the last in Foxe's lifetime. Chained in the churches and read aloud in households for generations, it became, after the Bible, perhaps the most widely read book in Protestant England. The popular abridgments that carry his name to this day, among them William Byron Forbush's edition of 1926, cut his work down and added chapters he never wrote; but its spirit is his.

The preacher and the peacemaker

Honours were offered him, and he took few of them. At the suggestion of Bishop Jewel of Salisbury he was given a prebend in Salisbury Cathedral, with the lease of the vicarage of Shipton, in May 1563. But he had a conscientious objection to wearing the surplice, and he would not pretend otherwise. The respect in which he was held was such that he kept his prebend until he died, nonconformity and all. His way of life stayed simple.

On Good Friday 1570, at Grindal's bidding, he preached at Paul's Cross, the great open-air pulpit of London. The pope had just excommunicated the queen, and the city was tense. Foxe preached Christ crucified. The sermon was printed at once, with a prayer, and reissued several times in his lifetime. In it he told his hearers what it truly means to know the cross:

To know the crucified sacrifice of Christ's body to be a perfect deliverance of all his people, to be a full satisfaction once, and for ever, for all our sins … this is to know Christ Jesus crucified.

— John Foxe, A Sermon of Christ Crucified, preached at Paul's Cross, 1570

Two years later his loyalties were tested in the most personal way. His old pupil and patron, the Duke of Norfolk, was condemned for conspiring with Mary Queen of Scots and the Catholic nobility against Elizabeth. Through the spring of 1572 Foxe and Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul's, ministered to the condemned man, and on 2 June they went with him to the scaffold. Foxe did not abandon the boy he had taught, even when the boy, grown, had chosen a cause Foxe hated.

Nor was his pastoral work only for the great. He was known as a man people sent for in trouble of soul.

"Spare their lives"

The most striking moment of Foxe's later years came in 1575. That spring a congregation of Dutch Anabaptists was arrested at a meeting near Aldgate, and two of them, Jan Pieters and Hendrik Terwoort, were condemned to be burned. Foxe had no sympathy with their teaching. But no one had been burned for religion in England for seventeen years, since the Marian fires he had spent his life recording, and he could not bear to see them lit again by Protestant hands. He wrote in Latin to the queen, to Lord Burghley and to the Lord Chief Justice, pleading that the punishment was out of all proportion to the offence, and that men erring from blindness rather than malice might yet be won. Banish them, he urged; imprison them; but do not burn them.

I have no favour for heretics, but I am a man and would spare the life of a man.

— John Foxe, from his Latin letter to Queen Elizabeth, 1575 (in translation)

He did not win. A month's respite was granted, and on 22 July 1575 both men were burned at Smithfield. But the letter was remembered. Later church historians such as Thomas Fuller praised it, and it stands as one of the most humane things written by any churchman of his age. Foxe was not a modern believer in toleration; he wanted heresy driven out of England. But he had looked too long at the fire to think that the fire could serve the gospel.

The end of a long labour

His last years were spent in London, in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate, still revising, still preaching, still writing. His sons grew up: Samuel, the elder, and Simeon, who became a physician and wrote the memoir of his father's life.

According to that family memoir, Foxe knew his end was near. He loved his sons dearly, but he did not wish them to watch him die, and a short time before his death he sent Samuel off on a journey of several days about some business, and asked that Simeon and Robert not be sent for. He wanted, it seems, to meet his Lord quietly and alone. He died on 18 April 1587, at about seventy years of age, and was buried in St Giles, Cripplegate, where Samuel set up a monument to him.

He had lived through four reigns and every turn of the English Reformation, and he never wore a martyr's crown. What he did was simpler and harder: he remembered. He made a nation remember the weaver and the bishop, the blind woman and the archbishop, who would not deny Christ, and he told their stories not so that readers would hate but so that they would see, as he put it, the wonderful works of God in His Church. The Church he wrote about has not failed yet, and the book he gave his life to is still read.