St Paul’s collection of holy relics was sold off during the Cromwellian Commonwealth of 1649–60, but there appeared to be an inexhaustible stock of these. The authorities were still selling portions of the Virgin Mary’s milk, the hair of Mary Magdalen, the hand of St John, pieces of Thomas à Becket’s skull and the blood of St Paul himself – all preserved in jewelled cases – 150 years later.
The Fire of London destroyed Old St Paul’s in 1666, but the building was spectacularly redesigned by Christopher Wren, who created what many believe to be the finest example of Renaissance architecture in Britain. Somehow St Paul’s escaped destruction during the Second World War Blitz.
PAUL’S CROSS
An open-air pulpit erected by the south wall of the pre-Fire of London St Paul’s was known as Paul’s Cross. Here papal bulls were broadcast, excommunications pronounced, royal proclamations made and heresies denounced at what was a kind of medieval Speakers’ Corner. It was also where the earliest English Bibles were burnt before the authorities decided to allow the people to hear the Scriptures in their native tongue.
In 1422 Richard Walker, a Worcester chaplain, appeared at Paul’s Cross on charges of sorcery. Two books on magic which he had been caught reading were then burnt before his eyes. In 1447 Reginald Pecock, Bishop of Chichester, was made to kneel here before the Archbishop of Canterbury and around 20,000 onlookers to make a full confession of his ‘errors’. That was how his captors described his writings, which were then cast into the fire as a warning of the fate that might soon befall him.
Preacher Beal stirred up the crowd so passionately on May Day 1517 that riots broke out across London as the mob attacked foreign merchants on what came to be called Evil May Day. Troops managed to restore order and took 400 rioters as prisoners. The leaders of the riots were hanged, drawn and quartered.
On 12 May 1521 an unusual book, Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defence of the Seven Sacraments), setting out Catholic arguments against the new Protestant creed being propounded by Martin Luther in Germany, was unveiled at Paul’s Cross. The author was supposedly none other than Henry VIII, the jousting, hunting, non-bookish king. Though few believed that Henry was capable of such writing, evidence shows that the king was indeed the author of the work, which he dedicated to the Pope and which earned him the title ‘Defender of the Faith’.
Copies of William Tyndale’s pioneering English translation of the Bible were burnt here in 1526, shortly after they had been smuggled into the country. They were selling in London for three shillings, but those found with such a Bible were made to ride backward on a donkey and wear a pasteboard mitre emblazoned with some of the offending passages. Tied to their backs were symbolic faggots of wood which they had to hurl into a bonfire as a warning of what would happen to them soon at Smithfield if they continued with their heretical reading.
The Rood of Grace (→ p. 132), a wooden cross bearing an image that could supposedly move and speak if approached by one who had lived a pure life, was smashed to pieces under the king’s orders at Paul’s Cross in 1538. Two years later it was here that William Jerome, the vicar of St Dunstan and All Saints, was burnt alive for preaching an Anabaptist sermon (belittling infant baptism).
Crowds would gather at Paul’s Cross to hear contentious sermons, which often resulted in trouble. For instance in 1549 preachers incited the onlookers to sack the cathedral itself, and a mob tore inside, destroyed the altar and smashed several tombs. At the first sermon preached here following the death of the Protestant king, Edward VI, on 6 July 1553 Bishop Bourne provoked the crowd by denouncing the Protestant Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley. A group of spectators began shouting: ‘He preaches damnation! Pull him down! Pull him down!’ Someone threw a dagger at Bourne. It stuck in one of the wooden side posts and the bishop was rushed into St Paul’s school for his own safety. In their desperation to exact revenge, the authorities arrested several people and imprisoned them in the Tower, while a priest and a barber had their ears nailed to the pillory at Paul’s Cross.
Ridley himself soon made his stand here. On 16 July he denounced both royal princesses, Mary and Elizabeth, daughters of Henry VIII, as illegitimate and singled out Mary for special abuse as she was a papist. Ridley believed that Lady Jane Grey, great-granddaughter of Henry VII, should take the throne as the best way of preserving a Protestant succession – which she did but for only nine days.
In April 1584 the Bishop of London preached here against astrologers who were predicting the end of the world owing to an imminent conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. On 7 February 1601 the Earl of Essex, at the conclusion of the sermon at Paul’s Cross, led a group of 300 rebels through the City shouting: ‘Murder, murder, God save the Queen!’ in protest at how England was supposedly about to be handed to the Spanish when Queen Elizabeth died. He was arrested and executed on Tower Hill a month later.
The Puritans pulled down Paul’s Cross in 1643.
ST PAUL’S CHURCHYARD
When Pope Pius V became pontiff in February 1570 he issued a papal bull, Regnans in Excelsis, urging Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth, ‘pretended Queen of England’. The Catholics believed Elizabeth was technically illegitimate as they did not recognise her mother, Anne Boleyn, the Protestant who had replaced the Catholic Catherine of Aragon in Henry’s favours, as being legitimately married to the king.
Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth, freeing her subjects from their allegiance to her. It was an absurd move as no Catholic European power was in a position to enforce his wishes. It also meant that from now on the queen would treat all Catholics as the enemy. A Catholic called John Felton pinned the papal bull to the gate of the Bishop of London’s palace and was duly hanged in St Paul’s Churchyard. Cut down while still alive, he supposedly shouted out the holy name of Jesus as the hangman held his heart in his hand.
George Williams was one of a dozen men who established the Young Men’s Christian Association above a draper’s shop in St Paul’s Churchyard in 1844. Their aim was to unite and direct ‘the efforts of Christian young men for the spiritual welfare of their fellows in the various departments of commercial life’. Soon other branches were formed, first in London, and then throughout the world.
SMITHFIELD EXECUTION SITE, West Smithfield
Originally the Smooth Field, this was Britain’s major execution site for Protestant martyrs in medieval times, where hundreds lost their lives.
The method of execution used at Smithfield was nearly always burning at the stake before a large crowd. Though gruesome, it was carried out in a far more humane manner than on the continent, where heretics often had their tongues cut off before the pyre was lit. In England burning occurred only after a series of rigorous trials had taken place and the condemned had been given the chance of recanting their views.
A dramatic preamble to the grim fate was the ceremony known as ‘carrying the faggot’. The alleged heretic, carrying a faggot of wood, would be taken to the place of execution. There a fire had been lit, and the accused would throw the faggot on to the fire and watch it burn as a warning that if they remained steadfast in their views they would be next for the flames. Before the pyre was lit, the victim’s friends and family would try to bribe the executioner to place a bag of gunpowder by the body. That way, when the flames rose, the gunpowder would explode and kill the poor wretch quickly, sparing them the slow torture of burning. This could not happen of course if it had been raining.
The first martyr to meet his death here was William Sawtrey, a priest and follower of the Bible translator John Wycliffe, who went to the stake in 1401. Sawtrey’s card was marked when he announced ‘instead of adoring the cross on which Christ suffered, I adore Christ who suffered on it’. In 1399 the Bishop of Norwich questioned Sawtrey over his beliefs, and had him arrested and imprisoned on charges of heresy. Sawtrey recanted his views and was released but felt that he had betrayed Christ. Two years later Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, had Sawtrey arrested again. After questioning Sawtrey, the Church authorities deemed ‘unacceptable’ his views on transubstantiation and the adoration