Catherine Cauchés, also spelled Katherine Cawches, with her two daughters, Guillemine Gilbert and Perotine Massey, was burned at St Peter Port, Guernsey, in 1556. Perotine Massey went into labour and delivered a baby boy as she was being burned, and the bailiff ordered him to be thrown back into the flames. ‘Mother’ Anne Tree was burned at East Grinstead that year. In Derby, Joan Waste, a 22-year-old woman, blind from birth, who worked as a knitter and a rope-maker, was prosecuted for objecting to church services in Latin, buying a New Testament in English and paying for it to be read to her. Her twin brother led her by the hand to her death. She was executed by being hanged until the rope burned through and dropped her in the flames. Margaret Hide and Agnes Stanley were burned together at Smithfield in 1557. Five of the seven ‘Maidstone’ martyrs of that year were women: Joan Bradbridge, Petronil Appleby (burned with her husband), Katherine Allin (burned with her husband, a miller), Joan Manning and Elizabeth (surname possibly Lewis), a blind maid.

  Widow Bradbridge was one of the seven ‘Canterbury’ martyrs burned in 1557 – the other women were ‘Wilson’s wife’, Barbara Final, and Alice Benden, who was denounced by her own husband. Ten Protestants were burned in one fire at Lewes, including Thomasina Wood a maidservant, Margery Morris who was burned alongside her son, Ann Ashdon and Mary Groves. Maidservant Elizabeth Cooper, the wife of a pewterer, withdrew her recantation and chose instead to die for her faith by burning at Norwich. Ten reformers were killed at Colchester Castle for their faith in 1557, five of them women: Agnes Silverside, Helen Ewring a miller’s wife, Elizabeth Folk a young maiden and servant, and Alice Munt burned with her husband, and her spinster daughter Rose Munt. Two women, originally scheduled to die with them – Agnes Bengeor and Margaret Thurston – died later in the same year. The sister of George Eagles was burned at Rochester, with an unnamed woman. Agnes Prest, a 54-year-old Devon woman ‘of very little and short stature, somewhat thick with a cheery countenance’, who had left her Roman Catholic husband to support herself by spinning, was arrested when she returned to him and burned at Southernhay. Mistress Joyce Lewis was a gentlewoman converted by the martyrdom of Laurence Sanders. She was arrested for irreverent behaviour in church and burned at Lichfield. Margery Austoo was burned with her husband at Islington in 1557. Cicely Ormes, a tailor’s daughter and the wife of a worsted weaver, retracted her recantation and was burned after delivering a spirited sermon from the stake at Norwich. Margaret Mearing refused to recant and was burned at Smithfield. Christian George, the second wife of Richard George of Essex, whose first wife was also martyred, was burned at Colchester in 1558. Alice Driver, a 30-year-old ploughwoman, the wife of a husbandman, was arrested for hiding a Protestant martyr, Alexander Gouch, in a haystack, argued with her interrogators and was burned at Ipswich. Katherine Knight/Tynley, an aged woman, was burned at Canterbury.

  Three women died in prison: Margaret Eliot (or Ellis) was imprisoned in Newgate in 1556 and may have died in jail or been burned at Smithfield that year; William Dangerfield’s wife, imprisoned with him, died after he did; their baby was sent away and died of cold and hunger. Alice Potkins died during her imprisonment in Canterbury Castle in 1556. Lady Jane Grey was beheaded in the Tower of London in 1554 ostensibly for treason, but partly for her refusal to accept the Roman Catholic doctrine.

  Roman Catholic women died for their faith in the next reign: professing Roman Catholicism under Elizabeth I. Margaret Clitherow, the daughter of a Protestant York wax chandler and wife of a York butcher, refused to plead when accused of hiding Roman Catholic priests in 1586. Although pregnant with her fourth child, she was executed by being crushed to death, under a door piled with seven hundredweight of stone.25 Margaret Ward, a maidservant to a London family, visited a priest in prison and smuggled in a rope so he could escape. She refused to reveal his hiding place, and refused to attend a Protestant church in exchange for a pardon. She was hanged in August 1588.26 Alice ‘Anne’ Line had a priest hole built in her house and was hosting a Candlemas service, with a priest in attendance, when her home was raided. The priest went into hiding and escaped, but Anne Line and her friend Margaret Gage were arrested. Gage was released and pardoned but Line was sent to Newgate Prison and sentenced to death by hanging on 27 February 1601. She spoke from the scaffold: ‘I am sentenced to die for harbouring a Catholic priest, and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.’27

  Religious Exiles

  Some reformers escaped Mary I’s England. Of the 788 recorded religious emigrants, 131 are known to have been women. One of these was a Jewish woman: Beatriz Fernandes, the wife of a physician, Henrique Nuñes, a leader of her community, holding sabbath services in her house, keeping up with new Jewish literature, baking Passover bread and eating a kosher diet. The Jewish community in London and Bristol had posed as Calvinist – a safe cover under Edward VI, but it made them heretics under Mary I. The Fernandes family fled to France in 1555, leaving some better-hidden members of the community in England.28 The Italian-Jewish family the Bassanos were arrested in 1541, but released. Their daughter Aemilia Lanyer would go on to be a courtier and poet under Elizabeth I and, after another expulsion of Jews in 1610, she wrote a poem, ‘Salve Deus Rex Judæorum’ (1611), which blames all men for the death of Jesus – not specifically Jewish men.29

  Anne Locke (1530–90) was born to a Calvinist family of London merchants who housed John Knox until he went into exile in Geneva. Locke and her husband followed him, and she studied with the Protestant reformer Calvin, translating and publishing his sermons. On her return to England on the death of Mary I in 1558, Anne married her second husband, a reformist preacher, and her money and influence put them in a circle of literary, Puritan and reformist women, including Lady Mary Mildmay, Lady Golding, Mrs Mary Honeywood, Mrs Barnett of Bray and Mrs Catherine Killigrew, who connected them to the Elizabethan court.30 Anne Locke was the first writer to compose in sonnet form. She published a 26-sonnet series on Psalm 51 called ‘A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner’.

  Many women fled into exile when the national religion was changed. Catherine Carey, daughter of Mary Boleyn, went into exile on the accession of Mary I in 1553. Her cousin Princess Elizabeth wrote in her diary ‘Cor Rotto’ (‘broken heart’) at Catherine’s leaving. Catherine and her husband Sir Francis Knollys would return when Elizabeth took the throne and become favoured members of her court. Rose Hickman preached the reformist word to a small congregation hidden in her own rooms before fleeing, like other reformers, to Europe.31 They were acknowledged during the crisis as religious leaders in their families and in their communities. Their contribution to religious scholarship and commitment in danger and in exile kept the Reformation alive in England. But on their return they were not rewarded for their fidelity to the church. No longer seen as heroines and leaders, they lost the equality that had been forged in equally shared danger. The church in Elizabethan England became moderate and turned its back on radical revolutionary theology and the women who had risked their lives for it.32

  Equally determined English women of the opposing faith also chose exile, fleeing Elizabethan England into Roman Catholic havens. In Europe, 17 houses in eight orders were established for English women who preferred to be enclosed abroad, rather than live in Protestant England.33 In the 100 years after the death of Elizabeth, as many as 4,000 English women would take the veil in 21 convents in Flanders and France.34

  Englishwoman Mary Ward (1585–1645) created a new Roman Catholic order of teaching and conversion for women, modelled on the work of the Jesuits. She claimed to have created ten religious houses for 500 women in Europe, and established a foundation near Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, with the reluctant permission of the pope.35 The convent was later removed to Mickelgate Bar, York, where a convent boarding and day school was created and survived constant harassment from religious opponents and mobs.

  Ward was a feminist Christian – claiming equality in the sight of God:

  wherein are we so inferior to other creatures that they should term us ‘but women?’ For what think you of this word, ‘but women?’ but as if we were in all things inferior to some other creature which I suppose to be man! Which I dare to be bold to say is a lie; and with respect to the good Father may say it is an error . . . There was a Father that lately came into England whom I heard say that he would not for a thousand of worlds be a woman, because he thought a woman could not apprehend God. I answered nothing, but only smiled, although I could have answered him, by the experience I have of the contrary. I could have been sorry for his want – I mean not want of judgment – nor to condemn his judgment, for he is a man of very good judgment; his want is in experience.36

  Preachers

  Reformation women seized the chance given them by their religion’s emphasis on personal prayer and revelation, to give witness to their faith. Women reformers preached in the open air, in secular spaces or in private rooms in houses. They may even have preached inside radical churches. Lollards – a group pressing for the reform of the Roman Catholic Church – included women in their meetings on equal grounds to men and were taught by women preachers.37

  Dorothy Kelly married a reformist preacher, and her marital home in Bristol became a centre of reformist thinking and a refuge for religious migrants fleeing to New England. Women were invited to give birth in secret, with Kelly attending as midwife, to avoid the ‘papist’ ceremonies of churching and baptism. Dorothy, in 1640, on her way to her husband’s church, filled with doubts, opened her Bible for guidance and found Revelation 14: 9–11, ‘If any man worship the beast’. Inspired, she formed her own separatist church and preached to a growing congregation of up to 160 Puritans in private houses and, when barred from houses, in the open air. Dorothy protested the ‘false sanctification’ of Christmas Day, claiming, as did many Puritans, that it was not defined as a holy day in the Bible. She defied the Bristol city fathers to keep her grocery shop open on the 25th.38

  English translations of the previously Latin or Greek Bible provided key work for the reformers, since it made the Bible accessible to everyone who could read; the word was no longer the exclusive property of elite, mostly male, scholars. Many poor people learned to read from the parish Bible – left open in the church – the only text that was available to them for free, perhaps the only book that they would ever be allowed to read.

  The Reformation freed women from ignorance, inspired them to literacy and promised spiritual equality before God. This view – of an accessible God and an individual private conscience – was of tremendous importance to all Christians but, for Christian women, who had been taught that they could not approach God without the mediation of a male priest, it was a special liberation. Though the Bible said that man had been made in the image of God, it nowhere ruled that a male priest stood at the gateway to God. When working women could read this in their own language, the rituals and traditions of the church, which had grown up over more than 1,000 years, were challenged. Women read that they could pray to God without the permission of a priest – without even a priest hearing their prayers. Women argued that a priest was not even needed for baptism. Now that God understood English, any English woman could speak to Him.

  English women, inspired by this direct relationship with God, now claimed equality with men before God. A civil war pamphlet complained of the false pride of at least six women preachers, who were said to demonstrate a logic and grasp of theology that was superior to that of men preachers. The pamphlet accused the women of wanting to dominate male preachers.39

  Women whose sexuality was repressed by the teaching of the church might find emotional and even physical release in personal private prayer. One Puritan preacher, Nathaniel Ranew, recommended that a devout woman should imagine: ‘Her Beloved the Lord Christ, his pure Colours white and Red, his most rare features and exact proportions of every part, his Head, Looks, Eyes, Cheeks, Lips, Hands, Legs and all his glorious perfections . . . he is altogether lovely’.40

  No wonder that Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick (1625–78), confided in her diary: ‘While I was thinking of Godes great love I fond my heart was warmed with a peaculior and transcendent deagree of love.’41 Rich’s transports of religious feeling coincided with the unhappy periods of her marriage with an extremely sick husband. At his death, when she became a wealthy widow and executor of his will, she enjoyed the work and profits of being a great landlord and gave up ecstatic prayer.

  No longer could God’s favours be bought. Everyone could examine their own conscience, and everyone – man or woman – might recognise in themselves the signs of Grace: the certainty of salvation. It was a matter of individual revelation, and a woman’s epiphany was as valid as any man’s. If a believer understood from God that she was saved, that was between her and God. Everyone was freed from the authority of the priesthood, and, especially and radically, women were free from the spiritual authority of men.

  John Foxe himself, the great historian of reformist martyrs, explicitly linked reformist faith with equality, telling women: ‘Ye were redeemed with as dear a price as men, yet be you all his flesh, so that also in the case and trial of your faith towards God, ye ought to be as strong.’42

  ‘Weaker Vessel’

  A successful queen on the throne (Elizabeth I, 1558–1603), women in authority especially in country estates, women in business especially in the growing towns, and a new state religion that authorised women to speak directly to God without the intervention of a male priest, suggested the equality of women in the world and before God. But a new translation of the Bible contradicted this. The translation of 1525–36 by William Tyndale invented a damning metaphor for women. He called them a ‘weaker vessel’.

  Here is the passage, as translated by John Wycliffe, in the medieval Wycliffe Bible of 1382–95:

  Also men dwelle togidre, and bi kunnyng yyue ye onoure to the wommanus freeltee, as to the more feble, and as to euen eiris of grace and of lijf, that youre preieris be not lettid. (1 Peter 3:7)43

  Also men dwell together, and by knowing give ye honour to the woman’s frailty, as to the more feeble, and as to even-heirs of grace and of life, that your prayers be not hindered.44

  The woman is more ‘feeble’ but she is equally to inherit. She is an even-heir to grace and life.

  The verse goes on: ‘. . . (Also men together dwelling, after science, or knowing, giving honour to the woman’s vessel, or body, as to the more sick, as and to even-heirs of grace of life, that your prayers be not letted.)45

  Two centuries later, William Tyndale in 1522 introduced – for the first time – the phrase of ‘weaker vessel’ into the first passage:

  Lyke wyse ye men dwell with them accordinge to knowledge gevinge honoure vnto the wyfe as vnto the weaker vessell and as vnto them that are heyres also of the grace of lyfe that youre prayers be not let.46

  Likewise ye husbands, dwell with them as men of knowledge, giving honour unto the woman, as unto the weaker vessel, even as they which are heirs together of the grace of life, that your prayers be not interrupted.47

  The new translation of the Bible changed women from being ‘more feeble’ but ‘even heirs’ to a ‘weaker vessel’ and an ‘also’ heir. It was a huge and extraordinary alteration by Tyndale, robbing women of their identity as individuals: describing a woman as a household object – I imagine a leaky water-pot – a different thing altogether from a man, the householder who owns the pot. Tyndale’s Bible became the text from which all other Bibles descended, even the famously poetic King James Version.

  William Tyndale expanded his definition of women as a ‘weaker vessel’ in his book The Obedience of a Christian Man, writing that the weak vessel contained lusts and wanton appetites: ‘God, which created woman knoweth what is in that weak vessel (as Peter calleth her) and hath therefore put her under the obedience of her husband to rule her lusts and wanton appetite.’48

  By 1563, the official Elizabethan sermon, the ‘Homily of the State of Matrimony’, which was read in every church by law, spoke of the ‘weaker vessel’ without further explanation – Tyndale’s condensed words became an accepted synonym for women, one still in dictionaries even today. The Homily spoke of the superiority of husbands and the feeble nature of all women.49 Every parish priest, in every church in England, was ordered to preach the new definition of women to his congregation: ‘The woman ought to haue a certaine honour attributed to her, that is to say, shee must bee spared and borne with, the rather for that she is the weaker vesell, of a fraile hart, inconstant and with a word soone stirred to wrath.’50

  Extraordinarily, under a queen militant, a church that had been defended by women saints, martyrs and militants, now defined women as weak and volatile: ‘A weake creature, not indued with like strength and constancie of minde, therefore they be the sooner disquieted and they be the more prone to all weake affections and dispositions of mind, more then men bee, and lighter they bee, and more vaine in their fantasies and opinions.’51