John Foxe (1516/1517 – 18 April 1587)"The patent of arms granted in 1590 to the family of John Foxe, and first printed by Maitland from a copy of 1692 in the college of arms, gives his birth year as 1516, and the date may have been supplied by [his own son] Samuel. But Samuel is very inaccurate in such matters; his diary misdates important happenings in his own life; and [his other son] Simeon's statement is too precise to be disregarded." Mozley, 12. was an English clergyman, theologian, and historian, notable for his martyrology Foxe's Book of Martyrs, telling of Christian martyrs throughout Western history, but particularly the sufferings of English Protestants and "proto-Protestants" from the 14th century and in the reign of Mary I. The book was widely owned and read by English Puritans and helped to mould British opinion on the Catholic Church for several centuries.William Haller, Foxe's First Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963) argues that Actes and Monuments is a complex book, portraying the English church as a body of elect, whose history of suffering and dedication to the faith echo the history of Israel in the Old Testament.
Education Foxe was born in Boston, Lincolnshire, England, of a middlingly prominent familyIn 1551, one Henry Foxe, a merchant and possible relative, became mayor of that town. and seems to have been an unusually studious and devout child.J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (New York: Macmillan Company, 1940), p. 13. After work when boys went out to play, "John would stay behind; and when search was made, he was found in church (sacro) at his prayers or deep in a book." In about 1534, when he was about 16, he entered Brasenose College, Oxford, where he was the pupil of John Hawarden (or Harding), a fellow of the college.Hawarden was perhaps a family friend; he had become rector of Coningsby in 1533, and Foxe's mother, her husband having died when Foxe was young, had married Richard Melton, a yeoman of Coningsby. Three decades later Foxe made a dedication to Hawarden in one of his books, thanking Hawarden for enabling his education. At Brasenose College, Foxe shared rooms with Alexander Nowell, afterwards dean of St Paul's Cathedral. In 1535 Foxe was admitted to Magdalen College School, where he may either have been improving his Latin or acting as a junior instructor. He became a probationer fellow in July 1538 and a full fellow the following July.
Foxe took his bachelor's degree on 17 July 1537, his master's degree in July 1543, and was lecturer in logic in 1539–1540.Foxe wrote several Latin plays on biblical subjects, of which the best, De Christo triumphante or Christus triumphans, an allegorical verse drama on the history of the church, was printed in London in 1551 and by Oporinus in Basel in March 1556. It was performed at Cambridge and probably Oxford in the 1560s. The play was translated into French in 1562 and English in 1579. The latter translation was produced by Richard Day, son of the printer, John Day or Daye, who published Foxe's Actes and Monuments. Foxe's earliest extant literary creation is Titus et Gesippus (written in 1544), a Latin comedy based on Boccaccio. A series of letters in Foxe's handwriting dated to 1544–45, shows Foxe to be "a man of friendly disposition and warm sympathies, deeply religious, an ardent student, zealous in making acquaintance with scholars."Mozley, p. 18. By the time he was twenty-five, he had read the Latin and Greek fathers, the schoolmen, the canon law, and had "acquired no mean skill in the Hebrew language."Mozley, p. 20.
Resignation from Oxford Foxe resigned from his college in 1545 after becoming a Protestant and thereby subscribing to beliefs condemned by the Church of England under Henry VIII.Foxe may have refused to attend mass. Other Protestants of future renown at Magdalen then were Henry Bull, Laurence Humphrey, Thomas Cooper, and Robert Crowley. After a year of "obligatory regency" (public lecturing), Foxe would have been obliged to take holy orders by Michaelmas 1545, and the primary reason for his resignation was probably his opposition to clerical celibacy, which he described in letters to friends as self-castration.BL, Lansdowne MS. 388, fols. 80v, 117r. Foxe may have been forced from the college in a general purge of its Protestant members although college records state that he resigned of his own accord and "ex honesta causa".There exists in Foxe's papers a draft of a letter to Owen Oglethorpe, president of Magdalen, in which Foxe protests against the charges of irreverence and of belonging to a new religion, which were brought against him by some of the college's masters, who are not named by Foxe (BL, Lansdowne MS 388, folios 53r–58r). Foxe says these masters persecuted other fellows, including Thomas Cooper, later Bishop of Lincoln and Winchester under Elizabeth, and Robert Crowley, a lifelong friend and associate of Foxe, who also left the college at that time. Foxe's letter is printed in Pratt's edition (vol. i. Appendix, pp. 58–61); see also J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (New York: Macmillan Company, 1940). Foxe's change of religious opinion may have temporarily broken his relationship with his stepfather and even have put his life in danger. Foxe personally witnessed the burning of William Cowbridge in September 1538.Mozley, p. 21.
After being forced to abandon what might have been a promising academic career, Foxe experienced a period of dire need. Hugh Latimer invited Foxe to live with him, but Foxe eventually became a tutor in the household of Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford-on-Avon. Before leaving the Lucys, Foxe married Agnes Randall on 3 February 1547.Thomas S. Freeman, "Foxe, John", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). The reasons for Foxe's departure from the Lucys are unknown. According to a short remembrance written by Simeon Foxe in 1611 and appended to the 1641 Actes and Monuments, Foxe stayed with the Randalls in Coventry before returning to his parents in Coningsby. They had six children.John H. King, ed., Foxe's Book of Martyrs: Select Narratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xvii.
London under Edward VI Foxe's prospects, and those of the Protestant cause generally, improved after the accession of Edward VI in January 1547 and the formation of a Privy Council dominated by pro-reform Protestants. In the middle of, or at the end of 1547 Foxe moved to London and probably lived in Stepney. There he completed three translations of Protestant sermons published by the "stout Protestant" Hugh Singleton.One sermon was by Martin Luther ESTC 16983 and another by Urbannus Regius: An Instruction of the Christian Faith (ESTC 120847). During this period Foxe also found a patron in Mary Fitzroy, Duchess of Richmond, who employed him as tutor to the children of her brother, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, a Roman Catholic who had been executed for treason in January 1547.Surrey's father, Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk was at that time imprisoned in the Tower of London. The children were Thomas, who would become the fourth duke of Norfolk and a valuable friend of Foxe; Jane, later Countess of Westmorland, and Henry, later earl of Northampton. The duchess was the widow of Henry VIII's illegitimate son Henry FitzRoy and in that sense was the sister-in-law of the new king. Foxe lived in the duchess's London household at Mountjoy House and later at Reigate Castle, and her patronage "facilitated Foxe's entry into the ranks of England's Protestant elite." During his stay at Reigate, Foxe helped suppress a cult that had arisen around the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Ouldsworth, which had been credited with miraculous healing powers.Freeman, brief on-line biography of Foxe. On another occasion he took the children under his care on a trip to Dorset, where he went on board a pirate ship anchored at West Lulworth and kept a valuable parcel of red and black velvet in safe-keeping for the ship's captain.
Foxe was ordained deacon by Nicholas Ridley on 24 June 1550. His circle of friends, associates, and supporters came to include John Hooper, William Turner, John Rogers, William Cecil, and most importantly John Bale, who was to become a close friend and "certainly encouraged, very probably guided, Foxe in the composition of his first martyrology." From 1548 to 1551, Foxe brought out one tract opposing the death penalty for adultery and another supporting ecclesiastical excommunication of those who he thought "veiled ambition under the cloak of Protestantism." He also worked unsuccessfully to prevent two burnings for religion that occurred during the reign of Edward VI.Mozley, pp. 31–36.
Marian exile On the accession of Mary I in July 1553, Foxe lost his tutorship when the children's grandfather, the Duke of Norfolk was released from prison. Foxe walked warily as befitted one who had published Protestant books in his own name. As the political climate worsened, Foxe believed himself personally threatened by Bishop Stephen Gardiner. Just ahead of officers sent to arrest him, he sailed with his pregnant wife from Ipswich to Nieuwpoort.Mozley, p. 41. He then travelled to Antwerp, Rotterdam, Frankfurt and Strasbourg, which he reached by July 1554. In Strasbourg, Foxe published a Latin history of the Christian persecutions, the draft of which he had brought from England and according to Encyclopedia Britannica, "formed the first outline of the Actes and Monuments."Mozley, p. 42. He had assistance from two clerics of widely differing opinions – from Edmund Grindal, who was later, as Archbishop of Canterbury, to maintain his Puritan convictions in opposition to Elizabeth I, and from John Aylmer, afterwards one of the most bitter opponents of the Puritan party. Bale too is also thought to have been a critical assistant in the production of this book, which dealt chiefly with figures deemed precursors to the Protestant Reformation: John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Savonarola and Reginald Pecock. It was printed in Strasbourg by Wendelin Richelius with the title of Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum. The final publication would then help shape the depiction and legend of Mary I as "Bloody Mary".
In the autumn of 1554, Foxe moved to Frankfurt, where he served as a preacher for the English church ministering to refugees in the city. There he was unwillingly drawn into a bitter theological controversy. One faction favoured the church polity and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, while the other advocated the Reformed models promoted by John Calvin's Genevan church. The latter group, led by John Knox, was supported by Foxe; the former was led by Richard Cox. Eventually Knox, who seems to have acted with more magnanimity, was expelled, and in the autumn of 1555, Foxe and about twenty others also left Frankfurt.Mozley, pp. 44–46. The prayer book faction reported Knox as having written treason against the Emperor, and they also persuaded the city magistrates to enforce the Prayer Book service on the English church. Although Foxe clearly favoured Knox, he was irenic by temperament and expressed his disgust at "the violence of the warring factions".Mozley, 46.