as she had been the wife of his late brother, Arthur. There was much confusion over the Bible’s position on such a matter, but as Catherine swore that her marriage to Arthur had not been consummated the point was dropped. Henry then asked the Pope for an annulment on the grounds that the original papal dispensation to marry his late brother’s widow was invalid. Clement may well have wanted to help the king but was in the unfortunate position of being a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V at the time and was unwilling to jeopardise his position any further.
Catherine was consequently brought before the court at Blackfriars on 18 June 1529. The king, the cardinals, the Archbishop of Canterbury and several other bishops attended the proceedings which ended inconclusively. Henry now exacted revenge on Wolsey, Archbishop of York and his leading minister, whom he blamed for the fiasco. Four years later Henry married Anne Boleyn and the Pope excommunicated him. Henry then broke England’s ties with Rome, declared himself head of the English Church and dissolved the monasteries. Blackfriars closed in 1538. Excavations conducted in 1890 and 1925 uncovered some remnants of the building but only a tiny portion of stone remains above ground.
→ Wycliffe in Oxford, p. 171
BRIDEWELL PRISON, Bridewell Place
The false messiah Elizeus Hall was sent to Bridewell Prison in 1562 after claiming to be a messenger from God who had been taken on a two-day visit to heaven and hell. In 1589 it was to Bridewell that one George Nichols was sent for being a Catholic priest. He and his associates, who had been arrested in Oxford (→ p. 174), were hung by their hands to make them betray their faith, but they refused to recant. They were all eventually hanged, drawn and quartered. The two founders of the Muggletonian sect, Lodowick Muggleton and John Reeve, were sent to Bridewell Prison in 1653 in an attempt to convince them to renounce their beliefs.
→ The Muggletonians, p. 23
CHEAPSIDE
In 1591 William Hacket paraded up and down Cheapside in a cart, claiming to be the messiah. His supporters believed Hacket was both the king of Europe and the angel who would appear at the Last Judgment. Hacket threatened to bring down a plague on England unless he was rightfully acknowledged, but when he announced that Queen Elizabeth had no right to the crown he was arrested for treason and executed. Hacket’s followers expected that divine intervention would save him, and were most vexed when none was forthcoming.
CHURCH OF THE HOLY SEPULCHRE-WITHOUT-NEWGATE, Holborn Viaduct
The largest parish church in the City of London, designed in a style similar to that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, was founded in 1137. Indeed the distance from the church to the now demolished north-west gate of the City corresponded almost exactly with the distance inside its Jerusalem namesake from the Holy Sepulchre to the Calvary on which Jesus’ cross was placed. The London church became an appropriate starting point for the Crusaders on their journey to the Holy Land to rescue the Holy Sepulchre from the Saracens.
EMANUEL SWEDENBORG’S VISION, Salisbury Court
While lodging in Salisbury Court in 1745 Emanuel Swedenborg, the major Swedish scientist-turned-mystic in whose name the New Church was founded after his death, had a religious vision. He described it to Thomas Hartley, rector of Winwick, as ‘the opening of his spiritual sight, the manifestation of the Lord to him in person’, and to his friend Robsahm as a vision of the Lord appearing before him announcing: ‘I am God the Lord, the Creator and Redeemer of the world. I have chosen thee to unfold the spiritual sense of the Holy Scripture. I will Myself dictate to thee what thou shalt write.’
In the vision Swedenborg met Jesus Christ who told him that humanity needed someone to explain the Scriptures properly and that he, Swedenborg, had been chosen for the task. He devoted the remaining twenty-eight years of his life to religion and wrote eighteen theological works, which were a major influence on William Blake. The New Church which his followers founded after his death continues to thrive.
→ Emanuel Swedenborg in the East End, p. 46
FIRE OF LONDON, Pudding Lane
The fire that destroyed much of the City in 1666 was connected to many of the religious controversies of the day. Indeed, to a number of religious commentators its outbreak on 2 September that year was no surprise. At the beginning of the year doom-mongers noted the worrying numerical conjunction of 1,000 (Christ’s millennium) with 666, the number of the Beast of the Book of Revelation. They predicted that London would turn into the fiery lake which according to the same book ‘burneth the fearful and unbelieving, the abominable, the murderers, the whoremongers, sorcerers, idolaters and liars’.
London would burn for being a city of sin, and two books published at the beginning of that year contained ominous predictions about the blaze. Daniel Baker in A Certaine Warning for a Naked Heart explained how London would be destroyed by a ‘consuming fire’, while Walter Gostelo in The Coming of God in Mercy, in Vengeance, Beginning with Fire, to Convert or Consume all this so Sinful City boasted: ‘If fire make not ashes of the City, and thy bones also, conclude me a liar for ever.’
Sure enough, on 2 September 1666, exactly a year after the Lord Mayor had ordered Londoners to light fires to burn out the Plague, the Great Fire of London broke out. Although at first many thought there was no reason for concern and that it would soon be contained, the Fire spread fast and eventually destroyed much of the capital, including eighty-six churches such as St Benet Sherhog and St Mary Magdalen Milk Street.
Immediately after the Fire the recriminations started. A local Catholic priest called Carpenter told his congregation that the flames ‘were come upon this land and people for the forsaking of the true Catholic religion’. Catholics pointed to at least a hundred years’ worth of transgressions by Londoners dating back to Henry VIII, whose defiance of the Pope in 1530 over his marriage to Catherine of Aragon broke the ties that bound the English Church to Rome, and led to the dissolution of the monasteries and abbeys. They pointed to the sins of Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians, who had ordered the execution of the ‘holy’ king, Charles I, he who had lived a life of devotion and had ‘suffered martyrdom in defence of the most holy religion’. They also drew up a list of current sins – ‘the prodigious ingratitude, burning lusts, dissolute court, profane and abominable lives’, as John Evelyn detailed in his diary – in which the mostly Protestant population had indulged.
And for Protestants there was an alternative list of sins that a presumably different God had punished in the Fire of London, namely those of the corrupt Romish monasteries and abbeys which had perverted the ancient religion and accumulated excessive wealth while indulging in simony, fecundity and hypocrisy. They remembered the sins of the Catholic queen, Mary Tudor, who had sent some 300 Protestants to a violent death for heresy in the 1550s and blamed Catholic agitators for starting the Fire. Yet others believed that the Fire had been started by a Jew distraught that the supposed messiah, Shabbatai Zevi, who had claimed he would be crowned that month, had backed down when faced with the wrath of the Turkish Sultan (→ p. 69).
Soon after the Fire, rumours spread that Robert Hubert, a French silversmith, allegedly an agent of the French king, had started the blaze on the Pope’s orders. Hubert was arrested in east London. He admitted that he had left Sweden for the English capital and gone to Pudding Lane where he had used a long pole to lob a fireball through the window of Farriner’s bakery. Hubert boasted of twenty-three co-conspirators, but his confession was probably false: there was no window at Farriner’s bakery and no ship had sailed into east London from Sweden on the day he claimed to have arrived. Nevertheless he was a convenient scapegoat and was hanged at Tyburn (→ p. 79).
GREAT SYNAGOGUE (1690–1941), Duke’s Place
Used by Jews of north European descent (Ashkenazis) until it was destroyed in the Second World War, the Great Synagogue was the traditional seat of the chief rabbi, a post and office which do not exist in Jewish law. Consequently, some religious Jews claimed that the office of the Chief Rabbi had been