This series, back again after a long hiatus! Robert Barnes (1495–1540), English reformer and case study in the inadvertent ecumenism of martyrdom. Date of commemoration: July 30.
It was February of 1526 and Robert Barnes was on trial.
This was not where he expected to be. Before the age of twenty he’d joined a house of Augustinian friars and showed such great promise that he was sent first to Louvain on the continent to earn a Doctorate of Divinity and then, on his return to England, was made prior of the Augustinian friary in Cambridge and earned yet another Doctorate of Divinity. Finding in the famous university town other like-minded humanists, Robert gathered around him an intellectually and spiritually reform-minded community that met for lively debate at the White Horse Inn.
In time, they felt they had to go public with their concerns, and Robert was the obvious choice. On Christmas Eve 1525 he delivered a firebrand sermon, skewering the luxurious lifestyle of the high-ranking clergy. In no time at all accusations of heresy were flying, there’d been a student demonstration, and Robert—with a handful of others—found himself dragged to London and imprisoned.
At the end of his three-day trial before Cardinal Wolsey, Robert was forced to read aloud a recantation in front of the huge crowd, the alternative being death at the stake. He had to kneel before the bishop and beg for absolution, which was denied him until he agreed to whatever penance the bishop chose to impose. He agreed and discovered the next day what it was to be.
At an even bigger and more lavish gathering of clergy, a bishop railed from the pulpit against Robert as well as Martin Luther, made the accused men ask again for forgiveness, and then had them carry the firewood for the ceremonial burning of heretical books. Only then were the offenders absolved, at which point the crowd was granted an indulgence for having witnessed the whole affair, and Robert was sent to Fleet Prison for another six months.
When his time was up, Robert was transferred to the Augustinian friary in London for house arrest. But he evidently had not learned his lesson from the whole sorry debacle. Immediately on arrival he got involved in the sale of Tyndale Bibles—translations of the Scriptures into English—and when rumor circulated that this time Robert really was going to be burned for his troubles, he hatched a plan. He left his clothes at the edge of the Thames with a suicide note appended but actually escaped to Antwerp with the help of German merchants.
It was no accident that Robert ended up in Wittenberg. Reform was known to emanate from that little Saxon town and Robert went to see for himself. There he passed three much happier years in self-imposed exile, studying at the university under the pseudonym Antonius Anglus or “English Anthony,” hobnobbing with Luther and Melanchthon, and living at Bugenhagen’s house.
It is no surprise that Robert’s reform impulses underwent a reform of their own during this period. While remaining critical of abuses of power and wealth, in Wittenberg Robert came more fully to understand the gospel as God’s free and unmerited gift of righteousness for sinners, conferred and accepted through faith. This became the centerpoint of his prolific theological writings. He also dug into the history of the church. Robert wrote the first Protestant history of the papacy, which so impressed Luther that he in turn took to investigating and reproducing historical sources for the sake of reform.
Robert did not forget about his homeland during his sojourn in Germany, however. He stayed in touch with sympathizers back home and took whatever opportunity he could to declare his unswerving loyalty to Henry VIII. Unswerving loyalty to a notoriously fickle king, however, is not the best policy, personally or politically. In 1531 Robert allowed himself to be persuaded to return to England and enjoyed serving as diplomat and later chaplain for his king. He cooperated with Thomas Cromwell and other English clergy on the reform of the church and led efforts to secure theological unity between the English and German reformers. But when Robert helped to broker Henry’s by now fourth marriage, the winds shifted. Henry, unsurprisingly, found fault with Anne of Cleves, and Robert bore some share of the blame. But worse was yet to come.
In early 1540 the bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, who had remained loyal to Roman teaching despite Henry’s breach with the pope, got into a prolonged and public debate with Robert—a “cockfight,” as one contemporary observer characterized it. In competing sermons they criticized each other and even traded insults. According to the same observer, “Gardiner was so tickled in the spleen” by Robert’s remarks that he complained to King Henry. Henry, agitated over his already unruly church, ordered Robert to submit to a list of theological articles drafted by Stephen. They could not have been more completely at odds with what Robert had learned in Wittenberg and had been teaching ever since.
It was as through history was repeating itself. Robert found himself subjected to the same humiliating business he’d been through with Cardinal Wolsey. He stood before Bishop Stephen, asked his forgiveness, took hold of his hand, and asked for a mutual expression of charity. Stephen at first declined but eventually relented. Robert walked free.
And then he promptly took to the pulpit and preached a sermon entirely contrary to his recantation—entirely faithfully to his evangelical beliefs.
Inspired by his example, Robert’s friends William Jerome and Thomas Garrett went out and did the same. Bishop Stephen could not abide the affront. Not long after Easter all three preachers were impounded in the Tower of London on the king’s orders. There they stayed from April till July, when Parliament passed a bill of attainder: a legal decree of guilt without trial that authorized execution, a favorite tool of Henry VIII’s. It was, in fact, the only bill of attainder in Henry’s entire reign for charges of heresy, despite the fact that there was never any list or account of what exact heretical beliefs the men held.
Two days after their colleague Thomas Cromwell was beheaded, William, Thomas, and Robert were burned at the stake. Robert’s last words were to forgive Bishop Stephen and to ask forgiveness of anyone he had injured. On the very same day three loyalists to Rome were also burned, reflecting the strange and inadvertent ecumenism of martyrdom that takes place in times of persecution.
Despite the great number of heretics and other purported criminals executed in England’s bloody sixteenth century, very few eyewitness reports of their deaths were preserved or circulated. Robert Barnes’s case was unique in that respect. His final words were recorded and published in both English (“Protestation”) and German (Bekenntnis der Glaube, “Confession of Faith) and ran through twenty editions. His case was so notorious that numerous competing ballads were composed about him, claiming him either as a most holy martyr or a most abominable villain. Indeed, a judge called one of Robert’s writings “the most detestible & most unshamefule boke of heryse that ever he herd.”
But when Martin Luther heard the news about his old friend and “holy martyr, St. Robert,” he concluded: “It is a special joy for me to hear that our good, righteous table companion and houseguest has been so graciously called by God to pour out his blood for the sake of His dear Son and to become a holy martyr. Thanks, praise, and glory be to the Father of our dear Lord Jesus Christ, who again, as at the beginning, has granted us to see the time in which His Christians, before our eyes and from our eyes and from beside us, are dragged off to martyrdom (that is, to heaven) and become saints. They have eaten and drunk with us (as the apostles say of Christ, Acts 4) and joined with us in honorable good cheer. Who could have believed twenty years ago that Christ our Lord would be so near to us and would eat, drink, and converse at our tables and live in our houses through His precious martyrs and dear saints?”
For Further Reading
Richard Eaves, “The Reformation Thought of Dr. Robert Barnes, Lutheran Chaplain and Ambassador for Henry VIII,” Lutheran Quarterly 28/2 (1976): 156–165.
Martin Luther, “Preface to Robert Barnes, Confession of Faith,” Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 60:230.
Korey D. Maas, The Reformation and Robert Barnes: History, Theology and Polemic in Early Modern England (Rochester: Boydell, 2010), and “Confession, Contention, and Confusion: The Last Words of Robert Barnes and the Shaping of Theological Identity,” Sixteenth Century Journal 42/3 (2011): 689–707.
The Reformation Essays of Dr. Robert Barnes, ed. Neelak S. Tjernagel (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2007 [1963]).