eastlondonhistory.com

The name of Bishop Edward Bonner is well remembered around Bethnal Green. We have a Bonner Street, and a Bonner primary school round the corner in Hartley Street. And within a couple of hundred yards, Victoria Park has a gate named after the bishop. Fitting memorials to a pious man of the cloth you might think. But this BIshop of London was known in his time as ‘Bloody Bonner’. During the mid-1500s, at the right hand of Queen Mary, he was a most enthusiastic burner of heretics (protestants in other words), killing hundreds before Mary’s death, Elizabeth’s accession and his own fall from grace.

That Bonner is so remembered in the area is more an accident of history than anything else. Among the many earthly rewards for Bonner’s service first to Henry VIII and then Queen Mary was the gift of the manor of Stepney, which came as part of the package for the Bishop of London at the time. Bonner was the last to hold the title of Lord Manor of Stepney, but a huge tract of open space became known forever as Bonner Fields. By the early 1800s, as building and industry encroached, the area had become brickfields, local artisans digging up the heavy London clay to make bricks to build the houses for a booming population.

It was this land that would be chosen as the site for the new Victoria Park. An 1839 report for the Registrar General recommended the creation of a public park, a healthy green space in the east to match the royal parks of west London. While the affluent West End had Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park, St James’s Park and the rest, there was a danger that the whole of east London would soon be under bricks and cobbles. So the new park was built, and got its Bonner Gate.

Bonner himself rose to a terrifying position of power at one of the bloodiest and most confused periods in English history. Born in 1500, the son of a Worcestershire sawyer, Bonner went up to Oxford and graduated in law. By 1529, he was chaplain to Cardinal Wolsey, and impressed both Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell. Bonner showed a remarkable ability to survive the internicine politics of the day, staying loyal to Wolsey even after the Cardinal’s fall from favour with the king. Cromwell had spotted in the lawyer a rare talent, and put him to use arguing Henry’s case in Rome, where the king’s casual attitude towards marriage and divorce had led to direct conflict with the Papacy.

Bonner wasn’t a popular figure, but it would be hard to question his stubborness or nerve. He toured the courts of Europe arguing Henry’s case. His manner - coarse, argumentative, dictatorial and overbearing - infuriated many. The French king, Francis I, was so offended by this medieval John Prescott, that he threatened him with a hundred strokes of the lash. Pope Clement supposedly threatened to have the envoy burned at the stake. He was effective though, and the king and Cromwell were grateful. During the 1530s he was granted a succession of ‘livings’, including East Dereham in Norfolk, Blaydon in Durham, Ripple in Worcestershire and Cherry Burton in Yorskshire. Bonner was becoming a very rich man.

At this point, Bonner was effectively batting for the newly separate Church of England against Rome. But following Henry’s death in 1547, he was appalled by the new Protestant reforms brought in by Lord Protector Edward Seymour (who effectively ruled England as regent for Henry’s son, the boy king Edward VI). In Edward’s name, Seymour repealed Henry’s ‘Six Articles’, rules on transubstantion, clerical celibacy, heard confession and the like, which kept the Church of England effectively a Catholic Church, albeit one separated from the authority of Rome.

Bonner was no fan of Rome either, and had been happy, like many other English clergymen, to help Henry break from the power of the Pope. But he certainly wasn’t ready to embrace the radical version of Christianity proferred by Martin Luther and his Protestants - for one thing, the challenge to authority went against his instincts. Stubborn as ever, he refused to bend with the new rules. The bishop was sent first to Fleet Prison in August 1547 and then to Marshalsea gaol in 1550. His sentence was ‘perpetual imprisonment’.

But perpetuity was shortlived. The young king died aged 16 in 1553, and Queen Mary came to the throne. Mary restored Catholicism and released Bonner, who took up his bishopric again, now an unashamedly Catholic and Rome-friendly cleric. Many were unhappy with the volte face. Most were given the opportunity to recant and accept Catholicism. Those who refused were burned at the stake. It’s from these bloody five years that Bonner’s terrible reputation comes, though some argue that Bonner was merely the instrument of a state where civil and ecclesiastical power had become one. Bonner was the instrument of Mary’s particularly brutal law, and on occasions was admonished for not being hard enough on the ‘heretics’.

He was pretty hard by most standards though. Hundreds were burned at the stake during the mid-1550s. Contemporary John Foxe describes his work thus: ‘This cannibal in three years space three hundred martyrs slew. They were his food, he loved so blood, he spared none he knew.’

If all modern political careers end in failure, those of the 16th century suffered a much worse fate, in prison or on the scaffold. Bonner predictably fell from grace under Mary’s successor, Elizabeth, and spent the final years of his life in and out of Marshalsea prison. He died there in September, 1569, and was buried in St George’s, Southwark.

It’s an irony of royal life that though our kings and queens may have been born in Westminster, Scotland, Germany, France or elsewhere, a good number of them ended their days right here – in Tower Hamlets.
With a room at the Tower, a number of them ended their days a little sooner than they would have planned.
Now a new book digs into the medical history of our monarchs. The Death of Kings takes a detailed, grisly, but fascinating look at the causes, that saw off some of our rulers.
Since William I built the Tower of London, it had become the most select jail in the land, housing not only enemies of the ruler but rulers who had fallen from power themselves.
Queen to be, Elizabeth I was famously incarcerated in the Tower by her sister, Queen Mary. In the 1550s, England was in the midst of a religious schism, as Mary tried to re-institute Catholicism as the established faith of the land.
Wyatt Rebellion
Elizabeth, meanwhile, faithfully followed her father Henry VIII’s lead, as founder of the Church of England. She became closely identified with plots such as the Wyatt Rebellion, which aimed to overthrow Mary and continue with England’s Protestant Reformation.
Mary had Elizabeth locked in the Tower for two months until she relented and put her under house arrest in Woodstock, Oxfordshire.
Another of Mary’s possible rivals was less fortunate. Her cousin, Lady Jane Grey was seen as a possible rallying figure for angry Protestants. Following the Wyatt Rebellion, many courtiers called for her death – Mary reluctantly agreed.
First though she tried to save Jane’s soul by begging her to convert to Catholicism. Jane, in her comfortable Tower apartments, reportedly enjoyed theological debates with Dr Feckenham, the Abbot of Westminster, but refused the offer. She was executed on Tower Green on February 12, 1554.
Eighty years before, one of Elizabeth’s predecessors as monarch had not managed to escape the Tower alive.

Melancholy
Henry VI had always had problems as King. He inherited a degree of mental instability from his mother, Catherine de Valois. He had attacks of melancholy and depression that lasted months, in one case from August 10, 1453 to Christmas the following year.
The apathetic king showed no reaction upon the birth of his son and had mixed fortunes in his battles with the House of York, at one stage being captured by the enemy. His powerful wife Queen Margaret, leading the royal army, managed to free her hapless husband with a victory at the Battle of St Albans.
But his freedom was short lived. Edward of York advanced on London and was proclaimed Edward IV - Henry was sent to the Tower in 1461. Edward soon fell out with his lieutenant, Warwick, and fled to Calais. Henry was free, and King, once more.
Edward returned to England in 1471 and, at the battle of Tewkesbury, the redoubtable Margaret was finally defeated. Edward VI returned to the Tower for good.
Stabbed
It is most likely that Henry was stabbed to death by his guards, on Edward’s orders. His body was disinterred in 1910, and medical experts took a new look at his case.
The book holds a grisly fascination – William II dying in battle, Henry V of cancer of the rectum, Henry III of a stroke, and Mary II of smallpox. Our rulers, though grand in life, in death are as human and vulnerable as the rest of us.

The Death of Kings:
a medical history of the Kings and Queens of England
by Clifford Brewer; published Abson Books £7.95.