Cranmer’s condemnation for treason was almost as great an embarrassment to John Foxe as it had been to the Archbishop himself. Obedience to lawful authority was axiomatic to both, as to all the orthodox reformers of die first generation. Against Catholic accusations that all Protestants were natural subverters of established order, they argued that the good Christian would be least a traitor to his Prince. Preaching upon the text ‘Render unto Caesar’ in November 1550, Hugh Latimer had declared,

In a preface to his Acts and Monuments, John Foxe explained why his ecclesiastical history was so deeply concerned with martyrs.

Poor John Knox felt a distinct sense of inferiority when he sat down to write the first book of his History of the Reformation in Scotland. Unlike his English friend John Foxe, he could not draw upon the stories of hundreds of martyrs and fit them into the complete history of the persecuted Church from its beginning until the present day. To make matters worse, Foxe would duplicate Knox’s labours by incorporating the stories of most of the Scottish martyrs into his 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments. In his ambition to be both the historian and the martyrologist of the Scottish Reformation, Knox thought he faced an immediate and apparently overwhelming problem: that of a distinct shortage of martyrs. Yet he was quickly reassured once he began assembling the details of those who had vigorously opposed the ‘manifest abuses, superstition and idolatry’, which characterized the Catholic Church in Scodand before the Reformation. Martyrs soon began to appear before his eyes, and Knox consoled himself, ‘Albeit there be no great number, yet are they more than the Collector would have looked for at the beginning.’

On 25 March 1586 for refusing to plead on a charge of harbouring Catholic priests Margaret Clitherow was pressed to death in York.

This quotation forms the climax of A True Report of the Life and Martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow, written by the seminary priest John Mush within three months of her death. Mush produced his work with a quite explicit didactic purpose.

Robert Bellarmine put it with his customary clarity and forcefulness when he wrote:

It was in recognition of this pressing reality that Rome—principally via the agency of die Sacred Congregation of Rites and Ceremonies—sought to put its house in order. It did so in two main ways: on the one hand, it relaunched official saint-making—the year of the congregation’s foundation (1588) saw the first official canonization after a hiatus of over half a century. Hand in hand with this went the tightening up of canonization procedure which was to culminate in a papal bull of 1634 that remained the final word on the subject until well into this century. On the other hand, regional churches were required to submit their local saints’ offices to Rome for approval. In addition, die authentication, translation, and display of relics became subject tounprecedented regulation.

Christianity came to Japan in 1549 in the person of the ‘Apostle to the Indies’, St Francis Xavier, yet in spite of initial progress both in making converts and in becoming part of the Japanese religious milieu, within a century it had virtually disappeared, harried to its demise by savage persecutions from a government convinced that Christianity was a threat to its survival. The suppression of Christianity produced many martyrs, of whom the best known are the ‘Twenty-Six Martyrs of Nagasaki’, crucified in 1597 and canonized in 1862. Of the thousands of others who perished, many are known neither by name nor date of martyrdom, but in one unique case the martyrs of a particular island are remembered and honoured by one of the world’s most secretive Christian groups, the Kakure Kirishitan, or ‘Hidden Christians’ of Japan.

Nineteenth-Century critics were entirely mistaken in supposing that political economy was the dismal science; it is in fact ecclesiastical history. Members of this society understand this better than any, exchanging, as they do, views and information mainly in print, and devoting their twice-yearly gatherings principally to encouraging the cheerfulness both of nature and of grace. Goethe had a word for it:

Es ist die ganze Kirchengeschichte
Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt.

‘Where is the Church of Scotland to be found?’ asked the leading Evangelical R. S. Candlish on 20 May 1843 at the first General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland. ‘She will not be found basking under the smiles of the great, but she is to be recognised once more, as in days of old, by her sufferings and her tears.’ In 1843 the Disruption of the Church of Scotland brought the birth of a new church, the Free Church of Scotland, as nearly a third of the ministers and nearly half the lay membership left the national Church of Scotland. They went out in part over a long-standing dispute concerning church patronage, but, more fundamentally, they left in protest against what they perceived as the refusal of the State to recognize the Church’s independence in spiritual matters. The new Free Church claimed to be not merely a secession or schism, but rather the true national Church of Scotland, a claim its adherents based on their willingness to suffer for the principle of the headship of Christ in the Church. They were the Church of the martyrs of the Scottish Reformation and of the Covenants, willing to lay down their fortunes, even their lives, for ‘the Crown rights of the Redeemer’. The true Church of Scotland, asserted the Free Church minister James Mackenzie, in 1859, ‘began in 1843, when die old Church, the Church of Knox, of Melville, of Henderson, and of the martyrs, left its connexion with the State, and stood out before the world free, bearing the banner which our brave fathers bore.’

Since the beginning of Anglican missionary activity in the southwest Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century, fifteen European missionaries and at least seven Pacific Islanders have died violently in the course of their work. In that same region, comprising island Melanesia and New Guinea, Roman Catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, and the London Missionary Society [L.M.S.] have each had their honour roll of martyrs. Three of these have achieved a measure of fame outside the Pacific and their own denomination: John Williams of the L.M.S., killed at Erromanga in Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides) in 1839; James Chalmers, also of the L.M.S., killed in New Guinea in 1901; and John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of Melanesia and head of the Melanesian Mission, killed in 1871. Patteson has been the subject of more than fifteen biographies (several of them in German and Dutch), in addition to essays in collections on English missionary heroes, scholarly articles, and pamphlets for popular consumption. In Anglican churches in England, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and elsewhere he is commemorated as missionary hero in memorial tablets and stained-glass windows.

On Thursday 25 September 1902 Liverpool’s endemic sectarian violence claimed perhaps its most notorious victim. John Kensit, founder of the Protestant Truth Society and instigator of the Kensit Crusade against ritualism in the Church of England, was attacked by a Roman Catholic crowd on his way from Birkenhead to Liverpool. An iron file was thrown, injuring the Protestant orator, and Kensit was taken to Liverpool Royal Infirmary. Although he began to recover, early in October septic pneumonia and meningitis developed, and on Wednesday 8 October, in the words of Kensit’s biographer, ‘his purified spirit, washed in the precious blood of the immaculate Lamb, was released from its earthly prison.’

Joan of Arc died at the stake in Rouen in 1431. She became a canonized saint of the Catholic Church only in 1920. It is well known that the wheels of the Vatican grind slowly, but 500 years is a long period to wait for sanctity, even by Roman standards. Obviously, in a short communication such as this, there is no time to explore the rich afterlife which Joan enjoyed between her death and her canonization. Rather, the more modest purpose of this paper is to show how her achievement of canonical status was preceded by a well-orchestrated campaign conducted by French Catholics during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If Joan was finally reclaimed as a Catholic saint and martyr, it was primarily because she was successfully represented as the very epitome of a heady blend of religion and nationalism that was one of the more distinctive and powerful forces of the era of the belle époque and the First World War.

These words of a Franciscan priest, Arthur Bell, executed at Tyburn in 1643, could have been taken as his own by Dom Bede Camm, the Benedictine martyrologist, who was one of the great propagandists of those English and Welsh Catholic martyrs who died in the period from the reign of Elizabeth to the Popish Plot. The lives of the martyrs were familiar to English Catholics through the writings of Richard Challoner (1691–1781), whose Memoirs of Missionary Priests had been available in various forms since its publication, as a kind of Catholic reply to Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, in two volumes in 1741–2, but in the late nineteenth century, as the English Catholics, reinforced by many converts from the Church of England, grew more combative in controversy following the relative calm of the Georgian period, the martyrs came more to the forefront. The church authorities sought recognition of the English martyrs’ heroic virtue. In 1874 Cardinal Manning had put under way an ‘ordinary process’, a preliminary judicial inquiry, to collect evidence to elevate the ‘venerable’ martyrs to the status of ‘beati’. In 1895, and again in 1929, large batches of English martyrs were declared blessed. In 1935 Thomas More and John Fisher were canonized. It was not until 1970 that forty of the later martyrs, a representative group, were officially declared saints.

It is certain that the unrest of Europe of the past twenty years will be dispelled. It is even likely that our whole civilisation will be advanced.’ So wrote A. E. Lawrie, Rector of Old St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh, in October of 1914. He was spending a three-month leave of absence as chaplain to an army hospital behind the lines in France. He added that the death of a particular soldier ‘spoke so loudly of Another Cruel Death, that one could not but link the two together—the spirit of self-indulgence will be trodden underfoot and exchanged for the spirit of self-discipline.’

Returning from his visit to Catherine the Great in 1773–4, chastened by a winter of ill health and frustration, which served finally to disillusion him of the prospects to be expected of an enlightened monarch, Diderot consoled himself by writing, during a sojourn at The Hague, an acerbic critique of the Instruction (Nakaz) in which his benefactress had outlined her political principles to the Legislative Commission of 1767. Most of Diderot’s Observations sur le Nakaz concentrated on refuting particular propositions advanced by the Empress. But he began with three general statements of principle, the last of which concerns the proper place of religion and the priesthood in the State. In setting out his objections to the fact that Catherine, like her mentor, Montesquieu, had opened her treatise with reference to God, Diderot is at his most splenetically anti-clerical.

The systematic study of religious Fundamentalism is now well under way. The first of six promised volumes under the auspices of the Fundamentalism Project of the University of Chicago, making a global examination of such movements in many religions, was published in 1991. Collections of papers evaluating specific aspects of Fundamentalism have been issued, and the theological method of the contemporary British movement has been scrutinized. Its American equivalent is the subject of one of the most illuminating of post-war works on the history of Christianity in the United States. Yet the history of the British movement has been allowed to remain in obscurity. Although, as will be seen, there are understandable reasons for the neglect, the growth of interest in world-wide Fundamentalism makes study of its British expression timely. More certainly than some of the other forms of defensively-minded traditional religion elsewhere that are now being labelled ‘Fundamentalist’, the British movement is entitled to the name invented by its counterpart in America. It arose at the same time, looking to some of the same men for leadership, and displayed similar traits. So an attempt is made here to present an overview of the Fundamentalists in Britain.

In early August 1942 an English Anglican missionary priest named Vivian Redlich met his death at the hands of the Japanese in Papua, then in the Anglican diocese of New Guinea. Redlich is one of a group of Papua New Guinea martyrs commemorated by the Anglican Church. I first heard his story when I joined the staff of his former theological college at Chichester, where he is remembered every year with a Eucharist at which an account of his martyrdom is liturgically read, and where he stands as a model of priestly dedication and sacrifice for those approaching ordination. I have prepared this paper to remember him on this fiftieth anniversary of his death, and in particular to set his story in the context of the earliest tradition of martyrology.

There is a good case for regarding the twentieth century as the century of Christian persecution and martyrdom. Both individual Christians, as well as the Church as a whole, have suffered severely at the hands of authoritarian regimes in Europe and Asia and also from institutional and state hostility in all but a few areas of the world. The Church has invariably been divided and split in its reactions to these pressures. This paper focuses upon the experience of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa where the Church has grown very rapidly in size and significance this century, most notably since the 1940s.