By 1600 many, perhaps most, English people knew the story of Francesco Spiera, whom they usually called ‘Francis Spira’. Spiera, an Italian lawyer, recanted his Protestant beliefs in 1548, then he despaired and died, convinced of his own damnation. For Protestants during the mid sixteenth-century persecutions, the moral of the tale was urgent and could not have been clearer: recant and you will meet with God’s retribution – in agony, like Spiera.
Spiera’s story was part of the ‘anti-Nicodemite’ propaganda campaign aimed at faint hearts who would not stand up and be counted. Contemporaries called them ‘Nicodemites’ after Nicodemus in the Gospels, who came to Christ by night. This theme was begun by Protestants in the 1540s and 1550s, but was later taken up by Catholics, when they too faced persecution. One particular quotation from Scripture was hammered home relentlessly: ‘The one who disowns me … I will disown’. Recantation was that sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness. In this European polemic, Spiera acquired a totemic significance.