Robert Barnes (martyr)

"Barnes and his Fellow-Prisoners Seeking Forgiveness", from an 1887 edition of Foxe's Book of Martyrs, illustrated by Kronheim.

Robert Barnes (c. 1495 – 30 July 1540) was an English reformer and martyr.

Life

Barnes was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk in 1495, and was educated at Cambridge, where he was a member of the Austin Friars. Sometime after 1514 he was sent to study in Leuven. Barnes returned to Cambridge in the early 1520s, where he graduated Doctor of Divinity in 1523, and, soon after, was made Prior of his Cambridge convent.

John Foxe says that Barnes was one of the Cambridge men who gathered at the White Horse Tavern for Bible-reading and theological discussion in the early 1530s. At the encouragement of Thomas Bilney, Barnes preached at the Christmas Day Midnight Mass in 1525 at St Edward's Church in Cambridge. Barnes' sermon, although against clerical pomp and ecclesiastical abuses, was neither particularly unorthodox nor surprising. However, after seeing a churchwarden whose civil suit resulted in the imprisonment of a local man, Fr. Barnes departed from his prepared text to denounce lawsuits by one Christian against another&mdash inside the parish church of the Cambridge University College of Lawyers. At a time when Cardinal Wolsey was attempting to stop the smuggling from the continent of copies of Martin Luther's books, Barnes' remarks appeared suspect.

Barnes before Cardinal Wolsey, 1870 illustration

As a result, in 1526 he was brought before the vice-chancellor for preaching a heterodox sermon, and was subsequently imterrogated by Wolsey and four other bishops. He was commanded to abjure or be burnt; and, after choosing the former, was committed to the Fleet prison and afterwards to the Austin Friary in London. Although confined to the house, he was allowed visitors. It was subsequently discovered that while incarcerated there, Barnes was secretly a distributor of illegal copies of the Protestant Bible.

He escaped to Antwerp in 1528, and also visited Wittenberg, where he became good friends with Martin Luther. While at Wittenberg in the summer of 1531, Barnes was commissioned to ascertain the opinion of Luther and other continental divines on the divorce proceedings between Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. That year he also published the first edition of A Supplication, which essentially outlined Lutheran theology in an appeal to Henry VIII. Stephen Vaughan, an agent of Thomas Cromwell in the Low Countries and an advanced reformer, came across a copy of Barnes's work and was so impressed by his Lutheran political philosophy of kingship that he pleaded with Cromwell to grant the exile a hearing.

In late 1531 Barnes returned to England, becoming one of the chief intermediaries between the English Court and the Lutheran German States, and he spent the next several years going between England and Germany. He was a vocal defender of Henry's Royal Supremacy over the Church of England. In 1539 he was employed in negotiations connected with Anne of Cleves's marriage. The policy was Cromwell's, but Henry VIII had already in 1538 refused to embrace Lutheranism theology, and the statute of Six Articles, followed by the immediate annulment of the King's marriage to Anne of Cleves (1540), brought Cromwell and all other the agents of that policy to ruin.

An attack upon Bishop Gardiner by Barnes in a sermon at St Paul's Cross launched a bitter struggle between the Crypto-Protestant and Crypto-Catholic courtiers in King Henry's council, which raged during the spring of 1540. Barnes was forced to apologise and recant; and Bishop Gardiner delivered a series of sermons at St Paul's Cross to counteract Barnes' invective. But a month or so later Cromwell was made earl of Essex, Gardiner's friend, Bishop Sampson, was sent to the Tower, and Barnes openly reverted to Lutheranism. It was a delusive victory. In July, Cromwell was attainted, Anne of Cleves was divorced and Barnes was burnt (30 July 1540).

Five other religious dissidents were executed on the same day: two fellow Lutherans; William Jerome and Thomas Gerrard, were, like Barnes, burnt at the stake for heresy under the Six Articles; three Catholic priests: Thomas Abel, Richard Fetherstone and Edward Powell, were hanged for high treason, for rejecting the King's title as Supreme Head of the Church of England and denouncing State control of the Church. Both Lutherans and Catholics on the continent were shocked and horrified by the executions. Luther published Barnes' confession with a preface of his own as Bekenntnis des Glaubens (1540).

Some historians have concluded that Barnes was crucial in having the English Protestants and Catholics alike understand the Reformation around them.

Literature

• Shortly after their executions, dialogue in verse was published, The Metynge of Doctor Barnes and Dr. Powell at Paradise Gate and of theyre communicacion bothe drawen to Smithfylde fro the Towar (London, 1540), in the British Museum.
• Robert Barnes also appears in The Mirror & the Light, by Hilary Mantel.

See also

• St Edward's Passage

Further reading

• Pollard, Albert Frederick (1911). "Barnes, Robert" . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 3 (11th ed.). p. 413.
• McGoldrick, James Edward (1979). Luther's English Connection: the Reformation Thought of Robert Barnes and [of] William Tyndale. Northwestern Publishing House. ISBN 0-8100-0070-9