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Readers of the second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, or any of the subsequent editions of that massive history of the persecutions inflicted on the Church, popularly known as ‘Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, would have found a coherent, lucid description, filled with circumstantial and often dramatic details, of the ordeals of James Bainham. According to this account, James Bainham, a member of the Middle Temple and the son of a Gloucestershire knight, was accused of heresy in 1531, arrested, and transported to Lord Chancellor More’s house in Chelsea. There he was tied to a tree in More’s garden and whipped; subsequently he was taken to the Tower and racked in More’s presence. Eventually, after repeated interrogations and under the threat of burning, Bainham abjured and did penance at Paul’s Cross. Yet Bainham’s conscience tormented him and, a little over a month after his release, he prayed for God’s forgiveness before an evangelical congregation, meeting secretly in a warehouse in Bow Lane. A week later, Bainham stood up on his pew in St Austin’s church, clutching a vernacular New Testament and William Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man to his chest and tearfully declared that he had denied God. He prayed for the congregation’s forgiveness and exhorted them to die rather than to submit as he had done. If this defiance was not sufficiently public, Bainham sent letters proclaiming his doctrinal convictions to the Bishop of London and others. Rearrested and re-examined, he was inevitably condemned to death as a relapsed heretic.

The images that the phrase “Marian Protestant” summons to mind are both dramatic and predictable. Whether they are of Cranmer holding his hand in the flame, Latimer exhorting Ridley to play the man, or more generalized images of men and women dying at the stake, we see the landscape of Marian Protestantism shrouded in the smoke from the fires of Smithfield and think of it exclusively in terms of martyrs. This unblinking fixation on the Marian martyrs is partly the result of an all too human fascination with violent death, but it is also the result of our dependence on John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563–83), popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs,” a sobriquet that does justice to Foxe's preoccupations when discussing the penultimate Tudor reign.Nevertheless, to ignore the majority of Marian Protestants who did not die for the gospel is to study the steeple and believe that you have examined the entire church. Like the steeple, the martyrs are the most conspicuous group of Marian Protestants, yet like a steeple their existence depended on the support of the rest of the church. However, even this metaphor fails to do justice to those coreligionists who provided the Marian martyrs with physical, financial, moral, and emotional support. The relationships between the martyrs and their “sustainers” (to use Foxe's phrase) were profound and complex, with both parties drawing strength from each other. The relationships between male martyrs and their female sustainers are of particular interest and importance; in fact, it will be suggested in this article that these relationships had a decisive influence on the development of English Protestantism.

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