The devil in disguise
Peter de Loriol on the fearsome Bishop Bonner of London
Above: Fulham palace
Muse not so much that natures worke
is thus deformed now.
With belly blowen and heade so swolne
For I shall tel, you how:
This cannibal in three yeares space
Three hundred Marters slew:
They were his food, he loved so blood
He spared none he knew
Who was this cannibal, this foot-loose devil portrayed by a contemporary? Who was this man who seemed to have relished floggings? A famous woodcut of him inflicting such a beating in his Fulham orchard conveys an impression of a perverted nature which it is perhaps easier to place now than it was at the time.
Why should this man have set his servants to chase and beat a bunch of young boys for no worse an offence than swimming in the river as he was passing by?
Who was this monster who, in 1558, when presented to Queen Elizabeth I, was refused the obligatory kiss of her hand because she feared the stench of death that hung about him?
The man was the Edmund Bonner (1500-1569), Bishop of London, incumbent of Fulham Palace from 1540–1550 and 1553–1559.
This cleric was, according to some, the illegitimate son of a George Savage, parson of Dunham in Cheshire, and Elizabeth Ffrodsham. After his birth his mother moved out of Cheshire and married a Worcestershire sawyer by the name of Bonner. Whatever the conditions of his birth, his intelligence was spotted by a local worthy who undertook to have him educated at his expense. He graduated from Oxford in 1519, was ordained as a priest and became Cardinal Wolsey’s chaplain.
After Wolsey’s fall Bonner was taken on by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and was used as an ambassador to the Papal court to try to broker a deal for Henry VIII’s divorce, then to try to stop the King’s excommunication. He was also an ambassador to France and, on his return to England in 1540, he was appointed to the See of London. It was the pinnacle of his career.
Bonner had had a reputation as a coarse and unscrupulous tool of Cromwell. He was not known to have protested against any of the changes effected by his masters: he professed to be no theologian and was in the habit, when asked technical questions, to refer his interrogators to the theologians.
The Reformation had nothing to appeal to him, except the repudiation of papal control, and he was one of those numerous Englishmen whose views were faithfully reflected in Henry's Act of the Six Articles which re-affirmed Roman Catholic teachings, but with the King as the head of the Church in England. Indeed, almost his first duty as Bishop of London was to try heretics under these articles: accusations of excessive cruelty and bias against the accused were broadcasted by his enemies and, from his ordination, he seems to have been unpopular in London.
On Henry’s death in 1547, Bonner’s conservative stance earned him strong critics in the new King and Cranmer. He refused to adhere to the more Protestant edicts and was imprisoned in 1550. Mary’s accession, however, earned him a reprieve. He enforced Roman Catholic worship in his diocese and his persecutions earned him the tile of "Bloody Bonner" and the sworn enmity of the Reformers.
He toed the State line by burning heretics at the stake without complaint – which leads one to think he may have found this a somewhat congenial duty! He did admit to having a fearsome temper.
His refusal to agree to Queen Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy earned him his second and final stay in prison. He died in the Marshalsea and was buried in St George’s, Southwark, in the middle of the night so as not cause a stir. His ghost is said to wander around in a black coach.
Sources
Old and New London, Walford (1897)
Fulham Old and New, Charles Feret (1890)