Town's faith is put to the test

ON THE morning of April 24, 1555, George Marsh was taken from his cell in the North Gate of the city of Chester and conducted by the local sheriffs to a Spital Broughton where a stake waited for him among a pile of wooden faggots.

This was to be the place of his execution. . .

George Marsh was a heretic and he was going to burn.

Even at the last moment his faith was tested by a chance of life. An official offered him a pardon if he would recant and abjure his heretical opinions.

But Marsh was determined. "Not on that condition," he replied.

They chained him to the stake and kindled the fire, which consumed him slowly. His last words were an agonised cry: "Father of heaven, have mercy on me!"

George Marsh was born in Bolton in 1515. What brought him to the stake? And what sort of world did he live in where such sacrifices could be made and such cruelties perpetrated by reasonable people who believed themselves to be doing God's work?

The historical over view is simple enough. King Henry VIII, eager for a male heir and also head over heels in love with Anne Boleyn, sought to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled.

But because of pressure exerted on the Pope by Catherine's powerful relatives the request was denied. Henry therefore decided to separate the Church of England from the Church of Rome.

The Act of Supremacy was passed in 1534. But this did not make England a Protestant country. Henry remained Catholic in his opinions and practices and was quite capable of incinerating any reformer who went too far.

When Henry died in 1547 he was succeeded by his son, the nine year old Edward VI.

During his short reign, religion in England was extensively reformed. The Book of Common Prayer was written, the Mass and various holy days abolished.

Edward was an enthusiastic follower of the new dispensation, of the teachings of Luther and Calvin. He hated idols, thought the Mass to be superstition and said of the then Pope that he was "the true son of the Devil".

It was against the background of these changes that George Marsh flourished.

But, unfortunately for George Marsh, Edward VI did not last for long. In 1553 he died of a respiratory disease which filled his lungs with ulcers. He was succeeded by his elder sister, Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, a staunch and sincere Roman Catholic who was determined to bring her country back into the communion of the world church.

She was also determined to pay back the Protestants and reformers who had made her mother's life such a misery.

On February 9, 1555, Bishop Hooper of Gloucester was burned at the stake. Bishops Ridley, Latimer and Archbishop Cranmer followed, and in all 280 people were executed in the same manner in a three year period. George Marsh was one of them.

Not much is known for sure of George Marsh's early years. He was born of yeoman stock -- a yeoman was a small, independent landholder and cultivator -- either at Broadgate Farm, Rumworth or more likely at Marsh Fold in Halliwell.

His parents had him educated, probably at the Bolton Grammar School. He became a farmer, marrying in around 1540. After the death of his wife he felt the urge to study religion and leaving his children in the care of his mother, he became a student at Cambridge University, which was a hotbed of the new Protestant teachings.

Marsh wasn't the only Boltonian at Cambridge, and he wasn't the only one to suffer during the reign of Queen Mary.

James and Leonard Pilkington, sons of the lord of manor of Rivington, were Cambridge students, active Protestants, and leading debaters. They fled to the Continent to escape the Marian persecution.

So did Thomas, Ralph and John Lever of Darcy Lever. All were Cambridge men, and Thomas Lever was one of the most famous and passionate of the Protestant Reformers. By 1551 he was master of St John's College, but the advent of Queen Mary made his position untenable and he fled abroad.

By the 1540s then Protestantism was already strongly established in Bolton, for all that the county of Lancashire was renowned throughout England for its staunch Catholicism.

Why should this be?

Some time around this period the antiquarian John Leland visited Bolton and this is the entry he made in his itinerary, published in 1558;

"Bolton-upon-Moore Market stondeth most by cotton and coarse yerne. Divers villages in the Mores about Bolton do make cottons. Nether the site nor the ground abowte Bolton is so good as it is abowte Byri. They burne at Bolton some canale, but more se cole -- of which the pits be not far off. They burne Turfe also."

"Se cole" is of course sea coal and there is a mention of it being dug in Bolton as early as 1337.

"Turfe" is peat, and the "cottons" referred to are in fact a type of woollen goods. But if Bolton stood (stondeth) mostly by its manufactures as early as the 1540s, then this might explain the strength of Protestantism in the town.

It seems certain that Bolton was more than a farming town even in the 16th century. We may imagine farm labourers and their families spinning yarns in their cottages up on the moors and sending them down to be retailed in the Market, which was held every Monday in what is now Churchgate.

The landlords probably supplied the raw material and then sold the finished product on.

We have seen that a fulling, or a cloth cleaning mill was established by Lawrence Brownlow on the banks of Eagley Brook as early as 1483. Already Bolton was to some extent "industrialised". This would have made it the ideal seedbed for Protestantism.

The trade in bulk yarns and "cottons" would have brought Boltonian merchants and businessmen into contact with natives of the southeast and especially London, where belief in the doctrines of the Swiss domiciled John Calvin was strong.

So as cotton was exported, Protestantism was imported and Bolton was well on the way to becoming the "Geneva of the North". In 1557 the Protestants of Bolton resisted the payment of tithes (a tax in which a 10th part of yearly income was surrendered) to the Catholic Church reinstated by Queen Mary.

The leading offenders included four Cromptons, one Bradshaw and a Mr Robert Bolton.

George Marsh graduated from Cambridge in 1551 or 1552, and became quickly first a curate, then a deacon, and then a priest. He did not preach in Bolton or Lancashire (there was probably no need -- James Pilkington and Thomas Lever did preach in Bolton, and probably to good effect) but rather in London and Leicestershire, and quickly made a name for himself.

When Mary came to the throne he decided to flee abroad, but first he returned home to Lancashire to visit his family and friends.

This proved a fatal miscalculation.

Marsh, whose London preaching had brought him to the attention of the Earl of Derby, was arrested in March 1554.

Actually it seems likely that the people who arrested Marsh did not want to burn him at the stake, rather they wanted to return him to the Catholic fold.

His interrogations began with Andrew Barton in the Green Chamber at Smithills Hall -- where Marsh left the famous footprint which can still be seen. He was moved to interrogation at Lathom Hall by the priests Robert Brassey and Richard Gerard. Interrogations were conducted gently, the aim being to convince him of the error of his ways. Even when he was condemned at Chester, Bishop Choates gave him repeated chances to recant. But George Marsh remained true to his beliefs and the flames took him.