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Image 22: The description of the burning of M John Bradford Preacher, and John Leafe a Prentice

Commentary on image by Margaret Aston

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Size: 130 x 179 mm

Location in editions: 1563, p. 1216; 1570, p. 1805; 1576, p. 1541; 1583, p. 1624.

Bradford, standing in the pyre on the right with his call to England to repent of idolatry, and the short figure on the left of the illiterate young apprentice, John Leafe, who died with him, are shown before the lighting of the fire.

The preliminaries reflected the godly fibre of the accused as they first prayed prostrate beside the stake, and then Bradford kissed the instruments of his coming death and gave his clothes to his servant. Apart from one pair of raised hands, officials and guards armed with pikes dominate the scene. Sheriff Woodroffe, who abruptly silenced Bradford's invocation and ordered his hands to be tied, was divinely punished by being struck down with paralysis six months after this event.

As other martyrdoms show, hands were the last remaining recourse for communication from the fire. This is not the only case (compare Laurence Saunders, or Latimer and Ridley) in which the illustrator takes temporal liberties, representing an unlit pyre as well as the martyr's last words uttered in the flames. And as elsewhere, the final words were set afresh in each edition gothic type (1563), roman thereafter but with minor differences in positioning.