John Frith

Tyndale’s Son in the Gospel, 1503–1533

John Frith was born in 1503 at Westerham in Kent; his family later moved to nearby Sevenoaks, where his father kept an inn. He was educated at Eton and at King’s College, Cambridge, taking his degree in 1525, and Foxe says he so excelled “that scarcely there was his equal amongst all his companions.” At some point he “fell into knowledge and acquaintance with William Tyndale, through whose instructions, he first received into his heart the seed of the Gospel and sincere godliness.”1 Foxe does not say where, and his editions differ; the likeliest time and place is London about 1523 or 1524, before Tyndale left England.2

Wolsey drew him to his new college at Oxford, but there Frith and others were shut in a cellar for their books, where three of them died on a diet of salt fish. Released on condition that he stay within ten miles of Oxford, he crossed to the Continent in 1528 to join Tyndale. In exile he married, was present at the Colloquy of Marburg in 1529, and served as a reader in Greek. He translated Patrick Hamilton’s Places into English, and under the name Richard Brightwell published The Revelation of Antichrist (1529), with an Antithesis setting the acts of Christ against those of the pope.3

On a brief return to England in Lent 1531 he was put in the stocks at Reading as a vagabond, until the schoolmaster Leonard Cox heard him recite Homer and won his release. Thomas More, then Lord Chancellor, pursued him “both by land and sea,” and Frith slipped back to Antwerp.4 There he wrote A Disputation of Purgatory (1531) against John Rastell, Thomas More, and Bishop John Fisher, the first full argument against purgatory by an English evangelical. Foxe says he so answered all three that he won Rastell to his side.5

He came home for the last time in July 1532. In October he was taken at Milton Shore in Essex while trying to cross back to the Continent, where his wife and children were waiting, and was sent to the Tower.6 There he wrote a short treatise for a friend denying transubstantiation. A tailor named William Holt, posing as a friend, carried a copy to More, who answered it; Frith, in irons and without books, replied from his cell.7 It was the first full rejection of transubstantiation and of a bodily presence written by an English evangelical. In the Tower he also wrote A Mirror to Know Thyself, a treatise on baptism, and a letter to the faithful in which he said plainly what he expected:

I ever thought, and yet do think, that to walk after God’s word would cost me my life at one time or another.8 John Frith

Tyndale, writing to him in prison, sent word that Frith’s wife was “well content with the will of God, and would not for her sake have the glory of God hindered.”9

Foxe admired his “friendly & prudent moderation in uttering of the truth”: if Romanists would stop worshiping the sacrament, Frith said, every man might judge of it as God put into his heart. He would not make his own view an article of faith binding on others, and he would not let his opponents make theirs one either. That, he said, was the real reason he would die: “for that I cannot agree with the divines and other head prelates, that it should be necessarily determined to be an article of faith” that the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ.10 Examined on purgatory, he answered:

The soul is purged with the word of God, which we receive through faith, to the salvation both of body and soul.11 John Frithfrom the Tower, 1533

When the king ordered him examined, Archbishop Cranmer sent a gentleman and a porter to bring him from the Tower to Croydon. On the way the two men, moved by his learning and gentleness, arranged to let him slip into the woods and escape into Kent. Frith refused. He had been willing to flee before he was taken, he said, but now that God had delivered him into the bishops’ hands for the sake of his doctrine, to run would be to run from God Himself:

If I should now start aside and run away, I should run from my God, and from the testimony of his holy word, worthy then of a thousand hells.12 John Frith

He told the gentleman that if he lived twenty years more, he would see the whole realm of Frith’s opinion concerning the sacrament. Cranmer, who examined him at Croydon, was not yet persuaded; in time he came to hold the view for which Frith died.13

Condemned by the bishops of London, Winchester, and Lincoln at St. Paul’s on June 20, 1533, he signed his answers with the words, “I, Frith, thus do think; and as I think, so have I said, written, taught, and affirmed.” The bishop of Winchester was Stephen Gardiner, once his tutor at Cambridge. Moved from the Tower to Newgate, he was burned at Smithfield on July 4, 1533, tied back to back with the young tailor Andrew Hewet, who had said he believed of the sacrament “even as John Frith doth.” At the stake a Dr. Cook told the crowd to pray for them no more than they would for a dog; Frith smiled and asked the Lord to forgive him. The wind drew out his suffering, but Foxe says he “willingly embraced” the fire. He was about thirty.14

Frith held the gospel the Reformers recovered: the distinction of law and gospel, justification by faith alone, and a sinner clothed, as he put it, “with another man’s justice” in union with Christ. Yet he would follow no man blindly. “I take not Luther for such an author that I think he cannot err,” he wrote, though not, he added, in the things that concern salvation.15


Other Reformers   William Tyndale

Sources

  1. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 4th ed. (London: John Day, 1583), vol. 2, “The story, examination, death, and martyrdom of John Frith”; Hilda Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, chapter “John Frith: He Preached Bible Doctrine.” For the Sevenoaks inn and Eton, see Michael S. Whiting, Luther in English: The Influence of His Theology of Law and Gospel on Early English Evangelicals (1525–35), Princeton Theological Monograph Series (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2010), ch. 7, “Law and Gospel in the Theology of John Frith.” See William Tyndale. ↩
  2. Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, weighing Foxe’s conflicting accounts against what is known of Tyndale’s movements. ↩
  3. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “John Frith” and the account of the Cardinal College prisoners; Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, on the marriage, Marburg, and the 1529 works; Foxe, “John Frith,” on his reading of Greek abroad. See Patrick Hamilton. ↩
  4. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “John Frith.” Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, dates the Reading episode most likely to the visit of Lent 1531 rather than to the final return of 1532. ↩
  5. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “John Frith”; Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7. ↩
  6. Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7; Samuel Macauley Jackson, ed., The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1908–14), “Frith (Fryth), John.” ↩
  7. New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia, “Frith (Fryth), John”; Foxe, as summarized in Mark Water, The New Encyclopedia of Christian Martyrs (Alresford: John Hunt, 2001), 651–52; Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, on the treatise as the first of its kind. ↩
  8. John Frith, “Letter unto the Faithful Followers of Christ’s Gospel, While He Was Prisoner in the Tower of London,” in Scott H. Hendrix and Bernard McGinn, eds., Early Protestant Spirituality, trans. Scott H. Hendrix, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 2009), 36–39. ↩
  9. “The Gallery—Characters in Tyndale’s Story,” Christian History 16 (1987), on Tyndale’s letter to Frith in the Tower. ↩
  10. John Frith, letter to his friends from the Tower, in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2. ↩
  11. John Frith, letter to his friends from the Tower, in Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2. ↩
  12. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, the account of Frith’s conveyance from the Tower to Croydon. ↩
  13. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, the Croydon account; Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, on Cranmer’s later adoption of Frith’s view. See Thomas Cranmer. ↩
  14. Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1583), vol. 2, “John Frith” and “Andrew Hewet burned with Master Frith”; Hagstotz, Heroes of the Reformation, “John Frith”; Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, on Gardiner and Newgate. Foxe states that Frith “by no means could be persuaded to recant.” ↩
  15. Whiting, Luther in English, ch. 7, quoting Frith’s Disputation of Purgatory (“another man’s justice”) and a passage addressed to Thomas More (on Luther); spelling modernized. ↩