This account is taken almost verbatim from that in Edward Hall and Richard Grafton, The vnion of the two noble and illustrate famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (STC 12721: London, 1548), part II, fo. 244r. Foxe, however, omits a phrase claiming that Mekins' fear was such that 'he had not cared of whom he had named'.

Foxe's source for this episode is unknown. However, Foxe's mentor John Bale had heard independently of the case, mentioning it briefly in his The Epistle exhortatorye of an Englyshe Christiane (STC 1291: Antwerp, 1544), fo. 13v and in his Scriptorum illustrium maioris Brytanniae ... Catalogus (Basel, 1557), vol. I p. 666. In Bale's account, Spenser was a player in interludes; the companion who died with him was named John Ramsey; and the execution took place in 1542. In 1570 and subsequent editions Foxe amalgamated this information with his own. He changed 1563's generic claim that Spenser was 'getting his liuing with þ^e sweate of hys browes and labours of hys handes' to the more specific statement that he 'became a player in interludes', and he added Ramsey to the list of those executed, although for some reason omitting his first name. He did not adopt Bale's dating, merely claiming with characteristic imprecision that the deaths took place 'about the same tyme' as Mekins' case (ie., 1541). The real confusion arose from the second figure mentioned in 1563, Andrew Hewyt. This appears to be a confusion with the Andrew Hewet burned in 1533, but Foxe, instead of correcting the name to Ramsey, instead declared from 1570 onwards that there were three individuals executed - although both his and Bale's sources agree that there were two. Cf. 1570, p. 1376, et seq.

Foxe's account of the monumental acts of the Reformation Parliament necessarily focused on the 'aboliyshing of the vsurped power and iurisdiction of the bishop of Rome' rather than the establishment of the royal supremacy. The marginal gloss to the 1563 edition, however, provides the key to later historians' interpretations of these events: 'The kinge proclaimed Supreme head by act of parliament'. By the 1570 edition, however, Foxe's marginal glosses subtly altered the message to meet an anticipated objection about the status of a proclamation: 'The stile of supreme head annexed to the crowne of England' adding, for good measure: 'The popes name and memory abolished'. There were other, even more substantial changes wrought by Foxe in this passage as between the 1563 edition and its successors. In 1563, he had said almost nothing about the other, more detailed but substantial measures that accompanied the famous proclamation and which had been turned into statutes by the Reformation Parliament. In 1570, Foxe was anxious to furnish much more substantive detail on the acts in restraint of appeals, payments to Rome, the forbidden degrees, etc. Wherever possible, Foxe also substantially increased the discussion of the ecclesiastical authorities which had supported these political changes, and their scriptural and other grounds for doing so. In the process, Foxe strengthened the impression in his text that these were changes which overthrew a usurpation, justified by law and scripture.

Andrew ChibiUniversity of Leicester