Queen Mary’s government burned Protestants for heresy in England between 1555 and 1558, and Colchester and the villages round it supplied a long list of victims. Among them was a household from Much Bentley, a village near Colchester: a farmer called William Mount, his wife Alice, and Alice’s daughter by an earlier marriage, Rose Allin. What is known of Rose comes almost entirely from John Foxe, who told her story in his Acts and Monuments, usually called the Book of Martyrs. Foxe wrote as a Protestant and an advocate, so the detail below is his account and is flagged as such.
The Horror
According to Foxe, the Mounts had been arrested before and released after making a submission. They went home, stopped attending church, and were denounced by their parish priest. In the early hours of March 7, 1557 an officer named Edmund Tyrrell came to the house with local men to arrest them.
Alice Mount was ill, and Rose went to fetch her a drink. Foxe says Tyrrell stopped her, took her by the wrist and held a lit candle against the back of her hand until the sinews cracked. A witness, William Candler, is named. Tyrrell is reported to have told her that she would burn with the rest. Rose answered that she had a better instructor than he did, and that if she was made to die she would die for Christ. When he asked why she did not cry out, she said she had no cause to cry and rather cause to rejoice. In Foxe’s telling she did not pull her hand away, and she remarked afterwards that she could have struck Tyrrell with the pot she held in her other hand but had not done so.
Foxe is the only detailed source for the scene, and the exact words are his reconstruction rather than a transcript. That a hand was burned is supported by the woodcut tradition that grew from his book, which shows Tyrrell holding Rose’s hand over a flame.
The family was taken to Colchester and held through the spring and summer. On June 24, 1557 they were examined and condemned at the Moot Hall, the town prison. Bishop Bonner sent the writ for their burning on July 30. On August 2, 1557 ten people were burned at Colchester: five men (William Bongeor, William Purcas, Thomas Benold, William Mount and John Johnson) and five women (Agnes Silverside, Helen Ewring, Elizabeth Folkes, Alice Mount and Rose Allin). Foxe says six died in the forenoon on open ground by the town wall and four in the afternoon in the castle yard. Which fire Rose stood at is unconfirmed, and later summaries disagree, some placing all ten at the castle.
Foxe describes a crowd in the thousands calling on God to strengthen the condemned. He also records that an officer struck Elizabeth Folkes on the shoulder with a hammer as she was being chained, and that she turned, lifted her eyes and went on exhorting the crowd. He gives the ten ages as adding up to about 406 years, though the individual ages he records do not clearly reach that total.
The Modern Relic
Colchester has kept the memory of its martyrs. A monument to the victims of the Marian persecutions stands in St Peter’s Church on North Hill, and another is in Colchester Town Hall. The spelling of Rose’s surname on such memorials and in the sources varies between Allin and Allen.
The best-known relic of her story is a picture. Foxe’s book was illustrated with woodcuts, and the image of a hand held above a flame, with martyrs burning in the scene above it, was engraved again for later editions. It is a Protestant memory, made to be read by Protestants, and it fixed one young woman’s endurance in print. Rose Allin went to fetch a drink for her mother in March 1557, and by August she was dead.
