Firebrand is about monstrous King Henry XIII, played by Jude Law, and his final wife, Catherine Parr, whom some in the King’s court deemed a political and religious subversive. Catholic integralists who want to restore Catholic Christendom will not like this film. Calvinist confessional state advocates will like the anti-regime motif and Protestant subversion but not its implications. Classical liberals will like this film, maybe TOO much!
Henry is ailing and increasingly paranoid. Most of his previous five wives were killed or discarded. He had of course broken with the Pope so he could divorce his first wife and remarry, only to execute his new wife, Anne Boleyn, whose Protestant sympathies exceeded his preferences. His final queen, Catherine, who was able to read the Bible in English thanks partly to Anne’s influence, was even more Protestant. She wrote two devotional books, becoming the first woman to publish in English under her own name.
Reading the Bible in English, and allowing independent thought, did not sync with Henry’s desire for an authoritarian monarchy in which he was the religious and political center. Initial policies allowing English language Bibles, accompanied by growing Protestant piety, were revamped. Fans of Martin Luther and the continental Reformation were feared. Some were jailed, tortured and burned at the stake. Henry had persecuted Catholics who resisted his divorce but had no tolerance for Protestants who did not conform to his capricious will.
The film focuses on Anne Askew, a highly literate minor noblewoman who relished reading and preaching to others about the Bible, unmediated by religious authorities. Historically she did influence members of Queen Catherine Parr’s retinue and possibly Catherine herself. The film fictionally portrays Anne and Catherine as lifelong friends, with the Queen covertly visiting Anne as she preaches illegally to her growing audience at secret forest meetings. This cinematic Anne is a political and religious firebrand who rejects hierarchy and demands equality, calling for social revolution.
Anne in reality was indeed quite provocative, maybe influenced by early Anabaptists, and unwilling to bend to political or ecclesial authority if at odds with her understanding of the Bible. She was accordingly arrested several times, tortured on the rack, which ripped her bones from their joints, and was carried to a stake to be burned. She was offered royal clemency if she renounced her zealous Protestant beliefs and named her religious cobeligerents. Possibly she was targeted for her perceived influence on Queen Catherine, with hopes that she would expose the Queen’s own supposed spiritual subversion. Anne adamantly refused, for which she was burned with several others. John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs reports that some of these martyrs sewed gunpowder into their garments so they would burn faster. Foxe wrote of Anne:
She being born of such stock and kindred that she might have lived in great wealth and prosperity, if she would rather have followed the world than Christ…
Anne Askew chose Christ over worldly riches, for which she is immortalized. In the film, Bishop Stephen Gardiner, an intimate to the King, is the main heresy hunter who wants to crush all religious dissent and the Queen whom he believes patronizes the heretics. In the film, Catherine is arrested for her heresy and saved only by the King’s death. Historically, her arrest was sought but the King ultimately declined to allow it.
Catherine, as the film portrays, was a devoted step mother to Henry’s three children, each of whom became ruler in their turn. Young Edward was a youthful king who accelerated the kingdom’s Protestantization. Mary, the oldest, would become known as “Bloody Mary” for attempting to exterminate Protestantism, her many victims detailed by Foxe. Most importantly, there is Elizabeth, who would be queen for 45 years. The film portrays her as devoted to Catherine, appalled by her cruel father, who had killed her mother and whom she fears may kill her, and highly intelligent. She translates one of Catherine’s devotional books into several languages.
Elizabeth, as portrayed in the film, and perhaps in history, is Catherine’s greatest legacy. As queen, Elizabeth would mandate that Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which told of her father’s and half sister’s religious victims, including Anne Askew, was widely distributed. Elizabeth solidified the Church of England as broadly Protestant and mostly avoided the extremes of her father and sister, ensuring her legacy and long governance.
In contrast, Henry’s religious and political tyranny, amplified by his cruelty and paranoia, abetted by supplicants like Bishop Gardiner, are rightly disdained in the film and in history. Nostalgists for old Christendom, in which throne and crown suppress political and religious dissent, will not enjoy this story. Anne Askew, backed by her friend Queen Catherine, is a proto-liberal, demanding free speech, equality, justice and defiance of unjust authority.
The film almost certainly exaggerates Anne’s social ambitions and vision, if not her courage and faith. But it captures the restless Protestant spirit that animated her and many others who chose martyrdom over compliance. They were defending their right to read the Bible, to speak to and about God without intermediaries, and to heed their consciences. They could not have realized they were unleashing a new understanding of civilization, in which individuals could think and speak for themselves without coercion. Instruments of Providence rarely appreciate their full vocation.
Firebrand is just a movie, not reliable history. But it captures the essence of a cosmic drama that continues to unfold. Will human dignity and liberty, rooted in God’s purposes, progress? Or will tyrants and authoritarian systems impose their own self-serving alternatives? Providence will prevail, but the path is filled with martyrs.