ABSTRACT
In 1886 the Baptist author Florence Gregg published the historical novel Bartholomew Legate: the Last Smithfield Martyr. Her avowed, partisan aim in so doing was to ‘rescue from oblivion the name of an heroic man’ and to protest against what she considered the ‘bigotry and intolerance’ of both the seventeenth century and her own late-Victorian era.2 The book contains a detailed – apparently eyewitness – account of a meeting between the antitrinitarian heretic, Legate, and his sovereign James I, which is worth recounting in a little detail. According to Gregg, the encounter took place in a private chamber in one of the royal palaces. She begins by telling us that just before Legate was brought in, James ordered his chief minister, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, to remove himself from behind a screen where he had been hiding and to leave them alone. She goes on to set the scene thus:
The two men proceeded to engage in a theological discussion. James told Legate he had summoned him before him to persuade him out of his doctrinal errors and, after Legate had confessed to preaching without a licence, argued that he should submit to the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical authorities and refrain from disseminating strange and heretical notions about Christ.
