Edmund Bonner (also Boner;^[2] c. 1500 – 5 September 1569) was Bishop of London from 1539 to 1549 and again from 1553 to 1559. Initially an instrumental figure in the schism of Henry VIII from Rome, he was antagonised by the Protestant reforms introduced by the Duke of Somerset and reconciled himself to Catholicism. He became notorious as "Bloody Bonner" for his role in the persecution of heretics under the Catholic government of Mary I of England, and ended his life as a prisoner under Queen Elizabeth I.

Bonner was the son of Elizabeth Frodsham, who was married to Edmund Bonner, a sawyer of Hanley, Worcestershire. John Strype printed an account, with many circumstantial details, stating that Bonner was the natural son of George Savage (and therefore grandson of Sir John Savage and great-nephew of Thomas Savage who had also served as Bishop of London, before he became Archbishop of York), rector of Davenham, Cheshire, and that his mother married Bonner only after the future bishop's birth.^[3] This account was disputed by Strype's contemporary, Sir Edmund Lechmere, who asserted that Bonner was of legitimate birth.^[4][5]

He was educated at Broadgates Hall, now Pembroke College, Oxford, graduating bachelor of civil and canon law in June 1519. He was ordained about the same time and admitted doctor of civil law (DCL) in 1525.^[6][5]

In 1529 he was Cardinal Thomas Wolsey's chaplain, which brought him to the notice of the king and Thomas Cromwell. After the fall of Wolsey he remained faithful to him and was with him at the time of his arrest at Cawood and death at Leicester in 1530. Subsequently, he was transferred, perhaps through Cromwell's influence, to the service of the king, and in January 1532 he was sent to Rome as the king's agent when the question of the king's divorce was raised. There he sought to obstruct the judicial proceedings against Henry in the papal curia.^[5]

In October 1533 he was entrusted with the task of suggesting to Clement VII (while he was the guest of Francis I at Marseille) Henry's appeal from the pope to a general council; but there seems to be no good authority for Gilbert Burnet's story that Clement threatened to have him burnt alive. For these and other services Bonner had been rewarded by successive grants of the livings of Cherry Burton (Yorkshire), Ripple (Worcestershire), Blaydon (County Durham), and East Dereham (Norfolk). He was rector of Uppingham (Rutland), 1528–1541 and, in 1535, he was made Archdeacon of Leicester.^[5]

During the following years he was much employed on important embassies in the king's interests, first to the pope to appeal against the excommunication pronounced in July 1533, afterwards to the Emperor to dissuade him from attending the general council which the pope wished to summon at Vicenza. Towards the end of 1535 he was sent to further what he called "the cause of the Gospel" (Letters and Papers, 1536, No. 469) in North Germany; and in 1536 he wrote a preface to Stephen Gardiner's De vera Obedientia, which asserted the royal and denied the papal supremacy, and was received with delight by the Lutherans. After a brief embassy to the Emperor in the spring of 1538, Bonner succeeded Gardiner as ambassador to the French Court in Paris. In this capacity he proved capable and successful, though irritation was frequently caused by his overbearing and dictatorial manner. He began his mission by sending Cromwell a long list of accusations against his predecessor. He was almost as bitter against Wyatt and Mason, whom he denounced as a "papist", and the violence of his conduct led Francis I to threaten him with a hundred strokes of the halberd. He seems, however, to have pleased his patron, Cromwell, and perhaps Henry, by his energy in seeing the king's Great Bible in English through the press in Paris. He was already king's chaplain; his appointment at Paris had been accompanied by promotion to the See of Hereford (27 November 1538) but owing to his absence he could neither be consecrated nor take possession of his see, and he was still abroad when he was translated to the Bishopric of London (October 1539).^[5] Bonner returned to England and was consecrated 4 April 1540.

Hitherto Bonner had possessed a reputation as a somewhat coarse and unscrupulous tool of Cromwell – a sort of ecclesiastical Thomas Wriothesley, he is not known to have protested against any of the changes effected by his masters; he professed to be no theologian, and was in the habit, when asked technical questions, to refer his interrogators to the theologians. He had graduated in law, and not in theology. There was nothing in the Reformation to appeal to him, except the repudiation of papal control; and he was one of those numerous Englishmen whose views were faithfully reflected in Henry's Act of the Six Articles.^[5] Indeed, almost his first duty as Bishop of London was to try heretics under these articles; accusations of excessive cruelty and bias against the accused were spread broadcast by his enemies, and from the first he seems to have been unpopular in London. He became a staunch conservative. During the years 1542-43 he was again abroad in Spain and Germany as ambassador to the emperor, at the end of which time he returned to London.

The death of the king on 28 January 1547, proved the turning point in Bonner's career. Hitherto he had shown himself entirely subservient to the sovereign, supporting him in the matter of the divorce, approving of the suppression of the religious houses and taking the oath of Supremacy which John Fisher and Thomas More refused at the cost of their lives. However, while accepting the schism from Rome, he had always resisted the Reformers' innovations and held to the doctrines of the old religion.

Therefore, from the first he put himself in opposition to the religious changes introduced by Protector Somerset and Archbishop Cranmer. Bonner began to doubt that supremacy when he saw to what uses it could be put by a Protestant council, and either he or Gardiner evolved the theory that the royal supremacy was in abeyance (undetermined) during a royal minority. The ground was skillfully chosen, but it was not legally nor constitutionally tenable. Both he and Gardiner had in fact sought fresh licences to exercise their ecclesiastical jurisdiction from the young king Edward VI; and, if he was supreme enough to confer jurisdiction, he was supreme enough to issue the injunctions and order the visitation to which Bonner objected. It was on this question that he came into conflict with Edward's government.^[5]

After the death of Mary, Elizabeth succeeded to the throne. The Council ordered him to resign the bishopric, which he refused to do, adding that he preferred death. He was sent again to the Marshalsea prison on 20 April 1560. During the next two years representatives of the Protestant party frequently clamoured for the execution of Bonner and the other imprisoned bishops. When the Parliament of 1563 met, a new Act was passed by which the first refusal of the oath of royal supremacy was praemunire, the second, high treason. The bishops had refused the oath once, so that by this Act, which became law on 10 April 1563, their next refusal of the oath might be followed by their death.^{[citation needed]} Thanks to the intervention of the Spanish ambassador, action against the bishops was delayed; but a year later, on 29 April 1564, Bonner was indicted on a charge of praemunire on refusing the oath when tendered him by his diocesan, Bishop Horne of Winchester. He challenged the legality of Horne's consecration, and a special act of parliament was passed to meet the point, while the charge against Bonner was withdrawn.^[8] Four times a year for three years he was forced to appear in the courts at Westminster only to be further remanded. The last of these appearances took place in the Michaelmas term of 1568, so the last year of the bishop's life was spent in prison. His demeanour during his long imprisonment was remarkable for his cheerfulness, and even John Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, describes him in a letter as "a most courteous man and gentlemanly both in his manners and appearance" (Zurich Letters, I, 34).

Bonner never tired of trying to convert others to Catholicism, and never expressed regret over his actions under Queen Mary. Bishop Jewel, in a letter to Peter Martyr Vermigli, related that "Being confined to the tower of London upon accession of Queen Elizabeth, the highest punishment inflicted, he went to visit some of the criminals kept in that prison, and wishing to encourage them, called them his friends and neighbors." Bonner died in the Marshalsea on 5 September 1569, and was buried in St George's, Southwark, secretly at midnight to avoid the risk of a hostile demonstration.

This section relies largely or entirely on a single source. (June 2017)

Contemporary Catholic writers attributed to Bonner and the other bishops who died in prison the honour of martyrdom: in vinculis obierunt martyres. On the walls of the English College, Rome, an inscription recording the deaths of eleven bishops, but without naming them, found a place among the paintings of the martyrs. Bonner was attacked during life with a rare hatred which has followed him into the grave, so that in English history few names have been so execrated and vilified as his.

A more charitable assessment of Bonner's character was made by an Anglican historian, S. R. Maitland, who considers him,

"... a man, straightforward and hearty, familiar and humorous, sometimes rough, perhaps coarse, naturally hot tempered, but obviously (by the testimony of his enemies) placable and easily entreated, capable of bearing most patiently much intemperate and insolent language, much reviling and low abuse directed against himself personally, against his order, and against those peculiar doctrines and practices of his church for maintaining which he had himself suffered the loss of all things, and borne long imprisonment. [...] In short, we can scarcely read with attention any one of the cases detailed by those who were no friends of Bonner, without seeing in him a judge who (even if we grant that he was dispensing bad laws badly) was obviously desirous to save the prisoner's life."

This verdict was generally followed by later historians. Lord Acton in the Cambridge Modern History (1904) argued: "The number of those put to death in his diocese of London was undoubtedly disproportionately large, but this would seem to have been more the result of the strength of the reforming element in the capital and in Essex than of the employment of exceptional rigour; while the evidence also shows that he himself patiently dealt with many of the Protestants, and did his best to induce them to renounce what he conscientiously believed to be their errors."^[9]

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Tregear Homilies

Twelve of Bonner's Homelies to be read within his diocese of London of all Parsons, vycars and curates (1555; nine of these were by John Harpsfield) were translated into the Cornish language by John Tregear, and are now the largest single work of traditional Cornish prose.

• Bonner Street, Bethnal Green, East London
• Bonner Hall Bridge, Regent's Canal
• Bonner Road, Bethnal Green, East London
• Bonner Primary School, Stainsbury Street E2