One woman who blazed a trail of defiance in the storm of England’s Reformation, wielding Scripture like a torch against Catholic and Protestant powers alike.
Joan Bocher, known as Joan of Kent, Joan Knell, or Joan Bouche, was burned at the stake on May 2, 1550, at Smithfield, London.
An Anabaptist evangelist, she wasn’t a pastor building a church but a bold voice proclaiming a faith she saw as raw and biblical.
Eclipsed by titans like Luther or Knox, Joan’s story demands attention, not just for her fiery death, but for her relentless call to a gospel open to all, freely embraced, unshackled by dogma or decree.
A Kentish Flame in a Reforming Fire
Joan’s roots lie in Kent’s misty edges, perhaps Romney Marsh, where Bocher and Knell families worked the land.
Born around 1500, she emerged as Henry VIII split from Rome, a shift that cracked open England’s religious landscape. By the 1530s, she was a fixture in Canterbury’s reforming circles, a “great reader of Scripture” among early Protestants.
But Joan didn’t settle for the Anglican pivot. She turned to Anabaptism, a radical wave from Switzerland and the Netherlands, rejecting infant baptism and state churches for a faith of personal conviction.
Her evangelistic spark flared around 1540, when she began smuggling William Tyndale’s outlawed New Testament to court ladies under Henry VIII.
Hiding books, some say under her skirts, she risked everything to spread what she saw as God’s unfiltered word. In 1543, heresy charges loomed over her views on Christ’s incarnation, but a commissary of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, and possibly Henry’s favor, spared her.
This brush with danger only fueled her. Linked to martyr Anne Askew, burned in 1546, Joan was an evangelist on the move, not a quiet conformist.
The Celestial Flesh: Joan’s Radical Gospel
Joan’s beliefs were her megaphone, and her noose. By the late 1540s, under Edward VI’s Protestant rule, she preached an Anabaptist twist: Christ’s flesh wasn’t “incarnate of the Virgin Mary” but a divine, celestial essence.
Mary’s sinful humanity, she argued, couldn’t birth the sinless Savior; the Word became flesh through a heavenly act. This wasn’t typical Anabaptism, many held orthodox views, but it echoed Dutch radicals like Melchior Hoffman, whose ideas seeped into England via exiles.
Her theology wasn’t abstract debate. It was a cry for a faith free of human systems, a gospel she shared with anyone who’d listen. Like modern provisionists, Joan saw grace as universal, not locked to the elect. John 3:16, “whoever believes”, wasn’t a riddle but an invitation.
First Timothy 2:4, “God desires all to be saved”, meant what it said, not in a predestined tease. Joan rejected the idea of limited atonement or forced salvation, she preached a God who offers and not ordains. Her evangelism was not about building a flock but opening people’s hearts with Scripture’s open call.
Arrest, Trial and Defiance
By the 1548, the voice of Jon grew too loud to ignore. Arrested under Edward VI, a boy-king guided by Protestant reformers, she faced Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, and a relentless tribunal.
They pressed her to recant for over a year, locking her in Lord Chancellor Rich’s York House as bishops pleaded. She stood firm. “She was so high in spirit that they could do nothing,” John Foxe wrote. Excommunicated by Cranmer on April 12, 1549, in St. Mary’s chapel at St. Paul’s, she was condemned by April 27, 1550.
Her execution stirred unease. Foxe begged royal chaplain John Rogers to spare “this wretched woman,” suggesting prison over fire. Rogers called burning “sufficiently mild” for heresy, a stance he’d regret when Mary I, burned him in 1555.
Edward VI, just 12, balked at her death warrant, asking Cranmer, “Will ye have me send her quick to the devil in her error?” Cranmer won out. On May 2, Joan faced the stake at Smithfield. As preacher Edward Scory sermonised, she rebuked him, claiming a thousand Anabaptists thrived in London’s diocese. Her final words were a shout of faith, not a whimper.
A British Echo of Anabaptism
Joan’s Kentish base ties her to England’s thin Anabaptist strand. Scotland forged a Presbyterian path under John Knox, but Joan found fertile ground in Kent with its Dutch immigrant links.
Her death under a Protestant king stunned reformers like Foxe, who saw it as a gospel betrayal. It highlighted Anabaptism’s price, Joan was England’s first native Anabaptist martyr, a lone evangelist in a land lurching toward uniformity.
Legacy: A Spark Unquenched
Joan left no writings, no church, just her witness. Her death prompted Edmund Becke’s A Brefe Confutacion (1550) to counter her “detestable opinion,” but it kept her name alive.
Later Baptists, like those at Eythorne in Kent, hailed her as a forerunner, though proof is slim. Her true mark is her evangelism: a woman of humble roots who challenged kings and bishops with a faith she saw as biblical, not boxed.
For those drawn to provisionism, where grace is a gift for all, taken by choice, Joan’s echo resonates. Her stand against a limited, coerced salvation mirrors Anabaptist giants like Balthasar Hubmaier, a call to peel faith back to its roots.
She didn’t win her day, but she lit a fire. In Kent’s marshes, Canterbury’s lanes, and Smithfield’s embers, Joan Bocher stands as an evangelist worth reclaiming, a voice for an unbound gospel.
References
Becke, Edmund. A Brefe Confutacion of this Most Detestable Opinion. 1550.
Estep, William R. The Anabaptist Story. Eerdmans, 1996.
Foxe, John. Acts and Monuments. Hendrickson Publishers, 2004.
Loades, David. The Reign of Edward VI. Bangor University Press, 1994.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. The Reformation. Penguin Books, 2005.
Pettegree, Andrew. Marian Protestantism. Scolar Press, 1996.
Verduin, Leonard. The Reformers and Their Stepchildren. The Baptist Standard Bearer, 2001.
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