on 25 Sept. 1558 (Nichols, p. 69). No woman suffered at all. The errors in date and christian name in the case of the man are very typical. Foxe moreover undoubtedly included among his martyrs persons executed for ordinary secular offences. He acknowledged his error in the case of John Marbeck, a Windsor ‘martyr’ of 1543 whom he represented, in his text of 1563 to have been burnt, whereas the man was condemned, but pardoned. But Foxe was often less ingenuous. He wrote that one Greenwood or Grimwood of Hitcham, near Ipswich, Suffolk, having obtained the conviction of a ‘martyr’ John Cooper, on concocted evidence, died miserably soon afterwards. Foxe was informed that Greenwood was alive and that the story of his death was a fiction. He went to Ipswich to examine witnesses, but never made any alteration in his account of the matter. At a later date (according to an obiter dictum of Coke) a clergyman named Prick recited Foxe's story about Greenwood from the pulpit of Hitcham church. Greenwood was present and proceeded against Prick for libel, but the courts held that no malicious defamation was intended (see Croke, Reports, ed. Leach, ii. 91). Foxe confessed that his story of Bishop Gardiner's death is derived from hearsay, but it is full of preposterous errors, some of which Foxe's personal knowledge must have enabled him to correct. With regard to the sketch of early church history which precedes his story of the martyrs, he undoubtedly had recourse to some early documents, especially to bishops' registers, but he depends largely on printed works like Crespin's ‘Actiones et Monimenta Martyrum,’ Geneva, 1560, or Illyricus's ‘Catalogus Testium Veritatis,’ Basle, 1556. It has been conclusively shown that his chapter on the Waldenses is directly translated from the ‘Catalogus’ of Illyricus, although Illyricus is not mentioned by Foxe among the authorities whom he acknowledges to have consulted. Foxe claims to have consulted ‘parchment documents’ on the subject, whereas he only knew them in the text of Illyricus's book. This indicates a loose notion of literary morality which justifies some of the harshest judgments passed on Foxe. In answering Alan Cope's ‘Sex Dialogi’ in the edition of 1570 he acknowledges small errors, but confesses characteristically, ‘I heare what you will saie; I should have taken more leisure and done it better. I graunt and confesse my fault; such is my vice. I cannot sit all the daie (M. Cope) fining and minsing my letters and combing my head and smoothing myself all the daie at the glasse of Cicero. Yet notwithstanding, doing what I can and doing my good will, me thinkes I should not be reprehended.’ He was a compiler on a gigantic scale, neither scrupulous nor scholarly, but appallingly industrious, and a useful witness to the temper of his age.
Dr. Maitland insisted that Foxe's name should be spelt without the final e. He himself spelt it indifferently Fox and Foxe, and latinised it sometimes as Foxus, sometimes as Foxius. His contemporaries usually write of him as Foxe.
Foxe's papers, which include many statements sent to him by correspondents in corroboration or in contradiction of his history, but never used by him, descended through his eldest son Samuel to his grandson, Thomas Foxe, and through Thomas to Thomas's daughter and sole heiress, Alice. Alice married Sir Richard Willys, created a baronet in 1646, and their son, Sir Thomas Fox Willys, died a lunatic in 1701. Strype obtained the papers shortly before that date, and when Strype died in 1737, they were purchased by Edward Harley, earl of Oxford. The majority of them now form volumes 416 to 426 and volume 590 in the Harleian collection of manuscripts at the British Museum. A few other papers are now among the Lansdowne MSS. 335, 388, 389, 819, and 1045. Strype has worked up many of these papers in his ‘Ecclesiastical Memorials,’ ‘Life of Cranmer,’ and elsewhere. An interesting selection is printed by J. G. Nichols in ‘Narratives of the Reformation’ (Camden Society, 1859).
A portrait by Glover has been often engraved. A painting by an unknown artist is in the National Portrait Gallery, and is inscribed ‘An. Dom. 1587. Ætatis suæ 70.’ There is also an engraving in Holland's ‘Herωologia,’ p. 200.
