Derby Cathedral

The Cathedral Church of All Saints at Derby in Derbyshire is a grand and imposing structure, and full of surprise. Its tall, late medieval tower (1520s-30s, actually) is attached to an obviously Georgian nave and chancel. One enters the eighteenth-century via the sixteenth. The interior boasts those typical, elegant white columns and the neatly carved faces of cherubs, as well as a wrought iron chancel screen.

Two notable women of the sixteenth century have connections to All Saints’. The first, and most famous, is Bess of Hardwick, better known after her fourth marriage as Elizabath Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury. She was the richest woman in England after Elizabath I, and one can still buy biographies of her, many of which are sold in the Derbyshire properties which maintain an association with her, chiefly Hardwick Hall and Chatsworth. The ancestress of dukes, earls, kings and queens (including His present Majesty), her elegant tomb dating prior to her death in 1608 shows her as a grand old lady, lying in state, bedecked in ermine and her countess’s coronet. Bess was certainly a Protestant, but like her royal mistress, her personal commitment to saving faith is ambiguous.

In contrast, the other woman is poor Joan Waste, a blind teenager, who was tried for her life in this church at the time of Bloody Queen Mary (1553–1558), Elizabeth's elder half-sister. For refusing to renounce her evangelical doctrine, she was taken from the church and burned to death on Derby’s Burton Road. Although a blue plaque was erected in her memory elsewhere in the city, the grand cathedral, the place of her public condemnation, bears no record of this dreadful act and the beginning of her martyrdom for Jesus Christ. She has no tomb or even burial, for her ashes will have blown away in the wind. Yet it is better to be a humble, toasted follower of Jesus Christ than the richest noblewoman in England, if without Jesus you live and die.

And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, Lord, which art holy and true! dost not thou judge and avenge our blood on them, that dwell on the earth? Revelation 6:10, Geneva Bible