The Poisoned Pages of a Martyr's Book

They didn’t use an assassin’s blade, but they turned a massive book into a lethal trap designed to destroy the state’s chief historian. In the early years of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, John Foxe published Acts and Monuments—famously known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs—a massive text exposing the graphic executions of Protestants under Bloody Mary. The book was so politically devastating to the Catholic counter-resistance that a plot was hatched to silence him forever. Knowing Foxe spent all his nights editing his manuscripts in a dark printing house, conspirators bribed a workshop assistant to coat the top outer corners of the heavy vellum pages with a tasteless, highly concentrated paste of arsenic and belladonna. The psychological genius of the trap relied on a common medieval habit: as Foxe turned the massive, stiff pages in the dim light, he would naturally wet his thumb with his own saliva to grip the parchment, systematically poisoning himself with every single chapter he read.

Interesting Fact The plot was only foiled because Foxe used a specialized ivory bone folder—a smooth tool used to crease and separate heavy manuscript pages—instead of his bare fingers during that specific editing session. When he noticed a strange, sticky discoloration transferring onto the clean ivory tool under his candlelight, he halted the work, saving himself from an agonized internal collapse.

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