2

Religious Noise

The rise of the sixth James of Scotland to the first James of England brought Calvinist Scots, Irish Catholics, and English Protestants uncomfortably under the same rule. The Protestants had their own jarring sects, which Bentivoglio summarized for the Vatican soon after James had ascended the English throne. Though a papal nuncio, Bentivoglio did not admire Rome’s slavish adherence to the doctrines of Trent and drew up a fair assessment of the religious scene in England.¹ He judged that the Protestants or Anglocalvinisti, who dominated parliament, were less fanatical than the fewer Calvinists who followed Geneva (puri Calvinisti or Puritans). He reported that the two sects agreed in dogma but differed over governance and liturgy. The Protestants retained ecclesiastical offices, most of the old liturgy, and the king as head of their religion. The Puritans rejected the hierarchy, the liturgy, and, as religious leader, the king.²

Bentivoglio rated James a convinced heretic with a ridiculous addiction to religious controversy that exposed him to dangerous flattery. Queen Anna is a Catholic and proves it by not attending Protestant services, but (in Bentivoglio’s opinion) her love of entertainments and amusements, and her facile and changeable character, leave the question of her religion open. Their first born, Henry, Prince of Wales, gives signs of being a vehement heretic. The greatest nobles are openly or covertly Catholic, the rest mostly Protestant. The middling nobility contains a large component of Puritans, the lower classes a greater, the city plebs more yet. Lower-class Catholics live in the country. The open Catholics and those protected by the great lords amount to around a thirtieth of the population. Subtracting them, crypto-Catholics, and indifferent believers, Bentivoglio estimated the number of devoted heretics at about a fifth of the English population.³

Continuing his report, Bentivoglio observed that the papal agent in England, Archpriest George Blackwell, supervised clergy trained at St Omer (run by the Jesuits) and at Douai (seculars), quasi-military establishments “where spiritual soldiers learn their discipline.” When on mission, they make war on one another, particularly over the Oath of Allegiance. And no doubt the oath was offensive, particularly the unnecessarily obnoxious clause, “I do abhorre, detest and abjure as impious and Hereticall this damnable doctrine and position, That Princes can be excommunicated or deprived by the Pope, [and] may be deposed or murthered by their Subjects.” Nonetheless, Archpriest Blackwell took the oath.⁴ So did many “church papists,” as the godly called Catholics who obeyed the Elizabethan statute requiring attendance at the parish church on Sundays and feast days. Dissembling church papists might escape recusancy fines and preserve their inheritances, “wear[ing] the maske of the Gospel…to save…charges.”⁵

From the safety of the Spanish Netherlands, Bentivoglio advised Rome not to tolerate the stratagems of church papists. Despite fines and forfeitures, the faith seemed to be strengthening in England. “And as fire is more intense the more enclosed it is, so the zeal of the Catholics of this reign is the more enflamed and invigorated the greater the obstacles they have encountered in not being allowed to practice and proselytize openly.”⁶ James would vacillate capriciously over imposition of the penalties for refusing the oath, whereas the war between the Jesuits and the seculars continued dependably to divide the Catholic community in Britain.⁷

James’s Polyphony

James’s first act on entering England in 1603 was to attend a sermon. The preacher, Tobie Matthew senior, then Bishop of Durham, advised James to accept English civil and religious life as he found it. Ignoring the advice, James doubled the number of weekly sermons.⁸ Since the godly preferred sermons to prayers, they took hope from his addiction and petitioned him to enforce observance of the Sabbath, elimination of pluralism, and abolition of popish ceremonies, vestments, and terminology. James invited them to send four of their party to a conference at Hampton Court in 1604 to dispute with a force of eight bishops commanded by the Archbishop of Canterbury. James found against them, not unexpectedly, since Basilikon doron condemns Puritans as “verie pestes in the Church and Common-Weale.” Blunting the blow, James agreed to diminish pluralism, commission a new translation of the Bible, and appoint the Calvinists Tobie Matthew and George Abbot as archbishops. Matthew went to York in 1606, Abbot to Canterbury in 1611.⁹

James balanced his religious books by accepting most sorts of non-Puritan Protestantism. Although his archbishops were Calvinists, his favorite preacher, Lancelot Andrewes, opposed them; and when he ordered up a sextet of sermonizers in 1609, three were pro- and three anti-Calvinist.¹⁰ Among the latter was Maurice William’s patron, the future Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. James’s brother-in-law, King Christian IV of Denmark, brought in another variety of Protestantism, Lutheranism, to which James had to attend as claimant to the international leadership of reformed religion. His management of the discord among the factions represented by Abbot, Matthew, Andrewes, and Christian gave him the confidence, and Protestants at home and abroad the impression, that he was a natural leader; while his knowledge of theology and toleration of Catholics who took the oath recommended him to those who, like the Catholic De Dominis and the Lutheran Kepler, believed in the possibility of a reunited Christian church.¹¹

Royal Religion

The key to forbearance was to set aside beliefs and practices of the several Christian sects irrelevant to such core doctrines as the Trinity and Incarnation. “Our appeal is to antiquity,” Andrewes said in explaining his master’s message, “we do not innovate…we renovate.”¹² The explanation itself was hardly innovative. Justification of every significant change as a return to sound past practice was a bromide of political and social discourse; “in reforming thinges of common practice, the cleering of the olde, which is abused, and not the breeding of the new, which is untried, is the natural amendment.” So thought the Master of the Rolls, Sir Julius Caesar. Acting accordingly, one of Sir Julius’s underlings recommended denying an otherwise acceptable petition because, “as from all novelties and inventions so from this, many mischiefs and inconveniences may arise.”¹³

James’s doctrine that Christians of various sects might live in harmony if they ignored small variations and indifferent practices disagreed with the general view that the most stable states tolerated only a single religion. Here Oligarchic Venice—impossibly stable yet innovative, quasi-tolerant yet Catholic—was a puzzle. James followed its fortunes closely. Take the time when, ignoring Basilikon doron’s warning, “be warre of Drunkenesse, which is a beastlie vice,” James and his good brother Christian were outperforming seasoned courtiers “overwhelmed…[with] women, and indeed wine too,”¹⁴ and the Venetian ambassador asked for an audience to discuss the papal interdict. It was not a convenient time. A tipsy Christian, playing the part of Solomon in a court masque, had tripped over a naked drunken Queen of Sheba, and had to be carried to bed.¹⁵ These divine rites completed, the monarchs were as “abstemious…[as] the severest Italian” when they admitted the ambassador.¹⁶

James exhibited a “profound knowledge of [Venetian] history” and a willingness to assist Venice, “with all my heart;” as for his arms, he reserved them (the ambassador reported in disgust) for hunting.¹⁷ Ignoring James’s instructions to encourage but not promise, Wotton offered the Venetians armed intervention if necessary and a league with Protestant powers against the pope.¹⁸ In justifying his misbehavior, he invoked an astrological metaphor: the meeting of the two kings in England at a crucial time for Venice had the look of a portent. “I see when Kings meet, it occasioneth as much discourse among politiques, as amongst astrologers at the conjunction of stars.”¹⁹ The starry message as usual was open to interpretation: Christian thought the situation ripe for a threat of armed intervention.²⁰ Fortunately none was required and James gained in reputation as a Protestant leader wise enough to overlook the adiaphora of his allies.

Bentivoglio’s report on religion in England had a coda about Christian. He was a dangerous man for Rome, violent and warlike, and yet possessed of an intellect and energy scarcely seen in Denmark, “so that it is a puzzle how he could have been born in such a cold and indolent place.”²¹ He speaks many languages, including Latin, wherein he converses with his ally James; but, despite this refinement, he and his quasi-independent nobles are fierce Lutherans. Christian will not allow even moderate Calvinism in his domains, although James, his great friend, presses him to do so.²²

To help him find a theological position that might minimize the disharmony among the Protestant sects, James convened a virtual academy similar to the company that created the King James Bible. More than one scholar worked on both projects. The first leader of this virtual academy and also the main figure in the translation was Bishop Andrewes. He had moved around the religious landscape, from a place close to Puritanism with respect to images, Sabbaths, and predestination to a place not far from Rome with respect to liturgy, the episcopate, and good works.²³ Despite his anti-Calvinist positions, Andrewes enjoyed James’s favor for the dexterity of his sermons and the strength of his championship of royal authority. Since Sir John Bankes also favored Andrewes, we must sample the flavor of his sermons.

A few months after the assassination of Henri IV, Andrews interpreted the apposite text nolite tangere christos meos, which James’s Bible made “touch not mine anointed” (1 Chron. 16:22), as the Lord’s instruction not to interfere with princes. “Allegiance is not due to him because he is vertuous, religious, or wise, but because he is Christus Domini.” No one, not even the pope, can remove a bad prince without violating divine commandment.²⁴ Andrewes extended this prohibition to attacks by voice and by pen, and to royal families, estates, and states; “not one of them is to be touched.” Even to will “touching” the sovereign is a crime, whether by a seditious thought or a Gunpowder Plot. God had saved the king from that heinous conspiracy, and Andrewes too, for James had made him a bishop on the eve of the attempt, and he would have been blown up with the Lords.²⁵ It does not follow, however, that because God delivered us from the powder men He has freed us from responsibilities for our actions. God has not arranged every little detail, as the Calvinists proclaim; “there is somewhat belongs to our part,” for instance, vigilance against touchers of the King’s Majesty. They can do damage before they receive the exquisite “touches of the place whither (being unrepentant) they must needes goe.”²⁶

With this teaching Andrewes fell in with the most uncompromising champions of divine right, like Abbot’s former chaplain Richard Mocket, risen, in 1614, to Warden of All Souls, Oxford. The warden proved, from many passages in the Old Testament and the New, that nothing, not infidelity, apostasy, or despotism, can dissolve the bond between a king and his people. All the people can do is to repent the sins that brought the tyrant over them, pray to God to correct him, and look forward to the Last Judgment.²⁷ In theology, however, Andrewes drifted far from the Mockets. He preferred a brand of Protestantism known under the awkward name of its main exponent, Professor Jacobus Arminius, who died in harness at the University of Leyden in 1609.

Although Arminianism agreed with his political theology in its rejection of extreme Calvinist doctrines of grace, James worried that the noisy antagonisms it inspired among Dutch Calvinists would counter his efforts to keep peace among Protestants worldwide. To root out Arminius’s doctrine at its source, James demanded the ouster of Arminius’s disciple and successor, Conrad Vorstius, for “monstrous…horrible…abominable” vices, one of which, “licencious libertie of disputing,” James shared with his victim; and he ordered Vorstius’s books burnt in London, Oxford, and Cambridge.²⁸ What more could he do? He consulted Sarpi; wise Fra Paolo advised him to seek some other amusement. But James persisted in regarding disturbances in the Dutch church as inimical to ecumenism and hired a former student of the Jesuits, George Eglisham, then (1612) pushing potable gold as a cure-all for folks who did not require a licensed physician, to annihilate Vorstius.²⁹ The semi-Jesuit quasi-quack overkilled Vorstius for his “Atheism, Paganism, Judaism, Turcism, Heresy, Schism, and Ignorance.”³⁰ The poor man never recovered his chair and lived to see his master’s teachings damned in 1619 by the Conclave of Dordrecht, or Synod of Dort, a sort of Calvinist Trent. James liked the damnation of Dort, as did Sarpi, on the theory that it would unify opposition to Rome. Andrewes thought that mutual forbearance was the better strategy and worked hard to blunt attacks on Arminianism.³¹

James responded to his growing theological difficulties by ordering an end to public discussion of divisive doctrines, much as Paul V did in silencing Galileo; with the significant difference, however, that, whereas the king outlawed disputes but not opinions, the pope prohibited a single opinion but not disputes. James could not live without disputing, however, and, ignoring his ban, allowed an attack on Puritanism. The attacker, Richard Montagu, voiced the scandalous opinion that the Church of England accepted Tridentine teachings on justification by faith and the merits of good works. Attacked by Archbishop Abbot, defended by Bishop Andrewes, and encouraged by a weakening king, Montagu indicated the direction of motion of the English Church.³²

Andrewes put up several more signposts. A prime example is his Easter sermon of 1620, another touching performance, based on Jesus’s words to Mary Magdalene, Noli me tangere, “touch me not” (John 20: 11–17). Mary at first mistook the risen Christ for a gardener and recognized him only when he spoke. Two disciples who did not recognize his voice identified him by his manner of breaking and blessing bread at dinner (Luke 24: 30–1). It is folly, Andrewes inferred, to set the word, that is, preaching, against the sacraments, as Puritans do, “seeing we have both, both are ready for us…thank Him for both, make use of both, having now done with one…make use of the other.” “It may be (who knows) if the one does not work, the other may.”³³ A unique preacher, Andrewes, in calling for curtailing preaching!

Despite his Arminian views, liturgical preferences, confrontational style, and muted enthusiasm for sermons, James appointed Andrewes Dean of the Royal Chapel. That was in 1619. The new dean immediately refitted most royal chapels for services in the old Catholic manner and purged the royal household of its Puritan chaplains.³⁴ He was bold enough to reprimand James for demanding that, regardless of the place the service had reached when he entered church, the sermon should thereupon begin.³⁵ Thus did Andrewes and his allies purify ritual and prepare the way for Laud, who, as co-editor of ninety-six of Andrewes’s sermons, confirmed the connection. Laudians expected that temperate preaching, solemn liturgy, and clerical leadership would “preserve truth and peace together,” and assure the proper relation of inferior to superior.³⁶

Andrewes was charitable to others and, charity beginning at home, kept a good table for himself. It is worth recording for those who can profit from it that he mastered the ancient languages by declining and conjugating them while he walked back and forth between Cambridge and London. He also knew a dozen modern languages, picked up in his youth from foreign friends of his merchant-sailor father, and Arabic, from a professional teacher of “oriental” tongues. Good cheer, good health, and polyglot reading made “his Sermons…inimitable, his writings…unanswerable.”³⁷ Sir John Bankes studied them carefully.

Bankes’s Religion

The future Attorney General and Chief Justice grew up in Keswick in Cumberland, where he was buffeted by wind from several pulpits. Catholicism loomed large in the north, and the old ceremonies lingered in Protestant churches. Perhaps the extended Bankes family included recusants, if Christopher Bankes, who entered the English College in Rome in 1642, was the relative he claimed to be.³⁸ Even zealous Archbishop Sandys had not been able to eradicate the old ways in his archdiocese and he had left it at his death in 1588 more exposed to recusancy and more crowded with crosses than he had found it. Ten years later the newly appointed Bishop of Carlisle, Henry Robinson, whose diocese included Cumberland, recorded his surprise at the extent and stubbornness of recusancy, the prevalence of unreformed liturgy, the ignorance of the clergy, and the lawlessness of the Scottish borderlands.³⁹ To combat the last of these evils he made common cause with the chief enforcer of border order, the Catholic Lord William Howard, who would be a major patron of Bankes. To combat the other disgraces, Robinson brought in sound new preachers from the south. Many came from Queen’s College, Oxford, which Robinson had headed for seventeen years before his elevation to the episcopate in 1598. He had the reputation of a strong preacher and a good administrator.⁴⁰

One of Robinson’s recruits from Queen’s was his brother Giles, whom he installed as vicar of Keswick’s parish church, St Kentigern in Crosswaithe, where John Bankes was born in 1589.⁴¹ Among those Vicar Giles tried to draw to his church was a large community of German miners, many of whom, however, preferred the Lutheran preacher Queen Elizabeth had allowed them to import. The Bankes family had close ties to nonconformist miners forged by Bankes’s merchant father, also named John, a relationship later cemented by the marriage of Bankes’s only sibling, his sister Joyce, into their leading family.⁴²

These were not ordinary miners. They possessed “no lesse judgment than industry in sundry excellent and choice experiments,” which, together with their relative civility, qualified them as exemplary in a popular manual for the making of English gentlemen.⁴³ The Bankes family had some mining interests themselves, and later John Bankes owned graphite deposits around Keswick that gave him a monopolistic, if not an artistic, interest in black-lead drawing.⁴⁴ Mining was never far from the noses and minds of the citizens of Keswick. Smoke from the smelters and lawsuits between Germans and locals over land, water, and timber insured it. The German community in Keswick showed young John not only variety in religion and power in technology, but also the merits of foreigners, diligence, and the common law.

Cumberland boys who studied in Oxford did so at Queen’s. Bankes entered in 1605 into the nourishing environment Robinson had created as provost: a godly Protestantism that accepted bishops and did not automatically disdain more liberal viewpoints. Not only was the religious tone of Queen’s familiar; Bankes also found at least one of his relatives there, his brother-in-law, David Heckstetter, who had left mining and Lutheranism and become a fellow of the college.⁴⁵ Despite these comforts, Bankes stayed only two years in Oxford. Thence he proceeded to Gray’s Inn to prepare for a legal career. That did not shield him from Bishop Robinson, who had joined Gray’s four years earlier.

The bishop had not come to learn the law but to participate in the inn’s social life. The Inns of Court then were much like Oxbridge colleges, places of miscellaneous learning and entertainment, “the noblest nursuries of humanity and liberty,” according to Ben Jonson, who supplied some of their merriment. If not noble, at least they were gentlemanly, since, by order of King James, only men so qualified could be members. The inns also offered prolonged thorny study for those who intended to earn their living by the law. These plodders were not in the majority. Like the colleges, the inns housed many young men who did not pursue degrees; almost 90 percent of those admitted sought only knowledge useful for running the estates they would inherit. They kept the inns lively and helped pay for entertainments on a royal scale. Christmas feasts at a single inn could cost £2,000 or more, over twenty times the yearly earnings of a superior artisan in London.⁴⁶ There were a few at Gray’s who by brilliance or birthright spent much of their time playing and yet became successful lawyers. An example, whose career ran parallel and character counter to Bankes’s, was John Finch, who entered Gray’s six years before Bankes and would proceed him by the same interval in climbing the ladder of the law.

Formal instruction at the inns was in the hands of readers (instructors) and benchers (seniors), about twenty in all, and barristers (alumni in legal practice), perhaps sixty. The standard career required seven or eight years of residence at an inn to barrister and twenty-five years to bencher and reader. In keeping with this schedule, Bankes was called to the bar in 1614 and became reader in 1630–1. He held the highest office at Gray’s Inn, Treasurer, from 1631 to 1636. He thus was in command when the Crown threatened inn mates who feasted on flesh during Lent with a punishment suitable to “the haynousnesse of soe high a contempt.”⁴⁷ From ordinary barrister, a chosen few might rise to serjeant-at-law after nomination by the Chief Justice of Common Pleas and examination by the existing serjeants. At every promotion the lucky candidate had to give his inn a feast. Readers’ revels could cost £1,000 for the three-week term. The honor of serjeancy could be ruinous. In addition to the cost of the feast, the new man had to make a contribution to the king, some £600 in 1623, and give presents, including gold rings and livery, to administrative officers and Crown servants, and all the nobles and Members of Parliament present at the revel.⁴⁸

Bankes became a serjeant in 1641. He had ascended owing to his “extraordinary discipline in his profession, his grave appearance, and excellent reputation,” his “great abilities and unblemished integrity,” and, no doubt, his generosity in feasting; in short, “an uncorrupted lawyer ǀ Virtue’s great miracle.”⁴⁹ He had pursued a parallel course of teaching and practicing before taking up his readership at Gray’s Inn. His lectures there extolled common law, “the common ancestor to all laws,”⁵⁰ and thus senior to the codes followed in civil, maritime, ecclesiastical, and prerogative courts. It was a proposition he often asserted when serving in Parliament. How he deployed it then against the Crown will appear in its place; here it is enough to know that he owed his parliamentary career to the Howards. The connection probably arose through Lord William’s need for a good lawyer familiar with Cumberland to help with business associated with his castle at Naworth some 35 miles from Keswick. Evidence of their business connection comes from Howard’s ledgers, which also support the guess that Bankes’s annual income around 1620 amounted perhaps to £500.⁵¹

The lord and the lawyer got on well, since Catholic William had a Protestant work ethic, and, as we know, strove to introduce something like law and order into the borderlands.

[William] Howard, than whom knight

Was never dubbed, more bold in fight

Now, when from war and armour free

More famed for stately courtesy,

had occasion for continuing legal advice, since, to the annoyance of local JPs, he insisted on proceeding in accordance with the law. When his business brought him to London and the house of his nephew, the Earl of Arundel, he enjoyed the company of the learned, for Lord William was also a fair scholar, an exemplary antiquarian, and a book collector. One of his last acquisitions was Sarpi’s Trent in its third edition, published in 1640, the year of Lord William’s death. It joined a library of Catholic devotional works and some diatribes of De Dominis, an assortment consistent with William’s anti-Roman Catholicism.⁵² We may take him as representative of the vast majority of James’s loyal wealthy Catholic subjects. James protected him from the recusancy laws, and he protected other Catholics from the king.⁵³

When he acted for Lord William, Bankes probably already inclined towards Arminianism. We might imagine him early in his practice as the briefless lawyer in one of John Harington’s epigrams:

I met a lawyer at the Court this Lent

And asking what great cause him thither sent

He said, that mou’d with Doctor Androes fame

To hear him preach, he only thither came.⁵⁴

Later Bankes copied out notes of Andrewes’s sermons.⁵⁵ Further evidence of Bankes’s religious position derives from his connection with Laud, who considered him an ally in the reform of the church and also of Oxford, to whose statutes he invited Bankes to add “beneficiall clauses as you shall thinke fitt.” Since the archbishop entertained Bankes at Lambeth Palace, it appears that their connection was social as well as political. A complaint by a Puritan accused of possessing libelous books confirms the conjecture that, soon after joining the government, if not before, Bankes had abandoned whatever Calvinist commitments he might have taken on in Keswick. “Mr Attorney, who hath ever been esteemed a religious and godly gentleman…is now very violent against maintayners of the truth.”⁵⁶

The vicar of St Bartholomew the Less, William Hall, gives further insight into Bankes’s religious–political standing in a dedication to him of a thoroughly Laudian sermon on the power of rulers and magistrates and the duty of the people.⁵⁷ A snippet of conversation between Bankes and Richard Sibbes, the popular moderate Puritan preacher of Gray’s Inn, allows a similar inference. Sibbes complained often about Laud’s insistence on ceremony and hierarchy.⁵⁸ Bankes advised him to stick more closely to his texts. “A good Textuary is a good lawyer as well as a good Divine.”⁵⁹ Explain the writ, squeeze it dry in the manner of Andrewes and the men of Gray’s Inn, and accept the outward forms of worship.

In the Royal Bed

James saw himself as a conciliator of religious differences not only among Protestants but also between them and Catholics. To prove his sincerity and fish for an ample dowry, he sought a dynastic connection with a Catholic state. Since he had pledged his daughter Elizabeth, born in 1596, to a rising Protestant leader, Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate, Henry, Prince of Wales, would have to wed a papist. In 1610, Henry then being 16, Wotton proposed the delightful, attractive, demure, and circumspect daughter of Carlo Emanuele II, Duke of Savoy, for the position; though small, Savoy had the important value of controlling strategic Alpine passes. Other Catholic powers with spare daughters then entered the bidding. The Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II, wooed Henry with wine and salami, bronzes and paintings, and the promise of one of his sisters. Marie de’ Medici, as regent of France, offered her daughter Christine, who, however, was only 4, and came with a dowry proportional to her size.⁶⁰ The Spanish hinted at a double marriage should Elizabeth jilt Frederick: Philip III for her, one of his sisters for Henry. Queen Anna plumped for Spain or Tuscany, and, to even the playing field, English Catholics promised a dowry for the Princess of Savoy.⁶¹

When Prince Henry’s sudden death in the fall of 1612 removed the threat of the great heretical prince, the Spanish lost interest in matching with England.⁶² The Italian states pursued the new Prince of Wales. Wotton went in great state to Savoy to negotiate a bride for “Baby Charles,” then 12, and a dowry James could accept. Carlo Emanuele could not afford it. Cosimo could. Hoping that Henry’s death might cause James to reconsider Elizabeth’s betrothal, he offered her his brother Francesco, Charles their younger sister Maria, and James a million gold scudi. The grand duke required of the king only that he grant Maria freedom of worship, stop molesting English Catholics, and give Elizabeth Ireland as a dowry.⁶³ Despite these advantages and against Queen Anna’s wishes, James married Elizabeth to Frederick.

Spanish Try

It remained to find a Catholic mate for Charles. Against the odds, James raised his game to Spain. This time he had his queen’s support.⁶⁴ Not so his brother-in-law’s. News of a union of England and Spain brought Uncle Christian angrily back to London.⁶⁵ He did not succeed in changing James’s mind. Still the kings managed a little royal sport, to the tune of £50,000. “The two monarchs were guilty of great intemperance, the Dane being addicted to drunkenness, to which James had not the least objection.”⁶⁶ It was not, however, the sort of behavior a well-bred Spanish princess would approve. As a better guide to capturing an infanta, James had the wheedling advice of the clever ambassador of Spain, the Count of Gondomar.

Gondomar deftly exploited James’s self-image as a peacemaker to keep him from mobilizing European Protestantism, entangled him in cobwebs over terms of the proposed marriage, and sympathized with his need for the money that a large Spanish dowry for Prince Charles would assuage. It is said that “Machiavellian” became a common term in English because of its frequent application to the Conde de Gondomar. The king and the count became close. When Gondomar left London for a brief visit home, James gave him as going-away presents the release of 100 imprisoned Catholic priests and the head of Sir Walter Raleigh.⁶⁷

A Spanish match became all the more desirable in James’s eyes after Habsburg armies dispossessed his daughter Elizabeth, then (in 1620) the Queen of Bohemia. She had risen to royalty when Frederick foolishly accepted the Bohemian crown from Protestant burgers who had no right to offer it. James judged Frederick’s acceptance a violation of the Holy Roman Emperor’s divine rights in Bohemia; Uncle Christian, less entangled with theory, regarded it as sheer stupidity.⁶⁸ The travail of Frederick and Elizabeth marked the onset of the Thirty Years War. They fled to The Hague. Although pressed to intervene to reestablish his kin by force of arms, and although a formal ally of Denmark against aggression by Catholic powers, James pursued peace and a Spanish union. He now hoped not only for a dowry, but also for effective pressure by the new young King of Spain, Philip IV, on his relatives the Austrian Habsburgs to withdraw their armies and their interests from Bohemia.

It was not easy for a Protestant king to bag a Spanish princess. Not only did James face tough opposition at home from people who remembered that the immediate forebears of the intended bride, the Infanta Maria Anna, had launched an Armada against them; he could not hope to gain Philip’s assent to the marriage without obtaining prior approval from the pope. He chose as his emissary to Rome George Gage, a Roman Catholic who had been present and supportive when his friend Tobie Matthew received Holy Orders from Bellarmine. Gage was an acute connoisseur, a first-class broker, and a man of sophisticated charm. He charmed Pope Gregory, who approved the proposed match on Gage’s insinuation that it would turn Charles Catholic.⁶⁹

By then smitten by pictures and reports of Maria Anna, the Crown Prince of Wales and the royal favorite, the Earl of Buckingham, slipped into Spain incognito to woo the lady in person (Figures 12 and 13). They galloped the 800 miles from Paris to Madrid in thirteen days.⁷⁰ Philip IV welcomed their unexpected sweaty arrival, but not their subsequent lengthy sojourn. His councilors opposed the marriage, as did the intended bride, and Philip dared not act against his kinsman the emperor. To extricate himself, Philip tightened the draft marriage contract to require toleration for all Catholics, withdrawal of the laws against recusants, liberal guarantees of free exercise of religion for Maria Anna’s household, and prior agreement by parliament to all provisions.⁷¹

Figure 12 Daniel Mytens, Prince Charles (c.1623), age 23.

Figure 13 Diego Velasquez, Infanta Maria Anna of Spain, once Charles’s inamorata, but at the time depicted, 1630, age 24, the Queen of Hungary.

In July 1623, James and his Privy Council swore to accept the terms of any marriage contract Charles, Buckingham, and Tobie Matthew, whom James sent to help with negotiations, managed to consummate in Madrid, and, on the 20th, Andrewes presided over a ratification of the marriage treaty in the Chapel Royal. In secret articles James made the unredeemable promise that Parliament would revoke the recusancy laws within three years. Nonetheless, the affair in Madrid did not prosper. Buckingham insisted that Philip agree to intercede in the Palatinate. Impossible! Matthew made a last appeal: if Philip did not accept the marriage under the conditions offered, the blood of English Catholics would be on his hands.⁷² Philip did not mind running the risk. Charles returned to England without his infanta. Instead, and in fact much better, he brought back four canvases by Titian.⁷³

It had been a fool’s errand, literally. The royal jester Archie had greater access to the infanta and her ladies than the Prince of Wales. So far had the Spanish held the suitor from his inamorata that (so Buckingham quipped in a letter to his wife) he needed a telescope to see her. To which his devoted gullible lady replied by sending the best perspective glasses she could find in London and her regrets that “the Prince is kept at such a distance that he needs them.”⁷⁴ Archie’s jokes also were productive, as they gained him a pension without the awkward qualification Philip placed on other such grants.⁷⁵ This was to agree to die, preferably soon, reconciled to Rome. Charles’s secretary Francis Cottington took advantage of the offer. Thinking himself on his deathbed, he entrusted his soul to the Roman Catholic Church; recovering, he reconverted; from which much later, again facing death, he again reconverted.⁷⁶ This last flip-flop occurred after Cottington had served Charles as a chief minister for many years.

The experience in Madrid jolted Charles’s religious sensibilities, which had developed under the supervision of tutors and chaplains who had educated Henry. The chaplains included anti-Arminians such as Joseph Hall of Foolania and the Clerk of the Closet Henry Burton, an extreme Puritan fated to return to these pages, and two sober divines trained to sniff and snuff out every whiff of Catholicism. The godly had therefore delighted in Charles: “Wee have yet the Sunne and the Moone [James and Anna], and starres of the Royal firmament: and though we have lost our morning Starre [Henry], yet we have Charls-waine [the pole star] in our Horizon.”⁷⁷ Andrewes alerted James to the undue influence on the prince of the godly types around him. James quickly replaced Charles’s Calvinist secretary with Cottington. That occurred in time for Cottington to join the mad gallop to Madrid. His Catholic sympathies and fourteen years of experience at the English embassy in Spain made him a useful man.

Several English Catholics and Catholic sympathizers who joined the nuptial battle helped to complete Charles’s liberation from Henry’s militant Protestantism. Among them was Matthew, who found the infanta satisfactory as to person, rather good looking, gentle, charitable, but very stubborn and (what made a bad combination) very pious.⁷⁸ There was also Kenelm Digby, the nephew of the English ambassador to Spain, who arrived direct from Tuscany with a recipe for a powder of sympathy that cured wounds when sprinkled on the weapon that inflicted the injury. It worked for James Howell, a traveler in the glass business, who washed up in Spain after buying materials in Venice, which mayhap included telescope lenses useful for spying on princesses; we will encounter him again as a travel writer. Howell’s cure won Digby’s powder a reputation of infallibility, but it neither cured Charles’s puppy love nor made Maria Anna sympathetic.⁷⁹ This census of informed Catholicizing Englishmen around Prince Charles in Madrid would be inexcusably incomplete without mentioning Endymion Porter, like Cottington an old Spanish hand, whose many moneymaking schemes would bring him frequently to the attention of Attorney General Bankes. Despite their failure to bring home the bride and the waste of £48,000 in the effort, Digby and Matthew received knighthood, and Buckingham promotion to duke.⁸⁰

Fallout

Letters from Micanzio to his friend Cavendish, which Hobbes translated into English for a wider audience, offer a Venetian view of these proceedings. Micanzio tried to understand why the wisest of kings was behaving as the greatest of fools. He could only suppose that wily James had a secret purpose that stayed his “mightie arme.” He must be very deep. “For neither desire of quietnes nor hate of mutations shall never make me to beleive that the wisest King of this Age, and the most learned of many Ages will neglect the heighth of his glorie especially falling in so joyntly with the service of God, & defense of truth and Justice.”⁸¹ And yet, he stands aside as Catholic armies drive his family from Bohemia.⁸²

Rumor now has it (in the summer of 1622) that James will conclude the match with Spain and free English Catholics; the pope has set up a committee of cardinals to consider the match and the recovery of England. Yet the infanta resists! The business will boomerang: “the endeavour of the Spanish Ministers to captivate the Prince [of Wales] to their opinions will make an Antiperistasis [a sort of backlash in Aristotelian natural philosophy] which strengthens all motion.”⁸³ Could that be James’s deep purpose? No! Micanzio reluctantly accepted the truth that Sarpi had seen much earlier: James was negligent, weak, indecisive, and mediocre, “the learnedest ass in Christendom,” made impotent by writing, busy not with issues befitting a king, but with “Vorstius and other paper-battles.”⁸⁴

Meanwhile the tragedy of De Dominis was playing out. While rumor was rife that James would convert, De Dominis enjoyed a hero’s welcome. He returned to Rome carried in a litter followed by a coach-and-six containing four pages in livery. The display, underwritten by Gondomar, implied that the apostate brought some great news. Pope Gregory absolved him of everything and gave him precedence over all other archbishops. In return, Micanzio continued, De Dominis boasts of his conquests, urges the Spanish match, and writes voluminously against the Protestants.⁸⁵ He is sincere in his zeal for the unification of Christianity: he just does not understand that popes have no interest in religion. Gondomar is no better. He pretends to share De Dominis’s cause of unification while conniving to send him for justice to Rome.⁸⁶

Micanzio’s analysis ends with the change of popes. Gregory has died, no loss, as the Spanish and the Jesuits controlled him.⁸⁷ The new man, Urban VIII, is promising. “He is a man of a fine literature, of a lively witt, obstinat in his owne opinions, a statesman and little above 50 yeares of age.” His nature is now (27 October 1623) evident: “violent, confident, apt to thinke him selfe allmighty, [a]bove all he hath most vast dessignes for the extirpation of those that hold contrary opinions to the Church of Rome.” One of the first to experience Urban’s sting was De Dominis.⁸⁸ Galileo would be another. Already, Micanzio reported, foreign books not in conformity with the Vatican’s views about the physical world system were unprocurable. Perhaps an antiperistasis will push Copernicus’s work. “[S]ince it hath bene prohibited by Rome that hath found Articles of faith also in Mathematicall inventions, it is to be believed that an appetite will grow for reviving it.” But there was no hope for Sarpi’s Trent, “so much as never perhapps hath any booke so much displeased them.”⁸⁹ It was a great book, so the cardinal nephew Ludovico Ludovisi conceded to the Venetian ambassador to Rome, and all the more dangerous for De Dominis for being so.⁹⁰

The playwright Thomas Middleton had escaped censure for insinuating, more gently than Micanzio, that the situation in Bohemia demanded action, not scholarship, from James.⁹¹ The Spanish debacle gave Middleton another opportunity for trouble. A game of chesse celebrated the unmasking of Gondomar and the demise of De Dominis in a hit that ran, unusually, for nine nights in a row before Spanish agents could persuade James to shut it down. Its smallest audience numbered in the thousands.⁹² As the Black King, Middleton intended Philip IV; as Black Bishop, the General of the Jesuits; and, among the Whites, James as king, Charles as knight, and Abbot as bishop. The main episodes are the seduction of White pawns by the Black Bishop’s (the Jesuit General’s) pawn, the White Knight’s trip to the Black House, and the plot of the Black Knight (Gondomar) against a fat bishop (De Dominis). We meet the bishop in the play worrying about his polemics. “Are my Bookes printed, Pawne? My last Inventions agaynst the Blackhouse?” The Black Knight: “Yond greasie tournecoate Gourmandizing Prelate do’s worke our house more mischief by his…fat and fulsome Volumes than the whole bodie of adverse partie.” The Black Knight helped dupe the Fat Bishop into returning to Rome and the White Knight came back unscathed from the Black House. Among real pawns seduced by the Black side was the mother of the White Duke, Buckingham.⁹³

The prince and the duke returned from Madrid spoiling for a fight. James still hoped, however, to recover the Palatinate through Spanish diplomacy. Unable to do so without money and against the opposition of the prince and the duke, he summoned a parliament.⁹⁴ He opened it in February 1624 with an uncharacteristic request for advice and assurances that everyone might speak frankly. The Commons waxed enthusiastic over war with Spain, if confined to piracy; rejected a land war for the Palatinate; and insisted on enforcement of the recusancy laws.⁹⁵ That was to require what James could not promise. He had just hurriedly arranged to wed Charles to France in the person of Henrietta Maria, the 15-year-old daughter of Henry IV and Marie de’ Medici, and the marriage contract provided for protection of Catholics in England. No matter that the provision violated James’s previous promise to parliament to make no such concession; among Stuart prerogatives was the right to lie.⁹⁶ Was this deception not justified by their expectation that their new in-laws would assist them in the Palatinate? Henrietta Maria’s brother, Louis XIII, refused the help. That brought James to the end of his contrivances. He was also near the end of his life. He called Andrewes to his bedside, but the bishop was too ill to attend him.⁹⁷ The king committed himself to God with what other help he could muster and left his three conflicted kingdoms to his inadequately prepared son and incompetent favorite.

A Venetian ambassador drew the character of Charles a year or so before he became king: chaste, economical, prudent, prudish, and close, especially in matters of religion. “He moves like a planet in its sphere, so naturally and quietly that one does not remark it.” His judgment is good. But as his father and the favorite often overcome it, he dissimulates. He excels at manly sports, especially on horseback. He frequents a “school of arms” that Henry had set up and works there on “out of the way mathematics and methods of encamping, being very interested in inventions.” He is not a student like his father but sometimes reads history or poetry. He speaks French and Latin fluently and knows some Italian. Catholics think that his wife, then expected to be the infanta, will win him over to their religion. Although his defense of Catholics against attacks on them by Puritans may support their optimism, they are wrong.⁹⁸

To these good qualities Charles added connoisseurship and patronage of the arts and the theater. He wrote well, thought a little, and worked hard. In contrast to his father and many of his courtiers, he was sober, decorous, and healthy. In short, he had the skills, interests, and virtues to be an exceptionally good king. He was a catastrophic failure. He could not overcome hesitancy that ended in indecisiveness or impulsiveness; self-doubt that led to overreliance on under-qualified advisers; vacillation over protection of his Catholic subjects; exaggeration of his divine rights and prerogatives that alienated his parliaments; and an agility at self-deception, amounting to genius, that enabled him to ignore the magnificent discrepancies between his means and goals.

Charles’s half-educated teenage wife, Henrietta Maria, added greatly to his difficulties. She brought with her a train of priests and nobles to entertain her and a bishop to oversee fulfillment of her pledge to the pope to convert her husband. The blatant behavior of her entourage intensified pressure to enforce the laws against Catholics. Charles responded by collecting recusancy fines, prohibiting the airing of new religious opinions in speech or in writing, threatening English fellow travelers attending French and Italian chapels, and, in violation of his marriage contract, dismissing most of the queen’s entourage.⁹⁹ These measures did not bring bliss to Charles’s wedded life. He did not get along with Henrietta Maria until the murder of Buckingham in 1628 opened political space for her and the birth of an heir, the future Charles II, in 1630 established her claim to it. They then fell in love, uncommonly for royalty, with one another. Many children followed. Being the stronger of the pair and as insistent on royal prerogatives as Charles, Henrietta Maria became a reliable helpmate in precipitating his downfall.

Caroline Cacophony

Arminians

Although even moderate Protestants considered Arminianism the gateway to Catholicism and genuflections, crossings, auricular confession, icons, incense, and priestly vestments so many stations on the road to Rome, Charles came to follow it as far as Andrewes went. It was he who commissioned Laud to publish Andrewes’s sermons and who chose as archbishops Laud’s guide to Arminius, Richard Neile (York, 1631), and Laud himself (Canterbury, 1633). During the first years of his reign Charles promoted a few Calvinists to please parliament; but, as he grew disenchanted with the Commons, he yielded to his political and aesthetic sensibilities and to Laud’s conception of order, decorum, hierarchy, and uniformity.¹⁰⁰ A maverick result of this regulation was the Collection of Private Devotions (1627) published by Laud’s protégé John Cosin, which specified the number of prayers, theological virtues, good works, and acts of mercy through which anyone so minded might rise arithmetically to God. Strict Calvinists objected to Cosin’s calculations. Charles made him a bishop.

Charles hoped to silence religious opponents through a declaration, approved by his bishops in December 1628, which defined the doctrine of the Church of England as the Thirty-Nine Articles and prohibited “further curious search” into theological questions. The kernel of the declaration resembled the decree of the Council of Trent invoked against Galileo: “no man hereafter shall either print or preach to draw the Article aside in any way, but shall submit to it in the plain and full meaning thereof, and shall not put his own sense or comment to be the meaning of the Article, but shall take it in the literal or grammatical sense.”¹⁰¹ Neither James nor Charles would have thought it improper for their fellow divine monarch the pope to silence speculation that might, in his sole judgment, endanger his state or diminish his authority.

On becoming archbishop, Laud ordered his vicar general, Nathaniel Brent, the translator of Sarpi, to enforce liturgical conformity within the archdiocese. Brent detected errors as readily as Trent had multiplied anathemas. He disciplined ministers for giving communion to parishioners standing, wearing inappropriate vestments, and misplacing the communion table. These measures encouraged Puritans weak in tolerance but strong in body to escape to the new settlements in America. The archbishop worried that their number might so increase that they would invade their homeland. He could think of nothing to do about it, however, and contented himself with trying to force English communities in Europe, and children born to European immigrants in England, to worship in the rites and language of the English church.¹⁰²

In June 1636, Laud improved the University of Oxford, already a model establishment, with the new statutes that John Bankes helped to draft. Sir John Coke, one of Charles’s two primary secretaries, presented them as the instructions of God’s vicar the king, the source of all laws, statutes, justice, honor, and titles in his realm, and also of all powers of persons, parliaments, courts, churches, corporations, societies, counties, and provinces. Two months later the king and queen were in Oxford as guests of Chancellor Laud. The university diverted them with three plays, one of which, Floating Island by the university’s orator, William Strode, was staged in Christ Church Hall with the elaborate machinery of an Italian masque. One courtier thought it the worst play he had ever seen, “but one he saw in Cambridge.”¹⁰³

In Strode’s Floating Island characters representing Lust, Wrath, and Deceit conspire to rid their country of the laws and person of good King Prudentius. Alerted to the plot, Prudentius follows the advice of Intellectus Agens, a know-it-all concocted for academic amusement from a difficult concept in Aristotle’s De anima, to leave his crown and disappear. The evil triumvirate offers the crown to Fancie, who finds it too heavy. She acts as queen, however, and directs her courtiers to do as they please. Confusion reigns. Prudentius returns and offers his crown to anyone able to bear its weight and responsibility. No one volunteers. All sue for grace, which wise and kind Prudentius grants. The king then marries the courtiers to one another. The happiest arrangement couples Melancholy and Concupiscence, on condition that they live in the suburbs, “or new England.”¹⁰⁴ According to a Catholic newsmonger, the play amused their Majesties, who fancied that Intellectus Agens was Laud and Concupiscence’s mate, Melancholy, a Puritan minister.¹⁰⁵

Puritans

The noisiest of the Puritans was a lawyer, William Prynne, who injudiciously published a book against play going late in 1632. Laud’s chaplain, Peter Heylyn, “pounced upon the book…with unscrupulous malignity.” He insinuated that it insulted the queen, who participated in masques and watched plays. In an act of solidarity with their sovereigns, Prynne’s colleagues at the Inns of Court presented the king and queen with a masque, James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace (February 1634), and a feast, at the monumental cost of £21,000, organized by such heavyweight lawyers as John Selden and the Attorney General William Noy. The crowd thronging to see it was so great that the royal couple could scarcely reach their seats. The party continued until dawn.¹⁰⁶

While the royals reveled, Prynne sat in the Tower awaiting trial. Some of his fellow prisoners were Catholics. To purge himself of contagion he wrote a poem (one of 100) affirming the role of reason in religion. He was right to say that it is wrong to obey “without inquiring the reason why ǀ As beasts obey their masters …”.¹⁰⁷ Usually he was not so reasonable. Do you wear your hair long? A pity: you risk damnation. It has happened often.

Though he were a Modest, Sober, Chast, Industrious, or somewhat Religious person at the first…[he] will soon degenerate into an Idle, Proud, Vainglorious, Unchast, Deboist [debauched], and graceless Ruffian: His Amorous, Frizled, Womanish, and Effeminate haire, and Locke, will draw him on to Idlenesse, Pride, Effeminacy, Wantonesse, Sensualitie, and Voluptuousnesse, by degrees; and all Prophanesse, so to the eternal wrecke and ruine of his Soule. This the woefull, and lamentable experience of thousands in our age can testifie.

QED. Much the same can be said about “that Meretricious, Execrable, and Odious Art of Face-Painting,” that “Unnaturall, Detestable, Heathenish, Proud, Lascivious, Whorish, and Infernall Practice.” To stand upright in God’s eyes, we must “cut, and cast off all these Love-Locks, Paintings, Powderings, Crimpings, Curlings, Cultures, and Attires” that deform our souls, “but are no luster to our bodies.”¹⁰⁸ The language was unreasonable but not, to many of the godly, the reasoning.¹⁰⁹

The same may be said for Prynne’s account of toasts. By drinking the king’s health, you start on a downward spiral to drunkenness, “as if you were no better than the Devill Bacchus.” Dear King Charles, do you know how serious the danger is? “Many thousand persons both are, and have been drawn to drunkenness and excesse…drinking their wit out of their heads, their health out of their bodies, and God out of their souls, whiles they have been too busie and officious in carousing Healths unto your Sacred Majesty.” Drive out those “gracelesse, swinish, and unthrifty Drunkards, the very Drones and caterpillars of a Common-Wealth"! Repair the “weake and sickly body of our State, (which reele[s] and struggle[s] like a drunken man,)”!¹¹⁰ Prynne produced his diatribes with the help of “a pott of Ale” served to him every three hours.¹¹¹

Prynne’s Historiomastix (1632), his scourge of plays and players, made him the mutilated public face of the purest Protestantism. By refusing to follow Star Chamber’s rules of pleading, he was held in contempt. For his insults to the court and to the queen, he had both ears notched or (historians have their disagreements) one sliced off, and indefinite lodging in the Tower of London. His confinement did not abate his pamphleteering. It brought him an ideal collaborator, that Henry Burton who had been ejected from Charles’s household for criticizing Laud. Burton had devoted his consequent leisure to lobbying for the slaughter of all Catholic priests found in England, although, he allowed, even such good work as destroying the Jesuits could not alter God’s predetermination of the saved and the damned.

Burton and Prynne were strict sabbatarians. They collaborated in attacking Laud and his lieutenants for approving The Book of Sports, drawn up in King James’s time, which itemized wholesome entertainments allowed on Sundays after services, “thereby so provok[ing] God, that his wrath in sundry places has broken out to the destruction of many.” Burton and Prynne gave fifty-six examples of individuals struck dead or otherwise punished for “such monstrous impieties” as Sunday sports, to which they added, on the authority of that Jesuitical servant of anti-Christ, Robert Cardinal Bellarmine, Turks and the plague.¹¹² Still, games and Turks were not nearly as dangerous as Laud’s prayer book and his bishops’ usurpation of authority. Burton delivered this alert in sermons on Guy Fawkes Day, 1636.¹¹³ He soon joined Prynne in jail. Rounding out his cull of the professions, Laud tossed in scholarly John Bastwick, MD, a graduate in medicine from Leyden and Padua. Bastwick had made a hobby of hounding bishops.¹¹⁴

Star Chamber sentenced the triumvirate to facial mutilation, followed, after recovery, by indefinite imprisonment in different dungeons. Charles’s viceroy in Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, a close ally of Laud, and, as will appear, a patron of both John Bankes and Maurice Williams, reckoned the treatment of the triumvirate lenient. “To be shut up and dark kept all their lives is punishment mild enough for such savages…A prince that loseth the force and example of his punishments loseth the greatest part of his dominions.” Lacking Wentworth’s power of ratiocination, the people of London were disgusted by the barbarity of the punishment and impressed by the fortitude of the sufferers. Perhaps most damaging to the king and his archbishop, the martyrs’ status as gentlemen distinguished in their professions earned them the sympathy of classes unmoved by the fates of ordinary miscreants.¹¹⁵

Bastwick, Burton, and Prynne went off to their prisons in triumph; the people lined the streets and showered them with gifts. Prynne’s path to prison ran through Chester. The mayor gave him a civic dinner and tapestries for his cell. Prynne and Burton returned in even greater glory when released by parliament in 1640. A hundred carriages, 1,500 or maybe 2,000 horsemen, and a crowd of 10,000 welcomed them to London. Robert Woodford, a Puritan country lawyer, was there. “Oh blessed be the Lord for this day; those holy livinge Martirs Mr Burton & Mr Prynne came to towne, & the Lords providence brought me out of the Temple to see them, my hart rejoyceth in the Lord for this day its even like the returne of the Captivity from Babilon.”¹¹⁶ Parliament appreciated Prynne’s bombastic style and appointed him its historiographer for the Civil War.

Most Puritans spokesmen of course did not rant like Prynne. The reverend John Geree’s précis, Character of a Puritan (1646), is a fine example of their humane style. Geree’s Puritan worships following God’s directions, not “after the traditions of men.” He is frequently at private prayer, but also requires preaching, preferably without “vain flourishing of wit.” He keeps the Sabbath. He wants his church to be decent, not magnificent, and free from “sensual delight” and bishops. He “abhor[s] the Popish doctrine of opus operatum,” the idea that good works might help the worker to salvation. Although wishing to act gravely in all things, “yet he denye[s] not himselfe the use of God’s blessing, lest he should be unthankfull,” and so allows himself to marry. The bottom line, however, is not far from Prynne’s: the Puritan’s life is perpetual warfare, “wherein Christ [is] his Captaine, his armes, prayers and teares.” So armed, the Puritan is “immoveable at all times, so that they who in the midst of many opinions have lost the view of true religion, may return to him, and there find it.”¹¹⁷ The language is gentle but the message unbending.

Catholics

Even with the best of wills, Charles could not have kept his contracted promise to protect Catholics from persecution. Poverty as well as politics forced his hand: “for as it concerneth Religion, so it [also] has relation to his maiesty’s Profite.”¹¹⁸ When lenient, Charles released priests from prison and recusants from fines with writs that might bear the explanation, “at the instance of our dearest consort the queene.”¹¹⁹ Henrietta Maria indulged her religion publicly. She maintained opulent chapels, which bold aesthetes came to see for their beauty and frequented to their peril, and reaped many proselytes.¹²⁰ Several of Charles’s senior ministers had already come over, or so it was rumored: Cottington and Francis Windebank, and the Lord Treasurer Richard Weston, all of whom would die Catholics. If the queen’s “religious zeale and constant devotions” succeeded, the king would be next.¹²¹ “We never had a greater calme,” an English agent of the Vatican reported, “since the queene came in than now.”¹²²

This upbeat report dated from 23 July 1633, a month after the Cardinals’ expert in heretical depravity had signed the sentence against Galileo; a few weeks later, on 4 and again on 17 August, Urban, apparently acting on the report, offered Laud a cardinal’s hat. The new archbishop turned down the second offer with less than a resounding refusal. “My answer again was, that something dwelt within me, which would not suffer that, till Rome were other than it is.”¹²³ He informed Charles of the offer. It did not disturb the détente then developing between king and pope, or discussions between Cottington’s group and cardinals Bentivoglio and Barberini.¹²⁴

The pope’s agent in the queen’s entourage, Gregorio Panzani, kept the good news flowing. He wrote that most Protestant bishops would happily combine with Catholics “for the ruine and rooting out of Puritanes” and that the king, both universities, and the nobility were likewise flexible. Catholics, though few in number, included people possessed of great wealth and high office. Charles might almost be counted among them, since, Panzani reported, he and most of his nobility “beleeve all that is taught by the Church, but not by the Court, of Rome.”¹²⁵ Urban knew enough about England to replace Panzani with a more astute courtier. He was George Conn, who took up his post in July 1636 and has an important role in our story.¹²⁶

Conn was a scion of a noble Scottish family, a historian of Scotland, a panegyrist of Charles’s grandmother Mary Queen of Scots, and an intimate of the Barberini. He was also a man of the world, having served secular princes for years before entering clerical life in 1623, and, as Cardinal Barberini’s secretary for Latin correspondence with German states, knew more about the affairs of the Palatinate than Charles.¹²⁷ Conn had every reason to expect that Urban would be as eager for the reconversion of England as he. On the very day of his inauguration, the pope had found time to open the question. Urban: “What news of King James and Prince Charles? Does there appear to be any hope of their conversion to the faith of their forefathers?” Conn: “[T]he offspring of Maria Stuart…they will return to the Church…never has a King or Queen of Scotland died separated from it.”¹²⁸ James had not yet made himself an exception to this rule.

Conn prepared for his mission by composing an account of the points at issue between Protestants and Catholics. He would draw only on Scripture, he wrote; Protestants had nothing to fear from him, “nothing to suspect, nothing to fear, everything sincere, safe, and hopeful.” On the question of predestination, however, Conn showed his steel. Protestants who doubted the compatibility of God’s foreknowledge with human free will presumptuously measured God’s mind by theirs. “Is there anyone so dull and stupid as to insist that free will cannot agree with God’s prevision?” Do not be duped by logic! “Impious and pertinacious sloth should be beaten with sticks until…it is willing to abstain from syllogisms.”¹²⁹

When Henrietta Maria became aware of Conn’s willingness to do without syllogisms and his other merits, she urged Urban to make him a cardinal and to send him to quiet the perennial disputes among English Catholics. Perhaps she also knew that Conn had had a hand in marrying her to Charles; for, when Urban tried to impose conditions on the license, Conn kept the English negotiators usefully informed about Vatican strategy.¹³⁰ Urban did not accede to the queen’s desire to make Conn a cardinal. The gambit of enticing Laud with a cardinal’s hat had not worked and it would have been wasteful to give a Scot one before securing Charles.¹³¹ Conn soon showed his acumen and diplomacy by winning the support of the secular faction of English Catholics, perhaps with the help of his brother, who served the queen.¹³²

Conn had many stories to tell about the Roman court. He belonged to a circle centered on Giovanni Ciampoli, a Vatican insider and a member of the academy of lynxes. The circle included a busybody convert, Kaspar Schoppe, who had ingratiated himself with Clement VIII by devising strategies for harvesting Protestant souls during the Jubilee of 1600 and with Paul V for rebutting King James’s claim to divine-right rule. During this last exercise Schoppe uncovered and exploited Wotton’s famous indiscreet quip, “an ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country.” Though to Wotton he was “a mud-caked quack of the Roman curia,” a “starving turncoat,” Schoppe dug up more than dirt.¹³³ A list he composed in the 1620s of the forty deserving intellectuals in Rome is a valuable document; it includes Conn among many other people favorable to Galileo.¹³⁴ Schoppe, Galileo, and a few of the forty deserving intellectuals persuaded a cardinal, Friedrich Eitel von Zollern, to air the Copernican question with Urban. The cardinal extracted from the pope the opinion that sun-centered astronomy had not been, and would not be, declared heretical.¹³⁵ Conn abetted their good work by recommending to the Barberini that Galileo proceed with the Dialogue. He left Rome a hero, not, to be sure, of Galilean advocacy, but of a poem in praise of ink, for his paradoxical portrayal in so dark a medium of the eternal glory of Mary Queen of Scots.¹³⁶

Conn quickly gained the confidence of Mary’s grandson by declaring that he had no difficulty serving both the Pope of Rome and the King of England and Scotland. “The king immediately gave me his hand saying, No, Giorgio, assure yourself [I know] that.”¹³⁷ The pope’s man joined the king and queen at Oxford for the performance of The Floating Island. Lady Arundel welcomed him to her table and chessboard, and, together with the queen and Endymion Porter’s wife, Olivia, helped him to make many conquests, inevitably known as Connverts.¹³⁸ Like Wotton in Venice, so Conn in London made friends among the mighty to subvert the religion of the state. So many were his Connverts that the openness with which Henrietta Maria paraded them made him uneasy.¹³⁹ Lady Olivia was if anything even less discreet. While her father’s last moments ticked away, she bundled him into her carriage to be brought for conversion just before his Protestant daughter arrived on a similar errand to another place. Of Lady Olivia’s deathbed rescue of her father, the learned lawyer John Selden, whom we shall consult later, observed, “[T]o turn a man when he lies dying, is just like one who hath a long time solicited a woman, and cannot obtain his end; at length makes her drunk, and so lies with her.”¹⁴⁰ Wealthy Anglicans wishing to die Catholic took the easier course of keeping a priest at home.¹⁴¹

Conn soon ran into the minefield of the Oath of Allegiance. He made some progress with Charles, who was uncharacteristically open about it. “The King put his hand on my shoulder [Conn reported] and replied, it is not yet time.”¹⁴² Neither Rome nor parliament would yield.¹⁴³ Conn remarked to Charles that in Rome they thought the king was above parliament. Charles replied that he thought so too but added that only parliament could change the oath.¹⁴⁴ In none of his negotiations did Conn try to use Laud; he distrusted the archbishop for intimating friendship for Rome while urging enforcement of the penal laws against Catholics and their subscription to the Oath of Allegiance in its original form and literal meaning. Despite Laud’s love of vestments, altar rails, crucifixes, statues, and bishops, God would never (so Conn judged) make use of so weak an instrument in so great a cause as the conversion of England.¹⁴⁵ Conn started his journey back to Rome in the summer of 1639. There he died in January 1640, leaving to his imperceptive predecessor Panzani an occhiale prospettico moltiplicatore—that is, a good telescope.¹⁴⁶

Calvinists

When King James visited his native kingdom in 1617, he required that it observe the religious practices of the Church of England. With the Stuart genius for compromise, he told his countrymen that they were barbarians for not kneeling to receive Communion. The order to genuflect was one of the Five Articles James had declared at Perth, which defined the minimum liturgy required for conformance in Scotland; other provisions mandated confirmation by bishops and celebration of Christmas and other pre-Reformation holidays. The articles irritated the Scots almost as much as the institution of bishops, which James had imposed on them in 1612. When Charles went to Scotland for his coronation in 1633, he brought Laud and a new prayer book to ensure that the Scots approached God as decorously as the English. The following year the king ordered the Scottish bishops to devise a liturgy “as near that of England as might be.” Opposition to it provoked a discovery as fine as Bedell’s about Paul V. Reading vv as m, vvill. lavd sums to 666.¹⁴⁷

The new liturgy was tried at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh in July 1637. The congregation rebelled; Charles ordered enforcement; the people heard popery knocking at the door; and a great popular movement against the bishops began to stir.¹⁴⁸ In February 1638, resistance organized and spread around a covenant whose subscribers undertook to defend the true religion against all comers and consequences. Charles explained that he had not intended any innovations, and would not press the prayer book provided that his loving people foreswore their covenant: for should they gain the control it asserted, he would be no stronger in Edinburgh than (the comparison haunted him) the doge in Venice, “which I will rather die than suffer.” This bravado, offered in June 1638, responded to Scottish demands for an Assembly of Clergy. The English doge agreed. By December the Assembly had swept away from Scotland the prayer book, the canons, the Articles of Perth, and the bishops.¹⁴⁹

As war rumbled, Charles put Arundel in charge of fortifying England’s northern borders. Catholicizing members of the Privy Council, Arundel, Cottington, and Windebank, urged armed confrontation; the Exchequer being empty, they had to contain their impatience. In the autumn of 1638, as thousands signed the Scottish Covenant, Charles suffered a blow that can only inspire sympathy. His impossible mother-in-law, Marie de’ Medici, came uninvited with a retinue of 600 and a monthly cost equal to that of keeping 1,200 soldiers in the field. Charles appealed to his brother-in-law to allow her to return to France; Louis proposed her native Florence; she preferred England. To cover her exactions and prepare for war, Charles scurried after money: English bishops and other high officials contributed £50,000; loyal Catholics gave £20,000, scarcely enough for a month of war, but something toward collecting an army of untrained pressed men who could live off the land while traveling to the Scottish frontier.¹⁵⁰

The first “Bishops’ War” began in March 1639 and ended in June. Charles’s forces, inexperienced unwilling men commanded by inexperienced committed commanders like himself and Arundel, were no match for the willing men and war-hardened officers fielded by the Scots. Uncle Christian offered to help in exchange for the Shetland and Orkney islands; his nephew declined the terms.¹⁵¹ Quite unconscious of the superiority of the Scottish forces, Charles complacently contemplated one of their encampments a dozen miles distant through a telescope. “Come, let us go to supper,” he said, “the number is not considerable.” Charles further demonstrated his misunderstanding of his situation by suggesting, as a basis for peace, that the Scots “take my word, and…submit all to my judgment.” They preferred a written agreement. It provided that the Scots disband their army and give back the royal castles they had taken, and that Charles disband his army and acknowledge the Assembly and the Scottish Parliament.¹⁵²

Though Charles was well out of his war, he could not bring himself to rescind any act by which his father had established bishops in Scotland: the scaffolding would remain though the building be destroyed. He would also retain the authority “to call assemblies and dissolve them, and to have a negative voice in them as is accustomed in all supreme powers in Christianity.”¹⁵³ War loomed once more. Where was the money to come from? The Crown tried to raise it from Spain against the cynical collateral of all English ships at that moment anchored in Spanish harbors. No deal. The queen and Secretary Windebank appealed to Rome. Urban replied that he would be happy to help a Catholic King of England. The Privy Council discussed debasing the currency. Charles required the nobles of the land and their servants to attend him at their expense. With £20,000 in hand, a promise of another £20,000 a year from the bishops, and a loan begun in the Privy Council that reached £250,000 in May 1640, Charles went to war again in June and suffered definitive defeat near Newcastle in August.¹⁵⁴ To secure a truce, he agreed to pay the expenses of the occupying Scots; to secure the money, he called a parliament, the second in the year. The first, the “Short Parliament,” had sat for three weeks in April before Charles terminated it for airing its grievances instead of granting him subsidies. The second, the “Long Parliament,” assembled early in November and sat for twenty years. It looked around for scapegoats. A week before Christmas it sent Laud to the Tower.

The spadework for the prosecution of Laud was the pleasant task of Prynne. He soon dug up a devastating document, of which he published an account with pungent annotations under the title Romes Master-peece. The masterpiece was the reconversion of England.¹⁵⁵ When Laud learned about it in the autumn of 1640, the plotters claimed to be well advanced. The Jesuits fomented it, of course, and Conn had abetted it by offering the king “gifts of Pictures, Antiquities, Idols and other vanities brought from Rome.” The plotters had enlisted Endymion Porter, “of the King’s bedchamber, most addicted to the Popish religion…[and] a bitter enemy of the King;” the inevitable Tobie Matthew, a Catholic priest, George Gage, a namesake of Mathew’s friend Gage, who had cleverly filled a palace with lascivious pictures to distract attention from the convent of nuns he maintained underground; and Secretary Windebank, “a most fierce Papist…the most unfaithful to the King of all men.”¹⁵⁶ Lady Arundel “bends all her nerves to the Universal Reformation,” meets the Pope’s agent three times a day, openly entertains him at her table, and tells him everything. Prynne: “The Jesuits learn of the Serpent to seduce Men by female Instruments.”¹⁵⁷ If the combined efforts of the fifty Scottish Jesuits said to be in London and the blandishments of the pope did not bring Charles around, he was to be eliminated by an ornament in Conn’s possession, a nut stuffed with poison. Prynne: “Jesuits make but a vaunt of poysoning Kings.”¹⁵⁸

The English ambassador at The Hague, Sir William Boswell, knew about the plot from a chaplain serving the Queen of Bohemia; Boswell told Laud, and Laud told the king. Boswell’s assurance that the unknown informant was ready to take an oath (Laud: “A very good argument of truth and reality”) and had spent a few years in the court and city of London (“Therefore a man of note and substance”) seems to have made the archbishop, who initially thought the plot a hoax, a believer.¹⁵⁹ And yet neither he nor Charles had acted in the emergency. Prynne again: “[Laud] will farre sooner hug a Popish Priest to his bosome, than take a Puritan by the little finger.”¹⁶⁰ Did not Rome offer him a cardinal’s hat? Nor can the king be exonerated. Did he not order Laud to order the Dean of Exeter to stop calling the pope “anti-Christ”?¹⁶¹ And did both of them not connive at having the psalms sung in the Gregorian manner in the Chapel Royal?¹⁶²

It was now clear that King Charles’s laxity had allowed papists to flourish everywhere, in the court, Privy Council, bedchamber, and royal bed. He had allowed Jesuits to stir up rebellion in Ireland and wars in England. To arms! The plot is “now driven on almost to its perfection.” We must act, and act together, “lest we perish through our owne private dissensions, folly, cowardice, covetousnesse, treachery, and scurrility.”¹⁶³ “By what Romish Strategems, Pollicies, Councels, Instruments circumvented, abused, [and] mis-councelled [have] the Kingdomes, Churches, Religions…been for sundry past-yeares reduced”! Thus, like Americans bamboozled to look for communists under every bed, many of Charles’s subjects, remembering the Gunpowder Plot and the Armada, Gondomar and the Spanish match, were ready to believe, or feign belief, in “many hidden, or forgotten Roman Plots of darkness.”¹⁶⁴

It was not unreasonable to suspect a conspiracy. The liberty Catholics enjoyed at Charles’s court in 1640 amazed Conn’s successor Carlo Rossetti. A Franciscan theologian, Henrietta Maria’s almoner Aegidius Chaissy, openly lectured in Oxford in 1641, and saved a few souls. It is said he almost bagged Ussher’s.¹⁶⁵ There was no end of evidence of sedition: the queen’s efforts to enlist the aid of the Vatican, Windebank’s orders of reprieve for arrested Catholics, and the ferocious Wentworth’s Irish army, which Charles refused to disband. In spring 1641, there came a rumor of invasion by France. Persecution of Catholics increased, with one result most satisfying to Charles. Parliament expelled his expensive conspiratorial mother-in-law.¹⁶⁶ In May, the Commons passed a “Protestation,” modeled on the Scottish Covenant, which required the swearer to uphold the Church of England; the Lords rejected it; the Commons responded by proposing the removal of Catholics from court and attendance on the Queen.¹⁶⁷ Nonetheless, when Rossetti took leave of the royal couple, Charles allowed that if he again became master in his dominions he would treat the pope’s spiritual subjects with the greatest gentleness. The queen clarified that in that happy circumstance it might take her husband some time to decide on the measures he would take owing to his habitual inability to make up his mind.¹⁶⁸