UNSETTLED ENGLAND
Enormities in the Queen’s Closet
NO SOONER DID the Royal Injunctions forbid contentious disputations than they broke out at the very heart of the new regime. The cause was a small object in the Queen’s Chapel Royal. In the summer of 1559, while Elizabeth was on progress in Kent and Surrey, the furnishings of the chapel were reformed. Elizabeth returned to court at the end of September, and on 5 October, for the wedding of a lady-in-waiting, she ordered a silver crucifix and candles to be placed on the chapel’s communion table.
It was an argument waiting to happen. Earlier that year on St George’s Day, during the court procession of the Knights of the Garter, Elizabeth had noticed an omission from the usual ceremonial. ‘Where’, she wanted to know ‘were the crosses?’ The implausible explanation was that the gold and silver processional crosses had been removed to the Tower for safe keeping. Elizabeth’s subsequent insistence on crucifix and candlesticks for her own chapel was a declaration that she was not to be pushed around.
The appearance of these ceremonial items caused uproar among her chaplains, but Elizabeth relented for only a few days. It was not a fuss over nothing. The place where the Queen worshipped was scarcely a ‘private’ one, but a shop-window of royal preferences and priorities. Ambassador de Quadra’s eyes lit up at this hopeful hint of further changes: ‘the crucifixes and vestments that were burnt a month ago are now set up again in the royal chapel, as they soon will be all over the kingdom’.
That, no doubt, was the fear of the bishops-elect. Jewel confessed his worry to Peter Martyr that the ‘ill-omened’ silver cross will ‘soon be drawn into a precedent’. ‘The wretched multitude’, complained Thomas Sampson, ‘are not only rejoicing at this, but will imitate it.’ One of that multitude, the London chronicler Henry Machyn, described with evident satisfaction the uncomfortable backdrop for Protestant clergymen preaching in the Chapel Royal at the turn of 1560, ‘the cross and two candles burning, and the tables standing altar-wise’.
Former exiles turned instinctively to Zürich for advice: in January 1560 Sampson wanted to know if Peter Martyr, Bullinger and Ochino agreed he should quit the ministry were the Queen to order cross and candles for all churches. The incoming bishops had been lobbying the Queen since October, when Sir Francis Knollys, among the most fervently Protestant of the lay councillors, wished Parker success in his campaign against ‘enormities yet in the Queen’s closet retained’. Richard Cox drafted a letter to Elizabeth explaining why he could not officiate in the Chapel Royal, ‘the cross and lights being there’. A petition from a group of senior clergymen begged the Queen to consider how ‘infinite millions of souls have been cast into eternal damnation by the occasion of images used in places of worship’.1
The bishops seemed of one mind, yet on 5 February 1560, the issue was formally debated among them at court: Jewel and Grindal versus Parker and Cox. There is no record of the disputation, and it is hard to believe Parker and Cox were sudden converts to the crucifix. Most likely, they agreed, reluctantly, to represent the royal view of the cross as an ‘indifferent’ item.
The stakes were high. ‘Matters are come to that pass,’ Jewel wrote on the eve of the debate, ‘that either the crosses and tin, which we have everywhere broken in pieces, must be restored, or our bishoprics relinquished.’ Edwin Sandys told Peter Martyr that Elizabeth was serious about reintroducing roods, with their figures of Mary and John, to parish churches, considering it ‘not contrary to the Word of God, nay, rather for the advantage of the church’. His ‘vehement’ dissent, he claimed, almost cost him his bishopric.2
The immediate outcome was not so much compromise as stalemate. Perhaps as a result of the court debate, Elizabeth realized there was virtually no support among bishops or councillors for a restoration of parish roods, and dropped the policy. Grindal’s accelerated campaign against rood lofts in London was an effort to capitalize on this while the going was good. At the beginning of March, a relieved Richard Cox wrote that ‘no crucifix is nowadays to be seen in any of our churches’.3 That was not quite true: Elizabeth stubbornly refused to give up her own cross. Rather like the Stranger Churches had been under Edward, the Chapel Royal was a pointer, hopeful or alarming, to further possibilities of change.
The row brought into the open an inconvenient truth: the Queen’s priorities were not the same as those of almost her entire ecclesiastical establishment. The idea that Elizabeth was cynically uninterested in religion, or that her religious beliefs are completely impenetrable, is misplaced. There is much evidence, not least from her own writings, of a woman serious and devout in her prayerful relationship with God. But the label English reformers were starting to apply to themselves – ‘Protestant’ – seems at best an inexact fit.4
Certainly, Elizabeth was anti-papal: she was, after all, the daughter of Anne Boleyn. She was likewise impatient of ‘superstition’ and scholastic sacramentalism. Her endorsement of the imagery of the cross, and a leaning towards some kind of belief in real presence in the eucharist, has affinities with German Lutheranism, though the Queen’s distaste for clerical marriage would scarcely have met with Luther’s approval. She had a penchant for elaborate church music, and did not care to enquire too closely into the opinions of those who provided it for her. The leading court composer at the start of her reign, Thomas Tallis, was certainly a Catholic sympathizer. He would later be joined by a brilliant younger colleague whose leanings towards the old faith were even more evident: William Byrd.
There is something to be said for the suggestion that Elizabeth’s faith was really that of an old-fashioned ‘evangelical’ of the generation bestriding her childhood. Her motto, after all, was semper eadem, always the same. The idea of finding solace in devout meditation on the cross of Christ was one that had been important to her last step-mother, Catherine Parr.5 But the fervency of that first generation, and its tendency to define itself by hostility to its enemies, seems lacking in Elizabeth.
The Queen’s religion was not that of her father. But it shared with his the quality of appearing idiosyncratic, uncategorizable. The difference was that while Henry’s faith expressed itself in aspirations towards absolute domination, Elizabeth’s was formed over two decades of finding herself at the mercy of others. She had learned the virtues of inwardness, and of knowing when, and when not, to take a principled stand. At heart, Elizabeth was a Nicodemite queen, and willing to reign as a queen of Nicodemites. She had no reason to love ‘popery’, but she did not see Catholics, even Roman ones, as the artful agents of Antichrist.
In so far as they already sensed this, her leading subjects found it hard to understand, and harder still to stomach. John Jewel’s ‘Challenge Sermon’, preached before a huge crowd at Paul’s Cross on 26 November 1559, and later repeated at court and again at Paul’s Cross, was a defiant declaration of theological war. Jewel offered unconditional surrender to his Romanist adversaries if they could supply ‘one sufficient sentence’, from scripture, the Fathers or old General Councils, to prove that in its first 600 years of existence the Church maintained prayer in a foreign tongue, private or sacrificial masses, communion in one kind, transubstantiation or papal supremacy.6
Meanwhile, from Scotland, Christopher Goodman sent Cecil an aggrieved inventory of everything in the settlement that ‘wounded the hearts of the godly’. One problem was the removal from the Litany of ‘the necessary prayer against the Romish Antichrist’; another, ‘which sticketh much in the hearts of many’, was the failure to impose sentences of death upon the ‘bloody bishops, and known murderers of God’s people’.7
Scotland was much in Cecil’s mind. By the late summer of 1559, France was sending troops in significant numbers to crush the Protestant revolt, and the Lords of the Congregation renewed their pleas for aid. Cecil was eager to oblige, from genuine sympathy with their cause, and because he had come to see Scotland as the key to English security. Henry II’s death in July 1559 put his son, Francis II, on the French throne. Francis’s wife was Mary Queen of Scots, now Queen of France too.
She wanted to be Queen of England. To his fury, Cecil learned from the ambassador in Paris, Nicholas Throckmorton, that Francis and Mary were using the English royal arms. He sat down to compose one of his regular ‘Memorials’. It proposed a Scotland free from both French influence and ‘from all idolatry’, united politically with England. If Mary and Francis would not agree, the Scottish Parliament should transfer the crown to the next heir.8 Cecil’s instincts were not those of a firebrand like Knox or Goodman. But he arrived at a similarly radical conclusion to theirs: political and religious necessity could justify the removal of an anointed monarch.
In December 1559, all of Elizabeth’s councillors, with the exception of the conservative Earl of Arundel, begged her to send an army to Scotland. The pleas fell on deaf ears: Cecil, in frustration, drafted a letter of resignation. At the start of the new year, Elizabeth’s deep-frozen aversion to assisting rebels started slowly to thaw. In January, an English fleet blockaded the Firth of Forth, and in March, a treaty with the Lords of the Congregation provided an English army to assist in the siege of Leith, where French forces were now bottled up.
The English expeditionary force performed poorly, but growing political turmoil in France, combined with the death in June of the regent, Mary of Guise, persuaded Paris to come to terms. French and English troops both withdrew in July 1560, and a reformed settlement was rapidly endorsed by the Scots Parliament. When Mary returned to Scotland the following year, an unexpected consequence of the death of her husband, it would be to a country offering no immediate threat to the regime in England.
No military threat, at least: for Scotland was an inspiration and rebuke to disappointed English reformers. Knox and his allies rapidly drew up a ‘Book of Discipline’ on the Genevan model. It provided for congregational election of ministers, and moral oversight of congregations by kirk sessions staffed by elders and deacons. ‘The gospel is received in Scotland’, Thomas Lever wrote to Bullinger in July 1560, but here, he noted ruefully, ‘no discipline is as yet established by any public authority’.9
Ironically, Cecil’s anti-Catholic Scottish policy received political cover from the most Catholic of European monarchs. Even after it transpired Elizabeth had no intention of marrying him, Philip II used his influence at the Roman curia to dissuade popes – Paul IV, who died in August 1559; then his successor, Pius IV – from excommunicating the Queen. The stated reason was that excommunication would make life more difficult for English Catholics; the real consideration was that it would make it easier for Mary Stewart and her Guise relatives to press their claim to the English throne.10
Life did get more difficult for English Catholics in the early part of 1560. On the feast of Candlemas, 2 February, worshippers attending mass at the house of the French ambassador were summarily arrested. The deposed Marian bishops hitherto enjoyed relative liberty, but in spring and early summer they were imprisoned – Bonner in the Marshalsea, well known to him from Edwardian days, others in the Fleet and the Tower.
Death had reduced their number to nine – Tunstall, last of the pre-Reformation bishops, died in November 1559; White, the funeral eulogist of Queen Mary, in January 1560. The survivors were regarded as security risks at a time of war with France. Feckenham too was sent to the Tower in May, as was Henry Cole, former dean of St Paul’s, and the first writer to take up with alacrity Jewel’s challenge to prove the antiquity of Catholic doctrines. The government did not know that three months earlier Cole had spoken treasonous words to the Spanish ambassador. If Philip would not stand by them in attempts to restore Catholicism, then ‘they would appeal to the French, or even to the Turks, rather than put up with these heretics’.11
The former bishops knew the Queen was a hopeless heretic, but the Pope was not so sure. In the early part of 1560, Pius IV made preparations to reconvene the suspended Council of Trent, and optimistically thought Elizabeth might want to send English representatives. Vincenzo Parpaglia, a former client of Pole, was despatched to the Netherlands in May, in hopes of entering England as papal nuncio. Philip regarded him as alarmingly pro-French, and Ambassador de Quadra did nothing to further the mission. Nicholas Throckmorton told the secretary of the Venetian ambassador in France that Elizabeth was hedging her bets about admitting him, having decided, ‘should the Council be free and universal, to send thither all her bishops and submit to it’. Elizabeth’s understanding of a ‘free’ council probably ruled out participation on any terms acceptable to the Pope, but Cecil was annoyed with Throckmorton for encouraging Elizabeth to speculate about prospects for the Council – ‘a matter of such weight being unmeet for a woman’s knowledge’.
A second papal envoy, an Italian abbot, Martinengo, was appointed in January 1561, this time with Spanish blessing. There was support for his mission even within English circles of power. Elizabeth’s favourite, Robert Dudley, was a free man, after his wife, Amy Robsart, broke her neck in September 1560 falling down a flight of stairs. The suspicious circumstances of her death made marriage to the Queen politically impossible – something Elizabeth soon reluctantly realized – but Dudley harboured hopes, and sought to enlist Spanish support with promises of participation at Trent. Cecil suavely informed de Quadra in March 1561 that Elizabeth would certainly be willing for English theologians to take part under papal chairmanship, so long as the gathering was held in a neutral place, and judged doctrines according to the scriptures and first four General Councils.12
In fact, Cecil was appalled by the prospect, and hard at work on a counter-stroke. At the beginning of April, a commission established to search out ‘mass mongers and conjurors’ claimed to have uncovered a conspiracy to bring about the Queen’s death using witchcraft, and it ordered the arrest of a clutch of Essex Catholic gentry. They included a stalwart of July 1553, Mary’s councillor Edward Waldegrave, who died in prison in late 1561. Confiscated letters showed the Marian bishops anticipating release from prison and freedom of conscience for Catholics. All this – along with news of discontent in Ireland, and of papist excitement at the discovery of the perfect image of a cross, found in a storm-wrecked tree on a Catholic estate in Wales – was enough for Elizabeth to endorse the Council’s veto on entry for the nuncio. Cecil confided to Throckmorton on 8 May that he meant none of them any personal harm, but ‘thought necessary to dull the papists’ expectation by discovering of certain massmongers and punishing them’. The reason for the verve of the papists? ‘The Queen’s lenity’.13
Queen Checks Bishops
In July 1561, Elizabeth set off on an ambitious two-month progress through Essex, Suffolk and Hertfordshire. It provided occasions, yet again, to display differences with her leading churchmen. Already in January, the Queen had issued a directive for better care to be taken of churches, and she was appalled by the condition she now found many of them in, and despatched orders to her ecclesiastical commissioners. It was reminiscent of her father during his Yorkshire progress of 1541. But where Henry’s concern had been to speed up changes to church furnishings, Elizabeth’s was to moderate them.
The Queen’s order for rood lofts to be cut down (see p. 442) was a literally halfway measure. The rood beams on which the lofts stood were to remain, and to be decorated with ‘some convenient crest’ (universally understood to mean the royal arms). There must be a ‘comely partition betwixt the chancel and the church’: the old notion of a division of sacred space was retained. Elizabeth also insisted that bells, which some Protestants saw as instruments of popish superstition, be protected from destruction; that the role of godparents in baptism – another object of godly suspicion – be preserved; and that communion tables be permanently embellished with ‘a fair linen cloth’, with a protective covering of silk or buckram – this at a time when Bishop Parkhurst of Norwich was ordering his clergy not to ‘suffer the Lord’s Table to be hanged and decked like an altar’.14
None of this came near the offence the Queen unwittingly – or, more likely, wittingly – caused with an order dashed off from Ipswich in early August. It declared wives and children to be obstacles to the clergy’s ‘quiet and orderly profession of study and learning’, and laid down that no wife, ‘or other woman’, was to be permitted within the precincts of cathedrals or university colleges. Elizabeth’s unwillingness to grant clerical marriage a renewed statutory basis was already a sore point. ‘The Queen’s majesty will wink at it,’ Sandys complained at the close of the 1559 Parliament, ‘but not stablish it by law, which is nothing else but to bastard our children.’
In the wake of the Ipswich directive, Archbishop Parker had a meeting with the Queen and emerged from it shell-shocked. He confided to Cecil that ‘I was in a horror to hear such words to come from her mild nature and Christianly learned conscience as she spake concerning God’s holy order of matrimony’. Parker was aggrieved. He felt he had given everything in service of Elizabeth, procuring the hatred of papists as well as ‘the foul reports of some Protestants’, only to be repaid with a ‘progress-hunting injunction, made upon the clergy with conference of no ecclesiastical person’. So much for the Queen’s promise not to challenge authority of divine offices. The views exchanged between Queen and archbishop were bracingly frank: Elizabeth ‘expressed to me a repentance that we were thus appointed in office, wishing it had been otherwise’.15
It was a spat, rather than a split. The story that Elizabeth once went out of her way to insult Parker’s wife is probably apocryphal – ‘Madam, I may not call you, and Mistress I am ashamed to call you, so I know not what to call you, but yet I do thank you.’ Nonetheless, the words spoken to Parker in haste and anger – that the Queen did not, in 1559–60, get the bishops she wanted – have the ring of truth. Elizabeth’s next episcopal appointment, in April 1562, was of Richard Cheyney to Gloucester. Cheyney was a Cambridge man, who had sided with Cheke and Cecil against Gardiner in the 1542 row over Greek pronunciation (see pp. 285–6). He was also a lifelong bachelor, as well as someone who had continued to hold office in the Church under Mary, and who retained a firm belief in real presence in the eucharist.16 Like Elizabeth herself, Cheyney was more an old-style evangelical, or a Lutheran, than a Reformed Protestant. Was his appointment to Hooper’s old diocese a sign of the ebbing tide of reform?
Not if the other bishops could help it. When an unknown Protestant secretly entered the Chapel Royal in August 1562, and broke to pieces the Queen’s cross and candlesticks, Bishop Parkhurst could scarcely contain his glee: ‘a good riddance of such a cross as that!’ But a subsequent letter to Bullinger sadly reported how ‘they were shortly after brought back again. … The lukewarmness of some persons very much retards the progress of the gospel.’17 ‘Some persons’: an English bishop, writing to his foreign mentor, barely bothered to veil the criticism of his own sovereign.
Elizabeth’s lukewarmness towards godly counsel depended on who was giving it. Having failed to acquire a consort’s throne with Spanish help in 1561, Robert Dudley reinvented himself as a patron of advanced Protestantism, and along with other councillors pressed hard for Elizabeth to provide military assistance to beleaguered co-religionists in France. In September 1562, a treaty agreed that an English army, under the command of Robert Dudley’s brother, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, would come to the aid of the French Protestants (known as Huguenots) in Normandy; in exchange, the Huguenot leader, Louis, Prince of Condé, promised to return Calais, and handed over Newhaven (Le Havre) as a pledge of good faith.
The expedition, militarily and politically, was a flop. Newhaven was abandoned the following summer in the face of hostility from Catholics and Huguenots alike. In the meantime, the English garrison there became a laboratory of Protestant reform. Old associates of Knox – William Whittingham, William Kethe and Thomas Wood – preached to the troops, and Genevan worship displaced the Prayer Book.
In December 1562, Cecil and Robert Dudley instructed the military comptroller of Newhaven, Cuthbert Vaughan, to rein back the innovations. Vaughan bluntly replied that, so as not to offend his Huguenot hosts, Warwick would simply not comply, though he intended no criticism of usages in the Church at home.
Vaughan himself, a veteran of Wyatt’s rebellion, was not himself so diplomatic: he saw ‘a great difference and choice’ between the experiments in France and the status quo at home. Vaughan longed to see ‘full Reformation of our Church’ in the coming Parliament, and removal of all ‘dregs of ceremonies and superstitions’. Yet if Dudley and Cecil would not lead the charge for reform in the Parliament, ‘by whom then, and when, shall we hope to be delivered?’18
The Parliament gathering on 11 January 1563 did not want for fiery Protestant fervour. It opened with a sermon in Westminster Abbey, preached by Alexander Nowell, dean of St Paul’s. Nowell praised (with questionable sincerity) the Queen’s ‘clemency and mercy’, but he aggressively called for sentence of death against ‘obstinate’ persons refusing to be reformed. A sermon that very day on the same theme at St Paul’s caused de Quadra to fear that the moment of martyrdom for the Marian bishops had arrived. Nowell’s sermon was overtly political, laced with demands for continued support of Scottish and French Protestants, and for the Queen to do her duty by marrying and producing an heir: ‘If your parents had been of your mind, where had you been then?’
The succession was at the front of minds at the start of 1563. The previous October, Elizabeth contracted smallpox, and for a time hovered between life and death. Nowell recalled countless conversations from those anxious days: ‘Alas, what trouble shall we be in, even as great or greater than France! For the succession is so uncertain, and such division for religion!’ A formal petition for the Queen to marry – organized by Cecil and other councillors – soon followed from the Lords and Commons. Elizabeth eventually replied, noncommittally, that she had taken no vow not to marry, and so they should ‘put out that heresy’ from their minds – another instance of her playful use of a perilous term.19
There was nothing amusing about the thought that – like her brother and sister – Elizabeth might die only a handful of years into her reign, leaving the succession yet more uncertain than in 1553 or 1558. For Cecil and other key advisors, none of the alternatives appealed. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, was a possibility. He was reliably Protestant, but his claim was tenuous, descending maternally (like Cardinal Pole’s) from Edward IV’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence. Katherine Grey (Jane’s sister) had a better legal case under Henry VIII’s will, but she was in disgrace for contracting an illicit marriage with Edward Seymour, son of the one-time Lord Protector, and she possessed little personally to recommend her to serious-minded councillors.
The qualifications of Mary of Scotland, in nearness of blood and experience of rule, spoke for themselves – despite Henry VIII’s attempt permanently to bar the Scottish line from the succession. As an orphan and a widow (Francis II died in December 1560), Mary was now less obviously under French sway, and her stock was rising – among religious conservatives, at least. To Protestants like William Cecil, the possible advent of a second Catholic Mary was the stuff of nightmares.
In March 1563, Cecil drafted a bill for the succession, adapting constitutional arrangements already imagined by him for Scotland to a possible scenario in England. If Elizabeth were to die suddenly, then sovereign powers would pass to the Privy Council until such time as Parliament was able to choose a successor: England would become de facto a republic, and then an elective monarchy. In an era of divine right monarchy, it was an extraordinarily radical plan. Only deep religious conviction allowed Cecil to conceive it, or other councillors and Members of Parliament to entertain it. To Elizabeth, however, discussion of the succession in any form was anathema, and the bill was dropped.20
Parliament contented itself with tightening the Queen’s security. An act ‘for the Assurance of the Queen’s Majesty’s Royal Power’ made denial of the Supremacy into a treasonable offence – a second refusal of the oath was now punishable by death. Along with schoolmasters, lawyers, candidates for degrees and ordination, MPs were added to the list of office-holders required to take the oath: Catholics, or at least open, Roman ones, were to be squeezed out of Parliament.
The bill’s passage was far from smooth: a remarkable eighty-three MPs voted against it in the Commons. Robert Atkinson, member for Appleby, Westmorland, in the far north-west, presented an adroit common lawyer’s case against it. Atkinson argued that support for the Pope was a religious offence, not a treasonable one. He highlighted the irony that Protestant preachers condemned the Six Articles, as well as ‘the dealings in Queen Mary’s days’, on the grounds that religion ‘must sink in by persuasion; it cannot be pressed in by violence’. A coerced oath would be self-defeating: ‘Think you, that all that take it will, upon the taking of it, change their consciences? Nay, many a false shrew there is that will lay his hand to the book, when his heart shall be far off.’ Far from cutting out sedition, enforced perjury would sew it into the very sinews of the state.
Atkinson concluded with a plea, not just for toleration, but for something like tolerance: ‘Let us therefore, for the honour of God, leave all malice, and notwithstanding religion, let us love together. For it is no point of religion, one to hate another.’ Charitable acceptance of difference was in the end inevitable: ‘when we have all done, to this we must come at last’. Years of destructive warfare in Germany ended at a point where ‘papist and Protestant can now quietly talk together’. Atkinson’s poignant appeal fulfilled the prophecy of another Catholic common lawyer: the dark day foreseen by Thomas More, when ‘we gladly would wish to be at league and composition with them, to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be content to let us have ours quietly to ourselves’ (see p. 191).
The bill was opposed in the Lords, but with the old bishops gone, the voices there lacked Atkinson’s subtlety. The Earl of Northumberland saw the ‘rigorous’ act as an attack on the ancient aristocracy: ‘when they had beheaded the clergy they would claim to do the same to the lay nobles’. Viscount Montague sounded an ominous note. Men of honour could not consent ‘to receive an opinion and new religion by force and compulsion … And it is to be feared, rather than to die, they will seek how to defend themselves.’
Toleration of dissent, or rebellion and civil war? The government rejected this as a false choice. Defending the bill in the Commons, Cecil played the anti-Spanish card, and painted it as a measure of crucial national security at a time when Philip was threatening war over refusal to admit the papal nuncio. Yet the strength of opposition was noted. The bill was amended in the Lords, making peers themselves exempt. The Spanish ambassador again expected imminent beheading of the imprisoned bishops, but again it did not happen.
Martyrdom was a double-edged sword, wielded in a blaze of publicity whose intensity could not easily be predicted or controlled. In April, Parker, assisted by Cecil, drafted a secret memo for the (Protestant) bishops. They were empowered under the act to tender the oath to any clergyman in their jurisdiction, but where they met with refusal they were not to offer it a second time without the archbishop’s explicit approval. Parker anticipated puzzlement and annoyance at this, and he did not want his brethren to think him ‘a patron for the easing of such evil-hearted subjects’. There was little doubt where the pressure for ‘lenity’ was coming from. In a letter to Cecil, Parker admitted he was issuing the directive on his own authority so as ‘not to recite the Queen’s Majesty’s name … to the discouragement of the honest Protestant’.21
As Cuthbert Vaughan had feared, the 1563 Parliament did little to advance reform, though an act authorizing translations of the Prayer Book and bible into Welsh was passed: an important first step towards counter-acting impressions that Protestant preaching in the principality was the imposition of an alien cultural system. There was no similar provision for Ireland. In January the previous year, the rebel Gaelic lord Shane O’Neill came to court to make a token declaration of submission to Elizabeth, his exotically clad gallowglass bodyguards exciting, according to the historian William Camden, ‘as much wonderment as if they had come from China or America’. In 1563, Shane was again in rebellion, his ambitions increasingly cloaked in the mantle of Catholic resistance.22
The real effort of Reformation in 1563 took place not in Parliament, but in Canterbury Convocation. Its major achievement was the framing of new articles of faith, a substantial revision of the Edwardian set, reducing the number from forty-two to thirty-nine. Some explicitly anti-anabaptist articles were dropped, while some anti-Catholic ones were sharpened: in an echo of propositions placed before the Westminster disputation, worship in a language not understood by the people was declared ‘repugnant to the Word of God’, and national churches were noted to have authority to ‘ordain, change and abolish ceremonies or rites’.
A new article announced the necessity of communion in two kinds, and transubstantiation was decreed to be a notion that ‘overthroweth the nature of a sacrament’. The ‘school authors’ of the Edwardian articles were relabelled as ‘Romish doctrine’. Catholics and Protestants, it was confirmed, recognized different bibles. The Council of Trent declared ‘deutero-canonical’ books such as Tobit, Ecclesiasticus and the two Books of Maccabees – found in an early Greek translation of the Old Testament but not in any Hebrew version – to be part of the canon of scripture. Article 6 denied this: the apocryphal texts were beneficial for ‘example of life and instruction of manners’, but could not be used as the basis of doctrine. It mattered: a key Catholic proof-text for purgatory was in the second Book of Maccabees.
On the Lord’s Supper, there was a change of emphasis from 1553, though quite what it signified was a moot point. The Forty-Two Articles denounced belief in ‘real and bodily presence, as they term it, of Christ’s flesh and blood in the sacrament’. The 1563 formula was a more positive affirmation: ‘the body of Christ is given, taken and eaten in the supper only after a heavenly and spiritual matter’.
It was still too negative for Bishop Cheyney, who seems, remarkably, to have refused to subscribe the articles. Edmund Guest of Rochester, after initial reluctance, did subscribe. In a letter to Cecil, he claimed credit for authorship of the revised article on the eucharist, and for trying to persuade Cheyney that the objectionable word ‘only’ was not meant to ‘exclude the presence of Christ’s body from the sacrament, but only the grossness and sensibleness in the receiving thereof’. Guest, like Cheyney, was a non-exile, and an alumnus of humanist, Henrician Cambridge. He did not lean as far as Cheyney towards Lutheran understandings of sacramental presence, but his eucharistic thinking encompassed the ‘real’ to an extent other bishops may not have realized, and would not have shared.
Elizabeth’s Church now possessed a doctrinal ‘Confession’, but the status of the articles remained oddly provisional. There was no move to undergird them with statutory authority, though the revisions in Convocation were timely enough to make that possible: the teaching of the Church, in Elizabeth’s view, was a matter for her and her clergy, not Parliament.
And in the final resort, just for her. Convocation approved thirty-nine articles, but when Elizabeth formally authorized them a few months later, there were only thirty-eight. The missing article was another on the eucharist. It stated ‘the wicked, and such as be void of a lively faith, although they do carnally and visibly press with their teeth … yet in no wise are they partakers of Christ, but rather to their condemnation do eat and drink the sign or sacrament of so great a thing’. This negative judgement of manducatio impiorum, reception by the unworthy, was a long-standing English Protestant belief, upheld by Cranmer and Ridley in the Lords’ debate of 1548 (see p. 323). It was also, in its unambiguous denial of any objective real presence, deeply offensive to German and Scandinavian Lutherans. Diplomatic considerations, as much as her own theological predilections, induced Elizabeth to suppress it.
There was an addition as well as a deletion. Article 20, ‘Of the Authority of the Church’, emerged from Convocation unchanged from 1553: ‘It is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God’s Word written.’ What Elizabeth put her name to was an article prefixing this with a declaration that ‘The Church hath power to decree rites and ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith.’23 Here, ‘the Church’ really meant the Queen. Like her father, Elizabeth reserved the right to decide what counted as ‘adiaphora’ and to compel people to observe it.
If this was a signal to over-hasty reformers, the bishops were laying down some markers of their own. Along with the articles, Convocation authorized a second book of Homilies for reading in Church. As with its Edwardian predecessor, the twenty topics were a mixture of the moralistic (‘Of Almsdeeds’, ‘Against Excess of Apparel’) and the more directly doctrinal. ‘Of the Worthy Receiving of the Sacrament’ fleshed out, so to speak, the understanding of Christ’s body in the eucharist. It distanced the Church from an older variety of sacramentarianism: here was ‘no bare sign, no untrue figure of a thing absent’. Yet there was little comfort for quasi-Lutherans. The eucharist was ‘spiritual food’, ‘a ghostly substance and not carnal’, made real by faith. It seemed much like Calvin’s ‘receptionist’ view.
The longest sermon in the collection was ‘Against Peril of Idolatry’, and probably written by John Jewel. It fulminated against ignorance and superstition, brandishing a bundle of scriptural and historical justifications for the iconoclastic work overseen by Jewel and the other visitors. The message insistently hammered home was that imagery was contrary to the second commandment, and that no images – especially images of Christ – should be erected in places of worship. Only by ‘destruction and utter abolishing of all images and idols out of the church’ could ‘God’s horrible wrath be averted’ – a duty the Lord ‘put in the minds of all Christian princes’. This was sailing close to the wind, for Jewel knew very well that God had put no such thought in the mind of Elizabeth.
Elizabeth mulled over the Homilies through the early summer, and when the volume was finally published at the end of July 1563, there were several changes from the presentation copy received some months earlier. A quotation from Augustine underlining the manducatio impiorum was gone. The Homily ‘Of Common Prayer and Sacraments’ was rewritten to suggest that, though only baptism and the eucharist were fully sacraments of Christ’s institution, other rites such as absolution and ordination retained some sacramental character. Most significantly, the sermon on idolatry was altered to state that it was a prince’s duty to remove ‘all such images’ (i.e. only abused ones) and that scripture suggested images should be banned from churches, not because they were ‘filthy and dead’, intrinsic sources of pollution, but only ‘for fear and occasion of worshipping them, though they be of themselves things indifferent’.24 Elizabeth did not manage to restore roods to parish churches, but she managed to say that she could, perhaps, if she wanted to. This was to rub salt into an episcopal wound, for the Queen had just thwarted another effort on the bishops’ part to move things forward, not back, from the settlement of 1559.
In addition to drafting the Thirty-Nine Articles and Homilies, the 1563 Convocation produced practical proposals for further reform. These were once thought to be the schemes of radicals in the lower house, sensibly blocked by the episcopate. But painstaking analysis of various drafts proves that the bishops, including Parker, were well aware of what was being proposed, and actively supportive.
The less contentious demands were for greater clarity in the Church’s teaching: a catechism written by Dean Nowell should be used in all churches and schools, and a book of doctrine set forth under royal authority. The suggestion was for this to be extracted from John Jewel’s Apologia pro Ecclesia Anglicana (Apology for the Church of England) – an extended treatment of the anti-Catholic themes of his Challenge Sermon, appearing early in 1562. In 1564, Cecil’s talented sister-in-law, Anne Bacon, produced an influential English translation, with a preface by Parker.
More provocative were calls for changes to the 1559 Prayer Book and its accompanying apparatus of worship. The petitioners – with the blessing of bishops like Sandys and Grindal – doubtless felt they were providing the same service Martin Bucer did for the Prayer Book of 1549: pointing out where liturgy remained too close to popery, and suggesting constructive improvements to bring it nearer to ‘the godly purity and simplicity used in the primitive Church’. The demands included an end to the sign of the cross in baptism, and to ‘superfluous’ bell-ringing and ‘curious’ singing – organs should be banned, and music restricted to unison psalms. Inevitably, there was a request for ‘the use of vestments, copes and surplices’ to be ‘from henceforth taken away’.
Cathedrals were to become centres of preaching, with thrice-weekly divinity lectures in English; non-preaching clergy must apply themselves to study of scripture or lose their positions. And ‘discipline’ – the holy grail of Protestant social reform – must be securely established: pending a thorough overhaul of canon law, there should be new laws against adulterers and fornicators, fines for failure to demonstrate basic knowledge of doctrine, public shaming for swearers and drunkards in some dedicated ‘place of penitents’, sharp punishments for people hearing mass or failing to take communion regularly. Not all of this appealed to lay Protestants. ‘There is a great labour made by the clergy for discipline,’ the poet George Ferrers wrote to his friend Thomas Challoner in January 1563, ‘whereof some suppose the Bishop of Rome has gone out at one door and comes in by another.’
The most important lay Protestant was having none of it. The disciplinary reform scheme survives in a manuscript with a heading in Parker’s handwriting: ‘Articles drawn out by some certain [people], and were exhibited to be admitted by authority, but not so allowed’.25 Elizabeth’s stonewall reaction to the proposals of 1563 was confirmation of a mind-set: she thought the statutes, Prayer Book and injunctions of 1559 were the summit of ecclesiastical perfection and not, as most of her bishops believed, a base-camp at the foot of the mountain.
Plague and Retribution
What God thought of it all was a matter of interpretation, though there was good reason, in the summer of 1563, to believe there was something he was not pleased about. Plague returned to England with unaccustomed vehemence, a deadly companion of the army skulking back from Newhaven. Before receding in early 1564, it took 80,000 lives, a quarter of them in London.
An official prayer was mandated to be read in churches. It enumerated blessings: ‘Thou hast delivered us from all horrible and execrable idolatry, wherein we were utterly drowned, and hast brought us unto the most clear and comfortable light of Thy blessed Word’. But an ingrate people neglected God’s commandments, following ‘our own carnal liberty’. Small wonder God should ‘show his wrath against sin, and call his people to repentance’.
The plague brought to the surface submerged anxieties about lukewarmness, neutrality and dissembling – a phenomenon, and an anxiety, that the heightened confessionalism of the mid-Tudor years helped to produce. Bishop Cox complained to Cecil in 1563 of the undermining of ministers’ efforts by ‘neuters, papists or carnal gospellers’. An English Protestant translation of a German Lutheran work identified a supposedly common type: ‘jacks of both sides, or walkers in a mean’, people who
craftily cloak and dissemble religion, and handle themselves in all outward affairs after such sort, as if a man were familiarly linked to both parties, not altogether gone from the papists, lest he be reckoned a stubborn fellow, nor utterly divorced from the gospellers, least he be called an apostate; and by that shift to walk as it were in the middle and most safe way, to be indifferent to both sides …
A pervasive sense of unease, even of alarm, was exacerbated by discovery of a sect who raised the habit of dissembling to an art form, and turned Nicodemism into a theological principle. The ‘Family of Love’, founded by the Dutch mystic Hendrik Niclaes, established itself in parts of rural England in the 1550s, but first came to official attention through the investigations of a Surrey magistrate in 1561. Two disgruntled former Familists confessed, among other shocking revelations, that ‘they hold it is lawful to do whatsoever the higher powers commandeth to be done, though it be against the commandments of God’. In Mary’s reign, members of the group moved from believing attendance at mass a sin to thinking it an obligation. Their religion was so inward and pure that no outward action could defile it: ‘They hold the Pope’s service, and this service now used in the church, to be nought, and yet to be by them used as free in the Lord to whom nothing is unclean.’26
As the plague struck London, the physician William Bullein offered caustic satire, as well as medical prescriptions, in his Dialogue Against the Fever Pestilence. One character unashamedly confesses ‘I am neither Catholic, Papist nor Protestant’; rather, ‘a nulla fidian [holder of no faith], and there are many of our sect’. Two equally shady types, the scheming lawyers Avarus and Ambodexter, reflect on how the world will never be merry ‘until these gospelling preachers have a sweating sickness at Smithfield’. The person to do it, ‘if he were again at liberty’, was ‘that holy man Bishop Bonner’.
Calls for vengeance against the Marian bishops, Bonner in particular, intensified during the plague. It seemed that some kind of expiation was needed to appease God’s righteous wrath. An earlier calamity ignited similar instincts. The burning of the steeple of St Paul’s Cathedral, as the result of a lightning strike on 4 June 1561, was said by Catholics to be punishment for abandoning the mass and the ancient faith. In a Paul’s Cross sermon, Bishop James Pilkington of Durham vigorously denied this, declaring, to the apparent rejoicing of his audience, that the Queen ‘intendeth that more severity of laws shall be executed against persons disobedient, as well in causes of religion as civil’. He urged people to follow God’s Word, and warned, presciently, ‘of some greater plague to follow, if amendment of life in all states did not ensue’.
Just prior to the outbreak, in March 1563, a book appeared from the press of John Day, a commercial hit in spite of its intimidating length. The Acts and Monuments of these Latter and Perilous Days was the culmination of years of labour by John Foxe, a former member of Knox’s faction at Frankfurt, and latterly a preacher in Norwich and London. It provided heart-rending accounts of the sufferings of the Marian martyrs, along with many details about their vindictive persecutors – above all, ‘Bloody Bonner’.
There was thus uproar in September 1563 when the government reassigned the former bishops to comfortable house arrest with their episcopal successors, in order, it was believed, to protect them from the plague. The move was denounced in sermons at Paul’s Cross and elsewhere. William Baldwin, a writer-turned-clergyman and master practitioner of anti-Catholic satire, was reported to be particularly vehement, ‘wishing a gallows set up in Smithfield, and the old bishops and other papists to be hanged thereon’.27
In April 1564, it did seem as if Bonner’s hour of reckoning had come. Bishop Horne of Winchester, in whose jurisdiction the Southwark Marshalsea prison lay, put the oath to him for the second time. Bonner refused, and was indicted in Queen’s Bench to face trial for treason. It was a daring and subversive stroke, undertaken by a trio of bishops without royal knowledge or permission. The instigator was Bonner’s successor, Edmund Grindal. He did not expect William Cecil to be unsympathetic, but purposely did not tell him beforehand so ‘that if any misliked the matter ye might liquido jurare [confidently swear] ye were not privy of it’.
‘Any’, of course, meant Elizabeth. Grindal, girded with expert legal opinion, had Parker’s written permission. The move was prompted by genuine animus against Bonner, and a determination he should face justice. But it was also an assertion of episcopal autonomy in the wake of recent checks and humiliations. Grindal envisaged the process against Bonner as the first of many: ‘no more meet man to begin withal than that person’.
To step in and halt a legitimate judicial process would be legally questionable and, given the state of Protestant opinion in London, politically risky. But there is little doubt Elizabeth was privately furious. During a visit to Cambridge in August, students acted before her a comedy satirizing the imprisoned bishops. One, ‘carrying a lamb in his hands as if he were eating it’, was clearly supposed to represent Bonner. Elizabeth, a past mistress of the dramatic walkout, angrily left, ‘using strong language’. The lights literally went out on the performance, as torch-bearers hurried to accompany the Queen.28
The declaration of episcopal independence went spectacularly awry. Bonner’s trial in the autumn of 1564 turned into a misfire, an embarrassing rebuff to the campaign for Marian reckoning. The ex-bishop, assisted by the eminent lawyers Edmund Plowden and Christopher Wray, a Catholic and a semi-Catholic, conducted as brilliant a defence against treason as Nicholas Throckmorton did ten years earlier (see p. 372).
Bonner hinged his case on a technical defect in the indictment. The law required the oath to be tendered him by a bishop, but Horne’s episcopal status, he claimed, was irregular because Archbishop Parker, who consecrated him, was himself technically deficient. The 1533 Appointment of Bishops Act stipulated the participation of four bishops, or three including an archbishop. Four (three ex-bishops and a suffragan) were eventually rounded up for Parker’s consecration in December 1559, but their status depended on the Edwardian Ordinal, which had been repealed by statute in Mary’s reign but not formally restored in Elizabeth’s.
The validity of the episcopal orders of men their papist opponents routinely referred to as ‘pseudo-bishops’ was a can of worms the government wanted to stay sealed. When, in November, it seemed the judges might find merit in Bonner’s arguments, the trial was permanently suspended. The new Spanish ambassador, Guzman de Silva, reported on 9 October that Cecil had ordered the bishops to treat gently ‘those of the old faith’, and the bishops were in consequence ‘very displeased’. Archbishop Young complained to the Queen that Bonner’s mistrial was a principal cause of ‘inconstancy and murmuring’ among Catholics in Yorkshire, encouraging a perception ‘that your Majesty would have none of that sort so offending your laws punished’.
Robert Dudley, once again intriguing for Spanish support, and recently ennobled as Earl of Leicester, was happy to take credit for protecting the lives of the deprived bishops, and he assured de Silva that the Queen knew nothing beforehand about the action against Bonner. De Silva, meanwhile, impressed upon Leicester that both he and Elizabeth needed the good will of English Catholics, who ‘were very numerous, much more so than those of the new religion, with whom the Queen and he were unpopular’.29
Mislikers of True Religion
De Silva was surely right. Catholics, however precisely defined, were very numerous in the early 1560s. Nicholas Sander, a fellow of New College, Oxford, who fled abroad rather than take the Oath of Supremacy, wrote in 1561 a report for the protector of English interests at Rome, Cardinal Morone. He claimed that less than 1 per cent of the population was ‘infected’ with heresy.30 That, undoubtedly, was an optimistic underestimate, but outside London and some other urban centres, Protestants were certainly the minority. Alarmingly, that was true even of the groups charged with responsibility for imposing the new order.
In October 1564, the Privy Council wrote to the bishops asking them to report on the reliability of justices of the peace in their dioceses. The replies placed magistrates in one of three categories: ‘favourers’, ‘hinderers’ or ‘indifferent’, in respect of ‘true religion’. Fewer than half the JPs were reckoned to be supporters of the government’s religious policies, and nearly a third positively opposed them. Catholic gentry were particularly concentrated in Hampshire, Sussex, Herefordshire and across the north. In Lancashire, only six out of twenty-five justices were thought favourable towards the settlement.
The findings underlined not only the strength of conservative feeling among the landowning elite, but also the depth of elite divisions, even within families. Edwin Sandys of Worcester placed Clement Throckmorton, one of the sons of Sir George, and sibling of Nicholas, among the ‘favourers of true religion’. Their elder brother Robert was one of the ‘adversaries’. Robert’s son, Thomas, was put in the column for ‘indifferent of religion’, though Bishop Bentham of Coventry and Lichfield considered both him and his father ‘no favourers’.
Bishops were shocked by what they discovered. Sandys urged the Council to consider the benefits ‘if all such as mislike and condemn true religion, now by common order set forth, were put out of authority’. This was what the ‘Device for the Alteration’ advocated in 1558. But reality had set in: as with the parish clergy, purging every magistrate not zealously committed to reform would make England ungovernable. The Council insisted on relatively few changes to commissions for 1565.
‘Misliking’ true religion could mean sponsoring an alternative. Sandys complained that ‘popish and perverse priests which, misliking religion, have forsaken the ministry’ were ‘kept in gentlemen’s houses’. These skulking priests were ‘had in great estimation’, and ‘marvellously pervert the simple’. One of their protectors was the former privy councillor and royal secretary, Sir John Bourne. During the royal visitation, Bourne removed the altar from the parish church to his house outside Worcester. Thereafter, he missed few opportunities to mock Sandys’s preaching, and showed a particular animus against clerical marriage. Two ministers’ wives, crossing the River Severn in a boat one day in 1563, were menaced by Bourne’s son and servants: ‘now you are among papists’. Bishop Scory of Hereford had similar tales to tell: office-holders in Mary’s Church, ‘mortal and deadly enemies to this religion’, were now saying masses in the houses of suspect JPs, ‘which come very seldom or not at all to church’.31
Catholics faced the self-same dilemma Protestants did after 1554: could they attend defective church services to fulfil the demands of the law, and the requirements of neighbourliness, or was such attendance quite literally damnable? Catholic perplexity was, if anything, greater than that of Marian Protestants: the communion service was not for them an ‘idol’, as the mass was for reformers. But there was at least a definitive authority to whom they could turn. In the summer of 1562, a group of leading Catholic laymen, via the Portuguese and Spanish ambassadors, petitioned the Council of Trent. They admitted that threats of imprisonment, and entreaties of friends and relatives, had induced many Catholic gentlemen ‘to allow themselves to be withdrawn from their resolution’ concerning presence at Protestant services; what did ‘men of true piety and learning think they ought to do?’
Ambassador de Quadra, still then pursuing Philip’s strategy of rapprochement with Elizabeth, added his own gloss. The ‘Common Prayers’ of the Church of England, he blithely declared, ‘contain no false doctrine whatever, nor anything impious. It is all Scripture or prayers taken from the Catholic Church.’ Attendance was not in itself evil, ‘apart from the sin of dissimulation, and possible harm caused by bad example’. De Quadra was a bishop as well as a diplomat, so did not come at things from a place of theological ignorance. But the judgement of the Council Fathers, delivered in August 1562, was emphatic: ‘You may not be present at such prayers of heretics, or at their sermons, without heinous offence and the indignation of God, and it is far better to suffer most bitter cruelties than to give the least sign of consent to such wicked and abominable rites.’32
This was a condemnation of Nicodemism as resounding as any produced by the Marian exiles. Yet there was, at first, virtually no papal effort to publicize it, even as Pius IV was quietly granting de Quadra powers to reconcile penitent heretics and schismatics – a move that provoked understandable anger on the part of the English government. Roman action against Elizabeth was still constrained by Habsburg influence. In addition to standing anxieties about France, there was a hopeful possibility that Elizabeth might marry the Archduke Charles, third son of the Emperor Ferdinand I, and a cousin of Philip of Spain.
Even Cecil thought the proposal worth considering: Charles was preferable to Leicester, and Cecil assumed (wrongly) that the Archduke would be prepared to convert to Protestantism. Negotiations did not get underway till August 1563, but in June Ferdinand reacted furiously when he heard some Englishmen at Louvain, working in concert with the imprisoned bishops, had requested the nearly concluded Council of Trent to instigate excommunication proceedings against Elizabeth. Under pressure from both Philip and Ferdinand, Pius IV dropped the idea.
Habsburg policy was to press the case for toleration, creating for English Catholics a situation analogous to that found in parts of Germany. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg, which ended the religious warfare in the Empire, embodied the famous principle, cuius regio eius religio (your ruler, his religion). But in some long-divided places it also confirmed arrangements for Lutherans and Catholics to worship alongside each other in uneasy co-existence. In September 1563, Ferdinand wrote to Elizabeth, thanking her for clemency towards the imprisoned bishops, and advancing a proposal from the cardinal legates at Trent: that Catholics in England be provided with at least one church in every city, to hear mass and celebrate the sacraments.
There was little chance of this being seriously entertained. Where minorities were formally tolerated in western Europe, it was usually the result of one side failing to vanquish the other in an inconclusive war. Such a war was something England, so far, had managed to avoid. Elizabeth’s reply to the Emperor encapsulated a philosophy of rule where ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ were impossible to pick apart:
To found churches for diverse rites, besides being openly repugnant to the enactments of our supreme Parliament, would be but to graft religion upon religion, to the distraction of good men’s minds, the fostering of the zeal of the factious, the sorry blending [disturbing] of the functions of church and state, and the utter confounding of all things human and divine in this our now peaceful state; a thing evil in itself, of the worst example, pernicious to our people, and to those themselves, in whose interest it is craved, neither advantageous nor indeed without peril.33
For Elizabeth, uniformity of religious practice was, quite literally, an article of faith. This was a conventional view of things, the standard assumption of states and ecclesiastical authorities across virtually all of late medieval Europe. But forty years of rival evangelisms, state-sponsored or freelance, had placed the ideal under intolerable strain. It could be maintained in one of three ways, or by some combination of them. Nonconformists could be eliminated, by fire, sword or expulsion; they could be converted; or they could be persuaded to conform and obey, irrespective of any inner convictions about truth.
Elizabeth, who had played the game from both sides, leaned instinctively towards the third way. Sir Nicholas Bacon’s son, Francis, would famously later say of her that she misliked ‘to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts’. Yet Elizabeth reigned in a profoundly anti-Nicodemite age, and her attempts to contain religious tensions had an inescapable tendency to inflame them.
English Catholics benefited little, in the first half of the 1560s, from the muffled and mixed messages from Rome. A clearer lead came from the imprisoned bishops and senior clergy. John Feckenham wrote in 1563 a detailed account of ‘considerations and causes, moving me not to be present at, nor to receive, neither use the service of the new book’. It was smuggled out of prison and circulated widely in manuscript. In 1564, Bishop Thomas Bentham complained about ‘lewd priests’ resorting for advice to the former bishop of Peterborough, David Pole.34
‘Recusancy’ was the legal term for refusal (Lat., recusare) to attend church, a statutory offence under the Act of Uniformity. It got under way without waiting for a steer from Trent or the papacy. The former Marian cathedral clergy, backbone of Pole’s Catholic reformation, played a crucial role in the process.35 The ex-dean of Durham, Thomas Robertson, was ‘thought to do much hurt’ in Yorkshire in 1562, while John Morren, Bonner’s former chaplain and one-time canon of St Paul’s, distributed a tract in the streets of Chester in 1561 warning any Catholics tempted to receive Protestant communion that in doing so ‘you break your profession made in baptism, and fall into schism, separating yourselves from God and his Church’. The ex-archdeacons of Derby and Huntingdon, John Ramridge and Anthony Draycott, said recusant masses for Catholic gentlemen in East Anglia. In 1561, a batch of deprived former canons from Exeter, Worcester and other places arrived in Hereford, and placed themselves at the disposal of a band of local recusants. Bishop Scory reported with disgust the welcome they received from the citizens, with feasting and a torch-lit street procession: ‘they could not much more reverently have entertained Christ himself’.
Catholic aristocrats provided shelter and protection. On completion of his visitation of Winchester in 1561, Bishop Horne told Cecil of general conformity, but also of persons ‘who have purposely withdrawn themselves … partly under pretence that they serve noblemen’. Richard Marshall, former dean of Christ Church, Oxford, an Edwardian evangelical who under Mary became a convinced Romanist, went north after deprivation or resignation in 1559. He stayed for a time with the Earl of Cumberland, and encouraged spiritual resistance among Catholics in Yorkshire, before being arrested and persuaded by Grindal to subscribe to the Thirty-Nine Articles in December 1563 – a temporary recantation. Alban Langdale, former archdeacon of Chichester and veteran of the 1559 Westminster disputation, went to the household of Viscount Montagu, the most vocal opponent of the settlement in the House of Lords. In 1561, Langdale appeared on a list of recusants in the diocese of Chichester: ‘learned, and very earnest in papistry’.36
The most earnest among the papists took the option favoured by zealous Protestants under Mary: flight into overseas exile, to worship as they liked, and speak and write freely against the iniquities of the regime at home. Among the first to leave was Thomas Harding, another Marian convert from evangelicalism choosing not to revert to his former opinions with the turning of the political tide. Harding went to Louvain, haven of choice for English papalists since the early 1530s. Richard Smyth, vice-chancellor of Oxford and preacher at the burning of Latimer and Ridley, attempted on Mary’s death to flee to Scotland. He was arrested in the borders, and placed in Parker’s custody at Lambeth. Here, under pressure, he subscribed to the royal supremacy. Temporary submission, followed by flight, was another way in which Elizabethan exiles imitated, if not flattered, their Marian predecessors. Early in 1560, Smyth gave Parker the slip and crossed to Louvain. In 1562, he was elected vice-chancellor of Douai, a brand new university established by Philip II on the southern edge of the Spanish Netherlands.
These two university towns, of Louvain and Douai, just a little further apart from each other than Oxford was from Cambridge, attracted scholars from their English counterparts in impressive – and, to Protestants, alarming – numbers. Louvain soon had houses of study named ‘Oxford’ and ‘Cambridge’. A contemporary Catholic estimate was of some 300 transplanted to the Low Countries in the first years of the reign. Cambridge lost its regius professors of divinity and civil law, as well as heads of several colleges, but Oxford lived up to its long-standing reputation as the more religiously conservative of the two universities: twenty-five fellows were ejected from New College alone.
By 1564, the exiles were bringing out works of religious controversy, usually published in the great printing centre of Antwerp, and initially in response to Jewel’s Challenge sermon and Apology. It began as a trickle, and became a flood of words: five works in 1564, fifteen in 1565, twelve in 1566 – a ‘havoc of books’, complained Alexander Nowell. Attacks from adversaries ‘beyond the sea’, Parker lamented to Cecil in March 1565, were multiplying in ‘books plentifully had in the court’. Jewel himself felt exhausted and beleaguered, ‘always battling with these monsters’. And yet, he sighed to Bullinger, they ‘must be answered’. Like Thomas More a generation earlier (see pp. 201–2), Protestants were caught up in a paradox of polemic: refuting an opponent’s views inevitably involved publicizing them. Jewel’s 1565 Replie unto M. Hardinges Answeare contained within it a complete text of Harding’s attack on the Protestant Church of England.
For the most part, the exiles wrote in English, recognizing the social broadening of the battle of ideas. Simple folk, huffed Nowell, ‘may much marvel at such plenty of English books’.37 In truth, English Protestants were thrown off-balance by the ferocity and sophistication of the assault, a further tribute to the intellectual and organizational refurbishment of English Catholicism taking place in Mary’s reign.
Members of the old guard – Smyth (who died in 1563) and Harding – were fully engaged. But, from the outset, leading roles devolved to members of a younger generation, writers born in the 1530s; ideological products of the Marian Church with no personal knowledge of the pre-Reformation world: Thomas Dorman, John Martiall, John Rastell, Nicholas Sander, Thomas Stapleton. Nor were the old dogs incapable of learning new tricks. Thomas Darbyshire and William Good, born in 1518 and 1527 respectively, entered the Society of Jesus in 1562–3. Jasper Heywood, son of the playwright John Heywood, and great-nephew of Thomas More, was another early English recruit to the order.
A rising star among the exiles was a Lancashire man, William Allen, who resigned his Oxford fellowship in 1560. After a period in the Low Countries, Allen returned to Lancashire to convalesce from illness, and was horrified to find there Catholics attending church, as well as priests prepared to say both communion services and covert masses. On his own account, Allen launched an itinerant campaign for recusancy, shuttling between gentry households to persuade people ‘truth was to be found nowhere else save with us Catholics’. By the spring of 1565, he was back in the Low Countries, adding to the printed chorus of condemnation against Jewel.
The exiles were mainly clergymen (though Allen was only ordained to the priesthood at Mechelen in 1565). But there was a sprinkling among them of laymen with political connections and sometimes militant convictions. Mary’s privy councillor Sir Francis Englefield went abroad, under royal licence, in 1559, but judged it prudent not to return. He was already a pensioner of King Philip, and remained in his service. John Story, heretic-hunter and parliamentary troublemaker, was imprisoned in the Fleet in 1560, but in 1563, with the connivance of the Spanish ambassador, he was able to escape to Louvain. There he formally took an oath of allegiance to Philip – an unusual and provocative step revealing his conviction that faith was the higher form of patriotism.38
In the main, the exiles adopted a stance of scrupulous loyalty to the person of Elizabeth. Harding’s 1565 Confutation of Jewel bore the royal arms on its title page, and was one of several works dedicated to the Queen. John Martiall invited ‘indifferent’ readers to note the contrast between Catholics’ writings and those of the late Marian exiles: ‘there is no blast blown against the monstrous regiment of women. … There is no libel set forth for order of succession.’
There was method in the modesty. The exiles were not strangers to English Protestantism, but astute observers of its stresses and tensions. Widening the wedge between Elizabeth and the more zealous of her clergy was a strategy that happily coincided with their long-held convictions that heresy was inherently factional and divisive. Martiall’s 1564 Treatyse of the Cross defended the image of the crucifix with recurrent reference to the example of the Chapel Royal. Harding was well informed about an incident at a Lenten court sermon in 1564, ‘your princely word commanding a preacher that opened his lewd mouth against the reverent use of the cross in your private chapel to retire from that ungodly digression’. The preacher was the dean of St Paul’s, Alexander Nowell, and his temerity in raising the subject prompted a devastating royal heckle: ‘To your text, Mr Dean—leave that, we have heard enough of that.’ Parker took the distraught Nowell home afterwards for dinner, ‘for pure pity’.39
Most of all, the exiles watched with vicarious delight as in 1564–5 a long-brewing storm prepared to break over the English Church. It was the question decided but not settled by the Injunctions of 1559: vestments of the clergy. In his Fortress of the Faith, printed at Antwerp in June 1565, Thomas Stapleton affected to marvel how anyone could acknowledge Elizabeth as Supreme Governor in spiritual causes, yet refuse to obey her in this decidedly spiritual matter. Catholics, of course, knew the value of vestments, yet ‘to be apparelled priest-like’ evidently seemed absurd to ‘the zealous gospellers of Geneva’ – people Stapleton off-handedly referred to as ‘the Puritans of our country’.
This was the first documented usage of a word very likely already in circulation. Some Elizabethan commentators thought Stapleton’s colleague Nicholas Sander invented the term ‘Puritan’, in ironic recognition of a supposedly fanatical obsession with ecclesiastical and personal purity. It was one of numerous mocking nicknames that for decades Catholics had been thinking up for their opponents; synonyms or sub-sets of ‘heretic’, and pay-back for the now ineradicably rooted epithet ‘papist’. No one in England, at least for many years to come, would call themselves a Puritan. But the label took hold widely and quickly: Catholic oil on the internal fires of the Church of England. Anti-puritanism created Puritanism.40 Discovering the name for a phenomenon of protest made it seem more like a movement, a party. It started to force people – most notably, the bishops themselves – to decide which side they were really on.
Rags of Rome
Following Convocation’s failure to amend the regulations on clerical vestments, some ministers decided simply to ignore them. A paper in Cecil’s possession, dating from 1564/5, listed disquieting ‘varieties in the service and administration used’. Communion was ministered by clergymen, ‘some with surplice and cap, some with surplice alone, others with none’. There were additional irregularities. Some ministers omitted the sign of the cross in baptism; some laypeople sat, or stood, rather than knelt, to receive communion, ‘some with unleavened bread, and some with leavened’. Communion tables stood variously, covered and uncovered, in naves and chancels, sometimes altarwise, sometimes not.
These were not always sins of silent omission. Among the grievances conservative parishioners in Hull, East Yorkshire, tabled in 1564 against their belligerent vicar, Melchior Smith, was that
since the time of his being vicar there, [he] hath not used to wear a priest’s cap, nor yet a surplice in the church in time of divine service, but openly in his sermons hath called priests’ caps and surplices vile clouts and rags, and hath said that priests’ caps are knaves’ caps.
To William Turner, dean of Wells, the ‘woollen horns’ of the square cap were indelibly associated with the ‘cruel and popish butchers which not long ago burned so many Christian martyrs’. He was said to have trained a little dog to snatch caps from the heads of visiting dignitaries.41 Nonconformity of this sort was not confined to the provinces: it was particularly visible in London, and in the now partially decatholicized universities. Bishops like Grindal, Bentham and Parkhurst turned a strategically blind eye.
By the autumn of 1564, Elizabeth decided to put an end to it. The Spanish ambassador reported in October that ‘Cecil tells these heretical bishops to look after their clergy, as the Queen is determined to reform them in their customs, and even in their dress, as the diversity that exists in everything cannot be tolerated’.
To many of the bishops, it seemed yet again an unnecessary fight over the wrong issue. ‘I marvel much that this small controversy for apparel should be so heavily taken,’ Pilkington groaned to Leicester. Such things might be borne with for a while, for the sake of ‘Christian liberty’, and ‘in hope to win the weak’. Yet ‘when liberty is turned to necessity, it is evil, and no longer liberty’. The unanswerable riposte was the addition Elizabeth made, without consultation of bishops, to Article 20: ‘The Church hath power to decree rites and ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith.’42
Parker attempted to broker a compromise, summoning to London the leaders of Oxford nonconformity, who were also the most eminent divines in the university: Laurence Humphrey, Regius Professor of Divinity, and Thomas Sampson, dean of Christ Church. Agreement – or at least a fudge – seemed possible. Humphrey and Sampson had, as usual, been soliciting Zürich for advice. They expected Bullinger to back their conscientious objection, but, much as the Swiss reformer disliked vestments, he advised that obedience to the magistrate took precedence. At a conference in December, Parker persuaded several leading churchmen, including Grindal and Horne, to sign up to the proposition that distinctions of ecclesiastical dress could be enjoined by public authority without taint of false doctrine. Humphrey and Sampson also signed, but after inscribing the words of St Paul: ‘all things are lawful to me, but not all are expedient … not all edify’. This was – in effect – to add, as the Catholic bishops did in 1531, ‘as far as the law of God allows’, to reserve the judgement of their conscience. Edification – a genteel, innocuous-sounding word – was in fact anything but. For Puritans, it was the bottom line, the necessary condition for ceremonies and habits of worship. If they did not positively help towards growth in the spirit, then they positively hindered it.43
Elizabeth had no patience for such scruples. On 25 January 1565, she sent a letter to Parker, drafted by Cecil, instructing him to put an end to ‘sufferance of sundry varieties and novelties, not only in opinions, but in external ceremonies and rites’. No one was to be admitted to ecclesiastical office without undertaking to maintain ‘one manner of uniformity throughout our whole realm’, and any ‘superior officers’ proving remiss in implementing it were to be reported, ‘for we intend to have no dissension or variety grow, by suffering of persons which maintain the same to remain in office’.44
For the bishops, this was a moment of decision, and of fateful entanglement with some old dilemmas. Was scripture the sole storehouse of acceptable practices for Church use? Most bishops, like most Protestants, thought not. But did strictly inessential items (adiaphora) have to meet the test of serving wider purposes of reform – to be things that ‘edified’? Or were they to be ‘borne with’ simply because they were desired by public authority, an authority that scripture itself enjoined Christians to obey?
It was a decision the bishops had in fact already taken, a bargain already struck, but one whose implications they now had to face up to. Grindal explained to Bullinger in 1566 that ‘we who are now bishops, on our first return, and before we entered on our ministry, contended long and earnestly for the removal of those things that have occasioned the present dispute’. Having failed, ‘we judged it best … not to desert our churches for the sake of a few ceremonies, and those not unlawful in themselves’. Mass resignations would leave the Church vulnerable to ‘Lutherans and semi-papists’ – Grindal had no appetite to see an episcopal bench lined by the likes of Richard Cheyney.
The bishops, then, would take a deep collective breath and enforce the Queen’s wishes. On 30 January 1565, in ‘obedience to her princely authority, and to avoid her heavy indignation’, Parker commanded Grindal to relay Elizabeth’s instructions to all bishops of the province, and to take action against offenders. In March, Grindal, along with Cox, Guest, Horne and Nicholas Bullingham of Lincoln, convened with Parker to draft a set of articles, issued early the next year as ‘Advertisements [notifications] for due order in the public administration of Common Prayers’ – a code of clerical discipline.
The Advertisements put preaching on a short rein. Licences issued before 1 March 1564 were suspended, with new applicants to be ‘diligently examined for their conformity’. All preachers were to stress ‘the reverent estimation of the holy sacraments’, and urge obedience to all requirements of the Prayer Book and Injunctions. Stipulations for clerical dress were carefully, minutely, set out. At home, in private studies, clergymen might ‘use their own liberty of comely apparel’, but travelling in public they must at all times wear the square cap and gown prescribed by the Injunctions – a pantomime of the observance of outward uniformity insisted on by the Queen. For services, there was a (slight) relaxation of the rules. In cathedrals, and for ministration of holy communion only, the cope was to be worn. In parish churches, for public prayer and celebration of all sacraments, the required standard was now ‘a comely surplice with sleeves’. The Advertisements ended, not exactly with an oath, but with a set of ‘protestations’ or promises for holders of ecclesiastical office to observe all the ceremonies of the Church.45
Elizabeth never formally assented to the Advertisements, which were issued on Parker’s authority alone. Perhaps this was because the stipulation of surplice rather than cope for parish eucharists represented a retrenchment from the 1559 settlement, something the Queen was prepared to tolerate but not officially endorse. Just as probably, the Queen wanted the bishops to take responsibility for implementing a divisive and unpopular policy: it was a test of loyalty, and a form of punishment.
Enforcement began with the universities, where it proved as painful as expected. In Oxford, the resistance of Humphrey and Sampson had wide support, and while Humphrey was able to cling to office, citing legal exemptions of his college, Magdalen, Sampson was deprived of his deanery of Christ Church. Cambridge was even more recalcitrant, with something like a full-scale student rebellion stirred up by the sermons against ‘popish trumpery’ of George Withers and William Fulke. Cecil, chancellor of the University, stepped in to force the university authorities to impose conformity, laying down the line that was his and Parker’s, but perhaps not quite Elizabeth’s – that vestments ‘of themselves were of none other value but to make a demonstration of obedience, and to render a testimony of unity’. The crackdown succeeded, but left a legacy of bitterness among young scholars preparing for ministry in parishes across England.
In London, showcase and nerve-centre of nonconformity, Grindal tried at the start of 1566 to broker a compromise, and managed to persuade all but a few former exiles to agree to the surplice, and a form of outdoor dress falling short of the square cap. He was still missing the point, which was full conformity to the Queen’s wishes, precisely because they were the Queen’s wishes. On 26 March 1566, Parker gave up waiting for royal approval of his Advertisements, and summoned the London clergy to appear before ecclesiastical commissioners at Lambeth. Grindal was now, reluctantly, on board, but privy councillors were notable by their absence. Robert Cole, rector of St Mary-le-Bow, a former opponent of the costume, modelled the gown and cap. The clergy were ordered to subscribe their willingness to wear this garb: ‘be brief; make no words’. Of nearly a hundred in attendance, sixty-one agreed to subscribe, and thirty-seven refused and were immediately suspended. They included such luminaries as James Calfhill, Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in Oxford, and the renowned authors Thomas Becon and John Foxe. Almost all the city’s lecturers were among the suspended, leading the former Genevan elder Thomas Wood to complain angrily to Cecil how ‘all exercises almost of interpretation of the scriptures … are utterly overthrown’, and of ‘the wonderful rejoicing also of the papists’.46
It was far from the end of the business. Suspended preachers refused to be silenced, and stirred up their supporters in sermons which, according to the conservative chronicler John Stow, ‘vehemently’ denounced the Queen, Council and bishops. Dissidents printed two tracts, The Voice of God and A Brief Discourse against the Outward Apparel, and, in emulation of old evangelical tactics, distributed them in the streets. The prime organizer was Robert Crowley, vicar of St Giles Cripplegate, who before his ordination worked as a printer and publisher. A month after the showdown at Lambeth, Crowley blocked a funeral cortège, its accompanying clerks in surplices, from entering St Giles. The church, he said, was his: ‘The Queen had given it him during his life and made him vicar thereof, wherefore he would not suffer any such superstitious rags of Rome there to enter.’
Easter 1566 saw instances of intimidation and resistance at other city churches. At St Mary Magdalen, Milk Street, the surpliced minister was unable to perform the sacrament after bread and communion cup were swiped from the holy table. Services were only possible at St Mildred, Bread Street, the Sunday after Easter, because the alderman’s deputy and prominent parishioners stood guard over a stand-in minister to protect him from the suspended rector and his glowering adherents. Rival groups of parishioners came to blows at All Hallows, Thames Street, after the conforming minister was seen to smile approvingly during a sermon denouncing the vestments policy. A Scottish clergyman, who first preached against surplices and later conformed, had a rough time of it on Whit Monday in St Margaret Pattens, Rood Lane. ‘A certain number of wives threw stones at him, and pulled him forth of the pulpit, rending his surplice and scratching his face’ – a ‘womanish brabble’ was how Grindal described the incident to Cecil.
Even, or especially, in a strongly patriarchal age, female voices demanded to be heard, and to express a sometimes raucous judgement on disputed matters of religion. When, at the start of June, several leading nonconformist clergy were summoned for extended discussions with Bishop Horne of Winchester, a supportive crowd of two to three hundred women accompanied the ministers over London Bridge into Southwark, showering them with gifts, and ‘animating them most earnestly to stand fast in the same their doctrine which they had taught touching surplices’. A few weeks earlier, a deputation of sixty women came to Grindal’s house to petition on behalf of an arrested divinity lecturer from Crowley’s parish of St Giles. Grindal delivered a patronizing message that they should ‘send me half-a-dozen of their husbands, and with them I would talk’. But the bishop was on the receiving end of female wrath at the start of the following year, when he came to preach at St Margaret’s, Old Fish Street, wearing the pointed square cap. The congregation, ‘especially the women’, hooted at him with the bull-baiting cry, ‘ware horns!’ One of the protestors, a Southwark tinker’s wife, was forced to sit outside the church the following Saturday on two ladders ‘like a cucking-stool’. But supporters gathered to tell her ‘to rejoice and praise the Lord for that he had made her worthy to suffer persecution for righteousness’.47
How, Grindal must have been thinking, had it all come to this? Former exiles with proud records of witness against Marian oppression were being cast in the role of persecutors of the godly. ‘Now my Lord of London’, Parker remarked wryly to Cecil in June 1566, ‘feeleth and seeth the marks and bounds of these good sprites, which, but for his tolerations etc., had been suppressed for five or six years ago.’ One suspended minister, a man called Pattenson, preached sermons calling Grindal an antichrist, a heretic and a traitor. He was unashamed to repeat the charges to Grindal’s face, citing the seventh chapter of Deuteronomy as condemnation of anyone who retained ‘idols’. Pattenson had been ordained by Grindal, but now recognized neither his suspension, nor any authority of a ‘popish licence’ or obligation to remain ministering within his cure. ‘My cure,’ he announced solemnly, ‘is wheresoever I do meet with a congregation that are willing to hear the word of God.’ The Duchess of Suffolk, grande dame of the Marian exile, petitioned for Pattenson’s release, but, unsurprisingly, he remained in custody.48
Pattenson’s preoccupations with preservation from the pollution of idolatry, and with total fidelity to a literal reading of God’s Word, were symptoms of a wider, and worrying, trend. The drive against nonconformity was producing a sometimes token conformity, but it was also creating more radical forms of dissent, and even withdrawal from communal worship. This was no complete novelty, for it was what some Protestant Londoners did in the reign of Mary. On 19 June 1567, a conventicle of around a hundred persons was discovered worshipping at the hall of the Plumbers’ Livery Company, hired ostensibly for a wedding. The ringleaders were questioned the next day by Grindal and other ecclesiastical commissioners. The bishop put it to them that, ‘in severing yourselves from the society of other Christians, you condemn not only us, but also the whole state of the Church reformed in King Edward’s days, which was well reformed according to the Word of God’.
That was at least two moot points. The group’s spokesman, John Smith, protested that for as long as the Word was freely preached, and sacraments ministered without ‘idolatrous gear’, they ‘never assembled together in houses’. But when ‘our preachers were displaced by your law’– a strikingly confrontational phrase – they began to look to the example of Queen Mary’s days, and the congregation at Geneva, ‘which used a book and order of preaching, ministering of the sacraments and discipline, most agreeable to the Word of God’.
Unfinished business from Mary’s reign hung heavily over a testy encounter. Smith wanted to know if Grindal would really have him return to his parish church – the minister there ‘is a very papist’. Another prisoner protested that he knew of ‘one that in Queen Mary’s time did persecute God’s saints, and brought them forth to Bishop Bonner, and now he is minister allowed of you, and never made recantation’. It did Grindal little good to protest that a few bad apples needn’t spoil the barrel, or that he himself was no fan of cope and surplice. Nor did appeals to the duty of obedience cut any ice with these perfectionists: ‘It lieth not in the authority of the prince, and liberty of a Christian man,’ stated Robert Hawkins, ‘to use and defend that [which] appertaineth to papistry and idolatry.’
Plumbers’ Hall was not some late flowering of the old sub-cultural exclusivity of Lollardy, or of the radical sectarianism of the mid-Tudor decades, for all that Stow might dismissively call such gatherings ‘congregations of the anabaptists’. The separatism of late 1560s’ London was an ideological creation of the Marian persecution, looking explicitly to the example of Knox’s Genevan congregation. Its roots were nourished by dissident preachers within the established Church.
The fountain-head of that nourishment was the church of Holy Trinity in the Minories, a former monastic ‘liberty’ near the Tower of London, which retained its ecclesiastical privileges limiting episcopal control. The Duchess of Suffolk was resident in the liberty, a patroness of preachers like Pattenson and Miles Coverdale, who preached thirteen times in the church in 1567–8. Stow believed that the separatists originally ‘kept their church at the Minories’, before starting to hold meetings in a minister’s house in Pudding Lane, a chopper’s house in Thames Street, a goldsmith’s dwelling near the Savoy, and many other places, including a ship moored at the dock known as St Katherine’s Pool.
They ‘called themselves Puritans, or Unspotted Lambs of the Lord’.49 More likely this was what critics, such as Stow himself, called them, adopting the pejorative jargon of the overseas Catholics. Nonetheless, the movement created by the vestments crisis of 1565–7 – which we can reasonably call Puritanism – faced from the start an existential dilemma: should it work to restore a defective Church from within, or abandon it for the purity and pleasure of underground worship?
Bridges between the bishops and advocates of further godly reform were in 1566 battered, but not burned. Parliament, which reconvened in September, remained a place for harmonized action. Once again, the Lords and Commons (egged on by Cecil) petitioned the Queen to marry and produce an heir. There were moves too to introduce a bill to settle the succession – all slapped down by Elizabeth with her usual imperious indignation: ‘a strange thing that the foot should direct the head in so weighty a cause’.
The question of the succession, and the cause of ‘religion’, were more than ever closely entwined. After deciding she could not herself marry Leicester, Elizabeth half-heartedly pushed for a match between him and the widowed Queen of Scots. But in July 1565 Mary married Henry, Lord Darnley. The marriage both strengthened and Catholicized Mary’s putative place in the English succession. Darnley had his own tenable claim to the throne: he was a grandson, via her second marriage, of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret. Crucially, he was born and brought up south of the border, and though he conformed while in England, in Scotland he reverted to the Catholicism of his youth. Unstable and self-obsessed, Darnley’s religious allegiances in 1565–6 fluctuated with the tide of Scottish politics. But in terms of the English succession he had an unbeatable qualification: in June 1566 Mary bore him a son.
Even before this, English exiles at Louvain were openly talking of Mary as heir to the English throne, and by October 1565 Philip II had finally come round to the conclusion ‘that she is the gate by which religion must enter the realm of England’. Reformers feared that the advocates of a Stewart succession within England were often but ‘dissimuled or hypocritical Protestants’. Thomas Sampson, deprived dean of Christ Church, was the probable author of a pamphlet urging Parliament to persuade the Queen to settle the succession, to avoid risks of civil war and rule by a ‘stranger’. If she proved reluctant, then members should ‘bestow your wisdom and power to put your country out of such peril’; in other words, act on their own authority without royal consent – once again, religious necessity was the mother of constitutional invention.50
The Queen forbad further discussion of the succession, but in the weeks preceding Christmas there was a push to resurrect unfinished business from the Convocation of 1563. A succession of bills was introduced into the Commons, aiming to improve education and discipline among the clergy, insisting on personal residence and condemning simony and unregulated leasing of benefices. Labelled A–F by the Clerk, the ‘alphabetical bills’ foundered on the rock of Elizabeth’s conviction that reforms to the Church were a matter for the Supreme Governor alone. By raising them, Lord Keeper Bacon was instructed to tell MPs, ‘You err in bringing her Majesty’s prerogative in question.’
Bill A went furthest, in every sense. It passed through the Commons, but Elizabeth sent instructions to Lord Keeper Bacon to inhibit discussion in the Lords. The bill gave statutory authority to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and most likely proposed making subscription to them a requirement for office. Parker protested to Elizabeth that the bill was not, as she seemed to suspect, devised and introduced by the bishops. But, as in the 1563 Convocation, they were happy to bless the reforming labours of others. On Christmas Eve, Parker, along with Archbishop Thomas Young of York, Grindal, and a dozen other bishops, sent Elizabeth a letter of remonstrance enumerating the dire consequences of ‘want of a plain certainty of Articles of doctrine, by law to be declared’. It was water off a duck’s back. Elizabeth had nothing against the book itself, ‘for it containeth the religion which she doth openly profess’. But she would not tolerate ‘the manner of putting forth’.
It was another royal rebuff for a broad coalition of Protestant interests. ‘The bill of religion stayed, to the comfort of the adversaries,’ was Cecil’s terse summary of the (non-) achievements of the 1566 Parliament. The failure increased the strain on relations between bishops and even the more moderate of the ‘Puritans’. At the height of the vestments controversy, Humphrey and Sampson told Bullinger they had no wish to sow schisms, or lead a ‘hostile opposition’. They disagreed with the decision, but would bear it: ‘we must indeed submit to the time’. But this was ‘only for a time, so that we may be always making progress, and never retreating’.
That was the rub: for the godly, pauses and delays were tolerable, but there could be no going back, even to the Church of Edward VI. In a dialogue by Anthony Gilby, written in 1566, a conformist character protests that, in Edwardian times, vestments were ‘used of godly men’. An honest soldier puts him straight: ‘That was but the first show of the light … we must grow to further perfection.’ The question was whether the bishops possessed either the will or stamina to strive for that perfection. ‘So long as the Parliament endured,’ Gilby reflected, ‘we all had hope of amendment, and kept silence. But now that it is ended, and all hope of man is past, we must turn to God.’51
The Religion Really Observed
In April 1567, Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, prepared to travel to Vienna, to resume negotiations for a possible marriage between Elizabeth and the Archduke Charles. It was a mission of acute diplomatic sensitivity, involving a response to the Habsburg demand, which Elizabeth was reluctant to concede, for Charles to be permitted to hear mass in England.
On the eve of his departure – in a version reported to the Spanish ambassador – Sussex confessed to Elizabeth how underprepared he felt for the delicate discussions over religion: ‘Although he was a native-born Englishman, and knew as well as others what was passing in the country, he was at a loss to state what was the religion that really was observed here.’ His understanding was that the Queen and her councillors ‘held by the Augsburg Confession’ (i.e. practised Lutheranism), but he was also aware that Calvinism ‘was being preached and being taught nearly everywhere’. Could the Council please decide upon this, so he would know what to say to his hosts?52
The perplexity was that of a courtier and soldier of no very fixed theological views, fretting about a mission he did not want to undertake. But the sense of uncertainty about where on the religious spectrum the Church of England really lay was one widely shared across that spectrum. In the context of Habsburg marriage negotiations, Elizabeth was anxious to show a cautious, conservative face. In summer 1565, Sussex accompanied the imperial ambassador to an elaborate choral service in the Chapel Royal. An effort to reassure him there had been no violent lurch towards heresy was reinforced by the gift of a Prayer Book, with encouragement to note the retention of old prayers, the words of administration at communion, and the rubric on vestments. Elizabeth may not have been prepared formally to endorse Parker’s Advertisements at home, but she was happy to send a printed copy of them to the Spanish court, and have them received there as ‘the articles of the English Church’.
A few weeks before the Austrian envoy’s arrival, Bishop Guest of Rochester preached before the Queen on Christ’s words, ‘Hoc est corpus meum quod pro vobis tradetur’ (This is my body, which is given up for you). Avoiding other issues of controversy, Guest repeatedly asserted the real presence in the sacrament. One of his listeners, it was reported, could not contain his enthusiasm, shouting out ‘I do believe it, and he who doth not should be forthwith burnt!’ Thomas Harding took it as a welcome sign of Elizabeth’s ‘good inclination towards the ancient and Catholic religion’ that she had personally thanked Guest, this ‘more temperate’ preacher.53
It was precisely because Catholics might choose to interpret vestments, Prayer Book ceremonies and the Queen’s cross in the Chapel Royal as signs of theological kinship that godly Protestants were more than ever convinced they must be removed. In October 1567, Elizabeth’s crucifix in the Chapel Royal was vandalized for a second time. ‘A certain youth’ knocked it over and stamped on it during a service. Some thought him mad, but Parkhurst believed he acted ‘under the influence of great zeal for God’. The image was, once again, replaced.
There were alarming reports, fuelled by the matrimonial negotiations, of people believing reconciliation with Rome to be on the cards. Cecil learned in August 1567 that Paris was full of false stories that the Queen had set the imprisoned bishops free and ordered them ‘to set up mass and old religion again’. Such rumours could rise up closer to home. In May 1566, Thomas Cole, archdeacon of Essex, a fervent critic of vestments, preached at Chelmsford – not, he protested, against the order for apparel itself, but ‘to hinder the disorderly talk and impudent conceit of the papists, which by reason of this order rumoured that they should have their mass again’.
Parker tried hard to persuade nonconformists that vestments could be ‘a means to win the adversaries from their errors, when they see us without superstition … turn those things to good uses’. But his opponents were having none of it. An anonymous Puritan pamphleteer imagined the sound of ‘the common voice’ – the kind of opinions bishops would hear ‘if you walked in the country’:
Popery is not so evil as they make it, for then they would never command these things so straitly to be observed … Neighbour, played we not a wise part, when we kept our mass clothes and books? For by the mass, neighbour, we shall have all again one day.
The ceremonial requirements, and the messages they emitted, were dangerous precisely because the Church at large was only patchily reformed, and in many places primed and ready for Catholic restoration. One preacher at Paul’s Cross in early 1566 reckoned there were three or four thousand churches where worship continued ‘according to the purification of the Jews’ – that is, where clergy and laity conspired and contrived to preserve elements of the popish past.54
A full decade into Elizabeth’s reign, few thoughtful observers truly believed ‘religion’ to be settled or secure. Elizabeth herself maintained it to be so, but precisely what it was she was asking the nation to value and believe seemed far from self-evident. At the local level, Protestantism continued its advance, particularly in towns. Yet its most enthusiastic proponents were often only incidentally and conditionally the agents of a state Church.
Even after years of episcopal prodding and probing, Catholic sentiment pervaded the parishes. Bishop Bullingham’s visitation of Lincoln in 1566, and Archbishop Young’s 1567 York visitation, revealed much evidence of altars and images, either concealed, or displayed openly in the churches. At Preston in the East Riding, the rood loft was ‘full of painted pictures’. A few miles away at Swine, the episcopal visitors found ‘a cross of wood standing over the north aisle, with a scutcheon [shield] having the figure of Five Wounds’. This, they may have recollected, was the badge of the 1536 Pilgrims. A dozen and more clergymen were uncovered in 1567 who ‘useth the communion for the dead’ – an application of new liturgical forms to old superstitious purposes. Things were even worse in North Wales, where the newly installed Bishop Nicholas Robinson of Bangor reported in October 1567 on ‘images and altars standing in churches undefaced, lewd and undecent vigils and watches observed, much pilgrimage-going, many candles set up to the honour of saints, some relics yet carried about, and all the countries full of beads and knots, besides divers other monuments of wilful serving of God’. He was at least making a start: ‘of which abuses, some (I thank God) are reformed’.
Slow, incomplete reformation was not limited to remote or upland regions. Numerous priests in Sussex were reported in 1569 to ‘keep yet still their chalices, looking for to have mass again’. Only in 1568 did the churchwardens of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge, and those of St Edmunds, Salisbury, sell off their holy water stoups, banners, vestments and processional crosses. One of these parishes lay in the intellectual home of Puritan nonconformity, the other in the episcopal seat of Bishop John Jewel.55
It is not quite enough to call this local recalcitrance ‘conservative’, if that is meant to imply only an unthinking, instinctual preference for ancestral custom. There was certainly strong attachment to traditional ways, but Catholicism was evolving in the mid-1560s, drawing strength and direction from its recent Marian reinvention. When Bishop Bentham of Coventry ordered churchwardens in 1565 to ‘diligently note and mark them that wear any beads’, he pinpointed an old-fashioned pious habit that was fast becoming an assertive statement of difference and dissent (see p. 344).
John Stow, London chronicler and pronounced anti-Puritan, was a nostalgic conservative whose published writings suggest a hankering for the ‘merry world’ of pre-Reformation times into which he was born around 1525. We don’t know exactly what Stow was thinking in the mid to late 1560s, but we know what he was reading. Thirty-nine suspect books were seized from his study in a raid ordered by Bishop Grindal in February 1569. They included pre-Reformation works of devotion; late Henrician eucharistic tracts by Smyth and Gardiner; a large collection of Marian pastoral and polemical writings by Bonner, Watson, Huggarde, Brooks and others; and a half-dozen recently published controversial works by the Louvain exiles Stapleton, Dorman, Rastell and Richard Shacklock. Stow’s book-list was an intellectual genealogy of English Catholicism, from its ascendancy prior to 1530, through its struggle to find and assert its voice under Henry and Edward, its confident reinvention under Mary, and its embrace of separatist resistance under Elizabeth.56
No doubt chastened by his experience, Stow remained, formally, in the Church of England. But Rome, finally, was moving beyond its policy of ‘wait and see’. In 1566, the new pope, Pius V, an austere and orthodox Dominican, formalized the positions of Thomas Harding and Nicholas Sander as apostolic delegates for England. They had the power to absolve people from the sin of schism, and the duty to explain to them it was indeed a sin. There was, Sander insisted in a work of 1567, no truth in rumours that ‘going to schismatical service is, or may be, winked at or dispensed’. Occupied with their literary war against Jewel, Harding and Sander delegated the task of going to England to publicize the ban on church-attendance to the Lancashire-born priest Laurence Vaux. Once back in the north-west, Vaux circulated letters announcing the ‘definitive sentence’, not just on attending communion service but against bringing infants to churches for baptism.
It was a declaration of complete spiritual separation: ‘We may not communicate or associate ourselves with heretic or schismatic in divine things.’ It was also a counsel of perfection for an imperfect world. Where could Catholics turn for rites of baptism and marriage, for the honourable burial of their dead?
For the gentry in particular, ceasing to worship in local churches of which they were patrons, places where their ancestors lay buried, was an act of social self-abnegation. Vaux recognized that some Catholics would find the mandate ‘hard, sharp, bitter and sore’. Yet other deprived priests soon possessed ‘faculties’ to reconcile schismatics, and in 1567–8 the Queen directed a stream of concerned letters at the bishop of Chester and the Lancashire magistrates, ordering the arrest of seditious persons, aiming ‘under colour of religion to draw sundry gentlemen and other our subjects … from their duty of allegiance’.57 The government was waking up to the fact that it had a real recusancy problem, its extent much greater than previous lax policing had been able to reveal.
Elizabeth’s goal as Supreme Governor, in the words of a 1559 proclamation, was ‘the soul health of her loving subjects, and the quieting of their consciences in the chief and principal points of Christian religion’.58 Whatever the condition of their souls, the consciences of a great many, Protestant and Catholic, had been stirred rather than quieted by the events of the ensuing nine years. The extent of their ‘loving’ was also about to undergo its greatest test. On the evening of 16 May 1568, a party of weary travellers disembarked from a fishing boat at Workington in Cumberland, on the southern coast of the Solway Firth. Among them was the Queen of Scots, a refugee from her own land, and a harbinger of trouble, tragedy and treason.