ADMONITIONS
The Queen of Scots
‘THE PERILS ARE many, great and imminent.’ William Cecil’s ‘short memorial of the state of the realm’, written at the start of 1569, made for sobering reading – purposefully so, as the intended recipient was likely Elizabeth herself. England was internally fragile and externally isolated. ‘Marriage’, ‘children’, ‘alliance’ headed a list of things ‘the weakness of the Queen’s Majesty’s estate growth upon lack of’. Cecil feared renewed rebellion in Ireland, ‘mixt with a Spanish practice’, and saw a heavy Spanish shadow falling across Europe as a whole. Philip II’s general, the Duke of Alva, seemed to have ruthlessly crushed the revolt against Spanish rule in the Netherlands. In France, the Huguenot leader, the Prince of Condé, was running out of men and money, while Spain and the Pope hurried to supply his enemies.
In November 1568, Cecil’s determination to contain Spanish ambition almost turned a cold war hot. He ordered confiscation of the cargo of several Spanish ships, carrying gold to Alva, and forced by storms into English ports. The Spanish retaliated against English property in the Netherlands, and open conflict was only just averted. The apparent recklessness reflected Cecil’s conviction that the Catholic powers were rampant and resurgent: the Council of Trent, he wrote in the Memorial, did much towards ‘the recovery of the tyranny of Rome’. With his eye on the bigger military and diplomatic picture, Cecil took little notice of threats posed by the English exiles, though he observed the presence of Englishmen as pensioners at Philip’s court, as well as the publication of ‘slanderous books and histories’ against the Queen.
One recent event was evidently too small a matter to be worthy of report. In September 1568, William Allen leased a house for a handful of students near the theology schools at the newly founded University of Douai. This ‘English College’ was a seminary, a priestly training school of the type planned by Cardinal Pole (see p. 401), and recently mandated by Trent for dioceses across the Catholic world. Exiled English Catholicism was at the forefront of this initiative. Priests, like wine or cheese, took time to perfect. But from the outset, students were admitted to the college with more than their own spiritual formation in mind. In a letter to the president of Philip’s Privy Council in the Netherlands, Allen predicted that within a few years the graduates would ‘be employed in promoting the Catholic cause in England, even at peril of their lives’.
A more clear and present danger was the person Cecil never referred to by name, only as ‘the Queen of Scots’. Mary’s strength underlined Elizabeth’s weakness. It lay in ‘the universal opinion of the world for the justice of her title’; in support from ‘the strongest monarchies of Christendom’; in ‘secret and great numbers of discontented subjects in this realm, that gape and practise for a change by her means’.
Cecil knew the remedies. Mary must formally relinquish all claims to the English succession. The current government of Scotland, under the Earl of Moray, should be supported. A defensive alliance with the Protestant princes of Germany contracted. The secretary was a practical man. But his realism made him more, not less, an idealist for the Protestant cause. True safety lay in pushing forward: ‘all means used to advance religion in this realm’.1
Cecil’s expansive estimate of the danger posed by Mary stands in contrast to her truly disastrous personal circumstances. It is hard to imagine what else could have gone wrong with her governance of Scotland. After returning from France in 1561, Mary endured with considerable grace the incessant hectoring of John Knox, and proved pragmatic about her anomalous position as the Catholic queen of a politically Protestant nation. It was her embrace of the duty Elizabeth perversely resisted – for a female ruler to marry – that proved her undoing.
As a king and a husband, Darnley was feckless, factional and violent. But a wide swathe of opinion was nonetheless deeply shocked when, on 10 February 1567, he was found murdered, his body under a tree in the garden of his house, blown up by gunpowder, at Kirk o’ Field, Edinburgh. Two months later, the chief suspect, the swaggering Earl of Bothwell, abducted and most likely raped the Queen.
Mary was (probably) innocent of complicity in Darnley’s murder, but her decision – from whatever mix of motives – to agree to marry Bothwell was an error of staggering proportions. Rebel lords took possession of her child and defeated the Queen’s forces in battle. She was imprisoned on a small island in Loch Leven, and on 24 July 1567 forced to abdicate the throne. Within a week, her one-year-old son was crowned as James VI.
On 2 May 1568, Mary escaped and raised an army against Moray, the Protestant regent. Eleven days later, her forces were defeated at the battle of Langside. Rather than stay in Scotland and regroup, Mary made the fateful decision to flee to England, and throw herself on the mercy of Elizabeth.
The quality of that mercy was strained, or at least conflicted. Mary was a political rival, as well as an accused adulteress and murderess; Elizabeth refused requests to grant her an audience. She was also an anointed monarch, overthrown by rebels imbued with the Knoxian principles Elizabeth loathed with every fibre of her regal being. Elizabeth hoped Mary might be restored, under strict conditions, to her throne, but she also agreed to investigate the Scottish government’s charges against her.
A ‘conference’ – rather than a formal trial – was convened at York in October 1568, soon afterwards moved to Westminster. Moray and the Scottish commissioners formally accused Mary of murder, and produced ‘proof’: a set of letters found in a casket, sent from Mary to Bothwell, and revealing her complicity in a plot to murder Darnley. Although the letters were almost certainly forged, or at least heavily doctored, the English commissioners acknowledged them as authentic.
The conference ended, in January 1569, with Elizabeth declaring nothing to be finally proven one way or the other. It was clear, however, that restoration was not an immediate option, and that English Protestant opinion was in the main firmly convinced of Mary’s guilt. On decidedly hazy legal grounds, the deposed Queen of Scots remained a prisoner, and at the start of February was moved from Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire to the secure custodianship of the Earl of Shrewsbury at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire – far from the escape routes of the coast, and further from the Catholic heartlands of the north.2
Counter-Reformation in the North
That may have been Cecil’s doing. High on his January 1569 to-do list was ‘to inquire and regard the state of the country northward, where her person is, and to keep suspected persons in some awe from harkening to practices, and the common people from riots and mutinies which are the cloaks and preparatives of rebellion’. They were prescient words, if not quite prescient enough.
Like other good Protestants, Cecil lay awake at night worrying about the slow progress of reform in the north. Archbishop Thomas Young of York was among the more pragmatic and accommodating of Elizabeth’s bishops. His death in June 1568 produced an opportunity for a firmer anti-Catholic hand at the tiller. Parker and Cecil favoured Grindal for the post, but Elizabeth, predictably, refused to make a decision, and the key diocese remained vacant.
The new, hawkish, Spanish ambassador, Guerau de Spes, was also looking to the north, hopefully rather than fearfully. In May 1569 he reported to Philip that nearly all Wales and the north were Catholic, and strongly attached to the Queen of Scots. In July he added that ‘a rising in the north is feared’, and that heretic ministers from there were arriving in London, driven out by their congregations. But Spanish hopes did not rest on the grievances of Yorkshire farmfolk; great men were in play. The Duke of Norfolk (grandson of the 3rd duke, who died in 1554) and the Earl of Arundel had assured the ambassador of their good will towards the King of Spain. Norfolk, wrote de Spes, adhered to the ‘Augustinian’ (Lutheran) Creed, but Arundel was confident he could convert him. The Earl of Northumberland was likewise pledged to support moves to restore the Catholic faith. And, at second-hand, a message from the imprisoned Mary: ‘Tell the ambassador that, if his master will help me, I shall be queen of England in three months, and mass shall be said all over the country.’3
It was a tangled web of threads, drawing into a pattern by the late summer of 1569. One solution to the Mary problem was – fourth time presumably lucky – for her to wed again, though the marriage to Bothwell, a fugitive and prisoner in Denmark, was not formally annulled. The proposal originated with the wily Scots politician William Maitland of Lethington, who put it to Norfolk at the York Conference. Safely married to a Protestant husband, Mary would cease to be a magnet of discontent, and Elizabeth could recognize her as heir, removing uncertainty over the English succession.
Norfolk, son of the executed Earl of Surrey, and England’s premier duke, though scarcely its leading statesman, was transfixed by the idea. Other leading Protestants saw merit in the scheme, including Nicholas Throckmorton and Leicester, for whom it promised a welcome reduction in the influence of William Cecil. Conservative nobles like Arundel and Pembroke were drawn to it for the same reason. Thomas Percy, Earl of Northumberland, was another number in a matrix of whispered discussions, connecting Tutbury to Rome and Madrid, via Ambassador de Spes, John Leslie, exiled bishop of Ross and Mary’s chief advisor, and Roberto Ridolfi, an energetic Florentine banker based in London. Ridolfi held an appointment as nunzio segreto (secret envoy) of the Pope. Northumberland was initially unenthusiastic about the marriage, later confessing he advised Mary that many of her supporters were wary of Norfolk’s Protestantism, and that ‘if she looked to recover her estate, it must be by advancing the Catholic religion’.4
There were only two problems with the plan: Elizabeth would never agree to it, and she was bound to find out. The Queen already knew what was afoot before Leicester confessed all to her on 6 September, a day after Bonner died in the Marshalsea, and was buried secretly at midnight on Grindal’s orders. The laying of one shade of the Marian past coincided with the rising spectre of another. Like Princess Mary in 1553, Norfolk ignored a summons to the court, and retreated to his estate at Kenninghall in East Anglia. But he lacked the nerve to raise a rebellion there, and at the start of October decided to go back to London and excuse himself to the Queen.
Norfolk was plotting a wedding, not a war, but he was privy to bold talk, and by the end of the summer had been drawn into the audacious plans of the northern Catholics. On the eve of his return to London he sent a message to the Earls of Northumberland and Westmorland, pleading that ‘they should not rise, for if they did, it would cost him his head’. Norfolk had a close connection to Charles Neville, Earl of Westmorland, husband of his sister, Jane. In a separate message he begged Westmorland not to take to arms, whatever Northumberland decided. But Jane was made of sterner stuff than her brother: ‘What a simple man the duke is, to begin a matter and not go through with it.’
Bereft of political support in the south, the northern earls – who were plotting a rebellion – quickly rethought their plans. Westmorland was an instinctive waverer, but his uncles Christopher and Cuthbert Neville were resolute warriors. Northumberland too was egged on by hawks in his retinue: Thomas Markenfield, a returnee from continental exile, and Richard Norton, a grizzled veteran of the rebellion of 1536. Most hawkish of all was the Countess of Westmorland. When it seemed – due to the suspicions of the government, and the growing preparedness of the president of the Council in the North, the Earl of Sussex – that action might be indefinitely postponed, she remonstrated with the procrastinating earls, lamenting ‘they and their country were shamed for ever, and that they must seek holes to creep into’.5
A summons to present themselves at court finally bounced the earls into action. On 9 November 1569, church bells began ringing at Topcliffe in North Yorkshire, chief residence of the Earl of Northumberland. The Neville tenantry had for days been trooping to the Earl of Westmorland’s castle at Brancepeth in County Durham, and Northumberland hastened to meet him there. He too was kept on his mettle by his (pregnant) wife, reported to Cecil as ‘the stouter of the two’. She ‘doth hasten him, and encourage him to persevere, and rides up and down with their army’.
Anne Percy was a sister of William Somerset, Catholic earl of Worcester. The rebels spread rumours he was raising Wales on their behalf, though in fact Worcester remained conspicuously loyal. As in 1536, there were fears of a more general conflagration. Bishop Sandys of Worcester wrote to Cecil about ‘counterfeited countenances and hollow hearts’. Cecil himself issued an order for the arrest in Oxford and Cambridge of ‘all young men being the sons or kinsfolk of any of the rebels in the north, or of any suspected persons for religion’.6 But the insurgency remained confined to the north, and to those parts of the north – County Durham and the North Riding of Yorkshire – where the earls and their lieutenants exercised immediate sway.
For all that, things were serious enough. Writing to the Queen from York on 26 November, Sir Ralph Sadler estimated the rebels’ strength to be about 6,000 foot and 1,000 horse, all well armed. It was at least as large an army as that fielded by the western rebels in 1549, and larger than that with which Wyatt nearly toppled Queen Mary in 1554. As usual, government forces on the ground were badly outnumbered. The Earl of Sussex was happier mustering horse and harness than discussing theology at the Austrian court, but even when reinforced by Sadler and Lord Hunsdon he commanded at York only a fraction of the rebel numbers. Tutbury was a hundred miles away, but the government was taking no chances: on 22 November orders were issued to move the Queen of Scots further south to Coventry.7
On the eve of the rising, as the earls and their confederates debated their options at Topcliffe, the question arose of what they were actually rebelling for. To Norton and Markenfield, it seemed obvious: ‘for religion’. But Westmorland demurred: ‘No; those that seem to take that quarrel in other countries are accounted as rebels, and therefore I will never blot my house which hath been this long preserved without staining.’ It was of a piece with Mary’s emphasis on legitimacy during her campaign in 1553, and with Wyatt’s determination to ‘not so much as mention religion’ (see p. 370). Once the rising was under way, a manifesto drawn up in the name of the two earls (and, to their acute embarrassment, in the names of Norfolk, Arundel and Pembroke) protested loyalty to the Queen, emphasized the need to clarify the succession and spoke in conventional terms about ‘subversion of the commonwealth’ by sinister councillors.8 The rebellion is often seen as a last gasp of the old feudal nobility, angered at their exclusion from the corridors of power. It was sustained, certainly, by traditional faith, but this too was the Indian summer of a passing world.
This interpretation is understandable, but in significant respects wrong. The Rising of the Northern Earls was the last in the great sequence of ‘Tudor Rebellions’ – conservative attempts to restore the upset balance of the commonwealth. But it was also, even more than Wyatt’s Rebellion, something new: an attempt at regime-change motivated by religion as a political ideology. It supplies compelling evidence of a mutation in English Catholicism, under way in the 1550s and accelerated in the 1560s, as traditional Christianity – or some strands of it – allowed itself to be reinvented as sectarian Roman Catholicism. It was also the closest that England came in the sixteenth century to a French-style war of religion.
The manifesto sent to the Earl of Derby, and forwarded by him to the court, spoke in deliberately ambiguous terms of the rebel leadership as ‘favourers of God’s Word’. But other proclamations issued by the earls, with the aim of drumming up recruits in the north, highlighted a duty to set forth God’s ‘true and Catholic religion’, and to resist the ‘new-found religion and heresy’ imposed on the realm by traitors.
Northumberland was himself, in a sense, a recent convert. In 1567, he was formally reconciled to Rome by a priest named Copley, one of those exercising a wandering ministry after refusal to submit to the settlement of 1559. Earlier in 1569, Northumberland took counsel with Nicholas Morton, sent from Rome by Pius V to gauge the situation of English Catholics, and authorized to grant powers of reconciliation to other priests. The rebel leadership scrupled over whether they might legitimately take up arms against Elizabeth before she was ‘lawfully excommunicated by the head of the Church’. Morton told anyone who would listen that Elizabeth was already excommunicated, by virtue of her refusal to admit the papal nuncio. On 8 November, the very eve of their revolt, the earls wrote to Rome for guidance. But Northumberland was already radicalized by reading the works of the Louvain exiles. Harding, Sander, Stapleton and others illuminated for him ‘the unity which ever hath been, throughout Christendom, among those called papists; the disagreement and great dissension continually growing, and that ever hath been, among the Protestants’.9
The leadership of the 1569 rising was unitedly ‘Roman’, in a way that that of 1536 was not (see p. 251). More surprisingly, this seems to have been true to a remarkable extent of the rank-and-file. These were not in the main Percy or Neville tenants activated by ancestral loyalty, but volunteers, emboldened by the earls’ leadership to express their uncompromising rejection of the state religion – though the loyalist gentleman Sir George Bowes claimed sourly that many were bribed or coerced into taking part.
That was not the case at Sedgefield, a village ten miles south of Durham. Here, as locals later testified, ‘the parish met together, and consulted to set in the altar stone’. They knew precisely where it was: buried in ‘Gibson’s garth’ (a yard or garden). A crowd – some said thirty, others eighty – dragged the altar to the church with ropes, and re-erected it with lime and mortar. Processional restoration was followed by iconoclastic destruction. The parish’s Protestant books – bible, homilies and psalters – were collected and taken to the town gate. There, before a ‘great multitude’, they were torn to shreds and thrown onto a fire. ‘Lo,’ cried the husbandman Roland Hixson, ‘where the Homilies flee to the devil!’ Mass was said in Sedgefield church for the first time in over a decade, accompanied by a combative sermon from the priest, Richard Hartborn. Witnesses recalled him saying that ‘the doctrine of England was naught, and that this realm was cut off from all other nations’; ‘they were all out of the way, and worse than a horse that hath been in the mire’. Parishioners knelt, and Hartborn reconciled them from the sin of schism.
The events at Sedgefield were far from unique: Prayer Books and bibles were destroyed in at least eighty-five Yorkshire and County Durham churches. The most dramatic episodes were in Durham itself, after the entry of the earls on 14 November. The full splendour of the Latin liturgy returned to Durham Cathedral, one of the great churches of northern Europe. Later protestations by the cathedral’s minor canons, lay clerks and choristers, that they took part in these triumphal rituals unwillingly, have a decidedly unconvincing air. Sermons about schism, and formal submission to Rome, were the core of the proceedings. The priest William Holmes ‘willed all that was disposed to be reconciled to kneel down; whereupon he pronounced a forma absolutionis in Latin, in the name of Christ and Bishop Pius’. It was St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, anniversary of the Marian reunion with Rome. It is doubtful that many, if any, in the cathedral remained standing. Holmes also invited priests to his lodging, for individual reconciliation.10
There was real revivalist fervour behind this local outbreak of the Counter-Reformation, heightened by the fact that, in James Pilkington (who sensibly fled south), Durham had endured the rule of one of England’s most zealously Protestant bishops. The regime at the cathedral, where the ‘Genevan’ William Whittingham served as dean, was positively puritanical. Whittingham’s French Huguenot wife used holy water stoups for salting beef in her kitchen, and was suspected of having burned the banner of St Cuthbert – the miracle-working relic, carried by the Pilgrims in 1536. Deprived of this totem, the rebels marched behind another familiar symbol of Catholic rebellion, the Five Wounds of Christ. It was also reported that ‘all their force, both of horse and foot’ wore red crosses on their clothes. The cross of St George was the conventional symbol of English soldiery in the field, but the hostility of Protestants to the religious iconography of the cross lent it new potency as a partisan emblem. Another witness declared that the wearing of a great crucifix around the neck was ‘the ensign of the order of these rebels’.11
For some, it was all too much. John Browne, priest of Witton Gilbert, a chapelry just north-west of Durham, stepped emotionally into the pulpit to ask mercy from God and his parishioners: ‘I have these eleven years taught you the wrong way.’ He renounced his office, insisting that ‘wheresoever you meet me, in town or field, take me as a stranger, and none of your curate’. Browne’s Nicodemism was a millstone around the conscience, not a lightly worn outward conformity. He was not the only clergyman at this time publically to beg his people’s forgiveness for leading them astray.12
The Catholic carnival of 1569 burned bright and brief. Hoped-for support in Lancashire and Cheshire was not forthcoming, and the earls fatefully turned back north in the last week of November, rather than press on to capture a thinly garrisoned York. While a large royal army gathered in the south, a handful of competent loyalist commanders – Sadler, Hunsdon, Sir John Forster, Sir Thomas Gargrave – helped shore up resistance, and prevent disorder from spreading, all the while seeking to convince a suspicious Elizabeth that Sussex had not deliberately allowed things to get out of hand. By mid-December, with the Queen’s army finally approaching the River Tees, the earls’ nerve gave out. They disbanded their foot soldiers, and fled with the fast-moving cavalry. Just after Christmas, they crossed the border into Scotland to seek shelter with Marian sympathizers.
It was not quite all over. A potential supporter in the far north-west, Leonard Dacre, was in London through the autumn contesting a lawsuit for control of the family estates. Ironically, his adversary was Norfolk, widowed step-father to the daughters of his brother, the fourth Lord Dacre. Leonard returned to the family seat at Naworth in Cumberland at the end of the year, but was soon under suspicion of raising troops to assist the rebels, rather than, as he claimed, to resist them. The assassination of the Earl of Moray by a Marian supporter on 23 January 1570 made a second rebellion, with Scottish support, seem a real possibility, and the government ordered Dacre’s arrest.
On 20 February, Dacre’s borderers pre-emptively offered battle to Lord Hunsdon on heathland near the River Gelt, a few miles east of Carlisle. It was a bloody and decisive encounter: Hunsdon’s horsemen charged Dacre’s infantry, and killed three or four hundred and captured a further two or three hundred. The single day’s death toll surpassed the four-year tally of Marian martyrs – another reminder that the ‘peaceful’ character of the English Reformation should never be blithely asserted.
Dacre himself escaped to Scotland, and within a year was in Antwerp, collecting a meagre pension from Philip II. Westmorland also fled from Scotland to the Spanish Netherlands, as did Markenfield and Norton. Northumberland’s courageous countess likewise made it to the Low Countries, but the earl was not so fortunate. On crossing into Scotland in December 1569, he was betrayed by border reivers and handed over to Moray. The Scots held him as a bargaining chip, and in June 1572 sold him to the English government.13
Aftermath
After the rising, the reckoning. With most of the leaders beyond her reach, Elizabeth’s vengeance fell on the ordinary rebels. Martial law was declared in the north, and the Privy Council authorized use of torture to discover the full extent of local treason. Sussex and his officers drew up lists of rebels, and fixed a number, generally between 20 and 40 per cent, of those to die in each district. The arbitrariness was almost the point, in a retaliation more brutal than that following any previous sixteenth-century rebellion. Sussex’s provost marshal, Sir George Bowes, travelled through the towns of Durham and North Yorkshire, with authority to hang more or fewer as he judged best. Writing to his cousin on 23 January, Bowes reckoned he had now executed ‘six hundred and odd’, adding that ‘the people are in marvellous fear, so that I trust there shall never such thing happen in these parts again’.14
Not in these parts, not in any parts. Despite its limited extent, and inept execution, the rebellion was widely seen, not as a little local difficulty, but as an existential threat to the survival of the Queen and the Protestant religion. A prayer of thanksgiving, ordered to be read in all churches, praised the Almighty’s ability ‘to vanquish infinite multitudes of thine enemies’. In 1570, a new ‘Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion’, of gruelling length, was added to the collection rebellious parishioners had burned copies of the previous year. Grindal’s translation to the smouldering see of York was hastily approved.
The rebellion inspired a rash of printed ballads and pamphlets, unofficial and semi-official. ‘Between Doncaster and Penrith [i.e. the whole region, from the River Trent northwards] / Be many popish hearts / Would their heads were in carts’. The quotation is from a mock funeral liturgy for Edmund Bonner. For many Protestants, the cruelties of the popish past underlined the dangers in the present; the rising was a wake-up call about the risks of leniency, of the sort Bonner had consistently received.
Most prolific of the pamphleteers was Thomas Norton, a godly lawyer who in 1561 produced the first English translation of Calvin’s Institutes. He was also the parliamentary agent, the ‘man of business’, for William Cecil. In one of half a dozen tracts written in 1569–70, Norton painted the papist, ‘one that believeth all the Pope’s doctrine to be true’, as by definition an enemy and traitor. Moreover, ‘no clemency, gentleness, benefits or loving dealing can win a papist, while he continues a papist, to love her Majesty’. Norton’s defence of the Queen barely masked a critique of her policy towards Catholics, a view shared by Bishop Horne of Winchester, who complained to Cecil in January 1570 of the ‘troubles and charges overmuch forbearing of the papists hath wrought’.15
That policy was changing even as the events of the rising played out. Cecil’s memorandum looked to have ‘the lawyers of the realm reformed’. In the autumn there was a purge of the Inns of Court, suspected to be nests of popery, as once they were of rebellious evangelicalism. In parallel, in November 1569, the government mounted a concerted nationwide drive to make justices of the peace take the Oath of Supremacy and subscribe to the Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. ‘Mislikers’ remaining in post through the 1560s – such as Nicholas Throckmorton’s brother, Robert, in Warwickshire – were now removed from the county commissions.
In Berkshire, Edmund Plowden, the Catholic lawyer who defended Bonner in 1564, found he could not subscribe, though with legal fastidiousness, he requested time to read carefully through every line of the act and Prayer Book. The exercise turned Plowden into a recusant, since he attended church regularly through the 1560s. A Herefordshire JP, John Scudamore, declared his willingness to be loyal and obedient in everything ‘saving matters of religion, or any manner thing touching the same … I do not refuse of obstinacy, but for conscience’s sake’.
The authorities were not prepared to accept any formal distinction between spiritual and temporal obedience: it made mockery of the principles on which the royal supremacy was founded. But another form of mockery – of which Robert Atkinson warned in the Parliament of 1563 – was the taking of an oath while dissimulating one’s inward dissent. Many Catholic sympathizers did just that, among them Nicholas and Robert’s brother, John Throckmorton, a significant regional office-holder as vice-president of the Council in Wales.
Atkinson himself, faced with expulsion from the Inner Temple, claimed evasively that he attended church whenever he was in the country; he was nonetheless disbarred. Bishop Horne observed how southern papists ‘stamp and stare at the rebels, and cry out at their lewd enterprise’. Yet he considered such protestations hypocritical; their real grievance with the northerners was ‘that they dealt the matter so foolishly it could take no better effect’.16
Regnans and Ridolfi
Suspicions that Catholics – all Catholics – were potential traitors were in the spring of 1570 powerfully confirmed by Rome itself. For years, exiles had been pressing the papacy to excommunicate Elizabeth. Nicholas Morton returned to Rome in the summer of 1569 with assurances of support in England for such a move, and news arriving after Christmas of the long-awaited rebellion convinced Pius V the time had come to act.
The process in Rome was not entirely arbitrary. Elizabeth was subject, in absentia, to a formal trial, whose proceedings opened on 5 February. The charges were of compelling her subjects to take a wicked oath; of depriving duly consecrated bishops and installing heretics in their place; of imprisoning people for hearing mass; of encouraging ‘Calvinistic’ sermons; and of ordaining heretical celebration of the Lord’s Supper. Twelve expert witnesses – all English and Welsh clerical exiles – testified to the truth of the charges. They included Thomas Goldwell, bishop of St Asaph and latterly delegate at Trent, an incarnation of Catholic resistance since the days of Henry VIII.
On 25 February 1570 Pius V promulgated the bull known from its opening words as Regnans in Excelsis (Ruling in the highest). The phrase referred to God, rather than the Pope, but the document exuded a high self-estimation of papal authority. Elizabeth, ‘pretended Queen of England’, was declared to be a heretic, cut off from the unity of the body of Christ, and ‘deprived of the right which she pretends to the foresaid kingdom’. All English people were absolved from ‘all manner of duty, fidelity and obedience’. Indeed, they were positively instructed ‘that they shall not once dare to obey her or any her directions’.17
The Pope, occupant of the oldest throne in Europe, thus revealed himself as much a political radical as any Knox or Goodman. He deposed a queen from her throne, and as good as authorized her subjects to rise in rebellion against her. An irritated Philip II was not consulted in advance, and thought ‘his Holiness allowed himself to be carried away by his zeal’. Philip also believed, rightly, that in current circumstances the measure was impractical and would simply drive Elizabeth and her ministers ‘the more to oppress and persecute the few good Catholics still remaining in England’. The Emperor Maximilian went as far as to ask the Pope to withdraw the excommunication. But even though news of the earls’ defeat, along with the unwillingness of Catholic powers to help enforce it, made the bull a virtual dead letter, Pius had written what he had written.
To be canonically valid, a bull needed to be ‘published’. Its promulgation in England was an occasion of high drama, akin to a formal declaration of war. Copies of the bull were smuggled into London, largely through the efforts of the ubiquitous Roberto Ridolfi, already questioned, and temporarily imprisoned, on suspicion of advancing money to the northern rebels. Early in the morning of 25 May 1570 the bull appeared nailed to the door of the bishop of London’s palace, near St Paul’s Cathedral. A wave of searches and arrests produced the name of John Felton, a wealthy layman resident in Surrey. Felton freely confessed to the deed, but was tortured to get him to admit to contacts with the Spanish ambassador. Felton was hanged and quartered in St Paul’s churchyard, near the scene of the crime, on 8 August. The hangman’s name, providentially, was Bull.18
Felton’s execution for treason, for publicizing an authoritative papal teaching, marked the start of a new and dangerous phase of religious conflict. Since Henry VIII’s days, no Catholic had been put to death in England solely for refusal to recognize the royal supremacy. There was, in both Edward’s reign and the first decade of Elizabeth’s, a pragmatic willingness to distinguish between the religious errors of Catholics and words and actions constituting a capital offence under the law. After Regnans in Excelsis that distinction became thoroughly muddied – in the eyes of the government, and in the minds of Catholics themselves.
A second treason trial confirmed the gloves were off. In August 1570, William Cecil, working at second and third hand with a team of agents in the Netherlands, arranged the kidnapping of John Story, now working for the Spanish authorities as a searcher of ships, for contraband and heretical literature. At his trial, Story claimed to have forsaken his country ‘for conscience’s sake’, and further, that he was no longer the Queen’s subject but ‘the subject of the most Catholic and mighty prince, King Philip’. Story hoped this would confer immunity; for his judges, it merely measured the depth of his treason.
Story’s real offence – now Bonner was dead – was to be the remembered face of the Marian persecution. His hanging and quartering at Tyburn on 1 June 1571 was a settling of old scores, and a delayed acknowledgement of long-ignored Protestant cries for vengeance. The publication in 1570 of a second, much expanded, edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments helped keep that resentful memory alive. In November that year, Cecil and a selection of godly privy councillors wrote to Parker instructing, ambitiously, that all parish churches acquire a copy of this huge work, it being ‘very profitable to bring her Majesty’s subjects to good opinion, understanding and dear liking of the present government … by true rehearsal and conference of times past’. Story’s fate was also a warning to other exiles – no longer just scholarly priests, but military men like Westmorland, Norton and Markenfield – that no one was beyond the government’s reach.19
While Story’s case trundled to its gruesome conclusion, the government became aware of another threat to the security of the Queen, and the Protestant religion. Once again, Roberto Ridolfi, papal agent and money-man, was the prime mover. He hatched a scheme for the overthrow and, if it proved necessary, assassination of Elizabeth, and the enthronement of Mary, after a second Catholic rebellion precipitated by the arrival of 8,000 Spanish troops under the Duke of Alva. Ridolfi persuaded Norfolk to agree to lead the revolt, and to profess a Catholicism for which he probably felt little personal enthusiasm. Norfolk had been treated with quite remarkable leniency by Elizabeth, released from the Tower into comfortable London house arrest in August 1570. But he remained obsessed with marriage to Mary – for reasons of honour and ambition, rather than any romantic attraction. Mary herself, through the bishop of Ross, signalled her assent.
Ridolfi left for the continent in March 1571, to drum up support from a highly sceptical Alva, a persuadable Philip II and an enthusiastic Pius V. The cheerfully indiscreet Ridolfi revealed details of the scheme to numerous others, including his own sovereign, Cosimo de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who felt honour-bound to send Elizabeth a warning. In fact, Cecil – since February 1571 ennobled as Lord Burghley – already knew what was afoot. Two weeks after Ridolfi’s departure, one of Mary’s servants was arrested at Dover and found in possession of ciphered letters from Ridolfi to Norfolk and his former brother-in-law, Lord Lumley. In August, two of Norfolk’s secretaries were caught trying to convey £600 in gold from the French ambassador to supporters of Mary in Scotland. This time, letters were deciphered proving Norfolk’s involvement, and he returned to the Tower to await trial for treason.20
The Ridolfi Plot was an implausible intrigue. Yet even without following so close upon the Northern Rising and the papal excommunication, it would have produced alarm in government circles, and, to Burghley, proof that the dark prognostications of his 1569 memorandum were fully justified. The Spanish were evidently willing to contemplate an ‘Enterprise of England’, and the Queen of Scots was the black widow spider, at the centre of a web of dangers, ensnaring enemies abroad and traitors at home.
As a new Parliament assembled at the start of April 1571, English Protestantism seemed refocused, reinvigorated, replenished. Episcopal appointments, in the wake of Grindal’s transfer to York, displayed a firmly evangelical face – no more mavericks of the Richard Cheyney school. Edwin Sandys replaced Grindal at London, and Nicholas Bullingham, a stout former exile, replaced Sandys at Worcester. Energetic Protestant reformers, Thomas Cooper and Richard Curteys, were installed in early 1571 in the key dioceses of Lincoln and Chichester. Richard Barnes, appointed to Carlisle in August 1570, proved a reliable royal agent in the post-rebellion clear-up.21
Catholicism, ‘popery’, had revealed its true face: it was not just a parody of Christian faith, but a principle of violence and subversion, infiltrating the realm from outside, and infecting the weak-willed within. The time had come for Protestants of all stripes to close ranks, overcome their differences and concentrate on defeating this existential threat. Or so one might have thought.
The Scrupulosity of Princes
On 25 February 1570, Queen Elizabeth attended a court Lenten sermon, the like of which she can scarcely have heard before. The preacher, Edward Dering, launched a fierce assault on the failings of the English Church. These were first and foremost problems of the ministry, beset by ignorance, pleasure-seeking, pluralism and non-residence. Far too many ministers were ‘dumb dogs’, unable to preach and edify their congregations: ‘Have we not made us priests like the people of the country?’
Like people like priest. Dering’s diatribe bore remarkable resemblances to the sermons of late medieval Catholic reformers (see pp. 42–3). Clericalism – an elevated sense of the status of ecclesiastical ministry, expressing itself through ferocious denunciation of that ministry’s unworthy practitioners – was as much a Protestant as a Catholic trait.
This was tough but standard fare. What made Dering’s sermon dynamite was that he called the bluff of the royal supremacy, laying responsibility, and blame, squarely on Elizabeth herself. ‘And yet you in the meanwhile that all these whoredoms are committed; you, at whose hands God will require it; you sit still and are careless, and let men do as they list.’ In a sermon replete with examples of the unenviable fates of unworthy biblical rulers, Dering threatened the Queen with divine judgement: ‘Let these things alone, and God is a righteous God; He will one day call you to your reckoning.’22 It was the very same day that Pius V, with a radically different understanding of God’s unhappiness with Elizabeth, issued his bull of deposition.
To say Elizabeth was displeased would be an understatement, even if Dering, speaking directly to the Queen in recognized ‘prophetic’ mode, did not do anything overtly or legally treasonous. Born in around 1540, Dering was too young to have been part of the Marian exile; he was one of a new generation of Protestant clergymen whose faith was formed in the fractious 1560s. Yet his sermon had nothing to say about surplices, caps, kneeling at communion, or other staple Puritan grievances. There was a sense that more fundamental matters needed to be looked to, if popery was to be rooted out, and true religion secured.
In the spring of 1570, Thomas Cartwright, newly appointed Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in Cambridge, delivered a series of lectures on the Acts of the Apostles. Cartwright was a veteran of the controversies over vestments, and withdrew for a time to serve as chaplain to Archbishop Adam Loftus of Armagh. In Ireland, the exposed front line of the struggle against popery, Puritans were usually welcomed by the bishops as brothers-in-arms, not shunned as disagreeable troublemakers.
Yet the office of bishop itself was under scrutiny as Cartwright – to the delight of younger scholars in his audiences – expounded the first two chapters of Acts, and argued that the organizational model of the early Church was prescriptive for Christianity in all subsequent ages. The Church of England, with its government by deans, archdeacons, bishops and archbishops, straight off the peg of medieval popery, stood rebuked by scripture. The primitive Church knew only of pastors and deacons. It had no elaborate hierarchies, but an equality of status among ministers. And it was evident from scripture that those ministers should be called to serve faithfully in one congregation, not pitched here and there by officials and patrons. Cartwright gave theological underpinning to the anti-episcopal prejudices inherited from Mary’s reign, and heightened by the vestments controversy. The word was not yet in use, but one day there would be a name for this: presbyterianism.
As Cambridge divided into pro- and anti-Cartwright factions, the establishment moved to assert its dominance. A new set of statutes, designed to place control of the university in the hands of conformist heads of houses, was drawn up by Andrew Perne, Master of Peterhouse, an arch-Nicodemite, holding the post since 1554, and by a rising academic star, John Whitgift, Master of Trinity. One of the statutes forbad public attacks on the established order of religion, and in December 1570, Whitgift, in his role as first vice-chancellor elected under the new constitution, deprived Cartwright of his professorship. Cartwright withdrew to Geneva, and to a teaching position in its Academy, working there alongside Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza, a robust theologian who believed episcopacy to be a worthless, man-made institution, and monarchical authority to be rooted in the consent of the people.23
Most educated English Protestants were by the early 1570s ‘Calvinists’ – in the sense that they accepted the doctrine of predestination. But to be a ‘Genevan’ meant something else: a political critic of the structure and governance of the English Church. Whether that criticism was loyal and constructive, or an instinct of insidious subversion, was very much a moot point.
For Members of Parliament meeting in April 1571, the issue was not so much whether to counter the threat from Rome, but whether the best way to counter it was to resume the neglected task of reforming the structures and practices of the Church of England. Elizabeth, wary and weary of being (literally) preached at, conveyed a message via Lord Keeper Bacon at the opening of the session: the Commons ‘should do well to meddle with no matters of state, but such as be propounded unto them’.
There were no difficulties about the passing of an act making it treason to call the sovereign ‘heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel or an usurper’ (as it had been under Henry), or another allowing for confiscation of the property of religious exiles. A third made it high treason to introduce papal bulls into England, and misprision of treason to conceal them. This act also threatened with penalties of praemunire anyone importing objects ‘called by the name of an Agnus Dei [a wax disc, with imprinted religious picture], or any crosses, pictures, beads or such like’, blessed by the Pope or anyone on his behalf – a further indication of how material objects of devotion were becoming politicized as tokens of nonconformist identity.
It was a different matter, however, with a more stringent measure for controlling the Catholic population at home. This bill proposed increasing the fine for non-attendance at church at least once a quarter to £12, and instituting a fine of 100 marks (£66) for failure to receive communion at least once in the year. With the enthusiastic backing of the bishops (and the likely tacit support of Burghley in the Lords), the bill passed both houses. Elizabeth vetoed it.24
This was, in its way, a defining moment. As the papal bull made clear, Catholics thought, or were supposed to think, that the Protestant eucharist was heretical; participating in it, a literally damnable matter. ‘Communion’, as the name implied, was a social act, signifying full membership of a community. The bill was intended to force religious conservatives to become de facto practising Protestants, or to identify themselves as outsiders, and face crippling financial penalties. It was designed to scotch Nicodemism, or to drive it so far in upon itself that it lost its moral compass.
It was not Elizabeth’s way – perhaps because she feared provoking resentful Catholics into a second round of rebellion; perhaps because of that instinctive reluctance to make windows into hearts that grew from her own life experience of concealment and compliance. Either way, the veto was an emphatic confirmation of an existing arrangement, whereby church attendance was a statutory duty, but participation in the sacraments was left to the feeble discipline of the church courts. The arrangement lent itself to the whispered suspicion that attendance at public worship could be a purely civil duty, divorced from the actual cultivation of a spiritual life. And it represented the implicit offer of a bargain between Elizabeth and her Catholic subjects: obey me, conform outwardly, and I will leave your souls alone. It was an offer the Protestant clergy, most of them, did not want Elizabeth to make, and one the Catholic clergy, most of them, did not want their people to accept.
In other respects, the Parliament of 1571 witnessed an agitated accumulation of alternate agendas. Elizabeth’s standing insistence that religious matters belonged to her sole prerogative was cheerfully ignored in an assembly many of whose members regarded the state of the Church as a standing item of business. ‘Puritan’ reformers enjoyed the tacit encouragement of leading councillors like Knollys and Leicester. The bishops had by no means given up on hopes of further substantial reform. But possibilities for collaboration with the godly laity were frayed by the disciplinary campaigns of the late 1560s, and by an understandable swelling of episcopal dignity on the part of men whose role and status were starting to be questioned.
Lay reformers in the Commons seized for themselves an abandoned episcopal project: the Church of England’s missing discipline. On 6 April, William Strickland, MP for Scarborough, revealed that Thomas Norton possessed a newly printed copy of Cranmer’s rejected plan for reform of the canon law, the Reformatio Legum. He called on Norton to bring it forth for consideration. The printing was organized by John Foxe, and the choreographed episode was intended to precipitate a wider reform of doctrine and worship – the two other marks of a true Church. Foxe’s preface to the reissued Reformatio criticized the Prayer Book, which Strickland’s speech damned with faint praise as merely ‘drawn very near to the sincerity of the truth’. Use of the sign of the cross, and permission for women, in necessity, to baptize were things ‘more superstitious … than in such high matters be tolerable’.
The Reformatio Legum was unacceptable to Elizabeth for much the same reason Northumberland disliked it: it strengthened the independent authority of the clergy. Nonetheless, a committee was established to confer about it with the bishops. In the meantime, Strickland continued to spearhead proposals for reform, calling for reintroduction of the ‘alphabet’ measures from 1566, and introducing his own bill for wholesale revision of the Prayer Book. This proposed the abolition of private baptism, ‘needless’ confirmation of children, vestments, kneeling at communion, and exchange of rings at the wedding service – a practice godly reformers viewed, with great seriousness, as a form of marital idolatry.
All this was too much even for sympathizers among the councillors. Knollys argued in the Commons that heresies in the Prayer Book were certainly to be reformed, ‘but if they are but matters of ceremony, then it behoveth to refer the same to her Majesty’. Almost apologetically, he urged his fellow parliamentarians towards a weary acceptance of the limits of the possible:
[W]hat cause there might be to make her Majesty not to run and join with those who seem to be earnest, we are not to search. Whether it be for that, orderly and in time, she hopeth to bring them all with her, or what secret cause or other scrupulosity there may be in princes, it is not for all sorts to know.
Strickland was too earnest for his own good, and during Parliament’s Easter recess, the Council – probably on the Queen’s orders – excluded him, and sent him to the Tower. Parliament had as keen a sense of its prerogatives as the Queen did of hers, and a rash of angry speeches about encroachment on the liberties of the House brought about Strickland’s release on 21 April. The Prayer Book bill died a quiet death, as attention turned to another piece of unfinished business: the Articles of Religion.25
In Convocation, the bishops overcame the reservations of Edmund Guest and restored the missing Article 29, with its stricture on the manducatio impiorum (see p. 458). Elizabeth, unwilling to face a fight on two fronts – against bishops in Convocation and radical MPs in Parliament – agreed to the reinsertion, and to the principle of statutory underpinning for the now Thirty-Nine Articles. This, too, proved a less than straightforward matter.
Two bills concerning the articles were introduced by reformers into the Commons. One required clergymen to subscribe them; the other confirmed the articles, but only a selection of the core ‘doctrinal’ ones, omitting those unpalatable to Puritan consciences, such as articles concerning the Homilies and consecration of bishops. It was a blatant attempt to redefine the Church of England’s priorities through selective editing, and while it passed the Commons, Elizabeth halted its progress in the Lords.
The Subscription Act did pass and receive royal assent. Henceforth, all new clergymen would have to subscribe the Articles, as would existing ministers ordained in any form other than that ‘set forth by Parliament in the time of … Edward VI, or now used’ – a symptom of continuing mistrust of the large number of Marian priests still ministering in the parishes.
Strickland and his allies scored one notable rear-guard success. The requirement was for clergymen to subscribe only those Articles of Religion ‘which … concern the confession of the true Christian faith, and the doctrine of the sacraments’ – whichever those were. In practice, bishops required new ordinands to subscribe in toto. Still, it was hardly a masterclass in smooth co-operation between Church and state. The Church of England had an agreed final text of its ‘confession of faith’, but Parliament stopped short of confirming the articles as normative or mandatory for the nation’s spiritual health. Instead, it required clergymen, some clergymen, to express assent to them – some of them. For good measure, even as she signed the bill, Elizabeth sent a message through Lord Keeper Bacon that it was really a matter for Convocation and bishops. Parliament should never have discussed it in the first place: those who ‘so audaciously and arrogantly have dealt in such matters may not look to receive further favour’.26
Elizabeth was even-handedly noncommittal in her dealings with Convocation. In response to the parliamentary committee on the Reformatio Legum, the bishops undertook to draw up new canons. These upheld the disciplinary requirements around vestments, and clerical subscription to (all of) the articles, but the prevailing tone was evangelical. ‘Preacher’ was the term used to designate parish clergymen, and schoolteachers were ordered to use Dean Nowell’s very Protestant catechism, which Thomas Norton had just translated into English. Elizabeth received the canons in June, and allowed them to be printed, but they went forth in the bishops’ names, not the Queen’s.27
Beyond Westminster, beyond the court, not everyone was simply waiting to decode confused instructions from the centre; reformation was following its own courses. In the forefront were county and market towns. On 5 June 1571, the day after Archbishop Parker sent the canons to the Queen, another set of orders was drawn up by the mayor and justices of Northampton, with ‘consent of the bishop of Peterborough’, Edmund Scambler. The document closely regulated times and patterns of services in the town’s churches, all to take place without any ‘singing and playing of organs’. Services should finish punctually to allow attendance at a weekly sermon in All Saints, ‘chief church’ of the town, where ‘the communion table standeth in the body of the church’, the orders adding, ‘according to the book’. Since Prayer Book and Injunctions contradicted each other (see p. 445), selective obedience was a technique of local empowerment. It was also a cause of contention: in East Anglia, Bishop Parkhurst encountered ‘earnest disputations’ in many places about wafers or common bread for the communion, ‘the one alleging the book, the other her Majesty’s Injunctions’.
In Northampton, on Thursdays, there was a weekly lecture, after which the mayor and his brethren, along with the preacher, minister and justices, would correct cases of ‘notorious blasphemy, whoredom, drunkenness, railing against religion’, reported by ‘certain sworn men appointed for that service in each parish’. This body was not called a consistory, but the allure of Genevan-style discipline for the town governors of Northampton was quite evident. It was also reflected in an order for the town’s youth to be instructed every Sunday ‘in a portion of Calvin’s catechism’.
Another injunction described a recent innovation. Every Saturday morning, from nine until eleven, there was ‘an exercise of the ministers, both of town and country, about the interpretation of scriptures’. In front of an audience of laypeople, ministers would take turns to preach on a given text, and then withdraw ‘into a privy place there to confer among themselves, as well touching doctrine as good life’.
The inspiration for this came not from Geneva, but from Zürich. Zwingli instituted these clerical workshops, where two or three proficient ministers would deliver sermons, and others take notes on how it should be done. The occasion was known as the prophezei, ‘prophesying’. Returning exiles imported the practice, and it was positively encouraged by several bishops: prophesyings began in Grindal’s London in the 1560s, and were starting to spring up elsewhere in the early 1570s, often at local initiative. By bringing people into the town, prophesyings were good for local business, but, most importantly, they were oases of preaching, in what many bishops still saw as a parched and desert land.28
Elizabeth herself gave only one order for the augmentation of preaching in the later part of 1571: a sermon of thanksgiving at Paul’s Cross, along with special prayers in churches, for the great victory on 7 October of the Spanish and papal fleet over the Ottoman Turks at Lepanto in the eastern Mediterranean. Whatever their differences, Catholics and Protestants shared in the common faith of Christendom against its external enemies, and church bells across London rang in celebration.
Not everyone saw it that way. One owner of a copy of an earlier prayer, issued to give thanks for the lifting of the Ottoman siege of Malta in 1565, replaced all references to ‘Turk’ and ‘Turks’ with ‘pope’ and ‘papists’. Thomas Cartwright, back in Cambridge from Geneva in the spring of 1572, suggested it would actually be safer for Protestants to copy their ‘indifferent ceremonies’ from Islam than from popery. The internationalist sympathies of Puritans were focused not on the beleaguered Catholics and Orthodox of Europe’s eastern frontier, but on the persecuted Protestants of France and the Netherlands. Their heroes were the Dutch ‘Sea Beggars’, godly privateers whom Elizabeth banned from English ports in the spring of 1572, but who reignited the rebellion in the Netherlands that April with their daring seizure of the port of Brill. The Sea Beggars’ motto was ‘rather Turkish than popish’, and they provocatively wore as a badge on their clothes the Islamic crescent moon.29 No English Protestant went that far. But many knew who their real enemies were, and how close they lay at hand.
An Axe or an Act?
Almost the last thing Elizabeth I wanted was a new Parliament, less than a year after the dissolution of the last. But the revelations of the Ridolfi Plot spurred the Privy Council into taking a firm line and insisting. One issue was in almost everyone’s minds: what to do about the Queen of Scots?
On 13 May 1572, less than a week after Parliament assembled, the Council presented the case against Mary to a committee of both Houses. She stood accused of laying claim to the English throne, of seeking a marriage with Norfolk to advance that claim, of instigating rebellion in the north, and of plotting an invasion of the realm.
Solutions, it seemed to most MPs, were staring them in the face: either Mary should be formally excluded from the succession by statute, or she should be tried for treason as if she were an English subject. Paul Wentworth, Puritan sympathizer and member for the Cornish borough of Liskeard, bluntly asked that ‘it may be put to the question of the House, whether we should call for an axe or an act’.
A taste for the axe was not limited to a bloodthirsty radical fringe. It was the preferred option for Burghley, for most of the Privy Council and for nearly all the bishops. By 19 May, a bill was prepared containing a petition for the Queen of Scots to be attainted. The language of Commons speeches was fiery, intemperate. Mary, said Nicholas St Leger, MP for Maidstone, was ‘the monstrous and huge dragon, and mass of the earth’. Thomas Norton revisited the themes of his tracts against the northern rebels. It was said mercy was good in a prince, but ‘mercy without her Majesty’s safety, causeth misery’.
More was at stake than Elizabeth’s personal well-being, and some MPs were not shy of saying it. ‘Since the Queen in respect of her own safety is not to be induced therein,’ argued Robert Newdigate, ‘let us petition she will do it in respect of our safety. I have heard she delighteth to be called our mother.’ Newdigate was being archly ironic. Others, like Thomas Dannet, were bluntly forthright. Elizabeth’s reluctance to settle the succession was nothing less than a refusal ‘to put us in safety after her death’. If she would not take necessary steps to prolong her subjects’ safety by preserving her own life, ‘true and faithful subjects, despairing of safety by her means, shall be forced to seek protection elsewhere’.
The inescapable conclusion from such language was that loyalty to Elizabeth was not absolute, but conditional on a willingness to defend the Protestant Church and succession. Remarkably – or perhaps, not so remarkably – the theme was developed most powerfully in a paper presented by the bishops, men with more cause than most to lament the Queen’s religious fecklessness. It drew on every resource of scripture to justify the harshest treatment for ‘the late Queen of Scots’, someone who ‘wrought by all means she can to seduce the people of God in this realm from true religion’. A wicked, criminal ruler was justly deposed.
But the bishops went further. The first Book of Kings recorded how King Saul spared the life of Agag, a defeated Amalekite king who persecuted the Jews. In consequence, ‘God took from the same Saul his good spirit and transferred the Kingdom of Israel from him and his heirs’. It was, the bishops doubtless felt, a warning rather than a threat. But there was no doubt ‘her Majesty must needs offend in conscience before God if she do not punish her [Mary] according to the measure of her offence’. The bishops also gave a surprisingly different spin to a text usually used to argue for absolute political obedience. St Paul’s Letter to the Romans 13:1, declared: ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers, for there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordained of God.’ The bishops read Paul to be saying that ‘the magistrate is the minister of God, and the revenger of wrath towards him that hath done evil’. If magistrates neglected this duty, ‘God threateneth heavy punishment’.
‘Magistrate’ was a telling word – not an anointed sacral monarchy, but an office in the commonwealth, with prescribed responsibilities – and one which hinted at possibilities of dismissal. The bishops’ moralizing essay was part of a co-ordinated front of censorious advice, an attempt to jostle Elizabeth down a road she did not wish to travel. Burghley arranged for a young clergyman, Tobie Matthew, to preach in front of her. He expostulated on Elizabeth’s duty to execute Mary; all, even queens, ‘must live within the lists of one’s own vocation’.30
Elizabeth I was not frightened of Burghley, or of bishops, however many blood-curdling Old Testament stories they had at their elbows. The Queen instructed Parliament to abandon ideas of an attainder, and proceed instead with a bill for exclusion. That bill passed both Houses, but when the moment for royal assent came, Elizabeth held back, saying ‘she is not yet fully resolved’. She did, however, make one significant concession, agreeing to the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, who had been tried and convicted in January for his role in the Ridolfi affair. The duke, asserting his Protestant faith, was beheaded at the Tower on 2 June.31
The wider cause of reform fared no better in the 1572 Parliament than in that of the preceding year, though reformers adopted a (seemingly) more moderate tack. Two MPs, Tristram Pistor and Robert Snagge, brought forward a bill, not to abolish the Prayer Book, but to make strict observance of the 1559 Act of Uniformity apply ‘only to such as shall say any papistical service’. Good Protestants – with consent of their bishop – would be free to omit ceremonies that were only included ‘in respect of the great weakness of the people’. In addition, individual bishops could license petitioning clergymen to use the forms of service employed by the French and Dutch Stranger Churches.
It was a prescription for liturgical free-for-all, making nonsense of any concept of uniformity. Yet it expressed an optimistic conviction that the times were right for evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, change:
Through this long continuance of preaching the Gospel under Your Highness’s authority … many congregations within Your Highness’s realm are grown to desire of attaining to some further form than in that book is prescribed. … A great number of learned pastors and zealous ministers … have omitted the precise rule and strait observation of the form prescribed … [while] a number of malicious adversaries of the truth do cover their malice under pretence of conformity and obedience …
The disobedient, in other words, were the most loyal and reliable. This perplexingly paradoxical logic was not entirely dismissed by leading figures of the government. Knollys helped to revise the bill, stripping out its most contentious aspect (permission to use Stranger Church liturgies), and assigning permission to alter Prayer Book usages to the bishops as a whole. In that form, many of them would have welcomed the bill. But bishops had learned, as MPs perhaps still had not, that Elizabeth would countenance no tinkering with the 1559 Prayer Book. Elizabeth read the drafts, and criticized them rather more courteously than was her wont. But she said she could consider no bills of religion that did not enjoy prior episcopal approval.32
Even while these collaborative plans were struggling to stay afloat in the Commons, the ship of reformation entered new, dangerously confrontational waters. Around the end of June 1572, an anonymous pamphlet was published in London. An Admonition to the Parliament was the work of two young clergymen, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and it raised the piratical flag of ecclesiastical mutiny.
Ambitious Spirits
The Admonition was a cocktail of finely distilled theological critique and home-brewed satirical mockery. Wilcox specialized in the former, Field, the latter. The Prayer Book, readers learned, was a work ‘culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass book’, a ‘reading service’ containing no ‘edification’. Its formal solemnity of alternating lines of text and response meant merely that congregations ‘toss the psalms in most places like tennis balls’.
‘Popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church’ included private communion and baptism (and use of the sign of the cross), holy days dedicated to saints, kneeling at communion, wafer bread, vestments. The ceremony of ‘churching’ women – readmitting them to worship after a period of separation following childbirth – ‘smelleth of Jewish purification’. Superstitious rituals marred the rites of confirmation, marriage and burial. Any special role for ministers at funerals was simply a means ‘whereby prayer for the dead is maintained’. Indeed, a fundamental misunderstanding of clerical ministry accounted for many of the Church’s failings: ‘by the Word of God, it is an office of preaching, they make it an office of reading’.
Who were ‘they’? The most inflammatory feature of the Admonition was its repudiation of any recognition of the bishops as fellow, albeit tardy, sojourners on the road to righteousness. They were not part of the solution, but the very root of the problem. Embittered by the experience of subscription and suspension, and energized by the theological insights of Cartwright, Field and Wilcox mapped out a presbyterian future for the Church, placing it in the hands ‘of lawful pastors, of watchful seniors and elders, and careful deacons’. ‘Archbishop’ and ‘bishop’ were names and roles ‘drawn out of the Pope’s shop’. Governance of the Church by them was naught but an ‘Antichristian tyranny’.33
For all its scurrility and ribald humour, the Admonition was not to be laughed off. By the end of August 1572, the work had run into its third edition, and in November 1572 A Second Admonition to Parliament added flesh to the bones, with more detailed exposition of what a ‘well reformed Church’ would look like: locally elected pastors reporting to regional ‘conferences’ of ministers; above them, synods provincial. This was not just blue-sky theorizing: Field had for some time been meeting in regular conference with other London ministers, and was in correspondence with like-minded clergymen in various English counties. An embryonic presbyterian organization was growing within the womb of the English Church.
The Second Admonition defined the conference – what Beza and other continental Calvinists would have called a classis – as ‘the meeting of some certain ministers, and other brethren’ at a significant town, or in a deanery, to discuss policy and exercise discipline. They were occasions when ministers would ‘confer and exercise themselves in prophesying, or in interpreting the scriptures’. The passing use of the word ‘prophesying’ was a fateful conflation. Subversive models of alternative church government might easily now be associated with the forms of in-service training smiled on by many of the bishops themselves.
The author of the Second Admonition was widely supposed to have been Cartwright, though a likelier candidate is Christopher Goodman, back from a spell in Ireland to a ministry in his native Chester, but still persona non grata on account of his earlier embrace of Knoxian resistance theory. Cartwright, however, was soon in the thick of things. John Whitgift, rapidly emerging as the leading voice of clerical ‘conformity’, completed an Answer to the Admonition in October 1572, shortly after depriving Cartwright of his Cambridge fellowship. Cartwright issued a Reply in April 1573, from the same secret press that produced the Second Admonition. Whitgift’s Against the Reply provoked Cartwright’s Second Reply and a subsequent Rest of the Second Reply.
The ‘Admonition Controversy’ was one of the great print-debates of the century, comparable to More’s titanic duel with Tyndale, or Jewel’s Challenge to the Louvainists. Cartwright and Whitgift were barely in disagreement with each other on issues of soteriology – the theology of salvation. Both recognized that good works played no instrumental role, and that God predestined to eternal life those he freely chose. Nor was there a total divergence on ecclesiology – the theology of the Church. They agreed there was both an invisible and a visible Church. Cartwright’s instinct, however, was to mould the latter to fit the shape of the former. It should be possible to identify the elect, through their unswerving obedience to the commandments of God, and to place them in leadership roles. Conversely, the recognizably unworthy and ungodly – very probably the damned, and so not even part of the true, invisible Church – should be excluded from sacraments and full membership of the visible Church.
Whitgift’s contrary instinct was for a kind of agnostic separation of the invisible and visible Churches. It was not possible to know who was saved and who was damned; the visible Church unavoidably contained within its ranks both good and evil people. This meant it was essential for the Church to exercise discipline and impose universal obedience to its rules, including observance of its ceremonies. Moreover, that discipline should be ‘according to the kind and form of government used in the commonwealth’. It was the Queen’s God-given right as Supreme Governor to prescribe rules for the governance of the Church, just as she did in temporal matters for the state, regardless of whether individual rituals were judged able to ‘edify’. This was music to royal ears. Whitgift’s was the antithesis of a political theology stressing at every turn the obligation on the ‘magistrate’ to conform herself to the commands of God in scripture, as interpreted for her by, of course, the clergy.34
In the meantime, Field and Wilcox were identified as the Admonition’s authors and imprisoned in Newgate. In June 1573, a royal proclamation condemned the work, and its sequel, and demanded surrender of all copies. The godly were far from uniformly supportive of the presbyterian agitation. Thomas Sampson and Robert Crowley, veteran leaders of the vestments protest, distanced themselves from these younger firebrands. Thomas Norton, the most resolutely ‘political’ of lay Puritans, thought the Admonition ‘fond’ (i.e. foolish): it ‘hath hindered much good and done much hurt, and in nothing more than in increasing the papists’ triumph against our Church’. Catholics liked nothing better than an intra-Protestant feud.
Nonetheless, the bishops felt abandoned and beleaguered. Parker complained to Burghley in November 1572 that, ‘among such as profess themselves Protestants’, the agitators were being praised ‘and we judged to be extreme persecutors’. There was clearly considerable lay support for the stance of the Puritan preachers. Early the next year, Parker warned darkly that, if action were not taken, ‘I fear ye shall feel Müntzer’s Commonwealth attempted shortly’ – half a century on, the horrors of the German Peasants’ War continued to haunt the imaginations of all ‘respectable’ Protestants.
In April 1573, Bishop Scambler of Peterborough lamented that ‘those whom men do call Puritans’ were out of control in various towns in Rutland and Northamptonshire, preaching without licence and administering sacraments in ways ‘contrary to the form prescribed by the public order of the realm’. In August, Sandys of London wrote to Bullinger in alarmist tones about ‘new orators’, men ‘seeking the complete overthrow and rooting up of our whole ecclesiastical polity’. Among their outlandish opinions was that ‘the civil magistrate has no authority in ecclesiastical matters’ – a view Sandys could reliably expect the clerical leader of Zürich, where institutions of Church and state were closely integrated, to find disturbingly abhorrent.
Closer to home, sympathy was in short supply. Councillors and courtiers scarcely rushed to take the bishops’ side. Sandys reflected bitterly that ‘ambitious spirits’, undermining religion ‘under the colour of Reformation’, were ‘favoured by some of great calling’. He had received ‘sundry letters from noblemen’ interceding for Field and Wilcox. Prior to release in the summer of 1573, they were transferred to more comfortable conditions, probably due to the influence of Leicester and Warwick. Like his father, the Duke of Northumberland, Leicester enjoyed posing as the patron of radical preachers who were able to keep the bishops on their toes. Goodman was a protégé, and told Leicester he was sorry that ‘for my sake your Lordship should grow in suspicion to be a maintainer of such as go about the undermining of the estate’; Parker suspected the earl of plotting against him with ‘certain precisians’.
Without backing from powerful laymen, the bishops – who had limited access to the Queen, and few powerful disciplinary tools of their own – remained relatively weak. In the summer of 1573, Sandys was reduced to begging Burghley and Leicester for help in regaining control of preaching in the capital, where supporters of Cartwright shamelessly expounded his ideas at Paul’s Cross, and where, despite the June proclamation, there was ‘not one book brought in’.35
Privy Council support for a crackdown was eventually forthcoming, probably thanks to the direct intervention of the Queen. On 14 October 1573, in the vicinity of Temple Bar, a radically Puritan – and probably unhinged – law student named Peter Birchet stabbed and seriously wounded the renowned sea captain Sir John Hawkins. It was an unfortunate case of mistaken identity. Hawkins’s fine clothing led Birchet to confuse him with Christopher Hatton, gentleman of the Privy Chamber and captain of the Yeomen of the Guard. Hatton had recently swept into public awareness as a new royal favourite. Some suspected him of secret papist sympathies, and many of the godly blamed him for the failure of reforming and anti-Marian measures in the Parliament of 1572.
Six days after the attack, a royal proclamation demanded stricter enforcement of the Act of Uniformity, and imprisonment for anyone preaching or writing against the Prayer Book. Somewhat spitefully, the Queen ascribed blame for the disorder to ‘the negligence of the bishops’. In November, the Privy Council established special commissions to investigate Puritan nonconformity, and to enforce subscription to articles upholding liturgical and ceremonial rules. A warrant was issued for Cartwright’s arrest: he went into hiding, and escaped before the end of the year to the Calvinist university town of Heidelberg. There he oversaw the printing of polemics against Whitgift, as well as A Brief Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfurt (1574) – a compilation of documents put together by Field and Thomas Wood, designed to show that the Puritan cause of the 1570s had a venerable ancestry in the principled actions of Marian exile.
London witnessed a renewed drive to impose use of the surplice: leading Puritans were rounded up and imprisoned. Robert Johnson, preacher at St Clement Danes, was incarcerated in the Westminster Gatehouse, spending his time there composing witty diatribes against Sandys and the dean of Westminster, Gabriel Goodman, whom he considered no better than a papist. Johnson died, a martyr to insanitary conditions, before April 1574. He was not the first. There were, claimed Thomas Wood in February, ‘three lately dead by the bishops’ imprisonment’. Yet, as in any persecution, there were apostates as well as martyrs, and some – like Edward Dering – who failed to take the bold stand the irreconcilables hoped they would.
Beyond the capital, waves of episcopally enforced subscription and suspension crashed along the Puritan shorelines of Northamptonshire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire and East Anglia. Wood grieved to Dean Whittingham of Durham that ‘the poor famished sheep of Christ are daily spoiled of their godly and learned shepherds’, driven out, in some bishoprics, ‘twelve at a clap’. In fact, enforcement of conformity was decidedly patchy. In Norwich, Parkhurst was as reluctant to become a persecutor of Puritans as he had been to become a bishop in the first place. He implemented some temporary suspensions, but those affected were still allowed to take part in the prophesyings.36
The furore surrounding the Admonition, and the failed parliamentary reform efforts of 1571–2, revealed English Protestantism to be deeply, perhaps fatally, fractured. The emerging fault lines lay not just between a mainstream drive for continuing reformation within the Church and the eccentric conservatism of its Supreme Governor, but between those committed to principles of hierarchy and order and those who felt licensed by their insight into the mind of God to build a godly society from the bottom up.
It was, nonetheless, a crisis that never quite became a conflagration. The deranged Birchet aside, and despite the vehemence of their language, Puritans were not minded to resort to actual violence in pursuit of their goals. Their political patrons were willing to offer protection, and happy to see bishops discomfited and embarrassed, but they would not write the Puritans a blank cheque, or endorse plans to overthrow the established ecclesiastical order.
There was also an abiding sense that, however bitter it became, this was still a family quarrel. Beyond the hearth, beyond the home, dangerous forces stirred. The third printing of the Admonition in 1572 coincided with dreadful news from France. On St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August), during an uneasy peace in the religious wars, Catholics in Paris, believing they had the blessing of the King, turned on their Huguenot neighbours and killed at least 2,000 of them in three days of savage slaughter. Thousands more died in copy-cat attacks in the provinces over the following weeks. The English ambassador, Francis Walsingham, would never forget, or forgive, what he witnessed in the French capital.
Was this the fate English Protestants narrowly escaped through exposure of Ridolfi’s Plot and Alva’s invasion plan? Parker reported to Burghley in September 1572 that the ‘imps’ (priests) of the English papists were ‘rejoicing much at this unnatural and unprincely cruelty and murder’. Some ‘looked for such slaughter at home’. Robert Beale, Clerk of the Privy Council, and a secretary to Walsingham in Paris at the time of the massacre, drew up an analysis for Burghley. It concluded that there was a ‘detestable conspiracy’ of the papacy, Spanish and French to divide the world between them, and that no trust could be placed in any Catholic in England ‘who thinketh in conscience, under the damnation of his soul, to owe a more obedience to a higher power’. Special prayers – quite different in tone from those appointed after Lepanto – were ordered to be read in church. The words of Psalm 22 expressed deep feelings of anxiety and persecution: ‘the wicked conspireth against us, and our enemies are daily in hand to swallow us up’.
The Privy Council ordered improvement of coastal defences, and for the navy to be put to sea. It also asked for names and statuses of papists throughout the realm. To compile such a register, thought Parker, ‘were an infinite matter’, the number of papists was growing so fast.37 Yet Burghley received that year an annotated list of ‘noblemen, gentlemen, yeomen and chief franklins’ within Hampshire. Of the 246 names, ninety-seven were marked ‘p’ and a further forty-seven ‘pp’: ‘papists’ and ‘earnest papists’. In a world of politicized faith, the unknowable reaches of the heart were redacted into formulaic abbreviation.
The episcopal authorities were far from complacent: in early 1573, for example, Bishop Bentham of Coventry hauled before him the curate Richard Cook for ‘too much familiarity and bearing with them in Stone (Staffordshire) which are judged to be papists’. But after the immediate shock of St Bartholomew subsided there was a sense that the domestic papist problem was containable. Parker even blamed the apparent flare-up of Catholic militancy in late 1572 on the fact that ‘they be exasperated by the disordered preachings and writings of some Puritans’. Bishop Horne of Winchester reported patriotically to Bullinger at the start of 1573 that England, ‘having secured tranquillity at home and peace abroad, is sailing as it were with full sails and a prosperous breeze’. The Church, admittedly, was dangerously agitated, but this was not so much due to papists, ‘who are daily restrained by severe laws’, as to ‘false brethren, who seem to be sliding into anabaptism’.38
The severe laws were invoked in June 1573, when a priest, Thomas Woodhouse, was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn after unwisely sending Burghley a letter defending the papal deposition, and forcibly defending his views in a subsequent interview with the Lord Treasurer. At least one cleric was executed under martial law in the north in 1569, but Woodhouse was the first priest formally to suffer under an Elizabethan statute.
He was also a human hinge between Catholicisms past and pending. Ordained under Mary, Woodhouse had been in the Fleet for religious disaffection since 1561. Yet in the year of his execution he wrote to Paris requesting admission to the Society of Jesus, and he died a Jesuit.
Jesuits were not – yet – a prime target of English Protestant hatred and fear. In fact, four years on from the Northern Rising and papal bull, the government felt able to show some magnanimity to its Catholic opponents. In 1574, the Privy Council ordered Abbot Feckenham and the former bishop of Lincoln, Thomas Watson, to be released from the Marshalsea, and Henry Cole, and the brothers John and Nicholas Harpsfield to be removed from the Fleet, on receipt of promises not to agitate publicly against the established religion.
Even as this small band of aged clergymen laid down the sword and shield of religious struggle, another group of younger ones prepared to pick them up. In 1573, the first graduates of Allen’s Douai seminary were ordained to the priesthood, and in 1574 four of them – Lewis Barlow, Henry Shaw, Martin Nelson and Thomas Metham – crossed secretly to England. Another seven followed in 1575. A new phase in the story of English Catholicism was under way.
The Council’s relatively compassionate attitude to the surviving pillars of the Marian regime contrasted with the outlook of some Puritans, for whom to forgive was to forget, and to forget was not an option. On 29 September 1574, Robert Crowley preached at the Guildhall, at the election of a new Lord Mayor. His text was Psalm 139 (‘Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?’), and his theme was the purity of Christian hatred. More than any other miscreant, Crowley admonished, a papist ‘must be so hated, that he be not chosen to supply any place in any public ministration’. At the start of the preceding year, John Browning, a Cambridge colleague of Cartwright, caused uproar when he preached in Great St Mary’s that no Protestant who attended an idolatrous mass could ever be forgiven for it; he even implied that death was the appropriate penalty for such apostasy. Among the outputs of Cartwright’s Heidelberg press was a satirical attack on Matthew Parker, claiming that while the faithful were giving their lives, Parker passed his time in ‘pleasant rest and leisure’. Only after Mary was safely dead did he creep ‘out of his lurking hole into the open sight of the world’.39
Parker may not have been burned, but he was certainly bruised by a decade and more of holding the line, at first Elizabeth’s, but increasingly his own, against those who – as he observed with bitter irony to the Lord Treasurer in April 1575 – saw both himself and Burghley as ‘great papists’:
Does your Lordship think I care either for cap, tippet, surplice, or wafer-bread, or any such? But [only] for the laws so established I esteem them, and not more for exercise of contempt against law and authority, which I see will be the end of it, nor for any other respect.
Dictating his letter from the sickbed that was soon to be his deathbed, Parker declared he had done his duty, and hoped Burghley would continue to do his, helping ‘her Majesty’s good government in princely constancy’.
He did not feel like the beneficiary of much constancy himself; in a final indignity, the Queen had just unexpectedly levied a charge on Parker for mounting a visitation of Winchester diocese. ‘Her majesty told me that I had supreme government ecclesiastical; but what is it to govern cumbered with such subtlety?’ With remarkable frankness, the ailing archbishop confessed to Burghley he did not really understand what the royal supremacy was. Certainly, the Queen’s powers were more than the papists would grant her, yet, ‘whatsoever the ecclesiastical prerogative is, I fear it is not so great as your pen hath given it in the Injunctions’.
In signing off, Parker’s mind turned to prophecies, and to an ‘old verse’ that kept springing into his head. Femina morte cadet, postquam terram mala tangent: A woman falls dead, and afterwards evils touch the land. However infuriating Parker – and Burghley – might find Elizabeth, her continued survival was all that was standing between them and the collapse of everything they held dear. It was not intended to be a comforting thought.
Parker died at Lambeth on 17 May 1575, doubtless wishing he had spent more time on his beloved antiquarian research – designed to show the Church of ancient Britain as resolutely non-Roman and proudly proto-Protestant – and less time dealing with ingrate Puritans.40 He left a modern Church formally intact, but wracked by mistrust and recrimination: between Puritans and bishops; between bishops and nobles; between almost everyone and a frustratingly impassive queen. His successor would need to possess in abundance the vision, direction and charisma that the weary and disillusioned Parker so patently lacked. As it turned out, all those things would still not be enough.
Grindal
On Friday 22 July 1575, the fires of Smithfield, doused since June 1558, were set alight once more. Two foreigners burned to death, after being convicted of heresy by an ecclesiastical commission headed by Bishop Sandys of London. John Foxe, John Field and other Puritans were there to see and hear them perish in agony, since no small bags of gunpowder (sometimes hung around the neck to hasten the end of heretics) were placed on their bodies.
Hendrik Terwoort and Jan Pietersz were members of a group of twenty-seven Flemish anabaptists, found worshipping at a house in Whitechapel on Easter Sunday – just a few of several thousand foreigners, economic and religious refugees, living in London and its suburbs. The discovery was an embarrassment to the Dutch Stranger Church, to which resident aliens were supposed to belong, and whose ministers (acting as interpreters) were active in efforts to get the prisoners to recant. Five did so, at Paul’s Cross on 15 May. The others would not, declaring in a petition to the Queen that they could not agree Christ took his flesh from the Virgin, ‘seeing we do not find the word “substance” expressed in the scripture’. Infant baptism was intolerable, as ‘we dare use no religious rites or ceremonies without a command from God’.
Most of the convicted anabaptists were deported, but two were held back for exemplary punishment. The Privy Council authorized the commission to pass the death sentence, and Elizabeth herself signed the warrant. It was, in part, a gesture towards a slight thaw in relations with Spain, tested to the limit over preceding years by English moral support for the Dutch rebels, and by the depredations in the Spanish Caribbean of pirate captains like John Hawkins and Francis Drake. In March 1575, Alva’s replacement as governor in the Netherlands, Luis de Requesens, agreed to expel from Spanish territory English participants in the rebellion of 1569. At the same time, the seizure of English ships by Dutch rebels had harmed their relations with the English government. It was an opportune moment for Elizabeth to show Philip she was no sympathizer with the most damnable views of some of his rebellious subjects.
After the conviction, the Stranger Churches and their English friends campaigned for clemency, or even for hanging rather than burning. To consign people to the flames, Foxe wrote in an impassioned direct appeal to Elizabeth, ‘is more after the Roman example, than a Christian custom’. Yet an important principle was, as it were, at stake. Among the doctrinal statements members of the Stranger Churches were required to subscribe in the summer of 1575, in order to prove their antipathy to anabaptism, was that Christian magistrates might legitimately impose the death penalty on obstinate heretics.41
The executions of Pietersz and Terwoort posed to English Puritans a profoundly painful question: did their sympathies lie with Christians seeking to apply to all aspects of life a literalist test of scriptural purity, or with church and state authorities willing to administer the unpalatable remedies of Pole and Bonner?
For all their dislike of judicial burning, even the bishops’ sternest critics in the fledgling presbyterian movement were genuinely horrified by the errors of the anabaptists. Their perverse and wilful misreading of scripture put them on a par with papists. Periodic eruptions of Christological heresy were a reminder to all ‘magisterial’ Protestants of their shared doctrinal ground, and of the need to defend it against both ravaging romanists and subversive sectarians.
What was needed was a strong archiepiscopal voice, to heal the hurts, and harness Puritan energies for the common good of the Church. Even as Parker lay dying, Burghley knew whose voice that should be. On 15 May 1575, he wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the meetest man to succeed should be the Archbishop of York … both for knowledge of government and good proof of the same in the north’. Walsingham was another friend of the godly, a determined Protestant who in 1573 joined the Privy Council and succeeded Burghley in the role of principal secretary.42
Edmund Grindal had certainly done his best in a region he described on arrival in 1570 as resembling ‘another church, rather than a member of the rest’. He prided himself on importing preachers into the archdiocese, and, working with an energetic dean, Matthew Hutton, on making York Minster into a beacon of Protestant sermonizing in a notoriously conservative city. Visitations in 1571 and 1575 revealed how deeply planted Catholic practices and attitudes remained across much of the north. But Grindal worked hard at rooting them out. He collaborated closely with the Earl of Huntingdon, godly president of the Council of the North, and made good use of the powerful York Ecclesiastical Commission – rather than the moribund ordinary machinery of the church courts – to identify, fine and punish recusants.
Papists, not Puritans, were the principal problem, and Grindal was able to assure Parker at the height of the crackdown in December 1573 that in the diocese of York the Prayer Book was ‘universally observed’, though elsewhere in the province there were, he admitted, ‘some novelties’. Grindal showed in London that he could enforce the line against dissidents when he needed to, but to supporters in 1575 he represented change, not continuity, with the entrenched and confrontational policies of Parker.
Parker himself mapped out a continuation of the disciplinary drive in his final letter to Burghley. For the pivotal see of Norwich (vacant since the death of Parkhurst in February 1575), he recommended three notoriously anti-Puritan candidates: John Whitgift, Dean Gabriel Goodman of Westminster and John Piers, Master of Balliol, Oxford. Men of this stamp were preferable to ‘my Lord of Leicester’s chaplains’. He did not say who his own replacement should be.
Elizabeth might have preferred Richard Cox of Ely, a man battling Puritanism since before its name was discovered. But in 1568 Cox committed a major faux pas, remarrying with unseemly haste after the death of his first wife. Whitgift was as yet only a dean. Henry VIII had fast-forwarded a lowly archdeacon to the see of Canterbury in 1533, but Elizabeth’s sense of decency and decorum was always stricter than her father’s. The bishop of Rochester, Edmund Freke, was transferred to Norwich, and though Elizabeth delayed the appointment until the end of the year, the archbishop of York was accepted for Canterbury.
Grindal was sound but not a stickler, an enthusiastic evangelical sharing much of the mind-set of sensible, moderate Puritans. Leading councillors breathed a sigh of relief at his appointment, hoping for reorientation of the Church towards reform rather than repression, and a renewed focus on combatting Catholicism. Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and by instinct a moderate Puritan, wrote to assure Grindal that ‘it is greatly hoped for by the godly and well-affected of this realm that your lordship will prove a profitable instrument in that calling’. Grindal himself confessed to ‘many conflicts with myself about that matter’. He would, however, accept the appointment, ‘lest in resisting the same I might with Jonah offend God’.43 Multiple disasters befell Jonah, after he defied the Lord’s commandment to go and preach in Nineveh. Yet Grindal’s obedience to God would not save him from his own ordeal in the belly of the whale.
Grindal arrived in London just in time for the new session of Parliament, opening on 8 February 1576. Mildmay expressed hopes this would be an occasion for ‘consultation … with some of your brethren how some part of those Romish dregs remaining [in the Church], offensive to the godly, may be removed’. A reforming coalition of councillors, bishops, and pious MPs was, it seemed, back in business.
This time there was to be no provocative Prayer Book bill; rather, a seemly petition. The call was made by Tristram Pistor, veteran of the parliamentary manoeuvres of 1572, and responded to in the establishment of a committee, well staffed with privy councillors. Their petition carefully avoided matters of liturgy and ceremony, calling instead for imposition of ‘true discipline’. Not discipline in the presbyterian sense, but crackdowns on non-residence and pluralism, and on procedural abuses by the church courts, along with greater encouragement for preaching.
Elizabeth’s reply was gracious, claiming (disingenuously?) these were all issues she was already thinking about, and intent on redressing. Once more she insisted, however, that such matters should be addressed, not by Parliament, but by clerics in Convocation. A new set of canons was duly produced there, with earnest but unexceptionable directions for closer scrutiny of ordination candidates, and catechizing of parish youth. Unlike the canons of 1571, these did receive official royal sanction, though also some royal corrections. The canon that veered closest to the concerns of militant Puritans, requiring that private baptisms be performed only by a ‘lawful minister’, was omitted from the printed version. Mildmay would later describe the 1576 canons as ‘little or nothing to the purpose’.
Elizabeth saw off the sole attempt to pass an act on religious matters. This was a revival of the 1571 proposal to make reception of communion a statutory requirement, and to increase fines for non-attendance at church. The bishops introduced the bill into the Lords, and Grindal, along with Burghley and Leicester, sat on the committee to which the bill was referred after its second reading. The committee tried to mollify the Queen by dropping the communion clause, but the bill made no further progress.44
Parliamentary routes to further reformation remained, as it seemed, blocked. But godly hopes in Grindal were not yet snuffed out. In June 1576, he persuaded the Privy Council to agree to a major overhaul of his archiepiscopal Court of Faculties. This was the body that, since the days of Henry VIII, had taken over the issuing of dispensations from the rulings of canon law that once pertained to the Roman curia. Puritans detested it: Field and Wilcox named the Court of Faculties ‘the filthy quagmire and poisoned plash of all the abominations that do infect the whole realm’. Henceforth, some more notorious abuses – such as licences for clergymen to hold three benefices in plurality – were no longer permitted.
Another gesture of episcopal reconciliation with the reformers concerned the bible. The Geneva Bible of 1560 (see p. 436) was the translation preferred by godly preachers, and by devout householders for domestic use. No edition of it was printed in England while Parker was alive. Indeed, he sponsored an alternative: an official replacement for the folio Great Bible of 1539, produced as a collective episcopal effort. The work was finally ready in October 1568, and in presenting this ‘Bishops’ Bible’ to the Queen, Parker pointedly noted how some churches were using for worship ‘translations which have not been laboured in your realm’. English-made was best, and a guiding principle of the Bishops’ Bible was to avoid definitive determination on controversial questions, and the ‘bitter notes’ allegedly characteristic of the Geneva version. The canons of 1571 ordered churchwardens to acquire a copy for their parish, ‘if it may conveniently be’.
The Bishops’ Bible possessed all the consistency and flair of a translation produced by a committee lacking a firm editorial hand. Grindal dutifully contributed, but was not a devotee of the project. In 1576, however, an edition of the Geneva Bible, the first of many, was produced in London by the Queen’s printer, Christopher Barker. It was a symptom of a new spring of evangelical reform.45
The Geneva Bible’s preface urged owners to study it regularly, at least twice a day. Yet, for many Protestant clergy, simply reading the scripture was never quite enough. The ‘Word’ was not synonymous with printed words on the page. In order to awake within an individual a necessary awareness of saving faith, words of scripture had to be brought alive; they had to be preached. To its most ardent proponents, the Protestant Reformation was nothing if it was not a perpetual pageant of preaching. The Church’s most fundamental problem was a shortage of competent preachers; printed Homilies were, at best, an inadequate stop-gap solution. That, of course, was not how Elizabeth saw things.
Prophesyings
The Queen seemingly became aware of prophesyings in 1574, when a message was passed to Sandys, via Parker, that ‘the exercises in your diocese called prophesyings should stay [cease]’. Sandys protested vigorously; like most bishops, he saw prophesyings as a valued resource for disseminating Protestant teaching in a still inadequately protestantized land. Parker sent a similar message to Parkhurst of Norwich, who requested further instructions after being assured by the councillors Knollys, Mildmay and Sir Thomas Smith that the order was intended to apply only to ‘schismatical and seditious’ meetings.
Under pressure from Parker, Parkhurst issued an order on 7 June 1574 to suppress all the ‘exercises’ in his diocese. He was afterwards informed by Freke of Rochester that no such order had been issued in his diocese, or in London, and that he and Sandys had simply tried to ensure ‘no matter of controversy’ was raised in the exercises. Shortly after Parkhurst ordered his chancellor to act, a leading Norfolk gentleman, Sir Christopher Heydon, secured letters signed by Sandys and two privy councillors for the restitution of prophesyings in the county. Then, on summer progress in 1575, Elizabeth learned about prophesyings at Welwyn in Hertfordshire, and ordered Bishop Cooper of Lincoln to suppress them. He did so, banning some, but not all, of the other exercises in the southern counties of his vast diocese.46
It was, then, a decidedly messy pattern: of orders issued, evaded and countermanded, of bishops quietly thwarting the Queen’s wishes with the covert encouragement of privy councillors. It came to an end in the summer of 1576. Grindal was not temperamentally cut out to play this kind of game, and Elizabeth’s hostility to the prophesyings became more insistent after she was informed of ‘disorders’ in the Midlands, especially in the Warwickshire town of Southam. In June, Leicester, Burghley and Walsingham all wrote to Grindal, informing (and warning) him of the Queen’s displeasure.
With Elizabeth in imperious mood, the limits of noble patronage for Puritans were cruelly exposed. In August, Thomas Wood wrote reproachfully to Leicester: ‘It is commonly reported among the godly … that your lordship hath been the chief instrument, or rather the only, of the overthrow of a most godly exercise at Southam.’ Leicester indignantly denied the charge, and enumerated his prodigious efforts over many years for the furtherance of preaching and godly reform. But he wanted Wood to understand that he was not someone ‘fantastically persuaded in religion’. He feared ‘the over busy dealing of some hath done so much hurt in striving to make better that which is by permission good enough already’. When the chips were down, Leicester was a man of the establishment, not the opposition.47
Which was Grindal? On 12 June 1576 the archbishop was summoned to Elizabeth’s presence, and told to suppress prophesyings throughout the province of Canterbury. Grindal requested time to consider, and to consult with his bishops. Their letters to him were almost universally supportive of the prophesyings as ‘profitable’ and ‘necessary’. Even Cheyney of Gloucester said he approved, ‘so they meddle not with matters in controversy’. The other ‘conservative’ on the episcopal bench, Edmund Guest, now bishop of Salisbury, was also in favour, though he was unhappy about the designation: prophecy was a gift to the Church of the Apostles, no longer present in the current age.
The exotic name was certainly a problem, perhaps conjuring in the Queen’s mind visions of ecstatic utterance and wild-eyed oratory. Grindal admitted as much, and was content with the staid description, ‘an exercise of the ministers’. But, whether they were called prophesyings or exercises, these were occasions without sanction in the Injunctions of 1559, or in any subsequent canons – that was the taproot of Elizabeth’s objection. It made the prophesyings vulnerable to denunciation, from conservative laity in the localities, or from more powerful figures in the orbit of the Queen. Bishop Cooper suspected the trouble started with ‘one or two of some countenance and easy access unto the prince, that have small liking to that, or any other thing whereby religion may be further published’. The name of nemesis whispered in court circles was that of Christopher Hatton.
Suspicion of prophesyings was an anti-Puritan trait, but it was more than paranoia and prejudice. In many places, exercises may indeed have been almost painfully respectable, yet the moving spirits of the prophesying movement were sometimes fiery ones. Eusebius Paget, moderator of the Southam exercise, was a deprived Northamptonshire minister who likened bishops to Pharisees, cardinals and abbots. Among Grindal’s episcopal correspondents, Scory of Hereford and Cox of Ely, survivors from Edwardian days, were frankly hostile. Scory suppressed prophesyings in his diocese because he feared an occurrence of what he heard was happening elsewhere: promotion of Cartwright’s presbyterian ideas ‘under colour of such exercise’.48
On 18 November, Elizabeth again summoned Grindal, ruled out further consultation, and ordered him to suppress prophesyings without additional delay. It was probably on this occasion that Elizabeth flatly told Grindal she ‘thought that three or four preachers may suffice for a shire’. It was an assessment of the Church’s needs leaving the evangelical archbishop almost literally speechless. But in any case it was a curt and abrupt interview, he ‘not being permitted to explain in person how it seemed to him’.
Yet explain he did, in a 6,000-word missive composed just under three weeks later. It was perhaps the most extraordinary letter ever sent by a bishop to an English monarch; it sealed Grindal’s fate, and set the Church of England on a new course.
What the Queen received was a candid lecture on the basics of Christian faith: ‘Public and continual preaching of God’s Word is the ordinary means and instrument of the salvation of mankind.’ Reading Homilies was all very well, ‘but is nothing comparable to the office of preaching’. There followed an impassioned defence of the prophesyings: dignified and orderly occasions, where ‘the gravest and best learned pastors are appointed of the bishop to moderate’, laymen were not permitted to speak, and ‘no controversy of this present time and state shall be moved’. Prophesyings made ministers ‘apter to teach their flocks’; drew them from idleness and gaming; elevated them in ‘the opinion of laymen’ – ‘nothing, by experience, beateth down popery more’.
And then Grindal said it: ‘I cannot with safe conscience, and without the offence of God, give my assent to the suppressing of the said exercises.’ Perhaps he should have stopped there, but the archbishop’s pen was liberated by the convictions of his courage. Just as Warham once likened himself to Becket, Grindal compared himself to Ambrose, fourth-century bishop of Milan, who defied the eastern and western emperors, Theodosius and Valentinian, over their toleration of Arian heresy and claims to control over Christian basilicas. Ambrose brought Theodosius to heel, by his innate moral authority, and by use of excommunication against him – it was, in the circumstances of the 1570s, an extraordinarily tactless historical analogy.
Parker said he did not know the bounds of royal supremacy; Grindal was sure that he did. Disputed matters of secular law were not simply decided by the Queen, but referred to the judges; likewise, ‘matters of doctrine or discipline of the Church’ pertained to the bishops. Grindal respectfully suggested that ‘when you deal in matters of faith and religion … you would not use to pronounce too resolutely and peremptorily … as ye may do in civil and extern matters’. In God’s causes, ‘the will of God, and not the will of any earthly creature, is to take place’.
The letter ended with sombre admonition: ‘remember, Madam, that you are a mortal creature’. If Elizabeth did not follow God’s will – interpreted for her by her bishops – there would be an inevitable reckoning:
Ye have done many things well, but except ye persevere to the end, ye cannot be blessed. For if ye turn away from God, then God will turn his merciful countenance from you. And what remaineth then to be looked for, but only a terrible expectation of God’s judgments, and a heaping up of wrath against the day of wrath.49
For Grindal himself, the day of wrath was temporarily postponed, as privy councillors, including Burghley and Leicester, busied themselves, first of all to delay Elizabeth from seeing the archbishop’s letter, and then to broker some kind of compromise. Grindal was warned to stay away from court, but for five months he continued to function as archbishop of Canterbury.
During those five months, the temperature in the higher reaches of the Church perceptibly changed. Sandys’s translation to York as Grindal’s successor created a vacancy in the key diocese of London. His successor, appointed in March 1577, was John Aylmer. A stalwart of the Marian exile, Aylmer blotted his episcopal prospects with his ham-fisted defence of female monarchy (see p. 431). But in the intervening years he slowly climbed the ladder of ecclesiastical promotion, and in the 1570s emerged as an outspoken critic of the prophesyings and a clerical protégé of Christopher Hatton.
John Whitgift, another pronounced anti-Puritan, and firm ally of Hatton, was enthroned as bishop of Worcester in May 1577. The crackdown hoped for by the dying, embittered Parker was seemingly under way. John Piers became bishop of Rochester in 1576, and transferred to Salisbury the following year. Pier’s replacement at Rochester, John Young, probably also owed his appointment to Hatton, the suspected crypto-papist. Aylmer approvingly described Young as a man ‘fit to bridle innovators’.
The first generation of Elizabethan bishops, largely united in background and attitude, sworn servants to ideals beyond obedience to monarchical command, was passing away: Parkhurst’s death in 1575 was followed by that of Pilkington in 1576; Bentham would die in 1579 and Horne in 1580. Grindal’s words of warning to the Queen in December 1576 belonged in a tradition of prophetic guidance and reproach, which the bishops collectively invoked over the fate of Mary in 1572. It expressed a profoundly Protestant sense of stewardship, of holders of roles and offices – including the crown – being ultimately accountable to God and the Christian commonwealth. It was an outlook Burghley, for all his affectionate loyalty to Elizabeth, wholeheartedly shared.
It was not the outlook of Whitgift or Aylmer. These were bulldog bishops of a new breed, and, in a strict sense of the term, ‘Elizabethans’. Nor was it the outlook of Christopher Hatton. In a pair of intimate letters, written to Hatton in the early part of 1578, Aylmer revealed his ‘mark to aim at’: correction of ‘offenders on both sides which swerve from the right path of obedience … both the papist and the Puritan’. He went on, in only semi-ironic mode: ‘I study with my eyes on my book, and my mind is in the court. I preach without spirit. I trust not of God, but of my sovereign, which is God’s lieutenant, and so another God unto me.’50 It was almost a parodic inversion of Grindal’s letter of royal remonstrance.
Grindal himself was summoned before the Privy Council on 27 May 1577, and, after refusing to retract his position, formally suspended from exercise of office. A few weeks earlier, on 7 May, Elizabeth demonstrated her own understanding of the royal supremacy, writing personally to all the bishops commanding them to suppress the ‘schismatical’ prophesyings, and to ensure preaching was restricted to duly licensed persons, lest she was forced ‘to make some example in reforming of you according to your deserts’.
The next step was deprivation; Elizabeth seemed intent on it. The only modern precedent, Cranmer’s removal by Mary I, was not a happy one; it was an eventuality leading councillors were desperate to avoid. Burghley saw ‘peril’ in the prospect of proceedings that ‘cannot but irritate our merciful God’. Knollys wrote in January 1578 that, if Grindal were deprived, ‘then up starts the pride and practice of the papists’. A combination of Grindal’s own ill health, and of intercessions from councillors – even from the decidedly non-vindictive Hatton – kept the moment of reckoning at bay. The archbishop of Canterbury remained in limbo, while practical church leadership devolved on Aylmer of London.
Zealous Protestants in government could feel the ship of state veering alarmingly off course. Yet there was still something they could do to right the direction. The official logic of the crackdown on prophesyings and Puritans was that their offences mirrored the disobedience of papists. Renewed attention to the Catholic threat might, then, concentrate the mind of the Queen, and mitigate the severity of the anti-Grindal reaction, without the need openly to oppose it.
In June 1577, Abbot Feckenham and other Catholics freed on parole were returned to confinement, accused of meeting with ‘evil disposed’ persons whom they further ‘perverted in religion’. In October, with Star Chamber proceedings hanging over Grindal’s head, Francis Walsingham worked with Aylmer to instruct the bishops to undertake at high speed a survey of recusancy in their dioceses. On 12 November, at the meeting during which Hatton was sworn to its membership, the Privy Council, with Burghley, Leicester, Bacon and Walsingham in attendance, ordered the immediate implementation of a death sentence on a priest, the first since 1573. Cuthbert Mayne was an alumnus of Allen’s Douai seminary, arrested in Cornwall in the summer, and found in possession of a papal bull. The bull pertained to an expired papal jubilee, and was not brought from Rome, but purchased from a bookseller in Douai, apparently as a kind of souvenir. But it was enough to make Mayne technically a traitor under the statute of 1571. His head was displayed on a spike at Launceston, and his quartered body parts at Bodmin, Torquay, Barnstaple and Wadesbridge – a literal posting of the popish threat across the market towns of Devon and Cornwall.
In February 1578, shortly after Burghley received news, from the newly appointed royal secretary, Sir Thomas Wilson, that Elizabeth was ‘much offended by the archbishop, and disliketh our darings for dealing with him’, another two Catholics went to the scaffold at Tyburn. The priest John Nelson and the layman Thomas Sherwood were arrested in London for attending Catholic services, and convicted of treason after describing the Queen as a heretic and schismatic – words their interrogators worked hard to get them to use. The Privy Council ordered Sherwood put to the rack when it seemed he ‘fain would retract his words in respect he affirmed her Majesty to be a heretic and usurper’.
The middle way of the Elizabethan Church, like Henry VIII’s middle way before it, was not an easy-going forbearance, but a course defined by coercion and violence. In front of the Privy Council, Grindal was hectoringly told by an unnamed councillor that the prophesyings, and his refusal to suppress them, were a source of ‘great divisions and sects’; a cause ‘that religion, which of its own nature should be uniform, would against his nature have proved milliform; yea, in continuance, nulliform’.51
An official campaign against milliformity intensified at the beginning of Elizabeth’s third decade on the throne. Some deviations – quiet, unobtrusive, preferably kept secret in the silent utterances of the heart – might be allowed to pass unexamined. But public or assertive performances of nonconformity contradicted the firmly held belief of both Queen and councillors that secure political authority required a dutiful uniformity in religious practice and allegiance. This belief was not, in its own terms, wrong. Yet a rigid determination to enforce that uniformity now promised only further effusions of blood. Rather than restoring the true ‘nature’ of religion, it risked simply proving how far its meanings had changed.