WARS OF RELIGION
A Shot Across the Bows
THE QUEEN WAS seated in her royal barge, on the Thames, between Greenwich and Deptford, 17 July 1579, a pleasant summer’s evening, when her reign almost came to an abrupt and bloody end. A bullet passed within six feet of her, striking one of the rowers through both arms. On the vessel, consternation erupted, yet – according to contemporary printed accounts – Elizabeth herself took charge, calmly seeing to the welfare of her wounded boatman.
It was not, in fact, an assassination attempt. A young servant, Thomas Appletree, had a new gun, and to test it rowed out in a little boat with a couple of friends, firing random shots across the water. Stupidity was no defence at law, and Appletree was sentenced to death. At the gallows, Sir Christopher Hatton declared all the reasons he deserved to die, before unexpectedly producing a royal reprieve: the cue for much popular rejoicing at the Queen’s merciful nature.
Hatton’s speech underlined a fact privy councillors wanted people to remember; something they themselves could rarely banish from mind: the precariousness of peace and Protestantism. Had the bullet slain the Queen, ‘our religion, and true faith in Jesus Christ, which we enjoy with unspeakable comfort of free conscience, might hereby have suffered confusion, and persecution of blood’. At the chance pace of a rower’s stroke, twenty years of happy government could easily have been ‘turned to bloody wars’.
Appletree himself was a pious, if thoughtless, youth. On the eve of his expected execution, he composed a lengthy prayer calling for God’s blessing on the Queen, and for ‘the establishing of a perfect government of thy Church, according to the rule of thy blessed Word’ and ‘the rooting out of all superstition and relics of Antichrist’.1
Yet if godly Protestants like Appletree had been privy to the barge-talk that summer’s evening, they might well have thought it more likely to comfort Antichrist than confound him. Sitting beside the Queen was a charming French ambassador, Jean de Simier. He was in England to discuss the prospects for a marriage between Elizabeth and his master – Francis, Duke of Anjou, youngest son of Henry II and Catherine de Medici, heir presumptive to his brother, Henry III, and, of course, a Roman Catholic.
It was not the first time Elizabeth contemplated a papist consort. She weighed the credentials of the Austrian Archduke Charles in the mid-1560s (see p. 478), and briefly considered Francis’s elder brother Henry – before his accession to the French throne – in 1570–1. The substitute merits of Francis, then Duke of Alençon, were thereafter periodically mooted by the French, but without much enthusiasm on the English side.
In 1579, the courtship came dramatically to life. Francis was no longer a teenager, but a personable young man of twenty-four. He visited in person in August, and Elizabeth professed herself enchanted with her ‘frog’. An heir was not literally inconceivable, though Elizabeth had turned forty-five in September 1578. The attractions of the match were more political than personal. The revolt in the Netherlands had spread to the Catholic provinces of the south, and Anjou, with an established reputation as a protector of French Huguenots, was raising troops to aid the insurgents. Elizabeth had already (in 1575) turned down an offer from the Dutch rebels to recognize her as their sovereign, and was resisting calls from Leicester and other councillors to intervene directly. Marriage to Anjou would increase diplomatic pressure on Philip II, and ideally lead to a peaceful resolution in the Netherlands, or at least a military one where French ambitions were being safely directed from London.2
The Privy Council was divided. Sussex was in favour of the match; Burghley, at best, sceptical; Leicester and Walsingham were strongly against. Proponents cheerfully predicted that Anjou would see the light and convert to Protestantism, but however strongly Elizabeth appeared to reject it, the reality was that marriage must mean toleration: minimally of Anjou and his entourage to hear mass in England; maximally of English Catholics generally.
That prospect galvanized Protestant opposition in the spring and summer of 1579. Preachers of the Lent sermons at court spoke ‘very violently against this marriage’. The Spanish ambassador supposed – not implausibly – that since the preachers escaped without punishment they must have the support of high-ranking figures. Elizabeth’s willingness to tolerate criticism had limits, however, and London preachers, many of whom were ‘covertly’ guiding their texts towards criticism of the marriage, were ordered at the start of April to steer well clear.3
The most forceful critique of the marriage crossed a line. In August 1579, a London lawyer, John Stubbs, perhaps being fed information by Leicester or Walsingham, published The discoverie of a gaping gulf whereunto England is like to be swallowed. A royal marriage to a papist could be nothing but a heinous sin, calling down the vengeful judgement of God. The work bristled with belligerent religious nationalism, comparing England to the Kingdom of Israel, and naming France ‘a principal prop of the tottering house of Antichrist’. The union would inevitably lead to the erection of an ‘idolatrous altar’ in London, ‘our Jerusalem’. And alongside its tub-thumping anti-popery, Stubbs’s tract advanced a novel constitutional claim: the Queen must contract no marriage ‘before she parley in Parliament with all her subjects’.
Stubbs’s pugnacious Puritanism, in toxic combination with disdain for the royal prerogative, explains the fury of Elizabeth’s response. An unusually long proclamation, issued on 27 September, defended the Queen’s record as a champion of Protestantism. It denounced Stubbs as a ‘seditious libeller’, and demanded the destruction of copies of his tract ‘seditiously dispersed into sundry corners of the realm’. Aylmer summoned London ministers to his palace and exhorted them to condemn Stubbs. Even Grindal was brought temporarily out of suspended animation. His friends on the Privy Council (Burghley, Knollys, Walsingham, Wilson) wrote in early October, in half-hope of rehabilitation, ordering him to convene prominent preachers and warn them against Stubbs’s iniquity.
Stubbs’s punishment, inflicted on 3 November, was suitably Old Testament. Elizabeth wanted him to hang, but a jury refused to convict for felony and he was retried under a Marian statute for inciting sedition. Prior to imprisonment, the public hangman struck off with a cleaver the right hand that wrote the Gaping Gulf. A similar punishment was inflicted on William Page – no lowly acolyte, but an MP and secretary to a leading councillor, the Earl of Bedford. Page’s crime was to have sent fifty copies to his friend, Sir Richard Grenville, for circulation in the West Country. The tract’s printer, Hugh Singleton, was spared on account of his advanced years. At that very moment, Singleton’s presses were producing the poet Edmund Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, a work packed with coded attacks on the Anjou match. Spenser had recently become secretary to Leicester, who may or may not have been Stubbs’s secret patron.4 It is difficult here to pin down the policy priorities of any unified Elizabethan ‘regime’.
Among Protestants, Stubbs’s mutilation went down badly. The crowd at his punishment was ominously and unusually silent. In Norwich, magistrates even debated whether to publicize the September proclamation, as they were required to do. Elizabeth was angered by the opposition, both in the country and on the Privy Council, openly voiced at a meeting in October 1579. Her instinct was to push ahead. It is to this juncture that we can ascribe reports, originating with the French ambassador, of Elizabeth considering a major change to the composition of the Council, dismissing Walsingham, the most dogged opponent of the match, and recruiting four heavyweight Catholics, including Viscount Montagu, and Henry Percy, brother and successor to the rebel Earl of Northumberland.
Protestants were right to be anxious. The marginalization of papists from political life, even to the point of extinction, was not, after all, an unalterable fact. Among Catholics, hopes for change were cautiously stirring. The most enthusiastic written endorsement of the marriage was a manuscript treatise by Henry Howard, younger brother of the executed Duke of Norfolk. Howard conformed outwardly, but was widely regarded as a secret papist. He had close links to Catholic supporters of Mary Queen of Scots.
Between them, Stubbs, the preachers, and the self-justificatory royal proclamation, all helped to ensure that the implications of the Anjou marriage were not a lofty preserve of policy-makers, but something discussed avidly by common folk in markets and alehouses. In these heady days, complete reversal of the Reformation did not seem implausible. In rural Warwickshire, one of the curates of the vicar of Wooton, ‘upon rumour of a change in religion … did shave his beard’, the symbol of a Protestant minister (see p. 393). ‘What if the world change, as it did in King Henry VIII’s time and in Queen Mary’s time?’ was the saucy response of a parishioner of Thornton-in-Craven, Yorkshire, presented for recusancy in 1580.
In the end, Elizabeth drew back from a policy bound to fracture any functioning concord on her Council, and to provoke resistance, vocal and perhaps violent, from the country at large. Characteristically, she did not admit to retreat, instructing her councillors to draw up terms for a marriage treaty. This recognized, reluctantly, the claims of Anjou and his servants to ‘exercise of their religion’, but the form of the wedding was left unresolved, and Elizabeth reserved her right to repudiate the treaty if she found she could not obtain her people’s consent. In January 1580, Elizabeth regretfully informed Anjou that her subjects’ objections had not been overcome, and asked him to rethink his insistence on freedom to hear mass. The negotiations continued, but the courtship’s moment had passed.5
English Catholics’ hopes of toleration, of readmission to the social and political life of the nation, took a blow – to the immense relief of bishops and councillors, whose alertness to a growing domestic danger had been heightened by the 1577 recusancy survey. ‘The papists,’ Aylmer remarked to Walsingham, ‘marvellously increase both in numbers and in obstinate withdrawal of themselves from the church.’6 That obstinacy was about to receive a major infusion of awkwardness, as the international Counter-Reformation turned its gaze to the prospects of England.
On 1 May 1579, Pope Gregory XIII issued a bull of foundation for a new institute in Rome. It decreed the formal conversion of the old English hospice (see p. 70) into an English College, to instruct young men of a nation that ‘once flourished with great wealth and concern for the Catholic Faith, but is now devastated by the dreadful taint of heresy’.
For some years, a process of transformation had been under way, seeing the hospice become a centre for clerical exiles, rather than itinerant pilgrims. From 1577, there was an influx of students from William Allen’s seminary at Douai, which, in March 1578, to escape political turmoil in the Netherlands, transferred itself to Rheims in northern France.
The mind-set of Allen’s students put them at odds with the existing regime in the hospice. They were imbued with an ethos of mission and conversion, while the current rector, Morris Clynnog, saw his task as the education and useful employment of expatriate priests, who would return to England only after a formal restoration of Catholicism there. The quarrel was overlaid with ethnic tensions, the English new arrivals accusing Clynnog of favouring fellow Welshmen among the students.
It was all rather mystifying to Pope Gregory, who had no idea the Welsh and English were separate species. Bombarded with memorials and petitions, he removed Clynnog in March 1579 and asked the General of the Society of Jesus, Everard Mercurian, a judicious Luxembourger, to take over control. An Italian Jesuit, Alfonso Agazzari, was installed as rector, and a change of direction was signalled in the declaration of the bull of foundation that henceforth graduates would ‘return to England to enlighten others who had fallen away’. All students would now take an oath, affirming their willingness to travel to England whenever their superiors commanded them – a local adaptation of the famous ‘fourth vow’ of the Jesuits, to offer ‘special obedience’ to the Pope in respect of missions.7
The coup in Rome was the capstone of a rising edifice of Catholic activism, with William Allen as its master-builder. Allen met with other English Catholic exiles at the start of 1576, and discussed with them the prospects for a joint papal-Spanish invasion. Philip was sympathetic, but military commitments in the Netherlands, and the continuing Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean, limited his offers of support to moral ones.
By 1578, that was starting to change. Philip helped to fund a scheme for the invasion of Ireland. It was the brainchild of Thomas Stukley, a colourful English exile and professional soldier, in Habsburg service, off and on, since the mid-1550s. Stukley set off from Civita Vecchia, the port of Rome, in February 1578. Docking en route at Lisbon, he was persuaded by the devout and charismatic King Sebastian I to join an expedition against the Moors in Morocco. Sebastian promised Stukley that, having dealt with the infidels, the crusade would then proceed to Ireland to confound the heretics. Both men, and an entire Portuguese army, perished in the sand at the battle of Alcazar on 4 August 1578.
The death of the childless King Sebastian provoked a Portuguese succession crisis. His heir was his uncle Henry, archbishop and cardinal; also childless. Henry’s death in 1580 prompted Philip to assert his own dynastic claim. It was enforced with a successful invasion: a demonstration, not lost on the English government, of what the King of Spain could do when he put his mind to it.
Meanwhile, the Irish enterprise entered a second phase under a new leader: James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald, a veteran rebel and exile, in possession of a papal brief promising a plenary indulgence to all Irish people who supported his insurgency. With a force of 700 Italian and Spanish troops, Fitzmaurice landed at Smerwick in south-west Ireland on 17 July 1579, unfurled a papal banner, and issued a proclamation calling on Irish lords to join him in overthrowing the heretic ‘she-tyrant’, Elizabeth. The papal bull of excommunication was perhaps not such a damp squib after all.
By Fitzmaurice’s side was the proclamation’s author, the English priest Nicholas Sander, who planned to raise an Irish army for the invasion of England. Sander was the most radical of Catholic resistance theorists. His 1571 work De visibili monarchia ecclesiae (Of the Visible Monarchy of the Church) praised John Felton as a martyr, and portrayed popes as world-bestriding sovereigns, whom other rulers were obligated to obey.8 This was a different brand of Catholicism from the one Elizabeth was (literally) flirting with in 1579, but to Englishmen like John Stubbs, the distinction was largely meaningless. Whatever aspect it chose to present, the face of Antichrist was the visage of sedition.
In the autumn of 1579, William Allen finalized his plans. There was to be a spiritual invasion of England, to parallel the military invasion of Ireland, and perhaps prepare for its progression across the intervening North Sea. Allen’s chosen instrument was the Society of Jesus, which, despite growing numbers of English recruits, had so far held largely aloof from the English mission. The still undecided fate of the Anjou negotiations strengthened the case for a show of Catholic strength, and, despite his reservations, General Mercurian agreed to the undertaking. He did, however, prepare instructions for the participants insisting on the purely religious nature of their assignment. Ambiguities about motive – and perhaps the sheer impossibility of separating spiritual aims from political ones – would from the outset dog the missionaries’ steps.
Allen knew the men he wanted. One was Robert Persons, a robust and resourceful Somerset man, of yeoman stock. In the late 1560s, Persons began an academic career at Oxford, still far from fully purged of Catholic sympathizers. Increasingly, he was drawn into their orbit, before decamping to the continent in 1574 and the following year joining the Society of Jesus. The other man was widely considered one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation, and, like Persons, was a convert to Catholicism from a Protestant, or at least conformist, background.
Edmund Campion was the son of a London bookseller, raised in a world of words and print. He prospered in Oxford as a fellow of St John’s, but, even before his ordination in 1569 as a Church of England deacon, was increasingly troubled at having taken the Oath of Supremacy. After a spell of semi-retirement in Ireland (a refuge for crypto-papists, as well as Puritans), Campion finally declared himself. He fled to Douai in 1571, and entered the Society of Jesus as a novice in Rome in 1573. At the time he received Allen’s summons, Campion, an exemplar of Jesuit scholarly internationalism, was teaching rhetoric and philosophy in Prague.
On 14 April 1580, Pope Gregory received Campion and Persons in audience in Rome. They sent him in advance nineteen questions, relating to ‘consolation and instruction of Catholics who are perplexed’. Several involved the day-to-day dilemmas of living among heretics. Was it ever acceptable to forego fast days and eat meat? (Yes, in cases of necessity, and without heretical intent.) Could a Catholic, outside of service times, pray in a church controlled by heretics? Again, yes, so long as scandal was avoided.
More thorny questions involved attendance at churches while services were taking place. What if someone, taking no part in ‘their heretical supper’, simply read Catholic prayers quietly? Or made plain their disapproval by sitting with a hat on? The Jesuits also posed the specific instance – perhaps prompted by a real case – of a Catholic noblewoman of the Queen’s household, dutifully accompanying her mistress into the ‘secret chamber from which Elizabeth hears the divine service of heretics’.
Gregory’s answers were less rigidly anti-Nicodemite than one might have expected. The noblewoman should seek to avoid such dangerous occasions, but if that proved impossible, she must take care ‘to show that she does not consent in any way to heresy’. Laypeople in general should follow the same course.
This note of pastoral flexibility, recognizing the difficult situation of Catholics, extended to the main meat of the questions: the status of Regnans in Excelsis. Gregory formally reissued the bull; there was no doubt that Elizabeth, a tyrant, remained excommunicated. Nonetheless, the Pope explained, it was legitimate to call her queen and obey her in civil matters. Catholics could even take civil oaths of loyalty to her, adding an evasive ‘etc.’ to the Queen’s regnal title.
In short, English Catholics were not obliged by the bull to take up arms against Elizabeth: they were off the hook on which Pius V had snagged them. Or not quite. ‘Things being as they are’, there was no expectation of hopeless sacrifice. But if ‘everything has been so arranged that hope of victory is certain’, then it was incumbent on people to help overthrow Elizabeth. In response to the most sensitive question of all, the Pope affirmed that ‘it is not lawful for a private person to kill any tyrant’. But if such an action were guaranteed to deliver control of the government, then killing Elizabeth would be lawful. As things stood, however, ‘it is much better not ever to talk at all about that matter’.9
Rome was ruling nothing out. English Catholics were allowed to be ‘loyal’, but their licence for loyalty could at any time be revoked – or should be revoked by themselves – if political or military circumstances changed. It was a slippery and perilous mandate for the Jesuits (still, it seems, unaware of what was happening in Ireland) to carry with them into a hostile land. It positively invited the hypothetical ‘bloody question’ that Burghley would soon start putting to arrested priests: if a foreign power invaded to implement the 1570 bull, whose side would you be on?
Campion and Persons, and a third Jesuit, the lay brother Ralph Emerson, crossed secretly and separately to England in June 1580, though their coming was well heralded and expected. The expedition from Rome to the Channel was something of a triumphal procession; among those accompanying the priests was the aged Bishop Thomas Goldwell, in disappointed hope he would be allowed to return with them. The journey included a moment of audacious theatre, when the party turned up in Geneva and demanded an impromptu disputation with Beza. Force of argument, the Jesuits believed, would carry all before it.
They arrived in a country rendered defensively fearful by the bloody course of the rebellion in Ireland, and by an earthquake that in April shook the capital and south-east, and seemed to many a portent of God’s judgement and displeasure. In London, the Lord Mayor recommended banning plays within the liberties; in Coventry, the traditional cycle of Corpus Christi mystery plays, revised but not abolished over preceding decades, was finally brought to an end. Troops were mustered that summer in every English county. In July, a proclamation warned people against spreading or heeding rumours that ‘the Pope, the King of Spain, and some other princes are accorded to make a great army to invade this realm’, while simultaneously reassuring them that if such a thing were to happen, the nation was fully prepared.10
Once in England, the Jesuits made contact with priests in the capital, and in the second week of July convened a meeting with lay and clerical leaders. At the ‘Synod of Southwark’ disagreement emerged over strategies for survival. Given the intense pressure from the authorities, some nobles and gentlemen hoped for concessions to attend heretical services, but on this Campion and Persons proved more Catholic than the Pope, insisting on strict recusancy as the only acceptable way.
Shortly afterwards, on a press secretly set up in East Ham, just outside London, Persons inaugurated his career as a brilliant polemicist and produced A Brief Discourse Concerning Certain Reasons why Catholics Refuse to go to Church. It is a work underlining just how far the meaning of ‘religion’ had changed over several decades of creative conflict. It was in the nature of a religion, Persons contended, to require some ‘sign or mark’ of its members’ allegiance and identity. For Catholics in England, absence from church was that ‘sign distinctive’. Non-absentees were not Catholics but ‘schismatics’. Mischievously, Persons observed that ‘the hotter sort of Protestants, called the Puritans … do utterly condemn the service which now the Protestants have, and thereupon do refrain from it as much as Catholics’. That was only partly true, but divisions among the heretics rarely went unremarked by the Catholic exiles. Persons in fact claimed that England now contained four religions, ‘distinct both in name, spirit, and doctrine: that is to say, the Catholics, the Protestants, the Puritans, and the householders of Love’.11
Persons’s uncompromising anti-Nicodemism offered only the same cold comfort that Protestants had received from their leaders under Mary: God would reward suffering in due time. But Catholic priests, unlike Protestant preachers, were accustomed to think in terms of ‘casuistry’ – the application, and sometimes adjustment, of general principles to fit particular cases.
Persons launched into print in response to a manuscript circulating among Catholic landowners imprisoned for recusancy, the work of Lord Montagu’s chaplain, Alban Langdale. It did not defend church-going as a general principle, but it argued that ‘God doth more regard the will and intention of the doer than the deed’. There were, for example, many parishes in England ‘where neither the curate nor parishioners are open professors of Protestantism nor known Protestants but dissembling Catholics’: in such places attendance hardly connoted Protestant commitment. Langdale denied a mere ‘corporate presence’ was the crux of distinction between heretics and believers: ‘If I pray not with them, if I sit when they kneel, if I refuse their communion etc, be not these signa distinctiva?’
Whatever these new Jesuits said, there were various ways to be a faithful Catholic. In time of persecution, it was possible to accept the Queen’s proposal – never openly stated, but implicit in the scope of her legislation – that church-going was primarily a matter of civil obedience rather than spiritual conviction.
For anxious Protestants (and for later tidy-minded historians), this was bad news. However many, or few, names appeared on lists of convicted recusants, it was impossible to know how many ‘real’ Catholics were actually out there. In the Warwickshire village of Rowington, in the cool shade of Anjou’s courtship, the Catholic gentleman William Skinner was hopeful of an imminent declaration of religious toleration; that ‘every man should live as he like’. He taunted the Protestant parish clerk: when such a decree was made, ‘how many thinkest thou … would come to church? Not passing ten of our parish, I warrant thee.’12
After the synod, Persons and Campion separated, and traversed a network of Catholic houses in the Thames Valley, the Midlands, the West Country and the north: saying mass, hearing confessions, reconciling ‘schismatics’ and preaching sermons – sometimes to large audiences. Before leaving London, the Jesuits agreed that each should draft a statement of intentions, underlining Mercurian’s insistence on the mission’s purely spiritual character, for use if they were arrested. The statements were supposed to remain sealed, but Campion’s ‘Letter to the Council’ was copied and widely circulated among supporters. By January 1581, it had twice been printed for refutation by outraged Protestant critics: the Puritan Meredith Hanmer christened it ‘Campion’s Brag’.
The Letter was a kind of riposte to Jewel’s Challenge sermon of two decades before. Campion declared himself eager to debate with councillors and divines, certain that ‘none of the Protestants, nor all the Protestants living … can maintain their doctrine in disputation’. Nor did he do much to allay Protestant fears about the Society of Jesus:
As touching our Society, be it known unto you that we have a league [with] all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach the practice of England, cheerfully to carry the cross which God shall lay upon us and never to despair [of] your recovery while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or to be consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun. It is of God; it cannot be withstood.13
Parliament reconvened in early 1581, in the midst of a moral panic about Jesuits. Ireland was spiralling further out of control. Fitzmaurice had been killed, but the Earl of Desmond and Viscount Baltinglass now carried the banner of Catholic rebellion across the southern provinces of Munster and Leinster. Wales too was causing concern, amidst fears it might serve as the point of entry for an invasion from Ireland. The start of 1581 witnessed the appearance of a Welsh Elizabeth Barton (see pp. 206–7). Elizabeth Orton was a teenager from Flintshire, whose ecstatic visions of purgatory involved denunciations of the established Church and exhortations to strict recusancy. Local Catholics circulated manuscript accounts of her utterances, which were reportedly sent to Ireland, and even to France and Rome.
In his speech before Parliament of 25 January, Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer, denounced the Jesuits: ‘a rabble of vagrant friars newly sprung up and coming through the world to trouble the Church of God’. The news, as Mildmay reported it, was not all bad: Fitzmaurice’s death was a token of God’s providential care, as was the fate of Spaniards recently ‘pulled out by the ears’ by ‘a noble captain’, the deputy of Ireland, Lord Grey of Wilton.
It was an upbeat way to describe an atrocity. In November 1580, a second, newly arrived, papal contingent, besieged in a fort outside the town of Smerwick in County Kerry, surrendered to Grey under a white flag, and handed over its weapons and standards. After excoriating the Pope who sent them – a ‘detestable shaveling’ – Grey ordered the systematic slaughter of the defenders: perhaps 600 in total, including accompanying priests and a leavening of women and children. In Ireland, militant Protestantism waged a brutal religious war, without mercy or regret. The English government sanctioned it, out of indifference to native Irish lives, and in hopes of cauterizing there the infection of seditious rebellion.14
The Execution of Justice
Within England itself, the law might still suffice. In Parliament, Mildmay spoke for the Privy Council as a whole in claiming Catholic disobedience was encouraged by ‘mildness of the laws hitherto’. Parliament passed new legislation making it a treasonable offence to convert anyone to Catholicism with intent to withdraw them from royal obedience. Attendance requirements under the Act of Uniformity were now to be enforced with crippling fines of £20 per month.
It was a persuasive inducement to conform, if not convert. People indicted for recusancy would be discharged if they agreed to ‘submit and conform’ themselves before their bishop. Once again, however, it was not the act the bishops really wanted. They backed a bill originating in the Lords to give the ecclesiastical Court of High Commission rights to levy heavy fines on non-communicants. The Commons put forward a still harsher bill, with death penalties and indefinite imprisonments. The bill that passed, limiting itself to physical attendance at church, bore the characteristic royal fingerprints.15
Meanwhile, Campion, Persons and Emerson remained at large, in defiance of a proclamation calling for the arrest of persons trained overseas, ‘whereof some of them carry the name of Jesuits, under the colour of a holy name to deceive and abuse the simpler sort’.
It was not the ‘simpler sort’ the authorities needed to worry about. Whether in Bolivia or Berkshire, Jesuits habitually targeted the elites, aiming to convert society through a downward osmosis of spiritual influence. On 27 June 1581, the Jesuits pulled off an extraordinary propaganda coup at the heart of the Protestant intellectual establishment. Oxford students congregating in the University Church of St Mary found copies of a Latin treatise strewn on the benches. It was a work by Campion: Rationes decem (Ten Reasons) in defence of the Catholic religion, freshly printed in 400 copies on Persons’s secret press, now relocated from East Ham to the manor house at Stonor Park in south Oxfordshire.
Campion’s ‘Reasons’ combatted the reformers’ claims across a broad series of fronts. Protestants’ scripturalism involved ignoring inconvenient texts (like the Epistle of James); their assertions of antiquity were contradicted by a host of early councils and Fathers. And any suggestion that Catholicism was a novel or alien creed was confounded by witness of simple observation. Habits of law, rituals of monarchy and nobility, customs of ordinary people, forms of architecture, fashions of dress – all were shaped by a faith ‘embedded in the very roots of our culture’. With scrupulous courtesy, Campion appealed directly to Elizabeth, inviting her to take her rightful place in a line of distinguished kings and emperors: ‘One heaven cannot hold both Calvin and the princes I have named.’16
The challenge could not be allowed to go unanswered, and barely three weeks later Campion was called to account. On 17 July 1581, along with two other priests and a handful of laymen, he was arrested at Lyford Grange in Berkshire, after being reported by an informer.
The blaze of publicity accompanying the Jesuit mission intensified in the months after Campion’s arrest. ‘There is tremendous talk here of Jesuits,’ Persons wrote to Agazzari in August, ‘and more fables perhaps are told about them than were told of old about monsters.’ Campion was granted in the Tower the disputation he asked for, against a tag-team of prominent Protestant divines, all determined to refute the Jesuit’s theological claims, and to unmask him as a seditious traitor rather than the simple pastor he claimed to be.
The disputation, spread over four sessions in August and September, was not intended to be fair. Campion had no access to books, and received no notification of topics. He was nonetheless acknowledged, even by his enemies, to have acquitted himself remarkably well. There were risks for the government in allowing Campion even a stage-managed platform for his views. But there were risks too in seeming to run scared of the free debate for which the Jesuit had called.
From the pulpit, and in print, government supporters waged a clamorous anti-Campion campaign, to win over ‘public opinion’. As the Jesuit went to trial in November 1581, the professors of divinity in Oxford and Cambridge, Laurence Humphrey and William Whitaker, produced learned Latin confutations of his Rationes decem. Both were anti-vestiarian Puritans, a type little to Aylmer’s taste. But at this moment of crisis, Elizabeth’s Church needed the intellectual firepower of godly Protestantism, and the bishop of London asked for their help. Some yet more radical figures, among them John Field, took time out from their quarrel with the bishops to denounce the Jesuits in print.
Puritans, including Cartwright, also rallied round to condemn a sensational Catholic publication of 1582: a translation of the New Testament into English, undertaken at Rheims under the direction of Gregory Martin. It was a rendition from the Vulgate rather than the original Greek, and in places cautiously and even curiously Latinate in its translations. Still, with its polemical preface and notes, it was a further sign of the eagerness of Catholic exiles to engage wholeheartedly in a battle of ideas – and, in its belated endorsement of vernacular scripture, an indication of their willingness to take the fight to the enemy.
Alongside the learned denunciations of Campion were a rash of racy, vernacular pamphlets, blackening him by association with popish superstition and subversion. Their leading producer was a slippery character, Anthony Munday, pamphleteer and actor, who gave evidence against Campion at his trial. Munday had lived in 1579 as a seminarian in the English College, and recounted his experiences there in a scandalous exposé, The English Roman Life (1582). After dinner, he reported, students would habitually sit with Jesuits around the fire, ‘and in all their talk, they strive who shall speak worst of her Majesty, of some of her Council, of some bishop’.
Spies, reporting to either Walsingham or Burghley, proliferated among the penniless overseas exiles, though it may well be that Munday initially went to Rome as a curious Catholic, rather than a patriotic Protestant. Even in his lurid anti-papal polemics, there were some who thought he protested too much, and in a world demanding outward professions of certainty, not everyone was sure how true allegiance was to be known.17
There were ways to make windows into men’s hearts. Any impression of Campion being crushed by sheer force of truth was illusory. In parallel with the Tower debates, he was subjected to bouts of rigorous interrogation, and periodic applications of excruciating torture. Campion never denied his faith, or confessed to treasonous intents, but he gave up names of Catholics who sheltered him, leading to a wave of arrests: perhaps as many as 500 landowners were interrogated on whether they ‘entertained’ Campion in their houses.
The increasing use of judicial torture was an innovation of the Elizabethan regime. It was illegal under the common law, and took place under authority of Privy Council warrants, granting the torturers immunity from prosecution. Thomas Norton, nicknamed ‘rack master’ by Persons, oversaw its use in the Tower. Both at the disputation, and his trial, Campion publicized the fact he had been tortured, creating billows of outrage in England and overseas. Soon after, Norton wrote to Walsingham to justify the practice. He insisted – a seemingly circular argument – that ‘none was put to the rack that was not first by manifest matter known to the Council to be guilty of treason … there was no innocent tormented’. It was important for Norton, in the era of the Spanish Inquisition, to assert, and presumably believe, that ‘no man was tormented for matter of religion, nor asked what he believed of any point of religion, but only to understand of particular practices for setting up their religion, by treason or force against the Queen’.18
The resort to torture reflected, then, not only the regime’s profound insecurity, but some important claims about the limits of ‘religion’ itself. These were soon enshrined in print. At the end of 1583, Norton’s apology for torture was printed, along with a short tract called The Execution of Justice in England. Its anonymous author was none other than Burghley, and its publication was an admission that the authorities had a serious problem.
Campion was executed at Tyburn on 1 December 1581, along with two other missionary priests, Alexander Bryant and Ralph Sherwin. Seven more priests were executed before May 1582, and another four by the close of the year. A further three priests and a layman were hanged in 1583. All were convicted as traitors, but Catholics insisted they died ‘for religion’ – a perception lent credence as much by Campion’s pious demeanour and courtesy to opponents as by his unfailing insistence on the spiritual nature of his mission. On the scaffold, Campion was urged by the attending minister to pray with him and make conventional gestures of penitence. This he politely refused to do, telling the preacher, ‘You and I, we are not of one religion.’
Campion’s status as a saintly martyr was soon being broadcast throughout Europe. Persons, having escaped to France in the summer of 1581, published in 1582 De persecutione Anglicana libellus (Book of the Persecution in England), rapidly reprinted in numerous editions, and translated into English, Italian, German, French and Spanish. The same year, William Allen produced A Brief History of the Glorious Martyrdom of Twelve Reverend Priests, intended to show ‘how by colour of contrived treason and conspiracy (the cause indeed being religion) the enemies of the Christian faith have shed their innocent blood’.
Persecution and martyrdom were words Protestants had become accustomed to owning; they disliked having them thrown in their face. A royal proclamation of April 1582 complained of numerous ‘letters, libels, pamphlets and books’, falsely insinuating Campion and others ‘were without just cause condemned’. Henceforth, all Jesuits and seminary priests were ipso facto to be considered traitors.
Capital punishment as such was not the crux of Catholic criticism. John Hamerton, of Hellifield in North Yorkshire, was in June 1582 accused of treason, after saying Campion, like Felton and Story, was unjustly put to death for religion; they died like apostles and martyrs. Hamerton was anything but squeamish: he nostalgically recalled how ‘he was Bonner’s man, and helped to set fire to the faggots to the most that were burned in Smithfield’. Indeed, ‘he yet rejoices to think how they fried in the flame, and what service he had done God in furthering their death’.19 Martyrs were not those who died for a cause. Martyrs were those who died for the truth.
On 2 August 1581, an Englishman was burned at the stake in Rome. Richard Atkins was a zealot, and possibly a lunatic, who travelled to Italy intending ‘to charge the Pope publicly with his sins’. He was arrested and sentenced to death after knocking the chalice from the priest’s hands at a mass in St Peter’s. Robert Persons reported the affair in the form of a printed letter ‘sent by an English gentleman from beyond the seas, to his friend in London’. The timing was significant, even instructive. Atkins perished only two days after the seminary priest Everard Hanse was put to death at Tyburn, and Persons claimed that as he finished writing news reached him of ‘the betraying and apprehension of Master Campion’.
The contrast between these paragons and the deranged Atkins was palpable; Persons signed off by suggesting to his friend that ‘if you communicate the case to Master Fox, perhaps he can make something of it’. It was a sarcastic jibe, yet in the 1583 edition of Acts and Monuments, Foxe did include a ‘true report of the horrible and merciless martyrdom of one Richard Atkins, an Englishman, with extreme torments’, largely lifted from a chapter of the ubiquitous Anthony Munday’s English Roman Life.20 More than ever, truth claims were tied up with the sufferings of acknowledged brethren, inflicted on them by unjust persecutors. A great deal was at stake in deciphering the deaths of growing numbers of Jesuits and seminary priests.
Burghley’s counter-attack, in the Execution of Justice, was itself partly a matter of numbers. Even by their own reckoning, papists could recite no more than sixty names of ‘martyrs’ from the past twenty-five years. They chose to forget the times of Queen Mary, when, in little more than five years, almost 400 died from ‘imprisonment, torments, famine and fire’. What the recent sufferers lacked in quantity, they also wanted for in quality. The denizens of the seminaries (‘seedmen of sedition’) were a rabble of social malcontents, disappointed scholars, bankrupt merchants. None was prosecuted for holding ‘contrary opinions in religion’, but only for treason and incitement to rebellion. They were convicted, not under strange or novel statutes, ‘but by the ancient temporal laws of the realm’ – technically true in the case of Campion, indicted under a statute of 1352.
The logic of Burghley’s propaganda propelled him towards definitions of ‘religion’ that few Protestant, let alone Catholic, clergy would readily have recognized. It seemed to be a matter of internally held doctrinal propositions, divorced from speech or action in the world. In a hastily produced rebuttal, William Allen flatly rejected the premise: ‘as though, forsooth, there were no question pertaining to faith and religion but touching our inward belief’. It was indeed a religious matter ‘to demand and press us by torture where, in whose houses, what days and times we say or hear mass; how many we have reconciled; what we have heard in confession; who resorteth to our preachings’.21
It is reasonable, if not particularly helpful, to observe that both men had a point. They were struggling to make sense of a newly emerging world, one in which inherited conceptions about the indivisibility of truth came up against pragmatic recognition that religious minorities might have to be accommodated, rather than simply wished out of existence. Nonetheless, neither the exiled opposition, nor in truth the government, was prepared to acknowledge a purely secular sphere of ‘politics’, or a sealed private one of ‘faith’. Both were playing for total victory, in a game where the stakes were very high. Caught in the middle were the Catholic laity, trying to reconcile their duties as loyal subjects with what was needed to save their souls.
In February 1583, Burghley interviewed Lord Vaux of Harrowden, a prominent Northamptonshire landowner, imprisoned for recusancy and for sustaining the fugitive Campion. The minister was surprisingly sympathetic to Vaux’s plight, and helped him draft a statement of submission to Elizabeth, acknowledging his fault and begging to be remitted his recusancy fine. Vaux’s capitulation was not total, however. He professed a willingness to listen to arguments or instruction, but asked ‘to be forborne to be compelled to come to the church, not for that I should so do in contempt of her Majesty or of her laws, but that my conscience only … did stay me’.
There was no right of conscience in Elizabethan England, and no relaxation of the recusancy laws for Vaux. Like his brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham (who also sheltered Campion), and his cousin, Thomas Throckmorton of Coughton (another brother-in-law of Tresham), Vaux continued to face indictments and fines for failure to attend church.22 All protested their loyalty to the Queen, but could a papist ever be a good subject?
Country Divinity
Plenty of people were convinced the answer was no. One of the many publications spawned by the Campion affair was A dialogue between a Papist and a Protestant (1582), which replayed in fictional form the kind of theological disputation conducted in the Tower. Its author was George Gifford, vicar of the Essex parish of Maldon, and a preacher of determinedly godly inclinations.
Gifford’s ‘papist’ objects to the label: ‘Wherefore should ye call me papist? I am obedient to the laws, and do not refuse to go to the church’. To his Protestant antagonist, this is a distinction without a difference: ‘there are papists which will not come at the church, and there are papists which can keep their conscience to themselves’. The test of loyalty proposed by the Queen’s legislation was, in the view of zealous reformers like Gifford, entirely inadequate. The long discussion between the men ends, not, as we might expect, with the papist’s submission and conversion, but with the Protestant recognizing its impossibility: ‘I leave you to the Lord; no hope I see to win you.’23
Yet Puritan ministers like Gifford, with years of pastoral parish experience, knew that the world was not in fact neatly divided between hopeless papists and dependable Protestants. In 1581, Gifford had published another dialogue: A Brief Discourse of Certain Points of the Religion, which is [found] among the Common Sort of Christians, which may be termed the Country Divinity. Its characters are a minister, ‘Zelotes’, and a middle-aged rural parishioner, ‘Atheos’.
Atheos means ‘without God’, but this well-meaning householder is no atheist in any sense we might today recognize. He is a diligent church-goer, who tries to follow the Ten Commandments and do well by his neighbours, and who protests that ‘I love God above all, and put my whole trust in him’. Atheos rejects indignantly any imputation to him of popery: ‘What tell you me of the Pope? I care not for him; I would both he and his dung were buried in the dunghill.’
Nonetheless, Atheos’s religion, his ‘country divinity’, does not count as Christianity by Zelotes’s (or Gifford’s) standards. He shows too little respect for preaching, and far too much for the faith of his forefathers: ‘What, should we seek for to be wiser or better than they?’ Most fundamentally, Atheos fails to grasp the key theological insight of the reformers – justification by faith alone – and believes people will be judged by the good they do in the world. ‘If a man be sorry, and ask God forgiveness, is he not even as well as they which are the more precise? The mercy of God must save all.’
Calvinist clergy knew that was not going to happen. From before the beginning of the world, God selected some people for eternal life, consigned others to eternal perdition. It was a certainty that the latter significantly outnumbered the former. For anyone with eyes to see, predestination was the unmistakable teaching of scripture. But it was more than an abstract proposition. It demanded a searching within oneself for signs of the saving faith that gave the Christian optimistic hope, ‘assurance’, of membership among the elect.
It was to this intent that another Essex Puritan minister, Richard Rogers, kept a diary in the 1580s, scrupulously recording both ‘torment’ and ‘sound peace’, as he analysed daily thoughts and motives. True faith meant moving beyond externals, beyond even the externals of right belief, to confront the unconquered wilfulness within. The Country Divinity contains a revealing exchange. Atheos is asked what he thinks of images, and dutifully replies that he never put any trust in them, or thought they could do him any good. Zelotes corrects him: ‘I do not speak of that outward giving of God’s worship, but of another, which is inward in the mind.’24 Idols were not merely material or ritual residues of the Catholic past, but any temptation of the will inserting itself between the believer and the true, unstinted worship of God.
Godly clergy in the 1580s worried that the parishes were full of Atheoses, people who failed to grasp there was more to being a Protestant than not being a papist. It was little good, thought Edward Dering, to ‘use thy liberty, say thou art a Protestant, renounce the Pope, except thou love righteousness’. We live in scandalous times, preached John Udall, a young lecturer at Kingston-upon-Thames, when someone can ‘put on the name of a Protestant’ and be ‘taken of others to be of a true and sound religion, yea though his life and conversation do swear the contrary’. In his own version of a Giffordesque dialogue, Udall has ‘Demetrius’, a usurer, comically declare: ‘Yea, by St Mary, I am a Protestant, for I love to eat flesh on the Friday.’
Twenty-five years after the accession of Elizabeth, it seemed to men like Gifford, Dering and Udall that the real task of reformation had barely begun. Formidable obstacles stood in its way, not least the attitudes of Atheos and his ilk, who considered godly preachers ‘busy controllers’, and moaned that ‘nowadays, there is nothing among many of ye but damnation, damnation’.
It was not a purely rural problem. ‘What kicking and pricking hath here been against the preachers?’ complained the anonymous author of a 1582 memorial about conditions in Southampton. They lacked adequate financial support, and found themselves ‘belied and railed upon behind their backs, upon credit of wicked and slanderous libels’. Examples of such self-pitying jeremiads can easily be multiplied.25
In many places outside London, preachers, or clergy of any kind with the education and motivation to bring about change, were still in short supply. In the midlands diocese of Coventry and Lichfield – not untypically of the country as a whole – a mere 14 per cent of beneficed clergy were graduates in 1584, though things were better in the hinterlands of the universities: 50 per cent in the diocese of Oxford in 1580.
Non-graduates, in the 1580s as in the 1510s, could be conscientious and popular pastors, just as they could be troublemakers and ne’er-do-wells. The gradual spread and acceptance of clerical marriage most likely reduced, though it certainly did not remove, scope for sexual misbehaviour and for parishioners to complain about it. At the start of the 1580s, the proportion of clerical will-makers who can be shown to be, or to have been, married varied between 40 per cent in the northern province and 71 per cent in Essex. Will-makers were by definition the elder generation of clergy, so actual percentages may already have been higher. Catholics, and other parishioners when they felt provoked, might still derisively call the minister’s lawful wife ‘priest’s whore’, but the number of such cases was relatively low. The realities of parish life, and the tiresome duty of paying tithes, produced levels of ‘anticlericalism’ in Elizabethan England that may have been lower than before the Reformation only because there were now fewer clergy around.
If anything, moralists like Gifford worried not so much about anticlericalism as about clergymen proving too popular with their parishioners, sitting with them in the alehouse rather than reproving them from the pulpit. Atheos’s own minister was not Zelotes but a certain ‘Sir Robert’. The traditional form of address (see p. 41) was still common in rural communities – at Bridlington in East Yorkshire, in 1584, there is a record of a parishioner receiving a similarly named curate at his home, ‘Sir Robert, you are welcome!’
Atheos’s Sir Robert is ‘a very good fellow: he will not stick when … honest men meet together to spend his groat at the alehouse’. Sir Robert is not some dissolute rake, but a charitable reconciler, ‘for if there be any that do not agree, he will seek for to make them friends’, getting them to play together at cards or bowls. Yet clerical ‘Sirs’, almost by definition, were not preachers. They could not awake in people a faith-filled awareness of Christ’s redeeming grace; they could not save souls.
The concern was shared by powerfully placed friends of the godly. In the aftermath of the prophesyings debacle, Sir Walter Mildmay wrote an excoriating letter to Bishop Scambler of Peterborough about matters in Northampton, ‘left destitute of a sufficient preacher’. It was a scandalous case for ‘a town so great, so notorious and so peopled’. Mildmay lectured the bishop on his duty to ensure provision: ‘Your whole diocese is your charge; it is your parish and your flock.’ The responsibility could not be left to ‘a scraping chancellor or a covetous commissary’. Mildmay’s general experience of the diocese was that ‘the chiefest places want preachers; that the ministers be for the most part unfitted and unmeet for so holy and so divine a vocation’.
It was with such deficiencies in mind that in January 1584 Mildmay founded a new Cambridge college, Emmanuel. The scriptural, Hebrew name (‘God with us’) stood out among the rows of colleges named for saints or monarchs. Emmanuel had a remit to train preachers, and a curriculum restricted to theology, Latin and Greek. From the outset, it had the reputation of a Puritan foundation, a godly retort to the priest-factories of Rheims and Rome.26 At least two missions to convert the nation were under way in the early 1580s: the Jesuit and seminarist crusade co-ordinated by Allen and Persons, and the godly drive to transform a tangled growth of country divinity into a harvest of productive faith.
Preachers like Gifford or Rogers were inclined to regard any people who did not share their vision of godly reformation as not really Protestants at all. But it would be a mistake simply to take their word for it. Another meticulous diarist of the 1580s was Richard Stonley, an official of the London Exchequer, who witnessed Campion and his companions drawn on hurdles to Tyburn in December 1581. Stonley was sharply censorious of Puritan deviations from prescribed norms, noting occasions in church where clergymen officiated ‘contrary to the order of the Book of Common Prayer’, and commenting approvingly when his minister ‘began service with the surplice on his back’. Yet Stonley hardly looks like an old-fashioned religious ‘conservative’. He was an aficionado of sermons at Paul’s Cross, presided over family prayers at home, and sometimes spent whole Sundays reading the Geneva Bible. He was also strongly anti-papist. A diary entry recording the execution of the priest Everard Hanse is accompanied by a quotation from Psalm 139: ‘I hate them with an unfeigned hatred, as they were mine utter enemies.’27
Protestant Reformation, moving into Elizabeth’s third decade, was starting to lay down roots in the parishes, even if not in the exact forms the most zealous godly clergy would have liked. The process is not always easy for us to discern – very few laypeople were, like Stonley, keepers of diaries, and quiet conformity with the rules represents a type of behaviour by definition less likely to generate written documentation than any sort of assertive challenge to them. Nonetheless, the gradual normalization of a broadly Protestant culture in the localities can be inferred from parish inventories showing an absence of old Catholic items and an accumulation of bibles, psalters, homilies, paraphrases and injunctions, along with copies of Jewel’s Apology and (to a lesser extent) Foxe’s Acts and Monuments.
It is evident too in mundane records of expenditure in parish accounts, including the wine (often in copious quantities) required for celebrations of the Protestant communion at Christmas, Easter, Whitsun and other occasional times of the year. Though they might now be stripped of many of their ancient furnishings, a real concern for the fabric and upkeep of parish churches survived through, or revived after, the tumult of the mid-Tudor decades. There were a few cases of shocking neglect, but in the main churches were well cared for, through the efforts of parishioners, and also – though a bugbear of Puritans – of the lay impropriators of tithes who were the institutional successors of the monks in ‘appropriated’ parishes (see p. 47). In episcopal visitations of the late 1570s and 1580s, fewer than 15 per cent of parishes in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire were reporting their chancel to be in a condition of dilapidation.28
Even in an age of confessional conflict and growing doctrinal awareness, the practice of faith remained to a considerable extent habitual. Medieval Christians were shaped by the mass; Elizabethan ones by the liturgies of the Prayer Book they heard recited week upon week on Sundays, and at regular ritual observances of birth, marriage and death. Godly clergy were sometimes suspicious of popular attachment to the official worship of the Church. ‘They do make the Book of Common Prayer a cloak for their papistry,’ the minister of Flixton in Suffolk, Thomas Deynes, said of his parishioners at the end of the 1580s. But Puritan condemnation of the Prayer Book as a compendium of ‘popish abuses’ did not cause everyone to forget, and should not cause us to forget, that its author was Thomas Cranmer, the flower of Protestant martyrdom, or that its language resonated with the core theological insights of the Reformation. Laypeople were never required to own copies of the Prayer Book, but some did, and bequeathed them fondly in their wills. It was one of a number of texts shaping the religious culture of the nation by the sheer magnitude of its physical presence: over fifty editions were published in the first three decades of Elizabeth’s reign.
Other formative texts were Protestant catechisms and books of religious instruction. Well over one hundred such works in English were published between 1559 and 1586, many in multiple editions. The bible itself was an ever more ubiquitous object, in homes as well as in churches: fifty-three editions of the complete bible, and forty-one of the New Testament appeared in 1560–89. Still more prevalent were copies of the Psalms: eighty-one editions of Sternhold and Hopkins’ version were printed in the same period.
Growing rates of literacy, and the increasing output of the press, helped ensure that by the 1580s the cultural imprint of Protestantism was becoming ever more widely and deeply felt, even by those experiencing within themselves no particular effusion of evangelical zeal. William Shakespeare, born in 1564, and receiving his grammar school education in Stratford in the 1570s, was very likely raised in a Catholic household, and as an adult and an author he never exhibited much enthusiasm for Protestantism of the ‘godly’ variety. But his dramatic works are permeated with allusions to the Prayer Book and Homilies, and to the bible, in both Bishops’ and Geneva versions.29
As more and more people born and raised in ‘days of popery’ died of old age, along with parish clergymen who had served their apprenticeship in the Henrician or Marian Church, it seemed that the passage of time, along with changes of perception and perspective achieved by a kind of cultural inhalation, was taking care of England’s gradual transformation into a properly Protestant nation. The types of people variously referred to by historians as ‘parish anglicans’ or ‘Prayer Book Protestants’, as exponents of ‘unspectacular orthodoxy’ or of ‘commonplace piety’, were conformists in the sense that they practised their religion in accordance with the dictates of the law, civil and ecclesiastical.30 It would be unwise to assume they were typically ‘mere conformists’, failing to engage meaningfully with any part of the spectrum of spiritual possibilities cast through the prism of the Elizabethan Settlement.
Quietly conformist Protestants were very likely in the majority in most places by the start of the 1580s.31 But to some true believers, their predominance scarcely represented a triumph of the Gospel at all. It seemed to promise only the mechanistic observance of a kind of ‘cold statute Protestantism’, in a Church but half-reformed. The life-giving soar of the spirit, the zeal to transform society out of an overwhelming love of Christ, and an equally all-encompassing hatred of sin, were tragically absent. As Zelotes parted company with Atheos on the road outside Chelmsford, some of his brothers in spirit paused and took breath before stepping up their efforts to save the Church of England from its own mediocrity; others prepared to shake its dust from their feet, and to follow another path entirely.
Without Tarrying for Any
In June 1583, a new proclamation condemned ‘sundry seditious, schismatical, and erroneous books and libels’, sent into England from beyond the seas, as well as their authors, ‘fled out of the realm as seditious persons’.
The guilty parties named were not exiled papists, but a pair of puritanical Protestants, who had abandoned the Church of England and established their own congregation at Middelburg in Zealand, a town liberated from the Spanish a few years earlier and already a centre for English Puritan printing. Robert Browne and Robert Harrison became friends at Cambridge, where Browne dissuaded Harrison from taking orders in a Church tainted by the unscriptural abomination of episcopacy. The parishes of the Church of England were all in spiritual bondage, and ‘whoever would take charge of them, must also come into bondage with them’. Far better to begin creating God’s kingdom with ‘the worthiest, were they never so few’.
The two men started holding conventicles in Cambridge, and in 1580 transferred operations to Norwich, where they organized a petition to Elizabeth, bearing the signatures of 175 supporters, and claiming the support of ‘infinite more’. It called for removal of ‘the government of Antichrist’, and institution of ‘that holy eldership, the very sinew of Christ’s Church, which is so plainly described and so weightily authorised in God’s Word’.
These were not anabaptists, espousing strange Christological heresies, but radical Puritans, reshaping the Church from the bottom up. In East Anglia they formed their own congregation, ‘in one covenant and fellowship together’, with the intention of making its members fully ‘obedient to Christ’. Sustained harassment from Bishop Freke prompted the move to Middelburg in the summer of 1582. There Browne rapidly published several tracts, including A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for any, and of the Wickedness of those Preachers which will not Reform themselves and their Charge, because they will tarry till the Magistrate Command or Compel them.
The ‘wicked’ preachers included those still hoping to alter the governance of the Church from within, even presbyterians such as Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers. As chaplains to the English Merchant Adventurers, they found themselves uncomfortable neighbours of Browne and Harrison in Middelburg, after the Company moved its operations there from Antwerp in October 1582.
Middelburg’s separatist congregation soon separated from itself. Towards the end of 1583, having quarrelled with Harrison, Browne departed for Scotland, hoping in vain to find there the perfectly ordered Church he endlessly sought. Harrison tried, and failed, to bring about a merger with Cartwright’s merchant flock, and a depleted Middelburg congregation limped on for a few years more.32 In England, separatism faced more harrowing trials.
Browne’s disciples were particularly concentrated in Bury St Edmunds, a Suffolk market town that also contained a strong bloc of Puritans, in bitter dispute with Bishop Freke. In 1582 some Brownists arranged to have a quotation from the Book of Revelation (2:19) painted around the royal arms in the parish church: ‘I know thy works and thy love, and service, and faith’.
It seemed innocuous enough. But one of the preachers brought from Cambridge to assist Freke against the Puritans realized something. The succeeding verse in Revelation went on to say, ‘Notwithstanding, I have a few things against thee, that thou sufferest the woman Jezebel, which calleth herself a Prophetess, to teach and to deceive my servants, to make them commit fornication, and to eat meats sacrificed unto idols.’ It was a coded but venomous attack against Elizabeth, and the antichristian remnants such as vestments (‘meat sacrificed to idols’) still corrupting her Church.
The astute scriptural detective was Richard Bancroft, a chaplain of Christopher Hatton, and a deadly anti-Puritan, who wasted no time before trying to tar nonconformist Puritans with the same brush used to highlight the rejectionism of the Brownists: several Puritan ministers were imprisoned in Bury gaol. It went harder on proven separatists. At the Bury Assizes, the tailor Elias Thacker and the shoemaker John Copping were tried and convicted for distributing the writings of Browne and Harrison. Thacker was hanged on 4 July 1583; Copping the following day. On both occasions, piles of forbidden books burned by the gallows.
It was another turning point. The authorities had on previous occasions executed anabaptist heretics, but this was the first official killing to target christologically orthodox fellow Protestants. The charge, of course, was sedition. But, as with the seminarist priests, distinctions between dying for treason and dying for religion lay squarely in the eye of the beholder. A third separatist, William Dennis, was hanged nearby about the same time, at Thetford in Norfolk. Presiding at the Bury Assizes was Chief Justice Sir Christopher Wray, a legal chameleon who defended Bonner in 1565, and in 1581 prosecuted Campion. Wray wrote to Burghley to warn him ‘there be many of Copping and Elias’ opinions’.33
On 8 May 1582, while the Bury ‘stirs’ were still simmering, remarkable events took place eight miles away, in the parish of Cockfield. Its rector was the Puritan minister John Knewstub, renowned for Paul’s Cross sermons against the Family of Love. No fewer than sixty ministers, ‘appointed out of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Norfolk’, attended a meeting there. The purpose was ‘to confer of the Common Book; what might be tolerated, and what necessarily to be refused’. It must have been difficult to conceal, or explain, the presence of so many clergymen in a small Suffolk village. Nonetheless, as the Suffolk minister Oliver Pig wrote a week later to John Field, ‘our meeting was appointed to be kept very secretly, and to be made known to none’.
The ministers met again at the end of September, at Wethersfield in Essex, where the diarist Richard Rogers was lecturer. They heard a sermon from Edmund Chapman, a deprived prebendary of Norwich, and lecturer at Dedham, a parish on the Essex–Suffolk border. It was the talk of the village alehouse. ‘What make all these knaves here today?’ demanded a local farmer, a veritable Atheos. ‘What, will they make a god of Rogers?’
Chapman was the host when the ministers assembled again at Dedham in October, and agreed to convene there regularly, the Monday after the first Sunday in every month. It was, in effect, a classis, a regional conference of ministers of the kind advocated by Wilcox, Field and Cartwright – a presbyterian sapling rooting itself in the undergrowth of the episcopal Church of England.
The ministers meeting at Dedham did not see themselves as revolutionaries; rather as colleagues offering mutual advice and support on ‘further reformation’ in their respective parishes. Like the participants in earlier prophesyings, they heard and critiqued sermons. Sometimes, the meeting was devoted to a fast: Puritans despised the prescribed fast days of the popish Church, but saw spiritual benefit in event-specific days of prayer and abstinence from food. They debated theological questions – such as how strictly the Sabbath should be observed – and discussed practical pastoral problems.
A recurrent issue was access to the sacraments, and whether parishioners falling short of the highest standards should be barred from receiving communion or from bringing their children to baptism. Puritan parish clergymen wrestled in their own minds with the question of whether their ministry was to the great mass of good and bad, or solely to a subset of the spiritually worthy.34
In August 1583, an ominous note entered the record: ‘it was said our meetings were known and threatened’; the ministers determined to seek legal advice on ‘how we may meet by law’. In October, they agreed ‘it were good the Archbishop should be written unto, to be favourable to our Church and to discipline’.
The ‘Archbishop’ was not Edmund Grindal. In July 1583, his health worn down by years of unremitting royal disfavour, suspended but never dismissed, Grindal died at his palace at Croydon. His successor, nominated by the Queen on 14 August, was widely anticipated. John Whitgift, bishop of Worcester, was enthroned on 23 October. He was indeed favourable to discipline, but not the sort of discipline the Dedham petitioners had in mind.
On 17 November 1583 – the twenty-fifth anniversary of Elizabeth’s accession – Whitgift preached at Paul’s Cross, laying out his priorities for government. The theme was obedience to magistrates and higher powers, foremost among them the Queen, ‘nursing-mother’ of the Church. Obedience was under threat from three sorts of people: papists, anabaptists, ‘and our wayward and conceited persons’ – men who coloured their doings with titles of ‘faith’ and ‘perfection’. These, it seemed, were to be the chief object of archiepiscopal attention. Robert Beale, Clerk of the Privy Council, and an industrious friend of the godly, told Whitgift the sermon ‘dismayed both myself and sundry others, who supposed your lordship would have run another course than it appeareth you have taken in hand’.
The course, however, was set, its sails billowing with something no archbishop of Canterbury had enjoyed for a very long time: the unconditional support of the Queen. Articles, approved by Elizabeth, were circulated to the dioceses on 29 October. They contained disciplinary and reform measures unexceptionable to most Protestants: a crackdown on recusants, closer examination of ordination candidates. The twist was in a final clause demanding all clergymen subscribe to three articles. The first, affirming the royal supremacy, and the third, declaring all Thirty-Nine Articles ‘agreeable to the Word of God’ were relatively uncontentious. The second required ministers to agree that the Book of Common Prayer ‘containeth nothing in it contrary to the Word of God’, and to promise to ‘use the form of the said book prescribed, in public prayer and administration of the sacraments’.
This was a net with a narrow mesh. The demand was bound to meet opposition, not just from hard-core Puritans and presbyterian activists among the salaried lecturers, but from a broader spectrum of godly beneficed clergy. Whitgift knew what he was doing. In a letter to Walsingham, he declared: ‘I have taken upon me the defence of the religion and rites of the Church of England, to appease the sects and schisms therein, to reduce all the ministers thereof to uniformity and due obedience. Herein, I intend to be constant, and not to waver with every wind.’35
He encountered a hurricane of opposition. County by county, ministers in their dozens refused to subscribe, or offered subscription in only limited and conditional fashion, especially in the Puritan heartlands of Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk. Somewhere between three and four hundred ministers declined subscription in the form Whitgift demanded: George Gifford and Richard Rogers were among those suspended.
Whitgift’s campaign had the inadvertent effect of encouraging dissident clergymen to correspond and organize, especially after the widely divergent reasons for refusal offered by early non-subscribers threatened to provide the archbishop with a propaganda coup. Field drew up a list of errors in the Prayer Book, and the Dedham Conference was at the heart of efforts to co-ordinate resistance, sending and receiving letters with suggested rationales for declining to subscribe.
How far could resistance go? Dedham itself was divided: Chapman and other moderates were for exploring terms for some acceptable form of subscription. But William Tey, rector of Peldon, declared that ‘the bishop’s authority is antichristian; ergo, not to be obeyed’. Ministers should preach, even when ordered not to by lay magistrates. The membrane between tarrying and not tarrying, dissenting and seceding, was here stretched very thin.
It was not just ministers who were unhappy. In May 1584, Whitgift had an awkward meeting with a delegation of twenty-five angry Kentish gentlemen, and the Privy Council was swamped with petitions from town corporations and landowners. In June, pressure from the Council forced Whitgift into a partial climb-down. He agreed to demand full subscription to only the first and third articles, along with a promise to use the Prayer Book ‘and none other’. Catholics were notorious casuists, but Puritans too understood how to find unstated meanings in a verbal declaration. They would use the Prayer Book, but not the whole of the Prayer Book. On that basis, all but a handful (the hold-outs included John Field) were prepared to subscribe.
Whitgift, however, was not done. He turned to the power of High Commission to pursue the most intransigent opponents, drawing up a set of twenty-four interrogatories explicitly aimed at Puritans. They demanded to know whether ‘you deem and judge the said whole Book to be a godly and virtuous Book’, whether ‘you have at the time of communion … worn only your ordinary apparel’, and whether ‘you have used private conferences and assemblies’. Suspects were required to answer upon an oath known as ex officio mero, unknown to the traditions of common law. The oath, previously used only against recusants, required defendants to swear they would answer truthfully any questions put to them, without knowing in advance what the questions were going to be. It took away any right of silence, potentially requiring people to incriminate themselves.
Use of the procedure against Essex dissidents such as Gifford provoked fresh waves of complaint to the Privy Council. In July, Burghley told the archbishop he thought his new articles to be ‘formed in a Romish style … so full of branches and circumstances, as I think the inquisitors of Spain use not so many questions to comprehend and trap their preys’. On 20 September, a majority of councillors wrote to Whitgift and Aylmer complaining about the treatment of the Essex ministers. The signatories did not include Hatton, whom Whitgift had thanked earlier that summer for his support in the face of ‘some unkind speeches … only for doing my duty’. The councillors included with their letter a survey of ministers in Essex, compiled by the Puritans themselves, and designed to demonstrate that the conformist clergy approved of by Whitgift were typically idle, immoral, non-resident or unsound in doctrine – a veritable flock of ‘Sir Roberts’. Those reluctant to subscribe were demonstrably more learned and reliable.36
Leading laymen professed bafflement that the archbishop of Canterbury was troubling good Protestants at a time of unprecedented Roman threats. Knollys appealed fruitlessly to Whitgift in June 1584 to allow non-subscribing ministers to preach, and afterwards wrote in frustration to Burghley:
[I]t grieves my heart to see the course of popish treason to be neglected, and to see the zealous preachers of the Gospel, sound in doctrine, who are the most diligent barkers against the popish wolf to save the fold and flock of Christ, to be persecuted and put to silence, as though there were no enemies to her Majesty and to the state but they …
As far as Knollys was concerned, ‘absolute authority of bishops … hath no foundation in the Word of God’. It threatened the Queen’s safety that direction of policy ‘should be taken from all councillors of her Majesty’s estate, and … given over to the rule of bishops’. The Pope’s adherents ‘laugh in their sleeve, and hope for a day’.
Burghley refrained from such anti-episcopal jibes, but asked Whitgift to comment on reports that papists in Cheshire and elsewhere rejoiced at the disciplinary campaign against Puritans. The archbishop affected not to see it: ‘They are urged to subscribe against the usurped power of the bishop of Rome – how can that please the papist? They subscribe that in our Book of Common Prayer there is nothing contrary to the Word of God – this cannot please the papists, which wholly condemn it.’
Nonetheless, Catholics tracked Protestant divisions with considerable interest. In the summer of 1584, an anonymous tract, The Copy of a letter written by a Master of Arts, was printed at Rouen. Universally known as Leicester’s Commonwealth, it took the form of courteous dialogue between a Protestant gentleman, a Protestant scholar and a Catholic lawyer. Their conversation was constructed to convey an insistent message: that the real threat to the realm was the Earl of Leicester – portrayed as scheming and debauched – along with his Puritan ‘faction’. Each speaker recognized that subjects naturally wished for ‘a prince and state of their own religion’, but that was not the world as it was. In England, refusing the religion of the state was made into treason. Yet, the lawyer explained, this ‘treason’ was different from ‘some actual attempt or treaty against the life of the state or prince’. Catholics might be ‘traitors’ in either category, but the same was true of ‘hot Puritans … whose differences from the state, especially in matters of government, is very well known’.
The safest way forward was surely a toleration, to ‘content all divisions, factions and parties among us, for their continuance in peace, be they papists, Puritans, Familians, or of whatsoever nice difference’. The tone was scrupulously loyal, prescribing remedies in Elizabeth’s best interests. If, as seems likely, Robert Persons was instrumental in the tract’s production, this was disingenuous as well as tendentious: he was up to his elbows in schemes for the Queen’s overthrow. But Puritan disobedience, and the patronage extended to it by nobles like Leicester, allowed papists to claim that they were just as good, if not better, subjects of the Queen.37
Bonds and Associations
The councillors, most of them, did not believe that; in the summer of 1584 the Queen’s safety was very much at the forefront of their minds. On 10 July, William of Orange, leader of the Dutch Revolt and a key English ally, was shot dead with a pistol by a Catholic assassin, a deed lauded by Philip of Spain.
Councillors did not need to ask themselves, ‘Could it happen here?’ In October the previous year, a Warwickshire squire, John Somerville, had been arrested for plotting the very prototype of the deed. He ‘meant to shoot her [Elizabeth] through with his dag [pistol] and hoped to see her head to be set upon a pole for that she was a serpent and a traitor’. Somerville – deluded, if not deranged – did not get far with his plan. His habit of announcing his intentions in front of company in alehouses meant he was arrested before getting out of Oxfordshire. Yet the government took his case extremely seriously. Prior to Somerville’s hanging himself in custody, he was personally interrogated by Elizabeth’s security chief and spy-master, Francis Walsingham.
Walsingham was on the cusp of neutralizing a more serious threat, details of which emerged with the arrest of Francis Throckmorton in November 1583. In truth, Throckmorton was a bit-player in the plot bearing his name, though he provides an intriguing study in trends within English Catholicism. His father was the royal office-holder, and ‘church papist’, Sir John Throckmorton, but Francis and his brother Thomas were red-bloodedly Roman, radicalized during time spent in the Low Countries in the late 1570s. The phenomenon was familiar to contemporaries. ‘You have at this day,’ a preacher warned at Paul’s Cross in 1578, ‘many young gentlemen … that are more obstinate and stubborn papists than their fathers.’
Than fathers, but perhaps not mothers. Sir John’s wife Margaret was a more constant papist than her spouse, a common pattern in Catholic families, and a by-product of recusancy legislation able to fine husbands but not wives, who in theory possessed no property of their own. ‘Such have a common saying,’ Protestants scoffed, ‘the unbelieving husband shall be saved by the believing wife.’
Francis Throckmorton also exemplified the genetic intimacy of popery and Protestantism. His uncle was the former royal councillor Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, and a Warwickshire cousin was a fiery Puritan activist, Job Throckmorton. Nicholas’s son, Arthur, was to be found socializing with all branches of the family during hunting trips to the Midlands. His diary entry for November 1579 reads: ‘I wrote to my cousin Job Throckmorton; I wrote to my cousin Francis Throckmorton.’ Such family ties, stretched but not broken across religious divides, were by no means unusual. But as details of the treason emerged, bonds of kinship were erased: references in Arthur’s diary to ‘my cousin Francis Throckmorton’ become simply ‘Francis Throckmorton’.
Francis was the courier, carrying letters between English exiles, the French and Spanish ambassadors, and Mary Queen of Scots. The serious players were William Allen, who helped hatch the scheme at a meeting in Paris in June 1583, and Henry, Duke of Guise, Mary’s cousin and leader of the militant wing of French Catholicism. The plan was for a Spanish–Italian force to invade via Lancashire, triggering a Catholic rebellion in the north. A second French army under Guise would land in Sussex, where it was hoped the influence of the Catholic magnates Henry, Earl of Northumberland, and Philip, Earl of Arundel, would generate local support.
This was a more plausible business than the Ridolfi Plot of a decade earlier, yet it proved fatal for only a few of those involved. Throckmorton was executed at Tyburn in July 1584. Northumberland took his own life in the Tower in 1585, while the government decided whether to bring treason charges. The more peripherally involved Arundel, a son of the late Duke of Norfolk, had been converted to Catholicism by Campion’s bravura performances in the Tower. He was sent there himself in 1585, and never left. The Spanish ambassador, Bernadino de Mendoza, was ignominiously expelled in January 1584.38
The main effect of the Throckmorton Plot was to reignite the campaign to ‘do something’ about the Queen of Scots. The something on this occasion was a dramatic political gesture, with far-reaching constitutional implications.
At the Privy Council meeting on 12 October 1584, Burghley and Walsingham presented their colleagues with ‘the instrument of an Association for the preservation of the Queen’s Majesty’s royal person’. It was a document binding signatories to resist to the full extent of their power ‘any act, counsel or consent to anything that shall tend to the harm of her Majesty’s royal person’. If, God forbid, the Queen should be assassinated, then they swore ‘never to accept, avow or favour any such pretended successors, by whom or for whom any such detestable act shall be committed’. In fact, the bondsmen promised to pursue such persons ‘to the death, with our joint and particular forces, and to take the uttermost revenge of them’.
This was religious politics in the red and raw. The Lord Treasurer, the Queen’s Secretary, and other leading officers of state made a public declaration that if anyone took Elizabeth’s life to advance the claims of Mary Stewart, then – without trial or legal nicety – they would kill Mary, whether she knew of the plan or not. The first Elizabeth heard about it was when she was presented with a copy at Hampton Court, freighted with the signatures of her leading nobles. It was not her way of doing politics, but, not for the first time, Burghley had seized the initiative.
The Bond was affirmed by all the great and the good: in a ruthlessly cynical move, Mary herself was prevailed upon to sign – a pledge of her loyalty, and a kind of pre-emptive suicide note. But its utility as both a practical and propaganda instrument depended upon wide diffusion. A day after Privy Council signatures were collected on 19 October, Walsingham claimed that ‘divers good and well affected subjects’ had somehow ‘got knowledge’ of the document and were eager to sign it. In fact, he and Burghley were actively soliciting the signatures of JPs and gentlemen, county by county. ‘The more public the matter is made,’ Walsingham reflected, ‘the better it is like to work.’
The intention was not quite to replicate what Henry VIII had aimed at in 1534, an oath sworn by all adult males. But in various places, humbler folk earnestly asked to be allowed to take part, and sometimes did so in great numbers. Justices in Yorkshire informed the Earl of Huntingdon they had taken signatures from ‘such of the meaner sort of gentlemen and of the principal freeholders and clothiers about them as sued to be accepted into the society’. By late November, Huntingdon reckoned he had at least 7,500 signatories.
Joining the association was a solemn ritual, a blood oath. It was sworn upon copies of the gospels, and the oath itself threatened retribution against backsliders, to be pursued by the rest ‘as perjured persons and as public enemies to God’. The Earl of Derby reported to Leicester on solemn proceedings in the parish church of Wigan: the gentry of Lancashire, in batches of six, reverently took their oath before the bishop of Chester, ‘upon their knees, bareheaded’. In this most ‘backward’ of counties, Catholics were surely among their number. The Bond, sensibly, spoke only of protection of the Queen from unnamed enemies, and said nothing explicitly about religion.39 But no one who seriously weighed the matter could be in any doubt this was an endeavour to protect the Protestant succession and prevent a Catholic one; an exercise in which ideological politics trumped monarchical rank, and the settled rules of inheritance.
Discovery of Catholic conspiracy, as in 1572, led to the summoning of Parliament: an Act for the Security of the Queen, for which the Association laid the foundations, was the Council’s chief priority. But the ecclesiastical wrangles of the preceding year were far from played out. At the opening ceremony on 23 November 1584, Whitgift preached on how contempt for good laws by ‘many orators’ was threatening all order. In an arresting image, he foresaw the unjust being ‘swept away like the spider in his cobweb’. The opening speech of the Lord Chancellor, Thomas Bromley, carried the now customary warning from Elizabeth against ‘the cause of religion to be spoken among them’: an injunction that not only many MPs, but also leading members of the Queen’s government fully intended to ignore.
The archbishop’s opponents lobbied tirelessly. Just before Parliament opened, the Dedham conference decided that from every county ‘some of the best credit and most forward for the gospel should go up to London, to solicit the cause of the Church’. MPs from Essex, Warwickshire and Lincolnshire presented petitions, bearing signatures of ‘gentlemen of the greatest worship in the same shires’, and complaining against restrictions on preachers. In December, at the request of the Earl of Leicester, there was a conference at Lambeth. In Leicester’s presence, and that of Burghley and Walsingham, Whitgift and Sandys debated with Travers and the Lincolnshire minister Thomas Sparke over disputed passages in the Prayer Book. The inconclusive disputation was a victory for the Puritans if only because the archbishop had been forced to contend with them on equal terms. Rumours they had been vanquished were countered by a pamphlet (probably the work of Field), whose title – The Unlawful Practices of Prelates – deliberately evoked Tyndale’s famous polemic against Wolsey. The bishops, said Edward Lewkenor, MP for George Gifford’s Maldon, a client of Leicester, ‘were rather deformers than reformers’.
Some godly clergy now sought sweeping solutions. Their surrogate in Parliament was the physician Dr Peter Turner, son of the preacher William Turner. On 14 December, he presented the Commons with ‘a bill and book’. The book was the liturgy of Calvin’s Geneva, as used by Knox’s Marian congregation. The bill imposed its use, along with an explicitly presbyterian structure for the Church, henceforth to be governed by pastors and elders, with consistories in each congregation, and synods of ministers and laymen in every county.
This was too radical even for friends of further reform: Francis Knollys and others spoke against the measure, and it was not put to a vote. But Knollys and Mildmay backed a Commons measure in the form of a petition to the Lords against ‘disorders’ in episcopal government. It lambasted the gamut of Whitgift’s policies: subscription, the ex officio oath, vexing of honest ministers ‘for omitting small portions, or some ceremony prescribed in the Prayer Book’. At the same time, and without using the word, the petition demanded restoration of prophesyings (‘some common exercises and conferences’), and suggested dramatic dilutions of episcopal authority: bishops should only be able to ordain with assistance from six other ministers, and only for specified vacant benefices, where candidates had already proved an ability to preach. These were the presbyterian tenets of equality of orders, and congregational calling of ministers, in scarcely veiled form. Whitgift’s sniffy response was that the proposals undermined the rights of patrons, and ‘savoureth of popular elections’.
The archbishop need not have worried. At the beginning of March 1585, the Speaker returned from a meeting with Elizabeth, charged to admonish the House for ignoring her directive about religion, and to remind them that the Queen ‘knows, and thinks you know, that she is Supreme Governor of this Church’. If abuses existed, she would take them in hand, but it was
her resolute pleasure [that] she will receive no motion of alteration or change of any law whereby the religion or Church of England stands established at this day. … For as she found it at her first coming in, and so hath maintained it these twenty-seven years, she meant in like state, by God’s grace, to continue it and leave it behind her.
It was Elizabeth’s clearest statement to date of what still seemed barely comprehensible to wide swathes of pious opinion, clerical and lay: the Church of England was flawless as it was. Even after hearing it, the Commons proceeded to discuss, and pass, a bill proposing harsh sanctions against unworthy ministers. In the Lords, where the bill disappeared, it was ‘greatly inveighed against’ by Whitgift. Leicester, a diarist recorded, seemed ‘much to mislike the bishops’ order of dealing’.40
The parliamentary session closed at the end of March, without a single bill for religion being passed, just as Elizabeth intended. The sorry state of affairs provoked one Puritan, the former Genevan exile William Fuller, to send the Queen that summer an extraordinary ‘book’ of impassioned remonstrance. Fuller had once been Elizabeth’s servant, when she lived in the household of Catherine Parr – a connection granting him access to the court, and in his own mind at least, a licence to speak freely: he had already offered criticisms at a personal audience in 1580.
In 1585, Fuller wrote fired by a sense of impending crisis and disaster, ‘in this last and worst age of the world’. He declared frustrated disappointment with a sovereign who as a child enjoyed glowing reports ‘for religion and all virtue and good learning’. God placed her on the throne, not only ‘to maintain his Church and kingdom, but also to put down that monstrous and deceitful Antichrist’ – even though she was already proved unworthy in her sister’s reign, ‘by reason of your yielding to that idolatry’.
Elizabeth’s offence was compounded by her agreeing ‘to be crowned and anointed at a most monstrous and idolatrous mass’, and afterwards by preserving in her chapel ‘that foul idol, the cross’. Worse, she permitted, without condign punishment, ‘divers Antichristians of this kingdom to have and adore secretly … that abominable idol and false god of bread’, all the while making peace with ‘Antichristian neighbours’. Steps to advance God’s kingdom were ‘so little as it is most lamentable to consider’. Satan’s kingdom was currently poised for bloody assault upon England, ‘and then to all the true churches of God in Europe’. These dangers were directly attributable to ‘your Majesty’s proceedings, which were neither hot nor cold’. The jeer was a common Puritan take on the Elizabethan ‘middle way’: an allusion to the Book of Revelation, where God threatens to spit out of his mouth the Church of Laodicea, for being ‘lukewarm’.
All this, perhaps, was more than enough. But Fuller felt emboldened to comment on the Queen’s personal habits. God’s Commandments forbad swearing, and yet ‘your gracious Majesty in your anger hath used to swear, sometimes by that abominable idol, the Mass, and often and grievously by God, and by Christ, and by many parts of His glorified body, and by Saints, Faith, Troth, and other forbidden things’. Elizabeth was a Catholic when it came to profanity – a trait she shared with many of her nominally Protestant subjects.
Fuller learned the fate of his book from a contact at court. The Queen read it, the morning after receipt. Burghley came into the chamber, and she told him about it. The book was lying on a chair, and ‘as he went out he took it with him’. Elizabeth later asked a lady-in-waiting to get it back for her, but she dared not bother the Lord Treasurer.41
Burghley had more important things on his mind than the grievances of an old and uppity Puritan. He had seen to it that the 1585 Parliament did pass an Act for the Queen’s Safety, a legal colouring for the vigilantism of the Bond of Association. A special commission of privy councillors and nobles would sit in judgement on anyone caught conspiring against the Queen; intended beneficiaries would be barred from claims to the throne; and private subjects were empowered to ‘pursue to death’ the conspirators, and anyone knowing about or agreeing to their plans. No potential pretender was identified; she did not need to be.
Accompanying the measure was a severe Act against Jesuits and Seminarists, which mimicked Burghley’s Execution of Justice in arguing that such creatures came to England solely to withdraw subjects from their obedience, and to ‘stir up and move sedition, rebellion and open hostility’. Henceforth, any priest entering the country after ordination abroad was ipso facto guilty of treason; any layperson assisting or sheltering him, a felon.
As the bill passed through the Commons, various proposed amendments plumbed the depths of anti-Catholic sentiment: any exiles not returning by a specified date should be proclaimed traitors; penalties should apply to foreign as well as native-born priests. Most draconian was a suggestion ‘that whosoever should teach the Romish religion should be as a traitor’. This threatened to conflate entirely the categories of treason and heresy, and to undermine fatally the government’s strategy for driving a wedge between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Catholics. MPs were persuaded by the counter-argument the measure would help papists, allowing them to claim that ‘seeing we could not convince their doctrine by doctrine, we sought to quench it by making it treason’.
Only one MP spoke against the act in principle. In December 1584, William Parry, member for Queenborough in Kent, warned there was ‘nothing therein but blood … nothing but despair and terror to us all’. His intervention caused uproar, and demands he be committed to the Tower: Parry was forced to apologize, kneeling at the bar of the House.
Before the bill reached the statute book, Parry was dead: hanged and quartered in Westminster Palace Yard on 2 March 1585, the only elected serving member of any Elizabethan Parliament to be tried and executed for treason. Parry was an extreme example of a recognizable type: the double agent who lost a sure grasp of which side he was really on. On the run from debt, Parry spent the early 1580s associating with Catholic exiles overseas, and sending self-aggrandizing reports on them to Burghley and Walsingham. At the same time, he was formally reconciled to the Catholic Church, and after boasting of a desire to kill ‘the greatest subject in England’ (Leicester), it was put to him by Thomas Morgan, a wandering agent of Mary Stewart, that Elizabeth herself would make the better target.
Back in England at the end of 1583, Parry was able to secure an audience with Elizabeth, attempting, bizarrely, to persuade her of the reality of a plot against her. Reading Allen’s Modest Defence reawakened in Parry a desire to undertake the deed himself. He recruited a co-conspirator, Edmund Neville, whose arrest in February 1585 precipitated Parry’s own. At their 1583 interview, Elizabeth told Parry that ‘never a Catholic should be troubled for religion or supremacy, so long as they lived like good subjects’, a crisp summary of her philosophy of governance. But commenting on Parry’s ignominious end, the Puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbes declared ‘that all papists are traitors in their hearts, howsoever otherwise they bear the world in hand’.42
War
William Fuller’s vision, of the forces of Antichrist massing for an attack on England, was not the apocalyptic fantasy of a solitary zealot. It was the long-held conviction of councillors like Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham that the prospects of the Protestant religion in England, and the victories of the Catholic powers abroad, were entwined threads of a single fate.
In October 1584, in the wake of the assassination of William of Orange, the Privy Council had convened to discuss the situation of the Dutch rebels, and to address Burghley’s imperative question: ‘If her Majesty shall not take them into her defence, then what shall she do or provide for her own surety against the King of Spain’s malice and forces, which he shall offer against this realm, when he hath subdued Holland and Zealand?’
The case for action was strengthened at the end of the year, when Philip signed the Treaty of Joinville with the Guises and the militant Catholic League, formed in France to resist the unpalatably ‘politique’ Henry III. The catalyst was the death of Elizabeth’s suitor, the Duke of Anjou, and Henry’s recognition as his heir of the Huguenot Henry of Navarre. As Burghley had been predicting since the 1560s, the forces of Spanish and French Catholicism were converging, on a sworn mission to destroy Protestantism in both France and the Netherlands.
Elizabeth took time to be persuaded, but by August 1585 she was ready to sign the Treaty of Nonsuch, which pledged to the States General of the Netherlands an annual subsidy, and the despatch of an army of 6,400 foot and 1,000 horse. Command of the expedition was assigned to the Earl of Leicester, an appointment welcomed by godly Protestants who admired his opposition to Whitgift, and saw in the war in the Netherlands a straight contest of Christ with Antichrist. Without fanfare or formal declaration, England was at war with Spain. Overt hostilities commenced in September, with the sailing of a fleet under Francis Drake, to intercept treasure fleets and harass Spanish colonies in the West Indies.
Early in the new year, Drake attacked and plundered the settlements of Santo Domingo in Hispaniola, and Cartagena on the Colombian coast. After the English left, letters home to the King contained aggrieved accounts of how the ‘Lutherans’ treated the cities as ‘an enemy of their religion’, burning churches, monasteries, nunneries and hospitals. The dean and chapter of Santo Domingo reported their cathedral becoming an empty shell, ‘for its altars, retables [altarpieces], crucifixes, images, choir, screens, organs, bells, and all other objects usual in such churches, they broke up, overthrew, burned and destroyed’.43 Sailors who were still unborn at the time of the orderly iconoclasm in English parish churches could indulge in an orgy of destruction, confident they were doing God’s work. William Fuller must have regretted he was not there to see it.
Closer to home, war made the bloody question about papist responses to foreign invasion less than ever a hypothetical one. On 25 April 1586, two priests, Robert Anderton and William Marsden, were put to death on the Isle of Wight, where stormy weather had forced their ship into land. Two weeks later, a royal proclamation offered an extended justification for their execution. After initial arrest, the priests persuaded the Winchester Assize judges that ‘they would at all times adventure their lives in defence of her Majesty and her realms against the Pope or any foreign power’, and their lives were spared. But further questioning in London produced more dubious responses. Anderton said he could not truthfully answer as to what he would do in case of a papally sanctioned invasion, as ‘in the meantime he may possibly become a Protestant’ – the kind of insolently equivocal response that drove interrogators to distraction.
Campion’s martyrdom cast a long shadow: the government was acutely anxious to demonstrate it acted justly, and that priests were executed solely for treasonous intents – even though the recent act against Jesuits and seminarists declared the very fact of their priesthood to be sufficient evidence of treason. Another execution under that act, driven through by zealous local authorities, caused widespread unease. In March 1586, a York butcher’s wife, Margaret Clitherow, was indicted for sheltering missionary priests, and then pressed to death with weights after she refused to plead. The possibility she was pregnant – which Clitherow refused to confirm or deny – left a particularly bad odour.44
If disquiet attended the execution, on questionable legal grounds, of a mere butcher’s wife, what might be the reaction, at home and abroad, to the unjust slaying of a queen? In 1585, Mary had been transferred to the custody of Sir Amyas Paulet, a close ally of Walsingham and a grimly determined supporter of the international Calvinist cause. Mary considered him ‘one of the most zealous and pitiless men I have ever known’. The Queen of Scots’ letters, and even her private apartments, were regularly searched for evidence of involvement in conspiracy, but nothing sufficient was found.
In July 1586, Walsingham got the evidence he needed. Earlier that summer, another Catholic plot crystallized. Its central figure was the Derbyshire gentleman Anthony Babington, egged on by the priest John Ballard, who was in touch with Mendoza, now Spanish ambassador in Paris, and able to elicit promises of Guise and Spanish forces. Babington recruited to the cause a handful of young Catholic radicals, who swore to assassinate Elizabeth as a prelude to foreign invasion. One of the conspirators, Gilbert Gifford, was, like Anthony Munday, a shiftless wanderer, expelled from the English College in Rome in 1580 in murky circumstances. In 1586, he was already secretly in the pay of Walsingham.
Crucially, Gifford was employed to carry letters to and from Mary at Chartley in Staffordshire, and suggested to her a scheme (in fact, devised by Walsingham) whereby messages were placed in sealed packets inside the beer barrels brought in and out by a ‘trustworthy’ brewer. Mary’s entire correspondence could now be removed, deciphered and replaced by Walsingham’s agents. The government did not cook up the Babington Plot, but allowed it to simmer near to boiling point.
Babington informed Mary that ‘the dispatch of the usurper’ was to be undertaken by ‘six noble gentlemen, all my private friends’, and the letter she wrote in reply on 17 July was fatally incriminating:
The affair being thus prepared, and forces in readiness both without and within the realm, then shall it be time to set the six gentlemen to work taking order; upon the accomplishing of their design, I may be suddenly transported out of this place, and that all your forces in the same time be on the field to meet me in tarrying for the arrival of the foreign aid …
Mary had explicitly given her consent to foreign invasion and to the assassination of her cousin; she had signed her own death warrant.
The conspirators were dealt with first. Babington and his confederates were put on trial in mid-September, charged with seeking to murder the Queen, stir up sedition and ‘subvert the true Christian religion’. He and six others were executed on 20 September. They experienced the full horror of the penalties for treason: cut down while still alive, castrated and disembowelled. Another seven conspirators followed the next day, though these were allowed to hang until dead. The contemporary historian William Camden said this was because Elizabeth ‘detested the former cruelty’. In fact, she told Burghley, she wanted the deaths of her would-be murderers to serve ‘for more terror’; adverse reactions from the crowd may have prompted the (relatively) greater leniency.45
There was no question of such indignities in death for an anointed queen, but Protestant councillors were this time determined that Mary must die. The commission envisaged under the Act for the Queen’s Safety convened at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire on 12 October, and finished its proceedings three days later. Elizabeth demanded a delay in pronouncing sentence, and the guilty verdict was read out in the Star Chamber at Westminster on 25 October.
In the meantime, Parliament was recalled. The sole purpose was to lobby for the death of Mary – advice that Elizabeth, who stayed away from the opening ceremony, did not want to hear. In the first week, privy councillors queued up to recount Mary’s crimes and call for her blood, without distinction of more or less godliness among them. Christopher Hatton named Mary ‘the hope of all idolatry’, and concluded, Ne periat Israel, periat Absalom: ‘if Israel is not to perish, Absalom must perish’. This was a reference to the rebellious son of King David (2 Samuel: 17–18), slain by his commander, Joab. David mourned for Absalom, as everyone knew Elizabeth would mourn for her cousin. Loyal subjects would harden their hearts on her behalf.
Amidst a torrent of bitter and impassioned speeches, that of Job Throckmorton, MP for Warwick, stood out. Mary was the inversion of all female propriety, ‘the daughter of sedition, the mother of rebellion, the nurse of impiety, the handmaid of iniquity, the sister of unshamefastness’. Throckmorton catalogued crimes of Catholics from the time of the ‘horrible slaughter’ in Paris, and named the guilty men: ‘an Allen, a Campion, a Bristow, a Sander, a Gifford, and I know not who’. He forbore to mention, though it cannot have been far from his mind, that his own cousin bestowed the family name on a popish conspiracy to murder Elizabeth.
To Puritans like Throckmorton, the death of Mary involved more than the personal safety of the Queen. His speech ended on a controversial constitutional note. ‘Under the warrant of God’s law, what may not this House do?’ If anyone said Parliament was ‘not able to cut off ten such serpents’ heads as this, not able to reform religion, and establish succession: it is treason’.
Lords and Commons, in a joint petition sent to Elizabeth on 12 November, demanded death for the former Queen of Scots. At its core was the argument that Mary was seeking to ‘supplant the gospel’. This evil threatened to overtake not England and Scotland alone, but ‘all parts beyond the seas where the gospel of God is maintained … if defection should happen in these two most valiant kingdoms’. The fate of the entire European Reformation, the Queen must understand, now rested upon her resolve.
Nonetheless, Elizabeth prevaricated, replying that the petition pointed towards ‘a course contrary to her own disposition and nature’. The Queen’s hesitation was not simply tenderness or squeamishness. The proposal was for Elizabeth to put to death, for political and religious reasons, a kinswoman and fellow monarch: she balked at the implications.46
On 4 December 1586, Elizabeth agreed to public proclamation of the sentence against Mary, but she still refused to sign the death warrant. Indeed, she hoped to evade responsibility entirely, and rely on the Bond of Association. A letter was sent to Sir Amyas Paulet, suggesting he should simply do away with Mary as he was sworn to do. Mary’s gaoler indignantly refused: ‘God forbid that I should make so foul a shipwreck of conscience.’
Elizabeth signed the warrant on 1 February 1587, amidst rumours (fostered by Burghley himself) of a Spanish landing in Wales. Even then, she did not think she was committing herself to immediate action, but, with steely unanimity of purpose, the Privy Council hastily despatched the warrant to Fotheringhay before the Queen could change her mind.
Mary was beheaded, on a scaffold in the great hall of Fotheringhay Castle, on 8 February. She was denied the ministrations of a priest, but scrupulously acted the part of Catholic martyr, approaching the block with Agnus Dei around her neck, crucifix in her hand, rosary at her belt. The undergarments to which she was stripped proved to be crimson – the liturgical colour for commemoration of martyrs. Mary declined an invitation from the dean of Peterborough to renounce ‘the vanity of her religion’.
Elizabeth received the news the following day, and in her fury even considered imprisoning Burghley and Walsingham. In the end, William Davison, the hapless secretary to whom the warrant was entrusted, took the blame. He went to the Tower, and stayed there for the best part of two years.47
Reactions in Catholic Europe were, if anything, more stunned and aggrieved than at news of the executions of More and Fisher, half a century before. In Paris, pictures of the royal martyrdom were set up in the churchyard of St Severin, alongside tableaux depicting the hanging and quartering of Jesuits in England. The English ambassador, Sir Edward Stafford, complained to Walsingham that 5,000 people a day were coming to see the display, and that ‘English knave priests … point with a rod and show everything, affirm it to be true and aggravate it’.
The pictures were the work of the English priest Richard Verstegan, and published that year in his Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Theatre of Cruelty of the Heretics of Our Times) – a work of Catholic martyrology designed to out-Foxe Foxe, and to bring European opinion up to crusading temperature. In Rome, Sixtus V elevated William Allen to the status of cardinal, making him the unquestioned leader of all English Catholics, a national governor-in-waiting. In Madrid, Philip II accelerated preparations for the Enterprise of England, while Allen and Persons pored over genealogies to justify the King of Spain’s dynastic claim (through the House of Lancaster) to the English throne. Mary, before the end, had named Philip as her successor.48
In England, the immediate emotion in many quarters was one of relief; not crisis impending, but crisis resolved. No longer was a formidable Catholic claimant rattling at the door of Protestant dynastic hopes. In a Commons speech on 27 February, Job Throckmorton praised the ‘very worthy act that was lately done at Fotheringhay’. But he lampooned any tendency towards satisfied complacency: ‘What, shall we thereupon set up all our sails and sing peace upon Israel?’
Even while the storm clouds were gathering over Fotheringhay, Puritans stepped up their efforts to purge the Church of its impurities. They now had an instrument with which to accomplish it, a Book of Discipline, drafted either by Cartwright or Travers over the course of 1585–6, and sent to all the regional conferences: a copy was received before April 1587 at Dedham, where it elicited mixed views. The Book contained a detailed outline of ‘the synodical discipline’, a presbyterian structure of church government based on the model of Scotland and other European Churches. Public worship was to be conducted from the Genevan Prayer Book.
Privy councillors employed the 1586 Parliament as an echo chamber for their advice on Mary Queen of Scots. But the godly, as ever, saw Parliament as the highest court of ecclesiastical policy, a place to debate and settle momentous issues. They revived the orchestrated petitioning campaign of 1584: supplications for unfettered preaching and reform of the ministry now purported to come from thousands of ordinary Christians rather than gentlemen and justices of the peace. There were further county-based ‘surveys of the ministry’. Warwickshire’s was probably compiled by Job Throckmorton, and offered considerable evidence of clerical dead wood mouldering in the midland parishes: numerous incumbents who once were ‘popish priests’, and several suspected, very revealingly, of ‘the vice of good fellowship’.
Throckmorton was part of a clique of Puritan MPs determined to bring presbyterian reform to fruition. Others included Anthony Cope, Edward Lewkenor and Peter Wentworth. Cope reintroduced a new ‘bill and book’ to the Commons. The bill’s lengthy preamble contained a potted history of the Reformation to date, praising Henry, Edward and Elizabeth for making a good start, but noting the ‘imperfections, corruptions and repugnancies with the Word of God, yet continued in the order and discipline of this Church’. Throckmorton, already in trouble for urging the Queen to accept an offer of sovereignty from the States General of the Netherlands, spoke passionately in the bill’s favour. He also attacked the propensity to caricature proponents of ‘bettering and reformation’:
To bewail the distresses of God’s children, it is Puritanism. To find fault with corruptions of our Church, it is Puritanism. To reprove a man for swearing, it is Puritanism. To banish an adulterer out of the house, it is Puritanism. To make humble suit to her Majesty and the High Court of Parliament for a learned ministry, it is Puritanism.
Throckmorton resented the lazy application of a demeaning label. But he had spotted something that was indeed stirring in the upper reaches of the Elizabethan establishment. The disciplinary crackdown on godly nonconformity was starting to evolve and mutate into a full-blooded ideology of anti-Puritanism.
It was short shrift for the bill and book, and a death-knell for Puritan attempts to use Parliament to change the face of the English Church. On 27 February, amidst scenes of confusion, the Speaker tried to prevent the bill being read in the Commons, and on the following day a message arrived from the Queen ordering members to desist. Attempts to evade the prohibition put Cope, Wentworth and three other members in the Tower, charged with holding extra-parliamentary conferences. They were soon joined there by Throckmorton, whose unflattering references to ‘the young imp of Scotland’ (James VI) offended Elizabeth and broke the unwritten rule against any discussion of the succession.49
On 4 March, a mixed trio of government spokesmen took turns to justify rejection of the bill and book: Sir Thomas Egerton, solicitor general, as voice of the establishment; Chancellor of the Exchequer Mildmay, the sorrowful face of moderate Puritanism; and Whitgift’s ally Christopher Hatton, shortly to be appointed Lord Chancellor. Hatton’s speech was the most interesting, not least because it was probably written for him by his chaplain, Richard Bancroft, nemesis of the Bury separatists.
Hatton’s defence of the ecclesiastical status quo was a smooth concoction of the principled and pragmatic. The reformation begun in King Edward’s time was, he said, brought by Elizabeth ‘to such perfection, as the profession of this reformed religion in England hath ever since been the chief key and stay thereof in all the reformed churches of Christendom’. By altering forms of service people had now used over decades, thinking them good and godly, ‘you shall drive them by thousands either to become atheists or papists’.
Yet the real weight of Hatton’s punch lay in his suggestion that presbyterians, and by extension godly Puritan internationalists, were intrinsically subversive individuals, inevitable opponents of royal supremacy. Who did not know of the ‘outrageous assertions’ in books of ‘your chief presbytery men’? Here, Hatton made mention of works on resistance theory by three leading Calvinist intellectuals – the Genevan leader Theodore Beza, the Scotsman, George Buchanan and the Huguenot, Philippe de Mornay. The implication was that these luminaries were embarrassing liabilities, rather than allies to feel proud of.
Monarchical jurisdiction was excised from the system being proposed: appeals passed only from presbytery (or classis) to provincial and then national synods – just as in the past all disputed ecclesiastical cases went ultimately to Rome. And Hatton inferred that Elizabeth herself might be subject to a presbytery’s censure or excommunication (a point on which the bill and book had understandably not touched). ‘I pray you, wherein differ these men in cause from the papists? The Pope denieth the supremacy of princes; so do in effect these.’
It was a significant shift of emphasis. For decades, Protestant writers located truth’s centre of gravity through reference to the counter-balancing errors of papists and anabaptists. This revised theological triangulation, measuring equidistance from papalist Catholicism and Calvinist presbyterianism, was something different, marking the advent of a new, more dogmatic style of Protestant conformity.
A straw in the wind was the outcome of a pulpit battle of 1586. The location was Temple Church in London, the spiritual home of lawyers from the nearby Inns of Court. The Master, appointed in 1585 on the recommendation of Aylmer, was an Oxford scholar, Richard Hooker. The benchers (senior members of the Inns) thereupon hired Cartwright’s ally Walter Travers as lecturer. Hooker politely declined Travers’s invitation to submit his own appointment to congregational approval.
Over several months, Travers’s afternoon lectures jostled against Hooker’s morning sermons. His principal objection to Hooker’s teaching was the latter’s claim that the medieval Church had maimed, rather than completely overthrown, the doctrine of justification by faith. It followed that pre-Reformation Catholics, and presumably also contemporary ones, could be saved. Such sympathetic words about papists, Travers indignantly complained, had not been heard in the realm since the days of Queen Mary. Whitgift himself had reservations about aspects of Hooker’s theology, but in March 1586 it was Travers whom he banned from preaching. A month earlier, Whitgift joined the Privy Council, its first episcopal member since Heath.50
The status of bishops themselves was another sign of changing times. Episcopal governance of the Church was an obvious continuation of medieval Catholic practice, and was generally defended, even by conservative Protestants like Whitgift, on utilitarian rather than doctrinal grounds. In 1587, however, the dean of Salisbury, John Bridges, published a weighty (1,400-page!) Defence of the Government Established in the Church of England. This attack on the Puritans suggested that episcopacy, rather than presbyterianism, was to be found in the pages of the New Testament. The office of bishop was of direct apostolic institution, and episcopacy was iure divino – rooted in, if not necessarily required by, divine law. If this was so, it implied a more distant relationship with European Churches (Zürich, Geneva) that Puritans typically saw as the ‘best reformed’, but which conspicuously rejected this divinely ordained instrument of governance.51
Episcopal authority received a boost with the defection of one of its fiercest critics. After leaving Middelburg for Scotland, and wandering around for a while in Europe, Robert Browne returned to England. He was soon arrested, and in October 1585 subscribed a document recognizing the authority of Archbishop Whitgift, and the Church of England as a true Church of God. Former brethren bewailed the betrayal, while others were suspicious of its sincerity. The Puritan layman Stephen Bredwell attacked Browne in a tract alleging that he ‘still seduceth, and carrieth away from the ordinary assemblies as many as he can’.
‘Brownism’ survived the surrender of its eponymous leader. On 8 October 1587, more than twenty separatists, men and women, were arrested at a conventicle in the London parish of St Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe. One of them, Margaret Maynard, confessed she had not been to church in ten years, and ‘sayeth that there is no Church in England’. A leading light of the group was John Greenwood, formerly a curate in Norfolk, who ‘disgraded myself through God’s mercy by repentance’. A close associate was Henry Barrow, son of a Norfolk gentleman, who was himself arrested on going to visit the prisoners in the Clink.
Barrow wrote a detailed account of his appearances before Whitgift and High Commission, for whom he refused to swear the ex officio oath. A first meeting with the archbishop set the tone for discussion. Whitgift demanded to know, ‘Of what occupation are you?’ Barrow: ‘A Christian.’ Whitgift: ‘So are we all.’ Barrow: ‘I deny that.’
Barrow and Greenwood produced from prison a steady stream of letters, tracts and petitions, smuggled out by sympathizers and printed overseas. The separatists refused to recognize any spiritual kinship with people outside their group, but they participated willingly enough in a common enterprise of Reformation Christians: the attempt to engage, shape and change opinion through the long-distance medium of print.52
Armada and Marprelate
In December 1587, the Earl of Leicester returned ingloriously from the Netherlands, having fallen out with his Dutch allies and achieved little of military consequence. At the Inner Temple in London, there was talk of the war, and much sympathy for ‘her Highness’ poor afflicted neighbours in Flanders’. But two of the butlers there, Thomas Martin and Edward Mellers, reportedly rejoiced at news of English setbacks. Martin ‘useth publicly in all his public speeches to extol the King of Spain … terming him a wise and valiant prince’.
Late in the previous year, in the Devon parish of Morchard Episcopi, the gentleman John Easton drank the health of King Philip at a neighbour’s house, while asking each man present ‘what part he would take if there were any war or stir?’ Easton himself boasted his willingness to be ‘the foremost horseman’. He seemed to mean in the Queen’s army, not the King of Spain’s, but his companions were not so sure, and reported him to the magistrate.53
The loyalties of English Catholics were more than ever under scrutiny as Philip finalized his preparations for an Armada against England. In the Netherlands, they had already proved fickle. Early in 1587, Sir William Stanley, commander of a regiment in Leicester’s army, defected to the Duke of Parma and handed to the Spanish the strategically important town of Deventer. William Allen published a justification of Stanley’s treason, as the actions of an informed Catholic conscience in the circumstances of an unjust war. In 1588, in his Admonition to the Nobility and People of England, Cardinal Allen dropped all pretence and called openly on Catholics to overthrow Elizabeth – no longer the unwitting victim of evil counsel, but a heretical and sacrilegious tyrant, ‘an incestuous bastard, begotten and born in sin of an infamous courtesan’. Elizabeth herself had shamefully ‘abused her body’, with the Earl of Leicester ‘and divers others’. Copies of the tract, printed but not published, sat ready to be shipped to England, once Spanish forces had established their bridgehead, propaganda fuel for the expected Catholic rebellion.
It is hard to say whether such a rebellion would have taken place. There is no evidence of preparation for it, and much evidence of lay Catholics loudly protesting their willingness to take up arms for the Queen. But there is equally no doubting the genuine fears among Protestants. At the height of the scare, Richard Rogers confided to his diary, ‘We are now in peril of goods, liberty, life by our enemies the Spaniards, and at home papists in multitudes ready to come on us unawares.’ Catholic houses were searched for weapons in the summer of 1588, and Lords Lieutenant ordered by the Privy Council to commit to prison ‘the most obstinate and noted’ recusants in their counties.54
The great Armada sailed from Lisbon in May 1588: 130 ships, aiming to collect a Spanish army in the Netherlands and reclaim England for the faith. The Armada’s progress was delayed by unseasonable weather, but in late July and early August it met the English fleet in the Channel in a succession of sharp engagements. A combination of superior naval tactics and luck secured victory for the English, while Dutch allies kept Parma’s troops bottled up in the Flemish ports. Powerful south-westerly winds bustled the Spanish out of the Channel in the second week of August, and refused thereafter to let up. Through September, the defeated Armada limped counter-clockwise around the British coast: only half the departing vessels returned to Spanish ports.
A military and patriotic triumph was portrayed, inevitably, as a religious one too. Sermons of thanksgiving began at Paul’s Cross as soon as the fact of victory became clear. Dean Nowell preached on 20 August, and at the sermon on 8 September eleven banners from Spanish ships were on display; one, bearing an image of the Virgin with Christ in her arms, was waved triumphantly over the pulpit. A day of national celebration was decreed for 19 November, an occasion for bonfires and bells in provincial town and rural parish alike. Elizabeth herself attended a thanksgiving service at St Paul’s on 24 November.
Pamphleteers hailed the evidence of a protective divine providence, and a narrow escape from spiritual as well as foreign tyranny. The Suffolk minister Thomas Rogers’s hastily published Historical Dialogue touching Antichrist and Popery cautioned that Catholics, no matter how loudly they protested their loyalty, were not to be trusted, ‘papists being the solicitors, papists the prosecutors of this war, papists the soldiers’.
That was pretty much an official line. A prayer of thanksgiving, appointed to be read in churches, declared how the Spaniards came with the intention ‘wholly to suppress thy Holy Word, and blessed Gospel of thy dear son, Our Saviour, Jesus Christ, which they, being drowned in idolatries and superstitions, do hate most deadly’. Privy councillors did their part to reinforce the message: a published letter purporting to be from an English Jesuit to the former ambassador Mendoza, and confessing how the Armada’s defeat ‘by no reason could proceed of man, or of any earthly power, but only of God’, was in fact the work of Burghley.
In February 1589, in the opening speech of a new Parliament, Lord Chancellor Hatton recited a litany of historical papal perfidy, from supposed plots against King John, via Clement VII and Paul III’s ‘fury against her Majesty’s father’, to the ‘raging bull’ of Pius V, the inspiration for the traitors Story, Harding, Felton, Sander, Campion, Somerville, Throckmorton and Babington – not to mention ‘that shameless atheist and bloody Cardinal, Allen’. It was he who made it ‘a point of the Romish religion’ for all priests and Catholics to solicit the aid of the Pope and the Spaniard. Constant vigilance was required against ‘those vile wretches, those bloody priests and false traitors, here in our bosoms, but beyond the seas especially’.55
Priests in England paid a high price for the government’s fear of domestic rebellion, and for the spiritual militarism of Cardinal Allen. The sailing of the Armada launched a wave of arrests and, from July 1588 onwards, a spate of killings: twenty-one priests and ten laypeople were put to death in the second half of the year, fourteen executions taking place in just three days, 28–30 August, when the military outcome was already clear. One of the victims was female. Margaret Ward, a gentlewoman’s attendant, smuggled into prison a rope, which enabled the priest William Watson to escape from Bridewell. Ward was flogged prior to her trial, and in her cell was hung cruelly from her wrists. She refused to beg for Elizabeth’s pardon, saying she was sure the Queen, if she had the compassion of a woman, would have done the same thing.
Ward featured in a broadside ballad, one of thirty or so published in connection with the defeat of the Armada. Sold to be sung ‘to the tune of Greensleeves’, it rattled rhythmically through the fourteen false traitors slain in late August, saying of Ward: ‘This wicked woman / void of grace, / would not repent in any case, / But desp’rately even at that place, / she died as a foe to England.’56
Texts such as this suggest a growing identification of Protestantism and patriotism, which, with official encouragement, the Armada crisis did much to cement. In November 1588, the churchwardens of St Peter’s church, St Albans, dutifully paid bellmen ‘to ring for our good success against the Spaniards’, after a court apparitor delivered a note requiring them to do it. Like countless other parishes, St Peter’s spent a few shillings every year to ring the church bells on 17 November, to commemorate the accession of Elizabeth. But only from 1590 onwards did the wardens typically pay the ringers ‘on coronation day’. Prior to that, the transaction was frequently recorded as taking place on St Hugh’s Day, the designation of 17 November under the old Catholic calendar. It was a small but significant gesture of forgetting and remembering. Across the country, the late 1580s also witnessed the final instances of episcopal complaints about ringing of parish bells taking place a couple of weeks earlier – on the abolished Catholic feast day of All Souls.57 Amidst the diffusion of a widespread popular anti-popery, Protestant England was finding its cultural bearings.
It was not, however, the kind of Protestant England the most resolute Protestants wanted. The Armada year was a year of unprecedented Puritan activism, which took the campaign for further reformation out of Parliament, out of the clerical conferences, and into the fractious forum of popular opinion. John Field, the acknowledged leader of the presbyterian movement, died in March 1588. September saw the death of the Puritans’ most powerful political protector, the Earl of Leicester (Mildmay died in the spring of the following year, and Walsingham early the year after). These departures brought both fragmentation and increased radicalization in Puritan patterns of behaviour, and produced an unforgiving official response.
The trail is laid out with printers’ ink. In April 1588, under instructions from Whitgift, officials of the Stationers’ Company, the body regulating the book trade, raided the London premises of Robert Waldegrave, and confiscated his press. Waldegrave was a veteran printer of Puritan books; he had produced works by Field and John Udall, as well as editions of Calvin and Knox. His current offence was to start printing a fiercely anti-episcopal assessment of The State of the Church of England, formerly ascribed by historians to Udall, but quite probably the work of Job Throckmorton.
Waldegrave re-equipped, and moved his operations underground. Through Udall he had been introduced to the minister John Penry, already in trouble with High Commission for aggressive lobbying of Parliament about deplorably superstitious conditions in his native Wales. In May or June 1588 Waldegrave and Penry set up a secret press in East Moseley, Surrey, in the house of Elizabeth Crane, the widow of a prominent Puritan gentleman. That summer, as naval battles raged in the Channel, Waldegrave anonymously printed presbyterian works by Penry and Udall. In October, he produced, in around a thousand copies, a short work called An Epistle to the Terrible Priests of the Convocation House. Within weeks, a determined hunt for its author was under way.
That author identified himself as ‘Martin Marprelate’. Martin was a nod to Luther, iconic father of the Reformation; Marprelate summed up an attitude towards the senior clergy who were its supposed guardians. Martin’s real identity remains uncertain, though stylistic similarities to his known works make Job Throckmorton the likeliest candidate for principal authorship of the Epistle, and of six subsequent tracts appearing from Waldegrave’s press up to September 1589, as it moved across country from one safe-house to another to avoid detection. Others – Penry, Udall, Elizabeth Crane’s second husband, George Carleton – may have chipped in. ‘Marprelate’ was always a project and a team, rather than any single individual.
The aim of the project was to step down from the high ground of scriptural and theological argument, and to pulverize the bishops with the base weapons of sarcasm, satire and cutting comedy. There were hints of this strategy in earlier Puritan works by Field, Gilby and others. But Marprelate took it much further, pitching directly for a populist, plebeian readership, and representing himself as the voice of an irrepressible Everyman: if he was to be hanged, ‘there will be twenty Martins spring in my place’. Despite relatively small print-runs, the pamphlets passed widely from hand to hand, spread by pedlars and small shopkeepers. A principal distributor was the cobbler Humphrey Newman, nicknamed ‘Brown-bread’. The participation of such people in discussions of church governance seemed to herald a dissolution of all social order. The dean of Exeter, Matthew Sutcliffe, caricatured presbyterian discipline as a world where people like himself must submit themselves to the judgement of ‘Hick, Hob and Clim of Clough; yea, and Margaret and Joan too’. ‘As they shoot at bishops now,’ warned the Earl of Hertford, ‘so they will do at the nobility also, if they be suffered.’58
Yet Martin was popular because he was funny, with knowing winks towards more learned readers, as well as belly laughs for the multitude. The original target was John Bridges’s ponderous Defence of the Government (‘a very portable book: a horse may carry it if he be not too weak’), which had unwisely challenged Puritans to make public, if they could, any allegations of misconduct against bishops. Martin cheerfully obliged, itemizing the financial misdeeds, habitual swearing and alleged addiction to bowling of Aylmer (‘Dumb John of London’), and mocking the rest of the bishops, individually and collectively, as a pack of ‘petty popes and petty antichrists’.
The approach was not entirely novel: it evoked how some evangelicals of an earlier generation spoke about Wolsey or Gardiner. And it amounted to a declaration by at least a section of English Puritans that they had cut all ties with the ecclesiastical establishment, regarding themselves now as travellers on a different road to Reformation, not the faster lane of a common one. In tone, and in some aspects of substance, it had more in common with the separatism of Barrow than the godliness of Grindal.
Retaliation was slow but inexorable. Whitgift remarked to Burghley in August 1589 that while, for his own part, ‘I make small account of their malice’, stern punishment was needed – in respect of the archbishop’s ‘calling and profession’, and of the scandal caused among people ‘apt to believe anything’. Disciplinary proceedings, he suggested, should be instigated by Burghley, rather than the bishops, so everyone might know ‘we are not cast off as abjects of the world’, or for ‘doing of our duties in suppressing sects and wicked opinions’.
Whitgift wrote after agents of the Earl of Derby had tracked Waldegrave’s press to a house just outside Manchester. Three printers taken in the raid were sent to London, the Privy Council instructing interrogators that ‘if they cannot bring them to confess the truth, then to put them all to the torture’. A final tract, The Protestation of Martin Marprelate, was defiantly printed in September on a hastily reassembled press, the type-setting perhaps done by Penry and Throckmorton themselves. Waldegrave and Penry fled to Scotland, but most of the other Marprelaters were eventually taken and questioned. Throckmorton, protected to some extent by his gentleman status, brazenly denied involvement – ‘I am not Martin; I knew not Martin.’ He was released following an inconclusive trial.
The affair provided an excuse for Whitgift and High Commission to go after the presbyterian ministers. In the midland counties of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire, studies were searched and documents seized: the archbishop learned a great deal about the clandestine activities of ministerial conferences over the preceding few years. Nine leading preachers were put on trial, first in High Commission and then in Star Chamber. They included Thomas Cartwright, despite his disavowals of sympathy for Marprelate. Burghley did what he could to protect Cartwright, but in the face of the Queen’s expressed displeasure, that was little enough. The ministers were stripped of their offices and orders, and banned from holding positions in the Church.59
That was as far as Puritan martyrdoms went, though Penry was to be tried and hanged for sedition in May 1593, after returning from Scotland and joining a separatist congregation in London (Barrow and Greenwood suffered the same fate a few weeks earlier). There was no need for a holocaust of presbyterians in 1589–90: their organization had been hollowed out and broken.
More importantly, presbyterianism was discredited, or at least substantial efforts were made to discredit it. At the heart of the campaign was Hatton’s chaplain, Richard Bancroft. On 9 February 1589, just after the opening of Parliament and three days before the issuing of a proclamation against the Marprelate Tracts, Bancroft preached a ferocious anti-Puritan sermon at Paul’s Cross. Robert Beale was shocked at its vehemence. It seemed to him that Bancroft believed ‘all such persons as have desired a perfect reformation of sundry abuses remaining in this Church’ were ‘in a yoke with papists, anabaptists and rebels’. The gist of Bancroft’s indictment was that Puritans were not troublesome spirits working within the Church, but sinister schismatics assailing it from without. For good measure, he affirmed the apostolic origins of episcopacy, bringing that controversial opinion to a wider audience than Bridges’s weighty tome had managed to reach.
It was Bancroft, too, who suggested to Whitgift the tactic of having Marprelate and his fellows ‘answered after their own vein’. Archiepiscopal patronage lay behind a burst of activity from a knot of London writers – Robert Greene, John Lyly, Thomas Nashe – who in 1589 produced a rash of popular pamphlets, mocking Puritans as seditious holy hypocrites.
Not everyone thought this a good idea. Francis Bacon, son of the former Lord Keeper, and a young man just entering on government service, wrote in about 1590 a memorandum ‘touching the controversies of the Church of England’. He considered it time for an end to ‘this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage’. In fact, they were literally being handled on the stage, in a brace of anti-Puritan plays helping to establish comic templates soon to be developed by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The Privy Council shared Bacon’s anxiety, and in November 1589 wrote to Whitgift instructing him to establish procedures for the vetting of comedies and tragedies. Actors must not ‘handle in their plays certain matters of divinity and of state, unfit to be suffered’.60 It was the recurrent, self-deluded fallacy of Tudor government authorities to believe that opinions and prejudices, once conjured into being by controversy and conflict, could be simply ordered back into oblivion. The Marprelate affair gave voice to a vein of undeferential popular Puritanism, and at the same time licensed the open expression of a belligerent popular anti-Puritanism; neither would thereafter go quietly away, and a half century later, they would go to war with each other.
Strange Contrariety of Humours
The late 1580s did not herald the end of endeavours to reform the worship, habits and thoughts of the people of England. But more than one grandiose project of Reformation peaked and ebbed in the period around 1587–9. Never again would such an opportunity present itself to restore England to the fraternity of Catholic nations, its traditional faith remade and renewed, under the tutelage of Jesuits and other educated priests, and inspired by the universalism of a resurgent Rome. In the coming years, doubts within the Catholic community about the wisdom of the strategies pursued by Robert Persons and Cardinal Allen would be ever more vocally expressed, and internal divisions would widen – about organization, the necessity of recusancy, and relations with the English state.
Simultaneously, the years around 1590 produced a climacteric of disappointment for the decades-long campaign to encourage the Protestant Church of England to become the best version of itself. The increasingly evident failure of bishops to make the case for continuing reformation pushed Puritanism into becoming a political movement – a movement that first broke against the crown’s determination not to allow Parliament to be used as a forum for the reform of religion, and then suffered the consequences of choosing to work and organize beyond it. Puritanism’s cultural potential as a force for the transformation of English society was barely yet tapped. As a political force it would eventually return with a variety of vengeances. But for the moment, at least, it was cowed, defeated and divided.
Yet the generals of the ascendant disciplinarian and conformist forces that seemingly triumphed over Puritanism in 1589–90 should have realized the shakiness of the ground on which they stood. Despite the – never entirely dependable – backing of the crown, the programme of Whitgift and his allies rested on a narrow base of support, distrusted and disliked by many of the lay elites, on the Council and in the counties. It commanded the loyalty, theological and otherwise, of only an uncertain percentage of the English clergy. Decades’ worth of discussion, division and debate made its vision of a total religious uniformity – of a collective obedience to the rules, precisely because they were the rules – no more than a fantasy and a delusion.
These were not the only proposals mooted at this time as to how English Christians should live in relation to each other. In the early weeks of 1587, an important and much anticipated book appeared in the shops of London booksellers. It was a revised edition of the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed. In fact the work of a team of authors, ‘Holinshed’ was an exhaustive compilation of histories of England, Scotland and Ireland, brought up to date with accounts of the events of recent years.
One of those noteworthy events was the 1571 battle of Lepanto, where a coalition of papal and Venetian naval forces routed the Turkish fleet, and halted, for a while at least, the Ottoman advance in the Mediterranean – an event marked at the time in London with prayers of thanksgiving and festive bonfires (see p. 502). The account of the battle in ‘Holinshed’ finishes with a remarkable postscript:
[S]uch is the malice of the time, that the Christians have more pleasure to draw their weapons one against another, than against that common enemy of us all, who regardeth neither Protestant nor Catholic … It were therefore to be wished … that Princes would permit their subjects to live in liberty of conscience concerning matters of faith, and that subjects again would be ready in dutiful wise to obey their Princes in matters of civil government, so that, compounding their controversies among themselves, with tolerable conditions, they might employ their forces against the common enemy, to the benefit of the whole Christian world, which, the more is the pity, they have so long exercised one against another …
It was the writer’s considered opinion that ‘matters in variance about religion’ should be settled by the word rather than by the sword, ‘an instrument full unfit for that purpose’.
Almost certainly, the author of this arresting passage was the antiquarian John Stow. Earlier in the reign, Stow showed distinct leanings towards Catholicism (see p. 481), and perhaps he still felt their pull. He had become, however, a conforming member of the Church of England, rather than a conscientious dissident from it. In various published writings, Stow waxed nostalgic for the culture of the pre-Reformation past, a time of spiritual fellowship and social harmony. But here he recognized that such days were irrevocably gone, and that plurality of religion was an established social fact. There was level-headed pragmatism, as well as lofty idealism, in his suggestion that loyalty to the state be recast as a civil matter, to allow religion to be argued over without violence or coercion, in a social and private sphere.
An idealist, but also a realist, Stow recognized his propositions were ‘rather to be wished than hoped for, by any apparent likelihood, considering the strange contrariety of humours now reigning among men’. Perhaps he would not have been overly surprised, had he learned later that year of the approach Elizabeth was secretly making to the Ottoman Sultan Murad III, asking for military aid against Philip of Spain and the ‘idolatrous princes’ supporting him.
Not only did Stow’s proposal not get off the ground, it was roundly criticized in the very text promoting it. The general editor of the second edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles was Abraham Fleming, a fervent Protestant, shortly to be ordained as a minister. His account of the deaths of the Babington conspirators (‘venomous vipers … their tigers’ hearts burned in the fire’) was so vehement that the Privy Council demanded it be toned down prior to publication. Stow’s plea for English people to be allowed to pursue their religion in peace prompted Fleming to add in the margin a sharp corrective note: ‘good counsel, if that faith be the faith of Christ and his true Church’.61
Fleming’s editorial intervention begged the elemental questions with which the whole spectacle described in this book began and ended: what actually was the true Church, and what did the faith of Christ really look like? To virtually all the people making use of the word, ‘Reformation’ suggested a lineal process of betterment and change – of agent acting progressively upon object to produce one perfected, or at least improved, bastion of faith. The experience of the English Reformation, for those who lived through it, could scarcely have been less like that. Its meanings and directions were at every stage bitterly disputed. England’s sixteenth-century wars of religion were usually metaphorical, but sometimes shockingly bloody. They were literary as well as theological, cultural as much as political, pitting papist against Protestant, Protestant against Puritan, in a profoundly perplexing contest, where the assertions of one party often confirmed the opposing convictions of the other, and where even catastrophic defeats could be chalked up as glorious martyrs’ victories.
The Reformation changed what it meant to be a Christian in England, affecting not just what people believed but how they believed it. At the same time it planted new, volatile and hazardous conditions deep into the furrows of English social, community and political life. John Stow’s proposal for coming to terms with pluralism by putting aside coercion, and for offering liberty of conscience in return for lawful obedience in matters of ‘civil government’, in the end offered the only viable solution for learning to live with the challenge of these permanently changed circumstances. Yet centuries would have to pass before everyone finally admitted that he had been right.