Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540-1688

This collection of essays by historians and literary scholars treats English history and culture from the Henrician Reformation to the Glorious Revolution as a single coherent period in which religion is a dominant element in political and cultural life. It seeks to explore the centrality of the religion-politics nexus for this whole period through examining a wide variety of literary and non-literary texts, from plays and poems to devotional treatises, political treatises and histories. It breaks down normal distinctions between Tudor and Stuart, pre- and post-Restoration periods to reveal a coherent (though not all serene and untroubled) post-Reformation culture struggling with major issues of belief, practice, and authority.

RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND POLITICS IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND, 1540-1688

RELIGION, LITERATURE, AND POLITICS IN POST-REFORMATION ENGLAND, 1540-1688 EDITED BY

DONNA B. HAMILTON University of Maryland, College Park

RICHARD STRIER University of Chicago

I CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge GB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1996 First published 1996 A catalogue record for this book is availablefrom the British Library Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Religion, literature, and politics in post-Reformation England, 1540-1688 / edited by Donna B. Hamilton, Richard Strier p. cm. ISBN o 521 47456 6 (hardback) 1. England-Church history-i6th century. 2. England-Church history-i7th century. 3. English literature-Early modern, 1500-1700. 4. Great Britain-History-Tudors, 1485-1603. 5. Great Britain-History-Stuarts, 1603-1714. I. Hamilton, Donna B. II. Strier, Richard. BR756.R45 1996 942.O5-dc2o 95-7950 GIP ISBN o 521 47456 6 hardback Transferred to digital printing 2003

Contents

List of contributors

page ix

Introduction Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier 1.

2.

3.

Sir John Oldcastle as symbol of Reformation historiography Annabel Patterson

i

6

The "sacred hunger of ambitious minds": Spenser's savage religion Andrew Hadjield

27

Subversive fathers and suffering subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity Debora K. Shuger

46

4.

Kneeling and the body politic Lori Anne Ferrell

70

5.

Donne and the politics of devotion Richard Strier

93

6.

Catholic, Anglican or puritan? Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England David L. Smith

7.

Crucifixion or apocalypse? Refiguring the Eikon Basilike Laura Blair McKnight

8.

Marvell, sacrilege, and Protestant historiography: contextualizing "Upon Appleton House" Gary D. Hamilton vii

115 138

161

Vlll

9.

10.

CONTENTS

Entering The Temple: women, reading, and devotion in seventeenth-century England Helen Wilcox

187

Contextualizing Dryden's Absalom: William Lawrence, the laws of marriage, and the case for King Monmouth Mark Goldie

208

11.

Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679-1682 Gary S. De Krey

231

12.

ShadwelPs dramatic trimming

253

Steven Pincus

Index

275

Contributors

Gary S. De Krey is professor of History at St. Olaf College. He is the author of A Fractured Society: the Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1yIJ (1985) and of several articles about Restoration politics and religion. Lori Anne Ferrell is Associate Professor of History of Christianity at the School of Theology at Claremont and at the Claremont Graduate School. She is co-editor of Society and Religion in Early Modern England and is completing a book on religio-political rhetoric at the Jacobean court. Mark Goldie is Lecturer in History at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Churchill College. He is author of many essays on politics, religion and ideas in later Stuart England and is co-editor of The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1750. Andrew Hadfield is Lecturer in History at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance (1994) and co-editor of Representing Ireland, 1534-1660 (1993) and Strangers to that Land: British Representations of Ireland from the Reformation to the Famine (1994). He is writing a book on Spenser and Ireland. D o n n a B. H a m i l t o n is Professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is the author of Virgil and "The Tempest: the Politics of Imitation (1990), Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (1992) and editing The Puritan for the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of Middleton. She is working on the English theatre, 1584-1594.

Gary D. Hamilton is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of several essays on ix

X

CONTRIBUTORS

political and theological dimensions of Milton's works. He is working on the rhetorics of religious conformity in relation to Milton after the Restoration. Laura Blair McKnight is a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities and a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Chicago. She is completing a dissertation entitled "Unsteady Thrones: The Rhetoric of Revolution in 1649, 1688 and 1776." Annabel Patterson is Karl Young Professor of English at Yale University. Her books include Censorship and Interpretation (1984), Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989), Reading Between the Lines (1992) and Reading Holinshed's Chronicles (1994). Steven Pincus is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Protestantism and Patriotism: The AngloDutch Wars and the Making of English National Identity (1995). He is at work on a book entitled "The Glorious Revolution and the Origins of Liberalism." Debora K. Shuger is Professor of English at UCLA. She is the author of Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the Renaissance (1988), Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (1990) and The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship Subjectivity, and Sacrifice (*994)D a v i d L. S m i t h is Fellow, Director of Studies in History, and Admissions Tutor of Selwyn College, Cambridge. He is the author of Oliver Cromwell: Politics and Religion in the English Revolution, 1640-1658 (1991), Louis XIV'(1992), Constitutional Royalism and the Searchfor Settlement, c. i64O~4g (1994) and co-editor of The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, ijy6~i64g (1995). Richard Strier is Professor of English and Humanities at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (1983), Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (1995), and the co-editor of The Historical Renaissance: New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (1988) and The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, (1995)-

Contributors

xi

Helen Wilcox is Professor and Head of the Department of English at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. She is editor and annotator of The Poetry of George Herbert (forthcoming), co-editor of Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by ijth-Century Englishwomen (1989), and editor of Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700 (1996). She is working

on the seventeenth-century devotional lyric and editing All's Well that Ends Well for Arden 3.

Introduction Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier

In Blake's Jerusalem, the "Great Voice of the Atlantic" terrifies Albion with a series of questions, including "What is a Church? and what / Is a Theater? are they Two & not One? can they Exist Separate? / Are not Religion and Politics the Same?"1 Albion is not up to dealing with these questions, but students of English history and literature must be. The relationship between the church and the theater in post-Reformation England is indeed a vexed one, and Blake is being deliberately provocative in equating them, but the equation between religion and politics is less paradoxical. Blake's provocative question seems merely accurate for the period from the dissolution of the monasteries to the Glorious Revolution. This volume explores ways in which policies, lives, sermons, histories, and literary works all reflect and enact the connections between religion and politics in this period. We purposely include essays on canonical authors (Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Dryden), on neglected genres (histories, sermons), on individual lives (Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset; women readers of Herbert's Temple), and on specific politico-religious controversies (the execution of Charles I; the legitimation of the Duke of Monmouth). We mean to cut across boundaries between fields (history, church history, literary criticism) and between literary and non-literary texts. We also mean to cut across boundaries between traditional periods. Building on the new interest in religion in Restoration politics, we are taking the time-span between the closing years of the reign of Henry VIII and the reign of the Protestant invaders, William and Mary, as a single unit rather than treating the Restoration period as a separate unit that shares its interests primarily with the next century. Admittedly, some of the transgressions that we are committing have become almost normal. Literary critics and historians are working together more closely, and have been doing so since the mid-1980s. This is partly what the New Historicism has meant, but partly too a result of

2

DONNA B. HAMILTON AND RICHARD STRIER

the growing practice in all academic fields of working across the boundaries of previously demarcated disciplines. As we see it, traditional period divisions for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England have not been regularly enough challenged, particularly in literary studies. And there is also much evidence that the great efflorescence in historicized literary studies of the early modern period in England has not been very mindful of religious issues; indeed some of these studies have tended to drive a wedge between scholars who emphasize religious issues and scholars who emphasize political ones. This volume aims to eliminate this wedge and to put the near identity of religion and politics squarely at the center of our sense of post-Reformation England. While literary scholars have been inclined to historicize literary texts in a context that often excludes religion, historians have moved religion to the front and center stage. By and large, the revisionists, who have argued that ideological consensus, not conflict, better describes English politics from the late 1590s through the early decades of the seventeenth century have also paid attention to consensus in religion, emphasizing the Calvinism and anti-popery that godly English Protestants had in common with each other.2 More recently, however, attention has turned to religion's role in the ideological conflicts of the period. 3 By way of essays on a range of events and practices, our volume features relationships between religious discourses and other discourses as they are reconfigured over time. Receiving persistent scrutiny in this volume are anti-Catholic attitudes and their implications in the public and private lives of English citizens. An instrument through which individual Protestants sought to establish a suitable Protestant identity, anti-Catholic rhetoric also became a central element in public debates over the grounds upon which governments could or could not tolerate diversity within Protestantism. As such, it dominated political discourse through the Restoration period.4 In a seminal essay that anticipates the interests of many of the studies that follow, Annabel Patterson focuses on the sixteenth-century project of rewriting pre-Reformation English history for a reforming Protestant England, a project that became one means by which an English Protestant identity was crafted. In their various revisions of Sir John Oldcastle's activities and reassessments of his threat to English order and stability, early historians from Bale to Holinshed exemplified the presence of religious diversity in early Reformation England even as their writings became an avenue through which the possibility of religious toleration was explored.

Introduction

3

Following this study are several essays that take account of the local situations in which various efforts to fashion an acceptable English Protestant identity were accomplished. Andrew Hadfield, reading the ambivalence toward violence in The Faerie Queene in the context of Spenser's Irish experience, targets a Protestant attitude toward power that is taken up in other essays in this volume. The violence that Spenser represented was a manifestation of the desire of the English Protestant to subdue, once and for all, Ireland and its papists; yet the propensity of English Protestants to authorize godly force against nonconformity also worried dissenting English Protestants through the 1680s. In studies by Lori Anne Ferrell and Richard Strier, the local conditions under consideration are the pressures within the Jacobean English church to conform in the use of ceremonies. Interrogating the recent emphasis on consensus in ecclesiastical politics under James I, Ferrell explains how attention to ceremonies highlighted the ongoing disagreements over the definition of Protestantism in this period, while blurring for some religious groups the accepted distinctions between Protestant and Catholic identities. Aligning Donne with the "ceremonialists" discussed by Ferrell, Strier locates in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1623) an illustration of private devotion as public polemic. Informed by a denial that private experience was central to Protestant devotion, Donne's book is seen to be as thoroughly political as it is devotional. If historians have downplayed the religious tensions in the Jacobean period, they have been increasingly mindful of the role of religious conflict in national politics later in the seventeenth century.5 With essays that reexamine contemporary understandings of the obstacles to political consensus in the aftermath of the Civil War and at the time of the Exclusion Crisis, our volume advances the project of describing the religious element in these crises. Attending to contemporary defenses of the regicide, prior to and including Milton's, Laura McKnight examines the problems created by Eikon Basilike, with its image of the king as a hero of conscience and as a saintly Protestant martyr. Gary D. Hamilton focuses on the political rhetoric utilized in the dismantling of episcopacy and on issues of Protestant identity inherent in mid-century anticlericalism, a central element in MarvelPs politics. Exploring anticlericalism in the Exclusion Crisis, Mark Goldie turns his attention to William Lawrence's attacks on the marriage laws, examining the role of these attacks in countering the objections to the Protestant Monmouth's claim to the throne. But as Gary S. De Krey points out, the crisis of 1679-1682 encompassed more than the effort to assure the presence of a godly

4

DONNA B. HAMILTON AND RICHARD STRIER

prince; it also involved a call for reformation within the church itself. Describing the catholic threat as existing within the English church as well as outside of it, and identifying that threat with the use of coercive authority, dissenters asserted that a Protestant church that persecuted Protestants was a contradiction in terms. In the course of exploring connections between religion and politics in the early modern period, several essays challenge the categories and labels that are frequently used to articulate these issues. Offering a model of Christianity that emphasizes its profound ambivalence about power, Debora K. Shuger's essay on Shakespeare and the church fathers prompts speculation on how a religious institution that authorized godly force to achieve conformity also possessed resources that might challenge or undermine that force. If that perspective complicates the use of such labels as "conservative" or "radical" to define the nature of that institution, so much the better. Shuger's essay allows us to acknowledge an orthodoxy and church structure that accommodated, more often than it excluded, the differences among its parishioners. What this essay prompts us to consider by one means, David L. Smith's essay achieves by another. Examining the relationship of religion and politics in the life of Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset, Smith focuses on Dorset's routine toleration of people with various views about religion and proposes that we think of Dorset's identity as a "conformist" as "an attitude rather than a creed." Smith's implied model of the English church as a place where people could come together with a variety of private beliefs is strikingly compatible with Helen Wilcox's understanding of how readily seventeenth-century women writers, giving voice to their own religious and political views, utilized George Herbert's Temple. Just as Wilcox calls attention to the inadequacy of defining The Temple as a male-generated text when being used by women for their devotional purposes, so Steven Pincus explores the inadequacy of the usual labelings when describing Thomas ShadwelPs dramatic works. Redefining how these plays relate to Restoration politics, Pincus revitalizes the "Trimmer" label and invests it with new possibilities for description. In other ways, too, essays in this volume speak to one another as they describe ways in which the discourses that constitute religious controversies and resolutions intersect with political and literary events. Among the continuities of concern in this volume are: the problem of the uses of history (Patterson, Hamilton, Goldie); recurring references to concepts such as the "beauty of holiness" and the need for mediation that defined the controversies concerning worship and power in the

Introduction

5

church (Ferrell, Strier, Hamilton); and recurring efforts to assess the conservative and radical implications of "true" religion (Hadfield, Shuger, Smith, McKnight, De Krey). As central as the similarity of concerns, however, is the diversity of approaches our authors bring to their pursuit of these concerns. Given the complexities of the relationships we address, a collaborative effort such as this one may be the only practical means of both remapping specific discursive areas and charting the relationships between discourses over a long chronological span. We hope to have provided a picture of post-Reformation England that is both various and coherent. We hope too that these essays will prompt further investigations into the period from Bale to Shadwell that will be as uninhibited by labels and preconceptions as the contributors to this volume have been. NOTES

1 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V Erdman (New York, 1965), P. 205. 2 See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society ijjg-i62j (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); and Nicholas Tyacke, AntiCalvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1^0-1640 (Oxford, 1987). For a critique of the idea of "Calvinist consensus" with regard to interpreting the Civil War, see Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism (Oxford, 1992), ch. 3. 3 See for example, Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, "Introduction: after Revisionism," in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion 1603—1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), pp. 1-46; and Johann Sommerville, "Ideology, Property and the Constitution," in Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 47-71. 4 On the importance of the continuing Catholic presence in postReformation England, see Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993). On ideological uses of antipapal rhetoric, see Peter Lake, "Anti-popery: The Structure of a Prejudice," in Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 72-106; on Restoration anti-popery, see Jonathan Scott, "England's Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot," in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 107-31. 5 See, for example, John Morrill, "The Religious Context of the English Civil War," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th sen, 34 (1984), 155-78; and Tim Harris, "Introduction: Revising the Restoration," in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, pp. 1-28.

CHAPTER

ONE

Sir John Oldcastle as symbol of Reformation historiography Annabel Patterson

In 1544 John Bale, whose efforts on behalf of the survival and transmission of English historical records are themselves legendary, attempted to rewrite one of the legends of the "proto-reformation" of the early fifteenth century. He published a revisionary account of the 1413 examination for heresy of Sir John Oldcastle, the Lollard knight, the first definitive event of the reign of Henry V; of the armed rebellion that Oldcastle may or may not have led in 1414; and of his eventual execution, burned hanging in chains, in December 1417.1 In the preface to this work Bale introduced an appeal for a new English historiography: I wold wyshe some learned Englyshe man . . . to set forth the inglish chronicles in their right shappe, as certain other landes hath done afore them al affections set a part. I can not think a more necessarye thing to be laboured to the honour of God, bewty of the realme, erudicion of the people and commodite of other landes, nexte the sacred scripturs of the bible, than that worke wold be. (A5V) John Bale himself wrote from exile during Henry VIIFs reign, and in explicit continuance of the work of Tyndale, who seems to have been responsible for the publication of a little Boke of thorpe or Oldecastelk, published in 1530, and condemned by Archbishop Warham and John Stokesley, bishop of London, in 1531.2 Bale describes his own historiographical method in the Brefe Chronycle (itself proscribed in 1546)3 as follows: I remembre that xiiii yeares ago the true servaunt of God Willyam Tindale put into the press a certain brefe examination of the sayd lorde Cobham ... written in the tyme of the sayd lordes trouble by a certain frinde of his & so reserved in copyes unto this our age. But sens that tyme I have founde it in theyr owne writtings (which were than his uttre ennemyes) in a moche more ample fourme than there. Speciallye in the great processe which Thomas Arundell the Archbischop of Caunterbury made than against him written by hys owne notaryes and clerkes, tokened also with his owne signe & seale . . . Besides all this Thomas Walden, being in those daies the kinges confessoure, and present at hys exami-

Sir John Oldcastle and Reformation historiography nation, condemnacion & excreacion, regestred it amonge other Processes more in hys boke called Fasciculus zizaniorum wiclevii4. . . Only such reasons have I added therunto as the aforenamed Thomas Walden proponed to him in the tyme of the examinacion . . . as with the maner of hys Godlye departing out of his frayle lyfe, which I found in other writinges and chronicles. (A3V-4T) Bale's own work as a historian would scarcely seem to merit the standard of disinterestedness ("al affections set a part") he proposed for the sixteenth century, and his own historiographical achievement has been more accurately described by Margaret Aston. Aston observes that Bale, more than any other English reformer, deserves the credit of having grasped, as early as 1544, that "the exile of the Papacy from England meant the ending of a whole historical tradition" and the opportunity for a new one; and he also perceived that the new historiographical project "involved more than the piecemeal editing of heretical literature": It meant taking over enemy territory, and using enemy ammunition. Official records, works compiled by the authorities to condemn and eradicate heresy, were to be used as they had never been used before; for an anti-Catholic purpose.5 Thus somehow Bale acquired possession of the famous documentary history, the Fasciculi Zizaniorum, which contained, among other things, the text of Archbishop ArundePs "Magnus Processus" against Oldcastle; and the Lollard knight's "uttre enemies," as Bale himself described them, were enrolled in his defence, long after they relinquished control over the archives that described their attempts to destroy him. It is much to my point that Bale saw the reconstruction of English historiography as a Reformation project, parallel to the dissemination of the Scriptures in English. Both were essential to the educational mission that began with Wycliffe and continued as an underground movement through the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth: a mission in which literacy and the accessibility of books were crucial, and spiritual and political consciousness-raising were to go hand in hand. In this program, the story of Sir John Oldcastle was to assume a privileged position, as one of those cultural icons in which are epitomized a society's conflicting and shifting values. Its best-known representation appeared at the very end of the sixteenth century, in what seem to have been rival plays reflecting the legend's elasticity. This is not the place to rehearse the mystery of how Shakespeare's unhistorical "Sir John Oldcasde" of his Henry IV, Part 1became the still more unhistorical Sir John Falstaff, nor to reargue the vexed question of why Shakespeare was thought to have

7

8

ANNABEL PATTERSON

insulted Oldcastle's memory.6 But the counter-play, The First Part of Sir John Old-Castle, collaboratively produced by Michael Drayton, Richard Hathway, Anthony Munday and Robert Wilson in 1599, was explicitly engaged in the historiographical and ideological duel which is here my primary interest. The Oldcastle story constituted from the beginning an unstable component of Henry V's own legend, of his reputation as the most successful incarnation of English nationalism, supported by an aggressive military foreign policy, of which Agincourt, of course, was the symbol and sanction. The story of Sir John Oldcastle, however, spoke to the other side of Henry's character, his strategic alliance with Archbishop Arundel, and hence his acceptance of the principle of religious persecution. One of the first applications of the terrible statute De heretico comburendo, the anti-Lollard statute of 1401 introduced at the urging of Archbishop Courtenay, which initiated in England the penalty of burning heretics at the stake,7 gave Henry, as heir apparent, an opportunity for a dramatic public demonstration of his own orthodoxy, in the 1410 conflagration of John Badby, a Lollard tailor.8 And when after his coronation Henry received complaints from Arundel that Oldcastle had been supporting unorthodox preaching and was in possession of at least one heretical book, Henry agreed (after attempts at personal persuasion had failed) to hand over his old friend and companion in arms to the ecclesiastical authorities, and may even have personally ordered his arrest. It was after Oldcastle's formal examination and condemnation that his supporters were themselves arrested and executed, on the grounds that they had raised an armed insurrection against church and state. The question that Bale and his successors in the Protestant tradition wished to bring to the attention of later readers was whether Oldcastle and his followers were guilty as charged; whether they were, to put it sharply, vicious traitors or unjustly martyred religious reformers. The earliest chroniclers of the Oldcastle story were scarcely themselves disinterested. They include Walsingham, who as a monk was an inveterate enemy of the Lollards; Titus Livius de Frulovisiis, whose Vita Henrici Quinti was written in the context of his patronage by Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, Henry's younger brother; and the anonymous cleric who wrote the Gesta Henrici Quinti as explicit propaganda for use at home and abroad; domestically to justify Henry's second campaign in France and the need for additional taxes to support it; in Europe to fortify Henry's negotiating position in the Council of Constance. In the next generation of historians the Oldcastle story passed to Polydore Vergil, to

Sir John Oldcastle and Reformation historiography

9

Fabian, and to the anonymous translator of Titus Livius, who produced what is known as The First English Life of Henry F, in order to apply its lessons to the times of Henry VIII.9 For all of these writers Oldcastle is a demon whose appearance at the beginning of the reign has to be exorcised before the miracle of Agincourt can take place. The story as told by the First English Life is typical: In the first yeare of this most excellent Kings raigne . . . fortuned a marvelous insurrection of heretiks; of which supersticious sect two knights were principall chieftaines, of whome the one was Sr. John Oldcastell When the newes thereof was first brought to the Kinge . . . and that he was informed that they were assembled in a fielde near London . . . called Ficket fielde, immediatlie . . . he assembled his people, with whome he sent his Brother, the Duke of Clarence, against those scelerate and misbeleevinge rebellions, whome almost without resistance he vanquished, and tooke part of them, and put the remnant to flight. And those that were taken the Kinge caused to be put to execucion after theire deserts. Amongest whome the aforesaide Lord Cobham was taken and dampned by the Church, was put into the Tower, from whence he escaped by breakinge of the prison, and fledd into Wales . . . Thus thefirstvictorie of that noble King after his Coronacion was against these cursed supersticious heretiquesfor Christ and the defence of the Church of God, in the defence and supportacion of our Catholiquefaith.10

In this opening manifesto, the sections in italics were either additions to or expansions of Titus Livius by the Henrician writer, whose work has been dated quite precisely as having been compiled in the context of Henry VIIFs treaty with France in 1513, which the historian chose to interpret as the "reconciliation of the same French King and his confederates unto our ghostly mother of the Church of Rome."11 Along with its bias, this account perpetuates the mistake of transposing Oldcastle's condemnation by the ecclesiastical authorities and subsequent imprisonment and escape from before the confrontation in St.Giles' or Ficket's Field to its aftermath. Not trivially, possible cause is therefore made into legitimate consequence. Margaret Aston, in reassessing Henry's confrontation with Lollardry, raised a central historiographical question about "Oldcastle's rebellion," as to whether we can trust the fifteenth-century sources: not only the early chroniclers, but also the official documents recording the indictments against Sir Roger Acton and his colleagues. We know something about the Lollard program for reform from their own documents; but, as Aston points out: "when argument was translated into action and issued in rebellion, the evidence for Lollard deeds and intentions comes almost completely from the other, and hostile side." Aston adds a note to the effect that the Coram Rege Rolls and the Ancient Indictments are the main

10

ANNABEL PATTERSON

sources for the events of 1414, and that on other occasions, such as after the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, it has been shown that such indictments might lie. "When it comes to determining the aims and intentions of the Lollard rebels," she warns, "one is usually not in a position to verify the facts."12 Aston does not, however, ultimately question whether a Lollard armed rebellion of any significant scale occurred in 1414, precisely that which Bale and consequently John Foxe subjected to interrogation. It is worth looking more closely at this historiographical dilemma. As Aston admits: None of the bills written "in his favour" which were advertised and circulated by Sir John Oldcastle and his accomplices seems to have survived, but the judicial proceedings taken after the revolt provide the names of persons who wrote and distributed them (such as Thomas He of Braybrooke), as well as indications of the aims of the rebels, which, presumably, they contained. The objectives there attributed to the Lollards were "wholly to annul the royal estate as well as the estate and office of prelates and religious orders in England, and to kill the king, his brothers . . . the prelates and other magnates of the kingdom, and to turn men of religion . . . to secular occupations: totally to despoil cathedrals and other churches and religious houses of their relics and other ecclesiastical goods, and to level them completely to the ground." Oldcastle himself was to be appointed regent. And, Aston concluded, "as is well known, the adherents to these plans proposed to meet together, from various parts of England, to the number of 20 thousand men," at St. Giles' Fields, on 10 January 1414.13 Between "presumably," which retains a shadow of the suspicion raised earlier that even official indictments may lie, and the summative phrase, "as is well known," lies a gap of credibility which, given the nature of the sources (and Walsingham's figure of twenty thousand persons has long been recognized as at least an exaggeration) it is no longer possible to close.14 It is not my purpose here to attempt to erase "Oldcastle's rebellion" from the record, although there do seem to be grounds for doubt: not only about Walsingham's figures but also about Oldcastle's presence at Ficket's Field and hence about his direct responsibility for what happened there. More important still is the question that would subsequently be raised by Foxe, as to whether what happened there was really an armed rebellion, a more peaceful demonstration, or merely a clandestine religious meeting whose motives and scale had been gravely distorted. There is some evidence that the Lollards had more in mind than purging the medieval church of decadent beliefs and practices. The first of the twelve articles of the manifesto nailed to the door of Westminster

Sir John Oldcastle and Reformation historiography

11

Hall (the parliament house) and St. Paul's in 1395 called for the disendowment of temporalities (the worldly possessions of the church), and the tenth opposed itself to war and capital punishment ("He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword"). It was, in all likelihood, the issue of disendowment that most urgently drove the campaign to suppress the Lollards, not least because it was capable of disquieting extension to the realm of secular property; but Lollard pacificism could also have seemed particularly dangerous to a monarch like Henry V who intended to make wars of aggression his strongest claim to legitimacy. And it is certainly worthy asking whether such pacificism would have seemed compatible with raising an armed rebellion. Essential to Bale's rewriting of the Oldcastle legend is the liberal notion that controversy in religion should be managed by the word rather than the sword, and that books and scholarship are the proper weapons of the new era. In Bale's commentary on Leland's Laboryouse Journey', another appeal for the revival of historical scholarship and bibliophilia, it is stated that Oldcastle "caused all of [Wycliffe's] workes to be coppyed oute by moste fayre wryters, at his owne great cost and charge, and so convayed them into the lande of Berne, that they myghte be there preserved from destruccyon."15 And although Oldcastle may have needed to have some of the doctrinal questions posed at his trial translated out of Latin, which Arundel explained condescendingly was to make up for his lack of learning (pro leviori intellectu eiusdem),16 W. T. Waugh was probably unjust in his description of Oldcastle as a man of few intellectual abilities.17 He had, after all, extensively demonstrated his literacy in English - the reformers' language of ideological choice - his forensic skills, and his command of the available media of publicity. Waugh himself admits that Bale's account of Oldcastle's examination by Arundel "may furnish something like a true account of what happened,"18 and it certainly illustrates the Lollard commitment to literacy as a defensive weapon. We are told that Oldcastle "toke paper & penne in hand, & so wrote a Christen confession or rekening of his owne hande . . . Wherein he also answereth to the iiii chefest Articles that the Archebishop layed against him,"19 and took it to Henry, who refused to read it. In preparation for the ecclesiastical examination itself, Oldcastle caused . . . the aforsayd confession of his faith to be coppyed agayne and the answere also (whiche he had made to the iiii articles propounded agaynst hym) to be wryten in maner of an indenture in two sheets of paper. That whan he shuld come to his answere, he might geve the one copy unto the Archbisshop, and reserve the other to himselfe. (C3V).

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This Oldcastle read before his examiners. When questioned further, Oldcastle refused to "declare his minde nor yet answere unto hys articles [other] than was Expresslye in hys Wryttinge there conteyned" (C6v).20 According to Bale's account, however, this scrupulously textualized approach to self-defense was abandoned in Oldcastle's second examination, where he seems to have regarded himself already doomed, and set about creating the dramatic image which would be the basis of his own survival as a legend. He questioned the authority of his examiners, citing Scripture as the only true adjudicator of his case: "No ground have ye in all the scripturs so lordely to take it uppon ye, but in Annas and Cayphas, which sate thus uppon Chryst, and upon his Apostles after his ascensyon" (Dyv). When they pressed him on the question of whether he would worship the cross, he "spreade his armes abroade" and said "This is a very crosse yea, and so moche better than your crosse of wood, in that it was created of God. Yet will not I seke to have it worshipped" (E41:). And after the bill of his condemnation had been read aloud, deprived of a jury of his peers, he took his case to the common people: "And therwith he turned him unto the People . . . and saying with a very loude voice. Good Christen people, for Gods love be wel ware of these men. For they will else begyle you and lead you blindelynge into hell with them selves" (Fir). John Foxe, as we know, inherited Bale's agenda, had access to many of his documents, and for the story of Sir John Oldcastle in the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments he relied extensively on Bale's Brefe Chronyde. But in the story of sixteenth-century historiography, Foxe is preceded by Edward Hall. In Hall, whose chronicle was explicitly in the service of Henry VIII, the process of creating a new, Protestant archive was uncertain and transitional, as befitted a reign in which the break with Rome was manifestly motivated by the king's non-religious and unedifying needs, and which was itself distinguished by its persecuting temper, beginning with the execution of Sir Thomas More for refusing to abandon his allegiance to Rome, and concluding in 1546 with the racking and burning of Anne Askew for convictions of the opposite import. Hall's own signature appears on Askew's confession, indicating that he was willing to participate in Henry's reaction against those forces of change he had himself unleashed. There is some reason to believe, however, that Hall's own convictions were unsettled, and that their instability surfaced in his treatment of the Oldcastle episode. Hall's account of the opening of Henry V's reign is heavily depen-

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dent on the fifteenth-century chroniclers, from whom he inherited his eulogistic, not to say hagiographical, tone with respect to the king himself; his emphasis on Henry's personal reformation ("he determined with hymself to put on the shape of a new man . . . turning insolencie and wildnes into gravitie and sobernes," p. 46); and his interest in the Council of Constance, at which Henry established himself as a significant force in international Christendom. Hall's account of Oldcastle's rebellion, however, is not only more succinct than that of Walsingham, Titus Livius, and the anonymous author of the Gesta, but entirely free of their hostility. Hall, by comparison, sounds noncommittal and nonevaluative. An innocent reader would be unable to detect where his own opinions reside: During thisfirsteyere, sir John Old Castle . . . was accused to the Archbishop of Cauntorbury of certain poynctes of heresy . . . The kyng . . . required the prelates that if he were a straied shepe, rather by gentlenes then by rigoure to reduce hym to his oldflocke.After that he sendyng for hym, godly exhorted and lovyngly admonished hym to reconcile hymself to God and his lawes. The lorde Cobham not onely thanked the kyng of his most favourable clemencye, but also declared firste to hym by mouthe and afterwarde by writyng the foundacion of his faith . . . The kyng . . . sente hym to the tower of London there to abide the determinacion of the clergie according to the statutes in and for that cace provided . . . The said lord was examined, apposed and fully heard, & in conclusion by the archbishop denounced an hereticke and so remitted again to the toure of London: From which place, ether by help of frendes or corrupcion of kepers, he prively escaped and cam into Wales, where he remained by the space of thre yeres and more.21 Though Hall sounds noncommittal, what he does not say would have carried its own message. He states only that Oldcastle was accused of heresy by Arundel and that the charge was confirmed by his formal examination. There is no indication that Oldcastle might have stood accused out of his own mouth, as Bale had enthusiastically conceded; and for Oldcastle himself, as distinct from Acton and his colleagues, Hall gives no sign that his offences included treason or sedition. Indeed, the firm statement that he escaped to Wales and remained there for three years effectively avoids the charge that he was present at Ficket's Field in January 1414. If we can believe John Foxe, Hall's account represented a dramatic conversion away from the hostile view of the fifteenth-century chroniclers. In the 1570 edition of the Acts and Monuments, Foxe responded to the Catholic counterattack on the new version of Oldcastle that he and Bale had put into circulation by claiming, among other things, that Hall

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had been influenced by Bale's work while his own was going through the press: The truth hereof is this, that as the said Edward Hall. . . was about the compiling of his story . . . others there were of the same sodality, who be yet alive, and were then in the house of Richard Grafton, he being both the printer of the said book, and also, it is thought, a great helper of the penning of the same. It so befell, that as Hall was entering into the story of sir John Oldcastle ... the book ofJohn Bale, touching the story of the lord Cobham, was at the same time newly come over: which book was privily conveyed by one of his servants into the study of Hall, so that in turning over his books it must needs come to his hands. At the sight whereof, when he saw the ground and reasons in that book contained, he turned to the authors in the aforesaid book alleged; whereupon, within two nights after, moved by what cause, I know not, but so it was, that he, taking his pen, rased and cancelled all that he had written before against sirJohn Oldcastle and his fellows, and which was now ready to go to print, containing near to the quantity of three pages. And ... the very selfsamefirstcopy of Hall, rased and crossed with his own pen, remaineth in my hands to be shown and seen, as need shall require.22 This is a great anecdote: replete with the aura of the surreptitious book trade, anthropologically rich in its intimation of the relation between masters and their more radical servants, and at least as strong in what Aston called circumstantial detail as the official documents charging Oldcasde and his followers with treason. If Foxe's story is true, the book by Bale "newly come over" must have been the 1544 Antwerp edition of his Brief Chronicle, which requires what Hall was then working on to be the posthumously published edition of 1548;23 and his suggestion that the printing house of Richard Grafton harbored "others . . . of the same sodality" may, if it refers to Protestant converts, tell us much of the complex life of printers at this time. At any rate, Foxe proceeded to specify what had been erased from the text prepared for the press: an account of "Oldcastle's rebellion" derived from Polydore Vergil and carrying his bias. All which matter, notwithstanding, the said Hall with his pen, at the sight of John Bale's book, did utterly extinguish and abolish; adding in the place thereof the words of Master Bale's book, touching the accusation and condemnation of the said lord Cobham before Thomas Arundel, archbishop of Canterbury, taken out of the letter of the said archbishop, as is in his own story to be seen.24 Obviously Foxe wished that a stroke of his pen could "utterly extinguish and abolish" the main core of the Oldcastle story as Lancastrian historiography had established it and which indeed survived his own

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efforts and those of Bale. His use of Hall as the model of a convert points clearly at the goal of other recantations in the future. But perhaps even more telling than the psychological drama here created is Foxe's analysis of the stance that Hall ultimately adopted, when he came to the end of the first phase of the Oldcastle story, the executions of Acton and (by his count) twenty-eight others for heresy and treason. "Some saie," Hall had written in 1544: that the occasion of their death was the conveighance of the Lorde Cobham out of prisone. Other write that it was bothe for treason and heresy as the record declareth. Certaine affirme that it was for feined causes by the spiritualtie more of displeasure then truth: the judgement whereof I leave to men indifferent. For surely all conjectures be not true, nor all writyinges are not the Gospell, & therefore because I was nether a witnes of the facte, nor present at the deede I overpasse that matter and begin another, (p. 49) At this extraordinary moment, Hall uncharacteristically raised the problem of historical verifiability and the fact of diversity of opinion. "The judgement whereof I leave to men indifferent." The meaning of "indifferent" as Hall uses it (to mean "disinterested") did not go unnoticed by Foxe, who, being of another disposition, did not approve: Moreover so doubtful he is and ambiguous, in declaration of this story, that no great certainty can be gathered of him ... men's opinions, determined! himself no certain thing thereof; but, as one indifferent, neither bound to the conjectures of all men, nor to the writings of all men, referreth the whole judgment of the matter free unto the reader.25 Nevertheless, Foxe himself a few pages later testifies, perhaps unconsciously, to the difficulties of assessment, not to mention other constraints upon the Tudor historians, that might indeed lead to their pulling their punches. Referring to the doubts that he himself had cast on the existence of any Lollard conspiracy to rebellion in the first edition of Acts and Monuments by showing how the different chroniclers got thendates wrong, he wrote: touching the matter of this conspiracy, I did not affirm or define any thing thereof in my former history so precisely that he [Harpsfield] could well take any vantage thereof against me, who, in writing of this conspiracy laid against sir Roger Acton, and sir John Oldcastle, do but disjunctively or doubtfully speak thereof, not concluding certainly this conspiracy either to be true, or not true, but only proving the same not to be true at that time, as Polydore Virgil, and Edward Hall, in their histories do affirm ... My words are plain, and are these: "Wherefore it is evident that there was either no conspiracy at all against the

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king, or else that it was at some other time, or done by some other captains," &. These be my words, with others besides; in which proposition disjunctive, if either part be true, it is enoughfor me.26 (italics added) Foxe righdy complained that there was little probative value in the preamble to the statute passed at the Leicester parliament, which cited "great rumours, congregations and insurrections" as the context for the new anti-Lollard legislation, and on which Harpsfield had relied as official proof of the rebellion. Entering a long debate as to the status of preambles to statutes, Foxe declared in favor of their merely rhetorical or ideological function: in this case, "to make mountains out of molehills, first of rumours [it] maketh congregations, and from congregations riseth up to insurrections; whereas in all these rumours, congregations and insurrections, yet never a blow was given . . . yea no express signification of any rebellious word, or malicious fact, described in records, or yet in any chronicle" (in, 358). Much of Foxe's strategy is satiric. He points to the implausibility of twenty thousands Lollards having encamped in the thickets in the "hot month of January"! "And peradventure, if truth were well sought," Foxe suggested, "it would be found at length, that instead of armies and weapons, they were coming only with their books, and with Beverly their preacher, into those thickets" (in, 359; italics

added). It was part of Foxe's program too to continue the contest as a battle of books, instead of weapons; and given the pacificist emphasis of the Lollards' manifesto, he might well have had truth on his side. But while Foxe scored some points in his battle with Harpsfield, not only in recording the way the early chroniclers contradict each other, but in noting the absence of official documents proving an armed insurrection,27 even he was unwilling to go beyond the point that his Catholic predecessors were not indifferent, and therefore not to be trusted.28 On this issue, it is interesting to follow the thinking of Oldcasde's modern biographer Waugh, whose own theory of what happened seems selfcontradictory. Having admitted that modern archives cannot produce more than about a hundred persons imprisoned, condemned or pardoned after the event (that is to say, having conceded Walsingham's unreliability as to its scale),29 Waugh nevertheless continued to believe in a rebellion on the grounds that the government would scarcely have constructed false charges on such a scale: It is impossible to believe, with Foxe, that a man of Henry V's nature would butcher more than forty of his subjects merely for the purpose of discrediting a small section of the nation. Moreover, if the country was the victim of a hoax, the fraud was in truth a most elaborate one. No trouble or expense was spared; large

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commissions of inquiry were appointed ... spies were employed and rewarded; numerous proclamations were issued . . . and men were arrested, imprisoned, released on bail, and, for the most part,finallyset at liberty and pardoned: and all this to cast discredit on a peaceable sect that was by no means popular and that was becoming less so every day.30 Almost every phrase in this statement begs the questions it attempts to settle; not least the notion that Lollardry was disappearing, which flies in the face of our after-knowledge. When Raphael Holinshed was developing the protocols for his Chronicles, he evidently consulted John Bale as well as John Foxe, though he made no mention of either at this point. Even more than Edward Hall, and certainly more than Bale himself, Holinshed attempted to fulfil the mandate Bale had articulated in the preface to his Brefe Chronycle of Oldcastle, the call for "some learned Englyshe man . . . to set forth the inglish chronicles in their right shappe . . . al affections set a part." The sources he cites in the margin are Titus Livius, Walsingham, and Hall. In fact, Titus Livius is a red herring. Holinshed's account could best be described as having used a close but much condensed paraphrase of Hall as the story's frame, that frame surrounding an epitome of Walsingham's version of the events of 1414,31 which appears to grant that an armed rebellion did indeed take place. Nevertheless, there are crucial omissions from and additions to both of his major (and incompatible) sources that result, as it were, in an entente between them, in the creation of a text that is even more "indifferent" than that of Hall. When Holinshed embarks on the Oldcastle episode, he follows Hall almost verbatim; but very slight changes are present, all the more significant for interrupting an otherwise mechanical process. Thus where Hall had written of Oldcastle's escape from the Tower, "from whiche place, ether by help of frendes or corrupcion of kepers, he prively escaped and cam into Wales, where he remained by the space of thre yeres and more" (p. 48), Holinshed wrote, "from which place, either by helpe of freends, or favour of keepers, he privilie escaped and came into Wales, where he remained for a season" (in, 63). The first alteration, from "corrupcion" to "favor," resonates ironically with Holinshed's emphasis, derived from Walsingham, on the failure of the rewards offered by Henry for Oldcastle's recapture, a failure that Holinshed glosses as a proof of Oldcastle's great national popularity; the second, "for a season" instead of the three years or more proposed by Hall, accords with Holinshed's expressed uncertainty as to whether Oldcastle himself had ever appeared at the head of an armed body in Ficket's Field. Some of those

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who were captured were reported to have said that "they came to meet with their capteine the lord Cobham": But whether he came thither at all, or made shift for himselfe to get awaie, it dooth not appeare; for he could not be heard of that time (as Thomas Walsingham confesseth) although the king by proclamation promised a thousand marks to him that could bring him foorth .. . By this it maie appeare, how greatly he was beloved, that there could not one be found, that for so great a reward would bring him to light, (m, 63) Moreover, Holinshed nowhere states that an armed rebellion was really planned. On the contrary, it was "advertised" to the king; it was "thought" that a great company would have joined Acton's group from the city had not Henry ordered the gates barred. Walsingham is made to "confess" that Henry's proclamation produced not a single traitor to Oldcasde; and in the margin of his chronicle Holinshed cast doubts on Walsingham's credibility by pointing to the exaggeration of his figures: "By this excessive number it may appeare, that Walsingham reporteth this matter according to the common fame, and not as one that searched out an exquisite truth." (in, 63). In other words, as Foxe had said in his attack on the preamble to the anti-Lollard statute of 1414, "to make mountains out of molehills, first of rumours Pie] maketh congregations, and from congregations riseth up to insurrections." Finally, after an extremely curt account of the trials and executions of Acton and twenty-seven others, Holinshed turned to Hall's summary of the "diverse interpretations" of these punishments, as I have cited it above, and as Foxe had turned it to Hall's discredit. Holinshed, however, was of another mind than Foxe. For after the sentence in which Hall acknowledged the counter-tradition, whereby "Certain affirme, that it was for feined causes surmized by the spiritualtie, more upon displeasure than truth," Holinshed took off with conjectures of his own: and that they were assembled to heare their preacher (the foresaid Beverlie) in that place there, out of the waie from resort of people, sith that they might not come togither openlie ... without danger to be apprehended; as ... hath beene ever of the persecutedflocke,when they are prohibited publikelie the exercise of their religion. But howsoever the matter went with these men, apprehended they were, and diverse of them executed . . . whether for rebellion or heresie, or for both (as the forme of the indictment importeth) I need not to spend manie words, sith others have so largely treated thereof; and therefore I refer those that wish to be more fullie satisfied herein unto their reports. (111, 63-4) Like Hall, Holinshed invited his readers to participate in the historiographical exercise; unlike Hall, he urged them to read further in the

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matter in order to increase their skills in historical evaluation; and one of those to whom he surely referred them, one who had "so largely treated thereof" that no Elizabethan reader of the Acts and Monuments could be ignorant of the problems with the indictment, was John Foxe, whose suggestion that "instead of armies and weapons," Acton and his companions were "coming only with their books, and with Beverly their preacher, into those thickets," had apparently taken root and grown in Holinshed's imagination. But this is not all; for I have cited above from the 1587 edition of the Chronicles', whereas in the first edition of 1577 Holinshed had concluded his story in a rather startling manner: I refer those that wish to be more fully satisfyed herein unto their discourses, having for mine owne part rather chosen to shewe what I finde recorded by Writers, than to use any censure, to the prejudice of other mens judgements, and therefore to leave this matter, and also the Lord Cobham, eyther in Wales, or else where, closely hid for the time from king Henries reach, (n, 1168) In this extraordinary gesture, the chronicler seems suddenly in league with the Lollard leader, "closely hid for the time" in nonevaluative statements and deference to other writers. It looks as though Oldcasde interested Holinshed precisely as a fox, for his capacity to slip through the government's fingers. His career as an escape artist, however, could not last indefinitely. Oldcasde was captured in the Marches of Wales, and brought to London "in a litter, wounded as he was," and returned to safe-keeping in the Tower; and, parliament being conveniendy assembled "for the levieng of monie, to furnish the kings great charges" for the French wars, Oldcasde was brought before the duke of Bedford, acting as regent in Henry's absence, and the other estates in parliament, and after his condemnation, "consumed with fire, the gallowes and all" in St. Giles' Field, the site of the supposed insurrection of 1413. While he followed Walsingham where it suited his theme, Holinshed calmly ignored the suggestion that Oldcasde had been treacherously dealing with the Scots earlier in the year,32 as, for the execution itself, he avoided Walsingham's tale that at his execution Oldcastle had promised his own resurrection in three days, in order to secure toleration for his followers. For Walsingham, as in our own time for Waugh, this was evidence of religious mania. 33 But perhaps, if indeed Oldcastle "really" made that promise, it was even at the time only a metaphor for the vitality of his own legend, for the iterability of the great tales from the distant past of resistance and nonconformity.

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About a year after Henry VIIFs Reformation parliament there was published a small tract entitled A proper dyaloge betwene a Gentillman and a husbandman, orA.B.C. to the spiritualtie. It appears to have been one of the

books owned by Richard Bayfield that led to his conviction and execution for heresy in 1531. Its author was Jerome Barlow, working for William Roye, who had once worked for Tyndale. Its purpose was to deny that Reformation anticlericism was in the 1530s a new phenomenon in English history, and to claim a continuous tradition of evangelical critique that goes back to the early fifteenth century. The Dyaloge's central polemic is anticlerical, but around the issue of disendowment are grouped the cultural issues that, I have argued, were since the end of the fourteenth century part of a single program: an entente between the secular classes in relation to both real and intellectual property; the relevance of past history, especially where it showed the intersection of church and state, as the material of consciousness-raising and solidarity; and, consequently, broad public access both to an English bible and to the English chronicles. This creation of a double vernacular scripture, as it were, takes us back full circle to the quotation from Bale's Brefe Chronycle with which I began. The Dyaloge^ conclusion directly links the burning of the new Testament in 1530, on the pretext that it "was obscured by translacyon . . . causynge moche errour," with the censorship of chronicles: Also after the same maner a fasshyon Subtelly to colour theyr abhomynacyon They destroyed cronicles not long a gone. Which for certeyne poyntes unreverently Soundynge agaynst the kynges auncestrye As they saye/were brent everychone.34 It cannot be coincidence that the Dyaloge, which adopts the conventions of popular complaint, nevertheless proposes to the gentry that they should engage in an alliance of the classes (or of high and popular culture), "Puttynge a parte pryvate affeccion" (the phrase that Bale would echo in his appeal for a new historiography) in the interests of freedom of conscience and economic advancement. At the advent of the Henrician Reformation, and the massive disendowment program that would accompany it, this was indeed a canny proposition. The Dyaloge consists of a rhyme royal address to the reader, a rhyme royal complaint by the gentleman against the encroachments that the church has made on his patrimonial lands; the dialogue proper, conducted in rhyming couplets; and an inserted prose tract against church

Sir John Oldcastle and Reformation historiography temporalities "made aboute the tyme of kynge Rycharde the seconde." The husbandman's case in favor of an unbroken tradition of anticlerical protest is supported by the survival of this text, which accrues authority precisely because of its antiquity: "it is above an hundred yere olde / As the englishe selfe dothe testifye" (p. 149). But another kind of warrant for the preexistence of Reformation principles is to be found in the history of live (historical) resistance; and one of its archetypical figures, amongst "other princes and lordes a great sorte / Whom the cronycles expresse by name," is SirJohn Oldcastle, a testimony to the fact that rank is no protection against religious repression. "Did they not," the gentleman asks rhetorically, "long strive and wrastle": Against the good knight syr John oldecastle Other wise called lorde of Cobham. That from hyghe heresye unto treasone They brought him to fynall destruction, (pp. 145-6) The invocation of Oldcastle, however, is part of a still larger historiographical strategy linking the reign of Henry VIII with that of Henry V; more specifically, the assertion of a fatal symmetry between 1414 and 1530. The gentleman complains that the clergy "have commaunded straytely / That none under payne be so hardye / To have in englishe the testament," adding that the English bible "as thou knowest" was burned in London, "the bishop making ther a sermon." He here referred to the episode that was subsequently recorded by both Hall and Holinshed, of the ban against Tyndale's new testament, and Cuthbert TunstalFs public burning of all the copies he had been able to purchase, a fruitless exercise that resulted in his unintentionally funding a new edition! Like Tyndale's new testament, the spirits of the Lollards invoked in the Dyaloge are also conspicuously resistant to the exorcism that censorship, public or internal, attempts to operate. They rise up out of the reign of Henry Y that legendary focus of English national pride, to suggest that the malice of the clergy was both the effective cause of Henry's military campaigns in France and the spiritual cause of what happened in the subsequent reign, the loss of all that Henry V had won. If the symmetry holds, implied is a parallel disaster for Henry VIII on the international front. The Dyaloge picks up the story of the Leicester parliament; of how, as Bale, Hall, Foxe, and Holinshed would each later maintain, the clergy diverted Henry's attention from the disendowment proposals by motivating, and offering to support, a war of aggression in France. The king,

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says the husbandman, having begun to note the clergy's tyranny, "determyned certeynly / To depryve theym temporally": Whos pretence / as sone as they perceyved Amonge theym selfes they Imagyned To get the kynge over in to fraunce. That whyles he conqueryd ther his ryght In england do what they lyst they myght. (p. 166) The Dyaloge connects this diversionary tactic by the bishops, which morally undermines all of Henry's claims to be waging a just war, to a darkly prophetic and revisionist account of the war itself, which in turn frames the suppression of the Lollards and their books: Whereof all bokes that they could get They caused on a fayre fyre to be set To expell goddes worde doynge their cure. But consyder what ther of did chaunce Moste terrible plages of fearfull vengeaunce And endles sorowe to oure nacion. For within shorte season after they lost Which many a mans lyfe did cost In fraunce their dominacion. Amonge them selves moste hatefull mourdre Many stronge batayles/one after a nother With great effusyon of englisshe bloode. Frende against frende/brother against brother, (p. 147) In other words, the history of Henry V as revived by the Lutherans of the early sixteenth century not only validated the pacifist principles of Wycliffe and his followers, by offering a critique of the popular view of that reign as the epitome of military success; but it also implied that the fratricidal strife of the wars of the Roses was the guilty consequence not of baronial factionalism but of would-be religious repression. That powerful combination of Protestant bibles, English chronicles, and Sir John Oldcastle would reappear at the very end of the sixteenth century on the Elizabethan stage, as a group of playwrights set themselves to defend Oldcastle's reputation against the irreverence imputed to Shakespeare. The First Part of SirJohn Oldcastle clearly committed itself to the historiographical tradition initiated by Bale and mediated through Foxe and Holinshed. The play includes a series of accusations against Oldcastle, but insists that he was never involved in any rebellion or conspiracy against Henry. A few more or less comic or disreputable figures, Acton, Beverly and Murley, plan and carry out a pathetic uprising; but

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when confronted by Henry and Oldcastle on the question of the latter's involvement, Acton admits that Oldcastle 5s presence at St. Giles's field was unproven: I must confesse we have no other ground But onely rumour to accuse this Lord, Which now I see was meerely fabulous.35

The sign of Oldcastle's religious beliefs in this turn-of-the-century play is his ownership of books in English, and a scene of censorship is staged accordingly: Enter Sumner with bookes. BISHOP: What bringst thou there? what, bookes of SUMNER: Yea my Lord, here's not a Latine booke,

heresie?

Not so much as our Ladies Psalter: Here's the Bible, the Testament, the Psalmes in Meeter, The sickman's salve, the Treasure of Gladnesse, All English, no not so much but the Almanacke's English.

And the bishop replies, "All English, burne them, burne them quickly" (p. 121).

It has been observed that this collection would be appropriate for a sixteenth-century Puritan's library;36 and the separation of Oldcastle from Acton et al. has been seen as a concern to place his views and behavior "within acceptable contemporary political parameters," in contrast to the more extreme Puritan fundamentalists.37 Perhaps so; but the play's sympathies seem to be decisively against the ecclesiastical authorities, with the bishop of Rochester standing in all too easily for Whitgift. His complaint that the Lollards "give themselves the name of Protestants, / And meete in fields and solitary groves" (p. 72) is easily updated to register the criminalization of Puritan "conventicles" that began with Elizabeth's suppression of the "prophesyings" in the late 1570s, and led to the Martin Marprelate controversy of 1588/9. Indeed, the most obvious reincarnation of Oldcastle's elusive spirit at the end of the Elizabethan era is neither Shakespeare's "old lad of the castle" nor the defensively disengaged Oldcastle of the rival play, but the irrepressible Martin, whose persona survived the destruction of his secret presses in the country, to reappear half a century later.38 The Just Censure and Reproofe, the ironical reproach of Martin Junior by his "father," was printed at the Priory, Wolston, in the summer of 1589; and into the mouth of Whitgift this pamphlet put, not unrealistically, a frantic speech to his pursuivants:

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my meaning is, that you should go all the ground that her Majesty hath, or find out Martin. Go me to Devonshire, and to the North parts . . . to seek this traitor Martin. For I will have him, or else I will no longer be Archbishop of Canterbury . . . He is in some corner of England, lurking and doing mischief . . . For we would . . . have him proclaimed traitor, and have it fellony, if we could, for any man to read his writings.39 That the equally slippery Oldcastle was burned hanging in chains had been engraved in the memories of Elizabethan readers of the Acts and Monuments by Foxe's striking woodcut. I take it that this iconography was a tribute to the foxes rather than the hounds.

NOTES

1 John Bale, A brefe Chronyck concerning the examination and death of the Blessed martir of Christ, Sir John Oldecastell the Lord Cobham. Antwerp, 1544. 2 It was among thirty books listed as forbidden in connection with the execution of Richard Bayfield in December 1531. See Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, v. 769; Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literary in Late

Medieval Religion (London, 1989), pp. 220-21. It appears to have been condemned again in 1542. A single copy survives, as BMG 12012 (STC 24045). 3 See H. McCusker, John Bale, Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1942; repr. Freeport, NY, 1971), pp. 16-17. 4 Thomas Walden is Thomas Netter of Walden. Netter was a Carmelite monk whose six-volume Doctrinale Fidei Catholicae constituted a comprehensive attack on Wycliffe's theology and that of his followers. He seems to have been deeply involved in the prosecution of Lollards, participating in the trials of John Badby in 1410, of Oldcastle in 1413, of William Taylor in 1423, and of William White in 1428. He was also a primary influence on Henry from the beginning until, according to J. H. Wylie, the king died in his arms (1, 241). See The Reign of Henry V, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1914), 1, 238-41. 5 Aston, Lollards and Reformers, pp. 235-6. See also William Haller, Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (New York, 1963), pp. 58-70. 6 For a balanced survey of the few facts and multiple hypotheses, see Janet Clare, uArt made tongue-tied by authority": Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic

Censorship (Manchester, 1990), pp. 76-9. 7 The statute included a focus on "conventicles and confederations," that is to say, on Lollard groups and meetings, and gave the rights of summary arrest and imprisonment of suspects to the bishops. 8 See Thomas Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, ed. H. T Riley, 2 vols. (London, 1864; Rolls Series, vol. xxvin, Part 1), 11, 282. 9 See C. L. Kingsford, The First English Life of Henry V(Oxford, 1911), p. xiii. 10 First English Life, pp. 22-3.

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25

11 First English Life, p. 190. 12 Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. 9. This initial skepticism is, however, then qualified. "If the accusations sometimes seem improbable it should be remembered that they also included much circumstantial detail, and when (as in the proceedings against those who had been in contact with Oldcastle in 1417), the jurors were themselves sympathetic, the case is not likely to have been grossly overstated." But see also the chapters on Oldcastle's trial and "The Lollard Rising" in Wylie, The Reign of Henry V, 1, 236-92. Wylie generally accepts the accounts of the early chroniclers, although he notes (p. 264) that we "have no record of [Lollard] intentions from their own point of view." 13 Aston, Lollards and Reformers, p. 25; italics added. She cites PRO King's Bench 27/63, Rex m. 25r., and Rotuli Parliamentorum, iv, pp. 107-10. 14 On the bias of official records, see also Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford, 1988), p. 59: "If any of the material appears to be impartial, it is probably the more to be distrusted: the records in the episcopal registers, in their formality and verbosity, may resemble a modern law report, but are almost invariably only a 'police memo' of charge and sentence." 15 John Bale, The laboryousejourney & serche ofjohan Leylande,for Englandes antiquiteeSy with declaracyons enlarged (London, 1549), ff-3v. 16 W. T. Waugh, "Sir John Oldcastle," English Historical Review 20 (1905), 453. 17 Waugh, "Sir John Oldcastle," pp. 657-8. 18 Waugh, "Sir John Oldcastle," p.450. 19 Bale, Brefe Chronycle, B7V; Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, 11, 293. 20 In addition, Bale explains that Oldcastle while in prison did what he could to "publish" his own defence: "Whyle the lord Cobham was . . . in the tower he sent out privily to his frinds. And they at his desire wrote this lytle bill here folowing, causing it to be set up in diverse quarters of London, that the peple shulde not beleve the slaundres and lyes [of] his enemies" (F2v). 21 Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre <2? Torke (London, 1548; repr. London, 1809; New York, 1965), p. 48. 22 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, ed. George Townsend, 8 vols. (London, 1843-49; r e P r New York, 1965), in, 377-8. Foxe was responding to the attack on Bale's Oldcastle by the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield, which appeared under the name of Alan Cope, Dialogi Sex (Antwerp, 1566). 23 C. L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 1913), p. 261, claims that there was an earlier edition of Hall's chronicle published in 1542. He gives no evidence for this assertion, also made in the Dictionary of National Biography. There is no trace of this edition in the Short Title Catalogue. 24 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, in, 378. 25 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, in, 378-9 (italics added). 26 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, in, 402. 27 See Foxe, Acts and Monuments, in, 351-9.

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28 Documentary evidence exists supporting Walsingham's statement that news of a Lollard conspiracy was supplied to the government by defectors; see Rot. Pat. I Henry Jfp.5, m.22, and Waugh, "Sir John Oldcastle," p. 640. 29 Waugh, "Sir John Oldcastle," pp. 646-7. Wylie, The Reign of Henry V, 1, 273-6, provides a longer list of those executed, and details of hundreds of people pardoned, which can be read either as evidence of Henry's clemency or widespread recognition that most of the arrests, which were carried out on the basis of accusation, were implausible. Note also the sinister detail recorded by Wylie, 1, 264-5, 267, that although Henry's proclamation declaring that certain Lollards have been brought before him and that seditious meetings were to take place is dated 7 January 1414, juries had actually "been empanelled many weeks beforehand." 30 Waugh, "Sir John Oldcastle," p. 646. 31 Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, 11, 297-9. 32 Walsingham, Historia Anglicana, 11, 325. 33 Walsingham claimed that Oldcastle told Sir Thomas Erpingham that, if he saw him rise on the third day, he should "procure peace for his sect," and identified the statement as "dementia." See Historia Anglicana, 11, 328. Bale, who owned a manuscript of Walsingham, wrote in the margin, "Nota de insania Cobam." See Alice Lyle Scoufos, Shakespeare's Typological Satire: A Study of the Falstqff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens, O H , 1979), p. 109. 34 A Proper Dyaloge, ed. Edward Arber, English Reprints, 28 (1871), pp. 167-8. 35 See The First Part of Sir John Oldcastle, ed. J. R. Macarthur (Chicago, 1907), p. 116. 36 See Mary Grace Adkins, "Sixteenth-century Religious and Political Implications in SirJohn Oldcastle," University of Texas Studies in English 22 (1942), 37 See David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1968), pp. 256-9; and The Oldcastle Controversy, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester, 1991), p. 16. 38 In Richard Overton's Araignement of Mr. Persecution . . . by Tongue Martin MarPriest (London, 1645). 39 See The Marprelate Tracts 1388, IJ89, ed. William Pierce (London, 1911), PP-

CHAPTER

TWO

The "sacred hunger of ambitious minds": Spenser's savage religion Andrew Hadfield

Discussions of Spenser's religious affiliation usually try to determine the precise nature of his faith from a scrupulous reading of his poetry. Critics have generally sifted through the evidence for doctrinal clues and lined these up against other contemporary writings to decide which label fitted Spenser best: Calvinist, Puritan, Anglican or Protestant. 1 But Spenser's religious views cannot be studied in isolation from other beliefs he might have held, or discourses he might have used, because, for Spenser, an English exile in Ireland from (at least) 1580 until his death, there could be no easy separation of religious views and political position.2 In Ireland in the last decades of the sixteenth-century considerations of personal religious persuasion had to be perceived in the light of other forces determining cultural and national identity; Spenser was forced to define himself as an English Protestant in order to distinguish himself from the Irish papists.3 Generally critics of the Faerie Queene have tried to circumscribe the influence of Spenser's Irish experience to the last three books, choosing to overlook the stubborn fact that the first edition of the poem did not appear in print until 1590, by which time Spenser had been resident in Ireland for ten years. Book 1, for example, has usually been straightforwardly decoded by commentators from the earl/seventeenth century to the present day without reference to Ireland. 4 Una, the representation of religious truth, becomes separated from the Red-Cross Knight, who is later discovered to be Saint George, by the wiles of the Catholic, Archimago; the primitive Protestant Church of England has become corrupted by Catholic duplicity. The book narrates a series of adventures which culminate in the Red-Cross Knight and Una being reunited and betrothed after the Knight has killed the Satanic dragon. 5 It ends with the Knight promising to return after having served the Faerie Queene for six years, a number which corresponds to the days of the creation, and also, the length of the reign of Mary and Philip.6 The book 27

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is said to look forwards to the religious triumphs of Elizabeth's reign, as England throws off its shackles. But within the book there is a troubling episode where Una is rescued from the Saracen knight, Sansloy, by a troop of fauns and satyrs who have been dancing in the wood (i,vi). This "rude, misshappen, monstrous rablement"(8), take her to the wood-god, Sylvanus, and proceed to worship her as a deity who exceeds their current religious knowledge and forms of representation. Therefore, she throws their notion of the sacred into crisis and inaugurates a whole new series of religious practices. Whilst "the woodborne people fall before her flat, / And worship her as Goddesse of the wood," Sylvanus tries to figure her in terms of his previous conception of beauty. Sometimes he sees her as Venus ("But Venus never had so sober mood"), sometimes as Diana ("But misseth bow, and shaftes, and buskins to her knee") (16); but eventually he comes to see in her a reminder of his dead love, Cyparisse, who pined away after Sylvanus accidentally shot his beloved hind (17).7 The female woodnymphs "Flocke all about to see her lovely face: / But when they vewed have her heavenly grace, / They envie her in their malitious mind, / And fly away for feare of fowle disgrace"; the male satyrs, in contrast, reject their womenfolk and gaze, seeing everything that is beautiful as a part of her (18); eventually, they transform her into an idol, and when she refuses that dubious honour, they worship her ass, possibly recalling the exiled Israelites' idolatry in Exodus 32. Una becomes rather distressed at this unwelcome attention and tries to teach them more wholesome doctrine, but they remain transfixed with visual images: During which time her gentle wit she plyes, To teach them truth, which, worshipt her in vaine, And made her th'Image of Idolatryes; But when their bootlesse zeale she did restraine From her own worship, they her Asse would worship fayn. 1, vi, 19

Eventually, when the satyrs leave her alone, Una is rescued by Sir Satyrane (see below, p. 39). Usually the satyrs have been interpreted as representatives of a form of "natural," animistic religion, ignorant primitive Christians, or, even the Jews, Egyptians, Greeks and Romans.8 But the satyrs are referred to as "The salvage nation" (11), a description which links them to the series of representations of savages in Books v and vi.9 This would suggest that the question of the identity of the satyrs ought to be read not simply in terms of the religious allegory of Book 1, but also as part of the wider

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29

themes and debates running throughout the whole narrative of the unfinished poem. The representation of the satyrs early on within the epic, in a book which allegorizes the legend of holiness, provocatively forces the reader to recognize that theological distinctions cannot be made without reference to questions of social being. One of the most striking aspects of the verses detailing the reactions of members of "the salvage nation" to Una is the diversity of their responses and attempt to understand Una in terms of their own experience of sacred images, a division noted in Una's fear of "commit[ing]/ Her single person to their barbarous truth" (12). She represents the fundamental indivisibility of a monolithic conception of religious "truth," which their reactions split up into a variety of representations. The story raises an important question about the nature of "truth" and its representation: as many Protestants who wished to refute what they saw as perverse and diabolic Christian thinking by an appeal to the literal "truth" of the Scriptures often had to recognize, "truth" had to be represented in order to be expressed, which meant that it had to be manifested as something which it was not, that is, in terms of figurative language. Una herself is a metaphorical representation of "truth" within the overall pattern of the allegory. She has to be defined against a representation of falsehood, Duessa, her imitation. Furthermore, in being betrothed to the Red-Cross Knight, who is Saint George, she is a specifically English representation of "truth" within a particular national language, English. In other words, she already exists as a representation herself within a series of differential signs and cannot possibly stand outside a system that is already in use. Readers of The Faerie Queene cannot securely assume that their understanding of their own religious representations and images avoids the misreadings, confusions and contradictions of "the salvage nation's" inability to read something beyond its own system of representation. Admittedly, the separation of the Red-Cross Knight and Una can be read as a glaring example of dramatic irony, where the reader knows far more than the characters acting out the story; however, incidents like Una's encounter with "the salvage nation" problematize this relationship of reader and text, putting the over-confident reader back to the same level of awareness as the hapless knight. In this essay I want to demonstrate that the developing project of The Faerie Queene demands that not only can Book 1 not be read in isolation from the rest of the poem, but that its apparent assumption of a self-sufficient Englishness is significantly qualified in later books. Spenser's Irish

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experience permeates all aspects of his work, from his relationship with the Queen, his political pronouncements, to the very language of his epic poem. "Savage" and "sacred" are perhaps the foundational puns which link Spenser's poetry and prose, simultaneously expressing the hope of salvation and religious purity, and the fear of disintegration and damnation. Whilst Spenser's work deals with the question of transformation — salvaging what has been lost — such puns point in two directions at once, articulating the horror that what has to be transformed might well be precisely that which resists transformation. For Spenser, Ireland does more than problematize the relationship between religion and politics, and poetry and prose: it also exists as the site of potential chaos where Englishness and its attendant certainties (truth) are turned against themselves in an orgy of violence, never to be redeemed. In a sense, Ireland inhabited the English Spenser used, turning ("troping") the literal into the pun, threatening to collapse clear and distinct ideas and make the language of politics become the rhetoric of apocalyptic destruction. In the second edition of The Faerie Queene, Spenser carefully linked representations and figures via deliberate verbal echoes, opening out the contexts of the poem and signalling different modes of discourse within which such images should now be read. Artegall, the Knight of Justice, is told at the start of Book v that his ultimate goal is to rescue Irena, who is being held captive by the tyrant, Grantorto. In canto xi Sir Sergis reminds Artegall of his promise "To meete her at the salvage Hands side" (39), and in canto xii, he duly crosses the sea and defeats the giant. As has been frequently noted, Irena is clearly supposed to rule Ireland and the fact that Artegall's quest should end there demonstrates that a direct link is made between the articulation of an abstract concept of justice and the establishment of Elizabethan rule in Ireland.10 The use of the term, "the salvage Island," forces the reader to re-read incidents in the narrative so that their significance in the light of later developments be considered; in other words, we are asked to go back, reconsider and qualify our earlier judgements.11 The reader is therefore invited to regard the representation of Ireland in terms of images of the savage and savagery which have preceded Book v (these include "the wilde and salvage man" who tries to rape Amoret in rv, iv, Sir Satyrane and Artegall himself), as well as in terms of the images which make up a substantial part of Book vi (the salvage man, the salvage nation and the brigands who destroy the pastoral idyll). This also means that the behavior of "the salvage nation" should be

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31

read in conjunction with the behavior of the inhabitants of "the salvage island." These inhabitants only really appear in one verse, submitting themselves to Irena with great gusto when Artegall finally cuts off Grantorto's head: Which when the people round about him saw, They shouted all for joy of his successe, Glad to be quit from that proud Tyrants awe, Which with strong powre did them long time oppresse; And running all with greedie joyfulnesse To faire Irena, at her feet did fall, And her adored with due humblenesse, As their true Liege and Princesse naturall; And eke her champions glorie sounded over all. (v, xii, 24) Their submission to Irena — the legitimate English ruler of Ireland, who stands as a representative of Gloriana (Elizabeth) — mirrors the worship of Una by "the salvage nation."12 Both incidents show savages recognizing a superior power which they depend on, but, whereas members of "the salvage nation" do not fully comprehend what it is they worship, the inhabitants of "the salvage island" are clearly making the right choice for the right reasons in rejecting tyranny for legitimate authority. These savages are clearly salvaged. However, this moment of sovereign/colonial success is made problematic in at least two ways. Firstly, Irena's position is undermined by the recall of Artegall to the Faerie Court before he has been able to use his sidekick, the iron-man, Talus, to root out elements hostile to English rule and thoroughly reform "that ragged common-weale"(26).13 Secondly, the "savage" Irish are represented as if they had been loyal all along and had only been led astray by the usurping force of the wicked tyrant, Grantorto. In effect, Book v splits the Irish into two; there are these obedient, savage Irish who worship Irena as a goddess; and there are those like Malengin, the figure of guile, who is represented wearing the Irish mande in the same way that Irenius described the native Irish in Spenser's prose tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland?l4 He is slaughtered by Talus and dismembered so ferociously that his corpse disappears (v, ix, 19).15 The premature recall of Artegall means that Talus cannot extirpate such dangerous rebels who live on to threaten the safety of English rule in Ireland and it remains a kingdom of divided loyalties.16 By the end of Book v the reader can be in no doubt that, as the narrative of The Faerie Queene progresses, things which probably appeared

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clear and distinct at the start of the poem, become inextricably interlinked. Canto xii begins with a crucially important pun which forms an explicit link between the desire for illicit territorial gain and the perversion of religion: O Sacred hunger of ambitious mindes, And impotent desire of men to raine, Whom neither dread of God, that devils bindes, Nor lawes of men, that common weales containe, Nor bands of nature, that wilde beastes restraine, Can keepe from outrage, and from doing wrong, Where they may hope a kingdome to obtaine. No faith so firme, no trust can be so strong, No love so lasting then, that may enduren long, (v, xii, 1) "Sacred" can mean both "proceeding from God" — and, hence, a taboo not to be violated — but also "accursed." The enterprise of Grantorto (literally, "great wrong" from the Italian) is thus a supposedly religious one in its aim of restoring Catholicism to Ireland; for a Protestant audience it is therefore an accursed threat to true religion in its desire to replace the Christian faith with that of the AntiChrist and is symptomatic of the Fall itself.17 Grantorto can be seen to represent the attempt of the Spanish monarchy and papal authorities to help the Irish overthrow English rule in Ireland: specifically, as Artegall is associated with Spenser's erstwhile patron, Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton, who was Lord Deputy from 1580 to 1582, the second Desmond Rebellion (1579-83), during which Spenser may have witnessed the notorious massacre at Smerwick (1580) and, on another occasion, the Irish forces marched into battle behind the papal banner.18 His claim to Ireland is allegorized as totally spurious and without foundation and the opening verse places him beyond the laws of God, men and nature. 19 The conflict between truth and falsehood moves out onto a wider stage. Book 1 can be seen as wholly concerned with a national issue: the marriage of Una (true religion) to the Red-Cross Knight (Saint George, a changeling in Faerieland, who is the offspring of "ancient race / Of Saxon kings" (1, xi, 65)) achieved in the face of an international Catholic threat which claims to go beyond the bounds of sovereign integrity.20 In Book v, Artegall (like the Red-Cross Knight, a changeling, a Briton, Arthur's half-brother, in, iii, 26-7) also has to face an international Catholic threat in the form of Grantorto. But, the nature of the conflict has altered, not least because Artegall has to cross the sea to Ireland. 21 We have moved from an explicitly religious allegory concerned to

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33

establish the legitimacy of English Christianity to a consideration of religion as it applies to practical conceptions of justice in a world of contemporary political struggles.22 The Proem to Book v acknowledges that the world had decayed from the Golden Age when "simple Truth did rayne, and was of all admyred" (v, Proem, 3) to a Stony Age where such notions of truth have been turned upside down, "vertue . . . Is now cald vice . . . Right now is wrong, and wrong that was is right,/ As all things else in time are chaunged quight (v, Proem, 4). The reader is informed that the distinction between truth and falsehood in the book of justice involves a difficult and delicate balancing act: the ancient principles of justice have to be isolated and applied to a world in which it is virtually impossible to separate truth and falsehood. In order to apply such principles and make them relevant they will have to be translated from their original pristine meanings into the language of duplicity with the attendant risk that in the process they will actually become the opposite of what they were meant to be, hence the frequent difficulty in the book of separating the means of implementing justice from what it is supposed to overcome.23 The very nature of ArtegalPs quest involves the possibility that he will be unable to succeed because it will be too difficult to distinguish between what he is supposed to uphold and what he has to reject and, indeed, it is the Faerie Queene herself who aborts the project, the centre of power actually serving to undermine itself. The problem of difficulty has become more grave: it is no longer a question of the reader misreading and being corrected, but a suggestion that perhaps there is no path through the mass of details to the truth. The book ends with Artegall and Talus crossing back over the sea to what is obviously England, having had to abandon the object of the quest, Irena, to an incompletely reformed commonwealth. There, they are attacked by two monstrous hags, Envy and Detraction, who proceed to slander their policies, claiming that they had been unmercifully cruel and that Grantorto had been treacherously put to death (v, xii, 40).24 Eventually the hags set the Blatant Beast, a monster with a multitude of tongues, onto them, and all three repeat a mass of vicious falsehoods. Envy and Detraction clearly represent the slander of English policy in Ireland. But that is not all, as the allegory moves outwards onto a wider stage, linking the religious representations of Book 1 with the political message of Book v. In Book vi, the Blatant Beast expands in significance, becoming the object of Sir Calidore's quest and, ultimately, the antithesis of the Knight of Courtesy's failed attempt to establish a correspondence between words and things: in other words, a representation

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of untruth, like the villains of Book i, Duessa and Archimago.25 A narrative link between Books v and vi occurs in the first canto when Calidore comes across Artegall returning to the Faerie Court and enquires if he has seen the Blatant Beast. Artegall replies that he saw the "Monster bred of hellishe race" on his return from the "salvage Island" (vi, i, 7-8). The ending of Book v retrospectively affirms that, like Book 1, it is also centrally concerned with the question of truth as the sequence of images of specifically Catholic untruth become absorbed into one which threatens language, the very means of representation itself. When Una was rescued from the "lawlesse lust" of Sansloy by "the salvage nation" in Book 1, her fear was described by the narrator in terms of two antithetical beasts competing for her: She more amaz'd, in double dread doth dwell; And every tender part for feare does shake: As when a greedie Wolfe through hunger fell A seely Lambe farre from theflockedoes take, Of whom he meanes his bloudie feast to make, A Lyon spyes fast running towards him, The innocent pray in hast he does forsake, Which quit from death yet quakes in every lim With chaunge of feare, to see the Lyon looke so grim. (1, vi, 10) Una has escaped from the wolf only to be ensnared by what she believes to be a lion. Wolves were a staple feature of Protestant pastoral satire, especially when preying on lambs, representing God's flock, and were almost inevitably associated with Catholicism.26 Sansloy, in terms of the romance motifs of the plot, is a false pagan knight who, in the guise of protecting Una, will prey on her as his spoil. The comparison of "the salvage nation" to a lion is a little more complex. On the one hand a lion denotes a menace to Una as God's threat to the Israelites in Jeremiah 5, 6: "Wherefore a lyon out of the forest shall slaye them, and a wolfe of the wildernesse shall destroy them." On the other, Una herself reads the "salvage nation" in terms of what she already knows -just as "the salvage nation" reads her - because Sansloy's capture of her was achieved through killing the lion which had hitherto helped to protect her; she sees the savages as allies against the wolf, replacing the original lion and therefore opposing good and evil beasts. This lion had been tamed by Una when she hadfirstbecome separated from the Red-Cross Knight and had been out "Hunting full greedie after salvage blood" (1, iii, 5). It becomes her companion and champion, accompanying her into the house of Abessa where they

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35

receive reluctant hospitality and slaying Kirkrapine, before his fatal encounter with Sansloy The lion has usually been interpreted to be Henry VIII, an ambivalent figure in later Reformation histories, who inaugurated, limited and suppressed the spread of Protestantism, exactly how the lion is portrayed here: he defends Una, is able to break down doors and offset some threats, but does nothing to stop their entry into the Catholic Abessa's house ("Nine hundred Pater nosters every day,/ And thrise nine hundred Aves she was wont to say" (1, iii, 13)) and fails to protect her from Sansloy.27 Una's initial perception of "the salvage nation" as akin to the lion who has just failed her implies that the savages might constitute a serious threat, they might prove inadequate, they might, in fact, be more successful than the real lion/Henry VIII in protecting her from the wolves. An ironic reversal has taken place: the lion was hunting for "salvage blood" which would have included Una; she now sees "the salvage nation" in terms of the lion. The savages actually succeed in preserving the figure who represents religious truth as well as the official founder of the English Reformation. At the end of Book v there is a similarly ironic reversal, again, employing specifically Protestant iconography. Envy and Detraction cry out against Artegall, "As it had bene two shepheardes curres, had scryde/ A ravenous Wolfe amongst the scattered flockes" (v, xii, 38). The real wolves are, of course, Envy and Detraction, who constitute the serious threat to the flock; but, true to the nature of wolves, they appear in sheep's clothing, claiming that Artegall's legitimate policy of trying to reform Irena's land by rooting out hostile elements is evil. In doing so, they are defending another wolf, the Catholic Grantorto, and are therefore trying to halt the progress of both the Reformation and the establishment of true political authority. It is further implied that they have influenced the Faerie Queene; although the reason for Artegall's premature recall is left unstated, its disastrous effects are made clear. Just as Henry VIII as the lion is shown to be a flawed hero who hinders as much as helps the Protestant cause, so is Elizabeth in her myopic policy towards Ireland; just as radical Protestant satire saw the most dangerous threat to their existence coming from within, so does The Faerie Queene. Book 1 ended with the hope of religious reform and national greatness, of Elizabeth going beyond her father and correcting his errors whilst preserving his virtues; the events of the later books imply that her reign was a false dawn for Protestants and that identical errors will be repeated. The central controlling figure of the book, the elusive Faerie

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Queene, turns out to be an imposter, as dangerous for her flock as those she is supposed to protect them from, so that the narrative progress of the work is under threat. There is no stable centre of truth. This process manifests itself in other ways. The poem confronts the reader with two diametrically opposed representations of Catholicism which cannot be separated from the series of representations of savagery. There is the image of the ignorant, but well-meaning idolater who can be transformed into something better with proper education and the benefits of nurture, set against the evil desires of those who pervert religion and threaten the foundations of the state's moral and legal basis. This latter category includes both the wolves within and without, like Duessa and Grantorto, and also the cannibalistic "salvage nation" which appears in Book vi, viii, who attempts to sacrifice Serena. This salvage nation exists as the antithesis of "the salvage nation" of Book 1 and practises diabolic natural religion: Unto their God they would her sacrifize, Whose share, her guiltlesse bloud they would present, But of her daintyfleshthey did devize To make a common feast, and feed with gurmandize. (vi, viii, 38) What strikes this "salvage nation" first is the beauty of Serena's face: but when her face Like the faire yvory shining they did see Each gan his fellow solace and embrace, For joy of such good hp by heavenly grace, (vi, viii, 37) There is the same rhyme here as there was in 1, vi, 18, face/grace, and an identical situation occurs as the visage of the beloved triggers a series of religious responses, so that this episode has to be read in terms of the earlier one. Whereas the wood-nymphs reacted with a mixture of envy and fear to their exposure to "heavenly grace," the "salvage nation" elevates the status of eating to a religious one. Serena is described in terms of a pornographic blazon akin to the language of much Elizabethan love poetry so that "the cannibals' confusion of the two appetites of hunger and lust with the language of a love-religion"28 actually forces the contemporary reader into a recognition that such writing is part of his or her own cultural matrix rather than that of the cannibals: Her yvorie necke, her alablaster brest, Her paps, which like white silken pillowes were, For love in soft delight thereon to rest;

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Her tender sides, her bellie white and clere, Which like an Altar did it selfe uprere, To offer sacrifice divine thereon; Her goodly thighes, whose glorie did appeare Like a triumphal Arch, and thereupon The spoiles of Princes hang'd, which were in battel won. (vi, viii, 42)

Spenser makes us see Serena's body as a construction of conceits which is dismembered and sacrificed as much by the civilized reader's gaze as the cannibals' knives. What should separate the reader from these cannibals, the ability to represent using language, in fact draws the two closer together.29 Spenser's prose dialogue, A View of the Present State of Ireland, contains

a similar discussion of the problem of religion and savagery. It opens with one of the disputants, Eudoxus, asking what courses can be taken for "reducine that salvage nation to better government and Civilitye."30 Irenius states that before he can suggest solutions, the evils of the country must be enumerated and these can be divided up into three main groups: laws, customs, and religion. He explains at great length that Irish society is so barbarous and the people so degenerate that they cannot be persuaded to obey civilized, English laws, but must be forced, emphasizing that it is no good applying laws without the threat of punishment. Laws, and methods of imposing them, differ from state to state and the Irish need stern laws which will be harshly applied. The imposition of these laws will sweep away the savage Irish customs which resist the advance of civilization: intermarriage and fostering of children, transhumance, wearing mandes and growing glibs (long moustaches), using kerns and gallowglasses to fight tribal wars, chaotic and murderous assemblies, keeping seditious bards who incite rebellion and improper land tenure. These are all derived from the savage customs of the ancient Scythians, one of the many ancestors of the contemporary Irish.31 Irenius's discussion of religion is much briefer because it is far easier to explain as a social phenomenon: "the faulte that I finde in religion is but one and the same universall throroughe all that Countrye, that is that they are all Papistes by theire profession but in the same so blindelye and brutishly enformed for the moste parte as that ye woulde rather thinke them Athiests or infidles" (p. 136). Just as in The Faerie Queene there is an explicit relationship between types of error which form a cluster of related forms — Catholicism, devil worship, savagery, paganism — so is there in Irenius's description of Irish religion in the View (Eudoxus

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comments that it "is trewlie a moste pitifull hearinge that so many soules should fall into the divells Iawes"). Irenius continues further to stress the innocence of the ignorant Irish whose religion developed in the way it did because they were converted via the direct command of the Pope rather than the true Christianity of the Protestant church: The generall faulte Comethe not of anie late abuse either in the people or theire priestes who Cane teache no better than they knowe nor shew more lighte then they have sene but in the first Institution and plantinge of religion . . . it is certaine that religion was generalie Corrupted with theire Popishe trumperie Therefore what other could they learne then such trashe as was taughte them And drinke of that Cupp of fornicacion with which the purple Harlott had then made all nacions drunken, (p.137)32 The religion of the Irish represented in the View resembles that of "the salvage nation" of Book 1 rather than Book vi as Irenius does not doubt the good faith of the savages' mistaken belief. Later, he argues that the Irish understand their professed religion as little as they do Protestantism and simply hate the latter "thoughe unknowen even for the verye hatred which they have of the Englishe and theire government." Thus, if St. Patrick could convert them from idolatry and paganism to Catholicism, "how muche more easely shall godlie teachers bringe them to the trewe understandinge of that which they allreadye professe" (p. 221). The logic of Irenius's argument would seem to imply that the innocence of the savage Irish can be cured by evangelical persuasion rather than military coercion and Eudoxus ventures an initial conclusion that what Irenius is saying is that he "finde[s] no faulte with the people them selves . . . but with the firste ordinance and institution thereof" (p. 138). Irenius refuses to draw such a moral because "the sinne or ignorance of the Priestes shall not excuse the people"; the religion of the Irish is simply one of a number of factors which have led the land into rebellion against English rule ("the verye hatred they have of the Englishe and theire government"). The blame lies not only in individual wills, but the in Convenience of the time and troublous occasions wherewith that wretched Realme hathe Continuallie bene tormoyled. ffor instruction in religion nedethe quiett times and ere we seke to settle a sounde discipline in the Clergie we muste purchase peace unto the Layitye for it is ill time to preache amongst swordes and . . . impossible . . . to settle a good opinion in the mindes of men for matters of Religion doubtfull which have a doubtlesse evill opinion of ourselves for er a newe be broughte in the olde muste be removed, (p. 138) Irenius's argument is that a religious problem cannot be solved in purely religious terms. The faith of "the salvage nation" may be the

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result of an innocent and understandable mistake, but its effects are far more wide-ranging and destructive. The consequences of the most benign error can be lethal, as Irenius's grim warnings imply. The point is that the particular brand of Irish Catholicism helps to make "the savage nation" a threat to English government. English rule has to be established before English Protestantism can be spread effectively and meaningfully, and this, according to Irenius, necessitates a full-scale military conquest as a prerequisite to both processes. The View argues the case that religious persuasion and national identity are mutually cohesive parts of the same whole.33 Irenius's manipulative rhetoric can be read in other ways. In The Faerie Queene, the second type of "salvage nation" qualified our understanding of the first; the first seemed at worst harmless, possibly good, the second, an evil menace. The Irish in the View combine both representations of savagery, being innocent in religious intent but guilty of serious transgression in effect and therefore demanding harsh and immediate suppression. The seeming paradox is that the excessive violence will appear to come from the forces of order, but, in fact, is caused by the errors of the subjects, however innocent they may be in terms of the personal conviction of their faith. Eradicating savagery will, of necessity, require the use of savage violence. This harsh reality is explicitly signalled in the epic poem too: on the third day of Satyrane's tournament an unknown warrior appears in "salvage weed, / With woody mosse bedight, and all his steed/ With oaken leaves attrapt, that seemed fit / For salvage wight" (rv, iv, 39). Satyrane was the knight who had rescued Una from "the salvage nation" in 1, vi, and had himself been brought up in the forest, "noursled up in life and manners wilde, / Emongst wild beast and woods, from lawes of men exilde" (1, vi, 23). The son of a human mother, Thyamis ("passion") and a satyr father, Therion ("wild beast"), Satyrane forms a link between the virtues and vices of nature and nurture and is represented as a "wild man of the woods."34 The knight who appears at his tournament and triumphs in violently bloody fashion - "Hewing, and slashing shields, and helmets bright,/ And beating downe, what ever nigh him came" (rv, iv, 41) - is later revealed to be Artegall, who Merlin has prophesied will marry Britomart in the previous book (in, ii, 24-5), and who takes on the role of the Knight of Justice in the subsequent book. He is dressed like Satyrane; the motto on his shield is "Salvagesse sansfinesse'3,which the narrator explains shows "secret wit" (rv, iv, 39). Thus, a wild, or savage knight takes the honors at the tournament of another savage knight.35 The brutal severity of the (as yet) unnamed savage knight's style of

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combat is mirrored later in his methods of applying justice in Book v; but, just as Irenius's perception of the Irish as religiously naive rather than wicked is carefully distinguished from his recommendation that the nation be reconquered in order to remove all recalcitrant elements and enable political order to be established, so is ArtegalTs role as justicer separated from the most horrifying aspects of his policy. The worst violence is performed by the dehumanized iron man, Talus, the sower of death, who "brusht, and battred them without remorse, / That on the ground he left full many a corse ... That they lay scattered over all the land,/ As thicke as doth the seede after the sowers hand" (v, xii, 7). Artegall's growth to maturity, as the husband-to-be of the British maiden and typological precursor of Elizabeth, Britomart, does not involve a rejection of savage violence so much as an intensification and, simultaneously, a separation of the means from the implementation of brutality (Artegall is actually shown restraining Talus in v, xii, 8, an absurdity given his close identification with the Irish policy of Spenser's erstwhile patron, Arthur, Lord Grey De Wilton).36 One possible way of reading Spenser's poetry and prose in a religious context is provided by a treatise deposited in the state papers (1572?), endorsed by Lord Burghley with the comment, "Sent from Thos. Cecil to me, wrytten by Mr. Carleton, concerning a power of 1000 horsemen and 2000 cullivers. To suffer the precise sort to inhabit Ireland."37 The paper argues that there are three sorts of disaffected subjects within the realm of England, papists, atheists and Protestants, and that all suffer equal favor and persecution: the first two groups are treated well because they are feared and persecuted because they are traitors and godless, the third favored "because wee, having some religion, feare to displease God in them" and persecuted because they are separatists. The author asserts that the good government of a state demands that papists and atheists ought to be "removed" as "they knowe no obedyence but under tyranny." However, the Protestants are a different matter as the reason for their disaffection is a noble one: "as they hate all heresyes and poperye, so they cannot be perswarded to beare lykynge of the Queen's proseedings in relygion, by reason that oure churche here is not reformed." Although they hold their own separate services and assemblies which will offend many supporters of the church settlement, they ought not to be punished for the same, because they are the Quene's owne bowells, her dearest subjects, the servants of God, and suche as doe tread the straighte pathe of the Lorde to salvacion. So that eyther the church of Englonde must be framed to theire appetyte, or els they must be suffred, with out blame, to proseede as they beginne.

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The author's solution to this problem is threefold: first, allow some to depart; second, allow some to remain in England and have their own churches; third, that those who want to go, ought to have bestowed upon them "a porcion of the countrye of Irelond" and so help to "beare a people to God's glorie and Englond's surety." This last notion is the most satisfactory because it will "not only worke the quyet of the Quene and State at home," but help to subdue a recalcitrant people who threaten the defence of the realm. There will, of course, be problems, the author concludes rather cryptically: "I will say no more but that so Godly & noble a journey shall fynde more enemyes then friends; such is the sleighte of Sathan when God's kingdome shynthe." Mr. Carle ton's tract is another argument that religious persuasion cannot be considered in isolation as a phenomenon in an Irish context; as historians have frequently pointed out, after the Reformation was imposed upon Ireland, religious differences reinforced and transposed English notions of their cultural separation from the Irish.38 Both Carleton's tract and Spenser's View argue that current English efforts to convert the Irish are grossly inadequate and need to be improved;39 both express explicit fears that the proper way to reform Ireland will be scorned and rejected because the central authorities simply do not understand the problems involved (something also emphasized in The Faerie Queene). Most importantly, Carleton's tract argues that the place of the truly godly in Elizabethan England is exile: their task is to shore up the realm from outside. A related but more pessimistic argument shadows the narrative of the extant fragment of The Faerie Queene where Spenser criticizes Elizabeth's indifference towards her Irish subjects and refusal to intervene and crush the elements of rebellion. In the "Two Cantos of Mutabilitie" there is a direct allegory of the Fall. Ireland is described as "the holy-Island" (vn, vi, 37), because in the past Diana (Cynthia) and her nymphs and satyrs used to come to relax: Whylome, when IRELANDflourishedin fame Of wealths and goodnesse, far above the rest Of all that beare the British Islands name, The Gods then us'd (for pleasure and for rest) Oft to resort there-to, when seem'd them best: But none of all there-in more pleasure found, Then Cynthia; that is sovereigne Queene profest Of woods and forrests, which therein abound, Sprinkled with wholsom waters, more then most on ground. (vn, vi, 38)

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After Faunus dares to see Diana naked whilst bathing, she abandons and curses the island, so that it ceases to be a pastoral retreat and is instead populated by wolves and thieves who still menace current inhabitants (vn, vi, 55). In the View, Irenius remarks that Ireland's ancient name was "sacra Insula, taking sacra for acursed" (p. 145). What this short narrative - usually read as if it were only peripheral to the plot of the Cantos - informs us is that Ireland is the place where both the political stability of the British Isles is threatened and the religious certainties outlined in the earlier books of the poem are rendered problematic. Cynthia, as the letter to Raleigh attached to the first and subsequent editions of the poem stated, stood for Elizabeth, so that Ireland is said to have been the fairest of the British Isles she rules.40 The fact that she curses Ireland and vows never to return must surely be read as a fierce criticism of her lack of concern for one of her kingdoms and her failure to intervene to prevent it from remaining as a dangerous and neglected land. Just as Ireland ceases to be an Edenic paradise and becomes instead a wilderness, so does an etymological change take place as its name ceases to mean "holy" and becomes instead "acursed." The fact that the debate between Mutability and Jove to decide who rules the universe takes place in a land that is shown to be mutable also serves to undercut Nature's judgement that Mutability's arguments are self-defeating and hence fail to unseat Jove from his position.41 Spenser has been forced to recognize where the most significant threat to his sense of a stable identity as a Protestant Englishman came from and what it had been defined against.42 Lord Burghley is long thought to have been one of Spenser's chief political opponents and was possibly instrumental in having him permanently exiled to Ireland in 1580.43 If so, it would seem likely that Spenser was regarded as akin to the Protestants of Carleton's treatise, useful (or harmless) abroad but dangerous at home. Spenser, in turn, founded much of his discussion of religion and politics in both the View and The Faerie Queene on two related puns, sacra (holy/accursed) and salvage (savage/rescued) which meant that two seemingly separate concepts are always juxtaposed and a subversive reading can be set beside a more orthodox one. Hence lines such as "O sacred hunger of ambitious mindes,/ And impotent desire of men to raine" (v, xii, 1), are offered as a general statement which is then specifically applied to Burbon (Henry IV of France), and the two tyrants Geryoneo and Grantorto.44 But in the context of the never-completed Book xn, they can clearly be used to refer directly to Gloriana and Elizabeth herself for

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her foolish policy of abandoning a half-reformed Ireland, so that the separation between holy/cursed Protestant and Catholic crusader is blurred and Artegall, the salvage knight, is not sure exactly what he is rescuing. Regarded another way still, the lines could be read in the more usual English sense - "sacred" as "holy" - in order to signify the problems Artegall has in completing his assigned task. Artegall has to be cruel to be kind and risk becoming what he is supposed to overcome: a gauntlet is continually laid down to the reader to condemn his enterprise. The point of this verse might be that Artegall has to go beyond all acceptable standards to complete his quest: "the impotent desire of men to raign" could refer to either ArtegalPs ultimate failure or the futile desires of those who want to rule but are not prepared to break eggs to make an omelette. Analogously, on this reading, English Protestants like Spenser himself could be said to have had a holy desire to see the salvage island where they lived ruled properly, tragically frustrated by the vacillations and ignorance of the central authorities. NOTES

1 Grace Warren Landrum, "Spenser's Use of the Bible and his Alleged Puritanism," PMLA 51 (1926), 517-44; Virgil K. Whitaker, The Religious Basis of Spenser's Thought (Stanford, CA, 1950); Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge, 1984); John N. King, Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1990), "Appendix: Was Spenser a Puritan," pp. 233-8. My thanks to Lucy E. Hadfield for help with this essay. 2 For detail of Spenser's life see Willy Maley, A Spenser Chronology (Basingstoke, 1994)3 See also Andrew Hadfield, "Translating the Reformation: John Bale's Irish Vocacyon," in Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict, 1534-1660,

4

5 6 7

ed. Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley (Cambridge, 1993), PP- 43-59See, for example, the comments of George de Malynes and John Hughes, cited in R. M. Cummings, ed., Spenser: The Critical Heritage (London, 1971), pp. 115, 263-4; Graham Hough, ed., The First Commentary on ccThe Faerie Queene" (Privately Published, 1964); Virgil K. Whitaker, "The Theological Structure of The Faerie Queene I," ELH19 (1952), 151-64; Michael O'Connell, Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser's Faerie Queene (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), ch. 2; Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader's Guide (Cambridge, 1984), ch. 1. See Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, ch. 5. Hough, ed., First Commentary, p. 10; O'Connell, Mirror and Veil, p. 61. On Cyparissus see Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes

44

8 9

10

11 12

13

14

ANDREW HADFIELD (Harmondsworth, 1955), p. 228. All references to The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London, 1977). See the entry on "satyrs" in The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 628; Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne: Renaissance Essays (London, 1971), pp. 48—9. For a general discussion see A. D. Hadfield, "The English Conception of Ireland, c.1540-1600, with special reference to the works of Edmund Spenser," Unpublished D. Phil. Thesis, University of Ulster at Coleraine, 1988, pp. 446-69. See also Roy Harvey Pierce, "Primitivistic Ideas in The Faerie Queene," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 44 (1945), 139-51For a more sustained analysis see Andrew Hadfield, "The Course of Justice: Spenser, Ireland and Political Discourse," Studio. JVeophilologica 65 (1993), 187-96, at pp. 192-3. Martha Craig, "The Secret Wit of Spenser's Language," in Elizabethan Poetry: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Paul Alpers (Oxford, 1967), pp. 447-72. On Irena and Ireland see Sheila Cavanagh, "'Such was Irena's Countenance': Ireland in Spenser's Prose and Poetry," Texas Studies in Language and Literature 28 (1986), 24—50. On the relationship between Artegall and Talus see Richard A. McCabe, "The Fate of Irena: Spenser and Political Violence," in Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, ed. Patricia Coughlan (Cork, 1989), pp. 109-25. E d m u n d Spenser, A Viewe of the presente state Irelande discoursed by waye of a dialogue betwene Eudoxus and Irenius, Works: A Variorum Edition, x, The Prose Works, ed.

Rudolf Gottfried (Baltimore, 1949), pp. 39-231, pp. 99-102; Graham Hough, Preface to The Faerie Queene, p. 194; Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, p. 590. 15 For comment see Hadfield, "The English Conception of Ireland," pp. 129-30. 16 See also the representation of the Irish rivers during the marriage of the Thames and the Medway (iv, xi, 40-4) and the comments in Hadfield, "The English Conception of Ireland," pp. 499-500. 17 Edwin A. Greenlaw, "Spenser and British Imperialism," Modern Philosophy 40 (1910/1), 347-70; Bernard Capp, "The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought," in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester, 1984), pp. 93-124 at pp. 95-9. 18 See the entry on "Grantorto" in The Spenser Encyclopedia, p. 339. 19 Alistair Fowler, "Spenser and War," in War, Literature and the Arts in SixteenthCentury Europe, ed. J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (Basingstoke, 1989), pp. 147-64 at pp. 158-9. 20 On the Protestant iconography of Book 1 see King, Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, ch. 5. 21 On the problem of ruling a British "multiple kingdom" see Conrad Russell, "The British Background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641," Historical Research 61 (1988), 166-82. 22 Judith Anderson, " 'Nor Man It Is': The Knight of Justice in Book v of Spenser's Faerie Queene," PMLA 85 (1970), 65-77.

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23 Jane Aptekar, Icons ofJustice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book Vof "The Faerie Queene" (New York, 1969), chs. 6-7. 24 It is usually assumed that the slander refers to Grey's ruthless policy at Smerwick (1580), which Spenser defended in the View, pp. 63—4, 159—62. 25 Anne Fogarty, "The Colonization of Language: Narrative Strategies in View of the Present State of Ireland and The Faerie Queene, Book vi," in Spenser and Ireland, ed. Coughlan, pp. 75-108, at pp. 93-104. 26 For an example, see King, Spenser's Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, p. 37. 27 See for example, James Nohrnberg, The Analogy of The Faerie Queene (Princeton, 1976), p. 218; Hough, A Preface to The Faerie Queene, p. 145. On the ambivalent image of Henry VIII for later Protestants, see John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, ^ X PP- 137-8. 28 Donald Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature: Wild Man and Shepherd in "The Faerie Queene" (New Haven and London, 1966), p. 106. 29 John Pitcher, "Tudor Literature," in The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, ed. Pat Rogers (Oxford, 1987), pp. 59-111, at pp. 88-90. 30 View, p. 43. Subsequent references in the text in parentheses. 31 See A. D. Hadfield, "Briton and Scythian: Tudor Representations of Irish Origins," Irish Historical Studies 28, no. 112 (Nov. 1993), 390-408. 32 Compare the representation of Duessa in Faerie Queene, 1, viii, 13-14. 33 See above, note 3. 34 Cheney, Spenser's Image of Nature, pp. 62-5. More generally see Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 1952). 35 The upbringings of Satyrane and Artegall are linked through a series of verbal echoes: compare, 1, vi, 21-7 and v, i, 5-8. 36 McCabe, "The Fate of Irena." 37 Extracts reprinted in CSPD, Addenda, ij66-y9, pp. li-iv. 38 John Gillingham, "The English Invasion of Ireland," in Representing Ireland, ed. Bradshaw et al, pp. 24-42, at p. 26. 39 View, pp. 221-2; Carleton, p. liii. 40 Hamilton, ed., The Faerie Queene, p. 737. 41 For a more sustained argument see Andrew Hadfield, "Spenser, Ireland and Sixteenth Century Political Discourse," Modern Language Review 89 (1994), 1-18, at pp. 13-18. 42 See Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley, "Introduction: Irish Representations and English Alternatives," in Representing Ireland, ed. Bradshaw et al., pp. 1-23. 43 Richard Rambuss, Spenser's Secret Career (Cambridge, 1993), pp.83-4, 90-1. 44 See the entries on "Burbon" and "Geryoneo" in The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp. 121, 331.

CHAPTER THREE

Subversivefathers and suffering subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity Debora K Shuger

The greatest princes and potentates in the world, the most wealthy and haughty of us all, but for one poor beggar had been irrecoverably miserable Isaac Barrow, Spital Sermon (1671) For Gold and Grace did never yet agree: Religion alwaies sides with povertie. George Herbert, The Church Militant I SUBVERSIVE FATHERS

The recent lack of interest in the religious significance of Shakespearean drama stems in part from a suspicion that it possessed no such significance. As R. M. Frye showed many years ago, the notion of religious literature is alien to the humanist poetics of the sixteenth century, which valued "poesie" for its ethical rather than redemptive force.l The royal proclamations censoring plays that touched on matters of religion (issued under Henry, Mary, Elizabeth, and James) seem to corroborate Frye's argument: Protestant Englishmen did not seem very enthusiastic about staging the mysteries of faith.2 But if it is not plausible to read Shakespeare's plays as Christian allegories, neither is it likely that the popular drama of a religiously saturated culture could, by a secular miracle, have extricated itself from the theocentric orientation informing the discourses of politics, gender, social order, and history. The issue which has been ignored is not whether Shakespeare teaches Christian doctrine - this is either a red herring or twice-cooked cabbage - but how religious ideology, understood not as a uniquely privileged "key" but as part of a cultural system, functions in these plays. This question, it seems to me, has been ignored as a result of the identification of "religion" in Shakespeare with the defense of the social order, with, that is, a conservative, aristocratic 46

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ideology. If the plays are religious in some meaningful sense then (the assumption is) they are politically incorrect and proof that the canon is an elitist, reactionary construct.3 Contemporary critics of Shakespeare have therefore tended to bypass or subvert any religious content of the plays in order to reclaim their authority for more radical, politicized, skeptical - and therefore more congenial - allegiances.4 The question of religion in Shakespearean drama thus involves the nature of Christianity in English Renaissance culture - in particular, the customary division between privileged Elizabethan-world-picture conservatives (identified with orthodox Christians) and marginalized, heterodox radicals. What I want to argue in the first half of this essay is that this division between Christian and radical is incorrect, and furthermore, precisely those moments in Shakespeare identified by modern critics as radical and subversive derive (however indirectly) from traditions of Christian radicalism, traditions not rooted in popular heterodoxy but in fact characteristic of the Church Fathers, particularly the Greek Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries. This claim is not quite as willfully perverse as it seems. Early Christianity was deeply skeptical of official ideology and social institutions; as Gibbon noted, it undermined the Roman Empire. The writings of the Fathers constituted the one great available model of a successful revolutionary movement, and, in Patterson's words, the "principles of natural justice and equality [were] always recuperable by radical Christianity."5 Although conservative cosmological tendencies exist in Christian thought from Eusebius through the Homily against Disobedience, they never dislodge earlier suspicions concerning the moral bases of the socio-political order. Moreover, for complex reasons, the Greek tradition seems to have been more radical than the Latin,6 and therefore the immense popularity of the Greek Fathers during the Renaissance is not without political significance - although, as John Cox has shown, a similar demystifying realism marks Augustinian political theory.7 Finally, since, during the Renaissance, the majority of priests and playwrights both belonged to the same highly anomalous category of educated plebeians, one might expect certain affinities between their sociological perceptions, it being a curiosity not sufficiently remarked that the clerisy the spokesmen for official ideology in the Christian West - were not, in general, drawn from its dominant classes. A few examples may clarify just what "radical" means when used in connection with the Patrologia. Gregory of Nazianzen's encomium on St. Basil culminates in three episodes in which Basil confronts the Roman

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authorities: the saint first defying the local prefect, then shielding a widow from both her family and the authorities, who forcibly searched the bishop's bedchamber (shades of Edgar Hoover and Martin Luther King), and finally going to prison, which provoked the following incident: When the city perceived the outrage . . . it became all on fire with rage . . . but especially the men from the small-arms factory and from the imperial weavingsheds . . . Each man was armed with the tool he was using, or with whatever else came to hand at the moment. Torch in hand, amid showers of stones, with cudgels ready, all ran and shouted together in their united zeal... Nor were the women weaponless, when roused by such an occasion. Their pins were their spears, and no longer remaining women, they were by the strength of their eagerness endowed with masculine courage . . . What then was the conduct of this haughty and daring judge? He begged for mercy in a pitiable state of distress, cringing before them to an unparalleled extent, until the arrival of the martyr without bloodshed, who had won his crown without blows . . . This was the doing of the God of Saints, Who . . . resisteth the proud, but giveth grace to the humble.8 Although the Church Fathers on the whole recommended martyrdom rather than armed resistance to official persecution, St. Gregory's admiration for these zealous plebeians and his enjoyment of the prefect's distress betray an unmistakable enthusiasm for such unchivalric and unallegorical Christian warfare. 9 Perhaps even more striking than this heroic ecphrasis of urban rioting is the Greek Fathers' demystification of hierarchy and the social distributions of power and privilege. Chrysostom sounds uncannily like Thomas More in his sense of the theatricality of social roles: In a theater of this world at mid-day the stage is set and many actors enter, playing parts, wearing masks on their faces, retelling some old story, narrating the events. One becomes a philosopher, though he is not a philosopher. Another becomes a king, though he is not a king . . . Another becomes a slave, though he is free . . . They appear something other than what they are, and they do not appear what they really are . . . As long as the audience remain in their seats, the masks are valid; but when evening overtakes them, and the play is ended, and everyone goes out, the masks are cast aside. He who is king inside the theater is found to be a coppersmith outside. The masks are removed, the deceit departs, the truth is revealed . . . Evening overtakes them, the play is ended, the truth appears. So it is also in life and its end. The present world is a theater, the conditions of men are roles: wealth and poverty, ruler and ruled, and so forth.10 Like later humanists, Chrysostom sees the theater as inherently subversive, interrogating the very order it dramatizes simply by dramatizing it;

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it is in fact likely that the radicalism of the early humanists owes more than a little to their rediscovery of the Greek Fathers. In England, the conflict between the early church and the imperial authorities remains a powerful paradigm - the palimpsest for Foxe's martyrology and still distantly audible in Lancelot Andrewes's early catechism, which argues the truth of Christianity from its resistance to princes.11 I have no intention of claiming that Shakespeare studied the Church Fathers; yet where Shakespeare seems most "radical" he also seems strikingly close to certain strands in the patristic tradition. Lear's prayer for the poor naked wretches (3.4.28-36), the ragged madness of Poor Tom, the bread riot in Coriolanus "feel" radical because most Elizabethan and Jacobean preaching does not deal with the suffering and hunger of the poor.12 From the 1590s on, if we may believe Christopher Hill, English Puritanism stressed "the apparently irredeemable wickedness, of many of the poor . . . Poverty has ceased to be a holy state and has become presumptive evidence of wickedness."13 There is an odd lack of interest in the social dimension of religious existence in the works of the major Elizabethan and Jacobean preachers, men like Perkins, Donne, Andrewes, and Hooker; in Donne, for example, other people usually figure only as a danger to one's own soul — they are the friends and neighbors who gently ridicule one's piety and call the pilgrim back to the City of Destruction.14 Perkins's treatment of social issues centers on the conservative notion of vocation, which grounds the extant social order in the divine; beggars, evicted peasants, and the unemployed are, according to Perkins, "(for the most part) a cursed generation."15 But Lear's naked wretches haunt Chrysostom in Antioch, where the poor man cannot sleep with pangs of the belly, restless famine besetting him, and that often while it is freezing, and the rain coming down on him . . . wandering about, like the dogs in the alleys, in darkness and in mire . . . [or] laid in rags, and straw, and dirt, has to bear all the cold.16 Like the plebeians in the first scene of Coriolanus, Chrysostom blames the hunger of the poor on hoarding patricians rather than the gods: as long as thou hast [what to give] . . . and there be others hungering, there is no excuse for thee. But when thou both shuttest up corn and raisest the price, and devisest other unusual tricks of traffic; what hope of salvation shalt thou have henceforth? Thou hast been bidden to give freely to the hungry, but thou dost not give at a suitable price even . . . thy dog is fed to fulness whilst Christ wastes with hunger.17

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These sermons graphically represent the injustice of the social order visible in the suffering bodies of the poor: beggars who, like Poor Tom, must feign madness and mutilate themselves to get alms, "chewing the skins of worn-out shoes . . . fixing sharp nails into their hands . . . lying about in frozen pools with naked stomachs" - "God's image and similitude, naked and trembling with cold, and with difficulty keeping himself upright." 18 The emphasis on the body in pain here, the profoundly unclassical sense that the vulnerability of the flesh lies at "the core of what it is to be human," 19 also links these passages to Shylock's "Hath not ajew eyes" speech, minus its final justification of revenge; Jews, like Christians, suffer disease, wounds, and death. (There's not much tickling in the Church Fathers.) The political implications of this vulnerability are spelled out in Lear. On the heath, Lear undertakes, in Patterson's words, "an emergent structural analysis of power and class relations":20 Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thy own back. Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind For which thou whipp'st her. The usurer hangs the cozener. Through tatter'd rags small vices do appear; Robes and furr'd gowns hide all. (4.6.156-61)21 Hierarchy is mocked and subverted by the shared vulnerability to sexual desire as well as whipping. This insight into the democratizing implications of lust and pain is evident in Jerome: He whom we look down upon, whom we cannot bear to see, the very sight of whom causes us to vomit, is the same as we are, formed with us from the selfsame clay, compacted of the same elements. Whatever he suffers, we also can suffer. Let us consider his suffering as our own . . . In silken robes or rags, the same lust holds sway. Desire neither fears the Emperor's purple nor keeps away from the beggar's filth.22 As in Shakespeare, clothing serves as a metonomy for class, concealing the "bare, forked animal" - concealing, that is, the fact that the poor and rich share the same sexualized body. For both prelate and playwright the "common catastrophe of lust" entails an outraged compassion for the victims of hierarchy. A sermon by St. Basil, which St. Ambrose includes in one of his homilies and which also appears (via Rufinus) in Gratian's Decretum - the basic text of medieval canon law - anticipates the second strain in Lear's invective: the condemnation of social inequity.

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But you say, "Where is the injustice if I diligently look after my own property without interfering with other people's?" O impudent words! Your own property, you say. What? From what stores did you bring it into this world? . . . No one may call his own what is common, of which, if man takes more than he needs, it is obtained by violence . . . Who is more unjust, more avaricious, more greedy than a man who takes the food of the multitude not for his use but for his abundance and luxuries? . . . The bread that you hold back belongs to the needy, the clothes that you shut away belong to the naked, the money that you bury in the ground is the price of redeeming and freeing the wretched.23 What Shakespeare shares with the Church Fathers is this savage perception of earthly injustice and these tragic bodies of the poor - bodies quite different from Bakhtin's carnivalesque and comic bodies, with their hearty appetites, animal vitality, and crowns made from "a meat pie that someone has bitten into." 24 Shakespeare has these too, but they belong to a conservative folk tradition predicated on the essential difference between peasant and aristocrat, sense and sensibility, ruled and ruler. The argument thus far suggests two corollaries. First, during the Renaissance, a primary role of the canon, however unintentional, was not to reproduce official ideology but rather to authorize and transmit subversion. A canonical/canonized author is precisely one who is not subject to censorship and therefore, unlike Foucault's "author," can "say forbidden things with impunity."25 There are no saints on the Index. For example, the defense of tyrannicide; the claim that government should be based on the consent of the lower orders; and the assertion that in times of neccessity all goods must be considered as common property, and hence that for a hungry person to take food is not theft would all have been considered alarming, if not revolutionary, to Tudor-Stuart authorities. But if these are radical postulates they are also Thomist, and, as far as I know, the Summa Theologiae never fell foul of the censors.26 Here the name of the canonical/canonized author evidently authorizes "forbidden things." Similarly, millenarianism, popular insurrection, and "semi-pelagianism" (in the form of the Greek Church's defense of free will) infiltrate Protestant England through, as it were, the main door. The same free passage, it should be noted, also extends to the secular canon. During the Renaissance classical texts obtain, by virtue of their canonicity, an inalienable imprimatur. Eloquent defenses of tyrannicide, libertinism, free speech, atheism, republicanism, and homosexual love are diffused via canonical transmission - available to schoolboys in Cicero, Vergil, Livy, Tacitus, Lucretius, and Ovid. And so too in Chrysostom's

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sermons the inequities of power inscribed on the bodies of the poor are the subject of canonical discourse. And this opens the possibility that the " 'sacralized' and 'sacralizing' figures," who in Foucault's account precede the invention of the author, share with this later creation the same transgressive practices - and hence that the connection between authorship and transgression did not result from changes in the copyright laws but from the ordinary experience of Renaissance schoolboys that old books tell dangerous tales.27 Canonical texts function quite differently in the cultural politics of the Renaissance from contemporary ones, which are subject to both secular and ecclesiastical authority, if only because the patristic and classical canons perform their critique from within the hegemony (thus rendering the notion of hegemony somewhat problematic) rather than infiltrating from its margins. The second corollary follows from this: the model of Renaissance culture which posits an official, orthodox, and conservative Christianity as the dominant ideology, challenged by subversive, heterodox peasants below and subversive, agnostic intellectuals above, is misleading. Pace Tillyard, the break with political cosmology - the legitimation of the social order as the embodiment of "natural" or "supernatural" hierarchy - characterizes both classical and Hebraic speculation from a very early period on: the insubordinate fulminations of the Old Testament prophets, Plato's ruthless critique of Athenian society, Antigone's defiance of Creon in the name of the "unwritten laws." Likewise, in the Christian West, orthodoxy is itself problematic and complex, fissured by a guilty disillusion over its own institutional bases, ambivalent about power, troubled by a bad conscience. One of the distinctive features of Christian culture, still visible in Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and liberation theology, derives from this persistent internal tension between social justice and established order - a tension not everywhere visible but also never really silenced: the Homily against Disobedience, for instance, had a wide audience, but so did Utopia. Furthermore, it is not invariably the case that the tension between justice and order is equivalent to a tension between, on the one hand, the avant-garde views of humanist intellectuals like More, Erasmus (translator of Lucian and Chrysostom), or Sir Henry Savile (editor of Tacitus and Chrysostom) and, on the other, an official discourse bent on maintaining property, power, and hierarchy. As the circulation of St. Basil's anti-Lockean manifesto in Ambrose and the Decretum suggests, the social radicalism of the Church Fathers infiltrates official discourse as

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well as both populist and humanist critique. For example, Lear's prayer for the "poor naked wretches" has a surprising discursive genealogy. It ends, "Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel, / That thou mayst shake the superflux to them, / And show the heavens more just" (3.4.34—6). "Superflux" is a Shakespearean coinage, a translation of a technical term from medieval canon law referring to that percentage of a person's income or goods that is owed to the poor. Johannes Teutonicus' thirteenth-century Glossa Ordinaria on the Decretum thus states that "in times of necessity any superfluous wealth . . . [is] to be regarded as common property, to be shared by all those in need."28 From the thirteenth century on, canonists defined the basic obligations of the rich towards the poor according to the formula that "a man who possessed 'superfluities' was morally bound to give to all in need, and those who had adequate though not 'superfluous' means were bound to give to all in a state of 'extreme necessity' " 29 Guido de Baysio's commentary on the Decretum (1300) thus concludes that "it is a precept to give alms from our superfluities"; similarly, the mid-fourteenth-century canonist Henricus de Bohic states that "we are bound to give what is superfluous"; Aquinas's Commentum in Lib. IV Sententiarum likewise affirms that "to give alms from superfluities is a matter of precept."30 The Decretum and its Glossa Ordinaria "bristle with phrases like . . . 'Our superfluities belong to the poor.'"31 All these assertions that the poor have a moral right to one's "superflux" rest on the widely accepted premise, in Aquinas's formulation, that "in times of necessity all things are common property (communia) . . . And therefore those things which some have in abundance are, according to natural law, owed to the sustenance of the poor" - from which he concludes, as mentioned above, that in cases of "evident and urgent necessity" one has a right to steal food or whatever else is required to preserve life.32 Hence, to return to Shakespeare, Lear's prayer does not voice subversive heterodoxies - whether popular or humanist - but the social teachings of the medieval church. In his painful epiphany, the pagan king for a moment grasps the nature of Christian caritas?3 Similarly, if one looks at the early modern discourses relevant to the question of hoarding and dearth raised in the opening scene of Coriolanus, one finds the suspicions of the Roman plebeians ratified from unexpected quarters. We know that hoarding was a problem during bad harvests in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries because of condemnations initiated by Crown and church - condemnations, that is, of the hoarders, not of those who protested such emergent capitalist practices. A contemporary economic historian thus observes that "Tudor

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regulations controlling the sale of grain were .. . based upon the explicit assumption that, in matters affecting the feeding of the people, individual actions based on considerations of private gain were sufficiently detrimental to the common weal to be named crimes." 34 This is borne out by specific instances of ecclesiastical and royal interference. In 1597 the Queen requested the Archbishop of Canterbury to commission sermons denouncing the "engrossers of corn"; in 1608 James "appealed to the justices of the peace to ensure 'that the poore may bee served of Corne at convenient and charitable prices [and] that the richer sort be earnestly mooved by Christian charitie, to cause their Graine to be sold under the common prices of the Market to the poorer sort'"; and in 1632 Laud's Star Chamber concluded its investigation of hoarding with the observation "'this last yeares famin was made by man and not by God.'" 35 Even though, as Hill puts it, "a major object" of both "possessing classes" and "middling sort" was "maintaining [the poor] in subjection and making them work," the more conservative piety of the Crown and the Laudian church preserved (to some degree) the ancient patristic outlook that had been incorporated into medieval poor law.36 As Tawney long ago remarked, "the official view of the proper system of agrarian relationships was on the whole favorable to the small man, and was, indeed, not very different from that expressed in the demands of the peasants themselves."37 The dangerous perceptions of Shakespeare's plebeians belong to the hegemony - a quasi-paradox constructed from our own reductive cultural models.38 II. SUFFERING SUBJECTS

At this point, I want to note something which has probably occurred to most readers, namely, that suffering peasants are rather rare in Shakespeare. Most of his lower-class characters are comic, even if not without a certain dignity; nevertheless, Dogberry, Mistress Quickly, and Elbow do not seem to have been created to call in question the social structures responsible for their idiosyncratic grammar. Shakespeare's "serious" protagonists uniformly belong to the upper-classes, Poor Tom being an only apparent exception. Compared to earlier texts like Piers Plowman, the Wakefield Mysteries, Larimer's sermons, and Woodstock, Shakespeare's plays disregard the tragedies of the permanently cheated.39 This is scarcely a new observation, but what I am interested in is whether this disregard is related to the secularization of the Shakespearean stage. Do the radical and Christian voices exit together, and if so, where?

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The consolidation of Tudor power led to the collapse of radical humanism - the infamous shift from Utopia to The Courtier splendidly outlined by G. K. Hunter in his work on Lyly. But the Erasmian concern for the transformation of society gave way not simply to the Elizabethan obsession with order but to a split between a largely secularized analysis of the social arena and a new inwardness. This split is registered with admirable precision by William Perkins: Every person is a double person and under two regiments. In the first regiment I am a person of mine own self, under Christ. . . [and] must after the example of Christ humble myself, forsake and deny myself ... and let every man go over me ... And yet I am to love them... In the temporal regiment, thou art a person in respect of another. Thou art husband, father, mother, daughter, wife, lord, subject and there thou must do according to thine office. If thou be a father, thou must do the office of a father and rule, or else thou damnedest thyself.40 Perkins's distinction between the two regiments, which he takes from Luther (probably via Tyndale) privatizes Christianity, localizing presence in subjectivity, while the temporal regiment is secularized and politicized. This migration of the sacred from the social order to pneumatic inwardness begins before the Renaissance; as Peter Brown notes, by the twelfth century, "the supernatural, which had tended to be treated as the main source of the objectified values of the group, came to be regarded as the preserve par excellence of the exact opposite; it became the preserve of intensely personal feeling," the domains of society and nature simultaneously taking on "an impersonal objectivity."41 In Luther, the equivalent distinction between temporal/secular and inward/spiritual regiments forms the basis of both his anthropology (the duplex persona) and social theory (the ^wei-Regimente-Lehre), and it is this Lutheran formulation that stands behind much sixteenth-century English speculation on the relation between private and public identity - central to moderate Puritans like Perkins as well as to Tyndale, Whitgift, and Hooker.42 This division, in turn, corresponds to a gradual fissuring within the English Renaissance episteme. On the one hand, the discourses of Christianity are increasingly confined to subjective spaces, textualized in the devotional lyric, meditation, and autobiography. On the other hand, at least among the intellectual and governing elite, the discourses of politics, history, and manners slip out from their medieval, Christian framework: witness the popularity of Tacitus, Sallust, courtly handbooks, and Machiavelli. Likewise the poor, whom medieval theology saw as the body of Christ and the proper objects of Christian charity, are reclassified as

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threats to secular society to be either punished or provided for by the state. This secularization likewise informs Shakespearean drama; the history plays, for example, seem distinctly less concerned with the judgments of divine providence than the politics of divine right.43 I am not planning to discuss the totality of Renaissance culture right now, but a single implication of this split: namely, the internalization of suffering peasants. A student of mine recently observed that Herbert's "Collar" sounds very much like a tenant's revolt against exploitation, injustice, and oppression; the language of social protest becomes the language of subjectivity - and this is generally true of Herbert, who constantly writes about employment, denial, misery, longing, hunger, and high rents. The same introjection of poverty informs Hooker's first sermon; he is trying to vocalize the experience of despair by a sort of choral prosopopoeia: Then we think, looking upon others, and comparing them with ourselves, Their tables are furnished day by day; earth and ashes are our bread: they sing to the lute, and they see their children dance before them; our hearts are heavy in our bodies as lead, our sighs beat as thick as a swift pulse, our tears do wash the beds wherein we lie: the sun shineth fair upon their foreheads; we are hanged up like bottles in the smoke, cast into corners like the sherds of a broken pot.44 Marginality, deprivation, and hunger turn trope, becoming the discourse of Protestant subjectivity; the psyche introjects the arena of conflict and misery. So too Spenser's Red Cross endures whipping, imprisonment, and starvation — but endures them allegorice, internally. Again, the internalization of the poor goes back to the high Middle Ages: to what R. W. Southern terms the Anselmian revolution and to Franciscan piety. Thus in his prayer to St. Peter, Anselm speaks of himself as "the poorest and basest of homunculi, weighed down with many and grave burdens, standing] in miserable need of the help of thy kindly power."45 Similarly, as Janet Coleman remarks, St. Francis "called himself servus, rusticus, mercenarius . .. calling upon his followers to associate with and be considered poor, feeble, vagabonds, beggars, labourers, unlettered, the powerless and the dispossessed."46 What happens in the Renaissance is that this monastic construction of the self as beggar enters literary representation, a transfer that parallels Foucault's description of the extension of monastic discipline to society as a whole.47 In particular, this construction marks Shakespearean tragedy: the secularization of narrative appears in conjunction with a new complexity in

Shakespeare and Christianity characterization, achieved, in part, by representing the self as suffering subject. Thus as Weimann and Patterson have observed, Hamlet's language borrows heavily from popular speech; his madness and impertinency, his frequent use of proverbs, "knavish speech" (3.6.23), and fondness for "images drawn from the most common aspects of everyday life" ally him to the lower-class figures of the Moralities.48 The prince, verily, is "a rogue and peasant slave" (2.2.553), "even poor in thanks" (2.2.275) ~ a rebellious subject constituted by the introjection of rebellious subjects. So too the thoughts of Richard II are "like seely beggars/ Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame" (5.5.25-6). Shakespeare's tragic heroes articulate their experience in the languages of madness, self-division, suffering, marginalization, and poverty; one thinks again of Edgar's bedlam beggar and Lear's nakedness in the storm. Such characters acquire their psychological depth by assimilating the ancient Christian discourses of social injustice to the structures of the psyche, where, to turn a phrase, "a beggar may go a progress through the interiority of a king."49 The mixing of beggars, clowns, and kings takes place within the tragic protagonist, enabling a fundamentally new representation of the self — one which is not to be confused with the reflexive, autonomous self associated (rightly or wrongly) with emergent capitalism, but a self marked by failure, alienation, and suffering. Moreover, this subjectivity or selfhood is not a function of class/race/gender.50 This may be one reason why Shakespeare has become the focus of recent discomforts with essentialism. The drastic separation of subjectivity from social role in Shakespeare becomes immediately apparent if one compares his plays with the aristocratic drama of Chapman or Dryden, where the upper-class characters know only the refined motives of honor and love, or indeed with virtually all pre-modern secular literature: Hector, Tristan, and the Wife of Bath, however brilliantly realized, have no selfhood apart from their socially ascribed attributes. In fact, the modern "radical" position that the material conditions of class, gender, and ethnicity determine selfhood is in some ways rather traditional, if not conservative. But Hamlet's suicidal depression, bursts of violence and cruelty, isolation, brooding, self-contempt, arrogance, and nauseous fury do not observe decorum. Neoclassical critics like Rymer, Dennis, and Voltaire objected to Shakespeare's characterization precisely because his kings were not sufficiently regal nor his noblemen adequately aristocratic. Before Lear, kings did not hallucinate or run around half-naked with flowers in their hair, weeping over their unkind children.

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Hence the recent scholarship on English Renaissance drama that classifies works according to their artisanal or aristocratic sympathies seems rather ill-suited to Shakespeare's plays, particularly the tragedies. These neither valorize the bourgeois virtues of honesty, personal responsibility, and thrift nor aristocratic courage, gallantry, generosity, and breeding.51 Like Herbert's lyrics and Hooker's sermon - the latter a favorite of the Leveller William Walwyn52 - Shakespeare's tragic dramas do not (at least not primarily) depict class-specific social identity. Nor did subsequent criticism venerate Shakespeare because he lent ideological support either to bourgeois/republican values (if so, Dekker and Middleton would have been preferred) or to conservative, royalist ones (then Jonson's masques would have crowned the canon). But if Shakespeare's tragedies are neither populist nor aristocratic, what sort of monstrous births are they then? The answer is the substance of Samuel Johnson's response to the neoclassical critique of Shakespearean indecorum. Johnson's phraseology has fallen from favor, but his observations, as is often the case, have an extraordinary precision. His Preface to Shakespeare thus begins with the problem just posed: namely, that Shakespeare's tragic protagonists - unlike virtually all prior literary personae - do not seem types of their class and social role. His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions . . . or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions. But Johnson then goes on, in a much-criticized passage, to specify the extraordinary object of Shakespearean mimesis - that which, for Johnson, justifies Shakespeare's canonical preeminence. they are the genuine progeny of common humanity . . . His persons act and speak by the influence of those general passions and principles by which all minds are agitated, and the whole system of life is continued in motion . . . Shakespeare has no heroes; his scenes are occupied only by men, who act and speak as the reader thinks that he should himself have spoken or acted on the same occasion.53 As with all generalizations, there are many exceptions and qualifications one might wish to make here,54 but the thrust of the argument seems valid. Lear's pedigree does not fundamentally alter the fact that he is a powerless and hurt old man tormented by rage, guilt, and thankless children. Shakespeare's plot, as Johnson puts it, "requires . . . kings, but he thinks only on men." His hand, as Lear puts it, "smells of mortality" (4.6.129).

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Nor is Johnson's distinction between cultural accidents and common humanity anachronistic. Although common humanity is not quite the same as Perkins' person of one's own self, they both demarcate a generic selfhood distinct from one's public, social identity — a selfhood already present in medieval religious texts but in Shakespeare for the first time transposed into secular, literary forms. To say this, moreover, does not entail the objective existence of an atemporal human nature; rather the reverse. Shakespeare's characters helped make possible the subsequent conceptualization of "human nature," understanding by this a historically specific configuration of inwardness not determined by social role precisely because it appropriates class conflict to its own self-divided structures. What strikes Johnson as "human nature" is a discursive construct effected by the introjection of base clowns and suffering subjects; as Perkins notes, the person of one's own self must "let every man go over him." Other Renaissance texts complicate this appropriation by the assimilation of additional marginalized voices - especially the female, the child, and the outcast - to the representations of subjectivity.55 Not surprisingly, this process is most often found in devotional writers like Herbert, Donne, and Southwell, who inherit the monastic formulation of the soul as sponsa,parvulus,patiens, and peccator. But the selfhood formed by these appropriations strangely corresponds to Foucault's claim that "in a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent."56 Children, the weak, madmen, and delinquents (read "sinners") - the interior personae of Foucault's modern subject - take their place alongside beggars on the interior stages of selves disciplined by Christianity. The movement from role-essentialism to "human nature" is thus driven by the identification of the privileged, male self (the author of pre-modern discourse) with its victims, an identification first articulated in the social thought of the Church Fathers and later internalized as the basis for the monastic construction of devotional subjectivity or the "soul."57 Hence - to circle back to where I began - the representation of "class conflict" in Shakespeare seems genetically linked to canonical Christian discourse. By a curious "superposition, whereby the things left over from an earlier stage turn out to be the basis for future developments,"58 the patristic critique of social injustice both informs Shakespeare's radical sympathies and supplies the symbols for his representation of tragic consciousness. Furthermore, while many

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Renaissance dramatists draw on the radical strains in traditional Christian social thought, Shakespeare seems the first to translate the medieval internalization of suffering subjects into a secular, literary idiom. And it is this shift from social radicalism to interiority that subsequently becomes the governing narrative of the modern epic. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained thus both reject Milton's earlier revolutionary politics, turning the eyes of hope instead to a "paradise within." Similarly, Wordsworth's Prelude describes the collapse of the poet's revolutionary idealism and subsequent discovery of the saving imagination. Yeats, Joyce, Dostoevsky, along with the later works of Blake and Shelley, probably could be considered here as well.59 The Shakespearean reconstitution of the subject out of the fragments of failed revolutions ("Shakespearean" being synecdocal here) shapes the politics of the English canon (and its academic guardians) with its (and our) perplexing mix of transgressive perception, hypertrophied subjectivity, and painfully inadequate opposition to real social inequities. Although this may be putting heretical gilding on an heterodox lily, I want to conclude with a few political axioms that seem relevant to contemporary Shakespeare criticism, much of which I find confusing - particularly its somewhat uncritical use of terms like "conservative" and "radical" or "populist." Before discussing these labels, it seems advisable to define them, one hopes in a generally acceptable fashion. I take it then that "conservative" denotes support for the established order in church and state; "radical" that which challenges oppressive social forms or traditional pieties (whether religious or metaphysical) or both; 60 "populist" views characteristic of the lower classes. If this much be granted, then several conclusions seem, at least to me, evident. First, "conservative" is not equivalent to "indifferent to the sufferings of the disenfranchised." To the best of my knowledge, besides Byron, the only English author who risked his freedom and safety for the poor and oppressed victims of colonial power is Jonathan Swift - a Tory and Anglican priest.61 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, radical thinkers like Machiavelli and Hobbes were (or at least were perceived to be) less picky about matters of social justice than traditional moralists. Second, "populist" and "radical" are not synonyms. The Shoemaker's Holiday, William Jennings Bryant, and Southern Baptists voice the aspirations and ideals of small farmers, laborers, and tradesmen although not noticeably subversive of established order. Conversely, the Leviathan is radical without being populist.62 In fact, one would be hard pressed to find

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more than a handful of pre-Civil War texts which are both populist and radical; as Heinemann remarks, "the aspirations and mentalities of the radical and democratic 'second revolution' are articulated, if at all, in Utopian fables and wishful fantasies of a poor man's heaven, divine revenge on the rich, a world magically turned upside-down" (italics mine).63 Third, radical texts do not invariably deal with social inequities rather than the motions of private interiority. Bunyan's Christian puts his fingers in his ears and flees from family and city in order to find his own salvation. Even tinkers have souls (and pens) as well as bodies; if anything, the "radicalism" of Pilgrim's Progress and Grace Abounding (as well as the Gospels and Lyrical Ballads) inheres in their claim that the inner lives of common laborers have both a literary and spiritual grandeur. 64 Fourth, works that do protest against social injustice are not ipso facto either conservative, radical, or populist. The motifs Heinemann associates with radical drama - outrage at "rack-renting and eviction of peasants; tax-farming on a grand scale for the profit of greedy courtiers and corrupt justices" - reappear in countless medieval and Renaissance sermons; J. W. Blench thus lists "the covetousness of landlords and their wicked enclosures . . . usury . . . the manifest shifts of the capitalist merchants . . . the extravagance of the rich, and the neglect of the poor" as homiletic commonplaces (and not only among Puritan preachers).65 The same themes recur in More, Nashe, and Jonson. Prior to the late seventeenth-century formulation of a distinctive capitalist/mercantilist ideology based on laissez-faire economics and the Lockean sanctification of property (and subsequently, social Darwinism and free market competition), most people seem to have held remarkably similar notions of social justice and ideal order.66 Thus even More's communist welfare-state won the enthusiastic praise of most of Europe's intellectual elite and posed no bar to its author's rapid advancement in the royal bureaucracy. And finally, the displacement of social discourses of suffering and poverty on to psychological representations is not necessarily wrong, since loneliness and grief are not less real or agonizing than physical deprivation. To the extent that materialisms remain illicitly dualist and merely invert the traditional valuations of the mind-body dichotomy, they are reductive and contradictory.67 NOTES

1 R. M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963). 2 Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England from the Middle Ages to the Present Day

(London, 1968), pp. 109-15.

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3 The case for a conservative, elitist Shakespeare has been strongly argued by Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), pp. 204, 226, 233, 244; and Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London, 1989), pp. 403-4 et passim. I of course basically agree with Taylor and Helgerson's argument that Shakespeare was not an early champion of political correctness. Recently, however, a couple of important studies have begun to explore the links between Christian radicalism and Shakespearean drama; see Richard Strier's "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1988), pp. 104-33 a n d John Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton, 1989). 4 See, for example, Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology, and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago, 1984); Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Cambridge, 1989); Stephen Greenblatt, "King Lear and Harsnett's 'Devil-Fiction,'" Genre 15, nos. 1-2 (1982): 239-42 (special issue on The Forms of Power and the Power of Forms in the Renaissance, ed. Greenblatt) and "The Improvisation of Power" in Renaissance Self-Fashioningfrom More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980). A comprehensive footnote here would include most New Historicist scholarship on Shakespeare as well as most of the feminist criticism of the earlier 1980s. If statistics are needed, a footnote to an abstract of a conference paper remarks that "of the nearly 950 bibliographic entries on Renaissance drama in a recent volume of the MLA Bibliography, only 15 address the relation between this theater and some aspect of sixteenth-century religion" (Huston Diehl, abstract of " 'O, reform it altogether': Imagining Theater in an Iconoclastic Age," 1991 SAA conference). 5 Patterson, Popular Voice, p. 40. 6 See Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York, 1988), pp. 98-126. 7 Cox, The Dramaturgy of Power. On the popularity of the Greek Fathers, particularly Chrysostom, during the Renaissance, one notes that: (1) From the later Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Chrysostom (whom Erasmus praises for being "theatrical" and "popular") was second only to Augustine in influence and authority (cf. Erasmus, Prefaces to the Fathers, the New Testament, on Study, ed. Robert Peters [Menston, Eng., 1970], p. 94; G. R. Evans, The Language and Logic of the Bible: The Road to Reformation [Cambridge, 1985], p. 21). (2) Sixteenth-century library inventories "reveal that seventy-two Cambridge scholars selected at random by that most random selector, death, owned 253 copies of the ten principal Greek Fathers" (Harold Weatherby, "The True Saint George," English Literary Renaissance I7[i987], 123). (3) There were at least seventeen editions of the complete works of Chrysostom in Latin translation published on the Continent between 1504 and 1614 (there are many more editions of single works); prior to 1642, English printers published eighteen items by Chrysostom, eleven in English translation; several

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9

10 11

12

13

14

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of these done by eminent humanists like Cheke, Chaloner, and Lupset. (4) Renaissance ars praedicandi and rhetorics regularly recommend Chrysostom as one of the two or three greatest models of sacred eloquence. Bartholomew Keckermann thus observes: "Chrysostomus concionator est oris vere aurei & populo accommodatissimus, ita ut vix quisquam eo vel verbis disertior, vel tota oratione & numeris iunctior. Erasmi Roterodami perspicax fuit in Patribus iudicium; is de Chrysostomo honorificicentissime scribit. . . Vix alius, inquit, in enarrandis sacris voluminibus dexterius versatus est, quam D. Iohannes Chrysostomus, nee alius scriptor magis accommodus his, qui separant admunuus concionandF (Rhetoricae ecclesiasticae [Hanover, 1616], pp. 131—2); see also Erasmus, Ecclesiastes sive concionator evangelicus [1535] in vol. v of Opera omnia emendatiora et auctiora, ed. J. LeClerc, 10 vols. (Leiden, 1703-6; rpt. London, 1962), v: 983c, 1011a; Nicholas Caussin, De eloquentia sacra et humana, HbriXVI [1617/8], 3rd edn. (Paris, 1630), pp. 988-1010; Luis de Granada, Ecclesiasticae rhetoricae, sive, de ratione concionandi [1576], rpt. in Ecclesiasticae rhetoricae (Verona, 1782), p. 250; Georgius Sohnius, Tractatus de interpretatione ecclesiastica, bound with Keekermann's Rhetoricae ecclesiasticae, p. 155. Saint Gregory Nazianzen, The Panegyric on S. Basil (Oration XLIII), Select Orations of Saint Gregory Nazianzen, trans. Charles Browne andJames Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, vol. VII (Grand Rapids, MI, 1978), pp. 413-14. See also Peter Brown's splendid analysis of the immensely popular secondcentury Acts of Paul and Thecla, in which St. Thecla, "the exposed, virgin traveler, did not merely resist the advances of the noble Alexander of Antioch; she boxed his ears with such force that the great golden crown of a priest of the Imperial cult, heavy with images of the Emperors themselves, toppled from his head" (The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity [New York, 1988], p. 157). Saint J o h n Chrysostom, On Wealth and Power, trans. Catharine Roth (Crestwood, NY, 1984), p. 109. Lancelot Andrewes, The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols., Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (Oxford, 1854), vi: 51.1 do not find, however, that Andrewes used this argument after the accession of James. See Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 86-7; Cox, Dramaturgy of Power, pp. 41-60; J. W. Blench, Preaching in England in the late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: A Study of English Sermons 1450-C.1600 (Oxford, 1964), pp. 319-20. Christopher Hill, "The Poor and the People," The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 3 vols. vol. in: People and Ideas in iyth Century England (Sussex, 1986), p. 259; Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the iyth Century (London, 1958), p. 218. Shuger, Habits of Thought, p. 203; Richard Strier, "Sanctifying the Aristocracy: 'Devout Humanism' in Francois de Sales, J o h n Donne, and George Herbert," Journal of Religion 69 (1989), 36-58.

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15 L. C. Knights, Drama & Society in the Age of Jonson (New York, 1937), pp. 146-8; Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, p. 229. 16 Saint John Chrysostom, The Homilies of Saint John Chrysostom on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians, ed. Rev. Talbot Chambers, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. xn (Grand Rapids, MI, 1979), p. 63. 17 Ibid., p. 362. 18 Ibid., p. 123. 19 Caroline Bynum, "The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg," Renaissance Quarterly 39 (1986), 413. 20 Patterson, Popular Voice, p. 112. 21 All quotations from Shakespeare have been taken from the 1963 reprint edition of the 1917 Yale Shakespeare. 22 St. Jerome, Epistolae, ed. Migne, Patrologia latina, xxn, 694, 731; translation in part from Peter Brown, The Body and Society, p. 317. 23 Quoted in Brian Tierney, Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England (Berkeley, 1959), p. 34. The passage is echoed in Larimer's 1552 sermons of the Lord's Prayer (Sermons, Parker Society 1, 398; quoted in Knights, Drama & Society, pp. 153-4). Interestingly, however, Larimer's qualification - that even though "the poor man hath title to the rich man's goods," he may never, even if starving, steal them - contradicts the explicit teachings of both Aquinas and canon law. 24 Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York, 1985), p. 67. The recent valorization of popular/peasant culture puzzles me, perhaps because, having lived in the South, I tend to associate Bristol's "energetic popular culture that struggles to retain its own particular and local authority over the ordering of social and economic life" (p. 6) with lynch mobs, Governor Wallace, and the segregation riots at the University of Mississippi, where the Federal marshals came in to protect the oppressed minority (James Meredith) from the post-football game (read "carnival") student protesters. The Bakhtinian assumption that popular culture is vital and liberating while central governments are repressive and authoritarian, while not invariably false, seems open to question and needs to be historicized rather than presupposed. See Helgerson's excellent discussion of the politics of carnival in Forms of Nationhood, pp. 218-22. 25 Michel Foucault, "What Is an Author?", in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1984), p. 108; Bristol, Carnival and Theater, p. 121. 26 See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2.2.42.2,1.2.95.4, 2.2.66.7, and his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard 44.2.2.5 (this latter passage quoted in R. W. and A. J. Carlyle, A History of Mediaeval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. [Edinburgh, 1903-36], v, 93). For the continued importance of Aquinas, even in Puritan Cambridge, see William T. Costello, The Scholastic Curriculum at Early Seventeenth-Century Cambridge (Cambridge, MA, 1985), p. 121. 27 Foucault, "What Is an Author?", p. 109. 28 Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 35.

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29 Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 117; cf. Janet Coleman, "Property and Poverty," The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought c. Jjo—c. 1450, ed. J. H. Burns (Cambridge, 1988), p. 619. 30 Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, pp. 36-7, 146-7. 31 Tierney, Medieval Poor Law, p. 37. 32 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2.2.66.7. 33 A related canon law distinction seems implicit in Lear's "O reason not the need! Our basest beggars / Are in the poorest things superfluous. / Allow not nature more than nature needs, / Man's life is cheap as beast's" (2.4.265-8). The contrast between superfluities and necessities comes from canon law, which distinguishes between superftua (that which is owed to the poor) and necessitas (that which one may lawfully keep for one's own use), holding, however, that "necessities" include not merely the bare minimum required to sustain life but also all possessions suitable to one's status. Lear implicitly defends this canonist view of "need" as a social (and therefore human) category against the rather more brutal standard of "nature." 34 Joyce Appleby, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), p. 53. 35 J°y c e Youings, Sixteenth-Century England, Pelican Social History of Britain (London, 1984), p. 277; Patterson, Popular Voice, pp. 137-8; John Walter and Keith Wrightson, "Dearth and the Social Order in Early Modern England," Past and Present 71 (1976), 22-42; Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, p. 228. Both James and Laud acted on these sentiments, prosecuting enclosures and hoarding in the Star Chamber with heavy fines; see Roger Lockyer, The Early Stuarts: A Political History of England, 1603-1642 (New York, 1989), p. 3. 36 Hill, "The Poor and the People," pp. 258, 261-2; Hugh Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645, 3rd edn. (London, 1988), pp. 166-70, 381-4. 37 Quoted in Knights, Drama & Society, p. 145; cf. Walter and Wrightson, "Dearth," p. 31. 38 Thus the anonymous play, Woodstock (1592), which Margot Heinemann calls "the boldest and most subversive of all Elizabethan historical plays" ("Political Drama," in The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway [Cambridge, 1990], p. 184) seems in many respects rather late medieval in its social outlook: its view of the barons as the king's natural counsellors, its idealization of works of mercy and indiscriminate charity to the poor, its ferocious dislike of "new men," its Fortescue-like depiction of England as a constitutional mixed monarchy (a dominiumpoliticum et regale). The play is implicitly antagonistic to the bureaucratic centralization, social mobility, and nascent capitalism of late Tudor polity, but its values are themselves traditional and fairly conservative. Cf. King James' advice to his son to "embrace the quarrell of the poore and distressed, as your owne particular... and remember of the honourable stile given to my grand-father of worthie memorie, in being called the poore mans Kin£ (Basilikon Doron, in The Political Works of James I, ed. Charles Mcllwain [Cambridge, MA, 1918], pp. 21-2).

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39 In some respects Shakespeare's disregard here conforms to the general practice of the Renaissance stage, where, as Michael Hattaway notes, "the poor generally appear as comic rather than deserving figures" ("Drama and Society," p. ioo). Anat Feinberg's excellent "The Representation of the Poor in Elizabethan and Stuart Drama" likewise concludes that, except for the Witch of Edmonton, the scene on the heath in King Lear "is unique in its poignant and tormented expression as well as the authentic picture which it gives of the state of the poor. The picture more commonly offered is far from a dismal one and is frivolous in comparison" (Literature and History 12 [1986], 153, 158). However, as Richard Helgerson has shown, plays produced for the largely plebeian audiences of the Rose, Red Bull, and the Fortune pay more attention to the sufferings of the common people, even if they do not often have serious lower-class protagonists (Forms of Nationhood, p. 234-5); interestingly, these plays also tend to be less secular than the Globe's repertoire. Dekker's works thus draw on the supernatural personae of the Moralities (If This Be Not a Good Play the Devil is In It), patristic hagiography (The Virgin Martyr), and Protestant apocalypticism (The Whore of Babylon). 40 William Perkins, "A Dialogue of the State of a Christian Man," in The Work of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward, The Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics (Appleford, Eng., 1970), p. 382; cf. Shuger, Habits of Thought, pp. 94ff. One should note, by the way, the radical difference between Perkins' duplex persona and the modern sociological notion of a homo duplex "in which the individual is a complex balance of asocial passion and social reason" (Bryan S. Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory [Oxford,

1984], p. 20). 41 Peter Brown, Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 1982), p. 325. 42 These divisions between public and private domains are not, however, central to Calvinism, which historically resisted the bifurcation of religious existence from social order; for a more detailed treatment of these issues, see Shuger, Habits of Thought, pp. 122-3, 25&- Turner's claim (a commonplace of Marxist sociology) that "the union of capitalist industrialization, utilitarian individualism and the nation-state provided the general conditions for the rise of the division between the public and private world" exemplifies the sort of academic nonsense produced by omitting religion from cultural analysis (The Body and Society, p. 37). 43 This is implied throughout David Bevington's Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA, 1968) - still one of the best general studies of the political contexts of Renaissance drama. See also Heinemann, "Political Drama," pp. 179-82. 44 Richard Hooker, "Of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect," in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, ed. Christopher Morris, 2 vols., Everyman's Library (New York, 1907), 1, 11. On Herbert, see also Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago, J 8

9 3)> PP- 186-7.

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45 Quoted in R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, IOJ9-C.IIJO (Cambridge, 1963), p. 44. 46 Coleman, "Property," p. 631. 47 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), pp. 137, 141, 149. 48 Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore, 1978), p. 130; Patterson, Popular Voice, pp. 99-100. 49 I owe this phrase (and much more) to my witty and esteemed colleague, Robert Watson. 50 The ungenderedness of the self, however, is more evident in religious texts like Donne's Holy Sonnets or Southwell's Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares, where the soul (anima) tends to be feminized, than it is in Shakespeare. Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Coriolanus, and Othello are acutely anxious about their masculinity - fearful of seeming "pigeon-livered," soft, vulnerable, weak but they do not think of themselves as women. 51 For this division, see Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts, Past and Present Publications (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 214-15; cf. Knights, Drama & Society, p. 242. 52 Joan S. Bennett notes this extraordinary detail in her Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton's Great Poems (Cambridge, MA, 1989), p. 82. 53 Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose, ed. Bertrand Bronson, 3rd edn (San Francisco, 1952), pp. 263-5. One should compare this to Erasmus' precepts for character-portrayal: "we shall have to depict the Carthaginian as an inveterate breaker of agreements, cunning, insolent, and showily dressed . . . Or we may take sex as a basis, and depict man on the one hand as firm, woman on the other as talkative, fickle, and superstitious; or make a characterization on grounds . . . of fortune, showing the wealthy man as haughty, the poor man as humble and diffident; or of employment, the soldier being arrogant and a great bragger about his own brave deeds, the pimp never keeping his word, the countryman inclined to pessimism, the courtier to flattery, the city man mild . . . Particularly appropriate to character delineation is . . . dialogue, in which we supply each person with utterances appropriate to his age, type, country, way of life, cast of mind, and character" (De duplici copia verborum ac rerum comentarii duo, ed. Craig Thompson, trans. Betty Knott, in vol. xxrv of The Collected Works of Erasmus [Toronto, 1974-], pp. 583, 586). For Erasmus, character should be a function of class/race/gender; forJohnson, Shakespeare's greatness lies in his ability to depict character in terms of fundamental human feelings and motives rather than the "accidents" of birth, employment, and breeding. 54 For example, most of Shakespeare's lower-class characters, the Duke in Measurefor Measure, Duncan, and so forth are socio-literary types. 55 On the inner self as child see Leah Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature (Pittsburg, 1978). 56 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 193.

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57 This identification is almost completely alien to classical thought (with the partial exception of Stoicism); cf. Turner, The Body and Society, p. 56; Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton, 1953), pp. 24-40. 58 H . I. Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison, WI, 1956), pp. 225-6. 59 The opposite movement - from spiritual inwardness to social activism structures Eliot's Middlemarch; Goethe's Faust attempts to reconcile the two. However, neither Dorothea's marriage to a liberal politician nor Faust's epiphanic celebration of land reclamation indicate "revolutionary" (as opposed to progressive or liberal) agenda. 60 This triple criterion seems necessary to account for contemporary usage, which categorizes Christians and idealists (e.g., Milton, Blake, Shelley) as radical in virtue of their political commitments, while also using "radical" for politically conservative writers (Freud, Hobbes) because materialists. Marxists, anarchists, etc. are, obviously, radicals in both senses. 61 Chrysostom himself died in exile as a result of his attempt to build a hospital for lepers near Constantinople's city walls. 62 Cf. Heinemann, "Political Drama," p. 172. 63 Heinemann, "Political Drama," p. 204; cf. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, p. 238. In this sense, no Renaissance play is as radical/populist as the Gospels (cf. the Lucan Beatitudes, the Magnificat, and Matthew 25). 64 Bunyan's narratives, one might say, do Shakespeare in reverse: the latter using the language of madmen, peasants, and beggars to portray aristocratic subjectivity, the former borrowing the aristocratic modes of allegorical romance to represent the interiority of common, laboring folk. Both authors, one might add, became immensely popular among both an elite and working-class readership. 65 Heinemann, "Political Drama," p. 185; J. W. Blench, Preaching, pp. 308, 312. Michael Hattaway's claim that Elizabethan dramatists performed a "radical critique" by showing that "political realities do not match theological ideals" is absurd; what Augustinian Christian would ever claim that they could, much less did? ("Drama and Society," The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, p. 102). Similarly, the "bitter outburst on behalf of the poor . . . in the tradition of John Ball" cited by Heinemann ("Political Drama," p. 175) makes much the same point as does Nashe in the third section of Christs Tears Over Jerusalem or Henry Bedel, vicar of Christ's Church, London, in his 1572 Sermon exhorting to pity thepoore (Blench, Preaching, pp. 181-2, 312). 66 Thus, for example, in Woodstock, Richard II does not tax, pillage, and oppress the commons because he holds an "elitist ideology" that justifies these acts, but because he is an immature, pampered lout. There was obviously, however, far less ideological consensus concerning the proper distribution of political authority and the best form of church government. On the social morality of English Renaissance drama and its

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sources, see Knights, Drama & Society', Hattaway, "Drama and Society," p. 105.

67 I would like to thank Donna Hamilton, who first suggested that I tackle the question of Shakespeare and Christianity; Robert Watson and Michael Schoenfeldt for their valuable comments on early drafts of this essay; and above all Richard Strier, to whose dislike of jargon of intellectual confusion, and of sloppy scholarship I am deeply indebted.

CHAPTER FOUR

Kneeling and the body politic1 Lori Anne Ferrell

If we examine theological debates from 1603 to 1625, w e find James I ruled over a better reformed church than did either his predecessor or his successor. If we consider ecclesiastical enforcement in the same period, we find James I ruled over a better conformed church. In fact, recent scholars have all but eliminated every possible point of contention that might have divided the Jacobean church, and still we know that James's was not an entirely reformed, quiet, nor contented religious settlement. When we analyze the rhetoric of religion in the early seventeenth century, then we find that James I ruled over a powderkeg. Both the evidence for and the source of this problem can be found in the polemics of the early Stuart church. Without question, James I managed a religious settlement that was remarkable in this age for its theological consensus and non-confrontational policies. But it is also true that he did so while always tolerating and often encouraging an official rhetoric of scorn and contumely against papist and puritan subjects who placed themselves outside the generous bounds of that settlement.2 In the case of puritanism, this was particularly destabilizing: unlike papists, puritans were a distinctive phenomenon contained for the most part within the Church of England.3 The official language of the church was thus set against puritan experience. While it may be true that the ecclesiastical policy of James I was designed to distinguish moderate puritans from radical, such careful distinctions could become blurred in the controversial rhetoric commissioned for that purpose. At the Jacobean court, one strand of anti-puritan polemic defined a variety of more or less conforming members of the Church of England using very broadly drawn characters of "preaching" and "praying" Protestants. These oppositional stereotypes lent themselves to a particularly crude type of verbal imaging: humility juxtaposed to pride, embodied by the praxis of worship. Such images played a significant role in the rhetoric of the 70

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Hampton Court Conference of 1604; they formed one basis for the political critique of puritanism throughout the reign; and, finally, they underwent a curious transformation. In the last years of James's reign, political pressures transformed what had been a secular polemic and bequeathed a fully-developed language of sacramentalism to the subsequent, disastrous ecclesiastical policies of Charles I and his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The purpose of this essay is to trace rhetorical pre-laudianism in the Jacobean church, in order to refute at least some of the claims for that church's quiescence and unity. The first section of this essay considers a piece of anecdotal evidence, featuring a king, a bishop, a puritan, and a scene-stealing gesture. The second section recasts a familiar ecclesiastical debate into cultural and political terms. Finally, the third section examines the effect of political anxiety on religious rhetoric and tracks its subsequent transformation into controversial doctrine. This approach, while diverse, focuses upon one subject, the debate over the meaning of the act of kneeling: a gesture symbolic of both religious and secular obedience, and thus exemplary of the power, interdependence, and ultimate vulnerability of political and religious discourse in the age of James I. I. SCENE! THE HAMPTON COURT CONFERENCE

On Monday, 16 January 1604, the second day of the Hampton Court Conference, puritan spokesman John Reynolds expressed his hopes to King James I that "good Pastors might be planted in all Churches to preach" the "pure" doctrine of the Church of England. The request was voiced in terms calculated to please a king who had voiced approval of both Calvinist doctrine and educated clergy. Taking up this point in debate, James expressed his own concerns over the maintenance of learned men in church livings when the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft, suddenly fell to his knees with the following entreaty: Because I see this is a time of moving petitions, may I humbly present two or three to your Majesty: First, that there be amongst us a praying ministry; it being now come to pass, that men think it the only duty of ministers to spend their time in the pulpit. I confess, in a church newly to be planted, preaching is most necessary, not so in one so long established, that prayer should be neglected.4 On the surface, these words seem unremarkable, and certainly more temperate than most of what the bishop had to say about the puritan program presented at Hampton Court. But they are fighting words

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nonetheless. Bancroft made a distinction between praying and preaching ministries in an attempt to win the king over to his view that there were two opposing parties in the Church of England.5 In his call for a ministry that was "learned," Reynolds employed a buzzword, recognized by everyone in the chamber, that signified "godly reforming preachers." Dr. Reynolds?s reluctance in debate to identify these evangelizing worthies (or himself, for that matter) as "puritan" displayed a politic delicacy matched only by recent historians. These days the Jacobean puritan is an endangered species, the victim of over-enthusiastic revisionism. The historiography of the Church of England under James I has produced a picture of a settlement marked by theological consensus and moderated by a king wellversed and adept in religious controversy, not over-zealous to enforce ecclesiastical canons, and determined to disarm extremists. This picture is misleading in its very accuracy. The problem of those pesky puritans remains, and its persistence begs a question: what exactly did their opponents find so offensive about them? If the singular crime of puritanism in this period was that of deviant ecclesiology,6 what danger could that possibly represent in the mild and moderate reign of "Great Britain's Solomon"?7 The problem is one of methodology - both ours and theirs. To begin, historians of the early Stuart church would do well to temper their preoccupation with theologians more or less enthusiastic about predestination. Recent analyses have focused almost exclusively on the doctrinal beliefs of Calvinists and anti-Calvinists, thereby limiting the focus of their debate to the definition of systems of salvation. To reduce the church to a soteriological think-tank, however, narrows its interests and leaves us with a picture of an institution isolated from the political and cultural issues of its day.8 This concentration on the taut logic of theology also leaves no room for consideration of the politic flexibility of seventeenth-century religious language. It must be remembered that the very impression of doctrinal solidarity that most Jacobean polemicists worked tirelessly to convey was itself a political and cultural construct. These writers did little to prepare us for the ecclesiastical crises of the 1630s; indeed, much of their discursive repertoire consisted of rhetorical strategies designed to defuse the notion of societal conflict.9 In this polemic, words like "praying" and "preaching" are not innocent descriptions of Christian worship: they are concealed weapons. To understand the meaning behind the Bancroft-Reynolds exchange at Hampton Court, modern

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historians must move beyond simply believing everything they have been told by early Stuart controversialists.10 In moving away from a naive consideration of a complex rhetoric, however, care must be taken to preserve the concept of puritanism for this period. To reduce it to a tolerated and assimilated non-conformity leaves us without a satisfying description of a persistent and vivid cultural phenomenon. Jacobean churchmen, like Jacobean theatre audiences, knew a puritan when they saw one. The word itself had a resonance that present-day scholars find almost impossible to describe.11 Puritans were not simply people who refused to wear surplices, make the sign of the cross, or call their communion tables altars. The visibility of the refusal itself projected matters of private conscience into the public realm; it "symbolized negative opinions," according to one seventeenth-century writer, and so exemplified societal as well as confessional disunity.12 What follows is an analysis of one aspect of the prayer-preaching controversy in the Jacobean church: the debate over kneeling in worship. The issue was neither minor nor strictly ecclesiastical. It occupied that volatile space where religious, political, and cultural matters contend. This is because the act itself supported the weight of multiple meanings. Kneeling conveyed the idea of obeisance to God; it conveyed the idea of obeisance to the monarch. In an erastian church, it conveyed these ideas simultaneously. Herein lay the heart of the problem - were the two issues coterminous? Just where in matters of religion did secular loyalty end and religious conviction begin? What was the spiritual duty of a subject confronted with the arbitrary rule of a royal supremacy? And just how arbitrary was that rule? These questions cut across theological lines, penetrating the religious and political culture of Jacobean England in a way that debates over predestination could not. Unlike beliefs, gestures were visible. The former could be discerned, indeed enforced, while the latter posed an entirely different problem. In addition, it is arguable that, soft on its enforcement as he was, the king was more preoccupied by the kneeling issue than by any of the other conformity issues of his reign.13 For these reasons, the debate provides a new and valuable perspective on what was at stake in the struggle to define the Church of England in the reign of James I. To return to the mise-en-scene described above: in rhetorical terms, Bancroft's juxtaposition of praying with preaching ministries was studied and succinct. He by-passed the theological consensus that may well have existed between two parties - after all, Calvin's theology has no exclusive relation either to prayer or to preaching - and pointed

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instead to what he found offensive about Reynolds's program. The bishop of London ingeniously transformed the idea of an educated preaching clergy, one of the cornerstones of Protestantism, into a threat to the royal supremacy.14 Conflating the intent of puritan petitioning with the aims of Protestant preaching, Bancroft implied that evangelicalism was little more than a respectable-sounding excuse for popular agitation. His allusion to "newly-planted" churches intensifies the force of this contention. To follow Bancroft's logic: if a preaching ministry was needed to inspire an immature church to initiate and continue the work of religious reformation (as it had throughout the history of Christianity and most memorably in the preceding century), then to endorse such a ministry was to critique the present state of religion under James. By suggesting that in calling for better preaching Reynolds had actually voiced a more general dissatisfaction with the king's religious leadership, Bancroft repackaged reform as disloyalty. Credit for brilliant politicking must be given to Bancroft, both for his unerring strike to the heart of what James would have found dangerous about puritanism and for his rhetorical devaluation of the powerful and influential concept of reformation. What is just as important if less noticed about the scene is how the bishop wrested control of the agenda from Reynolds by the simple expedient of falling to his knees. In doing so, he quite literally fleshed out his moderate words with an action guaranteed to make his underlying intent uncompromisingly clear. Bancroft's argument became well-nigh irresistible: not only did he enact the devout behavior he wished to promote, but in the same elegant gesture he also displayed his own submission to the king.15 Speaking on his knees, Bancroft turned a "praying ministry" into an obedient ministry, and identified it with a posture of humility and obeisance. An alternative image of "preaching" could then be silently suggested: the godly auditory sitting in their pews, hats on heads, stubbornly stiff-necked. This view of the "proud puritan" lent itself easily to conformist propaganda. Bancroft's action served to illustrate to James I that the conscientious refusal of puritans to kneel at worship could look very similar to a refusal to kneel before the king himself. In the same way that the king's loyal bishop turned himself into a living representation of the concept of conformity, the language of religious consensus was transformed into a medium of political conflict in the debates at Hampton Court.

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11. CONTEXT: KNEELING AND THE SIXTEENTH-CENTURY REFORMATION

While church historians generally treat the debate over kneeling as an ecclesiastical dispute, its long association with the rhetoric of politics and court culture is less noted. The narrative of this association begins with a sermon preached by John Knox to Edward VI and his court in 1552, one so fiery that it inspired a hasty revision of Edward's second Book of Common Prayer.16 The authors added a rubric declaring that obeisance at communion implied no adoration of Christ's body on the altar; instead, obeisance expressed thanksgiving, "the humble and grateful acknowledging of the benefits of Christ" undertaken to "avoid prophanation and disorder." This "Black Rubric" was thus oddly but aptly named. Kneeling continued to be prescribed as ritual in the English liturgy, but was left stripped of its previous religious coloration.17 This reinterpretation of ritual action relegated kneeling at communion, if only by implication, to the status of the merely ceremonial gestures of prayer described in the 1549 prayer book - such things as "kneeling, crossing, holding up of hands, knocking upon the breast," actions that could be "used or left" to the worshipper's discretion.18 These "things indifferent," or adiaphora, were practices neither prescribed nor proscribed in Scripture. Consequently they required a process of decoding subject to more controversial forms of authority. The Book of Common Prayer contended that ceremonies might be "altered and changed, and therefore are not to be esteemed equal with God's law," a statement that, when combined with an Act of Supremacy, could greatly strengthen the claims of the royal prerogative over things adiaphoric. To describe communion kneeling as expressive solely of humility and good order made possible, therefore, not only its description as mere ceremonial, but also its analogy to secular obedience. The radical nature of Edwardian reform, both in terms of doctrine and of practice, is exemplified by the language of the 1552 prayer book. But its influence was cut short by Edward's death and the accession of Mary I, who repealed it. As a consequence, this version was never generally used by English congregations. Its significance, therefore, lay in its power to shape the language of a later Book of Common Prayer. After a brief Catholic reign punctuated by the execution of heretics who denied the doctrine of transubstantiation, Protestantism and a Protestant communion service were reinstated, somewhat shakily, under Mary's successor Elizabeth I. This was no return to the heady days of

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earlier reform, however, a fact that is demonstrated in the construction of the Elizabethan prayer book.19 Elizabeth I preferred a more conservative formulation of communion; in the matter of the eucharist, therefore, the 1552 prayer book exerted a partially negative influence on its 1559 successor. The Black Rubric, with its explicit denial of any corporeal interpretation of the doctrine of the real presence, was not included, leaving communion kneeling open to diverse interpretations, including those of a catholic nature.20 The queen's moderation disappointed many of her reformminded subjects and some of her bishops, who had hoped finally to strip the English church of all its popish ceremonies, the remnants and reminders of a disconcertingly recent Catholic past. Royal apologists responded to resistance by citing Elizabeth's authority to retain as well as to alter things of a doctrinally indifferent nature, thereby taking Knox's argument to a logical, if disheartening, conclusion.21 With doctrinal attitudes toward the sacrament still unsettled at this time, kneeling at communion presented an interpretive minefield for Protestants to cross. By 1603 and the accession of James VI of Scotland to the throne of England, however, the idea that ceremonies like kneeling were in themselves adiaphoric actually began to work to the benefit of the king's puritan subjects. This is in part due to the relative broadmindedness of both the king and of his bishops, who in their visitation examinations frequently found room to maneuver around tricky situations. Where the need for men of good preaching and pastoral ability was particularly acute, Jacobean bishops were willing to compromise with nonconformists.22 This would not have been possible if ceremonial practices had been considered essential to the orthodox interpretation of sacramental theology. The politic flexibility of the episcopate in this matter indicates that, at this time, they were not. In a sense, therefore, the ideology of the Black Rubric was expressed defacto if not dejure in the religious culture of Jacobean England. James's accession was the catalyst for an initial period of intense print activity focusing on the topic of ceremonies. James's 1599 book Basilikon Down, with its conciliatory but ambiguous remarks about puritanism, had raised hopes, long suppressed in Elizabeth's reign, for further liturgical reformation. The "Millenary Petition" of 1603 that outlined puritan scruples in this matter prompted the Hampton Court Conference (and Bancroft's snide remark about "moving petitions" described above).23 While some concessions were made to Reynolds and his brethren at the conference, however, they were allowed no leeway on the issue of adiaphora.

Kneeling and the body politic The post-conference conformity campaign of 1604—5 w a s n a r dly the wholesale "harrying" with which James had threatened his recalcitrant clergy at Hampton Court. Few puritans were actually deprived for refusing certain liturgical practices. Jacobean bishops were not the only ones to practice the politic art of compromise. Convinced of the concept of spiritual "indifferency" - or perhaps convinced that no further discussion was possible - most ministers eventually found it possible to accommodate themselves to the ceremonies. The fact that James preferred to subdue his puritan clergy by requiring subscription to, rather than actual observance of, the canons of 1604 also made it possible for the godly to avoid total compliance.24 Nonetheless, some stiff-necked ministers refused even the piecrust promise of conformity. Notable were the clergy of the diocese of Lincoln, who in 1605 s e n t a treatise justifying non-subscription to the king.25 This was only one of a multitude of treatises and sermons printed in this period that argued for and against conformity.26 A decline in such publications after 1607 surely reflects the decline in episcopal enforcement after 1604—5. For some scholars, this relative inactivity signals the end of puritan resistance (and for a few, this effectively means the end of "puritanism") until the laudian campaigns for conformity in the 1630s.27 In actuality, the battle over ceremonies was always more extensively and exactingly conducted on the page than in the church courts during the reign of James I. Puritanism continued to be, at the very least, the on-going creation of negative polemics. Circa 1617, the print campaign in England shifted once more into high gear, driven by a campaign for ecclesiastical conformity in Scotland.28 It is not the purpose of this essay to examine the mechanisms, rhetorical or otherwise, of the king's authority in his native kirk. But it is important to note some aspects of the Scottish situation that had a significant effect on the second great English debate on ceremonial conformity conducted in the final decade of James's reign. The fifth of the Five Articles of Perth enjoined kneeling at communion, which was the only specific ceremonial performance to be thus commanded.29 This distinguishes the campaign from that of 1604-5 m England, which involved a broader and more general subscription to conformity. In addition, the earlier conflict had proceeded upon the assumption that communion kneeling could be thought of in the same way as all other "indifferent" worship gestures. Now the debate was refocused; not only did kneeling become the central issue and image in the ensuing controversy, but the stage was set for a much narrower and less

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forgiving dispute, one that pitted the interpretation of the eucharist against the meaning of obedience to the monarch. The sense that the rules of engagement had shifted permeates a contemporary account of an assembly held to discuss the articles prior to their official passage.30 David Calderwood, one of the Scottish ministers present, provides a characteristically harsh assessment of the king's move to reimpose this small measure of uniformity on a church vastly more reformed than its English counterpart. In his partisan report, recalcitrant clergy are portrayed as maneuvering unsuccessfully between the Scylla of religious conviction and the Charybdis of royal prerogative. (So much for the via media) Throughout, Calderwood portrays one dispute as symbolic of the entire enterprise: "Kneeling," according to the minister, "was chiefly agitate."31 The outraged minister's testimony paints a vivid picture of a hateful submission to monarchical authority in matters of religion. Calderwood's fears centered around the reimposition of kneeling as part of a royal campaign to reestablish "popish rites and superstitions" in Scotland. But the Five Articles of Perth would prove to be as inefficiently enforced as the English canons of 1604, a fact that should be filed separately from the numerous tracts and sermons on kneeling that date from this period. In 1617, as in 1604, t n e rhetoric stimulated by a conformity campaign had a longer shelf-life and a more extensive effect than did the campaign itself. The very real differences between the Scottish and English debate over ceremonial only serve to make their similarities more intriguing. It is at this point that the king's liturgical policy in Scotland must be considered in its other context.32 Its timing coincides with and should be related to a developing crisis of obedience in England after 1614, catalyzed by the king's plans to marry his son to a Catholic princess. As in Scotland, policy ran perilously counter to public sentiment; fears of court-based popery were aired in pamphlets and from pulpits.33 The debate over kneeling stimulated by the King's Scottish policy fit easily into the rhetorical atmosphere surrounding the Spanish match, not simply because both provoked violent anti-Catholic sentiment, but, more interestingly, because the defenders of the king in both situations employed the same forms of synechdochic imagery. The rhetoric promoting kneeling in Scotland was not merely incorporated within the English political situation; it was thrust into it to enhance the claims of royal apologia.

Here it is necessary to introduce one final element, the polemical

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preoccupation of a number of Jacobean court preachers: the promotion of the "beauty of holiness." In one sense, this concept can be traced from the Knoxian contention that worship should be conducted with order and decency, the guarantor of that style being the royal supremacy. But, as we will see, these relatively uncontroversial notions could lead to more dangerous interpretations. The appearance and prominence of language extolling the beauty of holiness in court polemic can be directly related to the defence of the king's authority in the increasingly tense political and rhetorical atmosphere of the second half of his reign. The defense of kneeling should be examined in the context of this more general polemic; indeed, it provides the necessary connection between the polemic and its historical setting. in.

CONNECTIONS: RHETORIC, RELIGION, AND

TRANSFORMATION

The Jacobean notion of the beauty of holiness was rooted in a metaphor of the monarch as builder and overseer of the church. Preachers at James's court deployed strikingly architectonic imagery in the service of this concept. On Easter 1611, Lancelot Andrewes preached on Psalm 118, "The stone, which the builders refused . . . is become the Head of the Corner." Andrewes drew from this text the lesson that every Christian was required to "make God an house": "If we be but ourselves . . . build God an oratory . . . if we have a household . . . build him a chapel . . . if a country or kingdom, then a Basilica or Metropolitan Church, which is properly the Prince's Building."34 The logic of this passage, with its hierarchical and metaphoric progression from prayer to Basilica, eventually locates the prayerfully devout believer within the structures of the king's religion. The analogy to the royal supremacy is clear and uncomplicated. This imagery could be manipulated, however, in a variety of ways. Andrewesian language graces a 1612 sermon preached before the king at the deteriorated abbey church of St. Alban's. William Westerman, a chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, cited his text, "And there was Jacob's well" (John 4:6), in a contemporary application to James's (in the Latin Jacobus) own stop on progress at a holy place.35 The preacher's purpose was to secure funds for the rebuilding of the abbey, and he used a familiar image to persuade James that such patronage was appropriate: "Kings . . . in the profession of our religion . . . erected Basilicas, Kinglike Palaces."36 We see, therefore, the influence of Andrewes's rhetorical

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strategies, now placed in the service of a straightforward campaign implicating the king in the actual beautification of the church. At Hampton Court in 1621, Christopher Swale made use of these same themes in a sermon on Jacob's vow (Genesis 28:22): "This Stone, which I have set up as a pillar, shall be God's house." Swale applied the text to the contemporary situation of the church and called upon the king to use his authority to ensure its physical maintenance. The literal thrust of his contemporary application makes it possible, therefore, to interpret his assertion, "no good thing will [God] with-hold from them, that worship him in the beauty of holiness," in the material as well as in the spiritual sense. Swale then pressed this aesthetic vision of the church into service as a criticism of non-conformity: "Private Conventicles are not to be compared with the public Assemblies of the Church."37 What distinguishes this style of anti-puritan rhetoric is not only its physical aesthetics, but also its logic in associating the idea of the "beauty of holiness" with the visible, established church. This aspect of Swale's sermon - the dichotomy presented between church and conventicle - demonstrates how the increasingly materialistic rhetoric of the "beauty of holiness" could provide a useful language to support and shape what Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake have identified as characteristic Jacobean ecclesiastical policy.38 (The drawbacks of the approach will be discussed below.) The distinction between public and private could be used to divide radical from moderate puritans by implying that any objection to this aesthetic of worship could only come from outside the church. Such rhetoric could work in tandem with a doctrine of adiaphora, since, by concentrating on the external, it could leave the workings of the individual conscience alone. Moderate puritans could, therefore, interpret ceremonial action in light of their inclusion in the visible church, while their personal beliefs, like their membership in the church invisible, remained matters not subject to ecclesiastical law. In fact, the attention paid to appearances can be seen as evidence of the broad theological consensus that characterized James's reign. Since orthodoxy was not the issue at stake in the Jacobean debate over kneeling, some of the king's polemicists concentrated instead on the visible impression made by kneeling or not kneeling. Bishop Thomas Morton offered an analysis that owes its ideology to the Black Rubric: Although there be not a proportion of equality, between a Civil and Religious reverence, yet is there a proportion of Similitude, and the one doth singularly illustrate the other, in this case. For as a civil gift ought to be taken with a civil reverence, from the hand of an earthly Sovereign, so must a spiritual gift; and

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the Instruments thereof, be received with a Spiritual and Religious Reverence . . . our religious receiving of Holy Rites, doth magnify the Author, but no way deify the gift.39 Morton's carefully drawn distinction between "proportion of equality" and "proportion of similitude" is a wonderfully complex statement about the inadequacy of any worship gesture to demonstrate sincerity or orthodoxy of belief. His defence of kneeling is rooted in the idea that the reverent gesture is itself an indifferent matter, as the reassurance about "religious receiving" not "deifying the gift" of communion indicates. The reference to obeisance to the king as "singularly" illustrative of communion kneeling makes the adiaphoric nature of the act even more explicit: the proper, uniform conduct of the communion thus becomes the "gift" of the sovereign to an obedient and grateful people. James himself contributed to the debate over kneeling in 1619, with his treatise A Meditation Upon the Lord's Prayer Written by the King's Majestyfor the Benefit of All His Subjects Especially of Such as Follow the Court. Prefaced

by a lengthy anti-puritan diatribe, in which James presented his meditation as a defense of liturgical prayer, the royal argument is drawn from a familiar polemical dichotomy. The king claimed that his meditation was designed to counteract a recent trend: puritans had rewritten the apostolic injunction "pray continually" to read "preach continually."40 In his view, such spiritual arrogance was visibly demonstrated in a refusal to kneel at the sacrament. James condemned those who sat "Jackfellowlike with Christ at the Lord's Table." The tableau illustrates the constituent characteristics of puritanism: pride, insolence, and irreverence.41 The king viewed this manifestation of what he called "the private spirit of Reformation" as a first step down the slippery slope of sectarianism. The airing of puritan scruples about ceremonies encouraged others who were more radically minded to leave the established church altogether. The king employed his own architectonic metaphor to explain this assertion more fully: "because that all our goodly material churches were built in time of popery . . . therefore to the woods and caves must they go like outlaws, to their sermons . . . thus have I sufficiently proved, I hope, that our puritans are the founders and fathers of the Brownists, the latter only boldly putting into practice what the former do teach, but dare not perform." The denunciation carries real polemical force; it was a warning to those who saw themselves as conscientious objectors in the adiaphoric tradition that the king deemed their attitudes irreconcilable to the established church. This focus differs from

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Morton's, whose language is designed to convince puritan brethren that uniformity of worship was a thing spiritually indifferent. A Meditation on the Lord's Prayer demonstrates that the concept of adiaphora had become an inadequate political and rhetorical strategy for maintaining the unity of the Jacobean church. By this time, James could draw upon a somewhat circumscribed set of rhetorical conventions to condemn puritanism. These conventions could be reduced to a single, succinct image. The amalgamation of the language of the Perth campaign and the defense of the king's foreign policy meant nonconformity was in danger of being exclusively defined as non-kneelery. The image was central to a polemic that paid increasing attention to the problem of irreverence altogether. By the second half of James's reign, court preachers increasingly recounted in detail the misbehavior of people in the pews, in lively language that must have been intentionally entertaining. Anthony Maxey, a perennially preferment-seeking conformist Calvinist, complained in a sermon to the king that most worshippers were "like Elephants . . . they have no joints in their knees, they talk, whisper, and gaze about, without any kind of bodily reverence, and as it may be thought, without any inward devotion at all." Maxey then went on to add that "the inward mind is expressed by the outward gesture, 42 a remark that is worth noting in more detail. Neither Maxey's zoological metaphor nor his reference to kneeling as the external symbol of an internal sanctification are original; they echo the rhetoric of other sermons, most notably a 1614 Easter sermon at court preached by Lancelot Andrewes.43 The entertainment value of picturing elephants in England's pews most certainly insured the metaphor's elevation into a sermonic buzzword. What is more significant here, however, is the way in which this very memorable and effective description is combined with and complicated by a claim that the quality of devotion was inevitably expressed in gesture (or the lack of it). By contrast, performance of secular obedience required no reference to the "inward mind"; in part, this was what detached adiaphoric observance from the necessity of a particular doctrinal interpretation. To speak of true religious devotion as necessarily expressed in external behavior opened up the conduct of the liturgy to assertions of its theological meaning. Not that this was what Maxey had in mind. Maxey and Morton (whose treatise represents the ironic counterpoint to a remarkably unsuccessful record against persistent non-conformity in his diocese44) fit

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into a familiar category of Jacobean Calvinism. These clerics supported conformity as an adiaphoric concept useful for the support of the royal supremacy This language of support, of course, could be usefully employed to combat the king's political opponents. But their condemnations of puritanism, frequent as they were, were undertaken in the assumption that the king's opponents in ceremonial matters were also his theological allies. For them, the beauty of holiness had no substantial doctrinal import. This common rhetoric, however, would be drawn upon by persons with different theological beliefs in a time when puritanism was implicated in political protests that went beyond matters of ceremonial nonconformity. This brings us finally to the drawbacks of Jacobean ecclesiastical policy and some increasingly audacious statements on behalf of the beauty of holiness. Considered in political context, a careful reading of the texts illuminates how the debate over kneeling could lead to serious questions in the 1620s about the king's theological commitments: not only to reformed Protestantism, but also to the English Calvinist consensus. It was one thing to claim that uniformity was aesthetically pleasing, but quite another to locate aesthetic values in the sacrament itself. In fact, the excess of attention paid to the sacrament of eucharist by some court preachers might have made the connection between court religion and potentially popish sacramentalism all too apparent to observers. In the final decade of James's reign, the rhetoric of obedience became vulnerable to a less adiaphoric interpretation, one going well beyond, it seems fair to say, the king's requirements. The theme of the beauty of holiness, while present in innocuous form in many court sermons, had been the persistent preoccupation of Lancelot Andrewes. His eloquence made him James's most favored preacher, but his anti-Calvinism rendered his defense of conformity into something decidedly more "avant-garde." 45 Despite the fact that Andrewes's personal theological opinions were controversial enough to be suppressed by royal fiat,46 they continued subtly to shape his rhetoric on issues of conformity and obedience. In a sense, therefore, Andrewes provides an interesting confirmation of Maxey's Theorem: in the outward effect of his sermon style, his inward mind was invariably expressed. The popularity of Andrewes's style, therefore, meant that his rhetoric was imitated at court, even by men whose theologies fit more acceptably and securely within the doctrinal assumptions of the Jacobean era. As the rhetoric of the kneeling campaign in Scotland was applied to the

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political situation in England, Andrewesian language extolling the beauty of holiness became the discourse of the hour. The imagery of kneeling acquired an unprecedented doctrinal significance. This new style of anti-puritan rhetoric called into question the very existence of a Calvinist consensus in the English church. Andrewes's Easter sermon of 1614 is evidence that his attention to the topic of kneeling predated the Scottish campaign. In expounding his text, "at the name of Jesus every knee will bow" (Philippians 2:10), Andrewes warned the king that irreverence was more to be avoided than popery: "heed would be taken, that by taking heed we prove not superstitious we slip not into the other extreme before we be aware: Which, of the two extremes, Religion worse endureth; as more opposite to it."47 Andrewes's concentration on outward performance rather than inward conviction was controversial enough to earn a moderate reproof from one court preacher a scant week later. Norwich Spackman, a chaplain to the bishop of Bath and Wells, preached at court on Matthew 9:13, "I will have mercy and not sacrifice," in which he interpreted "sacrifice" to mean "the whole outward service of God." Countering Andrewesian language with good old-fashioned adiaphoric rhetoric, the chaplain insisted ceremonies took second place to "inward worship"; they were "indifferent," "simply necessary" for believers, but certainly not "absolutely necessary for God." Spackman had no quarrel with ceremonial conformity; it is obvious, however, that he felt that Andrewes had overstepped the polemical boundaries of the debate on kneeling.48 Andrewes did not get called out very often. He was as politic as he was anti-Calvinist, and his careful avoidance of open religious controversy lent his polemic a multivalent quality often absent in that of other controversialists. His employment of the concept of the beauty of holiness as a rhetorical device to discredit puritanism, however, could lead to a subtle but significant shift in the way the sacrament of communion was discussed at court. This passage from a sermon of Easter 1621 indicts irreverence by citing John 20:17: Take this with you: Christ can say noli, then. For I know not how, our carriage, a many of us, is so loose; covered we sit, sitting we pray; standing, or walking, or as it takes us in the head, we receive; as if Christ were so gentle a person, we might touch Him, do to him what we list, He would take all well, He hath not the power to say noli to anything.49 Andrewes's use of noli me tangere, with its evocation of nemo me impune lacessit, appears designed to remind the king of the insult done to his authority in Scotland; preached at Whitehall, it serves as a warning about

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similar puritan attitudes in England. But Andrewes's rhetoric calls forth a simultaneous image, one that associates the king with Christ and then shifts the focus to the stronger image. The implication is that nonconformity defiles the literally "tangible" person of Christ. Andrewes thus leaves his argument open to a more material interpretation of Eucharistic doctrine.50 Other preachers were less subtle. Given the opportunity to defend James's campaign in Scotland, John Buckeridge, bishop of Rochester, turned on its head the old conformist view that kneeling was orderly and obedient, but not necessary to salvation. In 1617, he preached a controversial sermon before James that explored the nature of the relationship between secular and sacred obedience. Referring to both Scottish and English nonconformity, Buckeridge made the following statement, which represents a departure from conformist rhetoric like Morton's: All [James's] Kingdoms must be obedient to his venite, and joyne together, not only in imitate, in the unitie and substance of Religion, and worship of God, but also in uniformitate, in uniformitie of outward order and ceremony of Gods service, if possibly it may be; especially in . . . Adoration, and Prostration and Kneeling, which are not ceremonies (Rom. 13.4) but parts of divine service; and for disobedience must be subjected to his coercion, who bears not the sword in vaine.51 Here Buckeridge asserts that the act of kneeling was subject to the king's will, not because it was indifferent, but indeed because it was essential. The rationale for James's authority becomes the duty to have the act itself performed - not the duty to display obedience to the Royal Supremacy. In short, the focus has moved from an idea of service to the king to one of service to God. Where Buckeridge deviates from other conformist rhetoric is not simply in his discussion of obedience, but in the connection of arguments for obedience with those promoting a non-adiaphoric view of the Sacrament. The bishop wrote a longer treatise on kneeling the following year. In its preface, he implied that his ideas had proven so thoughtprovoking he had been asked to apply them more specifically, to the "particulars of the Sacrament." In doing this, Buckeridge revisited the politics of the debate over the Edwardian prayer book, effectively reversing the intent of that discourse. In 1552 the language of the Black Rubric presented the gestures of the Lord's Supper in the less-highly charged language of adiaphoric prayer gestures. With the kneeling issue refocused upon the eucharist, Buckeridge placed ecclesiastical law back into the

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service of God and undermined the notion of the political nature of the royal supremacy. The effect of Buckeridge's rhetoric was to assert an obligation greater than secular obedience, one that bound monarch and subject alike: So the Church of England, reforming by the rule of the Primitive Church, hath learned, and practised by her example, to prostrate and kneel at the receipt of those great and sacred Mysteries. In which I dispute not, whether it be duty of necessitie, or a Ceremony of Indifferency; I conceive upon reason, in mine own judgement, that it is a Duty, or part of Gods worship, not to be omitted in public and solemn Adoration, but in case of evident necessity.52 While there is enough theological ambiguity in the above passage to protect Buckeridge from a charge of heterodoxy, it is obvious that here the language of moderation has been stretched to its breaking point. The resort to his "own judgement" boasts of a liberty of conscience equal to that deplored in James's puritan opponents. The king, in searching for a polemic to counter religious opposition based on private dictates, ended up promoting the same dangerous claims from the other side. More significantly, when Buckeridge claimed the personal freedom to interpret certain ceremonies as essential rather than indifferent, this interpretation could be applied to practices that were enforceable under the ecclesiastical canons of 1604. Andrewes's 1614 and 1621 Easter sermons and Buckeridge's 1617 sermon and 1618 treatise are astounding, given the apologetic nature of most statements of court religion. They answer objections to the practice of kneeling by implying the very thing that objectors feared most that puritanism was worse than superstition, and that ceremonies were not to be thought of as adiaphoric. This exemplifies the dangerous shift in direction conformist views could take when travelling in tandem with a less-reformed sacramental theology. Buckeridge, like Andrewes, had always been given a mandate to air his ultra-conformist views when it was most needed - at those times when the king was beset by bothersome puritans or Scottish Presbyterians. His sermons re-established a kind of equilibrium of extreme rhetoric; therein lay their value.53 But this was less problematic when the extremity served the theme of obedience than when it delved into eucharistic theory. That the king finally allowed such an obviously provocative discussion of the Lord's supper to issue from the court pulpit and to be displayed in published works is a measure of how badly he needed a rhetorical counterweight to the opposition to his foreign diplomacy. James's needs, however, are only part of the picture. Royal apologists

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wrote not only to persuade the King's target audiences, but also to influence the King himself. Of course their writings did not take on a life of their own, but they did stimulate action, with consequences both literary and ecclesiological. The debate over kneeling provides an example of just how far James could be implicated in programs that reflected desires other than his own. That he had lost control of at least one aspect of ecclesiastical policy can be seen in his own contribution to the debate, his last written work, A Pattern for a King's Inauguration.

The inspiration for A Pattern is Matthew 27, the passage in which Roman soldiers strip and crown Jesus with thorns, kneel, and then mock him. From this grim narrative, James constructed a similitude with his own situation: unwilling to acknowledge the divinity of Christ, the soldiers perform "a civil homage, done to a temporal king." This abuse functions as a type of worship, contends James; God must "wring his glory out of corruptions." The observation has novel implications for nonconformity: These therefore, that will refuse in any place or at any time to worship Christ as well in body as in soul, are in that point inferior to those profane soldiers: which I wish were well observed by our foolish superstitious Puritans, that refuse to kneel at the receiving of the blessed Sacrament.54 The king's purpose here is to shame and thus correct non-conformity by means of an hyperbolic comparison: knees bent in mockery are superior to necks stiffened in religious opposition. To transform hypocrisy into a model of worship seems audacious and, on the surface, inappropriate. An analysis of how James fashioned a new argument from a wealth of current rhetorical strategies, however, provides a clue to his purpose. We see in this passage echoes of Morton's conformist polemic, but it is a rhetoric altered by the Andrewesian invocation of noli me tangere. Morton had linked the figures of Christ and king with a similitude the "civil gift" of religion received by a compliant and grateful people in the secular reflection of religious devotion. A Pattern offers a strikingly different linking image, the bent knees of mocking and abusive obeisance, civil scorn. The title of this work makes it clear that James has tied himself to the figure of a discredited Christ and to a sacrament for which he cannot enforce proper reverence. To borrow a phrase from Andrewes, neither Christ nor king have the power to say noli to anything. It is an oddly haunting final image. Here rhetoric functions as autobiography; James had indeed lost control, not of policy, but, more significantly, of the language of policy.

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The sermons and tracts examined above point out the significance of a simple gesture. Following the Black Rubric of 1552, criticism of nonconformity had centered upon the appearance - not the mentality - of kneeling, and thus the act itself remained open to a variety of religious interpretations. Once the interpretation fixed upon the sacrament, the description of religious obeisance shifted away from the adiaphoric. These works demonstrate how a once familiar language of conformity could be transformed by the super-charged politics of anti-puritanism of the late reign of James I. That the transformation was accomplished without the strong arm of royal enforcement makes it no less significant or real. The actual enforcement or non-enforcement of kneeling at communion in the Jacobean church bears little relation to the utilization of the idea of kneeling as a rhetorical device in the polemic of the period. Words, moreover, are not the actors here; people manipulating words are. If we examine the debate over kneeling against the backdrop of political developments in the later reign of James I, we find a language initiated by Calvinist conformists and reshaped by anti-Calvinist conformists. The latter would seize the polemical initiative in the next reign, at which time they could claim the considerable advantage of a tradition to support their once-suppressed doctrinal assertions. The rhetorical re-sacralizing of the act of kneeling was to be the first warning of more trouble to come. The development of a new polemic emphasizing the beauty of holiness in terms of eucharistic practice set the tone for the disastrous ecclesiastical policies of the 1630s. NOTES

1 A version of this essay was presented at a session of the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, January 1994. Portions of the manuscript have been read by David Cressy, Constance Jordan, Peter Lake, and Kevin Sharpe, whose suggestions have been very helpful. 2 Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, "The Ecclesiastical Policy of Kingjames I," Journal of British Studies 24, no.2 (April 1985), 173-92. 3 Patrick Collinson has written that puritans formed a "separation within the Church": "The Cohabitation of the Faithful with the Unfaithful," in O. Grell, J. Israel, and N. Tyacke, From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), p. 62. 4 Thomas Fuller, Church History of Britain (rpt: Oxford, 1865), p. 288; William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference.. .at Hampton Court ( L o n d o n ,

1604), pp. 53-4. 5 For the attitudes of the Jacobean episcopate on the significance of prayer and preaching, see Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor (Oxford, 1990),

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pp. 231-40; Peter Lake, "Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and AvantGarde Conformity at the Court ofJames I," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), 115—19; 124-30. For the purposes of this essay, my use of the term "ecclesiology" (which is defined in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary as the "science of church buildings and decorations") is enlarged generally to mean the perceptible and apparent practices of the Church as opposed to its theology. This picture is finally undergoing a much needed revision. "Puritanism," both name and thing, can be found in most of the essays on the Jacobean church in the latest addition to the "Problems in Focus" series: The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (London, 1993). In this volume, Fincham and Peter Lake have updated their 1985 Journal of British Studies article to include a discussion of the relation of Jacobean policy to its Caroline successor: "The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I," pp. 23-50. Peter Lake has recently voiced the same complaint in an essay on the church in the 1630s: "The Laudian Style," in Fincham, Early Stuart Church, p. 162. Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 9-20. I refer here to such works as N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987), Peter White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic (Cambridge, 1992), as well as the Past and Present debate involving these two authors, "The Rise of Arminianism Reconsidered," issues 101 (1983) and 115 (1987). Peter Lake added his mediating opinion: "Calvinism and the English Church, 1560-1640," Past and Present 114 (1987). Patrick Collinson's work also figures in this view of the church of England. His, Lake's, and Fincham's work, however, provide a welcome move away from strict considerations of theology. Collinson, "Cohabitation of the Faithful," pp. 53-5. Thomas Morton, A Defence of the Innocency of the Three Ceremonies of the Church of England (London, 1618), prefatory epistle. Fincham, Prelate, p. 239; David Calderwood, Perth Assembly (Leiden, 1619), pp. 4-10. Bancroft was a Calvinist, although he had misgivings about "puritanical" interpretations of the doctrine of predestination. His dislike of puritanism stemmed from his hatred of Presbyterianism: Stuart Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962), pp. 33-6; Fincham, Prelate, pp. 291-2; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 16-7. This is not to suggest that this incident was the only one in which Reynolds was interrupted by importunate bishops at Hampton Court, or even that Reynolds himself failed to show proper obeisance to James: Barlow, Summe and Substance, pp. 26; 41. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation, 2nd edn. (Pennsylvania, 1989), p. 278. J. Ketley, ed., The Two Liturgies, A.D. 1549, andA.D. 1332, With Other Documents Set Forth by Authority in the Reign of King Edward VI(Cambridge, 1844), pp. 97-9,

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282-3. In another sense, of course, the rubric was aptly named since it was printed in black instead of the usual red, as the word "rubric" implies. Two Liturgies, p. 157. Diarmid MacCullough, "The Myth of the English Reformation," Journal of British Studies 30, no.i (Jan. 1991), 1-19. Dickens, The English Reformation, p. 359. In addition, this open-ended interpretation of communion was aided by the 1559 words of institution, which simply combined the 1549 and 1552 formulae, thereby avoiding the exact sense of either. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, pp. 1-43; Norman Jones, Faith by Statute (London, 1982), pp. 134-6. See also James VFs very similar opinion as expressed in his Basilikon Down of 1599: C. H. Mcllwain, ed., The Political Works of James 1(rpt. 1918: New York, 1965), p. 17. Fincham, Prelate, pp. 212-47. A full transcript of the Millenary Petition is contained in J. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 117-19. See also Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft, pp. 43-73; Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 9-28. A specific complaint about kneeling is not included in the general objections to ceremony in the petition, although this argues for its potential for controversy; Kenyon states that kneeling was "perhaps the only significant point" in the puritan programme at the beginning of James's reign: Stuart Constitution, p. in.

24 Fincham and Lake, "Ecclesiastical Policy of James I," 169-207; Fincham, Prelate, pp. 214, 227. 25 An Abridgement of that Book which the ministers of Lincoln Diocese delivered to his Majesty. Being thefirstpart of an apologyfor themselves and their brethren that refuse the subscription, and conformity which is required (W. Jones's secret press, 1605). 26 To cite a few of the many examples, see Thomas Hutton, Reasonsfor Refusal of Subscription to the Book of Common Prayer (1605); Thomas Sparke, A Brotherly Persuasion to Unity and Uniformity (1607); Gabriel Powel, A Consideration of the Deprived and Silenced Minister's Arguments (1606); William Bradshaw, Twelve General Arguments proving that the ceremonies . . . are unlawful (1605); S. Hieron, A Defence of the Minister's Reasons for Refusal of Subscription (1607); th e s e and other works are also cited in Gerald Gragg, Reason and Authority: A Study of English Thought in the Early Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, 1975), pp. 127-58. 27 Cragg, Reason and Authority, p. 137; N. Tyacke, "The Legalizing of Dissent, 1571—1719," in From Persecution to Toleration, pp. 26-7; also see Fincham, Prelate, pp. 212-3, 258-60. 28 David George Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland: The History of An Idea 1560-1638 (Edinburgh, 1986), pp. 152-62. 29 The other articles required assent to confirmation by bishops, the imposition of holy days (Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost), and provisions for private baptism and communion. Galderwood, Perth Assembly, p. 8. Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland, p. 152. 30 This assembly, held in August 1617, reflected the controversial nature of

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James's religious settlement in Scotland, where he had earlier introduced a limited form of episcopacy. During its three-day course, presbyterian ministers were pitted against the king's emissaries and James's Scottish bishops in debate. And, as at Hampton Court, the contest favored the king and his episcopate: the articles eventually assented to were subsequently passed by a general assembly at Perth in 1618, and in Parliament in 1621: Mullan, Episcopacy in Scotland, p. 152. 31 Calderwood, Perth Assembly, pp. 1-10. 32 Calderwood feared that Scotland would be made to conform to the English Church: A Solution of Doctor Resolutus His Resolutionsfor Kneeling (Amsterdam, l6l 9)> P- 5533 Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 21-32; S. Adams, "Foreign Policy and the Parliaments of 1621 and 1624," in Faction and Parliament, ed. K. Sharpe (New York, 1979), pp. 139-41. 34 Lancelot Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before His Majesty at Whitehall (London, 1611), pp. 7-8. The occasion had a double import: Accession Day fell upon Easter that year. 35 William Westerman, J a r o ^ Well (London, 1613), p. 2. 36 Ibid., pp. 53-4. 37 Christopher Swale, Jacob's Vow (London, 1621), p. 17. 38 Fincham and Lake, "Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I," pp. 25-36. 39 Morton, A Defence, p. 292. 40 James I of England, A Meditation on the Lord's Prayer (London, 1619), pp. 5-6. 41 James I of England, The Works of that Most High and Mighty Prince James . . . Published by James Bishop of Winton. and Dean of his Majesty's Chapel Royal (London, 1616), pp. 575-8. A Meditation upon the Lord's Prayer and A Patternfor a King's Inauguration (London, 1620) were appended to the published Works in 1620.

42 Anthony Maxey, A Sermon Preached Before His Majesty at Bagshot, Sept 1 Anno Dom 1616 (London, 1619), p. 24. 43 Andrewes, A Sermon Preached on Easter Day Last (London, 1614), p. 25: "He will not have us worship Him like Elephants, as if we had no joints in our knees." 44 He was forced to write A Defence in order to regain royal favor; the treatise is dedicated to Buckingham: Fincham, Prelate, pp. 226-7. 45 The description is Peter Lake's: "Avant-Garde Conformity," p. 133. 46 Fincham and Lake, "Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I," pp. 62-4. 47 Andrewes, Sermon Preached on Easter Last, p. 30. I have slightly altered the punctuation of the 1614 published version in order to make the sense of the passage more readily apparent. The original runs: "Sure, heed would be taken, that by taking heed, we prove not superstitious: we slip not into the other extreme, before we be aware." 48 Norwich Spackman, A Sermon Preached Before His Majesty at Whitehall the First of May, 1614 (London, 1614), pp. 24-6; 46-7; 58.1 would like to thank Peter

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LORI ANNE FERRELL MacCullough for pointing out the proximity of this sermon to Andrewes's Easter sermon of the same year. Lancelot Andrewes, Works (Oxford, 1841), 111, 33; also quoted to different effect by Fincham, Prelate, p. 235; and Lake, "Avant-Garde Conformity," p. 119. A fuller text for Andrewes's remarks, "Touch me not, for I am not yet ascended to my father" (John 20:17), supports this reading and may also be a rebuke of Calvinist eucharistic doctrine, which taught that receivers were united with Christ in heaven at the moment of communication: Andrewes, in, 30. J o h n Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached Before His Majesty at Whitehall, March 22. 161J being Passion-Sunday, Touching Prostration, and Kneeling in the Worship of God. To Which is Added, a Discourse Concerning Kneeling at the Communion (London, 1618), pp. 5-8. Buckeridge, Discourse, p. 243. Lake, "Avant-Garde Conformity," p. 133. Works, pp. 607-8.

CHAPTER FIVE

Donne and the politics of devotion Richard Strier

One of the most productive developments in literary studies in the last decade or so has been the recognition that literary texts, even very great ones, often have "local" as well as grand or "universal" meanings. * The awareness of this possibility has allowed and encouraged us to see texts as entering into specific conversations and controversies of their times rather than only participating in some timeless Great Conversation. Texts have been seen as more grounded and more motivated, though not necessarily more shrunken and parochial (though this is, of course, a danger). How texts transcend their times and places and manage to be, as Pound puts it, "news that stays news" is a difficult problem for the "local" approach.2 Another problem, and one more internal to the approach, is how one determines what the political content of a text is. I think that this problem has not been sufficiently or self-consciously enough addressed. Critics tend to pick out bits and pieces, especially particular allusions, and to build their "readings" such as they are (they are rarely sustained) on such moments. Or they tend to fit texts into predetermined views of the author's political orientation.3 In this essay, I will argue that a number of recent treatments of Donne's post-ordination writings, especially the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623), n a v e been looking for the wrong thing in the wrong way and, in a sense, in the wrong places. To let the cats out of the bag, the critics in question have been looking for oppositionality in bits and pieces of the texts, and they have equated the politics of the texts with remarks about government and state power (hence bits and pieces) rather than with the theological and, especially, the ecclesiological dimensions of these texts. i: LOOKING FOR OPPOSITION

The quest to find an oppositional dimension in Donne's post-ordination writings has not been notably successful. The claims involved have 93

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ranged from the modest one of Annabel Patterson and David Norbrook that Donne was not "unambiguously absolutist" to the picture that Dave Gray and Jeanne Shami present of Donne as a (discreet) hero of conscience.4 These views all spring from a shared desire not to see Donne as "selling out to the Jacobean church and state,"5 a view which is associated with R. C. Bald (his biographer) and especially with John Carey (his phenomenologer).61 sympathize with the desire not to see Donne as merely a careerist - his writings, throughout his life, seem too rich for that - but I think that the critics searching for oppositionality in Donne's sermons and Devotions are falling prey to a false dichotomy. They are assuming that the only alternative to careerism and toadying is criticism or opposition. But what of the possibility of principled loyalty to the established church and state? Surely it is a mistake (though an easy and tempting one) to assume that only oppositional figures have principles. Carey's great statement that Donne's absolutist politics "came from his soul" has often been misinterpreted.7 As Debora Shuger has seen, it is not a cynical remark; it is an attempt to capture the depth and resonance that the idea of kingship had for Donne.8 The most thoughtful treatment of Donne's spiritual development sees his role in the Jacobean church as ultimately a satisfying acquisition "of something like the spiritual framework" that the Catholicism into which Donne was born would have provided him had he lived in a Catholic country.9 A good example of both the difficulty of maintaining the oppositional view and the importance of apprehending the richness of Donne's commitment to the established state and church arises in regard to Donne's sermon at Paul's Cross on 15 September 1622 in defense of the Directions to Preachers that the king had just promulgated that August.10 This is obviously quite a camel for the oppositionists to swallow. Norbrook acknowledges that "it has become notorious that Donne himself preached in defense of the restrictions" on preaching, but speculates that "it seems that it was precisely because he was not regarded as a partisan of the conservatives that James regarded him as a suitable person to justify his policies in public."11 But why "it seems" this way is never specified. Thomas Cogswell notes that Donne's sermons of this period "regularly stressed the importance of obedience," and Bald notes that "more than once" in the Lincoln's Inn sermons of this period Donne "had complained against excess freedom in preaching." 12 The sort of double-think involved in Norbrook's view - James chose Donne to expound his policies in the most visible London pulpit because James knew that Donne was not wholly committed to these policies - is unfortunately

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(and necessarily) prevalent in the efforts to present a critical or oppositional Donne. Patterson, immensely to her credit, attempts to provide textual support for her view of this sermon. She points to the genuine rhetorical complexity of Donne's defense of James's military inaction as itself a form of action: "as God sits in Heaven, and yet goes into the field, so they of whom God hath said, Tee are Gods, the lungs of the Earth, may stay at home, and yet goe too."13 Yet Patterson does not take seriously this God-king analogy nor deal with the reference later in the paragraph to the wisdom of princes keeping themselves "from engagements in unnecessary Warres, for that, that onely was Iosiah's mine." Again pointing to something real in the language, Patterson asks why Donne is so careful in praising James's efforts as a peacemaker who "hath sometime effected it in some place," but she does not consider the possibility that Donne is trying to be literal and accurate rather than coy. Patterson's main arguments, however, are based on her own rhetoric. She too engages in double-think - why "call attention to the domestic political ideal of 'moderation,' if not to suggest... that the Directions could be interpreted... as an immoderate and authoritarian speech act" - and in an appeal to something like "common sense": "Required to explain from the pulpit the pulpit's repression, Donne could not, in 1622, have been unaware of a painful contradiction" (p. 99). But this "contradiction" is conjured by the critic. The Directions did not forbid preaching. They did limit preaching on some theological topics to some persons (those who were deans or higher), and they did attempt to prohibit preaching on incendiary political topics. What is entirely missing from Patterson's and most other accounts of this sermon is any sense of its seriousness, its passion, and its sincerity. It is a long sermon, and, for Donne, a very carefully argued one (sequential argument is not generally a strong point of Donne's sermons). The discussions of this sermon seem universally to take their orientation not from James's obvious satisfaction with it - he immediately commanded it into print - but from a remark in a letter by John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton that in this sermon Donne "gave no great satisfaction, or as some say spake as if he himself were not so well satisfied."14 It is hardly to be expected that a sermon expounding the official line would "satisfy" the (actual) opposition, but there is no internal evidence for the claim, about which Chamberlain is either skeptical or neutral ("some say"), that Donne himself was "not so well satisfied" with what he was saying. The heart of the sermon for Donne is the assertion in his chosen text that "the stars in their courses fought against Sisera." "In their

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courses" is the key for him. Order is the key, and the great Pauline topos on this topic, I Corinthians 14:40, "Let all things be done decently and in order," is immediately invoked. Preachers "fight" by preaching, and "they must fight, as the Stars in heaven doe, In their order, and according to those directions, which they, to whom it appertaines, shall give them" (rv, 192). Men in Orders, Donne argues, should be orderly. It is characteristic of the Roman church that their "most disorderly men are their men in Orders." They are "so out of all Order, that they are within rule of no temporall Law, within jurisdiction of no Civill Magistrate, no secular Judge. They may kill Kings . . ." (p. 198). To invoke this image of the ultimate Jesuit disorder — "They may kill Kings" — is, as Donne well knows, powerfully to raise the stakes.15 To be in orders but disobedient is to be treasonous. Donne seems to be speaking out of deep conviction here. At one point in the sermon (never quoted by the critics), Donne explicitly addresses the issue of his own role with regard to the Directions to Preachers. He sees James as showing his greatness and goodness in following the Directions with a public sermon (thereby vouchsafing "to give some Reasons of this his proceeding"), and Donne says of his own role, "I was not willing onely, but glad to have my part therein that as in the feare of God, I have always preached to you the Gospel of ChristJesus, who is the God of your Salvation; So in the testimony of a good conscience, I might now preach to you, the Gospell of the Holy Ghost, who is the God of peace, of unitie, and of concord" (pp. 201-2). Donne's "I was not willing onely, but glad to have my part" does not sound like a man who is equivocating or speaking "as if he himself were not so well satisfied." Even the one case in which Donne was in trouble with the church and state authorities does not help establish his critical, oppositional, or even equivocal stance. The incident, as Bald has definitively shown, took place under Charles rather than, as Walton had presented it, under James, and it concerned a sermon Donne gave at Whitehall on the text "Take heed what you hear" (Mark 4: 24). Donne was utterly surprised to have been called on the carpet for this sermon, since he felt that he never, including in his poems, "set down anything with so much study, and diligence, labour of syllables, as in this Sermon I expressed those two points, which I take so much to conduce to his [the King's] service, the imprinting of persuasibility and obedience in the subject, and the breaking of the bed of whisperers."16 I do not know why Patterson thinks that this "emphasis on artfulness in the sermon is suspicious" unless she takes artfulness (which is her word) to be equivalent to deviousness (Censorship, p. 104). Donne's emphasis is not on how "artful" he has been but on how

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hard he was working to make his royalist point. The passage that probably got him in trouble (we don't know this for certain) was a reference to "Very religious Kings" who "may have had wives, that may have retained some tincture, some impressions of errour, which they may have sucked in their infancy from another Church" (vn, 409).17 This may have been taken, mild and tentative as it is ("some tincture, some impressions . . . may have sucked"), as a slur on Henrietta Maria.18 Patterson admirably recognizes that this passage could not have been intended as such. She recognizes that the point of the passage is that the queen is not to be "publikely traduced," though Patterson insists that the passage balances this with a suggestion that Henrietta is to be "privately disciplined" (Censorship, p. 102). But there is no suggestion of this sort in the passage.19 It is not about Henrietta Maria but about the established church. The king's wife image is an analogy. The point is that, even though "A Church may lacke something of exact perfection," that church "should not be said to be a supporter of Antichrist, or a limme of the beast, or a thirster after the cup of Babylon, for all that." Donne is defending the imperfect established church against those who are imagined to want it pure (the "puritans").20 He may, as Norbrook suggests, deconstruct the idea of the via media as a fixed point, but this does not devalue the Church of England for him.21 Donne indeed sees his church as only moving toward God, but he is emphatic that "nearer to him, and to the institutions of his Christ, can no Church, no not of the Reformation, be said to have come, then ours" (vn, 408). Donne was right to assert that his meaning is not critical or oppositional when one observes "the frame, and purpose" of the sermon (Letters, p. 262).22 Charles and Laud were quickly satisfied, since Donne was preaching at Paul's Cross (about the importance of church and state establishments) a month later (Sermons vn, 17). Oppositional readings of the Devotions are similar to those of the sermons. I will argue that the political content of the Devotions is to be found primarily in its attitude toward the church, but there certainly are remarks on and references to government in the volume. In his pioneering article on "The Political Implications of Donne's Devotions" Robert M. Cooper takes a passage in which Donne, in the course of an analogy, defends martial law and "present execution upon the people," as being about the duties and responsibilities of the king: Sometimes the insolency of those that are great puts the people into commotions; the great disease, and the greatest danger to the head, is the insolency of the great ones; and yet they execute martial law, they come to present executions upon the people, whose commotion was indeed but a symptom, (p. 58)23

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Cooper thinks that "the point here" is the king's responsibility for controlling the "great ones" and his guilt if he does not do so, but Donne says nothing at all about the king being responsible for "the insolency of those that are great" (p. 199). The stress on kingly responsibility (as opposed to proper violence) is entirely imported. Similar sorts of readings are promulgated by Dave Gray and Jeanne Shami in "Political Advice in Donne's Devotions." They argue that there are two main political themes in the Devotions, the vulnerability and the public responsibilities of the king, and they argue that these themes are worked out through the metaphor of the king as the heart of the kingdom (p. 346). Again, it is the stress on kingly responsibility that is dubious. In the text, vulnerability eliminates responsibility. Donne's emphasis is not on the importance of the heart caring for the "other parts," but on these parts caring for the vulnerable and absolutely crucial heart (p. 70). With regard to a similar passage on the danger of "rumor" to the chief organs of the body politic, Gray and Shami import the notion of "questionable activities on the part of the prince" provoking rumors. Donne never suggests this, but rather sees detractors of magistrates as spontaneously poisonous and (as always) properly subject to punitive power (pp. 79-80). Where Gray and Shami are on firmer ground is in calling attention to Donne's emphasis on the importance of "counsel" in states. Donne is explicit about this, so here their reading does not have to create or postulate supposed implications. Donne asserts that "the State is the happier, where businesses are carried by more counsels, than can be in one breast, how large soever" (p. 43). "How large soever" is clearly a protective maneuver (though probably sincere), but the important question is the significance of this emphasis on counsel. It is not clear that it was especially audacious. The claim for this rests on a weakly supported argument for Prince Charles being well-known at the time for not accepting counsel. Charles did, after all, always have counselors, and one of the major Parliamentary charges against him in the early 1640s was that he was too influenced by them. 24 The desirability of counsel in normal situations — we have already seen Donne's acceptance of extralegal actions in times of "necessity" - was not a republican or anti-absolutist theme. That good kings do and should in general take counsel and respect the laws was not at issue; what was at issue was whether they had to.25 The Devotions are silent on this, but, as Debora Shuger has shown, the sermons come out squarely on the absolutist side.26 The controversial issue in early modern political theory that the Devotions are explicit on is the key one: whether there were limits to the obedience a subject

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owed a prince.27 A central point in all five of King James's works on political theory was to argue against theories of legitimate resistance. 28 Everyone agreed that subjects should obey godly and virtuous princes. The issue was obedience to the wicked. For James, this issue was nonnegotiable, as it was for the Homily against Disobedience and Willful Rebellion — and as it is for Donne's Devotions:29 From this point of view, tyrants are as divinely instituted and protected as good kings are. As Donne puts it (addressing God), "thou who gavest Augustus the empire, gavest it to Nero too." Kings may behave badly, but "though kings deface in themselves thy first image in their own soul, thou givest no man leave to deface thy second image, imprinted indelibly in their power" (p. 52). Though kings act like beasts, in their power they remain inviolably and permanently "as gods."30 HI THE DEVOTIONS AS ARMINIAN POLEMIC

Once we stop looking for oppositionality in the Devotions, and even, paradoxical as it may seem, once we stop focusing on remarks and analogies about state power, the true political meaning of the text emerges. Instead of relying on hints, metaphors, and speculative applications, we can focus on the overt and central issues of the text. The Devotions become more sustainedly and deeply political when their politics are seen not in the politics of the Devotions but in the devotion of the Devotions. The text falls into place as part of the movement in the Jacobean and early Caroline church that Peter Lake has rather wickedly but quite precisely termed "avant-garde conformity."31 This is the movement, headed by Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud, that followed Richard Hooker in taking its orientation not from opposition to the church of Rome but from opposition to a polemically constructed image of "puritanism" in the English church. This movement had both a theological dimension, the anti-Calvinism studied by Tyacke, and a ceremonial and devotional dimension, recently expounded by Lake.32 These two strands are logically and were, in practice, separable (Milton, like many sectaries, was an anti-Calvinist anti-ceremonialist), but in general, as in Andrewes and Laud, the two strands went together.33 Together, they constituted what a contemporary opponent like Prynne meant by "Arminianism."34 Donne embraced both aspects of "Arminianism," and when the Devotions are seen in this context, their overall progression and their internal emphases fall into place, and the text as a whole, which has been ignored by historians, takes its place as a significant element or episode

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in the story of the English church from the 1590s to the early 1640s that Lake, Tyacke, Fincham, and others have been telling us.35 One of the major puzzles that this perspective solves is why Donne published the Devotions at all. He did not, after all, favor publishing, and he was perfectly capable of writing a book-length work and then merely holding on to it, or allowing it to circulate only among a circle of friends.36 With regard to both prose and verse, Donne generally published only on commission. This is as true of his major prose publication before his ordination, Pseudo-martyr(1610), as it is of his major poetic publication, The Anniversaries, published in 1611 and 1612.37 After his ordination in 1615, Donne was no less chary of publication. Only a handful of sermons were printed during his lifetime, and all of these were either commissioned or, as the title of his major sermon publications indicated, "Upon Speciall Occasions."38 In the light of Donne's publication history, the Devotions emerge as the major spontaneously published work of his lifetime. This is itself interesting, but the circumstances of the volume's publication intensify the problem. Not only did Donne willingly and spontaneously publish it, but he seems to have felt some extraordinarily strong need or impulse to do so. Donne seems to have fallen ill of the disease or diseases on which the Devotions meditate in November of 1623, a n d t o n a v e recovered in December of that year.39 The book was in the hands of the printer byJanuary of 1624, a n d appeared in print early in February. Donne literally rushed the book into print, but the question is why he would have wanted to do so. On the face of it, the volume seems highly unsuitable, since its subject matter (Donne's illness) and its procedures (free meditation and prayer) seem so thoroughly "private."40 This is the puzzle. Gray and Shami have recognized the problem and suggested that the issue of the Spanish Match explains the publication of the volume. But the question of the Spanish Match - toward which we do not know Donne's attitude - was moot by the end of 1623, a n d t n e v e r v general sort of advice that Gray and Shami, like Kate Frost, see the Devotions as giving to Prince Charles, its dedicatee, seems hardly to explain Donne's sense of urgency in rushing the book into print.41 Frost makes a more helpful suggestion in pointing to Encaenia, the only new sermon that Donne published in the year in which he wrote the Devotions. In the dedicatory epistle to Encaenia, preached at the dedication of a new chapel at Lincoln's Inn, Donne explains his willingness (against his normal practice and inclination) to let this sermon be printed "because, though in it I had no occasion to handle any matter of Controversie between us, and

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those of the Romane Persuasion, yet the whole body and frame of the Sermon, is opposed against one pestilent calumny of theirs, that wee have cast off all distinctions of places, and of dayes, and all outward meanes of assisting the devotions of the Congregation" {Sermons rv, 362-3). Frost rightly sees Donne providing a "rationale for publication" here, but she misses the substantive point of the passage. Following Bald, Frost sees the implied rationale for sermon publication to be "either special reference to contemporary problems or value in the enduring battle with Rome."42 But this passage says nothing about "reference to contemporary problems" and (despite Frost and Bald) it explicitly denies that the sermon in question deals with any of the doctrines that are central to "the enduring battle with Rome": "I had no occasion to handle any matter of Controversie between us, and those of the Romane Persuasion"

What Donne is concerned with — to the point of allowing publication - is a particularly "pestilent" calumny that he sees those of the Roman persuasion putting forth against the English church: that this church is a purely spiritualist one that has "cast off" all outward manifestations of religion, all concern with particular places and times, and all concern with "outward meanes of assisting" devotion. It is in defense of times, places, and "outward meanes" that Donne is willing to be "made publique." But the key question is why Donne should have been so moved by this particular aspersion. The answer, I think, has to do less with "the enduring battle with Rome" than with something much closer to home, namely, the attack of the Arminian wing of the Church of England on those who would further reform the liturgy and practice of that church, those (primarily within the church) who could be constructed as "puritans." Donne is especially sensitive to the charge of being against all ceremonies and "outward meanes" because it is one of the charges that he and his party most frequently used against their rivals within the Church of England. Encaenia is a defense of the English church against a conception of puritanism. The sermon is concerned to define the holiness of the church as not the holiness of the godly community (the "puritan" definition) but as the holiness of the consecrated physical structure. Donne concedes that "These walles are holy, because the Saints of Gorfmeet here within these walls to glorifie him," but Donne insists that "these places are not onely consecrated and sanctified by your comming" but are "sanctified also for your comming" (rv, 364). He acknowledges that God is indeed omnipresent and "dwells not in Temples made with handes," but notes that God accepts "at our hands

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our dedication of certaine places to his service" and, most significantly, insists that God "manifest [s] his working more effectually, more energetically in those places, then in any other" (iv, 369). Moreover, it is specifically clerical, not lay dedication ("encaenia") that makes churches special loci of God's presence (iv, 370-3). Donne published the Devotions for the same reason that he published Encaenia - to assert the importance of "places, and of dayes and all outward meanes." The urgency that Donne felt to publish the Devotions can most plausibly be seen as deriving from a profoundly felt (and highly political) sense that to have left his devotions private would have been a betrayal of his whole religious vision, and would have made him feel as if he were validating the piety of the group that (along with the Jesuits) he despised most. The dedication of the Devotions contains two odd and revealing moments. The first of these occurs in the list with which Donne begins the dedication: "I have had three births; one natural, when I came into the world; one, supernatural, when I entered into the ministry; and now, a preternatural birth, in returning to life, from this sickness" (p. 3). Lists tend to have a mind-numbing effect on the reader, but we must stay alert here. Donne asserts that his second birth, his "supernatural" one occurred when he entered "into the ministry." He completely avoids the normal Protestant conception of conversion as a person's second birth or "regeneration" - these are the normal terms. Donne's regeneration was entirely institutional, an entry into an official role in the institutional church. And this regeneration through institutional identity was presided over not by God but by the King. In Donne's "second birth" it was not God but "thy Highness' royal father" who "vouchsafed" Donne his hand. God has not yet been mentioned. He enters through Donne's account of James's mediation; Donne is presented "to the Father" through the intermediary of Charles's father.43 God is even more spectacularly and significantly bracketed later in the dedication when Donne directly addresses the matter of publication. "It might be enough," Donne says, " that God hath seen my devotions." But it is quite clearly not "enough." And Donne never explains why. The appeal to the example of Hezekiah — about which some of the critics have made heavy weather - is oddly inconsequent (since if "examples of good kings are commandments," they are commandments primarily on other "good kings"), and Donne casually passes over the Hezekiah allusion ("Besides") for a very light conceit about the prince accepting Donne's book as a child.44 It is not enough that God has seen Donne's devotions

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because for Donne legitimate devotion must be public. He sees "private devotion" as subversive, shameful, and perhaps even impossible. It is the province of puritans. As we saw in Encaenia, the anti-Laudians were correct in arguing that, in some real sense, the (let's call them) ceremonialists "put holiness in" places.45 Lake has shown that the rhetoric of discounting God's ubiquity was characteristic of the group associated with Andrewes and Laud (though God's essence "be diffused through heaven and earth," His glory "is peculiar to the tabernacle").46 We can understand the urgencies and anxieties of the Devotions when we recognize that they share this view. In the prayer of the eleventh Devotion, Donne acknowledges that while God is "alike and equally" in every mansion of the heavens, His "upper house," and though "here in thy lower house," God fills all, the lower is different from the upper in that on earth God is "elsewhere in some rooms thereof than in others; otherwise in thy church than in my chambers" (p. 75). Donne is obsessed with the physical distance that his disease forces him to keep from the church as a physical place. In the third Devotion, Donne asks in anguish, "how shall they come to thee whom thou hast nailed to their bed?" (p. 19). God is not, effectively, everywhere: "Thou art in the congregation, and I in a solitude." When Donne speaks to God of "the zeal of thy house" (p. 20), he is referring to the physical building and the communal worship that occurs there. He protests to God that his non-attendance at church "is not a recusancy" (p. 20). Yet who would have thought it was? Recusancy as a crime is on Donne's mind, and he finds himself forced into the behavior (nonattendance) that he so despises.47 He goes on to describe his non-attendance as "not a recusancy, for I would come, but an excommunication," for he "must not." But here too Donne feels like a criminal. In the fifth Devotion, Donne returns to the theme and again finds having an infectious disease "an excommunication" (p. 30). He attacks monastic practices (to "counterfeit the plague in a vow") and is especially concerned to devalue solitude. He finds it easy to do this on general grounds - God loves "plural things" and, in nature, "there is no phoenix; nothing singular, nothing alone" (p. 31) - but Donne finds the biblical testimony on solitude troubling. He finds it especially troubling that "thy Son refused not, nay affected solitariness, loneness many, many times," but he finds a way of discounting this.48 At the end of the fifth expostulation, he confronts the obvious possibility that he has been evading, "that solitariness" - which Donne immediately characterizes negatively in two appositive phrases ("dereliction, and abandoning of others") -

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"disposes us best for God, who accompanies us most alone" (p. 34). Against this idea, Donne attempts, quite remarkably, to use the story of Jacob wrestling with God as a negative instance: "though God came not to Jacob till he found him alone, yet when he found him alone, he wrestled with him and lamed him." The moral of the story, for Donne, is that to face God alone may put a person's conscience "out of joint." Face to face, in solitude, is the wrong way to approach God. Donne does not think that any fully positive religious action can be performed in private. One "can sin alone, and suffer alone, but not repent, not be absolved, without another" (p. 139). One cannot even repent alone. The inner state is not enough. Donne does not see God as primarily concerned with the private, non-social realm of the heart. "I know, my God," Donne says, in one of his many concessive constructions, "that thou considerest the heart," but, Donne immediately adds, "thou takest not off thine eye till thou come to the hand" (p. 134).49 Once we understand the place of "outward meanes" in the Devotions, we can see the significance of one of the central narrative and thematic topoi of the volume: Donne's attitudes toward his physicians. Why does he love them so much and have such reverence and respect for them? Surely this cannot be explained by the actual state of medicine in the early modern period (a state that Keith Thomas has wonderfully and terrifyingly evoked for us) or by the actual treatment (dead pigeons, purgings) that Donne received.50 Here too, the answer lies in the realm of ecclesiastical politics. The entrance of the doctor in the Devotions is very carefully managed; it begins Donne's orchestration of his major theme. At the end of the third Devotion, Donne prays for spiritual benefit from his affliction. Thinking of his pillows, he entreats, "As thou hast made these feathers thorns, in the sharpness of this sickness, so Lord, make these thorns feathers again" (p. 22). But the conceit cannot end there. The feathers become "feathers of thy dove, in the peace of conscience," but this is still too private and individual. The dove brings with it (potentially) the idea of the ark, and Donne asks for "holy recourse to thine ark, to the instruments of true comfort, in thy institutions and in the ordinances of thy church." This language of "institutions" and "ordinances" is crucial. In the next Devotion, when Donne first feels the need for a doctor, he inquires of God, "how soon wouldst thou have me go to the physician, and how far wouldst thou have me go with the physician?" (p. 25). He considers the conflicting biblical testimony about physicians and neatly resolves the contradictions by equating "falling" into the hands of the physician with trusting solely in physical means and

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neglecting "that spiritual physic which thou also hast instituted in thy church" (p. 26). The "also" is important here, because the literal physic turns out, like church ordinances, to be fully "instituted." In the prayer of the fourth Devotion, Donne speaks of himself as being "under the vehemence of two diseases" - that of sin and that of fever - and therefore "under the necessity of two physicians, authorized by thee, the bodily, and the spiritual" (p. 27). Both sorts of physicians are fully "authorized." The prayer then considers unauthorized means, and ends by asking God to afford Donne "the seals of thy church," the sacraments, and "for my temporal health, [to] prosper thine ordinance" (p. 29). "Ordinance" has shifted from the church at the end of the third Devotion to medicine at the end of the fourth, or rather, it has come to function as a term that designates any or all of the divinely authorized means by which God "has afforded help to man by" - in a wonderful and very calculated pun - "the ministry of man" (p. 27). Donne's development of what we might call the "happiness with doctors" trope in the first third of the Devotions culminates in the passage where Donne thanks God for sending him more physicians. Donne sees God's "way from the beginning" as "multiplication of thy helps," and he sees ingratitude in any refusal to accept such multiform helps. It is, I think, deeply indicative of the polemical core of the Devotions that in thinking about the "multiplication of thy helps," Donne prays: That for thy great help, thy word, I may seek that not from corners, nor conventicles, nor schismatical singularities, but from the association and communion of thy Catholic church, and those persons whom thou hast always furnished that church withal: and that I may associate thy word with thy sacrament, thy seal with thy patent; and in that sacrament associate the sign with the thing signified, the bread with the body of thy Son. (p. 48)51 Suddenly "helps" are institutional, and any attempt at dissociating any aspect of the church and its ceremonies from any other becomes "schismatical" and associated with "conventicles." The Devotions are a sustained paean to religious non-immediacy, to the importance of means, helps, assistances, and ordinances. Donne acknowledges, in the concessive mode with which we have become familiar, that God could "save without means," but Donne denies that God ever does (p. 127). The proper human devotional stance is grateful reverence for all the mediations that God has provided. In the passage on solitude that we have already partly examined, the potentially crippling terror of "face to face" encounter with God is contrasted with the more reliable "way of reflection, in the consolation of his [God's]

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temporal or spiritual servants, and ordinances" (p. 34). Reverence for God's ordinances, both "spiritual and civil" (p. 37), is the essential religious and political attitude. Donne's attitude toward his doctors expresses and models the proper attitude toward all of God's ministers, ordinances, assistances, instruments, and officers - in the church, the world, and the state (see the final expostulation for magistrates as ministers [pp. 154-5]). It is important to see that this positive attitude toward "helps" and assistances can always, as in the passage on "thy great help, thy word," become highly polemical. Of any ceremonial practice, Donne can say, as he does of church-ordained holidays (recall "distinctions of places, and of dayes" from the preface to Encaenia): "though thou remove them from being of the essence of our salvation, thou leavest them for assistances" (p. 91). This brings me to the matter of the bells. All readers and scholars (and writers) have recognized the power and importance of the section of the Devotions on the funeral bell. Any critic proposing, as I am doing, a new "key" to the Devotions must ultimately be tested by this section of the work. Hearing the funeral bell is the only "emergent occasion" that is discussed in more than one Devotion (the bell takes up three), and in this discussion the Arminianism and polemical anti-puritanism of the volume becomes explicit. In the expostulation of the sixteenth Devotion, the first on the funeral bells, Donne announces a change from his normal procedure. This expostulation is not addressed to God. It is addressed, rather, to other, improper expostulators, and to a very specific group of them. It is addressed to "those who dare expostulate with thee, when in the voice of thy church thou givest allowance to this ceremony of bells at funerals" (p. 104). These persons - who did not see themselves as expostulating with God in criticizing church practices in England - were the despised "puritans." Like almost every other ceremonial practice, funeral bells were indeed an issue in Jacobean England. Elizabethan and Jacobean puritans wanted to be buried "without any manner of pomp, and without the wearing of black gowns . . . or the jangling or ringing of any bells, or any other cere-

monies" (from a will of 1577).52 In 1616, the rector of Ickham in Kent indicated in his will that he wanted to be buried "without popish pomp, vain compliments, and ringing"53 Another Jacobean rector, in Toporley, Cheshire "even struck a man as he [the man in question] tolled for a passing soul."54 In his treatment of the "ceremony of bells" at funerals, Donne is as unaccommodating as he can be to those whom he sees as "schismatical." Instead of simply distinguishing between the abuses and the uses of bells

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at funerals, Donne enumerates a provocative and admittedly primitive view - that the ringing of funeral bells "hath been said to drive away evil spirits" - and then goes on to defend a version of this view (p. 104). He sees those who attack funeral bells and other such ceremonies as breaking "the communion of the saints in that which was intended for the advancement of it" (p. 105). In reprehending these persons, Donne does not, of course, see himself as breaking the communion of the saints. But we should, I think, see Donne as being purposely militant here. He speaks in a completely unqualified way in stating, emphatically, that "We cannot, we cannot, O my God, take in too many helps for religious duties" (p. 105). He is purposely going to the other extreme from the "puritans." He is purposely outraging them. After the statement on glorying in "helps," Donne goes on to defend "pictures" of God ("historical pictures," to be sure, but the thrust is clear).55 The expostulation against expostulators ends by moving from rejecting puritan piety to rejecting Calvinist (or simply Reformation) theology. Again, the language of "assistances" is crucial: In exalting of our religious devotions now we are Christians, thou hast been pleased to continue to us those assistances which did work upon the affections of natural men before; for thou lovest a good man as thou lovest a good Christian; and though grace be merely from me [viz. entirely from outside of me], yet thou dost not plant grace but in good natures. This is straightforward Thomism. 56 In the section on the funeral bells, Donne "came out" against the puritans. Much of the section, as we have seen, is explicitly polemical. In the eighteenth expostulation, Donne attacks the whole puritan attitude toward funerals. He recognizes that this attitude echoes many Old Testament prohibitions, but sees these prohibitions as relating only to "those times" when idolatry was a problem (pp. 117—18). The highly polemical status of this section of the Devotions should perhaps lead us to reconsider the most famous passage in the volume, the vision of the way in which we are all "involved in mankind" and each other (p. 109). Norbrook has sagely remarked that one person's impartiality is another's faction.57 In 1638, the Bishop of Ghichester issued injunctions to ensure that whenever anyone died in his See, there was "a passing bell tolled, that they who are within the hearing of it may . . . recommend the . . . departing soul into the hands of their Redeemer . . . out of a fellowfeeling for their own mortality."58 These injunctions were issued by Brian Duppa, who succeeded Richard Montague as Bishop of Chichester, and whose visitation articles (with those of Montague) have been described

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as "the authentic voice of Arminianism."59 It may well be that Donne's magnificent vision of human community is a version of an Arminian topos. Tyacke notes that in the 1620s one of the recurrent themes of Laud's sermons was "the 'unity' of Jerusalem, the ancient temple and city standing for the English church and state."60 Lake notes that it was against the puritan ideal of separating the godly from the ungodly that Hooker developed his vision of "the mystical union which bound all baptized members of the national church together as members of Christ's body."61 There is perhaps yet more to be said, though here, I freely admit, I am entering the realm of speculation. In this section of the Devotions, when Donne is defending a particular conception of "the communion of the saints," it may be that there is a quite specific argument at work. The great passage about being "involved in mankind" is almost certainly not, in its context, about "mankind." It is about Christendom, and, most specifically, as the seemingly casual mention of Europe indicates, it is about Europe. In context, it may be that the real point of "No man is an island" is that "No island is an island" — that is, that England should find a way to see itself as united with the Church of Rome. At the end of the Paul's Cross sermon of 1627, Donne prayed for God to "bring our Adversaries to such moderation as becomes them, who doe truly desire, that the Church may be truly Catholique, one flock, in onefold, under one

Shepherd" and, perhaps rather surprisingly, "of one practice in all outward and disciplinarian points" (vn, 433). But the idea of the reunion of European Christendom had been percolating earlier. As Anthony Milton explains, a variety of factors at the end of James's reign were encouraging a more tolerant attitude toward the Church of Rome; these factors included "the king's own pacific sensibilities" and "the particular requirements of the Oath of Allegiance controversy" (in which, of course, Donne participated).62 Cogswell notes that in 1622-3, " n o l ess than three Englishmen" were working on treatises stressing the unity of Christendom: Francis Bacon, John Stradling, and, most interestingly, Sir Henry Goodere. Goodere argued that Rome and Geneva "are not directly opposite as North and South Poles."63 Before 1610, in one of his greatest letters, Donne had written to Goodere that Rome, Wittenberg, and Geneva "are all virtuall beames of one Sun . . . not so contrary as the North and South Poles" [Letters, p. 25). So perhaps my suggestion is not utterly fantastic.64 Finally, as Robert Cooper argues, any serious reading of the Devotions must adequately explain "why the work ends with an almost frantic fear

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of relapse" (p. 193). Cooper's suggestion, that the end contemplates the possibility of James converting to Catholicism, is highly unlikely. It is much more plausible to see this ending as Donne's most important enactment of theological Arminianism. The doctrines of perseverance and absolute assurance were at the heart of the controversy over (theological) Arminianism; predestination was correlated with and buttressed these doctrines. Calvinist wills of the 1620s, according to Tyacke, reveal testators "confidently affirming their belief that they are elect saints" and doing so "often with no reference at all to personal sinfulness."65 Donne's psychological state at the end of the Devotions exactly mirrors theological Arminianism. "I durst deliver myself over to thee this minute," Donne affirms, before asking God to preserve him "in this state, free from all relapses" and to forgive him if, as he expects and fears, he does "relapse" into sin (p. 159). Arminius's position, as Carl Bangs explains, was not that assurance was not possible, but that only "present assurance of present salvation was possible," not, as the Calvinists believed, "present assurance of final salvation."66 So, in the complex and utterly sincere final prayer of the Devotions, we must see Donne as again taking his stand against the pernicious and arrogant "faction of assurance and undoubted salvation."67 But if I am right that the Devotions are, in an important and structuring sense, a "party" document, does this mean that from an aesthetic and human point of view they are truly "a diminished thing"? Does the text lose its purity and its grandeur? I think that it may lose its "purity," but that it does not lose its grandeur. Knowing the local contexts and commitments of the text helps us see where "grandeur" can come from. It need not be a matter of transcending factional positions. It may arise from richly inhabiting such a position. To reveal the political and local commitments of a text need not be a debunking activity. The difference between richly and thinly inhabiting a position may turn out to be of enormous aesthetic and human significance. Grandeur and purity may turn out rarely to coexist. NOTES

1 See for instance, Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley, 1988). 2 Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934; New York, i960), p. 29. 3 For a fuller discussion, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley, 1995), ch. 8. 4 David Norbrook, "The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters:

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Donne's Politics," in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and SeventeenthCentury English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago, 1990), p. 17; Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison, 1984), pp. 92-105 and "John Donne, Kingsman?" in The Mental World of theJacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 251-72; Dave Gray and Jeanne Shami, "Political Advice in Donne's Devotions: No Man is an Island," Modern Language Quarterly 50 (1989), 337-56. 5 Patterson, "All Donne," in Soliciting Interpretation, p. 41. 6 R. C. Bald, John Donne: A Life (New York, 1970); John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (New York, 1981). 7 Carey, Donne, p. 115. 8 Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley, 1990), pp. 1641!. 9 David Chanoff, "Donne's Anglicanism," Recusant History 15 (1980), 154-67. While I agree with the general picture that Chanoff provides, I would not, for reasons suggested below, call the position at which Donne arrived simply "Anglicanism" tout court. 10 For the Directions to Preachers, see Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, ed. Edward Cardwell, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1844), in, 198-203. 11 Norbrook, "The Monarchy of Wit," p. 22. 12 Thomas Cogswell, "England and the Spanish Match," in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London: Longman, 1989), p. 119; Bald, Donne, p. 434. 13 Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation, p. 98. For Donne's sermon, see The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1959), 10 vols. This sermon is number 7 in volume iv. Hereafter the sermons will be referred to by volume and page number. 14 Quoted in Bald, Donne, p. 435; Patterson, Censorship, p. 98. 15 On king-killing as a central anti-Jesuit trope, see Sidney Anglo, "More Machiavellian than Machiavel," in John Donne: Essays in Celebration ed. A. J. Smith (London, 1972), pp. 349-84, esp. pp. 373ff. 16 John Donne, Letters to Severall Persons of Honour, ed. Charles Edmund Merrill (New York, 1910), p. 262. (Hereafter cited as Letters.) 17 The suggestion that the references to Henrietta Maria were the cause of the inquiry appears in Simpson and Potter's introduction to the volume in which this sermon appears (vn, 41); Bald finds this plausible {Donne, p. 493). 18 This passage hardly constitutes even what Joshua Scodel calls "muted criticism of the queen's Catholicism." See "John Donne and the Religious Politics of the Via Media," in John Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T. Shawcross, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain and Frances Malpezzi (Conway, 1995). 19 It is worth pausing a moment over the other instance of "evenhandedness" Patterson finds in this sermon. She notes that Donne speaks of finding it inappropriate to "speake of the Duties of subjects before the King, or of the

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duties of Kings, in publike and popular Congregations" (vn, 403). What this means is that Donne does feel comfortable speaking of the duties of subjects most of the time (when the king is not present), and that he hardly ever feels comfortable speaking of the "duties of Kings." It is also worth pointing out that one of the major aims of the Directions to Preachers was precisely to remove discussions about kings from "publike and popular Congregations." Donne is pretending to "wish the king away" not out of fear but because, although he is in the king's presence, he is not addressing him. Donne is addressing potentially critical subjects. 20 That this passage sounds as if it could apply (as Christopher Hill has taken it) to the Roman church is perhaps, as we shall see below, not entirely irrelevant or unintentional. See Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, l l 91 \ P- 36. 21 Norbrook, "The Monarchy of Wit," pp. 23-4; and see also Scodel, "Donne and the Religious Politics of the Via Media." 22 When Donne says in this letter that "I would I were a little more guilty," he is not (as it is tempting to think) acknowledging guilt over being too fawning. He is worrying about the lack of any apparent reason for the displeasure at him, and he is stating his preference for an obvious reason rather than some hidden malice. 23 I quote from the widely available paperback edition (Ann Arbor, 1959), but I have also made use of the edition by Anthony Raspa (1975; New York, 1987). Where the texts substantively conflict, I have followed Raspa. For Cooper's article, see New Essays on Donne, ed. Gary A. Stringer (Salzburg, I 977)> PP- i9 2 ~ 2 1 0 24 This charge is ubiquitous. See, for instance, the opening petition of "the Grand Remonstrance" on how Charles's "royal authority and trust have been abused," and how the Jesuits have brought "divers of [their] instruments to be of your Privy Council." See Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1906), pp. 203-4. 25 In The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, James noted that "a good King, although hee be above the Law, will subject and frame his actions thereto . . . of his owne free-will." See The Political Works of James I, ed. C. H. Mcllwain (Cambridge, MA, 1918), p. 46. As J. P. Sommerville notes, absolutists routinely "admitted that kings should ordinarily rule according to law" (Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 [London, 1986], p. 36). 26 Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, pp. 166-71. 27 See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, 1978), vol. 11. 28 See Sommerville, "James I and the Divine Right of Kings," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, p. 58. 29 On difference between the Homily against Disobedience and the earlier Homily on Good Order, see Strier, Resistant Structures, ch. 7. 30 Recall the passage quoted above from the sermon on the Directions: "so they of whom God hath said, Tee are Gods, the Kings of the Earth, may stay at

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32

33

34 35

36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43 44

RICHARD STRIER home, and yet goe too." Donne was extremely fond of citing "lee are Gods" with regard to kings, and does so regularly in the sermons (see i, 233; n, 201; v, 85; vm, 115). See "Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, PP- II 3733See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. 1590-1640, paperback edn. (Oxford, 1990); Peter Lake, "The Laudian style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s," in The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Stanford, 1993), pp. 161-86. For Milton's (theological) Arminianism, see Maurice Kelley, Introduction to On Christian Doctrine, Complete Prose Works ofJohn Milton (New Haven, 1973), vn, 74-86; for "sectarian" anti-Calvinism (or Pelagianism), see the selections from Ulrich Stadler, Balthasar Hubmaier, and others in Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, ed. George Hunston Williams (Philadelphia 1957). Tyacke, AntiCalvinists, p. xii, notes the difficulty of locating any actual figure who clearly falls into the logically possible category of the Calvinist ceremonialist. See William Prynne, Anti-Arminianisme or the Church of England's Old Antithesis to New Arminianisme (1630). For Kenneth Fincham, see the Introduction, the essay co-authored with Lake on "The Ecclesiastical Policies of James I and Charles I," and his essay on "Episcopal Government, 1603-1640," in Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, pp. 1-22, 23-50, and 71-92. The reference is to Biathanatos, probably written in 1607-8, but which Donne instructed Sir Robert Ker in 1619 to keep but neither publish nor burn (Letters, p. 19). Conclave Ignati and its English translation, also falling within this period of Donne's most intense writing for publication (1610-12), may not exactly have been commissioned, but it was licensed by Dr. Morton, Donne's patron, and was clearly part of the project that produced Pseudo-martyr. For Donne's publications, see Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr. John Donne, Dean of Saint Paul's, 4th edn. (Oxford, 1973). On the disease/diseases controversy, see Devotions, ed. Raspa, pp. xiii-vxii. Each of the twenty-three Devotions is formally divided into sections labeled Meditation, Expostulation, and Prayer. For her view of the political advice in the text, see Kate Gartner Frost, Holy Delight: Typology, Numerology, and Autobiography in Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (Princeton, 1990), ch. 3. On the chronology of events concerning the Spanish Match, see Cogswell, "England and the Spanish Match," in Conflict, ed. Cust and Hughes, pp. 107-33. Frost, Holy Delight, p. 42; Bald, Donne, p. 447. Later in the Devotions Donne presents James as able to "ordain" (p. 54). The reference to Hezekiah is stressed by Frost, Holy Delight, pp. 44-77, and by Gray and Shami, "Political Advice," pp. 342-7.

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45 See, inter alia, The "Root and Branch" Petition, Article 17, in Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, ed. Gardiner, p. 141. 46 Thomas Laurence (in 1634), quoted in Lake, "The Laudian Style," p. 164. 47 As J. E. Neale and others have shown, most of the anti-recusancy activity after the 1593 statute extending the penalties to Protestant dissenters was directed against the latter group rather than against Catholics (the great target of the 1580s). See Elizabeth I and her Parliaments (New York, 1958), 11, 280-97. 48 A similar discounting occurs in the second prebend sermon (1625), VII> 5^49 In a move that strikes the modern reader as uncannily Wittgensteinian or Kripkean, Donne asserts that one cannot even trust one's own apparently privileged access to one's own inner life: "Evermore we are referred for our evidence of others, and of ourselves, to the hand" (p. 135; italics mine). See Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein On Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, 1982). 50 See Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), ch. 1. 51 The worst textual error in the Ann Arbor edition of the Devotions occurs in this passage, where in the first line quoted, this edition has "comers" for "corners." 52 From the will of Sir John Millicent of Barham, Cambridgeshire, 1577, as quoted in Clare Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual in Early Modern England(London, 1984), pp. 49-50. 53 Will of Samuel Hurlstone, MA, as quoted in Gittings, Death, Burial and the Individual, p. 50. 54 Discussed in Judith Maltby, " 'By this Book': Parishioners, the Prayer Book and the Established Church," The Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, p. 124. 55 Compare Donne's Paul's Cross sermon of May, 1627 o n m e defense of "pictures" (vn, 432). Bald sees this 1627 sermon as the moment when "perhaps for the first time" Donne "clearly and firmly stated his sympathy for the High Church position" (p. 498). I think that the evidence is overwhelming for Donne's much earlier "sympathy" for this position - which is too weak a way of putting it. 56 For the Thomist axioms, "without grace no merit" and "without merit no salvation," and for commentary on this position from a Reformation point of view, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson ([1953] rpt. New York, 1969), pp. 621-5. The clearest exposition is Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae, Question 114; see Aquinas on Nature and Grace, ed. A. M. Fairweather (Philadelphia, 1954), pp. 203-16. 57 "Monarchy of Wit," p. 25. 58 Quoted in Gittings, Death, p. 133. Gittings makes the connection with Donne but sees this connection only in very general terms. She does not identify the bishop in question and so cannot consider the connection in the light of this bishop's identity. 59 Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600-1660 (1975), pp. 80-1; see also Andrew Foster, "Church Policies of the 1630's," in Conflict, ed. Cust and Hughes, pp. 200-201.

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60 Tyacke, "Archbishop Laud," in Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, p. 59. 61 In "Andrewes, Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity," in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, p. 114. 62 Anthony Milton, "The Church of England, Rome and the True Church: The Demise of a Jacobean Consensus," in Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, p. 201. Pseudo-martyr, Donne's major publication, was part of the Oath of Allegiance controversy. 63 Cogswell, "England and the Spanish Match," in Conflict, ed. Cust and Hughes, p. 121. 64 On Donne's persistent "refusal to accept the divisions of Christendom as definitive," see Dominic Baker-Smith, "John Donne's Critique of True Religion," in Essays in Celebration, ed. Smith, pp. 404—32 (quotation from p. 421). 65 Tyacke, "Archbishop Laud," in Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, p. 62. See also Anti-Calvinists, in, 89. 66 Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville, 1971),

pp. 347-8. 67 Quoted in Fincham, "Episcopal Government, 1603-1640," in Early Stuart Church, ed. Fincham, p. 85.

CHAPTER

SIX

Catholic, Anglican or puritan? Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset, and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England David L. Smith The religion of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset,1 foxed his contemporaries, and he has proved an equally slippery customer for those modern historians who wish to see unbridgeable confessional gulfs opening up in the 1620s and 1630s.2 A detailed study of him reveals ambiguities of position that confused his contemporaries and confound modern categorization. Those who knew Dorset differed dramatically in their perception of his religion. To one French ambassador, Tillieres, he was "un puritain";3 while to William Middleton, Lord Fielding's chaplain, he appeared "strong for Precisians."4 By contrast, another French ambassador, Fontenay, believed that Dorset "n'est pas trop ennemy de nostre religion";5 and the papal agent Carlo Rossetti thought him "assai fautori nelP intrinseco dei Cattolicci." 6 In 1641 Sir Walter Erie even opposed the re-enfranchisement of Seaford on the grounds that "the lord of the town [i.e. Dorset] [was] a papist."7 Dorset was called everything from a puritan to a papist - and other things besides. In dedicating his "account of religion by reason" to Dorset, Sir John Suckling wrote that the tract - which was widely condemned as Socinian - "had like to make me an atheist at Court and your lordship no very good Christian."8 Whereas Professor Hexter addressed "the problem of the Presbyterian-Independents,"9 contemporary images of Dorset present the even more bizarre spectacle of a puritan-papist-pagan. Where, that is, they mention his religion at all. For time and again we find that descriptions focus mainly on Dorset's courtly and chivalric qualities. Clarendon portrayed Dorset as "a man of an obliging nature, much honour, of great generosity, and of most entire fidelity to the Crown"; but made no mention of his religious attitudes.10 When authors dedicated their writings to Dorset they consistently highlighted these same secular traits: Sir Richard Baker praised his "publicke vertues," Edward May his "noble nature"; and even John Bastwick called him simply "illustrissimus."11 Likewise, James Howell's "elegy upon the most "5

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accomplish'd and heroick... Earl of Dorsett" extolled his "admired perfections" and "goodly person," but had virtually nothing to say about his religion.12 All this material tells us much about how Dorset was perceived during his lifetime. But as evidence of his religious attitudes, the impressions of his contemporaries are of distinctly limited value: either they present conflicting views, or they fail to allude to his religion altogether. This sets the pattern for much of what follows. Dorset's religion proves extremely difficult to reconstruct, for the surviving evidence is patchy, ambiguous and oblique. However, I shall argue that this is itself a clue to his attitudes; and that the problems of retrieval and categorization which we face today partly reflect the actual nature of Dorset's beliefs three-and-a-half centuries ago. Let us now turn to the extant records of Dorset's own words. For him - as for the majority of English people in this period - we have litde written evidence of religious belief. No diary survives of the kind which illuminates the piety of Ralph Josselin or Thomas Dugard or Robert Woodford.13 The absence of any indication that Dorset ever compiled one might argue against an introspective "godliness," although after three-and-a-half centuries the argument from silence is hardly strong. More promisingly, we do possess a will in Dorset's hand dated 23 March 1624/5.14 Several historians, including Dr. Tyacke, have suggested that wills afford some of the most helpful glimpses of religious attitudes in early modern England. l5 So far, two sorts of doubts have been expressed about this deduction: first, that the preambles to wills may reveal the religious position of the scribe rather than that of the testator; and second, that such preambles tended to become mere formulae.16 Dorset's will, however, prompts a third reservation. For here we have a document, written by the testator, which does not follow a standard formula, yet which consistently strikes a note of studied moderation. The preamble reads: I ioyfully ressinge my sowle unto my Creator, confident of itts salvation through the mercy and mediation only of thatt Lambe of God, which taketh away the sinns of the world: vayled over with whose righteousness, my fayth is, thatt by imputative iustice itt shall appeare immaculate before the last tribunall, and receave through the intercession of his passion admittance into eternall glory, there with assuredness attendinge the ressurrection of my body; with beleefe of reunion, forever to remayne in perpetuall bliss: Lord soe bee itt.17 Clearly Dorset rejected the doctrine of saindy intercession, and this alone should dispel rumours that he was a "papist." Indeed, the preamble suggests a distincdy Calvinist position and shows some awareness of

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technical theology. The phrase "imputative iustice" logically implies the belief in man's innate depravity which commonly characterized "godly" wills. The word "assuredness" also seems significant and reinforces the impression of moderate Calvinism. But the rest of the will yields few further clues to Dorset's religious beliefs. His bequests — to his wife, children and staff — were apparently not determined by religious considerations. Interestingly, his two executors, Sir Henry Compton and Thomas Middlemore, were both Catholics.18 But this was probably less important than the fact that both held extensive lands in East Sussex, where Dorset's own territorial base was concentrated. 19 There are even likelier explanations for Dorset's choice. Sir Henry Compton was Dorset's brother-in-law, having married his sister, Cecily Sackville.20 Thomas Middlemore was a long-standing client of the Sackvilles: he was described in 1600 as "belongeinge to" Dorset's father;21 he later became one of Dorset's tenants;22 and he frequently witnessed Dorset's legal transactions.23 It seems highly unlikely that Dorset chose Compton and Middlemore as his executors because he shared their Catholicism. While their religion clearly did not dissuade him from appointing them, the positive reasons for his choice were probably that Compton and Middlemore were both powerful and established neighbors, that Compton was a close relative, and that Middlemore was a trusted client, tenant and friend. In short, the religious views expressed in Dorset's will reveal a moderate Calvinism, but apparently determined neither his choice of executors nor the pattern of his bequests. We seem to be little further forward. So far, we have encountered three reasons why the surviving evidence stubbornly refuses to illuminate Dorset's religious attitudes. First, it is necessarily incomplete and helpful material may well have been lost, for example when Dorset House was destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666.24 As in many historical enquiries, we cannot know whether sources once existed which no longer survive. Second, Dorset's will — where we might expect to find a clear statement of belief — does not give all that much away. Third, Dorset's contemporaries either reached incompatible conclusions about his religion, or preferred to dwell on other, secular characteristics. This last point brings us to another fundamental difficulty: as a peer, Privy Councillor and courtier, Dorset wore several hats besides that of the religious believer. Unlike men such as John Pym and Lord Saye and Sele, Dorset's religious attitudes did not dictate either his political agenda or his public persona. This becomes a serious handicap when we examine his speeches in Star Chamber for evidence of religious belief. On two

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occasions, Dorset addressed religious or ecclesiastical themes: at Henry Sherfield's trial (February 1633) an<^ a* William Prynne's first trial (February 1634). I shall argue, however, that these utterances cannot be treated as manifestations of a personal credo, but rather should be interpreted in the context of Dorset's wider concern to preserve order, and of his public offices as Privy Councillor and Henrietta Maria's Lord Chamberlain. In February 1633, Henry Sherfield, recorder of Salisbury, was brought before Star Chamber charged with smashing a stained-glass window in St. Edmund's Church, Salisbury, in defiance of Bishop Davenant's orders. The window depicted God as an old man measuring the world with a pair of compasses, and raising Eve out of the side of Adam. Sherfield allegedly declared that he did "not like these painted windowes in churches . . . they obscure the light, and may be a cause of much superstition." This particular window had "troubled" him "in conscience by the space of twenty years," and he felt "bound to do what he did to preserve a good conscience."25 The case split the Star Chamber. With Charles Fs encouragement, Laud, Neile and seven others urged the exemplary punishment of a £1,000 fine. Dorset, by contrast, took a more moderate line.26 He argued that Sherfield's action was not intrinsically evil: "if all unlawfull pictures and images were utterly taken out of the churches, I thinke it were a good worke; for at the best they are but vanities and teachers of lies." These views would be consistent with the evidence of Calvinism in Dorset's will. But then -just as we begin to penetrate to the inwardness of Dorset's religion the more secular concerns of the Privy Councillor become predominant. Sherfield's fault, Dorset declared, was that he had acted unilaterally, "without the Bishop of the place." Dorset vigorously defended "the authority of the reverend prelates" on the grounds that "whensoever that authority goeth downe, or decayeth, the monarchy dieth with it: I thinke they are inseparably ioyned together." As James I had put it, "no Bishop, no King." Dorset believed in a symbiotic hierarchy in both church and state, and praised Sherfield for proving "himselfe a conformitant." This concern for order also explains Dorset's refusal to punish Sherfield: The reason why I shall not sentence him is to avoyd the tumults of the rude ignorant people in the country where this gentleman dwelleth, where he hath beene a good governor . . . and noe doubt hath punished drunkennes, and disorders, and then such persons shall rejoyce agaynst him and say, this you have for your paynes and government, this would be noe good reward for him.27

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Dorset clearly feared the social consequences of a breakdown in order. Equally, Sherfield himself, "in going on his owne head without his ordinary to a worke of this nature," had offended against the hierarchy of the church. It was therefore appropriate that Sherfield should "make such acknowledgement to my lord Bishop of Sarum, and in such manner, as he shall thinke fitt"; but Dorset did not propose to fine him. However, the influence of Laud and Neile in particular ensured that the Star Chamber sentenced Sherfield to a £500 fine, as well as a public acknowledgement of his fault.28 How useful is this speech as evidence of Dorset's religious attitudes? It clearly indicates sympathy with the "godly" attack on ornaments, images, alehouses and drunkenness. Dorset was happy to see the church cleansed of "unlawfull pictures and images," but did not want this cleansing itself to be conducted in "unlawfull" ways. He was anxious to preserve order in church, state and society. Sherfield had acted on his own initiative, a case of insubordination which had to be punished. On the other hand, too severe a sentence might encourage unruly elements to rebel against a "good governor." This commitment to hierarchy, order and good government was surely conditioned by Dorset's position as a senior royal adviser. Throughout his speech we can hear the voice of a Privy Councillor - and one of considerable political sagacity, for Dorset perceived the counter-productive consequences of a harsh sentence far more clearly than Laud or Neile. He may also have wished to restrain Charles I, who was closely involved in Sherfield's case and personally determined the "publique manner" of his "acknowledgment."29 One of Dorset's most characteristic strategies as a councillor was to try to curb Caroline over-reactions by dropping veiled hints to the monarch. These typically suggested the attractions of a gentler course of action. It seems probable that Dorset's remarks about the symbiosis of episcopacy and monarchy, Sherfield's "conformity," and the dependence of local order on such "good governors," were at least partly designed to persuade Charles that the threat posed by Sherfield was less damaging in the long run than the effects of a harsh sentence. In this respect, Dorset's speech was perhaps of a piece with an episode four months later, when the Lord Keeper, Sir Tho[mas] Coventry, had a warrant to seale a pardon for the forfeitures of the papists, which he refusing to do, as contrary to law, the King sent for him, called him his Maister, and tooke away the Greate Seale: but upon some words of the Earle of Dorsett, who said, he knew the King would not condemne any man without hearing him, they were restored unto him againe.30

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Such an approach probably informed Dorset's speech at Sherfield's trial: it is likely that his words express less an individual's private stance on theological and ecclesiological issues than a Privy Councillor's public attempt to preserve order and hierarchy from both "the tumults of the rude ignorant people" and the hazards of royal heavy-handedness. Dorset's official hat was also apparent when he spoke at William Prynne's first trial in February 1634. Prynne's attacks on female actors in his book Histriomastix were widely perceived as libels against Queen Henrietta Maria. Dorset - her Lord Chamberlain and hence responsible for her theatrical entertainments - helped to secure Prynne's arrest in February 1633.31 When he came to be sentenced a year later Dorset was implacable.32 He condemned Prynne as "the damner of Prince, people and State," one who "invades heaven itselfe and flies upon the King's sacred person." Christ had "sent out his disciples with an ite,praedicate. Then holy men were advanced by humility. They taught obedience, to give unto Caesar that which is Caesar's . . . that if there be bad princes we must pray for them; if good, praise God for them." Again, this was a natural belief for someone in Dorset's position to hold. He then poured scorn on Prynne's religious "zeale": "this brittle conscienced brother will sweat at the sight of a surplice, tremble at a cappe, and rather suffer death than putt on womens apparrell." But Prynne's greatest offence was that he hath scandalised the Queenes Majesty, my loving Mistris, or faire Cynthia; one whose vertues noe Orator is able to display, noe Poet able to sett out. .. one soe sweetly disposed, that the sunne setts not upon her anger. A woman made for the redemption of all imperfections which men unjustly cast uppon that sexe. She is one that is constant in her devotion; as for confession, she troubleth her confessor with nothing more than that she hath nothing to trouble him withall. Dorset's robust defence of the Queen's "vertues" was matched only by his intense desire to see Prynne punished. He urged some form of corporal punishment — "his nose slitt, or a brand on his forehead, or . . . his eares cutt" - followed by a £10,000 fine and "perpetuall imprisonment."33 This vitriolic speech was in marked contrast to Dorset's far more moderate reaction to Sherfield. Prynne, after all, had not only threatened order but shown deep disrespect to the Queen. Dorset's sense of outrage can only have been heightened by his status as a Privy Councillor and above all as Henrietta Maria's Lord Chamberlain. As at Sherfield's trial, his views on religious matters - in this case his attitude to "holy men" and his contempt for Prynne's "zeale" - were moulded by his wider concern for order and by his tenure of secular offices.

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Unfortunately, this public persona continues to block our view of Dorset's private religion when we move out into the provinces. They prevent us, for example, from using his protection of a "nonconformist" minister, John Brinsley of Great Yarmouth, as evidence of religious conviction. The story is nonetheless of interest. In the early seventeenth century, the right to appoint a lecturer at Great Yarmouth was claimed by both the corporation and the Dean and Chapter of Norwich, who also nominated the incumbent of the parish church. Dorset was appointed High Steward of Great Yarmouth in 1629, a n d m April 1631 the bailiffs requested his help in "the obtaining and injoying of Mr Brinsleye to be our town preacher or lecturer."34 Dorset vigorously took up the corporation's case, but the Dean and Chapter of Norwich stood their ground. The following December they acknowledged Dorset's "letters in favour of Mr Brinsley", but defended their "right for choosinge ministers for the towne of Yermouth" as "mor likly to setle peace and quench facon than for one to be chosen by us and another by" the townsmen.35 At about the same time, they wrote to the Bishop of Norwich reminding him that Chancery had found Brinsley "a man unfitt for that place," and urging him not to license "a man so prejudiced": ". . . whatsoever is per him or his well willers pretended for his conformitye, yett are we vehemently suspicious that except they will sett their mynds uppon some other man they will have no peace amongst themselves."36 The case came before the King and Privy Council on 24 March 1632. Charles declared himself "sensible and careful... of countenancing and maintaining, as well of ecclesiastical authority and discipline, as of civil order and government."37 Brinsley was forbidden to lecture in the town, and the chapel in which he had preached was returned to its former use as a warehouse. Dorset apparently deferred to royal authority and abandoned the town's case.38 This shows that he was not so committed to Great Yarmouth or to Brinsley as to defend them in the face of political expediency. It seems likely that his earlier campaign was stimulated by his role as High Steward of the town rather than by any personal sympathy with Brinsley's religion. Once again, Dorset's commitment to order and deference to the Crown's authority were critical. Nevertheless, much recent research on early modern England has demonstrated that many public figures - including those of the first rank - did have definite and developed religious beliefs. The effects of high secular office cannot always obscure these. But they do sometimes mean that we have to look in other, more private, places. In particular, floods

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of light have been shed on lay piety by sensitive analysis of the lay-out and furnishings of private chapels; the choice of domestic chaplains; and the presentation of ministers to livings. Such highly personal evidence can give a peculiarly accurate insight into an individual's religious attitudes. Might it therefore provide the key to unlock the mysteries of Dorset's faith? The recent work of Pauline Croft on Robert Cecil and of Ian Atherton on Viscount Scudamore reveals that physical alterations to private places of worship faithfully reflected developments in spiritual beliefs.39 Unfortunately, in Dorset's case we again reach a dead end. The chapel in his country seat at Knole (Kent) was built in the late fifteenth century and redecorated in the late sixteenth.40 The style was simple but not austere: altar, family pew, pulpit, lectern, font. There is no evidence of further changes until the 1770s except for the installation - probably at some time during the seventeenth century - of four windows of "grisaille" work. The date of this feature is apparently unknown, and thus cannot be attributed with confidence to any particular Sackville. The almost total loss of Dorset's private accounts deprives us of information about expenditure on the chapel.41 Most of these accounts probably perished with Dorset House in 1666. The chapel of that house is also obscure, and no details can be found of its interior, let alone of specific innovations by Dorset. So this literal window into his soul is sadly blocked. We fare slightly better with domestic chaplains. Clearly a lay person would regularly experience his/her chaplain's services and sermons, and this therefore looks a very promising line of enquiry42 In Dorset's case at least two chaplains can be identified. We know something of the religious attitudes of the first, Brian Duppa, for he later became Bishop of Chichester (1638), Salisbury (1641) and Winchester (1660).43 In the first diocese, "Duppa's visitation articles of 1638 faithfully mirrored . . . Archbishop [Laud's] of three years previously."44 It was through Dorset that Duppa had secured his first major appointment, as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, ten years before.45 But such patronage does not necessarily prove that Dorset shared Duppa's religious views. After all, the two men had almost certainly met at university, for they both entered Christ Church as undergraduates in July 1605.46 Furthermore, from 1613 Duppa served as chaplain to Dorset's elder brother, the third Earl, and was "inherited" by the fourth Earl in 1624.47 It may well have been this long acquaintanceship and record of family service which recommended Duppa to Dorset, rather than his religious attitudes. For the

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second chaplain, Charles Beauvois, we have rather less to go on. His presentation in 1638 to the rectory of Withyham - a living which the chaplains to the Earls of Dorset seem often to have held in plurality - suggests that he also succeeded Duppa as household chaplain in that year.48 Beauvois was presented by the King, pro hac vice. This may imply that his religious sympathies were at least compatible with the official policies of the later 1630s; which in turn might suggest a certain doctrinal resemblance to his predecessor, Duppa. But in the present state of the evidence this must remain highly speculative. What, then, may be gleaned from Dorset's own presentations to livings? Once again, these can yield persuasive evidence of lay piety, as for example in Barbara Donagan's work on the "clerical patronage" of the second Earl of Warwick.49 For Dorset we have reasonably full information, and a pattern does begin to emerge. Among the Sackville papers, there survives a list of thirty-nine livings in Dorset's control. 50 By means of the Bishops' certificates of presentations to benefices, it has been possible to identify some of the ministers whom Dorset presented.51 These records are incomplete; in particular, those for the counties of Essex and Middlesex, which both contained Dorset livings, do not survive. This gap can however be filled by the register of the Bishops of London. 52 1 have traced twenty-two presentations by Dorset, of twenty different ministers. There is explicit evidence for the religious positions of four of these, and clues for a further five. We know most about Brian Duppa, James Marsh, George Blundell and John Tillinghast. Duppa's Laudian attitudes have already been discussed. James Marsh's attitudes were apparently similar: as Archdeacon of Chichester from 1640 he reissued Duppa's 1638 articles "without alteration" for his own visitations.53 He was sequestered in July 1643.54 By contrast, the Committee for Plundered Ministers commended George Blundell in 1647 as "a godlie and orthodox divine";55 while John Tillinghast is known to have been an Independent in the later 1640s, and possibly a Fifth Monarchist by 1651.56 Of the other five, Thomas Russell narrowly avoided suspension in 1635 f°r refusing "to bowe at the blessed name of Jesus";57 Richard Gough and Henry Sheppard were sequestered in 1643 a n d x^44 respectively;58 and Sheppard together with Robert Baker and Thomas Rogers definitely held church office after the Restoration. 59 It would be unwise to draw firm conclusions from such partial and incomplete evidence, but the religious positions of these nine ministers look pretty diverse. They certainly ranged from the Laudian to the Independent. I have so far found no sources which throw light on the beliefs of the other eleven,60

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although it seems that none of those still alive in 1660-2 was ejected.61 There are nevertheless signs of a consistent pattern in Dorset's presentations. Twelve of the ministers apparently graduated from either Oxford or Cambridge, and something of their personal background may therefore be found in the Alumni Oxonienses and Alumni Cantabrigienses.

Ten of these graduates were presented to Sussex livings. In eight cases we know the county in which their father lived, and in seven cases that county was also Sussex.62 Of the remaining two presentations, the minister at Tooting in Surrey was from Kingston, Surrey, while the one at St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, London, was the son of a City of London grocer.63 It thus appears that Dorset usually chose local men for his livings.64 This does not necessarily prove that religion was unimportant, but - as in his defence of Sherfield - it does suggest an alternative, secular reason for his behavior. There is an intriguing codicil to this last point. The whole question of lay presentation to impropriated livings was highly controversial in early Stuart England. This legacy of the Reformation came under growing attack from both right and left, from high churchmen such as Laud and Neile, and from "puritans"65 like the feoffees for the purchase of impropriations.66 On 14 February 1629, Dorset was appointed — along with men as diverse as Laud, Neile and Lord Saye and Sele — to a House of Lords committee "to draw one bill to prevent the decay of churches, chancels and chapels; and to draw one other bill for sufficient stipends to be allowed unto curates, as well unto curates who serve in churches appropriated as in other churches."67 The work of this committee was pre-empted by Parliament's dissolution on 10 March. It might however explain a mysterious paper of 1629, n o w i n the Trumbull archive, entitled "inducements for a generall colleccon to redeeme impropriacons to the Church." This records that "the right honourable] the Erie of Dorsett in perticuler hath offered to sell an impropriacon at an under value for the advancement of this good worke."68 I have not yet found evidence of whether Dorset actually sold any of his livings. His offer to do so is deeply ambiguous: anyone from Laud to Saye could have praised "this good worke." Where did Dorset stand on that spectrum? Is it simply that this particular source fails to tell us? Or was his position genuinely ambivalent? In an attempt to unravel Dorset's motives further, let us explore in turn his attitudes towards Laud on the one hand and "puritans" on the other. Dorset's relations with Archbishop Laud are very difficult to reconstruct precisely. Only fragments of evidence survive, but taken together

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they are perhaps suggestive. In public, Dorset treated Laud courteously. At the second trial of Bishop Williams of Lincoln in February 1639, Dorset declared: "my lord of Canterbury is so faithful towards the King, and so upright in his place, that never any that sate in his place before him had cleaner hands than he: he carries himself to the glory of God, the good and welfare of the Church, and the honour of the King."69 But such words do not necessarily mean that they were allies, for Dorset then (as in the Sherfield case) urged far more lenient penalties than Laud. Williams stood charged with receiving letters from Lambert Osbaldeston, the headmaster of Westminster School, which called Laud a "little . . . medling hocas pocas." 70 The Archbishop felt that Williams's offences were "abominably foul and clearly proved." Dorset, by contrast, laid the greatest blame on Osbaldeston, and argued that Williams had "fallen into the limetwiggs of his adversaries." He therefore advocated a relatively light fine of £3,000: as at Sherfield's trial, he opposed Laud's harsher sentence. Nor were these the only occasions on which Dorset sought to calm the Archbishop's temper. In 1640, Dorset rescued five "young gentlemen of Lincoln's Inn" who had drunk "a health to the confusion of the Archbishop of Canterbury" 71 Six years earlier, Dorset may also have tried to protect the celebrated "nonconformist" minister John Cotton of Boston from prosecution by the Court of High Commission. But as the source for this story dates from after 1700, it must be treated with considerable caution.72 Only once in his surviving correspondence does Dorset refer to Laud, in terms which suggest no animosity but perhaps some distance between them. "I conceave as well as you do," he wrote to the Earl of Middlesex on 1 October 1636, "that the litle man is turnd up trump. I nether envy his fortune nor malice his person, and am very well I think in his opinion and affections."73 Dorset's condescending epithet "the litle man" was presumably aimed either at Laud's diminutive stature or at his humble social background; while the phrase "turnd up trump" probably referred to Bishop Juxon's appointment as Lord Treasurer in March 1636 and to Laud's highly successful stage-management of the royal visit to Oxford the following summer.74 None of this diffuse evidence is conclusive. But read as a whole it suggests, perhaps, that Dorset was never very close to the Archbishop, viewed him with mild disdain, and on several occasions disagreed with his treatment of specific individuals. It is also worth adding that many within Henrietta Maria's entourage were actively hostile to Laud, on social and political as well as religious grounds. 75 It is possible that some of this antagonism rubbed off on the Queen's Lord

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Chamberlain. Indeed, as his speech as Prynne's trial shows, Dorset was so loyal to Henrietta Maria that her dislike of Laud was quite likely to influence Dorset's own behavior. This may well help to explain his lack of intimacy with the Archbishop. What, then, did Dorset think of Laud's opponents at the other end of the religious spectrum, the "puritans"? We have already detected one or two signs of sympathy: especially in his favorable view of the "godly magistrate" Henry Sherfield; and perhaps also in his putative help to John Cotton. The former suggests that Dorset tolerated "godliness" where it reinforced the existing order and hierarchy in church, state and society. However, as Richard Cust and Peter Lake have recently reminded us, during the early seventeenth century a perceived link developed between "puritanism" and "popularity."76 "Godliness" increasingly became associated with subversion of religious and political authority. For Dorset — the staunch upholder of order — this was the unacceptable face of "godliness." In September 1639 he lamented "how much liberty and puritanisme rayne in the populace of this people."77 A year later he remonstrated with the "godly" of Rye (Sussex) for "bread [ing] a suspition in the Kinges people that he was turninge papyst," and insisted that "they should rather helpe to finde out purytynes such as there frend Docktor Downinge of Hackney who preached a sedytious sermon."78 The fact that Dorset praised a "godly magistrate" as a bulwark against "the tumults of the rude ignorant people," but condemned "puritanism" when it implied sedition suggests that his variable view of "godliness" was a function of his consistent defence of the established order. Perhaps understandably in a peer, Dorset's primary aim remained the preservation of unity and degree within the existing hierarchical framework. As he wrote, hauntingly, to the Countess of Middlesex on the outbreak of civil war: "I wowld . . . my children had never binn borne, to live under the dominion of soe many Cades and Ketts, as threaten by there multitudes and insurrections to drowne all memory of monarchy, nobility, gentry, in this land."79 All this evidence prompts the question: how far did Dorset wish to defend the Church of England as part of the existing order? In his surviving letters and speeches, Dorset never ventures a general opinion of the Church of England. However, there is one vital clue which suggests an attachment to the canons and constitutions of the established church as they had developed since 1559. In December 1642, Dorset's long-standing friend Sir Kenelm Digby wrote a series of "observations" on Sir Thomas Browne's spiritual autobiography, Religio Medici.

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Digby mentions that he had immediately bought this book because Dorset "gave so advantageous a carecter of it," and describes it as "a favorite" of the Earl's which had "received the honour and safeguard of [his] approbation."80 Religio Medici, written in 1635-6 and published in 1642, contained an eloquent defence of the Church of England, "to whose faith" Browne professed himself "a sworne subject."81 Dorset's fondness for this work is highly suggestive. Browne's commitment to the Church of England rested, first, on a recognition of the value of reason in religious experience: "there is no Church . . . whose articles, constitutions and customes seeme so consonant unto reason."82 Suckling's dedication of his "account of religion by reason" to Dorset makes it all the more likely that the latter shared this perspective. The second distinctive feature of Browne's religion lay in his deep commitment to unity and tolerance: "I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe."83 Such a position is extraordinarily difficult to label, for it was an attitude rather than a creed. In its idealism, desire for charity and toleration, and acknowledgement of the use of reason in religious matters, it has clear affinities with the thought of the Cambridge Platonists.84 But it also bears a resemblance to what Peter Lake has recently termed "the conformist caste of mind."85 This was a moderate, latitudinarian outlook which consciously eschewed extremes and accepted the existence of diverse opinions within the Church of England. It transcended traditional polarities between "Anglicans" and "puritans" or "Calvinists" and "Arminians," and thus "undercut many of the received categories and generalizations" about early seventeenth-century religion.86 To characterize Dorset as a "conformist" might therefore explain why he numbered men as diverse as the Catholic Sir Kenelm Digby and the "puritan" Richard Amherst among his friends. Dorset secured a court entree for Digby in 1629, an<^ their relationship remained cordial thereafter.87 Amherst served until his death in 1632 as Dorset's steward and legal counsel, and rented a large mansion from him.88 He was also a trustee for the debts of Dorset's elder brother, and acted closely with Dorset in the Chancery disputes over their payment.89 Anthony Fletcher has described Amherst's will — in which he besought God "to be gracious unto [him] duringe [his] life" and to "defend [him] from [his] cruel, subtill, and malitious enemy the Devil and all his wicked spirittes" - as "distinctly puritan."90 Such beliefs are in stark contrast with Digby's devout Catholicism, yet both men were apparently on friendly terms

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with Dorset. An ecumenical, "conformist" outlook would also explain why the Catholicism of Sir Henry Compton and Thomas Middlemore did not prevent Dorset's appointing them executors; why the "godliness" of Brinsley and Sherfield did not dissuade him from publicly defending them; and why he praised the latter for proving "himselfe a conformitant." It explains the lack of dogma and extremism in Dorset's religious beliefs: the moderate Calvinism of his will; the cautious approach to several of Laud's decisions and to the more "sedytious" "puritans"; the general latitudinarianism and absence of hard edges. It helps to explain why Dorset's religion left few definite traces. And it may explain why his contemporaries either perceived that religion in diverse ways or felt able to ignore it entirely. This was a man who, like Sir Thomas Browne (as he presents himself in Religio Medici), did not allow differences of religious opinion to affect his political or personal relationships. For all these reasons, it may be helpful to describe Dorset's religious attitudes as "conformist." But people of quite contrasting opinions could claim to be "conformists" in early Stuart England. By itself the term is still somewhat vague and amorphous. It therefore needs stressing that Dorset was not just a "conformist"; he was also what I shall call a "Jacobethan." I have argued elsewhere that Dorset's political maxims corresponded far more closely to realities before 1625 than those thereafter.91 Enough has been said here to suggest that this was true also of his religion. His ecumenical outlook, which avoided extremes and tolerated a plurality of belief within a broad national church, stamps him unmistakably as someone who reached maturity in the England of Elizabeth I and James I.92 Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake have shown that James's ecclesiastical policies perpetuated the delicate balance of the Elizabethan settlement and so furthered the kind of church which Dorset sought.93 James was "a monarch dedicated to the principle of religious unity," and no one doctrinal position was able to dominate the church.94 It was otherwise under Charles I. In collaboration with Archbishop Laud, this king significantly narrowed the boundaries of legitimate religious belief and allowed a group of high churchmen to monopolize ecclesiastical preferment.95 In his hints to Charles - as at Sherfield's trial - and his attempts to restrain Laud's anger, Dorset looks very much like a "Jacobethan" trying to moderate Caroline policies. His aim was to offer what he later called "the more posed and wise advice."96 In the religious sphere, this advice probably sprang from a "Jacobethan" vision of the Church of England.

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This was the religious counterpart of Dorset's almost obsessive concern with social and political unity.97 His religious beliefs did not determine his attitudes to politics and society; rather, they reflected and complemented them. This is turn helps to explain why Dorset's religion has left little direct evidence. Undogmatic, ecumenical, "conformist" values simply did not generate - did not need to generate - as much written material as the relentless self-examination which lay behind many "puritan" diaries. Dorset's faith was part of a coherent package which married the secular and the spiritual. Unfortunately, any ideological conviction manifests itself most clearly - and its strength is easiest to assess - where it conflicts with other motives and then either overrides these or is overridden by them. Thus, Dorset's concern for order and his loyalty to Henrietta Maria were most cogently expressed when he thought they were under threat, as at Prynne's first trial. What never seems to have occurred was the sort of conflict between his religious and secular motives - the sense of being pulled in opposite directions - which alone would drive such beliefs into the open. There are some striking illustrations of the strength of religious convictions in the summer of 1642: the contrasted Cheshire leaders Sir Thomas Aston and Sir William Brereton dramatically reveal how religious imperatives could overcome constitutional preferences.98 But for many others, especially perhaps among the Royalists, no such evidence can be adduced. For example, when Edmund Waller defended bishops as "the counterscarp and outwork" of the whole ecclesiastical, social and political order, can the religious considerations be separated from the secular?99 Dorset likewise saw episcopacy and monarchy as mutually supportive, but it is impossible to isolate a purely religious motive for his Royalist allegiance. This is what makes the piety of so many people in early seventeenth-century England extremely difficult to reconstruct. The present enquiry has been impeded not only by the effects of fire, water and rats. We have also paid a penalty for the fact that someone three-and-a-half centuries ago possessed what today's jargon would term "a well integrated world-view." This interpretation explains why Dorset's religion never did - never could - override his constitutional preferences. They were aspects of a single harmonious outlook, within which they were distinguishable but not separable. Indeed, it is probable that such an approach characterizes most of the moderates of the 1640s. Those who gravitated towards the political extremes, especially among the Parliamentarians, were those whose religious beliefs operated rather like an "override key," those who felt such imperatives so deeply and intensely as to let them dictate their

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political agendas. Religion often forced such people to jettison conventional seventeenth-century assumptions about an innate symbiosis between Crown and Parliament. But for others, including Dorset, that symbiosis found a precise correlative in the religious sphere. Constitutional unity between monarch and subject, and ecclesiastical unity within a broad national church, mirrored and reinforced each other. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Dorset preferred not to subordinate secular ideals to religious but rather to treat them as facets of an integrated and indivisible whole.100 In that sense, "ambiguous" may not be quite the best adjective to describe Dorset's religious beliefs. The stem "ambi-" carries connotations of duality, of trying to have things both ways. In the late twentieth century, which tends to analyze power and authority in terms of checks and balances, of one force limiting another, it requires a real empathetic leap to think ourselves back into the mind-set of someone like Dorset — a mind-set which perceived the world in terms of unity, harmony and order. Amidst growing threats from both "left" and "right," Dorset remained committed to these "Jacobethan" values. Where we might see fences on which to sit, he would see seamless garments in need of repair. We are not assisted in this imaginative effort by the relative paucity of the surviving evidence. Yet this in itself tells us something about the actual nature of Dorset's beliefs. The evidential problems which we encounter today arise in part from what apparently went on in his soul in the early seventeenth century. This essay has recounted the search for an historical reality which by its very nature left little explicit evidence. In many historical enquiries, precise and well-defined historical realities can only be reconstructed tentatively and with difficulty because the vicissitudes of time have bequeathed few relics to us. In rather fewer cases, a complex, ambivalent historical reality may be reconstructed with something approaching certainty because the relevant material happens to survive. But in this case it seems that the nature of the historical experience itself partly explains the intractability of the available sources. Nevertheless, those sources permit us to discern, albeit dimly, something of that complex past experience. NOTES

This is a revised version of an essay first published in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 2 (1992), 105-24.1 am most grateful to John Morrill and Richard Strier for reading and commenting upon earlier drafts of it. I would also like to thank the following for much help, advice and stimulation

Edward Sackville and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England 131 on the subject of Dorset's religion: John Adamson, Ian Atherton, Gerald Aylmer, David Bevington, Richard Cust, Kenneth Fincham, Andrew Foster, Derek Hirst, Peter Lake, Anthony Milton, Kevin Sharpe, Nicholas Tyacke, and especially Colin Davis, the late Sir Geoffrey Elton, Conrad Russell and Peter Salt. 1 Dorset became a Privy Councillor in 1626 and Lord Chamberlain to Queen Henrietta Maria in 1628. During the Civil War he was a moderate Royalist. For a full-length study, see David L. Smith, "The Political Career of Edward Sackville, fourth Earl of Dorset (1590-1652)" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1990). For detailed analyses of the successive stages of his career, see also David L. Smith, "The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the Politics of the 1620s," Historical Research 65 (1992), 37—53; David L. Smith, "The Fourth Earl of Dorset and the Personal Rule of Charles I," Journal of British Studies 30 (1991), 257-87; David L. Smith, " 'The more posed and wise advice': the Fourth Earl of Dorset and the English Civil Wars," Historical Journal 34 (1991), 797-829. 2 See, for example, N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c. ijgo-1640 (Oxford, 1987), esp. chapters 6-8; andJ.P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (Harlow, 1986), esp. chapter 6. 3 Public Record Office, PRO 31/3/55 (Baschet's transcripts), unfol: Tillieres to Puisieux, 12 July 1621. 4 Quoted in William Prynne, Canterburies Doome (London, 1646), pp. 429—30. I owe this reference to Anthony Milton. 5 PRO, PRO 31/3/66, fo. 162V: Fontenay to Bouthillier, Aug. 1630. 6 PRO, PRO 31/9/19 (transcripts from Rome archives), fo. gr: Rossetti to Barberini, 7 Sept. 1640. 7 The Journal of Sir Simonds D'Ewesjrom the beginning of the Long Parliament to the opening of the trial of the Earl of Stafford, ed. W. Notestein (New Haven, 1923), pp. 321-2. 8 The Works of Sir John Suckling, ed. A.H. Thompson (London, 1910), p. 341. For the charge of Socinianism, see also PRO, SP 16/429/38 (Secretary Windebanke's notes, 27 Sept. 1639). The broad and narrow senses of this term are discussed in H. R. Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1987), pp^ 186-92. 9 J. H. Hexter, "The Problem of the Presbyterian Independents", reprinted in his Reappraisals in History (London, 1961), pp. 163-84. 10 Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W.D. Macray, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1888), 1, 75-6 (Book 1, §§ 129-31). 11 Richard Baker, Meditations and Disquisitions upon the One and Fiftieth Psalme of David (London, 1638), sig. 3[v]; Edward May, A most certaine and true Relation of a strange monster or serpentfound in the left ventricle of the heart of John Pennant, gentleman, of the age of twenty-oneyeares (London, 1639), sig. A2 [v]; J. Bastwick, nPASEII TQN EnilKOnQN, Sive Apologeticus ad Praesules Anglicanos (London, 1636), p. 178.

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12 James Howe]l,Ah, ha; Tumulus, Thalamus: Two Counter-Poems (London, 1654), sig. A (B[ritish] Lpbrary], E 228/1). 13 The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616—1683, ed. A. Macfarlane (London, 1976); A. Hughes, "Thomas Dugard and His Circle in the 1630s - a 'ParliamentaryPuritan' Connexion?," Historical Journal 29 (1986), 771-93; J. Fielding, "Opposition to the Personal Rule of Charles I: the Diary of Robert Woodford, 1637-41," Historical Journal 31 (1988), 769-88. 14 C[entre] [for] K[entish] S[tudies], Sackville MS, U 269/T83/5. 15 See esp. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 3, 12, 21, 89, 115, 191, 193, 215; also A. Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600-1660 (London, 1975), PP. 63-416 For the first point, see J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), esp. p. 10; for the second, J. D. Alsop, "Religious Preambles in Early Modern English Wills as Formulae," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 40 (1989), 19-27. 17 CKS, Sackville MS, U 269/T83/5, fo. ir. 18 Ibid., fo. 8r. For the religious beliefs of Compton and Middlemore, see Fletcher, Sussex, pp. 97-8, 100. 19 Compton lived at Brambletye, near East Grinstead: Fletcher, Sussex, pp. 28, 97. Middlemore lived at Rotherfield: ibid., p. 56. 20 BL, Harl. MS 1233 (misc. collections), fo. 91V. 21 PRO, SP 12/274/75 (R- Cooke to Mary Goche, 9 Mar. 1599/1600). 22 E[ast] S[ussex] Rfecord] O[ffice], Add. MS 5729/15 (indenture of 27 May 1628). 23 See, for example, ESRO, G 23/4 (indenture of 1 June 1618); BL, Add. Charter 9290 (indenture of 15 July 1629). 24 CKS, Sackville MS, U 269/L4 (papers relating to the destruction of Dorset House, 1666). 25 PRO, SP 16/183/58 (depositions concerning the smashing of a stainedglass window in St. Edmund's Church, Salisbury, [?] Jan. 1630/1), fo. ii2v; William Cobbett, A Complete Collection of State Trials, 33 vols. (London, 1809-26), in, 524. 26 The most reliable text of Dorset's speech at Sherfield's trial is that in Bodfleian] Libfrary], MS Tanner 299 (Archbishop Sancroft's transcripts), fos. 116V-117V, from which the following quotations are taken. For accounts of the trial, see P. Slack, "Religious Protest and Urban Authority: the Case of Henry Sherfield, Iconoclast, 1633," in Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest, ed. Derek Baker (Studies in Church History 9 [1972]), pp. 295-302; and Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven and London, 1992), pp. 345-8. 27 Sherfield's career and beliefs are analyzed in Paul Slack, "Poverty and Politics in Salisbury, 1597—1666," in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700, ed. P. Clark and P. Slack (London, 1972), pp. 164-203, esp. pp. 183-7, 191; and Paul Slack, "The Public Conscience of Henry Sherfield," in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England:

Essays

Edward Sackville and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England 133 Presented to G. E. Aylmer, ed. John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (Oxford, 1993), pp. I5I-7 1 28 Bod. Lib., MS Tanner 299, fos. I2iv-i22r. For Laud's speech, see ibid., fos. 111V-115V.

29 BL, Add. MS 64905 (Coke papers), fo. iiyr-v: draft letter from Sir John Coke to the Bishop of Salisbury, 15 Feb. 1632/3, with amendments in Charles Fs hand. I owe this reference to Kevin Sharpe. 30 BL, Egerton MS 784 (William Whiteway's diary), fo. 94r. 31 The warrant for Prynne's arrest, dated 1 Feb. 1632/3, was signed by eight Privy Councillors, including Dorset: Cfommons] Jfournal], 11, 124. Prynne later claimed that Dorset "was the chiefe meanes of helping [him] into prison": Hampshire Record Office, Jervoise of Herriard Park MS, 44 M69/XXXIX/88: Prynne to Henry Sherfield, 12 Oct. 1633. I owe this last reference to John Adamson. 32 The fullest and most reliable text of Dorset's speech at Prynne's first trial is that in Bod. Lib., MS Tanner 299, fos. I3ov-i3ir, from which the following quotations are taken. 33 This time, the final sentence was marginally less severe than Dorset advocated: Prynne was fined £5,000, pilloried, and had his ears cropped. See House of Lords Record Office, Main Papers, 20 Aug. 1644 (petition of William Prynne). 34 The lecturer was John Brinsley the younger, a prolific writer whose works are listed in Wing, B 4705-4737. The main documents relating to this episode are printed in H. Swinden, The History and Antiquities of Great Yarmouth (Norwich, 1772), pp. 826-56. The bailiffs' letter to Dorset is found at pp. 847-8. See also C. J. Palmer, The History of Great Yarmouth, 2 vols. (London, 1854-6), n, 158-64; and R. Cust, "Anti-Puritanism and Urban Politics: Charles I and Great Yarmouth," Historical Journal 35 (1992), 1-26. 35 Bod. Lib., MS Tanner 134 (diocese of Norwich papers), fo. i8gr: the Dean and Chapter of Norwich to Dorset, [?] Dec. 1631. 36 Ibid., fo. i84r: the Dean and Chapter of Norwich to the Bishop of Norwich, [?] 1632. 37 Palmer, Great Yarmouth, n, 162; PRO, PC 2/41 (Privy Council register), 481. 38 Cust, "Anti-Puritanism and Urban Politics," 20, 24-5. 39 P. Croft, "The Religion of Robert Cecil", Historical Journal 34 (1991), 773-96; I. J. Atherton, "Viscount Scudamore's 'Laudianism': the Religious Practices of the First Viscount Scudamore," ibid., 567-96. 40 These details about the chapel at Knole are derived from C. J. Phillips, History of the Sackville Family, 2 vols. (London, 1930), n, 353—6, 433—4, 449; and V Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (London, 1922), pp. 31-2. 41 For fragments of Dorset's accounts, see CKS, Sackville MS, U 269/A1/7-8; U 269/A41/1-2. None of these contains any material relating to the chapels at either Knole or Dorset House. 42 It bears fruit in, for example, J. T. Cliffe, The Puritan Gentry (London, 1984), esp. pp. 135-8, 162-8.

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43 See "The Correspondence of Bishop Brian Duppa and Sir Justinian Isham, 1650-1660," ed. G. Isham, Publ. Northants. Rec. Soc. 17 (1955), xixxxxi. 44 Fletcher, Sussex, p. 81. See also ibid., pp. 90-2; and Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, pp. 206-7. 45 William Laud, The History of the Troubles and Tryal of . . . William Laud (London, 1695), p. 366. 46 Duppa was admitted to Christ Church on 9 July 1605: Alumni Oxonienses, 1500-1714, ed. J. Foster, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1891-2), 1, 434; Dorset on 26 July: ibid., rv, 1298. 47 Phillips, Sackville Family, 1, 274-5. 48 PRO, SO 3/11 (Signet Office docquet book), unfol., June 1638; [anon.,] Historical Notices of the Parish of Withyham in the County of Sussex (London, 1857), pp. 24-5; LJ, v, 80.1 owe this last reference to John Adamson. 49 B. Donagan, "The clerical patronage of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick, 1616—1642," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 120 (i976)5 388-419. 50 CKS, Sackville MS, U 269/Q1. 51 These certificates are found in PRO, E 331. The information about Dorset's presentations derived from them is laid out in Smith, "Dorset," Appendix 2. 52 Guildhall Library, MS 9531/15 (register of the Bishops of London). I owe this reference to Kenneth Fincham. 53 Fletcher, Sussex, p. 81. 54 BL, Add. MS 15670 (Proceedings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers), fo. i77r; CJ, m, 161; A. G. Matthews, Walker Revised (Oxford, 1948; repr., 1988), p. 54. 55 BL, Add. MS 15671 (Proceedings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers), fo. 2i6r. In 1657, Blundell received a payment from First Fruits: W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 2 vols. (London, 1900), n, 579. This suggests that his beliefs were again deemed acceptable under the Protectorate. 56 For Tillinghast's beliefs, see G. F. Nuttall, Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1957), pp. 147-8, 152-3; and Dictionary of National Biography, ed. L. Stephen etai, 63 vols. (London, 1885-1900), LVI, 871.1 am grateful to Colin Davis for a discussion of Tillinghast's religious position. 57 PRO, SP 16/293/128 (Sir Nathaniel Brent's report of metropolitical visitation, 1635), fo. i5r-v. 58 For Gough, see BL, Add. MS 15670, fos. 2iv, 59r; Add. MS 15671, fo. 2i6r. Matthews, Walker Revised, pp. 356-7. For Sheppard, see Add. MS 15669 (Proceedings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers), fo. 8ir; Add. MS 15671, fos. 32V, 23ir; PRO, SP 46/82, fo. 233r (receipt on Sheppard's behalf, 7 Mar. 1643/4); Matthews, Walker Revised, p. 361. 59 For Sheppard, see Al Oxon., rv, 1344; for Robert Baker, Alumni Cantabrigienses. Part One: from the earliest times to 1751, ed. J. and J. A. Venn, 4

Edward Sackville and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England 135

60

61

62

63 64

65

66

67

vols. (Cambridge, 1922-7), 1, 72; for Thomas Rogers, AL Oxon., 111, 1276; AL Cant., in, 480. It is possible that Robert Man also held office after 1660: AL Cant, in, 132. Besides all the sources cited in the other notes to this paragraph, I have also checked the following: PRO, SP 22/1-3 (Proceedings of the Committee for Plundered Ministers); J. Walker, An Account of the . . . Sufferings of the Clergy (London, 1714); G. Hennessy, Chichester Diocese Clergy Lists (London, 1900); John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1541-185J, 11 (Chichester Diocese), comp. J. M. Horn (London, 1971); W.C. Renshaw, "Some Clergy of the Archdeaconry of Lewes and South Mailing Deanery," Sfussex] A[rchaeological] Collections] 55 (1912), 220-77; "The Acts of Bishop Montague," ed. W.D. Peckham, SAC 86 (1947), 141-54; R. Newcourt, Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinense, 2 vols. (London, 1708-10); A. Argent, "Aspects of the Ecclesiastical History of the Parishes of the City of London, 1640-9" (unpubl. Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1983); H. Smith, The Ecclesiastical History of Essex under the Long Parliament and Commonwealth (Colchester, 1932). No minister known to have been presented by Dorset appears in E. Calamy, An Account of the ministers . . . ejected or silenced, 1660—2, 2 vols. (London, 1727); or in A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised (Oxford, 1934; repr., 1988). These seven were Edward Kidder, Anthony Midleton, Thomas Rogers, Thomas Russell, George Thetcher, John Tillinghast and Samuel Woods: AL Oxon., 11, 848; in, 1276, 1292; rv, 1469, 1677; AL Cant., m, 184, 480; iv, 242. These two were, respectively, Robert Man and James Marsh: AL Cant., in, 132, 144; AL Oxon., in, 973. For a similar pattern among those clergy who were "sequestered or harassed" during the 1640s, see I. Green, "Career Prospects and Clerical Conformity in the Early Stuart Church," Past and Present, 90 (1981), 71—115, esp. 89-92.1 owe this reference to Ian Atherton. "Puritan" is of course a highly complex term, covering a variety of different beliefs. Nevertheless, it remains useful as a general label for those people who disliked the traces of Catholicism in the late Tudor and early Stuart church (such as bishops, vestments, and the Prayer Book), and who felt that the English Reformation was still incomplete. I use it in this sense throughout the present essay. On Laud, see esp. J. S. McGee, "William Laud and the Outward Face of Religion," in Leaders of the Reformation, ed. R. L. DeMolen (London, 1984), pp. 318-44; on Neile, A. Foster, "Church Policies of the 1630s," in Conflict in Early Stuart England, ed. R. Cust and A. Hughes (Harlow, 1989), pp. 193-223, esp. pp. 198-201; on the feoffees for the purchase of impropriations, Activities of the Puritan Faction of the Church of England, 1625-33, ed. I. M . Calder (London, 1957). LJ, rv, 31. Cf. Foster, "Church Policies," p. 202.

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68 BL, Trumbull Add. MS 31 (misc. Trumbull papers), unfol. 69 The most reliable text of Dorset's speech at Williams's second trial is that in Bod. Lib., MS Tanner 67 (letters and papers of 1638-9), fo. 9ir, from which the following quotations are taken. 70 J. Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: A Memorial Offer'd to the Great Deservings of John Williams, D.D. (London, 1693), p. 131. 71 John Rushworth, Historical Collections of private passages of State, 8 vols. (London, 1680-1701), 11, ii, 1180; Bod. Lib., MS Eng. Hist. B 204 (Warcup papers), fos. ir-v, 3r-v. I owe this last reference to John Adamson. 72 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London, 1702), in, 18-19. 73 CKS^ U[ncatalogued] C[ranfield] P[apers]: Dorset to the Earl of Middlesex, 1 Oct. 1636. 74 H. R. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud, 1573-1645 (London, 1940), pp. 32, 225-30, 287-95; Charles Carlton, Archbishop William Laud (London, 1987), pp. 3-6, 115-16, 141-3, 206, 228. 75 M. Smuts, "The Puritan Followers of Henrietta Maria in the 1630s," English Historical Review 93 (1978), 26—46; C. Hibbard, Charles I and the Popish Plot (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983), pp. 45, 60-4. 76 R. Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626-1628 (Oxford, 1987), esp. pp. 19-22, 209-12, 327-9; P. Lake, "Anti-Popery: the Structure of a prejudice," in Conflict, ed. Cust and Hughes, pp. 72-106, esp. pp. 84-5, 87, 90-1. 77 CKS, UCP: Dorset to the Earl of Middlesex, [?] Sept. 1639. 78 BL, Harl. M S 383 (letter book of Sir Simonds D'Ewes), fo. i85r: James Dee to Edmund Calamy, 25 Sept. 1640.1 owe this reference to Peter Salt. 79 CKS, UCP: Dorset to the Countess of Middlesex, [?] Aug. 1642. 80 Observations upon Religio Medici, occasionally written by Sir Kenelm Digby (London, 1643), pp. 2-3 (BL, E 1113/4). 81 Sir Thomas Browne, The Major Works, ed. C.A. Patrides (London, 1977), p. 64. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid., p. 65. 84 This link is noted in ibid., pp. 24-6; and in Rosalie L. Colie, Light and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1957), pp. xi-xii, 5, 130. See also Herschel Baker, The Wars of Truth (London and New York, 1952), pp. 124-31; and Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background (London, 1946), pp. 133-69. I am grateful to Richard Strier for advice on the Cambridge Platonists. 85 P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), p. 6. Cf.John S. Coolidge, The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Oxford, 1970), esp. chapters 1-2.1 owe this last reference to Richard Strier. 86 P. Lake, "The Calvinist Conformity of Robert Sanderson," Journal of British Studies 27 (1988), 81-116, esp. 114.1 am grateful to Conrad Russell for a discussion on this point. 87 PRO, SP 16/148/99 (Dorset to Viscount Dorchester, 30 Aug. 1629). See also SP 16/223/37 (Sir Kenelm Digby to SirJohn Coke, 19 Sept. 1632); and

Edward Sackville and the ambiguities of religion in early Stuart England 137

88 89

90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99

100

New York Public Library, Morgan MS B (letter book of Sir Kenelm Digby), unfol.: Digby to Dorset, 14 June 1633; and Digby to [?] Dorset, 6 Oct. 1633. Digby's Catholicism is discussed in M. Foster, "Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-65) as Man of Religion and Thinker," Downside Review 106 (1988), 35-58, 101-25. PRO, E 126/3 (Exchequer, King's Remembrancer, entry book of decrees and orders), fos. I5gr-i6or; ESRO, SAS/P41 (indenture of 22 June 1630); W. H. Godfrey, "The High Street, Lewes," SAC, 93 (1955), 1-33, at p. 17. For Amherst as a trustee for the third Earl of Dorset's debts, see BL, Add. MS 5701 (misc. Sussex collections), fos. 7ir-76r. For the main Chancery cases, see PRO, C 2 Jas. I, D 14/44, and C 2 Chas. I, M 22/41 (Chancery procs.). See also CKS, Sackville MS, U 269/L3 (exemplification of Chancery bill, 1625). PRO, PROB 11 (Prerogative Court of Canterbury, copies of probated wills), 161/61; Fletcher, Sussex, p. 63. Smith, "Dorset and the Politics of the 1620s." For an analogous interpretation of George Herbert, see Christopher Hodgkins, Authority, Church and Society in George Herbert (Missouri, 1993). I am grateful to Richard Strier for this reference and for alerting me to the parallel with Herbert. K. Fincham and P. Lake, "The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I," Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 169-207. Ibid.; the quotation is found at p. 187. For this, see esp. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists; Foster, "Church Policies"; and J. Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church (Oxford, 1992). Smith, " 'The More Posed and Wise Advice,'" p. 810. See esp. the correspondence quoted in ibid., pp. 809-12, 816-18. John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London and New York, !993)> P- 6 8 A. Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (London, 1981), p. 124. Cf. John M. Wallace, "Cooper's Hill, the Manifesto of Parliamentary Royalism, 1641," ELH, A Journal of English Literary History 41 (1974), 494-540, esp. pp. 5<>6-9> 538-40. Cf. Paul E. Kopperman, Sir Robert Heath, 1575-1649: window on an age (London, 1989), pp. 194-200.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Crucifixion or apocalypse? Refiguring the Eikon Basilike Laura Blair McKnight

The English regicides who tried and condemned their reigning monarch as a "tyrant," "traitor," "murderer," and "public enemy" could not have chosen a worse day than January 30, 1649 f°r hi s public execution.1 Whether by unlucky coincidence or divine providence, the second lesson appointed for that day in the Book of Common Prayer was the 27th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, on the trial and crucifixion of Christ.2 According to the royalists, the biblical narrative inevitably shaped the observer's understanding of the execution: "we could not but conceive, that the murther then to be acted, was like unto that which in the chapter is described."3 Speaking from the scaffold, Charles encouraged this comparison; he forgave his accusers and declared himself "the martyr of the people" (Trial, pp. 141-2). Although the regicides could cut off the king's scaffold performance with one blow of the executioner's axe, the myth of the execution as the crucifixion reenacted proved much more durable. The spectacle of Charles Fs Christlike martyrdom lived on in the most successful piece of royalist propaganda to issue from the English Civil Wars: the Eikon Basilike, commonly known as the "King's Book."4 In the Eikon Basilike, Charles does not merely claim a divine right to rule, but also a more personal kind of divinity: he strives "to imitate [his] crucified Redeemer" in "suffering for righteousness' sake" (EB, pp. 157; 176). Charles offers to "wear a crown of thorns with [his] Saviour" (EB, p. 28), he prays for his subjects in the words of Christ (EB, p. 46), and he refers to himself as "the stone which some builders refuse" which "may become the headstone of the corner" (EB, p. 94). He also finds detailed correlations between events in his own life and in the life of Jesus. He laments that he was "sold" by the Scots for a higher price than Judas received for Jesus (EB, p. 137), and, when deprived of his chaplains, complains, "the solitude they have confined me unto adds the wilderness to my temptations" (EB, p. 141). Most striking of all, the king 138

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suggests that he is an even more perfect sacrifice than Jesus. At one point Charles goes Christ one better, praying "not so much that this bitter cup of a violent death may pass from me as that of His wrath may pass from all those whose hands . . . are imbrued with my blood" (EB, p. 176).5 Published either on the day of the execution itself or very shortly thereafter, the Eikon Basilike soon achieved "phenomenal popularity": "Within a month and a half of Charles's death, approximately twenty English editions printed in England had left or were about to leave the press," and, by the end of 1649, thirty-five English editions had been printed in England.6 Bishop Gauden himself, in a letter to Sir Edward Hyde perhaps best captured the political force of the Eikon: "In a word, it was an army, and did vanquish more than any sword could."7 The Eikon Basilike was a particularly potent weapon in the rhetorical battle to interpret the execution to a bewildered populace because it hid its propagandistic purposes. As a series of personal meditations, the Eikon Basilike "was the ideal royalist polemic precisely because it was not polemical in nature; it demanded rebuttal most urgently exactly because it invited none."8 As soon as royalist writers recognized the Eikon's affective power, they copied it in elegies such as Life and Death of King Charles the Martyr Paralleled with our Saviour and King Charles I his Imitation of Christ.

Royalists also promoted their version of execution as crucifixion through elaborate rewritings of the passion narrative. One such rewrite pictures Charles as an English Christ, "tossed between Herod the damned Independent, and Pilate the devilish Presbyterian; and between them again delivered up to the Tumults of the said accursed Jews [the English people] to be Crucified."9 Defenders of the king's trial and execution had to respond to the Eikon Basilike, and, to be effective, their counterattack needed to dethrone the Christlike Charles of the "Royal Portrait." Just as protestant reformers had vigorously cleared images of saints and martyrs out of English churches at the time of the reformation because the common people had worshipped them, defenders of the regicide had to end the false, idolatrous worship of Charles Stuart encouraged by the King's Book.10 As "the Gospel of King Charles I," Eikon Basilike demanded rebuttal of a particular nature. Since the King's Book was persuasive insofar as it merged the identities of Charles and Christ, it effectively "side-stepped rational discussion."11 Writers defending the king's execution could argue endlessly that power resides originally in the people, or that English kings derive their titles from a usurper (William the Conqueror), but none of these approaches would address the identification that made

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Eikon Basilike such a formidable propaganda tool. This essay explores how pro-execution writers rose to Eikon Basilike\ rhetorical challenge by attacking Charles with his own weapons: they marshalled a range of mythical responses - responses in kind - to the Eikon Basilike^ crucified Charles/Christ. The documents I consider all appeared between the day of the execution itself and October 6, 1649, t n e day that Thomason assigns to the new government's "official" response to Eikon Basilike, Milton's Eikonoklastes}2 One advantage of such a survey is that it places Eikonoklastes in the context of other hostile responses to Eikon Basilike. Although my essay focuses primarily on non-Miltonic defenses of the execution, I will argue briefly that the widely recognized failure of Eikonoklastes can be explained in part by Milton's reluctance to employ some of the most powerful rhetorical strategies used by his predecessors. It is to these strategies that I now turn. 11

The least mythic attacks on Eikon Basilike appeal to the facts of the late king's behavior. Such attacks address the Christ parallel of Eikon Basilike only obliquely, by suggesting that a king who behaved as badly as Charles did cannot credibly be compared to Christ. A second group of arguments disputes Charles's Christ language by refusing to grant the king any special status. Instead of respecting Charles as "the Lord's Anointed," who rules by divine mandate, writers who use this approach assign the king some merely functional relationship to the state. Other defenders of the execution try to undermine Charles's self-ascribed divinity by comparing him to infamously evil kings and tyrants. Presenting the late king as Ahab or Pharaoh gives him mythically evil status, adding symbolic weight to fact-based efforts to simply convict him as a bad king. A fourth approach focuses on Charles's repeated claims in Eikon Basilike that he (like Christ) sacrificed himself for his people. Writers dispute this aspect of Charles's self-portrait by contrasting Charles as Bad Shepherd to Christ as Good Shepherd - a comparison that convicts Charles as a perverted or false Christ. Although the Bad Shepherd/Good Shepherd approach casts Charles and Christ as opposites, apologists for the execution contest Charles's Christ-like nature most directly when they cast him as the opposite of Christ, the devil or Satan. If Charles can be identified as the figure of ultimate evil rather than of ultimate good, his executioners invert the Eikon's entire scenario. And if they take this approach one step further and cast Charles as

Crucifixion or apocalypse? Refiguring the Eikon Basilike Antichrist or one of his allies, they can align themselves with the millennial Christ, who sweeps the minions of Antichrist (including Charles) from their thrones. I have thus identified several strains of anti-Charles rhetoric and suggested that these can be arranged in a kind of hierarchy from least to most mythic. Although most apologists for the execution make use of more than one of these approaches, I will consider the different antiCharles tropes one at a time. In tracing these tropes, it is important to keep in mind that when writers of differing political allegiances use similar language to discredit the late king, they have very different reasons for attacking him. For example, an Independent like John Goodwin condemns Charles's kingship as tyrannical while still demanding respect for legally constituted authority, while a radical anti-monarchist Digger condemns all hierarchical authority as tyranny, demanding radical social and institutional reforms. In the course of my survey, I will indicate the political allegiances of authors whenever possible, to avoid blurring distinct political positionings. Nonetheless, it is striking to note how individuals from different points along the revolutionary spectrum draw upon a common rhetorical arsenal in attacking the image of the king. The least mythical argument wielded by the proponents of the execution assumes that an evil person cannot legitimately be compared to Jesus. Like Milton in Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, who condemns Charles for massacring "faithful subjects" and destroying "whole cities and countries," writers who adopt this pragmatic argument analyze the king's behavior in order to demonstrate what an evil king Charles had in fact been.13 A few writers, like John Cook, chief prosecutor at the king's trial, criticize specific acts of Charles's reign, as motivated by the king's self-interest rather than by concern for his people. Thus Cook says of the calling of the Short Parliament: "It was not a voluntary free Act of grace, not the least ingredient or tincture of love or good affection to the people, that called the Short Parliament. . . but to serve his own turne against the Scots, whom he then had designed to enslave."14 In this passage, Cook progressively deflates the king's pretensions to God-like benevolence. Cook rules out divine graciousness or even simple affection as motivations for the calling of the Short Parliament, exposing the evil, selfish motives behind the king's act. Apologists for the execution who focus on the king's behavior criticize Charles for attacking rather than protecting his people. Like Cook, they express dismay that so much Protestant blood could be shed by "a

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Protestant Prince, stiled The Defendor of the Faith."15 One anonymous "well-wisher to peace and truth" blames Charles for turning the people against him: the king is guilty of "[setting] up his Standard against the Parliament, [of] murdering his best Subjects, [and of] compelling them in their owne defence to take up Armes." 16 The idea of subjects compelled to defend themselves against royal aggression is important for Goodwin when he labels Charles "the Architect and Masterwork-man in raising an unnecessary, or unjust War," and, therefore, "the first-born of murtherers."17 Goodwin echoes here the Parliamentary Declaration which claims that Charles "out-went all his Forefathers in evil."18 He wants to hold Charles accountable "both unto God and men, for all the bloud . . . s h e d in this War."19 Even when Charles's critics convincingly represent him as the destroyer of his subjects, however, opponents of the execution maintain that even wicked kings deserve obedience.20 More than one Presbyterian minister, though willing enough to concede the late king's wickedness, condemns the act of regicide, reminding his more radical colleagues that God gave Israel a king in his wrath.21 For some opponents of the execution, even a bad king remains inviolable as the "Lord's Anointed." Therefore defenders of the execution had to dispute Charles's sacred status, in order to hold him accountable for his acts. In an official declaration issued less than a month after the execution, Parliament revises the traditional identification of the king as the Lord's Anointed: "the words 'Touch not mine annoynted" were not spoken of kings, but unto kings, who were reproved, and enjoyned to do no harm to the Prophets and Saints of God, there understood to be his Annointed."22 According to this formulation, the king, not Parliament, has violated God's holy ordinance, and Parliament can hold the king accountable for murdering God's saints. The concept of "accountability" becomes crucial in treatments of the execution because it authorizes legal action against a tyrannical ruler. Without some concept of a contract between a ruler and his people, Charles I could never have been brought to trial. Two pamphlets received by Thomason on the same day both emphasize the king's accountability. In the first, a "wel-wisher to the safety and freedom" of the kingdom asserts that "a king to a people, is like an accountant to a Company;" in the second, "Rob Robbins" claims that the people have justly judged the king for "[refusing] to account." 23 Charles's opponents also hold him accountable on the basis of a Mosaic law condemning murderers. An anonymous critic of the king and his ministerial allies claims that the Covenant obliging subjects to

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defend their sovereign is superseded by God's commandment: "He that sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shedr."24 As Patricia Crawford

has pointed out, referring to Charles I as a "man of blood" not only "[sweeps] aside the sacredness of his person," it also justifies radical action to rid the nation of bloodguiltiness.25 According to this argument, even kings come under the jurisdiction of God's law. If indeed, as Parliament claims, "All Governors are but Trustees unto the People," kings can be held accountable if they betray that trust and harm their subjects.26 The divine right of kings collapses in the face of what Quentin Skinner calls "the private-law theory of individual resistance in cases of self-defense."27 Like the writers who claim that threatened subjects are compelled to defend themselves against royal aggression, William Thompson, commander of the army's forces in Oxfordshire, commends such self-defensive action as both sensible and legal: "the Souldiery may lawfully hold [i.e. hold back] the hands of that General, who will turn his Canon against his Army, on purpose to destroy them; the Sea men the hands of that Pilot, who willfully runs his ship upon a Rock."28 Thompson's appeal has the force of common sense, but to "hold the hands" of a murderous leader is not the same as to kill him. Thompson's audience knew that Parliament's High Court of Justice had gone far beyond restraint in trying and executing Charles I. Nonetheless, Thompson's focus on self-defense is important, since this theme could also be used to justify more radical measures. One anonymous defender of the execution suggests as much in applying a biblical aphorism to Charles's execution: "Think of a king unto a body Politique as no more than a right Eye or hand unto the body naturally yet you doe know who said, if a right eye or a right hand offend thee, pluck it out and cast it

off"29 In this passage, the anonymous author not only uses the words of Christ against Christ's would-be imitator, he also disputes the conventional image of the king as head of the political body.30 He asserts that cutting the king off from the body of the state for the good of the whole would not be fatal, alluding to Christ's assurance that it is better to go into heaven eyeless or handless (or, by implication, kingless), than to be thrown into hell with the body intact (Matthew 5:29-30).31 Efforts to contest the existence of a privileged relationship between king and people work to separate the man Charles Stuart from the office of monarch. In the words of the "Resolver" who advocates plucking out the offending eye or hand of kingship in the above cited passage, "the Scepter of Government is golden, but the hand which holdeth it is clay"32

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Demonstrating how human Charles had in fact been is the province of writers who list the king's evil actions. Unfortunately for the king's accusers, royalists contested even exhaustive listings of the wrongs Charles committed by turning the language of compulsion against the king's executioners: they argued that these "proported" evils were defensive measures the king was forced to adopt against a rebellious Parliament, or that they were extreme measures which Charles's disobedient subjects compelled him to inflict on them against his will.33 Defenders of the execution needed an anti-Charles argument which more directly attacked the Christ/Charles identification in Eikon Basilike. One option was to go beyond enumerating Charles's evil actions by associating the English king with other infamously evil kings. Biblical analogues for Charles I predominate, but defenders of the execution occasionally compare the late king to Greek or Roman tyrants. For example, John Goodwin in The Obstructours of Justice claims that Charles was worse than "Nero, Maximinus, and other Heathen Tyrants," because, unlike these rulers, Charles "knew his Lords will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will"^

Goodwin's logic finds

Charles more culpable than these heathen tyrants precisely because the English king was not a heathen. Like Cook, who exposes the self-interest behind Charles's calling of the Short Parliament, Goodwin suggests here that Charles was more interested in satisfying his own selfish desires than in doing God's will. As far as biblical figures are concerned, Charles is compared most often to Nimrod, Ahab, and Pharoah. Each of these comparisons accentuates a different facet of the late king's tyrannical rule. Writers who compare Charles to Nimrod emphasize that, like Nimrod, builder of Babel and the first tyrant, Charles turned on his subjects and sought to destroy them. An anonymous minister using this comparison writes that God helped the Army under Fairfax "to bring down, that proud (Gen io.9) Mmerod, the King that hunted after, not onely the Estates, but Liberties and precious lives of the best of his Subjects; and brake through all the hedges and boundaryes of just laws both of God and Man." 35 This writer criticizes not only the king's propensity for attacking his subjects, but also the lawlessness of Charles's aggression. Thanks to the Nimrod analogy, these familiar themes seem especially urgent: Englishmen fear for their property, their liberties, and their very lives under such a king. Because Nimrod did his own hunting, the Digger author of More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire portrays Charles's tyranny as more like that of Ahab, who convinced "the Chief of the City" to order Naboth's stoning

Crucifixion or apocalypse? Reftguring the Eikon Basilike so that Ahab and Jezebel could take his vineyard.36 Like Ahab, Charles I worked through lesser magistrates to invade his subject's property rights. Cook extends this analogy to more than justify the late king's punishment: "if King Ahab and Queen Jezabel, for the blood of one righteous JVaboth (who would not sell his inheritance for the full value) were justly put to death," King Charles deserves worse since he "is guilty of the blood of thousands, and fought for a pretended prerogative, that he might have any mans estate that he liked, without paying for it." 37 Like Ahab, Charles did not stop at stealing property; he also took away the lives of his subjects. For this reason three students at Trinity College claim that Charles sought to enslave his people "in more then [sic] Egyptian bondage." These students lament "the slavery of Subjects under Tyrants, who cannot call their lives their own." 38 Like the Trinity students, the army preacher Edward Harrison cites "a resolved and hard-hearted Pharaoh" as "the cause of Englands misery and desolation." However, Harrison is confident that God has heard "the Prayers and Tears of his People (as sometimes the Israelites)" He cites the king's execution as evidence that God has begun to deliver his people and make them free.39 According to the king's enemies, Charles I took arms against his people like Nimrod, stole their property like Ahab, and enslaved them like Pharaoh. But seventeenth-century readers steeped in the Bible would have also appreciated the more subtle thrusts of these comparisons. For example, Nimrod's association with Babylon would have reminded readers of the "Romish" tendencies of a king who, like Ahab, had been incited to stealing and murder by an idolatrous wife (1 Kings 21). Whatever aspect of the late king's tyranny they focus on, however, Charles's opponents strive to convince their fellow Englishmen that the late king was pursuing his own selfish interests when he began to attack his subjects. In order to dispute Charles's self-sacrificing stance in Eikon Basilike, a number of pro-execution writers point out the contrast between the "Bad Shepherd," Charles, and the "Good Shepherd," Christ. The king uses the shepherd metaphor only very sparingly in Eikon Basilike, probably because by this time anti-episcopal tracts had so thoroughly turned this metaphor against the king's original allies, the bishops, or "Bitesheeps," as Cook calls them.40 Yet much of the rhetorical force of the Eikon derives from the king's self-proclaimed love for his people, and from his professed willingness to sacrifice himself for their good.41 The regicides take Charles at his word: the anonymous author of The Original and End of Civil Power says that if Charles had wanted to

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be a good shepherd, he should truly have been "willing with Christ to lay down, even [his life] for [his] sheep or people."42 Instead Charles exploited his authority to destroy those he should have protected. According to Cook, the king acted as the patron of personal interest, "maliciously [opposing] his private Opinion against the publique Judgement," and as a "Lyon which has devoured so many sheep."43 While royalists extol Charles I as "the true Pastour, who gave his precious Life for his Flock," the king's opponents class him with all tyrannical rulers who, instead of being "Shepherds, careful to defend their flocks," are "most ravenous Wolves, whose panches are never longer full, then they are devouring the silly sheep."44 The following passage exemplifies the kind of explicit contrast the regicides set up: An example we have of [this] spirit in Christ himselfe towards the good of his Sheep, John 10.11. Where he saith, lam that good Shepheard, that good Shepheard layeth

downe his lifeforhis Sheepe: But, how distant was the Spirit of the late King from such a temper, that for a little self accommodation and forcible preservation of a few usurpt Priviledges [sic], . . . sought to destroy (if hee were a Shepheard) his Sheep.45 The good shepherd/bad shepherd trope presents the late king as a warped or negative image of Christ, or even as Christ's cosmic opposite. Indeed, when Cook uses the shepherd metaphor, he exclaims "O Lucifer" after cataloging the king's unshepherdlike sins.46 Writers less willing than Cook to equate Charles directly with Satan indict the late king indirectly through theoretical pronouncements on the Devil's activity in humans. One anonymous writer reminds his readers that "Anyone can become a Devill by joining hands with the devil," and notes that even Peter "was a Satan at one time."47 John Canne, a Fifth Monarchist, shows no such delicacy when he argues that Charles Fs Satanic behavior authorized his execution: "when Princes become Dragons (as the scripture usually stileth great Tyrants) 'tis lawful for the Supream and soveraign power of the People to shoot at them and kill them likewise."48 Canne admits that "the lawfull power of Princes [is] of God," but insists that "tyranny it self, and abuse of . . . power is of Satan."49 Cook subtly echoes this view, noting that kings who rule "by lust and not by law . . . are said to be Gods on Earth . . . in no other sence then the Devil is called the God of this world."50 The (at least) implied import of all these arguments justifies the execution: "wherein [magistrates] act like devills, they cease to be Gods, and therein are not to be regarded" — and may be condemned.51 Casting Charles I as the Devil or Satan would seem about as direct an

Crucifixion or apocalypse? Refiguring the Eikon Basilike attack as possible on the Christ parallel in Eikon Basilike. Yet, as the following passage by Bishop Henry Leslie indicates, royalists were able to use even this assault by the pro-execution forces to reinforce Eikon Basilike^ association of the late king and Christ. Leslie writes: As our Saviour by the pharisees was called an impostor, a deceiver and perverter of the people, a blasphemer, a Samaritan, and one that had a devill: So such language, and worse too, was bestowed upon his Sacred Majesty, by a pharisaicall broode of men, who are great pretenders to religion, but utterly void of it.52 Thus even calling Charles I a devil could backfire for pro-execution writers so long as royalists like Leslie held them to the king's script of execution as crucifixion. The king's detractors could not simply satanize Charles and expect the King's Book to lose its potency. They had to replace the Crucifixion drama at the heart of Eikon Basilike with another biblio-mythical drama - that of the End-time, when, in the words of New Testament scholar Werner Georg Kummel, Christ will return to replace "the age of godless earthly rule" with the "new age of the transcendental rule of God."53 Writers who use imagery from the Book of Revelation to defend the execution often explicitly identify the devil as the source of kingly power. Thus the "True Leveller" author of More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

calls Charles I "Antichrist's hackney," noting that in Revelation, "kings are the horns of the Beast."54 According to this author, "for one man to be Lord and King over another . . . he takes on him the place of Jesus, and so is a Rebel and Traytor to the crown and dignity of Jesus." He reasons, "if the devil be prince of this world, then all . . . Tytles of Superiority, as King, Lord; & c. are from [him]."55 An Independent divine like John Owen does not, of course, dismiss all authority as inherently antichristian, but Owen does agree that kings oppose Christ insofar as they "have given their power to Antichrist." Owen accuses earthly kings of "indeavoring to the utmost to keep the kingdom of Christ out of the world."56 The Apocalypse appeals to the defenders of the execution as a powerful antimonarchical drama, in which the millennial Christ "[breaks] kingdoms," "[tumbles] down Thrones," "[strikes] off Crowns," and "[wresdes] Scepters out of the hand, which have been lifted up, and thrust out against Him." 57 As Robert Wharton explains, Christ gets rid of usurpers like Charles in order to make room for his kingdom, turning "such offenders out of his service, that sate on Thrones as Gods."58 Charles's antichristian presumption, for Independent Robert Bacon,

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consists in having lifted himself above all "that was, or is, truly called God among men."59 As a result, Charles is improperly worshipped by his subjects; in Cook's words, he is "idolized and adored, as our good God onely ought to be."60 While criticizing Charles's self-exaltation, Thomas Banaster warns that when Christ comes to set up his kingdom, He "shal break in pieces all other kingdoms," including those of "worldlings, who have made gods of earthly Kings."61 In a similar passage, preacher John Warren points to the promise in the Book of Revelation that Christ shall put an end to monarchies "whose lofty heads have lookt upon themselves as in some need to invade heaven for want of room on earth."62 In the eyes of Charles I's enemies, the king tried to "invade heaven" most outrageously by identifying himself with the crucified Christ in Eikon Basilike. In response, the execution apologists attempt to unmask the Eikon's "false" Christ to reveal Antichrist. Wharton moves toward this end when he portrays Charles as one of the many incarnations of "the great Prince of the world," who sat for so long "upon thrones usurping authority over the Nations, and playing the tyrant over the Lord's inheritance," who now "must be cast out one throne after another; that the Kingdoms of the World may become the Kingdoms of the Lord and his Christ, Revel. 11.15."63 By translating the king's execution from crucifixion to apocalypse, writers like Wharton counter Charles's crucified Christ with the anti-monarchical Christ of the Book of Revelation. This strategy deals a powerful rhetorical blow to the Charles/Christ parallel in Eikon Basilike but it yields an even more powerful corollary: Charles's opponents can identify themselves with the millennial Christ, who casts false kings from their thrones. If the Endtime begins with the beheading of Charles Stuart, the regicides and their supporters are not only the Saints, who "bind their King in chaines, and their Nobles in fetters of Iron'' they are types of the apocalyptic Christ, who "[strikes] through kings, in the day of his Wrath."64 Like the millennial Christ,

who ends the idolatrous worship of the kings of the earth and guides men back to true worship, writers defending the regicide perform the Lord's work by weaning readers of the Eikon Basilike from the false worship of Charles Stuart. The Revelation framework gives these writers a way both of attacking the Christ/Charles identification which fuels Eikon Basilike, and of claiming for themselves an equally powerful Christie identification. In reinterpreting the execution of Charles I as a necessary step toward the millennium rather than as a second "crucifixion," the veteran iconoclasts who had executed the king oppose the myth of the Eikon Basilike with their own messianic myth.65

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in

Although all of the pro-execution arguments discussed above, especially the Revelation argument, forcefully contest the linking of Charles and Christ in Eikon Basilike, none of the writers who use these arguments explicitly name Eikon Basilike as the text they seek to answer.66 Instead, these writers focus on the "text" of the execution, attempting to justify the unprecedented act of legally trying and beheading their king. By contrast, Eikonoklastes engages the King's Book directly; it is Milton's detailed, sustained effort to smash the written Eikon of Charles Stuart. 67 Eikonoklastes was published in October, 1649, approximately six weeks after the first full-fledged attack on Eikon Basilike, entitled Eikon Alethine, "the Truthful Image." 68 Although this earlier work focuses on who might really have written the King's Book, it also addresses itself to the text of Eikon Basilike, attempting, page by page, chapter by chapter "to demolish the arguments and to expose the hypocrisy of the book." 69 Likewise, in Eikonoklastes, Milton chips away at Eikon Basilike's portrait of Charles by marring, one by one, its pieces. 70Milton reproduces the chapter headings of Eikon Basilike as his own chapter headings, and he quotes extensively, though not always faithfully from the king's text. Method is not the only thing Milton's tract shares with Eikon Alethine. Milton's central strategy of comparing the king's words to his "farr differing deeds" (E, in, 347) is reminiscent of Eikon Alethine's opposition between assertions and actions. And Milton shares his predecessor's frustration with the "Seduced People of England" who are so ready to adore "the counterfeit Pourtracture of one [they] sometimes [sic] knew no Saint."71 Also, like the author of Eikon Alethine, Milton argues that, by "[setting] falsehood on the Throne," Eikon Basilike aims at absolute tyranny. Milton too strives to conquer such tyranny through truthful representation, since "truth onely conquers the wise." Beyond these similarities, however, Milton and his anonymous colleague part company. Whereas Eikon Alethine's author attacks the King's Book in what Ernest B. Gilman calls "language as colorful as its opponents 'painted grapes,'" Milton's "plain telling of [the] plain truth" is distinguished, as Thomas Corns says, by "its lack of flourishes and artifice."72 As a result, Eikonoklastes works, in Corns's words, "to kill emotion," while Eikon Alethine incites its readers to "hisse" the Forger of Eikon Basilike "off the Stage."73 Furthermore, despite his self-proclaimed hatred for the "Forger," the author of Eikon Alethine masks his antagonism toward Charles I under the pretense of vindicating the late king's

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cause against the Forger's false assertions. Milton, on the other hand, despite his text's "determined politeness," cannot hide his scorn both for Charles and for the rabble who are seduced by his book.74 Clearly the author of Aeropagitica could have written a rhetorical tour de force like EikonAlethine. But Milton wants to appeal to a different audience than the readers of either Eikon Basilike or Eikon Alethine, and he wants to persuade them not with lavish rhetoric but with the simple truth. Milton expects Eikonoklastes to find few readers, but he is content with the "value and substantial worth" (E, in, 339-40) of that minority. He does not want to "beat Charles at his own game"; he wants to change the game, to appeal not to emotion but to reason. Instead of seducing readers with another fiction, Milton wants to sober them with facts.75 In his effort to avoid emotion in Eikonoklastes, Milton avoids the most mythic of the strategies we have seen in the other defenses of the execution. His attacks all come from the more literal end of the regicide rhetorical spectrum: he appeals to the facts of the late king's behavior; he disputes the king's sacred status; and he equates Charles I not only with biblical tyrants, but with tyrants from England's own history, or from the pagan or classical past. Over and over in Eikonoklastes, Milton argues that the king's borrowed words do not fit the way he really behaved as king of England. Milton looks to Charles's actions for an alternative portrait to the apocryphal one Eikon Basilike presents.76 Milton's own account of this basic methodology appears in his Preface: But if these his fair spok'n words shall be heer fairely confronted and laid parallel to his own farr differing deeds, manifest and visible to the whole Nation, then surely we may look on them who notwithstanding shall persist to give to bare words more credit then to op'n deeds, as men whose judgement was not rationally evinc'd and perswaded, but fatally stupifi'd and bewitch'd, into such a blinde and obstinate beleef. (E, in, 346-7) Milton lays bewitching words parallel to "manifest and visible" deeds throughout Eikonoklastes by quoting the Eikon Basilike and then citing contradictory evidence from the king's actions. For example, when the Charles of Eikon Basilike refuses to surrender the "incommunicable Jewell of

his conscience" by granting the Nineteen Propositions, Milton reminds his readers how eager the king was to pawn the true Crown Jewels in Holland "to buy Armes against his Subjects" (E, in, 459). This passage illustrates Milton's entire strategy in miniature: he lays words and deeds parallel by contrasting how the king handles the figurative and literal "Jewels."

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In contrasting assertions with actions, Milton's goal is always to un"bewitch" his readers by enabling them to see the real Charles behind the Eikon's false visual and verbal portrait. To this end, Milton argues that the king's performance of the crucifixion in Eikon Basilike is merely an act. According to Milton, the king and his supporters try to use words to "Canonize one another into Heav'n; he them in his Book, they him in the Portrature before his Book: but. . . Stage-work will not doe it" (E, in, 530). Milton warns that "quaint Emblems and devices begg'd from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall, will doe but ill to make a Saint or Martyr" {E, in, 343). Role-playing cannot hide the real Charles. In ridiculing Charles's "play-acting" in Eikon Basilike, Milton insists that the king's comparisons are idolatrous: "Nay that his reason is as Celestial and life-giving to the Parlament, as the Suns influence is to the Earth: What other notions but these, or such like, could swell up Caligula to think himself a God" (E, in, 467).77 The Caligula comparison fits the Charles of Eikon Basilike particularly well because the mad Roman tyrant actually considered himself a god, built a temple to himself, and appointed priests to attend his worship. In Milton's eyes, the Eikon Basilike duplicates Caligula's folly, attempting to elevate a tyrant like Charles I to the status of a god. Like earlier apologists for the execution, Milton stresses that Charles is so ambitious for his prerogative that he "dares ask away the Prerogative of Christ himself, 7b become the head stone of the Corner" (E, 111, 502). To counter the empty rhetoric of the Eikon Basilike, Milton has to show how Charles twists Scripture "to adulterat . . . Sacred words from the grace of God to the acts of his own grace" (E9 in, 404). Regarding the extensive use of psalm material in Eikon Basilike, Milton criticizes Charles for borrowing "presumptuously the words and protestations of David, without the spirit and conscience of David" (E, in, 381-2).78 The latter, according to Milton, would have been "much the holier theft" (E, in, 547). Milton also denies Charles the right to compare himself to Jesus. For example, Milton writes that, although Charles "would be all one with our Saviour," his ill government denies him the right to wear a Crown of Thorns as Jesus did: "to weare them [thorns] as our Saviour wore them is not giv'n to them that suffer by thir own demerits" (E, in, 417-18). Similarly, when the king asks God to forgive his accusers "for they know not what they doe," Milton responds, "It is an easie matter to say over what our Saviour said; but how he lov'd the People, other Arguments then affected sayings must demonstrat" (E, in, 447).

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Rejecting the bewitching words of Eikon Basilike as pretentious and empty, Milton uses the "other Arguments" of the king's "manifest and visible" actions to demolish the "Shrine" that the author of Eikon Basilike "dresses out" for the martyred king (/?, in, 343). Like other apologists for the regicide, Milton lends his fact-based portrait some symbolic force by associating the late king "with an astonishing array of despots from biblical and ancient history."79 David Loewenstein notes that, in addition to "Ahab, Herod, Nebuchadnezzar, Saul, Nimrod, Uzziah, Lucifer, Pharaoh, Balak, Rehoboam, Ahaz, Nero, Catiline, Caesar, Agrippa, Caligula, [and] Domitian," Milton suggests analogies between Charles and tyrants from other periods in history, such as "William the Conqueror, Turkish despots, . . . [and] the Byzantine tyrant, Andronicus Comnenus."80 For Loewenstein, Milton's Charles comes to represent "the very essence of tyranny itself."81 What Loewenstein fails to remark, however, is how unusual it is for an execution apologist to treat the Bible as just one of the many scripts for tyrannical kingship that Charles followed. Unlike earlier defenders of the execution, Milton rejects the mid-seventeenth-century tendency to privilege Scripture as the single appropriate framework for political debate. Milton's refusal to rely primarily on the Bible in defending Charles's execution explains in part why he hesitates to mythicize his vision of Charles as the prototypical tyrant by associating the English king with Antichrist. Milton waits until the last few pages of Eikonoklastes to remind his readers that kings who "(join] thir Armies with the Beast" will "perish with him by the King of Kings against whom they have rebell'd" (E, in, 599).82 Since, as Richard Bauckham points out, "the idea of Antichrist suggests a certain theatricality: evil playacting good, Satan disguising himself as and angel of light... 'to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect' (Mark 13:22)," Milton could have used this myth to underline the main themes of his attack on Eikon Basilike.83 Instead Milton steers clear of the highly imagistic apocalypticism of his predecessors, trusting to facts rather than flourishes to make his case against Charles. When Milton finally does invoke the Book of Revelation, it is a case of too little too late in terms of rhetorical impact. And, most importantly, Milton does not identify himself any more closely with the Saints who "bind thir Kings in Chaines" than with "theEoules" who "eat [kings']flesh" (E, 111,598-9).

As a result, Milton never effectively connects his iconoclastic activity in smashing Gauden's "Royal Portrait" with the millennial Christ who breaks down earthly kingdoms to make room for His kingdom. Milton's self-prescribed role as author is rather that of those "Greek Emperors"

Crucifixion or apocalypse? Refiguring the Eikon Basilike who "broke all superstitious Images to peeces" in order to end a "long tradition of Idolatry in the Church" (E, in, 343). Milton tries briefly to align himself with "true martyrs" like "our Saviour himself, John the Baptist, and Steev'n the Martyr" (E, in, 502),84 but he ultimately settles for a role like that of "Zorobabel" (E, m, 583),85 the Hebrew prince who "helped rebuild Jerusalem and its temple, after overseeing the deliverance of God's chosen people from Babylonian captivity (1 Esdras 3-4)."86 Unlike earlier apologists for the execution, Milton does not support his iconoclasm with the sanction of the millennial Christ. Milton also avoids the apocalypticism of his predecessors because, as Lois Potter has said, he wants to "take Charles out of mythology and into history."87 In this process Milton rejects the tools of image and myth that Charles uses so effectively in Eikon Basilike. He trusts with Lord President Bradshaw that if he can only show his countrymen the "meaning" Charles Stuart has "written . . . in bloody characters throughout the whole kingdom," the Eikon's "affected sayings" (£", in, 447) will lose their force.88 Although Steven Zwicker is right to note that Milton " [turns] the aesthetic into an accusation" in Eikonoklastes, Milton seems to recognize that poetry is only the means Charles uses to the politically more important end of appropriating a central religious identity.89 Milton focuses less on the king's many-faceted appropriation of the aesthetic than on his particular appropriation of Christ's sacrificial language and identity. In other words, it is not so much Charles I as author that troubles Milton, as Zwicker claims, but Charles I as divinely sanctioned king, ruling as Christ's vicar on earth. 90 In contrast to Zwicker, I believe that Milton's ultimate aim in Eikonoklastes is not to deny the late king intellectual property rights in Eikon Basilike, but to mute the overwhelming political force of that document. And Milton's strategy is not to challenge the authority of the aesthetic in political discourse, as Zwicker claims, but to challenge the authority of the religious in political discourse.91 Reading Milton's Eikonoklastes in the context of other defenses of the execution reveals more than just how unique Milton is in rejecting, not only apocalypticism in particular, but the Bible in general, as the single valid framework in which to understand the execution. Such contextualization also suggests the rhetorical perils that can attend both factbased and mythicized accounts of political events. As far as Milton's contemporaries were concerned, cold hard facts failed the author of Eikonoklastes. Milton's contemptuous, icy rebuttal could not compete with the pathos and resonance of the King's Book. On the other hand,

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execution apologists who adopted a more mythic rhetoric faced their own problems: appealing to a competing myth like the anti-monarchical Christ of Revelation opened up the regicides and their supporters to the same kind of efforts to cast them as Antichrist's minions that they had used against the late king. In the months following the execution, as the failure of Cromwell and his saints to set up the rule of Christ became increasingly apparent, their identification with Christ also became suspect. Pamphlet writers from various political camps tried to broaden public disapproval by exposing the so-called saints, and especially Cromwell, as both the Beast of Revelation and as Antichrist.92 Defenders of the execution opened themselves to public judgment as soon as they "authored" their alliance with the millennial Christ of Revelation. And, like the king before them, all Cromwell and his colleagues could do was articulate their mythology as persuasively as possible, trusting that their account would be the one the public would ultimately accept. For a brief time in 1649, Cromwell could credibly lead Christ's saints against the antichristian English monarch. But his forces did not have the last word, even on this trope. At the Restoration, Charles Fs son was hailed as a "messianic king."93 NOTES

1 For the terms of the condemnation see David Lagomarsino and Charles T. Wood, eds., The Trial of Charles I: A Documentary History (Hanover, PA, 1989),

p. 100. (Further page references will be given in the text as Trial) It should be noted that, although the term "regicide" is widespread in critical discourse, it does not fit the self-perception of the men directly responsible for Charles Fs execution. The members of the High Court of Justice regarded themselves not as murderers of their legal sovereign, but as judicial executioners of a tyrant convicted of capital crimes against the English people. 2 Helen W. Randall, "The Rise and Fall of a Martyrology: Sermons on Charles I," Huntington Library Quarterly 10 (1947), 137. 3 Henry Leslie, The Martyrdome of King Charles, Or his conformity with Christ in his

sufferings (London, June 1649) British Library Thomason Tracts (subsequently abbreviated as BL TT) E. 569 (10), p. 12. 4 The Eikon Basilike was originally issued as the work of King Charles I, and, except for regicide speculations as to other authors, was popularly perceived as written or at least dictated by the king himself. Today most scholars regard BishopJohn Gauden as the Eikon's author, but they acknowledge that Gauden based his text on a core of material which the king himself composed. See Philip A. Knachel, introduction to Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings byJohn Gauden (Ithaca, 1966),

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p. xxxii. (All subsequent references to Eikon Basilike will be to this edition and will be cited in the text as EB) 5 A similar moment occurs in The Life and Death of King Charles the Martyr, ParalkVd with our Saviour in all his Sufferings, when the author contrasts temporal and otherworldly kingdoms to claim that Charles's "priviledge of inviolability [was] far more clear then was [Christ's]" (London, August 1649) BLTT ) E. 5 7i(2),p.i/A2. 6 Knachel, Introduction, pp. xi, xiv-xv. 7 Ibid., p. xxxii. 8 Bruce Boehrer, "Elementary Structures of Kingship: Milton, Regicide, and the Family," Milton Studies 23 (1987), 105-6. 9 The Royall Legacies of Charles the First. . . To His Persecutors and Murderers (May 1649) BL TT, E. 557 (1), p. 2. For other extensive parallels see A Hand-Kirchife for Loyall Mourners (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 541 (6); A Faithful Subject's Sigh (June 1649) BL TT, E. 560 (4), pp. 5-6; and The Life and Death of King Charles the Martyr, Parallel'd with our Saviour, p. 2. 10 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (New York, 1977), p. 174. 11 Ibid., p. 177. 12 Merritt Y Hughes, preface to Eikonoklastes by John Milton, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al, 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953-82), ni, 335-. 13 John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, in John Milton Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Meritt Y Hughes (Indianapolis, 1957), p. 754. Hughes's version of The Tenure is based on the second edition dated 15 February, 1649 (n.s. 1650) by Thomason. Thomason dates the first edition 13 February 1648 (n.s. 1649). 14 John Cook, King Charts his Case; or an Appeal to all Rational Men concerning his Tryal (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 542 (3), p. 14. 15 Ibid., pp. 3-4. 16 A Shrill Cry in the Eares of Cavaliers, Apostates and Presbytersfor the Resolve of XIII Queries touching the primitive state of this nation since the Conquest (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 541 (10), p. 4. 17 John Goodwin, The Obstructours ofJustice. Or a Defence of the Honourable Sentence passed upon the late King by the High Court of Justice (London, May 1649) BL TT, E-557 (2), p. 9718 A Declaration of the Parlament of England, Expressing The Grounds for their late Proceedings, and of Setting the present Government in the way of a Free State (London, March 1649) BL TT, E. 548 (12), p. 7. 19 Goodwin, The Obstructours, p. 97. 20 According to the doctrine of passive obedience, "because a ruler's power is ordained of God, rulers must be obeyed in all their commands, even those which are unjust or which are contrary to the commandments of Scripture." David George Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Literature (The Hague, 1971), p. 56. For an overview of the question of obedience to the wicked in the Protestant tradition, see Richard

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Strier, "Faithful Servants: Shakespeare's Praise of Disobedience," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1988) pp. 104-33. See Noel Henning Mayfield, Puritans and Regicide: Presbyterian-Independent Differences over the Trial and Execution of Charles (I) Stuart (Lanham, 1988), p. 105. Mayfield shows how Presbyterians originally hostile to Charles I drew back from actually trying and executing the king. A Declaration of the Parlament of England, p. 14. The Execution of the late king Justified and the Parliament and Army therein Vindicated (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 545 (7), p. 7; [Rob Robbins], Reasons to Resolve the unresolved People of the legality of the Kings Tryal andJudgment (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 545 (10), p. 8. (Thomason suggests that Rob Robbins is a pseudonym by writing "Hobgoblin" after the name.) A Parallel between the Ministerial Ingenuity of the Forty Seven London Ministers and the fould miscarriages of the Army in their Declarations, and Covenant-Breaking (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 548 (8), pp. 55-6. Patricia Crawford, "Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood," Journal of British Studies 16, no. 2 (Spring 1977), 41, 45. A Declaration of the Parlament of England, p. 13. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1978), 11, 319. William Thompson, England's Standard Advanced in Oxfordshire (May 1649) BL TT, E. 555 (7), p. A2. The Resolver Continued, or satisfaction to some Scruples about the putting of the Late King to death (London, March 1649) BL TT, E. 546 (17), p. 18. In The Body Politic Hale traces the evolution of this metaphor in Renaissance literature. This passage represents one of the few times an apologist for the execution even alludes to beheading as the means used to execute Charles I. Most of the king's opponents studiously avoid any reference to the king's severed head. The Resolver Continued, p. 2. Charles indeed argues the latter in Eikon Basilike, pp. 122-3. Goodwin, The Obstructours, p. 90. Eye Salve to annoint the Eyes of the Ministers of the Province of London; that they may see their Error (at least) in opposing the present Proceedings of the Parliament and Army, in the due execution of Justice (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 542 (16), p. 2. More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire . . . The Second part (March 1649) BL TT, E. 548 (33), p. 7. This pamphlet's emphasis on Charles I as chief tyrant in charge of many lesser tyrants is characteristic of "Digger" (True Leveller) radicalism. Cook, King Chads his Case, p. 36. J. Fidoe, T.Jeanes, W. Shaw [students in Trinity College in Cambridge], The ParliamentJustified In their late Proceedings against Charls Stuart.. .As also an Answer to "The humble Advice of the Lecturers of Banbury and Brackley" (February 1649) BL TT, E. 545 (14), pp. 3-4.

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39 Edward Harrison, Plain Dealing: or, The Countreymans doleful Complaint to the Statesmen of the Times . . . wherein is set down the nature of Right Government (London, May 1649) BL TT, E. 554 (22), p. 9. 40 Cook, King Chads his Case, pp. 25-6. Charles refers to himself as a shepherd when he states his unwillingness to entrust himself and his flock to wolves (p. 48). He also prays that God spare his "sheep" (p. 150). 41 Many instances of Charles's supposed willingness to sacrifice himself for his subjects could be cited. A typical example occurs when the king bewails the fact that his own subjects afflict him: "but they must be my own subjects, who are, next to my children, dear to me; and for the restoring of whose tranquility I could willingly be the Jonah . . ." thrown overboard to calm the sea (p. 86). 42 Eutactus Philodemius, The Original and End of Civil Power (London, May 1649) BL TT, E. 554 (16), pp. 13-14. 43 Cook, King Chads his Case, pp. 6, 38. 44 The Royall Legacies of Charles the I, p. 3; A True Narrative of the Title, Government and Cause of the Death of the late Charles Stuart, King of England (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 541 (14), p. 3. 45 The Execution of the late King Justified, p. 5. 46 Cook, King Chads his Case, p. 6. 47 The Sense of the Covenant according to the minde of God and sense of his People. Intendedfor the vindication of our Heads, Judges and Officers heavily charged at that point (London, March 1649) BL TT, E. 548 (1), p. 11. 48 John Canne, The Golden Rule, or Justice Advanced(London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 543 (6), p. 1. 49 Ibid., p. 24. 50 Cook, King Chads his Case, p. 8. 51 Franciscus Leinsula, The Kingdoms Divisions Anatomized, Together with a Vindication of the Armies Proceedings (London, March 1649) BL TT, E. 545 (25) p. 6. 52 Leslie, The Martyrdome of King Charles, p. 15. 53 Werner Georg Kiimmel, Introduction to the New Testament, trans. Howard Clark Kee (Nashville, 1975), p. 454. 54 More Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, pp. 7, 12. 55 Ibid., pp. 10, 12. 56 John Owen, The Shaking and Translating of Heaven and Earth. A Sermon preached to the House of Commons, i9 April, a day set apart for extraordinary Humiliation (London, April 1649) BL TT, E. 551 (4), p. 21. 57 The Sense of the Covenant, p. 30. 58 Robert Wharton, A Declaration to Great Britain and Ireland, shewing the downfall of their Princes and wherefore it is come upon them (London, May 1649) BL TT, E. 555 (35), P- !559 Robert Bacon, The Labyrinth the Kingdom's In [A brief History of the Good and Evil of the former and present Power of the Nation] (London, February 1649) BL TT, E. 541 (26), p. 5.

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60 Cook, King Chads his Case, pp. 36-7. 61 Thomas Banaster, An Alarm to the World of the Appearing of Sions King (London, April 1649) B L TT > E - 55° (24). P- 562 J o h n Warren, The Potent Potter: or, a Sermon Preached befor the Honorable, the Commons of England (London, April 1649) BL TT, E. 551 (5), p. 8. 63 Wharton, Declaration, p. 8. 64 Leinsula, The Kingdoms Divisions, p. 2. By quoting these lines from Psalm 149, the author makes even King David speak out against Charles. 65 In Puritans and Regicide Mayfield demonstrates how the "identification of Charles I as one of the evil ten kings of Rev. 17 [expedited] and [facilitated] the unprecedented trial and execution of a Protestant monarch" (p. 94). Thus, the use of apocalyptic language and imagery to counter the crucified Charles of Eikon Basilike extended a pre-execution trend. 66 John Goodwin is something of an exception to this generalization. In The Obstructours of Justice he refers to Eikon Basilike in passing, but only to speculate about whether Charles I really authored the book (pp. 96-7). 67 John Milton, Eikonoklastes, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe etal, 8 vols. (New Haven, 1953-82) 111, 342. (All subsequent references to Eikonoklastes will be to this edition and will be cited as E parenthetically in the text.) 68 Eikon Alethine. The Portraiture of Truths most sacred Majesty truly suffering, though not solely (London, August 1649) BL TT, E. 569 (16). The date on Thomason's copy is 26 August. 69 Knachel, Introduction, p. xxii. 70 A number of critics have commented on the "point by point" character of Milton's attack on Eikon Basilike. See Lana Cable, "Milton's Iconoclastic Truth," in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, 1990), p. 138; and David Loewenstein, " 'Casting Down Imaginations': Milton as Iconoclast," Criticism 13:3 (Summer 1989), 253. 71 Eikon Alethine, Epistle to the Reader. All undocumented quotations in this paragraph come from this epistle. 72 Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago, 1986), p. 158; Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640-1660 (Oxford, 1992), p. 217. 73 Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, p. 205. 74 Ibid. 75 On this point I differ from Joan S. Bennett. Whereas she sees Milton writing "another fiction" in Eikonoklastes to reveal the true character of Charles, I see Milton appealing to fact - to what Charles actually did - in his rebuttal. Bennett stresses the refictionalizing, or more specifically, satanizing of Charles in Eikonoklastes because she reads this "royal portrait" as a precursor of the portrait of Satan in Paradise Lost. See Joan S. Bennett, "God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton's Royal Portraits," PMLA 92 (1977), 442. 76 Milton condemns the Eikon Basilike as a "Chapter of Apocrypha" in the

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79 80

81 82

83

84

85 86 87 88 89

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following passage: "It is no new, or unwonted thing for bad men to claim as much part in God as his best servants; to usurp and imitate thir words . . . This not onely in Scripture is familiarly to be found, but heer also in this Chapter of Apocrypha" Hughes notes both Milton's "thrust at the unctuously Biblical style of [the Eikon]" and his "play on the word apocryphal, meaning forged or dishonest." in, 528. Compare Eikon Alethine: "Thus Caligula indeed made himself a God while alive," p. 2. Many critics have noted the importance of psalm material in Eikon Basilike. See especially, Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, pp. 88-90; and Florence Sandier, "Icon and Iconoclast," Achievements of the Left Hand: Essays on the Prose of John Milton, ed. Michael Lieb and John T. Shawcross (Amherst, 1974), p. 172. David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, 1990), p. 70. Ibid. When comparing Charles I to other evil rulers and tyrants, Milton is much more likely than other execution apologists to turn to Roman rather than Old Testament history. This is perhaps because Milton's republican tendencies make him anxious to suggest that the king's execution will give rise to a Commonwealth much like Republican Rome. Ibid. Although most of Milton's apocalyptic language is contained in the last chapter of Eikonoklastes, he does refer at a few earlier points to the opposition between the kingdoms of the world and the kingdom of Christ. He notes that "the Kings of this World have both ever hated, and instinctively fear'd the Church of God" (in, 509), and he accuses Charles of supporting "an Antichristian Hierarchie" so that "Christs Kingdom could not be sett up without pulling down his" (111, 536). Finally, just prior to the final chapter, Milton reminds his readers of Christ's warning: "JVb man can serve two Masters" (111, 581). Nonetheless, Milton does not exploit the full apocalyptic implications of this basic opposition until the last few pages of his text. Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth century apocalypticism, millennarianism and the English Reformation: from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman, The Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics, vol. vin (Oxford, 1978), 105. On Milton's distinction between true and false martyrs see Laura Lunger Knoppers, "Paradise Regained and the Politics of Martyrdom," Modern Philology 90, no. 2 (November 1992), 211. Bauckham notes that Queen Elizabeth's subjects occasionally cast her in the role of Zerubbabel (Tudor Apocalypse, p. 127). Loewenstein, Milton, p. 72. Lois Potter, Secret Rites and Secret Writing: Royalist Literature, 1641—1660 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 182. Trial, p. 87. Steven N. Zwicker, Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-1689 (Ithaca, 1993), p. 59.

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90 Ibid., p. 46. 91 Ibid., p. 59. 92 For Cromwell as the Beast of Revelation see A Hue and Crie After Cromwell: or, The Cities Lamentationfor the losse of their Coyne and Conscience (July 1649) BL TT,

E. 565 (24), pp. 1-2; for Cromwell as Antichrist see Mercurius Pragmaticus. (For King Charls II), From Tuesday 11 Sept. to Tuesday 18 Sept. (London, 1649) BLTT,E. 574(1), title page. 93 Bernard Capp, "The Political Dimension of Apocalyptic Thought/' The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents,

Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester, 1984), p. 117.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Marvell, sacrilege, and Protestant historiography: contextualizing "Upon Appleton House" Gary D. Hamilton

What should he do? He would respect Religion, but not Right neglect: For first Religion taught him Right, And dazled not but clear'd his sight. Sometimes resolv'd, his Sword he draws, But reverenceth then the Laws. (lines 225-30)1

While not referring directly to Lord Fairfax, the famous subject of Andrew MarvelPs "Upon Appleton House," these words from the poem's nunnery episode identify central issues involved in contemporary evaluations of Fairfax's career. In this episode, and by way of a fictionalized account of the dissolution of the nunnery, Marvell described the general's ancestor, William Fairfax, as a thoughtful, action-oriented hero about to gain possession of the Nun Appleton estate.2 Depicting him as worthy of emulation by future generations of Protestants, Marvell presented William's storming of the nunnery as both lawful and religiously motivated. Indeed, the contemplative moment that precedes his struggle with the nuns - "What should he do?" - dissipates as soon as the poem establishes that the proposed action is not unlawful: "The Court him grants the lawful form; / Which licens'd either Peace or Force, / To hinder the unjust Divorce" of his destined spouse from him (lines 234—6). We can detect a playful defensiveness in these lines, as if Marvell were responding to an actual need to justify William's acquisition of church property. Playing off the event that gave rise to England's most widespread seizure of church lands, the "unjust divorce" of Henry VIII, Marvell represented the sixteenth-century transfer of church property to lay control as the correction of a past injustice. The injustice resided in the nuns' previous intervention between William and Isabel Thwaites, an act that interfered with William's ability to "seek her promis'd faith" (line 197). In his union with Isabel and simultaneous acquisition of "her" 161

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church lands, William was, in effect, reclaiming a prior right. The failure to reach this resolution peacefully was due to the nuns' refusal to recognize that right: "Yet still the Nuns his Right debar'd, / Standing upon their holy Guard" (lines 237-8). Although the nunnery section is often treated as typical anti-Catholic rhetoric, Marvell's framing of the encounter so as to feature competing legal claims signals as well a more specific mid-seventeenth-century relevance. In the early 1650s, winners of recent political battles often had to answer charges of illegality; Marvell's witty defensiveness fits this category, as an answer to complaints against the dismantling of English Protestantism in its episcopal form. Because this dismantling involved Parliament's selling the bishops' lands, public debate over this action almost invariably covered the topics included in the nunnery episode: clerical rights, anti-popery, and the precedent of the dissolution of monasteries under Henry VTII. Including this context in a reading of "Upon Appleton House" expands the possibilities for describing this poem's national significance. This context also provides another means of exploring Marvell's elusive political identity by establishing another thread of continuity between the pre-Restoration poet and the "protowhig" prose polemicist that he would become. The thread of continuity that this essay isolates is Marvell's anticlericalism, an attitude most fully expressed in Rehearsal Transprosed Parts One and Two (1672,1673), a work deeply rooted in the body of discourse on clerical rights that appeared in the 1640s. This discourse targeted the clericalism promulgated under Charles I,3 the defeat of whose policies required a reinterpretation of the history of Christianity in England in order to justify the curtailment of clerical power. Such an intellectual endeavor proved helpful in the defence of parliamentary actions of the 1640s; it was also useful to those who opposed the reassertion of political power by the Restoration clergy. Emphasizing the importance of anti-clericalist opposition in the shaping of Restoration politics, Mark Goldie notices that "church history was as natural a stamping ground for Whig polemicists as was parliamentary history," and he locates in Marvell's "Short Historical Essay" on Constantine and the church councils, which forms the last part of Mr. Smirke (1676), an illustration of the "anticlerical animus [which] allows us to see Whiggery less in terms of civil doctrines concerning constitutionalism and the right of revolution, and more in terms of ecclesiology."4 Although "Upon Appleton House" is of no direct concern to a story of Restoration politics, it conveys the same attitudes toward clericalism

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that Mr Smirke articulates, and within the ecclesiological framework characteristic of Marvell's later work. "Upon Appleton House" also puts on display the complications of disentangling the intricate relationships among religious rhetoric, "historical thinking," and ideological commitment in mid-seventeenth-century England.5 Celebrating the Reformation as an era of laicization, "Upon Appleton House" represents that process as important to the establishment of "Right Religion." And despite its proclamation that this occurrence marks an arrival of something new "'Twas no Religious House till now" (line 280) - it records the process by which this novelty becomes reconceived as founded on something ancient, thereby deflecting an attack on its "innovation" that might have rendered it illegitimate. Attending to the contours of Marvell's anti-clericalism encourages an expansion of the possibilities for describing his political commitments beyond those inherent in such seemingly incompatible labels as "loyalist" and "libertarian."6 Indeed, the call for lay control over church affairs served a number of different political agendas. If it is obvious that historical arguments for such control helped to legitimize Parliament's dismantling of the church hierarchy in the 1640s, it is also true that the case for laicization did not itself pit the rights of Parliament against those of the Crown. In theory at least, laicization was not incompatible with the desire to extol the authority of the Crown; many concluded that, even if the king resisted the notion, the curbing of clerical power was really in his best interest. In Rehearsal Transprosed, for example, the rhetoric of lay control functioned to join monarch and lay parliamentarians in a project that would serve both their interests. As was the case with the interfering nuns in the Appleton House narrative, the ideal could not be actualized until the influence of the clerics was curtailed.7 It is beyond the scope of this essay to determine the extent to which Marvell's interest in lay control over "the clerical estate" constituted the core of his political commitments. That Marvell, early in his career, echoed a growing mid-century anti-clerical sentiment is easier to substantiate, however, and can be demonstrated by examining "Upon Appleton House" in three interrelated, but successively broader contexts: (1) the contemporary significances attached to the selling of bishops' lands, a setting intricately connected to Marvell's presentation of Fairfax's role in English history; (2) the contemporary legal arguments for and against clerical rights that accompanied the fall of episcopacy in the 1640s and its subsequent rise again in the 1660s; and (3) the contemporary efforts to construct ancient Britain, particularly the story of

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Saxon Christianity, in ways that would justify or indict parliamentary efforts to disavow the clergy's traditional powers. BISHOPS

LANDS AND REGICIDE

The significance of the selling of the bishops' lands as a context for the representation of Fairfax in "Upon Appleton House" resides in the symbolism these transactions acquired as markers of progress in curing a malady that had produced England's bloody civil war. That symbolism was tied to a diagnosis, well-articulated in the early 1640s, which attributed society's ills to a clerical hierarchy that opposed parliamentary rights and prohibited, indeed reversed, progress toward a reformed church. The proposed remedy entailed increasing lay control over church affairs, a project which was to foster important changes: the influence of lay patronage would again be respected to a degree that it had not been in the Laudian church; the "lay-elders" of Parliament would replace the dreaded High Commission as supervisors over the lax morals of an undisciplined people; and episcopacy itself would be modified or, as eventually occurred on 9 October 1646, abolished.8 This project of laicization - which became the focus of intense parliamentary interest by the summer of 1641, and which saw partial implementation the following winter with a bill prohibiting bishops from holding temporal offices - resulted, on 16 November 1646, in legislation sanctioning the sale of bishops' lands, and on 30 April 1649, m m e ordinance approving the sale of the deans' and chapters' lands.9 The sense of closure accompanying the sale of bishops' lands gave these transactions importance in the autumn of 1648, when many who had been at war with their king had to decide if they could accept a peace settlement with him. In the final months of 1648, as opposing sides negotiated peace, the status of the 1646 legislation abolishing episcopacy was very much at stake. At issue for the king's party was the extent to which he should acquiesce to a parliamentary majority that wanted a national church on the Presbyterian model; for those parliamentarians committed to such a model, the question was whether to accept anything less. Although neither side was united within itself, on all sides a central element in deliberations was the fate of church lands.10 Among royalists there were conflicting views on how the interests and duties of the king related to the interests of the traditional episcopal church, a problem which directly raised the matter of church rights. When, for example, the author of "A Letter written to Dr. Samuel

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Turner" urged, in 1647, that the king accommodate Parliament on the matter of church government, he recommended the acceptance of "such conditions of peace as may be had." 11 As for the "taking away of Church Lands," he was "so farre from conceiving it sacriledge, that [he did] not conceive it unlawfull, but may be done without breach of any Law." He advised that the kingdom not be lost for "an imaginary right."12 Passionately rejecting this point of view was An Answer to a Letter . . . to Dr. Samuel Turner, asserting not only that confiscation of these lands was both illegal and sacrilegious but that the king's failure to uphold the church's rights would involve him in committing a third transgression, that of sinning against his conscience. Because the king, at his coronation, had "so strictly sworn to defend both the Episcopall Order, and the Church-lands and possessions," he could not violate that oath without sacrificing his soul.13 When the king indicated a willingness to suspend episcopacy for three years — at the end of which time he would reconsider the matter — he opened the door just wide enough so that those on each side of the question could find a reason to be hopeful.14 But if a three-year suspension permitted moderate Presbyterians who fervently wanted peace to accept the settlement, the temporary nature of the promise also became a rallying point for those who opposed it. And the lack of a permanent solution also allowed for a continuation of the rhetoric of reform that had been employed in bringing down the bishops; now it was used to oppose the settlement as well as to justify purging members of Parliament who supported it. Most importantly for "Upon Appleton House," the king's refusal to guarantee the abolition of episcopacy produced the conditions that allowed this reformist rhetoric to remain a potential unifying element for a deeply divided parliamentary membership after his execution. We can see this process at work in the Rump Parliament's justification of their annulment, on 12 December, of the vote taken a week earlier to proceed with the peace settlement. Included in A Declaration of the Commons of England, dated 15 January 1648 [9], this justification linked religion and parliamentary rights, a pairing that had worked so well to mobilize Parliament against the king earlier in the decade. These two issues came together around the problem of tenures on recently sold church lands. Because the king "would not abolish episcopacy, but onely suspend it," parliamentarians, who "had covenanted to extirpate" it, had betrayed a religious cause in supporting the settlement. Furthermore, the king "consented that the bishops lands should be let for a long term onely. . .whereas we had sold the said lands out-right." Proceeding

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with the settlement would mean "that the buyers (who adventured upon the publike faith of the parliament) should be defrauded of their bargains," and "episcopacy itself . . . should yet remain in the root, and a more then probable conjecture that it might recover itself."15 If the cause of "right religion" was a reason for proceeding against the king in January of 1649, ^ was also a reason for stopping those proceedings. Indeed, the alternatives that William Fairfax ponders in MarvelPs poem - a choice between "peace or force / To hinder the unjust divorce" between him and his bride and her lands - were those that his descendant had also confronted in the strikingly different circumstances that the purging of Parliament produced. This confrontation was poignantly represented in The Humble Advice. . .To his Excellency

Thomas Lord Fairfax, a plea made by a group of presbyterian ministers just five days before the king's execution, and remarkable for its attempt to bring together the two religious rhetorics currently in collision. Silent on the prospect of a revival of episcopacy, the ministers declared that the current "way of proceeding against his Majestie will. . .tend to the scandal and hazard of Religion." Arguing that peace was the only acceptable alternative, they utilized a rhetoric of obedience to condemn efforts to force the king's compliance, identifying any violation of the Oath of Allegiance and Supremacy as a "wounding [of] our consciences."16 Yet it was through a reformist rhetoric that they appealed to Fairfax to intervene in the crisis created by the parliamentary purge. Praising him as leader of a religious cause, they acknowledged that because of his efforts against "the common enemy" they "were in a fair way of being restored to . . . our Religion in purity."17 However, they feared that all might be lost unless "the secluded Members. . .be forthwith restored" and urged Fairfax "by all lawfull means to endevour the suspending of all proceedings against his Majesties Crown and Life."18 In adopting the genre of the country house poem as a vehicle for his praise of Lord Fairfax, Marvell created a device through which he could feature the religious cause which the presbyterian ministers had urged Fairfax to maintain, and, indeed, which both sides of the parliamentary divide in December of 1648 - those who sought peace with the king and those who would force him to make further concessions — insisted they were upholding. And he constructed the history of the estate to which the general had retired so as to privilege the perspective on corrupting clericalism that parliamentary rhetoric of the past decade had fostered. There was an obvious advantage in such a strategy, given Fairfax's own troubled mind over the outcome of the proceedings against the king.19

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It allowed Marvell to avoid dealing with the divisive issue of the king's execution, which he had confronted directly in "An Horatian Ode," and it permitted him to focus on the success of the general's career in ways most capable of unifying the divided proponents of the parliamentary cause.20 If William Fairfax's liberation of the nunnery might function as an occasion for recalling his descendant's military career, so might the presence of Fairfax as governor of Nun Appleton estate be viewed as emblematic of the positive effects that a policy of lay control over clerics could achieve. SACRILEGE AND SACRED PLAGES In A Letterfrom Utrecht, dated 4 June 1647 a n d printed in 1648, Clement Spelman, son of the eminent antiquary and church rights defender Sir Henry Spelman, admonished the nation, "See therefore that while ye abolish Episcopacie, ye do not open wide the door to ravenous Sacriledge that shall at once devoure the patrimony of Christ and his Church." 21 Eliciting the authority of such reformers as Luther, Calvin, and Knox to condemn "the conversion of Church-Lands to Lay-uses," he warned of imminent "heavy judgments" if the bishops' lands were sold.22 Also printed in 1648, a treatise entitled Church Lands Not To Be Sold emphasized the relevance of the admonition that "the Sacrilegious man in himself, or posterity perisheth." 23 Though these were desperate times, the sentiment was hardly invented for the occasion. From Richard Hooker, writing under Elizabeth, to Samuel Gardiner, writing under James, to John Gauden, writing at the beginning of the Restoration, the admonition against sacrilege was always accompanied by the warning of curses visited upon lay-holders of sacred lands. 24 In the Civil War period, the posthumously circulated ideas of Henry Spelman helped to shape attitudes on this subject. Noting this influence, Gauden explained, "Experience tells us (which Sir Henry Spelman observes) that as no private Families, so nor any Kings, ever grew more . . . lastingly prosperous by any Sacrilegious practices "25 What distinguished Henry Spelman from others who had written on sacrilege was his refusal to exempt the Henrician land transfers. In a lengthy epistle which Clement Spelman added to the third (1646) edition of his father's De non temerandis ecclesiis, this refusal was made quite public. Drawing upon his father's yet unpublished writings, Clement included among the list of "the cursed" the often cited case of William the Conqueror, who had "unfortunate tragedies occur to the family," but also the life of "King

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Henry the eighth, who ingrossed Sacriledge, and retailed it to Posterity."2^* In "the first halfe of his Raigne" "he was honoured . . . but after his Sacriledge . . . his Subjects Retell... And now (like Saul forsaken of God) he falls from one sinne to another."27 The implications for holders of abbey lands were clear. Many of the English gentry and their families, including the Fairfaxes, could expect a grim future. If the mention of a curse enforced the idea that the price of laicization might be too costly, the concept of "aeternal holinesse"28 — the notion that a property once dedicated to God could never be alienated from him — provided clericalists with further weaponry with which to protect the church's wealth. Although Henry Spelman's views on the legal implications of "eternal holiness" were not available in their "complete" form until 1698, they were essentially no different from those which Gardiner held in The Scourge of Sacriledge (1611), and which Clement Spelman set forth in the 1646 preface to De non temerandis ecclesiis, where he denied that "any Statute or humane Law doth, or can take away the Dedication or the Consecration of Abbeys, Monasteries &c." "If these be not removed," he stated, "then remain they still dedicated, still consecrated to God."29 The financial ramifications of this legal opinion were enormous. Because the holder of the "appropriation and Tithes" could only receive "the profit as the Abbot did," it was wrong to argue "that impropriate Churches . . . are made Lay & Temporal" and "disposable at the will of the owner: a doctrine which . . . concerns the estates and livelihood of so many."30 Church Lands Not To Be Sold developed these assumptions into an argument against the selling of the bishops' lands. Heavily influenced by Henry Spelman's writings, this treatise adopted a historical perspective which privileged the traditional rights of the clerical estate over the right of Parliament to interfere in church affairs; and consequently, it promoted the legal authority of certain Jacobean statutes over the 1538 Henrician statutes. Recognizing the idea of "eternal holiness" in the common law, Church Lands made extensive use of the legal commentaries of Edward Coke, who "cals Church lands divine Tenements, according to which K. Ethelred, long before, Anno 998. giving lands to the Church of Canterbury, stiles them Patrimonium Christi"31 In upholding the ancient rights of the church, Church Lands adopted Spelman's position on the thirteenth-century origin of Parliament: "When the lands were given, as most were, in the Saxon Kings times," there was not "such power in the Nobility and people, as to sell away the Church-Lands: for the first large Grant or power of Parliaments, was in Henry the Third's time."32 As for

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the legal status of the 1538 statutes in authorizing parliamentary interference, their authority was clearly rejected "not much above forty years agoe, in King James his time" when Parliament "waved the having any such power or privilege . . . to hinder Bishops" from setting the terms of the leases of their lands.33 Because these arguments so directly challenged the laicization project of the 1640s, any writer seriously interested in such a project had to confront them. Thus when Marvell, in Rehearsal Transprosed, attacked the clerical hierarchy, he not only demonstrated his awareness of these arguments but turned them back against the clericalists who employed them. Appearing after Charles II had issued his Declaration of Indulgence at a moment when clerical influence on government policy seemed to be on the wane — Part One of this work attempted to drive a wedge in the alliance between clerical and lay members of Parliament that had given the conformist platform its legislative successes. Focusing on Samuel Parker's "absolutist" rejection of the claims of individual conscience, Marvell portrayed Parker as representative of a clerical power that had proven itself antithetical to the interests of "the Gentry and the Commonalty" and that was wielded by "men [who] never think they have their full Rights unless they Reign" (1, 283,307). In noting how clerics wrongly identified their interests with those of the nation, Marvell highlighted the controversial perspective on the Henrician Reformation that Spelman's writings fostered. Countering clerical claims that puritan treachery constituted the chief danger to the realm, he used the tragedy of civil war — over a cause "too good to have been fought for" (1, 303) — as a historical lesson on the threat posed by ambitious clergymen. In epic fashion, he located the origin of this tragedy in the revenge of the clergy, who "had granted themselves Letters of Reprisal against the Laity, for the losses of the Church under Henry the Eight, and . . . would make a greater havock upon their Temporalities in retaliation" (1, 294). He drew attention to efforts by such clerics as Roger Manwaring and Richard Sibthorpe to convince the king that the laity had no rights, attributing such malicious counsel to a resentment "that the Puritans had ever since the Reformation obstructed that laziness and splendor which they injoyed under the Popes Supremacy, and the Gentry had (sacrilegiously) divided the Abby-Lands, and other fat morsels of the Church at the Dissolution" (1, 291,295). The clever manipulation of clericalist arguments displayed in Rehearsal Transprosed is also a central feature in "Upon Appleton House." Although each work addresses very different political circumstances,

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both recall the conditions that defined the project of laicization as a noble mission. If Rehearsal Transprosed reminds a forgetful Restoration audience of the problem that a program of lay control had attempted to address, "Upon Appleton House" rehearses for a divided mid-century audience the merits of the solution that many of them had once joined together to promote. Just as Fairfax's military successes represented to his contemporaries the defeat of a corrupting clerical power, so does Marvell's celebration of his employer answer the arguments that had sustained that power.34 Recollecting the answers to the clerics that had been articulated in Parliament a decade earlier, the poem highlights two prominent aspects of those replies: (1) in its attitude toward the house itself, it features the "holiness" of laicization, and (2) in its attitude toward Mary Fairfax, it recalls the benefits to the nation that the project of laicization might bestow. Central to Marvell's depiction of the Nun Appleton estate was his interrogation of what made a place sacred. This inquiry took a form common to Protestant discussions of the True Church. When one of Henry Spelman's readers criticized the use of the word Ecclesia for "a material Church, or (as in contempt he termeth it) a stone house"*5 he was insisting on a radically different attitude toward place than was privileged in the argument that church property was sacred. For Spelman's critic, a universal priesthood of believers presided over the True Church, located wherever the Word of God was rightly preached: "although there were never a stone-Church or minister in the kingdome, yet the Church, and service of God might stand well enough, for that every mans family is a Church, and every master thereof tyed to instruct his servants, every father his children."36 This perspective was one that James Harrington was also developing, a conception of a society in which "anticlericalism was the means of sanctification. . .a sacrament."37 While not directly addressing the issues at stake, "Upon Appleton House" implies a version of the reformed church entirely compatible with such views. What remained distinctive about Marvell's anti-clerical strategy in "Upon Appleton House" was that he did not reject the concept of sacred places but reappropriated it as a panegyric device to celebrate Fairfax. What Marvell's modern readers have identified as the poem's anxiety about "being in the world" is a direct effect of Marvell's execution of this design. Permeating the poem is the idea that Appleton House fulfills the same function in its society as "the material church" did in the days of old; it is a bastion against the turmoils and dangers of the outside world. Recalling the narrator's earlier need to "Take Sanctuary in the

Marvell, sacrilege, and Protestant historiography wood" (line 482), the final lines of the poem identify the present-day Appleton House as a place of refuge: "Let's in: for the dark Hemisphere/ Does now. . .appear" (lines 775—6). Just as the church had once been the edifice where needy souls could take sanctuary in time of danger, so does this residence now serve as a place of safety in a world that is "But a rude heap together hurl'd" (line 761).38 MarvelPs presentation of Fairfax's Nun Appleton estate as a sacred space was but a logical extension of the kind of temporal reappropriations that the nunnery episode records. Indeed, within its account of Reformation history Marvell provided the rationale for treating Appleton House as if it were a church, for there he reversed the process by which church lands had become, according to the clericalists, sacred ground. The initial historical transaction that made all the difference from the clericalist point of view was the shift of property from lay ownership to clerical control. From that point on, the land became forever holy, and any violation of that holiness was a sin. In MarvelPs narrative of the rescue of Isabel Thwaites, the significant moment of land transfer is retained but reassigned. Here the occasion that marks its holiness occurs in the return of property from clerical to lay control: "Twas no Religious House till now." That this historical land transaction will give rise to a continuing reverence for this holy place is predicted already in the fifth stanza of the poem, where we learn that "the after age / Shall hither come in pilgrimage, / These sacred places to adore / By Vere and Fairfax trod before" (lines 33—6). Long before Marvell had occasion to write "Upon Appleton House," two sharply contrasting attitudes over reformation had developed in English Protestantism. The question of what pre-Reformation concepts, institutions and practices needed to be repudiated in an authentically reformed church took on a special urgency in the 1630s, however, as Archbishops Neile and Laud implemented Charles I's sacerdotalist policies. Divines who supported these policies articulated the case for a purified (that is, unsuperstitious) reappropriation of certain rites and practices used in "romish" times. To them reformation meant not a disparaging of the church's liturgical and architectural riches and the wealth of its lands but a renewed dedication to more godly ends.39 In utilizing such pre-Reformation practices as making pilgrimages to sacred places and taking sanctuary in them, Marvell ostentatiously situated his poem alongside the clericalist reappropriations of "romish practices." In almost every element of this poem, we can detect a response to the clericalist arguments that the Civil War had served to defeat.

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A significant aspect of this answering process was MarvelPs response to the idea of sacrilege, a topic that his history of Appleton House brings directly to the fore. When one "of the SuttleNunns" in MarvelPs nunnery episode informs "the blooming virgin Thwates" that "Twere Sacriledge a Man t'admit / To holy things, for Heaven fit" (lines 94,90,139-40), she is uttering in parodic form a doctrine that had been central in clericalist writings in the 1640s. MarvelPs response to this argument addressed not just the clericalists, however, but the complicated attitudes of those contemporaries, the many among the Presbyterian clergy and laity, who supported the abolition of episcopacy but not the sale of church properties. We can partly explain the lack of consensus on this matter by acknowledging that an interest in lay control did not necessarily encompass a desire to see ownership of church lands pass into private hands. Indeed, the plan to do away with episcopacy that began to take shape in 1641 featured a reappropriation of church wealth, not private ownership. Revenues that had earlier supported the pomp and worldly living of corrupt churchmen were to be used instead to promote the cause of godly preaching. When Parliament authorized the sale of bishops' lands in 1646, it acted from expediency, therefore, not out of principle.40 In a country so divided, new owners of these properties received a mixed reaction to their purchases. In a narrative of his legal problems an account "Ordered, Anno. 1650. to be Reported to the then Parliament" - Cornelius Burges complained of the "Many, and loud . . . Clamors against the late long Parliament, for seising, and selling the Lands of Bishops" and of the "scourge of tongues" and the "gaul of Pens" that he had endured "for purchasing some of those Lands"*1 The counter position identified these transactions as being in the public interest, a defense which sometimes incorporated an "ancient rights" argument representing these sales as a return of the lands to their "original" condition - as they existed before the papacy wrested them away through deception and superstition.42 At the core of the "public interest" argument for "returning" church lands to private ownership was a concept that informed the conclusion of "Upon Appleton House," which celebrates Fairfax's daughter "Maria." New lay owners, unlike the bishops, could pass their lands on to their children. Bishops might seek short-term profits to serve their worldly appetites, but private landowners had a stake in the improvement of their properties and thus a strong commitment to their country's future as well. Because private owners had no need to recog-

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nize a conflict between private gain and public good, their "rescue" of church lands from bishops could even be construed as a patriotic duty. Available to counter "church rights" critics since the beginning of the English Reformation, this argument was most useful at moments of political crisis, when a proposed change of direction needed to be promoted or forestalled. The argument about heirs played a role, for example, in the 1641 debates over excluding bishops from Parliament. 43 And in 1660, when Parliament was again taking up the matter of bishops' lands - this time not to set up the conditions of their purchases but to decide the terms under which they would be returned to their pre1646 owners - George Wither warned of the "destruction of so many thousands of Families as may be impoverished . . . for the pleasing of a few, whose Claim and Interest dies with their persons, to the discontent of many whose right will never die, but still revive, and continue for ever in their heirs."44 In concluding his poem with a celebration of Maria, Marvell made the promising future as important a part of his tribute to Appleton House as the curse had been in the discussions of sacrilege. Despite its acknowledgment of England's ongoing tragedies, the poem records, in its structure, the estate's progress toward a prosperous state, of which the inner perfection of William and Isabella's marriageable descendant, Maria, becomes a fitting representation: "Hence She with Graces more divine / Supplies beyond her Sex the Line . . . While her glad Parents most rejoice, / And make their Destiny their Choice" (lines 737-8, 743-4). This combination of holiness and prosperity suggests that, far from being an abomination in God's sight, the laicization initiated in the Henrician Reformation is entirely consistent with "eternal holiness" and may even be its inevitable corollary. Instead of threatening an already existing holiness, lay intervention in church affairs promotes the fulfillment of past promises - ones made by subtle clerics in a superstitious age - that donated lands would become sacred places. If the nunnery episode celebrates the beginning of that process, and the poem's conclusion predicts its continuation, other sections of MarvelPs poem illustrate what that holy transformation might entail. GARDENS AND CLOISTERS

One explanation, besides greed, for puritan disinterest in "material" churches was the conviction that the church was not essentially a place but an "assembly" gathered to hear the Word of God. The concern was

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with the quality of the preaching, not the condition of the "stonehouse." In the 1630s, and again in the 1660s, clericalists challenged this attitude by extolling the church's non-preaching functions, the role of the physical church's beauty in its members' spiritual lives and the value of the study in which its non-preaching clerics engaged. In the 1640s, they emphasized that the sale of bishops' lands would insure the neglect of these non-preaching functions. In the sections of "Upon Appleton House" on Fairfax in his garden and the poet-tutor in the woods, Marvell signaled this clericalist context by his use of "prelate" allusions. In the garden Fairfax governs his sense-bombarding surroundings while Cawood Castle, one of the archbishop's residences, looms in the distance. And in the woods the narrator sits "like a great Prelate" in holy leisure. Critics dealing with the garden episode of "Upon Appleton House" have found a ready context in Marvell's own poetic canon, which features an abundance of gardens where retreats from the world take on a variety of positive and negative associations. More relevant to this essay are the commonplace comparisons between gardens and churches in biblical commentaries and contemporary ecclesiastical writings. As Kevin Sharpe notices, Archbishop Laud favored the analogy of the church as a garden.45 In referring to himself as a gardener, he was building on a tradition that was well-developed in the allegorical readings of the garden in the Song of Songs and which informed Luther's ecclesiastical reading of the Garden of Eden story.46 We can find this Laudian investment in the gardening metaphor in the 1641 treatise, A Discourse Of Sacriledge, which began by asserting that "The Church is like the Garden of Eden, which God . . . set our Parents to dresse,"47 and which proceeded by drawing out the implications of this analogy for understanding what the church should be and how it should be ordered. Just as John Milton described Paradise as a sensuous "Heaven on Earth," so did this work prefer that churches be places where "the riches, and braveries of this world, whereupon men set greatest price, might adorne their doctrine."48 Denying that preaching had the same status now as in "Primitive times," when "the only way then of propagating thereof was sermon-wise," it explained that "we have tythes and oblations, Bishops and governours, rich Colledges and Cathedrals, large priviledges & endowments; such as might make men that like not our Doctrine, fall in love with our discipline, and in admiring these glories, adore the Divinity that provok'd them."49 Laymen were to embellish the churches' material glory, therefore, not to take it away. In

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the past, "heroicke mindes not knowing in the world better how to bestow their estates. . .added superfluitie, and with riches, gave honour and sway to the Clergie."50 Consequently, "Christianitie grew upon the world, mankind became throughly [sic] religious, and the tempter was well nigh discouraged in his businesse."51 If sumptuously furnished cathedrals produced a thoroughly religious society, episcopacy provided the best assurance that it would remain in such a state. Such governance was necessary because this edenic church, despite its rich adornments, could never expect to be entirely free of danger: "The enemy will finde a gap, or where to make one, if there bee not some Generall to overlooke, some Commander to ride the round, and see the watch set."52 Thus it was that the gardening metaphor and the military metaphor came together in clericalist understandings of what church discipline was designed to accomplish. For archbishops Neile and Laud the task of being gardener/commander involved several tactics. As gardeners they favored ceremonies, which Laud referred to as hedges, that provided order and thus kept out the "disorderly" spontaneity that some puritans so cherished. As commanders, they issued visitation articles dictating that churches be beautified and, in the case of Laud, that swine be expelled from churchyards as unbefitting the dignity of sacred places.53 Given the abundance of ecclesiastical imagery in "Upon Appleton House," we should not be surprised to find in the garden episode a competing version of how the governor of church property should fulfill his role as gardener/commander. If Marvell had a polemical point, it would seem to be announced in the words that close this section: The sight does from these Bastions ply, Th' invisible Artilery; And at proud Cawood Castle seems To point the Battery of its beams. As if it quarrell'd in the seat The Ambition of its Prelate great, (lines 361-6) Not just "the sight" of any observer, but the whole garden section points its artillery at the residence of the Archbishop of York, and in the interest of redefining how the energies of a governor of a sacred place should best be directed. As in A Discourse of Sacriledge, images of the gardener and the military commander merge in "Upon Appleton House," but Marvell revised the functions of these roles. As gardener, Fairfax stood as the antithesis of the ambitious prelate concerned with worldly pomp and glory. Instead, he "did, with his utmost skill, / Ambition weed, but

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Conscience till" (lines 353—4). Likewise, as commander of this gardenfortress, his military tactics were at odds with the cult of the beauty of holiness that flourished under Neile and Laud. Ideas about beauty's role in aiding religious devotion belonged to the nuns, who specialized in "handling Natures finest Parts," making artful use of "Flow'rs," "Amber" "Balms" and "Pasts . . . as Baits for curious tasts" (lines 178-82). But Fairfax, whose strategy seemed designed to intervene in nature's onslaught on the senses, "laid these Gardens out in sport / In the just Figure of a Fort; / And with five Bastions it did fence, / As aiming one for ev'ry Sense" (lines 285-8). In moving from the narration of the nuns' sense-oriented religious devotion to its description of Fairfax's gardening skills, "Upon Appleton House" fulfills the essential part of its task of relating "The Progress of this Houses Fate" (line 84). Marvell duplicated this movement in the last part of the poem, where he told the same story, only this time as the progress of the poet-tutor's "fate." Marvell dramatized this progress as a moving beyond the attitudes associated with the monastic ideal; solitude, idleness, and pleasure give way to marriage, family, and an "unworldly" approach to religious devotion. In enacting this progress the poet-tutor participates in and then leaves behind activities which clericalists had defended as necessary non-preaching functions that church properties supported. One of these functions, the promotion of religious study, became controversial within a context of debate over proper use of church revenues. Thus, in the 1630s, as the church hierarchy challenged the primacy of preaching, church maintenance of non-preaching clerics became an increasingly partisan matter.54 In his preface to the 1646 publication of collected writings on church rights "by Henry Spelman and others," Jeremiah Stephens, former assistant to Spelman, lamented the decline of learning that accompanied the Reformation: "we have lost almost all the ancient priviledges and immunities, which were formerly granted to the Clergy: which were given, that they might be encouraged to attend their studies without distraction or avocation by secular troubles." 55 "Upon Appleton House" reproduces this more perfect world in the poet-tutor's escape to the woods, an interlude in which his experiences are described as "my studies" and where "Under this antick Cope I move / Like some great Prelate of the Grove" (lines 586, 591-2). The woods to which he retreats are consistently described as church-like, with "arching Boughs" uniting "Columnes of the Temple green" (lines 509-10), and they fulfill the function in society that clericalists had traditionally

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assigned to the "material church." In the "Sanctuary" of the wood, the presence of bloodshed - of civil and post-civil war conflict - that permeates the meadow portion is no longer perceived as a threat but as a contemplative opportunity: "And where the World no certain Shot / Can make, or me it toucheth not. / But I on it securely play" (lines 605-7).56 What the poet-tutor undergoes in the temple is not just a contemplative experience, but one which strongly echoes French meditative poetry that emphasizes the pleasures of retirement.57 He describes a mind at play with the sensuous world around him, moving from an involvement with nature to a contemplation of divine truth. It is an approach to religious devotion not inconsistent with that which Neile and Laud had promoted with their ideas on the beauty of holiness. But while his experiences with nature lead to intermittent contemplation of religious truths involving sin, punishment, and crucifixion, the results are questionable. The aftermath is a desire for a renewed world of pleasure and idleness: "Oh what a Pleasure 'tis to hedge / My Temples here with heavy sedge, / Abandoning my lazy Side, / Stretched as a Bank unto the Tide" (lines 641—4). The end result of the religious experience in the wood is thus "Narcissus like"; it produces a longing for a meadow experience "Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt / If they be in it or without" (lines 640,637-8). When the poet-tutor finally bids farewell to this "sanctuary" experience, it is to acknowledge the higher value that resides in Appleton House and in his role, as educator of Maria, in bringing the future into being. Having relinquished his sensuous attachment to a place that is apart from the world, he embraces, in his very description of the young Maria, a non-physical ideal of inner ordering, a superior space independent of the physical beauty and chaos that surrounds it. As the structure of the poem itself suggests, the significance of this movement can best be articulated from a historical perspective. VIRGINS, RAPES, AND RESCUES

MarvelPs fictionalized narrative of the rescue of a virgin from the perverse eroticism of the nunnery, and of her subsequent joining with her rescuer to establish "a religious house," features little of the impressive "learning" that Marvell included in "A Short Historical Essay on General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Religion." Nevertheless, it displays the same acute awareness of current political implications of ecclesiastical historiography. Indeed, MarvelPs tale of the rescue of

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Isabel Thwaites might well be described as a bold retelling of a famous story in Saxon church history, one that was widely used by Protestant historians to account for the founding of many of England's religious houses. This narrative featured the "dissolute" Edgar, who stormed a nunnery, took "by force" a virgin who resided therein,58 and then spent the rest of his days in penance, building churches and monasteries and greatly expanding the church's lands. In short, Edgar was as renowned for promoting the church's interests as Henry VIII was for curbing its power. How appropriate, then, that "Upon Appleton House" should feature a version of this story as dramatically altered as the Henrician Reformation had altered Edgar's legacy! But the Saxon background has a greater relevance to concerns of MarvelPs historical thinking than the mere details of Edgar's life, for Saxon Christianity was itself a site where important battles in post-Civil War Protestant historiography were destined to be fought. A preoccupation of Protestant historiography in the sixteenth century was with charting the rise of the papacy in such a way as to connect Rome with prophecies involving the rise and fall of the Antichrist. Perhaps because of this preoccupation, the resulting narratives did not always serve well the post-Civil War reformers' needs to justify their having curbed clerical power and dismantled the traditional English church. As has been noted, among "the more pressing historical problems" for sixteenth-century church historians was "the disentanglement of the traditions and rights of the English Church and hierarchy from those imposed by Rome during the days when Antichrist had reigned in England."59 John Foxe's solution lay in the concept of the thousand-year period in which Satan had been bound, an interval that he identified as the span of time from the reign of Constantine to the persecutions of Wycliffe and Hus. This conceptual frame allowed subsequent historians to portray Saxon Christianity as a golden age of sorts, when princes dutifully endowed and ruled over flourishing churches, and when the power of popes was curbed, a condition which continued until the reign of King John. By the early 1640s, however, it had become clear that such a narrative was also compatible with clericalist interests. In documenting the prominent place of clergy in the governing councils in the 500-year period before the Conquest, Henry Spelman's Concilia (1639) bolstered the arguments of those who defended clerical involvement in temporal affairs.60 It was necessary for those who would curb the power of the clerical estate to reinterpret the historical narrative in ways that served their own

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interests,61 a task which entailed putting pressure on certain elements in the narrative which allowed for ambiguity regarding the ancient status of the clergy. One of these pressure points involved questioning the purity of Saxon Christianity — an issue on which Marvell took a strong stand in Rehearsal Transprosed.62 But a related topic for interrogation was the extent to which the Constantinian model, with the prominence it gave to bishops, represented the ideal Christian commonwealth - the subject of "A Short Historical Essay." In the "Essay" Marvell, as others before him, revised Foxe's version of ecclesiastical history by emphasizing the negative impact on both Christianity and temporal liberty when Christian clerics gain power in a Christian state. He presented Constantine's reign not as the ending of an era of persecuting heathen emperors, as Foxe had emphasized, but as the beginning of an era of persecuting Christian bishops.63 Christianity, which grew under benign but heathen emperors, withered in the Christian state as ambitious clerics came between Christian rulers and their subjects. Motivated only by their own self-interested desire "to preserve the Rights and liberties of the Church," the bishops urged magistrates to make laws concerning things unnecessary; and consequently, they got princes to look upon subjects as enemies.64 The timely lessons on dangers of clerical power that Marvell and others drew from the Constantinian era were also available from the Saxon period, when religion "degenerated from that antient and right Evangelical Simplicity" (/?T,i,259). Rejecting the clericalists' enthusiasm for the age in which "the Bishops were equall to the greatest persons and estates of the kingdome,"65 critics of the clerical estate could sometimes follow the lead of sixteenth-century writers whose anti-papal interests prompted them to emphasize the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Saxon kings. Indeed, a historical precedent frequently cited to justify the Crown's right to confiscate church lands was a Saxon example: "when the Abbesse and Nunnes of Barkeley were with Child, their Nunnery was dissolved by Edward the Confessor... and their Lands confirmed upon a Lay Earl."66 These critics could often locate the negative aspects of Saxon church history where clericalists found their positive models. And in looking for the ideal king as "nursing father" of the church, it was hard to find better credentials than Edgar's. Some historians called him another Constantine.67 John Selden noted his determination that "the Church should enjoy all her Liberties"; and Thomas Fuller emphasized his commitment to the building and reforming of religious houses: "sole Founder of many, Co-founder of more, Benefactor to most Abbeys in England."68

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Though it was possible to interpret Edgar's spiritual leadership as exemplary for all ages, there was a bit more to this story. There was the matter of Edgar's humility, which some Protestant historians extolled and others regarded with deep suspicion. Praising Edgar as one who did not "usurp upon the Church," Henry Spelman noted that "how large soever his Dominion was, his humility was as great, and though . . . he carried himself as the head Officer of the Church, yet in matters of faith he was so obedient, that to expiate his incontinency with a Nun, he threw himself at the feet of Dunstan his Bishop, submitted himself to seven years penance, and presumed not to be consecrated till the 14. year of his reign."69 This was a remarkable interpretation of what others regarded as Edgar's double slavery, both to his "lascivious nature,"70 and to Bishop Dunstan, a condition which Fuller interpreted as his having become "so wholly Dunstanized, that he gave over his Soul, Body, and Estate to be ordered by him."71 Encoded, therefore, in the account of William Fairfax's storming of the nunnery and eventual founding of a religious house is another narrative that helps to identify its historical significance. In itself the dissolution of religious houses often functioned as a potent symbol of the English Reformation's radical break with a corrupt past. As William Camden expressed this historic achievement, Henry VIII "suppressed and expelled the Monks after they had in all plenty and fulnesse lived more than 500 yeeres."72 But in narrating this event as an altered version of the Edgar story, Marvell focused that symbolism in a way especially relevant for his own time. To transform Edgar's story was to change an outcome determined by the reign of bishops. This narrative thus served as a bridging device, allowing the Henrician expulsion of monks from their lands to merge with and assume the same historical significance as the contemporary story of Parliament's expulsion of bishops from their lands. That the vehicle for Marvell's adaptation was William Fairfax, not a king but an ancestor of Lord Fairfax, made its applicability to the story of Parliament's triumph over the bishops all the easier to establish. There is one further way in which the alteration of the Edgar narrative serves as a context in which to describe the historical significance of present-day Appleton House. It concerns the role of Maria: her place in ecclesiastical history and her function as a symbol of the Protestant ideal. Critics have long noted that the nunnery episode forms the context in which we come eventually to understand the value of Maria and her contribution to a definition of the new religious order that William Fairfax and Isabel Thwaites have founded. We are made to focus on

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Maria's inner beauty and purity. Though she is the source of beauty in the world, she does not permit the beauties of the world to adorn her. With "Graces more divine," she not only surpasses the nuns' religious order; she is incompatible with it. Quite literally, as the descendant of William and Isabel, she could not have come into being had the old religious house and its interfering nuns not been dissolved. Ultimately, however, marriageable Maria is not a symbol of "newness" but of continuity with the past, and not only for her family but for the nation as well. Closely related to Edgar's significance as a founder and benefactor of many of England's religious houses was the importance he held for Protestant historians as the initiator of a celibate priesthood. Camden noted how Edgar's clerical reform deviated sharply from earlier Christian practices: "upon the first foundation . . . [of] religious houses of England, maried Priests . . . who carrying a long time a great opinion of holinesse governed the Churches, untill that Dunstane Archbishop of Canterbury, had decreed in a Synode, That from thence

forward the religious men in England should live a single life."73 In storming the

nunnery and marrying the virgin, William Fairfax fulfilled an ancient promise. In making a radical break with the past, he established a link with a more ancient, worthier past. If Edgar's destiny was to expel holiness from holy places, the Fairfaxes' destiny was to permit holy laypersons to reclaim holy places. And although in "An Horatian Ode" justice was left to "plead the antient Rights in vain" (line 38), MarvelPs destiny was to reaffirm for a troubled nation that ancient holiness and ancient liberties were inextricably intertwined. NOTES

1 Reference to MarvelPs verse is from the first volume of H. M. Margoliouth, ed., The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 3rd edn rev. Pierre Legousis with E.E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1971), hereafter referred to by line number in the text. 2 See Lee Erickson, "Marvell's 'Upon Apple ton House' and the Fairfax Family," English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979), 159-61. 3 See Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992), pp. 275-402, on this king's commitment to "upholding the estate of the church" and "the status of the episcopacy" (p. 283) and to securing "better endowment for the clergy and their freedom from dependency on the laity" (p. 284); and Julian Davies, The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism 162^-164.1 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 205-50. In this essay the term "clericalist" refers to the substance and spirit of this policy. 4 "Priestcraft and the birth of Whiggism," in Political Discourse in Early Modern

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GARY D. HAMILTON Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 214,227. On problems of separating religion and political ideology, see Richard Cust and Ann Hughes, "Introduction: after Revision," in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603-1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), pp. 1-46; and Johann Sommerville, "Ideology, Property and the Constitution," in Conflict in Early Stuart England, pp. 47-71. Cf. J o h n Wallace, Destiny His Choice: the Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1968), and Warren L. Chernaik, The Poet's Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge, 1983). On limitations of the "loyalist" label, see Conal Condren, "Andrew Marvell as Polemicist: his Account of the Growth of Popery, and Arbitrary Government," in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, ed. Conal Condren and A. D. Cousins (Hants, 1990), pp. 160-1. Attackers of Part One targeted MarvelPs comment that "if the King may discharge the Function of the Priesthood, he may too . . . assume the Revenue" (1,112). In Part Two, he answered that he was not a nonconformist and had not attacked "the whole body of Clergy"; yet clerics should be servants of the laity, not their landlords, and church wealth should be redistributed to support its preaching ministry (11,88,53,293,147). References to Parts One and Two of Rehearsal Transprosed are from Gregg International Publishers facsimile reproduction of the 1672 and 1673 e ^itions (Hants, 1971), and will be cited by part and page numbers in the text. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil War (New York, 1981), pp. 82-124; John Morrill, "The Church in England, 1642-9," in Reactions to the English Civil War 1642-1649, ed. Morrill (New York, 1983), pp. 96-8; and "The Religious Context of the English Civil War," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser. 34 (1984), 163-7; an< ^ Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637-1642 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 336-54. For a hostile contemporary analysis of this diagnosis, see the anonymous Persecutio Undecima (1648). See H. J. Habakkuk, "Public Finance and the Sale of Confiscated Property during the Interregnum," Economic History Review 2nd ser. 15 (1962), 70-88; and I. J. Gendes and W. J. Sheils, "Confiscation and Restoration: The Archbishopric Estates": Borthwick Institute Papers 59 (1981), 1-39. See William Prynne, The Substance of a Speech Made in the House of Commons on the Fourth of Dec. 1648, 3rd edn. (London, 1649), [K verso]: "And shall we now after seven yeares Warres . . . make Bishops Lands . . . the onely ground of a new Warre?" An Answer to a Letter Written at Oxford, And superscribed to Dr. Samuel Turner, Concerning the Church, and the Revenues thereof (n.p., 1647), p. 1. An Answer, pp. 3, 7. An Answer, pp. 45,53. "An Answer" (pp. 9-53) has been attributed to Richard Steward. On Presbyterian efforts to react positively, see Richard Vines, His Maiesties

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15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32

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Concessions to the Bill of Abolition of Arch-Bishops and Bishops (London, 1660), dated 8 November 1648; Prynne, The Substance of a Speech, pp. 59-70, [K-K4 verso], 71—2; and David Underdown, Pride's Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971), pp. 133-7. A Declaration of the Commons of England. . . expressing the Reasons of the Adnulling and Vacating of these ensuing Votes. Reprinted in A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects [Somers Tracts], 2nd edn. (London, 1811), v, 172. The Humble Advice and Earnest Desires of Certain well-affected Ministers . . . of Banbury . . . and Bradyin . . . To his Excellency Thomas Lord Fairfax (London, 1649), P. 5The Humble Advice, p. 1. The Humble Advice, p. 9. Thomas Fairfax, Short Memorials of Thomas Lord Fairfax (London, 1699), p. 127: "All this I saw with grief and sorrow." Cf. Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament 1648-1653 (Cambridge, 1974), p. 116, on the Rump strategy "to appease moderates and presbyterians." A Letterfrom Utrecht, To the Assembly of Divines at Westminster (n.p., 1648), p. 2. Spelman, A Letterfrom Utrecht, [A]. Church Lands Not To Be Sold (n.p., 1648), pp. 72-3. [Attributed to J o h n Warner, Bishop of Rochester.] See Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA, 1977-80), in, 302; and Gardiner, The Scourge of Sacriledge (London, 1611), [L5]. O n sixteenth-century tensions involving clerical rights, see: Christopher Hill, Economic Problems of the Church (Oxford, 1956); Felicity Heal, Of Prelates and Princes (Cambridge, 1980); Michael Mendle, Dangerous Positions (Alabama, 1985), pp. 63-96; Peter Lake, "Conformist Clericalism? Richard Bancroft's Analysis of the Socio-economic Roots of Presbyterianism," Studies in Church History 24 (1987), 219-29. O n Jacobean tensions, see Andrew Foster, "The Clerical State Revitalized," in The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (Stanford, 1993), pp. 139-60. Antisacrilegus (London, 1660), p. 11. De non temerandis ecclesiis, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1646), [C3 verso]. O n this point see also the anonymous Noli me tangere (1642), which is heavily indebted to Spelman's writings. Spelman, De non temerandis ecclesiis, C4. William Prynne, The History of KingJohn, King Henry III, And the Most Illustrious King Edward the 1r(London, 1670), [K4], coined this term in rejecting the "sacrilege" argument. Spelman, De non temerandis ecclesiis, [A3 verso] -A4. Spelman, De non temerandis ecclesiis, A4-[A4 verso]. See Hill, Economic Problems, pp. 332-7; and Davies, Caroline Captivity, pp. 83-5. Church Lands, p. 6. Church Lands, p. 36.

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33 Church Lands, p. 34. See also Peter Heylyn, Ecclesia Vindicata: or, the Church of EnglandJustifed(London, 1657), [d2 verso]. 34 Cf. Patsy Griffin, "'Twas no Religious House till now': MarvelPs 'Upon Appleton House'", Studies in English Literature 28 (1988), 62. 35 Henry Spelman, An Apology of the Treatise "De non temerandis ecclesiis" against a Treatise by an unknown Author, [A4 verso]. Printed in Tithes too hot to Touch, [ed. Jeremiah Stephens] (London, 1646). 36 Spelman, An Apology, [B4]. 37 Mark Goldie, "The Civil Religion of James Harrington," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), p. 218. 38 The ironies of using this panegyric device will be especially apparent to those detecting criticism of Fairfax's retirement in this poem. On ancient privileges of sanctuary as related to church rights, see Nathaniel Bacon, An Historicall Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England. The First Part (London, 1647), P- J 39J a n d on Parliament's abolition of all such privileges in 1623, s e e Isobel D. Thornley, "The Destruction of Sanctuary," in Tudor Studies presented. . .to Albert Frederick Pollard (London, 1924), pp. 182-207. 39 See Church Lands, pp. 31-2. 40 See Prynne, The Substance of a Speech, p. 68; Fletcher, Outbreak, p. 102; and Gentles and Sheils, "Confiscation and Restoration," p. 4. 41 Burges, A Case Concerning the Buying of Bishops Lands (London, 1659), [A2 verso]. 42 See Burges, A Case, p. 18. 43 See [Cornelius Burges], An Humble Examination of a Printed Abstract of the Answers to Nine Reasons of the House of Commons, against the Votes of Bishops in Parliament (London, 1641), p. 43; and its answer, [Gerard Langbaine], Episcopall Inheritance; or a Reply to the Humble Examination (Oxford, 1641), p. 11. 44 Fides-Anglicana. Or, a Plea for the Public-Faith of these Nations, Lately pawned, forfeited and violated by some of theirformer Trustees (London, 1660), pp. 48-9. 45 "Archbishop Laud," History Today 33 (Aug. 1983), 28-9. 46 Martin Luther, Luther's Commentary on Genesis, trans. J. Theodore Mueller (Grand Rapids, 1958), 1, 88, where the Temple is described as a symbol of the Garden of Eden, which was to be, before the Fall, the "common temple of the world." 47 A Discourse Of Sacriledge (London, 1641), p. 2. 48 A Discourse Of Sacriledge, p. 3; for Milton, see Paradise Lost, Book iv, line 208. 49 A Discourse Of Sacriledge, pp. 3, 19, 25. 50 A Discourse Of Sacriledge, p. 4. 51 A Discourse Of Sacriledge, p. 6. 52 A Discourse Of Sacriledge, p. 22. 53 See William Laud, A Relation of the Conference between William Laud and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit, ed. C. H. Simpkinson (London, 1901), p. xxix; and Sharpe, "Archbishop Laud," pp. 28-9; see also Ronald Marchant, The Puritans and the Church Courts in the Diocese of York, 1560-1642 (London, i960), pp. 52-130;

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55

56

57

58

59 60

61

62 63 64

65 66

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J. Sears McGee, "William Laud and the Outward Face of Religion," in Leaders of the Reformation, ed. Richard DeMolen (London and Toronto, 1984), pp. 318—44; Davies, Caroline Captivity, pp. 72—9; and Peter Lake, " T h e Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness in the 1630s," in The Early Stuart Church, pp. 161-85. See Claire Cross, " 'Dens of Loitering Lubbers': Protestant Protest Against Cathedral Foundations, 1540-1640," Studies in Church History 9 (1972), 231-7. See also RT,I,I^I; and 11,147, 2 93Tithes too hot to be Touched, b<$. For contrasting views on the relationship between loss of church revenues and decline of learning, see Hooker, Works, in, 304; and John Milton, Areopagitica, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, [gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe], 8 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1953-82), 11, 531. See Cornelius Burges, Two Sermons Preached to the Honourable House of Commons (London, 1645), Second Sermon, p. 6, on the "delectation" associated with contemplation by those giving themselves to "Monkish Religion . . . sequestring themselves from that secular course of life." O n continental attitudes toward contemplation and their relationship to this poem, see Ruth Wallerstein, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison, 1965), pp. 306-36; and Annabel M. Patterson, Marvell and The Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ, 1978), pp. 102-6. [Serenus] Cressy, The Church-history of Brittanyfrom the Beginning of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (n.p., 1668), p. 862. A Roman Catholic convert, Cressy criticized "Modern Protestant writers" who "asperse [Edgar's] memory." Katharine R. Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain 1530-1645 (Oxford, 1979), p. 87. For a 1641 defense based on Spelman's Saxon research, see Episcopal Inheritance', and for later similar uses, see Ben Whalley, The Civil Rights, and Conveniences of Episcopacy (London, 1661); and Jeremiah Stephens, An Apology for the Ancient Rights and Power of Bishops to sit and Vote in Parliament (London, 1661). [Cornelius Burges], The Broken Line of Episcopal Inheritance (London, 1642), [A3 verso], [B], called the bishops' voting in Parliament "a pretended, rotten &mw-practise" and declared that "Spelmans booke, de Concilis, is no good . . . to prove . . . the Inheritance of Bishops"; see also Bacon, An Historicall Discourse, pp. 17-29. See RT, 1, 259. Mr. Smirke; or the Divine in Mode (London, 1676), p. 70; see also Prynne, The Substance of a Speech, [K3]. Mr. Smirke, pp. 72—3. Cf. William Lamont, " T h e Religion of Andrew Marvell: Locating the 'Bloody Horse,'" in The Political Identity of Andrew Marvell, pp. 135—56. [Langbaine], Episcopal Inheritance, p. 6. See An Apology for Purchases of Lands late of Bishops Deans and Chapters [1660], p. 3; William Prynne, A Seasonable Vindication of the Supreme Authority and Jurisdiction of Christian Kings, Lords, Parliaments (London, 1660), p. 91; and Prynne, History of King John, [1].

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67 [Sir Roger Twysden], An Historicall Vindication of the Church of England (London, 1657), p. 94; and Cressy, Church-history of Brittany, p. 868. 68 Selden, The Historie of Tithes (London, 1618), p. 218; and Fuller, The ChurchHistory of Britain (London, 1655), 11, 131-2. 69 Spelman, " T h e Larger Book of Tithes," Tithes too hot to Touch, pp. 184-5. 70 Of the History of Succession, in States, Countries, or Families (Oxford 1670), p. 304. 71 Fuller, Church-History, 11, 131. See also John Bale, The Actes of Englysh votaryes (1546), p. 65. 72 Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of . . . England, Scotland and Ireland, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1610), p. 576. 73 Camden, Britain, p. 576. For condemnation of Edgar and Dunstan for this innovation, see Matthew Parker, De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae (1572), pp. 49-57, a work Marvell quoted in RT, 1, 256-60.

CHAPTER NINE

Entering The Temple: women, reading, and devotion in seventeenth-century England Helen Wilcox

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence . . . Continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. (i Timothy 2.11-15) These infamous words of St. Paul, which must have formed the authoritative scriptural text for many a misogynist sermon at church and in the home, may serve to remind us of the constraints upon women's access to the word (and the Word) in a period of profound religious sensitivity such as the seventeenth century in England.1 The essential characteristic of a Christian woman, repeated in consecutive sentences in the Pauline text, is "silence": a silence representing submission, the silence of one who is "subject" to another's authority, a pupil or learner who is expressly forbidden to teach but must ever increase her holiness. It is interesting to observe how the word "holiness" replaces "hope" in this sober echo, for female consumption, of the more familiar trio of faith, hope and charity from 1 Corinthians 13.13; good works and a holy outlook were apparently more significant than inner confidence when it came to women's spirituality. How, then, was a woman to fulfil the requirements of devotion and femininity in the seventeenth century, as laid down by St. Paul? The most obvious way for a woman to learn in silence was either to listen to a man, or to read. And while listening to male authorities — father, husband, minister — no doubt took up a fair proportion of a woman's life, the intriguing area with which this essay will be concerned is the devotional reading of some seventeenth-century women and, more importantly, its consequences - for the silence of the interaction between a reader and a text is not necessarily the silence of submission. 187

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The whole field of women's reading in the early modern period is a relatively new and thoroughly complex area of study. What was the real level of women's literacy in the seventeenth century, and what other means of access to books would women have had other than private reading? What were they recommended to read, what did they actually read and how did they get hold of their reading materials? What impact did their reading have on them and others, and what evidence is there to enable us to measure the significant effects of their reading on them and on the literary and devotional culture of which they were a part? We are only just beginning to answer some of these questions,2 and this essay will attempt to take the discussion a little further into specific examples by restricting itself to one test case of women's reading in seventeenthcentury England. The group of readers in question is the fascinating cross-section of women known to have read George Herbert's Temple, that most famous of volumes of English devotional verse published posthumously in 1633.3 Herbert's poetry was enormously popular in the seventeenth century, going through thirteen editions by 1709 and being widely read, cited and imitated by readers from a staggering range of political and denominational affiliations.4 It is thus not surprising that there should be some evidence of the existence of women readers of The Temple, though the small number of written accounts of their reactions (at least, those known to us so far) may well be related to the separateness of the skills of reading and writing at that time; it was quite possible to be able to read but not to write. Further, while a woman might read and absorb the teachings of men in the silence deemed proper by St. Paul and many a patriarch after him, there was felt to be something distinctly unsober about the idea of women writing in this period, and so the written records of reading habits and responses to books are likely to be rarer for women readers than for their male contemporaries. However, the accumulated evidence of Herbert's seventeenth-century female readers provides a fascinating picture, if in miniature, of the gender politics of devotional reading.5 It must be added that Herbert's Temple is unlike many of the works generally recommended at the time for female readers, since it is not primarily didactic; for the most part, rather than tell them how to conduct themselves before God, the poetic sequence allows its readers to experience spiritual conflicts and joys. Although the poet's aim in his sequence of "Church-porch," "Church" and "Church Militant" is indeed to "finde him (sic), who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice," the immediate effect of the poems was — as this quotation makes clear —

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to be "delight." Only after the verse had delighted would it be transformed into some kind of holy "sacrifice" by which the reader would learn and grow in spiritual maturity.6 Of the many "delightful" effects of Herbert's devotional lyrics, three seem to me to be of paramount importance when considering women readers of his day. First, the poems work very closely with biblical tones, phrases and narrative forms,7 so that the lyrics, though delightful, are sanctioned by their biblical origins and echoes - a significant factor when non-biblical reading, especially for women, was closely monitored. In fact, the poems were regarded as so close to biblical that Herbert was known to hisfirstgeneration of readers as another David, the "sweet singer" who had written Psalms for a contemporary Christian "Temple."8 The second effect of The Temple likely to have been important for the female reader is Herbert's use of the traditions and tropes of love lyrics, a mode normally used to write about, if not for, women. In fact, Herbert's poems are so close to the secular love lyric that at least one of them is a direct parody of a contemporary love poem and would probably have shared the familiar secular tune.9 These two qualities together suggest a pleasurable enticement in the reading of Herbert's lyrics. They offered the experience of reading love poetry which, because of the fact that it is addressed not to a human beloved but to "My God, My King,"10 is conducive to St. Paul's "faith and charity and holiness with sobriety." The interesting consequence is that the woman reader is less readily identified with the object of the poems than with their speaking subject. The process of reading The Temple, then, involves attraction and identification, activities which depend upon the third major element of Herbert's work, the autobiographical mode in which so many of the lyrics are written. Once the reader has listened to the proverbial, preaching manner of "The Church-porch," most of the hundred and fifty shorter poems of "The Church" do not require passive reception on the part of the reader, but participation. The first-person style turns the reader, in effect, into the protagonist of the poems, and the ironies of complexity and simplicity with which they are concerned thus also involve the reader. Those who enter The Temple in order to read become the articulators of love and frustration, doubt and devotion, not the recipients of them. This is the appeal of Herbert's poems for most readers - male and female, seventeenth-century and modern - but for early women readers it represented a radical opportunity to exchange passivity for activity, and to find a devotional voice. This is a kind of reading which certainly does not end in "silence."

HELEN WILGOX

The title-page of The Temple confirms the sense of this book as a space within which voices can be heard; its epigraph is a quotation from Psalm 29, "In his Temple doth every man speak of his honour."11 The Temple is, in David's words, a place where men (and women?) can speak as well as listen. The renowned musical quality of Herbert's poems, which are often constructed on the principle of polyphonic parts "vied / And multiplied,"12 also contributes to the dominant impression of multiple voices raised to praise God, in both speech and song by author and reader, within the Temple. Herbert himself had a very active image of reading, expressed with reference to that most special book, the Bible itself, but readily applicable to the devotional reading brought to bear on The Temple during the seventeenth century.13 The opening of the first sonnet on "The H. Scriptures" suggests a positively sensual ideal of reading: Oh Book! infinite sweetnesse! let my heart Suck ev'ry letter, and a hony gain, Precious for any grief in any part; To cleare the breast, to mollifie all pain.14 The reader's involvement here is emotional and devotional simultaneously (it is the "heart" that reads), but the reading is material and detailed (the individual "letter" is attended to). The experience is sensually delightful (the book is "sweetnesse" itself and its parts are to be "sucked" for "hony"), and we may recall that "delight" was primary in Herbert's sense of what his own poems offered to their readers. "The H. Scriptures 1" goes on to describe the power of the Bible not only to relieve pain (the effect of the "hony" above) but also to change those who read it, and here the speaker addresses female readers directly: Ladies, look here; this is the thankfull glasse, That mends the lookers eyes: this is the well That washes what it shows. Who can indeare Thy praise too much? Taking on the tone of a market-stall salesman offering his wares, the speaker argues the superiority of the Bible over all other forms of looking-glass. The metaphor is deliberately taken from the range of what are assumed to be feminine concerns, in this case vanity and decorativeness.15 The impact of devotional reading suggested by these lines is striking: the reader sees herself in the text, but is also "mended," transformed by the reading. The mirror is thus accurate (it does not change

Women, reading, and devotion in seventeenth-century England the image seen in it) but at the same time locates the source of need and puts right the sinful weaknesses, not in the image but in the viewer herself. The "well," again a carefully chosen metaphor from the womanly sphere of daily tasks such as drawing water, suggests a book which reflects but effortlessly cleanses those who look into it. This sense of the reader finding herself expressed in the biblical text is confirmed and developed in the second sonnet on "The H. Scriptures," where the active ideal of reading by cumulative cross-reference is put forward: This verse marks that, and both do make a motion Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie: Then as dispersed herbs do watch a potion, These three make up some Christians destinie: Such are thy secrets, which my life makes good, And comments on thee: for in ev'ry thing Thy words dofindeme out, and parallels bring, And in another make me understood.16 The model of reading here is based on memory and connection — what we read on one page "marks" what we read on another — and leads to another sense of the word "reading," an interpretation arrived at through the accumulation of appropriate cross-references. And this "reading" is none other than "some Christians destinie": an individual life story is to be found within the pages of the Bible. Readers of The Temple, by analogy, will find themselves inscribed in and between the poems - "Thy words do finde me out" - and the process ends in "making" the reader "understood." Reading is a mutual revelation, dependent upon the text and its "secrets" but also on the reader, whose "life" itself "comments" on the book being read. Herbert's The Temple is therefore built on a principle of reading which is active, mutual and transformative, and this was a process which was envisaged by the poet himself in terms applicable to women as well as men. However, when looked at superficially from the female reader's perspective, The Temple is not obviously woman-friendly. The poems make reference to such unpromising clusters as "sick folks, women" and "those whom passions sway," as well as to the idea of poetic language as a prostitute whom the poet gallantly rescues, washes, and brings (Mary Magdalen-like) to the church door. 171 would contend, however, that these features would be largely irrelevant to the seventeenthcentury woman reader when set against the appeal of the predominant tone and concerns of his lyrics. What The Temple offered its women readers was moral and spiritual issues dramatized with a ring of auto-

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biographical truth, and a relationship with the divine embodied in a verbal mode which, while biblically inspired, was at once domesticated and witty. The personal humility common to both Christianity and culturally defined femininity is expressed but also problematized in Herbert's lyrics such as "The Holdfast" and the "Jordan" poems. The love lyrics to Christ in The Temple allow the reader to become the speaker and, as in "Love in," often take up the feminizing language of devotion, regarding courtship from the perspective of the recipient of Love's "welcome."18 11

It is thus perhaps not surprising that a number of seventeenth-century women took up the invitation to the "Ladies" to "look here" into The Temple. Let us begin, appropriately, with a piece of visual evidence of an early female reader of Herbert's poems: the "Great Picture" (completed in 1646) of the family of Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Northumberland, in which Herbert's small volume is depicted on the bookshelves of the mature Lady Anne.19 One might at first be tempted to speculate that the books appear in this rare visual catalogue simply as a statement of her taste, a status symbol rather than sign of actual reading. If this were true, the evidence would still be significant; Herbert's was a name worth putting onto the spine of a painted book in a Lady's library. It is also likely that the Countess included Herbert's works on her shelf because of her personal connection with him when he was at Bemerton and she at Wilton House.20 But the picture suggests more than either social or personal reasons for the presence of The Temple. While the books in the panel depicting the young Lady Anne are rather too neat to imply regular consultation, those shown behind the older portrait are refreshingly messy, resembling the true jumble of a much-used collection - and this is where The Temple is found, suggesting that she almost certainly did read it. Lady Anne may have read Herbert's poems as private devotions, or had them read aloud to her by her chaplain or companion; her diary indicates that both modes of "reading" were her custom.21 This gives us an additional model of seventeenth-century women's reading of Herbert; it was not always a private, "silent" affair but sometimes a communal and attentive listening to the lyrics read out by another reader. The contrast with a male mode of reading is fascinatingly suggested in the entry in Lady Anne's diary for 9 January, 1617:

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I went up to see the things in the closet and began to have Mr. Sandys's book read to me about the government of the Turks, my lord sitting the most part of the day reading in his closet.22 While Lady Anne experiences books as something aural and potentially social, her husband sits in private when he reads. Since the diary mentions the names of several female companions who read to Lady Anne, the shared femininity of her reading sessions may well have been significant too. Anne Clifford may have begun to read Herbert's poems because of her personal connection with him towards the end of his life. But how would other women come to read The Temple? There are many possible access routes, including recommendation, citation in other texts, or even the singing of Herbert's lyrics as hymns, but none of these would be specific to women readers. There is evidence, however, of actual recommendation of the The Temple as appropriate reading matter for women, and this is to be found in The Athenian Mercury, one of the earliest English newspapers, published (and largely written) by John Dunton from 1691 onwards. In the number for Tuesday, 24 October, 1693, Dunton replies on behalf of the "Learn'd Athenians" to a series of questions from an anonymous "Poetical Lady"; in the midst of enquiries ranging from anxiety over the wearing of pearls and patches to moral issues of loyalty and damnation, she asks: What Books of Poetry wou'd you Advise one that's Young, and extreamly delights in it, to read, both Divine and other?23 The printed answer makes reference to twenty-seven works or authors in total, and begins, not surprisingly, with biblical poetry in recent paraphrases such as Sandys's Psalms and Lloyd's Canticles. When it moves on to original poetry in the "Divine" category, the list features Cowley's Davideis, Sir J. Davies's JVosce Teipsum, Herbert's and Crashaw's Poems, Milton's Paradices, and (if you have patience) Wesley's Life of Christ?A Thus Herbert's poems were on the reading list of at least one "Poetical Lady" of the 1690s. The ensuing controversy over Dunton's last, less than tactful, remark about the patience necessary for a reader of Wesley's Life of Christ incidentally serves to confirm that the author of this advice indeed had women readers in mind. In order to extricate himself from the embarrassment of this "slurring Parenthesis" which a subsequent correspondent took to be an insult to Wesley, Dunton asserts that his comment was not a

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negative judgement on Wesley's work but a sign of his respect for its seriousness. Besides, he adds, the person who sent in the original query was of the Female Sex, for which Reason We doubted her Constancy might fail her in reading a Work of that length.25 Thus by means of a second "slurring" remark — this time doubting the resiliance of female readers - Dunton wriggles out of the consequences of his first comment. This intriguing example of journalistic sleight-ofhand signals both the initial perceived appropriateness of The Temple for women, and the condescension towards women implicit in Dunton's advice. The reference to Herbert in The Athenian Mercury is an unusually explicit recommendation of The Temple for a specifically female readership, but there are several other, less overt instances of an assumed link between Herbert and women readers in the seventeenth century. Many children from the 1670s onwards — female as well as male — would have encountered Herbert's works through Thomas White's Little Book for Little Children, which ends with a selection of moralistic couplets in alphabetical order of their opening letter, all taken from The Temple (mainly "The Church-porch") and entitled "Youth's Alphabet: or, Herbert's Morals."26 Under "D," for example, the non-conformist minister White urges the little children (using the Anglican parson's words), Dare to be true, nothing need a lie; A fault which needs it most, grows two thereby.27 It is entirely uncertain whether such a combined learning-aid to literacy and morality would have been much used for the benefit of young girls; more significant is the fact that it probably would have been recommended, and used, by many a mother. Another source of contact with Herbert's poems was Thomas Willis's Key of Knowledg (1682), a catechismal handbook designed for "Children and servants," a group which not only itself contained a fair proportion of females but also had a lot in common with women as disadvantaged persons in terms of literacy and independence. Willis's book, representing (in contrast to Thomas White's Little Book) guidance from the established church, ends with an anthology of some few pieces of Divine Poems, which may serve to imbellish the memory, and delight the mind.28 These "Apples of Gold in Pictures of Silver," as Willis characterizes his collection, consist to a considerable extent of proverb-like sayings from

Women, reading, and devotion in seventeenth-century England The Temple, including the whole of "Charms and Knots" and, as ever, much of "The Church-porch." The anthologist asserts that Herbert's poems are "more fit to be Imprinted on the Memories of Young People, than Prophane Songs."29 Specific advice to women in 1673 ~~ namely, Richard Allestree's The Ladies Calling - was written for a readership in which knowledge of Herbert's poems could apparently be taken for granted. In order to illustrate and clinch his point on the need for ladies to "restrain all excessive talkativeness," Allestree quotes a line and a half from "The Churchporch" with the introduction, "This is ingeniously exprest by our divine Poet Herbert"^ The lines in question are 305-6, "a civil guest / Will no more talk all, then eat all the feast," and Allestree finds Herbert a useful source of support for his own view that "the monopolizing of discourse" is "one of the greatest assumings imaginable." The vocabulary of his instruction is revealing: when a woman talks "excessively," she "assumes," presumably a reference to her taking a social position inappropriate to her gender. Allestree suggests that "modesty," so fundamental a term in the instruction of early modern women, should provide the "mesure of speaking" as well as its "manner." For a woman to talk without restraint is an "indecency in conversation." So Herbert's lines are used here to keep the women decent; their speech is loaded with sexual threat and the "divine Poet" can help to contain this. A poet whose works appealed to female readers would make a most persuasive authority in a conduct book addressed to women. Allestree's is the most contentious item in a sequence of pieces of evidence of Herbert's works being read by women in a variety of circumstances in the seventeenth century. We have discovered The Temple depicted as part of a woman's library, recommended to be read by a "Poetical Lady," quoted and adapted in books for children, servants and those who gave them rudimentary education, and referred to as an authority in a ladies' conduct book. But it is not at all surprising that one further group of women should have felt a particularly deep association with The Temple: the sisters, wives and daughters of the Little Gidding community led by Herbert's friend Nicholas Ferrar. The splendid manuscript copy of Herbert's poems (now in the Bodleian Library) was almost certainly copied out by Ferrar's nieces, Anna and Mary Collett. As early as 1634, one year after Herbert's death and the publication of The Temple, Susanna Collett (Ferrar's sister, mother of the calligraphers) wrote to her son Edward in the East Indies, sending him "three books of Mr. Herbert's" and pointing out that they "are here (and worthily) of

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great esteem."31 The woman letter-writer here is not only a purveyor of Herbert's text but a conveyor of the critical and devotional taste of her community. Almost a generation later, in 1650, another of Ferrar's nieces, Virginia, received a letter from one Edward Johnson, a settler of the Virginia Company, who had evidently also received a consignment of books from the Ferrar family intended to edify and entertain the members of the new American colony. Among the books received was The Temple, which Johnson singles out for special praise in his letter to Virginia Ferrar: Herbert's poems I received and at the opening of it I went into the Church and fell down on my knees to pray for you and your religious family.32 Here the bond between Virginia and Virginia, the English woman and the American settlement, was symbolically sealed by Herbert's book. Like her aunt, Susanna Collett, before her, Virginia Ferrar was more than just a reader of Herbert's work; these women were part of a group actively promoting the poetry and devotion, the critical and spiritual standards, of Herbert and all that he came to represent to the Little Gidding community and its tradition. Women readers and admirers of Herbert's works thus played a part in the forming of the literary and devotional taste of a generation and a new nation. in

It is becoming clear that Herbert's poetry was recommended to women, owned and read by them, used in books for them, and actively distributed and recommended by them in the seventeenth century. But what do we know of the impact or effect of The Temple on those women who did read it? For this we must turn to the writings of women themselves. Fortunately, there is a small number of Herbert's women readers whose jottings or more formal works record the use they made of their reading. Dame Sarah Cowper, for example, an avid keeper of commonplacebooks and diaries, chose to write out in one of her notebooks in the very last years of the seventeenth century a selection of quotations which she headed "Precepts out of Herbert's Poem."33 Her next seven pages are full of "sweet phrases"34 from The Temple. Sarah Cowper's favourite phrases seem to have come from "The Church-porch," as this is the poem most extensively quoted, beginning with the temperate moral advice "Stay at the third glass" from the seventh stanza. Extracts from eighteen different Herbert poems follow, but only two of these — "Jordan

Women, reading, and devotion in seventeenth-century England 11" and "The Method" — are given in full, and only one — "Conscience" - is identified by its title. The Herbert selection is followed immediately by extracts from four poems by Christopher Harvey, whose Synagogue professed to imitate The Temple and was bound with it in several seventeenth-century editions. This isolated piece of manuscript evidence identifies Sarah Holled, daughter of a London merchant, wife from 1664 of the baronet and MP for Hertford borough, Sir William Cowper, as an attentive and diligent reader for whom The Temple was, first and foremost, a helpful source of moral "precepts"; this is also confirmed by the index to her commonplace book as a whole, which offers a list of moral qualities illustrated by her chosen quotations. The title given for her anthology of Herbert snippets - "Precepts out of Herbert's Poem" - not only draws attention to her culling of wise and memorable sayings out of the The Temple, but also suggests by its singular "Poem" that Cowper regarded the whole work as a unity rather than an assembly of shorter lyrics or sub-sections. The extracts appear in the order of their occurrence in the sequence, conveying a sense of Cowper working her way through The Temple and picking out her favourite lines. However, there was probably also an element of remembering rather than copying, since Herbert's line breaks and stanza forms are not observed. This, in turn, would seem to emphasize the significance of meaning (rather than lyric technique) for this earnest seventeenth-century reader. Most interesting in this respect are Sarah Cowper's alterations to, or intrusions into, the original text, often freeing short passages from their immediate Herbertian context and thus making them available for an autobiographical application by Cowper. There are several signs that she rendered the text personal by means of apparently negligible changes — for example, in her citing of the first four lines from "The Answer": My comforts drop and melt away like snow: I shake my head, and all the thoughts and ends, Which my fierce youth did bandie, fall and flow Like leaves about me.35 Herbert's original reference to "my fierce youth" in the third line is altered by Cowper into "my fine youth," "fine" perhaps being a more seemly adjective than "fierce" for a female speaker to employ in describing her own younger days. This brief taste of "The Answer" is immediately followed in the commonplace-book by the opening of "The Elixer":

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Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see, which in The Temple is nineteen poems distant. Cowper's chosen juxtaposition of the two extracts (without an intervening title) implies that she wished to learn to perceive God's presence - the plea in "The Elixer" even in the bitter loss of "comforts" described and brought close to home in the opening lines of "The Answer." The selection as a whole focuses on self-discipline and the right response to affliction; this mood is highlighted by the addition of a pointing finger in the margin opposite her transcription of Herbert's "Obedience," line 28, a line which reminds the reader of the example of Christ whose own "sorrows were in earnest."36 Like many seventeenth-century readers of The Temple, Sarah Cowper appears to have been unable to distinguish between Herbert's work and that of his often unsubtle imitator, Harvey. Cowper's extracts from Harvey's Synagogue are not separated in any way from those taken out of The Temple, and all appear under the same overall title, "Precepts out of Herbert's Poem." However, other qualities suggest that Sarah Cowper was a rather thoughtful reader of Herbert's work. Her inclusion of "Jordan n" is one of only two known direct references to this self-reflexive poem in the entire seventeenth century, and yet she chose it as one of the two texts which she opted to copy out in full. This might suggest a sensitivity to the injunction of the "friend" in "Jordan 11" to "copy out" the "sweetnesse readie penn'd," not in this case in "love" but in the words of Herbert's lyrics. Her mingling of partial quotations from Herbert in newly formed sequences produces a fragmented medley of "readie penn'd" lines, a phenomenon which may be disturbing to the modern reader's sensibility towards the original text. However, this technique reveals a personalizing of The Temple which follows the pattern of Herbert's own treatment of biblical texts. In The Priest to the Temple he refers to the Bible as a source of "Precepts" for life,37 anticipating the term employed by Cowper with regard to The Temple, and her method of combining extracts from different poems recalls his description in "The H. Scriptures n" (see p. 191 above) of creative Bible reading by cross-reference. Her selection juxtaposes "verses" which "mark" or "make a motion" to one another in her own reading of The Temple, thus representing - as do all such anthologies of quotations - an interpretative strategy, whether conscious or unconscious. And in this process the reader who writes in her commonplace-book discovers "parallels" with

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her own experience and finds herself "understood" - comprehended or more clearly depicted - in the "another" which is here not the Bible but Herbert's poems. Cowper's commonplace-book supplies evidence of a woman reader who extracted from, interpreted, and made personal use of Herbert's text. This type of response, involving autobiographical identification within The Temple, is also the principle underlying the use of a Herbert poem in the Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval. Written in the 1660s, this intriguing work combines self-examination, prayer and exhortation with secular musings and memoirs. In a section entitled "Meditation's upon a fine sunshine day in the month of June," Delaval unites spiritual ideas of life's transience with a heartfelt personal lament of women's dependence on physical beauty: To this bright day and it's vanishing, I canfindnothing in my thoughts sofitto be compared as a beautyfull young vergin, since she will but for a time keep that name, and as long as she dos so by some she is esstimed and lov'd, and by a croud of other's made to beleive so. However she is despiss'd by none till her night aproach's. And then all her admierurs forsake her . . . 38 The fact that the youthful Delaval identifies herself with the "beautyfull young vergin" becomes clear as the meditation continues. When "beauty is banish'd by sicknesse or youth by old age" and the "croud" turn out to have been mere "flaterur's," only then, Delaval asserts, can a "true friend" be discerned; and she longs for "such a true friend," the discovery of whom would "much more rejoyce my heart then the oyntment and perfume Soloman speak's of."39 As the meditation draws to an end symbolically in parallel with the progress of the day, Delaval once again contemplates the "disfigureing" sicknesses and "sharp and lasting" sorrows which are the enemies of female beauty. However, she finds a way out of her melancholy by uniting her observations with those of Herbert in his poem "Vertue": But one exception may be made to what I now say which is that, if the beauty I am speakeing of be like what Mr. Harbert discrib's in his poem's, she shall shine agen much more than ever, shine eternally in those bless'd mantion's above which our Saviour spoke of to his deciples in there greatest afliction's that they might meditate upon them and be comforted. Only a faier and vertuous soul Like season'd timber never gives, But when the whole world turn's to cole Then cheifly lives.40

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Once again we see the personalizing of what "Mr. Harbert" wrote. In the original final stanza of "Virtue," the first adjective for the soul is "sweet," picking up the key word repeated in every preceding stanza. Delaval, probably through slight misremembrance though also because of the appropriateness to her meditation, alters "sweet" to "faier," a onesyllable synonym which draws the sweetness more specifically into the realm of "beauty" which is her central concern. In this case what is fascinating is the ease with which Herbert's material is made tofit- indeed, to offer the conclusion to - what is so obviously a female meditation. It is not, as it might at first appear, a generalized consideration of the passing of time, for the commonplaces are particularized in terms of a woman's social experience, including the vivid and almost claustrophobic sense of a circle of male "admierurs" who genuinely esteem her, hemmed in by a "croud" who are "made to beleive so" and whose unreliability suggests the fundamental vulnerability of her situation. It is perhaps the woman more than the soul who, in keeping up her selfesteem, must be "like season'd timber" which "never gives." And when the spiritual reward is eventually described by Delaval, it is again firmly feminized: "she shall shine agen." The soul, feminized by devotional tradition, is here specifically the essence of a woman. The evidence of Herbert's early women readers begins to create a picture of the radical potential of women's reading, through which, in the case of Delaval, Herbert's religious lyric could offer a sympathetic and yet authoritative voice in her meditative analysis of women's difficulties in society. It is also important to note that Herbert's poetry appealed to women in many different groups within seventeenthcentury society, breaking through not only the boundary of gender among its readers but many religious and political divisions in addition. The aesthetic which appealed to the royalist Lady Delaval, for example, also infiltrated the work of the puritan poet An Collins in the 1650s. Her one volume of verses, the Divine Songs and Meditations of 1653, is underpinned by the faith expressed in Herbert's "true Hymne" that if th'heart be moved, Although the verse be somewhat scant, God doth supplie the want. This aesthetic of sincerity, dangerous when applied with neither skill nor faith, in Collins's case is conscientiously adhered to as the justification for her confessional verse. The opening poem, "The Discourse," addresses a readership assumed to be "indeared" to "pietie," who will,

Women, reading, and devotion in seventeenth-century England therefore, delight "greatly in sinceritie" and consider that, if they find any "error" in the collection, "Twas want of Art, not true intent of mind."41 She describes herself — like so many women writers before and since — as one who is "unskilfull" in poetry, moved to "meddle" with something greater than she, undertaking "That which I cannot well end or begin."42 She advises her readers that before working their way through her poems they must first resolve themselves herein, If they consider, tis not want of skill, Thats more blameworthy than want of good will.43 She openly discusses the tension between a commitment to "honest meanings" and the obligation to use her poetic "talent" (or be called to "strict account" like the servant in the parable of the talents).44 The combination of the principles of "A true Hymne" and the self-awareness of the "Jordan" poems identifies the source of Collins's poetic heritage, perhaps caught "at two removes"45 since there is no direct reference to The Temple in her small volume. The fundamental similarity to Herbert's work lies in attitude rather than poetic technique. Her autobiographical discourses and lyrics serve to convey, in the words of the author, an "image of her mind,"46 words which cannot fail to remind us of Herbert's own reported description of The Temple as "a picture of . . . many spiritual conflicts."47 Her life story in "The Discourse" may be likened to Herbert's "Affliction 1" in her account of "Crosses" and "Cares" and the necessity of rejecting all "counterfet content."48 However, the closest that Collins comes to Herbert's manner is, not surprisingly, in the devotional mode of her lyrics, which draw extensively on the Song of Songs and thus gain a more intimate tone in spiritual communion with Christ: For in our Union with the Lord alone, Consists our happinesse.49 Her songs celebrate "the firme fruition, / Of his Sweet presence" — a sweetness which can be tasted and smelt - and they, almost simultaneously, bewail the times when Christ "seemes to hide" and the soul "Must needs confused lie."50 Behind these poems we surely hear Herbert's "The Odour" and "Deniall" in the physicality of the devotional experience, the plainly expressed closeness to Christ and the range of moods encountered even within one poem. Her lyric "The winter of my infancy," with the excessively modest title of "Another Song," resembles

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Herbert's writing in its atmosphere, vocabulary and, for once, its poetic form too. The poem recounts Collins's unhappy youth which was the reverse of what the "spring" period of a life ought to be, and the stanza form expressively dwindles towards a shortened last line as if in imitation of her drooping life: Thus is my Spring now almost past in heavinesse, The Sky of pleasure's over-cast with sad distresse For by a comfortlesse Eclips, Disconsolation and sore vexacion, My blossom nips.51 The "nipt blossome" of the speaker's "discontented" spirit in Herbert's "Deniall," the "eclipses" in "Misery" and "A Parodie," and the uncertain spiritual seasons in "The Flower," are vividly recalled here. The poem ends, rather as "The Flower" does, not with a resolution of the personal narrative but a diversion into "contemplation" of "heavenly blis" which, Collins reminds us, "Neither Logician nor Rhetorician / Can well define."52 Blunt though these last words are, they echo the assumptions of many poems in The Temple, particularly the dramatic escape from the rhetoric of "Prayer i" into the final phrase "something understood." As Collins also insists, the "pleasures" of "blis divine" are beyond definition. Collins's work is a fine example of the almost hidden process of the absorption of a devotional aesthetic through reading. Her poems suggest that in Herbert she found a model of a poet for whom plainness and modesty (qualities expected of a woman, and particularly a woman writer) could be not only spiritually apt but also expressively liberating. The influence of Herbert, in the fundamental rhetoric of sincerity as well as in the lyrical forms of her writing, mark Collins as a reader who thoroughly entered The Temple. Of course, there will have been many more women who read Herbert's poetry and revealed their absorption of its phrases and attitudes only in the transitory modes of conversation or prayer. Thus far, however, we have encountered seventeenth-century Englishwomen who, while treating The Temple in a variety of different fashions, all had a fundamentally religious purpose in mind. My final example of a woman reader of Herbert is one who wrote on secular subjects, though she employed a sacred vocabulary for her more profane friendships: "There's a Religion in our Love" wrote Katherine Philips, the "Matchless Orinda," to her friend Lucasia.53 Following the logic of this

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line, Philips expresses the depth of her conception of human friendship in the very terms used by Herbert for Christ; there is, indeed, a "Religion" (or a religious vocabulary and tone) in their love. As she wrote in the song "To my Excellent Lucasia, on our Friendship," never had Orinda found A Soul till she found thine; Which now inspires, cures and supplies, And guides my darkned Breast: For thou art all that I can prize, My Joy, my Life, my Rest.54 This last line is so close to the opening of Herbert's "true Hymne" - "My joy, my life, my crown!" — that it suggests a conscious echo, particularly in view of the fact that Herbert uses a similar triple pattern in "The Call": "Come, my Joy, my Love, my Heart." This is sacred parody in reverse; Herbert's lines are here re-appropriated by a secular love lyric, the very genre which originally gave The Temple its distinctive range and intimacy. As Herbert wrote in 1610, addressing God, Doth Poetry Wear Venus Livery? only serve her turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and layes Upon thine Altar burnt? Cannot thy love Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise As well as any she?55 The irony of Philips's borrowing of Herbert's triple-form line is that in its new context the words are, to complete the circle, once again addressed to a "she" (though not quite "any she")56 as in the original secular tradition. However, the fact that in its new setting the line is written by a "she" renders this new echo doubly fascinating. In the complex play of power between women and men, readers and poets, humans and God, the female reader has usurped all the leading positions. IV

Thus there were indeed women who, in several senses, entered The Temple in the seventeenth century. By reading they expressed themselves within and through the poems; by echoing, quoting and absorbing Herbert's lines, they found a devotional aesthetic and a voice. These women readers were no passive recipients of the text; they were remarkably active, as the

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preceding pages have shown. My researches (so far) have brought to light examples of women's involvement with Herbert's work at every stage of the transmission and reception of a text: copying the original manuscript, recommending the printed work and distributing copies of it, finding it to be appropriate reading matter for women, reading it or having it read to them, learning from its spiritual authority or through adaptations of its moral phrases, selecting and copying parts of it into a commonplacebook, quoting it in support of their own experience, and echoing its aesthetic and its language in their own poetic writings. This is a remarkable range of activities, but what do they all have in common? I would suggest that they share a sense that the devotional mode of The Temple could be appropriated by the women readers and made their own, whether in writing lyrics on the love of God or woman, or absorbing phrases and attitudes into the texts of their own lives. The reading mode found among these women is personal, creative and at times radical in its revelation of the imaginative energies with which women were able to interpret and use Herbert's text. It seems that Herbert's sacred love poetry supplied acceptable reading which mediated between the Bible and the self, and, while skilled and admirable, also gave scope for personal weakness to play a role and asserted the superiority of plainness over "quaint words, and trim invention."57 For women, whose access to the traditions of "quaint" and "trim" rhetoric was restricted and of whom weakness was assumed, this poetic devotion was both sympathetic and empowering. It is, of course, one of the ironies of reading that a text can be used in support of opposite causes. This is abundantly clear in the reception history of The Temple, which was read by Charles I before his execution and by Oliver Cromwell's chaplain afterwards. But in the case of Herbert's women readers it is equally true. On the one hand we find Richard Allestree depending upon "The Church-porch" in his advice to women to restrict their "talkativeness," thus upholding the stereotype of the modestly silent lady who, if she chattered, would represent a threat against decency. On the other hand we discover Elizabeth Delaval quoting "Vertue" at the conclusion of her private meditation challenging the social misunderstandings of women's beauty. Different pages of the same book strengthened gender codes in public and gave secret solace in the face of them. The women's use of Herbert's work also emerged through an enormous variety of modes, from the spectacle of the painting commissioned by Anne Clifford to the hiddenness of the Herbert medley in Sarah Cowper's commonplace-book or the indirect

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poetic echoes in An Collins's Divine Songs and Meditations. But what all these instances tell us is that women's reading could be not only attentive and sensitive but also interactive and constructive. The women who read The Temple entered a place of holiness, power and tradition, as its title implies; but by entering it they learned to speak with a new voice, as well as to "learn in silence with all subjection," to quote St. Paul. "In his Temple doth every man speak of his honour," stated Herbert's title-page (after the Psalms), and we can now assert that the use of "man" here cannot be interpreted as an exclusion of women from Herbert's written Temple. The devotional reading of his poems is, and was then, neither an all-male nor a silent activity; it is, rather, a drama of voices, including the reader's own.

NOTES

1 For a study of this phenomenon, see Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500—iy20 (London, 1993). 2 See, for example, Jacqueline Pearson, " 'Who is't can read a woman?': Women Reading, Reading Women, 1500-1700," in Women and Literature in Britain, 1500-1700, ed. by Helen Wilcox (Cambridge, forthcoming). 3 George Herbert, The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (Cambridge, 1633). 4 See C. A. Patrides (ed.), George Herbert: the Critical Heritage (London, 1983), Helen Wilcox, " 'Something Understood': the Reputation and Influence of George Herbert to 1715," Oxford University D.Phil thesis, 1984; and Robert H. Ray, The Herbert Allusion Book: Allusions to George Herbert in the Seventeenth

Century, Studies in Philology: Texts and Studies (Chapel Hill, 1986). 5 In an earlier version of this paper, I considered the evidence of Herbert's early female readers from a more Herbertian perspective - that is, asking what it tells us about the reception of The Temple rather than focusing on the women themselves as readers. I am grateful to the organisers of the Clark Library conference "Herbert and his Contemporaries" (November 1993) for their generous permission to develop the material in this way. 6 George Herbert, "The Church-porch" ("Perirrhanterium," lines 5-6), in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1974), p. 33. All further references are to this edition. 7 The fullest consideration of this phenomenon is Chana Bloch, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (Berkeley, 1985). 8 Barnabus Oley, "A Prefatory View of the Life and Vertues of the Authour," in Herbert's Remains (London, 1652), anv. 9 Herbert's lyric, simply entitled "A Parodie," is based on "Song: Soules joy, now I am gone," attributed to William Herbert, third Earl of Pembroke. See English Poems of George Herbert, pp. 187 and 211.

2O6 10 11 12 13

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"Jordan i." Psalm 29.9, Book of Common Prayer version. "Easter." For a discussion of the early treatment of Herbert's poetry as a kind of contemporary scripture, see Helen Wilcox, " 'Heaven's Lidger Here': Herbert's Temple and Seventeenth-century Devotion," in Images of Belief in Literature, ed. David Jasper (London, 1984), pp. 153-68. "The H. Scriptures 1," p. 76. The relating of metaphors to the interests of those who would read or hear them is specifically recommended by Herbert in his Priest to the Temple: Christ referred to "mustard-seed, and lillyes" in his parables told to country people so that "by familiar things hee might make his Doctrine slip the more easily into the hearts even of the meanest" {The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford, 1941), p. 261). "The H. Scriptures 11," English Poems, p. 77. "Constancie," "The Forerunners." "Love in." The "Great Picture," a Clifford family triptych, hangs in Appleby Castle, Cumbria. See Herbert's letter to "the Right Honourable the Lady Anne," Works, pp. 376-7. See, for instance, references in the diary of Lady Anne for April 1616 (when she rises early and goes into the garden for private meditation, taking a prayer book with her) and January 1617 (when "Rivers used to read to me in Montaigne's plays, and Moll Neville in the Faerie Queene"), in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-century Englishwomen, ed. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London, 1989), pp. 40, 46. Her Own Life, p. 44. The Athenian Mercury (London, 1693), vol. 12, number 1 (recto). Ibid, vol. 12, number 1 (verso). Ibid, vol. 12, number 4 (recto). Thomas White, A Little Book for Little Children (London, 1671?), title page and pp. 91-3. The only edition held by the British Library (and cited here) is the twelfth, dating from 1702; twelve editions in the space of thirty years suggests how widespread and popular the reading of this book must have been. Ibid., p. 92. These same lines ("The Church-porch," lines 77-8) also appear in White's main text, with the advice to "dear Children" to "learn these verses" (p. 15). Thomas Willis, D. D., The Key of Knowledg (London, 1682), A9r. Ibid., p. 137. Richard Allestree, The Ladies Calling (Oxford, 1673), P- 7Nicholas Ferrar, Two Lives, ed. J. E. B. Mayor (Cambridge, 1855), p. 313. A. L. Maycock, Chronicles of Little Gidding (London, 1954), p. 175.

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33 Hertfordshire Record Office MS D/EP F44 (hereafter referred to as Cowper MS), pp. 348-56. 34 "The Forerunners," line 13. 35 Cowper MS, p. 354. 36 Ibid., p. 351. 37 Herbert, Works, p. 228. 38 The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval, ed. Douglas G. Greene (Gateshead, 197s), P. 5539 Ibid., pp. 55-6. 40 Ibid. 41 An Collins, Divine Songs and Meditations (London, 1653), p. 2. 42 Ibid., p. 3. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., pp. 2 and 23; Matthew 25.14-30. 45 Herbert, "Jordan 1." 46 Collins, Divine Songs, p. 4. 47 Isaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London, 1670), p. 74. 48 Collins, Divine Songs, pp. 4, 8. 49 Ibid., p. 29. 50 Ibid., pp. 31, 30. 51 Ibid., p. 57. 52 Ibid., p. 58. 53 Katherine Philips, "Friendship's Mystery," in Poems by the Incomparable, Mrs. / a ? (1664), p. 43. 54 Ibid., pp. 104-5. 55 Herbert, "Sonnet 1" from Walton's Lives, in English Poems, p. 205. 56 In the world of Orinda, Lucasia was the designated idealized image for Anne Owen; see The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda,

vol. 1: the Poems, ed. Patrick Thomas (Stump Cross, 1990), pp. 8-9. 57 "Jordan 11."

CHAPTER

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Contextualizing Dryden's Absalom: William Lawrence, the laws of marriage, and the casefor King Monmouth Mark Goldie

In the opening lines of Absalom and Achitophel John Dryden depicts a polygamous golden age when men freely spread their seed, unencumbered by the Christian law of marriage: In pious times, e'r Priest-craft did begin, Before Polygamy was made a sin; When man, on many, multiply'd his kind, E'r one to one was, cursedly, confind: When Nature prompted, and no law deny'd Promiscuous use of Concubine and Bride; It was under this dispensation that Absalom, "so beautiful so brave," was born to one of King David's concubines. Dryden's Absalom represents Charles IFs illegitimate son James, the duke of Monmouth, who had been born to a Welshwoman called Lucy Walter. Charles had bedded her in 1649, during his exile in France. Now, in the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81, Monmouth, "the Protestant duke," staked a claim to the throne against "the Catholic duke," the king's brother and heir, James, duke of York. The fate of Protestant England, so it seemed to the Whigs, was in the balance because Monmouth was barred from the throne by his illegitimacy. But what if Monmouth was not "illegitimate" after all? What if "promiscuous use of concubine" was no sin? Dryden ironizes a libertine and anticlerical view that nature's laws are more liberal about sexual morality than those sanctioned by the church. By imposing a ceremonial apparatus upon marriage, the church had usurped control over the laws of bastardy and inheritance. By the purer law of nature the duke of Monmouth was, simply, his father's eldest son. It was "priestcraft" that excluded the Protestant heir.l A few months before the publication of Dryden's poem in November 1681, precisely this case had been argued in a remarkable treatise by an aged Whig lawyer called William Lawrence. The book appeared in two instalments. Marriage by the Moral Law of God Vindicated was published in 208

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late summer 1680, but the printing of the rest was interrupted by a raid on seditious printers. That was galling, for parliament was due to assemble on 21 October, and planned to debate the succession. On the 25th, protesting against the "interdiction of the press," Lawrence sent a copy of the incomplete treatise to the Whig leader, the earl of Shaftesbury, whom he acclaimed as the "chief assertor of the Protestant religion and liberties" - but whom Dryden derided as the crafty Achitophel. Lawrence announced that, in the present contest between the lineal and collateral heirs, his book "unanswerably proved" that the king's eldest son was the true legatee of the crown, and that, notwithstanding "all intrigues of Court," parliament should immediately proclaim the Protestant succession.2 In November a Bill to exclude the duke of York passed the House of Commons but was rejected by the Lords. The second instalment of Lawrence's treatise, The Right of Primogeniture in Succession to the Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland, carries the date

1681 and appeared at the turn of the new year. It concluded with an urgent address to parliament. At the end of March another Exclusion Bill failed when the king abruptly dissolved his last parliament. Lawrence did not live to see the Whigs' defeat, for he died that same month.3 In arguing that the law of nature vindicated Monmouth's legitimacy, Lawrence challenged the whole fabric of marriage law. He claimed it was nothing but a priestly innovation foisted on European society in popish times. Despite its rambling digressiveness, his 600-page book is remarkable for its sweep, its intellectual resourcefulness, and its impatiently reformist agenda. Amid much else, he excoriated the slavery of wives in marriage, advocated divorce, attacked Chancery and the church courts, and argued for Anglo-Scottish Union, religious toleration, freedom of the press, and the amelioration of poverty. He wrote like a coffee-house libertine when expounding the phantasmagoric diversity of sexual and marital mores worldwide. But he also wrote like the old Puritan that he was, when condemning the gaudy and priapic rituals that accompanied contemporary marriage celebrations. His point - when he reached it - was that only a conspiracy of priests and Tories was barring Monmouth from the British throne. Dryden offers one point of entry to Lawrence's treatise, John Locke another. "Who heir?" asked Locke in the last and longest chapter of his First Treatise of Government. In one passage of this relentless assault on Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, he argued that though we may readily accept that kingship has its rights, the critical question remains: who is

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the rightful inheritor of the crown? Filmer's assertion of monarchical supremacy does not resolve whether inheritance should, for example, pass through the female line (as it did in England, but not in France), or whether an enfeebled elder son should give place to a healthy younger son, or which of two male twins born by caesarian section should reign. These are not "idle speculations, but such as in history we shall find, have concerned the inheritance of crowns and kingdoms." Amid this tally, Locke had a further query: Whether the elder son by a concubine, before a younger son by a wife? From whence also will arise many questions of legitimation, and what in nature is the difference betwixt a wife and a concubine? For as to the municipal or positive laws of men, they can signify nothing here.4 Locke implied that, whatever human laws teach, it is an open question whether the law of nature distinguishes between a wife and a concubine. It was the closest Locke came to canvassing Monmouth's claim. He knew that William Lawrence had advanced the relevant case. He owned Lawrence's book - he lent his copy to James Tyrrell in the 1690s and was anxious to get it back. Lawrence was a brother-in-law of Locke's lifelong friend, the physician Thomas Sydenham. As Shaftesbury's political secretary and librarian, Locke would have received Lawrence's presentation copy of Marriage by the Moral Law?

The duke of Monmouth's bid for the crown ended on the battlefield of Sedgemoor and the executioner's block. In 1685 ~ m e Y ear t n a t m e duke of York became England's last Catholic monarch - scarcely any of the Whig magnates stirred themselves in Monmouth's cause, and he depended on a makeshift army of West Country artisans and farmers. Five years earlier, "young Jemmy" had been the darling of gentry and commonalty alike. As the king's favorite son, the holder of high office, and a charismatic martial hero, he had impeccable credentials for those who wished to attack "old Jemmy" while avoiding the charge that they were reviving the anarchic anti-monarchism of the Civil War era. With hindsight the claims of William of Orange loom larger, for in 1688 he successfully overthrew James II and assumed the throne. But Monmouth had enormous eclat and his cause sponsored a wealth of literature. Among some one hundred items, there are accounts of his heroism in Continental wars, his royal progresses, and his cures of scrofula by "touching for the King's Evil"; poems and songs on his surpassing virtue - and overweening ambition; celebrations of his zeal against popery; and allegories and jeremiads on the theme of Absalom, who, in

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the Book of Kings, eventually rose in rebellion against his father King David. The topos of the Biblical Absalom gained such an imaginative hold that Monmouth's life seemed destined to imitate art. Dryden's counterblast was a propagandist triumph for the Tories. It was, preened Narcissus Luttrell, "an excellent poem against the duke of Monmouth, earl of Shaftesbury and that party and in vindication of the king and his friends."6 Not least of the arts to which Monmouth gave impetus was the nascent novel, both in the bucolic romance, The Perplexed Prince (1682), and in Aphra Behn's hostile Love Letters from a Nobleman to his Sister (1684).7 Yet Monmouth's cause scarcely figures in the history of political thought. Lawrence's book was the only sustained treatise explicitly in the duke's defence. Astonishingly, it is not mentioned in the innumerable modern books about Monmouth and his rebellion.8 For this lacuna there is a simple explanation. The obvious way to remove the impediment of Monmouth's illegitimacy was to try to prove that Charles II had married Lucy Walter. The question of the putative marriage, and Lucy's character, have captivated contemporaries and historians alike. Charles published explicit denials of the marriage. But there were enough doubts to sustain rumors, among both contemporaries and modern investigators, who have labored to demonstrate the probability of a secret marriage - and to show that Lucy was not the low-born whore that the earl of Clarendon and John Evelyn took her for. From as early as 1662 Samuel Pepys heard rumors of a marriage and, as Queen Catherine of Braganza's barrenness became apparent, there was talk of having Monmouth declared legitimate. Relations between the dukes of York and Monmouth collapsed in 1678 when York discovered the omission of the phrase "natural son" in Monmouth's patent of appointment as Captain General. The most loudly canvassed story concerned the Black Box, supposed to contain a certificate of a marriage in Paris, officiated by John Cosin, later bishop of Durham. This "evidence" was discussed by Monmouth's best-known publicist, the Nonconformist divine and inveterate rebel, Robert Ferguson.9 The exclusive attention devoted to Ferguson's case for King Monmouth ignores Lawrence's contrary argument. For Lawrence, the search for a putative marriage ceremony was utterly irrelevant. Charles II was "married" to Lucy Walter not because of a superstition about a ceremony, but because sexual intercourse had taken place. The modern laws of marriage and legitimation had no authority under God's and nature's laws. They were corrupt artifices. During the Middle

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Ages popish churchmen had taken marriage under their wing, just as they had usurped authority over other spheres of life. By turning marriage into an ecclesiastical ceremony, requiring an officiating priest, the clergy amassed huge power and wealth. They manipulated kingdoms and estates through the power to adjudicate rules of legitimacy, inheritance, and affinity. The process culminated in the Council of Trent's decree that all marriages without a church ceremony were null and void, and their issue illegitimate. Among the manifold tasks of the Reformation, Lawrence argued, was the laicization of marriage, and the replacement of metaphysical mummery about ceremonies and certificates with a recognition of its real nature: a union grounded in coitus. Lawrence's book is a work of juridical and historical antipopery. It is to this argument that Dryden and Locke allude, not to Ferguson's tale of the Black Box. Despite all the rumors about the king's secret marriage, it is plain that Lawrence's version of King Monmouth's case was popular too. A government spy reported of Lawrence's treatise: "I have met with a book cut into two parts by the disturbance of the press . . . It came out very seasonably last Michaelmas Term and is to be found in all the great sectaries' libraries."10 There may also be an echo of Lawrence's case in John Crowne's adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry VI (1681). The cardinal gives voice to a Monmouthite plaint: . . . at my making there it seems did want Some Holy Ceremonies, for want of which I'm that the Rude IU-manar'd Law calls Bastard. . . . the Law has thrust me from Succession.] l Born in 1611 or 1612, William Lawrence, of Wraxhall in Dorset, was about thirty when the Civil War broke out and seventy when he published his only book. Educated at Trinity College, Oxford, and at the Middle Temple, he became a successful barrister.12 In a life of unostentatious legal sedulity, his sole period of public prominence was as a Cromwellian judge in Scotland between 1653 and 1660, and a member of the Protectorate parliaments. This experience cast its shadow over his treatise, which echoes Interregnum preoccupations. In its interstices lie recommendations for law reform similar to those enunciated by the Hale Commission in 1652 and by Cromwell's law reformer, William Sheppard, in England's Balme (1657). These include the reduction of lawyers' fees and obfuscatory proceedings, an end to the "exotic gibberish" of Latin and Law French, the alleviation of imprisonment for debt and extortionate bail requirements, the salarying of judges (in place of

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fees), and the abolition of ecclesiastical courts and excommunications (and particularly the transference of probate to secular courts) (1:254ft). Above all, Lawrence stood in the shadow of the Act of 1653 which introduced civil marriage, replacing church ceremonial (and heathenish merry-making) with a simple public declaration before a magistrate. The Act foundered upon popular attachment to church weddings and upon its dogmatic denial of the validity of marriages not civilly performed, but it provided an impetus for the evolution of the doctrine of marriage as a civil contract.13 When the Act was attacked in 1657 it was Cromwellian Presbyterians and Independents such as Lawrence's colleague John Desborough who defended it. Like them, Lawrence stood for secularizing and thereby re-Christianizing marriage: his attack on the "Romish hydra of formalities" was made in the name of godly reformation, the "correction of manners." Lawrence's book was redolent also of the Erastian Presbyterianism of his youth. The Reformation, he says, succeeded only in translating popedom from Rome to Canterbury, though he was content with bishops as pastoral "overseers," so long as they were not lordly prelates (I:375~~6, 396—400). His title page has allegorical figures of Religion, Justice, Property, Liberty, and Moral Law, standing against the enemy, Ceremonial Law, represented by a cathedral with noxious beasts prowling, and adorned with a mitre, rosary, candle, and marriage ring. He advocated liberty of conscience within a broad national church, and argued for the election of parish ministers by secret ballot (1:58, 343, 375-7, 415-17).14 His treatise was a belated essay in Puritan antiformalism.15 In 1678 Lawrence, like the rest of the Protestant nation, was badly scared by the revelation of a Popish Plot. He recorded the panic at rumors of a French invasion that gripped his native Dorset that winter (1:280). The emerging Whig party had an overwhelming sense that the king's government was criminally negligent of Catholicism, if not downright subverted by it. The godly faced the same crisis of "popery and arbitrary power" as they had in 1640.16 Lawrence joined those who took up their pens against popery. He published a translation of an anti-papal satire in the Erasmian tradition written by Ferrante Pallavicino, a Milanese adventurer, libertine and romancer, executed at the age of twenty-eight in 1644. The Heavenly Divorce: or, Our Saviour Divorcedfromthe Church of Rome his Spouse; Provoked by her Lewd and Adulterous Behaviour in the

World appeared about the end of 1678.17 // divortio celeste has three parts. In the first (all that Lawrence

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translated), the souls of the dead petition heaven asking that Christ repudiate the Church of Rome, "by reason of her lewd deportment in the world." St. Paul, acting as God's investigator, visits Italy to collect evidence. His dossier is predictably filled with manifold scandals: the sale of pardons, the rape of nuns, the nepotism of popes, the assassination of heretic princes, and the plots of Jesuits. A divorce between Christ and his church, that "wicked, lustful, cruel, bloody strumpet," is decreed amid an angelic fanfare. In the second part, the continuing evils of Rome are recorded, and in the third, the Reformed nations, Calvinist and Lutheran, supplicate to be the new spouse of Christ - but He prefers to wait and see. Pallavicino was as much Erastian as Erasmian. He applauded Paulo Sarpi, the theorist of Venetian resistance against the papacy. God gave temporal power to civil states and not to churchmen. This conviction, that "lay princes . . . represent God," remained equally strong in the English Puritan tradition, and reminds us that the ideal of the Godly Prince continued to be a mark of the Protestant - and even Whig - rejection of Rome.18 Lawrence asked that satiric prose be permitted even in so serious a matter as the fate of true religion, for the cunning of Ulysses is as useful as the courage of Ajax. He added that even to take up the pen required no small courage, for "the dangers of Primrose Hill are enough to discourage the boldest of English Patriots" - alluding to the murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, the magistrate who first investigated the Popish Plot.19 The Heavenly Divorce is saturated with sexual and marital imagery. Lawrence's own Marriage by the Moral Law turned from the rhetorical to the legal, historical, and anthropological interconnections between popery and sexuality. It is a profoundly paradoxical book, at once a defence of sexual freedom, and an obsessional disquisition on the homology between popery and sexual impurity. In its first guise it is libertine. Whereas the church teaches that coitus before church marriage is fornication, Lawrence holds that "fornication" simply does not exist. "Carnal knowledge . . . is not fornication": it constitutes "private marriage" (1:101). To this extent, Lawrence stands in the Restoration tradition of Epicurean skepticism about traditional Christian morality. Rochester's poetic celebrations of promiscuity is its most celebrated representative. In Henry Neville's The Isle of Pines (1668), a shipwrecked sailor fathers a whole commonwealth by his kept women. Denis Veyras's Utopian novel, The History of the Sevarites (1675), licenses polygamy. In plays and memoirs the fashionable spa of Tunbridge Wells became an

Contextualizing Dryden's Absalom emblem of a priapic state of nature. Lawrence sometimes voiced a gratuitous libertinism, as in his retailing of Montaigne's story of a French woman who was raped, "but after often rejoiced, and thanked God she had once in her life so much pleasure without sin" (1:16). But generally Lawrence is only pornographic when piously refuting priestcraft. He contrived to combine a permissive theory of marriage with a conventional ethical Puritanism, in a manner reminiscent of Milton. He disapproved of adultery and prostitution, and his case sometimes hangs quaintly and perilously on the notion that men and women will be faithful to those they first bed. One of Lawrence's chief grounds for disapproving of conventional marriage ceremonies is that they are occasions of "lascivious songs, promiscuous dancings, excessive vanity of apparel", gluttony, drunkenness, revelling, and the "public exposing of virgins . . . to be the gazingstocks of the multitude." The whole charade is an "unnecessary publication of what ought to be kept secret," such that it was, he said, odd that a society which indulges in it should take issue with Diogenes for publicly copulating in the market-place (1:198-200, 103-8; 2:84). It is not only the gaudiness, but the mercenariness of public marriage which disturbed Lawrence. Among the well-off, the practice of marriage portions, of dowries, reduces marriage to a cattle market. It amounts to a price "to hire men and women to live together" (1:114). It leads to the auctioning of wealthy daughters and to unseemly marriages between young men and rich old widows (1:70). It encourages the casual rape of poor women by wealthy men, for "though they had beauty to answer their lust, they had no money to answer their covetousness." Lawrence admired the laws of Sparta and Poland, where dowries were forbidden (1:113-15). The poor do not have dowries, but the appurtenances of church marriage are still a terrible burden to them. The expense of new clothes for man and woman, the wedding dinner, the barrel of beer, the bridal night, the baptizing of children, the godfathers and godmothers, the gossips, and churching the women . . . most commonly bring the poor man so far in debt, that he never recovers out of it as long as he lives. (i:i99)

Lawrence had embarked on a comprehensive critique of the institution of marriage. He saw the ceremony itself, the dispensations from impediments of affinity and consanguinity, the churching of women, and the prohibitions on marriage at certain times of year, as part of the fabric of priestly avarice. The priests had kept even kings in bondage. That the Reformation had its origin in Henry VTIFs marital difficulties

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was not, for Lawrence - as often it was for Anglican and Puritan divines - an embarrassing distraction from the theological core: it was of the essence. Henry's thwarting of papal power over the precious business of the royal succession was the very source of England's "Protestant religion and liberty." Now, in 1680, the Reformation must be renewed as it had begun, by breaking the fetters of the popish ceremonial law still seated in the heart of English marriage law (i:a2r-v). The "final causes" (in the Aristotelian sense of "purposes") of marriage are not to fill priests' pockets or give ecclesiastics power over inheritances, but to procreate and provide helpmeets in life (1:135). Lawrence construed the church's law of marriage not only in terms of anticlerical rhetoric — it is "superstitious" — but also in terms of nominalist logic - it is "unreal," not grounded in material fact. Canon law grounded marriage in pre-contracts and in verbal promises at the altar, rather than in carnal embrace. In so doing it perpetrated a "fiction" or empty abstraction. It privileged an "intention of the mind" over the "real and true" conjunction of bodies, and turned marriage into metaphysical gibberish (1:83, 193). Lawrence was deeply hostile in general to "the multitudes and miserable mischiefs of fictions and falsities in the spiritual common law and chancery courts in England," and on this theme he reminds the modern reader of Jeremy Bentham's denunciations a century later.20 It is striking that Lawrence's guiding idea - "copulation, not contract, makes a marriage" - was as foreign to the secular notion of contract as to the clerical notion of ceremony, and took him beyond the principle of public civil marriage embodied in the 1653 Act. For him, public logomachy was as inimical as religious ritual to the natural fact of coitus. The Catholic church's systematic separation of marriage from coitus was of a piece with its perverse principle of clerical celibacy, its prizing of virginity, and its legitimizing of unconsummated marriages. The English post-Reformation law of marriage still entailed many inherited fictions: the validity of betrothals, often undertaken by minors, and of pre-contracts; the legitimacy of a wife's children adulterously conceived; and the legal death of a woman upon marriage (1:186, 193, 197). This last topic especially animated Lawrence. He deplored the way marriage "transubstantiated" husband and wife into a single legal entity. "I shall not here dispute which is the greatest absurdity of transubstantiation, of bread into flesh in the mass, or of the flesh of a woman into the flesh of a man in marriage." The law of coverture was destructive to both parties, for each could despoil the other's estate. The woman of

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course suffered most, for she was "made a slave, incapable of property," "her estate forfeited and consumed by her husband's vices." The law treated wives "as if they had been bought by him for slaves at a market." Their inheritance could be squandered on their husband's "women, drinking, dicing, and other viciousness." If raped, she could only litigate through her husband; if "beaten by her husband, [she] hath no remedy." Prostitutes "are in better condition than wives," for the harlot did not lose "the property of her goods and rights to him who lies with her." In short, "ladies I pity you" (1:67-70). The remedy lay in giving wives the rights of legal personality claimed by all "freeborn Englishmen": A law would be thought very absurd and unjust, which should enact, that no man or woman should sue one another in the commonwealth; what horrible wickedness and villainies would be committed by the two sexes, one against another; but it is more unjust to make such a law in families, and more unjust to make such a law between men and their wives, than in families: for in the commonwealth, such as are persecuted in one city, can fly to another. In families such as like not one another's company, and are unmarried, can be received and have protection in other families. But men and their wives are chained together, and cannot avoid the injuries of one another; and have no remedy unless they have the same liberty too for injury and propriety of their own, as all other subjects have, and not compelled to live as outlaws, deprived of benefit of law. (171)21

Lawrence believed that those who cohabited without formal marriage were better behaved: It is well known men and women of all estates and conditions, if they have not been before a priest in a temple, will live forty years together in one house and dare not rob, beat, or injure one another; because they have liberty to sue for damage, which benefit this sottish sacrament of priests, and lawyers, gives no persons transubstantiated. (1:70-1) Lawrence's zealous castigations overlooked the small but significant progress of legal devices - separate maintenance agreements in the form of trusts, dower and jointure - which had begun to mitigate the legal doctrine of coverture, at least for the well-off. Ironically, Lawrence lambasted the one body which did bring about some improvement in the legal position of women in marriage: Chancery. It was the application of equity doctrines which opened the way to married women's separate property rights.22 But Lawrence saw Chancery as an oppressive instrument of royal interference. With the characteristic venom of a Puritan common lawyer he denounced the "terrible oppression" of the prerogative courts. He did not deny, however, the value of Chancery's equity

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principles, but believed they should be pleaded in the common law courts, as was done in Scotland (1:63). Lawrence's anticlericalism generated other types of legal blindness. It prevented him from acknowledging that canon law had always recognized that the essence of marriage lay in mutual consent - the presence of a priest was not necessary - and that the church courts were in some respects more tolerant of private marriage than the civil. He also failed to concede that the damaging consequences of coverture largely stemmed from common not canon law. Lawrence advocated divorce. Such advocacy was rare, and, except by private act of parliament, divorce remained impossible. A few writers took up the claim of Reformation theologians that Christ allowed a man to divorce his wife for adultery. This principle underlay the Roos divorce bill in 1670 (which all but two of the bishops opposed). That had produced a flurry of debate, the most outspoken tract being The Case of Divorce (1673) by Charles Wolseley, who was, like Lawrence, a Presbyterian royalist, a Cromwellian and Shaftesburian.23 Selden's Uxor Ebraica (1646) provided a scholarly examination of Christ's teaching in its Jewish context, but neither he nor Wolseley went further than allowing divorce for a wife's adultery. Milton had been more radical in his pamphlets of 1643—5: he condemned priestly ceremonialism as well as indissolubility.24 Locke's allowance of divorce once children had been educated is generally overlooked, but was noticed by eighteenth-century commentators.25 The subject was also canvassed in George Farquhar's play, The Beaux Stratagem (1707).26

In one passage, Lawrence permitted divorce "for adultery and other lawful causes," but in another, more bluntly, "divorce by consent." This was no rash slip: he applauded the "free divorce of both parties" in Roman law, and noted Seneca's allowance of divorce for women too (1:8, 17, 122-3). His preoccupation with fecundity made him emphatic that barren marriages could be repudiated - the point had force amid murmurs against Charles IFs childless queen.27 Solon's laws, Lawrence said, allowed divorce for impotence or sterility in either partner. He was also anxious that divorce should be as private as marriage. To insist on "public tribunals, is to contradict Christ himself, who speaks of a private divorce . . . and not a public sentence of any judge" (1:123). He put an argument for out-of-court settlements familiar enough today: proceedings in open court "make every petty difference between man and wife irreconcilable, and heightens contention" (1:121). These claims were accompanied by lengthy historical exemplification. He told of kings who were rid of barren wives, such as Dagobert who "repudiated hisfirstwife

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for barrenness, and marrieth Nantildis a nun," and Pepin who married his concubine in AD 696, by whom he had a future king, and who killed a bishop for reproving this marriage (1:19-20). And he retailed the gruesome record, from Clytemnestra onward, of husband-murder deriving from the enforced prolongation of dead marriages (1:123). Lawrence's concern to show that the modern law of marriage was a highly contingent artefact of medieval Catholicism led him into an anthropological disquisition on the cultural diversity of marital practices. He sought to show the improbability that European Catholic arrangements carried the force of natural law. At worst, it was an essay in salacious prurience. In Southern and Eastern climates, he suggested (anticipating Montesquieu's climatic anthropology), there was a propensity for polygamy. In Benin the king had five hundred wives and even the poorest men hadfive.The Jews regularly took two wives, especially if the first failed to breed. Spartan women had one husband to go to war and another to stay at home. Among the Medes monogamy was frowned upon and polygamy and polyandry accepted. Some societies allowed incestuous marriages, such as the Pharaohs of Egypt, and the Persians, whose King Cambyses was permitted by the magi to marry his sister. The sale and exchange of wives was widely known in India, China and Siberia, and allowed in Numa's constitution for ancient Rome. The practice of making the sexual services of wives available as hospitality to guests was also widespread. "In Cunall, a part of Tartary, they count it a great honour to have their wives and sisters at the pleasure of others whom they entertain." In some societies, the droit de seigneur was practised:28 the senators of the Canaries used to have "the first night's lodgings with every bride." In China it was accounted a charity to give money towards brothels for those too poor to pay for prostitutes. At Cambalu the prostitutes organized themselves into a "corporation." The native Americans and Guineans had a simple divorce "by the light of nature." Along the River Quizungo a maid who is to be married goes into the wilderness "to bewail her virginity" (1:5, 8, 10-14, 53, 127-9). And so on. Lawrence's violent anticlericalism led him to extend this survey to the alleged lascivious practices of priests down the ages. He contended that the popish imposition of religious cults upon sexuality amounted to a priestly licensing of copulation, and hence ultimately derived from the pagan worship of Venus and Priapus (1:43-4). The priests of Priapus, in order to establish inheritance rights, issued certificates, for a fee, denoting with whom a woman had copulated (2:50-1). Catholic priests, armed with marital law and the power of the confessional, had, Lawrence

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believed, a psychological control over men's wives, their beds, their secrets, their husband's property (2:35-6). Nor did the Catholic church demur at organized prostitution. "All popes are panders-general of all the stews and houses of fornication in Rome and fill their treasuries with the hires of whores" (2:120). The covetousness of priests was matched by their lustfulness: The Benyan Indians give their priests the first fruits of their wives, and think the marriage will not be blessed without it. The Southern Americans in divers parts, think it a great devotion to offer their daughters to befirstdeflowered by the priest. The Algier Mahometans, and the people of other parts of Africa, think it a meritorious work, to prostitute their wives to their Morabates or holy saints. (1:53) In Catholic Europe "how often . . . doth the new married wife return, more skilled for venereous postures, from confession of the priest." In Catholic lands there was a common taunt: they "jeer one another, that their children artfils de prestre" In the Basque region new wives were offered to the parish priests (1:53-4). One striking aspect of Lawrence's discussion was his approval of Islamic practices. Islam was beginning to serve polemically as a model of a religion relatively free of clericalism.29 Lawrence asserted that the Ottoman laity "self-marry without priest, temple, bell, book, or candle" and, consequently, marriages were more chaste, successions better ordered, and adulteries fewer (2:32). Ottoman property law was better: "the Turk is not so turkish to rob his wife, who is a free woman, or to transubstantiate the property of her goods to his" (1:68). Islam also offered a model for a well-ordered civil religion: "all Mahometan priests are chosen by the parish . . . they have neither consecration nor ordination, but continue as perfect laymen" (1:377). To gather his evidence, Lawrence plundered a wide range of sources. For the ancient world he cited Caesar, Diodorus Siculus, Lucan, Ovid, Pliny, Plutarch, and Seneca, together with the anti-pagan diatribes of the early Christian Fathers — Orosius, and especially Arnobius' account of Roman priapics. His favorite Renaissance sources were Cornelius Agrippa and Aretino. For the extra-European world he used the travel journals of Rycaut, Purchas, Iinschot, and Mendoza. He found much to help him in Bodin's Republique and in the historical lawbooks of Gentilis, du Moulin, and Skene. For medieval history and Catholicism he used Baker's Chronicle and Thomas Barlow's Popery (1679). For contemporary political wisdom he borrowed the politique Whiggery of Slingsby Bethell's The Interest of Princes (1680).

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The authority whom Lawrence most revered was John Selden - the DeJureNaturaliet Gentium (1640) and UxorEbraica (1646), which he repeat-

edly cited, especially for the practices of the ancient Hebrews and for the interpretation of Scripture. Selden argued that the religious solemnization of marriage was pagan in origin and not prescribed in Scripture, and that the Hebrews had been polygamous and allowed divorce. Milton's divorce tracts also cited Selden. Selden's work was immensely influential in conveying Grotius's natural law theory to England. It was an approach highly skeptical of orthodox ethical teleology. It stressed the amorality of the state of nature, and the manner in which human positive laws supervened in culturally diverse ways. These ideas circulated in the milieu of Selden's executors John Vaughan and Matthew Hale. Vaughan became Chief Justice of Common Pleas. In a characteristic ruling in 1669, concerning the case of a man marrying his great uncle's widow, he argued that "no copulation of any man with any woman . . . can be unnatural," and hence no kind of marriage was intrinsically unnatural. Of course, many practices come to be proscribed, but this was a matter of historically developed laws and customs. Vaughan recommended Selden's "incomparable work . . . concerning marriage and bodily knowledge."30 It was within this Seldenian tradition that Lawrence wrote. For him, the law of nature prescribed nothing beyond the elementary intuition that coitus was the essence of marriage. Lawrence's approach was thoroughly bookish. He offers little discussion of the prevailing practices of his own society, which in fact proved strikingly resistant to the strictures of the church. Pre-nuptial fornication, cohabitation, betrothal, trothplight, a variety of forms of plebeian private marriage, divorce and wife-sale, are among the practices now documented by social historians.31 Lawrence's own time saw the heyday of clandestine marriage, and the reasons for it were those he cites: the avoidance of expense, the desire for privacy, the evasion of parental interference, the retention of female property rights. Occasionally his text offers glimpses of social history. He tells a story of a poor couple whose church marriage was prevented when the priest demanded fees which they could not pay, so instead they "went to bed and married themselves the real way" (1:199). And he is alert to legal practice, applauding the Scottish law's partial allowance of private marriage, as well as underscoring that in English law clandestine marriages were valid, so that irregular marriages were not thereby void (i:iioff).32 Lawrence's encyclopedic dissection of marriage culminated in the most crucial part of his case. The consequence of the "popish" or

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"ceremonial" law of marriage of greatest moment for the kingdom in 1680 was the illegitimation of bastards. He pronounced that by the law of God and nature illegitimacy and concubinage were empty notions. "There was no such word or thing as 'bastard' in the whole scripture, or among the ancient lawyers or divines, until the popes and bishops falsely translated the scriptures" (2:55, 1:81). This led to a disquisition on the perversion of the Bible in the Authorized Version, which introduced, he says, 848 errors into the text. The Hebrew word "pillegesh" means one woman taken after another, and not a whore or concubine; most of the Hebrew words translated as "wife" in fact mean simply "woman"; the Greek "keturah" corresponds to the Latin "juvencula" and means "young woman," not concubine; the Hebrew "mamzer" and Greek "nothus" do not mean "bastard"; "nuptiae" came to mean a marriage ceremony but originally meant carnal knowledge; and there is no word in Scripture to correspond to the "uxor" ("wife") of the Latin Vulgate (1:142-61; 2:22,42-5, 67,79-81). Lawrence's sources here are Selden and "the great linguist" Hugh Broughton.33 Having rectified Scripture, Lawrence concluded that " 'tis manifest that Christ makes the marriage copulatione to be the ordinance of God"; that "marriage by carnal knowledge without ceremony appears by express command of scripture"; that Matthew 19:5-6 defines marriage as the uniting into one flesh; and that in the Old Testament "all natural children were legitimate" (2:air, 1:81-2; 2:69-71, 79-80, 87).34 Lawrence used an extended parenthesis on the subject of a wife's adultery to bring home the absurdity of contemporary legitimacy laws. As the law stood, any child of a wife, though conceived by someone other than her husband, was deemed legitimate offspring, and hence an heir of the husband, indeed chief heir if first-born. Equally, if a man married a woman pregnant by another man, the child was deemed his. Justice Rickhill, Lawrence tells us, had adumbrated this legal principle as, "Who that bulleth my cow, the calf is mine" (2:48). This rule was, Lawrence complained, a licence for adultery by wives and an affront to husbands. In this respect the law favored women, for it made inheritance lie with the bodily heirs of the wife, "beget them who will," and not with those of the husband. It was a monstrous legal fiction, sanctioned by those two supposed "Aristotles for the law," Coke and Littleton, who were slaves to popish jurisprudence. It was a fiction compounded by the nonsense that the rule applied only if the husband was "within the four seas" at the time of conception, for even the law could not swallow making a child by adultery legitimate when the husband was beyond the

Contextualizing Dryden's Absalom seas (1:72-6, 82).35 Lawrence told several stories of the consequences of the law of legitimacy. One is of an Oxford student conscientious enough to tell his "market maid" that he would provide for a child if she got pregnant, only to be told by her, "Oh, sir, never trouble yourself for that, for I am appointed to be married within these three days" (1:194-5). Another is of the Civil War soldier who returned home to find three children where one had been before, and must resignedly accept the new ones (1:75). A third is of the fifteenth-century Portuguese Queen Joan of Castile, required by the infertile king to sleep with a fecund subject in order to bear a "legitimate" heir: the people deposed that heir because they could not stomach such an incongruous "legitimacy" (2:57). Though the inheritance of estates and kingdoms preoccupied him, Lawrence had an eye to the practical consequences of bastardy law for the weak and the poor. Women who bore "bastards" outside ceremonial marriage were cruelly treated. We are, he says, shocked at Aristotle allowing the death of unwanted babies by exposure, but common English practice was scarcely better: Whole parishes rise with swords and staves against one poor sucking babe, to exterminate both it, and the mother naked, and to be vagabonds to beg, steal, or starve, only to save so small an alms as aliment to one poor infant, not able to speak or beg for itself. (i:2i)36 There was a crying need to establish a foundling hospital in England, on the model of those in France and Italy (1:238). On the Continent, meanwhile, the shame of illegitimacy led to a massacre of innocents by infanticide. A lake in Rome had been drained and six thousand infant skulls discovered (1:237). Lawrence's main concern is for a man's right to have all his natural children acknowledged. The remedy was to abolish the "barbarous law of illegitimation," for the "child should not be punished for the father's sin," and should be entitled to succeed to the father's estate and title. This would return the commonwealth to the virtue of earlier times; it would respect the scriptural injunction, "if children, then heirs" (2:air; Romans 8:17); it would restore "the most excellent law of the Emperor Anastasius, decreeing all natural children to be legitimate," a law swept away with the "diabolical pontifical invention of illegitimation" (1:65, 79-80). It is striking that, as an early expression of a characteristic Enlightenment theme, Lawrence's "priestcraft" thesis concerning the evolution of European marriage law remains a template in modern

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discussion. The anthropologist Jack Goody argues that most ancient Eurasian societies endorsed concubinage, as a means to secure heirs, and that this practice, together with full inheritance rights for the children of concubines, continued in the later Roman Empire, among the AngloSaxons and into Charlemagne's era. Only in the high Middle Ages did the church - partly from economic self-interest - gradually impose restrictive rules of legitimacy. This constituted a dramatic change in the idea of marriage, "leading to a split between sex and marriage, as well as between filiation and parenthood." However, J. A. Brundage protests that the erosion of the rights of illegitimate children originated in secular not ecclesiastical law, while C. N. L. Brooke doubts the clergy's economic motive.37 Superficially "feminist" though some of Lawrence's remarks are, particularly those on coverture and divorce noted earlier, he construed the reform of legitimacy law as a restoration of patriarchal rights. His Whiggism notwithstanding, his concern to justify Monmouth led him into a lather of enthusiasm for Charles II's right to be fully father of his eldest son. Priestly laws are seen to be unmanning the king, humiliating his masculinity by depriving him of his sons. Here he drew another lesson from the Ottoman Empire, where a legal reform had made marriage to be constituted by the birth of a child. "The Grand Seignior thereby regained into his own hand the patria potestas belonging to every father, of being judge who were his own children, which had been by his superstitious predecessors unwarily alienated to his arch-mufti or archbishop" (1:245). Lawrence's descant upon Monmouth as the king-patriarch's most glorious fruit is the type of exuberant Whig patriarchalism captured in Dryden's lines: Of all this Numerous Progeny was none So beautifull so brave as Absolon: Whether, inspir'd with some diviner Lust, His Father got him with a greater Gust; Or that his Conscious destiny made way By manly beauty to Imperiall sway. Lawrence's approach owed much to Bodin's exploration of the progressive enfeeblement of the patria potestas since Roman times.38 It was from Bodin that he took the notion that the Empress Theodora, "a common prostitute," inserted laws into her husband Justinian's law code "for the advantage of the women against the men" (1:22, 79-80). Lawrence was not here speaking approvingly, for he was apt to see bastardy laws as, in part, the revenge of jealous wives. The laws of illegitimacy established a "gynarchy, and pedarchy," in violation of "that patriarchy [which] was

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the first form of government instituted in families by God and nature" (1:77). The "more masculine princes both of Greece and Rome, vindicated their own power . . . against the priests and the ladies" (1:83). Lawrence next turned to an historical account designed to show that kings and parliaments had often overcome priestly laws and asserted their right to grant divorces, alter the succession, and legitimize heirs. More particularly, he showed how bastards had become kings. Theseus, King of Athens, appointed his bastard son heir, "whereby the certificate of the bishop was abolished" (1:82). The Emperor Constantine was the illegitimate son of Constantius (2:101). Pope Alexander VI sought to create a kingdom for his bastard son Cesare Borgia, which "Machiavel in his treatise De Principe proposeth as the only example for kings to imitate" (2:119). William the Conqueror "was the son of Rollo, duke of Normandy by Arlotte a mean woman," to whom he was not married by priestly ceremony (2:106). John of Gaunt's children by his mistress Katherine Swinford were legitimized by statute, and from one of these Henry VII was descended (2:108-9). Edward Ill's law of treason encompassed those who oppose the king's eldest son and applied to those who are sons by his "compaigne" - companion (2:20-1). There were also black moments in the annals of kingship. In France Hugh Capet made a law disinheriting natural sons in order to curry favor with the pope (2:106). In England Edward IV's sons were bastardized by parliament on the spurious ground that he had pre-contracted with another woman before he married their mother (1:94-5). Lawrence's key case was that of Elizabeth I, declared illegitimate by the Catholic church, but undeniably rightful queen of England. Throughout the seventeenth century Elizabeth was celebrated as a glorious exemplar of godly and puissant rulership. Lawrence labored to the utmost the parallel between Elizabeth and Monmouth. Both were victims of popish plots, both heroic Protestants, both bastardized by popish laws, both forsaken by their fathers (2:113-14). Elizabeth had even fought a war on behalf of the true doctrine of legitimacy: when Philip II of Spain seized the throne of Portugal from Don Antonio, who had been declared illegitimate, she sent an expedition under Sir Francis Drake (2:183-6). Lawrence's patriarchalism - and indifference to the concept of contract - put him at odds with other Whig controversialists. Others mounted a case for elective monarchy, and gave historical accounts of parliaments selecting the person most fit to govern. Locke, James Tyrrell and Algernon Sidney attacked the key Tory text, Sir Robert Filmer's

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Patriarcha. Lawrence's overt commitment to Monmouth, and willingness to challenge the structure of Christian marriage, led him to take a different stance. He was, paradoxically, closer to Tory claims on behalf of hereditary right. His final purpose was to demand that parliament pass an Act of Exclusion which specified the claims of the lineal heir. Once Monmouth's illegitimacy was refuted, then his candidacy was secured by primogenitive hereditary right. Monmouth "is legitimate, and the next lineal and lawful heres sanguinis, heir of blood, forjus sanguinis is the law of God and nature" (2:114). Parliament was called upon to perform a declaratory act, not an elective one. Lawrence pressed arguments which were the common stock of Tory defences of the duke of York, such as that to disinherit the heir was to court civil war (2:63). With passionate urgency he warned of the dangers to regimes which do not name the successor. Tacitus warned against Alexander the Great's mistake in not naming an heir (2:135). It was imperative that the people should have a firm statutory ground should they need to take arms to defend the succession against a popish insurrection (2:2128). It followed from Lawrence's case that the Tories' deployment of Filmer's patriarchalist defence of primogenitive rights was oddly matched to serve the claims of the king's brother. In his emphasis upon the rights of the lineal over the collateral heir, Lawrence skilfully decentred Tory claims to be the party of legitimism. "The general question now in agitation among the people is, Who is the next lawful heir to the crown? The Protestant saith, The king's eldest son; the Papist, a collateral heir; the free statesman, none at all" (2:A2r). The Tories warned that Whiggism led to a renewal of civil war and usurpation. But those who had the patience to read Lawrence's treatise would come away with a profound sense that it was the duke of York, the jealous and violent wicked uncle, who was intent upon usurping the crown and fomenting civil war against the king's son. Lawrence offered, as a parable of Yorkist Toryism, the story of Kenneth III of Scotland, brother of his predecessor, chosen in AD 970 by parliament in preference to his nephew; Kenneth promptly bullied parliament into passing a law of hereditary succession, in order to secure his own children, and then became a murderous tyrant (2:28). He also recalled Richard Ill's murder of the princes, his nephews, in the Tower, after declaring them illegitimate. The title page of Lawrence's book carried an ominously accusatory verse from St. Matthew's gospel: "When the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, this is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance" (2:11, 16—17; Matthew 21:38).

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Neither Charles II nor the majority of the English political elite were convinced by Lawrence's version of Whig patriarchalism. The bastard son did not inherit the throne. Monmouth, of course, believed in his own monarchical rights and during his rebellion in 1685 he declared himself king. There was also a more personal way in which he adopted Lawrence's principles. In the hours before his execution, Anglican divines begged the duke, for the sake of his eternal soul, to renounce not only the sin of rebellion but also the sin of adultery. He refused to do either. He had abandoned his duchess, to whom he had been married when he was fourteen and she twelve, and had lived with his mistress Henrietta Wentworth. Gilbert Burnet wrote that "both he and she came to fancy that. . . their living together was no way offensive to God."39

NOTES

1 There is an ocean of commentary on Dryden's opening lines. His tone makes for ambiguity. Where he stands on the sexual ideology which he ironizes is for others to debate. If the present essay establishes a link with William Lawrence, then those lines are a closely directed satire upon, and deflection of, a distinctive Whig view. The most recent discussion is P. Harth, Penfor a Party: Dryden's Tory Propaganda in its Contexts (Princeton, 1993); for one relevant context see J. Cairncross, After Polygamy was Made a Sin: The Social History of Christian Polygamy (London, 1974). 2 Public Record Office, London: Shaftesbury Papers, 31/24/6H. 3 The two parts of Lawrence's treatise will be cited in parentheses as 1 and 2 followed by page numbers. 4 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1, paras. 123-4. 5 J. Harrison and P. Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford, 1965), nos. 1693-4; The Correspondence ofJohn Locke, ed. E. S. De Beer (Oxford, 1976-89), v, 293,411. 6 In his copy now in the Huntington Library, California. 7 The literature of the Monmouth cause deserves exploration. There is no adequate bibliography. In modern times Monmouth and his rebellion have given rise to twenty novels and plays. 8 The best studies are P. Earle, Monmouth's Rebels (London, 1977) and R. Clifton, The Last Popular Rebellion (London, 1984). Lawrence is also absent from Dryden scholarship. The only previous discussion of him is by Rachel Weil: "Sexual Ideology and Political Propaganda in England 1680-1714" (PhD thesis, Princeton, 1991), pp. 83-91.1 read this thesis after drafting the present essay. See her: "The Politics of Legitimacy: Women and the Warming-Pan Scandal," in The Revolution of I68S-I689, ed. L. G. Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1992).

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9 A Letter to a Person of Honour Concerning the Black Box (1680); A Letter to a Person of Honour Concerning the King's Disavowing the Having been Married to the Duke of Monmouth's Mother (1680). 10 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1680-81, pp. 440-1 (7 Sept. 1681). 11 John Crowne, Henry the Sixth (1681), p. 17. I am grateful to Nancy Klein Maguire for this reference. 12 Dictionary of National Biography, Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis, ed. P. Bliss (Oxford, 1813-20), rv, 62-3; J. Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (London, 1861-74), 11, 201-3. 13 See J. R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages, 1600 to the Present (Oxford, 1985), pp. 55-6; R. Phillips, Putting Asunder: A History of Divorce (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 126-30; C. Durston, " 'Unhallowed Wedlocks': The Regulation of Marriage during the English Revolution," Historical Journal, 31 (1988), 45-59; S. Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Nebraska, 1979), pp. 14, 115-16; N. L. Matthews, William Sheppard, Cromwell's Law Reformer (Cambridge, 1984); D. Veall, The Popular Movement for Law Reform 1640-60 (Oxford, 1970); B. Worden, The Rump Parliament (Cambridge, 1974), ch. 5; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (London, 1972), ch. 15. 14 Despite his virulent antipopery, Lawrence advocated liberty of worship (but denial of public office) for Roman Catholics, because oppressed people were tempted to rebel, and because the recusancy laws were used to persecute Protestant Dissenters (1:393, 40I> 4*7 j 2 : i 3 I ? J57~6o). 15 See C. Davis, "Against Formality: One Aspect of the English Revolution," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 3 (1993), 265-88. 16 See J. Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 17 For the suggestion, for which the evidence is no stronger, that this was the work of a different William Lawrence, see The Diary of William Lawrence, ed. G. E. Aylmer (Beaminster, 1961), pp. xxi-xxii. 18 Ferrante Pallavicino, The Heavenly Divorce (1678), sig. Bir, B2r, A4r, pp. 69-76. For the persistence of the Godly Prince ideal, see W. Lamont, William Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979); M. Schonhorn, Defoe's Politics (Cambridge, I991)19 Pallavicino, Heavenly Divorce, sig. A5V, a3v. See N. Davidson, "Unbelief and Atheism in Italy, 1500-1700," \n Atheismfrom the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. M. Hunter and D. Wootton (Oxford, 1992), p. 79. 20 Primogeniture, Index, referring to 1:288—305. In the case of archaic official oaths, he thought fictions amounted to blasphemous hypocrisies, such as the nominal requirement on sheriffs to prosecute (Lollard) heretics. For such oaths he had an almost Quaker-like distaste. In 1678 he refused the office of sheriff of Dorset, partly from conscientious objections to the oath. He tried to publish his reasons, but was refused a license by the censor (1:166-7, 280). 21 Compare Steven Pincus's discussion of Shadwell, below p. 257. 22 A. L. Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London, 1993);

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28 29 30 31

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S. Staves, Married Women's Separate Property in England 1660-1833 (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). On the Roos case see Staves, Players' Scepters, pp. 157-8, 328; A. Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (London, 1984), pp. 337-49. C. Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, 1977), ch. 9; J. Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven, 1970); J. G. Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford, 1987); E. Owen, "Milton and Selden on Divorce," Studies in Philology 43 (1946), 233-57. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, n, paras. 81-2; T. Salmon, A Critical Essay Concerning Marriage (1724), pp. I I O - I I ; P. Delaney, Reflections upon Polygamy (lT$l\ PP- 37-8; Staves, Players' Scepters, pp. 141-3. For ideas of marriage in Restoration drama see Staves, Players' Scepters, ch. 3; G. S. Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Philadelphia, 1942). His contemporaries were preoccupied with securing population growth. William Petty advocated short-term civil marriage contracts, and financial rewards for prolific mothers, as a means of encouraging procreation: The Petty Papers, ed. Marquis of Lansdowne (London, 1927), 11, 50. Sir William Temple, in his Observations upon the Netherlands, complained that Christianity restricted population growth by its strictures on polygamy. For eighteenthcentury debate see A. O. Aldridge, "Polygamy and Deism," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 48 (1949), 343-60. Orjusprimae noctis: the alleged right of a feudal superior to deflower a vassal's bride - famously alluded to in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro. J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 4. R. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 112-5, and chs. 4-5. R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500—1830 (London, 1994); J. R. Gillis, "Conjugal Settlements: Resort to Clandestine and Common Law Marriage in England and Wales, 1650—1850," in Disputes and Settlements, ed. J. Bossy (Cambridge, 1983); J. R. Gillis, "Peasant, Plebeian, and Proletarian Marriage in Britain, 1600-1900," in Proletarianization and Family History, ed. D. Levine (Orlando, Florida, 1984); J. A. Sharpe, "Plebeian Marriage in Stuart England," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 36 (1986), 69-90; R. M. Smith, "Marriage Processes in the English Past," in The World we have Gained, ed. L. Bonfield, R. M. Smith, and K. Wrightson (Oxford, 1986), pp. 43—6; L. Stone, Road to Divorce: England, 1530—i98j (Oxford, 1990), chs. 3-4; R. B. Outhwaite, ed., Marriage and Society (London, 1981). Stair's Institutes (1681), the classic text on Scots law, grounded marriage in "the primitive law of nature . . . the conjunction of two single persons": "The public solemnity is . . . not essential to marriage": "By our custom, cohabitation . . . validates the marriage." However, Stair held that copulation was not essential to marriage. Institutes (Edinburgh, 1981), pp. 105, 107, 648-9, 1019. I 549~ 1 ^ 12 - Cambridge Puritan divine and rabbinical scholar; published on

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chronology and Scripture; emigrated to Germany, 1590; Works collected by Iightfoot (1662). The philological material, and indeed many of Lawrence's themes, are rehearsed in modern form in J. A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago, 1987). Lawrence's vehemence on this point may give force to Anthony Wood's claim that Lawrence's book was "written upon a discontent arising from his wife (a red-hair'd buxom woman) whom he esteem'd dishonest to him": Athenae Oxoniensis, iv, 62. See M. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987). J. Goody, The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 75-7, 191-2, 205; Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, pp. 606-7; C. N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage (Oxford, 1989), pp. 134-5. See also P. Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: The King's Wife in the Early Middle Ages (London, 1983); G. Duby, Medieval Marriage (Baltimore, 1978). Bodin, Republique (1676), Book 1, chs. 3-4. History of His Own Time (London, 1991), pp. 225-6. For commenting on a draft of this essay I am indebted to Donna Hamilton, Christine MacLeod, Steven Pincus, Naomi Tadmor, and Sylvana Tomaselli.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, i6yg—i682 Gary S. De Krey

The Restoration Crisis was a crisis about reformation. In early 1679, Sir Robert Southwell recorded his perception that "there is now spread an universal demand of reformation."1 Others who recorded their perceptions about the crisis of 1679—82 also believed it was a crisis about religion, a label that has recently been more strongly associated with 1640—2.2 Richard Baxter, for instance, beheld in 1679 a nation "distracted by Divisions; and much, if not most about Religion, . . . Teachers against Teachers, in Discourses, Sermons, Books, rendring each other despicable." Or, as Bishop Gilbert Burnet lamented two years later: "To what has a contest that began at first about hood and Surplices risen amongst us?" Writing in retrospect, the Anglican controversialist Edmund Bohun complained about "how the Dissenters took the occasion of the Plot, and of the general hatred against Popery to ruine the Loyal and conformable clergy." They had, he charged, "engrossed the Title of Protestant."3 The concept of reformation is a familiar one to students of Stuart history and literature, and those who have recently written about the Restoration have stressed the importance of religion in political debate. Nevertheless, the scholarship about this crisis continues to be preoccupied with political and constitutional issues and ideology, even as the climactic crisis of Charles IFs reign receives a remarkable facelift. The interpretive assumption that this was an "Exclusion Crisis" - that is, that the crisis was about the parliamentary tactic of removing the king's Catholic brother and heir from the succession - has particularly been challenged. Jonathan Scott, for instance, argues that the crisis was not really about the succession but was rather about the broader issues of "popery and arbitrary government," issues that made it a multi-faceted Restoration Crisis. Neither was the crisis a crisis of party, according to Scott, who rejects such proleptic "eighteenth-century" structures for the sake of emphasizing the role of seventeenth-century ideology, especially 231

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the republican ideology of Algernon Sidney. In the most comprehensive history of the crisis ever undertaken, Mark Knights has also placed exclusion and the succession in a broader ensemble of issues and has disputed the long-accepted view that this was a crisis driven by party. For him, the divisions within public opinion that emerged during the course of the crisis produced parties only at its conclusion. Mark Goldie has also given us a more complicated crisis that was as much "a crisis for episcopacy" as it was a crisis about popery and the constitution. The ideology of Goldie's Whigs "was born as much in anticlericalism as in constitutionalism," and it was directed as much against religious persecution as it was against arbitrary government.4 This essay will suggest that the Restoration Crisis cannot be fully understood unless we also pay attention to the endeavour of many dissenting authors to turn a crisis that began with the issue of popery into an opportunity for the further reformation of the Church of England. The crisis saw the publication of major work by the "churchly Presbyterians" Richard Baxter and John Humfrey, by the more sectarian Presbyterian Vincent Alsop, by the independent Dr. John Owen, by the Quaker William Penn, and by many other dissenting spokesmen. Their demand for reformation lay behind the parliamentary efforts of 1680-1 to achieve accommodation between the church and dissent.5 It also shaped the pervasive anti-prelatical sentiment of an opposition press invigorated both by the lapsing of the licensing act and by three general elections in two years, the first such elections in almost two decades. The issue of reformation enlivened public and parliamentary debate throughout the crisis and throughout the country, providing some of the conceptual language that influenced electors in many constituencies. And the Anglican reaction, with which the crisis concluded, was more than a rejection of the call for reformation. The Anglican reaction was also evidence of how successfully dissenters had articulated their message about Protestant renewal. Dissenters of different persuasions also differed somewhat in their cases for reformation. For some, the call for reformation principally involved the enunciation of terms upon which they hoped to enter the establishment. For others, the call for reformation established the principles upon which Protestants of different persuasions could share their Protestantism without sharing their churches. But these differences were not always as clear as was the common call for reformation, a call that united dissenters against churchmen. The ecclesiastical sphere of Restoration dissent was a rather fluid one, and providing too much struc-

Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, i6yg-i682 ture and coherence to dissenting differences can provide a clarity that is both artificial and misleading. Excluded from the church, Presbyterians, for instance, employed the concept of reformation both to defend their Protestant separation from an unreformed church and to demand the changes that would end their exclusion. Similarly, the independency of John Owen was defined along the old boundary between parochial and separating Congregationalism.6 The emphasis in this essay will therefore be upon the common dissenting agenda of reformation. Restoration dissenters argued that Protestantism in England was best secured and united against popery through reformation of the church's ceremonial life, through freedom for voluntary religious organization, through respect for individual faith, through reduction of clerical authority, and through clarification of the ecclesiastical authority of the prince. For Protestant dissenters, the Restoration Crisis was much more than a defensive crisis in which English Protestantism faced its continental and domestic Catholic adversaries. It was also a crisis about conscience. The dissenters' case for reformation built upon the arguments they had already made for liberty of conscience.7 Defining conscience as the rational faculty that individuals employ to determine whether their thoughts and actions are consistent with divine will, authors like Humfrey, Owen, and Vincent asserted that the dictates of conscience overrode other human obligations and that "nothing can possibly interpose between the Authority of God and the Conscience^ Such claims marked an important intellectual difference between the fragmented puritanism of the English Revolution and the more cohesive nonconformity of the Restoration. In 1645-9, liberty of conscience had been a critical issue dividing Presbyterians from independents and dividing independents from sectarians and Levellers.9 By the 1670s, however, the experience of persecution, an experience Presbyterians shared with other dissenters, had encouraged many of them to adopt the "healing principle" of liberty of conscience. Even the more restrained Baxter, once a vigorous opponent of such freedom, was rhetorically indistinguishable from the chief advocates of conscience in his attacks upon the practice of persecution. Dissenting apologists therefore argued, in common, that the persecuting Church of England was little different from the persecuting Church of Rome, at least in respect to their shared substitution of force for faith. The defence of conscience as an exercise of the Christian liberty conceived by St. Paul and recovered by the sixteenth-century reformers became the principal theme of seemingly inexhaustible dissenting variations.10

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In fact, in 1679—82, the dissenting agenda for reformation became an agenda for the complete abandonment of the church settlement of 1662—5. The call for reformation struck at the heart of the persecuting state championed by Restoration Anglicanism.11 Not surprisingly, dissenting arguments for reformation and for conscience were answered by Anglican defences of persecution as the bolt that locked the doors of church and state against imagination and anarchy. The issue of reformation in the Restoration Crisis points, therefore, to an ideological polarization that was deeply rooted in the seventeenth-century history of revolution and restoration and that expressed two different modes of Protestant discourse. The reformation discourse of the nonconformists and of the opposition was a discourse that coupled a defense of conscience with a defense of parliament. It shared few terms with the rival Protestant discourse of those who defended institutions "established by law" in church and in state. Reformation was an issue in the Restoration Crisis because it divided those who defined their freedoms and their obligations to God, to the king, and to fellow subjects in different Protestant languages. Little wonder that each community of discourse became convinced that the other was made up of "papists in masquerade." The dissenting call for reformation was, in the first instance, an argument that the Protestant Church of England was endangered by a departure from its Reformed roots and traditions. This argument - not a new one - was made by the spokesmen for Restoration dissent well before the Popish Plot. Nevertheless, the arousal of fears about Catholicism in 1678-9 gave dissenting authors both the ample evidence and the ample audience they needed to suggest that willful episcopal hostility to the church's Protestant past had played into the hands of the papists. The evangelical history they developed of episcopal declension from the Reformation built upon the puritan rhetoric of the past. And they advanced an increasingly militant rationale for their own separation from the Church of England as a defense of an historic reformation abandoned by the clerical establishment. For them, the expression of reformation principles in England now required freedom for voluntary religious organizations. They demanded this freedom, against imposed uniformity, even as they encouraged and influenced a renewal of national reformation through "Protestant union" in the 1680-1 parliament. To examine Restoration dissent in terms of objections to particular liturgical "impositions" is to miss the forest of reformation for the sake of the ceremonial trees. Like many Elizabethan and early Stuart

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puritans, the dissenting authors of the Restoration Crisis perceived reformation as the ongoing work of the church. Vincent Alsop wrote, for instance, that reformation should "be made in what is necessary . . . as often as is necessary" All the dissenting authors rooted their arguments against imposed ceremonies in the purposes of "our first Renowned Reformers" the perfection of whose work lay not in its completeness, nor in its array of ecclesiastical practices, but rather in its goal of conformity to the " Word of God" From this perspective, the historical retention of some traditional ceremonies in the English Reformation — ceremonies inherently inconsistent with the doctrine of justification by faith - had long outlived any useful Protestant purpose.12 Worse, since the reign of James I, the "corrupted party of the Church of England has been daily making nearer advances to that of Rome" The Popish Plot and the ensuing crisis were neither novel nor unexpected. Their true origins lay in the doctrinal and liturgical reversions of Archbishops like William Laud and theological writers like Peter Heylyn and Jeremy Taylor. The hopes of the papists had been raised once before, only to be disappointed in 1640, when a Protestant parliament had defeated the "Canterburians" But "the design of carrying on the Romish Interest" had been revived "by the Prelatical party" ever since "the happy Restoration of his Sacred Majesty." As before, "the Clergy fell a scrambling for preferments . . . whilst Reformation lay a bleeding, a gasping, a dying, for they had other Irons in the Fire." Chief amongst those other irons was the renewal of impositions upon conscience which tended "not to the Reformation, but to the destruction of the Church of England."13 From the perspective of dissent, the separation that had occurred in 1660-2 between reformation principles and the national establishment was the greatest disaster for English Protestantism since the Marian persecution. The responsibility for this debacle lay, according to Baxter, in the hands of the episcopal "party," a "big Sect" which had "appropriate [d] the name of The Church of England, (unjustly)." The nonconformists stood against this appropriation in the purity of their Reformed commitment: "They scruple all retreats in Reformation," according to Alsop, "and all retrograde motions towards Evangelical perfection and purity." They demanded a return to "the old Doctrine of the Ancient Church of England" to its Protestant roots and to its fraternity with the other Reformed churches of Europe. Only the elimination of impositions upon conscience could now provide the "top-stone to the Reformation" \ or, as John Owen wrote, provide "the only true way of uniting all Protestants."14

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Understanding reformation as a process, Restoration dissenters vigorously reprocessed and embellished the language of their puritan predecessors. Understanding reformation as a process, Restoration dissenters declared their attachment to a truly national Protestant settlement while at the same time separating from a church that had abandoned reformation. Alsop quoted John Hales in defense of separation as an affirmation rather than a repudiation of national tradition: " 'Where the cause of Schism is necessary, there not he that separates, but he that is the Cause of the Separation is the Schismatick.' " 15 Clearly, many dissenters were perched astride the boundary between identification with the national church and participation in separate worship. This ambiguity is nowhere more fully seen than in their defense of private assemblies. Those laity who turned to private assemblies did so both out of faithfulness to God and to the Reformation, according to their defenders. Troubled by the inadequacy of parish incumbents, by deficiencies in parish discipline, and by the imposition of nonessential rites and rubrics, they rightfully looked elsewhere for edifying worship. John Humfrey, a Presbyterian, was as explicit as any independent in investing the private religious assemblies of the dissenting clergy with divine warrant: "The preaching of the Gospel, and Particular Assemblies are of Divine [Institution], Parochial Churches are of Human Institution."16 Alsop expressed his confidence: that not onely the Scripture, but all Antiquity . . . will justifie .. . that person . .. who . . . earnestly pleading, and petitioning for Reformation, humbly desiring he may have Christs ordinances upon Christs terms, and yet being denied his Right shall make his applications to some other particular Church of Christ.17 Ultimately, according to these dissenting authorities, each Christian must follow a course dictated by his own conscience in choosing between parochial churches and dissenting assemblies. The edification that believers sought in worship was itself an individual matter: each believer must nurture his soul in that church and ministry that he judged, in his conscience, to be most effective for his own Christian life. Alsop defended the right of "every Particular Christian . . . to chuse his own Church."

Although he grounded this right in Christian conscience rather than in natural law, his conclusion is identical to that of John Locke, who maintained in 1681 that it is " 'part of my liberty as a Christian and as a man to choose of what church or religious society I will be of, as most conducing to the salvation of my soul.' " 18 For some separatists, the choice between parochial churches and

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gathered churches was mutually exclusive, but many other dissenters saw no incompatibility in preferring "particular assemblies" while working within their parishes for the reformation of the national church. According to Baxter, Howe, and Humfrey, dissenters were free to worship wherever they found the gospel.19 Indeed, Humfrey envisaged a reformed parochial establishment, which many Presbyterians would find acceptable, as the heart of a broader national settlement, of which the gathered churches would be a part. According to him, reformation required both an inclusive national church, which would comprehend most Protestants, and a toleration of those whose consciences still required a separate ministry. But because these separate assemblies would operate legally under the authority of the prince who headed the established church, they would be "Parts of the Church, as National, no less than the Parochial Assemblies." Baxter also reconciled separate worship with national traditions. He contended that "Auditories or Chappels" gathered by "silenced Ministers and people" to supplement parochial worship were already auxiliary "parts of the Parish Churches"2® Ever since the 1640s, when arguments for liberty of conscience and for voluntary religious organization had first been strenuously debated, opponents had insisted that such freedom would weaken church and state alike. But the dissenting divines of the Restoration Crisis explicitly embraced the acceptance of different Protestant perspectives as the best way of securing both reformation and religious peace. "God in the first Creation formed Men of differing Sizes, various Statures, and multiform shapes and complexions," wrote Alsop; and "so in the new Creation, it's none of Christ's design to reduce all sincere believers to an uniformity . . . but to perform a Nobler and more glorious work . . . that notwithstanding . . . diversities they may all live as Brethren." Baxter insisted that "a diversity of . . . circumstances and indifferent modes in divers Churches . . . and sometimes in the same Church, is no . . . dreadful mischief." Owen affirmed that "parties at difference" about some points of religion but agreeing in "all substantial parts" of Christianity were capable of "living alike peaceably." And the creator of the Protestant Utopia of Bensalia argued, in 1681, that "as long as there is any variety to be found in nature, it will be discernable in the difference of thoughts and opinions of men."21 Rejecting uniformity for the sake of the plurality in faith so despicable to the Anglican mind, the dissenting writers also transformed the Anglican strategy of persecuting Protestants from a necessary evil to a monstrous perversion of the Reformation. Baxter castigated persecutors

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as "the seed of Cain/' arguing that the restraint of conscience makes "Bruits" of men and leaves "Kings to be but Governours of Cattel." Alsop rejected "persecution for Religion" as "an impiety . . . abhorrent to the common light of Mankind" and as an "enslaving [of] all mens judgments and . . . Reasons to naked will and pleasure." Owen quipped that "believers are not made for churches, but churches are appointed for believers." Penn complained that "it is not the way to fill the Church to Destroy the People" and that "Conformity is Coercive, which is Popish." The Bensalian bishops were recommended for recognizing that worship is "a voluntary free action of the Soul in the exercise of things that relate to Heaven and happiness."22 Challenging the principle of persecution, dissenting spokesmen also condemned Anglican practice as an arbitrary assault upon English liberties. Writing in 1680, for instance, John Owen queried whether the "power, courts, and jurisdictions" of the Church of England — the instruments of persecution — were "agreeable unto the laws of the land and liberty of the subjects." John Howe denied the legality of persecution on the basis of legislative intent. Parliament, he claimed, could never have intended the "temporal ruine of so great a part of the Nation as are now found to be dissenters." Because the ecclesiastical laws are "mutable matters, generally designed to be probationary," the legitimacy of their continuing application depended upon whether or not they continued to accomplish their original purpose. Referring to the attempted parliamentary resettlement of the church in 1673, an effort expressing a new legislative intent to relax or to end persecution, Howe insisted that the penal laws were no longer enforceable.23 This critique of the persecuting church of the Restoration was one that struck a strong chord with opposition electors and with their representatives in the Commons.24 The political fruit of the call for reformation was most noticeable in the attempted work of the 1680-1 parliament. Protestant accommodation received more attention in that parliament than in any other session between 1673 and 1689 when, in December 1680, bills for comprehension and for toleration were considered. They owed much, as a new religious formula, to the arguments of the nonconformist spokesmen considered here, especially to John Humfrey and to Richard Baxter, who sought dialogue with Anglican MPs in order to secure their passage. However, these bills had not been developed in terms satisfactory either to Anglicans or to many dissenters before the premature end of the session.25 These bills were not the only measures considered by the Commons

Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, i6yg-i682 and the Lords in 1680-1 that reflected the call for reformation of the church. A bill to repeal the hated "35th of Elizabeth," the draconian law of 1593 against sectaries, achieved final approval in both houses. The House of Lords adopted a bill to safeguard Protestant dissenters from the penal legislation against Catholics, and the House of Commons resolved against the application of such laws to Protestants. The Commons considered measures to remove pluralities and to remedy abuses in the ecclesiastical courts. And they ordered the bringing in of a bill to abolish the Corporation Act, which according to London MP William Love had "set us all together by the ears." 26 Taken together, these bills point to the materialization of a new religious settlement. It had sufficient support, at least in the Commons, to replace the coercive church of the Restoration with a broadened and reformed Protestant church, one offering a limited toleration to "tender consciences" and one that no longer required the political proscription of Protestants outside its fold. But such a new church settlement was not to be. Reformation miscarried in the 1680—1 parliament when the impasse over the succession provoked the prorogation of 10 January 1681. Among the angry resolutions adopted by the Commons on that day, in the few minutes of working time available to MPs after they learned of their impending prorogation, was the unequivocal statement that "the Prosecution of Protestant Dissenters upon the Penal Laws, is, at this time, grievous to the Subject, a weakening of the Protestant Interest, an Encouragement to Popery, and dangerous to the Peace of the Kingdom." 27 Frustrated by the ensuing dissolution of this parliament, electors bent upon the reformation of English Protestantism were outraged by the failure of the parliamentary clerk to present the king with the statute repealing the Elizabethan law against sectaries. This result, which deprived a measure approved in both houses of its legal status, was apparently contrived by Charles, whose hardening attitude towards opposition MPs and dissenting electors would shortly be expressed in a renewal of persecution. 28 The demand for reformation was nevertheless repeated in the instructions offered in many constituencies to MPs chosen for the abortive Oxford Parliament. Electors in London, Middlesex, and several other constituencies called for Protestant union and for repeal of the Corporation Act and the penal laws. Bills against pluralism, non-residency, scandalous ministers, profaneness and debauchery, and abuses in the ecclesiastical courts were also recommended. 29 Reformation also miscarried in the 1680—1 parliament because the

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politicians were unable to neutralize the opposite religious passions aroused by the language in which reformation was debated. The dissenting case for reformation was rhetorically developed in language that was distinctly anti-prelatical and that inflamed the long-standing anticlerical animus of English popular and polite cultures. Indeed, the attack upon priestcraft that was so central to the early English Enlightenment, after 1689, was already quite apparent in efforts to reduce clerical authority in 1679-82. Interestingly, the year 1680 saw both the first reprint of John Milton's Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings (1659) and the publication of Charles Blount's generic attack upon the "fables" and "fictions" of priests.30 The considerable differences between the anti-formalism of Milton's Christian liberty and Blount's "rational way" in religion are, however, more apparent to modern scholars than they may have been to contemporary readers. Midway between the teeming intellectual freedom of the 1640s and 1650s and the more refined Augustan age, the Restoration Crisis produced an extended cultural fugue of revulsion for the priestly caste of the Restoration Settlement. The ecclesiological arguments of dissenting clerics mixed with popular disappointment in the re-established clergy and with the Erastian politics of many MPs to produce a repudiation of clerical authority among an important segment of the political public. Indeed, anti-prelacy was as pronounced an opposition sentiment in the Restoration Crisis as anti-Catholicism. That some of the spade work for the enlightened eighteenth-century rejection of priestcraft was done by ordained puritan clergy is but one of the ironies of the crisis. The dissenting attack upon the bishops was also an application of the ecclesiological principles of nonconformity that authors like Baxter and Owen were beginning to systematize for the sake of reformation. Offered in the hope of Protestant accommodation, the priorities that dissenting authors attached to consent in the selection of clergy and to voluntarism in religious association were priorities little respected in Anglican circles. Indeed, they could find no home in the hierarchical, sacerdotal, and coercive Restoration Church of England. Baxter insisted that pastors were selected in the apostolic church through the choice of the faithful, and he asserted that the people also originally had a voice in the selection of the bishops of their cities. "Therefore no man can be the Bishop or Pastor of a Church . . . against the . . . Peoples will." Baxter's objection to episcopacy in the Restoration church was not an objection to the institution per se but rather to the

Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, i6yg-i682 manner in which Anglicans ignored this popular right of election in their definition of episcopacy, in their manner of perpetuating it, and in the provision of parish ministry. The practice of Anglicanism deprived the Protestant people of England of a liberty as compelling as any other civil right. Alsop agreed, arguing that consent was as much the basis of more extended ecclesiastical organization as it was of civil organization. Bishops, he maintained, are "prudential Creatures, erected . . . by . . . consent." Similarly, John Howe denied any divine investiture in "the Guides of this church, not chosen by the people . . . [of] a power to make laws and Decrees" binding upon them.31 Clearly, the nonconformists placed their hopes for the future of reformation in England in the faith and in the hands of Protestant subjects. In doing so, they differed sharply from Anglicans, who placed their hopes more in the faith of the patristic fathers and in the hands of their episcopal successors. Conscience confronted the cathedral in these different Protestant perspectives, with dissenters appropriating, against a clerical order, Martin Luther's laicization of the priesthood among all believers. As one exponent of reformation protested in 1681: "They call themselves the only clergy-men, as if every member of Christs Church were not the clergy."32 These different understandings of authority in the church also encouraged and sustained the different political languages of contract and patriarchy that divided dissenters and anglicans in the Restoration Crisis. But the reformation of episcopacy was more important for dissenting authors than any remodelling of the state. Presbyterians, in particular, hoped to replace the diocesan episcopacy of the Restoration church with an institution more like primitive episcopacy, as they understood it. In the ancient church, they maintained, "no Bishop had more than one worshiping assembly at once." Drawing upon the 1641 proposals of James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, these churchly dissenters argued for a reduction of episcopacy through the multiplication of bishops: "I am for more Bishops, and not for fewer," wrote Baxter. And as Humfrey was subsequently to write, "Let there be as many Bishopricks as there are considerable Parsonages, or Parishes indowed." They also argued for the supplementation of episcopacy through the association of presbyters or pastors with the bishops for purposes of government and discipline. Moreover, they contended that the bishops needed to be construed not as the wielders of some apostolic, sacerdotal authority that was essentially independent of the state but rather as "Ecclesiastical Officers under the KING, acting Circa Sacra only, by Vertue of His Authority and Commission." Established by

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parliament, selected by the people, and acting as local agents of the royal supremacy, such "reformed" bishops could, according to Humfrey, serve both the parochial assemblies and the particular assemblies of a new Protestant regimen.33 Language such as this - language in which public and private assemblies were envisioned as companions in a reformed establishment and in which presbyters became auxiliaries to bishops rather than subordinates - was frightening enough for Anglicans. More frightening still was the attack of the dissenting clergy upon the actual practice of episcopacy in Restoration England. Not simply a reaction against persecution, this rhetorical assault was also the expression of Reformed hostility to the "Anglican polity" that had matured in the era of Danby.34 The clerical activism of the 1670s - activism at Court, in the country, and in the press - reminded nonconformists uncomfortably of the 1630s. And just as this "Anglican hegemony" drove Andrew Marvell and John Locke towards a defense of parliamentary government and liberty of conscience against clerical ambition, so it compelled dissenting divines to re-articulate puritan critiques of diocesan episcopacy as the greatest abomination in Christian history. The form of episcopacy practiced in the Restoration church had, in their minds, frequently undermined the gospel and threatened the independence of the godly prince. That diocesan episcopacy was incompatible with the gospel was one theme of Baxter's work during the crisis. This argument was at the heart of his rhetorically savage Church-History of the Government of Bishops (1680),

a popular volume with an anti-episcopal edge as sharp as any employed by Marvell or by Milton before him. Baxter had come to see the Constantinian establishment of the church as a watershed that drew upon both life-giving and death-dealing waters. If Constantine's actions had given the church better access to the world, "the world" was also "thus brought into the Church." Bishops with power under the state were tempted always to turn that power to their own purposes rather than to those of the gospel. Rarely had they hesitated to use such power arbitrarily against any who opposed them, that is, against so-called "schismaticks." The historical record of episcopal tyranny over the Church was evidence of how easily the "carnal and aspiring part of the Clergy" succumbed to the ways of the great enemy of God. Why did the Church always stand in need of reformation? Why did the gospel always require rescue from those who claimed to be its guardians? Because "the Prince of pride and darkness . . . hath . . . set his Malignant Ministers in the Chairs and Pulpits of the Church . . . Satan hath set up

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contentious, dividing, and silencing, and persecuting Prelates, to smite the true

Shepherds, and scatter the Flocks."35 This demonization of the form of episcopacy practiced in the Restoration church came from the most important "moderate" nonconformist of the seventeenth century! Three editions of Baxter's Church-History coincided with parliamentary consideration of Protestant accommodation in 1680-1. Their appearance demonstrated how much difficulty Presbyterians had in subordinating their views about episcopacy to a political strategy that might have accomplished reformation through Protestant accommodation. Not surprisingly, some Anglicans believed the real purpose of "Protestant union" was "to draw together all the . . . Fanatick Parties" to accomplish the "total Extirpation of Episcopal Government."36 The dissenters' almost ritualistic cursing of diocesan episcopacy as the greatest historical cause of the gospel's eclipse was accompanied by an equally unrestrained case against clericalism as the greatest threat to the liberties preserved in the English constitution. The clergy were sometimes presented in Whig and dissenting writing as bent upon misleading the prince into arbitrary modes of government dangerous to parliament and to popular liberties. Electors were warned, for instance, in the second parliamentary election of 1679, against "idle, covetous and sycophant Clergy-men, who . . . set up absolute Monarchy to be Jure Divino, declaiming against the unreasonable stubbornness of any Parliament." 37 But to Whig and dissenting authors of the Restoration Crisis, such clerical upholding of the prince's power was really for the benefit of the clergy themselves. They were as much a threat to the godly prince - long associated in the English Protestant mind with the process of reformation - as they were to civil liberties. The bishops and their clergy often upheld the power of the magistrate in order to gather it into their own hands. So argued many who opposed Charles II about the succession, but who nevertheless defended his authority over the church and in the state against episcopal ambition. Slingsby Bethel, Sheriff of London and Middlesex, warned his prince against the "Ecclesiastical Itch of Domination." If the "violent Church party" lacked the "NonConformists to . . . vent their choler upon," he maintained, "they might . . . soon prove mutinous." Humfrey worried about the dangerous consequence of civil oaths requiring obedience to ecclesiastical officers: "And what [a] . . . Plot have we had here . . . that Allegiance in effect should be sworn to the Bishops, as well as to the King." Baxter contended that diocesan bishops "are commonly for . . . ruling by constraint . . .

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usurping the power of the sword themselves . . . threatening . . . Magistrates that will not be their Executioners."38 In short, the Whig and dissenting argument became that "the Interest of Bishops, and their practice, is utterly destructive of, and repugnant to the establishment of Secular Powers."39 Opposition writers had no difficulty finding numerous examples of how churchmen had threatened secular authority in England. They remembered Archbishop Laud as the personification of the bishops' desire to exercise their power independently of the state and, more specifically, to administer a separate species of justice in the church courts. London attorney Edward Whitaker detected a revival of such efforts at the beginning of the Restoration: "Coming into their Bishopricks and great Estates, they thought it hard that they must have their Spiritual Swords tied, therefore all hands to work to get loose." Whitaker claimed that the jurisdiction exercised against dissenters in the church courts was contrary to law. So did the maverick Anglican clergyman Edmund Hickeringill. The clergy accuse the dissenters of disrespect for the royal prerogative, noted these authors; "and yet what Phanatick is there this day in England, does or ever did make so bold with the Kings Prerogative, as these high Churchmen?"*® The dissenting case against unreformed bishops as a threat to secular authority was more than an effective response to the Anglican condemnation of dissenting principles as destructive to monarchy. It also bespoke the depth of nonconformist attachment to the old hope for reformation through the auspices of the Christian magistrate, a hope which many dissenters continued to articulate even as they limited the magistrate's authority over religion for the sake of conscience. The calculus according to which dissenters weighed the relative authorities of conscience and the clergy, and of the prince and of the legislature, was a complicated one. Reading the ideology of dissent is correspondingly difficult. The grounds upon which nonconformists asserted the primacy of individual conscience — under God — against magisterial, episcopal, and legislative authority were distinctly "radical" in their political implications, as I have argued elsewhere.41 Nevertheless, when the Restoration Crisis is considered as a crisis about reformation, the political ideology of dissent shows another side. For, if the political exercise of the royal supremacy on behalf of a persecuting church drove dissenters towards limiting the authority of the Christian magistrate, the advancement of the process of reformation under the authority of a prince whom the dissenters hoped would yet prove godly - also required a defence of magistracy against Baxter's

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"malignant ministers." From the perspective of dissenters and Whigs, the Restoration Crisis was both about parliamentary government and about reformation; it was both about the constitution and about the church; it was both about the danger of a popish successor and about the danger of presumptuous prelates. Each problem suggested its own remedies. The opponents of a coercive church did not hesitate to appropriate the authority of civil magistracy to undermine the church's persecution of Protestants, while at the same time they pitted Protestant conscience and the English constitution against a monarch who had strayed into the Catholic courses of arbitrary government. These multiple textures of dissenting thought were not lost upon the Anglican writers of the crisis, whose political thought matched that of their opponents in its rhetorical and ideological fecundity42 What is often referred to as the "Tory reaction," the triumphant reassertion of Restoration principles after the Oxford Parliament, was as much a religious as a political reaction. Just as much as the Restoration Settlement itself, the "second restoration," celebrated from 1681 forwards in loyalist polemic, marked the public eclipse of conscience and reformation by authority and tradition. But even before 1681, Anglican thought provided an opposite ideological reading of the crisis that accurately measured the distance between the rival religious agendas of national reformation and national uniformity. Anglicans argued that reformation and conscience were popish contrivances to weaken the established church in preparation for its replacement. With the same intent, the papists had "begun and carried on" the "late Rebellion" under the pretext of obtaining liberty of conscience.43 That the Jesuit wreckers of English Protestantism were again at work in Presbyterian masquerade, feigning the goal of reformation for the sake of its opposite, was argued most effectively by Edward Stillingfleet, dean of St. Paul's. His famous 1680 sermon and treatise about separation marked the codification of loyalist perceptions of reformation as a Catholic stalking horse.44 "Our Dissenting Brethren . . . have been the great Promoters of the Roman Interest among us," wrote Stillingfleet. Their "Malicious Libels," published in "one Book after another," falsely represented episcopal government "as unlawful and inconsistent with the Primitive Institution . . . [and] our [historical] Reformation." Their "hopes of new revolutions," their demands for conscience and for renewed reformation, were nothing more than sectarian "insolence." To oblige the dissenters would only be to acquiesce in the papist design for "breaking all in pieces." Given the dissenters' uncharitable attack upon

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"their Governours" as a "persecuting Party/' the "condescension" of the church

to them could never go beyond a severely restricted indulgence.45 The anti-Catholicism of dissenting rhetoric could thus be inverted against nonconformity in loyalist guise. So could the dissenters' anticlericalism. John Dryden, for instance, wrote of "Hot Levites" who "led the pack" of Charles's opponents and who again "with a zealous cry Pursu'd their old belov'd theocracy." Founding their dominion on grace, the Presbyterians of Anglican historical memory had demonstrated an urge to free themselves from the prince, "assembling and making their own Laws without Regulations from the Civil Power."46 In the loyalist press, the names of Humfrey and Alsop, and those of Baxter and Owen were ritually cursed as the remnants of an Oliverian clerical caste.47 A third theme of Anglican writing was the belief that reformation and conscience were really vehicles for rebellion and ambition. Democratic, anarchic, and enthusiastic dangers were found behind opposition proposals about the church and the succession: by the dissenters' "Democratical Principles in Religion, is visibly seen what sort of Government they aim at in the State." 48 Once before, according to loyalist argument, those crying for liberty and for reformation had "pull[ed] down Monarchy and Hierarchy, . . . turning Union into Dissention, and the Church into a Conventicle. . . destroying the best of Kings to become Slaves to Jive hundred Tyrants"^ To demand reformation in 1679—82 was to demonstrate allegiance to the Solemn League and Covenant, which had once enshrined the same demand. Conscience was therefore an enemy as great as the pope. A "tender" conscience was an hypocritical cloak for foul purposes, "bi-fronted" in practicing rebellion while pretending religion, an "unfathomable thing" that scrupled ceremony but that was unscrupulous about oaths, that protected treason while undermining the legitimate succession.50 The "Records of 40 and 41" demonstrated how little faith could be placed in the call for liberty and reformation: Liberty, Property, Religion, Sweet Names, and so is REFORMATION. Rank sign of sickly and distempered Times, When fairest Names disguise the foulest Crimes.

The cry of Liberty helpeth Ambition,

And strait-lac'd Conscience choaks Religion?1

To say that the Restoration Crisis was a crisis about reformation is, therefore, to say that it was also a crisis of public confidence in the hierarchical beliefs that sustained hereditary monarchy, the episcopal guardianship of the faith, and a society of different ranks and orders.

Reformation in the Restoration Crisis, 1679-1682 Reformation was an issue that separated the political discourse of dissenters from that of Anglicans. Reformation divided the Protestant clergy and the Protestant laity. Reformation divided the ranks of authors, news agents, printers, and booksellers. Reformation divided the political audience of the nation into different fields of religious and political discourse, tying different audiences to different ideas through different distributive networks. The issue of reformation suggests how superficially the Restoration had healed the religious and political quarrels of the Revolution. These conclusions support the importance attached to ideology and to public opinion in the Restoration Crisis by Jonathan Scott, Mark Knights, and Mark Goldie. But the issue of reformation also points to a constant and fundamental division in the political and religious thought of Restoration Protestantism that preceded and shaped the Restoration Crisis. The call for reformation required English Protestants to divide between those who loathed religious coercion and those who condoned it. It left little ground in the middle, revealing how great was the distance by 1679 between a "moderate" Presbyterian like Baxter and a latitudinarian Anglican like Stillingfleet. As Richard Ashcraft has argued, latitudinarianism should not be construed as "a moderate middle ground between contending extremes; it is, rather,/w£ of one of the extremes."52 Similarly, Presbyterians in the Restoration Crisis did not speak the moderate language that some scholars have assigned them. Their outspoken rhetoric against persecution and in favor of separate worship made them, more than any tub-preaching sectarians, the objects of Anglican hostility. Furthermore, the principle of liberty for conscience, which was so intimately associated with the call for reformation, had, since the beginning of the Restoration, demonstrated its potential for dividing churchmen from dissenters. Claims for conscience were, arguably, the most important intellectual source of the long-term, continuing instability of the Restoration polity. Long before 1679, the Protestant political public of the Restoration had become schooled in the different mental habits and discourses of conscience and reformation and of coercion and uniformity.53 When additional critical issues arose in 1679-82, readers and electors were already accustomed to arguing these different languages and to responding to political issues on the basis of different assumptions and priorities. To be sure, Anglicans and dissenters in the Restoration Crisis shared a common Protestant heritage. But the history of reformation in the

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Restoration Crisis demonstrates how common heritages and traditions can often obscure essential differences in language, interpretation, and application. When Restoration dissenters maintained, as Christians and Englishmen, that they had a right to employ a rational faculty to determine their spiritual and civil obligations, they posed a fundamental challenge to the intellectual conventions of the Protestant establishment. And the dissenters' elevation of individual conscience did more than heighten the demand for reformation in 1679-82. It also reinforced conceptions of the state as resting upon contract and consent, and it pointed to important limitations upon magisterial authority and political obligation. Furthermore, little room could be found in this constellation of religious and political ideas for an authoritative clergy as the guardians of a national church. When the instability of the Restoration polity was addressed in the settlement of 1689, the debate about reformation in the Restoration Crisis was not forgotten. The Glorious Revolution became the durable settlement desired since 1649, m P ar t, because of its concessions to conscience. That these concessions were grudging and limited points again to the passions aroused by the call for reformation in 1679—82. In 1689, "Protestant union" was abandoned for the sake of political union: the act of toleration accepted and institutionalized the mutual distrust of Anglicans and dissenters. The Protestant uniformity desired in the English Restoration was replaced by the Protestant diversity of the English Revolution. The limited triumph of conscience in 1689 also marked an end to the Protestant pursuit of national reformation in England. Thereafter, the call for reformation of the nation was overshadowed by the call for reformation of manners. Concern about the unchurched was a concern that Anglicans and dissenters could pursue in separate churches. NOTES

I am indebted to numerous friends and colleagues for their comments upon drafts of this essay and to the American Philosophical Society for funding the research upon which it is based. 1 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new series, vol. rv, p. xviii. 2 John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (London, 1993), p. 69. 3 Richard Baxter, The Nonconformists Plea for Peace (1679), pp. 1-2; Gilbert Bur net, An Exhortation to Peace and Union (1681), p. 12; [Edmund Bohun], Reflections on a Pamphlet, stiled a Just and Modest Vindication (1683), p. 78.

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4 Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 1991), esp. pp. 9-17; Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in Crisis, 1678-81 (Cambridge, 1994); Mark Goldie, "Danby, the Bishops and the Whigs," in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990), pp. 80-1, 90-6; Mark Goldie, "Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism," in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), p. 214.1 wish to thank Dr. Knights for supplying me with the text of his book in advance of its publication. 5 Henry Horwitz, "Protestant Reconciliation in the Exclusion Crisis," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 15 (1964), 201-17. 6 See, for instance John Owen, Some Considerations about Union among Protestants (1680) in The Works of John Owen, ed. William H. Goold, 16 vols. (London and Edinburgh, 1850-3), xiv, esp. p. 520. 7 Gary S. De Krey, "Rethinking the Restoration: Dissenting Cases for Conscience, 1667-72," Historical Journal 38 (1995), 53~83. 8 [Vincent Alsop], Melius Inquirendum, or a Sober Inquiry, 3rd edn (1681), p. 365. 9 Avihu Zakai, "Religious Toleration and Its Enemies," Albion 21 (1989), 1-33; David Wootton, "Leveller Democracy and the Puritan Revolution," in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1yoo, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 412-42; Alan C. Houston, "'A Way of Settlement': The Levellers, Monopolies, and the Public Interest," History of Political Thought 14 (1993), 381-420. 10 See, for instance [John Howe], A Letter Written out of the Countrey to a Person of Quality (1680), pp. 17, 52-3; Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, pp. 18, 340-61; Owen, A Brief Vindication of the Nonconformists (1680) in Works, vol. xm, p. 310. For Baxter's more restrained definition of conscience, see The Second Part of the Nonconformists Pleafor Peace (1680), p. 40. For his rather sectarian thought and writing, 1676-84, see William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium (London, 1979), pp. 212, 240-58. 11 Mark Goldie, "The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England," in From Persecution to Toleration, ed. Ole. P. Grell, Jonathan I. Israel, and Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1991), pp. 331-68. 12 Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, pp. 67, 31, 37; A Proposal of Union amongst Protestants (1679), P- 313 Louis Du Moulin, A Short and True Account of the Several Advances (1680), pp. 9, 22, 25; Alsop, The Mischief of Impositions (1680), pp. 4-5; A Proposal of Union, p. 4; D. N. and N. Y, The Protestant Conformist (1679), pp. 6, 8. 14 Richard Baxter, Catholick Communion Defended against both Extreams (1684), pp. 1-2; Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, pp. 39, 10, 37; Proposal for Union, p. 3; John Owen, A Brief Vindication (1680) in Works, xm, 308-9. 15 Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, p. 190, quoting John Hales, A Tract concerning Schisme (1642). 16 [John Humfrey], An Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Sermon (1680), p. 6. Also see [John Humfrey], An Answer to Dr. Stillingfleefs Book (1682), p. 14; Alsop, Mischief

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19

20 21

22

23 24 25

26

27 28

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of Impositions, p. 28; Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, p. 38; J o h n Owen, Brief Vindication in Works, XIII, 315. Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, p. 203. Also see Alsop, Mischief of Impositions, unpaginated Epistle Dedicatory, B2 [3-4] and pp. 41-2. Alsop, Mischief of Impositions, unpaginated Epistle Dedicatory, B2; John Locke, "Critical notes upon Edward Stillingfleet's Mischief and Unreasonableness of Separation," Bodleian MS Locke c.34, fol. 74, as quoted by Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke's "Two Treatises of Government33 (Princeton, NJ, 1986), p. 493; John Spurr, "Schism and the Restoration Church," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 41 (1990), esp. 420-2. Baxter, Catholick Communion, second part, pp. 11, 22; Humfrey, Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Sermon, pp. 3-4; Humfrey, Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Book, pp. 33-5; Howe, Letter, pp. 3-5, 29, 31, 45, 49. Humfrey, Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Book, p. 30; Humfrey, Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Sermon, p. 31; Baxter, Nonconformists Plea, p. 117. Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, pp. 19-20; Richard Baxter, Second Part of Nonconformists Plea, p. 158; John Owen, Brief Vindication, p. 319; A Conference between a Bensalian Bishop and an English Doctor (1681), p. 5. Baxter, Catholick Communion, pp. 29, 33, 45; Baxter, Second Part of Nonconformists Plea, p. 45; Alsop, Melius Inquirendum, p. [8]; Alsop, Mischief of Impositions, unpaginated Epistle Dedicatory, D2 [3-4]; Owen, Brief Vindication in Works, XIII, 317; [William Penn], One Project for the Good of England [1679], pp. 3-4, 8; Conference between a Bensalian Bishop, pp. 6, 12. Owen, Considerations about Union in Works, xiv, p. 523; Howe, Letter, pp. 21-2. Knights stresses the hostility between churchmen and dissenters in the three parliamentary elections of the crisis: Politics and Opinion, chs. 7, 9. Dr. Williams's Library: Roger Morrice, Ent'ring Book, P, p. 288; Horwitz, "Reconciliation," pp. 206, 212, 216. Also see [Edmund Hickeringill], The Naked Truth. The Second Part (1680); Herbert Croft, The Naked Truth, 2nd edn, (1680); A Proposal Humbly offered to the Parliament (1680); Vox Regni [1680]; and A Collection of the Substance of several Speeches (1681). Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, 10 vols. (London, 1763), vn, 374; Folger Shakespeare Library, Newdigate Newsletters, L.c. 1020, 1026-7 (16, 30-1 Dec. 1680); Library of Congress, London News Letters (MS 18,124), vol. VII, fos. 131, 140-1 (30 Nov. and 21 Dec. 1680); Horwitz, "Protestant Reconciliation," p. 204; K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shqftesbury (Oxford, 1968), pp. 618-19. Grey, Debates, vni, 290. Haley, The First Earl of Shqftesbury, p. 619; Knights, Politics and Opinion, ch. 9. Also see The Death, Burial and Resurrection of... the 35th of Elizabeth [1681] and three pieces by Edward Whitaker: The Bishops Court Dissolved (1681), A Short History of the Life and Death of... the 35th of Elizabeth (1681), and A Justification of. . .A Short History (1681). A True Narrative of the Proceedings at Guild-Hall (1681); Vox Patriae (1681) in State Tracts. . . 1660, to 1689 ( l6 92), PP- 127, 132, 137, 144-5.

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30 J[ohn] M[ilton], A Supplement to Dr. Du Moulin (1680); [Charles Blount], Great is Diana of the Ephesians (1680) in The Miscellaneous Works (1695), esp. unpaginated Preface (F3) and pp. 3, 8, 21, 23-4; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 142-7; Goldie, "Priestcraft." 31 Baxter, Nonconformists Plea, pp. 25-6, 71; Baxter, Church-History of the Government of Bishops (1680), p. 7; Alsop, Mischief of Impositions, p. 28; Howe, Letter, pp. 24-5. 32 Whitaker, Bishops Court Dissolved, p. 1. 33 Baxter, Nonconformists Plea, p. 15 and unpaginated Epistle; [John Humfrey], The Healing Attempt (1689), P- 44 j Humfrey, Materialsfor Union (Oxford, 1681), p. 5; Humfrey, Answer to Dr. Stillingfleefs Book, pp. 28—34. 34 Mark Goldie, "John Locke and Anglican Royalism," Political Studies, 31 (1983), 61-85; Goldie, "Bishops and Whigs." 35 Baxter, Church-History, unpaginated Preface and pp. 15-16, 25, 458; Baxter, Catholick Communion, p. 25; Baxter, Second Part of the Nonconformists Plea, p. 143. 36 His Majesties Declaration Defended (1681), p. 17; [John Northleigh], The Parallel: or, the New Specious Association (1682), p. 29. 37 A Character of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1679), p. 4 and reprinted in C. B.,An Address to the Honourable City of London (1681), p. 6. 38 Slingsby Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated in The Interest of the Princes & States of Europe, 3rd edn (1689), pp. 21, 25-31; Humfrey, Answer to Dr. Stillingfleet's Sermon, p. 19; Baxter, Church-History, p. 25. 39 Du Moulin, Several Advances, p. 10. 40 Whitaker, Bishops Court Dissolved, pp. 33, 35-6; Hickeringill, Naked Truth. Second Part, p. 28. 41 De Krey, "Rethinking the Restoration." 42 Goldie, "The Theory of Religious Intolerance"; Mark Goldie, "The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution," in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. Robert Beddard (Oxford, 1991), pp. 102-36; Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles //(Cambridge, 1987), esp. ch. 6; Tim Harris, "Tories and the Rule of Law in the Reign of Charles II," The Seventeenth Century 8 (1993), 9-27; Philip Harth, Pen for a Party (Princeton, NJ, 1993), esp. ch. 5. 43 The Last Speech and Confession of Mr. John Southworth (1679). 44 Also see Gerald R. Cragg, Puritanism in the Period of the Great Persecution, 1660-1688 (New York, 1971), pp. 233-6; Robert A. Beddard, "Vincent Alsop and the Emancipation of Restoration Dissent," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 24 (1973), 163-7; John Spurr, The Restoration Church of England (New Haven, CT, 1991), pp. 154-5; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 490-3. 45 Edward Stillingfleet, The Mischief of Separation (1680), pp. 3, 15, 17, 20-2, 37, 54; Stillingfleet, The Unreasonableness of Separation (1680), pp. vii, x, xxxv, xlvii, liv, lxx, lxxx, lxxxv-lxxxvi. 46 John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, lines 519, 521-2, 527 in Poems On Affairs of State, ed. George De F. Lord et al. 7 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1963-75) (hereafter, POAS), n, 474-5; A Parallel between Episcopacy & Presbytery (1680), p. 3. 47 See, for example: Northleigh, The Parallel, pp. 13, 33-4; The Cavaliers Litany

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51 52

53

GARY S. DE KREY (1682); A Dialogue between Two Jesuits [1681]; A True Description of the Bull Feast (1683), p. 1; POAS, in, 224, 269, 397. A Parallel between Episcopacy & Presbytery, p. 1. True Description of the Bull Feast, p. 2. Northleigh, The Parallel, p. 1; The Loyal Protestants New Litany (1680); The Second Part of the Loyal Subject's Litany (1680); A Dialogue between Two Jesuits', The Newcastle Associators (1684); The Loyal Subjects Litany (1680); The Moderate Parliament Considered (1679); A Seasonable Invitationfor Monmouth to Return (1681), p. 2. A Dialogue Between the Ghosts of the Two last Parliaments (1681); A Letter to a Friend in the Country, touching the present Fears [1680], p. 1. Ashcraft, "Latitudinarianism and Toleration: Historical Myth versus Political History," in Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England, 1640-iyoo, ed. Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin (Cambridge, 1992), p. 155. Also see John Marshall, "John Locke and Latitudinarianism," in ibid., pp. 253-82. Gary S. De Krey, "The First Restoration Crisis: Conscience and Coercion in London, 1667-73," Albion 25 (1993), 565-80.

CHAPTER TWELVE

ShadweWs dramatic trimming Steven Pincus

"Matters of state," observed Charles IFs poet laureate John Dryden, "are canvassed on the stage, and things of concernment there managed."1 His literary and political nemesis Thomas Shadwell agreed that "plays and ballads have reform'd the state!"2 " 'Tis thought the stage / Breeds more opinions, and produces far / More heresies than the late Civil War," concurred another observer of Restoration drama.3 Using the same super-charged language, one of Shadwell's stage creations complained that "the wits are as bad as the divines, and have made such civil wars, that the little nation is almost undone."4 Naturally each playwright accused his opponents of having politicized the stage. Thomas Otway, for example, writing immediately after the Exclusion Crisis,5 sneered that "it is not long since in the noisy pit / Tumultuous faction sat the judge of wit; / There knaves applauded what their blockheads writ. / At a Whig-brother's play, the bawling crowd / Burst out in shouts, as zealous, and as loud, / As when some member's stout election-beer / Gains the mad voice of a whole drunken shire."6 After the Glorious Revolution, Thomas Shadwell countered that the stage was until recently dominated by the "loyal writers of the last two reigns, / Who tir'd their pens for Popery and chains."7 While it has long been known that Restoration drama was heavily politicized,8 very few scholars have asked serious questions about the political content of that drama. In a recent study of political tragedy, J. Douglas Canfield has discussed the ideology of that genre. He has concluded that from 1679 to 1689 royalist drama, embodying a "code of loyalty to a rightful monarch, however weak or indulgent, wrong or unfortunate," dominated the stage.9 Those few dramatists who were not royalist apologists, who did not celebrate a code of loyalty, have received even less scholarly attention. Thomas Shadwell, whose work was recently dismissed by one scholar as "predominantly slapstick,"10 is universally described as one of the most prominent critics of the royalist 253

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position. Following contemporary Tory controversialists,11 literary scholars have identified Shadwell as a Whig,12 as "Dryden's chief Whig rival,"13 as "the doughty Whig polemicist."14 Nevertheless the ideological content of that "Whiggery" is never explored.15 Until very recently historians and political theorists have been no more explicit about late-seventeenth-century political thought. In the last few years, however, two different views of Restoration political ideology have emerged. The first group of scholars emphasizes profound ideological differences between Whigs and Tories. Richard Ashcraft, in his richly documented and powerfully argued Revolutionary Politics and Locke's "Two Treatises of Government" has insisted upon a passionate ideo-

logical struggle between a profoundly conservative Tory party and the Whigs. The Whigs, he admits, held a variety of beliefs on important theoretical issues. But at their core was a deeply radical agenda, an agenda espoused by John Locke's political patron Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury. These "radical political ideas cast up by Shaftesbury's attempt to organize a revolution" in the 1680s, Ashcraft insists, should not be confused with the agenda of "the Whig orthodoxy of the Glorious Revolution." These radical ideas, "the revolutionary natural law position, with appeals to equality, freedom by natural birth, political power in the hands of the people, the free consent of every individual" were part of "a distinctively radical language associated with the Levellers."16 Mark Goldie, in his account of post-Revolutionary Whig ideology, has drawn similar conclusions. He, too, argues that Whig ideology was diluted and broadened after 1688, but that there remained a radical branch of the party - the True Whigs - who "recognized their intellectual ancestry in the republicanism of the Civil War and Exclusion years."17 Others within this group argue for a broader group of political ideologies falling under the Whig umbrella. Tim Harris has emphasized that the Exclusion crisis did produce "two fairly well-identified sides, both of which had distinct political ideologies and possessed a rudimentary degree of organization." While acknowledging that there were radicals among the Whigs, Harris suggests that both they and the Tories "embraced a broad spectrum of positions." The touchstone of Whig and Tory positions, he concludes, was "the issue of the Church, with the Whigs being the party sympathetic to Dissent."18 In his provocative studies of Algernon Sidney, Jonathan Scott has taken this insight about religion as the touchstone for developing a second view of Restoration political ideology. "It was concerns about religion, not about politics or economics," Scott has maintained, "which drove seven-

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teenth-century English people to compromise their political allegiances and mire themselves in one another's blood."19 The central issue, then, was not sectarian Protestant squabbles, but the fundamental European struggle between Protestantism and Catholicism, the struggle against the counter-Reformation. The crisis of 1677-83 which gave rise to party labels, was in reality the second English crisis of popery and arbitrary government, and the real danger from arbitrary government, "the more immediate fear," is that it would "lead to popery."20 Everyone in the 1670s and 1680s was concerned about popery - "there was broad consensus rather than division" - which is why "the notion of institutionalized party tells us little about this crisis."21 The result was that, while the local issues of the crisis changed over time, the basic religious fear remained constant. In the early phases of the crisis, Scott suggests, absolute monarchy threatened to bring in popery while in the later stages republicanism seemed more likely to do so. Rather than party divisions, there was a spectrum of beliefs in assessing the causes of the root problem: popery. The axis of that spectrum, "the events, structures and issues in the reign of Charles I I . . . are almost xerox copies of events, structures and issues of the early Stuart period."22 Unsurprisingly, then, the poles were defined by cavaliers and republican defenders of the "Good Old Cause." 23 There was, Scott concludes, a "consistency of rhetoric" throughout the crisis which implied a "consistency of its constituency." "The rhetoric was the same partly because . . . so were the people expressing it. To a large extent, and with the important exception of some hardliners on both sides, 1678's 'whigs' werei68i's'tories.'" 24 In this essay I propose to set the literary work of Thomas Shadwell against these historiographical positions. I will argue that though he was certainly not a Tory, he also fails the major ideological tests of Whiggery. Instead, he was a Trimmer, a Restoration ideological category which has largely fallen out of the historiographical tradition. 25 His elevation to poet laureate and historiographer royal immediately after the Glorious Revolution compels us, I think, to reassess the ideological content of that revolution.

If historians and political theorists have been uncertain about the nature of Whig ideology, they have spoken with an almost united voice on the content of Toryism. "The championship of patriarchal and divine-right monarchy," scholars have all agreed, "became a staple of Restoration

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royalist apologetic, long before the Tories decided to resuscitate Filmer's Patriarcha in 1680."26 Patriarchalism and high church ecclesiology, then, were the touchstones of Toryism.27 Unsurprisingly J. Douglas Canfield has discovered that Royalist "plays remain feudal and patriarchal." 28 Throughout his literary career Thomas Shadwell bitterly attacked and savagely ridiculed both high church Anglicanism and patriarchalism. In Psyche (1675) Delphic priests act in collusion with the eponymous heroine's jealous sisters to rid the world of their more desirable and beloved sibling. Psyche's two unrequited lovers complain bitterly of the evils of priestcraft after the Delphic oracle proclaims that she is to be sacrificed. "In all humane sciences we can find / In priests more errors than in all mankind."29 "For sacred you impose what you decree," complains Nicander, "and the deluded multitude believe, / By boasting of infallibility, / Th'unthinking rabble you with ease deceive."30 Shadwell gave his critique of priestcraft a more specifically English edge in his Exclusion Crisis play The Lancashire Witches (1681).31 The lascivious and foolish Smerk, a name with charged ideological significance after the publication of Andrew Marvell's bitter denunciation of the Anglican clergy in the person of Mr. Smirke,32 is ridiculed throughout the play. His attempts to seduce the daughter of the heroic Lancashire gentleman Sir Edward Hartfort are predictably rebuked. He is embarrassed when caught in an adulterous liaison. And, more ominously, he makes common cause with the popish priest Tegue O'Devilly in insisting upon the reality and perniciousness of witchcraft. But, the real significance of Smerk, the real scathing denunciation of high church Anglicanism, lies in ShadwelPs depiction of his political views. Smerk, whose study the heroine Isabella supposes is filled with "Laud's, Heylyn's, Andrewes, and Tom Fuller's works," insists that there is "no, no, no Popish Plot, but a Presbyterian one."33 High church denials of the reality of the Popish Plot later prompted Shadwell to deride "such Protestants as prop a Popish cause," Protestants who were so "loyal" as to advise the king to "break all bound of laws!"34 Proclaiming that "none but Phanaticks, Hobbists, and Atheists believe the plot," Smerk fumed against that organ of government which had publicized and validated the tales of Titus Oates. "Parliaments? tell me of Parliaments? with my Bible in my hand, I'll dispute with the whole House of Commons; Sir, I hate Parliaments."35 It is small wonder that the play "was opposed by Papists and their adherents," and no more surprising that the Church of England's supporters were upset by a play in which " 'tis evident that her sons, the clergy, are abused."36

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Against Tories and high church divines, Shadwell insisted that clerics should have no role in politics. "No controversial sermons will I hear," ShadwelPs hero Sir Edward Hartfort lectured his chaplain Smerk, "no meddling with government; y'are ignorant o'the laws and customs of our realm, and should be so, the other world should be your care, not this. A plow-man is as fit to be a pilot, as a clergy-man to be a statesman."37 The events of the 1680s, Shadwell argued, proved the inevitable results of priestly political meddling. "Those haughty priests could not contented be/ With what remain's from Popish dignity," he snorted, "But would their hierarchy have greater made, / With cast off rights the laity t'invade, / And call in Jus Divinum to their aid. / With that invisible commission arm'd/ Our kings, which sov'raign and inherent charm'd, / With sacred person, power without a bound, / Prerogative unlimited, no ground / Whereof is in our constitution found. / Thus they, by ecclesiastic flattery, / Turn'd kings to tyrants, and to slaves, the free."38 Shadwell was no less critical of Tory patriarchal theory.39 While Tories insisted that the king's power, like that of the father in each family, was absolute and unfettered, Shadwell championed the rights of women and children. In play after play, ShadwelPs heroines insist upon "the liberty of a She-subject of England," upon "the right of an EnglishWoman."40 Eugenia, the heroine of The Scowrers, insists against her mother's strict governance that she and her cousin "were born free, and we'll preserve that freedom; we have learn'd more wit than to call selfdefense rebellion."41 "Though on the stage we Spanish women be," announced one of the actresses in the epilogue to The Amorous Bigotte, "elsewhere we can use English liberty."42 Female liberty consisted both in rights within a marriage and the right to choose a spouse. "Now all ye husbands, let me warn ye!" Mrs. Gripe the heroine of The Woman-Captain pronounces, "if you'd preserve your honors, or your lives; / Ne'r do be tyrants o're your lawful wives."43 Through a variety of tricks and disguises — including impersonating her soldier-brother — Mrs. Gripe succeeds in putting her tyrannical husband to shame. The Spanish women in The Libertine contrast the "grave, dull, surly Spanish blockheads" with their ideal vision, presumably ShadwelPs own, of "frank, civil Englishmen." The English, Flavia reveals, "love men best that are kindest to their wives. Good men! poor hearts. And here, if an honest gentleman offers a wife a civility by the by, our bloody butcherly husbands are cutting of throats presently."44 In England, Shadwell also claims, women should be able to choose their own lovers. Isabella, Sir Edward Hartfort's witty and beautiful

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daughter in The Lancashire Witches, announces to her friend Theodosia that "for my part I am a free Englishwoman and will stand up for my liberty, and property of choice." Her friend quickly concurs, insisting that "I'll be a witness on thy side; I hate the imposition of a husband, 'tis as bad as popery."45 "I am a free heiress of England, where arbitrary power is at an end," proclaims Gertrude the heroine of the post-revolutionary comedy Bury-Fair, "and I am resolved to choose [a husband] for myself."46 The same principles of liberal governance apply to relations between parents and children in Shadwell's drama. In The Squire of Alsatia Shadwell contrasts the childrearing methods of two brothers. Sir William Belfond, whose son proves to be an irresponsible drunkard, insists that rigorous discipline and force is necessary for a child to be well brought up. Such a son, of course, will gladly accept a wife of his father's choosing. "He like her!" Sir William bellows when asked by his brother whether there is mutual affection in a proposed match, "What's matter whether he like her, or no? Is it not enough for him, that I do? Is a son, a boy, a jackanapes, to have a will of his own? That were to have him be the Father, and me the son."47 Naturally, the London brother, significantly a merchant, vigorously dissents. "Rigor makes nothing but hypocrites," he suggests. Instead, Sir Edward informs his brother that "I must govern by love. I had as leive govern a dog as a man if it must be by fear; this I take to be the difference between a good Father to children, and a harsh master over slaves."48 Naturally Sir Edward's son turns out to be honorable, trustworthy and loyal while Sir William's is revealed to be a scoundrel who detests his father. "There's no way / But gentleness, to make ripe girls obey," Shadwell consistently concludes, "Us'd ill, if they have beauty, wit or sense; / They will rebel in their own just defense."49 Perfidious high church doctrines and the theory of patriarchalism, Shadwell claimed, necessarily ate away at traditional English liberties, liberties enshrined in the ancient constitution. Unsurprisingly the Tory triumph after the dissolution of the last Exclusion Parliament in 1681 led, in Shadwell's view, to the worst sort of arbitrary government. Tories might claim to rule by law, but it was a perverse sort of law. "Our gracious statesmen vow not to forsake / Law - that is made by judges whom they make," Shadwell sneered, "Behind the curtain, by court-wires, with ease / They turn those pliant puppets as they please."50 Patriarchal divine-right monarchy transformed English kings into baroque monarchs, allowed them to rule by lust rather than by law, and changed

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property-owning English citizens into "subjects" who "were the stock upon the ground."51 In short, Shadwell maintained, Tories were unEnglish. After the Glorious Revolution, as poet laureate, Shadwell was free to depict the true allegiances of Jacobites - the ideological descendants of the Exclusion-era Tories he so detested.52 Sir Humphrey Maggot, the Jacobite alderman in ShadwelFs The Scowrers, praised Louis XIV as "a glorious Prince," while drinking toasts "to the Turk, the Pope, and King of France" for "we are of one side now."53 ShadwelPs excoriation of Tory principles permeated the entirety of his work. "Crown you his last performance with applause, / Who love, like him, our liberties and laws," his friends demanded in a fitting epilogue to hisfinalplay, "Let but the honest party do him right, / And their loud claps will give him fame, in spite / Of that faint hiss of grumbling Jacobite."54 11

Was Shadwell, then, a Whig? Did Shadwell endorse the Good Old Cause and Nonconformity against royalism and the Church of England? Was he really the laureate of Whiggery? The strongest case for such a view of Shadwell based on a reading of his drama, rather than upon the smears of Tory propagandists, has been made by Alan Fisher. Noting the similarities between the lifestyle and popularity of the future Whig leader George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, and the Athenian demagogue Alcibiades in ShadwelPs reworking of William Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (1678), Fisher has concluded that "Buckingham becomes the hero of ShadwelPs Timon in the role of Alcibiades."55 While Fisher certainly offers a subtle and lively reading of ShadwelPs revised Timon, and while Shadwell does employ the character of Apemantus to warn of the dangers of political flattery, it seems difficult to sustain a Whig reading of the play. Had the play been so obviously a political manifesto for Buckingham and his party - and whether such a party had coalesced at the time the play was produced is hotly disputed by the most recent historical research56 - it is unlikely that it would have been licensed by the high church Anglican and ultra-royalist Roger L'Estrange or that it would have "wonderfully pleas'd" the court.57 Nor is it clear that Alcibiades is in fact the hero of the play. Instead Timon is a tragic hero, a king done in by his willingness to listen to flatterers, his desire to please everyone, and his lust. Far from being presented as a

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political model, the demagogue Alcibiades rises to power as a consequence of political corruption. Apemantus, the most sophisticated if also the most bitter political analyst in the play, condemns Alcibiades for his "foul riot and his inordinate lust, his wavering passions, and his headlong will, his selfish principles, his contempt of others, his mockery, his various sports, his wantonness, the rage and madness of his luxury."58 Alcibiades is the product of a corrupt political culture rather than its savior. More significantly, Shadwell emphasizes the dangers of a sovereign Parliament in the play.59 Timon's demise is engineered by the senate, the same senate which had banished Alcibiades before the action of the play began. Far from advocating the sovereignty and rationality of Parliaments, the political program of the radical Whigs, Shadwell ends the play with Alcibiades liberating the "good citizens of Athens, from the most insupportable yokes of your four hundred tyrants." Without a mixed monarchy, without a gothic constitution, without an English ancient constitution, Shadwell implies that an unfettered senate will be "cursed tyrants to you" "making their wills, their base corrupted wills, the scope of justice."60 Shadwell, while certainly a bitter critic of patriarchalism and the unfettered power of the monarch, was no republican. He appreciated that tyranny could result from an unchecked oligarchy as well as from a monarch whose will was not bound by law. Shadwell, though certainly critical of Catholic priests and high church clerics, was not sympathetic to Dissent. Far from championing the cause of Nonconformists, he pilloried them on the stage. The godly are invariably portrayed as covetous and corrupt. Goldingham, the miser in ShadwelPs play of that name, has a puritan past. Colonel Hackwell, "the godly old fellow" in The Volunteers, "is of the honest vocation of stock-jobbing."61 The clever Mother in A True Widow (1678), Lady Cheatley, insists that one of the prime characteristics of "the godly" is their "great covetousness."62 ScrapealPs "a strange mixture," marvels Sir William Belfond in The Squire of Alsatia (1688), "a perpetual sermonhunter, repeats and sings the psalms continually, and prays so loud and vehemently, that he is a disturbance to his neighbors; he is so heavenward pious, and seems a saint of a scrivener."63 Not only were Dissenters covetous, in ShadwelPs view, they were cuckolds like Colonel Hackwell in The Volunteers, "above ordinances," and "hypocritical."64 Instead of showing sympathy for Dissent, Shadwell and his stage creations insisted that the English should be "religious not precise."65 Those who were "precise" in religion, mused Sir Edward Belfond, were likely to be guilty of "misguided zeal and spiritual pride."66 Indeed, Shadwell

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suggests in several plays, Dissenters were just as likely to be guilty of spiritual tyranny as high church clerics. "Art thou for persecution?" the sympathetic, if gruff, old Major General Blunt asks of the old puritan Hackwell in The Volunteers, "dost thou make heaven so narrow-hearted to own a party only? To hurt a man for not being of my opinion is of the devil; why art not angry with me for having black eyebrows?"67 In a telling exchange in The Squire of Alsatia, the heroines Isabella and Teresia complain about their puritan education. Not only were the books which they were compelled to read insufferably dull, but they found it difficult to believe "that religion can consist in scurvy out of fashion clothes, stiff constraining behavior, and sour countenances . . . A tristful aspect, looking always up one's nose, with a face full of spiritual pride." No, Teresia concludes, "true religion must make one cheerful, and effect one with most ravishing joy which must appear in the face too."68 Such a religion, ShadwelPs virtuous country gentleman Bellfort implies, is that espoused by "the true Church of England-men [who] believe [the popish plot] and are a great rock against the Church of Rome."69 Shadwell was no more sympathetic to radical politics than he was to radical religion. Goldingham, the eponymous villain of The Miser, is "a mighty well wisher to the damn'd good old cause." Indeed he freely admits that "I got a good part of my estate by rebellion (as many other estates were raised) . . ."70 Indeed even after the Glorious Revolution, when it would have been far less dangerous to admit sympathy for the Good Old Cause, Shadwell showers nothing but contempt on old roundheads. "We know thy principle," the sympathetic Major General Blunt explains to his old antagonist Colonel Hackwell, "'twas not right, thou fought'st against children's baptism, and not for liberty, but who should be your tyrant."71 If the Whig cause was the Good Old Cause, it was certainly not ShadwelPs cause. in

Was Shadwell, then, a mere political hack, a playwright who was happy to engage in political argument, but only on the winning side? Was Shadwell typical of the consensual political culture Jonathan Scott describes: a Whig in 1678 and a Tory by 1681? Certainly ShadwelPs literary career makes such an assumption improbable. Instead of changing his ideological commitments every time the political tide turned, Shadwell remained sufficiently devoted to his critique of Toryism that he was kept off the stage for almost a decade.

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"I never could recant in the worst of times, when my ruin was design'd, and my life was sought," he recalled bitterly, "and for near ten years I was kept from the exercise of that profession which had afforded me a complete subsistence."72 His son John later noted that Thomas Shadwell had "suffer'd for his good wishes and attempts to serve his country, and for showing on all occasions, as far as lay in his power, his dislike to any measures tending to give up the laws and liberties of the nation." 73 No wonder Thomas Shadwell attacked Dryden so bitterly. No wonder that he complained that if "any noble patriot" dared to defend his "country's rights," he was immediately set upon by "abject, fawning parasites and knaves, / Since they were such, would have all others slaves."74 If Shadwell was passionately committed to a political position, so passionately committed that he was willing to give up his literary career for those beliefs, and if he was neither a Tory nor a Whig, what then was the content of his political thought? Thomas Shadwell, it seems, was a Trimmer. While historians and literary scholars have long insisted on the binary nature of political divisions in Restoration political culture, have long ignored the existence of Trimmers, contemporaries were well aware of their significance. The rabid Tory polemicist Roger L'Estrange, a man with remarkable political acumen, began attacking Trimmers rather than Whigs in The Observator in November 1682. He was not tilting at windmills. He was sure there were Trimmers that "belong to the court . . . and to the City, and to the Country too. There are abundance of [Trimmers] up and down everywhere."75 "Now since the weight hangs all one side, brother, / You Trimmers shou'd to poise it, hang on t'other," sneered Dryden, "Damn'd neuters, in their middle way of steering, / are neither fish nor flesh, nor good red-herring: / Not Whigs, nor Tories they; nor this, nor that; / Not birds, nor beasts; but just a kind of bat." 76 In the face of Tory attacks - and Dryden and L'Estrange were only the most eloquent of royalist critics77 - it is hardly surprising that the Trimmers' most famous spokesman, the Marquis of Halifax, whined that "the poor Trimmer hath all the powder spent upon him alone, while the Whig is forgotten." So violent were the attacks, so vicious were the descriptions of the Trimmer, Halifax complained, that "were it a true picture that is made of him, it would be enough to fright children, and make women miscarry at the sight of it."78 The Restoration figures which historians have such difficulty classifying - the Marquis of Halifax, Sir William Coventry, Sir William Temple, Sir Thomas Littleton, Sir Richard Temple, the Earl of Anglesey - are

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hard to locate politically precisely because they were neither Whig nor Tory. This is not to say that Trimmers represented a third political party, but rather that they were a legitimate division "of opinion on political matters" as Betty Behrens claimed long ago.79 Indeed they have proved so historiographically elusive precisely because they claimed not to be a party. Sir William Coventry, who was not "ashamed to own myself to be indeed a Trimmer," once told Samuel Pepys "that he was never an intriguer in his life, nor will be, nor of any combination of persons to set up this or fling down that. . . but will stand upon his own defense and will stay by it."80 "I intend to avoid all cabals and deliver my opinion openly at Council and in Parliament," Halifax informed his friend Sir Thomas Thynne.81 Judging by their political careers this was a precept that both William Coventry and Halifax, in fact that all those whom one might call Trimmers, always kept. Not only does ShadwelPs literary production suggest that he might be a Trimmer; his closest personal connection also implies such a political association.82 Shadwell dedicated three plays to Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset.83 It was Dorset who housed Shadwell as one of his "family at Copt-Hall" during the years when he was kept off the stage.84 ShadwelPs promotion to poet laureate, he freely confessed, "is chiefly owing to the patronage of the noble Earl of Dorset, that great judge of wit and parts."85 Dorset in his youth had "turned his parts rather to books and conversation than to politics." When he involved himself in political actions, they were invariably loyal ones. He served in the fleet in the second Anglo-Dutch War and was active as Lord Lieutenant of Sussex in rounding up Rye House Plot conspirators. But in the reign of James II, Dorset "retired altogether from court." "As the irretrievable mistakes of that unhappy government went on to threaten the nation," Dorset roused himself to defend "the liberty of his country." Dorset "entered into the Prince of Orange's interest," the poet Matthew Prior recalled, "and carried on his part in that great enterprise here in London, and under the eye of the court, with the same resolution as his friend and fellow-patriot the late Duke of Devonshire did in open arms at Nottingham."86 One Londoner recalled hearing the Earl of Dorset say of the Dutch openly in 1688 "that if they come it may be called the Merry Invasion."87 James's policies, however, had not converted Dorset to radical Whiggery. Henry Horwitz has shown that on "the major and controversial questions" of 1689-1702, Dorset's voting record was hardly that of a committed Whig.88 What, then, were Trimmer principles? First and foremost Trimmers

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were committed to the English ancient constitution, or, in its European configuration, the gothic polity. Edmund HickeringilPs Trimmer defended, above all, "the ancient law and rights of the three estates of this realm."89 Sir Richard Temple, whose political maneuvers were always spectacular but whose principles were invariably moderate, emphasized that it was the English common law "as well as religion [which] distinguisheth this nation from those foreign princes who aspire after universal monarchy & indeed great care ought to be taken in maintaining those distinctions which may render this kingdom more difficult to be usurped by foreign princes, or to be united to them." 90 Halifax's Trimmer "thinketh the laws are jewels, so he believeth they are no where better set than in the constitution of our English government." 91 Laws he venerated because they are "the chains that tie up our unruly passions."92 Parliaments he praised since "tho' they may at some times be troublesome to authority, yet they add the greatest strength to it." 93 English government, Halifax adored, because in it "dominion and liberty are so happily reconciled; it giveth to the Prince the glorious power of commanding freemen; and to the subjects the satisfaction of seeing that power so lodged, as that their liberties are secure." 94 These were precisely the sentiments expressed by Thomas Shadwell. "I am a true English-man," ShadwelPs idealized Lancashire gentleman Sir Edward Hartfort enthuses, "I love the prince's rights and the people's liberties, and will defend them both with the last penny in my purse and the last drop in my veins. . . I hope to see the Prince and people flourish yet, old as I am, in spite of Jesuits; I am sure our constitution is the noblest in the world."95 Clodpate's eulogizing of the Polish constitution in Epsom-Wells - "there's a monarchy as it should be, every thing governed by the great Council. Ud's bud they have the best diet in Christendom" - is no less an endorsement of gothic monarchy.96 The possibility of the evisceration of the gothic monarchy in Europe, of the corrosion of the ancient constitution in England, was ShadwelPs greatest fear. "But Heaven preserve our legal monarchy / And all those laws that keep the people free," Shadwell implored, "of all mankind, for ever curs'd be they / Who would or king's or people's rights betray, / Or aught would change but by a legislative way."97 Naturally, support for the ancient constitution and endorsement of gothic monarchy was not unusual in English political culture. However both Whigs and Tories - unlike Trimmers - did not rely exclusively on historical interpretations of English mixed monarchy in the crucible of the Exclusion Crisis. While they continued to make historical argu-

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ments, they were quite prepared to supplement these claims with polemics based on accounts of natural and divine law. A defense of the monarchy based on patriarchalism and divine right, as Richard Ashcraft has shown, made it unnecessary for Tories to justify their position from history. It was enough to argue that power ultimately came from above.98 Whig radicals by contrast, in the face of the legalistic Tory backlash of 1681—85, were compelled to defend their positions in natural law terms. Government existed to serve the common good, in Whig political theory. Power, then, came from below, came from the people. While they were willing to praise the virtues of the old English mixed monarchy, the gothic polity, some Whigs argued that socio-economic and political changes rendered it currently incapable of protecting the people's liberty. The foundations on which the gothic polity had been based, Algernon Sidney argued, "were removed and the superstructure overthrown. The balance by which it subsisted was broken; and 'tis as impossible to restore it, as for most of those who at this day go under the name of noblemen, to perform the duties required from the ancient nobility of England."99 In this construction, of course, the ancient constitution could not be, and should no longer be, the ultimate authority.100 Both Whigs and Tories, then, were willing to argue vaguely that they supported mixed monarchy, but each provided an account of the origins of political power which, in times of crisis, rendered them quite radical indeed: Tories were ultimately reduced to defending absolute monarchy; while the logic of the Whig argument pushed them towards republicanism. In the sense that the Trimmers refused to discuss the origins of government, of the source of political power, they were the most profound defenders of the ancient constitution and the gothic polity. Betty Behrens, then, is surely right to claim that "the Trimmers were the only people who genuinely and consistently upheld" the idea of mixed monarchy as enshrined in the ancient constitution.101 What did the Trimmers think should be done if the ancient constitution was being violated, if the gothic polity was being rent asunder? There is no Trimmer theoretical discussion of this problem. Indeed Trimmers tried to avoid the question as long as they could. After the dissolution of the last Exclusion Parliament — at a moment in which many argued that Charles II was ruling in an arbitrary way102 — Shadwell insisted that "our king's too good to take that rugged course; / He'll win by kindness not subdue by force."103 Rather than advocate rebellion, as Algernon Sidney did at almost exactly this moment, Shadwell warned that "intestine jars but Popish ends can serve."104 If there was a threat to

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the English constitution during the reign of Charles II — at least after the fall of the Earl of Danby — Shadwell and his Trimmer friends felt that it was a future risk. After 1685, however, James II made a mockery of the constitution. He built up a standing army, violated Parliamentary statutes, and ultimately attempted to pack Parliament itself. The "very laws" were "destroyed which were made to serve the people in their estates, liberty and religion."105 While Shadwell was prepared to employ contractual language to criticize James IFs actions, he was unwilling to describe the events of 1688 as a rebellion or a revolution. James had been the revolutionary in destroying the English constitution. "The King did really depose himself," argued the Trimmer in one contemporary pamphlet.106 Shadwell argued that the English people had not been the aggressors, but had acted in "self-defense."107 Shadwell consistently staged such acts of self-defense, and in each case they resulted not in the ultimate victory of one party over the other — not in the triumph of Whig principles over Tory ones — but in reconciliation. It was to this theme that Shadwell returned in his final play, The Volunteers (1693). Lois Potter has argued persuasively that by staging Hackwell junior's flight to the protection of Major General Blunt against the unreasonable demands of the old puritan Hackwell senior, thus prompting "the reconciliation of an old Cavalier and an old Roundhead," Shadwell has powerfully reinforced that "myth of national unity," a myth encapsulated in the English constitution.108 The events of 1688-9, therefore, were not understood by Trimmers as a great political revolution against an out-moded form of governance. Rather they thought they were restoring old English governance which had been corrupted and distorted by an unholy alliance between an arbitrary English king, James II, and an aspiring universal monarch, Louis XIV James could have been a popular and successful king, despite his religious beliefs, recalled one pamphleteer "but instead of pursuing his own true interest, he hath blindly embraced that of France."109 Under James, averred the Trimmer in one popular dialogue, "there was a destructive conjunction of interest and design with a foreign tyrant to bring us and our dearest relations into like condition with France and Savoy."110 James II, political moderates agreed, had himself promoted a political revolution, and in so doing he had ceased to be an English King. "Seduced by the crafty and violent counsels of the French, together with his own haughty and capricious humor," Trimmers argued, James II "had violated the laws of which he was the Protector and not the sovereign."111

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Thomas Shadwell has notably failed to receive a place alongside the cultural giants of the seventeenth century. His name is not to be found in the pantheon of Whig heroes - a pantheon including John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Algernon Sidney, John Locke, John Pym and John Hampden. Indeed his criticism of religious Dissent, his disavowal of the Good Old Cause, and his uncompromising commitment to an historically justified English constitution would have made him a very unusual Whig. By contrast, his savage attacks on patriarchalism and high church Anglicanism made him a bitter foe of the Tory propagandists. So bitter, in fact, that he was often pilloried in Tory poems and broadsides. "Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he, / Who stand confirmed in full stupidity," Dryden has Flecknoe say in the single most often recited reference to one of the most prolific and popular Restoration dramatists, "the rest to some faint meaning make pretense, / But Shadwell never deviates into sense."112 Dryden's was a political rather than an artistic assessment of ShadwelPs work. Most contemporaries didn't find ShadwelPs meaning so difficult to decipher. John Aubrey knew that Thomas Shadwell "is accounted the best comedian we have now."113 Langbaine derided "our author's perpetual enemies, who are no more to be regarded, than the buzzing of flies and insects in hot weather."114 Most importantly William III appreciated the significance of ShadwelPs literary production, appreciated it so much that he made Shadwell his first poet laureate and historiographer royal. Shadwell was so honored because he was the ideal spokesman for William's Glorious Revolution - a Trimmer revolution in which the English constitution was restored, and the French-style baroque monarchy of James II rejected. In this context it seems likely that the Prince of Orange was doing much more than paying Halifax a "compliment" when he described himself as "a Trimmer."115 NOTES

1 John Dryden, "The Vindication," 1683, in Dryden, Works (Berkeley, 1993), xii, p. 312. In his Some Reflections on the Pretended Parallel (London, 1683), the

work which prompted Dryden's "Vindication," Shadwell agreed with Dryden on this point, if on nothing else: '"Tis a fine age when mercenary poets become politicians, and the plays business of state" (p. 25). 2 [Thomas Shadwell], "The Protestant Satire," 1684, Poems on Affairs of State, ed. George F. De Lord et al, 7 vols. (New Haven, CT, 1963-75) (hereafter POAS) iii, 513. 3 Elkanah Settle, Cambyses King of Persia: A Tragedy, dedicated to Anne

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STEVEN PINGUS Dutchess of Monmouth, licensed 6 March 1670/71 Roger L'Estrange (London, 1671), p. 87. Shadwell, Epsom-Wells, 1673, in The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London, 1927), m, i n . I am not unaware of Dr. Jonathan Scott's objection to the use of the term to describe the period 1677-83, but for purposes of clarity rather than interpretative proclivity, I shall use "Exclusion Crisis" throughout this essay. Thomas Otway, "The Atheist," 1684, i n Th* Works of Thomas Otway, ed. J. G. Ghosh (Oxford, 1932), 11, 399. Shadwell, The Scowrers, 1690, v, 86. See for example George Whiting, "The Condition of the London Theaters, 1679-1683: A Reflection of the Political Situation," Modern Philology 25 (1927), 195-206; George Whiting, "Political Satire in London Stage Plays, 1680-83," Modern Philology 28 (1930), 29-43. An excellent recent article, which however largely ignores Shadwell, is Susan J. Owen, "Interpreting the Politics of Restoration Drama," The Seventeenth Century 8 (Spring 1993), 67-97. J. Douglas Canfield, "Royalism's Last Stand: English Political Tragedy, 1679-89," Studies in Philology 82 (1985), 238. John Loftis has advanced a similar assessment: "Nearly all drama of the early years after the Restoration, comedy as well as tragedy, reveals a royalist bias." John Loftis, The Politics of Drama in Augustan England (Oxford, 1963), p. 8. Richard Strier has questioned this consensus with regard to Nahum Tate's King Lear in Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley, 1995), ch. 8. Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1y6g (Oxford, 1992), p. 71. See for example "The Whig's Lamentation," 1681, in POAS, 11, 451. Albert S. Borgman, Thomas Shadwell: His Life and Comedies (New York, 1928), pp. 72-84; Loftis, The Politics of Drama, p. 24; Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration (Cambridge, 1992), p. 224. Although Maguire unproblematically highlights Shadwell's Royalist connections elsewhere in the text. Alan S. Fisher, "The Significance of Thomas Shadwell," Studies in Modern Philology 71(1974), 226. Matthew H. Wikander, "The Spitted Infant: Scenic Emblem and Exclusionist Politics in Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1986), 351. Fisher is only partially an exception. He argues that Whig thought is a style in which "ideas are to be absolute and tangible; their expression is to be plain, explicit and abrupt" (p. 230). Obviously this says little about the content of those ideas, and would make Roger L'Estrange, for example, into a Whig. In addition, I will argue below that Shadwell's political ideas were not "absolute" but carefully modulated, that he is a poet laureate of moderation not of Whiggery.

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16 Richard Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and "Locke's Two Treatises of Government" (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 163-4, 182-4, 212-3. 17 Mark Goldie, "The Roots of True Whiggism," History of Political Thought 1 (Summer 1980), 196, 209-10. I am not suggesting that Goldie concurs with every detail of Ashcraft's argument. He clearly does not. Indeed his recent work has emphasized the central importance of religion in defining political ideologies in later seventeenth-century England and suggested that there were more political and religious options than merely Whig and Tory in that period. Indeed I suspect his categories of "conservative whig" and "moderate tory" are very close to the category of Trimmer which I describe in the concluding section of this essay. See, for example, his "The Civil Religion of James Harrington," in The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 197-222; "The Huguenot Experience and the Problem of Toleration in England," in The Huguenots and Ireland: Anatomy of an Emigration, ed. C. E. J. Caldicott, H. Gough and J-P. Pittion (Dublin, 1987); "Danby, the Bishops, and the Whigs," in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Tim Harris, Paul Seaward, and Mark Goldie (Oxford, 1990). 18 T i m Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660—1 y15 (New York, 1993), pp. 54, 72—4, 82, 104. Melinda Zook has also argued for a broadly based Whig tradition, including Reverend Samuel Johnson's ancient constitutionalism firmly within that tradition, and insisted that being "tolerant of dissent" was "expected of a Whig." Melinda Zook, "Early Whig Ideology, Ancient Constitutionalism, and the Reverend Samuel Johnson," Journal of British Studies 32 (April 1993), 155. Betty Behrens, in her classic article "The Whig Theory of the Constitution in the Age of Charles II," also argued from a broad-based Whig party including both ancient constitutionists and espousers of "reason" or natural law theory. But Behrens also argued for a Trimmer position, Cambridge Historical Journal 7 (1942), 45-6. 19 Jonathan Scott, "England's Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot," in Politics of Religion, p. n o . 20 Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis 1677-1683 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 32. 21 Ibid., p. 44. 22 Ibid., p. 6. 23 Ibid., pp. 47, 63, 196. 24 Ibid., p. 47. Scott, it must be noted, frequendy succumbs to the binary oppositional rhetoric he professes to abhor. He describes conflicts between "English republicans and loyalists" (p. 17), contrasts "opposition and loyalist" pamphlets (p. 80), and refers to "both sides of the polarised nation" (P. 62). 25 There has been very little work on Trimming. Donald Benson has argued that Trimmers were really Whigs. "Halifax and the Trimmers," Huntington Library Quarterly 27 (1964), 134. Mark Brown has argued that they were "in

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fact Tories." Huntington Library Quarterly 37(1974), 312. Only Betty Behrens (pp. 51, 70, 71) and Thomas Faulkner in his "Halifax's The Character of a Trimmer and L'Estrange's attack on Trimmers in The Observatory Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974), p. 81 have been willing to acknowledge their existence. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 58; Zook, "Early Whig Ideology," pp. 144, 152; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 232, 254; Goldie, "John Locke and Anglican Royalism," Political Studies 31(1983), 61-85 Alan Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, NJ, 1991), pp. 68-98; Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 74. It is important to note that Harris has emphasized, correctly, that Tories were not opposed to the law or to parliaments. They merely felt that the authority of both, ultimately, came from above. Ganfield, "Royalisms Last Stand," p. 235. Shadwell, Psyche, 1675,11, 299, 304. Ibid., 11, 299. Owen has claimed that this play "defends the values of the moderate Whig" (p. 87), but it is important to note that her definition of Whig is derived from J. R. Western, who himself assimilates "Trimmers" and "moderate Whigs." SeeJ. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution (Totowa, NJ, 1972), p. 19. Later he admits that Whigs, in times of crisis, ultimately defended their position by recourse to the claim that power comes from the people (pp. 30-1). I will suggest below that Trimmers are different from Whigs in that they would refuse to make that argument, even during times of crisis. Andrew Marvell, "Mr. Smirke: Or the Divine in Mode," 1676, in The Complete Works of Andrew Marvell, ed Alexander B. Grousart (New York, NJ, 1966), rv, 1-90. The best, and most recent discussion of the significance of this work is Mark Goldie, "Priestcraft and the Birth of Whiggism," in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 227-8. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, 1681, rv, 123 (for the library), 143. It is important to note that there is no "consistency of rhetoric" here between Tory and opposition rhetoric. While Tories might well call their opponents Popish, their opponents never called the Tories "Presbyterian." Shadwell, A Lenten Prologue, 1682, v, 243-4. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, rv, 144. Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), p. 447. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, rv, 108. Thomas Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem on his Highness the Prince of Orange His Coming into England (London, 1689), p. 3. This is reprinted in Works, v, 337-8It would be wrong, I think, to read Shadwell's defense of women's rights as ironic. David Roberts has shown that the Restoration stage played a significant role in carrying "the debate over women's rights to the public."

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David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama 1660-ijoo (Oxford, 1989), p. 146. These quotes are from The Woman-Captain, 1679, Works, rv, 28, 38, but as I hope to show below, this theme runs throughout ShadwelPs oeuvre. Shadwell, The Scowrers, v, no. Shadwell, The Amorous Bigotte, 1690, v, 78. Shadwell, The Woman-Captain, rv, 85. Shadwell, The Libertine, 1675, m> 60. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, rv, i n . Shadwell, Bury-Fair, 1689, rv, 339. In ShadwelTs The Miser Theodore and Theodora successfully resist their father's choice of spouses. Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia, 1688, rv, 253. Ibid., iv, 220-1. Shadwell, The Scowrers, v, 149. Shadwell, A Lenten Prologue, v, 243. Shadwell, A Congratulatory Poem, p. 4. I am not implying that all Tories became Jacobites. Rather I am suggesting that after the Glorious Revolution Whigs and Trimmers depicted James IFs most loyal supporters in that way. Shadwell, The Scowrers, v, 95, 113. Shadwell, The Volunteers, 1692, v, 161. Fisher, "The Significance of Thomas Shadwell," p. 227. Mark Knights, "Politics and Opinion during the Exclusion Crisis 1678-81" (Oxford D. Phil, 1989). John Downes (prompter for the Duke's company), Roscius Anglicanus, p. 37 quoted in William Van Lennep, The London Stage 1660-1800 (Carbondale, IL, 1965), 1, 266. It is interesting to ponder whether the support which L'Estrange offered reflected his own interest in some of the Senecan themes it espoused, and thus supports John Wallace's reading of Shakespeare's version of the play See John Wallace, "Timon of Athens and the Three Graces: Shakespeare's Senecan Study," Modern Philology 83 no. 4 (May 1986), 349-63. Shadwell, Timon of Athens, 1678, m, 222. Behrens, among others, has argued that the Whigs believed that "the House of Commons was the ultimate authority in the nation and the other organs of the constitution must be subordinated to it" (p. 49). Shadwell, Timon of Athens, in, 272. Fisher admits that at the end of the play "the senators do not have a shred of justice on their side" (p. 228). Far from recalling Whig propaganda of the Exclusion Crisis, this language is significantly reminiscent of the bitter critiques of the Rump Parliament. Shadwell, The Volunteers, v, 173. Shadwell, A True Widow, 1678, in, 299. Shadwell, The Squire of Alsatia, rv, 217. Shadwell, The Volunteers, v, 203; The Miser, 1672,11, 43; ibid., 11, 63. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, iv, 108. This typical criticism of Dissent

272

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82

83

84 85 86

STEVEN PINGUS is especially significant since it appears in a play in which Shadwell was especially critical of high churchmanship. Shadwell, The Squire qfAlsatia, iv, 254. Shadwell, The Volunteers, v, 194. Shadwell, The Squire qfAlsatia, rv, 249-50. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, iv, 144. Shadwell, The Miser, 11, 68-9. Shadwell, The Volunteers, v, 190. Shadwell, Bury-Fair, iv, 294. John Shadwell, Epistle Dedicatory in Thomas Shadwell, The Dramatick Works (London, 1720), vol. 1, sig. A4V. Shadwell, Bury-Fair, rv, 296. ShadwelTs bitter attacks on Dryden include "The Medal of John Bayes," 15 May 1682, in POAS, in; and Some Reflections on the Pretended Parallel (London, 1683). Roger L'Estrange, The Observator, 13 November 1682, no. 240. Dryden, "The Duke of Guise," 1683, Works, xn, 213. Benson, "Halifax and the Trimmers," p. 123. George Savile Marquis of Halifax, "Character of a Trimmer," in The Works of George Savile Marquis of Halifax, ed. Mark N. Brown (Oxford, 1989), 1, 180. Behrens, "The Whig Theory of the Constitution," p. 48. William Coventry to Viscount Weymouth, 26 January 1685, in H. C. Foxcroft, Life and Works of Sir George Savile . . . Marquis of Halifax (London, 1898), 11, 275; The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (London, 1970), 28 October 1667, vin, 506-7. Halifax to Sir Thomas Thynne, 27 February 1681, Longleat House, Thynne MSS vol. 15, f. 23V. It should be pointed out that unlike many Whigs, his family had an impeccable Royalist record in the Civil War. See Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, p. 18. I am aware that Dorset was for a time Dryden's patron as well. Indeed Dorset seems to have had quite catholic literary tastes. However, it is significant that as the political temperature heated up in the later 1670s and 1680s, Dorset's relations with Dryden cooled. In the dedication to his translation of the Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (London, 1693) Dryden claimed that the "cause for which I now suffer," the cause of James II, was one which Dorset was "engag'd against" (pp. xiii-xiv). I am grateful to Stephen Zwicker for discussing Dryden's relationship with Dorset with me, and for pointing me in the direction of his translation of Juvenal. Shadwell, The Miser, 11, 15; The Squire qfAlsatia, iv, 202; Bury-Fair, iv, 293. Langbaine, An Account, p. 443. Matthew Prior, "Dedication," 1708, in The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears (Oxford, 1959), 1, 250-1. For his activity as Lord Lieutenant see Dorset to Leoline Jenkins, 17 July 1683, CSPD, pp. 142—3.1 am grateful to Tim Harris for bringing this point to my attention. The one exception to Dorset's record of loyalty to the Crown

ShadweWs dramatic trimming

87 88

89 90

91 92 93 94

95 96 97

273

suggests the depth and longevity of his political commitment. In 1675, when a wide range of people were growing increasingly dissatisfied with the rule of Danby and the Bishops, Dorset was included among the "country Lords" who opposed the Test Act. A Letterfrom a Person of Quality to his Friend in the Country (1675), p. 31. Although the country Lords included future Whigs, they also included many who were not. William Westby, Memorandum Book, 20 October 1688, Folger Shakespeare Library, MSS V a. 469, f. 40. Henry Horwitz, Parliament, Policy and Politics in the Reign of William III (Newark, DE, 1977), p. 336. Dorset's willingness to flirt with Jacobites, presumably in defense of country principles, has led Tim Harris to accuse him of "fire-insurance Jacobitism" (Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 215). [Edmund Hickeringill], The Trimmer his Friendly Debate with the Observator Concerning Uniformity (London, 1683), p. 10. Sir Richard Temple, "An Essay Upon Government," Bodleian Library, MSS Eng. Hist. c. 201, f. nr. This is perhaps the place to say that I believe Trimmers had a distinctive religious position as well, one committed to a broadly-based national church that would be more sympathetic to religious Dissent. They were however skeptical of tolerationist claims. I have omitted a systematic discussion of their religious principles not because I do not believe such principles were central to Trimmer ideology, but because Mark Goldie and John Spurr have investigated "the ambiguities of the 'latitudinarian' and 'trimmer' positions" in their "Politics and the Restoration parish: Edward Fowler and the Struggle for St. Giles Cripplegate," English Historical Review 109 (1994), 572-96. Halifax, "Character of a Trimmer," Brown, p. 184. Ibid., p. 196. Ibid., p. 194. Ibid., p. 194. While Trimming is certainly a broad category, I think Jonathan Scott has gone too far in claiming that Halifax shared with Sidney "classical republicanism." See his Sidney, p. 142. In fact, Halifax explicitly considers and rejects the notion of republican government in the 'Character': "Monarchy is a thing which leaveth men no liberty and a common-wealth such a one as alloweth men no quiet. We think that a wise mean between these barbarous extremes is that which self preservation ought to dictate to our wishes" (Brown, pp. 184-5). Similar sentiments were expressed in Gr. Tr., A Friendly Debate Between Dr. Kingsman, a Dissatisfied Clergy-man, and Gratianus Trimmer (London, 1689), P- X45 Sir John Thompson, The Earl of Anglesey's State of the Government & Kingdom [written in 1682] (London, 1694), pp. 2-3. Shadwell, The Lancashire Witches, iv, 137. Shadwell, Epsom-Wells, n, 151. Shadwell, "The Medal of John Bayes," 15 May 1682, POAS, in, 94. Like Halifax and other Trimmers, Shadwell emphasized that unity between king and people was the only means by which England could be great.

274

98 99

100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107 108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115

STEVEN PINGUS "What personal greatness can our monarch own," he asked, "when hearts of subjects must support the throne" (p. 93). Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 188-9. Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G. West (Indianapolis, 1990), p. 526; Houston, Sidney and the Republican Heritage, pp. 187-91; Scott, Sidney, pp. 245-7. I a m extremely grateful to Alan Houston for reminding me of the central importance of discussions of the gothic polity in later seventeenth-century political thought. Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 90; Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics, pp. 189-94. Behrens, "The Whig Theory of the Constitution," pp. 51, 70. This point is made both by Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, p. 88; and Scott, Sidney, p. 20. Shadwell, "The Medal of John Bayes," 15 May 1682, POAS, m, 93. Ibid., in, 94. It is true, of course, that Shadwell accuses the Tories, specifically Dryden and L'Estrange of promoting these "intestine jars", but there is no warrant for believing that he would be any happier with a Whig rebellion. Shadwell expressed the moderation of his position eloquently in the preface to the poem: "They ought to lose the use of speech who dare to say anything irreverently of the king or disrespectfully of parliaments" (p. 78). This concept of governance by mutual love - a theme which dominates so many of ShadwelPs plays - is also the touchstone of Halifax's theory of government. See Brown, "Character of a Trimmer," pp. 188-9. Shadwell, Bury-Fair, rv, 294. A Friendly Debate, p. 34. Shadwell, Bury-Fair, rv, 294. Lois Potter, "Politics and Popular Culture: the theatrical response to the Revolution," in The Revolution of i688-8g: Changing Perspectives, ed. Lois Schwoerer (Cambridge, 1992), p. 194. A View of the True Interest of the Several States of Europe (London, 1689), pp. 37-8. A Friendly Debate, p. 8. The Present French King Demonstrated an Enemy to the Catholick as well as Protestant Religion, licensed iojune 1691 (London, 1691), p. 19. John Dryden, "Mac-Flecknoe," in The Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott and George Saintsbury, vol. x (Edinburgh, 1885), p. 440. Oliver Lawson Dick, ed. Aubrey's Brief Lives (London, 1950), p. 276. Langbaine, An Account, 1691, p. 450. "Of conversations between King William and Lord Halifax December 1688-March 1690," printed in Foxcroft, Life and Works, 11, 206. It was J. R. Western's notion that William was humoring Halifax. See J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution (London, 1972), p. 329. Robert Bucholz has noted that, in fact, William and Mary sought "to base their support upon the moderate men of both parties." R. O. Bucholz, The Augustan Court: Queen Anne and the Decline of Court Culture (Stanford, 1993), p. 71.

Index

Abbott, George (Archbishop), 79 Acton, Sir Roger, 13, 15, 18, 22-3 adiaphora, 75, 80, 81, 82-4, 85-6, 88 Agrippa (ancient Roman), 152 Agrippa, Cornelius, 220 Alexander (the Great), 226 Alexander VI (Pope), 225 Allestree, Richard, 195, 204 Alsop, Vincent, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 241, 246 Ambrose, Saint, 50 Amherst, Richard, 127 Anastasius (Roman Emperor), 223 Andrewes, Lancelot (Bishop), 49, 79-82, 83-5, 86, 87, 99,103, 256 Anselm, Saint, 56 anti-Calvinism, 83-4, 88, 99. 107 anti-Catholicism, 2, 6—26, 27, 34, 36, 37—8, 75-6, 78, 161-86, 208-30, 231-52, 254-5 anti-clericalism, 3, 20-1, 161-86, 208-30, 242-5 Antonio (of Portugal), 225 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 51, 53, 107 Aretino, 220 Aristotle, 223 Arminianism, 99, 101, 108-9 Arminius, Jacobus, 109 Arnobius, 220 Arundel, Thomas (Archbishop), 7, 8, 11, 13 Ashcraft, Richard, 247, 254, 265 Askew, Anne, 12 assurance, 109, 117 Aston, Margaret, 7, 9-10 Aston, Sir Thomas, 129 Atherton, Ian, 122 Aubrey, John, 267 Augustus, 99 Bacon, Sir Francis, 108 Bacon, Robert, 147 Baker, Sir Richard, 115

Baker, Robert, 123 Bradby, John, 8 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 51 Bald, R. C , 94, 96, 101 Bale, John, 5, 6-7, 10-12, 14-15, 20, 21, 22 Banaster, Thomas, 148 Bancroft, Richard (Archbishop), 71-2, 73-4, 76 Bangs, Carl, 109 Barlow, Jerome, 20 Barlow, Thomas, 220 Basil, Saint, 47-8, 50, 52 Bastwick,John, 115 Bauckham, Richard, 152 Baxter, Richard, 231, 232, 235, 237-8, 240-1, 242, 243, 244-5, 2 46, 247 Bayneld, Richard, 20 Beauvois, Charles, 123 Behn, Aphra, 211 Behrens, Betty, 263, 265 bells at funerals, 106-7 Bentham, Jeremy, 216 Bethell, Slingsby, 220, 243 Beverly (preacher), 19, 22 Black rubric, 75, 76, 80, 85, 88 Blake, William, 1,60 Blench, J. W, 61 Blount, Charles, 240 Blundell, George, 123 Bodin, Jean, 220, 224 Bohun, Edmund, 231 Borgia, Cesare, 225 Bradshaw, John, 153 Brereton, Sir William, 129 Brinsley,John, 121 Brooke, C. N. L., 224 Brown, Peter, 55 Browne, Sir Thomas, 126-7, 128 Brownists, 81 Brundage, James A., 224 Bryant, William Jennings, 60 Buckeridge, John (Bishop), 85-6

275

276

Index

Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of, 259 Bunyan, John, 61 Burges, Cornelius, 172 Burnet, Gilbert, 227, 231 Cade, Jack, 126 Caesar, Julius, 152, 220 Calderwood, David, 78 Caligula, 151, 152 Calvin, John, 73, 167 Calvinism, 72, 83, 84, 88, 109, 116—17, 118 Cambridge Platonists, 127 Cambyses, 219 Camden, William, 180, 181 Canfield, J. Douglas, 253, 256 Canne, John, 146 Carey, John, 94 Carleton, Mr. (author of treatise on Ireland), 40-2 Carleton, Dudley, 95 Castiglione, Baldesar, 55 Catherine of Braganza (Queen of England), 211, 218

Catiline, 152 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury, 122 Cecil, Thomas, 40 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 40, 42 ceremonies, 3, 70—92, 93-114, 208-30, 234-5 Chamberlain, John, 95 Chapman, George, 57 Charles I (King of England), 97, 119, 121, 128, 138-53, 162, 171, 204, 246; as Prince Charles, 98, 100, 102 Charles II (King of England), 154, 169, 208-11, 224, 227, 231, 243, 253, 255, 265-6 Chrysostom, Saint John, 48, 49, 51, 52 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, 115, 139, 211

Clifford, Lady Anne, 192-3, 204 Cogswell, Thomas, 94, 108 Coke, Edward, 168, 222 Coleman, Janet, 56 Collett, Anna, 195 Collett, Edward, 195 Collett, Mary, 195 Collett, Susanna, 195, 196 Collins, An, 200-2, 205 conscience 231-52 Compton, Sir Henry, 117, 128 Constantine, 162, 179, 225 Constantius, 225 Cook, John, 141, 144, 145, 148 Cooper, Robert M., 97-8, 108-9 Corns, Thomas, 149 Cosin,John (Bishop), 211

Cotton, John, 125, 126 Coventry, Sir William, 262, 263 Coventry, Sir Thomas, 119 coverture, laws of, 216-17 Cowper, Dame Sarah (nee Sarah Holled), 196—9,204 Cowper, Sir William, 197 Cox, John, 47 Crawford, Patricia, 143 Croft, Pauline, 122 Cromwell, Oliver, 154, 204, 212-13, 218, 246 Crowne, John, 212 Cust, Richard, 126 Dagobert, 218 Danby, Thomas Osborne, Earl of, 242, 266 De heretico comburendo, 8

Dekker, Thomas, 58, 60 De Krey, Gary S., 3, 5 Delaval, Lady Elizabeth, 199-200, 204 Dennis, John, 57 Desborough, John, 213 Devonshire, William Cavendish, Duke of, 263 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 126-7 Diggers, 141, 144 Diodorus Siculus, 220 Domitian, 152 Donagan, Barbara, 123 Donne, John, 3, 49, 59, 93-109 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 60 Downing, Calybute, 126 Drake, Sir Francis, 225 Drayton, Michael, 8 Dryden, John, 57, 208-27, 253> 254> 262, 267 Dugard, Thomas, 116 Du Moulin, Pierre, 220 Dunstan (Archbishop), 180, 181 Dunton,John, 193-4 Duppa, Brian (Bishop), 107, 122-3 Edgar (Anglo-Saxon King), 178-80, 181 Edward (the Confessor), 179 Edward IV (King of England), 225 Edward VI (King of England), 75 Edward III (King of England), 225 Elizabeth I (Queen of England), 28, 31, 40, 42, 46, 54> 75~6> l 6 7, 225, 239 Erastianism, 213-14 Erasmus, 52, 213 Erie, Sir Walter, 115 Ethelred, 168 Eusebius, 47 Evelyn, John, 211 Exclusion Crisis, 208, 231, 253, 254, 256, 258, 264-5

Index Fairfax, Maria, 172-3, 177, 181 Fairfax, Thomas, Lord, 144, 164, 167, 170, 174, 175-6, 180 Fairfax, William, 161-2, 166, 167, 173, 180, 181

Farquhar, George, 218 Ferguson, Robert, 211, 212 Ferrar, Nicholas, 195 Ferrar, Virginia, 196 Ferrell, Lori Anne, 3, 5 Fielding, Basil, Lord, 115 Filmer, Sir Robert, 209-10, 225-6, 256 Fincham, Kenneth, 80, 100, 128 Fisher, Alan, 259 Five Articles of Perth 77, 78, 82 Fletcher, Anthony, 127 Fontenay-Marueil, Marquis of, 115 Foucault, Michel, 51, 52, 56, 59 Foxe,John, 10, 12, 13, 14-16, 17, 21, 22, 24, 178, 179 Francis, Saint, 56 Frost, Kate, 100-1 Frye, Roland M., 46 Fuller, Thomas, 179, 256 Gardiner, Samuel, 167 Gauden, John (Bishop), 139, 152, 167 Gentilis, Alberico, 220 Gibbon, Edward, 47 Gilman, Ernest B., 149 Glorious Revolution, 248, 253, 254, 259, 261, 267 Goldie, Mark, 3, 4, 162, 232, 247, 254 Goodere, Henry, 108 Godfrey, Sir Edmund, 214 Goodwin, John, 141, 142, 144 Goody, Jack, 224 Gough, Richard, 123 Gratian, 50 Grafton, Richard, 14 Gray, Dave, 94, 98, 100 Gregory, Saint, 48 Grey, Arthur, Lord de Wilton, 32 Grotius, 221 Hadfield, Andrew, 3, 5 Hale, Matthew, 221 Hales, John, 236 Halifax, George Savile, Marquis de, 262, 263, 264, 267 Hall, Edward, 13-14, 15, 17, 18, 21 Hamilton, Gary D., 3, 4, 5 Hampden, John, 267 Hampton Court Conference, 71-2, 76-7 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 16

277

Harrington, James, 170 Harris, Tim, 254 Harrison, Edward, 145 Harvey, Christopher, 197-8 Hathaway, Richard, 8 Heinemann, Margot, 61 Henrietta Maria (Queen of England), 97, 118, 120, 125-6, 129 Henry VIII (King of England), 6, 9, 10, 12, 20, 21, 35, 46, 161, 167, 168, 178, 180, 215 Henry V (King of England), 6, 8, 11, 12, 16-17, 21—2

Henry IV (King of France), 42 Henry VII (King of England), 225 Henry III (King of England), 168 Herbert, George, 4, 56, 58, 59, 188-205 Hexter,J. H., 115 Heylyn, Peter, 256 Hickeringill, Edmund, 244, 264 Hill, Christopher, 49, 54 historiography 2, 4, 6-26, 161-86, 208-30 Hobbes, Thomas, 60 Holinshed, Raphael, 17-19, 21, 22 Hooker, Richard, 49, 55, 56, 58, 99, 167 Hoover, J. Edgar, 48 Horwitz, Henry, 263 Howe, John, 237, 238, 241 Howell, James, 115 Humfrey, John, 232, 233, 236, 237, 238, 241-2, 246 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 8 Hunter, G. K., 55 Hus,John, 178 Ireland 3, 27-45 Islam, 220 James I (King of England), 3, 54, 70-2, 74, 77-8. 81-2, 85, 86-8, 94-5, 96, 99, 102, 109, 118, 128, 167, 235 (as James VI, King of Scotland), 76 James II (King of England), 210, 263, 266, 267 (as Duke of York), 208-9 Jerome, Saint, 50 Jesuits, 96, 102, 214 Joan of Castile, 223 John (King of England), 178 John of Gaunt, 225 Johnson, Edward, 196 Johnson, Samuel, 58-9 Jonson, Ben, 58, 61 Josselin, Ralph, 116 Joyce, James, 60 Justinian, 224 Juxon, William (Bishop), 125

278

Index

Kenneth III (King of Scotland), 226 Ket, Robert, 126 King, Martin Luther, 48, 52 Knights, Mark, 232, 247 Knox, John, 75, 76, 79, 167 Kiimmel, Werner G., 147 Lake, Peter, 80, 99, 100, 103, 126, 127, 128 Langbaine, Gerrard, 267 Latimer, Hugh, 54 Laud, William (Archbishop), 54, 71, 97, 99, 103, 108, 118-19, I22> 124-6, 128, 164, 171, !74> !75> !76-7» 235, 244, 256 Lawrence, William, 208-27 Leland,John, 11 Leslie, Henry (Bishop), 147 L'Estrange, Roger, 259, 262 Linschot, J. H. van, 220 Littleton, Sir Edward, 222 Littleton, Sir Thomas, 262 Livy, 51 Lloyd, David, 193 "local" meanings, 93 Locke, John, 52, 61, 209-10, 212, 218, 225, 236, 242, 254, 267 Loewenstein, David, 152 Louis XIV (King of France), 266 Lollardry 6-26 Love, William, 239 Lucan,220 Lucian, 52 Lucretius, 51 Luther, Martin, 55, 167, 174, 241 Luttrell, Nicholas, 211 Lyly, John, 55 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 55, 60, 225 Marprelate tracts, 23 Marsh, James, 123 Marvell, Andrew, 161—81, 242, 256, 267 Maximinus, 144 Mary (Queen of England), 27, 46, 75 Maxey, Anthony, 82, 83 May, Edward, 115 McKnight, Laura Blair, 3, 5 Mendoza, Juan de Escalante de, 220 Middleton, Thomas, 58, 117, 128 Middleton, William, 115 Milton, Anthony, 108 Milton, John, 3, 60, 99, 140, 141, 149-53, X74> 215, 218, 221, 240, 242, 267 Monmouth, James, Duke of, 208-11, 224-6, 227 Montague, Richard, 107 Montaigne, 215

Montesquieu, 219 More, Sir Thomas, 48, 52, 55, 61 Morton, Thomas (Bishop), 80-1, 82, 85, 87 Munday, Anthony, 8 Nashe, Thomas, 61 Nantildis, 219 Nazianzen, Saint Gregory of, 47 Neile, Richard (Archbishop), 118-19,124, 171, 175. 176, 177 Nero, 99, 144, 152 Neville, Henry, 214 New historicism, 1, 46-7 Norbrook, David, 94, 107 Oates, Titus, 256 Oath of Allegiance controversy, 108 Oldcastle, Sir John, 2, 6-24 Orosius, 220 Osbaldeston, Lambert, 125 Otway, Thomas, 253 Ovid, 51, 220 Owen, John, 147, 232, 233, 235, 237, 238, 240, 246 Pallavicino, Ferrante, 213-14 Parker, Samuel, 169 Patterson, Annabel, 2, 4, 47, 50, 57, 94, 95,

96-7 Peasants' Revolt (1381), 10 Penn, William, 232 Pepin (King of France), 219 Pepys, Samuel, 263 Perkins, William, 49, 55, 58, 59 persecution (and conscience), 233-4, 237-8 Philip II (King of Spain), 27, 225 Philips, Katherine, 202-3 Piers Plowman, 5

Pincus, Steven, 4 Plato, 52 Pliny, 220 Plutarch, 220 Popish Plot, 213, 231, 234, 235 pornography, 215 Potter, Lois, 153, 266 Pound, Ezra, 93 Prior, Matthew, 263 Prynne, William, 99, 118, 120, 126, 129 Purchas, Samuel, 220 Puritanism, 49, 77, 81, 84-5, 101, 119, 233, 255, 260-1, 267 Puritans, 23, 71-2, 73, 106-7, 126-8, 200, 209, 213-14 Pym,John, 117, 267

Index Raleigh, Sir Walter, 42 Reynolds, John, 71-2, 74, 76 Richard II (King of England), 21, 57 Richard III (King of England), 226 Rickhill, Sir William, 222 Rochester, John Wilmot, Earl of, 214 Rogers, Thomas, 123 Rollo of Normandy, 225 Rossetti, Carlo, 115 Roye, William, 20 Rufinus, 50 Russell, Thomas, 123 Rycaut, Paul, 220 Rye House Plot, 263 Rymer, Thomas, 57 Sackville, Cecily, 117 Sackville, Edward, 4th Earl of Dorset, 4, 115730 Sackville, Charles, 5th Earl of Dorset, 263 Sallust, 55 Sandys, George, 193 Sarpi, Paolo, 214 Savile, Sir Henry, 52 Saye and Sele, William Fiennes, Viscount of, 117, 124 Scodand 77-8, 83, 84, 85 Scott, Jonathan, 231, 247, 254-5, 261 Selden, John, 179, 218, 221 Seneca, 218, 220 Shadwell, John, 262 Shadwell, Thomas 4, 5, 253-67 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 209, 210, 218, 254 Shakespeare, William, 4, 7, 22, 23, 46-61, 212, 259 Shami, Jeanne, 94, 98, 100 Sharpe, Kevin, 174 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 60 Sheppard, Henry, 123 Sheppard, William, 212 Sherfield, Henry, 118-19, 120, 124, 125, 126, 128 Shuger, Debora K., 4, 5, 94, 98 Sidney, Algernon, 225, 232, 254, 265, 267 Skene, Sir John, 220 skepticism, 214 Skinner, Quentin, 143 Smith, David L., 4, 5 Socinianism, 115 Solon, 218 Southern, R. W, 56 Southwell, Robert (Jesuit), 59 Southwell, Sir Robert, 231 Spackman, Norwich, 84

279

Spelman, Clement, 167, 168, 169 Spelman, Henry, 167, 168, 170, 176, 178, 180 Spenser, Edmund, 27-43, 56 Stephens, Jeremiah, 176 Stillingfleet, Edward, 245-6, 247 Stokesley, John (Bishop), 6 Stradling,John, 108 Strier, Richard, 3, 5 Suckling, Sir John, 115, 127 Swale, Christopher, 80 Swift, Jonathan, 60 Swinford, Katherine, 225 Sydenham, Thomas, 210 Tacitus, 51,51,55, 226 Tawney, R. H., 54 Taylor, Jeremy, 235 Temple, Sir Richard, 262, 264 Temple, Sir William, 262 Teutonicus, Johannes, 53 Theodora, 224 Thomas, Keith, 104 Thomason, George, 140, 142 Thompson, William, 143 Thwaites, Isabel, 161, 171, 173, 178. 180 Thynne, Thomas, 263 Tillieres, Count Leveneur de, 115 Tillinghast,John, 123 Titus Livius (de Frulovisiis), 8, 9, 13, 17 toleration 3, 4, 115-37, 239 Trent, Council of, 212 Trimmers, 4, 255, 262-7 Tunstall, Cuthbert, 21 Turner, Samuel, 164-5 Tyacke, Nicholas, 99, 100, 108, 109, 116 Tyndale, William, 6, 20, 21, 55 Tyrrell, James, 210, 225 unity of Christendom, 107-8 Vaughan, John, 221 Vergil, 51 Vergil, Polydore, 8, 14 Veyras, Denis, 214 violence 3, 4, 11, 12, 15-19, 21-2, 27-45 Voltaire, 57 Walden, Thomas, 6-7 Wales 13, 19 Waller, Edmund, 129 Walsingham, Thomas, 8, 10, 13, 16, 17, 18 Walter, Lucy, 208, 211 Walton, Izaak, 96 Walwyn, Wiliam, 58 Warham, William (Archbishop), 6

28o

Index

Warren, John, 148 Waugh,W.T, 11, 16,19 Weimann, Robert, 57 Wentworth, Henrietta, 227 Wesley, John, 193-4 Westerman, William, 79 Wharton, Robert, 147, 148 Whitaker, Edward, 244 White, Thomas, 194 Whitgift, John (Archbishop), 23, 54, 55 Wilcox, Helen, 4 William (the Conqueror), 139, 152, 167, 225 William III (King of England), 267; as William of Orange, 210, 263

Williams, John (Bishop), 125 Willis, Thomas, 194 Wilson, Robert, 8 Wither, George, 173 Wolseley, Charles, 218 women 187-207, 203-30, 257-8, 262 Woodford, Robert, 116 Woodstock, 54

Wordsworth, William, 60, 61 Wycliffe, William, 7, 11, 178 Yeats, William Butler, 60 Zwicker, Steven, 153