Reformation Reputations: The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History 9783030554330

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Reformation Reputations The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History Edited by David J. Crankshaw · George W. C. Gross

Reformation Reputations

David J. Crankshaw · George W. C. Gross Editors

Reformation Reputations The Power of the Individual in English Reformation History

Editors David J. Crankshaw Department of Theology and Religious Studies King’s College London London, UK

George W. C. Gross Department of Theology and Religious Studies King’s College London London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-55433-0 ISBN 978-3-030-55434-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Portrait of Sir Thomas More, by Hans Holbein the Younger, oil on panel, 1527: The Frick Collection, New York, USA, Accession Number 1912.1.77 (© Alamy Stock Photo) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the Institute of Historical Research seminar on ‘The Religious History of Britain 1500–1800’ this book is dedicated by the editors being two of its convenors

Preface and Acknowledgments

One of our contributors has remarked, though elsewhere, that ‘we are living in a golden age for scholarship on the Tudor dynasty and on the Reformation’.1 Much of the current efflorescence lies in historians examining the social dimension to religious change in the sixteenth century, particularly the question of how ideas were communicated, and to whom. Indeed, it is perfectly legitimate, and far from anachronistic, to speak of the marketing of both evangelical concepts and evangelical personalities. Building upon the seminal work of R. W. Scribner, Andrew Pettegree has, for instance, recently entitled a book ‘BrandLuther’.2 More or less running in parallel with research into modes of transmission has been investigation of impact, leading to debate about the criteria (then and now) according to which ‘The Protestant Reformation’ might be judged a ‘success’.3 There is no need to engage with that controversy here, except to say that just as the topic of ‘impact’ can be seen as a corollary to that of ‘communication’, so (it seems to us) the topic of ‘memorialization’ might be recognized as a corollary to that of ‘impact’, since only things that have made an impact—for good or ill—are usually deemed worthy of remembrance. How, in short, have subsequent eras remembered the momentous splitting asunder of western Christendom in the early modern period? From a 2016 standpoint, the impending quincentenary of Martin Luther’s famous protest against indulgences could be expected to bring forth a tidal-wave of commemorative publications. And, in fact, a highlight proved to be Peter Marshall’s short book which not only inquired

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

into what had happened in October 1517, but also probed the anniversaries of 1617, 1817 and 1917.4 Yet there seemed to be some merit in demonstrating that, for all its importance, Luther’s was not the only show in town, even if, compared to the German Reformation, the English Reformation—hugely indebted to Luther’s doctrines in its initial phases as it was—lacked an obvious starting date; we would have to improvise. An opportunity to mark the quincentenary, albeit from an English perspective, arose fortuitously, in that the editors assumed responsibility for organizing the 2017–2018 programme of the postgraduate seminar on ‘The Religious History of Britain 1500–1800’ convened at the Institute of Historical Research, part of the School of Advanced Study of the University of London. Moreover, another notable birthday soon appeared on the horizon, for 2017 would be the twenty-fifth year since the seminar’s foundation by Kenneth Fincham, Susan Hardman Moore and Nicholas Tyacke. Contemplating how the celebration of these two anniversaries could be combined, we hit upon the notion of ‘reputations’, given that the imminent Luther-fest would, to a large extent, be predicated upon the reformer’s enduring renown—and was bound to give rise to scholarly re-assessment of his character, role and status. What, in other words, could be said about the lives, and especially the after-lives, of selected figures who, in one way or another, influenced England’s extraordinarily convoluted Reformation? Thus was born Reformation Reputations. In constructing the seminar programme, we encouraged potential speakers to embrace that theme, and can report, with delight, that four chapters printed below originated as papers delivered in 2017–2018,5 while a fifth was read early in the following academic year.6 Reasonably enough, not all of those invited to present papers wished to alter the focus of what they already had in hand. We therefore took advantage of gaps in the seminar series to commission four chapters that would help us to meet one of our main objectives, namely to achieve both temporal evenness across the sixteenth century and balance between Protestants and Roman Catholics, clergy and laity. On gender, the editors were keen to secure parity too, but women are badly under-represented in the primary sources, and those achieving prominence have rightly received considerable attention in other works published over the last decade. Nevertheless, Susan Wabuda takes as her subject one of the outstanding women of the whole sixteenth century—Anne Askew—and Rachel Basch is to be applauded for ambitiously establishing the reputations of no fewer than three members of that much neglected category: bishops’ wives. Women are certainly not

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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absent from the remaining chapters. No doubt other editors would have picked different figures, but we believe that an illuminating selection is treated in this volume, and our choices are explained in more detail in the Introduction. Whether it was for accepting a seminar invitation, or for fulfilling a later commission, we thank each of our essayists. Inevitably, the making of a book is a collaborative venture beyond the work of the author(s). In this case, we wish to thank Professor Maurice Whitehead, Schwarzenbach research fellow at the Venerable English College in Rome, for answering inquiries and for sending scans of material unavailable in the United Kingdom; Claire Welford-Elkin, rare books superintendent in Cambridge University Library, for bibliographical assistance at a critical juncture; Mary Allen, deputy archivist at the Jesuit archives in London, for clarifying a number of mysteries concerning particular sources; and Emma Butterfield and Lisa Olrichs of the National Portrait Gallery, Deirdre O’Hanlon of Alamy, Sian Phillips of Bridgeman Images and Lucia Rinolfi of the British Museum for their co-operation in supplying and licensing illustrations. To Lady Gross, we are hugely grateful for checking the typescript prior to submission. Above all, we are indebted to three people in the History section at Palgrave Macmillan without whom this project would not have been possible and with whom it has been a pleasure to work: Molly Beck, commissioning editor, and Maeve Sinnott and Joseph Johnson, successive assistant editors. London, UK June 2020

David J. Crankshaw George W. C. Gross

Notes 1. S. Wabuda, Thomas Cranmer (Abingdon, 2017), p. 249. 2. R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981); A. Pettegree, Brand Luther: 1517, Printing, and the Making of the Reformation (New York, 2015). 3. Landmark publications include G. Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, Maryland, and London, 1978) and G. Parker, ‘Success and Failure During the First Century of the Reformation’, Past and Present, 136 (1992), pp. 43–82.

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

4. P. Marshall, 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation (Oxford, 2017). 5. Chapters 2 (9 January 2018), 3 (6 March 2018), 7 (24 April 2018) and 9 (31 October 2017). 6. Chapter 6 (23 October 2018, in the Great Hall of Lambeth Palace).

Conventions

With reference to the early modern period, dates are Old Style, i.e. in accordance with the Julian Calendar, but with the beginning of the calendar year taken to have been 1 January. Dates after September 1752 are New Style (i.e. follow the Gregorian Calendar). Where individuals mentioned here receive an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the spelling of personal names has been standardized to usage there; life-dates also conform to what is given in that work. If they exist, then English forms of foreign place-names are used. Original spelling has been retained in quotations, except that, in English text, ‘i’ and ‘j’ and ‘u’ and ‘v’ have silently been brought into line with modern practice. Capitalization has been modernized, save where an author intended it for emphasis. Generally speaking, punctuation has been preserved, unless it hampers understanding, in which case problematic punctuation marks have silently been suppressed, while editorial insertions are enclosed by square brackets. A change in the type of punctuation mark is signalled in the same way. Foreign words have been italicized, regardless of whether or not they are so distinguished in the source of the quotation. Since book titles also appear in italics, those written in a foreign language are, in addition, underlined; the same rule applies to foreign-language words included in book titles that are otherwise given in English.

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Contents

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2

Introduction: Reformation, Life-Writing and the Commemorative Impulse—The Power of the Individual David J. Crankshaw and George W. C. Gross 1535 in 1935: Catholic Saints and English Identity: The Canonization of Thomas More and John Fisher William Sheils

3

Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered Ashley Null

4

‘Agents of the Reformation’: Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale Rachel Basch

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189

223

5

Anne Askew Susan Wabuda

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6

‘A Man of Stomach’: Matthew Parker’s Reputation David J. Crankshaw

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CONTENTS

7

John Whitgift Redivivus: Reconsidering the Reputation of Elizabeth’s Last Archbishop of Canterbury Felicity Heal

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9

10

Anthony Munday: Eloquent Equivocator or Contemptible Turncoat? Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon Polemic, Memory and Emotion: John Gerard and the Writing of the Counter-Reformation in England Peter Lake and Michael Questier Rehabilitating Robert Persons: Then and Now Victor Houliston

Index

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421

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Notes on Contributors

Dr. Rachel Basch completed a B.A. degree in History and an M.A. degree in Early Modern History at the University of York before moving to Royal Holloway, University of London, for doctoral study. Her Ph.D. thesis is entitled ‘The Changing Status and Identity of English Bishops’ Wives c.1549–1625’ (2016) and was supervised by Dr. Anna Whitelock. She has been a Visiting Lecturer and Graduate Teaching Assistant at both Royal Holloway and King’s College London, and now works as a policy adviser for the Civil Service. Dr. David J. Crankshaw is Lecturer in the History of Early Modern Christianity at King’s College London. He has published on the Court of Faculties, St. Paul’s Cathedral and ecclesiastical statesmanship. Recent publications include ‘Chaplains to the Elizabethan Nobility: Activities, Categories and Patterns’, in H. Adlington et al. (eds), Chaplains in Early Modern England: Patronage, Literature and Religion (Manchester, 2013), pp. 36–63. An essay ‘Overt, Covert and Collectible: Luther’s Works in England and English’ has been submitted for publication in the proceedings of the Reformation quincentenary symposium held at St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on 31 October 2017. In 2020, he will publish an edition of newly discovered government correspondence entitled Proceedings of the Privy Council of Queen Elizabeth I, 1582–1583, 2 volumes (Woodbridge). He is writing a biography of Archbishop Parker.

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Dr. Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon is currently a Holland Fellow at the University of Durham and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford. She specializes in the history of the book trade in England, Portugal and Spain, and in the rise of nationalism, hate speech and Islamophobia in print, as well as in methodologies for counteracting them. She is the author of Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot, 2008), co-author with T. S. Freeman of Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2011) and has written Amadís and Palmeirim in England: Anglo-Iberian Relations and the Uses of Medieval and Early Modern Arthuriana (forthcoming). Dr. George W. C. Gross is a Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London, where he wrote his doctoral thesis entitled ‘“The Lord’s Anointed”: British Coronations in Religious, Political and Social Contexts, c.1661–c.1714’ (2017). He has read papers at the Institute of Historical Research in London, at Westminster Abbey and at the University of Kent, and is currently preparing his coronation research for publication. Some of his work takes an Anglo-Russian view: a recent publication is (trans. Ju. S. Frolova) ‘From London to Moscow Coronations: Perceptions of Monarchy’, Systems Psychology and Sociology, 2 (26) (Moscow, 2018), pp. 97–110; an article on Tsar Ivan IV (‘The Terrible’) and Queen Elizabeth I is forthcoming. Dr. Felicity Heal is an Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford. She was a lecturer in History at the University of Oxford from 1980 to 2011. She has published on many aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain, with especial focus on religious, social and cultural history. Her books include Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), Reformation in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2003) and The Power of Gifts: Gift-Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2014). She became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. Victor Houliston, who obtained his doctorate from Oxford University in 1986, is a Professor of English Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He has published extensively on the career of Robert Persons, including Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot, 2007). He is the director of an international project to prepare a

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multi-volume, multi-lingual edition of Persons’s correspondence: The Correspondence and Unpublished Papers of Robert Persons, SJ: Volume I: 1574–1588, co-edited with Ginevra Crosignani and Thomas M. McCoog, SJ, was published in Toronto in 2017. Peter Lake is University Distinguished Professor of History, Professor of the History of Christianity and Martha Rivers Ingram Chair of History at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee. He is the author of seven books, including Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016), based upon the Ford Lectures delivered in the University of Oxford, and How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 2016). He has collaborated with Michael Questier in several publications, most notably The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011). Ashley Null, a B.D. of the University of Cambridge, is the Canon Theologian for the Episcopal Diocese of Western Kansas and the Anglican Diocese of Egypt. His research on Thomas Cranmer has been awarded Fulbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, Guggenheim and German Research Council grants. He is currently a Visiting Fellow of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge and of St. John’s College, Durham. He also serves as the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Alexandria School of Theology in Egypt. Michael Questier is Research Professor, Department of History, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, and Honorary Chair of History at the University of Durham. His many publications include Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge, 1996), Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006) and (with Peter Lake) The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011). He recently brought out (with P. D. Clarke) an edition of documents under the title Papal Authority and the Limits of the Law in Tudor England, Camden Miscellany XXXVI, Camden Society, 5th Series, 48 (Cambridge, 2015). Professor Questier’s latest books are: Dynastic Politics and the British Reformations, 1558–1630 (Oxford, 2019) and (with Peter Lake)

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All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). William Sheils is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of York. He has published widely on post-Reformation English religious and social history and received a festschrift: N. Lewycky and A. Morton (eds), Getting Along? Religious Identities and Confessional Relations in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of Professor W. J. Sheils (Farnham, 2012). He continues to work across confessional boundaries, having recently contributed essays to Oxford University Press volumes on the histories of Anglicanism and The Protestant Tradition, and an essay for a book on British Catholicism since the Reformation to be published by Brill. Susan Wabuda, Professor of History at Fordham University in New York, is the author of Thomas Cranmer (Abingdon, 2017) in the series Routledge Historical Biographies, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002) and articles and essays on many aspects of the English Reformation and early modern English History. She is currently engaged on a biography of Hugh Latimer.

Abbreviations

ABSI Anstruther, Seminary Priests

APC

ASV b. bap. BJRL BL BM Bodl. Bray, Documents c. Caraman, Gerard

CCCC CHR col./cols Cox, Writings & Letters

Archivum Britannicum Societatis Iesu, London G. Anstruther, The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales 1558–1850, 4 vols (Ware, Durham and Great Wakering, [1968]–1977) J. R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, New Series, 32 vols (London, 1890– 1907) Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Rome born baptized Bulletin of the John Rylands Library The British Library, London The British Museum, London The Bodleian Library, Oxford G. Bray (ed.), Documents of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1994) circa P. Caraman (ed. and trans.), John Gerard: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London, 1951) Corpus Christi College, Cambridge The Catholic Historical Review column/columns J. E. Cox (ed.), Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of xix

xx

ABBREVIATIONS

CS CUL d. edn EEBO EHR fl. fol./fols HJ HLQ JBS JEH JRH LP

LPL MacCulloch, Cranmer

Marshall, Heretics & Believers

McCoog, Building the Faith

McCoog, ‘Our Lamp’

MP n.p. Nichols, Narratives

NPG

Canterbury, Martyr, 1556, PS (Cambridge, 1846) The Camden Society Cambridge University Library died edition Early English Books Online The English Historical Review floruit folio/folios The Historical Journal The Huntington Library Quarterly Journal of British Studies The Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of Religious History J. S. Brewer et al. (eds), Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. Preserved in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and Elsewhere in England, 23 vols in 37 parts (London, 1862–1932) Lambeth Palace Library, London D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer: A Life (1st edn, New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1996) P. Marshall, Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 2017) T. M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1589–1597: Building the Faith of Saint Peter upon the King’s of Spain’s Monarchy (Farnham, 2012) T. M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England, 1598–1606: ‘Lest Our Lamp be Entirely Extinguished’ (Leiden, 2017) Modern Philology no place J. G. Nichols (ed.), Narratives of the Days of the Reformation, Chiefly from the Manuscripts of John Foxe the Martyrologist; with Two Contemporary Biographies of Archbishop Cranmer, CS, First (Old) Series, LXXVII ([London], 1859) National Portrait Gallery, London

ABBREVIATIONS

ODNB

OED

P&P PCRS PL Porter, Cambridge PS RQ RS SCJ sig./sigs STC

Strype, Parker

TNA trans. Trapp & Herbrüggen, More

TRHS v. vols Watson, Decacordon

xxi

H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000, 61 vols (Oxford, 2004) [NB that only contributor name, subject name and subject life-dates are cited, on the ground that many readers will probably access the online edn, and entries are easy enough to find in the printed edn] J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (preparers), The Oxford English Dictionary, 20 vols (2nd edn, Oxford, 1989) Past and Present Publications of the Catholic Record Society The Parker Library H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge, 1958) The Parker Society Renaissance Quarterly Renaissance Studies The Sixteenth Century Journal signature/signatures A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, eds A. W. Pollard et al., 3 vols, I: A–H (2nd edn, London, 1986); II: I–Z (2nd edn, London, 1976); III: A Printers’ and Publishers’ Index; other Indexes & Appendices; Cumulative Addenda & Corrigenda (1st edn, London, 1991) J. Strype, The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, The First Archbishop of Canterbury in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth … (London, 1711) The National Archives, Kew translator/translators J. B. Trapp and H. S. Herbrüggen, ‘The King’s Good Servant’: Sir Thomas More 1477/8–1535 (London, 1977) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society versus volumes W. Watson, ADecacordonof Ten Quodlibeticall Questions Concerning Religion and State … ([London], 1602) [STC, 25123]

xxii Wing

ABBREVIATIONS

Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America, and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700, eds D. G. Wing et al., 3 vols (2nd edn, New York, 1972–1988)

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.3

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 3.1

Portrait of John Strype, by George Vertue, after an unknown artist, line engraving, engraved 1721: NPG D8897 (© National Portrait Gallery, London) The Martyrs’ Memorial, St. Giles’s Street, Oxford, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, 1841, by an unknown photographer, photograph, c.1897 (© Chris Howes/Wild Places Photography/Alamy Stock Photo) ‘The Clouds That Gather Round the Setting Sun or Cardinal Wolsey in Disgrace’, by John Seymour Lucas, oil on canvas, 1901: Orleans House Gallery, Twickenham, Greater London, Accession LDORL 00887 (© The History Emporium/Alamy Stock Photo) Medal commemorating the canonization of Cardinal John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, showing (obverse) Pope Pius XI, by Aurelio Mistruzzi, bronze, 1935: NPG D7201 (© National Portrait Gallery, London) Medal commemorating the canonization of Cardinal John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, showing (reverse) Fisher and More, by Aurelio Mistruzzi, bronze, 1935: NPG D7201 (© National Portrait Gallery, London) Portrait of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, by Gerlach Flicke, oil on panel, 1545–1546: NPG 535 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

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49

98

160

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3

Fig. 6.1

Portrait of Johannes Oecolampadius by Hans Asper, mixed media on panel, c.1531–1550: Kunstmuseum Basel Inv. 12 (© The Picture Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo) Maison Kammerzell, Place de la Cathédrale, Strasbourg, France, fifteenth century, altered in 1589, by an unknown photographer, photograph, c.1895 (© Historic Collection/Alamy Stock Photo) Original letter from Anne Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany, 22 September 1554: State Archive of the canton of Zürich, StAZH, E II 343a Item 469 (© State Archive of the canton of Zürich) Portrait of John Bale, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, woodcut, c.1557, printed in John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie Quam Nunc Angliam & Scotiam Vocant: Catalogus …, 2 vols (Basel, 1557–1559) [STC, 1296 Variant], I frontispiece: BM, Item O,8.30 (misdated 1548 in catalogue) (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved) The burning of Anne Askew, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, woodcut, [c.1548], first printed in Robert Crowley, The Confutation of XIII Articles, Wherunto Nicolas Shaxton, Late Byshop of Salilburye [ sic] Subscribed and Caused be Set Forthe in Print the Yere … MCXLVI [ sic] When he Recanted in Smithfielde at London at the Burning of Mestres Anne Askue … (London, [1548]) [STC, 6083], frontispiece and reprinted (the source here) in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments … (1st edition, London, 1563) [STC, 11222], p. 666 (© Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo) Portrait of an unknown lady, formerly thought to be Anne Askew, by Hans Eworth, oil on panel, 1560: The National Trust, Item 1298241, Tatton Park, Cheshire (© Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo) Portrait of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, by Remigius Hogenbergh, after [Richard Lyne], line engraving, 1573: NPG D25183 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 6.2

Fig. 6.3

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

Anne Boleyn, queen of England, commending the Princess Elizabeth to the care of Matthew Parker, by Thomas Williams, after John Callcott Horsley, letterpress wood-engraving, c.1866, printed in Anon. (ed.), Pictures of Society … (London, 1866), unpaginated plate opposite p. 110: BM, Item 1922.0209.29 (© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved) Interior of The Parker Library, part of New Court, by William Wilkins, completed 1827, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, showing one of Archbishop Parker’s MSS (MS 4: The Dover Bible, Volume II) open in the foreground, by an unknown photographer, photograph, 2015 (© Brian Harris/Alamy Stock Photo) Portrait of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, by an unknown artist, oil on canvas, c.1600: The Old Schools, University of Cambridge (© University of Cambridge) Panorama of the city of London from Southwark, by an unknown artist, Dutch School, oil on wood, c.1630: Museum of London, Item 92.7 (© Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo) The English College, Rome, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, woodcut, [c.1596], printed in Marc’ Antonio Ciappi, Compendio delle Heroiche, et Gloriose Attioni, et Santa Vita di Papa Greg. XIII … (Rome, 1596), p. 27 (© Reproduced by kind permission of the rector of the Venerable English College, Rome)

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2

A Roman Catholic priest on The Rack, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, engraving, [c.1582], seemingly first printed in [Robert Persons], De Persecvtione Anglicana Libellvs … (Rome, 1582), [Plate 4] in unpaginated end section and reprinted (the source here) in Anon. (trans.), Historia del Glorioso Martirio di Sedici Sacerdoti Martirizati in Inghilterra per la Confessione … della Fede Catolica, Fanno 1581[,] 1582 & 1583 … (Macerata, 1583), [Plate 4] in unpaginated end section (NB present in copy at Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome, but omitted from some copies elsewhere), an Italian translation of [William Allen] (ed.), A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII Reverend Priests, Executed Within These Twelvemonethes for Confession and Defence of the Catholike Faith. But Under the False Pretence of Treason ... (n.p. [Rheims], 1582) [STC, 369.5, which does not contain this image]: The British Library, London (© The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/Bridgeman Images) Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, mostly fifteenth century and later, showing the west side, in the outer wall of which is the drainage passage probably used to conceal John Gerard and other Roman Catholic priests in October 1591, The National Trust, by an unknown photographer, photograph, 2008 (© Panther Media GmbH/Alamy Stock Photo) Title-page of The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution …, by R.[obert] P.[ersons] ([Rouen], 1582) [STC, 19353]: The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford, Shelfmark Mar. 392, title-page (© Reproduced by permission of The Bodleian Libraries, The University of Oxford) Portrait of Robert Persons, by Charles Weld, after an unknown artist, drawing, c.1857, probably from an original image then in Rome: Stonyhurst College, Lancashire (© Reproduced by kind permission of the governors of Stonyhurst College, Lancashire)

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List of Tables

Table 1.1

Table 1.2

A provisional conspectus of non-anthology autobiographies and biographies of figures connected with the English Reformation, written up to 1718 English reformation ‘lives’ anthologized: Collected biographies and biographical sketches published in works other than martyrologies up to 1692

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Reformation, Life-Writing and the Commemorative Impulse—The Power of the Individual David J. Crankshaw and George W. C. Gross

Prologue It is a cliché that we live in a ‘celebrity culture’. The noun ‘celebrity’— ‘the state or fact of being well known, widely discussed, or publicly esteemed’—is often taken to refer to an ephemeral condition, to be contrasted with ‘fame’, yet the oldest attestation, dating from Chaucer’s time, suggests synonymity.1 Nevertheless, ‘fame’ (‘the character attributed to a person or thing by report or generally entertained’)2 was probably more common in early-modern usage than ‘celebrity’3 and shared with ‘reputation’—first recorded c.1390 in the phrase ‘of reputacioun’, meaning ‘of high esteem’4 —the possible connotation of longevity, a connotation inadequately acknowledged by the Oxford English Dictionary, for had not Shakespeare’s Cassio cried out ‘Reputation, reputation,

D. J. Crankshaw · G. W. C. Gross (B) King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. J. Crankshaw e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_1

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reputation! O, I have lost my reputation! I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial’?5 ‘Celebrity’, Tillyard declares, ‘appears to have been made in the eighteenth century’.6 Barry, introducing a special periodical issue devoted to that theme, seems to agree, remarking, however, that ‘fame and celebrity have coexisted for centuries’ and that the latter phenomenon has a ‘prehistory’ that ‘can be traced to coins and portraits, iconic representations of the famous in Western culture since Roman times’. Why that ‘prehistory’ should be linked exclusively to the visual is far from clear, but then her overview is full of untested assumptions, culminating in the baffling statement that the ensuing essays chart ‘the history of the privatization and commodification of individual subjectivity’.7 The muddle continues in a recent book by Antoine Lilti, who (according to Cowan) finds the invention of celebrity in the century of Romanticism and Revolution from 1750 to 1850[.] … Lilti argues that celebrity should be distinguished from other forms of notoriety, most notably glory (gloire) and reputation. Glory is the judgement of posterity, reserved for those who have achieved great things and have been remembered as such; reputation is a localized form of notoriety in which a person’s character is known and judged by his or her peers.

Since when were ‘glory’ and ‘reputation’ forms of ‘notoriety’? Is Lilti (or his translator) unaware of that word’s usual pejorative meaning? Strangely, Cowan fails to comment on this linguistic perversity and in glossing Lilti accepts much of his taxonomy: Early modern scholars will recognize glory as a ‘keyword’ of the era[.] … Reputation was also key to understanding the honor culture that was so crucial to the maintenance of the pre-modern social order: reputation was the essence of one’s place within the social order and it was key to the maintenance of identity within that order. Unlike glory, reputation was important for everyone: it was not the preserve of magistrates and other elites. Women and commoners were equally invested in maintaining their sense of honor amongst their peers.8

While ‘reputation’ certainly could have a narrowly contemporaneous and localized application,9 its usage is likely to have been far more fluid than either Lilti or Cowan allow, and it is telling that both Barry and Cowan occasionally use ‘fame’, ‘renown’ and ‘reputation’ with no

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obvious distinction. Definitional tangles do not, however, vitiate Cowan’s piece, which is valuable in questioning the supposed conceptual novelty of ‘celebrity’ and, relatedly, in challenging ‘the chronology of its putative emergence’—i.e. the Habermas-inspired fixation with the eighteenth century. Instead, he insists, ‘the history of modern celebrity needs to be placed within a much longer durée history of fame’.10 The present volume is, in part, a contribution to just such a history. But fame for whom? Like beauty, reputation is in the eye of the beholder, and it mattered a great deal to the denizens of Tudor England whose eye that was. For the author of a tract on gentility, there could be no doubt that true honor consisteth not in the admiration of common people, but in the vertue of him that therwith is indued. And that the reputation which a few wise men do give unto a gentleman is of more worth then that of the multitude, wherupon is inferred that the respect which is borne to any man by them of the Court and citie (beeing the best and wisest sort) is more estimable then that which is borne by the common people.11

What we might regard as snobbery was an indelible feature of the mindset; ‘popularity’ was a dirty word.12 Then there was the calculation, and sheer chutzpah, that could be involved in the quest for renown. No stranger to ambition, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) drew attention to those aspects when he wrote that the winning of honour is but the revealing of a mans vertue and worth without disadvantage, for some in their actions doe affect honour and reputation, which sort of men are commonly much talked of, but inwardly little admired: and some darken their vertue in the shew of it, so as they be under-valewed in opinion. ¶ If a man performe that which hath not beene attempted before, or attempted and given over, or hath beene atchieved, but not with so good circumstance, he shall purchase more honour then by effecting a matter of greater difficultie or vertue, wherein he is but a follower. ¶ If a man so temper his actions as in some one of them hee doe content everie faction or combination of people, the musicke will be the fuller. ¶ A man is an ill husband of his honour that entereth into any action, the failing wherein may disgrace him more then the carrying of it through can honour him. ¶ Discreete followers helpe much to reputation. ¶ Envie[,] which is the canker of honour, is best extinguished by declaring a mans selfe in his ends, rather to seeke merite then fame, and

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by attributing a mans successes rather to divine providence & felicitie then to his vertue or pollicie.13

Bacon’s aphorisms brilliantly capture what would be essential characteristics of the reputable English gentleman for the next four hundred years. Although it is important to know how the sixteenth century understood ‘reputation’, the definition adopted in this volume is necessarily much broader, for the essays collected here explore, in different ways, the interplay between the concept of ‘reputation’, the agency of the individual and the complex processes of religious change and resistance, central to the period, that are conventionally designated ‘The Reformation’, or (acknowledging revisionism) ‘Reformations’. On one level, our contributors’ brief was simple: what were, and are, the Reformation reputations of their chosen figures, all men and women of undisputed significance, if of uneven scholarly coverage? But that basic question opened up many more, on deeper levels. How far did those individuals seek to create a reputation—so-called Renaissance ‘self-fashioning’14 —and, moreover, one of pronounced religious inflection? If reputations were forged externally to the subject, then how and by whom? As a series of contested movements, did the Reformation (the shorthand term that we shall continue to use despite its defects) provide a suitable seed-bed for the emergence not only of distinctive reputations, but also of distinctive types of reputation? To what extent were reputations fabricated according to pre-existing models, and the fruits intended to be exemplary? In what ways were reputations perpetuated by succeeding generations and why? Were those reputations manipulated polemically? If so, then to what effect? At a time when even texts and manuscripts (inanimate objects after all) are deemed to have ‘after-lives’,15 it seems appropriate to shine the spotlight on what really had once breathed—on the lives, and especially the after-lives, of those flesh and blood human beings whose outstanding characters and deeds make the Tudor age one of such perennial fascination. Although a comprehensive analysis of these issues is impossible within the compass of an Introduction, we aim to touch upon some of them here, indicating as we go how the following essays mesh with our overall theme. But before embarking upon that task, it is critical to probe a still more fundamental conundrum: what did it mean to possess a ‘reputation’, religious or otherwise? Was a ‘reputation’ invariably a good thing? In short, we are led to consider the mixture of chivalric culture and Roman Catholic piety that

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flourished in England as the fifteenth century turned into the sixteenth— a mixture whose twin components would come under attack from one wing of a modish Renaissance humanism. By undermining the standards by which ‘fame’ had traditionally been conceived, that wing’s leading intellectuals created a new context within which Reformation reputations would ultimately have to be fabricated.

Heroes and Heroines The celebrities of pre-Reformation England may crudely be divided into kings, knights, saints and the mythogenic outlaw Robin Hood. Following the work of various scholars, nothing need be said here about Henry VII’s energetic and inventive exploitation of ‘the politics of display and symbol’, or rather of princely magnificence, even if Sharpe does damn him with faint praise for having been nowhere near as ‘successful’ at it as his only surviving son and three English grandchildren. Yet the verdict offered in Francis Bacon’s 1622 Historie, and a fortiori Sharpe’s ‘postcard recognition test’, are bizarrely anachronistic criteria for measuring the achievements of the usurper who launched what he calls ‘the Tudor theatricalization of monarchy’ and ‘the increasing publicization of regality’.16 Taking as his subject ‘representations of early modern rule’, Sharpe explains that his purpose was ‘to study all the means by which rulers from Henry VIII to Queen Anne sought to establish and sustain their authority, enhance their … reputation, and refute or neuter criticism and opposition, through changing and often difficult circumstances’.17 Absorbing though his book is in its detail, there is no escaping the conclusion that, like the influential output of the Warburg School which he assails, the story is overwhelmingly one of production at the expense of any serious consideration of consumption. That approach is to ignore Sydney Anglo’s sage scepticism of 1992, for Anglo had asked: ‘who actually saw the architectural embellishments, illuminated manuscripts, gems and paintings that are constantly before our eyes as evidence of Tudor iconography? None of these things was intended for the uncouth gaze of the multitude’. The same problem arises in relation to royal events. Progresses were relatively few and far between, and left vast swathes of the realm unvisited. York, he notes, ‘had to wait until 1541 for its first and only view of Henry VIII’. Elizabeth’s ceremonial entries to the capital numbered two: one in 1559 immediately before her coronation and another (omitted by Anglo) to the Armada victory thanksgiving service

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at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1588. It is all very well for historians to scrutinize a foreign observer’s account of the 1595 Garter ceremony in which he reported that ‘there was a great crush in the chapel, as many of the common people had thronged thither’, but (wonders Anglo) ‘what was the population of England in 1595, and what proportion managed to squeeze into the chapel and courtyard of Windsor Castle?’. On tournaments, he is scathing. Sir Roy Strong’s claim that ‘everyone knew about them, everyone had seen them’ provokes the acid retort ‘everyone who was a somebody, perhaps: but not everyone who was a nobody’. Anglo continues in similar vein: Some historians write as though Renaissance neoplatonic magic actually worked; or they give the impression that, all over England, Elizabethan fans were following the tournaments as if glued to television sets, sitting enthralled while expert commentators described the lists, interpreted the sexual and political significance of the queen’s apparel, analysed the courtly imprese, and assessed the prowess of the tilters. Yet how could the great mass of the queen’s subjects share in the spectacle, devices and verses which would have been largely incomprehensible and inaudible even to those actually present? Some of the citizens of London may have enjoyed these emasculated neochivalric spectacles but, apart from the fact that Elizabeth’s Accession Day had become a national holiday, it is difficult to see how the rest of England would have been affected.

Nobody denies that ‘artistic and intellectual ingenuity was deployed in the closed circuit of clambering courtiership’, but historians have (he thinks) become ‘both too sophisticated and too gullible’: ‘we treat the web-spinning subtleties of sixteenth-century scholars and the intricate flattery of courtiers alike with too much respect’. Modern exegesis falls down because it ‘fails to acknowledge the immense distance between what a writer or artist may have intended, and what an ordinary reader or viewer might have understood’.18 And there lies the nub of the problem, since even exhaustive investigation of consumption will not tell us what we ideally wish to know, which is the nature of the perceptions and/or commitments engendered by consumption of the materials examined by Anglo and Sharpe. Where does this situation leave students of monarchical reputations? It implies, of course, that there must have been gradations. How sovereigns were generally reputed among their courtiers, who could observe many of their doings at first-hand, will surely have differed from how they were reputed by people geographically

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remote from the Court and in their everyday lives cut off from political society. If people in the latter category thought about the ruler at all, then was that mostly (or entirely) in stereotypical terms: they assumed that the king was doing whatever kings were traditionally expected to do, in much the same way as we talk of ‘The Government’ with only a hazy notion of its composition and activities at any one time? A third category, one might imagine, was constituted by outsiders whose opinions were coloured by hearing (or hearing of) royal proclamations, or by experiencing (or being told about) Crown intervention in local affairs or by reading (or having read to them) manuscript newsletters and/or printed chronicles. Lastly, there are the impressions formed by foreigners. Yet should native contemporaries have arrived at an unflattering appraisal of their sovereign, there was, ordinarily, a formidable obstacle to its free expression, namely the law. 1534 saw the first major revision of treason legislation since 1352. Whereas the medieval Act had declared as treason any attempt to cause the death of the king, queen or heirs to the throne by an overt action, the new law extended the definition to encompass any wish and any attempt to cause bodily harm to the personages specified, even if that wish was only expressed maliciously either in speech or in writing. To render oral assertions susceptible to treasonous construction was bad enough, but another passage reveals the kinds of epithets probably already being uttered, for it states that from henceforth it would be deemed treason to call the king, either by word of mouth or on the page, a heretic, infidel, schismatic, tyrant or usurper.19 Moreover, a 1554 statute defined sedition sweepingly. It now became a crime to originate slanderous talk (i.e. news or rumours) about the king or queen, to spread such talk as might have been originated by someone else or maliciously to ‘devise write printe or set forthe any maner of booke rime ballade letter or writing, conteining any false matter … of sclander reproche and dishonour of the king and quenes Majesties or of either of them’.20 The statute was re-enacted in 1559 and replaced by a tougher one in 1581.21 When John Massee, a Kentish tailor, was indicted at the assizes in 1591 for having exclaimed ‘by God’s wounds, the queene ys a whore’, it was probably under that Act.22 Granted: Strong, Anglo and Sharpe have taught us a huge amount about what Tudor monarchs wished their reputations to be. Nevertheless, what their popular reputations really were, during their lifetimes, lies for the most part hidden beyond recovery, unless humble folk such as Massee were sufficiently incautious to fall foul of the law and sufficiently unlucky to be delated to the authorities. As Burke puts it: ‘kings

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inherited considerable reserves of popular goodwill’ and ‘were presumed benevolent, even heroic, until they were proved to be otherwise’. ‘Criticism’, he adds, ‘was inhibited’ not only by ‘the fear of punishment’, but also by ‘a self-censorship’ which possibly operated unconsciously.23 Can the nachleben of each of the Tudor sovereigns be reconstructed? Yes, it can—albeit chiefly on the basis of literary and artistic survivals that may, or may not, be representative of earlier and wider feeling.24 The tricky nature of domestic evidence is presumably one reason why some historians have looked abroad for their sources, which are, inevitably, not without interpretative hazards of their own.25 Royal celebrity, then, is deeply problematic. In turning to knights, by contrast, we are on much firmer ground. ‘A chivalrous society’, contends Saul, ‘was in a very real sense a community of memory’: The valorous deeds performed by knights lived on in the recollection of friends, family and descendants. Chivalrous men recognized that deeds of the highest valour could be inspirational to generations to come and so their memory would be perpetuated.

This species of memory, he says, ‘is perhaps best seen as a form of family memory’, though one can argue that it ‘also belonged to the chivalric class as a whole’. Of the many things keeping knightly remembrance going, the role of the heralds, in Saul’s opinion, was pivotal. Emerging in the second half of the twelfth century in conjunction with the invention of the tournament as an institution for learning and practising feats of arms, the heralds served as ‘witnesses to chivalric achievement’ by compiling colourful rolls of arms and sometimes, if talented in minstrelsy, by composing verse narratives to accompany them. During the thirteenth century, heraldry became an important signifier of ownership and patronage. Coats of arms appeared on castle gatehouses, on household chattels and on fixtures and fittings (including vestments) given to churches. Heraldry was attractive to the knightly strata, Saul avers, because of ‘its ability to articulate in bold visual form their military and cultural concerns’. To be plain: ‘heraldry, memory and identity were all closely associated’. It was the heralds who oversaw grand aristocratic and gentry funerals, the purpose of which on one hand was ‘to demonstrate the honour and immortality of the deceased’s family’ and on the other ‘to emphasize the religious dimension to Christian knighthood’. The trappings—banners and helms—might even be left behind

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in churches, where they remain today. Grave coverings were initially comparatively modest brasses, but gradually gave way to elaborate tomb monuments surmounted by recumbent effigies in attitudes of prayer, the subjects shown impressively clad in the latest armour. In surviving examples, the surrounding surfaces are typically a riot of self-projection, with armorials and inscriptions testifying (in shifting proportions) to martial distinction and illustrious birth, though pedigrees are not necessarily wholly authentic. The display could continue on donor panels, murals and stained-glass windows. Non-literary objects and emblematic codes were especially important for memorialization in the predominantly oral cultures of the early and central Middle Ages. However, the subsequent spread of literacy caused them to be supplemented by texts in the shape of family histories, cartularies and chivalric ‘biographies’. Focusing on the Beauchamp earls of Warwick, Saul’s discussion of the last of those categories is particularly helpful. One of the Beaumonts, earlier holders of the title, had commissioned the writing of a romance, ‘Guy of Warwick’, about a legendary ancestor who had performed deeds of exceptional valour in the Holy Land. By the fourteenth century, the Beauchamps were enthusiastically appropriating him as a genuine forbear and some of his alleged effects, notably a massive sword, could be seen at Warwick Castle. So successful did Guy’s cult become that two new ‘Lives’ were written in the 1420s: a French prose version produced at the behest of the then earl of Warwick, Richard Beauchamp (1382–1439), and a verse version penned by John Lydgate (c.1370–1449/1450?) under the patronage of Margaret, one of that earl’s daughters. This keenness to foster a proud chivalric reputation persisted to the last of the line: Earl Richard’s youngest daughter, Anne. In the 1480s, she commissioned two works designed to glorify the family history: the ‘Rous Roll’ is an account of the earls and countesses of Warwick decorated with their coats of arms, while the ‘Beauchamp Pageant’ is a wide-ranging illustrated ‘Life’ of her father that must draw upon older biographical material sadly now lost. Commenting on the Beauchamps’ penchant for dynastic self-promotion, Saul has this to say: ‘that we think so well of them today is due in no small part to their own efforts to ensure that we do’. They understood that although brave acts might win fame for a knight that fame could pass away. If a reputation were to live on, it had to be … cherished. It had to find permanent witness in writing or art. Much the same point can be made in respect of the reputations of some of the

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knights who had made their names in the earlier stages of the Hundred Years War. Then, as later, great reputations were not the spontaneous outcome of great deeds of arms; they were the result of careful nurturing and manipulation by those who controlled the flow of information.26

People watching tournaments or attending elite funerals or encountering heraldic symbols may well have interpreted their experiences in the light of knightly behaviour held up as exemplary in the latemedieval chivalric literature that was created in surprising quantities and is known to have circulated extensively within polite society.27 The earliest such texts had been written either in French or in Anglo-Norman, but from the close of the thirteenth century many English adaptations were being made: some in verse, others in prose. Twenty-three separate Arthurian romances have survived from 1300 to 1500, often in multiple manuscripts. One distinctive feature of these English redactions is the elevation of Sir Gawain to a position of prominence almost rivalling that of King Arthur. Saul identifies three major anonymous poems of the late fourteenth century in which, building upon his long-standing idealization as ‘the model of masculinity, a hero dedicated to fighting’ at the hands of Chrétien de Troyes (fl. c.1160–1181), Sir Gawain finally achieves a ‘starring role’: the stanzaic ‘Morte Arthur’, the alliterative ‘Morte Arthure’ and the masterpiece ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’. For Saul, the last of that trio is a ‘penetrating work’ which makes its main protagonist ‘a vehicle for the exploration of the conflicts and dilemmas inherent in the knightly ideal itself’. Yet another superlative contribution to the genre was still to come: in the late 1460s, Sir Thomas Malory (1415× 18–1471) would finish writing his ambitious ‘Morte Darthur’—an epic re-casting of the traditional tales into a cycle comprising eight lengthy English romances. William Caxton published a heavily tidied-up version in 1485, and Wynkyn de Worde reprinted it (with changes) in 1498 and 1529, to speak only of the decades before the Break with Rome. Although Sir Lancelot’s profile had hardly been slight in Malory’s sources, it was he who brought him to the forefront as the personification of perfect knighthood, putting even Arthur into the shade. Interestingly, Saul argues that Malory portrayed chivalry ‘as an essentially non-religious institution’. In his re-telling, ‘the notion of the questing knight of French romance was in the process of being superseded by a knighthood committed to serving the common weal’.

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Complementing this efflorescence of chivalric fiction (much of which would have been read as the history of remote times) was the emergence of the secular chronicle. Prior to the mid fourteenth century, chronicles had been monastic productions whose pious compilers interpreted the past through the prism of God’s providence. But increasing literary patronage by the nobility and gentry encouraged the growth of a new style of historical reconstruction that adopted a distinctively chivalric perspective. Infused with a powerful moral dimension and didactic purpose, the French prose chronicle had its roots in the knightly culture of the small continental state of Hainault. The pioneer was Jean le Bel (c.1290–1370). He began work on his compilation in 1352, eventually covering the period from the late thirteenth century down to 1361. Jean Froissart (1337?–c.1404) was his eminent successor. Extant in three main recensions, Froissart’s chronicle initially traversed the same chronological span as had le Bel, but the author then continued independently thereafter, bequeathing to posterity the principal French narrative of the Hundred Years War as far as 1400. It was immensely popular, establishing the fame, as war heroes, of Edward III; The Black Prince; Henry, duke of Lancaster; Reginald, Lord Cobham; Sir John Chandos; Sir Fulk Harley; and Sir Walter Mauny. We have already mentioned the chivalric ‘biography’ in connection with Beauchamp family memorialization; there can be little doubt, however, that the proliferation of chronicles championing martial valour prompted heralds to essay biographical accounts. That descriptor is chosen with care because those texts are scarcely biographies as the concept is generally understood nowadays, not that it has ever been monolithic,28 for (to quote Saul) ‘the essence … was to present the person as knight and not the knight as person’. Chandos Herald’s ‘Life of the Black Prince’ (written c.1376–1387 in Anglo-Norman verse) is seemingly the only such work celebrating an English knight of that period of which scholars are aware, though Saul is surely correct in presuming other examples to have been lost. Since Chandos Herald’s ‘Life’ exists in just two medieval manuscripts,29 and remained unpublished until 1842,30 students are up against the same problem of exposure as Anglo has emphasized with regard to Tudor royal extravaganzas and iconography. If readers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries found their role-models in chivalric history, then it would almost certainly have been among the pages of Froissart’s chronicle—over 150 widely scattered manuscripts have come down to us and a two-volume English

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translation was printed (ostensibly at Henry VIII’s behest) in London in 1523–1525 [STC, 11396, 11397].31 Obviously, the apotheosis of the stereotypical knight, and the celebrity accorded to specific knights, is unlikely to have been meaningful to the great mass of the uneducated. Altogether different, though, was the veneration of the saints. That the saints bulked large in medieval piety, owing chiefly to their intercessory function in the economy of salvation, is a commonplace observation.32 Yet it is easy to forget, at this distance, just how pervasive they were otherwise. For a start, their huge number ought to be acknowledged, a number running into the thousands. The task of counting them is perhaps best left to insomniac historians—and, indeed, several attempts have been made.33 How worthwhile they were must be a moot point in view of Bartlett’s qualification: There is not, and cannot be, a definitive list of Christian saints. This is because sanctity is not an objectively identifiable feature but an attribute: saints are people who are treated as saints. Hence someone might be a saint in one time and place and not in another, a saint for some people but not for others.34

During the early Middle Ages, cults sprang up spontaneously; in so far as there was any official ecclesiastical scrutiny, it came from the local bishop. The pope (as bishop of Rome) was merely one among many prelates who could formally designate somebody a saint, and the earliest attested papal canonization dates from 993. The years around 1200, however, saw what Bartlett calls the ‘crystallization’ of the pontifical claim to enjoy a monopoly over canonization. Inevitably, the bureaucratic process evolved, particularly in the first half of the thirteenth century, but it normally began with the dispatch of a ‘postulation’ (i.e. petition) to the pope, that request for an inquiry being supplemented by letters of support submitted by powerful figures. If the pope was persuaded of the existence of a prima facie case, then he appointed commissioners to hold hearings (‘inquests’) in the area in which the candidate had been active. A questionnaire was compiled in order to shape the examination of witnesses. Giving as an example the document prepared for the 1307 inquest into the sanctity of Thomas de Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford, Bartlett explains that the questions are grouped under three headings: Thomas’s life and the virtues that he had exhibited in living it; his reputation; and his miracles. Having outlined the topics gathered under the first heading, Bartlett goes on:

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The second heading addressed the … question ‘whether it was public knowledge and general report and opinion or belief of the people that the said lord Thomas was a saint’, then probing into who had been heard asserting this, when and where and by what kind of person, and then, even more searchingly, what the witness understood by the phrase ‘public knowledge’.

Such inquiries about reputation (‘fama’) suggest, he argues, something critical: If there was evidence that someone was being regarded as a saint, this strengthened the case. The canonization process thus required evidence that the candidate was being treated as a saint: invocation, miracles, fama, and so on. It did not seek to ban these until it had issued a verdict. Hence pre-canonization cult was not only licit, but essential.

Once depositions under oath had been taken, the dossiers were forwarded to Rome for the ‘curial phase’—evaluation by a committee of three cardinals. Of course, many cases fell by the wayside at one stage or another; the success rate was only 50 per cent. Nevertheless, should the papal curia be convinced by the accumulated proofs, then the candidate was declared a saint in a special Mass, presided over by the pope himself, during which the new saint’s feast-day was proclaimed. Publicity was also given via the promulgation of a Bull. Significant though papal canonization was in creating the top tier of saints—and we must certainly not underestimate the tenacity and cost involved in propelling each cause—it is crucial to see the outcome in proportion. Bartlett remarks that there were about thirty-eight papal canonizations 993–1198 and no more than forty 1198– 1500. Narrowing our gaze within the latter period, forty-seven people are known to have been the subject of canonization inquests (including unsuccessful ones) during the thirteenth century. By contrast, Michael Goodich found that 518 new saints were being venerated in that same 100 years. Clearly, then, Rome might say what it liked, but (to borrow Bartlett’s apt metaphor) ‘the great stream of the cult of the saints flowed on’, at least throughout the Middle Ages.35 Instead of enumerating saints, or distinguishing between canonized and non-canonized ones, it is more useful to appreciate the many other ways in which they can be classified. Bartlett discusses nine main categories; a list of his sub-headings and sub-sub-headings will suffice: ‘The Queen of Heaven’, i.e. the Virgin Mary; ‘Angels’; ‘Apostles and Evangelists’; ‘Martyrs’; ‘Confessors’, further divided into ‘Doctors of the

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Church’, ‘Bishops’, ‘Abbots’ and ‘Hermits’; ‘Virgins’; ‘Old Testament Saints’; ‘Lay Saints’; and ‘Royal Saints’, with a sub-section on ‘Female Royal Saints’.36 How did this vast celestial community impinge upon the lives of ordinary Christians? Unlike us, whose high mobility perhaps encourages inattention to place-name etymology, medieval people were deeply rooted geographically, especially in the countryside, and it is hard to imagine that long-standing residence did not foster some pride in a settlement’s nominal association with a saint. One thinks of St. Bees in Cumberland, named after the (mythical) Irish virgin princess St. Bega; St. David’s in Pembrokeshire, named after the sixth-century Welsh bishop; and St. Neot’s in Huntingdonshire, so named following the translation there (c.980) of the relics of the ninth-century Cornish monk and hermit. Where villages bore an identical name, reference to a saint could be a helpful distinction, as with Somerset’s Hinton St. George (the dedication of the parish church) and Dorset’s Hinton St. Mary (acknowledging its then ownership by St. Mary’s Abbey, Shaftesbury). Towns and cities pursued the same strategy. London’s most basic administrative unit was the parish, repeated church dedications to specific saints giving rise to memorable topographical locators, such as ‘St. Michael Cornhill’, ‘St. Michael Crooked Lane’ and so forth.37 In his widely circulated didactic manual ‘Festial ’, probably written in the later 1380s and first printed in 1483, the Augustinian canon John Mirk explained the rationale behind dedications: For ryght as a temporall lord helpyth and defendyth all that byn parechons or tenantys, ryght soo the saynt that ys patron of the chyrche helpyth and defendyth all that byn paryschons to hym, and don hym worschyp halowyng his day, and offyrne to hym.38

Folk unmoved by place-names and church dedications surely cannot have been indifferent to baptismal names. Bartlett relates that the naming of children after the saints was ‘a Christian practice even before the time of Constantine’. The idea was that it established a special bond between them, bringing down upon the recipient some measure of divine approbation. Across western Christendom, saints’ names became far more common in the later Middle Ages, largely displacing ‘earlier local vernacular name repertoires’, in Bartlett’s description. As illustration, he traces the growing popularity of ‘John’ (with equivalent ‘Johannes’ and its abbreviation ‘Hans’) and notes the diffusion of ‘Francis’ in response to

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the canonization of St. Francis of Assisi in 1228. Strongly advocating the choice of saints’ names, Antoninus, a mid fifteenth-century archbishop of Florence, condemned resort to ‘Lancelot’ and other ‘names of pagans’. The evidence seems incontrovertible: The names of biblical saints, like John, James, Peter and Mary, and the great universal martyr-saints, like Catherine and Margaret, as well as a select few of the confessors, such as Antony and Nicholas, came to predominate. Alongside this change, went two other developments: the reduction in the variety of names used and the adoption of hereditary family surnames. These processes were not uniform, but they were clear, and sometimes fairly dramatic, producing a European naming pattern in 1500 radically different from that of 1100.39

Even if the possible influence of nomenclature is dismissed as circumstantial, since historians cannot apprehend the resonances in individual minds, the fact is that church-goers—which by law everyone had to be— were bombarded by reminders of the saints. Some cults were only local, others regional and the greatest supra-regional, yet it would have been a rare medieval church indeed that did not confront the visitor with striking images of a selection of saints. Rood-screen dado panels provided one favoured locus for display,40 stained-glass windows another.41 To the visual was added the aural, although the number of name-checks varied depending upon the liturgy. Every Latin Mass invoked certain saints because their names were recited in two prayers embedded in the Canon, its centrepiece. The first prayer (‘Communicantes ’) recalled the apostles, St. Paul, five early popes and seven early martyrs, while the second (‘Nobis quoque peccatoribus ’) mentioned four New Testament figures, four postbiblical male martyrs and seven female martyrs. Unsurprisingly, Mass was suitably elaborated when said on a saint’s feast-day. It was not, however, the vehicle for the most extensive treatment; that honour fell to the Office, i.e. the daily round of services (incorporating hymns, prayers, Psalms and readings) comprising Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None and Vespers. On feast-days, much more time would have been allocated, in the Office, to the commemoration of the saint momentarily in the frame. Matins, for instance, might have included readings from a ‘Life’ or perhaps from an account of the saint’s miracles. ‘There was’, says Bartlett, ‘a complex interplay between the texts of the liturgy and hagiographic writing’. And how frequently must parishioners have been summoned for

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such solemn acts of remembrance! The ecclesiastical year, already replete with seasonal rituals,42 became so stuffed with saints’ feast-days (albeit not all observed universally) that sophisticated grading systems emerged, resulting in the most important days (either those dedicated to major saints or those dedicated to saints of local significance) being marked out by preparatory vigils and succeeding Octaves. Liturgical Kalendars, typically prefacing Psalters, reveal which saints were generally venerated in any particular community, for their feast-days are usually categorized in eyecatching fashion, as it might be by the use of gold leaf or red ink—the origin of the expression ‘red-letter day’.43 We have been sketching some of the means by which saints entered the consciousness of the average Christian through regular church attendance. Yet for enthusiastic believers, not least seekers after miraculous cures, routine parochial worship will have constituted the minimum of their spiritual witness. As Rosser demonstrates, voluntarism had long existed within the institutional structure of the medieval parish,44 and it flourished outside the parish too. Thanks to Chaucer, among others, pilgrimage is perhaps the best-known form.45 But not everyone could afford to travel, or travel very far. A more modest outlet for voluntaristic impulses was membership of a religious gild, normally obtainable upon payment of an annual subscription. Established and administered by the laity, though employing priests principally to say Mass for deceased members, gilds proliferated enormously in pre-Reformation England. Several might be accommodated in a single parish. Alternatively, they might be attached to a cathedral or to a religious house—and it was possible to join any number of them, wherever located.46 Gilds are interesting from our perspective because their dedications (to the extent that those may be recovered from references in wills, church wardens’ accounts and other sources) indicate the relative popularity of the saints. Studying the diocese of Bath and Wells, French found that the Virgin Mary easily bore the palm; at the bottom of the league-table, with one dedication apiece, were smaller fry like ‘St. Dubricius’ (properly St. Dyfrig), ‘St. Etheldrede’ (properly St. Æthelthryth) and ‘St. Olave’ (properly St. Olaf, quondam king of Norway as Olaf II Haraldsson).47 The city of Norwich boasted many gilds, including those named after SS Barbara, Botulph and George.48 The devotional focus for such societies would have been a side altar dedicated correspondingly and almost certainly furnished with an image of the dedicatee. Importantly, however, gild membership did not preclude wider loyalties. When John Thrale of Luton made his will in

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1505, for instance, he remembered not only the gild of the Holy Trinity there and the gild of St. Mary at Boston in Lincolnshire, but also SS John the Baptist and Katherine, leaving money to maintain lights burning before their images, which seemingly adorned his parish church.49 The intriguing question, then, is how personal preferences such as those arose. Rarely is a reason revealed: we know that (c.1450) an unnamed woman commissioned the learned Augustinian friar John Capgrave to write a ‘Life’ of St. Augustine of Hippo because she had been born on his feastday. Capgrave also wrote ‘Lives’ of SS Gilbert of Sempringham, Katherine and Norbert.50 Otherwise, could it have been true that, to an unfathomable degree, individual preferences actually stemmed from exposure (not necessarily directly) to precisely the kind of literature that Capgrave was producing?51 If so, then the prime candidate for exerting the widest influence must be the ‘Legenda Aurea’ (or ‘Golden Legend’) assembled between 1252 and 1265 by the Italian Dominican friar Jacobus de Voragine (c.1229–1298). The compiler classified his material as either ‘temporale’ or ‘sanctorale’. Of the 182 chapters in the standard modern English edition, twenty-two belong to the former category, sixteen being a systematic exposition of soteriological doctrine arranged in a Christocentric progression from Advent to ‘The Exaltation of the Holy Cross’. Three ancillary chapters deal with Marian feasts, two with the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, respectively, and another with ‘The Dedication of a Church’.52 The remaining 160 chapters, mostly saints’ ‘Lives’,53 make up the ‘sanctorale’ category. But instead of grouping chapters into two discrete and unequal blocs consistent with the basic conceptual division, Jacobus disposed everything into a single sequence according to the liturgical calendar, thereby assigning fixed positions to what in some cases must be moveable feasts and interspersing expository chapters and hagiographical ones. This pattern, at first glance slightly odd, is explained by the fact that the book was intended for the instruction of priests and preachers, who could quarry it (in Duffy’s words) ‘to bulk out their sermons and catecheses’. Yet Jacobus’s coverage is idiosyncratic. In the ‘temporale’ bracket, Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday are strangely absent. So too is the feast of Corpus Christi, established as recently as 1264. For Duffy, an ‘impression of old-fashionedness’ slides into one of ‘archaism’ when he considers the selection of saints: apart from just five figures chosen from among the illustrious men and women canonized in the previous 100 years,54 Jacobus confined his attention to people who

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had been venerated for aeons. Major New Testament personages obviously had to be included, as did the Fathers, the Doctors and certain popes, monks and hermits of the Early Church. The compiler’s greatest enthusiasm, however, seems to have been reserved for the martyr-saints of the first four centuries of Christian history. Those ‘Lives’, writes Duffy, ‘filled as they are with lurid detail of gruesome sufferings, with defiance and rejection of the world, and larded with spectacular miracles, undoubtedly appeal[ed] to a medieval taste for romance, excitement and pious entertainment’. That the ‘Legenda Aurea’ was quickly appreciated beyond ecclesiastical circles is suggested by the extraordinary number of extant manuscripts: over 950 of the Latin original (plus more than 80 of selections) and about 500 containing either all or part of Jacobus’s text translated into one or another of the main European vernaculars.55 Its onward march is astonishing. The first of many French renditions (this by Jean Belet) was effected around the beginning of the fourteenth century56 ; another (by Jean de Vignay) was probably completed some years before 1348 (the date appearing on the best manuscript) and is known as Version (a) of the ‘Légende Dorée’. In 1401–1402, Jean Golein added forty-six items, the so-called ‘Festes nouvelles ’ remembering saints with French connections, to create Version (b). Somewhere in Flanders, perhaps c.1472–1475, Version (b) was revised as Version (c)—the contents were re-organized, new ‘Lives’ of saints possessing north European links were incorporated and different texts were substituted for several originals.57 Meanwhile, the anonymous ‘synfulle wretche’ (once wrongly conjectured to have been Osbern Bokenham) had translated an early version of the ‘Légende Dorée’ into English. Dated 1438 in the colophon of Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Douce 372, one of at least seven surviving manuscripts, this translation, conventionally designated the ‘Gilte Legende’, omits de Voragine’s fanciful ‘etymology’ prefacing each biography and eight of the biographies themselves. As though to compensate for those excisions, however, copies contain varying numbers of extra chapters, mostly ‘Lives’ of English saints.58 Responding from 1443 to a series of elite commissions, Bokenham (b. 1392/1393, d. in or after 1464) wrote thirteen verse ‘Lives’ of female saints, the texts being gathered and transcribed into a unique manuscript in 1447. A tantalizing statement in another of his works indicates that Bokenham’s hagiography had been far more extensive than Legends of Holy Women, the modern editorial title, yet it was only in 2007 that Horobin discovered the missing volume at Abbotsford House in Scotland. Now scholars

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could see that the Augustinian friar had translated the whole of the ‘Legenda Aurea’ directly from de Voragine’s Latin prototype, albeit with frequent changes designed to meet the perceived needs of his readership/audience. In particular, argues Horobin, Bokenham sought to cast his saints ‘as examples to be followed rather than revered’, which meant (contrary to Jacobus’s aims) accentuating their humanity and deliberately downplaying ‘miraculous interventions’.59 The ‘synfulle wretche’ and the prolific Bokenham were not alone in making English adaptations of the ‘Legenda Aurea’: its influence has been traced (controversially) in the much-reproduced ‘South English Legendary’ of either 1276 or 127960 and Rydel has lately detected Jacobus’s prologue discussion of the liturgical calendar (a prologue ignored by other medieval translators into English) lurking behind thirty-eight lines of an anonymous poem attributable to the third quarter of the fifteenth century.61 By that stage, of course, the running was increasingly being made by printed books. Seybolt lists ninety-seven Latin editions of the ‘Legenda Aurea’ published 1470–1500 across such printing centres as Cologne, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, Basel, Paris, Augsburg, Toulouse, Ulm, Lyon, Venice, Deventer, Geneva, Reutlingen, Brussels, Louvain and Hagenau. With little delay, vernacular translations rolled off the presses in impressive quantities: in High German from 1472, in French from 1475, in Italian from [1475], in Czech from c.1475–1479, in Dutch from 1478 and in Low German from c.1480. There may be some justification for Seybolt’s assertion that ‘the Legenda Aurea led the Bible in the number of editions issued in the fifteenth century’.62 Unsurprisingly, Caxton, having re-located from the continent to Westminster, mobilized himself to serve the Anglophone market, producing in [1483–1484] what Jeremy hails as a ‘monumental edition’ constituting ‘his most ambitious undertaking as translator, editor, and printer’. The massive folio book, she explains, surpasses every other version of the ‘Legenda Aurea’ in its scope, for the original Latin text has been augmented by about a third. How the expansion was achieved is complex. Caxton cut four of de Voragine’s chapters entirely.63 On the other hand, he added ten chapters on feasts ‘represented’ by accretions to Jacobus’s work and fifty-nine ‘Lives’ not found in the Latin anthology at all.64 This manipulation was prompted by the fact that, as Caxton himself admitted, he had before him three discrepant exemplars: Jacobus’s original Latin compilation, a French translation (now identified as Version (c) of the ‘Légende Dorée’) and an English translation (now known to have been the ‘Gilte Legende’). As

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might be expected of one exhibiting magpie tendencies, Caxton was no painstaking craftsman in his treatment of the principal sources: in Jeremy’s view, the resulting first edition of The Golden Legend [STC, 24874] is ‘marked by omission, condensation, distortion, and error’. But the great entrepreneur was not an unskilful hack either—he inserted some short passages of his own authorship, a large section ultimately derived from the Bible and a ‘Life’ of St. Roche (external to both the ‘Legenda Aurea’ and its redactions) which, he claimed, he had translated from Latin personally.65 Recent research has shed considerable light on Caxton’s working methods,66 and much more will surely become clear upon the appearance of the first volume of a critical edition.67 A second impression of The Golden Legend of [1483–1484] came out in 1487, with new editions (printed by De Worde at Westminster) following in 1493, 1498, 1504, 1507, 1512, 1521 and 1527, each analysed by Coatesworth.68 Regardless of format, de Voragine’s legendary was evidently an international best-seller, and Ring’s study offers an interesting insight into how some early-modern readers interacted with their copies of Caxton’s recension.69 Indeed, so highly prized was the work that it is mentioned specifically in wills: given the date, 1411, John Pakenham, a priest, could only have been referring to a manuscript, but the book bequeathed in 1491 by the layman William Stenyng may well have been a Caxton.70 The categories ‘knight’ and ‘saint’ were not always as distinct as we might imagine, since embellishments to the story of St. Martin of Tours (316–397) changed the former imperial guard in the Roman army into ‘the archetypal Christian soldier’, whose fictitious knightly investiture ceremony was appropriated (argues Hoch) in order to fulfil ‘an expressly Franciscan need for a chivalric surrogate’—the point being to portray St. Francis of Assisi (1181/1182–1226) as the new St. Martin.71 Closer to home, though perhaps equally famous for helping the deserving, was the considerably more mythogenic Robin Hood. In tackling this complex topic for our purposes, it is crucial to ignore the outlaw’s Tudor gentrification, and other accretions to the medieval legend, while recognizing the force of Knight’s claim that he is ‘only exceeded in Anglophone culture by King Arthur for the length of time when the hero has been in public memory’.72 Mainstream historians have been liberated from the futile quest for ‘the real-life Robin’ by the discovery that tales in one shape or form were already circulating by 1262, such that a fugitive from justice whose true name is known could be re-described in official records as William ‘Robehod’.73 Clearly, what would later in the thirteenth century

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become a patronym had attained the preliminary status of nickname, or possibly alias, its usage memorializing the exploits of some shadowy Yorkshire robber (probably several) living in the remote past. Spread orally, a still relatively amorphous legend (the details of which are obscure) is thought to have undergone significant elaboration during Edward II’s reign, at some indeterminate stage following that king’s northern peregrination of 1323. William Langland, writing the B-Text of ‘Piers Plowman’ in 1377, characterized Sloth as a priest who neglected to perfect his Paternoster in favour of reciting rhymes of Robin Hood. A play about the renowned highwayman was performed at Exeter as early as 1426–1427. The play text (if there had been one) has vanished, but it was later in that same century that the so-called ‘ballads’ constituting the medieval Robin Hood canon were finally committed to paper, for the most part anonymously. Classified by Holt as ‘a thriller’, ‘Robin Hood and the Monk’ was transcribed into a clerical miscellany by Gilbert Pilkington after 1465.74 ‘Robin Hood and the Potter’—‘a burlesque’, according to Holt—survives in a manuscript compiled in Norfolk after 1468.75 Although ‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne’ exists in a seventeenth-century volume of English ballads designated ‘The Percy Folio’,76 its composition has been assigned to the late fifteenth century, an approximation confirmed by the remarkably similar play fragment ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham’, which belongs to c.1475.77 Completing the medieval canon, and its most substantial component, is Wynkyn de Worde’s A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode (London, [1506?]) [STC, 13689]—an epic ballad made up of eight sections (‘fyttes’) of which a single example (at Cambridge University Library) has come down to us. Readers should note, however, that 202 of the 456 stanzas may be found in the unique copy (at the National Library of Scotland) of another edition—A Gest of Robyn Hode [STC, 13689.5]—believed to have been printed c.1510–1515 at Antwerp by Jan van Doesborch. The Doesborch edition (also cited as the ‘Lettersnijder’ edition) is regarded as lying nearer to the missing original manuscripts because it preserves linguistic archaisms modernized by de Worde, whose revised version was reproduced in successive early-modern editions. Ikegami’s conclusion that the Geste was ‘composed’ in the fifteenth century, a conclusion oddly unknown to Ohlgren, has been reinforced by the latter’s research, with the refinement of a narrowing of the period of compilation—he stresses that pre-existing sources were joined together, the obscure poet inserting linking material of his own devising— either to Henry V’s reign or to that of Henry VI. Yet Ohlgren insists that

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the Geste is set during the early decades of Edward III’s reign.78 Critical editions of the foregoing works proliferate.79 Although the Exeter performance had been a municipal entertainment, Robin Hood ‘plays’ took off from the last quarter of the fifteenth century at parish level. Across southern England and the Midlands, with concentrations in the Thames and Severn valleys and the westernmost counties of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, they became an important feature—nearly annual in some places, more intermittent in others— of the seasonal festivities that commenced on May Day and ran into the next two calendar months. Such festivities (styled ‘May ales’ or ‘May games’ even if happening in June–July) might encompass archery, bell-ringing, dancing, drama, drinking, feasting, minstrelsy, music and wrestling. Described as ‘disguisings’, ‘gatherings’ or ‘revels’, the Robin Hood element usually arose when a trusted middle-ranking parishioner was chosen to assume his identity with the aim of collecting money for communal good causes, which not unusually found their expression in a project concerning church fabric, often in return for the granting of ‘livery’ to distinguish the contributor as a member of the outlaw’s band for the duration of the celebrations. Indeed, ‘Robin Hood’ organized and presided as Lord of Misrule over the whole programme of summer events—the figure, says Richardson, had been assimilated to ‘the carnival tradition in England’. Practice must have differed from parish to parish, but Stokes probably captures the essence when he writes (of Yeovil, in Somerset) that the Robin Hood convivialities ‘were a complex mimetic process, unified by the Robin Hood metaphor, that moved through a variety of settings including the church, parish house, streets, fields, and dwellings’. Among the treats laid on were ‘archery contests’, ‘dramatizations of mock confrontations’ and ‘a play’. ‘While noisy and festive’, he adds, ‘they were no mere bacchanal. At one point or another they involved much of the parish in what amounted to a civic mimesis-cumfund-raiser’. Ironically, Robin Hood ‘plays’ seem to have been forborne in the northern shires in which the main protagonist was supposed to have been active. How, elsewhere, the largely mysterious narrative content related to the extant ballads is problematic. Despite their occurrence at Thame (Oxfordshire) in 1474, at Croscombe (Somerset) in 1476–1477 and at Henley-on-Thames (Oxfordshire) from 1499, each apparently antedating the publication of the Geste, Hutton contends that ‘almost certainly it was the printing of the ballads’ that accounts for the popularity of the Robin Hood plays ‘based upon them’. Yet other scholars are

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not so sure. Dobson floats the idea that the early ballads may in fact have been influenced by dramatic representations, and Pollard states categorically that ‘by 1500 play and rhyme were interchangeable’. We need not be detained by the dissonance. The crux of the matter is that whether by purely oral transmission of mutating ancient ballads, by dissemination of the Geste, or even by experience of themed parochial revels, few people alive in early sixteenth-century England can have been oblivious of Robin Hood’s swashbuckling adventures.80 Commentators may focus on this or that bit of the medieval canon, but they agree that Robin Hood was a popular hero. The questions are: a hero for whom, and why? Modern debate began when the Marxist historian R. H. Hilton argued that the ballads should be interpreted in terms of class conflict: notwithstanding his self-identification as a yeoman, Robin is a free peasant articulating peasant ideology for a peasant audience.81 That construction was challenged by J. C. Holt, who believed that the ballads originated in elite households: ‘yeoman’ describes a mid-range office in just such an environment.82 While scholars quickly abandoned Hilton’s emphasis on the peasantry, Dobson and Taylor underscored his thesis of a non-gentry milieu albeit with reference to a burgeoning new social group, the ‘middling sort’, which emerged during the century following the Black Death. ‘Robin Hood’, they averred, ‘is presented as a yeoman hero for a yeoman audience’—‘yeoman’ in this context means a social category sandwiched between gentlemen above and husbandmen below.83 In offering fresh insights, subsequent contributions (far too numerous for all but a few of the most important to be mentioned here) have generally built upon the foundations laid by Dobson and Taylor. Richmond, for instance, views Robin Hood as the personification of ‘yeomanliness’, to adopt Peter Coss’s coinage: a tough figure without lineage whose virtue is demonstrated by his conduct and whose ‘most striking characteristic is his self-confident independence. … Robin was nobody’s servant—not even the king’s for long. This says an immense amount about him and his audience in a society where the mentality of feudal service lingered’. Nevertheless, Richmond detects ‘no ethic of accumulation’ in the ballads. Frugal in his own tastes, Robin is generous to those in need, yet not prodigal to all-comers. Moreover, there is a sense in which some elite values—largesse and the chivalry of the tournament—are being parodied. That mockery paints the outlaw as ‘a non-aspirant’: he is not part of ‘English Polite Society’ and has no yearning to join it. On the contrary, ‘yeomanliness’ was ‘sufficiently distinctive … to be seen as a worthy

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human condition. It was a knowable condition; and in the person of Robin Hood it was a desirable state’. One could go further: ‘neither a feudal nor a capitalist hero’, he is rather ‘a hero for a society in transition’. Concomitantly, the ballads glorify the idealized and topsy-turvy world of the greenwood, where ‘the dream of justice’, ‘the dream of freedom’ and ‘the dream of the forest’ intersect and are played out. Law and government, on this reading, are conceptualized as inherently unjust. Richmond is at his most acute when he remarks that the period 1350–1500 was ‘the only time before 1945’ in which ‘a non-gentleman was everyone’s literary hero’.84 Can the precise kind of yeoman signalled by Robin’s ‘yeomanliness’ be ascertained? It can, for Almond and Pollard insist that his status as a yeoman of the forest, an ambiguous figure set apart from, but yet well-known to, both gentle and popular audiences, and who sustains himself by an activity, hunting, practised by both, brings the heterogeneous elements of the ballads together. The liminality of this status means that Robin Hood is not only accessible to different kinds of yeoman, but also stands on the threshold of the social divide between gentility and commonality. In a fiction in which audiences composed of all ranks of society can make contact with the hero, and identify themselves with different associations of the hero’s status, the yeoman of the forest acts as a pivotal point of reference. … When we first hear the tales in their fifteenth-century form, Robin Hood is already all things to all men.85

Separately, Pollard suggests that Robin Hood is ‘a forester turned poacher and highwayman’ who resorts to ‘righteous violence’ in order to bring about true justice in circumstances where corrupt officers of the law have failed. The ballads do not fairly reflect patterns of fifteenth-century crime as detailed in legal records, but may be a semi-humorous vehicle for perpetuating what had been an oral history of criminality. Indeed, the tales ‘perhaps appealed to a counter-culture, in which sympathy existed for some notorious criminals in their conflict with the law’.86 The legend distorts historical truth in other ways. Barnsdale in South Yorkshire was not a forest and even Sherwood Forest was no longer a vast tract of untouched wilderness; the oscillation between the two places perhaps betokens the elision of divergent narrative traditions. The important point is that Robin’s greenwood is an ‘idealized sylvan setting’—a ‘forest of the imagination’ stretching unbroken from Barnsdale to Nottingham. Similarly, there never was a solitary ‘sheriff of Nottingham’ at any one

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time; the poets probably had in mind the sheriff of Nottinghamshire, whose commission (before the 1560s) also covered Derbyshire. But, again, historians’ inability to find a real incumbent to fit the description in every particular is irrelevant since the sheriff is a fictionalized figure: ‘a fool, a coward, an oath-breaker, and a drunkard’, he stands, to some extent, ‘for all the evil ministers of the Crown who ever lived’. And yet Pollard perceives more than mere derision here: the satire of the blundering sheriff is the satire ‘of all who enjoy privilege and power’. The episode when Little John (under the alias ‘Reynolde Greenlefe’) is taken into the sheriff’s service and causes havoc on being denied his dinner ‘is a feast of misrule in which the aristocratic household is turned upside down. It is introduced as “good mirth”, but knock-about comedy … is subversive’. Because ‘the noble household was a microcosm of society’, the whole social order was, in effect, under attack. More subversive still is Robin’s negotiation of his restoration to the king’s favour. For a subject to lay down conditions in return for a pardon was unheard of—surely such bargaining must be seen as a thrust at the very notion of an absolute royal prerogative.87 That line of argument is developed in another essay, where Pollard remarks that the ‘middling sort’ to whom the ballads are thought especially to have spoken was precisely the social group which, in the fifteenth century, provided leaders for those recurring rebellions against royal misgovernment that came to be launched in the name of the commonweal. In the real world, direct action in the interests of restorative justice was not met with regal magnanimity and reform; insurgents were rounded up and executed. But instead of rejecting ‘righteous violence’ for that reason, the legend endorses it. It is, of course, the outcome that differs: in the escapist world of Robin Hood’s greenwood, ‘the impossible can happen’. Crucially, however, the alternative paradigm with which we are presented, the paradigm of a truly just society, is patently nonmonarchical. Is the only other option ‘anarchy’, or rather ‘an idealization of anarchy’, as Pollard seems to suppose? Hardly: one could argue that the authors were rather more sophisticated than he gives them credit, and that what they sought to depict, with a clear-sighted recognition of English kings’ propensity to break their promises, is a parallel universe existing somewhere north of the ‘frontier’ town of Nottingham, bounded by a porous membrane permitting Robin’s pragmatic engagement with the external realm of corruption and display and defined by the bold reclamation of an aboriginal popular sovereignty.88

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If this vision of a new social order was not appealing enough, then there was the religious dimension. Carroll highlights the Protestant allegation that some pre-Reformation preachers had customarily embedded Robin Hood tales in their sermons as exempla intended to hold the attention of congregations all too prone to boredom. What, he wonders, did they see in the ballads that could possibly have promoted acceptable piety? The answer is two-fold: Robin’s attachment to the Mass on one hand and his reverence for the Virgin Mary on the other. That he was also hostile to monasticism was perhaps a bonus in certain quarters. Let us now put those characteristics into context. Given the centrality of the Mass in normative Roman Catholicism, the run-away success of Mary’s cult and the declining prestige of the religious orders, with the probable exception of the friars, it is likely that many hearers/readers of the ballads would enthusiastically have cleaved to Robin Hood as one who shared their devotional preferences. Yet Carroll’s conclusion goes beyond such straightforward observations to challenge revisionist historians on their own ground, as it were, for he adduces disturbing evidence to suggest that, in common with who knows how many other folk, the famous outlaw exceeded approved doctrine in venerating Mary not so much as the premier intercessor with Christ/God on behalf of sinners than as a supernatural being possessed of protective power in her own right. In short, she had usurped her son’s supreme position in the Roman Catholic pantheon, at least in the lived experience of humble believers.89 Other recent analysts have hypothesized quite different reasons for the immense popularity of the medieval greenwood canon. From Taylor’s perspective, for example, the ‘distinct regionalism’ manifest in the Geste has been inadequately appreciated: the stories ‘embody an older form of lordship waning in the face of centralized sovereign absolutism. Robin Hood’s and King Edward’s ride from the forest becomes the last gasp of sovereignty based in mutuality between the king and his subject’.90 Hoyle, by contrast, declares that while many people may simply have enjoyed the legend as ‘a rollicking good yarn’ without serious contemplation of its implications, professional soldiers perhaps found in the Geste ‘something to which they could relate from their own experience’. The idea seems plausible enough, though on certain issues Hoyle fails to engage with the relevant technical literature, rendering his discussion problematic, not to say retrograde. But he is undoubtedly correct to underline the legend’s extraordinary plasticity (‘it can be shaped to mean

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different things to different people at the same time’) and high recognition factor.91 After all, Robin Hood had already become proverbial by 1429.92 He was, indeed, a hero for all seasons.

Culture War Our hero; your villain. We know, or think we know, that the England which found its celebrities in knights, saints and Robin Hood was swept away by the Protestant Reformation. Some connection is obviously undeniable, but the supposed causality is altogether too facile. What really undermined the reputations of those late-medieval role-models was Renaissance humanism. Derived from the phrase ‘studia humanitatis ’, the term ‘humanism’ was invented in the nineteenth century as a label for the ‘intellectual value-system’ of the Renaissance.93 Sufficiently protean to defy comprehensive definition here, it has been described by Paul Joachimsen (1867–1930) as ‘an intellectual movement, primarily literary and philological, which was rooted in the love and desire for the rebirth of classical antiquity’. Quoting Joachimsen with approval, Spitz adds that humanism was not mere antiquarianism, an interest in classical culture for its own sake. Rather, it was a special way of looking at antiquity and of relating it to the present. Classical culture not only provided the humanists with certain forms for artistic and literary expression, but also with new norms for judging and directing thought and action. The humanist believed that the liberal arts, the humaniora, were the studies best designed to perfect and to ornament man.94

One major difficulty with the historiography of Renaissance humanism is its lop-sidedness. Critics tend to focus on the movement’s novelties, addressing, in particular, the question of the extent to which the Renaissance humanist skill-set (and the pioneering publications of some leading lights) paved the way for the Reformation. Far less space is devoted to exposing the nature and scale of ‘progressive’ attacks on cultural orthodoxies. If scholars do acknowledge such assaults, then it is often tangentially and allusively. David Starkey, for instance, writes that ‘conscious reform … stimulated an awareness of what was being changed. The result, paradoxically, was a deeper understanding of tradition’. For him, Sir Thomas More’s ‘repudiation of the values of his own culture was the representative act of a Renaissance which sought to replace a

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living (if rather battered) native tradition with a neo-classicism that was both alien and still-born’.95 Carroll cites works by Malory, Lydgate and Skelton in order to illustrate ‘how little influence humanism had on the literature of this period’, quite ignoring the fact that a crescendo of vituperation blasted the status quo.96 In one breath, Rex (following Kristeller) notes ‘the continuities of the Renaissance with the medieval past’, while in another remarks that the humanists’ emerging concept of ‘the Middle Ages’ itself eventuated from a ‘new realization that there was a historical gulf between ancient Rome and their own times’, but otherwise cannot see much beyond the vociferous sneering at scholastic dons for their ‘barbarous’ style and the satirical digs at popular hagiography for its far-fetched embroidery of the truth.97 Perhaps the most perceptive commentator is Hankins: ‘to celebrate the past was inevitably to criticize the present’. He goes on: When preening themselves on their own achievements or flattering a prince, humanists praised the triumph of classical values over ‘medieval’ or ‘Gothic’ rudeness. In both cases, the mere existence of alternatives … undermined the chief support of any traditional society: its inability to recognize the value and the possibility of other ways of doing things. The humanists’ ‘culture war’ turned that inability into possibility, even actuality. Their intimate knowledge of another culture, their habit of comparing that culture with their own age, their realism and their habit of arguing both sides of a question led in the end to an incipient form of cultural relativism.98

The academic pressure towards ever-increasing specialization (which pushes scholars close to the myopia brilliantly sent up by Kingsley Amis)99 means that although this or that aspect of the humanists’ attack on latemedieval culture has been scrutinized, the full breadth and force of their disparagement remains unappreciated. This is not the place to make good the deficit, but it is worth giving some flavour of the onslaught with regard to our three main categories of knights, saints and Robin Hood. To speak initially only of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, the roots of their antipathy to chivalric culture are traceable to 1506, when they jointly published their collected Greek–Latin translations of the satirical writings of Lucian of Samosata (c.125–180). Baker-Smith finds the nub in More’s rendition of the dialogue ‘Cynicus ’ in which consuetudo (glossed as ‘the inert forms of social conformity’) are contrasted with appetitus (‘blind passion’). The dichotomy, he explains, was then ‘cultivated in humanist

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satire’ as a ‘radical opposition between custom, the familiar rituals of social life, and the genuine requirements of nature’. Put into modern jargon: Erasmus and More were engaged in a process of ‘de-naturalization’, that is to say the exposure of the pseudo-nature created by social conventions. A striking and often misunderstood feature of Erasmus’s criticism of his world is the way in which he perceives original sin operating through the agency of inherited social forms. So, to take the case of chivalry, it appears to him as a cultural system devised to promote war and to disguise its true consequences under a veneer of glory.

Baker-Smith’s second point about the Lucian project is that, as he completed his translations of individual dialogues, Erasmus dispatched pre-publication dedicatory manuscript copies to influential courtiers of Henry VII, such as Bishop Richard Fox (1447/1448–1528), Archdeacon Thomas Ruthall (d. 1523) and Archdeacon Christopher Urswick (1448?– 1522). Mostly royal councillors, members of this group are significant because, like the king, they believed in a non-interventionist foreign policy and were cool in their dealings with the lay nobility, whose rolemodels were ‘backward looking’. But Henry VIII’s accession in 1509 overturned the apple-cart. Keen to imitate Henry V, the athletic young sovereign sought to revive English territorial ambitions in France, looking for ‘a new Agincourt’. War would inevitably be predicated upon a mutually beneficial alliance with ‘a warrior aristocracy’. An episode in the May Day festivities of 1511, as related by the historian Edward Hall, is seen by Baker-Smith as emblematic of a revivified chivalric ideology being fanned by monarchical belligerency. Out riding, the king encountered a pageant-car resembling a ship under sail: The master hailed the king and that noble company, and said he was a mariner, and was come from a strange port … to see if any deeds of arms were to be done in the country of which he might make report. An herald demanded the name of his ship; he answered she is called Fame and is laden with good Renown; then said the herald, if you will bring your ship into the bay of Hardines you must double the point of Gentilnes and there you will find a company that will meddle with your merchandise.

Later that year, the conciliar hawks were to prevail over the doves, presaging Henry VIII’s costly invasion of France in 1513. It was the

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post-1509 chivalric resurgence, and specifically the 1513 campaign, which drove Erasmus and More to mount a literary counter-offensive. Direct criticism was, of course, unwise, but (to quote Baker-Smith) ‘what was open to attack was the institution of chivalry and with it those social customs which softened the brutal face of war’. More’s response to the events of 1512–1513 (including the disastrous Scottish invasion of England) consisted of three epigrams on James IV, one on the capture of Tournai and two hilariously skewering the fatuous poem Chordigera by Germain de Brie (Brixius)—all saw the light of day in the Epigrammata, printed in 1518. His most famous contribution, however, is Utopia, published in 1516, where the lengthy account of the islanders’ ‘military practices’ drips with anti-chivalric satire. Erasmus’s earliest known intervention north of the Alps was tiny and subtle: when the Strasbourg edition of his Adagia appeared in 1514, he added to the phrase ‘And the Holy Ghost descended in the form of a dove’ the words ‘not of an eagle or a bird of prey’—the eagle was the symbol of the Habsburgs. Yet he was less reticent in the third edition, published at Basel in 1515, inserting three adages on kingship and war that proclaim his essential pacifism; ‘Dulce bellum inexpertis ’ is the most celebrated of the trio. Baker-Smith pursues Erasmus’s programme through to his Querela Pacis of 1517, which he regards as marking the end of this highly fruitful period of collaboration between the two great humanists.100 That may indeed be true. Nevertheless, the extreme selectivity of Baker-Smith’s analysis is not altogether helpful, since it gives the impression of a brief, two-man burst of activity. In fact, Erasmus not only touched upon these themes in pre1518 works barely noticed by Baker-Smith, but also in at least one book brought out in the next decade, while (unsurprisingly) the Erasmus-More output of 1515–1518 seems to have inspired contemporaneous humanists to adopt a similarly excoriating anti-chivalric rhetoric. Taking these supplementary works chronologically, we begin with a text—Erasmus’s Institutio Principis Christiani (Basel, 1516)—that was dedicated to Prince Charles (soon to become head of the Habsburgs and the Emperor Charles V) and incorporated in a volume an illuminated copy of which (still extant) the author presented to Henry VIII in 1517. Traditionalist readers may have been startled to learn that today we see a great many people enjoying the stories of Arthur and Lancelot and other legends of that sort, which are not only tyrannical but also utterly illiterate, foolish, and on the level of old wives’ tales, so that it

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would be more advisable to put one’s reading time into the comedies or the myths of the poets rather than into that sort of drivel.101

At about the same time, Richard Pace (1483?–1536) had a dig at aristocratic boorishness, drawing attention to the loud-mouthed magnate who wished his son to be skilled in hunting at the expense of any acquisition of learning.102 In De Institutione Feminae Christianae (Antwerp, 1524), the Spaniard Juan Luis Vives (1492/1493–1540) listed sundry chivalric romances to be tabooed as pestiferous. No specifically English examples are given, but when Richard Hyrde’s translation emerged in [1529?] the following passage had been interpolated: ‘In Englande, Parthenope, Genarides, Hippomadon, William and Melyour, Libius and Arthur, Guye, Bevis, and many other’.103 Meanwhile, in 1526–1528, Vives had penned De Officio Mariti, first printed at Bruges in 1529. There, as rendered in the English translation of [1555?], he distinguished between acceptable reading-matter—‘the workes of poetes, the fables of Milesii, as that of the golden asse, and … all Lucianes workes’—and manye other whiche are written in the vulgar tonge, as of Trystram, Launcelote, Ogier, Amasus and of Artur[,] the whiche were … made by suche as were ydle & knew nothinge. These bokes do hurt both man & woman, for they make them wylye & craftye, they kyndle … covetousnes, inflame angre, & all beastly and filthy desyre.104

William Tyndale (c.1494–1536) warned that the prelates’ prohibition on layfolk accessing vernacular scripture was not for love of their souls in as moch as they permitte … you to reade Robyn Hode & Bevise Hampton, Hercules, Hector and Troylus with a tousande [sic] histories fables of love & wantones & of rybaudry as fylthy as herte can thinke, corrupte the myndes of youth withall, clene contrary to the doctrine Christ & of his apostles.105

of & to of

Discussing the early stages of education, Erasmus held that utility and delight could go hand-in-hand. Nothing in his pedagogical method precluded ‘that a boy learn a pretty story from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives’ fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays’.106 Thomas Starkey (c.1498–1538) was scandalized that ‘gentylmen study more to bryng up gud hounds then [sic] wyse heyrys’. ‘Featys of

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the body & chyvalry’ did have a place in his radical reformist vision of 1529–1532, though subordinated to careful instruction with a view to responsible governance in the commonwealth.107 The [early 1539] draft of what Elton calls a Crown ‘handout’ probably intended for foreign consumption boasts that Englishmens’ access to the Bible had now pushed aside ‘the old fabulous and fantastical books of the Table Round, Lancelot du Lac, Huon de Bordeaux, Bevy of Hampton [and] Guy of Warwick’.108 Such strictures surely had some effect, for the vogue for printed chivalric romances seems to have come to an abrupt end c.1530— with a single possible exception, in 1535, none is known to have been published between that point and c.1553, when William Copland, the London printer, inaugurated a revival with the re-issue of Guy of Warwick [STC, 12541.5].109 In that particular case, one measure of success is perhaps the hero’s inclusion among Richard Lloyd’s nine worthies.110 Even so, Protestants of various stripes would continue the humanist antichivalric invective—Roger Ascham’s oft-quoted diatribe must stand for many111 —and the well-connected gentleman Robert Ashley may not have been the only recipient of a strongly Reformed Elizabethan education (he was taught by Adrian Saravia) to have recalled with shame that, as a boy, he had abandoned play, sleep and work if by chance he had come across a book containing some fabulous and useless fictions such as were told about Bevis of Hamtoun or Guy of Warwick, or the history of Valentine and Orson, or the life of Arthur king of Britain and his knights of the Round Table, or portents and monsters of a kind that never existed, or else indeed were useless and vain things surpassing all belief added in by monks with nothing better to do (made up in an earlier age to entrap the ignorant common man and ensnare him with pleasures).112

But aspects of the chivalric ethos did not disappear under the weight of humanist-Protestant denunciation: Nievergelt argues that the English translation of Jean de Cartigny’s pious allegory Le Voyage du Chevalier Errant (published in 1557 and reworked and reprinted in 1572) is ‘the first text to establish [Sir Francis] Drake as a national epic hero endowed with the aura of a religious figure, albeit not a specifically Protestant hero’. In the preface, Robert Norman, the self-styled ‘hydrographer’, achieved a remarkable synthesis, assimilating the recently dubbed circumnavigator to the ancient motif of the questing knight, yet simultaneously stressing ‘the

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convergence of religious and economic concerns’. The book, concludes Nievergelt, ‘praises Drake at once as an epic hero, a medieval knight, a devout pilgrim, a model for greater social mobility and a harbinger and prophet of a new age’.113 If the early sixteenth-century attack on chivalry really was as devastating as it seems to have been, at least in the short-term, then is its potency attributable solely to Baker-Smith’s dichotomy between custom and nature? While many scholars delineate the humanist disdain as the launch-pad for their distinctive analyses,114 few penetrate to its conceptual core, which proves to have been more complex than Baker-Smith allows. The best guide is Adams, who argues that Renaissance humanist criticisms may be divided into four main clusters. Most important of all is the cluster gathered under the heading ‘tyrants vs. just kings’. Our critics, he insists, were against … tyrants and tyranny in all forms, against the idea that the king can do no wrong and that the right of a ruling class is its might. They were against the idea that tyrants should be glamorized in either history or romance. They were against the idea that romance, history, or biography should be admired when it represents tyrants or military conquerors (such as Alexander or Caesar) as ‘great’ and good men, worthy to be imitated by modern princes.

The second cluster of criticisms, closely connected to the first, concerns the antithesis between ‘a war-ridden and disintegrating late-medieval society’ and what might be: a reconfigured social order grounded upon ‘peace and Christian justice’. That is the cluster, we can now recognize, of special interest to Baker-Smith. Particularly germane for this Introduction, however, is the third cluster, whose relationship to the previous two will be obvious: More and his circle … were against certain traditional ideas (whether found in medieval romance or in some classic writers) centred on the codes of value that powerfully affect men’s motivations. They were against the idea that true ‘glory’ can be derived from depraved pleasures, from senseless brutality, violence, or bloodshed, or from their ritualized form – war. They were against the idea that unnecessary wars … can rightly be called ‘glorious’, or that manslaughter is ever such. They were against the idea that true human ‘greatness’ is to be found in the tyrants or conquerors of history or romance. They were against the idea that mere possession of great power

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or wealth made its possessor a ‘great’ man. They were against the idea that moral, aesthetic, or other values can be determined or changed at will by these alleged supermen. As to ‘honour’ – that shibboleth of the decayed world of chivalry – these humanist new critics were against all ideas of ‘honour’ that, however superficially appealing in literary disguises, had in life become mere euphemisms, masks, or pretexts for the exploitation of the commonwealth by a ruling and war-loving class of men who were virtually devoid of any sense of social responsibility.

Quite an indictment of the status quo! Finally, some Renaissance humanists, notably More and Vives, opposed the prevailing denigration of female capacity: ‘they were … against the idea that women could not or should not be educated for mature and civilized roles in marriage and society’.115 Clearly, the humanist project involved a fundamental re-assessment of pre-existing reputations—and, indeed, of what it should mean to have one. A scepticism as thoroughgoing as that was hardly likely to leave the cult of the saints unscathed. In fact, sixteenth-century humanists were anticipated by Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) in his 1455 prohibition on the clergy of the diocese of Brixen (Bressanone) teaching their parishioners such ‘superstitiosa’ as lay embedded in the ‘Legenda Aurea’ narratives of SS Blaise, Barbara, Catherine, Dorothea and Margaret of Antioch. According to Reames, he found them suspicious because of the promise, common to all, that devotional acts would be rewarded with miracles, but Frazier sees lack of historicity as the ground of his objection.116 Erasmus took aim at the cult in his immensely successful Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly) first published in Paris in 1511; the book went through forty-two Latin editions by the author’s death in 1536, appearing additionally in various vernaculars: French (1520), German (1520) and English (1549). With characteristic wit, he has ‘Folly’ declaim that those folk are all men of my kidney who delight in miracles and fictitious marvels[.] … They can never have enough of such tales when there are any wonders to relate about ghosts … and the dead, and all the countless miracles there are of that kind. The further these are from the truth, the more eagerly they are believed[.] … Such things not only serve remarkably well for whiling away a tedious hour[,] but can also be profitable, especially for preachers and demagogues.

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Popular beliefs surrounding the saints and their images, indulgences (‘imaginary pardons’) and clerical profiteering—each aspect comes in for Erasmus’s withering scorn.117 The satirist returned to the fray in the revised edition (Basel, 1518) of his Enchiridion Militis Christiani, which had first been printed at Antwerp in 1503 in a collection of Lucubratiunculae.118 The revised edition became the base-text for an anonymous English translation of 1523 (extant in a unique manuscript copy) thought by Cummings to have been effected by Tyndale, and that version has obvious affinities with the English rendition published frequently from 1533.119 Fun is poked at the misapprehensions of the uneducated laity. Deceived by so-called religious men, whose motivation was pure greed, they had fallen into what amounted to paganism: There be [some] that honour certeyn sayntes with certeyn ceremonyes. One saluteth Christofer every daye, but not excepte he beholde his ymage. Whether loketh he? Veryly to this poynte. He hath borne hym selfe in hande that he shal be all that day sure from evyl deth. An other worshyppeth one Rochus, but why? Bycause he byleveth that he wyl kepe awaye the pestylence from his body. An other mombleth certayne prayers to Barbara or George, lest he shold fall into his ennemyes handes. This man fasteth to Saint Apolyne, leest his tethe shold ake. That man visiteth the ymage of holy Job, bycause he wolde be without scabbes. … Whiche honouryng of sayntes trewly, except it be referred from the respect of corporal commodytees or incommodytees unto Chryst, is not for a Chrysten man, in so moche that it is not farre from the supersticiousnesse of them whiche in tyme passed vowed the tenth parte of their goodes to Hercules, to the entent they myght waxe ryche. … Or whiche sacryfyced a bull to Neptunus, that they myght have good passage by see[.] … The names be chaunged, but veryly they have bothe one ende and entent.120

To this recent critique, the evangelical Reformation added only reinforcement. Martin Luther responded to the 1524 translation of the relics of St. Benno of Meissen—his was one of the last two canonizations to take place, in 1523, before a loss of papal nerve that would persist until 1588— by writing a polemical tract entitled Widder den Newen Abgott … (Wittenberg, 1524) (Against the New Idol ).121 Yet humanists evidently felt no need to cede the initiative to newcomers. Lampooning the exploitation of gullible pilgrims by the grasping ecclesiastical establishments at Walsingham and Canterbury while the poor wasted away from hunger and thirst, Erasmus included what was to become the famous dialogue

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‘Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo’ (‘A Pilgrimage for Religion’s Sake’) in the February 1526 Basel edition of his celebrated Colloquies.122 That colloquy was published separately, in English translation, in [1536–1537].123 Rome belatedly recognized the damage when (in 1559) the Colloquies were entered on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.124 Vives, like Erasmus a life-long Roman Catholic, expressed disgust at de Voragine’s ubiquitous tome: the ‘Legenda’ was not ‘Aurea’, but rather ‘ferrei oris, plumbei cordis ’ (‘iron-mouthed and leaden-hearted’). He explained: What could be more abominable [foedius ] than this book? What a disgrace to us Christians that the pre-eminent deeds of our saints have not been more truly and accurately preserved, so that we might know or imitate such virtue, when the Greek and Roman authors have written with such care about their generals, philosophers and sages!125

Vives elaborated upon the same complaint in another treatise published in 1531: What has been written on the lives of the saints, with few exceptions, has been polluted with many fabrications. The writer followed his own inclination, and has told us not what the saint actually did, but what the writer would have wished him to have done[.] … There have been those who, instead of using great scrupulousness, shaped together small falsehoods, on behalf of religion. This is dangerous, since it may take away confidence in what is true[.]126

So perilous had the situation become by 1529, when England’s legislative Reformation had still to begin,127 that More was driven to publish (in June) the book known as A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, the main aim of which (insists Duffy) was ‘to defend the presence of Christ in the life of the Church as embodied in its devotional and sacramental practice, … specifically in all the concrete forms of the cult of the saints’.128 But it was too late. In 1532, Hugh Latimer would be in trouble for preaching against purgatory, the invocation of the saints and the adornment and veneration of their images. A forced recantation did nothing to deter him, and the following year he was to inflame Bristol with aggressive sermons on the same themes.129 Much of the hostility to the saints’ prominence in popular piety crystallized around the allegation of idolatry. Although iconoclasm had not been unheard of in the 1520s, ‘a

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minor epidemic’ of it erupted in eastern England in the early 1530s.130 Ominously, [1535] saw the emergence of William Marshall’s English translation of a Latin version of Martin Bucer’s German treatise against images—ominous because Marshall was perhaps even then working for Thomas Cromwell and one of his interpolations calls for images to be burnt.131 As things turned out, those developments were prelude to the Crown’s attempt to curb cultic excess—and certainly to prevent idolatry—in the Ten Articles agreed in Convocation on 11 July 1536.132 Just over a week later, Convocation issued a decree abrogating various saints’ feast-days, implicitly including (in July) that marking Thomas Becket’s translation.133 On 11 August, the king indicated his backing by circularizing the bishops with copies of the decree, ordering enforcement.134 By that stage, Cromwell, as vicegerent, may already have promulgated the first set of Royal Injunctions [STC, 10084.7], which again attack the cult of the saints, albeit in general terms.135 Yet while the Government’s huge disendowment of the Church gathered pace, its campaign against those who had been fêted as religious superstars became increasingly targeted. MacCulloch writes that ‘ever since Henry had discovered that he was Supreme Head of the Church of England, he had detested the memory of Becket, whose cult represented the triumph of the Western Church over a king of England’.136 Battle-lines were drawn in Cromwell’s second set of Royal Injunctions [STC, 10087], published on 5 September 1538: the clergy are instructed to omit Becket’s principal commemoration on 29 December.137 Within a few days, royal commissioners descended upon Canterbury Cathedral to destroy the most renowned shrine in the realm; the saint’s bones were probably burnt.138 Physical annihilation, however, was far from the regime’s only goal: there must be a public process of detoxification—or rather of exorcism (Elton’s word) and of de-sanctification (Scully’s).139 A multi-purpose royal proclamation of 16 November 1538 therefore informed the king’s subjects that Becket’s death was ‘untruely called martyrdome’ and that he had been canonized by the pope ‘bycause he had ben a champion to maynteyne his usurped auctoritie, and a bearer of the iniquitie of the clergie’. Notwithstanding canonization, ‘there appereth nothynge in his lyfe and exteriour conversation wherby he shuld be callyd a sainct, but rather estemed to have ben a rebell and traytour to his prynce’. Accordingly, his image was to be removed from every place of worship, his name erased from all service books and his feast-days pass unobserved.140 The Crown made another effort to re-write Becket’s biography in December 1538, when the king circularized magistrates with

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a denunciatory missive.141 More extraordinary still is the tale of a ‘trial’, held earlier in 1538, in which the dead archbishop had been found guilty of treason—a tale of obscure authorship, though plausible enough to have persuaded Pope Paul III (reigned 1534–1549) to update the 1535 Bull of excommunication against Henry VIII. Even some modern historians have fallen for this spectacular sixteenth-century example of ‘fake news’.142 A draft government ‘handout’ attributable to early 1539 delivered the coup de grâce: England’s quondam premier martyr-saint had really been ‘a great warrior, a burner of towns, an encroacher of benefices, a hunter and hawker, proud and seditious’.143 The Henrician besmirching of Becket’s reputation may be taken as symbolic of the wider attack upon saints, shrines, images and pilgrimage. But caution is needed: the ferocity of the Reformation dénouement ought not to blind us to the corrosive effects of what had gone before. Using Seybolt’s data, Reames shows that demand for de Voragine’s Latin ‘Legenda Aurea’ was in free-fall by the 1490s, long antedating Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Only twenty-three editions are known to have been published 1491–1500, compared to forty-one in the preceding decade, while the number of printing centres represented by that output shrank to seven: Basel, Hagenau, Louvain, Lyon, Nuremberg, Strasbourg and Venice. In just three of the seven (Basel, Lyon and Strasbourg) was consumption sufficient to warrant the production of up to four or five new impressions. For Reames, the most striking trend was the rapid collapse of interest across the Holy Roman Empire: ‘after 1488, no further Latin editions are attested from Ulm; after 1490, none from Cologne; [and] after 1496, none from Nuremberg’. Regarding vernacular translations, the picture was more varied. England was unusual in that Caxton’s version kept appearing until as late as 1527, though not again until the nineteenth century. By contrast, strong demand in German- and Dutch-speaking areas of the Empire diminished sharply as the 1400s drew to a close, with re-issues occurring sporadically in Antwerp, Basel and Strasbourg beyond 1516–1517. Translations never seem to have taken off in Spain and Bohemia.144 Irrespective of language, where sales of de Voragine’s work had formerly been robust, was the late-medieval slump due to market saturation or were other factors in play? It is hard to credit the first possibility since the market should have been expanding: literacy was spreading and many urban environments, which led the countryside in that respect, were undergoing massive growth; towns and cities were, after all, bureaucratic hubs and beacons of learning.145 And so we

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fall back upon the second possibility, namely that religious and intellectual fashions were changing. That hypothesis receives support from other indices. At Canterbury, Becket had ostensibly performed his last recorded miracle in 1474; Henry VI, venerated at Windsor despite noncanonization, gave up in 1500. Most extant reliquaries belong to the period before that threshold. No fresh cults sprang up in the early sixteenth century. By 1520–1529, a tiny minority of testators in the dioceses of Durham, Exeter and York remembered shrines in their wills. Tellingly, the average annual offerings at Canterbury (to all shrines, not merely Becket’s) had plummeted from £370 in 1390–1439 to £14 in 1490–1538.146 As popular heroes and heroines, the saints had lost their lustre. Vitiated by an indifference to documented fact, the ‘Legenda Aurea’ quickly succumbed to the down-to-earth scepticism, and stricter standards of accuracy, ushered in by Renaissance humanists. How ironic that Erasmus’s satire was subsequently mistaken for a truthful portrayal of the pre-Reformation past!147 Yet the saints had been too great a part of English religious culture simply to be ignored: when perceptions of holiness shifted, a phenomenon also manifest within Counter-Reformation Catholicism,148 evangelical reformers found it necessary to re-write their lives for polemical purposes and enthusiastically adapted the ‘saint play’ to fit an urgent new agenda.149 Robin Hood fared little better. Even before Renaissance humanism reached England, there had been negative comment.150 That manuscript annotation, probably made in the 1460s, cannot have been seen by many readers. Of a different order, because printed from 1493, was the long prose dialogue ‘Dives and Pauper’, written 1405–1410, whose anonymous author complained that the people these daies is fulle undevoute to God and to holy Churche. And they love but ful lytel men of holy Churche, and they ben lothe to come in holy churche whanne they be bounde to come thider[.] … They have levir [i.e. rather] go to the taverne than to holy church[,] levyr to here a songe of Robynhode or of some rybaudry thanne to here … Goddes servyce.151

In 1509, Alexander Barclay (c.1484–1552) brought out [STC, 3545] what has been described as ‘a versified adaptation’ of the Latin, French and Dutch versions of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff , a satire in the Roman tradition originally published in German in 1494.152 According to Barclay,

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The holy Bybyll grounde of trouth and of lawe Is nowe of many abject and nought set by Nor godly scripture is nat worth an hawe But talys ar lovyd grounde of rybawdry And many blynddyd ar so with theyr foly That no scripture thynke they so true nor gode As is a folysshe yest of Robyn Hode.

Referring to the clergy, he added: And in the mornynge whan they come to the quere The one begynneth a fable or a hystory The other lenyth theyr erys it to here Takynge it in stede of the Invytory Some other maketh respons antym and memory And all of fables and jestis of Robyn Hode Or other tryfyls that skantly ar so gode.153

Tyndale warned in May 1528 that ‘he that hath not the [holy] sprite [i.e. spirit] hath no fealing … nether abhorreth the pleasures of synne, nether hath any moare certente of the promyses of God than I have of a tale of Robin Hode’.154 Discussing biblical exegesis later that year, the illustrious translator continued the denigration: ‘If I coulde not prove with an open texte that which the allegory doeth expresse, then were the allegory a thinge to be gested at and of no greater value then [sic] a tale of Robyn Hode’.155 A satire directed against Cardinal Wolsey, Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe …, which is variously attributed to Jerome Barlow, William Barlow [Finch] and William Roy, castigated the bishops in the following terms: Wholy scripture concernynge. Their frantyke foly is so pevisshe, That they contempne in Englisshe, To have the Newe Testament. But as for tales of Robyn Hode, With wother jestes nether honest nor goode, They have none impediment.156

When Erasmus published the first Latin edition of his Apophthegmata at Basel in 1531, he revisited themes that we have noticed in earlier works. Udall’s English translation renders the key passage thus:

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In sermones percase it is not conveniente to miengle jestyng saiynges of mortall menne with the holy scriptures of God, but yet might the same muche more excusably bee used, to quicken suche as at sermones been ever noddyng, then [sic] olde wives foolyshe tales of Robyn Hoode …, whiche many preachers have … customably used to bryng in, taken out even of the veraye botome and grossest parte of the dreggues of the commen peoples foolyshe talkyng.157

There could be no clearer instance of the new determination to drive a wedge between the sacred and the profane. Intelligence that ‘the chanseler [of the diocese] of London’ had advised a merchant to buy Robin Hood books for his servants to read, rather than scripture, moved the future martyr Robert Barnes (c.1495–1540) to despair: O Lorde God … why slepist thou? Why sufferst thou this blasphemy? Thou hast defended thy prophetes with wilde fier from Heven, and wylte thou suffer thy wonly sone and thy hevynly worde thus to be dyspysyd and to be rekenyd but as a story of Robyn Hoode?158

The humanist diplomat Richard Morison (c.1510–1556) advocated drastic action, telling Henry VIII in an unpublished treatise of [1535– 1536] proposing a Latin codification of the common law that in somer[,] comenly upon the holy daies in most places of your realm, ther be playes of Robyn Hoode …, wherin besides the lewdenes and rebawdry that ther is opened to the people, disobedience also to your officers is tought[.] … Howmoche better is it that those plaies shulde be forbodden … and others dyvysed to set forthe … lyvely before the peoples eies the … wickednes of the bisshop of Rome, monkes, freers, nonnes, and suche like [.]159

How many readers repudiated the famous outlaw, and abandoned the literature recounting his exploits, in the light of such sustained criticism? In the end, we are left with a dichotomy. On one hand, the anti-monasticism of the medieval Robin Hood canon may, as Field suggests, have resonated with an early sixteenth century populace which (the Pilgrimage of Grace excepted) would not do much to resist the Crown’s dissolution of the religious houses, despite the general vitality of pre-Reformation piety.160 And, indeed, at least one element of the parochial Robin Hood dramatic heritage would be purloined for re-use

42

D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

in evangelical propaganda.161 Yet on the other hand, a powerful stream of thought—initially humanist, though later Protestant—evidently viewed tales from the Greenwood as worse than merely worthless: they were dangerous, perhaps even blasphemous. For educated citizens exposed to increasingly dismissive voices, Robin must have seemed a far cry from an authentic national hero. We have pretended, for ease of analysis, that ‘Renaissance humanism’ was monolithic, but it was not. While humanists collectively waged war on late-medieval cultural values, an internecine dispute arose over which classical value-system was to be asserted against them. Nelson argues that there were ‘two distinct and incommensurable accounts of republican government available in the early-modern period, one drawn from the Latin sources of Roman antiquity, and the other drawn from the principal texts of Greek moral and political philosophy’. The former account defines liberty as independence, exalting that status as the root of civic virtue, which is understood as ‘a disinterested commitment to the public good’. This school of thought holds that virtue encourages justice—and justice is conceived as ‘an imperative to respect private property’. What did such ideas mean in practice? Nelson tells us: For neo-Roman theorists, dedication to justice allows the cultivation of the common good, which produces concord and peace and enables the state to seek its highest goals of glory and greatness. Implicit in all of this is that individuals should reject the contemplative life and embrace the active life of civic engagement (vita activa), performing their officia to their friends and family, promoting the glory of their patria, and securing honour and fame for themselves.

Cicero (106 BC–43 BC) was the high-priest of the Roman model, fetishized by mainstream Renaissance humanists whose essential mind-set has been reconstructed by Quentin Skinner. For maverick sixteenthcentury Italian opponents like Ortensio Lando (c.1512–c.1555), Ciceronianism amounted to a pathological cult of glory. It is not difficult to grasp how those adopting Cicero’s perspectives may have sought to carve out a Reformation reputation, nor how others could have interpreted the actions of leading figures with reference to the same conceptual framework. Standing against that framework, however, is the Greek model, which seems to have been predicated on the idea that the kind of freedom

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to be valued is (in Nelson’s words) ‘the condition of living according to our rational nature’. ‘It assumes’, he explains, that most men can be free in this sense only if they are ruled by their moral superiors: if someone ruled by his passions is left to rule himself, then he is enslaved. The Greek tradition also assumes that the purpose of civic life is not glory, which it dismisses as the irrelevant approval of nonexperts, but rather happiness (eudaimonia), the fulfilment of our rational nature through contemplation. Most important of all, the Greek account exhibits a sharply contrasting theory of justice. The virtue of justice is not seen as a matter of giving each person ius suum in the Roman sense, but is rather an arrangement of elements that accords with nature. In the case of the state, justice is secured by the rule of reason in the persons of the most excellent men: it results in a social existence which teaches citizens virtue. This view of justice as a natural balance among elements in turn leads to a completely anti-Roman endorsement of property regulations and the redistribution of wealth.

Readers conversant with Utopia will at once recognize that it belongs to the Greek side of the divide. In fact, Nelson’s contention is that, in writing the book, More was provocatively taking up Erasmus’s antiCiceronian banner, for what the character Hythloday describes so vividly is unmistakably a ‘Hellenic land without private property where the entire community was one large family, and where gloria had been replaced by felicitas [happiness] as the organizing goal of social life’.162 Nelson would perhaps be the first to admit that the Erasmian Hellenophiles constituted a minority among Renaissance humanists, albeit one whose publications were disproportionately successful. But if few colleagues followed them in opposing neo-platonism to fashionable Ciceronianism, then that did not mean that the many eschewed the ancient Greek inheritance altogether. On the contrary, Plutarch of Chaeronea (c.45–125 AD) provided a hugely influential model for lifewriting in the guise of the Parallel Lives: moralizing characterizations of pairs of Greek and Roman heroes, including Cicero himself. For most of the Middle Ages, the work had been known only indirectly, mentioned by Latin authors such as Jerome and Macrobius. Manuscripts of the whole extant composition (or substantial parts of it) did not become available in western Europe until the end of the fourteenth century. The

44

D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

first complete Latin translation was printed at Rome in 1470. Working from the original Greek text, Jacques Amyot (1513–1593) published a French edition in 1559, which formed the basis for Thomas North’s famous English rendition of 1579 [STC, 20065]—the book much used by Shakespeare.163 Even before the appearance of that version, however, Tudor-Stuart biographers were adopting a Plutarchan style; Mossman explores examples stretching from George Cavendish’s 1558 Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey to Sir Fulke Greville’s ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’ finished c.1612–1614, with a nod to Izaak Walton’s Lives, studied in depth by Martin.164 Besides rediscovering Plutarch, Renaissance humanists innovated. Scholarly biography since the Roman historian Suetonius (b. c.69 AD) had traditionally been structured as a series of entries gathered into what Weiss calls ‘a De Viris Illustribus catalogue’. While assemblages of that sort did not vanish, as he acknowledges and as we shall shortly see, ‘their role was usurped and their content altered by the emergence of the individual biography’—‘a self-contained interpretative description’ of the subject’s life not intended for an anthology. No matter what kind of person was under the spotlight, stand-alone biographies were designed to do more than merely communicate data: they must edify the reader, especially morally. Yet the range of literary forms from which the biographer must select his vehicle was broader than one might suppose, as Weiss explains: Such forms as memoirs, letters, orations, and prefaces were not only conveniences suited to different occasions; they could also imply whether their author had intended a larger or a smaller audience, and thereby indicated the degree to which the author intended his subject’s life and virtues to be publicized or generalized. This degree of publicity or privacy also implicitly clued the reader into the relative accuracy he might expect in the information conveyed. An informal memoir in a personal letter might be less complete or less accurate than an official Vita published as a preface to the subject’s collected Opera.

Weiss writes specifically of humanist biographies of other humanists, but his points obviously have wider application. At any rate, he indicates the variety of literary forms by discussing six contrasting ‘Lives’ of the polymath Rudolph Agricola (1444–1485), Dutch by birth, though the founding father of Renaissance humanism in Germany. Two of those

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‘Lives’ originated with Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), the second of them being a commencement oration delivered at the University of Wittenberg in 1539. In that oration, Melanchthon emphasized certain details in order to present Agricola as (to quote Weiss) ‘an out-and-out precursor of the Reformation’.165 Thus did the Reformation provoke the re-evaluation of much that had preceded it; there was no such thing, in the sixteenth century, as disinterested biography.

Making Reformation Reputations Let us now put ourselves in the shoes of Melanchthon’s English contemporaries. Had there ever been a generation, since the Norman Conquest, which had grown up to find its pantheon of inherited heroes and heroines—men and women in whom there had been some emotional investment, to say no more—excoriated by modish intellectuals of international repute? It is not suggested that everyone was touched by the Renaissance humanist critique, nor that those encountering such views necessarily lost their admiration for knights, saints or Robin Hood overnight. But we wish to argue that, given the critics’ prominence and the persistence of their attacks in print, the culture war outlined above must have had a significant impact—unquantifiable though that may be—upon the literate, opinion-forming social elite of Tudor England, and that historians of the English Reformation have paid inadequate attention (if any) to the nature and consequences of that impact. For more was at stake than merely the reputations of particular knights, particular saints and the man from the Greenwood: to assail medieval chivalric literature was to call into question the ingrained aristocratic and gentry ethos of martial prowess and the hunt; to expose the fabrications in the cult of the saints was to cast doubt not only upon what could truly be known, but also upon the sincerity of the Roman Catholic Church and its personnel under whose auspices individual cults had been allowed to flourish; and to denounce Robin Hood, charismatic star of entertainingly subversive tales one purpose of which may have been to function as a sort of safety-valve, was ostensibly to champion an incipient puritanical authoritarianism. So many reputations and so many conceptual frameworks, at one time firmly established, were being undermined, or rather a concerted attempt was being made to

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D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

undermine them! How could that situation not have been deeply unsettling? Translating the problem into twenty-first-century terms is perhaps helpful. Can we imagine what it would be like if a cohort of respected commentators plausibly demolished the reputations of—picking an unscientific cross-section of fields—all those who, in the last twenty years, have won Nobel prizes, have been Olympic medallists, have reached the Top Ten in the pop charts, have performed as soloists at the Proms or have graced the pages of Hello! magazine. Today we are probably better than our ancestors at answering back and can easily find solidarity via social media. Putting those considerations on one side, however, might people whose role-models belong to any of the aforementioned categories not feel disorientated, even aggrieved, at their idols’ dethronement—at the open deconstruction of their celebrity? Would they not wonder how such figures had come to be revered in the first place and whether or not any other reputations were safe from challenge? In short, we are hypothesizing the early sixteenth-century existence, by no means universal, of what is best described as a psychological shock: the shock of losing some major part of one’s cultural bearings. The difficulty is that psychological shocks are not readily susceptible to historical inquiry, yet they may have been no less real for all that.166 If our hypothesis is correct, then it is the consequence of the psychological shock that is germane to us and to historians of the English Reformation. Put simply, we are getting at the matter of trust. We trust our heroes and heroines in the sense that we have faith in the value of what they have achieved and what they stand for. On a deeper level, the recognition of merit in those who enjoy wide esteem must operate (not necessarily consciously) as a comforting validation of personal belief. For the most part, we cannot expect much else in return for our reverence: notwithstanding some feeling of affinity, role-models are typically remote; they may, in fact, be dead. But the saints were a special case, for acceptance of their posthumous miracle-working capabilities presupposed that they had gained everlasting life in Heaven. By delegation of divine power, it was thought, they could (and did) intervene in earthly affairs; veneration was intended to promote intercession, often (though not always) for mundane benefit. We referred a moment ago to self-validation. Validation is a useful concept to which to return because, importantly, knights were dubbed by the king, the fount of all honour, and the top tier of saints had

1

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obtained validation through canonization, the preserve, since the thirteenth century, of the papacy. How could the authenticators be trusted if those whom they had validated were being discredited, or if the ethos exemplified by the honorands was in a process of collapse? We submit, therefore, that the English Reformation burst upon a society many of whose leading members were probably experiencing less a crisis of religion than a crisis of trust. Trust in authority had either been eroded or was undergoing degradation. That outcome must surely have coloured popular perceptions of the men and women who were thrust into the limelight (or thrust themselves into it) as England’s sixteenth-century religious transformation unfolded. Who were the actors in that bloody drama? Were they reputable? What, indeed, were their reputations? Amid anxieties over salvation, could they be trusted? To insist that reputations mattered, and still do, is to assert, or rather to re-assert, the significance of the individual—of the power of individual agency. Accounts of the English Reformation are replete with abstractions unknown (or barely known) to the Tudor era: anticlericalism, Lollardy, presbyterianism, puritanism, recusancy and so forth. Moreover, historians increasingly concentrate on the social and cultural dimensions of religious change, investigating (for instance) generational turnover,167 religious identity and nomenclature168 and landscape and sacred space.169 Fascinating though that research may be, is there a danger of rendering the Reformation too impersonal, of neglecting the decisive role of the individual as actor and exemplar? It has not always been thus. Strype cast most of his writing in the form of biography, covering (among others) John Aylmer, Sir John Cheke, Edmund Grindal, Matthew Parker and John Whitgift (see Fig. 1.1).170 Nobody (we hazard a guess) has erected a monument to an abstraction; much effort, by contrast, was expended in the nineteenth century on memorializing in stone first the Oxford Martyrs and then William Tyndale (see Fig. 1.2)—complex campaigns related by Atherstone.171 Female historians under Queen Victoria tended to specialize in producing ‘Lives’.172 Distinguished modern scholars from Sir John Neale to Sir Keith Thomas have defended the biographical approach.173 Indeed, some of our finest Reformation historians have scarcely avoided the genre, witness Collinson’s Grindal and MacCulloch’s Cranmer and Cromwell.174 Yet there is a curious disconnect in the literature. On one hand, biographers of the cradle-to-grave variety commonly take the fame of their subject for granted, whereas the way in which it had been constructed (and perhaps later manipulated) might be

48

D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Fig. 1.1 Portrait of John Strype, by George Vertue, after an unknown artist, line engraving, engraved 1721

at once problematic and illuminating. On the other, the rapidly growing secondary material on early-modern ‘life-writing’ runs the risk of exaggerating the scale of the phenomenon it purports to examine, sometimes fails to consider the religious context and rarely assesses the primary sources themselves from the angle of ‘reputation’.175 This disjuncture is unfortunate because progress in answering certain key questions will best be made by drawing together the work of experts in specialist fields. Of those fields, the most fruitful in recent years has been that exploring early-modern martyrology,176 such that little on the topic need be said here, except to make three points, all concerning John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments … (1st edition, London, 1563) [STC, 11222]. The first point touches the issue of the extent to which Foxe was considered, or should be considered, the ‘author’ of that book, since a high proportion of it consists of primary sources printed either in extenso

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Fig. 1.2 The Martyrs’ Memorial, St. Giles’s Street, Oxford, designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, 1841, by an unknown photographer, photograph, c.1897

or as passages in quotation. How, as editor, Foxe shaped his text polemically has been elucidated by Freeman and Monta, who remark (citing two prefaces added to the 1570 edition) that ‘Foxe presents his work as authoritative precisely because it is not original’. Those prefaces list what are introduced as ‘The names of the authors alleged in this booke, besides many and sondry other authors whose names are unknowen, and … divers recordes of Parlament, and also other matters found out in registers of sondry byshops of this realme’. It may be true, as Freeman and Monta explain, that the lists were inserted following criticism of the first edition by Thomas Stapleton and other Roman Catholic controversialists.177 But might not the overt incorporation of so many primary sources in the first place, as a fundamental strand of Foxe’s publishing strategy, have been a response to the crisis of trust to which we have adverted? In short, by broadcasting the heroic status of the Marian martyrs, the martyrologist was making an epistemological statement: fidelity to ‘true religion’ was

50

D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

proved chiefly, of course, by a willingness to suffer death, yet both the fact of martyrdom and the circumstances leading up to it were demonstrable by seemingly unimpeachable documentary evidence. Foxe knew of de Voragine’s ‘Legenda Aurea’ and was perhaps aware of its widespread preReformation collapse in popularity, due at least in part to Renaissance humanist critique of its veracity.178 His aim, surely, was to make the reputations of the Protestant martyrs unassailable. The second point is linked to the first and is, admittedly, entirely speculative, though has not, we believe, been made before. It is that Foxe may have been moved to provide generous documentary support by his appreciation of the humble social status (and possibly age profile) of many Marian martyrs. Accepting Freeman’s caveats about defects in the records, which mean that occupations are sometimes obscure, we are nevertheless struck by the appearance in his list of men described as blacksmith, brewer, bricklayer, butcher, carpenter, cook, fisherman, husbandman, labourer, mason, miller, painter, shearman, shoemaker, tanner and weaver.179 In view of the snobbery of the period, would it have been incredible to Foxe’s intended readers that figures from such lowly walks of life could have achieved renown as Christian martyrs had he not given them written proof? That Foxe, by suppressio veri, did find it useful to suggest ordinariness is revealed by his account of John Porter. Porter emerges from Actes and Monuments as an innocent commoner who had been starved to death in prison in 1542 after incarceration by Bishop Bonner of London for having read the English Bible to crowds gathered in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Clearly, Foxe sought to depict Bonner as so malicious that he would break the law in order to deny the people access to vernacular scripture. The reality, however, is that Bonner was abroad when the episode supposedly occurred, while Porter enjoyed connections at Court, had already been in trouble for enunciating evangelical doctrine and ended up in gaol for rejecting the eucharistic theology endorsed by the Crown. Yet Foxe launched Porter’s posthumous career as a Protestant hero for championing the right of ordinary folk to hear the unadulterated Word of God.180 The third point follows on from the second: if Foxe’s book taught generations of readers that, by choosing his instruments as he had done, God had democratized fame, then what did that do to perceptions of celebrity?

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These ruminations throw into relief the ‘key questions’ to which vague reference was made above. The most obvious one is this: what proportion of sixteenth-century life-writing was taken up by martyrology? Or, to approach the problem from the other side, were there non-martyrological features of the period that lent themselves to the fashioning of distinctive kinds of reputation? Calvinist predestinarianism is one possibility, leading in a roundabout way to (for example) the domestic godliness of a Lady Margaret Hoby and the practical divinity of a Richard Greenham.181 Alternatively, how important was it that religious policy was driven by very different Tudor monarchs, creating the dilemma of political obedience? Were Reformation reputations necessarily inflected by considerations of loyalty, not only to successive rulers, but also to their officers, in Church and State? That conundrum would seem to take us close to the cliché that history (and, by extension, biography) is written by the victors, were it not for the fact that, in contrast to Whig historiography, revisionism has made it far less clear who the winners were, should there have been any. Even if life-writing is separable from politics, then the question of repetition arises: how do we explain why some figures are treated over and over again, ad nauseam, while others sink into oblivion? What, in brief, makes a reputation endure and what causes it to fade? Are the reasons to be found in lifetime status, in gender bias, in educational priorities, in the shifting sands of confessional conflict or in the vagaries of the publishing industry? Such questions are too large for answer here, but it may be helpful, as a first step in that direction, to try to gain a sense of the scale of life-writing with regard to people who achieved prominence in England’s Reformation, not all of whom were English. No conspectus, we believe, has hitherto been printed. Inevitably, none can be complete: texts will have been lost, and others extant in manuscript may lie undetected. Nevertheless, the information currently available is presented in Table 1.1. Table 1.1 shows that biographies of leading first-generation continental Protestant reformers—Zwingli, Oecolampadius and Luther—were soon published in Latin, but that it was an extraordinarily long time (1561) before their appearance in English, notwithstanding the five-year hiatus of Mary’s reign (items 1, 2 and 5). Only Calvin’s biography (item 13) went straight into an English translation in 1564; a robust market must have been foreseen. For pre-Elizabethan natives, other than those memorialized in martyrological anthologies, there was considerable delay before biographies reached print at all: Roper’s ‘Life’ of More in 1626 (item 8) and Cavendish’s ‘Life’ of Wolsey in 1641 (item 6)—and a garbled text at

Date of composition

[1534]

[1545–1546]

16th century

[1548]

[c.1554– 1558]

[1556– 1558]19

[c.1557]

[c.1557–58]

[After 1559]

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

(a) Prose 1 1532

No.

Anon.

Oswald Myconius (1488–1552) Wolfgang Capito (1478–1541) Anne Askew

Author

Martin Luther (1483–1546) Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) Thomas Wolsey George Cavendish (b. (1470/1471–1530) 1494, d. in or before 1562?) Thomas Cranmer Anon., perhaps Stephen (1489–1556) Nevinson [Nevynson] (c.1520–1580)20 Sir Thomas More William Roper (1495× 98–1578) (1478–1535) Sir Thomas More Nicholas Harpsfield (1478–1535) (1519–1575) Giovanni Pietro Carafa, Anon. Pope Paul IV (1476–1559)

Henry VIII (1491–1547)

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) Johann Oecolampadius (1482–1531) Anne Askew (c.1521–1546)

Subject

1559;21 185922

1548 (Latin);13 1561 (English);14 2002 (critical edn)15 1641 (garbled);16 1959 (critical edn);17 1962 (modern English)18

1546;7 1547;8 [c.1550?];9 [c.1560];10 1996 (critical edn)11 Unknown

1536 (Latin);2 1561 (English);3 1979 (critical edn, German)4 1534 (Latin);5 1561 (English)6

Publication (Select)

BL, Harleian MS 1626;23 1935 (critical edn);24 1962 (modern 6254 English)25 Emmanuel College, 193226 Cambridge, MS 76 BL, Add. MS 8295, Unknown fols 2r–81r (Italian and Latin, copy)

BL, Harleian MS 417, fols 90–93

BL, Egerton MS 2402

Original MSS presumed lost BL, Lansdowne MS 105, item 612 Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Principal manuscript source

Table 1.1 A provisional conspectus of non-anthology autobiographies and biographies of figures connected with the English Reformation, written up to 17181

52 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

[1559– 1575]27 [1563]

[1564]

[1571]

[1572]

[1573]

Undated, but pre 1574

[1574 for the translation]

?

11

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

12

Date of composition

No.

Gaspard de Coligny, comte de Châtillon (1519–1572)

Matthew Parker (1504–1575)

Matthew Parker (1504–1575)

John Jewel (1522–1571)

John Story (1503/1504?–1571) Ignatius Loyola (c.1491–1556)

Jean Calvin (1509–1564)

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) Reginald Pole (1500–1558)

Subject

Laurence Humphrey (1525 ×27–1589) Anon., perhaps John Joscelin [Joscelyn] (1529–1603) Anon., perhaps John Joscelin [Joscelyn] (1529–1603), but anon. trans. and annotators, possibly J. Stubbs et al. Anon.42

Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1526–1611)

Theodore Beza (1519–1605)33 Anon.

Ralph Morice (fl. 1522–1570) Ludovico Beccadelli (1501–1572)

Author

Untraced

CCCC, PL MS 489, pp. 71–89 (Latin Matthaeus ) MS of translation untraced

Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, MS 665436 Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

CCCC, PL MS 128

Principal manuscript source

(continued)

1576 (English, from Latin)43

157441

From 1572 in Latin; from 1583 in Spanish; from 1586 in Italian; from 1590 in German; from 1593 in Polish; from 1599 in French37 1573 (Latin);38 1609 (condensed English version)39 1572–1574 (Latin)40

157135

1563 (Latin, from Italian);29 1690 (Latin);30 1766 (English);31 1799 (Italian)32 1564 (English, from French)34

185928

Publication (Select)

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

53

Date of composition

[1575–1600]

[c.1576]

[16th century] c.1581

[1585]

[1585]

[1585] 1586

[1588]

20

21

22

23

24

25

26 27

28

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)

Thomas Alfield (1552–1585) Ignatius Loyola (c.1491–1556) William Parry (d. 1585) Margaret Clitherow [née Middleton] (1552/53–1586)

Giovanni Pietro Carafa, Pope Paul IV (1476–1559) Thomas Whithorne (c.1528–1596) Henry Fitzalan, 12th earl of Arundel (1512–1580) Sir James Croft (c.1518–1590)

Subject

(continued)

No.

Table 1.1

Thomas Stapleton (1535–1598)

Giampietro Maffei (1538–1603) Anon. John Mush [alias Ratcliffe] (1552–1612)

Anon.

Anon., probably a member of his household Sir James Croft

Thomas Whithorne

Antonio Caracciolo

Author

(ii) Vatican Library, Barberini Latini, Codex 355552 Untraced

Untraced (i) York Minster Library, MS T. D. I

Untraced

BL, Harleian MS 1763 (Italian) Bodl., MS Eng. misc. c. 330 BL, Royal MS 17 A IX University of Nottingham Library, Portland MS PwV83 Untraced

Principal manuscript source

1588 (Latin);55 1928 (English)56

[1585]51 [1849];53 187754

From 1585 in Latin; from 1594 in French50

[1585]49

197748

1961 (original spelling);45 1962 (abridgement, modern spelling)46 183347

1612 (Latin)44

Publication (Select)

54 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Date of composition

[c.1590]

[1591]

1592–159458

No.

29

30

31

John Dee (1527–1609)

Katherine Stubbes [Stubbs] [née Emmes] (1570/1571–1590)

Felice Peretti di Montalto, Pope Sixtus V (1521–1590)

Subject

Philip Stubbes [Stubbs] (b. c.1555, d. in or after 1610), claiming to have taken down her words John Dee

Anon.

Author

(ii) Copy by ‘Dr Smith’, untraced (iii) Copy, 1673, by Elias Ashmole, now Bodl., Ashmole MS 1788, item 1

(i) Original MS was Cotton MS Vitellius C VII, now destroyed

BL, Add. MS 8369, fols 40r–357r (Italian, copy) Untraced

Principal manuscript source

(continued)

1726;59 185160

[1591]57

Unknown

Publication (Select)

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

55

Date of composition

1593–1595

Begun July 1594

1598

[1598]

32

33

34

35

Robert Persons (1546–1610) Richard Cosin (1548?–1597)

Edmund Campion (1540–1581)

Edmund Campion (1540–1581)

Subject

(continued)

No.

Table 1.1

William Barlow (d. 1613)

Robert Persons

Robert Persons (1546–1610)

Robert Persons (1546–1610)

Author

Untraced

(ii) ABSI, MS Collectanea P. I, fols 76–146 (copy)62 Untraced

(ii) ABSI, MS Collectanea P. I, fols 147–159 (copy) (i) ABSI, MS A IV 2 (formerly at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire) (original MS)61

(i) ABSI, MS A II 14 (formerly at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire) (holograph draft Latin ‘Life’)

Principal manuscript source

1598 (Latin)65

1906 and 190764

1877–187863

Publication (Select)

56 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

[c.Nov 1598–May 1599] 1599

[1599]

[c.May 1599–24 Mar 1603] Late 16th century

[1602]

[1603]

[1603]

36

38

39

41

42

43

40

37

Date of composition

No.

William Whittingham (d. 1579)

Katherine Brettergh [née Bruen] (1579–1601) William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley (1520/1521–1598)

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) William Whitaker (1547/48–1595) William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley (1520/1521–1598) Anne Boleyn (c.1500–1536)

William Alabaster (1568–1640)

Subject

Anon.

Anon., perhaps William Harrison77 John Clapham (1566–1619)

George Wyatt (1553–1624)

Anon.

Abdias Assheton

Ro: Ba:

William Alabaster

Author

(ii) BL, Add. MS 22295 Bodl., MS Wood E 64, item 5

(i) BL, Sloane MS 718

BL, Add. MS 62135, fols 47r–65r (complete copy) and 404r–415v (copy lacking beginning)74 Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Venerable English College, Rome, Liber 139466 LPL, MS 179

Principal manuscript source

187081

195180

(continued)

1602;78 c.199379

1817 (with omissions);75 182576

1732;71 1732;72 199073

1599 (Latin)70

195069

1982;67 199768

Publication (Select)

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

57

Date of composition

Elizabethan

[After 1603]

[1607–16]83

17th century

17th century

?

[1608]88

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

Magdalen Browne [née Dacre], viscountess Montague (1538–1608)

Philip II, king of Spain (1527–1598) John Fisher (c.1469–1535)

Henry VIII (1491–1547)

Mary [Mary Stewart], queen of Scots (1542–1587) Richard Vaughan (c.1553–1607)

John Fisher (c.1469–1535)

Subject

(continued)

No.

Table 1.1

Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O.2.28 BL, Harleian MS 371, fols 59r–121v

Principal manuscript source

Richard Smith (1567–1655)

Anon.

Pierre de Prette

Anon.

(ii) BL, Sloane MS 2495 BL, Sloane MS 2802, fols 1r–27r86 BL, Harleian MS 6382 Untraced

(ii) BL, Harleian MS 6495, item 6 (i) Corpus Christi College, Oxford, MS CCLV, item 4785

John Williams (1582–1650) (i) BL, Sloane MS 1983 A84

Anon.

Anon.

Author

1609 (Latin);89 1627;90 [1954]91

192187

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

Unknown

1891–189382

Publication (Select)

58 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Date of composition

[c.1609]

Completed [c.1610–12]96

No.

51

52

Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

John Gerard (1564–1637)

Subject

Sir Fulke Greville, 1st baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1554–1628)

John Gerard

Author

(ii) Hertfordshire Record Office, Hertford, MS DE/Hx/F 109, fols 1r–81r (iii) Shrewsbury Library, MS 295 (iv) Trinity College, Cambridge, MSS R.7.32, 33

(ii) Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, MS? (18th century Latin copy) (iii) BL, Add. MS 37271 (Latin copy) (i) Bodl., MS Juel-Jensen E 5, item 1

(i) Original Latin MS untraced (in Sant’ Andrea, novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Rome, when copied)92

Principal manuscript source

(continued)

1652;97 1986 (critical edn)98

1881 (incomplete);93 1886 (probably incomplete);94 1951 (complete)95

Publication (Select)

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

59

Date of composition

[c.1611]

[c.1611]

[c.1611– 1620]

[1612]

?

[c.1616– 1620]

[1618]

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

Edmund Campion (1540–1581)

John Whitgift (1530/1531?–1604) Jane Suárez de Figueroa [née Dormer], duchess of Feria (1538–1612) Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)

Edward VI (–1553)

John Foxe (1516/1517–1587) William Weston [alias Edmunds, Hunt] (1549/1550–1615)

Subject

(continued)

No.

Table 1.1

Paolo Bombino (c.1575–1648)

(Christopher) Cresacre More (1572–1649)105

Sir George Paule (1563–1635) Henry Clifford

Sir John Hayward (1564?–1627)

Anon., perhaps Simeon Foxe (1569–1642) William Weston

Author

(ii) Bodl., Tanner MS 329108

MS in possession (in 1887) of Lord Dormer Several MSS, but unclear which offers most authoritative reading106 (i) Original untraced

(ii) Trinity College, Cambridge, MS O.4.2 Untraced

BL, Lansdowne MS 388 (Latin)99 ABSI, MS A IV 5 (formerly at Stonyhurst College, Lancashire) (i) BL, Harleian MS 6021

Principal manuscript source

1618 (Latin);109 1620 (Latin);110

1631?107

1887104

1612103

1630; 1993102

1955 (English, from Latin)101

1641 (Latin and English)100

Publication (Select)

60 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Date of composition

[1628]

[c.1630]

[1631]

1635

Before c.1641

[1675]

Before 1689

[1701]

[1705]

No.

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) Laurence Chaderton (1536?–1640) John Aylmer (1520/1521–1594) Sir John Cheke (1514–1557)

Bernard Gilpin (1516–1584) Philip Howard, 13th earl of Arundel (1557–1595), and Anne Howard [née Dacre], countess of Arundel (1557–1630) Ignatius Loyola (c.1491–1556) Anne Howard [née Dacre], countess of Arundel (1557–1630) Sir Thomas More (1478–1535)

Subject

John Strype (1643–1737)

Domenico Regi (1608–1679?) William Dillingham (c.1617–1689) John Strype (1643–1737)

John Hawkins (c.1587–c.1641)

Juan Eusebio Nieremberg (1595–1658) Anon.

George Carleton (1557/1558–1628) Anon.

Author

BL, Harleian MS 6202 (incomplete)

BL, Harleian MS 7052 Untraced

Arundel Castle, Sussex, Library, MS (unnumbered)117 National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Adv. MS 33.7.16118 Untraced

Untraced

Arundel Castle, Sussex, Library, MS (unnumbered)113

Untraced

Principal manuscript source

1705123

1701122

(continued)

1700 (Latin);120 1884 (English)121

1675 (Italian)119

Unknown

1631 (Spanish)116

1857;114 1971 (earl only)115

1628;111 1629112

Publication (Select)

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

61

[1710]

[1711]

[1718]

69

70

71

[1551]

[temp. Edward VI]

[1572]

[1579]

[1582]

[1583]

2

3

4

5

6

John Strype (1643–1737)

Edmund Grindal (1516× 20–1583) Matthew Parker (1504–1575) John Whitgift (1530/1531?–1604) Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

1551127

1583132

[1582]131

[1579]130

1572129

1928–1929 (extracts)128

1718126

1711125

1710124

Publication (Select)

Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.33 Untraced

Untraced

Principal manuscript source

Henry Brandon, 2nd duke of Various Suffolk (1535–1551) and Charles Brandon, 3rd duke of Suffolk (1537/1538–1551) William Palmer Stephen Gardiner (c.1495× 98–1555) William Paulet, 1st marquess of Rowland Broughton Winchester (1474/1475?–1572) Sir Nicholas Bacon George Whetstone (1510–1579) (bap. 1550, d. 1587) Sir James Dyer (1510–1582) George Whetstone (bap. 1550, d. 1587) Thomas Radcliffe, 3rd earl of George Whetstone Sussex (1526/1527–1583) (bap. 1550, d. 1587)

John Strype (1643–1737)

John Strype (1643–1737)

Author

Subject

1

(b) Verse

Date of composition

(continued)

No.

Table 1.1

62 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

[1587]

[1599]

[1607]

8

9

10

Thomas Wolsey (1470/1471–1530) Thomas Cromwell, earl of Essex (b. in or before 1485, d. 1540)

Francis Russell, 2nd earl of Bedford (1526/1527–1585) Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586)

George Whetstone (bap. 1550, d. 1587) George Whetstone (bap. 1550, d. 1587) Thomas Storer (1571–1604) Michael Drayton (1563–1631) Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

Untraced

1607;136 1609137

1599135

[1587]134

1585133

1 Unless otherwise stated, publications are in English, though it has sometimes been necessary to state that fact explicitly in order to distinguish English language edns from those published in other languages 2 ‘Vita Huldrici Zwingli ad Agathium Beronensem. Ab Oswaldo Myconio Conscripta, Tiguri, 1532’, printed in DD Ioannis Oecolampadii et Hvldrichi Zvinglii Epistolarvm Libri Qvatvor … Vtriusq[ue] Uita & Obitus, Simone Grynaeo, Wolfgango Capitone & Osvaldo Myconio Autoribus (Basel, 1536) 3 H. Bennet (trans.), A Famous and Godly History, Contaynyng the Lyues & Actes of Three Renowmed Reformers of the Christia[n] Church, Martine Luther, Iohn Ecolampadius, and Huldericke Zuinglius …, 2 parts (London, 1561) [STC, 1881], Part II sigs [M3]v–[O7]v 4 E.G. Rüsch (ed.), Oswald Myconius, Vom Leben und Sterben Huldrych Zwinglis: Das älteste Lebensbild Zwinglis (St Gallen, 1979) 5 W. Capito (ed.), In Prophetam Ezechielem Commentarivs D. Ioan. Oecolampadij … De Obitv Oecolamp. Epist. Grynaei. De Uita Eius Wolfgan. Capito (‘Argentorati’ = Strasbourg, 1534) 6 H. Bennet (trans.), A Famous and Godly History, Contaynyng the Lyues & Actes of Three Renowmed Reformers of the Christia[n] Church, Martine Luther, Iohn Ecolampadius, and Huldericke Zuinglius …, 2 parts (London, 1561) [STC, 1881], Part II sigs K1r–[M3]r 7 J. Bale (ed.), The First Examinacyon of Anne Askewe, Latelye Martyred in Smythfelde, by the Romysh Popes Upholders … (‘Marpurg in the lande of Hessen’ [recte Wesel], November 1546) [STC, 848] 8 J. Bale (ed.), The Lattre Examinacyon of Anne Askewe, Latelye Martyred in Smythfelde, by the Wycked Synagoge of Antichrist … (‘Marpurg in the lande of Hessen’ [recte Wesel], January 1547) [STC, 850] 9 Anon. (ed.), The Fyrst Examinacion of the Worthy Servant of God, Maisters Anne Askewe, the Yonger Doughter of Syr William Askewe Knyght of Lyncolne Shyre: Lately Martyred in Smithfield, by the Romyshe Popes Upholders … The Lattr Examinacion … ([London, c.1550?]) [STC, 852.5] 10 Anon. (ed.), The First Examination of the Worthy Servaunt of God, Maistres Anne Askew … [with The Lattre Examinacion … printed under a separate title-page] ([London, c.1560]) [STC, 853] 11 E. V. Beilin (ed.), The Examinations of Anne Askew (New York, 1996)

[1585]

7

(b) Verse

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

63

translation) 16 [George Cavendish], The Negotiations of Thomas Woolsey … (London, 1641) [Wing, C1619] 17 R. S. Sylvester (ed.), The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, EETS, Original Series, 243 (London, 1959) 18 R. S. Sylvester and D. P. Harding (eds), Two Early Tudor Lives: The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish; The Life of Sir Thomas More by William Roper (New Haven, CT, and London, 1962), pp. 1–193 19 MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 633 20 The case is made ibid., pp. 633–6 21 J. Foxe and H. Pantaleon, Rervm in Ecclesia Gestarum … Commentarij, 2 vols (Basel, 1559–63), I pp. 708–25 (Latin translation) 22 Nichols, Narratives, pp. 218–33 (English original) 23 Anon. (ed.), The Mirrour of Vertue in Worldly Greatnes. Or The Life of Syr Thomas More Knight, Sometime Lo. Chancellour of England (‘Paris’ [recte St Omer], 1626) [STC, 21316]. This is not the title cited in J. Guy, Thomas More (London, 2000), pp. xvii, 233, but the basis for Guy’s version is unclear 24 E. V. Hitchcock (ed.), The Lyfe of Sir Thomas Moore, Knighte Written by William Roper, Esquire, Whiche Maried Margreat, Daughter of the Sayed Thomas Moore, EETS. Original Series, 197 (London, 1935) 25 R. S. Sylvester and D. P. Harding (eds), Two Early Tudor Lives: The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish; The Life of Sir Thomas More by William Roper (New Haven, CT, and London, 1962), pp. 195–254 26 E. V. Hitchcock and R. W. Chambers (eds), The Life and Death of Sr Thomas Moore, Knight, Sometymes Lord High Chancellor of England, Written in the Tyme of Queene Marie by Nicholas Harpsfield, L.D., EETS, Original Series, 186 (London, 1932) 27 The period when Matthew Parker was archbishop of Canterbury, for the biography was evidently written during his archiepiscopate: Nichols, Narratives, p. 234 28 Ibid., pp. 234–72 29 A. Dvditivs [András Dudith] (trans.), Ludovico Beccadelli, Vita Reginaldi Poli … (Venice, 1563) 30 A. Dudithio [András Dudith] (trans.), Ludovico Beccadelli, Vita Reginaldi Poli … (London, 1690) 31 B. Pye (trans.), The Life of Cardinal Reginald Pole, Written Originally in Italian, by Lodovico Beccatelli, Archbishop of Ragusa; And Now First Translated into English … (London, 1766) 32 L. Beccadelli, ‘Vita del Cardinale Reginaldo Polo’, in G. Morandi (ed.), Monumenti di Varia Letteratura Tratti dai Manoscritti di Monsignor Lodovico Beccadelli Arcivescovo di Ragusa, 2 vols in 3 parts (Bologna, 1797–1804), I Part II pp. 277–333

15 E. Vandiver et al. (trans. and eds), Luther’s Lives: Two Contemporary Accounts of Martin Luther (Manchester, 2002), pp. 14–39 (new English

Luther, Iohn Ecolampadius, and Huldericke Zuinglius …, 2 parts (London, 1561) [STC, 1881], Part I sigs B1r–[H4]v

12 A short and defamatory ‘Life’ written in French 13 P. Melanchthon, Historia de Vita et Actis … Lutheri … ([‘Hieraefordiam’ = Erfurt], 1548) 14 H. Bennet (trans.), A Famous and Godly History, Contaynyng the Lyues & Actes of Three Renowmed Reformers of the Christia[n] Church, Martine

64 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

but in the same year had translated it into French and published it separately: I. Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes (Aldershot, 2008), p. xviii, where she remarks (n. 16) that the latter text was ‘augmented and reworked’ by Nicolas Colladon, who printed his version in the preface to the 1565 French translation (published in Geneva) of Calvin’s commentary on Joshua 34 I. S. [John Stubbs] (trans.), A Discourse Wrytten by M. Theodore de Beza, Conteyning in Briefe the Historie of the Life and Death of Maister Iohn Caluin … (London, 1564) [STC, 2017] 35 Anon., A Declaration of the Lyfe and Death of John Story, Late a Romish Canonicall Doctor, by Professyon (London, 1571) [STC, 23297] 36 Described as a 16th-century Spanish MS, but Greenwood does not speculate about its status: J. Greenwood, ‘Tracing the Cult of Ignatius Loyola Through Print’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXVIII, fasc. 175 (2019-I), pp. 138, 141. He also notes (ibid.) the existence of a MS translation into Vietnamese, seemingly dated 1644 37 Listed ibid., pp. 145–50 38 L. Humphrey, Joannis Juelli Angli, Episcopi Sarisburiensis Vita & Mors … (London, 1573) [STC, 13963]. The last pages contain memorial verses penned by various authors 39 This version of Humphrey’s biography, said by Fuller in 1651 to have been executed by Daniel Featley, appears in Anon. (ed.), The Works of the Very Learned and Reuerend Father in God Iohn Iewell, Not Long Since Bishop of Sarisbvrie (London, 1609) [STC, 14579], sigs ¶¶[1]r–¶¶[6]v (unsigned and undated), reprinted in T. Fuller et al., Abel Redevivus: or The Dead Yet Speaking. The Lives and Deaths of the Moderne Divines (London, 1651) [Wing, F2400], sig. A3v (on Featley’s role) and pp. 301–14 (the ‘Life’) 40 Printed in certain copies of M. Parker et al., De Antiqvitate Britannicae Ecclesiae & Priuilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis Eiusdem 70 ([Lambeth], 1572–74) [STC, 19292] 41 Anon. (ed. and trans.), The Life off the 70 Archbishopp off Canterbury Presentlye Sittinge Englished and to be Added to the 69 Lately Sett Forth in Latin … ([Heidelberg], 1574) [STC, 19292a] 42 Sometimes attributed to Jean de Serres; to François Hotman; or to Jean Hotman, seigneur de Villers-Saint-Paul 43 A. Golding (trans.), Anon., The Lyfe of the Most Godly, Valeant and Noble Capteine and Maintener of the Trew Christian Religion in Fraunce, Iasper Colignie Shatilion, Sometyme Greate Admirall of Fraunce (London, 1576) [STC, 22248] 44 A. Caraccioli, De Vita Pavli Qvarti Pont. Max. … (Coloniæ Vbiorvm, 1612) 45 J. M. Osborn (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1961) 46 J. M. Osborn (ed.), The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne (Oxford, 1962) 47 J. G. N.[ichols] (ed.), ‘Life of the Last Fitz-Alan, Earl of Arundel’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, CIII Part II (1833), pp. 10–18, 118–24, 209–15 48 R. E. Ham (ed.), ‘The Autobiography of Sir James Croft’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, L (1977), pp. 48–57 49 Anon., The Life and End of Thomas Awfeeld a Seminary Preest and Thomas Webley a Dyers Servant in London, Beeing Both Traitours Who Were Condemned as Fellons for Bringing Seditious Books into This Realme and Dispersing of the Same, Among Their Favourers: For Which They Were Executed at Tibourne the 6 Day of this Monthe of July 1585 (London, [1585]) [STC, 997]

33 Beza had originally published the ‘Life’ in Latin as the preface to a 1564 edn of Calvin’s commentary on the Old Testament book of Joshua,

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

65

50 Listed in J. Greenwood, ‘Tracing the Cult of Ignatius Loyola Through Print’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXVIII, fasc. 175 (2019-I), pp. 150–3 51 Anon., A Trve and Plaine Declaration of the Horrible Treasons, Practised by William Parry the Traitor, Against the Queenes Maiestie. … Also an Addition Not Impertinent Thereunto, Containing a Short Collection of his Birth, Education and Course of Life. … (London, [1585]) [STC, 19342a], pp. 40–5 52 Described briefly in M. Claridge, Margaret Clitherow (1556?–1586) (London, 1966), p. 183 (where it is said formerly to have been in the Venerable English College, Rome) 53 W. Nicholson (ed.), Life and Death of Margaret Clitherow, The Martyr of York: Now First Published from the Original Manuscript (London, [1849]). The present identification of Nicholson’s MS source is unclear, though he said that it was then in the possession of Peter Middleton of Stockeld Park, Yorkshire 54 Of (i): J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, 3 vols (London, 1872–77), III pp. 331–440 (incomplete) 55 T. Stapleton, Tres Thomae … (‘Dvaci’ [i.e. Douai], 1588), where More’s ‘Life’ is separately paginated 56 P. E. Hallett (trans.), The Life and Illustrious Martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, Formerly Lord Chancellor of England (Part III of ‘Tres Thomae’, Printed at Douai, 1588). By Thomas Stapleton (London, 1928) 57 P. Stubbes (ed.), Katherine Stubbes, A Christall Glasse for Christian Women. Containing, a Most Excellent Discourse, of the Godlie Life and Christian Death of Mistresse Katherine Stubbes … (n.p., [1591]) [STC, 23381]. Because the title-page is lacking in the Early English Books Online copy of the first edn, we quote the title of the 1600 edn [STC, 23382.3] 58 R. J. Roberts, ‘Dee, John (1527–1609)’, in ODNB 59 ‘The Compendious Rehearsal of John Dee’ is printed from (ii) (a MS then in Thomas Hearne’s possession) in T. Hearne (ed.), Johannis, Confratris & Monachi Glastoniensis, Chronica Sive Historia de Rebus Glastoniensibus. …, 2 vols (Oxford, 1726), II pp. 497–556 (Appendix IV) 60 Hearne’s text of ‘The Compendious Rehearsal of John Dee’ is reprinted in J. Crossley (ed.), ‘Autobiographical Tracts of Dr. John Dee, Warden of the College of Manchester’, Chetham Miscellanies, I, Remains Historical & Literary Connected with the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester Published by the Chetham Society, XXIV ([Manchester], 1851), pp. 1–45 61 MS seemingly entitled ‘Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmond Campian’: R. Simpson (revised, edited and enlarged by P. Joseph), Edmund Campion (Leominster, 2010), p. 649 62 Christopher Grene’s 1689 copy: see ibid. and G. Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham, 2015), p. 397 63 J. H. Pollen (ed.), Letters and Notices, 11 (1877), pp. 219–42, 308–39 and 12 (1878), pp. 1–68. According to R. Simpson (revised, edited and enlarged by P. Joseph), Edmund Campion (Leominster, 2010), p. 649, this work ‘is not found in libraries’, having been published privately for circulation within the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Consequently, it has not been possible to check these details 64 J. H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, Miscellanea II , PCRS, II (London, 1906), pp. 12–218 and Miscellanea IV , PCRS, IV (London, 1907), pp. 1–161 65 W. Barlow, Vita et Obitvs Ornatissimi Celeberrimiq[ue] Viri Richardi Cosin … (London, 1598) [STC, 1460] 66 Described in J. Bertram, ‘The Conversion of William Alabaster’, The Venerabile, XXXII No. 3 (2002), pp. 14–21

66 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Un’Epoca Inquieta (Florence, 1982). It has not been possible to check these details 68 D. F. Sutton (ed.), Unpublished Works by William Alabaster (1568–1640), Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, No. 126 (Salzburg, 1997) 69 E. V. Hitchcock and P. E. Hallett (eds), The Life of Syr Thomas More, Somtymes Lord Chancellour of England by Ro: Ba:, EETS, Original Series, 222 (London, 1950) 70 A. Assheton, ‘Vitae et Mortis, Doctissimi Sanctissimique Theologi Gvilielmi Whitakeri …’, in J. Allenson (ed.), Praelectiones Doctissimi Viri Gvilielmi Whitakeri …, 2 parts ([Cambridge], 1599) [STC, 25368], II pp. 27–51 71 A. Collins (ed.), The Life of that Great Statesman William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Secretary of State in the Reign of King Edward the Sixth, and Lord High Treasurer of England in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. Publish’d from the Original Manuscript Wrote Soon After His Lordship’s Death, Now in the Library of the Right Honorable Brownlow Earl of Exeter … (London, 1732) 72 F. Peck (ed.), Desiderata Curiosa …, 2 vols (1st edn, London, 1732–35), I pp. 1–66 (‘The Compleat Statesman, Exemplified in the Life & Actions of Sir William Cecil, Lord Burghley …’) 73 A. G. R. Smith (ed.), The Anonymous Life of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, Studies in British History, 20 (Lewiston, NY, and Lampeter, 1990) 74 Formerly BL, Loan Collection 15: D. M. Loades (ed.), The Papers of George Wyatt Esquire of Boxley Abbey in the County of Kent Son and Heir of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Younger, CS, 4th Series, 5 (London, 1968), p. 1 75 Published privately, according to Loades, who gives no further details: see ibid., pp. 1, 224 76 ‘Extracts from the Life of the Virtuous Christian and Renowned Queen Anne Boleigne. By George Wyatt, Esq. Written at the Close of the Sixteenth Century. From the Manuscript Collections of the Rev. John Lewis’, printed in S. W. Singer (ed.), The Life of Cardinal Wolsey. By George Cavendish …, 2 vols (Chiswick, 1825), II pp. 175–215 (Appendix) 77 Harrison was one of the two Lancashire clerics whose funeral sermons preface the ‘Life’ and was almost certainly responsible for assembling the volume for publication. The case is made in Z. Leader (general ed.), The Oxford History of Life-Writing, 7 vols (Oxford, 2018–), II pp. 162–4 78 W. Harrison and W. Leigh, Deaths Aduantage Little Regarded, and the Soules Solace Against Sorrow Preached in Two Funerall Sermons … at the Buriall of Mistris Katherin Brettergh the Third of Iune 1601. … Whereunto is Annexed, the Christian Life and Godly Death of the Said Gentlewoman (London, 1602) [STC, 12866]. The ‘Life’ has its own title-page and pagination 79 See also Deaths Advantage Little Regarded /by William Harrison. The Soules Solace Against Sorrow /by William Leigh. And, A Brief Discourse of the Christian Life and Godly Death of Mistris Katherin Brettergh (1602): A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by R. M. Warnicke and B. A. Doebler (Delmar, NY, c.1993) 80 E. P. Read and C. Read (eds), Elizabeth of England: Certain Observations Concerning the Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth by John Clapham (Philadelphia, PA, 1951) 81 M. A. E. Green (ed.), ‘Life of Mr William Whittingham, Dean of Durham, From a MS in Antony Wood’s Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford…’, Camden Miscellany VI , CS, First (Old) Series, CIV ([London], 1871)

67 J. Bertram’s transcription of the original MS was published (without acknowledgement) in C. Fazzari, William Alabaster: Un Uomo Inquieto in

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

67

82 F. Van Ortroy (ed.), ‘Vie du Bienheureux Martyr Jean Fisher Cardinal, Évêque de Rochester (†1535): Texte Anglais et Traduction Latine du XVIe Siècle’, Analecta Bollandiana, X (1891), pp. 121–365 and XII (1893), pp. 97–287. This material was re-issued as a separate book: F. Van Ortroy (ed.), Vie du Bienheureux Martyr Jean Fisher… (Brussels, 1893) 83 The period from Vaughan’s death during which Thomas Egerton’s noble title was baron Ellesmere 84 Entitled ‘Vaughanus Redivivus Sive Amplissimi Viri Domini Richardi Vaughan, Doctoris in Theologia et Primo Bangorensis, Deinde Cestriensis, Postremo Londoniensis Ecclesiae Episcopi, Vita atque Obitus, per Joannem Williams, cum Epistola Dedicatoria ad Thomam Egerton, Baronem de Ellesmere, Angliae Cancellarium Praemissa’ 85 ‘The life of Henry VIII from the time of his falling in love with Ann Bullen to the death of Queen Katharine’: H. O. Coxe, Catalogus Codicum MSS Qui in Collegiis Aulisque Oxoniensibus Hodie Adservantur, 2 vols (Oxford, 1852), II p. 108. It remains to be seen whether or not this MS is more authoritative than the BL one 86 Spanish translation from French 87 R. Bayne (transcriber), The Life of Fisher: Transcribed From MS Harleian 6382, EETS, Extra Series, CXVII (London, 1921) 88 Text originated as a funeral sermon 89 R. Smith, Vita Illustrissimae, ac Piissimae Dominae Magdalenae Montis-Acuti in Anglia Vicecomitissae (Rome, 1609) 90 C.[uthbert] F.[ursdon] (trans.), The Life of the Most Honourable and Vertuous Lady the La. Magdalen Viscountesse Montague ([St Omer], 1627) [STC, 22811] 91 A. C. Southern (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House: Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) Translated into English from the Original Latin of Dr. Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, by Cuthbert Fursdon, O.S.B., in the Year 1627 (London and Glasgow, [1954]) 92 G. R. Kingdon (ed. and trans.), During the Persecution: Autobiography of Father John Gerard of the Society of Jesus (London, 1886), p. ix 93 From (ii) in J. Morris (ed.) and G. R. Kingdon (trans.), The Life of Father John Gerard, of the Society of Jesus (3rd edn, London, 1881). Kingdon’s role is acknowledged only on p. ix of the Preface 94 From (ii) in G. R. Kingdon (ed. and trans.), During the Persecution: Autobiography of Father John Gerard of the Society of Jesus (London, 1886) 95 Caraman, Gerard (new English translation) 96 J. Gouws, ‘Greville, Fulke, first Baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court (1554–1628)’, in ODNB 97 Written as ‘A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’, but published as Sir Fulke Grevil, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney. With the True Interest of England as it then Stood in Relation to all Forrain Princes: And Particularly for Suppressing the Power of Spain Stated by Him. His Principall Actions, Counsels, Designes, and Death. Together with a Short Account of the Maximes and Policies used by Queen Elizabeth in her Government (London, 1652 [recte 1651]) [Wing, B4899] 98 J. Gouws (ed.), The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke (Oxford, 1986), pp. 3–135 99 Discussed in J. F. Mozley, John Foxe and His Book (London, 1940), pp. 1–11 100 The English translation precedes the Latin original, with separate sig. numeration: J. Fox [sic], Acts and Monuments…, 3 vols (London, 1641) [Wing, F2035], II sigs A3r–v (address to reader, English) and A4r–[B6]v (‘Life’, English), A[1]r–v (address to reader, Latin) and A2r–[B4]v (‘Life’, Latin)

68 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Derbyshire, Hardwick MS 52 (c.1620s–30s); (iv) English Province of the Society of Jesus, Gillow MS 993; (v) Inner Temple Library, London, Petyt MS 538/45, fols 177r–263v; (vi) University of San Francisco, Gleeson Library, MS DA334.M8.M83 1620 (c.1620); (vii) Yale University, Gen MSS Vol. 87 (early 17th century); (viii) ibid., Gen MSS Vol. 264, fols 91r–119v (last three chapters only, early–mid 17th century) 107 M. C. M. E. [Magister Cresacre More Eboracensis], D. O. M. S. The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore Lord High Chancellour of England ([Douai, 1631?]) [STC, 18066]. See also an unpublished critical edn: M. A. Anderegg, ‘An Edition of Cresacre More’s Life of Sir Thomas More’, Yale University, PhD thesis (1972) 108 Incomplete English translation 109 P. Bombino, Vita et Martyrivm Edmvndi Campiani Martyris Angli è Societate Iesv (Antwerp, 1618) 110 P. Bombino, Vita et Martyrivm Edmvndi Campiani Martyris Angli è Societate Iesv (Mantua, 1620) 111 G. Carleton, Vita Bernardi Gilpini, Viri Sanctissimi, Famaque Apud Anglos Aquolinares Celeberrimi (London, 1628) [STC, 4646] 112 W. Freake (trans.), G. Carleton, The Life of Bernard Gilpin, A Man Most Holy and Renowned Among the Northerne English (London, 1629) [STC, 4647] 113 An 18th-century copy of a lost original. The MS is entitled ‘The Life and Death of the Renown’d Confessor Phillippe Howard Earl of Arundel &c [and] The Life of the Right-Honourable Lady the Lady Anne Countess of Arundell and Surrey, Foundresse of the English College of the Society of Jesus in Gant’. We are grateful to Craig Irving, archives manager, for sending this information 114 Duke of Norfolk (ed.), The Lives of Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, and of Anne Dacres, His Wife (London, 1857) 115 F. W. Steer (ed.), The Life of St. Philip Howard (Chichester, 1971) 116 J. E. Nieremberg, Vida de San Ignacio de Loyola… (Madrid, 1631) 117 Possibly an 18th-century copy of a lost original. The MS (dated 1635 at the end) is entitled ‘The Life of ye Right Honourable & Virtuous Lady, ye Lady Anne Late Countess of Arundell & Surrey’. We are indebted to Craig Irving for this information 118 Copy of c.1630s 119 D. Regi, Della Vita Di Tomaso Moro Gran Cancelliere D’Inghilterra (Milan, 1675) 120 T. Dillingham (ed.), W. Dillingham, Vita Laurentii Chadertoni S.T.P. & Collegii Emmanuelis apud Cantabrigienses Magistri Primi… (Cambridge, 1700), pp. 1–49 121 E. S. Shuckburgh (ed. and trans.), Laurence Chaderton, D.D. (First Master of Emmanuel): Translated from a Latin Memoir of Dr. Dillingham… (Cambridge, 1884) (preface, p. v discloses that this is an abridged translation)

106 (i) Bodl., Tanner MS 395, fols 45v–47r (extract, late 17th century); (ii) BL, Royal MS 17 B XXVII (early 17th century); (iii) Chatsworth House,

104 J. Stevenson (ed.), The Life of Jane Dormer Duchess of Feria by Henry Clifford (London, 1887) 105 Formerly attributed to Thomas More IV

Knight, Comptroller of his Graces Householde (London, 1612) [STC, 19484]

101 P. Caraman (ed. and trans.), William Weston: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London, 1955) 102 B. L. Beer (ed.), The Life and Raigne of King Edward the Sixth by John Hayward (Kent, OH, 1993) 103 Sir George Paule, The Life of the Most Reverend and Religiovs Prelate John Whitgift, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Written by Sir George Paule

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

69

Reign of Queen Elizabeth;… The Whole Digested, Compiled and Attested from Records, Registers, Original Letters, and Other Authentick MSS. Taken From the Choicest Libraries and Collections of the Kingdom. In Four Books. Together With a Large Appendix of the Said Papers… (London, 1718) 127 [T. Wilson] (ed.), Vita et Obitus Duorum Fratrum Suffolciensium Henrici et Caroli Brandoni… (London, 1551) [STC, 25816] 128 P. Janelle (ed.), ‘An Unpublished Poem on Bishop Stephen Gardiner’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, VI (1928–29), pp. 12–25, 89–96, 167–74 129 R. Broughton, A Briefe Discourse of the Lyfe and Death of… Sir William Pawlet… Marques of Winchester… (London, 1572) [STC, 3901] 130 G. Whetstone, A Remembraunce, of the Woorthie and Well Imployed Life, of… Sir Nicholas Bacon… (London, [1579]) [STC, 25343] 131 G. Whetstone, A Remembraunce of the Precious Vertues of… Sir Iames Dier… (London, [1582]) [STC, 25345] 132 G. Whetstone, A Remembraunce of the Life, Death, and Vertues, of the… late Erle of Sussex… (London, 1583) [STC, 25344] 133 G. Whetstone, A Mirror of Treue Honour and Christian Nobilitie Exposing: the Life, Death, and Diuine Vertues, of the… Earle of Bedford… (London, 1585) [STC, 25342] 134 G. Whetstone, Sir Phillip Sidney, His Honorable Life, His Valiant Death, and True Vertues… (London, [1587]) [STC, 25349] 135 T. Storer, The Life and Death of Thomas Wolsey Cardinall… (London, 1599) [STC, 23294] 136 M. Drayton, The Legend of Great Cromwel (London, 1607) [STC, 7204] 137 M. Drayton, The Historie of the Life and Death of the Lord Cromwell, Sometimes Earle of Essex, and Lord Chancellor of England (London, 1609) [STC, 7204.5]

123 J. Strype, The Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke, Kt. First Instructer, Afterwards Secretary of State to King Edward VI… (London, 1705) 124 J. Strype, The History of the Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, Edmund Grindal… (London, 1710) 125 Strype, Parker 126 J. Strype, The Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, D. D. The Third and Last Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, in the

Queen Elizabeth… (London, 1701)

122 J. Strype, Historical Collections of the Life and Acts of the Right Reverend Father in God, John Aylmer, Lord Bishop of London in the Reign of

70 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

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that. During the second half of the sixteenth century, most Elizabethan life-writing was inaccessible to everybody except the very well-connected or the very well-educated because works fell into one or the other of two categories. They either existed solely in manuscript (items 9, 11, 21– 23, 27, 31–34, 36, 37, 39, 40, 42–44, and 49) or they were published in Latin (items 12, 15–17, 25, 28, 35, and 38). In the former case, unless authors kept them secret, it is conceivable that the manuscripts enjoyed limited circulation in networks of kith and kin. In the latter case, choice of language may have been conditioned by a desire to appeal to an international readership, plausible enough for Humphrey’s ‘Life’ of Jewel (item 16). But it is hard to believe that anyone could have imagined a substantial continental thirst to learn more about Richard Cosin and William Whitaker (items 35 and 38)—hence we conjecture that there the real intention was to restrict biographical data to learned elites (academic, clerical and legal) at home. Doubtless some linguistically talented non-Latinate readers could access foreign vernacular translations: Beccadelli’s ‘Life’ of Pole (item 12) had first been printed in Italian, while de Ribadeneyra’s ‘Life’ of Loyola (item 15) emerged at intervals from 1583 in Spanish, Italian, German, Polish and French. Cynics will probably claim that all biographical writing is polemical. Certainly, what stands out from the table, though to no great surprise, is that works that spoke to a topical situation—items 3, 14, 24, 26, 30 and 41—quickly saw print in English. The remainder of the table indicates that a sizeable quantity of biographical material about English Reformation notables, even if penned earlier, was first published in the seventeenth century, or just into the eighteenth century182 : far from creating Reformation reputations, it must have been responding to an interest in reputations already made— and made, crucially, by other means. We particularly have in mind items 20, 50, 52, 53, 55, 56, 58–60, 62, 65, and 66. The time-lag between the subject’s death and the publication of what may be the only free-standing early-modern biography could therefore be as long as forty-four years: that was true of Carleton’s ‘Life’ of Gilpin (item 60). How many folk, by that stage, had any first-hand recollection of the famous man? Our general conclusion, then, is that (save for a privileged few) very little can have been known, in the sixteenth century, about the curricula vitae of the prominent individuals who had been making, or were in the process of making, English Reformation history. Professional historians are trained to be sensitive to the problem of hindsight, which is usually conceptualized in terms of events; we must ensure that our awareness of outcomes

72

D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

does not prejudice our efforts to ascertain causes. Study of Table 1.1 crystallizes a cognate hazard, namely that we, as eager readers of these ‘Lives’, may unconsciously project on to people living in the past a knowledge of their contemporaries’ personal histories (and thus insight into their characters and motivation) that they, en masse, could never have possessed. Let us now return to our central point about a generation that, arguably, had suffered the psychological shock of witnessing the wholesale discrediting of inherited role-models: it would be naïve to suppose that members of that generation could readily find Reformation replacements on the basis of the life-writing so familiar to us, for many of those self-same works had yet to enter the public sphere. That Reformation England was not awash with biographies of its celebrities is confirmed by booksellers’ stock-lists and by library inventories. Leedham-Green’s edition of Cambridge probate material could not be checked,183 but other sources afford a sequence of snapshots beginning in the 1580s. According to a 1583 catalogue, Cambridge University Library held only one biographical work touching recent national history: Foxe’s first (Latin) martyrology of 1559. Apart from four copies of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, all the other biographies in the collection concerned continental personages.184 A glimpse into the commercial activities of Thomas Chard, the London bookseller, does not suggest any great demand for ‘Lives’.185 Judging by a lengthy 1584 book inventory, the 2nd earl of Bedford’s biographical interests were wholly satisfied by Plutarch and (incongruously, given his puritan leanings) studies of Charlemagne; Charles, cardinal of Lorraine; and Catherine de’Medici, dowager queen of France.186 Roger Ward’s 1585 stock included few ‘Lives’: one copy of Plutarch, a different biography of Charlemagne (perhaps that by Acciaiuoli) and (probably) the 1561 English translation of Melanchthon’s biography of Luther.187 The dishonest Exchequer administrator Richard Stonley (1520/1521–1600) owned a large library, itemized in 1597, yet in all cases but two the works of a biographical character deal either with classical subjects (Plutarch, again) or with biblical figures (‘The lyves of Adam and others’) or with the heroes of early Christianity (‘The lyves of the holy saints [,] phrofitts and patriarks’) or are unidentifiable (‘vita philosophor’ and ‘The Spaniards life’). And what were the exceptions?—Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, in the shape of a two-volume edition and a one-volume abridgement. On the famous non-martyr personalities of the English Reformation, there was nothing.188 Looking slightly further ahead, Warkentin tells us that the 2nd earl of Leicester’s library

1

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at Penshurst was rich in classical texts, histories and early-modern publications in the fields of political theory and theological controversy. In addition, books of fiction, music and poetry rubbed shoulders with tomes on cookery, mineralogy and travel and exploration. Conspicuously underrepresented was biography, though she does note Sidney’s purchases of Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, of Torsellini’s ‘Life’ of St. Francis Xavier and of Ducros’ ‘Life’ of the duc de Montmorency.189 The dearth of literature celebrating home-grown celebrities is no optical illusion: the diverse assemblages of books analysed above contain little of relevance because little was to be had. Writing in 1605, Sir Francis Bacon thought the situation deplorable: For Lives, I doe finde [it] strange that these times have so litle esteemed the vertues of the times, as that the writings of Lives should be no more frequent. For although there be not many soveraigne princes or absolute commanders, and that states are most collected into monarchies; yet are there many worthy personages, that deserve better then [sic] dispersed report, or barren elogies.190

Bacon spoke too soon: the seventeenth century would not only be a great age of English life-writing, perhaps among the greatest, but would also compensate for the publishing deficiencies of the previous one hundred years. Such Reformation reputations as already existed—a moot point, as we shall see—now received a make-over as the ancient vehicle of the biographical anthology (which under the Tudors had largely been confined to martyrologies and works of local antiquarianism) was pressed into service and took off spectacularly. From the 1650s, there was an almost unquenchable thirst for what Collinson calls ‘exemplary Christian biography’. Interestingly, he traces some inspiration for this literature back to Erasmus, for it was an Erasmian notion (albeit not a peculiarly Erasmian one) ‘that Christian truth was more persuasive mirrored in the particularities of human existence than argued in dogmatic abstractions’.191 To Collinson’s brief discussion of Samuel Clarke’s voluminous anthologies may be added detailed analyses by Eales and Lake. Eales explains that the presbyterian Clarke (1599–1682) saw himself as Foxe’s heir in the puritan tradition and, like Foxe, massaged earlier texts, composed by others, in order to suit his polemical agenda. That agenda, as regards the ‘Lives’ falling within her sample, was to present idealized models of feminine godliness for public consumption and imitation. If

74

D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

the products were increasingly hackneyed, then that was partly because the compiler’s chief original sources, printed funeral sermons, had themselves become somewhat formulaic. It was by comparing those accounts with Clarke’s entries that Eales could appreciate the nature of his manipulation.192 Lake, by contrast, assesses Clarke’s compilations in the light of the ecclesiastical-political contexts in which they were printed and reprinted, namely the circumstances of 1651 and 1652, of 1660 and 1662, of 1675 and 1677 and of 1683. He shows how Clarke skilfully deployed the ‘Lives’ to underpin, and thereby justify, specific religious commitments and narratives. Lake’s exposition is too dense for easy summary here, but the following extract gives readers a representative flavour of the whole. He is nearing the end of the section covering Clarke’s publications of the early 1650s: What we are seeing here was the construction of a spectrum of respectable, orthodox Protestant opinion running from Potter on the one extreme, through the likes of Sibbes, Preston, and Stock, to Greenham and Dod, Hildersham and Baynes, and Bradshaw and Cartwright, at the other. Here, then, was an orthodox English Protestant tradition being equated with a respectable puritan tradition. That tradition was connected to the version of the true Church and of Church history contained in the front parts of Clarke’s two Martyrologies by the inclusion of the lives of Colet, Coverdale, and Sandys. Colet was pictured as a proto-Protestant, a … link between the preceding narratives and later puritanism because of the hostile attentions that his reforming activities consistently attracted from the bishops. Coverdale linked Colet to the later divines as did Sandys. Sandys, of course, became a bishop, but the account of his life in Clarke concentrated on his activities supporting Northumberland’s coup against Mary, and on his subsequent imprisonment and then escape from the jaws of death in Marian England to exile and safety abroad. Sandys’s preferment to the episcopate occurred in the last paragraph of the life, which concluded a matter of twelve lines later. Here was an episcopal life being put to anything but episcopalian purposes[.]193

That interpretation seems convincing enough until one realizes that only a relatively simple kind of contextualization is on offer. While Lake knows perfectly well that there was such a thing as the genre of the ‘godly life’ anthologized, no anthologies other than Clarke’s intrude upon his inquiry. But might it not be important to register that Colet and Sandys had both been noticed in pre-Civil War biographical compilations and,

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more recently, in one edited by the episcopalian divine Thomas Fuller (1607/1608–1661)?194 Is it irrelevant that Clarke and Fuller were to some extent rivals, the former (in 1651) publicly accusing the latter of plagiarizing sixty-nine ‘Lives’ from his Marrow of Ecclesiastical Historie … (London, 1650) [Wing, C4543]?195 In other words, contextualization with reference to a second matrix is also desirable: the matrix consisting of collected biographies of ‘English worthies’. For a critical question is this: how much consistency was there, across the seventeenth century, over the choice of individuals for memorialization in biographical anthologies? And where there was no tradition of inclusion, how should the sudden appearance of a ‘Life’ be explained? The church manship of the editor is unlikely to have been the sole factor. What were the others? Again, answers to these questions cannot be provided in the scope of an introduction. In order to obtain an overview of the problem, however, the contents of fifteen anthologies have been tabulated in so far as they concern figures of prominence in the English Reformation. The picture emerging from Table 1.2 is one of huge instability. Whether they were for good or for ill, if the sixteenth century had closed with the Reformation reputations of major players firmly established, that is to say ‘major players’ according to our criteria, then we would expect to find a high degree of consistency over who made it into these volumes. Yet the opposite was true. Of laymen, the 1st earl of Essex, the earl of Warwick, the first two earls of Pembroke, Sir John Cheke and Sir Henry Sidney failed to feature beyond the first phase of anthologizing, defined as the period before 1640. Of clerics, Becon, Vaughan and Whitehead were in the same boat. Conversely, some individuals whose Reformation reputations we might suppose to have been secure only put in an appearance in the second phase, from 1650. Andrewes, Bilney, Cartwright, Chaderton, Coverdale, Frith, Gilpin, Greenham, Hildersham, Hooper, Philpott [Philpot] and Taylor all fall into that category. A small group of men popped up very late indeed: Hooker in 1670, Oldcastle in 1682 and Fisher in 1684. Perplexingly, several great names of the English Reformation vanished from the anthologies altogether post Restoration, a fate befalling Abbot, Bale, Chaderton, Colet, Coverdale, Erasmus, Greenham, Hildersham and Sandys. What criteria were operative? No doubt the foregoing analysis is crudely impressionistic—and a considerable amount of fresh research would be needed before we could begin to grasp the reputational ebbs and flows signalled in Table 1.2. Nevertheless, even at this stage, one broad conclusion seems to be warranted: that the idea of

Abbot, Robert (1559/1560–1618) Andrewes, Lancelot (1555–1626) Babington, Gervase (1549/1550–1610) Bacon, Sir Nicholas (1510–1579) Bale, John (1495–1563) Baynes, Paul (c.1573–1617) Becon, Thomas (1512/1513–1567) Bilney, Thomas (c.1495–1531) Bolton, Robert (1572–1631) Bradford, John (c.1510–1555) Bradshaw, William (bap. 1570, d. 1618) Bucer, Martin (1491–1551) Caius, John (1510–1573)

Subject

A 1572–1574

•

•

•

• •

•

•

•

•

•

• •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

E 1651

•

•

•

D 1650

•

•

•

C 1637

•

B [1620]

F 1651

•

•

G 1652

•

•

H 1660

•

•

I 1660

J 1662

K 1670

L 1677

•

•

M 1682

•

•

N 1684

•

•

•

O 1692

Table 1.2 English reformation ‘lives’ anthologized: Collected biographies and biographical sketches published in works other than martyrologies up to 1692

76 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

A 1572–1574

Cartwright, Thomas (1534/1535–1603) Cecil, William, 1st baron Burghley (1520/1521–1598) Chaderton, Laurence (1536?–1640) Cheke, Sir John (1514–1557) Colet, John (1467–1519) Coverdale, Miles (1488–1569) Cranmer, Thomas • (1489–1556) Cromwell, Thomas, earl of Essex (b. in or before 1485, d. 1540) Dering, Edward (c.1540–1576) Devereux, Walter, 1st earl of Essex (1539–1576)

Subject

•

•

•

•

•

•

C 1637

•

•

•

B [1620]

•

•

D 1650

•

•

•

E 1651 •

F 1651

• •

•

•

•

H 1660

•

•

G 1652

•

•

I 1660

J 1662

K 1670

L 1677

•

M 1682

•

•

•

O 1692

(continued)

•

•

•

N 1684

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

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A 1572–1574

(continued)

Dudley, Ambrose, earl of Warwick (c.1530–1590) Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester (1532/1533–1588) Erasmus, Desiderius (c.1467–1536) Fagius, Paul (c.1504–1549) Fisher, John (c.1469–1535) Foxe, John (1516/1517–1587) Frith, John (1503–1533) Gilpin, Bernard (1516–1584) Greenham, Richard (early 1540s–1594) Grey, Lady Jane (1537–1554) Grindal, Edmund (1516×20–1583)

Subject

Table 1.2

•

•

•

•

•

B [1620]

•

•

• 3

• •

• •

•

•

•

•

•

E 1651

• •

D 1650

•

C 1637

F 1651

•

G 1652

•

H 1660

•

I 1660

J 1662

K 1670

L 1677

•

•

•

•

M 1682

•

•

N 1684

•

•

• •

•

O 1692

78 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Herbert, Henry, 2nd earl of Pembroke (b. in or after 1538, d. 1601) Herbert, William, 1st earl of Pembroke (1506/1507–1570) Hildersham [Hildersam], Arthur (1563–1632) Holland, Thomas (d. 1612) Hooker, Richard (1554–1600) Hooper, John (1495× 1500–1555) Humphrey, Laurence (1525×27–1589) Jewel, John (1522–1571) Laski, Jan [Johannes à Lasco] (1499–1560) Latimer, Hugh (c.1485–1555) Montagu, James (1568–1618)

Subject

A 1572–1574

•

• •

• •

• •

• •

C 1637

•

•

•

B [1620]

•

•

• •

•

•

•

•

• •

•

E 1651

•

D 1650

•

F 1651

G 1652

•

H 1660

I 1660

•

J 1662

• 4

K 1670

•

L 1677

•

•

•

M 1682

•

•

•

•

•

O 1692

(continued)

N 1684

1 INTRODUCTION: REFORMATION, LIFE-WRITING …

79

•

•

A 1572–1574

(continued)

More, John (c.1542–1592) More, Sir Thomas (1478–1535) Nowell, Alexander (c.1516/1517–1602) Oldcastle, Sir John, called Lord Cobham (d. 1417) Parker, Matthew (1504–1575) Perkins, William (1558–1602) Philpott [Philpot], John (1515/1516–1555) Pole, Reginald (1500–1558) Rainolds [Reynolds], John (1549–1607) Ridley, Nicholas (c.1502–1555) Rogers, John (c.1500–1555) Sandys, Edwin (1519?–1588)

Subject

Table 1.2

•

• •

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

E 1651

•

•

•

D 1650

• •

•

•

•

•

•

C 1637

•

•

•

•

B [1620]

F 1651

•

G 1652

•

H 1660

•

I 1660

J 1662

K 1670

•

L 1677

•

•

•

•

M 1682

•

N 1684

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

O 1692

80 D. J. CRANKSHAW AND G. W. C. GROSS

Saunders, Lawrence (d. 1555) Seymour, Edward, 1st duke of Somerset (c.1500–1552) Sidney, Sir Henry (1529–1586) Sidney, Sir Philip (1554–1586) Taylor, Rowland (d. 1555) Tyndale, William (c.1494–1536) Vaughan, Richard (c.1553–1607) Vermigli, Pietro Martire [Peter Martyr] (1499–1562) Walsingham, Sir Francis (c.1532–1590) Warham, William (1450?–1532) Whitaker, William (1547/1548–1595)

Subject

•

A 1572–1574

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

•

B [1620]

•

•

•

C 1637

•

•

•

•

•

D 1650

•

•

•

•

•

E 1651

F 1651

G 1652

H 1660

•

•

I 1660

J 1662

K 1670

•

L 1677

•

•

•

•

M 1682

•

•

•

•

•

•

O 1692

(continued)

•

•

•

N 1684

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•

•

•

B [1620]

•

•

C 1637

•

•

•

•

•

E 1651

•

D 1650

F 1651

G 1652

H 1660

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I 1660

J 1662

K 1670

•

L 1677

•

M 1682

•

•

N 1684

•

•

O 1692

A = M. Parker et al., De Antiqvitate Britannicae Ecclesiae & Priuilegiis Ecclesiae Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis Eiusdem 70 ([Lambeth], 1572–74) [STC, 19292] (Latin) B = H.[enry] H.[olland], Herωologia Anglica…, 2 books in 1 ([Arnhem, 1620]) [STC, 13582] (Latin) C = D. Lupton (ed. and trans.), J. Verheiden, The History of the Moderne Protestant Divines … (London, 1637) [STC, 24660] D = S. Clarke, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical Historie, Conteined in the Lives of the Fathers, and Other Learned Men, and Famous Divines … (London, 1650) [Wing, C4543] E = T. Fuller et al., Abel Redevivus: or The Dead Yet Speaking. The Lives and Deaths of the Moderne Divines (London, 1651) [Wing, F2400] F = S. Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie… Whereunto are Added, the Lives of Sundry Modern Divines … (London, 1651) [Wing, C4513] G = S. Clarke, A Martyrologie, Containing a Collection of all the Persecutions Which Have Befallen the Church of England… to the End of Queen Maries Reign… (London, 1652) [Wing, C4546] NB that these ‘Lives’ appear in the second section, which has its own title-page and is separately paginated H = S. Clarke, The Lives of Two and Twenty English Divines … (London, 1660) [Wing, C4540] I = W. Winstanley, England’s Worthies. Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons From Constantine the Great, to the Death of Oliver Cromwel … (1st edn, London, 1660) [Wing, W3058] (See also N) J = C. Barksdale, Characters, and Historical Memorials, on the Lives and Actions of England’s Late Worthies, in Church and State (London, 1662) [Wing, B792] K = I. Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Mr. Richard Hooker, Mr. George Herbert … (London, 1670) [Wing, W671] L = C.[lement] B.[arksdale] (compiler), The Lives of Ten Excellent Men… (London, 1677) [Wing, B796]

A 1572–1574

(continued)

Whitehead, David (c.1492–1571) Whitgift, John (1530/1531?–1604) Willet, Andrew (1561/1562–1621) Wolsey, Thomas (1470/1471–1530) Wyclif [Wycliffe], John (d. 1384)

Subject

Table 1.2

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M = J. S.[hurley] (compiler), Ecclesiastical History Epitomiz’d Containing a Faithful Account of the Birth, Life, and Doctrine; Crucifixion and Ascension of… Jesus. With the Lives of the Apostles, Evangelists, and Primitive Fathers, and Other Famous Men in the Christian Church… Continued to the Reformation, and Since Deduc’d to this Present Age, 2 parts (1st edn, London, 1682–83) [Wing, S3504 and S3506: the parts are given separate Wing numbers], II2 (See also O) N = W. Winstanley, England’s Worthies. Select Lives of the Most Eminent Persons of the English Nation, from Constantine the Great, Down to These Times (2nd edn, London, 1684) [Wing, W3059] (See also I) O = J. S.[hurley] (compiler), An Epitomy of Ecclesiastical History. Containing… II. The Lives of the Antient Fathers, School-Men, First Reformers, and Modern Divines. III. The Lives of Several Honourable and Pious Persons, Who Have Lived in These Latter Centuries … (2nd edn, London, 1692) [Wing, S3505] (See also M) 1 Excluding [Anthony à Wood], Athenae Oxonienses. An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the Most Ancient and Famous University of Oxford, From the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the End of the Year 1690…, 2 vols (London, 1691–92) [Wing, W3382 and W3383A] on the ground that it introduces another criterion beyond repute. The table above should not be taken to indicate the full complement of ‘Lives’ found in the respective works. We have omitted (a) sovereigns, with the exception of Lady Jane Grey; (b) figures who lived during the English Reformation, but did not contribute significantly to it, such as Sir Francis Drake; (c) foreign divines, unless they visited England during that period; and (d) people who were important in religious affairs, though made their mark predominantly after Elizabeth I’s death in 1603. Nor should it be assumed that each appearance of a ‘Life’ was a fresh composition; copying (whether acknowledged borrowing or plagiarism) was rife. However, the textual relationships between the items recorded below are too complex to be explained here 2 We print the title of Part I, although the medieval and early modern ‘Lives’ appear in Part II, which bears a slightly different title, beginning ‘An Epitomy of Ecclesiastical History’ 3 Erroneously ‘William’ 4 The ‘Life’ of Hooker had appeared in 1665 and in 1666, but the 1670 volume is the first in which it is published together with other biographies written by Walton: J. Martin, ‘Walton, Izaak (1593–1683)’, in ODNB.nnnn

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an early-modern canon of Reformation notables—those of undisputed reputation—is chimerical; the deep confessional divisions sown by the Reformation itself had seen to that. Let us pull some threads together. J. J. Scarisbrick insisted, in the first wave of revisionist scholarship, that ‘on the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came’.196 We argue that one reason for that tardiness, besides the popularity of late-medieval Roman Catholicism and widespread hostility to ‘heresy’, was a crisis of trust: a generation— or rather its educated elite—had experienced the wholesale discrediting of inherited role-models, secular and religious, in the humanist-inspired culture war of the decades leading up to the Break with Rome. Perhaps the fervour of converts to evangelical doctrine is explicable, in part, in terms of their placing their trust wholly in Christ—and not only in a soteriological context; they had no need for any other hero. But what of the rest: the less zealous and the uncommitted? Who, on earth, should be trusted? Who commanded respect? For believers (like Samuel Clarke) in the idea that the true Church is defined through persecution, heroes and heroines aplenty could be found memorialized in the pages of Actes and Monuments . Yet the English Reformation was not made entirely by the blood of martyrs—and, in any event, Foxe’s great book appeared some forty years after it had begun. Reviewing Table 1.1, we concluded that much sixteenth-century life-writing, as it relates to nonmartyrs prominent in England’s religious upheavals, must at the time have been generally inaccessible, either because it remained in manuscript or because it was published in Latin. Bibliographical evidence confirms that native biography was not a popular genre. The information gathered in Table 1.2 suggests that when popularity soared, during the next century, there was huge inconsistency over who merited inclusion in biographical anthologies. Some publications were partisan, which undoubtedly accounts for the selection policy. But the period also saw the emergence of volumes anthologizing the ‘Lives’ of English worthies, and it is far less clear what criteria the instigators of those enterprises might have been applying. The preceding discussion leads inexorably to these questions: when and how were Reformation reputations made? Where did they originate? The answer is that they did not principally derive from the life-writing

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that we know so well, though those works will of course have developed them, either by addition, by confirmation or by qualification. For the truth, seldom acknowledged, is that biographies, almost by definition, are reactive. The inconsequential do not, as a rule, become the subject of a ‘Life’. An individual must already have possessed a reputation in order to attract a biographer’s attention, whatever that author then does to it, or with it. So the real problem lies a stage further back: how were reputations formed in such a way as to provoke the later writing of a ‘Life’? As it happens, Bacon (quoted above) gave us a clue when he lamented that England’s worthies, lacking biographies, deserved better than ‘dispersed report, or barren elogies’. ‘Dispersed report’ may be glossed as ‘appraisals in various places’, while ‘barren elogies’ points to dull and unfruitful elegiac verse. But an elegy is only one kind of report, and it is easy to identify a whole series of literary and artistic artefacts that could have contributed, bit-by-bit, to the construction of a reputation. Take, for example, the letter. Renaissance humanists enthusiastically channelled their rhetorical skills into penning missives that were rarely intended to be private. Aspects of their communications culture fed into what Greengrass calls an ‘epistolary Reformation’.197 Another possibility is the portrait, which might be printed as a woodcut, later as an engraving.198 Then there is the funeral sermon.199 How somebody comes across in the chronicles of Edward Hall, Richard Grafton, Raphael Holinshed or John Stow was perhaps instrumental in shaping their public profile.200 One could go on. Since there is insufficient space here for the discussion of all of those topics, we offer three case-studies each of which sees the formation of Reformation reputations in a different light. The first study concentrates on immediate post mortem strategies for projecting the alleged personal attributes of the deceased person. Next comes an illustration of biography as polemical reaction to what the writer saw as the blackening of his former master’s reputation by a chronicler. Although our focus in those two sub-sections is on the Tudor era, we do not mean to imply that the moulding of reputations was limited to the early-modern period. Far from it: the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries have also played their parts, not least through the medium of film, which is explored in the third case-study.

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The Commemorative Impulse: Monuments and Epitaphs One way of fostering a reputation, except in the case of martyrs who usually had no graves, was through the epitaph,201 examples of which are mentioned in four chapters below. Camden held that ‘among all funerall honours [,] epitaphes have alwaies bene most respective, for in them love was shewed to the deceased[,] memory was continued to posterity, friends were comforted, and the reader put in mind of humane fraielty’. The idea originated, he thought, with the distraught pupils of Linus of Thrace, a figure in Greek mythology, who had ‘bewayled their maister[,] when he was slaine, in dolefull verses’—hence the first epitaphs were ‘song at burialls’ and only later ‘engraved upon the sepulchers’.202 Unsurprisingly, then, they have been recognized as the cousin of the ballad, about which more anon. Medieval epitaphs were typically terse. According to Leland, the text gracing a tomb at Fairford in Gloucestershire, for instance, read simply: Orate pro animabus Joannis Tame armigeri & Aliciæ uxoris ejus[,] qui quidem Joannes obiit 8 die mensis Maij, a[nn]o d[omini] 1500, & an[n]o regni regis Henrici 7 16. Et prædicta Alicia obiit 20 die mensis Decembris, an[n]o d[omini] 1471.

In fact, the inscription edging the rectangular brass, still in situ, continues to the corner and along the fourth side: quorum a[n]i[m]abus propicietur de[us]. For Jhus lov pray for me I may not pray now pray ye | with a pater noster ande ave that my paynes relessid may be.

Additional biographical details were rare, unless the subject was royal, a prominent cleric or had belonged to a religious order. Visiting an ancient chapel at Stoke sub Hamdon in Somerset, the antiquary was moved to transcribe an extraordinary brass telling (in French) of the numerous martial exploits of ‘Maheu de Gurney’, who had fought at Crécy and died in 1406. Some inscriptions had already been defaced when Leland saw them in the late 1530s and early 1540s,203 but many more would suffer either in the intensive iconoclasm of the Edwardian Reformation or in the purge effected at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign. Protestants took offence at pictures deemed to be idolatrous and at any words

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(such as the requests for supplicatory prayers topping and tailing the Tame epitaph) indicative of a belief in purgatory, which had been rejected as non-biblical.204 Occasionally, a piece of brass would be re-used rather than melted down, becoming a revealing palimpsest.205 One might imagine that, with the Roman Catholic economy of salvation rejected, its intercessory institutions dissolved and its imagery mostly obliterated, the funerary epitaph was doomed to extinction. Yet nothing could be further from the truth: historians agree that examples proliferated enormously in the century after the Reformation, whenever exactly that is taken to have occurred. To a large extent, of course, the increasing number of epitaphs was related to the increasing number of monuments. And since their provision was costly,206 families must clearly have been making more than merely financial investments. Surveying seven centuries after c.1100, Houlbrooke isolates three parallel trends: firstly, ‘a gradual downwards diffusion of the practice of erecting monuments from the uppermost ranks of society to its middling strata’; secondly, the growing importance of commemoration, instead of the encouragement of intercession, as the monument’s prime purpose; and thirdly, ‘a longterm shift of emphasis from the visual representation of the deceased to the epitaph’. Apropos of epitaphic content, there was a tension. Houlbrooke is surely correct to argue that, on one hand, brevity was desirable: normally shorter than the elegy, the epitaph nonetheless had to find a readership if it was not to be a waste of space and money: ‘It spoke especially to the unknown visitor pausing, perhaps only briefly, in the secluded aisle. It therefore had to seize attention and hold the reader long enough to drive a message home’. Clever devices were deployed to that end: acrostics, anagrams, metaphors, paradox, puns and similes. This period was, he says, ‘the great age of the conceit’.207 On the other hand, the imperative to communicate the message promoted prolixity, for the main rationale behind the inscription, particularly under a Protestant dispensation, was to present the dead subject as a fitting pattern for imitation by dwelling upon that person’s distinctive character, life-story and achievements. Supplementing the basic mnemonic function was a strengthening didacticism. The change from Latin to English (though never universal) should be understood in that context. So it was that, starting in Henry VIII’s reign, copious biographical detail began to appear in funerary epitaphs. The Cambridgeshire brass to Edward Myrfin (d. 1553) furnishes one such text, recounting his travels to continental Europe and, further afield, to Armenia, Greece, Syria and Turkey—extending, indeed, all the

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way to Jerusalem. At Great Bookham (Surrey) there is a memorial brass to Edmund Slyfield (d. 1591), which (to quote Rex) ‘runs through his ancestry, career and character in 32 romping English heptameters’.208 While no scholar doubts the scale of the phenomenon, interpretation of causation varies. There is a tendency lazily to attribute all of these developments to the Reformation, meaning chiefly the devastation wrought ideologically upon the doctrine of purgatory and physically upon unacceptable objects. That the latter attacks had been too indiscriminate is proved by Elizabeth’s proclamation of 19 September 1560 prohibiting the wanton destruction of those tombs that could not be considered ‘superstitious’ on the grounds that it was wrong to extinguish ‘the honorable and good memory of sundry virtuous and noble persons deceased’ and that crucial genealogical evidence (which had a bearing on inheritance rights) was being lost.209 However, Rex undermines such facile accounts with two key points: one, that the switch to English had been accomplished in the fifty years before Henry VIII broke with Rome; and two, that ‘it was not solely in England, nor solely in Protestant countries, that funeral monuments showed an increasing concern with realistic depiction, factual detail and vernacular accessibility’. Apart from the powerful needs adumbrated by Camden, another pan-European factor was in play: the spread of Renaissance humanism.210 As we have seen, Renaissance humanism was fundamentally an educative ethos of rediscovery and re-appraisal211 ; among other things, it stimulated rising lay literacy levels.212 In England, that impulse acted symbiotically with the emergence of standardized English as a literary language, an emergence that had been in train since the age of Wycliffe and Chaucer. Rex exposes the different presuppositions inherent in linguistic choice. Because Latin was the language of learning, and hence of the Church, to install an epitaph in that tongue, prior to the Reformation, was to assume that intercessory prayer was predominantly a clerical activity. Relatively few people beyond the clergy could have grasped it. Propounding an inscription in English, by contrast, betrayed the assumption that literate layfolk might also be prevailed upon to pray for souls departed. In short, mundane intercession, which was one aspect of the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead, was undergoing some degree of laicization. Yet not everyone bought into that project. Rex

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notes that those who selected Latin were making a statement too, for that output increasingly consisted of what he calls ‘polished elegiacs’, citing Bishop Stokesley’s inscription as one example. Renaissance humanism was a rarefied intellectual fashion—and whether it was by composition or by commission, some individuals could not resist the temptation to show off their familiarity with the best in up-to-date neo-classical versification. Rising above issues of medium and style, though, is that of matter: latemedieval and early-modern epitaphs laden with biographical information index the prevalence of that Ciceronian version of Renaissance humanism, with its advocacy of active citizenship—‘the nobility of service’, as Rex puts it—in pursuit of a better commonweal, immediate personal glory and everlasting fame.213 Nothing encapsulates that mentalité more effectively than the revision of an old distich for the monument built for Lady Ramsey (d. 1601) at London’s Christ Church Newgate in 1596. As quoted by Goodrich, this text: Forma, genus, mores, sapientia, res et honores Morte ruunt subita, sola manent merita Beauty, lineage, morals, wisdom, wealth and honours Tumble down with sudden death, only merits remain

became this text: Forma, Decus, Mores, Sapientia, Res & Honores, Morte ruunt subita; vivit post funera Fama. Beauty, glory, morals, Wisdom, wealth, and honours, Tumble down with sudden death; After the funeral, fame lives.214

Observe the replacement of ‘merits’, commensurate with a worksorientated pre-Reformation soteriology, by ‘fame’. What conclusions are to be drawn? For Protestants, cut off from traditional Roman Catholic modes of remembrance, memory of the dead had become ‘secularized’. But Rex is conscious of the hazard in applying so controversial a notion

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as ‘secularization’—similarly that of ‘individualism’—and wisely offers clarification: It would be better to say that memory of the dead had become more a matter of nature than of grace, although both nature and grace remained part of a profoundly religious world-view. This naturalization of memory was undoubtedly a result of the reception of humanist ideas.

For Rex, therefore, two concurrent streams of belief and practice may be traced across the later Middle Ages and into the early sixteenth century: the ancient concept of ‘remembrance as intercession’ and the much more recent (Renaissance humanist) concept of ‘remembrance as recollection’—or rather, we might add, remembrance as glorification. When the former came to be proscribed in Reformation England, the latter ‘was all that was left’.215 From that perspective, one can appreciate the force of Lindley’s argument that physical objects—he says ‘tomb-monuments’, though inscriptions specifically deserve emphasis—became even more significant than they had been before the dissolutions because the ‘religious and institutional frameworks previously used to convey memory and meaning had been destroyed’.216 Yet, pace Rex, some scholars are not so convinced that the notionally Protestant world-view truly was ‘profoundly religious’. Religion is barely mentioned in Llewellyn’s brief study, where social status and honour are found to have been central: funerary monuments ‘were intended to establish in the collective memory and set for ever the honourable reputation of the subjects they commemorated’.217 And Thomas, having quoted a plethora of literary sources all pointing in the same direction, is more scathing still: Among the social elite, the horror of oblivion was an obsessive preoccupation; so much so as to make one doubt whether the Christian doctrine of the afterlife can have been a living reality for those to whom posthumous fame was so overriding an objective. A modern historian [Mervyn James] has well remarked that ‘the true religion of the man of honour lay in the immortality which honourable deeds conferred, their memory being preserved and celebrated in the community to which he belonged’; and it is hard not to feel that the highest value of these seekers after posthumous fame was essentially pagan.218

One difficulty in assessing the supply side of commemoration by epitaph is obscurity over who composed them. Camden identified (or

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thought that he could identify) the authors of some of his older examples, such as Arnulph of Lisieux on Henry I and Giraldus Cambrensis on Theobald of Blois, though most are anonymous. Predictably, attributions become more frequent, and probably more accurate, as he approached his own time: that, for instance, Surrey had memorialized Thomas Clere (buried in 1545) and George Buchanan Roger Ascham (d. 1568), John Jewel (d. 1571) and Sir Nicholas Bacon (d. 1579). He even felt confident enough to declare certain epitaphs to be verbal self-portraits, namely those of Walter Milles and Robert Traps.219 If the authorship of Miles Coverdale’s inscription had become mysterious by Fuller’s day,220 then the same cannot be said of John Aylmer’s, for which Richard Vaughan, his quondam chaplain and successor-but-two in the see of London, was apparently responsible221 —and it was another chaplain, Benjamin Carier, who penned Whitgift’s tomb-epitaph extant at Croydon.222 How instrumental in commemorative strategies were chaplains when (as in the latter case) a prelate had died unmarried? On the other side of the fence, surviving kin were presumably behind the decision to use an inscription to signal continuing adherence to Roman Catholicism. The Gage family of West Firle in Sussex and the Parys family of Linton in Cambridgeshire were not alone in defying confessional orthodoxy in that way.223 Epitaphs were anthologized into the late nineteenth century,224 yet modern academe seems to have evinced curiously little appetite for probing the relationships between ‘epitaphers’ and their subjects, as well as the exact circumstances in which texts were procured.225 Considerably more information is available for the consumption side of the business. Epitaphs were merely one of many features of interest to Leland, and he probably copied only those texts that struck him as unusual. Antiquaries following his lead in the emerging field of chorography divided in their treatment of ecclesiastical monuments. Lambarde ignored them in his famous account of Kent, as did Norden, covering Hertfordshire.226 Stow was deliberately sparing, disclosing whose tombs he had located far more often than he quoted what any inscriptions may have said.227 Conversely, the unknown author of the Suffolk chorography, writing c.1600–1605, unself-consciously harked back to Leland’s style, albeit with fuller transcriptions.228 The growing obsession with commemorative material was by no means as parochial (in every sense) as those cases might imply: in William Barker’s book of [1554], we possibly have the first instance of international epitaph-tourism, at any rate by an Englishman.229 It would be a serious mistake, however, to suppose that

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funerary epitaphs resonated no further than antiquarian cliques. In 1593, the author John Eliot, giving his fictitious Frenchman a tour of London’s principal sights, imagined showing him the epitaph to Sir Philip Sidney in St. Paul’s Cathedral, which he was the first to print, and it was still on the tourist trail (or so Thomas Dekker’s reference suggests) in 1609.230 What purported to be the real epitaph to an earlier military hero, John Talbot, 1st earl of Shrewsbury, who had initially been buried in France in 1453, but which (Manley contends) had actually been concocted anachronistically on the basis of an heraldic epitaph lately placed (in 1591) near the Sheffield tomb of the 6th earl of Shrewsbury, was incorporated into Shakespeare’s Henry VI Part 1 (the relevant section conjecturally dating from 1592) before being quoted in print by Roger Cotton in 1596 and by Richard Crompton in 1599.231 Epitaphs also found their way into diaries.232 That the Society of Antiquaries could devote a session to the topic in 1600, with papers submitted by nine members, indicates the importance that it had attained.233 These developments culminated, in the pre-Civil War period, in Weever’s celebrated compendium of 1631.234 Such was the genre fluidity of the age that, as literary artefacts, epitaphs were detachable from monuments altogether. A commonplace book preserves five songs in the repertory of Richard Sheale of Tamworth in Staffordshire, who was a highly mobile minstrel patronized by the Stanleys. Some of the ballads are unlikely to be of Sheale’s invention, but experts agree that he probably wrote the elegy to the countess of Derby, at whose deathbed and funeral (early 1558) he seems to have been an eye-witness.235 The context implies that that epitaph was intended for vocalization, and therefore that it belonged to the medieval tradition whereby a minstrel sang an oral tribute in the dead person’s household. At the same time, however, Lady Derby’s epitaph (to quote Rollins) ‘bears every sign of having been composed for publication by the ballad press’. Accepting his interpretation, Watt concludes that, given ‘the growing importance of the printed word’, localized performance was no longer enough: ‘there was apparently a desire to have this eulogy legitimized in print, and distributed in broadside form’. Whether or not it was ever printed is obscure, since no printed example survives, yet Sheale’s appropriation of broadside style (presumably inspired by familiarity with other kinds of broadside ballad) can hardly be doubted—and it is telling that, in the commonplace book, his collection of songs is interspersed with material demonstrably copied from broadsides.236

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Sheale had in fact spotted a promising emerging market. The earliest extant broadside epitaph, on Edward VI, had only been written in 1554– 1558, though its date of publication is unclear237 ; the next, mourning Mary I, came out in [1559].238 Over Elizabeth’s reign and into James I’s, a ‘trickle-down’ effect is observable, as similar broadsides moved beyond royalty239 to commemorate members of the nobility,240 nonnoble courtiers and officers of State,241 leading Protestant clergy,242 distinguished lawyers243 and the great and the good of London.244 There is even a broadside epitaph to the second son of a deceased Welsh knight, whose claim to fame must surely be dubious.245 But to lump all of these examples together indiscriminately would be foolish, for Livingston argues that Richard Price’s epitaph (not entered in the Stationers’ Company register) was ‘designed as a more or less private memorial, with perhaps only a few copies run off for friends’—she is convinced by the grieving author’s affirmation of personal knowledge of his subject. At the other end of the spectrum is the epitaph to Sir Edward Saunders, described as ‘a commercial production’, where precise information about availability contrasts with the vague brevity of the publisher’s imprint rounding off the Price broadside. Indeed, the piece on Saunders was destined to be absorbed into the second edition of a poetic miscellany— M. Edwardes et al., The Paradyse of Daynty Devises … (London, 1578) [STC, 7517], fols 13v–14v—that would prove to be a huge best-seller: at least ten editions appeared between 1576 and 1606. Naturally, exposure was not the same as intimacy: Lloyd’s ditty (in Livingston’s opinion) ‘lacks the remotest detail about Saunders’s life’ save that he had been a longserving judge and had died an old man—points, she suggests, of common knowledge.246 Reviewing our endnote lists in the light of what else is known about the authors, it becomes obvious that Elderton and Phillips were mere hacks:247 prolific metropolitan ballad-writers who opportunistically re-packaged their ephemeral wares as ‘epitaphs’; like broadsides in general, many of which were never registered with the Stationers’ Company, only a tiny proportion of their total output survives.248 Of course, poor registration and survival rates present a major interpretative headache for historians: did Elderton memorialize Jewel because he thought that he could capitalize upon a distinctive pre-existing reputation (certainly possible in Jewel’s case given his role as a religious controversialist)249 or were there analogous effusions on numerous other bishops that, for whatever reason, have vanished without trace? The question is unanswerable. But let us consider the scenario from another angle, from

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the angle of the lives to which these epitaphs ostensibly bore witness: in many cases, reputations lay at the mercy of men whose direct acquaintance with the departed can have been slender, if it had existed at all, and whose involvement in the trade was mainly, perhaps exclusively, profit-driven. While minstrelsy shaded into broadside balladry, the broadside-asepitaph struggled to contain the demands placed upon it. Sometimes eschewing the word ‘epitaph’, what was essentially the same kind of commemoration could expand from a single sheet to an item of four pages,250 eight pages,251 twelve pages252 or even sixteen pages253 —in the Ramsey memorial, the epitaph proper is supplied with an appendix of epigrams treating of mortality and, unusually, a title-page guarantee that the ensemble had been ‘published by the consent of the executors’. Such outsize efforts demonstrate the concept’s adaptability: the word ‘epitaph’ increasingly came to be applied to ad hominem verse that bore no necessary relationship to funerary monuments, either real or projected. These so-called ‘epitaphs’ are frequently encountered in manuscript miscellanies,254 might be gathered together in printed memorial volumes255 and were certainly capable of creative deployment across many adjacent genres.256 We have hitherto been analysing laudatory epitaphs. They had their anti-type. No doubt many Elizabethans were already aware of the Marian bishop of London’s characterization as ‘Bloody Bonner’, not least from extensive coverage in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments … (1st edition, London, 1563) [STC, 11222]. But Bonner’s death in the Marshalsea Prison on 5 September 1569, coupled with his midnight burial for fear of popular disturbance,257 unleashed three condemnatory epitaphs: one a broadside, the others longer.258 Broke’s contribution elicited a verse response, seemingly lost in its original form, the text of which is known from its recapitulation in his furious rebuttal. Denouncing the work as ‘a slaunderous libell’, Broke began by addressing the outrageous suggestion that Bonner had been a ‘blessed saint’: No malice moved hath my minde, nor tauntingly the truth I penne: No spite did cause me to depaint, this Boner saint of Sathans denne. Where as the devill beares the crosse, a holy sort it should appeare:

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If Boner be a blessed saint, then cruell Nero neede not feare.259

To the Renaissance humanist mind, Nero (it scarcely needs saying) was a by-word for evil.260 Unsurprisingly, the Roman emperor also put in an appearance—two in fact—in the most sensational libel of the later sixteenth century: the tract colloquially re-named ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’. Published anonymously in 1584, and probably written by the group of Roman Catholic exiles surrounding Charles Arundell, this exposé of the malign influence and alleged vices of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, similarly made hay with the concept of an ‘epitaph’. The vehicle is a pithy account of the fate of Emperor Varius Avitus Bassanius, known as Heliogabalus, who had surpassed all others in ‘carnal beastliness’ and been murdered by his own soldiers. After his corpse had been dragged through the city upon the ground ‘like a dog’, it had been cast into the common privy, with this epitaph: Hic projectus est indomitae et rabide libidinus catulus —Here is thrown in the whelp of unruly and raging lust, which epitaph may also one day chance to serve my Lord of Leicester … if he go forward as he hath begun and die as he deserveth.261

‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ is notorious. Among its scurrilous progeny, and much less well known, is a mock epitaph which exists in so many manuscripts (giving variant readings) that it must have circulated very widely. According to Peck, the best version is this: Epitaphium Heere lyes the valiant soldier that never drewe his sword. Heere lyes the loyall courtier that never kept his woord[.] Heere lyes the noble leacher that used art to provoke[.] Heere lyes the constant housband whose love was firme as smoke. Heere lyes the politician & nutt worme of the state[.] Heere lyes the erle of Leicester that God & man did hate.

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[Richard Verstegan], the Roman Catholic propagandist, published a shorter version at [Antwerp] in 1592.262 In either version, however, the epitaph is comparatively anodyne, for it strangely omits the religious dimension. That gap may be filled by reference to the other buildingblocks of Leicester’s ‘Black Legend’, which consistently portray him as a dissembling chameleon whose over-riding aim was to fleece the Church. One tract must stand for the rest. The earl, its anonymous author asserted, employed sundry devices in various ways as one for papistes and other for Protestantes and the third for puritanes, emboldeninge the puritanes againste the bi[s]hopes, tellinge them that there livinges makes them so [fat] and then beinge greased in hand by the bishopes tels them that the puritanes ar a sedisius kinde of people and not to bee sofer[ed in a Ch]ristian common welth, animatinge the one agai[nst] the other … hee beinge indede of no religion but that which bringes him in gaine[,] … for he hath learned of his master Machiavell to make a use of all religions and to torne them all to his owne commoditie.263

With texts such as these in the public domain, it is hard to see how Leicester’s posthumous reputation could ever have recovered, though Adams avers that ‘the decisive blow’ was struck by Camden in the Annales.264 As Llewellyn observes, citing McManners, nobody was under oath when composing an epitaph.265 In his study of Midlands monumental inscriptions, Hickman finds that while many refer to religious piety as an important personal characteristic, few ‘demonstrate a specifically Protestant conception of salvation’; unambiguously Calvinist statements are rare.266 Where there does seem to have been a conscious attempt to foster a reputation for unusual godliness, one is entitled (at first glance) to be sceptical. Lady Stanhope’s tomb at Shelford (Nottinghamshire) claims that she kept continually a worshipful house, relieved the poor daily, gave good countenance and comfort to the preachers of God’s Word, spent the most of the time of her latter daies in prayer, and in using the church where God’s Word was preached. She died [in 1588] in the faith of Christ, with hope of a joyfull resurrection.

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In reproducing the foregoing text from an antiquarian source, Hickman leaves it at that, but such a portrayal surely cries out for contextualization.267 As it happens, the gentlewoman’s will tends to be corroborative: she quoted Psalm 133:1 to her children and their spouses, bequeathing to Lord Burghley a ring inscribed ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ and to Lady Burghley another ring reading ‘I die to live’. Having said that, the errors and omissions discoverable on other parts of the tomb are a warning against credulity.268 It is the same story concerning broadside epitaphs. Hacks like Phillips generally avoided attributing specific religious beliefs to lay subjects. Other writers, however, felt greater freedom, giving grounds for supposing (for example) that Pembroke, Walsingham and Lambe must be numbered among the elect; a hater of idolaters and ‘popish traytors’, Walsingham is further described as ‘a speciall stay’ to sincere preachers of God’s Word and a man who had maintained them in his household for the delivery of daily sermons. Affirmative though those texts are, at least one broadside epitaph was intended to be corrective. Of the 3rd earl of Derby, Denton reported this: No traytor coulde him traine, at no time to rebell: nor papist coulde him ought perswade, he liked them not so well. To deale by their device, to holde with Scottish dame: nor duke thats dubd, nor Percies pride, that sought their countries bane. Though papistes him extoll, and make the worlde beleeve: yet at his death he them renounst, and to his Christ did cleave. Hee knewe their trash be suche on, masse he did not builde. but onely calde one Jesu Christ, to helpe him win the fielde. And thus hee died in Christ, no helpe he sought from pope: but in the death and bloud of Christ, he put his fixed hope. … No bloode he brought in Maries dayes, to burne or for to broyle: nor well he likt of Spanish pride, that sought this realme to spoyle.

But that was to protest too much. Historians agree that Derby was severely conservative in religion: he had opposed all the strongly evangelical Edwardian legislation and under Mary had persecuted Protestants. The claim of a deathbed conversion cannot be verified.269 Recent decades have seen an explosion of interest in the changing relationship between the living and the dead during the English Reformation. Outstanding books by Llewellyn, Marshall and Sherlock inevitably discuss epitaphs, though never directly through the prism of ‘reputation’.270

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Yet it is hard to imagine that such texts, whether affixed to funerary monuments or published as cheap broadsides, cannot have exercised a substantial influence in shaping reputations, just like the modern obituary, into which they were evolving.271 And we are encouraged in that conclusion by Williams’s findings about the extent of epitaphic circulation in manuscript.272 The task now is to find concrete evidence of reliance upon epitaphs in terms of the esteem (or opprobrium) in which certain figures were held. As the Bonner, Leicester and Derby cases indicate, epitaphs could be utilized polemically. How far was misinformation recognized and publicly denounced?

The Fallen Celebrity: Defending the Indefensible How a reputation could be forged and manipulated is brilliantly exemplified by the case of Cardinal Wolsey, who had been destroyed by the Boleyn faction at Court.273 Stripped of his office of lord chancellor on 18 October 1529, he had languished in the political wilderness—a period evoked imaginatively in Lucas’s early twentieth-century painting (see Fig. 1.3)—until his death at Leicester Abbey on 29 November 1530 while

Fig. 1.3 ‘The Clouds That Gather Round the Setting Sun or Cardinal Wolsey in Disgrace’, by John Seymour Lucas, oil on canvas, 1901

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en route from Yorkshire to the capital with a treason trial in prospect.274 If Edward Hall’s ‘chronicle’ is to be believed, though on this point it probably only reflects his London environment, then there was considerable popular discussion of State affairs in those febrile years: he wrote frequently of ‘common rumour’, of matters being ‘commoned of’ and of ‘disputacions and commonynges’. English layfolk, he alleged, ‘sore murmored’ at Henry VIII’s attempts to procure the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.275 Wolsey surely featured extensively in that grass-roots commentary, but what exactly ordinary people said about him during his ascendancy and shortly thereafter may be irrecoverable. For a selection of courtiers, and the newly arrived French ambassador, the posthumous agenda was set by the play performed some time before 23 January [1531] at the earl of Wiltshire’s dinner party, a play which depicted the late cardinal’s descent into Hell; the host was Anne Boleyn’s father. It was reported that ‘the duke’—very likely the duke of Norfolk, her uncle—had caused the farce to be published; no copy survives.276 The earliest sustained attack upon Wolsey in print may therefore have come from Hall, the first edition of whose ‘chronicle’ appeared in 1548. The book claims that the discarded minister had been crafty, deceitful, malicious, proud, subtle and vicious, that he had ‘ruled’ Henry VIII for many years, that he had been ‘lothe’ to deliver up the great seal of England, that he had grudged at his fall and that he had conspired with foreign powers to frustrate the king’s endeavours—‘for he compted himselfe egall with princes’. Moreover, Hall perpetuated the fable, sown abroad by the courtier-diplomat Sir Francis Bryan a fortnight after Wolsey’s burial, that the cardinal had killed himself by an overdose of medication.277 Suicide was held to incur damnation. From the reader’s perspective, the denigration continued in Polydore Vergil’s Anglica Historia, the relevant part of which, although almost certainly written contemporaneously with the events it describes, did not see the light of day (in Latin) until 1555. Vergil blamed Wolsey for planting in Henry VIII’s mind doubts about the validity of his marriage.278 The accumulation of what he regarded as lies moved George Cavendish to produce his classic Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey.279 Formerly his subject’s gentleman-usher and special messenger, Cavendish approached the task fresh from composing the so-called ‘Metrical Visions’, which contain a poem on Wolsey, the entire work revealing that he, Cavendish, was already familiar with the de casibus tradition originating in Boccaccio’s ‘De Casibus Virorum Illustrium’ (Redaction A of c.1360; Redaction

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B of 1373), not least through plagiarism from Lydgate’s ‘The Fall of Princes’ (begun c.1431; completed in either 1438 or 1439).280 That the Life, written c.1554–1558, belongs to the same tradition has long been recognized, but there are grounds for thinking that the genre received important modification at Cavendish’s hands. Before explaining those grounds, however, we must note two of Sylvester’s insights. The first insight is that about half-way through the text there occurs the pivot upon which the entire narrative turns—i.e. the precise moment of Wolsey’s fall, when the dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk come to seize the great seal—and that Cavendish’s treatment of time varies strikingly from one side to the other. Of the cardinal’s fifty-nine years, fifty-eight are compressed into the portion leading up to the pivot, whereas the whole of the portion stretching down from it is given over to an account of his last year. ‘In terms of Cavendish’s overall plan’, observes Sylvester, ‘it takes the cardinal as long to die as it took him to live. His death … has assumed an aesthetic significance equal to that of his period of glory’. The second insight is that the author skilfully embedded a ‘correspondent structure’ in his work, that is to say ‘an explicit or implicit paralleling of scenes in the second part … with scenes in the first part’. In other words, Cavendish incorporated numerous cross-references, all of them designed to foster ‘remembered associations’. The effect of this ‘alternating pattern of forecasting and reminiscing scenes’ is not only to ‘draw the two halves … more and more tightly together’, but also to emphasize ‘over and over again the one central antithesis on which the Life is based – Wolsey’s “assendyng & dissendyng to & frome honorous estate”’.281 For a fuller understanding of why Cavendish adopted those strategies, it is necessary to refer to Wooden and Britnell. Wooden argues that the biographer imposed two ideological constructs upon his material. The more obvious construct is the de casibus paradigm stressing the role of Fortune and her wheel. Yet differing conceptions of Fortune existed in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In one variant, Fortune was ‘simply the name given to blind chance, caprice, an amoral power with vast influence over the lives of men’. Constant only in her mutability, she resembled the notoriously fickle goddess Fortuna in Machiavelli’s Il Principe (written 1513; published 1532). In another variant, closely related to the first, Fortune was seen as ‘a false idol, as the spirit of evil in the world, luring men to trust her, offering them her gifts that she may enslave and destroy them’. Wooden insists that both conceptions underpin Cavendish’s moralizations in the first half of the Life, where the focus is on Wolsey’s

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unusually swift rise from humble obscurity to ostentatious earthly success by means of ‘pollecy’, a tale climaxing in the divorce hearings at Blackfriars. Less obvious, though, is the other construct: that of the morality play, at the centre of which lies the progression from sin to salvation. It is in connection with the latter framework that readers encounter a third variant of the Fortune motif. Wooden defines it as ‘the specifically Christian conception of Fortune as an instrument in God’s plan for the disposition of man and an agent in this world of His will’. That conception, he contends, is not evident prior to the cardinal’s fall. And the reason?—because it is something that Wolsey must learn. The learning process is long and difficult, but by receiving the gift of poverty and by suffering severe illness he undergoes a moral awakening conducive to spiritual growth. In the course of the ensuing maturation, Wolsey finally sees Henry VIII’s odious character square on and discovers his true friends, one of whom is Cavendish. Such is the story of the second half of the Life, which climaxes in the Christian death of the now penitent sinner. By relating Wolsey’s tortuous journey from ignorance to enlightenment—or rather his internal rehabilitation through purification in heart, mind, body and soul—Cavendish notably deviates from de casibus convention.282 Like Wooden, Britnell acknowledges that the author’s over-riding concerns were to refute the slur that Wolsey had caused religious schism by undermining the king’s marriage and to challenge the belief that his former master had probably expired in a state of damnation. Yet his analysis goes further, for Britnell highlights Cavendish’s anxiety to reveal that far from being clouded by the misery of a shocking impenitence, Wolsey’s end had in fact been attended by tokens of divine grace, in that he had been granted prophetic power during his last four weeks alive. Besides accurately predicting the hour of his departure, Wolsey had ostensibly warned of the dangers posed by Lutheran heretics, alluding to the seditious tendencies of the older Wycliffite and Hussite movements. To quote Britnell: The reader is undoubtedly being invited to define the events of the years 1530–53 as the realization of what Wolsey had foreseen. ‘Myschefe uppon myschefe, inconvenyence uppon inconvenyence, barynes & skarcyte of all thynges, for lake of good order in the comen welthe’ – this is a description of the Reformation period from the standpoint of a religious conservative who valued a quiet life. By the time Cavendish was writing[,] he knew that Wolsey’s prophecies were true ones.

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Additionally, Britnell sees ‘a distinctive value’ in the Hampton Court epilogue: Cavendish’s admission that, following Sir William Kingston’s helpful warning, he had lied to the king’s council about Wolsey’s last words ‘serves to enhance his seeming honesty’. According to Britnell’s reading, the biographer’s determination to tell the truth in the face of lies was a deeply laid fuse within the text, buried at first under uncontentious matter in which Cavendish concedes points to his former master’s enemies, leading by leisurely episodes to a wholly new account of Wolsey’s last years, days and hours that establishes the state of his soul at the time of his death, and culminating dramatically, after the main story is over, in a portrayal of the climate of repression that explains why the truth had been so long concealed.283

We may conclude, then, that Cavendish’s complex design was something of a double-edged sword because both the overt de casibus model discussed by Sylvester and the more subtle redemptive scheme delineated separately by Wooden and Britnell required the blackening of Wolsey’s reputation in relation to the lengthy span before his fall. Since Cavendish did not shrink from depicting the cardinal’s inordinate ambition, greed, pomp and vindictiveness, and ironically relied heavily upon Hall in writing the first half of the Life,284 it is hardly surprising that much of his account (as Britnell remarks) ‘could be mistaken for that of a critic’ rather than that of a supporter.285 In fairness, a great deal of the mud was justified—and stuck.286 Cavendish’s Life circulated quite widely. Apart from the author’s holograph manuscript, thirty secondary manuscripts were known to Sylvester and seven more have now been found, including one largely copied by John Stow.287 That the quondam gentleman-usher’s careful balancing of the complementary halves was a hostage to fortune is proved by a Bodleian Library ‘copy’. As Edwards explains, MS Dugdale 28 preserves not so much a transcript of the original text as a drastic abridgement of it, the effect of which is to re-shape the narrative polemically. The crucial second half has been condensed into a single terse paragraph that tells nothing of the cardinal’s long delayed epiphany. And in tackling the first half, the anonymous redactor ruthlessly pared away his source in order to leave just four episodes. The intention, argues Edwards, was obviously to juxtapose Wolsey’s character flaws, as disclosed in episodes one to three,

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with the calamitous effects of those flaws, as revealed in the final episode, namely the Blackfriars divorce hearings: For the redactor stresses [that] it was Wolsey’s ambition and its manifestations in plurality, luxury, and … power … that drove the nobility to use Anne Boleyn as a political pawn, thus precipitating the divorce debate … In this last scene[,] it is not Wolsey who dominates, but on the one hand Henry … and on the other the faithful Catholics – Catherine herself, the defiant Bishop [Fisher] of Rochester, and the unyielding [Cardinal] Campeggio. Wolsey fades into insignificance. Thus the redaction acquires by its selectivity a new causality through its dramatic contrasting of Wolsey’s arrogance and power and their consequences for Catholicism.

Even in the remaining vignettes, any comments favourable to Wolsey were cut, together with ‘nearly all Cavendish’s moralizing interjections’. The result was ‘to heighten the sense of Wolsey’s direct culpability’ for what the redactor plainly saw as the disaster of the English Reformation. If the abridgement really was executed as early as Edwards supposes, then it is anachronistic to talk of ‘recusant polemics’, but that the cardinal’s reputation had by the late 1550s already become toxic for Counter-Reformation Roman Catholics seems undeniable.288 MS Dugdale 28 marks only the beginning of a process of adaptation. Stow was responsible for introducing Cavendish’s Life to print, albeit by appropriating huge swathes for his famous Chronicles of England … (London, [1580]) [STC, 23333]—and with the slightest of acknowledgements. Most borrowings are verbatim, though he was shrewd enough to omit statements critical either of Elizabeth I’s parents or of Protestantism. At the same time, such scruples did not prevent his retaining (in Wiley’s words) ‘all passages in which Cavendish praises the cardinal’s accomplishments and his patient bearing under affliction’. To some extent, he believes, Stow’s contribution neutralized the ‘caustic judgements’ of Hall and Vergil (particularly by quoting the king’s public affirmation that his chief minister had not made him doubt the legality of his marriage) and thus went some way towards countering what he calls ‘the popular tradition that Wolsey was wholly bad’. How exactly that tradition had grown up, if its existence can be verified, is not altogether clear. From Stow, generous portions of the Life passed into the second edition (London,

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[1587]) [STC, 13569] of Holinshed’s Chronicles (whose editors excised politically problematic lines and were much less charitable than Stow, giving vent to their anti-Catholicism by, for example, importing from Hall the insinuation that Wolsey had committed suicide) and thence into William Shakespeare’s and John Fletcher’s King Henry the Eighth (All is True) of 1613. There, notes Hornbeck, the two authors crafted ‘a sharp contrast between the proud, dominant Wolsey of the first half of the play and the disgraced, penitent Wolsey of the second’. In short, ‘Hall’s Wolsey … here yields place to Cavendish’s’. Meanwhile, the Stuart succession to the English throne had liberated historians from earlier restrictions and the rapid decline in Henry VIII’s reputation did something to ameliorate that of the cardinal. Among those taking advantage of the new climate was John Speed, whose History of Great Britaine … (London, 1611) [STC, 23045] is less conservative than Holinshed’s Chronicles and brings out the tragedy of Wolsey’s rise and fall, for Speed was greatly impressed by the extent of the minister’s authority; his indebtedness to Cavendish’s Life is explicit. Writing initially in Latin—Rerum Anglicarum Henrico VIII Edwardo VI et Maria Regnantibus, Annales … ([Germany?], 1616) [STC, 11945] was eventually published in an augmented English translation as Annales … (London, 1630) [STC, 11947]—Francis Godwin viewed Wolsey with a degree of tolerance that occasionally bordered on admiration, but Wiley finds his handling of the Life to have been cavalier: Godwin’s wish to expose Henry VIII’s culpability drove him to take liberties with the text in such a manner as to betray personal prejudices. Although much of his account of Wolsey’s fall and death derives from Cavendish, the biographer’s unambiguous testimony touching the Boleyn faction’s determination to crush their enemy is suppressed. Of all the seventeenth-century commentators, Lord Herbert of Cherbury was apparently the most scathing about the cardinal’s character. Yet he did not flinch from recounting the plotting of Anne Boleyn and her accessaries. Indeed, Herbert admitted many more of Cavendish’s passages than had Godwin, and he quoted his manuscript source accurately. Hence Wiley may well be correct in asserting that The Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth … (London, 1649) [Wing, H1504]—which had been completed c.1640—achieved an unprecedented standard of impartiality, since Herbert treated Cavendish’s work ‘as a historical document rather than as a moral tract or tragedy of fortune’.

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Leaping from the sublime to the ridiculous, we cannot end this brief survey of Wolsey’s reputational nachleben without noticing the appearance of two polemics only a few months after Herbert had laid down his pen. Capitalizing upon the collapse of state censorship and the abolition of the Court of Star Chamber, persons unknown published Cavendish’s Life in full for the first time, if under the odd title of The Negotiations of Thomas Woolsey, the Great Cardinall of England Containing His Life and Death … (London, 1641) [Wing, C1619]. But alas!—this is a deeply corrupt text, mangled by puritan propagandists intent upon conscripting his witness to prelatical malignity for their virulent antiepiscopal campaign. The book’s impact was probably not inconsiderable, for there came forth, perhaps in quick succession, another work designed to make even more transparent what Wiley calls ‘the resemblances which might be inferred from the biography’. This latter effort, a pamphlet, is entitled A True Description or Rather a Parallel Betweene Cardinall Wolsey, Arch-Bishop of York, and William Laud, Arch-Bishop of Canterbury (n.p., 1641) [Wing, T2679]. In reality, of course, the men were poles apart. Sad to say, the Negotiations was the sole printed edition of Cavendish’s Life available to readers until most of the way through the eighteenth century. From a twenty-first century perspective, one can recognize, with Hornbeck, that a continuum runs from Hall’s character assassination at one end to the former servant’s broadly sympathetic portrayal at the other; irrespective of medium, most representations fall somewhere along that spectrum, the bulk in recent years being nearer to Cavendish than to Hall.289 Nevertheless, Clio (the muse of History) must have the last laugh: the notion of Wolsey’s redemptive odyssey is an attractive one, but is it true? Three letters discovered in the British Library and published in 1984 tell a different story. They reveal that precisely when, according to Cavendish, the penitent ogre had finally attained spiritual illumination and resigned himself to God’s mercy, the flesh-and-blood Wolsey was in fact immersed in treasonable agitation with France and the papacy.290 Only one conclusion seems viable: so far as Cardinal Wolsey’s reputation is concerned, Hall had it right.

Memorialization in Film The commemorative impulse has not only found an outlet in architecture, literature and portraiture, for (since the late nineteenth century)

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film has also recorded historical events and been used to present both history and historical fiction to mass audiences. Whether cinema movies, serial television dramas or one-off documentaries, the moving image has made a substantial impact on the reputations of certain historical figures, including three featured in this book: significantly in the case of Sir Thomas More (A Man for All Seasons , 1966) and to a lesser extent in the cases of Anne Askew (The Tudors , a four-season series broadcast 2007–2011) and Thomas Cranmer (Wolf Hall , a mini-series broadcast in 2015). Such coverage has given those figures global reputations, though not necessarily ones that are factually based. The corollary, of course, is that individuals who have been excluded from film treatment may be diminished, in the sense that the public risks losing sight of their lives and importance. They may, in fact, be forgotten. These thoughts inevitably take us into the tricky territory of ‘the popular imagination’, which (despite its obvious pitfalls) is still occasionally invoked by modern scholars. Take, for example, the recent statement that ‘at the time, and in the popular imagination ever since, the deaths of Thomas More, John Fisher and the Carthusian monks have been closely associated’.291 That association may once have been common, though how that could be proved is rather obscure, but Barron’s claim probably does not match the reality from the second half of the twentieth century, given the huge artistic and commercial success of Fred Zinnemann’s Oscar-winning film A Man for All Seasons , which elevated More’s reputation—in terms of what we might call ‘recognition factor’—far above those of Fisher and the Carthusian monks. Indeed, More is easily the most famous person to be discussed in these pages. Can anyone today even name those Carthusian martyrs? Would Hollywood entertain the idea of making Fisher the subject of an epic film? It seems unlikely. Yet if the cardinal has been left behind, then that does not necessarily mean to say that all commentators have jumped on to the Robert Bolt bandwagon—Bolt’s stage-play, premièred in 1960, formed the basis for the film’s screenplay. In fact, some biographers (we have Ackroyd in mind) have avoided engaging with the issue in any thorough way, as though the cinematic legacy is irrelevant. Other critics might see it as a dereliction of duty not to consider how the film has impressed upon the popular psyche an enduring image of the multi-talented More, who Ackroyd concedes is ‘one of the few Londoners upon whom sainthood has been conferred and the first English layman to be beatified as a martyr’.292 As Marshall observes: ‘every so often … a historical film comes along which gets under the skin of the scholarly

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community even to the extent that it becomes part of the process of historical debate and explanation itself’.293 A Man for All Seasons is clearly just such a film. It is possible, it goes without saying, to snipe at film and television history for needless inaccuracies and oversimplifications, even for presenting fiction as fact, but the truth is that the output does continue to inform opinion on various levels. Historians would be wise, wherever they can, to become part of the production process with the aim of shaping the material because (like it or not) ‘the content of historical films is actually a matter of considerable importance since they reinforce and perpetuate, if not actually create, myths about the past that are very difficult to shift or dislodge’.294 Schama argues that in the field of documentaries ‘television history, done well through the union of provoking commentary and spectacular visual imagination, has nothing to apologise for’.295 The same might be said, with caveats touching artistic licence, for powerful historical drama, not least ‘biopics’. Works in that sub-genre (which are sometimes made for the large screen) can repeat old tropes and consolidate prejudices, but they can also challenge pre-conceived notions and encourage viewers to evaluate new ideas, thereby stimulating wider historical debate. Like Schama a prolific practitioner on the small screen, Hunt adds this: Television history can reach millions and in so doing has the capacity to stir wide-ranging debates about identity, heritage, class, religion, race, gender and every other myriad topic which the study of history entails.296

Different biographies (and media) will bring out different aspects of an individual’s character and activities. A Man for All Seasons , for instance, accentuates the intellectualism of Sir Thomas More the common lawyer, underlines the general importance of law and shows how, in the political battles of the early Henrician Reformation, the individual (and in More’s case an individual of tremendous moral authority and international reputation) could be pitted against the State, yet his ‘religious zeal is barely hinted at’.297 The film therefore has limitations, but so do many published accounts of this remarkable figure. As Sharpe puts it, neatly summarizing Guy’s research, More was a person of many facets, often conflicting: In a historical life that departed from the traditional biographical form, the humanist scholar and martyr Thomas More was not just a man for all

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seasons; his life was one of many different and contradictory performances and of many representations and stories. Far from trying to resolve them into one account, Guy insists that these multiple representations are not just pertinent to – they are – the life of Thomas More.298

As with any medium, film can privilege particular elements at the expense of others, such editorial choices often being driven by the predilections of the director and/or the producer and/or the financiers. A Man for All Seasons , Super insists, ‘demonstrates … [Zinnemann’s] recurring interest in filming stories generated by political upheaval’. Consequently, it is the politics, and not More’s religiosity, that is emphasized.299 That slant actually remains true to Bolt’s original intention, for he ‘clearly indicates in his preface to the play that he interprets the conflict between the king and More in a political light’.300 Striking too is that it was ‘the feature film’s extreme time limitations [that] obliged the writer and the director to investigate the political and the ideological by localizing the conflict around an individual’.301 Evidently, external factors like duration can play a major part in dictating historical representation. This is an important point because we ought to recognize (and in relation to all media) that there is usually a complex trade-off between what the writer and maker wish to achieve and what the medium itself permits, whether that be size of text, or type of paint or length of programme, not forgetting the constraints probably imposed by whoever else controls the realization of any specific artistic project, as it might be film-studio moguls, TV channels, publishers or art patrons. The biographical approach lends itself to various media, and can generate works that are more readily accessible to consumers than something that seeks to convey abstract themes, inherently difficult as the latter would be. Zinnemann, Super stresses, preferred to ‘focus on the individual, not the universal’.302 That said, Sir Thomas More, as a film subject, called for a further narrowing of scope because he was not a one-dimensional character. Indeed, that is a theme in relation to many of the figures discussed in this volume. We are not dealing with personalities that may easily be classified, notwithstanding their presentation in the school classroom or the university lecture theatre, where they tend to be boxed into Aristotelian categories and are simplistically said to have stood for one thing or another. Overall, Zinnemann’s film allowed for a strong telling of the impact of the State on an individual, and specifically on that individual’s conscience, with a ‘focus on how the political affects the personal’.303

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Fascination with individual reputations, and indeed with the whole concept of reputations not linked to rulers or military leaders, perhaps emerged with Renaissance humanism, and fed into the Reformation, which added (or at any rate gave added weight to) the ingredient of private conscience. For the English Reformation was a complicated series of movements driven by men and women who were not always courtiers, and did not always wield either political or military power, but who were impelled by their conscience to make a stand for their beliefs. In 1966, ‘despite what the businessmen may have thought, the dramatization and exploration of this conflict interested a large audience’.304 The often fraught relationship between the individual and the State is something to which twentieth- and twenty-first century minds are accustomed, but it may have seemed excitingly radical to have located the conflict dramatically in a sixteenth-century context, and it could even be true that until the crisis of the 1530s no such clash (or rather not quite in those terms) could have been conceptualized. Many financial backers and critics may have feared that both play and film were overly academic, given the ‘primarily intellectual theme’.305 But if so, then that was a classic misunderstanding of popular intelligence: in America, the Broadway production and then the film smashed box-office records.306 For Hollywood, ‘the critical, and unexpected financial, success of A Man for All Seasons revived … [its] interest in Henry VIII’.307 This renewed interest led to Anne of the Thousand Days , which was made in 1969, a mere three years after the release of Zinnemann’s epic on More. This volume’s concentration on individuals, and on the force of individual agency, also intersects with the theme of freedom of speech. Our Tudor celebrities did not enjoy free speech, yet in contrasting ways they chose to put their heads above the parapet, some challenging the State, others social convention. They did so at risk to their own lives. Some scholars have made the point: Bolt’s play and the 1966 film additionally dramatize a more local issue: freedom of speech[.] … We may easily forget that More’s silence in refusing to swear to the Oath of Succession was a political crime in Tudor England, where no freedom of speech – even freedom of thought – existed.308

It was not merely the desire of individuals to express their inner beliefs that was risky; a failure openly to endorse Government policy could similarly be perilous. For More, it was his ‘refusal to acknowledge publicly

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the king’s new marriage [that] was dangerous precisely because it was a matter of State as much as a matter of private conscience’.309 We live in a world obsessed with individualism, but in many ways one in which, paradoxically, people are defined by what they ‘are’ rather than by what they think or do. The figures examined in this volume stand out because of what they thought and because of their actions consonant with their convictions. Arguably, it was the discovery of religious conscience—something that they could not ignore and which they felt God would not ignore—that propelled both the Reformation and the Counter Reformation forward. Many made the ultimate sacrifice. On More and A Man for All Seasons , we can perhaps leave the last word to Nicholl: The wise and courageous morality displayed by Sir Thomas in the sixteenth century was rare then, a puzzle to his family, friends, enemies, and king; no wonder that his story, as a play and as a movie, attracted and inspired so many Americans throughout the 1960’s.310

In fact, what was rare in 1531–1535 became considerably less rare as the English Reformation unfolded, but it is certainly the case that for many generations since the 1960s, and not just American ones, More’s story continues to inspire. Despite obvious detractions, therefore, film and television history, and historical drama, can successfully locate influential individuals within appropriate conceptual frameworks, bringing complex characters to the attention of mass audiences. Yet Kaes highlights a darker side to the enterprise: Cinematic images have created a technological bank that is shared by everyone and offers little escape. It increasingly shapes and legitimizes our perception of the past. Memory in the age of electronic reproducibility and dissemination has become public; memory has become socialized by technology. History itself, so it seems, has been democratized by these easily accessible images, but the power over what is shared as popular memory has passed into the hands of those who produce these images.

He finds it unsurprising ‘that struggle has erupted over the production, administration, and control of public memory’. Film-makers have ‘a special role’—we might say responsibility—because their products ‘not only reach a much larger audience than, say, speeches, conference papers, or books; they also tend to move and manipulate spectators in a more

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direct, emotional way’.311 Kaes goes further to elucidate the dynamic interplay of fact and fiction in historical drama on screen, plus the capacity of film to generate a sense of ‘reality’: Films – as complex fictional constructs – offer ambivalent perspectives and contradictory attitudes that resist simple explanations and call for multiple readings. Films dealing with history represent a dynamic and complex balance between two referents: one appealing to the historical knowledge or memory of the viewer and to a certain extent verifiable, the other taking liberties with historical facts for the sake of inventive storytelling. Historical films thus toy with temporal ambivalences, associations, and identifications and have a tendency to expunge historical distance. Precisely because they present the past as pure presence …, historical films seem effective in engaging the viewer more than, for example, the historical novel. Moreover, historical films are as much about the present as about the past and often intervene in ongoing debates.312

This latter point is also emphasized by Roche in his analysis of Quentin Tarantino’s pseudo-historical works—that throughout those films there is the ‘ethical and political potential of allegory and metaphor’, both of which serve, by means of analogy, ‘to broaden the historical and geographical scope beyond the represented and its context’. Apart from dealing with their core subject-matter, films thus possess the versatility to become ‘ethically and politically engaged with real-world [i.e. current] concerns’.313 To the professional historian, that idea is immediately hugely problematic, for the priorities of the present are not those of the past: the past was different. There is the obvious danger of judging historical figures, and historical events, through a wholly anachronistic modern lens. And yet, as Marshall underlines, that issue is of critical importance to scholarship too: ‘the dilemma of historical film – how to respect the autonomy of the past while rationalizing its representation in the present – is the dilemma of academic history also’.314 Given the current propensity (in England) for history to be taught with little reference to chronology—bewildered pupils can leap from a study of Nazi Germany one moment to the Tudors the next and then progress via the ancient Egyptians to the 1930s again—film and television history, if carried out sensitively, can help viewers to place a historical personality of interest back into that figure’s true timeframe, while simultaneously sparking the imagination. Here, again, Hunt has a valuable perspective:

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The growth in archaeological and architectural television history, the success of local and genealogical histories, can be attributed to their capacity for helping to cement the individual within a broader historical lineage. Indeed, in an era of devolution, globalization and social transformation[,] that search for identification – national, familial, racial – is often regarded as one of the key elements behind the success of television history.315

To conclude: historical films (and their television cousins) undoubtedly have many flaws, but they also have the capacity to reach far more consumers than academic monographs, and the interpretations they offer—of key figures as much as of major events and of broader movements—do contribute to the perceptions of the past held by millions. For that reason, they cannot simply be ignored on grounds of a few unfortunate lapses in accuracy. And with an acclaimed movie such as Zinnemann’s A Man for All Seasons , they have the power to ‘make’ a reputation in a modern context.

Reformation Reputations Made and Marred We recognize that the idea of ‘reputations’ and their evolution has been on Reformation historians’ radar-screens since at least Margaret Aston’s essay of 1965.316 What was thereafter a trickle of articles on the same theme has in recent years become a steady stream, with notable publications on figures as diverse as Bernard Gilpin, Reginald Pole, Richard Hooker and Edmund Campion.317 But this is the first book to take ‘Reformation reputations’ as its organizing principle, as distinct from studies of the English Reformation and memory.318 In putting it together, we were anxious to apply the criteria outlined in the Preface, namely to cover both sides of the confessional divide, to allow for a broad temporal span, to redress the gender imbalance evident in many older accounts and to intersperse essays on famous figures with discussion of people less likely to have been encountered before. We hope that readers will find the selected personalities intriguing and our contributors’ interpretations thought-provoking. It only remains to say a few words about each of the following chapters and, in doing so, to isolate some important themes running through them. William Sheils’s chapter on Thomas More and John Fisher focuses on their reputations centred in the 1930s—and details the process to

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their canonization in 1935, ‘hailed by contemporaries as a landmark in the history of English Catholicism and its relations with the prevailing national culture’. This analysis of twentieth-century attitudes to Catholicism within England shows just how far things had shifted to a more favourable disposition, and the ‘burgeoning sense of confidence’ that the Catholic Church in England felt in the 1930s. R. W. Chambers, writing from an Anglican standpoint, ‘stressed More’s universal appeal. By likening that appeal to love of mountains or a devotion to St. Francis of Assisi, Chambers made a cultural point rather than a religious one’ thus marking an important distinction. Chambers’s description of More’s martyrdom as having been ‘for the right of the individual conscience against the State’. In the circumstances of the mid-1930s … was a message of immediate significance. Chambers had been one of those non-Catholics who had supported the canonization of More, but he saw More’s example as appealing principally to a wider humanitarian tradition, and his biography was directed to that wider readership.

As with early-modern reputations, the canonization of More and Fisher, was not greeted with universal approval or a consistent response, for Cambridge University ignored that of Fisher, while Oxford, by contrast, celebrated that of More. This pattern has been mirrored in the detailed way in which the life of More has been captured and re-told on numerous occasions, far supplanting the position of that of Fisher. Sheils looks to redress that balance, notably critiquing David Mathew’s work on Fisher ‘as grossly unfair’, for in his assessment of Fisher … Matthew revealed the extent to which More dominated the story. Despite being linked in death, their lives were treated in contrasting fashion. While More was the herald of the modern world, Fisher is characterized as standing at the end of the medieval tradition.

Sheils reminds us of the transformative work of Fisher on the University of Cambridge and his fostering of humanist scholarship, and the way in which he ‘is said to have spoken “for the inarticulate” and to have stood for that unlettered peasant piety which the Northern Pilgrims of 1536 and the Western Rebels of 1549 had felt but could not express’. Nevertheless,

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Fisher’s place, in almost all writing of the 1930s, was to stand in More’s shadow … Fisher was clearly identified with the Roman Catholic Church and, even more importantly perhaps, with the papacy, through the Cardinal’s hat that he had received shortly before his death.

By contrast, More appealed to Christians of different denominations and non-Christian alike ‘as an exemplary figure’. As with the other characters featured in this volume, those that have been perceived to have more ‘human’ less ‘spiritual qualities’ have had more enduring wider public reputations. More has become a saint of the English-speaking world, his reputation carried far afield by the religious teaching orders, causing him to be admired for his human as much as for his spiritual qualities, and not only by Catholics. In that sense, [More’s] … transcendent image was more important than the historical figure.

More, Cranmer and Parker for instance are known less for their theology and more for their practical lives. Null redresses this balance by focusing on the theology of Cranmer, while Crankshaw focuses on the reputation of Parker as the religious archbishop and less the intellectual collector of books. As the religiously charged confessional world of the Reformation has dwindled away far into an early-modern distance, and the secular and ecumenical movements of the later twentieth century and twentyfirst centuries have taken hold, so More has been captured as a universal figure, commemorated in the Anglican liturgical year on the 6 July, on the ‘anniversary of his execution’. Much of this reputation of course began as Sheils reveals with Bolt’s play and Zinnemann’s 1966 production of A Man for All Seasons . The religious side to More was almost completely removed in favour of the humanist lawyer. More recent scholarship including Yale’s editions of More’s work, the journal Moreana, Germain Marc’hadour, Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton, and Eamon Duffy’s works have sought to redress this flattering critique, by placing More ‘firmly within the constraints of the times in which he lived, informed by cross-denominational studies of persecution’ and remembering his ‘role as a prosecutor, or persecutor, of dissidents’. Indeed in the fictional world, Hilary Mantel’s More of Wolf Hall (2009) has also presented a ‘darker’, cynical and more religiously fanatical character.

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More and Fisher, are perhaps more fortunate than most in terms of reputational legacy with their saintly status, for ‘reputations ebb and flow, but sanctity does not’. Yet as Sheils concludes, More’s own epitaph for his tomb in Chelsea Old Church is a reminder of his ‘fierce pursuit of heretics, as of thieves and murderers – becomes intelligible: neither to be excused nor denied’. Thus there is always a danger in reputations of the favourable status of hero or likewise the villain.319 For some, Sir Thomas will always be elevated and indeed this is a theme of this volume in terms of questions of faith, for certain religious figures—with these significant reputations, have been appropriated by differing elements in different faiths for their own means. Many Anglicans have held Sir Thomas More in high regard—people often see what they want to see, overlooking the flaws and foibles, and the harsh, less flattering elements to these characters—something that More knew all about, in his critical treatment of Richard III. For, the concept of the early-modern biography is a difficult one, when compared to the modern notion of biographical accounts. More himself is guilty of a lack of historical fairness, his ‘notorious treatment of Richard III is called a Historia, for instance, not a Vita’ and is ‘almost unique among royal biographies before 1688 in being hostile to, or at least highly critical of, its subject’.320 Perhaps, in the case of saintly reputations, we should be reminded of the sage words of Sir Walter Raleigh: that who-so-ever in writing modern historie shall follow truth too neare the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth.321

Ashley Null’s work on Archbishop Cranmer provides a fresh take on his theological thinking, assessing just what type of Bible man he was and what exactly were his influences. In many ways we see in this chapter, a form of early Wesley in evangelical thought—a strange warming of the heart type of scriptural faith. Null also introduces the important concept of solifidianism in Cranmer’s life.322 Furthermore, we see the importance of key figures in influencing Cranmer’s way of thought and the role of scripture in other key figures of the time, for examples, Lady Margaret Beaufort, Katherine Parr and Thomas Bilney. Cranmer would take these ideas and enshrine them under the reign of Edward VI. Null’s work is a revision on Cranmer’s theological reputation, arguing that Cranmer has been wrongly selectively quoted by Greenslade and Walsh. He notes that

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the historiography agrees that Cranmer changed his views on transubstantiation sometime during the 1540s, but that is where the agreement stops. Null takes the view that with the influence of Cranmer’s study of Cyril of Alexandria (c.376–444) and in the evidence of his research into patristics, Cranmer’s Edwardian positions should be seen not as a repudiation of his earlier beliefs, but that his solifidianism was a fulfilment and ‘final fruit’ of his theological studies. He did not turn to the early Church Fathers to support a fresh view, he had in fact been studying them for a considerable time and as with the rapidly changing views of the period, developed his stance on the real presence in a gradual fashion. This article points to Cranmer’s impressive theological reputation and scholarship and just how learned these various thinkers were, whatever their differing religious opinions. These figures were intellectuals in many ways, Null elevates Cranmer’s theological reputation as being as important as his practical Edwardian Reformation actions. He was not just an administrator and one channelling the views of others, he was as MacCulloch’s work has shown and Atkins has stated ‘a thinker and actor in his own right’.323 As with More and A Man for All Seasons , and accounts of Thomas Cranmer, the religious nature of these characters have often been downplayed in favour of presenting a practical figure, or an ecumenical one that might appeal to present-day audiences, championing free speech or the rights of different religious views. This was a theme of memorialization for Reformation characters in the Victorian period.324 This campaigns for the memorialization of William Tyndale in the nineteenth century sought to present Tyndale ‘as a unifying figure, lauded for his courageous translation while his distinctive evangelical theology was downplayed’.325 Null has put theology at the forefront of his study of Thomas Cranmer, while Sheils has shown how More’s reputation morphed in the twentieth century into a figure of appeal both to Roman Catholics and Anglicans alike. How can we form a view of characters we know so little about, and to whom we do not even have surviving pictures? In an internet age, a world of such vast access to knowledge, it is often difficult to conceive that we can know so little—yet this is the challenge that Rachel Basch has grappled with in her analysis of bishops wives—Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale. This chapter helps to provide an invaluable insight into clerical wives and one of the most radical changes of the Reformation for the new Protestantism focussed on the ‘home’.

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Luther (and other reformers) realized (possibly because his revolutionary marriage to a nun and happy family life with numerous ‘table talks’) that his new wave of ideas would best survive and be propagated if they developed in the household. The concept of clerical marriage was to provide a model example for the community, yet it was fraught with danger in Tudor England. This is not to say that these figures are worthy of greater attention because they were ‘new’ families in which women played a more prominent role—for there are many examples of successful and educated women and families, not least that of Thomas More’s. Nevertheless, not enough attention has been given to the wives behind these prominent Protestant husbands and this chapter redresses some of that balance of lack of, or weak historiography. Perhaps because marriage is seen in twenty-first century eyes as such an establishment tradition, it is easily forgotten as to just how ground-breaking and risky these clerical marriages were, for both parties. These three characters have been ostensibly overlooked because they were not ‘martyrs’ or ‘heroines’ or ‘godly’ people as per Anne Askew, they have therefore lacked the focus of a historical lens. This chapter points out that such an approach fails to recognize the importance of everyday praxis—for the majority it was essential not just to have martyrs for ideas, but also model examples and those to ‘live out’ the new theology. Yet that in itself would make it very difficult to piece together any form of reputation, so again we turn to the written word and in this instance, correspondence, for information on these remarkable individuals. It was not just the printed word that drove Reformation thought, but the written word too and the Tudor age saw extensive letter writing. These wives also played vital roles in maintaining the legacies of their husbands in publication form and in maintaining links to the wider Reformed groups, not least during the Marian exile. Our knowledge therefore of Thomas Cranmer, John Hooper and Myles Coverdale owes much to their wives, but that in itself does not do justice to the reputations of their wives. Margaret, Anne and Elizabeth are all worthy of greater study, because they were part of that ‘bold first generation [that] made the extraordinary decision to flout the law and accepted social norms by marrying a clergyman’, and in so doing, their radicalism, helped establish a new normality, that remained within the Church of England to this day. Of all the characters included in this volume, Anne Askew is perhaps exactly the type of person the editors had in mind when the idea of the project was conceived: a reputation formed precisely because and out of

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the Reformation. Here was an individual that we would not know about, but for the religious flux of the time. More importantly, Askew was a character that shaped the religious change of the time—whose individual life was confessionalized and whose conscientious decision to take a stand for her religious beliefs would be used for and against her in the polemical battles of the epoch. As with the writers covering the other Reformation figures in this book, Wabuda draws out the brave and unusual nature of Askew, above all, she was uncompromising, another feature of the other characters discussed in these pages. She was also a pathfinder for the Protestant cause and despite the ‘fraught history of religious conformity’ chose to make a stand for her beliefs.326 She died challenging the doctrine of transubstantiation (as John Porter had done too in 1542, not for his Bible readings, but denying the real presence in the Eucharist)—her radicalism or heresy of 1545 would, just a few years later, be a defining point for those who supported the decisive break with Rome and the creation of the Church of England. So why does Anne Askew, this unusual individual for the early-modern period, a woman too in a patriarchal age, and of an important, but not enormously significant background, have a reputation at all? Why do we know about her? As with much of Reformation history, we know because of the power and prevalence of print and ‘her writings have been in print almost continuously since the mid-sixteenth century’. Her reputation has thus ‘been fashioned and refashioned’ by proponents and opponents alike using her Examinations as a foundation for her beliefs. The combination of Bale and Foxe established Anne’s legacy in the history of Protestant martyrs. Like Foxe, Bale made ‘full use of the printing press’ and ‘showered England with a deluge of vituperative Protestant pamphlets’.327 Even with state censorship and controls on the press for the different sides of the religious divide, it was almost impossible for governments to stamp out clandestine printing or prevent pamphlets from moving across Europe. As Clegg argues, when analysed historiographically, state censorship during this period, looks properly planned and delineated, but in fact such a view would ‘impose a kind of order and intentionality that often was not there’.328 In reality, ‘press control was largely reactive rather than proactive, and since the ‘machinery’ of control was not in regular use, it was often ineffectual’.329 The power of print (albeit with some controls) allowed for the mass distribution of ideas, in a way not possible in previous centuries.

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Thus, we turn in the first instance to those who published and accumulated or edited the works of these figures for the early reputations (and indeed survival) of our knowledge of these characters. Without such fans or followers or disciples, it is hard to imagine that Askew, or indeed many of our characters discussed in this volume, would have been known at all to a modern audience. The difficulty is, that established early-modern views, not always reasonably or fairly created, have lingered on into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and this volume looks to provide if not revisionist interpretations on the individual characters, but fresh interpretations in part clean of former critique, but if not possible to establish clear new lines of fact, acknowledging the propagandists that have come before. Though not a reputation covered in this volume, Richards article on Mary I, outlines in detail the very real problem of the perpetuation of ‘established views’ and how they have ‘remained potent … perhaps even beyond the hopes of John Foxe’.330 The contributors to this volume have has to meander the path of both positive and negative reputational writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as Macdonald has put it, the years that followed the Reformation, did not lead to a framework in which biography was written without reference to contextual religious debate of the Civil Wars or the Restoration—for this ‘was a period when personal and political animosities were strong, and it is difficult to account for the character of a good deal of the writing in the years which followed the Restoration unless it is remembered that the fear of another civil war was, at times, very real’.331 Therefore, we are not merely dealing with a highly sensitive and politically motivated Reformation period for biographical and reputational writing and print, but we are also dealing with the periods that have followed that were equally religiously and politically charged. Of course, biographical writing and the writing of history in general is shaped by the priorities of the age in which it is written on any view, but what followed the Reformation, was no less religiously weighted than the writings of Foxe and Bale. Therefore, it is clear, that reliance on these early-modern writers can often obscure the individualistic nature of these remarkable people. In the case of Anne Askew, Bale possessed a first-person narrative from her own pen, which he published verbatim - so the prickly yet attractive personality of the lady did shine through the typological exegesis. But Bale made it totally clear that Oldcastle [the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle,

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executed 1417] and Mistress Askew were important, not as individuals, but simply as types or exempla of true Christian sainthood.332

In this regard, and in contrast to Bale, Wabuda brings to life Askew as the ‘individual’, with Anne’s intriguing background from a successful ‘Lincolnshire gentry’ family—well-connected to the elite of the land. She would unusually for the time, leave her husband, although we do not know why she did so from her own words. Wabuda points out that speculation on Askew’s marital problems rests in Bale’s interpretation of events. What is clear is the importance of new humanist thought that was spreading in Western Europe and the politicized nature of the 1530s, from the Lincolnshire Rebellion to the Pilgrimage of Grace. Fresh ideas on thinking and religion were there for the inquisitive mind. We do not know of Askew’s education, but she was clearly educated ‘with superlative skills in reading [and] writing’. This was of course an age of tremendous educational progress in England, in which monarch after monarch could be regarded as scholars in their own right. Coupled with Askew’s educational knowledge, was a desire for scriptural knowledge, a want of evangelicals in this period. As with Tyndale, these path finders for the propagating of English Bibles, were ahead of the authorities and would suffer as such. Yet their legacy was ultimately the publication of a numerous English Bibles, not least Henry VIII’s Great Bible of 1539 (a volte-face indeed), culminating in the more enduring King James Bible of 1611. Askew desired for the word of God to be spoken as well as read and it was this act that was so ‘deliberately provocative’, as the legislation set-out that the Bible could be read privately, but not publicly, for fear of misinterpretation. Restrictions in the 1540s limited this to noblemen and gentlemen. The idea of a woman declaiming (even from the gentry) was deeply disturbing to the authorities and local clergy. As with so many that desired more knowledge, contacts and exposure, she set-off for London and mixed in evangelical circles there, particularly in and around the Inns of Court. Her ultimate demise rested not, however, in reading the Bible, but ‘rather her challenges to official orthodoxy about the Eucharist’. Questions on the real presence would be a chief battle ground in the Reformation and she would be tortured on the rack for her cause and ultimately burnt at the stake for denial of the real presence. Her death and that of her fellow compatriots (Lassells, Hadlem and Hemley) moved evangelical opinion, that under Edward VI, the ‘Act of Six Articles’ was repealed. Her acts and reputation therefore cemented her

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theology in the years that followed, most notably in the Book of Common Prayer and the rejection of the doctrine of transubstantiation. What is drawn out so well in this essay, in the demise of Askew and other prominent individuals stretching the patience of the authorities, is the way in which the tables turned. Edward Crome’s challenge to the Act of Six Articles in April 1546 highlighted the inconsistencies of government policy on the Mass—which forced the hand of the State. The differing factions and rivalries of the Court sought to make their mark on State policy and the religious changes that this might bring. It was in response to this moment that would see the long-term formation of Anne’s reputation and other individuals in this collection, in the changes to beliefs in transubstantiation. The power and reach of the Privy Council in these shifting sands of state policy should not be underestimated. Yet it was difficult to act in these scenarios, because the individuals involved were challenging belief systems resting in faith and conscience, not a call to arms or a desire for a redistribution of wealth. This was a rebellion of the mentality of the religious system of the age, as opposed to a revolt. It could not readily be stamped out and the heavy-handed nature of the State gave fresh significance, voice and status to individual candles that would otherwise have burned brightly for a time, but then subsided. The illegal use of torture by Thomas Wriothesley and Richard Rich (who ironically has no favourable reputation whatsoever) far from bringing Askew to heal, added greatly to the Protestant propaganda machine of Bale and Foxe. In many ways Wabuda draws out how foolish the efforts of the authorities were (but also how difficult it was for them), Anne was not a traitor or directly dangerous, but her heresy was seen as political disloyalty. What is so striking in reputations, is how Askew’s sacrifice (as great as that of Sir Thomas More) was part of a movement that did change the political and religious dynamic of the age. More’s reputation has been the greater, the more prevalent. He of course held one of the highest offices of the land, but Askew’s death could in some ways be seen as changing the dynamic. Her fanatical religious fervour was for the Protestant cause not in vain. Yet although she was on the side of the victors, history has given much to More who was not with the victorious, and as Wabuda points out, Anne’s original voice remains hard to find. We are left then, with a series of questions—is a reputation, one in which the life of someone changes something that they wished to achieve or do? That they influenced a new view on the sacraments? On the real presence? Or is it an

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achievement if one’s voice is not fully revealed to those that follow? That a mystery remains? That said, Wabuda concludes that although Bale and Foxe shaped Askew’s reputation, she was the ‘premier creator’—but it is also worth noting that ‘[c]ause, and not courage alone, made the martyr’. The success of her cause has perhaps ironically limited her reputation, for she was ultimately one of many victors in the religious battles of the Reformation, but in the patriarchal Tudor age she was a remarkable ‘artist of a very high order’ and her Examinations and story were worth re-telling for Bale and Foxe and remain fascinating to this day. As with the other chapters in this book, Matthew Parker’s reputation, owes much to the early-modern account of his life, and in this instance Strype’s 1711 ‘didactic biography’. David Crankshaw unravels the remarkable life of Parker as one (like that of More) who straddles the intellectual and religious divides. For he was both an ecclesiastical figure, driving the religious settlement of the 1560s, as well as a scholar. Crankshaw raises the important point of ‘place’ association regarding reputations, for Parker it was Norwich, Cambridge and Lambeth Palace. This link to location can also be seen with the rise of Thomas Cromwell, as MacCulloch points out, in Cromwell’s case—Putney—was ‘nothing and everything’ to the great councillor of Henry VIII. Cromwell’s smartest move was to flee it [Putney] while still in his teens, to travel through mainland Europe and thus refashion himself as much more than a Tudor Englishman. Yet once he could enjoy the reward for his travels and administrative drudgery, he triumphantly reasserted his link to that ferry-side village on the Thames.

A little further down the river was of course Thomas More and Chelsea. Place, both in social hierarchy and in location, mattered tremendously in the Tudor age, whether university towns, religious centres or as is clear from the above, locations with easy access to the Thames and therefore to the main tributary or point of access to the monarch and their palaces with Thames links. Crankshaw’s chapter also makes mention of Parker’s wife and so in this volume we have reference to four bishops’ wives—three of course the subject of Basch’s contribution; all significant figures in the success of their husbands. Parker’s rise to fame is linked to the patronage of Anne

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Boleyn and his close connection with Elizabeth I as her chaplain as well as his ability as a preacher. Yet again, the position of the Court, and key evangelicals played pivotal roles in the development of the Reformation with their ability to dispense vital backing and sponsorship.333 So too the Reformation is intrinsically linked with the spoken word—and we have a unifying link here, between, Askew, Cranmer, and Parker, for Elizabeth’s archbishop’s early reputation was as a ‘leading evangelical preacher’. Just as Sheils’s work on More, and Null’s on Cranmer have highlighted the way in which a posthumous reputation can focus on one element of a character, while diminishing another, so this is the case for Parker too. For More, we have a focus on his individualism, scholarship and humanism, rather than the zealous religious pursuer of heretics. For Cranmer, we have a focus on his managerial role at the expense of his theology. For Parker, ‘the archbishop is increasingly remembered mainly as a collector of rare books and manuscripts; as an historian of, and propagandist for, the English Church; and as a patron of intellectuals pursuing the same endeavours’. The ‘centre of attention today is very much the magnificent Parker Library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge’. Crankshaw’s work seeks to recover Parker’s life as an ‘ecclesiastical figure’, that does not diminish his scholarly reputation, but seeks to address his time in religious office and the ‘milestones’ that are his legacy—both positive and negative, from for examples, the ‘Vestiarian Controversy’ and being the implementor of Elizabeth I’s ‘demand for ritual uniformity’, to creating the office of lay reader, episcopal synods in 1560 and 1561, the Eleven Articles and a new ecclesiastical calendar, to the Thirty-Eight Articles of Religion (1563) and the Bishops’ Bible of 1568. Given the religious complexities of the Elizabethan settlement, the incomplete list above of Parker’s legacy, goes someway to understanding Strype’s view of Parker as a ‘man of stomach’ for he was clearly more than an intellectual and bibliophile, to have achieved so much, and as Heal has said, to have ‘determine[d] the future direction of Anglicanism’. Elizabeth I’s last archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, has quite remarkably avoided a full biography since 1718. Felicity Heal sets out the explanation as to why this has been and provides an analysis of his reputation then and an assessment now. In contrast to some of the characters in this volume, Whitgift had a more notable reputation following his lifetime, but not since, yet as Heal argues, his life and actions are vital to understanding the Church of England and the nature of the Reformation in Elizabethan England. His time as leading bishop also illustrates the

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divisions between the reformers, who were just as divided as their Roman Catholic opponents, as described in the analysis of Robert Persons. Heal explores the extent to which Whitgift was a classical Elizabethan middleman, suffering Godly attacks (as discussed by Collinson and Lake), but maintaining a pragmatic compromise so embraced by the queen. Yet, ‘only after his demise did Whitgift’s reputation as a courageous leader … gain greater traction’. Nevertheless, more recent history has seen his life drifting into the secondary status of an important figure, but not discussed in the same way as others in this volume. Yet, he helped cement the peace of the fragile new Church of England with ‘order and discipline’ and Heal concludes that he was as ‘single-minded and ruthless’ as any in his defence of crown and episcopal authority. In discussing Usher’s analysis, we also see a figure that had to deal with the power of the Privy Council, Court politics, and other major players in the Tudor world and most significantly Lord Burghley. For many of the figures in this volume, the Tudor Court had to be manoeuvred with kid gloves to drive forward a policy and to survive. Even the most gifted would fall by the wayside and perhaps in a focus on reputations, it is something that Whitgift died with the Church of England more-or-less intact from his inheritance of archbishop, in contrast with that of More and Cranmer. Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon’s work on Anthony Munday reveals further, just how well travelled many of our figures were and just how important their links to the continent were for forming views and opinions and shaping political and religious debate. It is also telling that the stereotypes and labelling of much of Reformation history, of Roman Catholic and Protestant, of Anglican and Puritan, is so often insufficiently nuanced and inadequate to explain the beliefs of so many in the early-modern world. Many people had varying views, not least because religious opinion and religious doctrine were evolving all the time, and thus quite naturally in the shifting sands and flux of the era, not everyone conformed to type. Munday’s life straddled the timeframe of these tremendous changes. If his personal beliefs and the changes taking place were unclear to contemporaries, then modern historiography has continued the debate.334 Evenden-Kenyon’s work looks into foreign language texts to reveal more about his true character. Yet again, the essential significance of print was there for Munday, both with the publishing background of his father and in his work as an author and translator. As with our other characters he was also well-educated and had the ability to function as an Elizabethan intelligencer, a man of many

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parts, possibly even a spy—part author, translator, actor and pseudodiplomat. As a translator he was also in a form of limbo or no-man’s land, a conduit between religious and national communities. In contrast, however, to the other figures in this collection, Munday is not easily categorized and his reputation and the continued interest in him, stems from his diverse and intriguing background, and not from a single-minded belief in a religion. We have sought to present in this volume an ecumenical approach in terms of the split of these differing figures of the Reformation. The life and reputation of John Gerard again rests much in written accounts of his exploits, but the absence of their lives in more public debate and knowledge to this day, beyond historical and theological circles, owes much to the greater prevalence of other figures that have captured the imagination of the general public and reader. A turn of fate as Lake and Questier have uncovered, there was a chance that Gerard might have been the focus of Zinnemann’s attention rather than Sir Thomas More for a film in the 1960s, as it transpired of course A Man for All Seasons would take Sir Thomas More and his reputation (at least as presented in the movie) to a far wider audience than so many other Reformation characters. We are left with the question of what if? That aside, Gerard led a remarkable life, but as with the other characters in this volume, success and reputation needed money and patronage. It also needed the ability to mix within the highest echelons of the land and according to Gerard’s text, he was able ‘to integrate himself into elite social circles’. It is all the more telling, that given their minority position in England, the Roman Catholic church and the Roman Catholic English, even within their different groupings, never gave up or disappeared. In this sense their survival and the work of characters like Gerard can be seen as a success story. It perhaps also says something of the wider nature of Roman Catholicism within England. Yet analysis of Gerard’s life further highlights (as with Persons’s) the divisions within causes, in this case Jesuit and the differing views of such affiliations, from a European perspective and from an English or British overview. Victor Houliston provides a fresh take on the life and reputation of Robert Persons. Such an account highlights not only the multiplicity of views prevalent between confessions, but within confessions too. The debate that surrounds Persons is not one of Protestant or Roman Catholic, but rather between Roman Catholics. Was he a ‘villain’ or a ‘hero’? Just as the terminology of Reformation thought gave rise to ‘Protestant’, so even the spelling of his name has reflected opponents and

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supporters—‘Parsons’ for hostility and ‘Persons’ to those sympathetic or admiring of his life and views. A unifying factor among our case-studies is the prevalence of a strong academic grounding to their individual ideas and Persons is another case in point—with Oxford and Balliol College providing a university education and the tools to drive forward his role in the world. Again, as with so many of this collection, Persons developed strong literally skills and again the importance of the textual word is another vital theme in the survival of the reputation of these various characters. What is also striking (even if not in theological thought) was the outward looking nature of so many of these figures in Tudor England. As with Sir Thomas More, Persons was very well travelled, and these links would drive his ‘involvement in political and military intrigues that became a determining factor in his reputation’. With travel came proximity to new ideas, humanist thought, and counter-reformation divides, not least the powerful influence of the Jesuits. It is within this mix that Persons found himself. For secular Roman Catholics keen to maintain their position in England, but wary of upsetting the Elizabethan authorities, Persons and the Jesuit missions drew dangerous attention to Roman Catholicism in the country. He was not therefore universally popular. To those beyond English shores, particularly in Rome, and Spain, he was a tool in the hope of recapturing England for the Papal cause. In the ambiguity of his reputation among English Roman Catholics we also see the complexity of the battle of ideas in Elizabethan England—with questions of nation over religion and vice versa. Perhaps the most telling conclusion we can draw from this man of ‘no illustrious forebears’ and a son of a Somerset yeoman, not born in anyway into international diplomacy and courtly circles, is that Persons has a reputation—even if disputed. The survival of such a figure in a Tudor world not lacking in intriguing characters and personalities—almost ubiquitous—is in itself interesting, and one that came not from the majority, but a minority in England.

Notes 1. Sense 1 (a) in OED (online), noting ‘in early use frequently synonymous with fame’. 2. Sense 2 (a) ibid. 3. Judging by EEBO searches. 4. Sense 1 (a) and Phrase P1 (a) in OED (online). 5. Othello, Act II Scene 3.

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6. S. Tillyard, ‘Celebrity in 18th-Century London’, History Today, 55 (June, 2005), p. 20. 7. E. Barry, ‘Celebrity, Cultural Production and Public Life’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11 (2008), pp. 251–8, introducing the theme ‘A Cultural History of Celebrity’. 8. B. Cowan, ‘Histories of Celebrity in Post-Revolutionary England’, Historical Social Research /Historische Sozialforschung, Supplement No. 32 (2019), pp. 84–5. 9. Brilliantly exposed in C. Berry, ‘“Go to Hyr Neybors Wher She Dwelte Before”: Reputation and Mobility at the London Consistory Court in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in E. A. New and C. Steer (eds), Medieval Londoners: Essays to Mark the Eightieth Birthday of Caroline M. Barron (London, 2019), pp. 95–116. 10. B. Cowan, ‘Histories of Celebrity in Post-Revolutionary England’, Historical Social Research /Historische Sozialforschung, Supplement No. 32 (2019), pp. 83–98 (at pp. 84, 85), ignoring important contributions to the ongoing debate: S. Morgan, ‘Celebrity: Academic “PseudoEvent” or a Useful Concept for Historians?’, Cultural and Social History, 8 (2011), pp. 95–114; U. Rublack, ‘Celebrity as Concept: An Early Modern Perspective’, ibid., pp. 399–403; and A. D. Wesolowski, ‘Beyond Celebrity History: Towards the Consolidation of Fame Studies’, Celebrity Studies (essay published online October 2018). 11. Anon., Cyvile and Uncyvile Life. A Discourse Very Profitable, Pleasant, and Fit to bee Read of all Nobilitie and Gentlemen … (London, 1579) [STC, 15589.5], sig. N3v. 12. P. Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy; or John Whitgift, Antipuritanism, and the “Invention” of Popularity’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010), pp. 463–95. 13. F. Bacon, Essayes. Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion (London, 1597) [STC, 1137], fols 9v–10r. Note the overtone to ‘pollicie’: N. Orsini, ‘“Policy”: Or the Language of Elizabethan Machiavellianism’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, IX (1946), pp. 122–34. 14. S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self -Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago, IL, and London, 1980). 15. S. Tullis, ‘Glanvill After Glanvill: The Afterlife of a Medieval Legal Treatise’, in S. Jenks et al. (eds), Laws, Lawyers and Texts: Studies in Medieval Legal History in Honour of Paul Brand, Medieval Law and Its Practice, 13 (Leiden, 2012), pp. 327–59; S. Echard, ‘Containing the Book: The Institutional Afterlives of Medieval Manuscripts’, in M. Johnston and M. van Dussen (eds), The Medieval Manuscript Book: Cultural Approaches (Cambridge, 2015), pp. 96–118.

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16. K. Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy: Authority and Image in SixteenthCentury England (New Haven, CT, and London, 2009), pp. 61–78 (misdating Bacon’s Historie ‘1616’). 17. Ibid., pp. xxiii–xxiv. 18. S. Anglo, Images of Tudor Kingship (London, 1992), pp. 98–130 (his emphases), reprinted (without illustrations) in J. Guy (ed.), The Tudor Monarchy (London, 1997), pp. 16–42. 19. 26 Henry VIII c. 13: The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810– 28), III pp. 508–9. 20. 1 and 2 Philip and Mary c. 3: ibid., IV Part I, pp. 240–1. 21. 1 Elizabeth I c. 6 and 23 Elizabeth I c. 2: ibid., pp. 366–7 and 659–61 respectively. 22. A. Wood, ‘The Queen Is “A Goggyll Eyed Hoore”: Gender and Seditious Speech in Early Modern England’, in N. Tyacke (ed.), The English Revolution c.1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities (Manchester, 2007), p. 89. 23. P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (3rd edn, Farnham, 2009), p. 208. 24. e.g. S. Anglo, ‘Ill of the Dead: The Posthumous Reputation of Henry VII’, RS, 1 (1987), pp. 27–47; U. Baumann, ‘“The Virtuous Prince”: William Thomas and Ulpian Fulwell on Henry VIII’, in U. Baumann (ed.), Henry VIII: In History, Historiography and Literature (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 167–201; J. Beer, ‘The Image of a King: Henry VIII in the Tudor Chronicles of Edward Hall and Raphael Holinshed’, ibid., pp. 129–49; P. Marshall, ‘Henry VIII and the Modern Historians: The Making of a Twentieth-Century Reputation’, in M. Rankin et al. (eds), Henry VIII and His Afterlives: Literature, Politics, and Art (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 246–65; T. Betteridge and T. S. Freeman, ‘Introduction: All Is True—Henry VIII In and Out of History’, in T. Betteridge and T. S. Freeman (eds), Henry VIII and History (Farnham, 2012), pp. 1–19; C. Colbert, ‘The Daughter of Time: The Afterlife of Mary Tudor, 1558–1625’, Memorial University of Newfoundland, PhD thesis (2009); J. M. Richards, ‘Defaming and Defining “Bloody Mary” in Nineteenth-Century England’, BJRL, 90 (2014), pp. 287– 303; D. R. Woolf, ‘Two Elizabeths? James I and the Late Queen’s Famous Memory’, Canadian Journal of History, 20 (1985), pp. 167– 91; M. Dobson and N. J. Watson, England’s Elizabeth: An Afterlife in Fame and Fantasy (Oxford, 2002); J. Watkins, Representing Elizabeth in Stuart England: Literature, History, Sovereignty (Cambridge, 2002); P. Collinson, ‘Elizabeth I and the Verdicts of History’, Historical Research, LXXVI (2003), pp. 469–91; P. Collinson, ‘William Camden and the Anti-Myth of Elizabeth: Setting the Mould?’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), The Myth of Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 79–98,

1

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33.

34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

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reprinted in P. Collinson, This England: Essays on the English Nation and Commonwealth in the Sixteenth Century (Manchester, 2011), pp. 270– 86; and P. Sherlock, ‘The Monuments of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart: King James and the Manipulation of Memory’, JBS, 46 (2007), pp. 263–89. U. Morét and S. Väthjunker, ‘Henry VIII in Sixteenth-Century Scottish Chronicles’, in U. Baumann (ed.), Henry VIII: In History, Historiography and Literature (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), pp. 151–66; N. Matar, ‘Queen Elizabeth I Through Moroccan Eyes’, Journal of Early Modern History, 12 (2008), pp. 55–76. N. Saul, For Honour and Fame: Chivalry in England, 1066–1500 (London, 2011), pp. 283–304. Y.-C. Wang, ‘Caxton’s Romances and Their Early Tudor Readers’, HLQ , 67 (2004), pp. 173–88; M. Leitch, ‘Thinking Twice About Treason in Caxton’s Prose Romances: Proper Chivalric Conduct and the English Printing Press’, Medium Ævum, 81 (2012), pp. 41–69. H. Lee, Biography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2009). At Worcester College, Oxford, and in Senate House Library, University of London. H. O. Coxe (ed. and trans.), The Black Prince: An Historical Poem, Written in French by Chandos Herald (privately published, London, 1842). Unless otherwise indicated, this paragraph rests, like its predecessor, upon N. Saul, For Honour and Fame: Chivalry in England, 1066–1500 (London, 2011), pp. 305–24, but see also P. Ainsworth, ‘Jean Froissart: A Sexcentenary Reappraisal’, French Studies, LIX (2005), pp. 364–72. For an excellent survey, see E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580 (New Haven, CT, and London, 1992) [hereafter Duffy, Stripping ], pp. 155–205. Discussed in R. Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, 2013) [hereafter Bartlett, Saints ], pp. 137–9. Ibid., p. 137. Ibid., pp. 57–64, 142. Ibid., pp. 137–238. Place-names are discussed ibid., pp. 454–8 and dedications of churches and altars ibid., pp. 444–54, though we substitute some examples of our own. T. Erbe (ed.), Mirk’s Festial: A Collection of Homilies, by Johannes Mirkus (John Mirk) …, Early English Text Society [hereafter EETS], Extra Series, 96 (London, 1905), pp. 241–2 (thorn changed to ‘th’). See also S. Powell, ‘Mirk, John (fl. c.1382–c.1414)’, in ODNB. On personal names, see Bartlett, Saints, pp. 459–70.

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40. E. Duffy, ‘The Parish, Piety and Patronage: The Evidence of RoodScreens’, in E. Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), pp. 55–82. 41. R. Koopmans, ‘Early Sixteenth-Century Stained Glass at St. Michael-leBelfrey and the Commemoration of Thomas Becket in Late Medieval York’, Speculum, 89 (2014), pp. 1040–1100 and literature cited there. 42. R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400– 1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5–48. 43. Unless otherwise indicated, this paragraph rests upon Bartlett, Saints, pp. 113–36. 44. G. Rosser, ‘Parochial Conformity and Voluntary Religion in LateMedieval England’, TRHS, 6th Series, I (1991), pp. 173–89. 45. The literature is vast, but important contributions include R. C. Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims: Popular Beliefs in Medieval England (London, 1977); D. Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London, 2000); D. Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c.700– c.1500 (Basingstoke, 2002); G. W. Bernard, The Late Medieval English Church: Vitality and Vulnerability before the Break with Rome (New Haven, CT, and London, 2012), pp. 125–50; M. Champion, ‘Personal Piety or Priestly Persuasion: Evidence of Pilgrimage Bequests in the Wills of the Archdeaconry of Sudbury, 1439–1474’, Peregrinations: Journal of Medieval Art and Architecture, 3 (2012), pp. 66–82; Bartlett, Saints, pp. 410–43; R. Lutton, ‘Richard Guldeford’s Pilgrimage: Piety and Cultural Change in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century England’, History, 98 (2013), pp. 41–78; R. Lutton, ‘Pilgrimage and Travel Writing in Early Sixteenth-Century England: The Pilgrimage Accounts of Thomas Larke and Robert Langton’, Viator, 48 (2017), pp. 333–57; H. van Asperen, ‘The Book as Shrine, the Badge as Bookmark: Religious Badges and Pilgrims’ Souvenirs in Devotional Manuscripts’, in M. Faini and A. Meneghin (eds), Domestic Devotions in the Early Modern World (Leiden, 2019), pp. 288–312; and J. Jenkins, ‘Replication or Rivalry? The “Becketization” of Pilgrimage in English Cathedrals’, Religion, 49 (2019), pp. 24–47. 46. Passing over regional studies, the best general account is G. Rosser, The Art of Solidarity in the Middle Ages: Guilds in England, 1250–1550 (Oxford, 2015). 47. Her tabulation should be treated with caution: the figures do not add up to the total printed there and many of them bear little relationship to the data presented in the Appendix, though the general picture is clear: K. L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), pp. 196 (Table 6.2) and 211–27 (Appendix).

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48. N. P. Tanner, The Church in Late Medieval Norwich 1370–1532, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts, 66 (Toronto, 1984), pp. 208–10. 49. P. Bell (ed.), Bedfordshire Wills 1480–1519, The Publications of the Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, XLV (Bedford, 1966), pp. 55–6. 50. K. A. Winstead, ‘Saintly Exemplarity’, in P. Strohm (ed.), Middle English: Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature (Oxford, 2007), p. 347. See also P. J. Lucas, ‘Capgrave, John (1393–1464)’, in ODNB, K. A. Winstead, John Capgrave’s Fifteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 2007) and J. Henry, ‘Capgrave’s Dedications: Reassessing an English Flunkey’, Studies in Philology, 110 (2013), pp. 731–61. 51. On ‘The Literature of Sanctity’, see Bartlett, Saints, pp. 504–86. 52. Chapters 1, 6, 13, 14, 31–5, 51, 53, 54, 68, 72, 73, 137 + 37, 119, 131 + 162 + 163 + 182. 53. Chapter 44 is on ‘The Chair of St Peter’. 54. Thomas Becket (1173), Francis of Assisi (1228), Dominic (1234), Elizabeth of Hungary (1235) and Peter of Verona (1253). For analysis of how de Voragine re-fashioned the ‘Vita’ of one of those saints, see L. Burke, ‘A Sister in the World: Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the Golden Legend’, The Hungarian Historical Review, 5 (2016), pp. 509–35. 55. Anon. (ed.), W. G. Ryan (trans.), Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend: Readings on the Saints (paperback edn with an introduction by Eamon Duffy, Princeton, 2012). Other than in correcting the compositional period in line with B. Fleith, Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte der Lateinischen Legenda Aurea (Brussels, 1991), in citing Burke’s essay and in re-calculating Duffy’s chapter totals, this paragraph rests upon the Introduction to the 2012 edn (pp. xi–xx), which is reprinted (with revisions) in E. Duffy, Royal Books and Holy Bones: Essays in Medieval Christianity (London, 2018), pp. 29–42. 56. M. Jeremy, ‘Caxton’s Golden Legend and De Vignai’s Légende Dorée’, Mediaeval Studies, 8 (1946), p. 97. 57. To the foregoing essay add R. Hamer, ‘Jean Golein’s Festes Nouvelles: A Caxton Source’, Medium Ævum, 55 (1986), pp. 254–60; H. E. Maddocks, ‘The Illuminated Manuscripts of the Légende Dorée: Jean de Vignay’s Translation of Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea’, University of Melbourne, PhD thesis (1989); and R. Hamer, ‘From Vignay’s Légende Dorée to the Earliest Printed Editions’, Le Moyen Français, 32 (1993), pp. 71–81. 58. M. Jeremy, ‘The English Prose Translation of Legenda Aurea’, Modern Language Notes [hereafter MLN ], 59 (1944), pp. 181–3; M. Jeremy, ‘Caxton and the Synfulle Wretche’, Traditio, 4 (1946), pp. 423–8; A. Kurvinen, ‘Caxton’s Golden Legend and the Manuscripts of the Gilte Legende’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 60 (1959), pp. 353–75; R.

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59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

Hamer and V. Russell (eds), Supplementary Lives in Some Manuscripts of the Gilte Legende, EETS, Original Series, 315 (Oxford, 2000); and R. Hamer (ed.), Gilte Legende, 3 vols, EETS, Original Series, 327, 328, 339 (Oxford, 2006–12). S. Horobin, ‘A Manuscript Found in Abbotsford House and the Lost Legendary of Osbern Bokenham’, English Manuscript Studies, 1100– 1700, 14 (2007), pp. 132–64; S. Horobin, ‘Politics, Patronage, and Piety in the Work of Osbern Bokenham’, Speculum, 82 (2007), pp. 932–49 (at p. 937). Among the huge literature, see especially M. E. Wells, ‘The South English Legendary in Its Relation to the Legenda Aurea’, PMLA, 51 (1936), pp. 337–60; M. E. Wells, ‘The Structural Development of the South English Legendary’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 41 (1942), pp. 320–44; M. Görlach, The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary, Leeds Texts and Monographs, New Series, 6 (Leeds, 1974); T. J. Heffernan, ‘Additional Evidence for a More Precise Date of the “South English Legendary”’, Traditio, 35 (1979), pp. 345–51; and H. Blurton and J. Wogan-Browne (eds), Rethinking the South English Legendaries (Manchester, 2011). C. E. Rydel, ‘A Discovery of the Only Middle English Version of the Legenda Aurea Prologue in The Assembly of Gods ’, Notes and Queries, CCLVIII (2013), pp. 508–12. R. F. Seybolt, ‘Fifteenth Century Editions of the Legenda Aurea’, Speculum, 21 (1946), pp. 327–38; R. F. Seybolt, ‘The Legenda Aurea, Bible, and Historia Scholastica’, ibid., pp. 339–42 (at p. 342). On SS Appollonia, Boniface, Sophia and the Virgin of Antioch, but they had already been dropped from some earlier MSS: M. Jeremy, ‘Caxton’s Golden Legend and Varagine’s Legenda Aurea’, ibid., 21 (1946), p. 214 (n. 12). Jeremy explains (ibid., n. 13) that she uses the word ‘represented’ because ‘although Caxton’s chapters correspond nominally, they are in every case based on divergent texts’. Ibid., pp. 212–21 (at p. 212); M. Jeremy, ‘Caxton’s Original Additions to the Legenda Aurea’, MLN , 64 (1949), pp. 259–61; M. Jeremy, ‘Caxton’s Life of S. Rocke’, ibid., 67 (1952), pp. 313–17; N. F. Blake, ‘The Biblical Additions in Caxton’s “Golden Legend”’, Traditio, 25 (1969), pp. 231–47. J. Coatesworth, ‘The Design of the Golden Legend: English Printing in a European Context’, BJRL, 91 (2015), pp. 21–49; J. Scahill, ‘Caxton at Work: How the Temporale of the Golden Legend Was Made’, Journal of the Early Book Society for the Study of Manuscripts and Printing History, 21 (2018), pp. 197–214.

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67. M. Taguchi et al. (eds), William Caxton, The Golden Legend, I, EETS, Original Series, 355 (forthcoming, Oxford, 2020). 68. See her essay cited above, n. 66. 69. M. Ring, ‘Annotating the Golden Legend in Early Modern England’, RQ , 72 (2019), pp. 816–62. 70. F. W. Weaver (ed.), Somerset Medieval Wills (Third Series) 1531–1558, Somerset Record Society, XXI (no place, 1905), pp. 1–2 (Pakenham); F. W. Weaver (ed.), Somerset Medieval Wills (1383–1500), Somerset Record Society, XVI (no place, 1901), p. 294 (Stenyng). 71. A. S. Hoch, ‘St. Martin of Tours: His Transformation into a Chivalric Hero and Franciscan Ideal’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 50 Bd, H. 4 (1987), pp. 471–82 (at pp. 472, 481). 72. S. Knight, ‘Remembering Robin Hood: Five Centuries of Outlaw Ideology’, European Journal of English Studies, 10 (2006), pp. 149–61 (at p. 149), a rude and simplistic discussion to be treated with caution. 73. D. Crook, ‘Some Further Evidence Concerning the Dating of the Origins of the Legend of Robin Hood’, EHR, XCIX (1984), pp. 530–4. 74. T. H. Ohlgren, ‘Robin Hood and the Monk and the Manuscript Context of Cambridge Universiy Library MS Ff. 5. 48’, Nottingham Medieval Studies [hereafter NMS], XLVIII (2004), pp. 80–115. 75. T. H. Ohlgren, ‘Richard Call, the Pastons, and the Manuscript Context of Robin Hood and the Potter (Cambridge, University Library Ee. 4. 35. 1)’, ibid., XLV (2001), pp. 210–33. 76. BL, Add. MS 27879. 77. Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.2.64, analysed in J. Marshall, ‘“Goon in-to Bernysdale”: The Trail of the Paston Robin Hood Play’, Leeds Studies in English, New Series, 29 (1998), pp. 185–217. 78. M. Ikegami, ‘The Language and the Date of A Gest of Robyn Hode’, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 96 (1995), pp. 271–81; T. H. Ohlgren, ‘Edwardus Redivivus in A Gest of Robyn Hode’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 99 (2000), pp. 1–28; and P. J. A. Franssen, ‘Jan van Doesborch: The Antwerp Connection’, Quærendo, 47 (2017), pp. 293, 300. 79. (i) D. Wiles (ed.), The Early Plays of Robin Hood (Cambridge, 1981); (ii) R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor (eds), The Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (revised edn, Stroud, 1997); (iii) S. Knight and T. Ohlgren (eds), Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales (2nd edn, Kalamazoo, MI, c.2000); (iv) T. H. Ohlgren (ed.), Robin Hood: The Early Poems, 1465–1560: Texts, Contexts, and Ideology (Newark, Delaware, c.2007); and (v) T. H. Ohlgren and L. M. Matheson (eds), Early Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Edition of the Texts, ca. 1425 to ca. 1600, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 428 (Tempe, AZ, 2013).

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80. This paragraph rests upon J. D. Stokes, ‘Robin Hood and the Churchwardens in Yeovil’, Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, 3 (1986), pp. 1–25 (at p. 8); R. Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 27–33, 60; C. Richardson, ‘The Figure of Robin Hood within the Carnival Tradition’, Records of Early English Drama, 22 (1997), pp. 18–25 (at p. 18); R. B. Dobson, ‘Robin Hood: The Genesis of a Popular Hero’, in T. Hahn (ed.), Robin Hood in Popular Culture: Violence, Transgression, and Justice (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 61–77 (at p. 65); J. Marshall, ‘“Comyth in Robyn Hode”: Paying and Playing the Outlaw at Croscombe’, Leeds Studies in English, New Series, 32 (2001), pp. 345–68; A. J. Pollard, Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context (Abingdon, 2004), p. 11; J. Marshall, ‘Gathering in the Name of the Outlaw: REED and Robin Hood’, in A. Douglas and S.-B. MacLean (eds), REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years (Toronto, 2006), pp. 65–84; and C. Davidson, Festivals and Plays in Late Medieval Britain (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 36–9, 54, 111–12. 81. R. H. Hilton, ‘The Origins of Robin Hood’, P&P, 14 (1958), pp. 30– 44. 82. J. C. Holt, ‘The Origins and Audience of the Ballads of Robin Hood’, ibid., 18 (1960), pp. 89–110 and J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (1st edn, London, 1982; 2nd edn, London, 2011). See also J. C. Holt, ‘Hood, Robin (supposedly fl. late 12th–thirteenth centuries)’, in ODNB. 83. R. B. Dobson and J. Taylor (eds), The Rymes of Robyn Hood: An Introduction to the English Outlaw (revised edn, Stroud, 1997), p. 34. 84. C. Richmond, ‘An Outlaw and Some Peasants: The Possible Significance of Robin Hood’, NMS, XXXVII (1993), pp. 90–101 (at pp. 99, 95, 98, 99, 98, 92, 93, 99, 92). 85. R. Almond and A. J. Pollard, ‘The Yeomanry of Robin Hood and Social Terminology in Fifteenth-Century England’, P&P, 170 (2001), pp. 52– 77 (at p. 77). 86. A. J. Pollard, ‘Idealising Criminality: Robin Hood in the Fifteenth Century’, in R. Horrox and S. Rees Jones (eds), Pragmatic Utopias: Ideals and Communities, 1200–1630 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 156–73 (at pp. 161, 162, 167). 87. A. J. Pollard, ‘Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest and the Sheriff of Nottingham’, NMS, LII (2008), pp. 113–30 (at pp. 122, 127, 128). 88. A. J. Pollard, ‘Political Ideology in the Early Stories of Robin Hood’, in J. C. Appleby and P. Dalton (eds), Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society, c.1066–c.1600 (Farnham, 2009), pp. 111–28 (at p. 126). 89. M. P. Carroll, ‘The Early Robin Hood and “The Myght of Mylde Marye”: Revisiting the Lived Experience of Catholicism in Late Medieval

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91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

103.

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England’, Studies in Religion /Sciences Religieuses, 43 (2014), pp. 116– 34. J. Taylor, ‘“Me Longeth Sore to Bernysdale”: Centralization, Resistance, and the Bare Life of the Greenwood in A Gest of Robyn Hode’, MP, 110 (2013), pp. 313–39 (at p. 315). R. W. Hoyle, ‘A Re-Reading of the Gest of Robyn Hode’, NMS, 61 (2017), pp. 67–113 (at pp. 107, 68). A. J. Pollard, Imagining Robin Hood: The Late-Medieval Stories in Historical Context (Abingdon, 2004), p. 11. E. Cameron, The European Reformation (1st edn, Oxford, 1991), p. 64. L. W. Spitz, ‘Humanism and the Reformation’, in R. M. Kingdon (ed.), Transition and Revolution: Problems and Issues of European Renaissance and Reformation History (Minneapolis, MN, 1974), pp. 153–67 (at p. 154). D. Starkey, ‘England’, in R. Porter and M. Teich (eds), The Renaissance in National Context (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 146–63 (at pp. 146, 156). C. Carroll, ‘Humanism and English Literature in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries’, in J. Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 246–68 (at p. 247). R. Rex, ‘Humanism’, in A. Pettegree (ed.), The Reformation World (London, 2000), pp. 51–70 (at pp. 52, 53). J. Hankins, ‘Humanism and the Origins of Modern Political Thought’, in J. Kraye (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 118–41 (at pp. 125, 127–8). We arrived at the notion of ‘culture war’ before reading Hankins’s essay, but it is encouraging to find him in agreement. K. Amis, Lucky Jim (London, 1954). D. Baker-Smith, ‘“Inglorious Glory”: 1513 and the Humanist Attack on Chivalry’, in S. Anglo (ed.), Chivalry in the Renaissance (Woodbridge, 1990), pp. 129–44, misdating (p. 130) first publication of the Querela Pacis ‘1518’. See also E. Rummel, ‘The Reception of Erasmus’ Adages in Sixteenth-Century England’, Renaissance and Reformation /Renaissance et Réforme, New Series, 18 (1994), pp. 19–30; E. Ní Chuilleanáin, ‘Motives of Translation: More, Erasmus and Lucian’, Hermathena, 183 (2007), pp. 49–62. L. Jardine (ed.), Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince (Cambridge, 1997), p. 61. F. Manley and R. S. Sylvester (eds), Richard Pace, De Fructu Qui Ex Doctrina Percipitur (The Benefit of a Liberal Education), The Renaissance Society of America, Renaissance Text Series, II (New York, 1967), pp. 23–5. R. Hyrde (trans.), Juan Luis Vives, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman … (London, [1529?]) [STC,

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104.

105. 106.

107. 108.

109.

110.

111. 112.

113.

24856], sig. [E4]r. There is a modern edn of part of the original work: C. Fantazzi (ed. and trans.) and C. Matheeussen (ed.), J. L. Vives, De Institutione Feminae Christianae: Liber Primus (Leiden, 1996). For insight into the author’s unusual outlook, see I. Bejczy, ‘“Historia Praestat Omnibus Disciplinis ”: Juan Luis Vives on History and Historical Study’, RS, 17 (2003), pp. 69–83. T. Paynell (trans.), Juan Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband … (London, [1555?]) [STC, 24855], sig. [O7]r–v. A modern edn of the original work is: C. Fantazzi (ed. and trans.), De Officio Mariti (Leiden, 2006). W. Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man … (‘Marlborow in the lande of Hesse’ [recte Antwerp], 1528) [STC, 24446], fol. 20r. D. Erasmus, De Pueris Statim ac Liberaliter Instituendis Libellus … (Basel, 1529), an incomplete English translation of which is printed in W. H. Woodward, Desiderius Erasmus Concerning the Aim and Method of Education (Cambridge, 1904), pp. 179–222 (at p. 214). For analysis, see E. Rummel, ‘Structure and Argumentation in Erasmus’ De Pueris Instituendis ’, Renaissance and Reformation /Renaissance et Réforme, New Series, 5 (1981), pp. 127–40. T. F. Mayer (ed.), Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, CS, 4th Series, 37 (London, 1989), pp. 125, 126. G. R. Elton, Policy and Police: The Enforcement of the Reformation in the Age of Thomas Cromwell (Cambridge, 1972) [hereafter Elton, Policy], pp. 195–8 (at p. 196). E. Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and Resistance: Narratives of Chivalry in MidTudor England’, RS, 24 (2010), pp. 482–95 (errors and omissions). See also H. R. Tedder, revised by M. C. Erler, ‘Copland, William (d. 1569)’, in ODNB. The others are: Joshua, Hector, David, Alexander, Judas Maccabeus, Julius Caesar, Arthur and Charles the Great: R. Lloyd, A Briefe Discourse of the Most Renowned Actes and Right Valiant Conquests of Those Puisant Princes, Called the Nine Worthies … (London, 1584) [STC, 16634], sigs [F4]v–[G2]r. R. Ascham, The Scholemaster … (London, 1570) [STC, 832], fol. 27r–v. R. S. Crane, ‘The Reading of an Elizabethan Youth’, MP, 11 (1913), pp. 269–71 (Latin); H. Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), p. 444 (n. 101) (English). See also J. Ferris, ‘Ashley, Robert (1565–1641)’, in ODNB. W. Goodyear (trans.), J. de Cartigny, The Voyage of the Wandering Knight … (London, 1581) [STC, 4700], analysed in M. Nievergelt, ‘Francis Drake: Merchant, Knight and Pilgrim’, RS, 23 (2009), pp. 53– 70, quoting (p. 59 n. 39) Christopher Hodgkins’s opinion that Drake

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115.

116.

117.

118. 119.

120.

121. 122.

123.

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was ‘one of the first commoner “celebrities” in English history’. See also J. A. Bennett, ‘Norman, Robert (fl. 1560–1584)’, in ODNB (errors). See R. S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance (Menasha, WI, 1919); A. Davis, Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance (Cambridge, 2003), especially pp. 1–39; and E. L. Wilson, ‘Reading, Romance, and Humanism in Early Modern England’, University of York, PhD thesis (2007). R. P. Adams, ‘Bold Bawdry and Open Manslaughter: The English New Humanist Attack on Medieval Romance’, HLQ , 23 (1959), pp. 33–48 (at pp. 34, 35, 36, 37). S. L. Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History (Madison, WI, and London, 1985), pp. 39, 50; A. K. Frazier, Possible Lives: Authors and Saints in Renaissance Italy (New York, 2005), p. 201 (n. 143). B. Radice (trans.) and A. H. T. Levi (ed.), Erasmus, Praise of Folly and Letter to Martin Dorp 1515 (Harmondsworth, 1971), pp. 8, 125–31 (at p. 125). D. Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani … (Basel, 1518), pp. 57–8. BL, Add. MS 89149, fols 57v–58r; B. Cummings, ‘William Tyndale and Erasmus on How to Read the Bible: A Newly Discovered Manuscript of the English Enchiridion’, Reformation, 23 (2018), pp. 29–52; D. Erasmus, A Booke Called in Latyn Enchiridion Militis Christiani, and in Englysshe the Manuell of the Christen Knyght … (London, 1533) [STC, 10479]. Due to a flaw in EEBO, the relevant pages of STC, 10479 are inaccessible. We therefore quote the corresponding passage from the next available edn: D. Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani, Whiche May be Called in Englysshe the Hansom Weapon of a Christen Knyght … ([London, 1534]) [STC, 10480], sigs [G8]v–H2r. Bartlett, Saints, pp. 85–6. D. Erasmus, Familiarium Colloquiorum … (Basel, 1526), more readily accessible in C. R. Thompson (ed. and trans.), Colloquies, 2 vols, Collected Works of Erasmus, 39 and 40 (Toronto, 1997), II pp. 619– 74. For analysis, see G. Waller, Walsingham and the English Imagination (Farnham, 2011), pp. 65–90, though he is mistaken in stating (p. 66) that the ‘Peregrinatio’ had first appeared in the 1524 edn. Anon. (trans.), D. Erasmus, A Dialoge or Communication of Two Persons Devysyd … in the Laten Tonge … Intituled [the] Pylgremage of Pure Devotyon … ([London?, 1536–37]) [STC, 10454]. For contexualization, see C. Shrank, ‘Mirroring the “Long Reformation”: Translating Erasmus’ Colloquies in Early Modern England’, Reformation, 24 (2019), pp. 59–75, where (pp. 63–4) a revised date is suggested convincingly. Ibid., p. 61.

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125. J. L. Vives, De Causis Corruptarum Artium …, printed in J. L. Vives, De Disciplinis Libri XX (Antwerp, 1531), quoted (in S. L. Reames’s translation) in E. Birge Vitz, ‘From the Oral to the Written in Medieval and Renaissance Saints’ Lives’, in R. Blumenfeld-Kosinski and T. Szell (eds), Images of Sainthood in Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1991), pp. 97–114 (at p. 110). 126. F. Watson (ed. and trans.), Vives: On Education: A Translation of the De Tradendis Disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives (Cambridge, 1913), pp. cxlviii, 248–9. 127. The Reformation Parliament did not convene until 3 November 1529: S. E. Lehmberg, The Reformation Parliament, 1529–1536 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 76. 128. Sir Thomas More, A Dyaloge … Wherin be Treated Dyvers Maters, as of the Veneration [and] Worshyp of Ymages [and] Relyques, Prayng to Sayntys, [and] Goyng on Pylgrymage … (London, 1529) [STC, 18084]; E. Duffy, ‘“The Comen Knowen Multytude of Crysten Men”: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and the Defence of Christendom’, in G. M. Logan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 191–215 (at p. 197, his emphasis). 129. Elton, Policy, pp. 112–17; M. C. Skeeters, Community and Clergy: Bristol and the Reformation c.1530–c.1570 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 38–46. 130. Duffy, Stripping, p. 381. 131. W. Marshall (trans.), M. Bucer, A Treatise Declaryng & Shewing … that Pyctures & Other Ymages Which Were Wont to be Worshypped, ar in no Wise to be Suffred in the … Churches of Christen Men … (n.p., [1535]) [STC, 24238]. We quote the title-page of STC, 24239 because that of STC, 24238 is missing in the EEBO copy. See also A. Ryrie, ‘Marshall, William (d. 1540?)’, in ODNB. 132. Elton, Policy, p. 246 (date); Bray, Documents, pp. 162–74 (text). 133. S. E. Lehmberg, The Later Parliaments of Henry VIII: 1536–1547 (Cambridge, 1977), p. 39 (date); D. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae …, 4 vols (London, 1737), III pp. 823–4 (text); Duffy, Stripping, pp. 394–5 (implications). 134. Henry VIII to Edward Fox, bishop of Hereford, Chertsey, 11 August [1536], printed in D. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae …, 4 vols (London, 1737), III p. 824. 135. Bray, Documents, pp. 175–8 (text). For a reason to link their promulgation with 1 August 1536, see D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (London, 2018), pp. 361, 665 (n. 58). 136. MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 227. 137. Elton, Policy, p. 254 (date); Bray, Documents, pp. 179–83 (text). 138. R. E. Scully, ‘The Unmaking of a Saint: Thomas Becket and the English Reformation’, CHR, 86 (2000), pp. 593–4.

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139. Elton, Policy, p. 197 (‘Becket … needed to be exorcised’); R. E. Scully, ‘The Unmaking of a Saint: Thomas Becket and the English Reformation’, CHR, 86 (2000), p. 594. 140. STC, 7790. 141. Printed in N. Pocock (ed.), Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 7 vols (new edn, Oxford, 1865), VI pp. 223–7. 142. D. Wilkins (ed.), Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae …, 4 vols (London, 1737), III pp. 835–6; J. F. Davis, ‘Lollards, Reformers and St. Thomas of Canterbury’, The University of Birmingham Historical Journal, IX (1963), pp. 12–13; Elton, Policy, p. 257 (n. 1, supporting J. H. Pollen’s exposure of the hoax); V. Houliston, ‘St Thomas Becket in the Propaganda of the English Counter-Reformation’, RS, 7 (1993), p. 48; and R. E. Scully, ‘The Unmaking of a Saint: Thomas Becket and the English Reformation’, CHR, 86 (2000), pp. 595–6. 143. Elton, Policy, pp. 195, 197. 144. S. L. Reames, The Legenda Aurea: A Reexamination of its Paradoxical History (Madison, WI, and London, 1985), pp. 27–9. Regarding France, her conclusions need qualification in the light of B. Dunn– Lardeau and D. Coq, ‘Fifteenth and Sixteenth-Century Editions of the Légende Dorée’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 47 (1985), pp. 87–101. 145. C. R. Friedrichs, The Early Modern City 1450–1750 (London, 1995). 146. R. Whiting, Local Responses to the English Reformation (Basingstoke, 1998), p. 97. 147. G. D. Dodds, ‘An Accidental Historian: Erasmus and the English History of the Reformation’, Church History, 82 (2013), pp. 273–92. 148. C. Copeland, ‘Sanctity’, in A. Bamji et al. (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 225–41. See also A. S. Larsen, ‘The Humanist Grammar of Sanctity in the Early Lives of Thomas More’, in E. von Contzen and A. Bernau (eds), Sanctity as Literature in Late Medieval Britain (Manchester, 2015), pp. 209–27. 149. H. L. Parish, ‘“Then May the Deuyls of Hell Be Sayntes Also’: The Mediaeval Church in Sixteenth-Century England’, Reformation, 4 (1999), pp. 71–91; H. L. Parish, ‘“Impudent and Abhominable Fictions”: Rewriting Saints’ Lives in the English Reformation’, SCJ , XXXII (2001), pp. 45–65; J. Mueller, ‘The Saints’, in B. Cummings and J. Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford, 2010), pp. 166–87; and P. Happé, ‘The Protestant Adaptation of the Saint Play’, in C. Davidson (ed.), The Saint Play in Medieval Europe, Medieval Institute Publications, Early Drama, Art, and Music Monograph Series, 8 (Kalamazoo, MI, 1986), pp. 205–40.

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150. J. M. Luxford, ‘An English Chronicle Entry on Robin Hood’, Journal of Medieval History, 35 (2009), pp. 70–6. 151. Anon., Dives [and] Paup[er] (London, 1493) [STC, 19212], sigs [F5]v–[F6]r. 152. R. Levin, ‘An Unrecorded Version of The Ship of Fools ’, The Review of English Studies, New Series, 54 (2003), pp. 464–72 (at p. 464); U. Gaier, ‘Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff and the Humanists’, PMLA, 83 (1968), pp. 266–70. 153. T. H. Jamieson (ed.), The Ship of Fools Translated by Alexander Barclay, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1874), I p. 72, II p. 155. 154. W. Tyndale, That Fayth the Mother of all Good Workes Justifieth Us Before We Can Bringe Forth Anye Good Worke … (‘Malborowe in the londe of Hesse’ [recte Antwerp], 1528) [STC, 24454], fol. 27v. 155. W. Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man … (‘Marlborow in the lande of Hesse’ [recte Antwerp], 1528) [STC, 24446], fol. 132r. 156. Anon., Rede Me and Be Nott Wrothe … ([Strasbourg, 1528]) [STC, 1462.7], sig. [D7]r. 157. N. Udall (trans.), D. Erasmus, Apophthegmes … ([London], 1542) [STC, 10443], sig. ***[1]v. See also sig. K3r. 158. R. Barnes, A Supplicatyon Made … Unto … Kinge Henrye the Eyght … ([Antwerp, 1531?]) [STC, 1470], fol. 102r. 159. S. Anglo (ed.), ‘An Early Tudor Programme for Plays and Other Demonstrations Against the Pope’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XX (1957), p. 179. On the date, see Elton, Policy, p. 185. More recent discussion is available in T. A. Sowerby, Renaissance and Reform in Tudor England: The Careers of Sir Richard Morison c.1513–1556 (Oxford, 2010), pp. 88–9. 160. S. Field, ‘Devotion, Discontent, and the Henrician Reformation: The Evidence of the Robin Hood Stories’, JBS, 41 (2002), pp. 6–22. 161. E. Gerhardt, ‘John Bale’s Adaptation of Parish- and Civic-Drama’s Playing Practices’, Reformation, 19 (2014), pp. 6–20. For context, but containing errors, see J. Leininger, ‘Evangelical “Enterluders”: Patronage and Playing in Reformation England’, Reformation & Renaissance Review, 4 (2002), pp. 55, 63–4. 162. E. Nelson, ‘Utopia Through Italian Eyes: Thomas More and the Critics of Civic Humanism’, RQ , 59 (2006), pp. 1029–57 (at pp. 1032, 1032– 3, 1038). See also D. Marsh, ‘Cicero in the Renaissance’, in C. Steel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Cicero (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 306– 17. 163. S. Xenophontos and K. Oikonomopoulou, ‘Introduction’, in S. Xenophontos and K. Oikonomopoulou (eds), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Plutarch (Leiden, 2019), pp. 1–13; F. Frazier and O. Guerrier, ‘Plutarch’s French Translation by Amyot’, ibid., pp. 421–35; M.

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164.

165.

166.

167.

168.

169.

170. 171.

172. 173.

174.

175.

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Lucchesi, ‘The First Editions of Plutarch’s Works, and the Translation by Thomas North’, ibid., pp. 436–57. J. Mossman, ‘Plutarch and English Biography’, Hermathena, 183 (2007), pp. 75–100; J. Martin, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of Biography (Oxford, 2001), pp. 32–65. J. M. Weiss, ‘The Six Lives of Rudolph Agricola: Forms and Functions of the Humanist Biography’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 30 (1981), pp. 19– 39 (at pp. 19, 21, 33). There are, nevertheless, fugitive bits of evidence. See, for example, the plaintive MS verses added (perhaps by Sir William Bellasis) to a copy of Copland’s 1557 edn of Malory: E. Wilson-Lee, ‘Romance and Resistance: Narratives of Chivalry in Mid-Tudor England’, RS, 24 (2010), pp. 487–9. N. Jones, ‘Living the Reformations: Generational Experience and Political Perception in Early Modern England’, HLQ , 60 (1999), pp. 273– 88. C. Shrank, ‘Andrew Borde and the Politics of Identity in Reformation England’, Reformation, 5 (2001), pp. 1–26 and P. Marshall, ‘Is the Pope Catholic? Henry VIII and the Semantics of Schism’, in E. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 22–48. A. Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2011); C. Marsh, ‘Sacred Space in England, 1560–1640: The View from the Pew’, JEH , 53 (2002), pp. 286–311. G. H. Martin and A. McConnell, ‘Strype, John (1643–1737)’, in ODNB. A. Atherstone, ‘The Martyrs’ Memorial at Oxford’, JEH , 54 (2003), pp. 278–301; A. Atherstone, ‘Memorializing William Tyndale’, BJRL, 90 (2014), pp. 155–78. R. Maitzen, ‘“This Feminine Preserve”: Historical Biographies by Victorian Women’, Victorian Studies, 38 (1995), pp. 371–93. J. E. Neale, ‘The Biographical Approach to History’, History, New Series, 36 (1951), pp. 193–203; B. W. Tuchman, ‘Biography as a Prism of History’, in M. Pachter (ed.), Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art (Washington, DC, 1979), pp. 132–47; and K. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005). P. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979); MacCulloch, Cranmer; D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cromwell: A Life (London, 2018). M. Longaker, English Biography in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, PA, 1931), pp. 1–61 (‘Life-Writing Before the Eighteenth Century’);

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J. H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, CT, and London, 1984); T. F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf (eds), The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995); P. Burke, ‘Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes’, in R. Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), pp. 17–28; G. Parry, ‘Biography in the Seventeenth Century’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 29 (2000), pp. 314–22; G. Braden, ‘Biography’, in R. Ellis et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 4 vols (Oxford, 2005– 10), II pp. 322–30; I. Backus, Life Writing in Reformation Europe: Lives of Reformers by Friends, Disciples and Foes (Aldershot, 2008); K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008); B. Cummings, ‘Autobiography and the History of Reading’, in B. Cummings and J. Simpson (eds), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (Oxford, 2010), pp. 635–57; M. M. Dowd and J. A. Eckerle, ‘Recent Studies in Early Modern English Life Writing’, English Literary Renaissance, 40 (2010), pp. 132–62; M. Prestwich, ‘Medieval Biography’, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 40 (2010), pp. 325–46 (useful general reflections); A. Smyth, Autobiography in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2010); D. Clarke, ‘Life Writing’, in A. Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 452–67; P. Baker (ed.), Biography, Historiography, and Modes of Philosophizing: The Tradition of Collective Biography in Early Modern Europe, The Renaissance Society of America Texts and Studies Series, 7 (Leiden, 2017); K. Hodgkin, ‘Autobiographical Writings’, in A. Hiscock and H. Wilcox (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion (Oxford, 2017), pp. 207–22; and Z. Leader (general ed.), The Oxford History of Life-Writing, 7 vols (Oxford, 2018–), 2 (‘Early Modern’). 176. Major contributions include: B. S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999); A. Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, c.2002); C. Highley, ‘Richard Verstegan’s Book of Martyrs’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds), John Foxe and his World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 183–97; M. L. Hickerson, Making Women Martyrs in Tudor England (Basingstoke, 2005); T. M. McCoog, ‘Construing Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1582–1602’, in E. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 95– 127; T. S. Freeman and T. F. Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom in

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178.

179.

180. 181.

182.

183.

184.

185.

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England, c.1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007); T. Freeman, ‘The Power of Polemic: Catholic Responses to the Calendar in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, JEH , 61 (2010), pp. 475–95; P. Lake and M. Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011); and E. Evenden and T. S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2013). T. S. Freeman and S. B. Monta, ‘The Style of Authorship in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments ’, in A. Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 522–43 (at pp. 529–30, their emphasis). Foxe cited the ‘Legenda Aurea’ in 1563: E. Evenden and T. S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2013), p. 114. [T. S. Freeman], ‘Appendix: The Marian Martyrs’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), Mary Tudor: Old and New Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2011), pp. 225–71. R. E. Shields and J. H. Forse, ‘Creating the Image of a Martyr: John Porter, Bible Reader’, SCJ , XXXIII (2002), pp. 725–34. J. Moody (ed.), The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605 (Stroud, 1998); K. L. Parker and E. J. Carlson, ‘Practical Divinity’: The Works and Life of Revd Richard Greenham (Aldershot, 1998). Obviously, that was because, in some instances, the subject had lived into the seventeenth century, such as Whitgift (item 56). But the point is that even when that had been the case, the publication of a biography might be much delayed: Dillingham’s ‘Life’ (item 66) came out sixty years after Chaderton’s death. E. S. Leedham-Green (ed.), Books in Cambridge Inventories: Book-Lists from Vice-Chancellor’s Court Probate Inventories in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1986). E. Leedham-Green and D. McKitterick (eds), ‘A Catalogue of Cambridge University Library in 1583’, in J. P. Carley and C. G. C. Tite (eds), Books and Collectors 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson (London, 1997), pp. 170 (Foxe), 181 (Plutarch), 200 (Giovio), 201 (Cuspinian), 203 (Platina), 213 (Plutarch), 214 (Plutarch). R. Jahn, ‘Letters and Booklists of Thomas Chard (or Chare) of London, 1583–4’, The Library, 4th Series, IV (1923), pp. 219–37, though there is reference (p. 231) to a book on Guy of Warwick. M. St. Clare Byrne and G. Scott Thomson (eds), ‘“My Lord’s Books”: The Library of Francis, Second Earl of Bedford, in 1584’, The Review of English Studies, VII (1931), pp. 396 (Plutarch), 399 (Charlemagne), 402 (Lorraine and Catherine de’Medici).

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187. A. Rodger (ed.), ‘Roger Ward’s Shrewsbury Stock: An Inventory of 1585’, The Library, 5th Series, XIII (1958), pp. 251 (Charlemagne), 255 (Plutarch), 258 (Luther). 188. L. Hotson, ‘The Library of Elizabeth’s Embezzling Teller’, Studies in Bibliography: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, II (1949–50), pp. 51, 55, 58, 60. 189. G. Warkentin, ‘The World and the Book at Penshurst: The Second Earl of Leicester (1595–1677) and His Library’, The Library, 6th Series, XX (1998), pp. 332–3, 334, 337. 190. F. Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, Divine and Humane (London, 1605) [STC, 1164], sig. Dd[1]v. 191. P. Collinson, ‘“A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in D. Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History, Studies in Church History, 14 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 223–49, reprinted in P. Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 499–525 (at pp. 500, 501). 192. J. Eales, ‘Samuel Clarke and the “Lives” of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History, 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 365–76. 193. P. Lake, ‘Reading Clarke’s Lives in Political and Polemical Context’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008), pp. 293–318 (at p. 301). 194. On him, see W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’s Religious Past (Oxford, 2018). 195. S. Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie … Whereunto are Added, the Lives of Sundry Modern Divines … (London, 1651) [Wing, C4513], sig. [b4]r. See also D. H. Woodward, ‘Thomas Fuller, the Protestant Divines, and Plagiary Yet Speaking’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, IV (1966), pp. 201–24. 196. J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford, 1984), p. 1. 197. C. Guillén, ‘Notes Toward the Study of the Renaissance Letter’, in B. K. Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, Harvard English Studies, 14 (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 70–101; P. Croft, ‘Libels, Popular Literacy and Public Opinion in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, LXVIII (1995), pp. 266– 85; G. Schneider, ‘Libelous Letters in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, MP, 105 (2008), pp. 475–509; A. Bellany, ‘Libel’, in G. Kelly (general ed.), The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, 9 vols (Oxford, 2011–), I pp. 141–63; A. Andreani, ‘Manuscripts, Secretaries,

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198. 199.

200.

201.

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and Scribes: The Production of Diplomatic Letters at Court’, in C. M. Bajetta et al. (eds), Elizabeth I’s Foreign Correspondence: Letters, Rhetoric, and Politics (New York, 2014), pp. 3–23; J. Daybell, ‘Early Modern Letter-Books, Miscellanies, and the Reading and Reception of Scribally Copied Letters’, in J. Eckhardt and D. Starza Smith (eds), Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2014), pp. 57–72; and M. Greengrass, ‘An “Epistolary Reformation”: The Role and Significance of Letters in the First Century of the Protestant Reformation’, in U. Rublack (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of The Protestant Reformations (Oxford, 2017), pp. 431–56. Due to a lack of space, our discussion of ‘epigraphs and images’ will appear elsewhere. F. B. Tromly, ‘“Accordinge to Sounde Religion”: The Elizabethan Controversy over the Funeral Sermon’, The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 13 (1983), pp. 293–312; D. d’Avray, ‘The Comparative Study of Memorial Preaching’, TRHS, 5th Series, 40 (1990), pp. 25–42; R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 295–330; and E. J. Carlson, ‘English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety in Pre-1640 Sermons’, Albion, 32 (2000), pp. 567–97. D. R. Woolf, ‘Genre into Artifact: The Decline of the English Chronicle in the Sixteenth Century’, SCJ , XIX (1988), pp. 321–54; E. J. Devereux, ‘Empty Tuns and Unfruitful Grafts: Richard Grafton’s Historical Publications’, ibid., XXI (1990), pp. 33–56; D. S. Kastan, ‘Opening Gates and Stopping Hedges: Grafton, Stow, and the Politics of Elizabethan History Writing’, in E. Fowler and R. Greene (eds), The Project of Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 66–79; D. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003); I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (eds), John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book (London, 2004); B. L. Beer, ‘John Kyngston and Fabyan’s Chronicle (1559)’, The Library, 7th Series, 14 (2013), pp. 199–207; B. van Es, ‘Raphael Holinshed and Historical Writing’, in A. Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 310–25; and P. Kewes et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford, 2013). There is, however, a palimpsest brass tablet in Hadleigh Church (Suffolk) to the memory of Rowland Taylor, who had been martyred on Aldham Common, north of the town, on 9 February 1555, though Lindley does not state when it was erected, if known: P. Lindley, ‘“Disrespect for the Dead”? The Destruction of Tomb Monuments in Mid-SixteenthCentury England’, Church Monuments, XIX (2004), pp. 71–2 (misdates

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202.

203.

204.

205. 206. 207. 208.

209.

execution). The brass is omitted in E. J. Carlson, ‘Taylor, Rowland (d. 1555)’, in ODNB. Camden’s essay ‘Epitaphes’ survives in at least three states. As delivered to the Society of Antiquaries in 1600, it is printed in Anon. (ed.), A Collection of Curious Discourses …, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1771), I pp. 228–32. He published an expanded version in [W. Camden], Remaines of a Greater Worke … (London, 1605) [STC, 4521], pp. 27– 59 (2nd pagination) (at p. 28). A still longer text, date unspecified, appeared posthumously in pp. 310–54 of the 1771 compilation. L. Toulmin Smith (ed.), The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, 5 vols (London, 1906–10), I pp. 127 (Fairford), 159 (Stoke sub Hamdon), 265 (defacement). Leland’s transcription of the Tame text is accurate, but he differed in handling abbreviations and dates: C. T. Davis, The Monumental Brasses of Gloucestershire (London, 1899), pp. 98–103 (at p. 100, with English translation). The literature is huge, but see especially J. Bertram, ‘Orate Pro Anima: Some Aspects of Medieval Devotion Illustrated on Brasses’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, XIII Part 4 (1983), pp. 321–42; M. Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford, 1988); C. Burgess, ‘“A Fond Thing Vainly Invented”: An Essay on Purgatory and Pious Motive in Late Medieval England’, in S. J. Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion 1350–1750 (London, 1988), pp. 56– 84; Duffy, Stripping, pp. 332–4, 494–5; P. Lindley, ‘“Disrespect for the Dead”? The Destruction of Tomb Monuments in Mid-SixteenthCentury England’, Church Monuments, XIX (2004), pp. 53–79; C. Burgess, ‘Obligations and Strategy: Managing Memory in the Later Medieval Parish’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, XVIII Part 4 (2012), pp. 289–310; and M. Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2016). N. Saul, ‘What an Epitaph Can Tell Us: Recovering the World of John Lovekyn’, Ecclesiology Today, 43 (2010), pp. 61–7. N. Llewellyn, Funeral Monuments in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge, 2000) [hereafter Llewellyn, Monuments ], pp. 163–80. R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 344, 351. R. Rex, ‘Monumental Brasses and the Reformation’, Transactions of the Monumental Brass Society, XIV Part 5 (1990), pp. 376–94 [hereafter Rex, ‘Brasses’], pp. 383, 385. On increasing word-counts, see P. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), p. 271. P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, and London, 1964–69), II pp. 146–8 (at p. 146).

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210. 211. 212. 213. 214.

215. 216.

217.

218. 219.

220.

221. 222. 223. 224.

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Origin and impact are discussed in P. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002), pp. 168–72. Rex, ‘Brasses’, pp. 385–6, 391. See above, p. 27. D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge, 1980). Rex, ‘Brasses’, pp. 386–9. J. Goodrich, ‘Class, Humanism, and Neo-Latin Epitaphs in Early Modern England: The Funerary Inscriptions of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell’, SCJ , XLIX (2018), p. 366 (our emphases). This problematic essay ignores F. Heal, ‘Reputation and Honour in Court and Country: Lady Elizabeth Russell and Sir Thomas Hoby’, TRHS, 6th Series, VI (1996), pp. 161–78. Rex, ‘Brasses’, pp. 380, 391–2. P. Lindley, ‘“Disrespect for the Dead”? The Destruction of Tomb Monuments in Mid-Sixteenth-Century England’, Church Monuments, XIX (2004), p. 73. N. Llewellyn, ‘Honour in Life, Death and in the Memory: Funeral Monuments in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 6th Series, VI (1996), pp. 179–200 (at p. 179). K. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), pp. 147–86, 226–67 (at pp. 240–1). In the third state of Camden’s essay: Anon. (ed.), A Collection of Curious Discourses …, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1771), I pp. 319–20, 321, 329 [recte 339], 342–3 (Buchanan’s three epitaphs), 341. The location of Milles’s monument is undisclosed, but Traps’s was at St Leonard’s Foster Lane in London and Stow dated it 1526: C. L. Kingsford (ed.), A Survey of London by John Stow: Reprinted From the Text of 1603, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908), I pp. 306–7, II p. 342. T. Fuller, The Church-History of Britain; From the Birth of Jesus Christ, Untill the Year MDCXLVIII (London, 1655) [Wing, F2416], Book IX pp. 64–5. T. Fuller, The History of the Worthies of England … (London, 1662) [Wing, F2440], p. 238 (part). D. W. Garrow, The History & Antiquities of Croydon … (Croydon, 1818), pp. 285–7 (Latin, with English translation). P. Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 114–17. T. F. Ravenshaw (ed.), Antiente Epitaphes (From A.D. 1250 to A.D. 1800) Collected & Sett Forth in Chronologicall Order (London, 1878). For an overview, see K. S. Guthke, ‘Talking Stones: Anthologies of Epitaphs from Humanism to Popular Culture’, Harvard Library Bulletin, New Series, 10 (1999), pp. 19–69.

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225. A few cases are sketched in Llewellyn, Monuments, pp. 116–28. John Foxe is said (in Humfrey Wanley’s catalogue of Harleian MSS) to have drafted Latin and English epitaphs to George Talbot, 6th earl of Shrewsbury: BL, Harleian MS 374. 226. W. Lambarde, A Perambulation of Kent … (London, 1576) [STC, 15175.5]; J. Norden, Specvli Britanniæ Pars The Description of Hartfordshire ([London], 1598) [STC, 18637]. 227. e.g. C. L. Kingsford (ed.), A Survey of London by John Stow: Reprinted From the Text of 1603, 2 vols (Oxford, 1908), I pp. 207 (John Rainwell, 1445), 222 (John Shrow, 1487), 262 (Thomas Tusser, 1580). Many new monuments had been omitted, Stow explained to Manningham, because the subjects had been monument defacers ‘and soe [he] thinkes them worthy to be deprived of that memory whereof they have injuriously robbed others’: R. P. Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602–1603 (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1976), p. 154 (December 1602). 228. e.g. D. MacCulloch (ed.), The Chorography of Suffolk, Suffolk Records Society, XIX (Ipswich, 1976), pp. 76–9 (Little Glemham). 229. Gathered (amongst other Italian places) from Bologna, Florence, Naples, Rome, Siena and Venice. The [1554] edn (known from a single reference) is lost, but the work is accessible in the 2nd edn: Epitaphia et Inscriptiones Lvgvbres. A Gulielmo Berchero [i.e. W. Barker], Cum in Italia, Animi Causa, Peregrinaretur, Collecta (London, 1566) [STC, 1427]. See also K. R. Bartlett, ‘Barker, William (fl. 1540–1576)’, in ODNB, though more helpful is G. B. Parks, ‘William Barker, Tudor Translator’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 51 (1957), pp. 126–40. 230. J. Eliot, Ortho-Epia Gallica … (London, 1593) [STC, 7574], p. 163, quoted (inaccurately) in W. H. Bond, ‘The Epitaph of Sir Philip Sidney’, MLN , 58 (1943), pp. 253–7. 231. J. A. Pearce, ‘An Earlier Talbot Epitaph’, ibid., 59 (1944), pp. 327–9. Note that the interpretative scheme to which that piece relates is not universally accepted. On the whole issue, see now L. Manley, ‘Eagle and Hound: The “Epitaph” of Talbot and the Date of 1 H VI ’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 26 (2013), pp. 136–55. 232. R. P. Sorlien (ed.), The Diary of John Manningham of the Middle Temple 1602–1603 (Hanover, New Hampshire, 1976), p. 100 (October 1602). 233. Anon. (ed.), A Collection of Curious Discourses …, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1771), I pp. 121–2, 228–60, II pp. 375–7. 234. J. Weever, Ancient Funerall Monuments … (London, 1631) [STC, 25223]. See also D. Kathman, ‘Weever, John (1575/76–1632)’, in ODNB.

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235. Printed in T. Wright (ed.), Songs and Ballads, With Other Short Poems, Chiefly of the Reign of Philip and Mary (London, 1860), pp. 179–82. 236. On Sheale, see T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 16–21 (quoting Rollins), 323. 237. For the sake of brevity, in citing broadside epitaphs we give subjects’ names instead of quoting titles: Anon., on Edward VI (London, [1558?]) [STC, 5229]. The closing petition for God to save the king and queen puts composition within 1554–58. 238. Anon., on Mary I (London, [1559]) [STC, 17559]. The statement appended to the title, that this text had been ‘augmented by the first author’, implies that there had been an earlier edn, now lost. 239. J. Phillips, on countess of Lennox (London, [1578]) [STC, 19866]. See also a much longer work: J. Phillips, A Commemoration of the … Countis of Lennox … (London, [1578]) [STC, 19864]. 240. (i) W. Elderton, on marchioness [of Northampton] (London, [1569?]) [STC, 7562], which states the tune to be used in singing this ballad and is studied in J. Hyde, ‘William Elderton’s Ladie Marques Identified’, Notes and Queries, 260 (2015), pp. 541–2, naming her as Elizabeth Parr [née Brooke] (d. 1565); (ii) [T.] Churchyard, on earl of Pembroke (London, 1570) [STC, 5227]; (iii) J. Denton, on earl of Derby (London, [1572]) [STC, 6674]; (iv) what may be two drafts of a lost broadside epitaph to the 3rd earl of Derby survive in BL, Harleian MS 2129, printed in T. W. King and F. R. Raines (eds), Lancashire Funeral Certificates, The Chetham Society, LXXV ([Manchester], 1869), pp. 14–15 (signed ‘R’); (v) Guil. P. [William Patten], on earl of Arundel (London, [1580]) [STC, 19120.7, attributed to William Painter]; (vi) J. Phillips, on earl of Southampton ([London, 1581]) [STC, 19867]; (vii) N.[icholas] B.[ourman], on earl of Bedford (London, [1585]) [STC, 3412.7]. 241. (i) T. Newton, on Lady Knollys (‘Knowles’) (London, [1569]) [STC, 18512]; (ii) T. Nelson, on Sir Francis Walsingham ([London, 1590]) [STC, 18424]. 242. (i) J. Awdelie, on John Veron (London, [1563?]) [STC, 992]; (ii) an epitaph by Thomas Brice on the London preacher Thomas Horton is likely, at forty-six lines, to have been printed as a broadside in 1564, but survives in a transcript of the 1570s: P. Lee, ‘The Compilation of a Seventeenth-Century Kentish Manuscript Book, Its Authorship, Ownership and Purpose’, Archaeologia Cantiana, CXV (1996), pp. 399–400, 401–2; (iii) N.[icholas] Bour.[man], on John Jewel (London, 1571) [STC, 3414]; (iv) W. Elderton, on John Jewel (London, [1571]) [STC, 7556]. 243. (i) R. M., on Richard Goodrich (‘Goodricke’) ([London, 1562]) [STC, 17145.3]; (ii) L. Lloyd, on Sir Edward Saunders (London, [1576])

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244.

245. 246. 247. 248.

249.

250.

251. 252. 253.

254.

[STC, 16620]; (iii) Anon., on Sir Edward Stanhope (London, 1608) [STC, 23224.5]. (i) Anon., on Francis Benison (London, 1570) [STC, 991]; (ii) J. Phillips, on wife of Alexander Avenon (‘Avenet’), lord mayor of London (London, [1570]) [STC, 19868]; (iii) J. Phillips, on Sir William Garrarde (‘Garrat’) (London, 1571) [STC, 19869]; (iv) R. B., on Benedict Spinola (London, [1580]) [STC, 1057]; (v) A. Fleming, on William Lambe (London, [1580]) [STC, 11038]. R. D., on Richard Price, esquire (London, [1587?]) [STC, 6178]. C. R. Livingston, ‘The Provenance of Three Early Broadsheets’, The Library, 6th Series, II (1980), pp. 53–60. See E. Goldring, ‘Elderton, William (d. in or before 1592)’, and A. Walsham, ‘Phillips [Phillip], John (d. 1594×1617)’, in ODNB. Livingston states (see above, n. 246) that over 4000 broadside ballads are estimated to have been published in the sixteenth century, of which only c.2000 are recorded in the Stationers’ Company register. Of those thousands, a mere 250 sheets (or thereabouts) are extant. See P. Milward, ‘The Jewel-Harding Controversy’, Albion, 6 (1974), pp. 320–41. One challenge in assessing reputations is that appreciations are sometimes undated, such as the couplet written in an early-modern hand and signed ‘G. D.’ on the title-page of a copy of Jewel’s 1564 Apologie: ‘A jewell once of Jewell England had /Few such are found, the pearles do prove so bad’: Sotheby’s, Highlights from the Mendham Collection: The Property of the Law Society of England and Wales, London, 5 June 2013 (Lot 84). But two pages of verse: S. P., on Dame Helen Branch (London, 1594) [STC, 19078.4]. Here and in what follows, we give subjects’ names instead of verbose titles. But six pages of verse: W. Patten, on William Winter (London, 1589) [STC, 19477]. But eight pages of verse: A.[ngel] D.[ay], on Sir Philip Sidney (London, [1586?]) [STC, 6409]. (i) But twelve pages of verse: F. Newport, on Dorothy Wynnes (London, [1560]) [STC, 18499]; (ii) But twelve pages of verse: J. Phillips, on Sir Christopher Hatton (London, 1591) [STC, 19876]; (iii) But five pages of epitaph: N. Bourman, on Lady Mary Ramsey (London, 1602) [STC, 3415]. J. Schlueter, ‘The Kassel Miscellany of Seventeenth-Century Poems’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 107 (2013), pp. 241–70; A. F. Marotti, ‘Christ Church, Oxford, and Beyond: Folger MS V.a.345 and Its Manuscript and Print Sources’, Studies in Philology, 113 (2016), pp. 850–78.

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255. J. F. McDiarmid, ‘Classical Epitaphs for Heroes of Faith: Mid-Tudor Neo-Latin Memorial Volumes and Their Protestant Humanist Context’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 3 (1996), pp. 23–47. 256. Noted in I. D. McFarlane, ‘The Renaissance Epitaph’, The Modern Language Review, 81 (1986), p. xxv and explored at length in S. L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb (Basingstoke, 2009). 257. K. Carleton, ‘Bonner, Edmund (d. 1569)’, in ODNB, ignoring the following literature. 258. (i) T. Broke the Younger, An Epitaphe Declaryng the Lyfe and End of D. Edmund Boner &c. (London, [1569?]) [STC, 3817.4]; (ii) T. Knell the Younger, An Epitaph, Or Rather a Short Discourse Made Upon the Life & Death of D. Boner … (London, 14 September 1569) [STC, 15033]; (iii) Lemeke Avale [pseudonym], A Commemoration or Dirige of Bastarde Edmonde Boner … ([London], 1569) [STC, 977], discussed briefly in A. Bryson, ‘Elizabethan Verse Libel’, in R. M. Smuts (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Age of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2016), pp. 480–1. 259. T. Broke the Younger, A Slaunderous Libell (Cast Abroad) Unto an Epitaph Set Forth Upon the Death of D. E. Boner, With a Reply to the Same Lying Libell (London, [1569?]) [STC, 3817.7], sig. [A1]v. 260. W. B. Gwyn, ‘Cruel Nero: The Concept of the Tyrant and the Image of Nero in Western Political Thought’, History of Political Thought, XII (1991), pp. 421–55. 261. D. C. Peck (ed.), Leicester’s Commonwealth: The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents (Athens, OH, 1985), pp. 86 (Nero), 87 (quotation), 121 (Nero). 262. E. A. Strathmann, ‘An Epitaph Attributed to Ralegh’, MLN , 60 (1945), pp. 111–14; D. C. Peck, ‘Another Version of the Leicester Epitaphium’, Notes and Queries, 221 (1976), pp. 227–8. For a superior reading of the shorter version, see Staffordshire Record Office, Stafford, MS D5121/3/1, fol. 138v. 263. D. C. Peck (ed.), ‘“The Letter of Estate”: An Elizabethan Libel’, Notes and Queries, 226 (1981), pp. 21–35 (at p. 30). See also D. C. Peck (ed.), ‘“News From Heaven and Hell”: A Defamatory Narrative of the Earl of Leicester’, English Literary Renaissance, 8 (1978), pp. 141– 58 and F. B. Williams, Jr (ed.), Thomas Rogers, Leicester’s Ghost, The Renaissance English Text Society, IV (Chicago, IL, 1972). 264. S. Adams, ‘Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester (1532/33–1588)’, in ODNB. 265. Llewellyn, Monuments, p. 118. 266. D. Hickman, ‘Wise and Religious Epitaphs: Funerary Inscriptions as Evidence for Religious Change in Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire, c.1500–1640’, Midland History, 26 (2001), pp. 107–27 (at p. 124).

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267. Ibid., p. 113. 268. B. Cobbing and P. Priestland, Sir Thomas Stanhope of Shelford: Local Life in Elizabethan Times (Radcliffe-on-Trent, 2003), pp. 171–7. 269. C. Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 183–92; B. Coward, ‘A “Crisis of the Aristocracy” in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries? The Case of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby, 1504–1642’, Northern History, XVIII (1982), pp. 66– 8; L. A. Knafla, ‘Stanley, Edward, third earl of Derby (1509–1572)’, in ODNB. 270. Llewellyn, Monuments; P. Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford, 2002); P. Sherlock, Monuments and Memory in Early Modern England (Aldershot, 2008). See also J. Hyde, ‘Verse Epitaphs and the Memorialisation of Women in Reformation England’, Literature Compass, 13 (2016), pp. 701–10. 271. E. Barry, ‘From Epitaph to Obituary: Death and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century British Culture’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11 (2008), pp. 259–75. 272. C. B. Williams, ‘Manuscript, Monument, Memory: The Circulation of Epitaphs in the 17th Century’, Literature Compass, 11 (2014), pp. 573– 82. 273. E. W. Ives, ‘The Fall of Wolsey’, in S. J. Gunn and P. G. Lindley (eds), Cardinal Wolsey: Church, State and Art (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 286–315, challenged unconvincingly in G. W. Bernard, ‘The Fall of Wolsey Reconsidered’, JBS, 35 (1996), pp. 277–310, reprinted in G. W. Bernard, Power and Politics in Tudor England (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 51–79. 274. For a succinct biography, see S. M. Jack, ‘Wolsey, Thomas (1470/71– 1530)’, in ODNB. 275. E. Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke … (London, 1548) [STC, 12721] [Henry VIII section separately foliated], fols 180r, 181v, 183v. 276. Calendar of Letters, Despatches, and State Papers, Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere [title repeatedly modified from Volume VI], eds G. A. Bergenroth et al., 13 vols in 18 parts (London etc., 1862–1954), IV Part II pp. 38–41 (Eustace Chapuys, imperial ambassador to the English Court, to the Empress Isabella, London, 23 January [1531]). 277. E. Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke … (London, 1548) [STC, 12721] [Henry VIII section separately foliated], fols 183v–184r, 193v–194v. On Bryan’s misinformation, and for evidence of similar false accounts, see R. H. Britnell, ‘Penitence and Prophecy: George Cavendish on the Last State of Cardinal Wolsey’, JEH , 48 (1997), pp. 271–2.

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278. D. Hay (ed. and trans.), The Anglica Historia of Polydore Vergil A.D. 1485–1537 , CS, 3rd Series, LXXIV (London, 1950), pp. 324–33. 279. The standard edn is R. S. Sylvester (ed.), The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, EETS, Original Series, 243 (London, 1959). 280. A. S. G. Edwards, ‘The Date of George Cavendish’s Metrical Visions ’, Philological Quarterly, 53 (1974), pp. 128–32 and A. S. G. Edwards (ed.), George Cavendish, Metrical Visions, The Renaissance English Text Society, IX (Columbia, South Carolina, 1980), pp. 29–37 (on Wolsey). For those compositional dates, see G. Armstrong, The English Boccaccio: A History in Books (Toronto and London, 2013), p. 24 and D. Gray, ‘Lydgate, John (c.1370–1449/50?)’, in ODNB respectively. 281. R. S. Sylvester, ‘Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey: The Artistry of a Tudor Biographer’, Studies in Philology, 57 (1960), pp. 44–71 (at pp. 48, 51, 52, 53). 282. W. W. Wooden, ‘The Art of Partisan Biography: George Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey’, Renaissance and Reformation /Renaissance et Réforme, New Series, 1 (1977), pp. 24–35 (at pp. 27–8). 283. R. H. Britnell, ‘Penitence and Prophecy: George Cavendish on the Last State of Cardinal Wolsey’, JEH , 48 (1997), pp. 263–81 (at pp. 273– 4, 279, 281). He writes (pp. 280–1) that ‘the declaration of truth’ was ‘the start of a deeply laid fuse’, but that does not make sense because the reader has just been told that Cavendish postponed the declaration until near the end of the work. Consequently, we have substituted ‘determination to tell the truth’, which seems to reflect more accurately what Britnell seeks to convey. 284. S. W. May, ‘Cavendish’s Use of Hall’s Chronicle’, Neophilologus, 59 (1975), pp. 293–300. 285. R. H. Britnell, ‘Penitence and Prophecy: George Cavendish on the Last State of Cardinal Wolsey’, JEH , 48 (1997), p. 265. 286. See also J. H. Anderson, Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (New Haven, CT, and London, 1984), pp. 27–39 (problematic); J. Crewe, ‘The Wolsey Paradigm?’, Criticism, 30 (1988), pp. 153–69; L. R. Gardiner, ‘George Cavendish: An Early Tudor Political Commentator?’, Parergon, New Series, 6 (1988), pp. 77–87; T. Betteridge, Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83 (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 126–39; M. Pincombe, ‘A Place in the Shade: George Cavendish and Tragedy’, in M. Pincombe and C. Shrank (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485– 1603 (Oxford, 2009), pp. 372–88; and B. J. Irish, Emotion in the Tudor Court: Literature, History, and Early Modern Feeling (Evanston, IL, 2018), pp. 19–53. 287. R. S. Sylvester (ed.), The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, EETS, Original Series, 243 (London, 1959), pp. 274–88;

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288. 289.

290.

291. 292. 293.

294. 295. 296. 297.

298.

299.

A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Unrecorded Manuscripts of George Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey’, Notes and Queries, CCLIV (2009), pp. 512–13. On one of the seven, see E. Treharne, ‘Stanford University’s Cavendish Manuscript: Wolsey, Elizabeth I, Shakespeare, and Milton’, in E. Jones (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts: A Festschrift for Gordon Campbell (Chichester, 2015), pp. 3–20. A. S. G. Edwards, ‘A Tudor Redactor at Work’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 3 (1973), pp. 10–13. The foregoing part of this paragraph, like its two predecessors, relies upon P. L. Wiley, ‘Renaissance Exploitation of Cavendish’s Life of Wolsey’, Studies in Philology, XLIII (1946), pp. 121–46 (bibliographical citations corrected) and P. Hornbeck, ‘Thomas Wolsey on Stage and Screen’, HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 72 Issue 4 (2016), pp. e1–e10, now greatly expanded in J. P. Hornbeck II, Remembering Wolsey: A History of Commemorations and Representations (New York, 2019). See also H. Trevor-Roper, Archbishop Laud 1573–1645 (3rd edn, Basingstoke, 1988), pp. 52–3; C. Jackson, ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the Presentation of the Henrician Reformation in His Life and Raigne of King Henry the Eighth’, The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013), pp. 139–61. L. R. Gardiner, ‘Further News of Cardinal Wolsey’s End, November– December 1530’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, LVII (1984), pp. 99–107. C. M. Barron, ‘Thomas More, the London Charterhouse and Richard III’, The Fifteenth Century, X (Woodbridge, 2011), p. 204. P. Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More (London, 1998), p. 395. P. Marshall, ‘Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons ’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 46. T. S. Freeman, ‘Introduction: It’s Only a Movie’, ibid., p. 11. S. Schama, ‘Television and the Trouble with History’, in D. Cannadine (ed.), History and the Media (London, 2004), p. 33. T. Hunt, ‘How Does Television Enhance History?’, ibid., p. 98. T. S. Freeman, ‘Introduction: It’s Only a Movie’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 18. K. Sharpe, Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England (London, 2013), p. 230, citing J. Guy, Thomas More (London, 2000). J. N. Super, ‘Fred Zinnemann, A Man for All Seasons (1966), and Documentary Fiction’, in A. Nolletti, Jr (ed.), The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives (Albany, NY, 1999), p. 157.

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300. 301. 302. 303. 304. 305.

306. 307.

308.

309. 310. 311. 312. 313. 314.

315. 316.

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Ibid., p. 165. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid., p. 176. Ibid., p. 161. Ibid. Quoted in J. R. Nicholl, ‘More Captivates America: The Popular Success of A Man for All Seasons ’, Moreana, XIII No. 51 (September 1976), p. 144. Ibid., p. 139. T. S. Freeman, ‘A Tyrant for All Seasons: Henry VIII on Film’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 42. J. N. Super, ‘Fred Zinnemann, A Man for All Seasons (1966), and Documentary Fiction’, in A. Nolletti, Jr (ed.), The Films of Fred Zinnemann: Critical Perspectives (Albany, NY, 1999), pp. 163–4. Ibid., p. 164. J. R. Nicholl, ‘More Captivates America: The Popular Success of A Man for All Seasons ’, Moreana, XIII No. 51 (September 1976), p. 144. A. Kaes, ‘History and Film: Public Memory in the Age of Electronic Dissemination’, History and Memory, 2 (1990), p. 113. Ibid., pp. 113–14 (his emphasis). D. Roche, Quentin Tarantino: Poetics and Politics of Cinematic Metafiction (Jackson, Mississippi, 2018), pp. 30–1. P. Marshall, ‘Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons ’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 59. T. Hunt, ‘How Does Television Enhance History?’, in D. Cannadine (ed.), History and the Media (London, 2004), p. 97. M. Aston, ‘John Wycliffe’s Reformation Reputation’, P&P, 30 (1965), pp. 23–51, a coda to which is A. Kenny, ‘The Accursed Memory: The Counter-Reformation Reputation of John Wyclif’, in A. Kenny (ed.), Wyclif in his Times (Oxford, 1986), pp. 147–68. D. Marcombe, ‘Bernard Gilpin: Anatomy of an Elizabethan Legend’, Northern History, XVI (1980), pp. 20–39; T. F. Mayer, ‘A StickingPlaster Saint? Autobiography and Hagiography in the Making of Reginald Pole’, in T. F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf (eds), The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV (Ann Arbor, MI, 1995), pp. 205–22; D. MacCulloch, ‘Richard Hooker’s Reputation’, EHR, CXVII (2002), pp. 773–812; and G. Kilroy, ‘A Tangled Chronicle: The Struggle Over the Memory of Edmund Campion’, in A. Gordon and T. Rist (eds), The Arts of Remembrance in Early Modern England: Memorial Cultures of the Post Reformation (Farnham, 2013), pp. 141–59.

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318. A. Walsham, ‘History, Memory, and the English Reformation’, HJ , 55 (2012), pp. 899–938. 319. e.g. M. Riordan and A. Ryrie, ‘Stephen Gardiner and the Making of a Protestant Villain’, SCJ , XXXIV (2003), pp. 1039–40. 320. J. Mossman, ‘Plutarch and English Biography’, Hermathena, 183 (2007), p. 78 and H. MacDonald, ‘The Law and Defamatory Biographies in the Seventeenth Century’, The Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), p. 188. See also C. M. Barron, ‘Thomas More, the London Charterhouse and Richard III’, The Fifteenth Century, X (Woodbridge, 2011), pp. 212–13. 321. H. MacDonald, ‘The Law and Defamatory Biographies in the Seventeenth Century’, The Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), p. 187. See also J. Mossman, ‘Plutarch and English Biography’, Hermathena, 183 (2007), pp. 90–1. 322. The doctrine or tenet of justification by faith alone. 323. G. Atkins, ‘Truth at Stake? The Posthumous Reputation of Archbishop Cranmer’, BJRL, 90 (2014), p. 279. See also MacCulloch, Cranmer. 324. G. Atkins, ‘Truth at Stake? The Posthumous Reputation of Archbishop Cranmer’, BJRL, 90 (2014), p. 259: This was also a product of the battle within Anglicanism over identity, rocked by both the ‘collapse of the confessional ideal in 1828–32’, the ‘bitter debates over the Oxford Movement in the 1830s’, the mid-century ‘growth of English Catholicism’ and ‘the rise of militant nonconformity’. Finding an ecumenical ‘universal’ approach, or another way of viewing a religious figure of another hue, was the driving force over a confessionalized approach. 325. A. Atherstone, ‘Memorializing William Tyndale’, ibid., pp. 174–5. 326. R. Harkins, ‘Elizabethan Puritanism and the Politics of Memory in PostMarian England’, HJ , 57 (2014), p. 899. 327. L. P. Fairfield, ‘The Vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography’, RQ , 24 (1971), p. 329. 328. C. S. Clegg, ‘Censorship and the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission in England to 1640’, Journal of Modern European History, 3 (2005), p. 57. 329. Ibid. 330. J. M. Richards, ‘Defaming and Defining “Bloody Mary” in NineteenthCentury England’, BJRL, 90 (2014), p. 301. 331. H. MacDonald, ‘The Law and Defamatory Biographies in the Seventeenth Century’, The Review of English Studies, 20 (1944), p. 177. 332. L. P. Fairfield, ‘The Vocacyon of Johan Bale and Early English Autobiography’, RQ , 24 (1971), p. 334. 333. See also, in passing, Nicholas Shaxton in Basch’s chapter. 334. See also D. M. Bergeron, ‘Afterlives: Thomas Middleton and Anthony Munday’, Studies in Philology, 111 (2014), p. 65: ‘Scholars have invested

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considerable effort in analyzing what Munday actually did, but they have had little to say about his self-conscious importing’ in reference to a civic pageant written by Thomas Middleton. As with much about Munday, we might know his actions, but why he acted remains obscure.

CHAPTER 2

1535 in 1935: Catholic Saints and English Identity: The Canonization of Thomas More and John Fisher William Sheils

The canonization of Bishop John Fisher (c.1469–1535) and Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) in St. Peter’s Basilica on 19 May 1935—commemorated by the medal illustrated as Figs. 2.1 and 2.2—was hailed by contemporaries as a landmark in the history of English Catholicism and its relations with the prevailing national culture. It was an occasion for great rejoicing in many quarters and, as a Times leader put it on 2 February after the announcement from Rome had made it clear that the cause would proceed to a successful conclusion, there could be no worthier choice than the present… Both MORE and FISHER were English of the English. Their work was done[,] and their mark was left[,] in institutions that have remained through four centuries at the core of the national life, in Parliament, in the law courts, in the universities. They contributed, one of them greatly, to the foundation of English literature.

W. Sheils (B) University of York, York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_2

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Fig. 2.1 Medal commemorating the canonization of Cardinal John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, showing (obverse) Pope Pius XI, by Aurelio Mistruzzi, bronze, 1935

Here is no ‘fugitive and cloistered virtue’. These were men of the great world, who lived in the world and loved it, yet were not its slaves and defied it… for conscience sake… The vast majority of their countrymen, of all schools of religious thought, have long held them in honour; and even the most militant of Protestant controversialists has no quarrel with SIR THOMAS MORE… Toleration was no part of the creed of these two saints. It may nevertheless be part of the moral that the modern world will draw from their story. Conscience still asserts its own sovereignty against secular power… To all alike, whether those of their own fold who will believe in ST. THOMAS and ST. JOHN as a living help in time of trouble, or those without to whom they are no more than a historic example, the spirits of these two just men made perfect will remain an abiding inspiration.1

For all its pleasure in the papal announcement, the leader also revealed potential difficulties and disagreements: not only about the meanings of

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Fig. 2.2 Medal commemorating the canonization of Cardinal John Fisher and Sir Thomas More, showing (reverse) Fisher and More, by Aurelio Mistruzzi, bronze, 1935

the lives of More and Fisher, but also about the process of canonization which they were about to undergo. As a letter to the editor published five days later (and sent from the Hotel Victoria in Zermatt, Switzerland) was to remind Times readers, More’s universal appeal was not necessarily universally welcome: There seems reason to suppose that the adumbrated canonization of Sir Thomas More is calculated to afford gratification to people of widely differing creeds and political orientation. I suggest this because I have in my possession a handbook published in Moscow for the use of the army of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. This commences with a calendar bristling with the anniversaries of those whom communism delights to honour. Conspicuous among them, and

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sandwiched between the names of Marx, Engels, Bebel, Lasalle, and Lenin, is that of the author of ‘Utopia’.2

This chapter will examine contemporary responses, Catholic and otherwise, to the canonization in order to see how those issues alluded to in the Times leader—the relationship between sanctity and patriotism, martyrdom and conscience—were debated at the time. In so doing, it is hoped that some light will be shed on the place of Roman Catholicism within the culture of the English Establishment during the 1930s. The story of the canonization started soon after the executions of More and Fisher, but the formal process was much delayed and only formally progressed by their beatification, along with fifty-two other English martyrs, by Pope Leo XIII on 29 December 1886, which happened also to be the feast day of St. Thomas Becket.3 How the causes of More and Fisher were uncoupled from their fellow beati so that they could proceed to canonization separately reveals much about early twentieth-century English Catholic politics, but, while interesting in itself, need not detain us here. The English hierarchy agreed to allow a separate cause for More and Fisher in 1926 and, led by Archbishop Peter Amigo of Southwark (1864–1949), a petition to that effect was sent to Rome. Little progress was made until 1929, the centenary of Catholic Emancipation, when the pope beatified a further 136 English martyrs, executed between 1583 and 1681.4 We may start the story with an event designed to commemorate that centenary: the exhibition dedicated to Sir Thomas More held at the shrine at his home in Beaufort Street, Chelsea, in the week marking the anniversary of his execution. This was a decidedly Catholic event and its nature can be gauged by the contents of the exhibition, where pride of place went to the relics, including More’s hair shirt, on loan from the nuns at Newton Abbot in Devon, and a reliquary from Stonyhurst College in Lancashire containing teeth and pieces of bone. The first of the seven speakers was Ronald Knox (1888–1957), who addressed the long-established charge of religious intolerance first made against More by John Foxe in his Actes and Monuments … (1st edition, London, 1563) [STC, 11222]. Perhaps carried away by the occasion, and by his other literary activity as a writer of detective fiction, Knox described the execution as ‘one of the foulest crimes in history’ and expressed a desire ‘to have non-Catholics here while we are reconstructing the crime, because they are the criminals’. He concluded by characterizing More as ‘the beau ideal of a Catholic Englishman; so Catholic in his reverence for the saints,

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for the Mass, for the holy souls, so English in his impatience of shams, in his bluff humour, in his lucid sanity of judgment’. The last of these virtues stood in stark contrast to Knox’s own earlier intemperate remarks about English Protestants. Other speakers during the week included Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) on More as ‘The Witness to Abstract Truth’; G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who described More as the best friend of the Renaissance ‘killed as the worst enemy of the Reformation’; and Cyril Jarrett [name in religion Bede] (1881–1934), who spoke on More as ‘A National Bulwark Against Tyranny’, likening what he described as the destructive tendencies of the reformers in the 1530s to the contemporary position of the Bolsheviks, characterizing More as a defender of ‘culture’ which, in the then present as in the earlier period, remained ‘the only hope of Christendom’.5 The Anglican literary scholar R. W. Chambers (1874–1942) was invited to add an Introduction to the published version of these addresses and the exhibition catalogue, which he graciously did by stressing More’s universal appeal. By likening that appeal to a love of mountains or a devotion to St. Francis of Assisi, Chambers made a cultural point rather than a religious one, marking a distinction to which we shall return.6 Chambers had recently published his famous essay ‘The Saga and the Myth of Sir Thomas More’, in which he argued that the scholarly editions of the early ‘Lives’ of More which were then in progress would lead to a recovery of the early biographical tradition and restore consistency to More’s life and thought. This, Chambers concluded, would overturn the dominant academic view of More derived from Protestant and free-thinking historians and biographers such as J. A. Froude (1818–1894) and Sir Sidney Lee (1859–1926), who had argued that More’s later life represented a turning away from the ideals of his early career.7 The immediate purpose of the exhibition was to raise funds for the restoration of the Beaufort Street convent, but, in addition to celebrating More’s life and death, it was hoped that, following the work of Chambers, ‘a saner view of Catholicism’ (in the words of the Jesuit Henry Browne) would become more widespread among the English and that More must come to be regarded not merely as a Catholic, but as a representative Catholic. The new England must learn that More’s virtue and outstanding greatness proceeded from a common faith, which was so ingrained in him as to be the real, though sometimes hidden, source of his whole activity, secular as well as religious.8

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Unlike Chambers, therefore, the speakers at the exhibition saw More’s life as not only one which represented those moral and civic virtues to which all England should aspire, but also as one which, when properly considered, beside increasing understanding of Catholicism among the English would ultimately lead them back to that common faith that had formed the well-spring of his actions. The balance between the religious and the cultural significance of his greatness that is implied in these two assessments still needed to be worked out—and that remained so in 1935, when the process of canonization was well advanced. Recent research shows that the Catholic Church in England had a burgeoning sense of confidence in the 1930s. Whereas hitherto the community had been bottled up in Lancashire and the main towns, it was now spreading into the suburbs and smaller country towns, as records of ordinations and church building demonstrate. By the 1930s, there were some 12,000 converts a year and, at a time when the other major Churches were in numerical decline, the Catholic constituency was being strengthened in many parts of the country. This growth in numbers was accompanied by a qualitative change; the expansion of public schools and the increasing presence of Catholic dons at the universities and in the Foreign Office, as well as among the literary and journalistic professions, had created a Catholic sub-culture that was both upper-class and, in its terms, apolitical—a sub-culture within which converts, clerical and lay, played a prominent role.9 One such convert was Christopher Hollis (1902–1977). Son of an Anglican bishop and a friend of Ronald Knox and Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) at Oxford, he was later to become a Conservative MP. In November 1934, he published a ‘Life’ of More in which he defended his subject against the charge of religious persecution while at the same time denying that More had had any sympathy for what he called liberalism: ‘A case can be made out that Thomas More was a socialist… the present writer would not accept it; yet it can be made out without flat absurdity. But no case at all can be made out that he was a liberal’. In his Epilogue, Hollis summed up what he considered England had lost by More’s execution. Four things were killed by that act, three of which—learning, justice and laughter—were in measure given back to England by God in due time, but the fourth, holiness, remained absent, so that it would only be when a man of More’s sanctity was again in a position of political power in England ‘that we shall be able to say that God has finally lifted from us the curse that is upon us for the murder of the greatest of our countrymen’.10

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By the time that this biography was published, a petition from Cardinal Francis Bourne (1861–1935), signed by over 170,000 individuals including non-Catholics like Chambers, had been sent from England to Rome asking the pope to proceed to the canonization of Fisher and More. On 29 January 1935, the Congregation of Sacred Rites declared them both to be martyrs ‘formally and materially’, and on 10 February Pius XI declared that the Church could move to canonization without further signs or miracles, a point about which the English press made much.11 Meanwhile, the ailing Bourne had died and been replaced as archbishop of Westminster, to the surprise of the English bishops and English Catholics generally, by a sixty-nine-year-old Yorkshireman, Arthur Hinsley (1865–1943), who had spent most of his life working in Rome or for the Vatican in Africa, and had yet to take up his new appointment.12 The dispensation with miracles, perfectly normal in the case of martyrs, was treated as a special dispensation by non-Catholic commentators in England. It was said by the Times correspondent to reflect the pope’s particular interest in England and his understanding of English sensibilities, also being his response to the large number of English pilgrims who had travelled to Rome in the Holy Year proclaimed for 1933, a fact demonstrating the intense devotion to the papacy which the correspondent (and other contemporary commentators) saw as characteristic of the old English Catholic tradition. In reporting these circumstances, the correspondent further noted that ‘in some Roman Catholic circles’ the canonization was viewed as a hint to Hitler, ‘showing the light in which the Vatican regards those German Roman Catholics who have been done to death by Nazi extremists’.13 Whether or not this was fanciful, it is worth noting that Pius XI, at the consistory recording the formal vote to progress to canonization, not only preached on the benefits that would thereby accrue to England, but then went on to reflect on the current world situation and the evil of any impending war. In many quarters, the canonization was identified with the moral defence of conscience against secular materialism, and in some at least, especially on the Continent, secular materialism was not thought of solely in terms of communism, but also in terms of national socialism.14 Meanwhile, the Catholic faithful, those who could afford it, descended on Rome, and a triduum of Masses was celebrated over the period 21–23 March 1935, with Amigo, Hinsley and Archbishop Thomas Williams of Birmingham (1877–1946) presiding; the closing ceremony, held on the evening of 23

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March, was led by Cardinal Pignatelli di Belmonte (1851–1948), dean of the Sacred College.15 Once the canonization had been announced, questions of protocol came into play. In what way, if any, should the British Crown or Government be represented at the ceremony on 19 May? After all, the saints had been put to death by the predecessors of those currently in authority. In the event, and after much negotiation, there was neither royal nor governmental representation, though the minister to the Holy See, Sir Charles Wingfield (1877–1960), and Lady Drummond, the wife of the ambassador to Italy, attended in private capacities. In an interesting gesture, the pope, during Mass, availed himself of the gold plate that had been sent by Queen Victoria to Leo XIII for use at the beatification service in 1888.16 In addition to these normal diplomatic concerns, the spring of 1935 presented a particular sensitivity in that it marked the Silver Jubilee of the accessions of King George V and Queen Mary on 6 May. The near coincidence in dates had the potential of raising once again the issue of the loyalty of English Catholics, a loyalty which many members of the press chose to question at this time—not so much in relation to Rome, as in relation to Ireland. That the papacy (possibly on Hinsley’s prompting) was alert to this point is shown by proceedings on 3 March 1935, when the decree super tuto—the final step before the canonizations could occur—was declaimed in St. Peter’s Basilica. An address of thanks for the decree was given by Hinsley, whereupon the pope made a speech in reply in which he linked the two events, declaring (as reported by The Times ) that the two martyrs ‘seemed in the glory of their celestial crowns to wish to render honour to that earthly Crown to which they had always been faithful, and to impart the lesson that no subject could be more faithful than he who was prepared to face death rather than tarnish his conduct and his faith’. This was a narrow line to tread, and one which the new archbishop negotiated with great skill, despite objections from the Home Office and other official quarters.17 Nor did his co-religionists help matters: when the theme of loyalty was taken up by Catholics in England, they did not always demonstrate the same degree of subtlety. At a celebration in honour of the saints held at London’s Vaudeville Theatre on 5 May, the day before the Silver Jubilee festivities, Father Sir John O’Connell reminded his hearers that to-day our minds are full of thanksgiving for two great events in our lives. The first is our gratitude to the holy father that he has determined to raise

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to the supreme honours of the Catholic Church that great, outstanding and truly typical Englishman Thomas More… the proto-martyr of English laymen. The other thought which must be uppermost in our minds is one of loyalty on this day of all days to our sovereign lord the king and of gratitude to Almighty God for having granted him a reign of twenty-five years to rule his people with so much wisdom, with so much self-sacrificing devotion, without distinction of class or creed, and to show forth in the twentieth century an example of all that a man, a citizen, a husband and a father of a family should be as our martyr, Thomas More, was four hundred years ago.

Linking More’s Englishness to the Silver Jubilee provided Catholics with the opportunity to profess their loyalty, a loyalty which many of them claimed was unjustly suspected by their non-Catholic countrymen. Note, however, the absence of any reference to Fisher in O’Connell’s remarks.18 The question of loyalty was also addressed by Father Richard Smith of the English College in Rome, who had prepared the dual ‘Lives’ of Fisher and More for the postulancy and had appended a ‘vindication’ to the published version in which he declared that we have been called traitors down the centuries. If our martyrs gave their lives for the faith, they no less truly gave their lives for their country – their country and ours. We are still looked on askance as half-English, men of a divided allegiance. And now this ‘foreign potentate’, this ‘pope of Rome’, to whom we profess an ‘un-English’ loyalty, has declared before the world that his hold over our obedience in no way detracts from the due honour and reverence in which we gladly hold our king and our beloved country.19

These are the words of the official historian of the cause, and they were echoed by many other members of the Catholic sub-culture of the day, but their declarations and actions at that time contained if not discordant, then at least polyphonic tones. To return to the Vaudeville Theatre: O’Connell’s speech finished with the reminder that More had died as a witness to two essential doctrines of the Catholic faith: ‘the sanctity, permanence and inviolability of the sacrament of marriage, and for the supremacy over the whole Catholic Church in every part of the world of the pope as a successor and representative of Peter’.20 Such a statement could have been interpreted by unsympathetic hearers as recalling that alleged dual allegiance, and those minded to construe matters in this way would not have been reassured by the

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event’s culmination: a wordless play designed by Harry [Hilary] Pepler (1878–1951), better known as an associate of Eric Gill (1882–1940) at the St. Dominic’s Press at Ditchling in East Sussex. The piece was entitled ‘The Field is Won’, recalling More’s words to William Roper as he set out for his fateful encounter with the King’s Council at Lambeth. The drama of the play lay in the clash of two wills, those of More and Anne Boleyn, and the masque’s action continually underlined the parallel between the fate of More and that of St. John the Baptist, with Henry VIII cast as Herod and Anne, according to Pepler’s instructions, combining ‘the will of Herodias with the charm of Salome’. The drama was set against a background of struggle between Church and State, represented by the figures of Divus and Potens respectively, with the former only being assured of victory through the martyrdom of More, whose path to the scaffold, and particularly his meeting with his daughter Margaret, was intended to remind the audience of the way of the Cross. Furthermore, the construction of Henry as the tyrant of the gospel story, not unlike those secular tyrants of the 1930s who were also threatening religion, was a recurrent theme in much contemporary Catholic polemic—and revived anti-Catholic sentiments in some non-Catholic circles, scholarly and otherwise. Anne Boleyn’s portrayal as the wilful temptress was a constant feature of Catholic historical writing about Henry’s Court at this date, and served to reinforce those anti-Catholic feelings, especially since several commentators, including the postulancy’s own historian, could not resist drawing attention to the fact that the canonization itself was taking place on the anniversary of Anne’s execution in 1536.21 The line between loyal rejoicing on the one hand and uncharitable triumphalism on the other was a narrow one which the excitement of the moment sometimes obscured. So far we have concentrated on the preamble to the event, so to speak, and almost exclusively on Catholic commentary. We may now turn to the canonization itself, which will restore Fisher to the narrative. The report in The Times notes that miracles had been dispensed with and, in order to emphasise the ecumenical character of the occasion, proclaims rather pompously that, apropos of the saints to be, ‘the testimony of The Times and of Protestant writers such as James Gairdner, Samuel Knight, and Lord Macaulay, has been invoked in proof of their sanctity’.22 This was true up to a point: unlike the beatification process, when no attempt had been made to seek opinions beyond the faithful, the promoters of the

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cause this time made much of More’s reputation among English nonCatholic scholars and literary figures, delighting especially in the praise given to him by Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), described in the documentation as a ‘scornful sceptic’, as well as the approbation of international thinkers, such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).23 In reporting the ceremony itself, The Times notes that the banner for Fisher was carried by four clerics and that of More by four laymen, thus stressing the involvement of both elements of the Church in the service. The banners themselves deserve some attention as iconographic representations of the messages to be conveyed. More’s banner depicted his leave-taking of his family on his way to The Tower and clearly sent home the message about the sanctity of marriage and of family life as a specifically lay apostolate, a message reiterated in the printed ‘Lives’. As a banner for a martyr, Fisher’s was less predictable, showing him as vice-chancellor of the University of Cambridge laying before Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), Henry VII’s mother, plans for the foundation of Christ’s College. Fisher saw his sponsorship of learning not only as a good in itself, but also as an essential element in the drive against heresy. This was the theme of Pius XI’s sermon at the canonization: ‘his [Fisher’s] episcopal residence seemed rather a church and a university for studies than a private residence… to vindicate the primacy with which the Roman pontiffs are invested by divine command’.24 The emphasis upon the latter undermined, in the view of English Establishment opinion, the recognition given by the Catholic Church to Fisher’s learning, and cut little ice in Cambridge, at least at an official university level. Despite the efforts of Charles Raven (1885–1964), regius professor of divinity and a fellow of Christ’s College, who wrote suggesting that the university send a representative, the Senate ignored the request and Cambridge did not send anybody to the canonization.25 The university made no public celebration, but a lecture on Fisher was given in St. John’s College on 5 May and copies of his portrait in hall, and of his autograph in the College archives, were forwarded to Rome. The major event had to wait until the end of July, to mark the quatercentenary of Fisher’s execution, when four colleges associated with him—Christ’s, Queens’, St. John’s and Trinity—organized a lecture at St. John’s delivered by the master, E. A. Benians, followed by a dinner held at Trinity. The lecture focused on Fisher’s support of Renaissance Humanist scholarship and his contribution to collegiate life, ending with a reference to his canonization and the words ‘we, not less mindful of his virtue and service, in this hall

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which knew his presence, remember to-day, with gratitude and humility, one who has placed us for ever in his debt’.26 Elsewhere in Cambridge, the canonization had proved to be a contentious issue in university circles, as can be seen from the response of the public orator, T. R. Glover, a classics don at St. John’s College and former president of the Baptist Union of England and Wales. The Times report notes that one of the supporters of Fisher’s banner was Charles Duchemin, rector of the Beda College in Rome, commenting that he represented Cambridge University. A correction followed from Glover, couched in the following terms: Sir, In your issue of to-day… it is stated [that] at the canonization of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, which took place in Rome on Sunday, ‘Cambridge University’ was represented by a monsignor with a French name. Will you allow me space to state that no Grace was passed by the Senate delegating anybody to represent the University of Cambridge at this function, and that without such a Grace a delegate cannot be appointed?

Glover was clearly not minded to welcome the canonization, but, despite his surname ‘Duchemin’, the target of Glover’s ire was in fact a graduate of Trinity College and member of a long-established Midlands manufacturing family. Although the Senate of the university reprimanded its public orator, Glover remained in office; evidently, one influential sector of the English Establishment chose to distance itself emphatically from what it saw as an alien process.27 If Cambridge University ignored the canonization of Fisher, then Oxford, by contrast, celebrated that of More. Unexceptionally, a lecture on More was given at St. Aloysius, the church attached to Campion Hall, on the day of the canonization, but, more significantly, an exhibition celebrating More opened in the Bodleian Library on the day after the ceremony. The choice of subject-matter is interesting, for instead of evading the religious implications of the event and producing an exhibition of More’s works alone, or mounting one which sought to place him in the context of the emergence of English as a written language, Oxford put on a display celebrating works by both men, and ‘also exhibited books written by Oxford recusants; early editions of Robert Southwell, poet and martyr; and some of the most notable productions of the secret presses which were operative in England during the reigns of Elizabeth

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and James I’, thus locating More and Fisher firmly in the recusant tradition. Among works included were those by William Allen, Augustine Baker, Edmund Campion, Nicholas Harpsfield, Robert Persons, Thomas Stapleton and Cuthbert Tunstall, many of which had been borrowed from Catholic owners and institutions, such as the colleges at Douai, Oscott and Stonyhurst. The advice and assistance of the Jesuit Father Newdigate of Campion Hall was acknowledged in the report, and the event indicates the way in which the Jesuits, the Dominicans at Blackfriars Hall and Knox (as chaplain) had become part of the intellectual and cultural life of the university at this date—for Oxford had produced many of the converts contributing to that upper-class Catholic sub-culture noted above.28 Of the other bodies associated with the new saints, the legal profession was one, whose substantial Catholic constituency probably lamented the fact that it was not formally represented at the ceremony,29 though a reception hosted by Lord Russell of Killowen and the Thomas More Society, at which R. W. Chambers delivered a lecture on ‘The Place of St Thomas More in English History and Literature’, was held at Lincoln’s Inn on 16 June 1936. Hinsley and the treasurer and masters of the Bench there were present; the vote of thanks to Professor Chambers was moved by Sir Frederick Pollock and seconded by T. S. Eliot.30 Back in 1935, at Rochester Cathedral, there was a service on the anniversary of Fisher’s execution; the address, given by the dean, Francis Underhill, was published as a small pamphlet. It emphasises his work as a diocesan pastor, refers to the Henrician regime under which he suffered as ‘one of the most savage tyrannies this country has known’ and concludes unexceptionally that ‘the whole Church does well to honour him’.31 These institutional responses were not the only public reactions to the canonization, which aroused a good deal of press comment. The principal Catholic weekly The Tablet , still under the prickly editorship of Ernest Oldmeadow, adopted an all-too-predictable tone of over-sensitivity, questioning the right of non-Catholic newspapers to assess the event at all and referring to ‘the present Anglican tenants’ when reporting the commemoration at Rochester. Simultaneously, it was berating the BBC for not transmitting a broadcast of the ceremony, a decision made for technical reasons, according to the board, and pointed out to its readers that a full broadcast could be heard on the Irish Athlone station. The issue of 25 May contains a fulsome report of the broadcast, with a heavyhanded and pointed emphasis on the excellent quality of the sound!32

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The Catholic Herald on the other hand, through its special correspondent in Rome Robert Speaight (1904–1976), adopted a more ecumenical and universal line in its reportage, saluting the two saints as ‘liberal souls’ who had died ‘for the fundamental rights of man’. Fisher’s fate was linked to the persecution of those Church figures opposing Nazism through a direct comparison with Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (1869–1952), archbishop of Munich. Turning to England, the convert W. E. Orchard (1877–1955) argued, in a measured piece published in the issue of 18 May, that More’s life (no mention of Fisher) was not so much a vindication of English Catholicism as it was than a model for it to emulate, so that if Catholics could show More’s qualities of reasonableness, humanity and culture, then they would discover the Roman Catholic Church’s ‘entire compatibility with reason… and patriotism’, thus removing the suspicion of a dual allegiance.33 The theme of Church and State was taken up at the Catholic Summer School organized at Cambridge later that year and given international relevance by J. Eppstein, who addressed the growth of totalitarian states: ‘We can only watch with sympathy and help with our prayers the Catholics of Germany, upon whom even now has broken the storm… They have been chosen as St John Fisher, St Thomas More and their fellow-martyrs were chosen in Tudor England to bear the brunt of the battle’.34 The Catholic Herald was reflecting views which were also being aired in parts of the non-Catholic press. The Church Times reported on 24 May: ‘Rome has done the whole world a service in canonizing at this time two men who gave their lives in the resistance to a doctrine of secular nationalism, which, if once generally admitted, would shackle both the minds and the souls of men in chains of steel’—and similar comments were made in the Free Church press, though doubts about the validity of the process itself were sometimes raised.35 Some religious weeklies avoided controversy by choosing to ignore the matter entirely; the evangelical Low Church newspaper The Guardian (not to be confused with the daily newspaper The Manchester Guardian) made no reference to the canonization in its issue of 24 May, but did, perhaps not unintentionally, devote its two leaders of that day to two subjects raised by other commentators on events in Rome: the character of English Christianity and the nature of heroism. The editor dealt with the former through a lengthy account of Bede’s life and work, prompted by an exhibition of Bedan and Northumbrian manuscripts being held at that time in the British Museum; the matter of heroism was treated through an assessment of

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T. E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, whose fatal accident had occurred on the same day as the canonization. The readership of The Guardian was generally Protestant, and in the following week it announced a meeting of Anglican and Free Church leaders to form a committee intended to plan the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Reformation and of the authorization of an English Bible, set to take place in 1938.36 The Guardian’s response—of avoiding direct discussion and of finding alternative strategies by which to address the questions raised by the lives of More and Fisher—was typical of the editorial reaction among those whose churchmanship was naturally unsympathetic to what was going on in Rome. There was little outright press controversy at an editorial level. Nevertheless, Catholic sensitivities, especially those of The Tablet , were quick to find offence in the writings of some journalists. In her regular column in The Spectator, ‘Marginal Comments’, Rose Macaulay (1881– 1958), at that time somewhat distanced from her Anglican roots, wrote an ironic, and irenic, article on 18 January 1935 which begins ‘Two more Englishmen are shortly to be canonized, and high time too; they have hovered in a state of beatitude quite long enough’—and continues in the same light-hearted vein, casting a mocking eye on those Italian, French and Spanish saints ‘obsessed to a fault with their own devotions, austerities, and modesties, and given to renouncing such lusts of the flesh as there really seems no call for them to have heard of’. It was the final paragraph which really stung The Tablet , however. It begins: ‘Fisher and More were, in fact, Renaissance, unschismed Anglicans, and died quod Anglicana ecclesia libera sit. They should be joined in their saintship by other Anglican martyrs and scholars, such as Hooper, Latimer and Ridley’. This brought the following prickly response from Oldmeadow in The Tablet : ‘this is one of those matters on which smart jokes and pert paradoxes cannot be fabricated without offence to good taste’.37 The Tablet ’s prickliness was probably ingrained by this time, but it may have been sharpened by the consistently critical tone on matters Catholic adopted by some of the regular contributors to The Spectator, and especially on the subject of More, whose reputation had been addressed in a number of reviews by the controversial Oxford historian A. L. Rowse (1903–1997). His opinions are most clearly revealed in a piece that he wrote later that year, a review of Chambers’s ‘Life’ entitled ‘St Thomas of Chelsea’. While praising the humanity of the book, Rowse commented thus:

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The psychology of the martyr is surely a very curious and morbid thing. Two main elements seem to be essential to it in conjunction; and in these days of psychological analysis they are not difficult to identify. There is first a deep-rooted spiritual (or intellectual) pride amounting to an invincible obstinacy, and second a positive desire for pain… Both elements were present in a very marked degree in Sir Thomas More.

He followed that damning analysis with a reference to More’s ‘magnificent and moving end’, but then undermined the implied admiration with this dismissive sentence: ‘He [More] fell back, of course, as they all do, upon his certainty with regard to the next world’.38 If Rowse’s review can be taken to represent sceptical secular opinion about the canonization, then Chambers’s biography stood for the response of sympathetic non-Catholic scholarship. This is not the place to discuss the book in detail, except to acknowledge that it received a wide public readership, was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was to have a profound effect upon views of More for a generation. It was the inspiration for the professed non-believer Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons (1961), which, to a later generation, fashioned the modern iconographic representation of More in Paul Scofield’s celebrated portrayal on both stage and screen. Writing from his position as Quain professor of English at University College, London, Chambers opened his book with a direct comparison between More and Socrates, noting that this parallel had been part of Catholic tradition since the time of More’s contemporary, Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–1558). In his final chapter, an Epilogue entitled ‘More’s Place in History’, Chambers returned to the comparison, likening More’s death to that of Socrates, with an emphasis which placed the significance of More’s life as much in the liberal, civil virtues of classical antiquity as in those of Christianity—a point he reinforced in describing More’s death as having been ‘for the right of the individual conscience, as against the State’. In the circumstances of the mid-1930s, that was a message of immediate significance. Chambers had been one of those non-Catholics who had supported the canonization of More, but he saw More’s example as appealing principally to a wider humanitarian tradition, and his biography was directed to that wider readership.39 The book was reviewed at length by G. G. Coulton (1858–1947), an Anglican of committed Protestant temper and the eminence grise of Cambridge historical scholarship, who was the self-appointed academic

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scourge of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authority, both medieval and contemporary.40 Although Chambers had written ‘a great book’, it was, as a biography, somewhat lacking in historical context, and Coulton expatiated on the state of the sixteenth-century papacy. To Coulton, Chambers’s book displayed a rose-tinted view of the medieval Church, for ‘no State has ever been more definitely totalitarian than the Church into which he [More] was born… Moreover, those totalitarian principles have not been abandoned to this moment’, a point which he elaborated by reference to the interference of the papal legate in recent political affairs in Malta. Thus, to Coulton, the liberal stance taken by More was at odds with the totalitarian tendencies of the institution which was now canonizing him, for although More had been sent to the block in England, had he been ‘born in Italy, he might well have gone to the stake’.41 Coulton’s purpose was not to undermine the greatness of the man, but rather to distance the virtues which More had exhibited from the institution claiming him as its saint. Far from being about More the individual, then, Coulton’s argument with Chambers was really about his Church and, as such, the review is a revealing expression of what Establishment Protestantism thought about the place of Roman Catholic culture in national life. Disagreement about the meanings of the lives of More and Fisher was not confined to non-Catholic commentators like Coulton and Chambers, however. Chambers’s Roman Catholic equivalent, also writing from a base in Gower Street, where he was chaplain to the University of London, was David Mathew. Not a convert himself, Mathew was, nonetheless, a product of that upper-class Oxford Catholic sub-culture which had arisen in the 1920s and, in common with More, he had tried his vocation with the Carthusians as a young man. His book Catholicism in England was published in 1936 and has been hailed as a landmark in the incipient emergence of a more confident English Catholicism into mainstream national life. Yet, as its sub-titles suggest, Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition, that confidence was still a qualified one.42 Mathew’s account begins in 1535, the year of the martyrdoms, and although Fisher and More were linked in his mind, More is the undoubted hero. It was he who stood at the head of that articulate, lay and gentry-dominated recusancy which, in Mathew’s analysis, had sustained the faith through four centuries. Mathew’s portrayal of More is similar to that of Chambers: of a great lay Christian Humanist who touched many areas of life. But it was in assessing his death that a fine (albeit significant) shift of emphasis

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occurred, for More had died not so much ‘for liberty of conscience’, to use Chambers’s phrase, than ‘for the freedom to follow Catholic truth’. As such, he was a martyr of the Church, rather than a hero of humanity— though, of course, those qualities were not separable in the mind of a Catholic writer, even one as learned as Mathew. It is in his assessment of Fisher that Mathew revealed the extent to which More dominated the story. Despite being linked in death, their lives were treated in contrasting fashion. While More was the herald of the modern world, Fisher is characterized as standing at the end of the medieval tradition: a man who ‘belonged… to an earlier time’ and— in a grossly unfair judgement upon someone who had transformed the University of Cambridge and fostered Humanist scholarship there—is said to have spoken ‘for the inarticulate’ and to have stood for that unlettered peasant piety which the northern pilgrims of 1536 and the western rebels of 1549 had felt but could not express. Fisher’s place, in almost all writing of the 1930s, was to stand in More’s shadow, a fact which may have owed much to his status as priest, bishop and cardinal; whereas More could appeal to a wide range of Christian, and indeed non-Christian, opinion as an exemplary figure, Fisher was clearly identified with the Roman Catholic Church and, even more importantly perhaps, with the papacy, through the cardinal’s hat that he had received shortly before his death.43 That perception of Fisher as primarily a saint of the Church was central to Catholic commentators, even as they recognized the difficulties that his life had posed for English Protestants: ‘while many Protestant writers have a way of taking More to their hearts, they cannot bear Fisher… But with Catholics, the life and martyrdom of Fisher excites love of the true faith’.44 For most Catholic clergy and the hierarchy, however, the wider Christian Humanist dimension of the canonization was less important than those lessons which could be transmitted to the English faithful. These can be gleaned from three representative sources: the dual biography written by Father Henry Rope, archivist of the English College in Rome; the pamphlets produced by the Catholic Truth Society; and the pastoral letters of the bishops, as reported in the Catholic press.45 In these sources, Fisher is given the same attention as More, and their martyrdoms, rather than their lives, are seen to have contained the essential elements of the message whose communication to the faithful the canonization facilitated. The message was threefold: firstly, that the new saints had died because of their loyalty to the pope and that therefore that obedience and loyalty

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to the papacy which had characterized English Catholicism from the beginning would be strengthened in the present generation; secondly, that they had died in defence of the indissolubility and sanctity of marriage, an institution under threat in the mid-1930s because of recent changes in divorce law grounded in that secular materialism which lay at the root of the final lesson; and thirdly, that the two saints had died in resisting a tyrannical form of caesaro-papism, the precursor of that secular materialism which not only threatened family life but was also manifested most obviously in the contemporary world by the emergence of communism. For Catholic commentators, and especially clerics, the canonization of More and Fisher was an opportunity to underline the loyalty of the faithful to the papacy, to encourage vocations to the priesthood and to strengthen opposition to divorce and secularism—divorce in a British context and communism in a European one. The canonization generated a variety of responses, both to the event itself and to the lives and deaths of the principals, that cut across denominational lines. Between Chambers and Mathew there was a wide measure of agreement, which made their analyzes closer to each other than to those of many of their co-religionists, while from entirely different perspectives (and with almost directly opposite results) both Christopher Hollis and G. G. Coulton could conclude that More was no liberal. What the various responses also reveal are tensions between notions of sanctity (as understood in the canonization process), heroism and Englishness. When the Times leader suggests that More and Fisher could appeal both to Catholics as saints to help them in their daily struggles and to non-Catholics as exempla to look up to, it draws an implicit distinction between saints and heroes. That distinction—between the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity and the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance—is largely a question of emphasis, even regarding the lives of other saints whose causes had been advanced by the papal postulancy, but it is a significant one. Among non-Catholic commentators, the heroic aspect loomed largest and is neatly encapsulated in Chambers’s judgement that, like Socrates and St. Francis of Assisi, ‘More knew that by his death the final seal was being placed upon his life’.46 The distinction between sanctity and heroism undoubtedly explains the way in which More eclipsed Fisher in contemporary discussion, notwithstanding their shared heroism in the face of State persecution. More’s life could fit a heroic agenda in several other ways: classical learning of European-wide significance; the origin of an idea,

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Utopia, that was to become a recurring theme in western culture; and the forgoing of a successful public career on a point of principle—to name just three. Fisher’s life was less easy to press into a classical heroic mould. His scholarship was profound, but often mediated through the work of others; his career was one of significant (though backroom) administration and quiet pastoral care; and the award of a cardinal’s hat from the pope compromised his reputation outside his Church. Above all, More could be characterized as a source of important subsequent developments. If both were saints, then More was also a hero—and it was that quality which commended him to his non-Catholic fellow countrymen, a conclusion bringing us, very appropriately, to the topic of Englishness. It is already clear that much was made, by Catholics and non-Catholics alike, of the Englishness of these two saints, but in terms of the papacy, of course, their appeal was universal: that is what made them saints. They were undoubtedly English saints, yet they were also saints of the Englishspeaking world at a time when, as Pius XI acknowledged in his address, that language had itself spread across the globe.47 The timing, therefore, was apt. The postulancy recognized this international dimension, seeking (and receiving) evidence of devotion to both More and Fisher from throughout the English-speaking world as part of the evidence for their cults.48 In that world, they were venerated by Catholic populations that were often of Irish extraction or had been taught by religious of Irish extraction—and, indeed, the Irish hierarchy and the Irish Bar had been active supporters of the cause. In the context of that upper-class English Catholic sub-culture highlighted earlier, this was an awkward issue, complicating the opportunity to articulate claims to patriotism that the canonization otherwise seemed to offer and which, therefore, its members chose largely to ignore.49 Their silence was a Catholic echo of that non-Catholic silence from Cambridge about Fisher’s canonization. The universal appeal of the two new saints was central to the message emanating from Rome, but for English Catholics it was their Englishness that was paramount. In England, it was left to sympathetic non-Catholic commentators—such as Chambers; Claude Jenkins (1877– 1959), librarian at Lambeth Palace and later professor of ecclesiastical history at King’s College, London; and Sidney Dark (1872–1947), the left-leaning editor of The Church Times —to stress the universality of More’s appeal beyond his own Church.50 Sainthood and Englishness still stood somewhat apart from each other and continued to do so for some time. The events of 1935 did, however,

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bring them closer together, and afforded the new archbishop of Westminster an opportunity to place Roman Catholic concerns nearer to the heart of national life. That was a development which, by skilful management, he was able to exploit in succeeding years. Nevertheless, even Hinsley’s renowned diplomatic talents, and good relations with his Anglican counterparts, could not effect a rapprochement between popular notions of Englishness and Catholicity. In 1940, following the fall of France, the cardinal’s attempt to lead an ecumenical renewal of national life through the ‘Sword of the Spirit’ movement was undermined by the hostility of his fellow bishops on the one hand and, on the other, by those deepseated Protestant suspicions about Catholic commitment to democracy that had been re-awakened by the Spanish Civil War.51 That struggle also revealed fissures within the English Catholic community between the gentry-dominated professional elite and increasingly active working-class Catholics emerging through the trade union movement.

Postscript A brief consideration of the years since 1935 is probably called for. Subsequent studies of Fisher have largely been confined to academic circles.52 In wider literary culture, among both Catholics and non-Catholics, the figure of More has dominated, much as it did during the canonization process itself. The canonization confirmed publicly More’s place within English Catholicism; his feast day, shared with Fisher, is celebrated annually on 22 June, and numerous churches have been dedicated to him, evincing a new confidence in an English Catholic identity.53 More widely, as Pius XI predicted, More has become a saint of the English-speaking world, his reputation carried far afield by the religious teaching orders, causing him to be admired for his human as much as for his spiritual qualities, and not only by Catholics, but also by those non-Catholics (and non-Christians) educated in their schools. In that sense, the transcendent image was more important than the historical figure.54 That global reach was re-affirmed at the millennium, when Pope John Paul II, in an apostolic letter dated 31 October 2000, granted More the somewhat problematic title of ‘patron saint of statesmen and politicians’.55 The Anglican strand which had supported More’s canonization continued within that communion, especially among members of its liberal Anglo-Catholic wing. Additionally, the ecumenical movement of the later twentieth-century resulted in More’s commemoration being

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incorporated into the Anglican liturgical year in 1980, in the shape of an annual remembrance on 6 July, the anniversary of his execution. And other Anglican Churches in communion with Canterbury—Australia, Brazil, Canada and South Africa—also recognize that day. These developments are perhaps an acknowledgment of that long-standing tradition hinted at in Rose Macaulay’s ironic debating point of 1935 about More’s status as an ‘unschismed Anglican’, a tradition also recalled in the annual memorial lecture held at St. Dunstan’s Church in Canterbury, where More’s head is said to be buried.56 Within a less obviously religious context, More’s reputation as a defender of the right of conscience has attracted attention, and this aspect was at its greatest during the 1960s, when A Man for All Seasons , the play by the non-believer Robert Bolt, brought his life to a broader and more popular audience, extending its impact worldwide following the Oscar triumphs of the famous 1966 Fred Zinnemann film.57 In the wake of that fictionalized biography, the atheist Oxford historian and public intellectual Hugh Trevor-Roper, who had long admired More if not his later controversial career or his attachment to what he considered to be an authoritarian and persecuting Church,58 praised him as ‘the first great Englishman whom we feel that we know, the most saintly of Humanists… the universal man of our cool northern Renaissance’.59 As part of the 1978 celebrations for the quincentenary of More’s birth, he also wrote an essay entitled ‘The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More’, which placed him firmly within the Renaissance Platonist tradition and, following Bolt, declared that More’s then current reputation was ‘quite independent of his Catholicism. This is shown by the simultaneous revival of More’s greatest friend, Erasmus’.60 In parallel, scholarship on More has progressed internationally: the appearance of the Yale edition of More’s works, published in fifteen volumes between 1963 and 1997, led to a more nuanced, and critical, assessment of his reputation, as have the endeavours of the Amici Thomae Mori, not least through their journal Moreana, founded by the French scholar Germain Marc’hadour in 1963 and currently published by Edinburgh University Press.61 Since the 1960s, that more critical view has gained a firm academic footing: some scholars, most notably Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton (1921–1994) and his students, have challenged More’s reputation for saintliness by focusing on his dealings with heretics, the ferocity of which, in fairness to him, More did not deny. In this research, More’s role as a prosecutor, or persecutor, of dissidents has been at the centre of the debate.62 The overall effect

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of this massive outpouring of historical scholarship has been to anchor More’s activities more firmly within the constraints of the times in which he lived, informed by cross-denominational studies of persecution. Support for More’s virtues in 1935 came largely from literary scholars, then engaged in producing critical editions of the early ‘Lives’, while more recent analysis has mostly been located within history faculties, emerging from researchers investigating the legal and administrative records of the period. Nevertheless, More still commands cultural resonance beyond the academy—and the new, darker More has in turn entered the fictionalized Tudor world through Hilary Mantel’s persuasive portrayal of those elements in More’s character in her 2009 novel Wolf Hall and its successful iterations for stage and screen.63 As with the Bolt play and film, so with Mantel’s More: historians, most notably Eamon Duffy, have responded to this fictionalized representation by revisiting More’s works in order to trace the intellectual and devotional roots of actions which, to modern readers and viewers not versed in early sixteenth-century history, can seem abhorrent and inexplicable.64 Reputations ebb and flow, but sanctity does not. Unlike the arguments of 1935, which focused on the transcendent and the national, the current debate is tied more firmly to the historical and the personal, so that the epitaph composed by More himself for his tomb in Chelsea Old Church—in which he avouched his fierce pursuit of heretics, as of thieves and murderers—becomes intelligible: neither to be excused nor denied.

Notes 1. The Times, No. 46978 (2 February 1935), p. 13 (leader ‘St Thomas and St John’). The canonization has been treated before: J. Davies, ‘A Cult from Above: The Cause for Canonization of John Fisher and Thomas More’, Recusant History, 28 (2007), pp. 458–74; J. Guy, Thomas More: A Very Brief History (London, 2017), pp. 70–80. 2. The Times, No. 46982 (7 February 1935), p. 15 (letter from L. V. S. Blacker printed under heading ‘Sir Thomas More in Moscow’). Until after the fall of the Soviet Union, there was, in Red Square, a col. listing the authors referred to by the correspondent. A letter published ibid., No. 46988 (14 February 1935), p. 8 (letter from J. M. Scott printed under heading ‘Thomas More and the Soviet’) rejected this view of More, claiming that the ‘Soviets’ misunderstood him and that he was an opponent of communism!

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3. L. Underwood, ‘English Catholic Martyrs’, in G. Atkins (ed.), Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester, 2016), pp. 144–60 is the latest account. As mentioned ibid., p. 148, The Times took a very different attitude to the process at this time. 4. J. Guy, Thomas More: A Very Brief History (London, 2017), pp. 74– 5; Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, Rome, 91/6, 7 (Amigo’s letter to Rome, 26 November 1926). The debate about separating More and Fisher from the other beati was vigorously pursued among the English hierarchy, and will be treated at length elsewhere. Papal permission to proceed separately was given on 18 June 1930: Southwark Roman Catholic Diocesan Archives, London, Amigo Papers, R 76.1 (report of vice-postulator, 28 March 1931). For the beatification of December 1929, see H. van Laak, Beati Martyres Angli (Rome, 1930). 5. R. Knox et al., The Fame of Blessed Thomas More: Being Addresses Delivered in His Honour in Chelsea, July 1929 (London, 1929), pp. 37, 38, 49, 63, 105–16; the exhibition catalogue is at pp. 117–29. 6. Ibid., pp. 11–34. 7. R. W. Chambers, ‘The Saga and the Myth of Sir Thomas More’, Proceedings of the British Academy, XII (London, 1926), pp. 179–225. 8. R. Knox et al., The Fame of Blessed Thomas More: Being Addresses Delivered in His Honour in Chelsea, July 1929 (London, 1929), p. 92. See S. Lee’s entry on More in L. Stephen and S. Lee (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols (1st edn, London, 1885–1900), XXXVIII pp. 429–49. 9. A. Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–1990 (3rd edn, London, 1991), pp. 273–88. 10. C. Hollis, Sir Thomas More (London, 1934), pp. 173, 298–300. 11. e.g. The Times, No. 46959 (11 January 1935), p. 11 (‘Two New English Saints: Special Reasons for Canonization’); ibid., No. 47068 (20 May 1935), p. 13 (‘The Two New Saints: Canonization in Rome’). 12. M. Vickers, By the Thames Divided: Cardinal Bourne in Southwark and Westminster (Leominster, 2013); J. Hagerty, Cardinal Hinsley: Priest and Patriot (Oxford, 2008), pp. 186–98. 13. The Times, No. 46959 (11 January 1935), p. 11 (‘Two New English Saints: Special Reasons for Canonization’). 14. Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, Rome, SCR 9/6.1 (printed Decretum for canonization); The Times, No. 47028 (2 April 1935), p. 14 (‘The Crime of War: Message from the Pope: “A Manifestation of Folly”: Suspense and Fear’). 15. L’Osservatore Romano, 25 March 1935. 16. ASV, Seg. Di Stato, Rubr 38a, Fasc. 1, 144504/346 records the distribution of tickets for non-ecclesiastical representatives at the ceremony. Five seats were reserved for England, but the largest representation came from Germany, allocated 200 tickets. The list of countries given tickets is

2

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

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headed by Ireland, with eighteen. Over 2000 English pilgrims are said to have been present in Rome, of whom 400 had been assigned seats: see the report of the ceremony in The Times, No. 47068 (20 May 1935), p. 13 (‘The Two New Saints: Canonization in Rome’); J. Guy, Thomas More: A Very Brief History (London, 2017), p. 78. J. Hagerty, Cardinal Hinsley: Priest and Patriot (Oxford, 2008), pp. 218– 20; The Times, No. 47003 (4 March 1935), p. 13 (‘New English Saints: The Pope and the King’s Jubilee’). O’Connell’s address appears under the title ‘Thomas More, Martyr and Citizen of London’, The Tablet , CLXV (18 May 1935), pp. 624–5 (at p. 624). Catholic reticence about Fisher is reflected in the fact that there is no index reference to him in The Tablet for January–June 1935. Other speakers at the Vaudeville Theatre event were: Sir Felix Cassel, KC, treasurer of Lincoln’s Inn; Lady Winefride Elwes on ‘More: The Family Man’; Mr. Richard O’Sullivan, KC on ‘More: The Judge’; Lord Russell of Killowen, president of the Thomas More Society; and Mr. S. Seuffert, honorary secretary of the Society of Our Lady of Good Counsel, on ‘More: The Friend of the Poor and Oppressed’: see the report in The Times, No. 47056 (6 May 1935), p. 19 (‘Canonization of Sir Thomas More: Tributes at London Demonstration’). R. L. Smith, John Fisher and Thomas More: Two English Saints (London, 1935), p. 296. The Tablet , CLXV (18 May 1935), pp. 624–5 (at p. 625). [H. D. C. Pepler] (illustrations by D. Jones), The Field Is Won: The Life and Death of Sir Thomas More Kt: A Wordless Play Arranged to Celebrate the Canonization of John Cardinal Fisher Bishop of Rochester and of Sir Thomas More Kt, Sometime Lord Chancellor of England, Martyred in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Five Hundred and Thirty Five (London, [1935]), pp. 2–4, 17, 19. See also The Times, No. 47056 (6 May 1935), p. 19 (attributing the production to ‘the Catholic Drama League’). Ibid., No. 47068 (20 May 1935), p. 13 (‘The Two New Saints: Canonization in Rome’). J. Grisar, ‘De Aestimatione et Fama Quibus Habiti Sunt et Habentur Beati Joannes Fisher et Thomas Morus ’, Section VI in Sacra Rituum Congregatione, Canonizationis Beatorum Martyrum Joannis Card. Fisher Episcopi Roffensis et Thomae More Magni Angliae Cancellarii (Rome, 1934). This book is rare. The eds are extremely grateful to Professor Maurice Whitehead for sending accurate bibliographical details, taken from the copy at the Venerable English College in Rome. L’Osservatore Romano, 20–21 May 1935, printing a translation of the pope’s sermon; The Times, No. 47068 (20 May 1935), p. 13 (‘The Two New Saints: Canonization in Rome’). According to the former source, the supporters of Fisher’s banner were all monsignori: Charles Corbishley,

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25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

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rector of Ushaw College, Durham; Charles Duchemin, rector of the Beda College, Rome; William Godfrey, rector of the English College, Rome; and Philip Hallett, rector of Wonersh Seminary as well as vice-postulant of the cause. The supporters of More’s banner, present in an individual capacity, are there said to have been Mr. Thomas More Eyston, a member of the More family; Henry Stafford Northcote, 3rd earl of Iddesleigh; Mr. Richard O’Sullivan, KC; and Mr. Guy Wingate, an Oxford graduate. The Times differs over those supporting More’s banner. CUL, University Archives, Min I 25 (4 March 1535) Item 15, with letter annexed. It is perhaps worth noting that at the same meeting (Item 11) Senate agreed to award an Honorary LittD degree to R. B. Merriman, ed. of the Life and Letters of Thomas Cromwell, 2 vols (Oxford, 1902). See also Cambridge University Reporter, LXV (1934–35), pp. 908, 971 (both on Merriman). Anon., ‘The Quatercentenary Celebration of St John of Rochester’, The Eagle: A Magazine Supported by Members of St John’s College, XLIX (1935), pp. 73–5; E. A. Benians, John Fisher: A Lecture Delivered in the Hall of St John’s College on the Occasion of the Quatercentenary Celebration by Queens’, Christ’s, St John’s and Trinity Colleges (Cambridge, 1935), p. 41. See also an article printed in the magazine of Queens’ College: R. G. D. L., ‘John Fisher (1487), President of Queens’ 1505–8’, The Dial, No. 79 (Lent Term, 1935), pp. 6–11. At Christ’s College, there were several contributions: Christ’s College Magazine, XLII [1935], pp. 1 (editorial, with facing portrait of Fisher, in the Combination Room), 2–11 (J. Petit, ‘The Canonization of the New Saint’), 11–12 (Anon., ‘St John Fisher & Lady Margaret’), 12–14 (Anon., ‘John Fisher’), 61–8 (W. M. Browne, ‘A Sermon Preached… at the Commemoration of Benefactors… in the Centenary Year of Bishop John Fisher’s Martyrdom’) and 80–1 (H. Rackham, ‘Bishop Fisher: Some Notes’). The Times, No. 47070 (22 May 1935), p. 12 (letter printed under heading ‘The Two New Saints’); CUL, University Archives, Min I 25 (27 May 1535) Item 10. On Glover, see H. G. Wood, Terrot Reaveley Glover: A Biography (Cambridge, 1953), where he is described (p. 150) as ‘pugnacious in religious matters’. Anon., ‘St Thomas More and St John Fisher’, The Bodleian Quarterly Record, VIII (1938 for 1935–37), pp. 66–72. See also the enthusiastic report in The Tablet , CLXV (18 May 1935), pp. 623–4 (‘Oxford Honours More: A Bodleian Exhibition’) and the cooler response in The Times, No. 47069 (21 May 1935), p. 10 (‘More and Fisher Exhibition: Rare Works at Bodleian Library’); L. E. Bellanti, Saint Thomas More: A Sermon Preached at St Aloysius’, Oxford, May 19th 1935 (Oxford, [1935]). Lord Russell of Killowen is reported to have said on 5 May 1935 that ‘it was sad that no one would be present at the canonization… to represent

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30.

31. 32.

33.

34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

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the English judiciary. The proper authorities had been approached without result. All the Catholic Christian world would wonder at this when honour was conferred upon the most distinguished son the judiciary had ever produced’: The Times, No. 47056 (6 May 1935), p. 19 (‘Canonization of Sir Thomas More: Tributes at London Demonstration’). I am grateful to Mr. Dunstan Speight, librarian of Lincoln’s Inn, for confirming that there is no evidence in the archives of any canonization-related celebration having taken place there in 1935. On the 1936 event, see ibid., No. 47403 (17 June 1936), p. 21 (‘Place of St Thomas More: Reception in Lincoln’s Inn’); R. O’Sullivan, ‘St Thomas More and Lincoln’s Inn’, The Catholic Lawyer, 3 (1957), p. 80. F. Underhill, John Fisher: Bishop of Rochester and Cardinal (London, [1935]), especially p. 3. The Tablet , CLXV (26 January 1935), p. 110 (‘Anglican Saints! BB. John Fisher and Thomas More’), ibid. (11 May 1935), p. 588 and ibid. (25 May 1935), p. 668 (‘“Bright Intervals”: Rome via Athlone’). The Catholic Herald, No. 2570 (25 May 1935), p. 9 (R. W. Speaight, ‘Their Glory Is Declared to Us: St John of Rochester and St Thomas More Formally Canonized: “High Mass and a Lot of People”’) and ibid., No. 2599 (18 May 1935), p. 16 (W. E. Orchard, ‘More and England: What His Canonization May Mean: But It All Depends on Us’). Faulhaber remains contentious in German historiography, subsequently offering support to Hitler: G. C. Zahn, German Catholics and Hitler’s Wars: A Study in Social Control (London, 1963), pp. 150–75. See also Southwark Roman Catholic Diocesan Archives, London, Amigo Papers, Correspondence with Hinsley, letter of 22 December 1934, in which Hinsley drew the same parallel. J. Eppstein, ‘The Totalitarian State’, in Anon. (ed.) (preface by C. Lattey), Church and State: Papers Read at the Summer School of Catholic Studies, Held at Cambridge, July 27th to August 6th, 1935 (London, 1936), pp. 207–35 (at p. 231). The Church Times , CXIII (24 May 1935), p. 611 (untitled item in section ‘Summary’). The Guardian: The Church Newspaper, No. 4668 (24 May 1935), p. 332 (‘Bede’ and ‘Lawrence of Arabia’) and No. 4669 (31 May 1935), p. 345 (‘The Reformation: Fourth Centenary Celebration’). The Spectator, No. 5560 (18 January 1935), p. 81; The Tablet , CLXV (26 January 1935), p. 110 (‘Anglican Saints! BB. John Fisher and Thomas More’). The Spectator, No. 5579 (31 May 1935), p. 924. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (London, 1935), pp. 16–19, 351–400 (at p. 400). The book went through five printings in its first year. On

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40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

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the author, see D. Everett, revised by J. D. Haigh, ‘Chambers, Raymond Wilson (1874–1942)’, in ODNB. See G. G. Coulton, Romanism and Truth, 2 vols (London, 1930– 31); G. G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (London, 1938). Note also G. G. Coulton, Fourscore Years: An Autobiography (Cambridge, 1943), especially pp. 329–37 for his scholarly disagreements with Cardinal Gasquet. In his review of three books: G. G. Coulton, ‘The Faith of St Thomas More’, The Quarterly Review, 265 (1935), pp. 327–43 (at pp. 327, 334, 335), reprinted in R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour (eds), Essential Articles for the Study of Thomas More (Hamden, Connecticut, 1977), pp. 502–12. Anon., ‘Mathew, David James (1902–1975)’, in ODNB. D. Mathew, Catholicism in England 1535–1935: Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition (London, 1936), pp. 6–10 (at p. 7). H. J. Parkinson, John Fisher: Defender of the Unity of Christendom (Kensington, [1935]), p. 2. H. E.G. Rope, Fisher and More (London, 1935), pp. 118–20, 202–4; W. Sherren, St Thomas More for Children (London, 1936), especially p. 63. Pastoral letters are several and repeat the same message: e.g. the Lenten Pastoral Letter of Joseph Cowgill, bishop of Leeds, copy in Leeds Diocesan Archives, Leeds, Acta Ecclesia Loidensis, 21 pp. 8–10. R. W. Chambers, Thomas More (London, 1935), p. 385. L’Osservatore Romano, 20–21 May 1935 and ASV, Seg. di Stato, Rubr 38a, Fasc. 1, 143215, Nos. 289–300 (Pius XI’s address to the diplomatic corps). Archivum Venerabilis Collegii Anglorum de Urbe, Rome, SCR 91/6 (containing letters of support from Calcutta, Natal, the New Hebrides, Southern Nigeria, Scotland, Simla, Suez and elsewhere). British letters— from dioceses, educational establishments and Catholic organizations—are filed in ASV, Seg. Di Stato, Rubr 38a, Fasc. 1, 138733–143122. Although the English Bar was not represented at the canonization, Richard O’Sullivan, KC, a member of the Irish Bar, but a lawyer who had taken silk before the establishment of the Irish Free State, was a supporter of More’s banner: see above, n. 23. C. Jenkins, Sir Thomas More: A Commemoration Lecture Delivered in the Chapter House, Canterbury, at the Festival of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral, June, 1935 (Canterbury, 1935). J. Hagerty, Cardinal Hinsley: Priest and Patriot (Oxford, 2008), pp. 238– 50, 303–22. See contributions to B. Bradshaw and E. Duffy (eds), Humanism, Reform and Reformation: The Career of John Fisher (Cambridge, 1989); E. Duffy, ‘John Fisher and the Spirit of His Age’, in E. Duffy, Saints, Sacrilege

2

53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59.

60.

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and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations (London, 2012), pp. 133–50. Church dedications in the decade following the canonization were dominated by Thomas More. A few churches were dedicated to both saints, and there was a following for Fisher in his native Yorkshire and in the counties covered by his diocese of Rochester, but devotion to him outside those areas was rare, whereas dedications to More were ubiquitous. Exact figures are impossible to construct now, but the broad trend can be ascertained from current Catholic diocesan directories and from the website taking-stock.org.uk, which lacks information from three dioceses. It shows eleven churches dedicated to More, four to Fisher and one shared dedication in the years 1935–1945. Another burst of dedications to More began with the 1960s church extension after Vatican II, probably an unexpected consequence, by Bolt certainly, of the popularity of A Man for All Seasons . e.g. an Indian Marxist colleague at the University of York, the late Professor T. V. Sathyamurthy, always kept a copy of the Holbein portrait in his office, remembering his schooling in Madras (now Chennai). More was especially promoted by the Jesuits in India, probably reflecting the sharing of his Christian name with that of the Apostle of India. The apostolic letter (issued ‘motu proprio’) is accessible via www.w2.vat ican. Anon. (ed.), The Alternative Service Book 1980: Services Authorized for Use in the Church of England in Conjunction with the Book of Common Prayer: Together with the Liturgical Psalter (Colchester, 1980), p. 19 (calendar entry). Macaulay was following a well-established tradition: see R. Southey, The Book of the Church, 2 vols (2nd edn, London, 1824), II pp. 24–5. See P. Marshall, ‘Saints and Cinemas: A Man for All Seasons ’, in S. Doran and T. S. Freeman (eds), Tudors and Stuarts on Film: Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 46–59. See his essay ‘Sir Thomas More and the English Lay Recusants’, reprinted in H. R. Trevor-Roper, Historical Essays (London, 1957), pp. 91–7. It is unclear whether Trevor-Roper had spoken or written these words, but they are quoted in R. W. Apple, Jr., ‘Gallery in London Presents an Exhibition for All Seasons’, The New York Times, CXXVII (4 December 1977), p. 81, quoted by the Catholic historian and theologian Marvin O’Connell in his critique of Bolt’s characterization: ‘A Man for All Seasons : An Historian’s Demur’, Catholic Dossier, 8 (2002), pp. 16–19. H. Trevor-Roper, ‘The Intellectual World of Sir Thomas More’, The American Scholar, 48 (1979), pp. 19–32 (at p. 21). The celebrations included a major exhibition at NPG: Trapp & Herbrüggen, More. For Trevor-Roper’s later interest in this subject, see ‘Sir Thomas More

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61. 62.

63.

64.

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and Utopia’, in H. Trevor-Roper, Renaissance Essays (London, 1985), pp. 24–58. Various eds, The Complete Works of St Thomas More, 15 vols in 19 parts (New Haven, CT and London, 1963–97); Moreana (1963 to date). Two of Elton’s early essays on More are reprinted in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1974–92), I pp. 129–72; J. Guy, Thomas More (London, 2000) is a judicious summary of this scholarship; G. M. Logan (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas More (Cambridge, 2011) has several essays on different aspects of More’s career and reputation, most relevant here is that by A. L. Prescott, ‘Afterlives’, pp. 265–87. H. Mantel, Wolf Hall (London, 2009); The Royal Shakespeare Company, ‘Wolf Hall’, premièred in the Swan Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon in January 2014, at the Aldwych Theatre in London in May 2014 and in the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway in New York in March 2015; BBC Television, ‘Wolf Hall’, six episodes broadcast on BBC2, January– February 2015. See also Mantel’s ‘A Letter to Thomas More, Knight’, in H. Mantel and X. F. Salomon, Holbein’s Sir Thomas More (New York, 2018), pp. 11–17. E. Duffy, Reformation Divided: Catholics, Protestants and the Conversion of England (London, 2017), pp. 19–95 prints revised versions of three essays on More and heresy. See also his comments ibid., pp. 10–11.

CHAPTER 3

Thomas Cranmer’s Reputation Reconsidered Ashley Null

Introduction In the famous 1545–1546 Gerlach Flicke portrait of Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) at the National Portrait Gallery in London (see Fig. 3.1),1 the primate of all England looks out at us as if we had just walked in on him unexpectedly in his study. He is seated at a richly carpeted desk. The billowing curtain behind him is drawn back, enabling the sun to provide plenty of good light for the archbishop’s reading, which we have evidently interrupted. Two books and a letter lie on top of the table, evidencing his engagement in study as a break from the pressing responsibilities of office. Yet in his long, slender and rather pale scholar’s hands is the particular, still-open, book from whose consideration we have just distracted him. Due to its helpful labelling, we can see that the archbishop has been reading from the Epistles of St. Paul. His eyes look straight at us, as if he is ready to share with us some thoughts about what he has been reading. Although Cranmer was notoriously reticent about his interior life, in this portrait he seeks to make a public statement about his ministry. He wishes to be known as an archbishop whose most characteristic act is to read Scripture so as to be ready to share it.

A. Null (B) Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_3

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Fig. 3.1 Portrait of Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, by Gerlach Flicke, oil on panel, 1545–1546

No New Athena Clearly, Cranmer intended to be seen as a Christian leader who was a ‘Bible man’. But what kind of Bible man? One who supported the medieval emphasis on using Scripture to become good enough so as to become acceptable to God? Or one who followed the ‘new learning’, which argued that God drew to himself those who simply trusted

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his biblical promise of free salvation in Christ?2 The question mattered deeply in his own day, filled as it was with bloody religious conflict, where the stakes were quite literal, as Cranmer himself would eventually experience. The question has also mattered deeply to historians ever afterwards, especially since so many of them have anchored their evaluations of the English Reformation in their perceptions of Cranmer’s theological commitments.3 That Cranmer sought to be identified with those who embraced the ‘new learning’ would seem a reasonable enough deduction from the painting. After all, he is holding Paul’s Epistles in his hands, the source that Luther and his fellow travellers had mined for their doctrine of justification by faith alone.4 Does that then suggest that Cranmer wished to be known as a Protestant? Not if one means by that term someone whose religious sensibilities were nurtured to maturity by a self-confidant Protestant culture. While their new ideas were a massive headache for Establishment interests, the first generation of English reformers did not leap from the pages of Scripture fully formed and armed like some Christian version of Athena springing from the pounding head of Zeus. Early English evangelicals were as much late medieval Catholics as they were early modern heralds of a new religious era. Even if Cranmer’s commitment to solifidianism is given pride of place in the portrait, its setting is thoroughly traditional. Cranmer does indeed have Paul in his hands, but he is in his study, not in the church. He does have Paul in his hands, but a book by St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) lies on the table, as well as a letter addressed to him in his capacity as archbishop of Canterbury.5 In an age of self-fashioning, Cranmer is also presenting himself as a faithful ‘mixed-life’ bishop in the tradition of Pope Gregory I [‘St Gregory the Great’] (c.540–604). Pope Gregory argued that the ideal preacher-pastor had to follow the example of Jesus himself by combining an active life of service with a regular retreat into the quiet life of contemplation: The Redeemer of the human race performed miracles in the city during the day, and spent the night on the mountain in assiduous prayer, obviously in order to form perfect preachers and teach them never to abandon activity in favor of a love of contemplation or to scorn the joy of contemplation because of excessive involvement in activity. They should rather silently

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absorb in contemplation what they would pour out in speech when occupied for their neighbors’ sake. By contemplation, indeed, we reach the love of God, but by preaching we again profit our neighbor.6

In fourteenth-century England, Walter Hilton (c.1343–1396) sought to make this ‘mixed-life’ piety the norm not only for the clergy, but also for devout laypeople.7 In his ‘Epistle on the Mixed Life’, he discouraged a lay lord who was considering renouncing his position and possessions preparatory to entering a religious order. Citing the teaching of St. Gregory, Hilton counselled his correspondent to stay in his station, fulfilling his social obligations to serve his dependants while privately pursuing a life of devotion.8 By the end of the fifteenth century, this pattern of Christian living had become deeply rooted in English spirituality, attracting even royalty as followers and advocates.9 Cecily [Cicely] [née Neville], duchess of York (1415–1495), the mother of Edward IV, had Hilton’s ‘Epistle’ as one option for the readings given during her lunch.10 Lady Margaret Beaufort, countess of Richmond and Derby (1443–1509), the mother of Henry VII, commanded Wynkyn de Worde (d. 1534/35) to produce the editio princeps of Hilton’s Scala Perfeccionis [The Ladder of Perfeccion] ([Westminster], 1494) [STC, 14042], half of the print-run also including the ‘Epistle’, since the Tudor Humanism she promoted was thoroughly imbued with the ‘mixed-life’ ideal, as was her own piety.11 Cranmer was not only a ‘Bible man’, but also a Cambridge man—and a man who was at the university precisely when its theological training was largely shaped by Lady Margaret’s Humanist agenda. Not surprisingly, then, his portrait shows him fulfilling both duties of the ‘mixed-life’ tradition. While committed diligently to serving others by managing the affairs of the Church, as represented by the letter, he has still taken time to withdraw for study and contemplation, as the presence of Paul’s Epistles and a theological treatise by St. Augustine testify. In fact, the depiction was not merely a primate’s pious propaganda; art was simply illustrating something of which everyone at Court was already well aware. According to Ralph Morice (fl. 1522–1570), his principal private secretary and early biographer, despite the pressures of Cranmer’s office, it was well knowene that commonlie, yf he hadd not busynes of the prince’s, or speciall urgent causes before hym, he spente iij partes of the daie in studie as effectuallie as he hadd byn at Cambridge [.]12

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This same sort of self-presentation as an authentic catholic bishop in the ‘mixed-life’ tradition would also seem to lie behind another wellknown trait ably rendered by Flicke as well—Cranmer’s notoriously ever-present poker face. According to Morice again, he was a man of suche temperature of nature, or rather so mortified, that no maner of prosperitie or adversitie coulde alter… his accustumed conditions: for, being the stormes never so terrible or odious, nor the prosperous estate of the tyme never so pleasante, joyous, or acceptable, to the face of [the] worlde his counteynance, diete, or sleape comonlie never… changed, so that thei whiche were mooste nerest and conversante aboute hym never or syldome perceyvid by no… token of counteynance howe the affaires of the prince or the realme wente. Notwithstanding privatelie with his secrete and speciall frends he wolde shede forth many bitter teares, lamenting the miseries and calamities of the worlde.13

In a Court filled with those plotting against him, no doubt a demeanour which kept his enemies guessing would have been a useful survival tactic. Yet there was more to his public emotional restraint than that. For St. Gregory, the whole point of the combination of active service and contemplative study was to mortify worldly passions: All perfect preachers, you see, unquestionably bury their souls, which are dead to the desires of the present life, under the covering of good works and contemplation. They do this in order that their souls may lie hidden underneath an active and contemplative life, virtually without feelings from concupiscence of the flesh, although previously their souls were sensible of worldly desire and lived a mortal life.14

Nothing better demonstrated Cranmer’s cultivation of a genuine ‘mixedlife’ piety to a Tudor Court steeped in that spiritual tradition than his acting out Gregory’s call for detachment from the allure of the world through his famous poker face. Clearly, Peter Marshall is right to note how very comfortable the early English reformers were with the vocabulary and rhythms of late medieval Catholicism.15 He even shrewdly observes that their cultivation of an appearance of holiness, by medieval standards, seems to have been a conscious evangelical strategy to win converts.16 While William Barlow [Finch] (d. 1568) rejected as totally false the reputation for holiness

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among ‘Gospellers’, he nonetheless agreed that the only means of determining whether or not a person’s interpretation of Scripture was sound was by the sanctity of life their doctrine produced.17 Hence, the early reformers hoped to interest others in seeking to know more about their theology by demonstrating the kind of life it generated in them. Cranmer said as much himself. When queried as to why he so easily forgave his enemies, he countered: What will ye have a man do to hym that ys not yet come to the knowledge of the trueth of the gospell…? Shall we perhapps, in his jorney comyng towards us, by severitie and cruell behaviour overthrowe hym, and as it were in his viage stoppe hym? I take not this the wey to alleure men to embrace the doctrine of the gospell. And if it be a true rule of our Saviour Christe to do good for evill, than lett suche as are not yet come to favour our religion lerne to folowe the doctrine of the gospell by our example in using them frendlie and charitablie.18

Cranmer sought to practise the medieval ideal of loving one’s enemies as a way to give credibility to his understanding of the gospel by showing forth its traditionally accepted fruit in his own life. Yet, Cranmer’s commitment to exhibiting traditional catholic personal morality, even as he sought to proclaim a very non-medieval solifidianism, was more than just a nostalgic comfortableness with the devotional atmosphere and aspirations of his youth, or even essentially an evangelistic strategy designed to gain new adherents to the Reformation gospel. While both were undoubtedly true, Cranmer saw a deeper, inherent connection between his beliefs and his behaviour. He embraced justification by faith not as a repudiation of his medieval English spirituality, but as the only possible means for attaining its fulfilment. As for understanding why he thought so, we need look no further than St. Augustine’s book sitting on his desk. By including On Faith and Works in his portrait of the archbishop, Flicke has helpfully pointed historians to two important, albeit often misunderstood, factors in Cranmer’s theology, namely the central role of the affections in salvation and sanctification, as well as his deep Humanist commitment to confirm his understanding of Scripture through sincere and thorough research in the writings of the Church Fathers.

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New Insights into Tudor Evangelical Conversion The heart of Tudor Protestantism was not right doctrine, but right desire. Of course, Thomas Cranmer and his fellow English reformers thought that sound instruction was essential, but they insisted that it had to be proclaimed in ways that would move hearers to embrace it from the bottom of their hearts. Doctrine, rightly taught, would give birth to desire, but desire would enable that doctrine to be embraced inwardly and expressed outwardly in behaviour. Augustine had taught as much in his treatise On Faith and Works. Expressive of his later affective theology, this text outlines his mature understanding of the relationship between faith and works, as ‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’ would duly note.19 On the one hand, Augustine clearly stated that Paul’s teaching on justification by faith meant that good works did not precede justification, but followed it, because only people imbued with the Holy Spirit could perform works out of a love for righteousness. On the other hand, once Christ dwelt in the believer’s heart by faith, this living faith necessarily produced good works performed out of love for God.20 Hence, the hallmark of true Christian faith was a spirit-enabled love for God visibly expressed in godliness. The writings of Richard Rolle (1305×10–1349) and Walter Hilton had trained devout early-Tudor Christians to embrace affective piety as the heart of true Christianity. The most popular devotional writers for fifteenth-century England, Rolle and Hilton encouraged their readers to ruminate on Scripture so that they would experience a burning love for Christ. While Rolle saw contemplation as a gateway to God-given physical sensations of ecstasy, Hilton encouraged a more practical goal. He wished his readers to channel their newly received divine love into a striving for moral perfection. Here was the practical, biblical piety that Lady Margaret Beaufort hoped to see cultivated in the ‘mixed-life’ tradition. She incorporated it into her highly influential Humanist education programme for the English Church, since continental Humanism also stressed that Scripture’s power to transform human affections would lead to moral reformation. Indeed, the great Humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus (c.1467–1536) insisted that the gospel was the living mind of Christ, whose words had the power to re-programme the human heart and mind so that people could lead godly lives.21 We can see this progression from reading the Scriptures to transformed affections in the conversion narratives of the early English reformers

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Thomas Bilney (c.1495–1531) and Queen Katherine Parr (1512–1548). According to Bilney, he often ‘felt a change’ in himself ‘from the right hand of the most high God’ when he read Scripture. It happened for the first time while reading Erasmus’s new Latin translation of the Bible: I chanced upon this sentence of St Paul (Oh most sweet and comfortable sentence to my soul!) I Tim. 1:15: ‘It is a true saying and worthy of all men to be embraced, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief and principal’. This one sentence, through God’s instruction… working inwardly in my heart, did so gladden it – which before was wounded by the awareness of my sins almost to the point of desperation – that immediatly I felt a marvelous inner peace, so much so that my bruised bones leapt for joy. After this, the Scripture began to be more pleasant to me than honey or the honey comb[.]22

Katherine Parr, the widow of Henry VIII, used the same emotive language to describe her reading of Scripture, but she also explicitly outlined how it was the doctrine of justification by faith that led to the renovation of her affections. Although she had previously pursued what she thought were good works in order to right her relationship with God, she learned from Scripture the true way of salvation. Firstly, God drew her to himself with gentle biblical promises, rather than with threats of fearful punishments: Cum to me al ye that labour, and ar burdened, and I shall refresshe you. What gentle, mercyfull, & comfortable wordes ar these, to all sinners?… What a most gracious comfortable, and gentle saying was this, w[ith] suche pleasant and swete wordes, to allure his enemies to cum unto him?23

Then, moved by Scripture, Katherine asked for a supernatural gift to enable her to trust the promise of free and instant forgiveness for her sins made possible by Jesus’s death on the Cross: When I behold the benignitie, liberalitie, mercy, and goodnes, of the lorde, I am encoraged, boldened, and stirred to aske [for] suche a noble gift.24

By this divinely given faith, Katherine felt an inward peace which convinced her that she truly had been forgiven. That new conviction, in turn, led to a new confidence:

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By this fayth I am assured: and by thys assurance, I fele the remission of my sinnes: this is it that maketh me bold, this is it that comforteth me, this is it that quencheth all dispayre.25

In her description of how she now felt connected to God, Katherine even used the language of imputation, the technical terminology associated with solifidianism: Thus I feele my selfe to cum, as it were in a newe garment, before god, and nowe by his mercye, to be taken iuste, and rightwise.26

Finally, she began to live motivated by God’s love, rather than by sin and self. For traditionalists, the gift of divine love was the foundation of a person’s inherent righteousness which justified them before God. For the ‘Gospellers’, divine love was the fruit of gratitude for having been justified because of faith in God’s promise. Katherine made her position perfectly clear: Then began I to dwel in god by charitie, knowing by the lovyng charitie of god in the remission of my sinnes, that god is charitie as Saint John sayth. So that of my faythe (wherby I came to knowe god, and wherby it pleased god even because I trusted in hym, to iustifie me) sprang this excellent charitie in my harte.27

Here we see the doctrinal bridge by which the scriptural affective piety of medieval English spirituality and Renaissance Humanism crossed over into early Protestantism. England’s reformers embraced justification by faith because they came to believe that only by first experiencing the unconditional love of God made known in salvation as a free gift could human beings ever begin to find the power of loving him in return. To adapt a term from T. S. Eliot, Bilney and Katherine Parr clearly ‘felt their thought’, but only because of the power of solifidianism.28 Thomas Cranmer agreed. Consider his description, given to Henry VIII, of the interplay between the mental realization of the free pardon for sins offered by the evangelical reading of Scripture and the affections of the human heart: But, if the profession of our faith of the remission of our own sins enter within us into the deepness of our hearts, then it must needs kindle a warm fire of love in our hearts towards God, and towards all other for the love

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of God, – a fervent mind to seek and procure God’s honour, will, and pleasure in all things, – a good will and mind to help every man and to do good unto them, so far as our might, wisdom, learning, counsel, health, strength, and all other gifts which we have received of God, will extend, – and, in summa, a firm intent and purpose to do all that is good, and leave all that is evil.29

Rooted in St. Paul, guided by Augustine’s On Faith and Works and using the language of Rolle and Hilton, Cranmer summarized in this passage his understanding of ‘lively faith’. He would soon enshrine these soteriological principles in his first formulary for the Church of England under the boy-king Edward VI (1537–1553). Popularly known as the Book of Homilies, though really entitled Certain Sermons, or Homilies… (London, 1547) [STC, 13638.5], these twelve sermons were required to be read, in order, in every parish church every Sunday. On the one hand, the first homily on Scripture clearly teaches the supernatural power of the Bible to turn people’s hearts to God and the doing of his will: ‘[The words of Holy Scripture] have power to convert through God’s promise, and they be effectual through God’s assistance’. Those who devoted themselves to ‘continual reading and meditation of God’s Word’ would discover that ‘the great affection to the transitory things of this world shall be diminished in him, and the great desire of heavenly things that be therein promised of God shall increase in him’. Hence, ‘the hearing and keeping of [Scripture] maketh us blessed, sanctifieth us and maketh us holy’.30 On the other hand, the third homily on salvation describes how Scripture’s transforming power imparts two key gifts to believers: saving faith and loving obedience, with the latter being the fruit of the former. Firstly, a ‘sure trust and confidence in God’s merciful promises, to be saved from everlasting damnation by Christ’, justified sinners. Here is the most important reason for Cranmer’s evangelism of prodigal leniency. As a public enactment of his biblical exegesis, he gave grace to the unworthy in the hope that they might begin to understand that God did likewise in salvation. Secondly, gratitude for this assurance of unmerited salvation then led to ‘a loving heart to obey his commandments’, drawing believers closer to God and to one another.31 For Cranmer, since only solifidianism revealed the unconditional love of God, only solifidianism would enable Christians to become loving, and so fulfil the medieval ideal. Therefore,

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he mandated its regular proclamation from the pulpit of every parish church in England.

New Insights into Cranmer’s Patristic Methodology Not surprisingly, Cranmer’s traditionalist contemporaries were not at all impressed with his learning in the Fathers. According to Miles Huggarde (fl. 1533–1557), ‘the chiefe byshop of them all’ did indeed ‘rushe to the doctors’, but did so ‘unreverently’, merely to ‘rent out’ ‘in gobetes small, pieces for his purpose’. Consequently, such ‘pellet-sized’ bits of patristic writing, shorn from their contexts, were guided by Cranmer’s reason rather than by the received wisdom of ancient revelation. The end result was a thorough destruction of the ancient faith instead of its recovery, as Cranmer claimed.32 450 years later, modern scholars have found little fault with the traditionalist assessment of Cranmer. In his inaugural 1960 lecture at Oxford, Professor Greenslade repristinated the pellet analogy, although he equably made the charge against both the English reformers and their traditionalist opponents, in their sixteenth-century doctrinal wars: Passages torn from their context were marshalled for or against propositions already formulated; theologians were tempted to look for ammunition rather than instruction… In either case, there was as yet little disinterested study of individual Fathers in the round.33

Twenty years later, K. J. Walsh came to the same conclusion. After examining Cranmer’s first book on the Eucharist, the Defence, and its forty-some page preparatory research manuscript, ‘De re sacramentaria’, Walsh acknowledged that the archbishop had a remarkably up-to-date library of the new Humanist editions of the Fathers.34 He even lauded the precision with which Cranmer insisted that quotations from them be recorded in his notebooks, commending the high level of verbal accuracy and the archbishop’s rare attention to the details of punctuation. Walsh, however, was far less positive about how Cranmer actually found and used patristic material for his theological writings. In his view, the archbishop merely looked to his library to give a Renaissance varnish to his essentially medieval methodology. Rather than reading widely in the Fathers himself, Cranmer simply relied upon such standard florilegia as the Decretum of

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Gratian (fl. mid-12th century) and the popular pseudonymous Reformation anthology Unio Dissidentium. He also incorporated the research of others, principally Tractatio de Sacramento Eucharistiae… (London, [1549]) [STC, 24673] by Pietro Martire [Peter Martyr] Vermigli (1499– 1562) and Dialogus Quo Patrum Sententiam de Coena Domini Bona Fide Explanat (Basel, 1530) by Johannes Oecolampadius (1482–1531) as well. Although Cranmer made some corrections of his sources in line with current Humanist scholarship, Walsh concluded that there was little evidence that he had used his magnificent Humanist library to broaden significantly the body of patristic passages on the Eucharist beyond that already known to scholasticism. Walsh’s second criticism is a corollary to his first. Since Cranmer gathered his learning in the Fathers from catenae, his selections had long been separated from their initial contexts, thus rendering them powerless to convey an accurate sense of the original patristic arguments. Yet, according to Walsh, the archbishop’s working methods gave little indication that such a consequence was of any concern. As a committed Protestant, Cranmer considered the role of the Fathers to be to confirm a prior conclusion that he had reached via biblical exegesis, not to be the means by which he arrived at theological truth. Hence, patristic conclusions, rather than their reasoning, were what the primate valued. Moreover, still shaped by the medieval educational system, Cranmer valued these conclusions as an effective arsenal with which to score debating points. As a result, Walsh detected in the archbishop’s ‘readiness to trade “authorities” with the authority-mongers’ more than a whiff of ‘self-justification’.35 In short, the Fathers served as a source of validation and defence of Cranmer’s own opinions, not as a means of shaping them—‘peices for his purpose’, in Huggarde’s words. Citing Greenslade’s famous lecture, Walsh excused the archbishop’s lack of attentiveness to the voice of the patristic era simply as a failure to rise above the normal academic practice of his own age. Yet, such disinterested scholarly fairness so often denied Cranmer in the past did not ultimately alter history’s final judgment upon him in this matter. For, by explaining the archbishop in the context of his times, Walsh only sought to reinforce his principal point that Cranmer had failed to examine the Fathers in theirs.36 This essentially negative evaluation soon became the standard description of Cranmer’s patristic scholarship.37 Even Jean-Louis Quantin’s otherwise ground-breaking re-assessment of the role of the Fathers in the development of Anglican identity simply repristinates Walsh’s work.38

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To understand Cranmer’s patristic research in the Edwardian period, we need to look at the papers of one of his secretaries, Pierre Alexandre [pseudonym Simon Alexius] (c.1498–1563), who was also deeply involved with Cranmer on at least two major theological projects. Firstly, he was charged with creating indexed epitomes to the works of the major early Church theologians: Dionysius the Areopagite (falsely thought to be St. Paul’s first-century convert in Athens),39 Ignatius of Antioch (c.35–107), Polycarp of Smyrna (c.69–155), Irenaeus of Lyon (c.130–200), Cyprian of Carthage (c.200–258), Tertullian of Carthage (c.160–225), Origen of Alexandria (c.185–254), Athanasius of Alexandria (c.296–373) and Epiphanius of Salamis (c.315–403). In the case of John Chrysostom (c.347–407) and Augustine of Hippo (354–430), whose voluminous output was too great for individual epitomes, over seventy theological loci communes drawn from their works were recorded instead. The project was divided between three massive manuscripts: Dionysius to Tertullian, Origen to Epiphanius and, finally, Chrysostom and Augustine, as the final word for both the Greek and Latin patristic traditions. Of the three presentation manuscripts made for Cranmer, only that covering Origen to Epiphanius, dated Lambeth Palace, April 1550, now survives as Cambridge University Library MS Ee.2.8. Pierre Alexandre, however, kept for his own use the working papers from which the presentation copies were made. These papers now survive in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, as Latin MS 3396, fols 1r–40r (Dionysius to Irenaeus, but lacking Polycarp); Latin MS 1624 (Cyprian and Tertullian); Latin MS 1647 (Origen, Athanasius and Epiphanius); and Dupuy MS 614, fols 271r–286v (Augustine and Chrysostom, but only as an index, giving the first three words and last three words of every quotation included in a now lost manuscript that ran to at least some 1600 pages). However, as if such a massive project was not enough, Cranmer commissioned a second theological research endeavour, this one dedicated to the subject of the Eucharist. From this study would eventually emerge his book A Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Bloud of our Saviour Christ.40 The project had three parts. Firstly, there were over three hundred folio pages of quotations on the Eucharist listed by author from over forty major theologians extending from Dionysius to Innocent III. Given Cranmer’s Humanist preference for ancient authors, twenty-five of these authorial loci were drawn from theologians who lived prior to 500 AD, and many of their writings were read in course through editions of their collected works,

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with volume and folio numbers duly recorded in order of their appearance in the latest editions. In the light of all the comments about Cranmer’s alleged lack of interest in context, the length of the individual quotations from his major authors is just as important, and indeed as impressively large, as their number. Consider his entries from Augustine, his largest authorial commonplace. Forty-four per cent of this section consists of extracts that are at least a full folio side in length.41 The extracts from Chrysostom’s locus are even longer. Seventy per cent of material from Cranmer’s number-two theologian consists of quotations that are at least one whole folio side in extent, and forty-five per cent stretch to at least two folio sides.42 Secondly, a selection of writings was gathered from contemporary reformed theologians: Johannes à Lasco [Jan Laski] (1499–1560), Oecolampadius, Peter Martyr Vermigli and, naturally, Martin Bucer (1491–1551). Thirdly, propositional loci, derived from the historical theologians’ loci, were drawn up. These propositions would eventually become the key points in Cranmer’s book. The textual history of the Edwardian eucharistic research project is a bit complicated.43 In brief, the process began with an initial list of books to be consulted (extant as CCCC, PL MS 102, pp. 243–6), next a preliminary collection of extracts was gathered (ibid., pp. 213–42) and then the greatly expanded version of extracts from the writings of over forty patristic and medieval theologians was put together (BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 40r–184r).44 To these historical commonplaces, contemporary reformed authorial loci were added (ibid., fols 188r–236v). Now a first culling of red-underlined passages in the historical authorial loci was made as the basis for eleven propositional loci, the famous ‘De re sacramentaria’ (CCCC, PL MS 102, pp. 151–93), hitherto the only known surviving Cranmer research for the Defence.45 Subsequently, a reworked expansion of these eleven propositional loci to twenty-seven was effected, with all of Cranmer’s many handwritten corrections to ‘De re sacramentaria’ being incorporated in the new twenty-seven-loci recension (BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 237v–259r).46 This set of commonplaces constituted the basis from which the Defence was written, for patristic quotations found in the Defence, but not in ‘De re sacramentaria’, are included in BnF, Latin MS 3396.47 Eventually, even these loci were revised again, with a further twelve commonplaces being added.48 This final attempt by Cranmer to express his views on the pressing questions of the day associated with this sacrament was recorded at a fairly late stage in its

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development in BnF, Dupuy MS 424, fols 64r–109r, since only its final folios also bear Cranmer’s handwritten corrections.49 All scholars agree that Cranmer changed from a real to a spiritual presence position sometime during the 1540s. But that is about all the agreement there is. When the transition happened, how it happened, how long it took, on what basis it happened, and what was the ultimate result—all these questions have been fiercely debated ever since,50 and all of them will need to be revisited in the light of Cranmer’s extensive Edwardian eucharistic research project, as now revealed.

The Influence of Cyril of Alexandria (c.376–444) Upon Cranmer While Cranmer never wavered in his commitment to an effectual presence in Holy Communion, he eventually changed his understanding of its mode. This led him in the end to maintain two positions simultaneously. On the one hand, since Christ’s ascension, his human body is now located in Heaven and totally absent from the earth until his return. Christ is present in this world, in the sacrament, and in believers only by his divinity. According to Cranmer, ‘Christian people must believe, that although Christ be absent from us as concerning his body, yet by his power he governeth us and all things, and is present with all them that love him’.51 Because God relates to his people by the Spirit, even if Christ’s human body were present during Holy Communion, that would be of no supernatural benefit to believers.52 On the other hand, those with saving faith receive in the sacrament ‘Christ himself, whole body and soul, manhood and Godhead’ for ‘nourishment and augmentation’.53 How did Cranmer conclude that it was possible to have only a spiritual presence of Christ in Holy Communion, yet for it still to be right to teach that in the sacrament a believer was united to the whole Christ? Understandably, not a few scholars have seen in these twin tenets a fundamentally irreconcilable contradiction.54 In the new light of Cranmer’s massive patristic research on the Eucharist, we need to consider this question afresh, beginning with his red annotations to Oecolampadius’s Dialogus and associated letters (see Fig. 3.2).55 Peter Newman Brooks has suggested that Cranmer culled early Church quotations from the Dialogus for the section on the Eucharist in ‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’, which he compiled during the late 1530s.

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Fig. 3.2 Portrait of Johannes Oecolampadius by Hans Asper, mixed media on panel, c.1531–1550

Brooks notes that this early ‘reliance on Oecolampadius’ is rather counterintuitive, since the Swiss reformer was writing to support a spiritual presence understanding of Holy Communion while at that juncture Cranmer held a real presence position.56 In reality, however, at the time of compiling the ‘Great Commonplaces’, Cranmer seems to have looked to Oecolampadius’s opponents for assistance, in particular Albert Pighe’s Hierarchiae Ecclesiasticae Assertio (1538) and Philipp Melanchthon’s Sententiae Veterum Aliquot Scriptorum de Coena Domini (1530).57 The

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quotations bracketed in Cranmer’s still extant copy of Pighe appear in ‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’,58 while none of the bracketed passages in the surviving copy of Cranmer’s Dialogus are found there.59 In fact, what Brooks spotted in the ‘Great Commonplaces’ are the quotations from Melanchthon’s Sententiae that Oecolampadius had quoted in full in order to refute them,60 which presumably Cranmer had also bracketed for recording in his own (now lost) copy of Melanchthon.61 Hence, it would seem that the red bracketing and associated markings in Cranmer’s surviving copy of the Dialogus were not made until later, most likely during his period of re-assessment in the 1540s, when he was moving towards the spiritual presence interpretation which Oecolampadius advocated.62 We may then examine the annotations in Cranmer’s Dialogus for insights into the arguments that helped to persuade the archbishop to adopt his mature twin tenets. Two passages marked-up in red would seem to be particularly helpful. The first is found in the text of a letter from Oecolampadius to Martin Bucer, dated 3 September 1530. Here the Basel reformer offered his explanation as to how it was possible to insist upon a spiritual presence in the Lord’s Supper and, notwithstanding, also to maintain that believers still received the whole Christ, both spirit and body, in the sacrament: And although we may not say that [Christ’s] salvific body is united with the bread or properly pressed between lips and teeth, we have never said, however, that because of this it can be separated from his divine spirit. On the contrary, we abhor that real separation as the worst plague. For Christ’s body or humanity is not therefore divided from his deity, since the latter is immeasurable and everywhere, while the former is, however, circumscribed and occupying a fixed place. We say that his body and blood is nevertheless passed on and received together with the bread and the wine in a symbolic manner through faithful contemplation.63

Cranmer responded by underlining the key sections as shown above and by writing in the margin: ‘How the true body of Christ is present in the Supper’. That Cranmer used the adjective ‘true’ beside this description of Christ’s body given in the sacrament—a word nowhere found in Oecolampadius’s text—seems to suggest that Cranmer now believed the Christological argument to be convincing. The second significant annotated passage would appear to offer an explanation from the Fathers as to why Cranmer came into agreement

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with Oecolampadius. This set of annotations is made in a different shade of red, and the script of its marginalium is slightly smaller, suggesting that it predates the first. It also comes from the Dialogus proper, at the point when the Basel reformer argued that believers were sanctified, made one with Christ and quickened to eternal life through the Holy Spirit, not by Christ’s bodily presence within the elements of communion.64 To show patristic support for his emphasis upon the Spirit, Oecolampadius quoted Cyril of Alexandria’s exposition of his eleventh anathema against Nestorius (c.386–450): →In65 church we celebrate the holy, life-giving and bloodless sacrifice, not because we believe that the offering is the body of an ordinary person like ourselves, or that the same is true of the precious blood. Rather, we understand the offering to have become the very own body and blood of the all-powerful Word. For ordinary flesh cannot give life, as our Saviour himself testifies: ‘The flesh is of no use; it is the Spirit who gives life’.66 Because the offering has become the Word’s own flesh, we therefore deem it life-giving, which it is. As our Saviour himself says, ‘Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, the one who feeds on me will live because of me’.67 Therefore, since Nestorius (and those who agree with him) ignorantly destroy the power of the mystery, he has rightly been anathematized.←68

Here we can clearly see Cyril’s Christology at work, defending the unity of Christ’s human and divine natures as one single subject, the Incarnate Word of God, against Nestorius’s insistence on maintaining a strict separation between Christ’s humanity and divinity when describing his activities, e.g. the man Jesus wept, but God the Logos raised Lazarus from the dead. Because the Incarnate Word could not be divided, as a single entity, when Jesus’s humanity walked the earth, his divinity still filled the heavens. Likewise, as a single entity, when Jesus’s humanity ascended to Heaven to be seated at the right hand of God, his divinity still filled the whole earth.69 Hence, Cyril argued in this text that Christ’s flesh in the sacrament gave life because where his body was, his spirit was also. Indeed, according to modern scholarship, Cyril developed his Christology specifically in order to defend his understanding of Christ’s life-giving corporal presence in the Eucharist.70 Yet, we have already seen Oecolampadius apply the principle of an undivided Christ to make the opposite argument: that where his spirit was, a direct connection to his absent body was

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also. Now in the Dialogus, Oecolampadius has supplied his patristic confirmation for this claim. Even more importantly, however, Cyril’s doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (communication of properties) is on display here too. The Incarnate Word’s union resulted in the Divine Spirit enhancing his human nature, yet without violating the basic nature of either. Hence, Christ’s flesh had the power to give eternal life to the fallen flesh of other human beings precisely because it would bear the Spirit to them. Oecolampadius, however, has used these very principles to come to the opposite conclusion. Christ’s body could only be in Heaven, lest the communicatio idiomatum destroy his basic human nature, but that was no impediment to the sacrament giving deepened supernatural life to believers through a spiritual presence, nor for the spiritual presence to connect them to Christ’s physical body in Heaven, since Christ himself remained undivided. In Cyril’s own use of John 6:63 to emphasize the Spirit as the agent of renewal in Holy Communion, Oecolampadius found a key patristic source for his own understanding of an effectual presence through the Spirit. What was Cranmer’s response to Oecolampadius’s use of Cyril on these key points in the course of his patristic research in the 1540s? After all, Melanchthon had deployed lengthy quotations from Cyril to argue for a real presence position which Cranmer had duly recorded in his ‘Great Commonplaces’ during the 1530s.71 Years before, in reference to the writings of Oecolampadius, Cranmer had asserted that he read almost everything Oecolampadius wrote, but also that ‘the writings of every man must be read with discrimination’.72 So, ever the cautious scholar, he now bracketed the whole passage, drew a red line in the margin beside it, marked it with his symbol for ‘Note!’ and wrote: ‘This place must be examined’. And that is precisely what he did in BnF, Latin MS 3396 as part of his massive eucharistic research project—twenty-seven folio sides focusing on the concept that the Spirit of the undivided Christ gives life through the sacrament.73 What he found, and what he had recorded there, were not only numerous examples of Cyril’s emphasis upon the Spirit working immortality in the flesh of fallen human beings through Holy Communion, but also the sacrament’s role in promoting holiness through the renewing of their affections: Thus through many various ways the gracious mercy of God likes to draw human nature away from the desire for transitory things. For although the lust of the flesh, like a great stony weight, presses down on our nature to

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seek what is passing away and so, as a tyrant, reduce us to its control, Christ brings us around, as if with a bridle, to the longing for better things.74

When Cranmer later returned to his copy of the Dialogus and its associated letters, he was able to underline Oecolampadius’s description of the spiritual presence and pen a positive endorsement. The largest contributors to Cranmer’s authorial commonplaces on the Eucharist were Augustine (24%), Chrysostom (19%) and Cyril of Alexandria (10%). Although Walsh thought that the Greek East was ‘all but a closed book’ to Cranmer,75 it was in fact there that he found the patristic grounds for holding his mature, seemingly mutually exclusive, twin tenets on Holy Communion. While modern scholars are free to dispute the accuracy of Cranmer’s construal of Cyril, as well as of the other historic theologians whose works are excerpted in his notebooks on the sacrament of the Eucharist, it is no longer tenable to claim that he had not thoroughly studied their writings in context, nor that his mature thinking was not influenced by their reasoning.76 Cranmer’s reputation must be revised accordingly. Just as his commitment to solifidianism should best be understood as his fulfilling the aims of the medieval ‘mixed-life’ piety of his upbringing, not as its repudiation, so Cranmer’s mature embrace of a reformed view of the sacraments should be seen as the final fruit of his thorough-going patristic studies—rather than that the Fathers merely provided polemical ammunition for a position that he had already adopted. With Cranmer’s understanding of the Eucharist as a means for receiving supernatural assistance to fight sin, and for inspiring loving godliness, we have now come full circle. The archbishop’s patristic studies in Cyril of Alexandria only reinforced his appreciation for the role of the affections in the Christian life. If justification by faith gave birth to a new burning love for God and others, then Holy Communion was indeed its ‘nourishment and augmentation’ for sanctification. The sacrament’s proper focus was not the transformation of the elements, but of the human will, by means of union with Christ through spirit-empowered faith. Hence, Cranmer proved to be no new Athena. While clearly a herald for a new religious era, he rooted his reform of the doctrine of the recently independent Church of England in the medieval pursuit of right desire as determined by the ancient wisdom of Scripture and guided by the insights of the Fathers, just as his portrait by Flicke had suggested—for those with eyes to see and hearts to embrace.

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Notes 1. NPG 535. On the artist, see C. MacLeod, ‘Flicke, Gerlach [Garlick, Garlicke] (d. 1558)’, in ODNB. 2. That the phrase ‘new learning’ in Tudor England referred specifically to Protestant Humanism, rather than to Renaissance Humanism in general, is argued in R. Rex, ‘The New Learning’, JEH , 44 (1993), pp. 26–44. 3. See MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 1–2; A. Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford, 2000), pp. 2–4; and P. N. Brooks, Cranmer in Context (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 117–27. 4. For further indications of his Reformation commitments in the Flicke portrait, see A. Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford, 2000), pp. 96–7, 102–3, 109–10. 5. The other book resting on the table long ago lost its labelling and has defied identification. 6. B. Kerns (trans.), Gregory the Great, Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, 5 vols (Collegeville, MN, 2014–19), II p. 81 (6.37.56). 7. See J. P. H. Clark, ‘Action and Contemplation in Walter Hilton’, The Downside Review, 97 (1979), pp. 258–74. 8. See S. J. Ogilvie-Thomson (ed.), Walter Hilton’s Mixed Life, Edited from Lambeth Palace MS 472 (Salzburg, 1986). 9. See V. Edden, ‘The Devotional Life of the Laity in the Late Middle Ages’, in D. Dyas et al. (eds), Approaching Medieval English Anchoritic and Mystical Texts (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 35–49; H. M. Carey, ‘Devout Literate Laypeople and the Pursuit of the Mixed Life in Later Medieval England’, JRH , 14 (1987), pp. 361–81. 10. C. A. J. Armstrong, ‘The Piety of Cicely, Duchess of York: A Study in Late Mediaeval Culture’, in D. Woodruff (ed.), For Hilaire Belloc: Essays in Honour of His 72nd Birthday (London, 1942), pp. 73–94, reprinted in C. A. J. Armstrong, England, France and Burgundy in the Fifteenth Century (London, 1983), pp. 135–56 (at p. 141). 11. M. K. Jones and M. G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 197– 201. 12. ‘Anecdotes and Character of Archbishop Cranmer, by Ralph Morice, His Secretary’, printed in Nichols, Narratives, pp. 234–72 (at p. 250). 13. Ibid., pp. 244–5. 14. B. Kerns (trans.), Gregory the Great, Moral Reflections on the Book of Job, 5 vols (Collegeville, MN, 2014–19), II pp. 80–1 (6.37.56). 15. Marshall, Heretics & Believers, pp. 137–49. See also A. Null, ‘Thomas Cranmer and Tudor Evangelicalism’, in M. A. G. Haykin and K. J. Stewart (eds), The Emergence of Evangelicalism: Exploring Historical Continuities (Nottingham, 2008), pp. 221–51.

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16. Marshall, Heretics & Believers, pp. 142–3. 17. ‘How shall wee then knowe whether they be the ryght preachers, & theyre doctryne the worde of god or no? Trewly Cryste gevyth us a rule infallyble, sayenge: By theyr frutes ye shall knowe theym… A great occasyon why that many be so fervent in favouryng thys Lutherane doctryne ys the vayn prayses of much people comyng from thence, reporting that there is so good order, such charytable lyberalyte, and evangelyke conversacyon, whych ys all to gether false’: W. Barlow, A Dyaloge Descrybyng the Orygynall Ground of These Lutheran Faccyons, and Many of Theyr Abusys (London, 1531) [STC, 1461], sigs B3r, [B4]v. 18. Nichols, Narratives, pp. 246–7. 19. BL, Royal MSS 7.B.XI and 7.B.XII (‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’) [hereafter CGC I and CGC II]; A. Null, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of Repentance: Renewing the Power to Love (Oxford, 2000), pp. 254–66, especially pp. 262–3. 20. See CGC II, fols 98v–99v. 21. [W. Roye?] (trans.), D. Erasmus, An Exhortation to the Diligent Studye of Scripture… (‘Malborow’ [i.e. Antwerp], 1529) [STC, 10493], sigs A2r–v, [A6]r. 22. J. Foxe, Actes and Monumentes… (2nd edn, London, 1570) [STC, 11223], pp. 1141–3 (at p. 1143). Bilney’s description of his conversion is contained in correspondence with Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall during his 1527 heresy trial. Foxe printed two versions: the original Latin and an English translation. The ‘quotation’ here is the present author’s modernized English revision of Foxe’s translation, made in the light of the original Latin. 23. K. Parr, The Lamentacion of a Sinner… (London, 1547) [STC, 4827], sig. B2v. 24. Ibid., sig. [B3]r–v. 25. Ibid., sigs [B3]v–[B4]r. 26. Ibid., sig. [B4]v. 27. Ibid., sig. [B6]r–v. 28. [T. S. Eliot], ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 1031 (20 October 1921), pp. 669–70 (at p. 669). 29. Cox, Writings & Letters, p. 86. 30. R. B. Bond (ed.), Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition (Toronto, 1987), pp. 62–3 (spelling modernized). 31. Cox, Writings & Letters, p. 133. 32. M. Huggarde, The Assault of the Sacrament of the Altar… Written in the Yere of Oure Lorde 1549… (London, 1554) [STC, 13556], sig. E2r. 33. S. L. Greenslade, The English Reformers and the Fathers of the Church… (Oxford, 1960), p. 16.

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34. K. J. Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers, Especially in the Defence’, JRH , 11 (1980), pp. 227–47; T. Cranmer, A Defence of the True and Catholike Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Bloud of Our Saviour Christ, with a Confutation of Sundry Errors Concernyng the Same, Grounded and Stablished Upon Goddes Holy Woorde, & Approved by the Consent of the Moste Auncient Doctors of the Churche… (London, 1550) [STC, 6000] [hereafter Cranmer, Defence]; and CCCC, PL MS 102, pp. 151–93 (‘De re sacramentaria’). 35. K. J. Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers, Especially in the Defence’, JRH , 11 (1980), pp. 237–8. 36. Ibid., p. 247. 37. e.g. see M. Anderson, ‘Rhetoric and Reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’, SCJ , XIX (1988), pp. 451–69 (at p. 457); MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 416, 467–9, 490; C. A. Zwierlein, ‘Der Reformierte Erasmianer a Lasco und die Herausbildung seiner Abendmahlslehre 1544–1552’, in C. Strohm (ed.), Johannes a Lasco (1499–1560): Polnischer Baron, Humanist und Europäischer Reformator: Beiträge zum Internationalen Symposium vom 14–17 Oktober 1999 in der Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek Emden (Tübingen, 2000) pp. 35–99, especially p. 95 (n. 218); and A. Middleton, Fathers and Anglicans: The Limits of Orthodoxy (Leominster, 2001), pp. 22–8. 38. J.-L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009), p. 26. 39. See Acts of the Apostles 17:34. 40. Cranmer, Defence. 41. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris [hereafter BnF] Latin MS 3396, fols 130r–131r, 131v–132r, 132r–v, 132v–133r, 133v–134v, 140r–141r, 141v–142v, 143r–v, 145v–146r, 147v–148v, 148v–149r, 151r–v, 154r– v, 157v–158r, 158r–159r, 159r–v, 160r–161r, 161v–162r, 162v–163r, 164r–v, 164v–165r, 165r–v. 42. Ibid., fols 79r–80v, 80v–81v, 85r–86v, 86v–87r, 87r–88r, 88v–89r, 89r–v, 92r–93r, 93v–94v, 94v–95v, 95v–96v, 97r–v, 98r–99r, 99v–100v, 100v– 101r, 101r–102r, 102v–103r, 103v–106r (fol. 105 is blank), 106r–107r. 43. A full discussion will appear in the third volume of my edn of Cranmer’s theological notebooks, to be published by Oxford University Press. 44. Note the high correlation between passages marked in Cranmer’s library books and quotations recorded in the Paris extracts. Examples are indicated in Appendix 1. 45. Numerous quotations given in CCCC, PL MS 102, pp. 151–93 are also found in BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 40r–184r, often in the context of much longer passages and usually underlined in red. See, e.g., CCCC, PL MS 102, p. 156 and BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 147r, 165r, 169r, 170r,

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46.

47.

48.

49. 50.

51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

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178r, 179r, 182r and 183v. How the texts compare is shown in Appendix 2. e.g. cf. CCCC, PL MS 102, pp. 153–6 and BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 246r–247r. Note that when the first two commonplaces in ‘De re sacramentaria’ were combined into one commonplace in the BnF MS, all of Cranmer’s handwritten deletions, insertions and revisions, as well as his re-numbering of quotations, have been followed exactly. These changes are laid out in Appendix 3. e.g. cf. (i) BnF, Latin MS 3396, fol. 242v with Cranmer, Defence, Book V, Chapter 13, fols 113r–114r and (ii) BnF, Latin MS 3396, fol. 243v with Cranmer, Defence, Book II, Chapter 13, fols 40v–43v. BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 237v–259r were later amended so as to serve as a working copy for ibid., Dupuy MS 424, fols 64r–109r. New citations were added at the end of each of those original commonplaces that were to be retained and twelve new commonplaces were appended to the whole document. Consequently, as it now stands, BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 237v–263r contain thirty-nine commonplaces. For Cranmer’s handwritten corrections, see ibid., Dupuy MS 424, fols 90r, 98v–99v, 103r–v, 104v. Consider, e.g., the competing descriptions of Cranmer’s mature eucharistic doctrine offered by three well-respected scholars: C. W. Dugmore, The Mass and the English Reformers (London, 1958); P. N. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1992); and B. Hall, ‘Cranmer, the Eucharist and the Foreign Divines in the Reign of Edward VI’, in P. Ayris and D. Selwyn (eds), Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar (Woodbridge, 1993), pp. 217–58. J. E. Cox (ed.), Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Martyr, 1556, Relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, PS (Cambridge, 1844), p. 96. Ibid., pp. 183, 219. Ibid., p. 25. Richardson argued that Cranmer’s insistence upon Christ’s body being confined to Heaven (because of his very broad nominalism) conflicted with his realist language of believers’ union with Christ both spiritually and corporally: C. C. Richardson, ‘Cranmer and the Analysis of Eucharistic Doctrine’, The Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, XVI (1965), pp. 421–37; Cf. G. P. Jeanes, Signs of God’s Promise: Thomas Cranmer’s Sacramental Theology and the Book of Common Prayer (London, 2008), pp. 6–10; and B. Douglas, A Companion to Anglican Eucharistic Theology, 2 vols (Leiden, 2012), I pp. 87–90. T. Bibliander (ed.), DD. Ioannis Oecolampadii et Huldrichi Zvinglii Epistolarum Libri Quatuor… (Basel, 1536), Book 3. Cranmer’s copy of

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58. 59. 60.

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this publication is extant as CUL, Shelfmark H*.8.17(C), noticed in D. G. Selwyn, The Library of Thomas Cranmer, Oxford Bibliographical Society Publications, 3rd Series, 1 (Oxford, 1996) [hereafter Selwyn, Library], p. 65 (No. 234). In that copy, hereafter C[ranmer]L[ibrary] 234, the relevant section is fols 114r–168v, where the Dialogus begins on fol. 130r. P. N. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 34–5. A. Pighe, Hierarchiae Ecclesiasticae Assertio (Cologne, 1538). Cranmer’s copy is extant as BL, Shelfmark 1124.cc.16, noticed in Selwyn, Library, p. 70 (No. 258) and cited hereafter as CL 258. Several corresponding quotations are listed in Appendix 4. For comparisons, see Appendix 5. cf. P. Melanchthon, Sentenciae Veterum Aliquot Scriptorum de Coena Domini (Wittenberg, 1530), sigs A5r–B1v, B2v, B3v–[B6]r; CGC I, fols 81r–v, 82v–86v; P. N. Brooks, Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist (2nd edn, Basingstoke, 1992), p. 35 (n. 1). Three quotations in ‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’ cited by Brooks as coming from Oecolampadius are not found in either Melanchthon or Pighe. However, these remaining extracts have several textual differences with the Dialogus: cf. the following entries: (i) ‘[Gelasius papa] adversus Eutichen et Nestorium’ (CGC I, fol. 79v) and ‘Gelasius papa in Concilio Romano’ (CL 234, fol. 153v). (ii) ‘Hieronimi hedibiae Questio 2’ (CGC I, fol. 89v) and ‘Hieronymus ad Hedibiam’ (CL 234, fol. 148r). (iii) ‘[Hieronimus] in Matthaeum ca. 26’ (CGC I, fol. 89v) and ‘Hieronymus super Matth’ (CL 234, fol. 142v).

Therefore, while being the same passages, it seems unlikely that even these three quotations were copied into ‘Cranmer’s Great Commonplaces’ directly from Oecolampadius. 62. Note that Cranmer’s markings in CL 234 were made over time in different shades of red ink and also in black ink. Some red marginalia are associated with red underlinings (e.g. fol. 128r), others with red brackets (e.g. fol. 151r) and still others with red quotation marks placed in the margin (e.g. fol. 138v). Since Cranmer routinely bracketed quotations in his personal library books for his copyist to record in notebooks, these sets of annotations are most likely to have belonged to a formal research programme. The black annotations, the largest in CL 234, are his last, for the archbishop’s handwriting became wider and larger as he aged (fol. 134v; the smaller black annotation here is not Cranmer’s). 63. ‘Et quamuis non dicamus corpus illud panaceum, uel pani unitum, uel labijs ac dentibus proprie premi: non tamen ipsum a spiritu diuino ipsius

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64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72. 73.

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separari propterea unquam diximus, imo separationem illam realem uti summam pestem execramur. Non enim ideo separatur corpus uel humanitas Christi a deitate, quia haec ubique est ac immensa: illa uero circumscripta, et certum locum occupans. Cum pane etiam ac uino symboliκîς [sic] nihilominus et contemplatione fidei, corpus et sanguinem tradi et accipi dicimus ’: ibid., fol. 128r, where Cranmer’s marginalium reads ‘Quomodo in coena sit verum corpus Christi’. Ibid., fol. 134v. Here and elsewhere in this essay, an arrow and the underlining of the first two characters is an attempt to show where Cranmer’s bracket begins, with the same in reverse signifying his closing bracket. John 6:63 [Vulgate: John 6:64]. John 6:57 [Vulgate: John 6:58]. ‘→Sanctum ac uiuificum et incruentum in ecclesijs operamur sacrificium, non unius qui sicut nos, et communis hominis corpus esse credentes, quod proponitur, similiter et uenerabilem sanguinem: sed accipientes magis, ut factum proprium corpus, et etiam sanguinem omnipotentis uerbi. Communis enim caro uiuificare nequit, cuius testis est ipse Seruator dicens, Caro prodest nihil, spiritus est qui uiuificat: quoniam propria facta est uerbi. Sic igitur cogitatur, et est uiuifica, sicut dicit ipse Seruator: Et sicut misit me uiuens pater, et ego uiuo propter patrem, et qui manducat me uiuet propter me. Quoniam igitur Nestorius, et qui eadem sentient, indocte destruunt mysterij uirtutem, ob hoc et recte factus est anathematis mus←’: CL 234, fol. 151r, where Cranmer’s marginalia read ‘Hic locus quaerendus est ’ and ‘Nota’. Note that the black underlinings in the text here were not made by Cranmer. See J. A. McGuckin, St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy: Its History, Theology, and Texts (Leiden, 1994; Crestwood and New York, 2004), especially pp. 175–226; H. van Loon, The Dyophysite Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (Leiden, 2009). See, e.g., H. Chadwick, ‘Eucharist and Christology in the Nestorian Controversy’, The Journal of Theological Studies, New Series, II (1951), pp. 145–64, especially pp. 153–6. CGC I, fols 82v–84v. Thomas Cranmer to Joachim Vadian, n.p., n.d. [1537], printed in Cox, Writings & Letters, p. 344 (Letter CXCIII). BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 65v–77v, 82r–v. For the quotation from Cyril’s explanation of the eleventh anathema that Oecolampadius used in the Dialogus, see ibid., fol. 74v.

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74. ‘Ita gratia et misericordia dei, vel a cupiditate caducarum rerum, variis multisque modis humanam solet reuocare naturam. N am quum ut, magni ponderis lapis ad haec instabilia carnis premat appetitus, et tyrannice ad imperium suum redigat, quasi freno ad desiderium rerum meliorum Christus nos circumducit’: ibid., fol. 66r. See also ibid., fol. 70r. 75. K. J. Walsh, ‘Cranmer and the Fathers, Especially in the Defence’, JRH , 11 (1980), p. 242. 76. For more on how Cranmer adopted Cyril’s reasoning for his description and defence of a spiritual presence, see A. Null, ‘Thomas Cranmer’, in J. S. Holcomb and D. A. Johnson (eds), Christian Theologies of the Sacraments: A Comparative Introduction (New York, 2017), pp. 219–33.

Appendix 1 Cranmer’s Library Books and the Paris Eucharistic Commonplaces (i) Cranmer’s copy of Chrysostom, Opera, 6 parts in 5 vols (Basel, 1547) (BL, Shelfmark L.19.f.5) = Selwyn, Library, p. 47 (No. 170) Vol. I col. 59 Vol. I col. 712 Vol. II cols 432–5 Vol. II col. 247 Vol. II cols 664–6 Vol. II cols 669–70 Vol. II col. 670 Vol. II col. 671 Vol. II col. 669 Vol. II col. 810 Vol. II cols 867–8 Vol. III col. 214 Vol. III col. 219 Vol. III cols 223–4 Vol. III cols 224–5 Vol. III col. 226 Vol. III col. 821 Vol. III cols 821–2 Vol. III cols 822–3 Vol. III cols 918–19 Vol. III col. 934

(i) BnF, Latin MS 3396

fol. fol. fols fol. fols fol. fol. fol. fol. fol. fol. fol. fol. fols fols fol. fol. fol. fols fol. fol.

79r 79r 79r–80v 80v 80v–81v 83v 83v 83v 84r 84r–v 84v 84v 85r 86v–87r 87r–88r 88r 88r 88r–v 88v–89r 89r–v 89v (continued)

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(continued) The parallels continue in Vols IV and V (ii) Cranmer’s copy of Hesychius, In Leuiticum… (Basel, 1527) (CUL, Shelfmark C*.10.19(c)) = Selwyn, Library, pp. 41–2 (No. 150) fol. 48r (iii) Cranmer’s copy of Jerome [Hieronymus], Opera, 9 books in 4 vols (Paris, 1533–34) (BL, Shelfmark 476.g.10–13) = Selwyn, Library, pp. 44–5 (No. 159) Book V fol. 90r, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Sacramentum euchar[istiae]’ Book V fol. 104r, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘De eucharistia’ Book V fol. 110r, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Eucharistia’ Book V fol. 114r, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Eucharistia’ (iv) Cranmer’s copy of Oecumenius, Commentaria… (Louvain, 1543) (BL, Shelfmark 1218.k.12) = Selwyn, Library, p. 66 (No. 239) pp. 232–3

(ii) BnF, Latin MS 3396

fol. 126v (iii) BnF, Latin MS 3396

fol. 118v fol. 118v fols 118v–119r fol. 119r–v (iv) BnF, Latin MS 3396

fol. 171v

Appendix 2 Entries in ‘De re sacramentaria’ and the Paris Authorial Eucharistic Commonplaces Compared CCCC, PL MS 102, p. 156

BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 40r–184r

‘Augustinus, de trinitate li. 3, ca. 4. Paulus potuit significando praedicare… in memoriam pro nobis dominicae passionis ’

‘Paulus… potuit tamen significando praedicare dominum Ihesum christum aliter per linguam suam, aliter per epistolam suam, aliter per sacramentum corporis et sanguinis eius… corpus christi et sanguinem dicimus, sed illum tantum quod ex fructibus terrae acceptum, et prece mystica consecratum rite summus ad salutem spiritalem in memoriam pro nobis dominicae passionis’ (fol. 147r–v) ‘Idem, de verbis Apostoli sermo 2 dominus Iesus ‘quod corpus dixit escam sanguinem corpus dixit escam, sanuginem potum, potum, sacramentum fidelium sacramentum fidelium’ agnoscunt fideles’ (fol. 165r) (continued)

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(continued) CCCC, PL MS 102, p. 156

BnF, Latin MS 3396, fols 40r–184r

‘Theodoretus in 1 dialogo. In ipsa mysteriorum ‘Ortho: in ipsa nimirum mysteriorum traditione Christus panem vocavit corpus suum, traditione, corpus panem vocavit, et et Sanguinem poculum mixtum’ sanguinem poculum mixtum’ (fol. 182r) ‘Theophilactus in Math. Ca. 26. Porro dicens ‘Porro dictum, hoc est corpus meum Hoc est corpus meum, ostendit quod ipsum ostendit quod ipsum corpus domini est corpus domini est panis qui sanctificatur in panis qui sanctificatur in altari, et non altare’ respondens figura’ (fol. 169r) ‘Damascenus, li. 4, ca. 14. Quia mos est ‘quia mos est hominibus panem hominibus panem manducare, et vinum manducare, et vivum aquamque bibere, aquamque bibere, coniunxit hijs ipsis suam coniunxit his ipsis suam divinitatem, et fecit haec suum corpus et sanguinem’ divinitatem, et fecit haec suum corpus, et (fol. 170r) sanguinem’ ‘Rabanus li. 1, ca. 31. Quia panis corporalis ‘Ergo quia panis corporis cor firmat, cor firmat ideo ille corpus christi congruentur ideo ille corpus christi congruenter [sic] nuncupatur. Vinum autem quia nuncupatur. Vinum autem quia sanguinem operatur in carne ideo ad sanguinem operatur in carne, ideo ad sanguinem Christi refertur’ sanguinem christi refertur’ (fol. 178r) ‘Anselmus I Cor. 10. Panis quem frangimus est ‘Panis quem frangimus est participatio participatio corporis domini, quia ipse panis corporis domini quia ipse panis quem quem multis dividimus, est verum corpus multis dividimus, est verum corpus domini’ domini’ (fol. 179r) ‘Haymo I Cor 11. Panis quem cotidie ‘Panis… quem quotidie consecrant consecrant sacredotes in ecclesia, verum corpus sacerdotes in ecclesia, cum virtute divinitatis quae illum replet panem christi est’ verum corpus Christi est’ (fol. 183v)

Appendix 3 How Cranmer Combined Two Propositional Commonplaces from ‘De re sacramentaria’ into One for the Paris Version

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CCCC, PL MS 102, p. 153

BnF, Latin MS 3396, fol. 246r

7 6 Julius fol. 4 [‘tantum et calicem’ added by Cranmer] Gregorius fol. 8 2 Origines fol. 12 4 Tertullianus Christus corporis 6 6 7 Idem [added by Cranmer] Cyprianus de unctione chrismatis Dedit 14 Beda 12 11 Cyrillus in Johannem lib. 4. ca. 14. Idem ad Calosyrium [added by Cranmer] Hieronymus ad Hedibiam [added by Cranmer] 9 8 Chrysostomus in Math. 26. ca. 26. homilia 83 [added by Cranmer] Idem in Cor 1. ca. 10. homilia 24. [added by Cranmer] Idem in 1. ad Cor. ca. 11. homilia 27. [added by Cranmer]

Math. 26, etc. [1] Irenaeus lib 4 adversus valentinianos cap 32 Et capite 34 Et cap 57 Et lib ?5 Cum panem qui [2] Origenes fol. 12 Tertullianus [3] adversus Iudaeos Idem adversus Martionem [4] Idem Christus corporis Cyprianus [5] ad magnum lib 1 epistola 6 Et lib. 2, epistola 3 [no ‘de unctione chrismatis, Ut symere’] [6] idem de unctione chrismatis Dedit

Ibid., p. 155 1 Irenaeus li. 4. adversus valentinianos cap. 32. Et ca. 34. Et ca. 57. [added by Cranmer] Et li. 5. Cum panem qui 3 Tertullianus, adversus Judaeos Et adversus Martionem 5 Cyprianus ad magnum. li. 1. epistola 6. Et li. 2. epistola 3 Et de unctione chrismatis, Ut symera 7 8 Epiphanius 10 9 Hieronimus ab Hedibiam Photius

Ibid., fol. 246v [7] Iulius ... tantum et calicem [8] Epiphanius [9] Chrysostomus in Matheum cap 26 homilia 83 Idem in Corr: cap 10 homilia 24 Idem in 1 ad Corrinth: cap 11 homilia 27 [10] Hieronimus ad Hedibiam [11] Augustinus de trinitate lib 3 cap 4 Idem de verbis apostoli sermo: 2 [12] Cyrillus in Ioannem lib. 4 cap 14 Idem ad calosirium [13] Theodoretus

Ibid., p. 156 Augustinus in sermone ad infantes 11 10 stet idem Augustinus [in superscript added by Cranmer] de trinitate li. 3, ca. 4 Idem de verbis Apostoli sermo 2 13 Theodoretus Theophilactus Damascenus Rabanus Anselmus Haymo

Ibid., fol. 247r Theophilactus Damascenus Rabanus Anselmus Haymo

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Appendix 4 Cranmer’s Bracketed Quotations in CL 258 and Entries in CGC I Quotation in CL 258

Location in CGC I

‘Theophylactus ille Bulgarorum episcopus, exponens… alioqui assueti sumus ’, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Theophilactus ’ (fol. 27r–v) ‘Damascenus ’, ‘suscepturus voluntariam pro nobis… incorporati Christo existentes ’, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Damascenus ’ (fols 27v–28v) ‘Leo’, ‘in epistola ad Constantinopolitanos: In ecclesia Dei… factus est, transeamus ’, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Leo’ (fol. 29r) ‘Leo’, ‘in sermone de ieiunio mensis septimi: Hanc… quod accipitur, disputatur’ (fol. 29r) ‘Leo’, ‘in epistola ad Anastasium… sacramentum propitiationis exequitur’ (fol. 29r) ‘Gregorius ’, ‘in homilia paschali… ore cordis hauritur’, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Gregorius ’ (fol. 28v) ‘Augustinus ’, ‘in sermone ad neophytos… mendacem putauerit Christum’, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Augustinus ’ (fol. 29r–v) ‘Augustinus ’, ‘libro quarto de Trinitate… effectum sacerdotis nostris ’ (fol. 29v) ‘Augustinus ’, ‘carnalem intelligentiam… quomodo spiritu vegetatur’ (fol. 29v) ‘Cyrillus ’, ‘Dixit ergo… sed ipsum verum’, with Cranmer’s marginalium ‘Cyrillus ’ (fol. 30r) ‘Cyrillus ’, ‘Mortui sunt, inquit… viuificat ista caro’ (fol. 30v) ‘Cyrillus ’, ‘Itaque quae pauloante… alio opus habet ’ (fol. 30v) ‘Cyrillus ’, ‘Litigabant ad haec… impossibile apud Deum’ (fol. 30v) ‘Cyrillus ’, ‘Audientes enim: Nisi… et commendauit) cognouerant ’ (fol. 32r)

fol. 99v fols 100r–101v

fols 79v–80r fol. 80r fol. 80r fol. 94v fol. 91v fol. 91v fol. 91v fol. 84v fol. fol. fol. fol.

84v 85r 85r 85r

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Appendix 5 The Absence of Cranmer’s Bracketed Quotations Found in his Copy of Oecolampadius’s Dialogus from Comparable Sections in the ‘De Eucharistia’ Locus of his ‘Great Commonplaces’ (CGC I, fols 78r–123v) Quotation in CL 234

Comparison with CGC I

‘Beda super Lucam’ (fol. 142v) ‘Athanasius in libro quo explanat, qui dixerit verbum contra filium hominis ’ (fol. 143v) ‘Anathematismus undecimus Cyrilli’ and ‘Cyrillus ad reginas de recta fide’ (fol. 151r) and ‘Cyrillus ad obiectiones Theodoreti’ (fol. 152r) and ‘Cyrillus in Exodum’ (fols 158v–159r) ‘Scribit [Leo] etiam Anatholio’ (fol. 152v), ‘Leo in sermone de ieiunio septimi mensis ’ [two extracts] and ‘Constantinopolitanis scribens ’ (fol. 153r) (NB three of the four quotations in CL 234—except the second extract from the Sermon on Fasting in the Seventh Month—are also bracketed in CL 258 and recorded in CGC I. However, CGC I follows the text of the quotations as found in CL 258 rather than CL 234. Cf. (i) ‘in sermone de ieiunio mensis septimi: Hanc, inquit, confessionem’, CL 258, fol. 29r and CGC I, fol. 80r; ‘in sermone de ieiunio septimi mensis. Hanc confessionem’, CL 234, fol. 153r; (ii) ‘in epistola ad Constantinopolitanos: In ecclesia Dei omnium’, CL 258, fol. 29r and CGC I, fols 79v–80r; ‘Constantinopolitanis scribens. In ecclesia Dei, in omnium’, CL 234, fol. 153r; (iii) ‘in epistola ad Anastasium Thessalonicensis? Episcopum suum per Orientem legatum: Aliter enim in ecclesia Dei, quae corpus est Christi, nec rata sunt sacerdotia, nec vera sacrificia’, CL 258, fol. 29r and CGC I, fol. 80r; ‘Scribit [Leo] etiam Anatholio, quod obscurius Lanfranco citanti erat, sic: Aliter enim in ecclesia Dei, quae corpus est Christi, nec grata sunt sacerdotia, nec rata sacraficia’, CL 234, fol. 152v. Indeed, Oecolampadius then added the rest of Leo’s sentence, since he thought it clarified that Christ remained at God’s right hand interceding for his people. Cranmer also bracketed that quotation, but it does not appear in the ‘Great Commonplaces’) ‘Tertullianus de resurrectione’ (fol. 159v)

fol. 94v

fols 82v–85r

fols 79v–80r

fol. 120r–v (continued)

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(continued) Quotation in CL 234

Comparison with CGC I

‘Chrysostomus super Ioannem Homilia XLVI ’ (fol. 159v) and ‘Chrysostomus Homilia XX in Secundam ad Corinthios ’ (fols 159v–160r) and ‘Chrysostomus in Matthaeum Homilia XI Operis imperfecti’ (fol. 160r) ‘In sermone de unctione chrysmatis, qui asscribitur Cypriano’ (fol. 162r) ‘Fulgentius ad Thrasamundum, Liber II ’ (fols 164v–165r) (NB that the quotation in CL 234 is much longer than that in CGC I and that there are significant textual differences. CL 234 has ‘ad Thrasamundum’, ‘divinam vero’, ‘ad coelum’, ‘certissimo sermone potest cognosci’, ‘suam humanitatem’, ‘sum usque’ and ‘Deus est ’, whereas CGC I has ‘ad transmundum’, ‘vero divinam’, ‘ad coelos ’, ‘certissimo potest cognosci sermone’, ‘humanitatem suam’, ‘sum omnibus diebus usque’ and ‘est Deus ’) and ‘Fulgentius ad Thrasamundum, Liber III ’ (fol. 166r) ‘Fulgentius ad Monymum’ (fol. 168v) ‘Augustinus in sermone ad infantes ’ (fol. 168r) ‘Augustinus et in alio sermone de sacramentis fidelium’ (fol. 168v) ‘Ex compendio synodorum’ (fol. 154r), ‘Bernardus in sermone coenae Domini’ (fol. 155v), ‘[Bernardus ] sermone 39 in Cantica’ (fol. 156r) and ‘Hesychius Liber IIII ’ (fol. 158v)

fols 86r–89r

fols 94r, 123r–v fol. 123r–v

fol. 94r fol. 91v fols 90r–92v, 97r–99r, 120v–122v

CHAPTER 4

‘Agents of the Reformation’: Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale Rachel Basch

Introduction The legalization of clerical marriage in England has been described as ‘among the most revolutionary changes in religion and ethics produced by the Reformation’.1 Ending five centuries of prescribed clerical celibacy, it challenged previously accepted social and legal norms and ‘brought women and sexuality into the heart of the ecclesiastical Establishment in a novel way’.2 Wed to leaders of the English Church, bishops’ wives were the most visible and scrutinized of all clerical wives and came closer than any other women—bar Elizabeth I as supreme governor—to the pinnacle of the Church’s polity. Intimately connected to the reform cause, their marriages bound them to, but also helped to shape, the development of the Church of England in the sixteenth century. Moreover, as bishops’ wives, they pioneered a new social role that embodied many of the contradictions of the English Reformation itself. While reformed bishops were

R. Basch (B) Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_4

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increasingly expected to act as godly superintendents, though stripped of assets by successive Tudor monarchs, they retained their position near the top of an almost completely unreformed Church structure. For their own part, bishops’ wives were married to some of the greatest office-holders in the realm, yet were never accorded a corresponding title to match their husbands’ status. Despite their direct experience of the Reformation and unique social role, bishops’ wives—and, indeed, clerical wives generally—have not fared well in Reformation historiography. Although studies have focused on legal and polemical aspects of clerical marriage, as well as its economic impact on the Church, the women at the centre of this significant institutional change have, with key exceptions, largely been overlooked.3 In contrast to many figures examined in this collection of essays, their life stories are not well known, and they have been dwarfed by their famous husbands in nearly all accounts. These were women who should have enjoyed posthumous reputations, but did not. Engaging with this volume’s emphasis upon the pivotal role of the individual, the present chapter seeks to explain this neglect and rectify it, concentrating on the lives of some of the earliest English bishops’ wives: Margaret Cranmer (d. c.1575), Anne Hooper (d. 1554) and Elizabeth Coverdale (d. 1565). It will be argued that through their extraordinary decisions to marry a clergyman in such turbulent times, and their responses to the crisis posed by Mary I’s accession and re-introduction of Roman Catholicism, these women all made unique contributions to the early English Reformation, and must be regarded as ‘agents of the Reformation’ in their own right.4 Drawing together limited sources, this chapter explores the extent to which these women were able to shape their own roles and immediate reputations. This analysis will be framed by a discussion of the historiographical factors that have led to their relative obscurity, as well as of the new trends in historical scholarship that may finally allow them to emerge from the shadows cast by their husbands’ towering reputations, to be re-instated more prominently in Reformation narratives.

Clerical Marriage The abolition of clerical celibacy in England has process of far more perplexity and intricacy’ than adopting the Reformation.5 Numbers of married increase during the 1530s. However, official policy

been described as ‘a in any other country priests first began to remained consistently

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hostile throughout Henry VIII’s reign and in 1539 the ‘Act of Six Articles’ ruled that all existing marriages were void, also insisting that any subsequent breaches in the law were to be treated as felonies, subject to the death penalty. On Edward VI’s accession in January 1547, many reformers confidently expected a change in policy and took the opportunity to marry. However, despite early support from both Convocation and the House of Commons, delays in the Lords meant that an Act legalizing clerical marriage was not passed until February 1549. Even at this stage, nine bishops are recorded as having voted against the measure and the Act fell far short of offering a positive affirmation of clerical marriage, declaring that it would be much better for priests voluntarily to remain celibate. This legislation did little to abate popular hostility towards clerical marriage, and in February 1552 a second statute was required to reinforce its provisions. The latter Act explicitly states that, contrary to popular slanders, clerical wives and children were entitled to receive dower and inheritance—and would have done much, had it endured, to secure their legal and social status. However, Mary Tudor’s unexpected accession in July 1553 saw a wholesale reversal in policy: by December, both Edwardian statutes had been repealed. In March 1554, she issued a set of articles ordering the deprivation of all married ministers, having already acted against the married bishops, whom she held particularly culpable for setting a bad example to the lower clergy.

Historiography Obviously, the turbulent events of 1539–1559 had a profound impact upon clerical wives, whose personal lives were repeatedly laid victim to State policy. Yet despite the very immediate way in which the Reformation affected them, clerical wives’ experience of these years has largely been overlooked by modern Reformation historians. This neglect is surprising, given the prolonged attempt by historians of both main confessions to assess how far the Reformations impacted the lives and status of women. On the Protestant side, questions have centred on the extent to which the elevation of women’s domestic roles, advocated by the reformers, translated into an increase in women’s social status and educational opportunities. Or, as Roper has powerfully asserted, did reformed theology limit women by imposing a restrictive patriarchal ideology?6 The degree to which the early evangelical movement encouraged and/or enabled female participation has also been debated. On the other side of the

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confessional divide, there has been more agreement that the Catholic Reformation energized female lay and religious piety. Many studies have emphasized the vitality, on the Continent, of female religious orders and highlighted the importance of the spiritual movements led by St. Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) and Mary Ward (1585–1645), while, with regard to England, women’s ability to circumvent the Elizabethan recusancy laws has been explored.7 It will be a major contention of this chapter that clerical marriage was a very active and individualistic way in which women engaged with the early Protestant Reformation in England, and that it marked a distinctive break from past practice. Beyond general accounts of the Reformation’s impact on women, case studies of specific women have often focused on elite figures who could take advantage of their traditional social role to support the evangelical movement through the appointment of domestic chaplains, the exercise of ecclesiastical patronage and the education of their children and servants.8 John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1563 and later editions) has ensured that the female martyrs have always been thoroughly investigated. More recent research has sought to re-assess the participation of particular women in the Marian exile and in the Protestant underground congregations, which had previously been a relatively neglected field.9 Inspired by Collinson’s inquiry into the exile Anne Locke’s life, and especially her friendship with John Knox (c.1514–1572), several scholars have studied other godly women, largely concentrating upon their epistolary relationships with Protestant divines and their role in succouring imprisoned ministers.10 In spite of their matrimonial ties to the men responsible for shaping and implementing England’s religious settlements, bishops’ wives have not attracted significant attention either collectively or individually.

‘Agents of the Reformation’ Undoubtedly, scarce source material is partly to blame for the lack of enquiry into clerical wives, episcopal or otherwise. As with any investigation into early-modern women, limited primary sources, and particularly sources that can be ascribed to the women themselves, does make any attempt to reconstruct their lives challenging. However, all too often a dearth of evidence seems to have been taken for granted by historians, before they even tried looking for it, with the result that the reputations of bishops’ wives amount to little more than stale anecdotes and sketchy

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generalizations. The story of Mrs. Cranmer being conveyed around Europe concealed in a suitcase is still often related as an amusing aside; some scholars, presumably dismayed at the supposed shortage of material, have taken refuge in sweeping generalizations, such as the curious observation that ‘no doubt the majority of episcopal wives were devout women who behaved with decorum, and the great complex of chambers and antechambers in the major palaces easily absorbed them’.11 ‘Absorbed them’! This remark wholly obscures women’s important contributions to the establishment of clerical marriage and misrepresents the availability of sources, which, while not plentiful, can nevertheless be found in greater quantities than has previously been acknowledged. It is also likely that neglect stems from a lack of interest in, or awareness of, how clerical marriage affected women. Although historians have explored the extent to which a minister’s decision to marry corresponded to a wider suite of evangelical beliefs, little concern has been shown for the women whom they married, save as the ‘passive recipients of their husbands’ choice’.12 Speaking of the lower clergy, it can be hard to ascertain a strong link between marriage and reformist beliefs. Many leading reformers, however, left statements justifying their stance on clerical marriage, so that there can be no doubt that their marriages belonged to a wider theological framework and acted as markers of confessional allegiance. Like many early reformers, Miles Coverdale (1488–1569), Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) and John Hooper (1495×1500–1555) had all taken vows of celibacy as a necessary part of their clerical vocation, yet actively chose to wed in dangerous circumstances. MacCulloch describes Cranmer’s marriage as a ‘watershed’ moment in his thinking, and a ‘drastic step’, given the risks involved in taking it (in 1532) while engaged upon a diplomatic mission for Henry VIII.13 Yet, as Plummer notes in her account of German clerical marriage, a woman’s resolution to wed a pastor was just as much an ‘act of rebellion’ for her as it was for her husband—and, for many of the first clerical wives, entailed considerable legal, social and economic hazards. Clerical marriage was a conscious public move which challenged accepted standards and forced communities to make decisions about wider evangelical teachings.14 Through their nuptials, women thus became living embodiments of a key Reformation debate. Plummer’s study is significant because of its attempt to recognize female agency, arguing that women must be regarded as ‘agents of the Reformation and their actions and motivations taken as seriously as those

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of men’.15 During the 1520s and 1530s, clerical marriage transgressed ‘local, canon, and imperial law’, which meant that it brought the threat of legal sanction, economic hardship and social exclusion: arrest, banishment or (in one extreme case) execution were potential outcomes.16 While ‘conviction or convenience’ have been proffered as reasons why such unions occurred, Plummer holds this formulation to be too simplistic, pointing out that clerical marriage would have brought little convenience to most women in the early Reformation.17 It is true that for some women, such as former nuns or clerical concubines, marriage to a priest may have seemed preferable to their current condition, but on the other hand, as Plummer emphasizes, not all first-generation clerical wives came from marginal backgrounds.18 Women hailing from more secure social milieu would undoubtedly have had the opportunity to marry other partners in safer circumstances, and were evidently driven by different motivations, ranging from personal religious conviction to pressure from families keen to demonstrate public allegiance to the emerging evangelical Reformation.19 Something along the lines of Plummer’s study, but examining what may have impelled the earliest English bishops’ wives to marry, is needed. As with the leaders of the evangelical movement in Germany, the marriages of the men who would become influential in the English Reformation set an example to the lower clergy—their marital status became a hallmark of the reformed Church. Indeed, the marriages of Cranmer, Hooper and Coverdale have long been recognized as expressions of their conversion. Though written proof is lacking for their wives, circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that religious conviction also played a part in their decisions. All three women were related to continental reformers, through either blood or marriage, and both Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale were themselves religious exiles, having fled from the Low Countries and Scotland, respectively before their marriages in the 1540s. Margaret Cranmer met her husband in her home city of Nuremberg through his friendship with her uncle, the prominent reformer Andreas Osiander (1498–1552). Cranmer had been married once already, to a girl known to us only as Joan, while a student at the University of Cambridge. Despite not yet being ordained, he had been forced to resign his fellowship at Jesus College, though after his wife’s early death in childbirth he had been re-admitted and proceeded to study theology, taking holy orders at some point before 1520.20 The circumstances of Cranmer’s second marriage, in

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1532 and to Margaret, were very different—and, as MacCulloch acknowledges, he gambled with far higher stakes.21 At this juncture, Cranmer held an important position in royal service as ambassador to the Court of the holy roman emperor, Charles V (1500–1558). He had, of course, taken a vow of celibacy upon ordination, so this second marriage was a crime in canon law. Just how much Cranmer had gambled would become clear a few months later when, still abroad on his diplomatic mission, he heard that he had been chosen archbishop of Canterbury and recalled to England. The risks attached to Cranmer’s German marriage are self-evident, though (as Mary Prior stresses) it is necessary to remember that they applied to both husband and wife.22 Having lived in Nuremberg, specifically in the household of her uncle Osiander, who had married her aunt Katherine Preu, Margaret would have been very familiar with Lutheran doctrine and with the practice of clerical marriage. While there is no record of Margaret’s feelings about her marriage to Cranmer, it is highly likely that conviction played some part in her decision. To be sure, there was little convenience in her choice, which meant leaving the freedom and safety of Lutheran Nuremberg to join Cranmer for an uncertain future in England, where the religious situation was much more volatile. From a 1532 perspective, both perhaps hoped that England, like Nuremberg, would eventually fall to the reformers, but their current situation was precarious indeed, and Cranmer was initially obliged to leave Margaret behind in Germany as he pursued his diplomatic mission on behalf of the Crown. When, at length, Margaret joined her spouse in England, their marriage had to be kept a closely guarded secret. At first, Margaret was able to live quietly. It has been suggested that she may have resided at Ford, one of the more remote archiepiscopal palaces, located in the village of Hoath, six miles north-east of Canterbury.23 This conjecture is based upon a much later inventory of that property, taken after Cranmer’s arrest in 1553, which lists the contents of ‘his [Cranmer’s] wiefes chamber’.24 However, the passage of the ‘Act of Six Articles’ in 1539 altered her position. Cranmer publicly opposed the Bill in the House of Lords, and, according to Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–1575), sent Margaret and their children back to Germany following its enactment.25 Did Margaret return to England before the accession of Edward VI? The matter is obscure, but it seems unlikely given the story told in Parker’s De Antiqvitate Britannicæ, and highlighted by Prior, in which Henry VIII challenged Cranmer on the Six Articles and

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asked him pointedly whether or not ‘his inner or privie bed were free from those articles’. That was in 1543. Certainly, Cranmer did not openly acknowledge Margaret until Edward’s reign.26 Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale also had links to important figures in the continental reform movement and spent time among evangelical communities abroad. There are several striking parallels between these two women, most significantly the fact that they came from noble families and were both religious exiles before they married. John Foxe (1516/17–1587) described Anne Hooper (née de Tscerlas) as ‘a Burgonion woman born, and of great parentage’.27 In exile, she was attached to the household of the Dutch aristocrat Jacques de Bourgogne, seigneur de Falais, a distant relation (albeit in an illegitimate line) of Charles V and a close correspondent of Jean Calvin (1509–1564) until their friendship disintegrated in 1552.28 Calvin had encouraged de Falais and his wife to leave the Netherlands in 1543, and although they had originally intended to join him in Geneva, they settled temporarily in Strasbourg, where Anne met and married John Hooper.29 Some idea of what Strasbourg must then have looked like, but on a larger scale, may be gained from Fig. 4.1, showing a celebrated building (still standing) with which they were probably all familiar. Hooper was a former monk who had entered a Cistercian monastery at an unknown date either in or after 1519, remaining there until its suppression in 1537. He had then entered the service of Sir Thomas Arundell, during which he encountered the works of the great Swiss reformers Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) and Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575). This exposure had a profound impact upon him and dramatically altered the course of his life, forcing him to leave England, firstly in 1539 and then again in 1544. Hooper’s earliest spell in exile was spent in Paris, but on the second occasion he went to Strasbourg, where he established connections with some of the leading continental reformers. It was while living there that he formed a close and enduring friendship with Bullinger, the antistes of Zürich.30 Hooper seemingly described meeting Anne in a letter addressed to Bullinger in [1546], informing him of his intention briefly to return to England in order to attempt to retrieve some portion of his prospective inheritance from his father, whom he feared might otherwise leave him nothing, since he was ‘so opposed’ to his religious beliefs. Hooper related that he had recently met ‘two sisters of noble family’ in the household of Richard [Hilles] (c.1514–1587), ‘the younger of whom, named Anna, is exceedingly favourable to true religion’. He hoped that Bullinger

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Fig. 4.1 Maison Kammerzell, Place de la Cathédrale, Strasbourg, France, fifteenth century, altered in 1589, by an unknown photographer, photograph, c.1895

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would soon meet her.31 It is probable that this woman was his future wife, given Foxe’s allusion to Anne’s parentage and the fact that she is known to have travelled with a sister who would marry the influential reformer Valérand Poullain (c.1509–1557) in Zürich in January 1548. In all likelihood, Anne and Hooper wed soon after Hooper’s return from England: in [December 1546], he added greetings from his wife to a warm letter written to Bullinger, possibly sent from Basel.32 The marriages of Anne and her sister demonstrate a high level of personal autonomy. They brought them firmly within the network of reformers based in Zürich and Geneva. Very little is known about their birth family, although it appears that the sisters were living independently from them and had made their own decision to go into exile for religion, an option rarely available to women. This point is confirmed in Hooper’s letter to Bullinger written from Antwerp in May 1549, as the couple journeyed to England. Hooper recounted how, being close to her former home, Anne had written to her family. After receiving that letter, her mother had passed it to her son to read, ‘who immediately threw it into the fire without reading it’. Hooper concluded thus: ‘you see the words of Christ are true, that the brother shall persecute the brother for the sake of the Word of God’. This material suggests that like Hooper, who was estranged from his father, the sisters had disregarded their natal family in choosing to pursue their evangelical religious beliefs.33 Undoubtedly, it was in neither the social nor the financial interests of the sisters to marry clergymen—and their noble descent meant that there was considerable disparity between themselves and their husbands. This situation is a marker of the turbulence of the times. As Plummer has demonstrated for Germany, clerical wives initially came from a diverse range of backgrounds and it was not until the 1540s, when the Magisterial Reformation had become embedded, that such wives increasingly originated in the middle classes.34 The same was true in England, where bishops’ wives came to be drawn from the relatively narrow social band of the gentry, as well as from emerging clerical dynasties. Later bishops could not hope to make alliances with women belonging to noble families. It is therefore another sign of the strong convictions that must have driven them that the two de Tscerlas girls embarked upon marriages that were, in some respects, misalliances. It is also possible that they were motivated by a desire to be involved in the intellectual leadership of the evangelical movement. Anne is by far the best documented Edwardian bishop’s wife thanks to the survival of so

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many of John Hooper’s letters, plus, uniquely, a set of six letters written by Anne herself to the couple’s mutual friend Bullinger (see Fig. 4.2).35

Fig. 4.2 Original letter from Anne Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, Frankfurton-Main, Germany, 22 September 1554

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Written in Latin, Anne’s letters reveal that she was highly educated, and she maintained a separate correspondence with Bullinger throughout her marriage. Between 1547 and their return to England in 1549, Anne and her husband lived in Zürich, where they were immersed in the culture of the reform community. From subsequent correspondence, sent after their departure for England, it is clear that they had established warm and enduring friendships with many of Zürich’s ‘learned men’ and their wives, whom they held in high esteem.36 The couple’s daughter, Rachel, was born in Zürich in 1547, and her parents ensured that she had a lasting connection to the Swiss Churches by appointing Bullinger and the wife of Theodore Bibliander (1509–1564) as her ‘sponsors’. The Hoopers frequently referred to this link in their correspondence with Bullinger; John mentioned that Anne often told Rachel of her birthplace, and he ensured that Rachel was instructed in the baptismal promises that had been made on her behalf.37 Like Anne Hooper, Elizabeth Coverdale (née Matthewson or Macheson) is described as springing from noble roots, in this case in Scotland. Moreover, in a remarkable direct parallel, she fled her native country with a sister, Agnes. The pair came to England in the early 1530s, where Agnes married John Macalpine (d. 1557), also known as John Machabeus, a former Dominican friar who had been forced to leave Scotland in 1534 and went on to become an influential Protestant reformer, not least as professor of theology at the University of Copenhagen and chaplain to King Christian III of Denmark (reigned 1534–1559).38 While resident in England, Macalpine became a chaplain to Nicholas Shaxton (c.1485– 1556), the evangelical bishop of Salisbury. Shaxton was involved in the early reform movement in England and rose to prominence through the patronage of Anne Boleyn (c.1500–1536). He was also married, having (like Cranmer) taken a ‘calculated risk’ to enter the state of matrimony during the religious confusion of the mid-1530s, only to be confounded by the ‘Act of Six Articles’ in 1539. In contrast to Cranmer, however, Shaxton resigned his bishopric in protest at the statute. The archbishop later provided him with a benefice at Hadleigh in Suffolk, where he lived quietly with his family for several years. But in 1546, Shaxton again became embroiled in controversy. Arrested and condemned to be burnt, he was nevertheless persuaded to recant and formally put aside his wife.39 Macalpine did not follow the riskier path of his patron, Shaxton, and soon after the ‘Act of Six Articles’ reached the statute book left for Saxony with his wife Agnes.40 Elizabeth had probably been living with her sister

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and brother-in-law until her own marriage to Miles Coverdale at some stage in 1540, after which they also quit England. It is unclear exactly when Elizabeth had met her husband, who was himself an early convert to evangelical doctrines and had previously been forced into exile in 1528 after preaching a series of radical sermons. He had returned in 1535 and became heavily involved in the initiative led by the king’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell (b. in or before 1485, d. 1540) for an authorized English Bible to be printed for purchase by every parish. However, like his new brother-in-law Macalpine, he evidently felt that, following the evangelical faction’s reversal of fortune, it was no longer safe to remain in England, and so departed with Elizabeth for Strasbourg. Although very little is known about the backgrounds of Agnes and Elizabeth, it is safe to assume that, as with Anne Hooper and her sister, they were not driven by mere expediency. Having left Scotland on religious grounds, they undertook to marry clerics at a time when the legality of that step was unclear. Once their marriages had become crimes, they followed their husbands into a second exile. During her sojourn abroad, Elizabeth Coverdale, like Anne Hooper, was immersed in the intellectual life of the evangelical community. On entering Strasbourg, the Coverdales were met by Calvin’s wife, Idelette de Bure, dating their arrival to some point after August 1540, when Calvin’s marriage had taken place.41 In common with other leading reformers’ wives, Idelette devoted herself to her husband’s work and welcomed religious refugees into her home. Coverdale later asked Calvin ‘affectionately [to] salute your wife, who deserved so well from me and mine, when we went up to Strasburgh’, implying that she had offered them either help or hospitality.42 While resident in Strasbourg, the English couple also became well acquainted with Konrad Hubert (1507–1577), Martin Bucer’s secretary, and his family. Hubert successfully recommended Coverdale for the post of headmaster and assistant minister of a boys’ school in his small home town of Bergzabern (now Bad Bergzabern in the Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany), located about forty miles north of Strasbourg, where Miles and Elizabeth lived for 1543– 1548. Surviving correspondence from that period shows the strength of friendship between the two families.43 Coverdale often sent warm greetings from his wife, and Elizabeth made an independent visit to the Huberts in Strasbourg, staying with them after the birth of one of Margaret’s children. The Coverdales also entertained Bucer when he inspected the church at Bergzabern, and they regularly dined with the

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local prefect and his wife. Writing to Hubert about one such occasion, Coverdale described how, over dinner, the conversation had turned to the subject of sacred ministry. He explained that he would have been glad to have contributed his thoughts, ‘but the wife of the prefect pleaded the cause of the Lord with such dexterity, that it was needless for me to say anything’—evidencing again the licence some women enjoyed to participate in learned discussion.44

‘A Most Sober, Chaste, and Godly Matron’: Becoming the Bishop’s Wife Henry VIII’s death in January 1547 removed some of the more immediate dangers to the reformers and their families, but the legalization of clerical marriage in 1549 brought its own challenges, as the bishops’ wives openly assumed roles without precedent. Of course, Margaret, Anne and Elizabeth possessed the advantage of having lived within Protestant communities, where they had befriended the wives of the leading continental reformers—those women would have been the closest available role models for their new situation. Echoing Martin Luther, many of the early reformers to have married wrote enthusiastically about their wives’ virtues and about the important role that they played in supporting their ministries. Before his marriage to Wibrandis Rosenblatt (1504–1564), Bucer admitted to a fellow divine that he was confident of a successful union, for in past years she [Wibrandis] has really proven that she is not only pure, honorable, faithful and godly, but also a diligent helper, who fruitfully made herself useful to the Church and has a gift for ministry as for many years she demonstrated in her marriage to those two precious men of God, [Johannes] Oecolampadius [1482–1531] and [Wolfgang] Capito [c.1478– 1541].45

After her death, Calvin similarly described his wife as ‘the best companion of my life’ and a ‘faithful helper of my ministry’.46 In their letters to each other, it is striking how assiduously married pastors inquired about each other’s families, sending greetings and compliments to their correspondents’ ‘godly’ and ‘pious’ wives. To some extent, these courtesies were social convention, though the reformers, as pioneers of a novel social institution, had to defend their choices against conservative critics. In that

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context, it is perhaps not surprising that certain characteristics came to be celebrated (and even exaggerated) in their spouses. Back in England, however, the reality of life as an episcopal wife was rather different, and the women performing this role had to contend with the management of large estates and households, besides negotiating their husbands’ spiritual and social responsibilities. As for the nature of their daily lives and experiences under Edward VI, little evidence is extant, although there are a few fragments. Once again, the Hoopers are the best documented couple, thanks to the survival of their letters overseas. Having returned to England, John was not consecrated bishop of Gloucester until March 1551. Before then, he and his wife lived in London under the protection of Hooper’s patron, Edward Seymour, 1st duke of Somerset (c.1500–1552). From here, they were well placed to send political news to Bullinger in Zürich. Unfortunately, none of Anne’s letters from this period have come down to us, but they are referenced in her husband’s letter of 5 February 1550. It seems that some of his own communications had gone astray, and he added that those dispatched by his wife to the wives of Bullinger and Bibliander had also not been received, ‘or you would at least have learned from them the situation both of myself and of this kingdom’.47 The Hoopers now moved in influential metropolitan circles. Writing in May 1550, Martin Micronius (who had known them in Zürich and had accompanied them to England) told Bullinger that ‘Mistress Anna, the wife of Hooper, is not at home. She has gone to the mansion of a certain noble lady in the neighbourhood of the city, for [a] change of air’.48 The earliest surviving letter from Anne to Bullinger is dated London, 3 April [1551], shortly after Hooper’s consecration as bishop. It is filled with a combination of personal and political news, and documents the author’s concern for her husband’s ministry. She asked Bullinger ‘to recommend Master Hooper to be more moderate in his labour’, as she was worried that his heavy preaching schedule and ‘overabundant exertions’ could lead to premature decay, by which very many souls now hungering after the Word of God, and whose hunger is well known from the frequent anxiety to hear him, will be deprived both of their teacher and his doctrine.49

By the time the next extant letter to Bullinger was written, on 27 October 1551, the demands of Anne’s new life appear to have caught up with

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her and she excused herself for not having replied sooner on account of having been ‘overwhelmed by so many and urgent engagements that scarce any leisure was allowed me’. She assured Bullinger that it was not sloth that had delayed her, as ‘at this time my engagements will not admit of its indulgence’.50 It certainly seems likely that, as Hooper’s wife, Anne would have been kept occupied, particularly given his enthusiasm for entertaining. As Heal has demonstrated, the provision of hospitality remained a key episcopal duty. While there was still an expectation that bishops meet their social obligations to their peers, reformers increasingly emphasized care for the bodies and souls of the poor, provision of which was regarded as the correct use of bishops’ wealth and a way of turning each clerical household into a centre for reformation.51 According to Foxe, who had personal experience of his hospitality at Gloucester, Hooper successfully upheld these principles, providing food and religious instruction to the city’s poor. The martyrologist also praised the character of the bishop’s household, describing it as like ‘some holye temple. Everye corner therof, beyng so stuffed and full of vertue, piety, silence, love of God, and readyng of the holye Scriptures’.52 Although Anne is not mentioned explicitly in Foxe’s account, it is likely that she was busy managing the household, for Hooper was often away, most obviously in personally conducting extensive visitations of his twin dioceses—Worcester was added to Gloucester in 1552. Despite Foxe’s enthusiastic approbation, not everybody felt that the Hoopers were getting the balance right; the couple did attract criticism from their friend Micronius. In a 1551 letter addressed to Bullinger, he wrote this: I pray you to exert your influence in recommending to him [Hooper] meekness and gentleness. Exhort Mistress Anna, his wife, not to entangle herself with the cares of this life. Let her beware of the thorns, by which the Word of God is choked. It is a most dangerous thing for one who is in the service of Christ to hunt after riches and honours. Your admonitions will have much weight with them both.53

Micronius does not make any specific allegations, but the drift of his jibe—that John, and particularly Anne, had become overly concerned with worldly status and material possessions—is clear. Although this is the earliest recorded criticism of an episcopal couple, such barbs would

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later become common and are indicative of the contradictions inherent in the role of a post-Reformation bishop, especially in an era of massive impauperization, manifest in the drift of the destitute to the cities. Caught between reformist precepts stressing the primacy of poor relief and traditionalist expectations of lavish sociability, bishops had to walk a very fine line.54 They often found themselves in an impossible position: too much retrenchment in hospitality meant grumbles about parsimony; living it up in the style of their medieval predecessors, however, made them vulnerable to the charge that such luxury was inappropriate for a man of God. The emergence of clerical families was an added complication. With no independent income, precisely what a suitable standard of living for them ought to be became contentious during Elizabeth’s reign; Anne was certainly not the last bishop’s wife to be accused of excessive worldliness. For Cranmer, as primate of all England and de facto leader of the evangelical movement, the contradictions inherent in the role of bishop were especially acute, since he was forced to compromise between old and new practices.55 The surviving ordinances from Lambeth Palace demonstrate that he retained the vast medieval structure based upon a strict hierarchy; here was an establishment equivalent in size to the grandest of magnate households.56 In 1550, Cranmer received a royal licence to retain a hundred persons,57 and he could enjoy all the fine trappings of the archiepiscopal residences at Lambeth and elsewhere, trappings itemized in the inventory taken after his arrest in 1553.58 It is unclear whether or not Margaret had a formal role in the large hierarchical household; she is not mentioned in the ordinances.59 The wife of Cranmer’s successor-but-one, Matthew Parker, certainly played an active role in managing her husband’s archiepiscopal household, and there is no reason to think that Margaret Cranmer would not have done the same once the archbishop was free to bring her to Lambeth.60 In later Chancery documentation, relating to the breakdown of Margaret’s third marriage, a friend described how ‘the old gentell woman [Margaret] had alwayes beene good to the pore and loked to have contenewed her former good wyll’, but explained that, ‘in short tyme’ after her wedding, she had been prevented by her new spouse from carrying out ‘all such honest and godley dedes which in many yeres before she had bene accustomed to doo’.61 Although he retained a traditional domestic structure at Lambeth, Cranmer was notable for unusual generosity to the poor, and it is probable that Margaret contributed on that score.62 There is a strong likelihood, too, that she assisted in entertaining guests at Lambeth, including the distinguished foreign divines

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exiled to England, Martin Bucer and Paul Fagius (c.1504–1549). The only known reference by Cranmer to his family occurs in a letter addressed to Bucer: he conveyed greetings from ‘all mine to you and all yours’.63 Like Hooper, Coverdale was not appointed to a bishopric (Exeter) until 1551, upon the ejection of the aged John Veysey [formerly Harman] (c.1464–1554). Prior to that event, he had become a royal chaplain, and undoubtedly joined Hooper in moving in influential evangelical circles. Once established at Exeter, his household received glowing praise from the antiquary and civic administrator John Hooker [Vowell] (c.1527– 1601), who noted that he kept great hospitality at his house, considering his income; was very moderate in diet, godly in life, friendly to the godly, liberal to the poor, and courteous to all men[.] … His wife was a most sober, chaste, and godly matron; his house and houshold another church, in which was daily exercised godliness and virtue.64

Despite such a panegyric, however, Coverdale was unpopular in his diocese; Hooker also recorded how, notwithstanding the bishop’s dedication to preaching, ‘the common people (whose old bottles would receive no new wine) did not like or love him, because he was a preacher of the gospel, an enemy to popery, and a married man’.65 This situation was not unique: many Edwardian ministers were upbraided for their marriages. Indeed, so great was public hostility that, as previously noted, the Government felt compelled to pass a second Act of Parliament in support of clerical wedlock.

‘In the Time of Her Adversitie’ Although legal Edwardian clerical marriage proved to be short-lived, and remained divisive, progress had been made, and the limited surviving evidence suggests that bishops’ wives were adapting to their new roles. However, Mary I’s surprise accession in July 1553 meant the end of the relative security enjoyed under Edward VI; for Margaret, Anne and Elizabeth, the full risk in marrying prominent evangelical clergy was to be realized. Following a political and religious hiatus over the summer, during which the triumphant Marian regime established itself, swift action was taken to remove married bishops from their sees. Cranmer and Hooper had been imprisoned in the Tower of London and the Fleet

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Prison, respectively by September 1553, while Coverdale was placed under house arrest. Their wives, of course, were left in an extremely perilous situation. It has long been widely assumed—and the assumption continues to this day—that Margaret Cranmer went into exile at some point either shortly before or soon after her husband’s execution on 21 March 1556. However, multiple sources suggest that she is far more likely to have remained in England throughout Mary’s reign; she stayed in touch with members of Cranmer’s old circle, some of whom assisted her in the preservation of her family and its inheritance. The couple’s young son, Thomas, was certainly sent abroad in 1554, under the protection of the archbishop’s brother Edmund, quondam archdeacon of Canterbury, who had been deprived for marriage.66 Almost certainly, Margaret was party to arrangements for her son’s departure, but she did not accompany him into exile, nor join him there subsequently. Instead, Margaret seems to have taken up residence with the Scott family, who lived in a Camberwell manor house, close to her former residence at Lambeth Palace. Evidence to support this interpretation lies in a later collection of Chancery documents relating to the breakdown of what would be Margaret’s third marriage, to Bartholomew Scott. Testimony provided by Margaret’s son-in-law, Thomas Norton (1530×32–1584), cites the kindness shown to her by Scott ‘in the time of her adversitie after the said archibyshops troble and deathe’. This information suggests Margaret’s presence in London at least until Cranmer’s burning.67 That scenario is consistent with what may be gleaned from the official inventory of her late husband’s property compiled by Sir Robert Southwell (c.1506– 1559), chiefly that Margaret received numerous goods from Lambeth following the dissolution of the archiepiscopal household. Several items, including crockery and utensils, are listed as ‘geven to the busshoppes wief’, while larger objects, including ‘fetherbeddes and … boulsters’, are recorded as having been ‘delivered to the busshoppes wief’. The detailed inventory is specific about the dispersal of Cranmer’s effects; the fact that these items are said to have been either ‘geven’ or ‘delivered’ to the late archbishop’s wife implies that she was still near at hand to receive them.68 Assumptions that Margaret left England after Cranmer’s death have largely hinged on her second marriage, to the notable evangelical printer Edward Whitchurch (d. 1562), who is generally believed to have escaped to Germany during Mary’s reign; it is thought that he met and married Margaret there.69 However, Scott Lucas has recently demonstrated that

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Whitchurch remained in the capital throughout the Marian period. By tracing a sequence of property transactions, Lucas shows how Whitchurch liquidated his assets in order to ensure that he could operate below the radar, for his mission was covertly to obstruct the printing of conservative religious texts and to support evangelicals.70 It is therefore much more likely that the couple married in London. Further evidence placing them in England may be found in Whitchurch’s action, in June 1557, to secure the Yorkshire inheritance of Margaret’s son Thomas. Upon the archbishop’s attainder for treason, two properties formerly assigned in remainder to Thomas junior reverted (in remainder) to the Crown. However, in 1557 Cranmer’s friends John Gawyn and Reyner [Reginald, Reynold] Wolfe (d. in or before 1574) successfully petitioned to have the remainder of those properties re-granted to them for an annual rent, in lieu of the Crown’s interest in the land, secretly holding them in trust for young Thomas.71 In his will, Whitchurch claimed the credit for this scheme, stating that ‘by my traveile and charge I have redemed of Quene Mary the leace of Kyrkstall and Anys’, the two properties in question.72 By marrying Whitchurch, Margaret remained connected to the evangelical network that had surrounded her and Archbishop Cranmer during Edward’s reign, gaining his protection. Prior describes him as ‘such a man as Protestant martyrs advised their wives to take in their widowhoods: godly men who would be good fathers to their children’.73 Certainly, he rose to the challenge of protecting the Cranmer legacy. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, Whitchurch caused Thomas Cranmer to receive the reserved rents from the two Yorkshire properties and arranged the marriage of Margaret’s daughter to Thomas Norton, soon to become famous as one of the Privy Council’s leading ‘men-of-business’ in Parliament. Whitchurch’s will specifies bequests to both of his adoptive children, as well as to Margaret, referring to his ‘service and good will to her and hers’.74 However, while Whitchurch and the wider circle associated with the martyred primate undoubtedly helped Margaret through the difficult Marian years, and beyond, she was not a passive figure. On the contrary: she took an active role in preserving her family’s inheritance. The Chancery papers documenting the deterioration in her third marriage, to Scott, include a plea written by Margaret herself for her rights in the Yorkshire properties to be recognized, after they had been usurped by one John Mylne. Confident of her case, she set out how the estates had previously been possessed by Thomas Cranmer, ‘late archbishop of Canterberie and husband to your sayd oratore’, before being granted

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by letters patent of Philip and Mary to Gawyn and Wolfe. These documents also reveal that when the Scott marriage collapsed acrimoniously, Margaret personally appealed to Archbishop Parker. Parker intervened directly, instructing that she should reside with Cranmer’s friend Reyner Wolfe for her ‘better securytye’.75 This concern for Margaret’s welfare (doubtless shared with others) is all of a piece with Parker’s interest in accumulating information about his eminent predecessor’s life and collections.76 While one can only speculate about Margaret’s feelings during ‘the time of her adversitie’, four extant letters from Anne Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, dating from 1554 to 1555, give a unique insight into her reaction to the tribulations of Mary’s reign. In contrast to Margaret, Anne did leave England, setting out for Frankfurt in the spring of 1554; her brother-in-law, Valérand Poullain, was chief minister there. Like Margaret, however, she was, unsurprisingly, unwilling to leave her husband, and only did so upon his repeated urging—and that of their friends. Hooper was clearly able to maintain a correspondence with his wife during his imprisonment in the Fleet, though almost all of their letters are sadly lost, and Anne acted as conduit for those of his communications directed further afield. The single surviving letter from John to Anne is dated October 1553, shortly after his incarceration began. It is addressed to ‘[my] dearly beloved and my godly wife’, but was surely intended for wider distribution.77 Entitled ‘An exhortation to patience’, the letter offers advice on how Christians should deal with periods of adversity, citing biblical passages chosen to console. Interestingly, despite referring to Anne throughout the text as ‘my dearly beloved wife’, Hooper signed himself ‘your brother in Christ, John Hoper’.78 This valedictory expression was normally used by religious men writing to other religious men, so its appearance here strikingly testifies to a level of spiritual equality between partners in this time of suffering. The depth of Anne’s suffering is evident from the first in this batch of letters addressed to Bullinger, dated Frankfurt, 20 April 1554. Anne thanked her correspondent for the timely arrival of his missive, and for his concern, adding that God had at that time visited me with a calamity in which I was forced not only to lament the common condition of the Church at large, but also my own individual affliction. My woman’s mind being battered with these two engines, what wonder if it seemed immediately about to give way? But

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the spirit of the Lord was with me, and raised up his ministers to give me comfort … For after I had received and read it [Bullinger’s letter] over, I began by God’s assistance to bear myself up against such a weight of calamity[.]79

Contextualizing her own suffering within the larger disaster that had befallen the Protestant Church, Anne drew upon her strong evangelical convictions to stave off despair. She went on to describe the circumstances in Frankfurt, relating that ‘the Senate has granted liberty to the foreign Church for their whole ecclesiastical ministry both of the Word and sacraments’.80 Considering that development, she told Bullinger that, despite his wish that she join him in Zürich, she preferred to stay put until she knew ‘how the Lord shall deal with my husband’, for whom she was ‘not a little anxious’.81 Anne’s anxiety grew. Although in September 1554 she informed Bullinger that she was bearing the misfortune ‘as firmly as I can’,82 by 12 November of that year she had become ‘more than commonly anxious’ about her spouse.83 This nervousness came in response to bad news from England that ‘the hand of an individual had been burnt off, because he refused to hear Mass’.84 Anne insisted that she was ‘never entirely forsaken of the Lord’, but the inevitability of her husband’s death, as corporal punishment began to be deployed against evangelicals, must have become increasingly apparent. She admitted that she often felt herself ‘to be all but dead through grief’, and asked for Bullinger’s prayers.85 Hooper and the religious situation in England were obviously never far from Anne’s thoughts, yet her letters also reveal her enthusiasm for, and engagement with, the exile church in Frankfurt and the community worshipping there. In 1554, she explained that the congregation had been granted the use of the Church of the White Virgins, where her brother-in-law Poullain had delivered the first sermon and baptized his son in the Rhine.86 As a result of her close personal connections to both Poullain and Bullinger, Anne was able to act as intermediary, as well as providing a bridge between the two reformed communities. Each leader sent greetings to the other via Anne’s letters. For example, Poullain is reported to have ‘earnestly entreated’ her to salute Bullinger in his name, asking her ‘to commend his ministry’ to Bullinger’s prayers and the prayers of his colleagues in Zürich.87 Later, Anne forwarded to him a book outlining ‘the constitution and general order of our little Church’, with a request from Poullain for the great reformer to check whether or

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not any corrections were needed.88 Anne herself implored Bullinger to do this ‘for Christ’s sake’, indicating her investment in the congregation and desire to ensure its orthodoxy.89 As the case of Anne Hooper proves, exile could afford women rare opportunities to participate in the organization (even governance) of such Churches. Continuing the practice of her English residency, Anne used her letters to Bullinger to communicate political news, underlining how women could play an important role in transmitting information across the Continent. Anne’s last surviving letter addressed to Bullinger is dated 11 April 1555, some two months after Hooper’s burning at Gloucester. Her grief is transparent, and she prayed Bullinger ‘by the holy friendship of the most holy martyr my husband, of whom being now deprived I consider this life to be death, do not forsake me’.90 Yet despite her personal sense of desolation, Anne demonstrated that she was still concerned about the wider Protestant movement and about the preservation of her husband’s legacy: she asked Bullinger to revise and print a book written by Hooper during his imprisonment that had been sent to her for publication. Anne explained that she had already attempted to fulfil Hooper’s wish for the work to be published before the next Frankfurt book fair by sending it to Pietro Martire [Peter Martyr] Vermigli (1499–1562) in Strasbourg. Vermigli, however, had been unable to bring it to the press because of the eucharistic doctrine articulated within, which was contrary to that allowed there. Anne vouchsafed that, knowing how Hooper’s memory was ‘most precious’ to Bullinger, she felt sure that he would ‘oblige him in this matter, as if he were now alive’. The letter goes on with a reiteration about her grief, but also with an expression of her faith in salvation: ‘indeed, he is alive with all the holy martyrs, and with his Christ the head of the martyrs; and I am dead here till God shall again unite me to him’.91 In the postscript, Anne betrayed her sentiments towards the regime that had executed her husband, for she reported that ‘Rachel sends you an English coin, on which are the effigies of Ahab and Jezebel’. Her meaning was clear: Philip and Mary were Ahab and Jezebel, the Old Testament rulers who had abandoned the worship of God in favour of false deities.92 Tragically, Anne did not live to see the restoration of Protestantism in England under Elizabeth I, dying just months later (in December 1554) during a plague outbreak in Frankfurt, followed soon afterwards by her two children, who had joined her there.

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As one of the most prominent reformers alongside Cranmer and Hooper, Coverdale was brought before the Privy Council almost immediately after Mary’s accession. Nevertheless, he was permitted to return to his diocese under house arrest. While many (including Coverdale himself) believed that he would be executed, he was spared that fate by the intervention of the king of Denmark, Christian III, who petitioned Mary for Coverdale’s release on behalf of his chaplain (and Coverdale’s brotherin-law) John Macalpine. The diplomatic wrangling lasted nearly a year, with Mary initially claiming that the deprived bishop of Exeter was being detained because of a debt allegedly owed to the Crown, not on religious grounds. Christian persisted, declaring that since Coverdale had not held the see for long, or been able to derive any great ‘commodity’ from it, he felt confident that Mary’s ‘benignity’ would cause her to overlook the supposed debt and release him—he looked forward to welcoming the former bishop soon.93 Although Mary delayed again, she eventually relented, such that in 1555 the Privy Council issued a passport for Coverdale to ‘passe from hence towardes Denmarke with two of his servantes, his bagges and baggages’.94 Elizabeth Coverdale is not mentioned in this material, but it is likely that she joined Miles, who went first to Denmark, where he was offered a benefice by Christian III. Refusing that preferment, he then briefly became chaplain to some merchants of the English Church at Wesel, before returning via Frankfurt (where the Book of Common Prayer was being revised) to his old position at Bergzabern. The couple stayed there for two years. In 1557, they moved to Aarau in Switzerland, where municipal records describe Coverdale as a former bishop accompanied by a wife and two children.95 In October 1558, the last full month of Mary I’s life, the Coverdales received leave to settle in Geneva, where Miles collaborated in the production of what would become the Geneva Bible. The sources extant from this time are silent about Elizabeth, but we know that her husband was invited to stand godfather to Knox’s second son, Eleazer, in November 1558.96 Godparenthood helped to consolidate links between the reformers. Indeed, bishops and their wives later proved to be popular choices for each other’s children, as well as for the offspring of junior members of a cathedral establishment.97 Upon Mary’s death, Miles and Elizabeth returned to England, though Coverdale did not resume his bishopric under the restored Protestant regime. Their economic circumstances continued to be strained. Elizabeth died in

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September 1565, having unquestionably proved her commitment to her husband and his ministry, above all in enduring multiple periods of exile and endless financial woes. Miles (who remarried) outlived her by just over three years.98

Conclusion Marriage to a famous or influential man does not automatically qualify women for historical study. In the cases of Margaret Cranmer, Anne Hooper and Elizabeth Coverdale, however, it is entirely fitting that they should step forward and, as it were, claim their own Reformation reputations. Albeit more prominent because of their husbands’ episcopal status, by doing so, they stand alongside the many other women who, in that first bold generation, made the extraordinary decision to flout the law and accepted social norms by marrying a clergyman. As the Reformation unfolded, clerical marriage would increasingly become a step less radical, but in the early years surveyed here—early years of what (we should remember) was a highly precarious movement—it was fraught with risk, the reality of which all three women would discover. In marrying evangelical ministers, they tied themselves to the fate of the reformist cause, simultaneously becoming living embodiments of it. There can be no doubt that our three principal subjects all acted out of conviction, making autonomous choices to enable them to follow their consciences: certainly before their unions, and for Margaret and Anne also in their widowhoods. Uncompromising in their religious beliefs, they supported their husbands’ ministries in the face of numerous obstacles and inconveniences. During Edward VI’s short reign, they pioneered the role of bishop’s wife, experiencing some of the pressures and prejudices that Elizabethan episcopal wives would later have to encounter. Before then, in grappling with the personal catastrophe visited upon them by Mary Tudor’s restoration of Roman Catholicism, they demonstrated resilience and tenacity, finding support in evangelical networks within which they themselves played an active role. While sixteenth-century clerical marriage can profitably be viewed through legal, economic and theological lenses, the real significance of the institution, and the story of how it came to be embedded in the Church of England, can only be ascertained by looking at the individuals involved, not least the women who made it possible.

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Notes 1. J. K. Yost, ‘The Reformation Defense of Clerical Marriage in the Reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI’, Church History, 50 (1981), p. 152. 2. P. Sherlock, ‘Monuments, Reputation and Clerical Marriage in Reformation England: Bishop Barlow’s Daughters’, Gender and History, 16 (2004), p. 57. 3. E.g. J. Berlatsky, ‘The Elizabethan Episcopate: Patterns of Life and Expenditure’, in R. O’Day and F. Heal (eds), Princes and Paupers in the English Church 1500–1800 (Leicester, 1981), pp. 111–27; E. J. Carlson, ‘Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation’, JBS, 31 (1992), pp. 1–31; and H. L. Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent Policy and Practice (Aldershot, 2000). The notable exception is M. Prior, ‘Reviled and Crucified Marriages: The Position of Tudor Bishops’ Wives’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500–1800 (London, 1985), pp. 118–48. 4. M. E. Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (Farnham, 2012) [hereafter Plummer, Clerical Marriage], p. 213. 5. H. C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church (4th edn, London, 1932), p. 378. 6. General studies include: S. Marshall (ed.), Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds (Bloomington, IN, 1989); P. Crawford, Women and Religion in England 1500–1720 (London, 1993); and M. E. Wiesner, Gender, Church, and State in Early Modern Germany: Essays (London, 1998). Roper powerfully challenges the assumption that the Reformation was beneficial to women, arguing that their position was worsened by it: L. Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989). Another local study shows that, on the whole, the Reformation did not improve the situation for women: S. C. Karant-Nunn, ‘Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau’, SCJ , XIII (1982), pp. 17–42. 7. For the Continent: E. Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal, 1990); B. B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford, 2004); and S. Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life, 1450–1700 (Oxford, 2007). For England: M. B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women 1560–1640’, in M. Prior (ed.), Women in English Society 1500– 1800 (London, 1985), pp. 149–80; C. Walker, ‘“Doe Not Supose Me a Well Mortifyed Nun Dead to the World”: Letter-Writing in Early Modern English Convents’, in J. Daybell (ed.), Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke, 2001), pp. 159–76; and C. Walker,

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9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (Basingstoke, 2002). E.g. M. P. Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, OH, 1985); M. F. Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580 (Woodbridge, 2008); M. White (ed.), English Women, Religion, and Textual Production, 1500–1625 (Farnham, 2011); and G. Allen, The Cooke Sisters: Education, Piety and Politics in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2013). C. H. Garrett, The Marian Exiles: A Study in the Origins of Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 1938) [hereafter Garrett, Marian Exiles ]. Garrett’s seminal register of over 450 exiles is representative of this neglect. It mentions women only briefly in biographies of their male relations, and no attempts have since been made to provide a more up-to-date version. P. Collinson, ‘The Role of Women in the English Reformation Illustrated by the Life and Friendships of Anne Locke’, in G. J. Cuming (ed.), Studies in Church History, II (Leiden, 1965), pp. 258–72, reprinted in P. Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 273–87; C. M. Newman, ‘The Reformation and Elizabeth Bowes: A Study of a Sixteenth-Century Northern Gentlewoman’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History, 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 325–33; S. Wabuda, ‘Shunamites and Nurses of the English Reformation: The Activities of Mary Glover, Niece of Hugh Latimer’, ibid., pp. 335–44; T. Freeman, ‘“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”: The Elizabethan Martyrologists and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs’, JBS, 39 (2000), pp. 8–33; and J. Higginbotham, ‘The Exile of Rose Hickman Throckmorton’, Reformation, 15 (2010), pp. 99–114. P. Hembry, ‘Episcopal Palaces, 1535 to 1660’, in E. W. Ives et al. (eds), Wealth and Power in Tudor England: Essays Presented to S. T. Bindoff (London, 1978), p. 161. Plummer, Clerical Marriage, p. 213. MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 72. Plummer, Clerical Marriage, p. 213. Ibid. Ibid., p. 212. Ibid. Ibid., p. 225. Ibid., p. 242. MacCulloch, Cranmer, pp. 21–3. Ibid., p. 72.

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22. M. Prior, ‘Cranmer, Margaret (d. c.1575)’, in ODNB; M. Prior, ‘The Marriages of Thomas Cranmer and Margaret Cranmer’ (unpublished MS in the present author’s possession), p. 1. 23. MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 250. 24. TNA, E 154/2/39, fol. 77r. 25. [M. Parker et al.], De Antiqvitate Britannicæ Ecclesiæ & Priuilegiis Ecclesiæ Cantuariensis, cum Archiepiscopis Eiusdem 70 ([Lambeth], 1572–1574) [STC, 19292], pp. 381–405 (at pp. 390–3). 26. M. Prior, ‘Cranmer, Margaret (d. c.1575)’, in ODNB. 27. J. Foxe, Actes and Monuments … (1st edn, London, 1563) [STC, 11222], p. 1049. For ‘Burgonion’, read ‘Burgundian’, meaning a native of the Low Countries. 28. On him, see D. Constable and M. R. Gilchrist (trans.), J. Bonnet, Letters of John Calvin…, 4 vols (Philadelphia, PA, [1858]), I p. 395 (n. 1). 29. ‘Charles D’Espeville’ [i.e. Jean Calvin] to Jacques de Bourgogne, Seigneur de Falais, n.p., [14 October 1543], printed ibid., pp. 395–8 (Letter CX). 30. D. G. Newcombe, ‘Hooper, John (1495×1500–1555)’, in ODNB. 31. John Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, Strasbourg, 27 January [1546], printed in H. Robinson (ed.), Original Letters Relative to the English Reformation, Written During the Reigns of King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, and Queen Mary: Chiefly from the Archives of Zürich, 2 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1846–1847) [hereafter Robinson, Original Letters ], I pp. 34–5, 38 (Letter XXI). 32. Same to same, [Basel], [probably soon after 12 December 1546], printed ibid., pp. 40–2 (Letter XXIII). 33. Same to same, Antwerp, 3 May 1549, printed ibid., p. 63 (Letter XXXI). 34. Plummer, Clerical Marriage, p. 218. 35. Held in The State Archives, Zürich, Switzerland, MSS E II 343 and E II 343a, the original letters are discussed briefly in R. A. Giselbrecht, ‘Religious Intent and the Art of Courteous Pleasantry: A Few Letters from Englishwomen to Heinrich Bullinger (1543–1562)’, in J. A. Chappell and K. A. Kramer (eds), Women During the English Reformations: Renegotiating Gender and Religious Identity (New York, 2014), pp. 53–8 (using a variant spelling: ‘de Tserclaes’). 36. John Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, London, 27 December 1549, printed in Robinson, Original Letters, I pp. 73–4 (Letter XXXVI). 37. Same to same, Gloucester, 1 August 1551, printed ibid., p. 92 (Letter XL). 38. R. L. Greaves, ‘Macalpine, John (d. 1557)’, in ODNB. 39. S. Wabuda, ‘Shaxton, Nicholas (c.1485–1556)’, ibid. 40. R. L. Greaves, ‘Macalpine, John (d. 1557)’, ibid. 41. J. Witte, Jr. and R. M. Kingdon, Sex, Marriage, and Family in John Calvin’s Geneva, 1: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage (Grand Rapids, MI, 2005), p. 99. No further vols were published.

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42. Miles Coverdale to Jean Calvin, Frankfurt, 26 March 1548, printed in G. Pearson (ed.), Remains of Myles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter…, PS (Cambridge, 1846), p. 526 (Letter XXXIII). 43. For evidence of friendship, see Miles Coverdale to Konrad Hubert, Bergzabern, 3 October [1544], printed ibid., pp. 514–5 (Letter XXII), addressed to ‘my brother and greatly respected friend in the Lord’. 44. Ibid., p. 514. 45. J. Vriend and L. D. Bierma (trans.), H. J. Selderhuis, Marriage and Divorce in the Thought of Martin Bucer, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, XLVIII (Kirksville, MO, 1999), p. 125. 46. Jean Calvin to Pierre Viret, n.p., 7 April 1549, printed in D. Constable and M. R. Gilchrist (trans.), J. Bonnet, Letters of John Calvin …, 4 vols (Philadelphia, PA, [1858]), II pp. 216–7 (Letter CCXXXVIII). 47. John Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, London, 5 February 1550, printed in Robinson, Original Letters, I p. 74 (Letter XXXVII). 48. Martin Micronius to Heinrich Bullinger, London, 20 May 1550, printed ibid., II p. 562 (Letter CCLX). 49. Anne Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, London, 3 April [1551], printed ibid., I p. 108 (Letter XLIX). 50. Same to same, Gloucester, 27 October 1551, printed ibid., p. 109 (Letter L). 51. F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 265–6. 52. J. Foxe, Actes and Monuments … (1st edn, London, 1563) [STC, 11222], p. 1053. 53. Martin Micronius to Heinrich Bullinger, [London], 14 August 1551, printed in Robinson, Original Letters, II p. 576 (Letter CCLXV). 54. On some of the general context, but also mentioning Hooper, see F. Heal, ‘Economic Problems of the Clergy’, in F. Heal and R. O’Day (eds), Church and Society in England: Henry VIII to James I (London, 1977), pp. 99–118. 55. F. Heal, ‘The Archbishops of Canterbury and the Practice of Hospitality’, JEH , 33 (1982), pp. 553–4. 56. LPL, MS 884. 57. R. H. Brodie (ed.), Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward VI , 6 vols (London, 1924–1929), IV p. 7. 58. That is one of several archiepiscopal residences inventoried in TNA, E 154/2/39, fols 62r–86v. 59. LPL, MS 884. 60. Strype described how Margaret Parker rose to the challenge of becoming the archbishop of Canterbury’s wife, ordering ‘her house keeping so nobly and splendidly … that all things answered that venerable dignity’: Strype, Parker, p. 25. A set of household ordinances attributed to Parker also suggest that Margaret played an active role in its management: LPL, MS 1072.

252 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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TNA, C 3/217/30 (Bartholomew Scotte v. Thomas Norton et al.). F. Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1990), pp. 265–6. MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 481. Anon., The Antient History and Description of the City of Exeter … Compiled and Digested from the Works of Hooker, Izacke, and Others (Exeter, [1765?]), pp. 280–1. Ibid., p. 281. Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 136. TNA, C 3/217/30 (Bartholomew Scotte v. Thomas Norton et al.). Ibid., E 154/2/39, fols 66v, 67r and 64v respectively. Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 325. S. Lucas, ‘“An Auncient Zelous Gospeller […] Desirous to Do Any Thing to Common Good”: Edward Whitchurch and the Reformist Cause in Marian and Elizabethan England’, Reformation, 21 (2016), pp. 47–67. Calendar of the Patent Rolls Preserved in the Public Record Office, Philip and Mary, eds M. S. Giuseppi et al., 4 vols (London, 1936–1939), III pp. 483–4 (4 June 1557, citing an enfeoffment of 10 June 1551). TNA, PROB 11/45/323 (3 December 1562). M. Prior, ‘Cranmer, Margaret (d. c.1575)’, in ODNB. TNA, PROB 11/45/323 (3 December 1562). Ibid., C 3/191/68 (Margaret Whitchurch v. John Mylne et al.). See P. M. Black, ‘Matthew Parker’s Search for Cranmer’s “Great Notable Written Books”’, The Library, 5th Series, XXIX (1974), pp. 312–22. John Hooper to Anne Hooper, n.p., 13 October 1553, printed in C. Nevinson (ed.), Later Writings of Bishop Hooper, Together With His Letters and Other Pieces, PS (Cambridge, 1852), pp. 578–88 (Letter XXVI). Ibid., p. 588. Anne Hooper to Heinrich Bullinger, Frankfurt, 20 April 1554, printed in Robinson, Original Letters, I p. 110 (Letter LI). Ibid. Ibid., pp. 110–1. Same to same, Frankfurt, 22 September 1554, printed ibid., p. 112 (Letter LII). Same to same, Frankfurt, 12 November 1554, printed ibid., p. 113 (Letter LIII). Ibid. Ibid. Same to same, Frankfurt, 20 April 1554, printed ibid., p. 111 (Letter LI). Ibid. Same to same, Frankfurt, 22 September 1554, printed ibid., p. 112 (Letter LII). Ibid.

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90. Same to same, Frankfurt, 11 April 1555, printed ibid., p. 114 (Letter LIV). 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid., p. 115. 93. J. Foxe, Actes and Monuments … (1st edn, London, 1563) [STC, 11222], p. 1082 (printing Christian’s letter of 24 September 1554, with English translation). 94. APC, V p. 97 (19 February 1555). 95. D. Daniell, ‘Coverdale, Miles (1488–1569)’, in ODNB. 96. Garrett, Marian Exiles, p. 133. 97. R. Basch, ‘The Changing Status and Identity of English Bishops’ Wives c.1549–1625’, Royal Holloway University of London PhD thesis (2017), p. 160. 98. D. Daniell, ‘Coverdale, Miles (1488–1569)’, in ODNB.

CHAPTER 5

Anne Askew Susan Wabuda

In the four and three-quarter centuries since she was tortured and burned at the stake as a heretic, Anne Askew’s reputation has been transformed time and again until the present day, when she is recognized as a cultural figure in Tudor history second only to a queen in importance. The bundle of writings that she left at her death in 1546 was printed as her Examinations , first by John Bale (see Fig. 5.1) and later by John Foxe. Her papers became a trophy in their hands.1 In their posthumous collaboration with her, they were responsible for establishing Askew as the courageous epitome of a Protestant martyr.2 In celebrating her learning, and in comparing her to Henry VIII’s daughter Elizabeth, Bale also played an essential role in extending Askew’s reputation as a woman who was educated beyond the common attainments for her time.3 Opponents challenged Askew’s identity as a martyr, but Elizabeth’s ultimate success in gaining the throne meant that, as Foxe printed and reprinted Askew’s words in editions of his ‘Book of Martyrs’, her story about the injustices she had suffered became one of the most compelling contributions to Actes and Monuments .4 Until only recently,

S. Wabuda (B) Fordham University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_5

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Fig. 5.1 Portrait of John Bale, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, woodcut, c.1557, printed in John Bale, Scriptorum Illustrium Maioris Brytannie Quam Nunc Angliam & Scotiam Vocant: Catalogus …, 2 vols (Basel, 1557–1559) [STC, 1296 Variant], I frontispiece

Foxe’s narrative of events dominated accounts of the religious history of sixteenth-century England. Therefore, Askew’s Examinations have always had a place in the literature of the English Reformation, if only in the background of the broad historical sweep.

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This essay will explore the ways in which Askew’s reputation has been fashioned and refashioned so as to address the questions that succeeding generations have raised in order to understand her and her place in the Reformation in England. It will start with a new overview of her life, incorporating fresh evidence, for I wish to argue that Askew herself was the premier shaper of her ultimate reputation, even though her words were filled with resounding silences that need to be explored. Although her writings have been in print almost continuously since the mid-sixteenth century,5 the Examinations have had an unusually complicated history. No original manuscript is now known to exist. Bale gave her two books their titles, but her papers included letters, a confession, a prayer and a ballad, in addition to accounts of the several interrogations that she endured.6 In some senses, Askew did not speak. Rather than answer her enemies directly in her own words, she let the Word of God speak for her in such a way as to embarrass the powerful men who condemned her. She composed elaborate collations of Scripture, drawn from both testaments, to answer her foes. Her Examinations were a fulfilment of the ideal that devout Christians should enclose the words of the gospel in their hearts, to guide them in their lives, and to transform them, so that they became the living embodiment of the divine. Askew’s declarations of faith established her as a triumphant witness to Christ.7 Starting in the later decades of the twentieth century, her story received fresh attention, when new measures to recover women’s writings were inaugurated with the aim of redressing the perceived imbalance in the historical record that had previously excluded them. Askew’s Examinations became important for new reasons.8 This time, they were embraced as a leading contribution to a newly-recognized canon of early-modern women’s writings.9 A scholarly controversy ensued, driven by the need to assess the extent to which her texts had been compromised by Foxe, and especially by Bale, who was recognized as the primary ‘protector and explicator’ of the Examinations .10 Most recently, scholars of the history of reading have once again identified Askew as a courageous figure who legitimated her speech as much as her silence.11

A ‘Life’, Reconstructed Partially Anne Askew was born into the Lincolnshire gentry, probably at Stallingborough about the year 1521, to a family ‘of a verye auncyent and noble stocke’.12 Bale emphasized her gentle birth. Her father Sir William Askew

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(or Ayscough, one of the preferred spellings of the family name) was knighted in 1513. Her mother was Elizabeth Wrottesley, his first wife. She died shortly after the birth of a daughter, Anne’s younger sister Jane. In 1522, Sir William married Elizabeth Hutton, the wealthy widow of Sir William Hansard of South Kelsey. Locally, Sir William played an unusually conspicuous role, for until the mid-1530s, Lincolnshire lacked an aristocratic magnate who could dominate the shire in the same way that the Howard family presided over Norfolk. Among his friends was Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559) of Durham, who held lands nearby. Sir William served as a knight of the shire in the ‘Reformation Parliament’, which began in 1529, and he was often named as a royal commissioner to conduct various duties on behalf of the Crown.13 Anne’s eldest brother and Sir William’s heir was Francis, who would be knighted in the reign of Edward VI. Other brothers included Edward and Christopher. One of them was sent to Cambridge, where he proceeded first to a BA degree in 1535, and three years later to the MA degree.14 Edward was a servant to Archbishop Thomas Cranmer until the end of 1539, when he was named to become one of the new gentlemen pensioners who served as a guard of honour for the king. Cranmer described Edward to Thomas Cromwell, lord privy seal, as having ‘a very gentle nature’, and as capable of doing the king ‘diligent and faithful service’.15 Christopher, until his untimely death in 1543, waited on Henry VIII in his private suite of rooms at Court as a member of the king’s Privy Chamber.16 Of Anne’s education and that of her sisters, what she read and how she was taught and by whom, there is almost no information. She was probably raised to direct a large household, one that befitted her rank as a gentlewoman whose family enjoyed extensive connections among England’s elite. She was given superlative skills in reading, in writing and probably in keeping household accounts too. The years of her upbringing coincided with new trends in the education of young girls that were encouraged by Renaissance Humanist scholars, in part as a response to the immediate supposition that Henry and Katherine of Aragon’s daughter Mary (1516–1558) would inherit the throne. Desiderius Erasmus (c.1467–1536), Sir Thomas More (1478– 1535) and Juan Luis Vives (1492/93–1540) all placed new value on female learning. In his Instruction of a Christen Woman, Vives recommended that when young girls were taught to write, they should copy over ‘some sad sentence, prudent and chaste, taken out of holy Scripture’,

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or the writings of the ancient philosophers, to learn and be guided by for the rest of their lives.17 His book was dedicated to Queen Katherine and it praised More’s learned daughters, but to what extent, or if, the new trends in Humanism reached Sir William Askew’s daughters and step-daughters in their formative years cannot be known. Although Anne Askew used no Latin or Greek in her writings, her facility in Scripture was so impressive that her family’s prestige may have been enhanced by her attainments. Writing in 1548, Bale emphasized that great ladies like Askew ‘are become gloryouse to the worlde by the stodye of good letters’, and especially by their ‘dayle exercyse’ in divine Scripture.18 Like much of the rest of England in the 1530s, Lincolnshire became politicized by the changes in policy and religious practices that the Government encouraged. The legislation that rejected the papacy and made Henry VIII supreme head of the English Church was completed in 1534. The following year, every adult male was required to swear an oath that he would keep the terms of the Act of Succession, which denounced the papacy for usurping powers that belonged to England’s kings.19 It fell to Sir William to implement many unpopular directives in Lincolnshire, including the collection of new taxes.20 In October 1536, six counties in northern England rose in opposition. The Lincolnshire Rebellion and Yorkshire’s Pilgrimage of Grace were the greatest crises that the Tudors faced during Henry’s reign. His subjects rebelled because they feared that the traditions that defined their religious lives would change if monasteries were closed and saints were no longer honoured as they had been for many centuries. At Caistor, where he was serving on a royal commission, Sir William was taken hostage by the rebels. His sons were abducted from South Kelsey. With great reluctance, the commissioners were forced to make concessions to their captors, who wished them to lead their rising against the king. Henry responded by sending an army northward. At its head was his closest friend and former brother-in-law, Charles Brandon (c.1484– 1545), 1st duke of Suffolk. Although the rebels vastly outnumbered the king’s men, the Lincolnshire Rebellion collapsed rapidly because the royal commissioners had no desire of their own to challenge Henry’s authority. Afterward, with some difficulty, Sir William was able to convince Suffolk of his loyalty, but the husband of one of his Hansard step-daughters was executed for the role he had played in the risings.21

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In the rebellion’s aftermath, as his children reached marriageable age, Sir William arranged matches for them among local gentry families. Bale suggested that he agreed for his eldest daughter to wed the heir to a Lincolnshire neighbour, one of the numerous members of the ancient Kyme family. However, Anne’s sister died before she could be married, and therefore to save the alliance, Bale claimed, Sir William ‘constrayned’ Anne to marry the young man instead. The Privy Council later recorded his name as Thomas Keyme, but all efforts to identify him further have been unsuccessful.22 Bale argued that Anne ‘was compelled’ to marry her bridegroom ‘agaynst her wyll or fre consent’, and he dismissed Sir William’s actions as typical of the ambitions of his social class, and of parents who forced their children into unions they did not seek so that they might ‘save the moneye’.23 Recent research into Askew family wills reveals that Anne’s father’s plans were probably even more complicated than Bale could know. Sir William also arranged Jane’s marriage to George Seyntpole, who had relatives among members of the Kyme family.24 Moreover, Seyntpole pursued an important career as steward to the duke and duchess of Suffolk. Even before the rebellion occurred, Henry VIII had sought to strengthen the stability of the county when he established Suffolk as the leading aristocrat in Lincolnshire through his marriage to the young heiress Katherine Willoughby (1519–1580).25 Evidently, Sir William placed his children in the most advantageous positions that he could obtain for them. Sir William remained deeply conservative in his opinions. In 1539, he incurred renewed disgrace after offering hospitality to one of Tunstall’s chaplains, Dr Richard Hillyard, who fled to Scotland and then to Rome rather than consent to Henry’s supremacy. As he made his escape northward, Hillyard stayed briefly at Stallingborough. In 1540, the king’s Privy Council summoned Sir William to reveal his reasons for assisting Hillyard. But by then, as the knight explained in his letters, he was so weakened by a wasting illness that he could no longer travel. Nevertheless, his excuses were rejected; the Crown seized his lands and other possessions.26 He did not mention any of his daughters in his will, perhaps because they had already been settled in marriage. He asked that, his debts having been paid and his bequests satisfied, Francis and his widow, Elizabeth, should use his goods for the ‘welthe’ of his soul and all Christian souls. Stallingborough’s church of St. Peter, where he requested burial ‘before the ymmage of oure lady’ in the chapel dedicated to the Virgin Mary,

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no longer stands. At his death in May 1541, the Crown released his possessions to Francis.27 Despite what may have been an inauspicious start to the marriage, Bale related that Anne ‘demeaned her selfe lyke a Christen wyfe’, by which he meant that she subordinated herself to her husband. Bale was told that they had two children. However, over time, the marriage broke down. Bale wrote that ‘by oft readynge of the sacred Bible’, Anne ‘fell clerelye from all olde superstycyons of papystrye, to a perfyght beleve in Jhesus Christ’. From Askew herself there was no account of a conversion experience of the sort Bale described.28 According to Bale, her new beliefs ‘so offended the prestes’ that at their instigation her husband ‘vyolentlye drove her oute of hys howse’, whereupon ‘she thought her selfe free’ of a marriage into which she had been forced in the first place. She decided, in the light of 1 Corinthians 7:10– 15, that she was not bound to stay in her marriage with her ‘unbelevynge husbande’. She had been trapped in an ‘unlawfull’ union contracted without her full consent. Askew ‘coulde not thynke’ that, in driving her out of his house, her spouse was ‘worthye of her marryage’, for holy wedlock had been created by God himself. Therefore, suggested Bale, she ‘sought of the law a dyvorcement’.29 Although many historians have followed Bale’s account closely when writing of her marital problems, it should be noted that in her Examinations Askew herself provided almost no references to her husband, no description of her marriage and no reasons that would explain why she left him. It may be, as some scholars have speculated, that she took a suit to the Church courts in Lincoln for a legal separation a mensa et thoro that would allow her to live apart from Kyme, although neither could marry again. No evidence has yet been recovered that she did so.30 Because she said that Lord Chancellor Thomas Wriothesley (1505–1550) ‘knewe all redye my mynde’ concerning her husband, and that she would show Henry VIII ‘the truthe’ about her marriage ‘if it were the kynges pleasure to heare me’, historians have assumed that she took up her marital difficulties for redress in the Court of Chancery.31 Further research there may shed light on any case. But in her own words, she made no disclosures. Bale’s idea that she ‘sought of the law a dyvorcement’ may be his amplification of what he thought she wished to do, informed as he may have been by the writings of Heinrich Bullinger about ‘divorsement’.32 As part of his efforts to portray Askew as a Protestant heroine, Bale’s

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description of her subordination may have been designed to deflect criticism that she was a bad wife, though that was exactly the conclusion her detractors drew.33 In the first part of the Examinations , Askew wrote that her friends had warned her that if she went to Lincoln, then ‘thre score prestes’ would be ‘bent agaynst me’. They—the clergy—had boasted that they would ‘assault me and put me to great trouble’. But she was unafraid, ‘because I knewe my matter to be good’. The episode remains obscure since Askew did not explain when or why she went to Lincoln, where she stayed six days ‘to se what wolde be sayd unto me’. She spent her time in the cathedral, ‘readynge upon the Byble’, and the priests ‘resorted unto me by ij and by ij by v and by vj myndynge to have spoken to me, yet went they theyr wayes agayne with out wordes speakynge’.34 Askew’s appearance in the cathedral may have been deliberately provocative because she read the Bible openly where she could be seen. The king approved the release of the English Bible from 1537.35 Although the Royal Injunctions of 1538 had required that English Bibles be set up in every church for every person who wished to read ‘privily’, and to listen to readings quietly, almost immediately Henry’s government had second thoughts as lay people converged to interpret, without either instruction or permission, what holy writ meant. The Government feared that regular worship services were being disturbed and that dangerous disagreements might be encouraged.36 In 1542–1543, Parliament passed the Act for the Advancement of True Religion, which restricted Bible reading to the upper classes, and especially to noblemen and gentlemen, who enjoyed the authority to teach their families in privacy, as they saw fit.37 In the Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, and indeed beyond, women were discouraged from speaking in public on the strength of the strictures established by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 14:34–5 that they must keep silent in church. By extension, no woman was allowed to teach men. The Act for the Advancement of True Religion now forbade most women from reading the Bible. Only ladies and gentlewomen might read Scripture, and then in such strict seclusion that they could not be overheard by any other person.38 Two copies of the Bible had been set up on desks in the nave of Lincoln Cathedral in 1540–1541, and although it is impossible to know when Askew paid her visit, her presence there concerned the priests who approached her and then withdrew, without speaking to her. Only one

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spoke, and ‘hys wordes were of so small effecte’ that later she told Bishop Edmund Bonner of London that she did not remember what he had said.39 Afterward, Askew left Lincolnshire for London, perhaps to be close to her younger brothers who were serving the king. John Louthe (d. 1590), one of her friends, told Foxe that she obtained lodgings in a house near the Inns of Court ‘over-agaynste the Temple’.40 She called herself by her own name again, which was such an unusual step that many misunderstood and thought that she was ‘Askues wyfe’.41 There was little precedent for a woman to live separately from her husband. As her own person, she probably had almost no existence under common law.42 Yet she developed many important contacts at the Inns of Court, among lawyers, as well as with evangelicals in the royal household, including Katherine, duchess of Suffolk. She also gained the interest of Sir Anthony Denny (1501–1549), the most influential member of the king’s Privy Chamber and his wife Joan (d. 1553), who served Queen Katherine Parr (1512–1548). The court of London’s lord mayor and aldermen recorded Askew’s first detention in March 1545, when a woman complained to the authorities that she had heard her read from the New Testament that ‘God was not in temples made with handes’. This was a text that Askew took from the words of St. Stephen, the first martyr of the Christian Church, who had been stoned to death for identifying Jesus as the Messiah.43 At first, her examiners proceeded against her under the Act for the Advancement of True Religion. Askew was frequently reminded that, as a woman, she had no right under the law to read Scripture in the hearing of others, much less to discuss it openly, although she did so. Louthe told Foxe that the lord mayor denigrated her by addressing her as ‘thou folyshe woman’.44 Bonner’s chancellor Henry Cole (1504/5–1579/80) said ‘that I was moche to blame for utterynge the Scriptures’, for Paul had forbidden women either to speak or to talk of the Word of God. But she shifted the discussion to her advantage. ‘I answered hym, that I knewe Paules meanynge so well as he’: that the Apostle had prohibited women from speaking in church only, ‘in the congregacyon by the waye of teachynge’. She asked him how many women he had seen go into the pulpit and preach. When he replied that he had never seen any, she told him that ‘he ought to fynde no faute in poore women, except they had offended the lawe’.45 By implication, even if the law silenced her, the authority of Scripture permitted her to speak and teach, if not to preach, because the

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words she articulated were not her own, but rather the words of God’s gospel, which she had ‘closed up in my harte’.46 However, prosecutions under the Act for the Advancement of True Religion proved difficult to pursue, as the authorities discovered.47 In 1540, Bonner had prepared a warning which he posted above the chained Bibles in St. Paul’s Cathedral. It called for ‘devocion, humilite and quyetnes’ from readers, who were not to disturb any ‘Christen brother’ nor make noise during services and sermons. No reader was to comment upon the text of Scripture.48 Almost immediately, the mercer John Porter transgressed when his Bible reading attracted large crowds at St. Paul’s. He died in prison by 1542. Foxe represented him as a martyr because he dared to read the Bible openly, but the authorities were able to move against Porter effectively only because they said that he had denied the Real Presence in the sacrament of the altar. Under the ‘Act of Six Articles’, all of the king’s subjects were required to believe that the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, which had hung upon the Cross on the day of the crucifixion, was present in the consecrated bread and wine. That Act had been passed by Parliament in 1539, despite serious opposition from Cranmer in the House of Lords and in Convocation. To deny the Real Presence was heresy, a capital offence. Those convicted were sent from the bishop’s court to the secular arm of the Government to be burnt at the stake.49 Like Porter, Askew’s chief offence was not Bible reading, but rather her challenges to official orthodoxy about the Eucharist.50 Askew’s examiners quickly expanded their questioning to discover whether or not she had violated the terms of the ‘Act of Six Articles’. In quoting St. Stephen when she said that ‘God was not in temples made with handes’, and that she would ‘rather … reade fyve lynes in the Bible, than to heare fyve Masses in the temple’, she had come close to denying the Real Presence.51 On 10 March 1545, she was placed in ward in one of the London Counters for ‘further examynacon’.52 Denial of traditional teachings concerning the Mass already had a long history in England before the Reformation began. The Lollards challenged many of the doctrines of the medieval Church in the century before Luther emerged. Despite bishops’ vigilance against them, pockets of Lollardy survived into the sixteenth century, dissolving into evangelicalism once English Bibles became available.53 Askew was not a Lollard, but some of the older controversies that were related to the sacrament of the altar resurfaced during her first examination. William Laxton, lord

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mayor of London,54 asked her whether or not a mouse that ate the consecrated host was capable of receiving God. In the first of her Examinations , she wrote that ‘I made them no answere, but smyled’.55 According to Louthe, she did answer. When the lord mayor told her that he thought the mouse would be damned, she responded ‘Alacke, poore mowse!’.56 ‘I made them no answere’ highlights an important aspect of the first of Askew’s Examinations because, as with the subject of her marriage, she refused to discuss her theological opinions in any detail.57 At the same time, she used coded language to play to her friends in the audience and to those who would later read her words—language that they would understand as a declaration of the Protestant faith they shared.58 On 23 March 1545, Askew’s cousin Christopher Brittayne, a member of the Middle Temple, asked Laxton to release her on bail. The lord mayor might have preferred to dismiss the charges against her, but he could not order her to be ‘laufully delyvered’ because she had been imprisoned at the instance of the bishop’s officers, who told Brittayne that her case was ‘haynouse’.59 Legal rights due her were denied.60 Bishop Bonner wished Brittayne to persuade her to reveal her full opinions, to ‘the verye bottom of my harte’.61 Bonner questioned Askew on 25 March, and he pounced on her admission that ‘in sprete and faythe’ she received the body and blood of Christ. ‘In sprete and faythe’ provided the merest hint that she did not believe in the Real Presence. She told him that without faith and spirit she could not receive Christ worthily.62 He asked her what she understood by saying that ‘God was not in temples made with handes’. She answered: ‘I beleve as the Scripture doth teache me’. He tried for a long time to drive her to say more. She would not, ‘but concluded thus with hym, that I beleved therin[,] and in all other thynges, as Christ and hys holye Apostles ded leave them’.63 In his study of evangelicals in the early English Reformation, Alec Ryrie has concluded that prosecution under the ‘Act of Six Articles’ was only intermittent. The Henrician State could not conduct pervasive campaigns against heresy in the face of strong opposition from the king’s subjects. The authorities were especially unwilling to pursue heresy cases when the accused had powerful friends.64 When Askew was questioned by Bonner, Brittayne brought with him a number of influential men, including Edmund Butts, the son of the king’s physician; Edward Hall (1497–1547) of Gray’s Inn, author of Hall’s Chronicle and Christopher, a servant to Sir Anthony Denny. In his turn, Bonner was supported by

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a stellar group of Oxford theologians. They included Dr John Standish (c.1509–1570) and the regius professor of divinity, Dr. Richard Smyth [Smith] (1499/1500–1563). As she stood before them, Askew used irony to play up her disadvantaged status as a woman. She turned her questioners’ words back at them. Standish requested Bonner to ask her what she understood of 1 Corinthians 14:34–5—that women must be silent in church. She replied: ‘it was agaynst Saynt Paules lernynge, that I beynge a woman, shuld interprete the Scriptures, specyallye where so manye wyse lerned men were’.65 At length, Bonner prepared a document for her to sign which stated clearly that she believed the very body and blood of Christ to be in the Eucharist. He was willing to permit her release should she sign it. Rightly, she perceived that Bonner’s document was a repudiation of what she truly believed. When he read it to her, she asked him to add the words ‘I beleve so moche therof, as the holye Scripture doth agre to’, which was a caveat that would spare her conscience. He admonished her that she should not teach him what to write, and he read the document aloud to her supporters. They begged her to sign. Bonner told her that he had shown her great favour because ‘I had good fryndes, and also … I was come of a worshypfull stocke’.66 She did sign, but added her own inscription: ‘I Anne Askewe do beleve all maner thynges contayned in the faythe of the Catholyck Churche’—a declaration implying that Bonner stood at variance with the Church that had been established by the Apostles. In ‘a great furye’, Bonner ‘flonge’ into his chamber. The bishop told Brittayne that Askew ‘was a woman, and that he was nothynge deceyved in me’. Her cousin begged Bonner ‘not to sett my weake womannys wytt, to hys lordshyppes great wysdome’. With heavy reluctance, Bonner accepted Askew’s signature. The recantation was also signed by his officers and by her friends, in order to attest to the fact that she had submitted. When, at a later date, the document was recorded in Bonner’s episcopal register for 20 March 1545, the caveat that Askew had added to her subscription was omitted.67 She was not bailed immediately. Bonner required her to appear at the Guildhall, where the recantation was read out publicly in her presence. After delays, and what Anne described as ‘moche a do’, she was bailed in March, although that was not the end.68 Her account of her first examination does not mention that she was arraigned at the Guildhall on 13 June 1545 for speaking against the sacrament of the altar. Charged at the same time were Robert Lukine, a servant to Sir Humphrey Browne,

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a justice of the Court of King’s Bench, and Joan Sawtery, wife of John Sawtery of London. No witnesses against Askew were forthcoming, and all three were found not guilty. Only now was she fully discharged from the accusations against her.69 Askew’s first appearance at the Guildhall had been engineered by Bonner so as to humiliate and discredit her. The bishop composed the document that she signed, and he publicized it with the aim of creating the impression that she had denied her faith, which she later maintained was not her intent when she signed. It cannot be known with any certainty when the first of her Examinations was prepared: immediately after she appeared before Bonner or after she had been condemned the next year. It begins with the words: ‘To satisfie your expectation, good people’, an acknowledgement of the desire among her friends to know, from her perspective, what had really happened, and her assurance that they had not been implicated in her troubles. She wrote her account as a series of dialogues in which she never initiated a conversation. In responding to the men who questioned her, she portrayed herself as thwarting them. She made Bonner look foolish when she wrote that he had ‘flonge’ himself into his chamber, defeated by a ‘weake womannys wytt’.70 For nearly a year, her enemies could do no more against her because of the powerful support that she enjoyed. According to Louthe, a man ‘hott in his religione’ took lodgings at the house next to Anne’s, because he hoped to catch her in a compromising situation. Instead, he discovered that she spent her nights in prayer.71 However, a crisis broke in early 1546 concerning the meaning of the Mass that was of such magnitude that none of Askew’s friends was powerful enough to save her again. The poisonous rivalries that divided conservative and evangelical factions in the Privy Council and the Privy Chamber burst into a violent struggle for ascendancy as the old king’s health failed. The crisis was inadvertently triggered in April 1546 when the London preacher Dr Edward Crome highlighted an inconsistency in the Government’s policies towards the Mass, after Parliament passed an Act abolishing chantries, whose main purpose was to celebrate private Masses for the dead. In his sermons, Crome suggested that the Mass did not relieve the sufferings of souls in purgatory because Christ was the only sufficient sacrifice for sin. The Mass was a commemoration of Jesus’s death. Crome’s sermons in early 1546 challenged the doctrinal legitimacy of the ‘Act of Six Articles’.

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Immediately, Bonner moved against him. Crome was supposed to retract his opinions, and endorse the tenet of the Real Presence, at Paul’s Cross—the nation’s premier pulpit, located in the precincts of St. Paul’s Cathedral—on 9 May. However, Crome defied the king’s expectation of a recantation. He stood before an audience of thousands and refused. He repeated his belief that the Mass was not a sacrifice, but rather a thanksgiving for, and a commemoration of, Christ’s death. Crome’s defiance unleashed an investigation that swept up more than twenty people. Another sixty escaped abroad in fear for their lives.72 Askew was implicated, for, in the first of her examinations, she had said that she was willing to make her confession to Crome because she trusted him as a man of wisdom.73 But Crome had also divulged the names of his friends.74 On 24 May, the Privy Council sent for ‘oone Kyme and his wief’,75 and a great search was made for her. According to Askew family legend, one of her letters was intercepted, and her brother Francis, fearful for his standing and even his life, unwillingly surrendered her to the authorities.76 In mid-June 1546, Askew and Kyme appeared before the Privy Council at Greenwich. When asked about ‘Master Kyme’, she refused to answer to anyone but the king. She was told that ‘it was not mete for the kynge with me to be troubled’. Nor would she give a straightforward account of her opinions concerning the sacrament of the altar. Bishop Stephen Gardiner of Winchester said that she ‘spake in parables’ and rebuked her as ‘a paratte’. He urged her to ‘confesse the sacrament to be fleshe, bloude and bone’. When she would not answer, nor speak to him alone, ‘the byshopp sayd, I shuld be brente’. She refused to sign another submission. Kyme was released to return to Lincolnshire, but privy councillors decided that Anne was ‘very obstinate and heddye in reasoning of matiers of religion’, and she was committed to Newgate Prison ‘to answere to the lawe’.77 At the same time, the wider investigations reached deep into the Court and the king’s Privy Chamber. George Blage (c.1512–1551), one of Henry’s favourites, and John Lassells [Lascelles] (d. 1546), who had revealed Queen Katherine Howard’s indiscretions in 1541, were charged with denying the Real Presence. When they did not repudiate their opinions, they were speedily condemned. On 18 June, Askew was brought to the Guildhall to face a panel of justices who included Lord Mayor Martin Bowes, Bishop Bonner and Bishop Nicholas Heath (1501?–1578) of Worcester. She was accused

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together with Nicholas Shaxton (c.1485–1556), the former bishop of Salisbury, and a stranger, John Hadlam, an Essex tailor. If she had been cautious before, now her answers became clearer and adamant. Anne told the assembly that she believed that the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary, ‘is now gloriouse in Heaven’, and that Christ will come again. Her words were the words of the Creed, and, once again, she implied that the bishops had imposed their own doctrines, which violated the ancient teachings of the Church. ‘And as for that ye call your God, [it] is but a pece of breade’. Without trial by jury, she and the others were condemned to be burned.78 Immediately, on Tuesday 19 June, Shaxton submitted to Bonner and Heath, converting to the Government’s doctrinal orthodoxy. He and Blage were later pardoned by the king. That same day, Askew was sent from Newgate to meet at a London inn with Bonner and the privy councillor Sir Richard Rich (1496/97–1567), who tried to persuade her to follow Shaxton’s example. Shaxton, also present, ‘counselled me to recant as he had done’. She told him that it was better for him never to have been born.79 Rich committed her to the Tower. There, he and Wriothesley, perhaps along with other privy councillors, charged her to name ‘man or woman of my secte’. She refused. They pressed her to implicate some of the greatest ladies of the Court, all of whom were evangelicals and served Queen Katherine Parr: Katherine, duchess of Suffolk; Anne Radcliffe, countess of Sussex; Anne Stanhope, countess of Hertford, who was the wife of Edward Seymour (c.1500–1552); Lady Denny and Lady Fitzwilliam. The earl of Hertford (the future Lord Protector Somerset) was an uncle of Prince Edward, heir to the throne, and a stumbling block to Wriothesley’s ambitions. Askew refused to help them. They demanded to know who had assisted her a year previously when she had been held prisoner in one of the Counters. She replied that her maid had gone into the streets and begged money from apprentices. The most that she would confess was that she had been given sums of money by men who said they were sent by Lady Hertford and Lady Denny, but ‘whether it were true or no, I can not tell’.80 Had members of the Privy Council itself maintained her? Upon her refusal to say, ‘they ded put me on the racke’. Because ‘I laye styll and ded not crye’, and did not implicate anyone, Lord Chancellor Wriothesley and Rich ‘toke peynes to racke me [with] their owne handes, tyll I was nygh dead’.81 The torture of Anne Askew in the Tower of London was

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illegal, and a flagrant breach of accustomed procedure. As a gentlewoman, and as a condemned prisoner, she should have been protected by the law. Instead, the lord chancellor tried to use her to destroy his rivals. When he failed, he realized that he was endangered by the strength of her resistance. After she had been loosened from the rack, she sat for two hours on the bare floor, as Wriothesley sought ‘with manye flatterynge wordes’ to persuade her to leave her opinions, which she refused to do. Later, when he asked her again to abandon them or be burned, she sent him word that she would ‘rather dye, than to breake my faythe’.82 She was brought out of the Tower to a house and put to bed, ‘with as werye and payneful bones, as ever had pacyent Job’.83 Immediately, news spread in London that she had been racked, and that she had been ‘sore tormented, but she would not converte for all the paine’. Crome appeared again at Paul’s Cross on 27 June, when he made a clear recantation that repudiated his former evasions and equivocations. On 12 July, Askew was moved by water from the Tower to Blackfriars and then to Newgate, ‘caried in a chaire’ by the sheriffs’ officers because the torture had been so damaging that she could no longer stand.84 In the time remaining to her, Askew composed her last words. She prepared letters addressed to Wriothesley and to the king. Among the most coercive aspects of the Henrician Reformation was the Government’s insistence that the king’s authority be accepted as a matter of salvation. Heresy was political disloyalty.85 Defiantly, she informed Henry that although ‘I am by the lawe condempned for an evyll doer’, she asked Heaven and earth to record ‘that I shall dye in my innocencye’. She declared that ‘concernynge the supper of the Lorde, I beleve so moch as Christ hath sayd therin, whych he confirmed wyth hys most blessyd bloude’.86 To Lassells she wrote that she understood that the Privy Council ‘is not a lyttle dyspleased’ that word had spread that she had been racked, for its members were ‘ashamed of their uncomelye doynges’ for fear of the king’s displeasure. ‘Well, their crueltye God forgeve them’.87 Her recantation from the previous year was now written into Bonner’s register, the official record of the proceedings of his episcopate, but out of place, behind Shaxton’s submission. To justify her execution, Bonner put the recantations into print. Now, once again, she repudiated the document that she had signed.88 Before she died, she made a confession of her faith in which she defended the teaching of the Creed, which states that Christ ‘sytteth on the ryght hande of God the father almyghtye’. Therefore, ‘the holye and blessyd supper of the Lorde’ was ‘a

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most necessarye remembraunce of hys gloryouse sufferynges and deathe’. She believed ‘all those Scriptures to be true, whom he hath confirmed with hys most precyouse bloude’. The Mass, as it was used in Henry’s Church, she declared was ‘the most abhomynable ydoll that is in the worlde’. She was willing to suffer and die for her faith.89 The day before her execution, she and Lassells were visited in Newgate Prison by Louthe, who later told Foxe that ‘she hadd an angel’s countenance, and a smylyng face’.90 On 16 July 1546, ‘Anne Keme, alias Askewe, gentlewoman’ was brought to the place of execution at Smithfield in a dung cart, sitting in a chair and held up by two serjeants. With her were Lassells, Hadlam and John Hemley, priest. They were then chained to several stakes. A special gallery had been built so that Bowes and the London aldermen, along with Wriothesley and other privy councillors, could lend their authority to the proceedings. A pulpit was situated next to the stakes to enable Shaxton to preach to a crowd numbered in the thousands. Weeping, he expatiated on the errors that he had once shared with the condemned, and on the favour that he had received in the shape of the king’s pardon. According to Foxe, Askew answered him, rebuking Shaxton for misquoting Scripture: ‘he speaketh without the booke’. Wriothesley offered her a royal pardon if she would recant, but she refused, saying that she would not deny her lord and master. Emboldened by her constancy, the three men also refused. Bowes commanded that the torch be put to them. In ‘the hower of derkenes’ (as Louthe called it) she and the others were consumed together in one fire (see Fig. 5.2).91 At the beginning of August, Shaxton recanted again at Paul’s Cross, and in the next month condemned books (including some of Bale’s works) were burned there,92 but further persecutions were deflected as Hertford and other leading evangelicals gathered their strength to act as counterweights to Bonner and Gardiner. The attempt to remove Queen Katherine Parr failed. The courage with which Askew and Lassells had gone to their deaths made such an impression that a shift occurred in perceptions about the meaning of the Eucharist. By challenging the tenet of the Real Presence as they did, it became harder in the next reign for English evangelicals to maintain the idea that Christ’s body and blood remained in the consecrated bread and wine. Under Edward VI, the ‘Act of Six Articles’ was repealed. The Book of Common Prayer rejected the

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Fig. 5.2 The burning of Anne Askew, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, woodcut, [c.1548], first printed in Robert Crowley, The Confutation of XIII Articles, Wherunto Nicolas Shaxton, Late Byshop of Salilburye [ sic] Subscribed and Caused be Set Forthe in Print the Yere … MCXLVI [ sic] When he Recanted in Smithfielde at London at the Burning of Mestres Anne Askue … (London, [1548]) [STC, 6083], frontispiece and reprinted (the source here) in John Foxe, Actes and Monuments … (1st edition, London, 1563) [STC, 11222], p. 666

doctrine of the Real Presence even as it taught that Christ was present truly and spiritually in the Lord’s supper. Anne’s sacrifice helped to lead to reforms that allowed opinions like hers to occupy a secure place in the theology of the English Church under Edward and Elizabeth I.93

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Beyond Smithfield At the time of Anne’s death, John Bale was living in exile along the lower Rhine in the city of Wesel, in the duchy of Cleves.94 He recorded that German-speaking merchants who had attended her execution brought him her papers in ‘her owne hande writynge’,95 but, alternatively, they may have been sent to him by someone of importance, perhaps a figure from the Court or another ‘secrete frynde’ to whom she addressed the second of her Examinations . Bale recognized that he could use her writings to reprehend the ‘tyrannouse vyolence’ she had been shown.96 He divided her papers into two portions: the material that he entitled her ‘first examinacyon’ and everything else, which he categorized as her ‘lattre examinacyon’, although the second group might be better described as a collection of short, unconnected pieces that included her letters and a ballad.97 Each examination Bale divided into brief sections. Askew’s words were set in a large typeface. His extensive commentaries, which he termed his ‘elucydacyon’, were interlarded between passages of her text in smaller type. The two Examinations were printed separately in Wesel by Dirick van der Straten, disguised as coming from a press at Marburg in Hesse, a ruse designed to identify Bale as a successor to the translator of the English Bible, William Tyndale, who had used Marburg colophons for his books.98 For Bale, Askew’s Examinations were precious evidence that showed that Protestantism was the one true Church. Her words were a reproof to all who stood in the way of the Reformation. Bale dramatized Askew beyond any ordinary woman when he placed her in the great procession of martyrs of the Christian Church. He compared her to many saints, and especially to Blandina, an otherwise obscure secondcentury martyr, whose sacrifice in southern France had been recounted by Eusebius (d. 339) in his Ecclesiastical History. On the title-page of each portion of Askew’s Examinations , the same woodcut appears (which Bale may have designed) depicting Askew as a woman with a shining face wearing classical dress. She holds a book labelled ‘Biblia’ and the palm of martyrdom. Under her feet is a dragon sporting the triple tiara of the papacy, a reconfiguration of the standard medieval iconography of St. Margaret of Antioch, who was portrayed treading down the dragon. Bale wrote that Askew ‘hath strongly troden downe the head of the serpent’ and that she had achieved a notable victory over ‘the pestyferouse seede of that vyperouse worme of Rome’.99 As she was represented by Bale,

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Askew became the model of a Protestant saint: mild in manner, godly in the study of Scripture and a courageous defender of truth. Askew’s style of collating extracts from Scripture into coherent statements of faith may have been both characteristic of her generation of English reformers and imitated by her admirers. Robert Glover, who was burnt in 1555, also composed letters that are dense with references to biblical passages. He advised his wife Mary to set before her the examples of those who had behaved boldly in God’s cause, especially Anne Askew, a faithful witness to Christ.100 The most powerful piece of writing attributed to Askew was also the most politically dangerous: the ‘Balade’ that she ‘made and sange’ in Newgate, not long before she suffered. It is the last item that Bale printed in the Lattre Examinacyon, and here he provided no commentary. The ballad begins: Lyke as the armed knyght Appoynted to the fielde With thys world wyll I fyght And fayth shall be my shielde.

Its tone shifts: I sawe a ryall trone Where Justyce shuld have sytt But in her stede was one Of modye cruell wytt.

Because righteousness had been swept away, Satan was able to suck up ‘gyltelesse bloude’. The ballad ends with a martyr-like prayer of forgiveness for those who caused her suffering: Yet Lorde I the desyre For that they do to me Lete them not tast the hyre Of their inyquyte.101

Neither Askew nor Bale directly associated the occupant of the royal throne with Henry VIII, but the implication may have been unavoidable as Bale’s editions reached England. The First Examinacyon was printed in

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November 1546 and the Lattre Examinacyon bears the date 16 January 1547. They arrived in time to usher in the reign of Edward VI upon the death of his father on 28 January. In May, Gardiner wrote to Lord Protector Somerset that he had seen two English books by Bale that were ‘very pernicious, sedicious, and slaundrous’. It grieved him, he said, to see Henry VIII’s memory dishonoured in works that ‘painted’ Askew as a saint and martyr. Her examinations had allegedly been ‘utterly misreported’, and Gardiner denounced Bale’s ‘untruth’.102 In some copies of Askew’s Lattre Examinacyon, pages were pasted down so as to suppress passages that mention Sir William Paget (1505/6–1563), Henry’s principal secretary and an essential member of Edward’s government. Paget had questioned Askew harshly. Those who had actually been involved in examining her could construe Bale’s editions as an embarrassment to the new regime, and an indictment that reform of the Church under Edward was not being carried out sufficiently quickly or completely.103 Perhaps c.1550, Askew’s Examinations were reprinted in [London] without Bale’s ‘elucydacyon’.104 Once Mary Tudor became queen, in 1553, Bale’s presentation of Askew as a martyr came under attack. In his Displaying of the Protestantes … of 1556, Miles Huggarde (fl. 1533–1557) disparaged the theology of Edward’s Church. Cranmer had ‘erred greatly in taking Luther’s parte’, but the archbishop had condemned Joan Bocher as an Anabaptist in 1549. She had denied the full humanity of Jesus when she argued that Christ took no flesh from the Virgin Mary. Although her views were much more radical than Askew’s, Bocher claimed that Askew was her friend and that together they had smuggled illegal books into the royal household. Huggarde was outraged that Bale could compare Askew to ‘a true martyr’ like Blandina when she had refused all offers of clemency. Huggarde said that, when burnt in 1550, Bocher had reviled the preacher, spat at him and made the obscene ‘sygne of the gallowes towardes him’, just as Askew had done to Shaxton. Women, as St. Paul had written, ought to be silent in the congregation, but Huggarde suggested that ‘these hote soules’ were ‘so fervent in sprite’ that, because barred from preaching, ‘they are contented to burne’.105 So influential was Bale’s portrait of Askew that Roman Catholic writers responded against it in Elizabeth I’s reign, and it may have helped to shape one famous account of the martyrdom of St. Margaret Clitherow of York, who was executed in 1586.106

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As many leaders of Edward’s Church went to the stake in Mary’s reign, Askew’s story became valuable again as a precedent for Protestants to defend their message. Foxe began to compile material for his ‘Book of Martyrs’ while still in exile. In 1559, near the start of Elizabeth’s reign, he released a Latin translation of her work, printed in Basel for the international market, which he drew from a reprint of Askew’s Examinations that lacked Bale’s commentaries. At the same time, the martyrologist Adriaen van Haemstede (1525–1562) translated her Examinations into Dutch.107 Under Elizabeth, Foxe presented Askew’s story yet again, starting in 1563, in the ever-expanding English editions of his Actes and Monuments . By dividing her account into paragraphs, he was able to heighten its sense of suspense and drama, and he empowered her words beyond any effect that Bale had achieved.108 Foxe also supplied documents that enhanced her narrative. For example, he added the text of her recantation from Bonner’s register—and by drawing attention to discrepancies in the dates between the register version of events and Askew’s June 1545 appearance at the Guildhall, Foxe was able to contend that Bonner had set out to deceive. Her submission, he suggested, was a forgery. Thus Foxe elided the implication that Askew had not always been steadfast in maintaining her opinions.109 Moreover, Foxe appended fresh material concerning Lassells and Blage that contributed substantially to Askew’s story. Indeed, he provided an engaging account of Katherine Parr’s preservation from her enemies, a circumstance that was implicitly linked to Askew’s racking. In short, Foxe remade Askew into a figure of uncomplicated heroism. So subtle was he in re-shaping her exposition that scholars have recently seen him as Askew’s posthumous ‘collaborator’.110 Another collaborator may have been the duchess of Suffolk, for in 1560 (at about the same time that Askew’s Examinations were again printed without Bale’s commentaries)111 Katherine Willoughby may have commissioned the painter Hans Eworth to paint the portrait of a woman clad in Elizabethan dress, with crimson-coloured ruffles at her neck and wrists. The painting (now at Tatton Park in Cheshire) bears the inscription ‘Rather deathe: than false of faythe’ (see Fig. 5.3). It has come down to posterity as a posthumous portrait of ‘Anne Ayscough’, perhaps as the likeness of her sister Jane, then the widow of Katherine’s steward. Although the real history of the painting has seemingly been lost in time, the association of Askew’s name with this portrait points to an enduring respect for her memory.112

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Fig. 5.3 Portrait of an unknown lady, formerly thought to be Anne Askew, by Hans Eworth, oil on panel, 1560

Elizabeth’s long reign and the impact of Actes and Monuments made Askew into a figure of the Protestant Establishment. So successful was Foxe that abridgements of his massive work began to appear even in his

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lifetime—more accessible volumes that were marketed to distinct readerships.113 Brief extracts from Askew’s writings were reprinted, and her reputation continued to change under fresh editorial supervision. Thomas Bentley’s [1582] compendium of women’s writings—The Monument of Matrones —celebrates Anne for the short prayer that she wrote not long before her death, forgiving her enemies, a prayer which he recommended be said by his readers.114 As they approached the ends of their lives, women were encouraged to listen to, or to read, the stories of Askew and those other female martyrs who feature in Actes and Monuments for guidance on how to die well.115 In the seventeenth century, if the usual attribution of authorship is accepted, the scholar and royal tutor Bathsua Makin (b. 1600, d. in or after 1675) cited Askew as an example to emulate when she recommended that young gentlewomen be given an education that included classical languages and improving literature. Drawing perhaps upon Bale’s edition of Elizabeth’s translation of Marguerite of Navarre’s A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle, Makin praised the eloquence of women as orators. Great learning had fitted Queen Elizabeth for government. She had ‘swayed the scepter of this nation with as great honour as any man before her’. The Reformation itself ‘seems to be begun and carried on by women’. Makin praised ‘M[ist]ris Ann Askue’ as ‘a person famous for learning and piety’. When Askew ‘seasoned’ Katherine Parr and evangelical ladies of the Court, and afterward ‘sealed her profession with her blood’, then ‘the seed of Reformation seemed to be sowed by her hand’.116

A Legacy Refashioned Encouraged by the fresh attention that John N. King and Elaine V. Beilin (among others) brought to Anne Askew’s Examinations in the 1980s, scholars began to seize upon the potential for developing a canon of women’s writings for early modern England. As part of that effort, Bale’s and Foxe’s editorial practices came under new scrutiny. Gardiner had doubted Bale’s truthfulness, and, given an unsatisfied desire for Askew’s original unedited text, his ‘elucydacyon’ could appear to be an intrusive interruption of his heroine’s own voice.117 Because Bale may have

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been uncomfortable with some of her calculated and strategic silences, he arguably wished to amplify for his readers what he thought she had meant. Paradoxically, by lending her his masculine editorial authority, some scholars have insisted that Bale perhaps inadvertently ‘diluted’ Askew’s unfamiliar role as a teacher.118 Askew and Bale possibly believed that Scripture authorized her and all godly women to speak, but it is unlikely that the Pauline prohibitions against women’s speaking and teaching were immediately overcome by her example.119 In assessing the influence that Bale and Foxe exercised over Askew’s texts, Thomas S. Freeman and Sarah E. Wall have observed that Bale edited the Examinations with a light touch, and left her words largely intact. However, some of the changes he made in her writings, and his interpretation of her character, should be noted. Bale’s biographer, Leslie P. Fairfield, thought that he might have made a small intervention concerning her opinion about the meaning of taking communion, an alteration which brought it more in line with his own.120 In his Dutch martyrology of 1559, Adriaen van Haemstede intriguingly printed an exchange between Askew and Gardiner that does not appear in any other published version of the Examinations . When the bishop accused her of having no more business with Scripture than did a sow with a saddle, she responded with an insult: that a sow had as much business wearing a saddle as an ass does a mitre.121 Just as Louthe reported that she had said ‘Alacke, poore mowse!’ to the lord mayor,122 and as Huggarde complained that her behaviour at the stake had been unbecoming a martyr, so the real Anne may have been less ‘dayntye, and tender’ than Bale suggested.123 Like Bale, Foxe drew back from the fullest implications of her words. Perhaps because he thought the material too dangerous, he did not reprint the Newgate ‘Balade’.124 Thus again, in Actes and Monuments , Askew comes across on the page as less forceful than she was in life. Many collaborators were responsible for shaping Anne Askew’s posthumous reputation, although she was its premier creator.125 Cause, and not courage alone, made the martyr. In her reading practices, in her writings, and in her presentation of herself, Askew was an artist of a very high order. Among her final words, those with which she concluded her letters, were these: ‘pray, pray, pray’.126

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Notes 1. Comprising (i) J. Bale (ed.), The First Examinacyon of Anne Askewe, Latelye Martyred in Smythfelde, by the Romysh Popes Upholders … (‘Marpurg in the lande of Hessen’ [recte Wesel], November 1546) [STC, 848] [hereafter First Examinacyon] and (ii) J. Bale (ed.), The Lattre Examinacyon of Anne Askewe, Latelye Martyred in Smythfelde, by the Wycked Synagoge of Antichrist … (‘Marpurg in the lande of Hessen’ [recte Wesel], January 1547) [STC, 850] [hereafter Lattre Examinacyon]. Facsimile reprints of both books are available in B. S. Travitsky and P. Cullen (general eds), The Early Modern Gentlewoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, Part 1: Printed Writings, 1500–1640, Volume 1: Anne Askew (Aldershot, c.1996), where the selection is introduced by J. N. King. There is a modern critical edn of the two books: E. V. Beilin (ed.), The Examinations of Anne Askew (New York, 1996) [hereafter Beilin, Examinations ]. See also D. Watt, ‘Askew [married name Kyme], Anne (c.1521–1546)’, in ODNB. 2. For collaborations, see S. M. Felch, ‘The Backward Gaze: Editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Prayerbook’, in S. C. E. Ross and P. Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 21–39; T. S. Freeman and S. E. Wall, ‘Racking the Body, Shaping the Text: The Account of Anne Askew in Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs”’, RQ , 54 (2001), pp. 1165–96 [hereafter Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’]; P. Pender, ‘Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in The Examinations ’, HLQ , 73 (2010), pp. 507–22; S. E. Wall, ‘Editing Anne Askew’s Examinations : John Bale, John Foxe, and Early Modern Textual Practices’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds), John Foxe and His World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 249–62. See also P. Collinson, ‘Truth and Legend: The Veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’, in A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds), Clio’s Mirror: Historiography in Britain and the Netherlands, Britain and the Netherlands, VIII (Zutphen, 1985), pp. 31–54, reprinted in P. Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London, 1994), pp. 151–77. 3. J. Bale (ed.) and the Lady Elizabeth (trans.), Marguerite of Navarre, A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle … ([Wesel], April 1548) [STC, 17320], fols 46r–47r. 4. J. Foxe, Actes and Monuments …, 2 vols (4th edn, London, 1583) [STC, 11225] [hereafter Foxe, A&M ], II pp. 1234–6. See also coverage of Anne Askew in the Latin precursor to Foxe’s more famous English martyrology: Ioanne Foxo [John Foxe], Rervm in Ecclesia Gestarum … (Basel, 1559), pp. 144 [recte p. 184]–200, especially pp. 199–200. 5. E. V. Beilin, ‘A Woman for All Seasons: The Reinvention of Anne Askew’, in P. J. Benson and V. Kirkham (eds), Strong Voices, Weak

5

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

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History: Early Women Writers & Canons in England, France, & Italy (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005), pp. 341–64. Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’; S. E. Wall, ‘Editing Anne Askew’s Examinations : John Bale, John Foxe, and Early Modern Textual Practices’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds), John Foxe and His World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 249–62. P. Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in J. Andersen and E. Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2002), pp. 42–79. On the intense biblicism of the letters that went into Actes and Monuments , see my essay ‘Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale, and the Making of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs ’, in D. Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, Studies in Church History, 30 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 245–58; and S. Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 68–9. See J. N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, New Jersey, c.1982) [hereafter King, Reformation Literature], pp. 71–80, 420–3, 439–40, 442, 444. See D. Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 81–117 and especially the seven essays on Askew and her legacy reprinted in E. V. Beilin (ed.), Ashgate Critical Essays on Women Writers in England, 1550–1700, 1: Early Tudor Women Writers (Farnham, 2009) [hereafter Beilin, Critical Essays ], pp. 227–376. See especially T. Betteridge, ‘Anne Askewe, John Bale, and Protestant History’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27 (1997), pp. 265–84 [hereafter Betteridge, ‘Protestant History’], reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 251–70. P. Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in J. Andersen and E. Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2002), pp. 42–79. Beilin, Examinations , p. 9. T. M. Hofmann, ‘Askew (Ayscough), Sir William’, in S. T. Bindoff (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1509–1558, 3 vols (London, 1982), I pp. 342–3. Tunstall: LP, X No. 1141. The marriage of Sir William’s eldest son, Francis, to Elizabeth Hutton’s heiress granddaughter, Elizabeth Hansard, brought South Kelsey to the Askew family: D. Wilson, A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England (London, 1972) [hereafter Wilson, Tapestry], pp. 22–5, 159. M. Bateson (ed.), Grace Book B: Part II: Containing the Accounts of the Proctors of the University of Cambridge, 1511–1544, Luard Memorial Series, III (Cambridge, 1905), pp. 189, 212–13.

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15. Thomas Cranmer to Thomas Cromwell, Ford, 28 December [1539], printed in Cox, Writings & Letters, p. 399 (Letter CCLXVII). 16. S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 371. 17. R. Hyrde (trans.), J. L. Vives, A Very Frutefull and Pleasant Boke Called the Instruction of a Christen Woman … (London, [1529?]) [STC, 24856], sigs E2r, E1r. 18. See also his commentary in J. Bale (ed.) and the Lady Elizabeth (trans.), Marguerite of Navarre, A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle … ([Wesel], April 1548) [STC, 17320], fols 46r–47r and his account of Askew’s elegant intellectual attainments in J. Bale, Illustrium Maioris Britanniae Scriptorum, Hoc Est, Angliae, Cambriae, ac Scotiae Summarium … (‘Gippeswici in Anglia’ [recte Wesel], 1548) [STC, 1295], fol. 229r–v. See also J. Goodrich, ‘Class, Humanism, and NeoLatin Epitaphs in Early Modern England: The Funerary Inscriptions of Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell’, SCJ , XLIX (2018), pp. 339–68 and T. S. Graban, ‘Feminine Irony and the Art of Linguistic Cooperation in Anne Askew’s Sixteenth-Century Examinacyons ’, Rhetorica, XXV (2007), pp. 385–411. 19. J. M. Gray, Oaths and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2013), p. 59. 20. LP, VIII No. 149 (44). 21. See Wilson, Tapestry, pp. 55–84 (Chapter 3: ‘Knights Defensive’); M. E. James, ‘Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: The Lincolnshire Rebellion 1536’, P&P, 48 (1970), pp. 3–78, reprinted in M. James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 188–269. But see also S. J. Gunn, ‘Peers, Commons and Gentry in the Lincolnshire Revolt of 1536’, P&P, 123 (1989), pp. 52–79. 22. APC, I p. 462 (19 June 1546). The modern ed. in Beilin, Examinations , p. xix and D. Watt, ‘Askew [married name Kyme], Anne (c.1521–1546)’, in ODNB suggest that the two best candidates for Anne’s husband were both from Friskney. 23. Lattre Examinacyon, fol. 15r; Beilin, Examinations , p. 92. 24. See the will of George Seyntpole, dated 30 December 1558 and proved on 22 February 1559, with elaborate provisions for the health of his soul: TNA, PROB 11/42A, fols 338v–341v. 25. S. Gunn, Charles Brandon: Henry VIII’s Closest Friend (Stroud, 2015), especially Chapter 5—though the book is a re-titled reprint of S. J. Gunn, Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk c.1484–1545 (Oxford, 1988); S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 371. Katherine was the daughter of the 11th baron Willoughby de Eresby, who died in 1526. She was married at fourteen, soon after the death of Brandon’s third wife, Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor, the dowager queen

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27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

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of France: see S. Wabuda, ‘Bertie [née Willoughby; other married name Brandon], Katherine, duchess of Suffolk (1519–1580)’, in ODNB and M. F. Harkrider, Women, Reform and Community in Early Modern England: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580 (Woodbridge, 2008). Hillyard: TNA, SP 1/155, fol. 185r–v (LP, XIV Part II No. 749 (2)); F. A. Gasquet, A History of the Venerable English College, Rome … (London, 1920), pp. 55–6. Sir William’s final illness: LP, XV Nos 105, 601. Release of his goods: ibid., XVI No. 878 (9) for May 1541. For the will of Sir William Ayscough of Stallingborough, Lincolnshire, made on 6 August 1540 and proved on 18 May 1541, see TNA, PROB 11/28, fol. 228v. Lattre Examinacyon, fol. 15r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 92–3. What became of her children is unknown. Lattre Examinacyon, fol. 15r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 92–3. Wilson, Tapestry, pp. 163–7. Lattre Examinacyon, fol. 15r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 92–3; Wilson, Tapestry, pp. 203–4. Lattre Examinacyon, fol. 15r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 92–3; M. Coverdale (trans.), [H. Bullinger], The Christen State of Matrimonye … ([Antwerp], 1541) [STC, 4045], sigs A2v, A4v, A8r, [B6]r–v, [D6]r–E2r, F3r–G2v, H[1]r–H3v, [K5]r–[K7]r. M. Huggarde, The Displaying of the Protestantes … (London, 1556) [STC, 13558], sigs 77v–80r. First Examinacyon, fols 32v–34r; Beilin, Examinations , p. 56. See S. Wabuda, ‘“A Day after Doomsday”: Cranmer and the Bible Translations of the 1530s’, in K. Killeen et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700 (Oxford, 2015), pp. 23–37. T. Cromwell, Injunctions for the Clerge [The Second Henrician Royal Injunctions] ([London], 1538) [STC, 10086], reprinted in Bray, Documents, pp. 179–83. See also Thomas Cranmer to Lord Lisle, Croydon, 13 July [1539], printed in Cox, Writings & Letters, pp. 390–2 (Letter CCLVII). 34 and 35 Henry VIII c. 1 (‘An Acte for the advauncement of true religion and for the abbolisshment of the contrarie’), printed in The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–1828), III pp. 894–7 (Clauses VIII, X–XVI); M. Aston, ‘Lap Books and Lectern Books: The Revelatory Book in the Reformation’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), The Church and the Book, Studies in Church History, 38 (Woodbridge, 2004), pp. 163–89 [hereafter Aston, ‘Revelatory Book’]. 34 and 35 Henry VIII c. 1 (‘An Acte for the advauncement of true religion and for the abbolisshment of the contrarie’), printed in The

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39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–1828), III pp. 894– 7 (Clauses VIII, X–XVI); M. Beard, Women and Power: A Manifesto (London, 2017), p. 13. See also S. Wabuda, ‘The Woman with the Rock: The Controversy on Women and Bible Reading’, in S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (eds), Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from his Students (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 40–59 and S. Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 99–106, 116. Lattre Examinacyon, fol. 15r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 92–3; First Examinacyon, fols 32v–34r; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 56–7; Aston, ‘Revelatory Book’, p. 177; M. Bowker, ‘Historical Survey, 1450–1750’, in D. Owen (ed.), A History of Lincoln Minster (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 164–209 (at pp. 181–2). ‘The Reminiscences of John Loude or Louthe, Archdeacon of Nottingham, Addressed to John Foxe in 1579’, printed in Nichols, Narratives, pp. 1–59 (at p. 40). London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA], MS COL/CA/01/01/011 (formerly Repertory 11), fols 151v, 152v. See also W. D. Hamilton (ed.), A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from A.D. 1485 to 1559. By Charles Wriothesley, Windsor Herald, 2 vols, CS, Second (New) Series, XI and XX (n.p., 1875 and 1877) [hereafter Hamilton, Chronicle], I p. 155. P. McQuade, ‘“Except That They Had Offended the Lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew’, Literature and History, 3rd Series, 3 (1994), pp. 1–14, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 237–50 (at p. 238). Her detention: LMA, MS COL/CA/01/01/011 (formerly Repertory 11), fols 151v, 152v; Acts of the Apostles 7:48–9, 55–6 and 17:24–34; First Examinacyon, fols 2v–3r; Beilin, Examinations , p. 20. Nichols, Narratives, p. 41. First Examinacyon, fol. 10r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 29–30; S. Wabuda, Preaching During the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), p. 116; G. Gertz-Robinson, ‘Stepping into the Pulpit? Women’s Preaching in The Book of Margery Kempe and The Examinations of Anne Askew’, in L. Olson and K. Kerby-Fulton (eds), Voices in Dialogue: Reading Women in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, Indiana, c.2005), pp. 459–82, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 343–66; G. Gertz, Heresy Trials and English Women Writers, 1400–1670 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 75–105. In March 1556, Cole delivered the sermon at Cranmer’s execution: T. F. Mayer, ‘Cole, Henry (1504/5–1579/80)’, in ODNB. Beilin, Examinations , p. 143.

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47. A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH , 53 (2002), pp. 64–92 [hereafter Ryrie, ‘Strange Death’] (at pp. 85–6). 48. [E. Bonner], An Admonicion and Advertisement Geven by the Bysshop of London, to All Readers of Thys Byble in the Englyshe Tounge (n.p., [1540]) [not in STC ], discussed in Aston, ‘Revelatory Book’, pp. 180– 2 (illustrated on p. 181) and in M. Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2016), p. 913 (illustrated as Figure 89). 49. Ryrie, ‘Strange Death’; G. Redworth, ‘A Study in the Formulation of Policy: The Genesis and Evolution of the Act of Six Articles’, JEH , 37 (1986), pp. 42–67. To argue that Askew was condemned for denying the doctrine of transubstantiation is not quite correct because the ‘Act of Six Articles’ did not explicitly endorse transubstantiation: Betteridge, ‘Protestant History’, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 251–70 (at p. 251). 50. 31 Henry VIII c. 14 (‘An Acte abolishing diversity in opynions’), printed in The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–1828), III pp. 739– 43 and in Bray, Documents, pp. 222–32; R. E. Shields and J. H. Forse, ‘Creating the Image of a Martyr: John Porter, Bible Reader’, SCJ , XXXIII (2002), pp. 725–34; Aston, ‘Revelatory Book’, pp. 181–2. 51. Acts of the Apostles 7:48–9, 55–6 and 17:24–34; First Examinacyon, fols 2v–3r; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 20–1. 52. Records of the city of London’s Court of Aldermen establish beyond doubt that Askew’s first examination occurred in 1545, not in the following year: First Examinacyon, fol. 3r; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 20– 1; LMA, MS COL/CA/01/01/011 (formerly Repertory 11), fols 151v, 152v. On the prisons known as the Counters, see B. Watson, ‘The Compter Prisons of London’, London Archaeologist, 7 (1993), pp. 115–21. 53. Ryrie, ‘Strange Death’, pp. 78–82. 54. Louthe erred in identifying the lord mayor as Sir Martin Bowes: Nichols, Narratives, pp. 40–1. LMA, MS COL/CA/01/01/011 (formerly Repertory 11), fols 118r, 152v state clearly that the lord mayor at the time of Anne’s first examination was Laxton. See also J. D. Alsop, ‘Laxton, Sir William (d. 1556)’, in ODNB. 55. First Examinacyon, fols 7v–10r; Beilin, Examinations , p. 27; A. Hudson, ‘The Mouse in the Pyx: Popular Heresy and the Eucharist’, Trivium, 26 (1991), pp. 40–53. 56. Nichols, Narratives, pp. 40–1. 57. Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, p. 1182; Betteridge, ‘Protestant History’, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 251–70; A. Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, c.2002) [hereafter Dillon, Construction], p. 295.

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58. T. S. Graban, ‘Feminine Irony and the Art of Linguistic Cooperation in Anne Askew’s Sixteenth-Century Examinacyons ’, Rhetorica, XXV (2007), pp. 399–400. 59. LMA, MS COL/CA/01/01/011 (formerly Repertory 11), fols 151v, 152v; First Examinacyon, fols 12r, 16v–17r; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 36–8. 60. P. McQuade, ‘“Except That They Had Offended the Lawe”: Gender and Jurisprudence in The Examinations of Anne Askew’, Literature and History, 3rd Series, 3 (1994), pp. 1–14, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 237–50 (at pp. 241, 243); S. Brigden, London and the Reformation (Oxford, 1989), p. 371. 61. Beilin, Examinations , pp. 40, 44. 62. First Examinacyon, fol. 4r; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 20–1, 46. 63. Acts of the Apostles 7:48–9, 55–6 and 17:24–34; First Examinacyon, fol. 27r–v; Beilin, Examinations , p. 49. 64. Foxe, A&M , II pp. 1234–6; A. Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII: Evangelicals in the Early English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 25–38. 65. First Examinacyon, fol. 31v; Beilin, Examinations , p. 54. 66. First Examinacyon, fol. 37r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 60–3, 136. 67. First Examinacyon, fol. 37r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 62–3; LMA, MS 9531/12 Part 1, fol. 109r; Foxe, A&M , II pp. 1236–7; G. Townsend (ed.), The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: With a Life of the Martyrologist, and Vindication of the Work, 8 vols (London, 1843–1849), V pp. 542–3. 68. First Examinacyon, fol. 37r–v; Beilin, Examinations , p. 65. 69. Hamilton, Chronicle, I pp. 155–6. 70. First Examinacyon, fols 1v, 37r–v; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 19, 62–3; LMA, MS 9531/12 Part 1, fol. 109r, reprinted in G. Townsend (ed.), The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: With a Life of the Martyrologist, and Vindication of the Work, 8 vols (London, 1843–1849), V pp. 542–3. See also E. V. Beilin, ‘Anne Askew’s Dialogue with Authority’, in M.R. Logan and P. L. Rudnytsky (eds), Contending Kingdoms: Historical, Psychological, and Feminist Approaches to the Literature of SixteenthCentury England and France (Detroit, Michigan, c.1991), pp. 313–22, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 227–36; S. Brietz Monta, ‘The Inheritance of Anne Askew, English Protestant Martyr’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 94 (2003), pp. 134–60, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 315–41. Shortly before her execution, she referred to her signing once again, and gave a slightly different caveat: ‘with moch a do, at the last I wrote thus, I Anne Askewe do beleve thys if Gods worde do agre to the same, and the true Catholick Churche’: Beilin, Examinations , p. 136. Similarly, Bonner prepared a recantation for Cranmer

5

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

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to make before his execution, and he persisted in publicizing it even though Cranmer had forcibly rejected it in the hour of his death: E. Bonner (ed.), All the Submyssyons, and Recantations of Thomas Cranmer, Late Archebyshop of Canterburye, Truely Set Forth Both in Latyn and Englysh, Agreable to the Originalles, Wrytten and Subscribed With His Owne Hande (London, 1556) [STC, 5990] and S. Wabuda, Thomas Cranmer (Abingdon, 2017), pp. 235–8. Nichols, Narratives, p. 40. S. Wabuda, ‘Equivocation and Recantation During the English Reformation: The “Subtle Shadows” of Dr. Edward Crome’, JEH , 44 (1993), pp. 224–42. Beilin, Examinations , pp. 33, 39. Hamilton, Chronicle, I p. 167. APC, I p. 424. E. Ayscu, A Historie Contayning the Warres, Treaties, Marriages, and Other Occurrents Betweene England and Scotland … (London, 1607) [STC, 1014], pp. 306–9. APC, I p. 462 (19 June 1546); Beilin, Examinations , pp. 91–102. Ibid., pp. 110–11. Wriothesley dated her Guildhall appearance 18 June 1546: Hamilton, Chronicle, I pp. 167–8. Beilin, Examinations , p. 119; Hamilton, Chronicle, I p. 168. Beilin, Examinations , pp. 121–7. Ibid., p. 127. Ibid., pp. 130, 132. Ibid., p. 132. Hamilton, Chronicle, I pp. 168–9; Nichols, Narratives, pp. 43–4. P. Marshall, ‘Papist as Heretic: The Burning of John Forest, 1538’, HJ , 41 (1998), pp. 351–74 and Marshall, Heretics & Believers, pp. xii, 297– 8. Beilin, Examinations , pp. 116–18. Ibid., p. 134. Ibid., pp. 135–7. No printed copy of her recantation is known. Ibid., pp. 140–4. Nichols, Narratives, p. 41. Ibid., pp. 43–4; Hamilton, Chronicle, I pp. 169–70; Foxe, A&M , II p. 1240. Hamilton, Chronicle, I pp. 170, 175. Ryrie, ‘Strange Death’. P. Happé, John Bale, Twayne’s English Authors Series, No. 520 (New York, 1996), p. 11. First Examinacyon, fol. 5r; Beilin, Examinations , p. 7. Ibid., p. 88; King, Reformation Literature, pp. 72–3. See Beilin, Examinations , pp. 72, 149–50.

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98. King, Reformation Literature, p. 72; D. Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), p. 81. 99. J. Bale (ed.) and the Lady Elizabeth (trans.), Marguerite of Navarre, A Godly Medytacyon of the Christen Sowle … ([Wesel], April 1548) [STC, 17320], fols 46r–47r; Dillon, Construction, pp. 30–4, 177–8, 298–310; J. N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, New Jersey, 1989), pp. 207–11. 100. G. Townsend (ed.), The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe: With a Life of the Martyrologist, and Vindication of the Work, 8 vols (London, 1843–1849), VII pp. 387–90 (at p. 388); S. Wabuda, ‘Henry Bull, Miles Coverdale, and the Making of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs ’, in D. Wood (ed.), Martyrs and Martyrologies, Studies in Church History, 30 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 245–58. 101. Lattre Examinacyon, fols 63r–[64]r; Beilin, Examinations , pp. 149–50. 102. J. A. Muller (ed.), The Letters of Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 276–86 (No. 120); Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, p. 1169. 103. J. A. Muller (ed.), The Letters of Stephen Gardiner (Cambridge, 1933), pp. 286–96 (No. 121); Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, p. 1171; King, Reformation Literature, pp. 77–81; S. E. Wall, ‘Editing Anne Askew’s Examinations : John Bale, John Foxe, and Early Modern Textual Practices’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds), John Foxe and His World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 249–62. 104. The only surviving copy is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York: Anon. (ed.), The Fyrst Examinacion of the Worthy Servant of God, Maisters Anne Askewe, the Yonger Doughter of Syr William Askewe Knyght of Lyncolne Shyre: Lately Martyred in Smithfield, by the Romyshe Popes Upholders … The Lattr Examinacion … ([London, c.1550?]) [STC, 852.5]; Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, p. 1171. 105. M. Huggarde, The Displaying of the Protestantes … (London, 1556) [STC, 13558], sigs 17v, 19r, 46r–48v, 75r–v, 77v. See also A. Hope, ‘Bocher, Joan (d. 1550)’, in ODNB. 106. Dillon, Construction, pp. 175–205, 278–98, 305–8. See also P. Lake and M. Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011), pp. 197, 208 (n. 14), 237 (n. 15). 107. Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, pp. 1171–8. 108. Ibid. 109. Foxe, A&M , II pp. 1236–7; Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, pp. 1181–2. 110. Foxe, A&M , II pp. 1236–7; Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, pp. 1181–2. See also S. M. Felch, ‘The Backward Gaze: Editing Elizabeth Tyrwhit’s Prayerbook’, in S. C. E. Ross and P. Salzman (eds), Editing Early Modern Women (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 21–39.

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111. Anon. (ed.), The First Examination of the Worthy Servaunt of God, Maistres Anne Askew … [with The Lattre Examinacion … printed under a separate title-page] ([London, c.1560]) [STC, 853]; Dillon, Construction, p. 298. 112. A. Boyle, ‘Hans Eworth’s Portrait of the Earl of Arundel and the Politics of 1549–50’, EHR, CXVII (2002), pp. 25–47 (at pp. 37–8); R. C. Strong, The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture (London, 1969), p. 93; T. Cooper and H. Walker, ‘Talent and Adversity: A Reassessment of the Life and Works of Hans Eworth in Antwerp and London’, in T. Cooper et al. (eds), Painting in Britain 1500–1630: Production, Influences and Patronage (Oxford, 2015), p. 237 (accepting this picture—‘previously Anne Ayscough’—in the Eworth canon, but saying nothing about the identity of the sitter). After George Seyntpole’s death, Jane married Richard Disney (d. 1578). Her will was made on 24 November 1590 (codicil dated the following day) and proved on 7 January 1591: Lincolnshire Archives, Lincoln, MS LCC Wills 1590/158, fols 158r–160r. 113. D. S. Kastan, ‘Little Foxes’, in C. Highley and J. N. King (eds), John Foxe and His World (Aldershot, 2002), pp. 117–29. 114. T. Bentley, The Monument of Matrones … ([London, 1582]) [STC, 1892], p. 214; J. N. King, ‘Thomas Bentley’s Monument of Matrons: The Earliest Anthology of English Women’s Texts’, in P. J. Benson and V. Kirkham (eds), Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers & Canons in England, France, & Italy (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 2005), pp. 216–38. 115. R. Calis et al., ‘Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580–1730’, P&P, 241 (2018), pp. 69–141 (at pp. 118–19). 116. [B. Makin], An Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen, in Religion, Manners, Arts & Tongues. With an Answer to the Objections Against this Way of Education (London, 1673) [Wing, M309], p. 28. 117. D. Watt, Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997), p. 83. 118. S. Brietz Monta, ‘The Inheritance of Anne Askew, English Protestant Martyr’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 94 (2003), pp. 134–60, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 315–41 (at p. 319). 119. On this point, see R. Calis et al., ‘Passing the Book: Cultures of Reading in the Winthrop Family, 1580–1730’, P&P, 241 (2018), pp. 69–141. 120. L. P. Fairfield, ‘John Bale and the Development of Protestant Hagiography in England’, JEH , XXIV (1973), pp. 145–60; Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, p. 1169. 121. A. van Haemstede, De Gheschiedenisse Ende den Doodt der Vromer Martelaren … ([Antwerp], 1559), p. 161—although Emden is sometimes conjectured as the place of publication, Antwerp is suggested by

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122. 123. 124. 125.

126.

specialist literature cited in M. C. Plomp, ‘Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Illustrations for Adriaen van Haemstede’s Books of Martyrs of 1657 and 1659’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVIII (2006), p. 180 (n. 1); Freeman & Wall, ‘Shaping’, p. 1170. Nichols, Narratives, pp. 40–1. Beilin, Examinations , p. 7. Betteridge, ‘Protestant History’, reprinted in Beilin, Critical Essays, pp. 251–70 (at p. 266). P. Pender, ‘Reading Bale Reading Anne Askew: Contested Collaboration in The Examinations ’, HLQ , 73 (2010), pp. 507–22; P. Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in J. Andersen and E. Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2002), pp. 42–79. Beilin, Examinations , pp. 182, 188.

CHAPTER 6

‘A Man of Stomach’: Matthew Parker’s Reputation David J. Crankshaw

Introduction Personal reputations can sometimes become inextricably associated with places.1 A case in point concerns that remarkable man Matthew Parker (1504–1575), Elizabeth I’s first archbishop of Canterbury (see Fig. 6.1), whose life drew together, and made a substantial impact upon, three localities: Norwich, Cambridge and Lambeth Palace, situated on the south bank of the River Thames nearly opposite Westminster. In taking as our subject Parker’s memorialization, and for reasons which will soon become clear, it seems fitting to begin with the last of the three. Although he cannot have known the present iteration of the Great Hall, he certainly knew the private chapel, for (unimpeachable sources relate) it was there, on 17 December 1559, that he was consecrated primate of all England—a consecration of no small consequence for believers in apostolic succession (and later of much controversy) because all Anglican Orders depend upon it. At least two of the archbishop’s grandchildren were born within the precincts.2 Alas!—between that pair of happy family events, he suffered

D. J. Crankshaw (B) King’s College London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_6

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Fig. 6.1 Portrait of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, by Remigius Hogenbergh, after [Richard Lyne], line engraving, 1573

a grievous loss: Margaret, whom Parker described as ‘my most dearly beloved and virtuous wife’, died in August 1570 and lies buried in the Duke of Norfolk’s Chapel inside Lambeth parish church, adjacent to the gatehouse.3 Parker himself died in the palace on 17 May 1575. His

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bowels were interred near his wife’s remains, but his body in the archiepiscopal chapel4 —the only person to have been buried there to that date,5 and still (I understand) the solitary occupant today.6 Actually, there was a good reason for that unusual choice of resting place. The Church of England divine Thomas Gataker contributed a short biography of Parker to Abel Redevivus, the important collection of didactic ‘Lives’ normally attributed to the general editorship of Thomas Fuller (1607/8–1661)— Fuller’s portrait appears as a frontispiece and he supplied the ‘epistle to the reader’—and brought out in 1651. To quote Gataker, there was a story that a great noble man in hig[h]est favour in those times, having laboured … to get that house from the sea, this our archbishop therein … stoutly withstood him, and by earnest solicitation obtained from the queens majesty this promise, that he should never have it so long as the archbishop aboad there: which he therefore (to adde the stronger obligation to that promise) took order it should be as well after his decease as before.7

Whether or not the tale is true, it is emblematic of Parker’s embattled position, and implies a recognition that not even the word of a prince could be trusted, a circumstance proved by bitter experience: Gloriana was unreliable. The archbishop’s plain black marble tomb was ready to receive him,8 and would soon sport the Latin epitaph that had been composed some years previously by his old friend Dr. Walter Haddon.9 In translation, the text reads thus: Mathew Parker lived sober and wise, Learned by studie and continuall practise Loving, true, off lyfe uncontrold The Courte did foster him, both young, and old. Orderly he delt, the ryght he did defend, He lyved unto God[;] to God he mad his ende.10 Anno Domini 1575, ætatis suæ 71.11

Fine words!—and those who know Parker’s biography will struggle to detect any undue flattery here. Yet, evidently, somebody felt that they did not quite do justice to the deceased, because, appended to Gataker’s sketch, is another epitaph, probably devised either by Francis Quarles or by his son John, though unsigned12 :

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Love, learning, wisedome and true zeale, Patience in want, and bounty in weale Were the chiefe flowers in that crown Which gave this man of men renowne: The crosiar did not supersede His cure of souls, nor did he pleade Affaires at Court: His past’rall heate Grew nere the lesse as he grew great: Five kings and queenes, his dayes did see Enthron’d and septer’d: The first three Did view his merit, and enhaunc’d him, The fourth destroy’d, the fift advanc’d him To Lambeth chayre, where he the Church did guide In peace; and full of age and honor dyed.13

Not only is that epitaph (to my mind) moving verse, but it also subtly asserts the importance of Anne Boleyn in launching Parker’s career: she must have been one of those five kings and queens. The claim is true to the facts, in that we know that he had been summoned from Cambridge in 1535 to be one of her chaplains and that he received ecclesiastical preferment at her hands shortly afterwards.14 What is most striking, however, is that the poet assimilates Anne Boleyn, a queen consort, to the ranks of England’s sovereigns, ‘enthron’d and septer’d’. This assimilation may have seemed justifiable in view of the peculiarities of her coronation: she was seated in the ancient Coronation Chair and crowned with St. Edward’s Crown—the only occasion upon which that privilege has been accorded to anyone other than the reigning monarch.15 Arguably, those features put her, in some sense, on a par with Henry VIII himself. Parker wrote, in a revealing turn of phrase, that he had been ‘called to the Court of Queen Anne’.16 She was more than simply a king’s wife, and that special status perhaps made it harder for the young chaplain to ignore what she said to him about her daughter a few days before her arrest in 1536—mysterious words generally interpreted as committing the Princess Elizabeth to Parker’s spiritual custody, thereby establishing a bond to which he would refer in [1559] and [1572].17 Here was a moment to capture the romantic imagination of a Victorian artist: see Fig. 6.2. As though two epitaphs are not enough, there is the third. Do not look for that black marble sepulchre of the 1570s. It has gone. Once episcopacy had been abolished in 1646, Lambeth Palace was purchased by Thomas Scott, the regicide, and Matthew Hardy, the latter receiving the

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Fig. 6.2 Anne Boleyn, queen of England, commending the Princess Elizabeth to the care of Matthew Parker, by Thomas Williams, after John Callcott Horsley, letterpress wood-engraving, c.1866, printed in Anon. (ed.), Pictures of Society … (London, 1866), unpaginated plate opposite p. 110

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chapel. Having discovered Parker’s monument, Hardy caused the tomb to be opened, the lead coffin to be sold and the undecayed corpse to be thrown into a dunghill. Not long after the Restoration, in 1661, Robert Pory (a chaplain to his uncle-in-law Archbishop Juxon and presumably some relation of the John Pory who had been one of Parker’s greatest Cambridge friends) pressed the House of Lords into requiring Hardy to disclose the body’s whereabouts and to return it, but nothing seems to have been done, since Hardy complained that he had been refused access to the premises. Sir William Dugdale, the antiquary, may have been instrumental in resuming the campaign by acquainting Archbishop Sancroft with the scandal—or so John Strype believed. When the bones were at length decently re-buried in the chapel, albeit not exactly in the same spot as before, Sancroft ordered a monument to be erected bearing a Latin epitaph reporting the horrible indignities to which his dead predecessor had been exposed.18 Each of these epitaphs tells us something valuable about Parker’s reputation, but the first two, being focused on the character and achievements of the living man, inevitably give a favourable account that is highly selective. Selectivity is, indeed, the theme of the remainder of this chapter. However, its purpose is not principally to investigate what current scholarship has to say about the archbishop’s life and career. My aim is far more modest than that: simply to establish, as one step towards a fuller analysis elsewhere, how Parker has been remembered—or rather, for what he has been remembered—in the intervening centuries. I cannot yet claim to have read all relevant sources, though I hope that enough evidence is presented here to sustain the argument that Parker’s ecclesiastical role was comparatively neglected for a considerable period after his death, that it came to be recognized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when there was an appreciation of his significance in a range of fields notwithstanding vicious attacks on his reputation emanating from certain quarters, but that the earlier model has been re-asserting itself: the archbishop is increasingly remembered mainly as a collector of rare books and manuscripts; as an historian of, and propagandist for, the English Church; and as a patron of intellectuals pursuing the same endeavours. The centre of attention today is very much the magnificent Parker Library at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge (see Fig. 6.3)—on what is there, whence it came and how it was used—as the conference held at his alma mater in 2016 amply demonstrated. Valuable though the papers were, Parker’s day job, as it were, barely got a mention. Perhaps this shift reflects,

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Fig. 6.3 Interior of The Parker Library, part of New Court, by William Wilkins, completed 1827, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, showing one of Archbishop Parker’s MSS (MS 4: The Dover Bible, Volume II) open in the foreground, by an unknown photographer, photograph, 2015

to some extent, the anti-institutionalism of contemporary society and, in particular, the marginalization of the Church of England in national culture.

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Parker’s Lifetime Reputation The nature of Parker’s reputation during his lifetime is a moot point. What can the ordinary layperson have known about him prior to his arrival at Lambeth? His first reputation was as an itinerant preacher, and he clearly felt proud of those engagements because he recorded some of them on a parchment roll of autobiographical memoranda.19 The inaugural expedition occurred in Advent 1533, when he gave sermons at Grantchester, Landbeach, St. Benedict’s in Cambridge, Madingley and Barton. The next year, he preached at Balsham, during the primary visitation of the new bishop of Ely, Thomas Goodrich.20 Parker’s earliest biographer says that he spoke ‘in the most famous cities and places of this realme’, and ‘with greate commendation’. Indeed, it was the ‘fame’ generated by these sermons that allegedly reached Henry VIII’s ears and led to the call to Court21 ; more precisely, the extant letters of summons were penned in [March 1535] by John Skip on behalf of Anne Boleyn.22 Then followed a sequence of sermons delivered before members of the royal family: the infant Lady Elizabeth in 1535; the king in Lent 1536; Prince Edward in 1539; Lady Elizabeth again in 1540; Edward VI in Lent 1549; and the king once more in Lent 1552.23 Despite the prestige of such appointments, it is unlikely that Parker had abandoned preaching further afield. For one thing, we have a notable letter addressed to him, about August–September 1535, by Hugh Latimer. The beginning runs thus: My owne good Master Parcare salutem. And as yett I have devysyd nothynge, nor yett wyll tyll I have spokyn with the kynges grace & have passyd thorow the next Parliament. And the[n] whatt I shall altere & change, fownde & confownde[,] you shall natt be ignorantt ther of. Vale & doo as Master Latymer shall move you to doo[.]24

Royal assent had just been granted to Latimer’s election as bishop of Worcester.25 The letter breathes an atmosphere of exuberance at the prospect of reform—and Parker is to be privy to the enterprise. Would Latimer, the evangelical preacher par excellence, have written to our man so warmly—the camaraderie is obvious—had not his correspondent been similarly active in preaching the Word? In the second place, Parker’s original preaching licence survives. Issued by Thomas Cromwell (now Lord Cromwell) as vicegerent in spirituals, and dated 26 March

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1537, it allowed the recipient (designated the king’s chaplain) to preach in any church in either Latin or English.26 Finally, letters preserved in Cambridge show that Parker was invited to preach at Paul’s Cross in London, and before Edward VI, on occasions omitted from the memoranda roll: in July [1548] (at the behest of Protector Somerset and on Privy Council advice), in March 1550 and in Lent 1551.27 Thus, courtiers and inhabitants of the metropolis presumably encountered him primarily as a leading evangelical preacher. During Elizabeth’s first Parliament, in 1559, preaching was supposed to have ceased throughout the realm, except before the queen, then resident at Westminster, in the shape of the traditional series of Lenten sermons.28 Henry Machyn, the London chronicler, recorded some details, though the unique manuscript is damaged at the pertinent spot. ‘Master Parker’ was one of four preachers identified, delivering his sermon on 10 February; Machyn was unaware of the preachers’ names on at least two days—our man must have stood out.29 The set of twelve names was soon available in print (April 1559) in An Epitome of Cronicles, which avers that these divines all bent themselves[,] to the uttermost of their knowledge, to beat down Antichrist and his power, and dyd therin so much that none that had not his hert altogither hardened would ones open his mouthe agaynste that they taught.30

Picking up rumours that Parker would be elevated to the primacy, a pair of foreign diplomats noted independently (in June 1559) two key biographical facts: that he had been a chaplain to Anne Boleyn and that he was married.31 When Machyn next had something to write about Parker, on 23 June, it was to number him among what he believed to be six newly elected bishops ‘com from beyond the see’, which was incorrect in his case, but betrays an interesting assumption. As archbishop-elect, Parker officiated at the obsequies for Henry II of France held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in early September. By now better informed about his subject’s academic attainments, Machyn went on to record Dr. Parker’s consecration at Lambeth on 17 December and that he had preached ‘a nobull sermon’ at Court in April 1560.32 Around the time of his appointment, therefore, Parker was probably known merely as a married priest, formerly serving Anne Boleyn, who was a strident anti-Catholic preacher; others

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may have shared Machyn’s misapprehension concerning continental exile under Mary I. If Parker was bothered about his reputation—and there is evidence to suggest that he was—then he made a serious mistake: he failed to publish any of those sermons. So far as one can tell, the only Parkerian sermon to reach print, ostensibly soon after the event, was that delivered in English33 at Martin Bucer’s Cambridge funeral on 3 March 1551.34 Some scholars insist that another English edition followed c.1570,35 but it is unknown to the Short-Title Catalogue. The text appeared in an abridged Latin translation in 1561–156236 and again in Bucer’s Scripta Anglicana, published at Basel in 1577.37 When the Latin version was retranslated into English, probably in 1587,38 the sermon was transformed into anti-Whitgift polemic: ‘By turning Parker and Bucer into Protestant saints’, Flory contends, Thomas Newton could ‘deploy them as symbolic arguments for the further reformation of the English Church in a presbyterian direction’.39 Could it be that, on other occasions, there was no text—that Parker preached entirely extempore, and that (for whatever reason) nobody took notes from which to produce an unauthorized edition? With the passage of time, therefore, what may have been dazzling exercises in pulpit oratory inevitably faded into oblivion. As Parker’s preaching reputation dwindled, fresh ones arose, fabricated firstly by Roman Catholic controversialists and secondly by Protestants critical of his doings and increasingly hostile to episcopacy altogether. In his mid-1560s paper war against John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, the Oxford-educated and Louvain-based papal supporter Thomas Stapleton (1535–1598)40 claimed that sacramentarianism, ‘which presently beareth the swaie’, had not existed in England for a full nine years and the Lutherans, which is the primitive Church of Protestants, is in England utterly lost, Luther him selfe beinge accompted a very papist, and the Lutheran, an asse in a rochet, a lince wolse bishop[.]41

This was to say that such prelates were neither one thing nor the other.42 Hitherto, no names had been divulged, but later in 1565 another Louvain exile called Thomas Dorman took up the simile in taunting Alexander Nowell, dean of St. Paul’s. ‘Tell us’, he asked rhetorically, how did it come about

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that three of the moste grave, modeste, and learned emongest yow, men, to saye the truthe, in all respectes (heresye set aparte) worthy to beare the office off true bishoppes … are of their subjectes so contemptuouslye set at naught: whereof I saye it procedeth that one is called Matthewe meale mouthe,43 a lince wolsy bishoppe[.]

Thus branded a wishy-washy Lutheran dinosaur by association, Parker is also explicitly identified in the margin.44 Dorman was, of course, alluding to the opening salvoes in the Elizabethan phase of the Vestiarian Controversy,45 the first of that concatenation of disasters that collectively constituted the tipping-point in terms of esteem for the archbishop, the others being the imposition of the Advertisments 46 —canons in all but name, though so designated because of the queen’s pusillanimous refusal to support a primate who was doing her dirty work for her; Elizabeth’s demand for ritual uniformity was, in truth, impossible to meet—and the failure of the Alphabet Bills in the parliamentary session of 1566– 1567. The fall-out was predictable. In his famous House of Commons oration on free speech in 1576, by which time Parker was safely dead, the firebrand Peter Wentworth offered this damaging reminiscence: I was amongst others the last Parliament [i.e. in 1571] sent unto the bishopp [sic] of Canterbury for the articles of religion that then passed this house.47 He asked us why we did put out of the booke the articles for the homilyes consecrateing of bishopps, and such like. ‘Surely, Sir’, said I, ‘because wee were soe occupied in other matters that wee had noe time to examine them how they agreed with the Word of God’. ‘What’, said he, ‘surely yow mistooke the matter; yow will referr your selves wholly to us therein’. ‘Noe, by the faith I beare to God’, said I, ‘wee will pass nothing before we understand what it is, for that were but to make yow popes; make yow popes who list’, said I, ‘for we will make yow none’.48

If this offensive language really had been used, then it quickly proved to be contagious. For Parker, the public climax to puritan abuse came in An Admonition to the Parliament, the opening presbyterian manifesto published anonymously by John Field and Thomas Wilcox in [1572], which denounces the archbishop’s Faculty Office as ‘this filthy court’ and excoriates the primate himself as ‘this pettie pope’.49 Although there is a long-standing (but unreasoned) tradition of assigning its composition to either 157050 or 1571,51 the text entitled ‘A Viewe of Antichrist, His Lawes and Ceremonies, in Our English Church Unreformed’ (which may

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at first have been published as a distinct pamphlet now lost) seems most likely to post-date An Admonition to the Parliament since the lists of faults comprising the second and third tables (the latter at least supplied by Anthony Gilby) summarize much of its content—the drift is certainly stridently presbyterian.52 Moreover, the third table was to be recycled in a book brought out by Gilby in 1581, which (according to an authorial statement printed close to the beginning) had been written nearly seven years previously.53 It is probable, therefore, that this hostile material had originally been produced c.1574, while Parker was still alive, and that the compilation was a team effort, for the fourth table is followed by the initials ‘T. W.’—widely interpreted as standing for Thomas Wilcox; other collaborators remain anonymous.54 Of the discrete sections from which ‘A Viewe of Antichrist’ has been assembled, the second table—structured as a vitriolic point-by-point comparison—is the one germane here. Two elements of it give the flavour: 4

The pope of Rome doeth commaunde superstitious holy dayes to be kept, contrarie to the commaundement of God. The pope of Lambeth doeth the same, and compelleth men to breake the commaundement of God, to observe popish traditions.

… 8

The pope of Rome doeth preferre his ceremonies above the Worde of God. The pope of Lambeth, and his cardinalles the other bishops, doe the same. For (say they) if Paule him selfe were here, or Calvin, or any other godly man, whose doctrine were never so sounde, and in life never so upright: yet shall they not preache or minister, except they would first subscribe, & weare popish corned cappe, surplesse, coape, and such like idolatrous stuffe. Beholde the pope and his cardinalles.

In the margin, alongside the first reference to the pope of Lambeth and his cardinals, three names appear: Parker, Cox and Horne.55 The pamphlet may have been reprinted in 1578,56 and perhaps again in 1580– 158157 ; copies of any redaction could have circulated in manuscript. Danner’s suggestion that the archbishop was ‘affectionately’ designated ‘pope of Lambeth’ may be dismissed as ludicrous.58 Parker knew as early as November [1572] that his reputation was in peril, if not in tatters. Protestants across the realm, he told Burghley, judged the bishops ‘to be extreme persecutors’, adding that puritans ‘slander us with infamous

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books and libels, lying they care not how deep’.59 And while all this was going on, Parker had to contend with the messy Thomas Aldrich dispute at Corpus Christi College, which led to a stand-off between the ecclesiastical commissioners under his chairmanship, defending their right to intervene by virtue of the royal prerogative, and the Cambridge heads of house, defending the university’s immunity from outside interference.60 The archbishop wrote to Elizabeth to warn her that some of Aldrich’s friends were going up to Court to solicit letters of dispensation from the college statutes and they say in jest that I am pope of Lambeth and of Benet College, and that I am out of all credit and of no reputation, and that they will sue to some great man of the [Privy] Council to accept him as chaplain, to outface me, and to beard mine authority.61

There was a sour coda to these wrangles. With his research team, which included George Acworth62 and John Joscelin,63 Parker had been working for some years on a history of the English Church conceived as a sequence of Latin biographies of his sixty-nine predecessors, an enterprise approximating to Number 8 in the typology of early modern life-writing set out by Mayer and Woolf.64 De Antiqvitate Britannicæ is a highly complex book because it was published privately, the printing was carried out by John Day (1521/22–1584) in Lambeth Palace, the printrun was tiny (perhaps under thirty) and no two examples are identical.65 Those copies in the first batch to be distributed,66 in 1572, end with the entry on Reginald Pole.67 Parker’s ‘Life’—the so-called ‘Matthaeus ’—had already been written by Joscelin, a chaplain and secretary, but was kept back on grounds of modesty.68 It was added to certain copies prepared in 1574–157569 either for presentation to friends or for bestowal upon ‘publick libraries’.70 Somehow, the archbishop’s puritan enemies—in this case conjecturally identified by the Short-Title Catalogue as Michael Hickes, Vincent Skinner and John Stubbs—acquired the ‘Matthaeus ’, translated it into English and printed it abroad with malicious marginalia, a foreshadowing (as Collinson observes) of Martin Marprelate.71 Should Zürich72 give way to Heidelberg as the probable place of publication, then Thomas Cartwright (1534/35–1603) was surely central to this striking act of subversion.73 Where the text records Parker’s ordination, the annotation snipes ‘poope holye’. Against the reference to his youthful itinerant preaching, we find, incredibly, this paradoxical comment: ‘he

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that preacheth every where preaches no where’. Joscelin’s praise of his master’s careful husbanding of resources so that he could pay taxes and yet provide hospitality, as well as settle debts promptly, is met with the barbed retort that these things had been achieved ‘by his heapinge upp of livinge[,] by havinge of charges without doinge of dewtie[,] by sumptuous feastinge … and lordly pompe’. Acknowledgement of Parker’s role in the production of the Bishops’ Bible (1568) draws forth this pungent remark: ‘Let men judge whether he did so much good by bringinge in that translation, as harme by stayinge the Geneva’. The annotator gave his own verdict a page or two later: Parker was ‘a blacke bishopbe [sic] to the Churche off Englande’.74 Later writers have not been impressed. [Anthony à Wood] judged the translator ‘a thro-paced separatist’ who had supplied ‘very vile notes’ designed to bring ‘an odium’ upon the primate.75 Edmund Lodge was outraged: this ‘vulgar publication’, stuffed with notes of ‘the most scurrilous ribaldry’, had been ‘a virulent and wholly undisguised attack’ upon the declining archbishop. From Lodge’s perspective, it was a sorry picture: Continually thwarted in the execution of his high functions; maligned by a multiplicity of libels; his credit undermined with the people, and, through the intrigues of Leicester and some others, failing with the queen; he lived in fact under a persecution, and was perhaps saved by death from undeserved impeachment, or at least disgrace.76

Parker’s Posthumous Reputation By the time of Parker’s death in 1575, there was, of course, a great deal to remember. Taking selected milestones in chronological order, one could have drawn attention to his pioneering introduction, in the emergency conditions subsisting in the aftermath of the 1559 Church Settlement, of the office of lay reader77 ; to the seminal policy documents hammered out in episcopal synods convened at Lambeth Palace in [1560] and in 156178 ; and to three very significant documents which reached print, under Parker’s supervision, in the period between those two synods: the Eleven Articles intended to be read by ministers upon taking up a cure and twice yearly thereafter ([1560])79 ; the table of prohibited degrees in marriage (1560)80 ; and a new ecclesiastical calendar (1561).81 High on many a list of his archiepiscopal achievements would probably be the promulgation of the Thirty-Eight Articles of Religion (1563), still the Church of

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England’s doctrinal standard in their 1571 re-formulation,82 and of the Elizabethan book of homilies.83 Others may share Brooks’s belief that the 1568 Bishops’ Bible84 (the basis for the Authorised Version) has been ‘sadly underrated by scholars’.85 Law reveals how much Parker’s interventions, as archbishop of Canterbury, mattered in fractious Cambridge.86 A thread running through several modern accounts is that his steadfast courage was itself crucial: To speak of him, with [W. H.] Frere, as steering the Church of England to safety is to claim more than can even be claimed for Captain Elizabeth and master mariner Cecil. Perhaps John Jewel had the right word when he wrote to Parker in June 1563: ‘your grace is sacra anchora [a holy anchor] unto me and others’. He was the anchor man. The anchor to a Church caught in a gale off a lee shore, compassed with swift and deadly currents which might have dragged her to disaster.87

The primate gave the nascent institution what McGrath calls its ‘shape’— in Heal’s words, ‘his vision of an ordered, hierarchical Church, assimilating Protestant theology and a reformed Catholic structure, did much to determine the future direction of Anglicanism’.88 And Porter is prepared to argue for an importance broader still: that ‘he decisively influenced the English national character. … The progression from the Reformation to the Stiff Upper Lip would make an interesting study; and Parker, I think, would figure in it’.89 Which aspects of a primacy remarkable for its fecundity would commentators and biographers care to mention? Though it cannot have been dispassionate, the funeral sermon preached by Bishop Thomas Cooper of Lincoln90 might tell us something useful were it not for the curious fact that no text seems to survive. Edmund Grindal, archbishop of York, was to succeed Parker at Canterbury, but his thoughts are unrecorded. The obsequious John Whitgift, disciplinarian master of Trinity College, Cambridge, broke a confidence by reporting to Burghley what a witness at the archbishop’s deathbed had told him, namely that Parker had penned a letter to the queen that touched both Burghley and Lord Keeper Bacon, ‘inveying … earnestly against you as chief procurers of the spoil of the Church’. This communication was among several last missives allegedly ‘written with bitterness’. Whitgift offered no further reflections on the man who, only a month or so previously, had sought to advance his own career by recommending him for a bishopric, assuming that he had known of it.91 Writing in July,

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Bishop Cox of Ely lamented Parker’s departure, describing him as ‘a man of an even and firm character, and a zealous defender of true religion’.92 So much for former clerical colleagues. Leaving aside private expressions of grief, such as William Lambarde’s diary admission that the archbishop had been ‘mei amans ’,93 the fairly immediate pattern for public memorialization, and interestingly one originating from a lay impulse, was set by the indefatigable John Stow (1524/25–1605) in the [1580] edition of his Chronicles of England. Stow, who between 1570 and 1574 had provided source materials for some of Parker’s editorial projects and would later call the archbishop his animator and benefactor, printed the tomb epitaph composed by Haddon before listing the primate’s many accomplishments, chief of which was that he had examined throughly [sic] the Englishe translation of the holy Bibles, wherein he partlye used the helpe of his brethren bishoppes, and other doctours, and caused the same to be newly printed in the largest volume, for the furniture of many churches then wanting.

Second in importance to masterminding the production of the Bishops’ Bible, the version authorized by the Crown, was that making diligent searche for the antiquities of the Brytons, and Englishe Saxons, to the end those monuments might be carefully kepte, he caused them to be well bounde and trimlye covered, and such wherof he knew very few examples to be extant (among the which was Matthew Paris … and Thomas Walsingham) hee caused to be printed.

It was after registering those achievements that Stow, having evidently read Parker’s will, turned (in this order) to the restoration of the firedamaged archiepiscopal palace at Canterbury, which had cost over £1400; the foundation of a grammar school at Rochdale in Lancashire; the avalanche of benefactions descending upon Corpus Christi College in Cambridge; the endowment of five sermons to be preached every Rogation Week at several locations in Norfolk, Parker’s native county; the specification of legacies to the city of Norwich, his birthplace; the award to Mattishall in Norfolk (his wife’s home town) of an annuity, to be divided among the poor, with provision also for a yearly sermon; and the bequest of books to Gonville and Caius College, Trinity Hall and

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Cambridge University Library, the two colleges additionally to receive items of silver-gilt plate.94 The first real attempt at a ‘potted biography’, probably partly reliant upon Stow, seems to have come in 1601, incorporated in a work begun some seven or eight years previously the professed aim of which was to portray the episcopate positively for the purpose of countering the misapprehensions of ‘the vulgar sort’ that had been fomented by uncharitable criticism. In A Catalogue of the Bishops of England …, Francis Godwin, sub-dean of Exeter, briefly noted the Boleyn connection and Parker’s marital status, proceeding to salute him as (in this order) founder of Rochdale Grammar School; benefactor of Corpus Christi College; instigator of six sermons preached annually in five Norfolk churches; and donor to the city of Norwich, Gonville and Caius College, Trinity Hall and the University of Cambridge. Moreover, Parker had ‘otherwise bestowed much money unto charitable uses, not necessary particularly to be remembred’. Next to be noticed were his repairs to the archiepiscopal palaces at Canterbury and Lambeth. ‘But above any thing’, declared Godwin, ‘I may not forget his great care of preserving antiquities, unto which his care we are beholding for most of our ancient histories, that but for him were even upon the point utterly to perish’. Strikingly, there is nothing in Godwin’s account about Parker’s stewardship of the Church of England for fifteen and a half years, nor about his literary activities, including oversight of the creation of the Bishops’ Bible. Was he taking them for granted or had they already receded far into the distance, having been eclipsed (in Godwin’s opinion) by acts of enduring significance?95 William Camden’s approach was not dissimilar. In the dedicatory epistle to a Latin book of 1603, he recalled Parker’s position as ‘that unique father and sponsor of all disciplines, and the prime promoter of venerable antiquity’, for ‘he did, with great expences, and greater care, retrieve from all parts MSS books from ruine’, which he reposited in the library of Corpus Christi College.96 When writing his Annales, the first three books of which appeared in Latin in 1615 and in English in 1625, Camden saw fit to mention Parker only twice: firstly (under 1558) as member of the team charged with revising the Edwardian Book of Common Prayer; and secondly (under 1559) as the new occupant of St. Augustine’s Chair. Just two features were plucked from Parker’s curriculum vitae, that he had served Henry VIII as a councillor and that he had been dean of the College of Stoke-by-Clare in Suffolk, but he did at least receive praise as ‘a godly, wise, and right modest man’. In

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terms of his role in the religious politics of the reign, however, Parker was simply off Camden’s radar screen; his passing was ignored.97 If Camden’s work was a dead-end, so far as the archbishop’s posthumous reputation is concerned, then the same cannot be said of Godwin’s effort. Henry Holland (b. 1583, d. in or after 1649) re-packaged it for his biographical dictionary of English worthies [1620], by which I mean he offered a Latin abridgement, putting the Norwich benefactions first after the career summary, and supplied three adornments: an engraved portrait based (or so George Vertue thought) on a painting hanging at Lambeth Palace, the Haddon epitaph (now unattributed) and a selective list of Parker’s publications, albeit including (second to the Bucer funeral sermon) De Antiqvitate Britannicæ.98 Translated back into English, Holland’s text was stolen by Donald Lupton (d. 1676) for his internationalist book The History of the Moderne Protestant Divines, where (in the English section) our primate rubs shoulders with John Jewel (beforehand) and John Foxe (afterwards) in a sequence of pieces on English religious writers that begins with Wycliffe and runs (until this point) through Bale, Colet, Tyndale, Bradford, Latimer, Ridley, Cranmer, Sandys and Nowell. Referring to the engraved portrait prefacing the Parker entry, Lupton averred that ‘this countenance speaks gravity, and hee was no lesse than he appeares’.99 Before the Civil Wars, his name was occasionally invoked polemically. For example, the city of Oxford minister and Gloucester Hall fellow Giles Widdowes (1588/89–1645) preached a sermon, subsequently published, in which he spoke of ‘the suppression of puritans by Arch-bishops Parker[,] Grindall[,] and Whitegift’—a claim that would have surprised the first two of those prelates, but comprehensible in the context of what Tyacke calls ‘the dethronement of Oxford Calvinism’, for the work was a provocative exercise in ‘Arminian partisanship’.100 Commencing in 1650 his massive (if derivative) project of anthologizing godly ‘Lives’, the moderate presbyterian clergyman Samuel Clarke (by this stage beneficed at St. Benet Fink in London) concentrated on recounting succinctly Parker’s rise to power and prodigious acts of charity, noting that Elizabeth had been impressed by his ‘admirable learning, and pietie’; that his subject had been archbishop of Canterbury—‘which place hee supplied with great commendation for above 15 years’—was really rather tangential. Certainly, no space was allowed for an account of Parker’s ecclesiastical leadership during his incumbency.101 An advocate for primitive episcopacy, and shortly to be elevated to the see of Worcester in the Restoration Church, John Gauden held that the

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‘gracious and glorious martyr-bishops in England’—he meant Cranmer, Latimer, Hooper, Ridley and Ferrar—had laid a foundation upon which it had pleased God ‘to build a superstructure worthy of it in other most worthy bishops’. Not all of them could be given ‘their just character’ due to lack of time, yet ‘an asterisk of honor’ ought to be placed against select names. ‘What man had more Christian gravity than Archbishop Parker?’ is the rhetorical question opening Gauden’s catalogue. But the grave man’s doings went unmentioned.102 When his biographer sought a suitable model for Edward Rainbow’s humility in being reluctant to assume even higher office in 1664, in this case the bishopric of Carlisle, it was perhaps natural for him to have turned to Parker: ‘He was desirous, as our most reverend and learned primate, Archbishop Parker, was in the last age, to be serviceable to the Church, tho’ moving in a lower sphere’— Rainbow was already dean of Peterborough.103 By 1700, then, Parker was principally celebrated for his sterling character, for his antiquarianism and for his munificence; the record of his practical stewardship of the Church of England was clearly too divisive, and hence too problematic, to be dredged up. Seventeenth-century authors who did address some other facet of Parker’s biography tended to concentrate upon the notorious Nag’s Head fable. The gist is that the four prelates commissioned by Elizabeth to consecrate Parker—men not at that time in possession of sees, though three had been diocesan bishops under Edward VI and the fourth had been a suffragan bishop consecrated under Henry VIII—had met him at the Nag’s Head tavern in London’s Cheapside and there went through a mock ceremony that was (to quote the Roman Catholic historian Birt) ‘a travesty of the sacred rite’.104 It followed, or so the tale’s supporters claimed, that official documentation of a solemn Lambeth consecration must be forged.105 If Parker had been improperly consecrated, then the entire Church of England ministry was (and is) invalid. Needless to say, the story was unknown to Parker’s era and can be traced no further back than the 1598 autobiography of the minor poet William Alabaster,106 though it gained currency via a 1604 book written by the Irish Jesuit Christopher Holywood, publishing pseudonymously.107 According to the Roman Catholic priest John Pits, however, the report of the alleged events at the Nag’s Head had originated with Thomas Neal, quondam chaplain to Bishop Edmund Bonner of London, who (surprisingly, in the light of that connection) had held the regius chair of Hebrew at Oxford between 1559 and 1569.108 Francis Mason (if he really had written the

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lion’s share of the book, rather than Bishop John Overall of Norwich) seems to have been the first Anglican divine to print a refutation, in 1613;109 the issue takes up much of the entry on Parker in Francis Godwin’s enlarged biographical dictionary brought out a few years later, where an accusing finger points at further Roman Catholic clergy, at least one of them a Jesuit.110 Fuller was vehement in his repudiation. In The Church-History of Britain; From the Birth of Jesus Christ, Untill the Year MDCXLVIII (London, 1655) [Wing, F2416] he protested that when once one Jesuite had got this shamelesse lie of the Nagg’s-Head … by the ears, instantly Champney, Fitz-Simon[,] Persons, Killison, Constable, and all the whole kennell of them, baule it out in their books to all posterity.

It all rested, he insisted, on Neal’s uncorroborated testimony. But against Neal could be avouched the word of Sir Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham, who lived until 1624. Better known to history by his earlier title of Lord Howard of Effingham, the elderly peer and hero of the naval campaign against the Spanish Armada, being requested of a friend, whether he could remember Matthew Parkers consecration, gave an exact account of the same … performed in Lambeth Chappel, being himself an eyewitness thereof, and an invited guest to the great feast kept there that day, therefore the more observant of all particular passages thereat, because the said arch-bishop was … a kinsman.

What conclusion was to be drawn? Fuller pulled no punches: Let the papists … not be so busie to cast durt on our bishops, but first fall on washing the face of their own pope, even John the Twelv’th, whom an excellent authour reporteth to have ordained a deacon in a stable, for which two cardinals reproved him. And let these three stories be told together [—] that the Empress Hellen was the daughter of an hostler [i.e. ostler— stableman at an inn]; that Arch-bishop Cranmer himself was an hostler; and that our first b[isho]ps in Queen Elizabeths dayes were consecrated in the Naggs-Head. I say let these three be told together, because wise and good men will believe them together, as all comming forth of the forge of falsehood and malice.

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Unfortunately, this peroration more or less exhausted what Fuller (an episcopalian divine) thought it necessary to set down. Admittedly, there are one or two bare biographical facts. And Parker is described first as ‘learned, and religious’ and later as ‘discreet and moderate’. But as regards ecclesiastical leadership—almost nothing: ‘sound and sincere in pressing conformity’. Once again, antiquarianism steals the limelight, with Fuller’s tart observation that he confuted that character which one gives of antiquaries, that generally they are either superstitious or supercilious, his skill in antiquity being attended with soundnesse of doctrine and humility of manners.

Perhaps a saving grace is praise of Mrs. Parker: ‘a patern for all prelates wives’.111 The future bishop of Salisbury Gilbert Burnet was clearly acquainted with some of Parker’s correspondence and used it to stress his reluctance to assume the primacy—this would become a standard motif in many subsequent accounts. Nevertheless, what is interesting about Burnet’s treatment is how he deployed this material in order to propound confessionalizing generalizations. We learn that Parker rejected Sir Nicholas Bacon’s overtures (Bacon acting on the queen’s behalf) on grounds of bodily weakness and unsuitability for so huge a responsibility. Burnet commented thus: He desired that he might be put in some small benefice … so far was he from aspirings to great wealth, or high dignities: and as Cranmer had done before him, he continued for many months so averse to it, that it was very hard to overcome him. Such promotions are generally, if not greedily sought after, yet at least willingly enough undertaken: but this looked liker the practises in ancient than modern times. In the best ages of the Church, instead of that ambitus, which has given such scandal to the world in later times, it was ordinary for men to flye from the offer of great preferments, and to retire to a wilderness, or a monastery, rather than undertake a charge which they thought above their merit or capacity to discharge. And this will still shew it self in all such as have a just sense of the pastoral care[.] … And it was thought no small honour to the Reformation, that the two chief instruments that promoted it, Cranmer and Parker, gave such evidences of a primitive spirit, in being so unwillingly advanced.

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How one wishes that, in the United Kingdom today, senior figures in public life were equally sensitive to the dangers of ‘The Peter Principle’! At least Parker vindicated the trust reposed in him, emerging from Burnet’s pages as the second of two ‘chief instruments’ promoting the Reformation.112 1711 marked a turning-point, in that all later writers were dependent upon John Strype’s didactic biography, published by subscription and still the most detailed available.113 A staunch defender of the Church of England despite his strong non-conformist family roots,114 it was Strype who gave me part of the title of this chapter: Parker was, he said, ‘a man of stomach’,115 which means (according to the online Oxford English Dictionary) someone exhibiting ‘spirit, courage, valour, bravery’. But we can guess as much from his ensuing remarks, alleging that, in a good cause, he feared no body: No, not the greatest man, when he had right on his side, or in the distribution of justice, and discharge of his conscience. Which made him often struggle with great courtiers, and sometimes even with the queen her self[.] … And because he wanted [i.e. lacked] a complying, flattering, complaisant temper and carriage, he procured to himself many powerful enemies; and especially the … earl of Leicester, who constantly opposed all the good motions he made to the queen; and particularly, for promoting worthy men to the bishopricks, and other ecclesiastical preferments[.]116

After the accolades of Burnet and the exertions of Strype, the heart sinks upon encountering the dreariness of John Le Neve (b. 1679, d. in or before 1741). The Lives and Characters, Deaths, Burials, and Epitaphs, Works of Piety, Charity, and Other Munificent Benefactions of all the Protestant Bishops of the Church of England Since the Reformation, as Settled by Queen Elizabeth Anno Dom. 1559 (1720) is something of a misnomer, certainly in terms of Parker’s ‘life and character’. What we get is a dry chronological list of biographical events—nobody appears to have told Le Neve that historical writing à la medieval chronicle was passé. It takes ten pages to reach the point at which the Nag’s Head fable can be dismissed. Then comes an announcement: The intended brevity of this work will not allow room to mention every particular of his behaviour during his possessing this high dignity; but they

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that would see a very full account of his transactions, may be abundantly satisfied with the Reverend Mr Strype’s elaborate performance[.]

For what does he allow space in the remaining sixteen pages of this entry? The promulgation of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion? The Vestiarian Controversy and Parker’s issue of the Advertisments ? The Admonition Controversy? No—the framework is provided by the archbishop’s round of episcopal consecrations interspersed with notices of benefactions and fabric repairs.117 Things could only get better. They did. As the eighteenth century unfolded, Parker popped up in all manner of contexts. One newspaper gave its readers an enthusiastic biographical sketch claiming that ‘almost all parts of the Reformation passed through his hands’. Indeed, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, ‘his piety, wisdom, and moderation, were so well known abroad, and to the foreign princes, and their principal ministers of state, that all the methods used to carry on that great and glorious design, were under his cognizance, care, and management’—certainly an exaggeration of primatial competence.118 A controversial 1764 study of the royal prerogative, published anonymously by a member of Lincoln’s Inn, quotes from one of Parker’s books and describes its author as ‘a prelate of great erudition, and deeply skilled in the knowledge of antiquity’.119 Nine year later, when James West’s vast art collection came to be auctioned in London, Parker’s portrait was believed to have been painted by no less than Holbein—highly improbable, though it is gratifying that it fetched more than a picture listed as a Durer.120 Albeit fleeting, one of the most interesting appraisals—printed in 1796—sprang from the pen of the great historian Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)—interesting because Gibbon (a Roman Catholic convert) appreciated our man’s versatility, for here is a recognition of ecclesiastical statesmanship as well as antiquarianism. He began by dilating on the Henrician dissolutions of the religious houses: The Protestant and the patriot must applaud our deliverance; but the critic may deplore the rude havoc that was made in the libraries of churches and monasteries by the zeal, the avarice and the neglect of unworthy reformers. Far different from such reformers was the learned and pious Matthew Parker[.] … His apostolical virtues were not incompatible with the love of learning, and while he exercised the arduous office, not of governing, but of founding the Church of England, he strenuously applied himself to revive the study of the Saxon tongue, and of English antiquities.

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Citing Matthew Paris, Thomas Walsingham and others, Gibbon commended the production of editions of ‘our ancient historians’. After the death of ‘this respectable prelate’, he added, ‘this national duty was for some years abandoned to the diligence of foreigners’.121 James Pettit Andrews is, I suppose, generally forgotten these days, yet his twovolume History of Great Britain from 1547 to 1603, while dependent upon Fuller, Strype and other ‘authorities’, offers a far more sophisticated synthesis than many of its predecessors. The Thirty-Nine Articles now attract notice. We are given a sketchy account of the Vestiarian Controversy. Even prophesyings appear: ‘Archbishop Parker determined to suppress them, as he looked on them as exercises of puritanism’—actually, his attitude was much more ambivalent than that statement would suggest. Still, Andrews cast his net impressively widely. Parker was, he says, ‘a good oriental scholar’. Moreover, poetry was something to which he turned during his enforced retirement under Mary, translating the psalms into metre. All of this information is presented by way of introduction to a specimen of Parkerian verse: the Eighteenth Psalm. Sadly, Andrews was unkind: the lines are said to be ‘pompous’; they cannot be compared, ‘without great disadvantage’, to ‘the celebrated version of Sternhold’. The coup de grâce comes in the shape of the verdict handed down by an unnamed ‘historian of English poetry’, quoted as follows: Here is some degree of spirit, and a choice of phraseology; but, on the whole, Parker will be found to want facility, and in general to have been unpractised, in writing English verses. His abilities were destined to other studies, and adapted to employments of a more archiepiscopal nature.

Parker may have won no plaudits on that front, but Andrews was willing to bestow praise elsewhere: for protecting John Day, the printer, and for encouraging the art of engraving: ‘Archbishop Parker was its especial patron, and kept two persons in his house, Hogenberg and Lyne …, employed chiefly in engraving genealogies’.122 This broader approach— to convey a sense of what was attempted in office—continued in A New and General Biographical Dictionary of 1798. Here the anonymous author larded the conventional selection of facts with fresh details, probably drawn from Strype: that Parker had preached to the insurgents during Kett’s Rebellion in 1549 and that (besides attending to the psalms) he had used the unwelcome Marian interlude to write a defence of clerical

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marriage. Reaching Elizabeth’s reign, the biographer really hit his stride. Parker was ‘peculiarly qualified’ for elevation to Canterbury on account of ‘his great prudence, courage, conduct, experience and learning’. These qualities were exactly what was needed ‘for carrying on the work of reformation with vigour to its perfect establishment’. To refer to his primary metropolitical visitation was thus entirely fitting. Indeed, it is reported that he exhorted his clergy to the constant and diligent execution of their duty, in instructing the people committed to their charge, by his own example: for, as his important and public affairs would permit, he preached sometimes in his own cathedral, and at other times in the towns and villages abroad; continuing … in this practice, though labouring under many infirmities, the attendants of old age.

Other instances of what Parker sought to achieve as archbishop are given. By contrast—and hence supporting my overall argument—the charitable side of his activities is whittled down to a single line stating that he became ‘a special benefactor’ of Corpus Christi College.123 Space constraints do not allow a thorough examination of nineteenthcentury sources. Nevertheless, judging by those that have been sampled, the emphasis on ecclesiastical reform and religious politics seems to have persisted,124 but Parker’s reputation also came in for a severe battering. Having rejected Methodism, the American preacher William Guirey (1773–1840), who had perhaps already joined the O’Kelly Movement and was certainly hostile to episcopacy, thought him guilty of ‘tyranny’, along with his successors Whitgift and Bancroft. This terrible trio, bent upon enforcing ceremonial conformity, had allegedly caused over 400 ‘pious and learned men’—‘not only members, but ministers of the Church’—to be ‘silenced, suspended, deprived—many of them loaded with chains and heavy fines, shut up in filthy jails, where they slowly expired through penury and want’.125 Dealing with Parker over ten pages, the 1808 volume of the General Biography by John Aikin, Thomas Morgan and William Johnston told his story in admirable detail—only to finish up with character assassination. ‘Archbishop Parker’, they declare, has the honour to rank among the principal agents in exposing the superstitions of popery, and in placing the Protestant religion on a permanent footing in England. It is to be lamented, however, that he sullied this

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honour by introducing into Protestantism much of the ecclesiastical pride, and tyrannical persecuting spirit, of the Church from which he separated. It is justly observed by Dr Warner that a general character of him cannot be given, which will accord with the former and latter part of his life, since he was so different a man in those two periods. In the former part of his life he had behaved with remarkable good temper, as a modest humble man; and the great unwillingness with which he accepted the primacy shews that he entertained a deep sense of the duties of the episcopal office, and that he was then uninfluenced by avarice or ambition. But when he was invested with the archiepiscopal dignity, he lost all his former humbleness of mind, and assumed high notions of authority both in Church and State. He became as rough and uncourtly in his behaviour towards those who had business with him as he was slavish in his obedience to the prerogative and supremacy[.] … Indeed, the arbitrary, and even illegal[,] manner in which he persecuted the puritans … will ever reflect the greatest dishonour on his memory. His religion seems to have almost wholly consisted in a servile submission to the queen’s injunctions, and in regulating the public service of the Church; for while he was expending his zeal, and time, and labour, in suppressing puritanism, he appears to have taken little care to reform the lives and manners of his clergy[.]126

Of course, most of this vituperation is partisan nonsense. Aikin, probably the editor, is described by Thomas as ‘a radical with a Dissenting background’127 ; about Morgan (presumably the ‘M’ identified at the end of the Parker entry) nothing seems to be known. On the last point, one need only call in evidence Parker’s pioneering surveys of the ministry.128 They reveal a primate passionately inquisitive about the backgrounds and capacities of the clerical workforce. That he could neither overcome systemic problems to do with patronage and remuneration nor neutralize the vested interests of the aristocracy and gentry was hardly exclusively his fault. Regrettably, the poison of the General Biography seeped into Lucy Aikin’s Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (3rd edition, 1819)129 ; Thomas Morell’s Studies in History (3rd edition, 1822)130 ; James Anthony Froude’s History of England (1856–1870), describing Parker as ‘corrupt’ and Grindal as ‘a sincere Protestant’, which is slyly to present his predecessor as insincere131 ; and even Hubert Hall’s Society in the Elizabethan Age (5th edition, 1902)—yoking Parker and Whitgift together as ‘well-meaning bigots’.132 Its full effects remain to be seen.

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Conclusion Modern scholarship has mostly taken us far away from that kind of egregious bias,133 but where has it left us? Recent decades have witnessed a marvellous renaissance in the study of certain early modern antiquaries and historians. I am thinking particularly of works on Foxe (chiefly by Evenden and Freeman)134 ; Holinshed (by Patterson and the contributors to The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles)135 ; Leland (by Carley)136 ; and Stow (by those writing in a 2004 collection of essays edited by Gadd and Gillespie).137 Parker has been the subject of similar treatment, with valuable investigations undertaken by (among others) Bjorklund,138 Black,139 Grafton,140 Graham,141 Graham and Watson,142 Jones,143 Kleist144 and Robinson.145 In parallel, we have had illuminating accounts of how Tudor and Stuart readers engaged with their books (by Sherman),146 how the discipline of history was transformed in this period (by Broadway, Grafton and Woolf)147 and how national history was appropriated for polemical purposes (by Grafton, Heal and Oates).148 Naturally, Parker features somewhere in each of these discussions, which is all to the good. My point, however, is that this concentration on his antiquarian and historical activities comes at the expense of an appreciation of him as an ecclesiastical figure. In other words, to return to Gibbon, it is Parker as the post-Marian founder of the Church of England that is in danger of comparative neglect. Let me substantiate that claim. Haigh’s well-known textbook—English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (1993)149 —mentions Parker only three times, entirely incidentally. Not many more references occur in the otherwise excellent essays printed in Doran and Jones (eds), The Elizabethan World (2011).150 The same is true of Ives’s The Reformation Experience (2012) and of Marshall’s brilliant Heretics and Believers (2017).151 He receives no substantive entry in a recent Dictionary of the Reformation, though does feature slightly in notices of William Barlow and Thomas Bilney.152 Lapidge indexes him merely as ‘antiquary’.153 Our man has been relegated to a walk-on part, if that. Curiously, therefore, we have reverted to the priorities of the earliest memorializations: it is the picture of Parker as collector, author, editor and benefactor that dominates, at any rate in the specialist literature. That was not what Strype had intended. The encomiastic conclusion to his 1711 biography is worth quoting in full:

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Had not the Church met with such a stout and unwearied patron of it at that time, when there was such continual strugling to throw off its godly orders, and break in pieces those constitutions on which it was at first established, it would in all probability have never been able to have subsisted afterwards. So that I may call him our Churches Nehemiah. For as the Jewish Nehemiah built the walls of Jerusalem in so much opposition, and thereby got himself such everlasting fame …[,] so the WALLS of our Jerusalem shall be Archbishop Parker’s eternal monument; partly for building them up, chiefly for preserving them, being built, from being thrown down again.154

Perhaps there is a need to bolster his reputation by somehow combining Parker the Church of England’s Nehemiah and Parker the patriotic scholar.

Notes 1. I am very grateful to Dr. Tom Freeman for his helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. 2. J. Bruce and T. T. Perowne (eds), Correspondence of Matthew Parker, D.D., Archbishop of Canterbury. Comprising Letters Written by and to Him, from A.D. 1535, to His Death, A.D. 1575, PS (Cambridge, 1853) [hereafter Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence], pp. x–xi (Margaret and Jane Parker). 3. Ibid., p. x and C. Drew (ed.), Lambeth Churchwardens’ Accounts 1504– 1645 and Vestry Book 1610, 2 vols, Surrey Record Society, XVIII and XX (n.p., 1941–1950), I p. 100 (grave said to be located in the Duchess of Norfolk’s Chapel). For discussion of this chapel, see N. Clark, ‘The Gendering of Dynastic Memory: Burial Choices of the Howards, 1485– 1559’, JEH , 68 (2017), pp. 747–65, though she is wrong to claim that, in this period, archbishops of Canterbury generally buried ‘their dead’ in the palace chapel. 4. V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962), p. 340. 5. T. Fuller et al., Abel Redevivus: or The Dead Yet Speaking. The Lives and Deaths of the Moderne Divines … (London, 1651) [Wing, F2400] [hereafter Fuller, Abel ], p. 529. For analysis of this work, see W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’s Religious Past (Oxford, 2018), pp. 144–6. Such biographical compilations are discussed in P. Collinson, ‘“A Magazine of Religious Patterns”: An Erasmian Topic Transposed in English Protestantism’, in D. Baker (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History, Studies in Church History, 14 (Oxford, 1977), pp. 223–49, reprinted in P. Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London, 1983), pp. 499–525.

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6. T. Tatton-Brown, Lambeth Palace: A History of the Archbishops of Canterbury and their Houses (London, 2000), p. 69 (‘uniquely, he was buried in Lambeth Palace chapel’). For an overview, see P. Sherlock, ‘Episcopal Tombs in Early Modern England’, JEH , 55 (2004), pp. 654–80. 7. Fuller, Abel, sigs A3v–[A4]r (Gataker’s authorship), p. 530. See also B. Usher, ‘Gataker [formerly Gatacre], Thomas (1574–1654)’, in ODNB. That the volume had probably been compiled largely by the publisher, John Stafford, is suggested in W. B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller: Discovering England’s Religious Past (Oxford, 2018), p. 144 (n. 111). 8. Anon. (ed. and trans.), [John Joscelin], The Life off the 70 Archbishopp off Canterbury Presentlye Sittinge Englished, and to be Added to the 69 Lately Sett Forth in Latin. This Numbre off Seventy is so Compleat a Number as it is Great Pitie ther Shold be One More: But That as Augustin was the First, so Mathew Might be the Last ([Heidelberg], 1574) [STC, 19292a] [hereafter [Joscelin], Life], sigs C2v–C3r. This preparation would be satirized by Matthew Prior, the poet, in 1714: K. Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2009), p. 248. 9. The Latin epitaph (minus the last line given below) is printed in T. Hatcher (ed.), Poematvm Gvalteri Haddoni, Legvm Doctoris, Sparsim Collectorvm, Libri Dvo (London, 1576) [STC, 12597], sig. [K5]r–v. See also G. Bray, ‘Haddon, Walter (1514/15–1571)’, in ODNB, from which L. V. Ryan, ‘Walter Haddon: Elizabethan Latinist’, HLQ , XVII (1954), pp. 99–124 is omitted. 10. [Joscelin], Life, sig. C3r–v (original emphases), perhaps the source for the text given in Fuller, Abel, pp. 529–30 (differs only in spelling and punctuation). 11. Both of the foregoing sources omit the last line because composition of the epitaph had antedated Parker’s death. Hook, however, printed the whole Latin epitaph, including this last line. Although his source is obscure, it presumably derived ultimately from the original tomb: W. F. Hook, Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, 12 vols (London, 1860– 1876), IX p. 584. 12. D. H. Woodward, ‘Thomas Fuller, the Protestant Divines, and Plagiary Yet Speaking’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, IV (1966), pp. 208–9. See K. J. Höltgen, ‘Quarles, Francis (1592–1644)’ and J. Horden, ‘Quarles, John (1624/25–1665)’, in ODNB. 13. Fuller, Abel, p. 533 (original emphasis). 14. Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, p. vii (Parker’s note of his preferment, on 4 November 1535, to the deanery of Stoke-by-Clare, Suffolk). He was apparently inducted on 13 November: BL, Lansdowne MS 981, fol. 120v. I thank Mr Bryn Blake, formerly my student, for help in accessing this MS. See also D. MacCulloch, Suffolk and the Tudors:

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15.

16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

Politics and Religion in an English County 1500–1600 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 138–9. E. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn: ‘The Most Happy’ (Malden, Massachusetts, 2004), pp. 178–9; A. Hunt, The Drama of Coronation: Medieval Ceremony in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 39–76. Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, p. vii (my emphases). Matthew Parker to Sir Nicholas Bacon, n.p., 1 March [1559], and same to Sir William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley, n.p., [6 October 1572], printed ibid., pp. 57–63 (at p. 59) and 400–1 (at p. 400) respectively. The story is reconstructed from: C. H. Firth (ed.), ‘Thomas Scot’s Account of his Actions as Intelligencer During the Commonwealth’, EHR, XII (1897), p. 124; R. W. Monro and M. A. Thoms, ‘The Manuscripts of the House of Lords’, Seventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, 2 parts (London, 1879), I pp. 149 (15 July 1661), 152 (9 December 1661), 153 (8 January 1662); Anon. (eds), Journals of the House of Lords (London, 1767–), XI p. 319 (24 July 1661); [A. à Wood], Athenae Oxonienses. An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the Most Ancient and Famous University of Oxford, From the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the End of the Year 1690 …, 2 vols (London, 1691–1692) [Wing, W3382 and W3383A], I col. 589; Strype, Parker, p. 499 (quoting Sancroft’s Parker epitaph); and S. Wright, ‘Pory, Robert (1608?–1669)’, in ODNB. Parker and John Pory had been undergraduates together: V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962), p. 232. CCCC, PL MS 583. Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, pp. vii, ix. [Joscelin], Life, sig. A3r–v. Both letters are: John Skip to Matthew Parker, Hampton Court, [23 March 1535], printed in Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, pp. 1–2 (Letters I and II). Ibid., pp. ix–x (certain years given here must be advanced by one), 40 (Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, to Matthew Parker, Lambeth, 17 February 1549), 41 (Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Westminster, to same, Westminster, 4 March 1549). BL, Add. MS 19400, fol. 17r–v (Hugh Latimer to Matthew Parker, chaplain to the queen, n.p., n.d.), calendared in LP, IX No. 1117 and printed (inaccurately) in Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, p. v (n. 1). Latimer described himself as ‘off Wor[c]ester’ rather than signing as Hugh Wigorn, which suggests that the letter belongs to the period between 11 August (royal assent) and 23 September 1535 (consecration): H. P. F. King et al. (compilers), John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae

6

26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31.

32.

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Anglicanae 1300–1541, 12 vols ([London], 1962–1967), IV p. 58. On what ensued, see S. Wabuda, ‘“Fruitful Preaching” in the Diocese of Worcester: Bishop Hugh Latimer and His Influence, 1535–1539’, in E. J. Carlson (ed.), Religion and the English People 1500–1640: New Voices, New Perspectives, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, XLV (Kirksville, Missouri, 1998), pp. 49–74. CCCC, Archives MS XL A.1. Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, pp. 39 (Letter XXVII: Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, to Matthew Parker, Lambeth, 5 May [1548]), ix (n. 4: same to same, 8 January 1550) and 43 (Letter XXXIV: same to same, Lambeth, 12 February 1551). P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1964–1969), II pp. 102–3 (Westminster, 27 December 1558) and T. Lanquet et al., An Epitome of Cronicles … (London, 1559) [STC, 15217.5, colophon dated 5 April], sig. [Cggg6]r. J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and MerchantTaylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, CS, First (Old) Series, XLII (London, 1848), p. 189. For a re-assessment, see I. Mortimer, ‘Tudor Chronicler or Sixteenth-Century Diarist? Henry Machyn and the Nature of His Manuscript’, SCJ , XXXIII (2002), pp. 981–98. T. Lanquet et al., An Epitome of Cronicles … (London, 1559) [STC, 15217.5, colophon dated 5 April], sig. [Cggg6]r. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in other Libraries of Northern Italy, eds R. Brown et al., 38 vols (London etc., 1864– 1947), VII pp. 94–6 (Il Schifanoya to the castellan of Mantua, London, 6 June 1559), 100–4 (Paulo Tiepolo, Venetian ambassador to the Court of Philip II, to the doge and Senate of Venice, Brussels, 16 June 1559). J. G. Nichols (ed.), The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and MerchantTaylor of London, from A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, CS, First (Old) Series, XLII (London, 1848), pp. 201 (misinformed about two episcopal appointments), 209–10, 220, 230. Writing from Westminster on 10 March 1551, John Cheke told Peter Martyr Vermigli that the sermon had been given in English: Anon. (ed.), De Obitu Doctissimi et Sanctissimi Theologi Doctoris Martini Buceri, Regij in Celeberrima Cantabrigiensi Academia apud Anglos Publice Sacrarum Literarum Praelectoris Epistolæ Duæ … (London, 1551) [STC, 5108], sig. B1v (erroneously as ‘D. Barkarus ’). Modern scholarship is inconsistent here: Strype, Parker, p. 28 (English); V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962), p. 47 (English, on no evidence, but citing a Latin version printed at Basel in 1577); and Porter, Cambridge, p. 55 (Latin, seemingly only on the basis of the 1577 edn).

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34. Bucer probably died on 1 March and his funeral is reported to have taken place two days later, though the churchwardens’ accounts specify no date and detail only seat repairs: C. Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1946), p. 28 (n. 3); W. K. Jordan (ed.), The Chronicle and Political Papers of King Edward VI (London, 1966), pp. 53–4; J. E. Foster (ed.), Churchwardens’ Accounts of St Mary the Great Cambridge from 1504 to 1635, Publications of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, Octavo Series, XXXV (Cambridge, 1905), p. 123. That Parker’s sermon had won universal admiration is stated in a letter (which also summarizes its content) addressed by Nicholas Carr to John Cheke, dated Trinity College, Cambridge, ides [i.e. 15] March 1551: Anon. (ed.), De Obitu Doctissimi et Sanctissimi Theologi Doctoris Martini Buceri, Regij in Celeberrima Cantabrigiensi Academia apud Anglos Publice Sacrarum Literarum Praelectoris Epistolæ Duæ … (London, 1551) [STC, 5108], sigs G2v–[G4]v. McDiarmid confirms that Carr’s summary seems to match later publications of the full text: J. F. McDiarmid, ‘Classical Epitaphs for Heroes of Faith: Mid-Tudor Neo-Latin Memorial Volumes and Their Protestant Humanist Context’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 3 (1996), p. 34 (n. 49). The first edn of the complete sermon appears to be M. Parker, Howe We Ought to Take the Death of the Godly. A Sermon Made in Cambrydge at the Buriall of the Noble Clerck D. M. Bucer (London, [1551?]) [STC, 19293, listing five copies, one imperfect]. The sermon is analysed in G. W. Pigman III, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 29–31 (described as important, it is said to combine ‘a fiercely logical rigorism with concession to the weakness of human nature’), R. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 222–3 and J. Martin, Walton’s Lives: Conformist Commemorations and the Rise of Biography (Oxford, 2001), pp. 17–21. 35. Allegedly printed by Thomas Purfoote, the book is cited as M. Parker, A Funerall Sermon Preached 1551 at the Buriall of M. Bucer (1570?) in C. Hopf, Martin Bucer and the English Reformation (Oxford, 1946), p. 29 (n. 5) and as M. Parker, A Funeral Sermon Preached at the Burial of M. Bucer (London, 1570) in S. Flory, ‘How to Remember Thee? Problems of Memorialization in English Writing, 1558–1625’, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Ph.D. thesis (2008), pp. 57 (imagining that this edn must have been a new translation), 58 (n. 45, wrongly claiming that ‘Parker’s sermon was originally in Latin’), 237.

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36. C. Hubertus (ed.), Historia Uera: De Vita, Obitv, Sepvltvra, Accvsatione Hæreseos, Condemnatione, Exhumatione, Combustione Honorificaque Tandem Restitutione Beatorum Atque Doctissimorum Theologorum D. Martini Bvceri & Pavli Fagii … (Argentinæ [i.e. Strasbourg], 1561– 1562), fols 53r–65v. 37. C. Hubertus (ed.), Martini Bvceri, Scripta Anglicana … (Basel, 1577), pp. 892–9. 38. T. Newton (ed. and trans.), M. Parker, A Funerall Sermon, Both Godlye, Learned and Comfortable, Preached at S. Maries in Cambridge, Anno 1551 at the Buriall of … Martin Bucer (London, [1587]) [STC, 19293a]. The dedicatory epistle (sig. A2r) is dated Little Ilford, Essex, 24 February 1587, where the trans. had been rector since 1583. In his literary activities, he was both prolific and highly versatile: see G. Braden, ‘Newton, Thomas (1544/45–1607)’, in ODNB. 39. S. Flory, ‘How to Remember Thee? Problems of Memorialization in English Writing, 1558–1625’, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Ph.D. thesis (2008), pp. 56–64 (at p. 64), though Flory’s Collinson-dependent characterization of Parker is old-fashioned. 40. He had fled to the Low Countries in late 1559: M. R. O’Connell, Thomas Stapleton and the Counter Reformation (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1964), pp. 28–9. 41. T. Stapleton, A Fortresse of the Faith First Planted Amonge Us Englishmen, and Continued Hitherto in the Universall Church of Christ. The Faith of Which Time Protestants Call, Papistry (Antwerp, 1565) [STC, 23232], fol. 102v. On this phenomenon, see B. Hall, ‘The Early Rise and Gradual Decline of Lutheranism in England (1520–1600)’, in D. Baker (ed.), Reform and Reformation: England and the Continent c.1500–c.1750, Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 2 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 103–31, reprinted in B. Hall, Humanists and Protestants: 1500– 1900 (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 208–36; A. Ryrie, ‘The Strange Death of Lutheran England’, JEH , 53 (2002), pp. 64–92; and D. S. Gehring, ‘From the Strange Death to the Odd Afterlife of Lutheran England’, HJ , 57 (2014), pp. 825–44. 42. The online edn of OED quotes Stapleton for this figurative usage, also noting that the noun ‘linsey-woolsey’ originally meant ‘a textile material, woven from a mixture of wool and flax’. 43. The adjective ‘mealy-mouthed’ is defined as ‘reticent … afraid to speak one’s mind or to use plain terms’ ibid., where attestations from 1571 and 1575 are quoted.

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44. T. Dorman, A Disproufe of M. Nowelles Reproufe (Antwerp, 3 December 1565) [STC, 7061], fol. 103v (the other two bishops are identified as Richard Cheyney of Gloucester and Edmund Guest of Rochester). See F. A. James III, ‘Dorman, Thomas (c.1534–c.1577)’, in ODNB. 45. J. H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy: An Historical Study of the Earliest Tensions within the Church of England in the Reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth (Kampen, 1960); D. Keep, ‘Bullinger’s Intervention in the Vestiarian Controversy of 1566’, The Evangelical Quarterly, XLVII (1975), pp. 223–30; W. Phillips, ‘Henry Bullinger and the Elizabethan Vestiarian Controversy: An Analysis of Influence’, JRH , 11 (1980– 1981), pp. 363–84; B. Usher, ‘The Deanery of Bocking and the Demise of the Vestiarian Controversy’, JEH , 52 (2001), pp. 434–55. 46. M. Parker et al., Advertisments Partly for Due Order in the Publique Administration of Common Prayers and Usinge the Holy Sacramentes, and Partly for the Apparrell of all Persons Ecclesiasticall … (London, [1565?]) [STC, 10027]. 47. i.e. the Bill requiring clerical subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles, which resulted in 13 Elizabeth I c. 12, printed in The Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols (London, 1810–1828), IV Part I pp. 546–7. 48. T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I , 3 vols ([Leicester] and London, 1981–1995), I p. 432. The best account of the context remains T. S. Freeman, ‘“The Reformation of the Church in this Parliament”: Thomas Norton, John Foxe and the Parliament of 1571’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), pp. 131–47. 49. [J. Field and T. Wilcox], An Admonition to the Parliament ([Hemel Hempstead?, 1572]) [STC, 10847], sig. D[1]v. For a modern edn, see W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas (eds), Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt With a Reprint of the Admonition to the Parliament and Kindred Documents, 1572 (London, 1907), p. 33. 50. B. Brook, The Lives of the Puritans: Containing a Biographical Account of Those Divines Who Distinguished Themselves in the Cause of Religious Liberty, from the Reformation Under Queen Elizabeth, to the Act of Uniformity, in 1662, 3 vols (London, 1813), I p. 282; W. Maskell, Holy Baptism: A Dissertation (London, 1848), p. 87 (n. 4, ‘about … 1570’); A. Peel (ed.), The Seconde Parte of a Register: Being a Calendar of Manuscripts Under That Title Intended for Publication by the Puritans About 1593, and Now in Dr. Williams’s Library, London, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915), I p. 30; D. G. Danner, ‘Anthony Gilby: Puritan in Exile—A Biographical Approach’, Church History, 40 (1971), pp. 420–1. 51. J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928), p. 175 (n. 6).

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52. Anon. [J. Udall] (ed.), A Parte of a Register, Contayninge Sundrie Memorable Matters, Written by Diuers Godly and Learned in Our Time, Which Stande for, and Desire the Reformation of Our Church, in Discipline and Ceremonies, Accordinge to the Pure Worde of God, and the Lawe of Our Lande ([Middelburg, 1593?]) [STC, 10400], pp. 55–72. ‘A Viewe’ is oddly ignored in C. Cross, ‘Gilby, Anthony (c.1510–1585)’, in ODNB, where the publication history of A Pleasaunt Dialogue is confused. 53. A.[nthony] G.[ilby], A Pleasaunt Dialogue, Betweene a Souldior of Barwicke, and an English Chaplaine. Wherein Are Largely Handled & Laide Open, Such Reasons as are Brought in for Maintenaunce of Popishe Traditions in Our Eng[lish] Church … ([Middelburg?], 1581) [STC, 11888], sigs B[1]v (statement), [L7]r–M5r (recycled material). Nevertheless, the tract was evidently inspired by events of 1565–1566, as indicated by the prefatory letter (sigs [A7]r–B[1]r) dated London, 10 May 1566—and one historian treats the whole book as belonging to ‘the literary warfare of 1566’: J. H. Primus, The Vestments Controversy: An Historical Study of the Earliest Tensions within the Church of England in the Reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth (Kampen, 1960), pp. 145–8. 54. Peel and Danner (see above, n. 50) assume that Gilby was either principal or sole author respectively, with Peel noting the involvement of ‘T. W.’— ‘probably Thomas Wilcox’. 55. Anon. [J. Udall] (ed.), A Parte of a Register, Contayninge Sundrie Memorable Matters, Written by Diuers Godly and Learned in Our Time, Which Stande for, and Desire the Reformation of Our Church, in Discipline and Ceremonies, Accordinge to the Pure Worde of God, and the Lawe of Our Lande ([Middelburg, 1593?]) [STC, 10400], pp. 57, 58. 56. See ibid., p. 55 for proof that the introduction had been updated in 1578. That statement was presumably the basis for Strype’s claim that this ‘bitter book’ had come forth c.1578: J. Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and Other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, During Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign … (‘new edn’, 4 vols in 7 parts, Oxford, 1824), II Part II pp. 215–18 (summary). A 1578 impression is taken as fact by Peel (see above, n. 50). 57. See Anon. [J. Udall] (ed.), A Parte of a Register, Contayninge Sundrie Memorable Matters, Written by Diuers Godly and Learned in Our Time, Which Stande for, and Desire the Reformation of Our Church, in Discipline and Ceremonies, Accordinge to the Pure Worde of God, and the Lawe of Our Lande ([Middelburg, 1593?]) [STC, 10400], p. 72 for evidence of updating in 23 Elizabeth. 58. See above, n. 50.

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59. Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, pp. 409–11 (Letter CCCXIII: Matthew Parker to Sir William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley, Lambeth, 22 November [1572]). 60. Porter, Cambridge, pp. 146–55. 61. Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, pp. 428–9 (Letter CCCXXVIII: Matthew Parker to Elizabeth I, n.p., [15 June 1573]). 62. R. H. Fritz, ‘Acworth, George (1534–1581×86)’, in ODNB. 63. G. H. Martin, ‘Joscelin [Joscelyn], John (1529–1603)’, ibid., which omits T. Graham and A. G. Watson (eds), The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Monograph No. 13 (Cambridge, 1998). 64. T. F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf, ‘Introduction’, in T. F. Mayer and D. R. Woolf (eds), The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1995), p. 15. 65. M. Parker et al., De Antiqvitate Britannicæ Ecclesiæ & Priuilegiis Ecclesiæ Cantuariensis, Cum Archiepiscopis Eiusdem 70 ([Lambeth Palace], 1572– 1574) [STC, 19292]. That the printing occurred at Lambeth Palace is attested by a Latin inscription, in the hand of the archbishop’s son John, in a copy extant at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Shelfmark A.19.9.Th): E. Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 108–11 (quoting inscription; shelfmark corrected). 66. Writing in 1715–1716, Morris Drake Morris believed that these copies had been ‘commonly sold’, but whether or not that is true remains unclear: BL, Harleian MS 7176, p. 75. See G. Goodwin, revised by P. Carter, ‘Morris, Morris Drake (1695–c.1733)’, in ODNB. 67. e.g. BL, Shelfmark C.24.b.6, where the Latin ‘Matthaeus ’ has been added neatly in MS. 68. Joscelin’s MS of the ‘Matthaeus ’ is CCCC, PL MS 489, pp. 71–89 (undated). 69. e.g. BL, Shelfmark G.11757 (printed ‘Matthaeus ’). 70. BL, Harleian MS 7176, p. 75. 71. P. Collinson’s review of V. J. K. Brook, A Life of Archbishop Parker (Oxford, 1962) in JEH , 13 (1962), p. 245. 72. C. E. S.[ayle], Early English Printed Books in the University Library Cambridge (1475 to 1640), 4 vols (Cambridge, 1900–1907), III p. 1414 (No. 6298). 73. The typeface is that associated with the press of Michael Schirat. Cartwright saw at least five books through that press in the period 1574–1577: A. F. Johnson, ‘Books Printed at Heidelberg for Thomas Cartwright’, The Library, 5th Series, II (1948), pp. 284–6. The link is

6

74. 75.

76.

77.

78.

79.

80.

81.

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accepted in P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 152–3. It is unclear why Mears (who vaguely mentions ‘typographical evidence’) rejects the idea of a connection with Schirat’s press: N. Mears, ‘Counsel, Public Debate, and Queenship: John Stubbs’s The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf , 1579’, HJ , 44 (2001), pp. 642–3 (mistaking the extent of the translation). [Joscelin], Life, sigs A3r, B5v–[B6]r, C2r, C3r. [A. à Wood], Athenae Oxonienses. An Exact History of All the Writers and Bishops Who Have Had Their Education in the Most Ancient and Famous University of Oxford, From the Fifteenth Year of King Henry the Seventh, Dom. 1500, to the End of the Year 1690 …, 2 vols (London, 1691–1692) [Wing, W3382 and W3383A], I col. 589 (wrongly locating publication in Holland). E. Lodge, Portraits of Illustrious Personages of Great Britain …, 12 vols (London, 1823–1834), III pp. 1–9 (at p. 7). See L. Peltz, ‘Lodge, Edmund (1756–1839)’, in ODNB. B. Usher, ‘Expedient and Experiment: The Elizabethan Lay Reader’, in R. N. Swanson (ed.), Continuity and Change in Christian Worship, Studies in Church History, 35 (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 185–98. W. M. Kennedy (ed.), The ‘Interpretations’ of the Bishops & Their Influence on Elizabethan Episcopal Policy (With an Appendix of the Original Documents), Alcuin Club Tracts, VIII (London, 1908). M. Parker et al., A Declaration of Certayne Principall Articles of Religion … (London, [1560]) [STC, 10034.4], contextualized briefly in M. Davie, ‘The Augsburg Confession and the Thirty-Nine Articles’, in D. Wendebourg (ed.), Sister Reformations/Schwesterreformationen: The Reformation in Germany and in England/Die Reformation in Deutschland und in England (Tübingen, 2010), pp. 198–9. M. Parker, An Admonicion (For the Necessitie of the Presente Tyme Tyll a Furder Consultation) to All Suche as Shall Intende Hereafter to Enter the State of Matrimonye Godly and Agreably to Lawes ([London], 1560) [not in STC ], which exists (a broadsheet annotated by several hands, one of them Parker’s) in CCCC, PL MS 113, pp. 328i–328l. A revised version was issued in 1563: see ibid., pp. 328a–328d and 328e–328h. Valuable analysis is available in R. B. Outhwaite, Clandestine Marriage in England, 1500–1850 (London, 1995), pp. 6, 7, 24, 67; M. Harding, ‘The Curious Incident of the Marriage Act (No 2) 1537 and the Irish Statute Book’, Legal Studies, 32 (2012), pp. 78–108. Seemingly untitled, the work is reprinted (from a CUL copy) in W. K. Clay (ed.), Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, PS (Cambridge, 1847), pp. 435–55.

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82. Originally published in Latin (omitting Article 29 at Elizabeth’s behest) as [M. Parker et al.], Articvli, de Quibus in Synodo Londinensi Anno Domini, Iuxta Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ Computationem, MDLXII, ad Tollendam Opinionum Dissensionem, & Firmandum in Uera Religione Consensum, Inter Archiepiscopos Episcoposque Utriusque Prouinciæ, Nec Non Etiam Uniuersum Clerum Conuenit (London, 1563) [STC, 10035]. The missing article was restored in 1571, when the set was re-confirmed and enshrined in statute. 83. [M. Parker et al.], The Seconde Tome of Homelyes … (London, 1563) [STC, 13663], discussed in A. Null, ‘Official Tudor Homilies’, in P. McCullough et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford, 2011), pp. 359–63. 84. The Holie Bible Conteynyng the Olde Testament and the Newe (London, [1568]) [STC, 2099 and many later edns]. 85. P. Brooks, ‘Matthew Parker—The Abandoned Archbishop: An Address in Commemoration of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury [,] Given in the Chapel of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge 27 April, 1975’ [unpublished typescript available in CCCC, PL], p. 4. 86. C. Law, Contested Reformations in the University of Cambridge 1535– 1584 (Woodbridge, 2018), passim. 87. G. Rupp, Matthew Parker, A Man: The Text of a Lecture Given in the Mill Lane Lecture Rooms, Cambridge, on 4 March 1975 ([Cambridge, 1975]), p. 19. 88. P. McGrath, Papists and Puritans Under Elizabeth I (London, 1967), p. 50; F. Heal, ‘Parker, Matthew’, in H. J. Hillerbrand (general ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols (Oxford, 1996), III p. 216. 89. H. C. Porter, ‘Archbishop Matthew Parker’, Letter of the Corpus Association, No. 46 (1967), pp. 18–19. 90. Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Ashmole 836, p. 280. 91. John Whitgift to Sir William Cecil, 1st baron Burghley, Trinity College, Cambridge, 30 May 1575, printed from an untraced source in Strype, Parker, p. 495, where Andrew Perne is suggested as the informant. On Whitgift’s nomination to the queen for a bishopric, see Bruce & Perowne, Correspondence, p. 476 (Letter CCCLXVIII: Matthew Parker to Edmund Grindal, archbishop of York, Lambeth, 17 March 1575). In fact, Whitgift would not join the episcopate until 1577. 92. H. Robinson (ed.), The Zürich Letters, Comprising the Correspondence of Several English Bishops and Others, With Some of the Helvetian Reformers, During the Early Part of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, PS (Cambridge,

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93.

94.

95.

96.

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1842), p. 317 (Letter CXXVII: Richard Cox to Rodolph Gualter, Isle of Ely, 31 July 1575). Anon. (ed.), ‘The Lambarde Diary’, Miscellanea Genealogica et Heraldica, Old Series, II (London, 1876), p. 100, though Lambarde was incorrect in stating that Parker had been buried in Lambeth parish church. There is much on the friendship between the two great antiquaries in R. M. Warnicke, William Lambarde: Elizabethan Antiquary 1536–1601 (London, 1973); R. J. S. Grant, Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde, and the Laws of the Anglo-Saxons (Amsterdam, 1996); and R. Brackmann, The Elizabethan Invention of Anglo-Saxon England: Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Study of Old English (Cambridge, 2012). J. Stow, The Chronicles of England, from Brute unto this Present Yeare of Christ 1580 (London, [1580]) [STC, 23333], pp. 1182–3. On Stow’s relationship with Parker, see B. L. Beer, Tudor England Observed: The World of John Stow (Stroud, 1998), pp. 7, 9, 12, 14–15, 28; I. W. Archer, ‘John Stow, Citizen and Historian’, in I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (eds), John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book (London, 2004), pp. 20, 22; and O. Harris, ‘Stow and the Contemporary Antiquarian Network’, ibid., pp. 28–30. F.[rancis] G.[odwin], A Catalogue of the Bishops of England, Since the First Planting of Christian Religion in This Island, Together With a Briefe History of Their Lives and Memorable Actions, so Neere as Can be Gathered Out of Antiquity (London, 1601) [STC, 11937], sigs [A3]r–[A4]v (epistle to the reader) and pp. 129–30 (my emphases). See also D. R. Woolf, ‘Godwin, Francis (1562–1633)’, in ODNB, describing the book as ‘unevenly researched’. Parker was ‘singularis ille omnium disciplinarum pater fautorque, & summus venerandæ antiquitatis cultor …, qui cum magnis impensis & maiori cura vndique libros manuscriptos ab interitu vindicasset, quos in bibliotheca Collegii Corporis Christi Cantabrigiæ reposuit ’: W. Camden (ed.), Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica, Cambrica, a Veteribvs Scripta … (2nd edn, Frankfurt, 1603), sigs ***2r–v (in dedicatory epistle addressed to Fulke Greville). I owe the translation of the first quotation to the kindness of Dr. Elisabeth Leedham-Green; the second comes from Strype, Parker, p. 540. Note that this dedicatory epistle does not feature in the first edn of Camden’s book (Frankfurt, 1602) published under a slightly different title. For analysis of the second edn, which reprints Parker’s essay on Asser’s ‘Life’ of Ælfred, see W. H. Herendeen, William Camden: A Life in Context (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 96, 167–8, 176–8, 285, 289, 507 (seemingly unaware of 1602 edn).

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97. A. Darcie (trans.), W. Camden, Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth Queene of England France and Ireland &c. …, 3 books (London, 1625) [STC, 4497], Book I pp. 10, 32 (where incorrectly described as a privy councillor—it is possible, however, that Parker had belonged to the unreformed Henrician King’s Council, though such membership remains to be corroborated). 98. H.[enry] H.[olland], Herωologia Anglica …, 2 books in 1 ([Arnhem, 1620]) [STC, 13582], Book II pp. 174–7. Vertue’s comment is an annotation to the copy now CUL, Shelfmark Keynes.D.5.19. 99. D. Lupton (ed. and trans.), J. Verheiden, The History of the Moderne Protestant Divines … (London, 1637) [STC, 24660], pp. 269–75. 100. G. Widdowes, The Schysmatical Puritan. A Sermon Preached at Witney Concerning the Lawfulnesse of Church-Authority, for Ordaining, and Commanding of Rites, and Ceremonies, to Beautifie the Church (Oxford, 1630) [STC, 25594], sig. B[1]v. Extracts are printed in L. A. Sasek (ed.), Images of English Puritanism: A Collection of Contemporary Sources, 1589–1646 (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, c.1989), pp. 284–96 (relevant passage at p. 290). See also N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 78–81. 101. S. Clarke, The Marrow of Ecclesiastical Historie, Conteined in the Lives of the Fathers, and Other Learned Men, and Famous Divines, Which Have Flourished in the Church Since Christ’s Time, to This Present Age … (London, 1650) [Wing, C4543], pp. 287–8 (incorrect life dates). On his compilations, see J. Eales, ‘Samuel Clarke and the “Lives” of Godly Women in Seventeenth-Century England’, in W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (eds), Women in the Church, Studies in Church History, 27 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 365–76; P. Lake, ‘Reading Clarke’s Lives in Political and Polemical Context’, in K. Sharpe and S. N. Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2008), pp. 293–318; and Z. Leader (general ed.), The Oxford History of Life-Writing, 7 vols (Oxford, 2018–), II pp. 199–214. See also A. Hughes, ‘Clarke, Samuel (1599–1682)’, in ODNB. 102. J. Gauden, Iερα ακρυα. Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ Suspiria. The Tears, Sighs, Complaints, and Prayers of the Church of England: Setting Forth Her Former Constitution, Compared With Her Present Condition … (London, 1659) [Wing, G359], p. 612. See also B. D. Spinks, ‘Gauden, John (1599/1600?–1662)’, in ODNB. 103. [J. Banks], The Life of the Right Reverend Father in God, Edw. Rainbow, D.D. Late Lord Bishop of Carlisle. To Which is Added, a Sermon Preached at His Funeral by Thomas Tully … at Dalston, April the 1st 1684 (London, 1688) [Wing, B669], pp. 57–9.

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104. H. N. Birt, The Elizabethan Religious Settlement: A Study of Contemporary Documents (London, 1907), pp. 249–50 (where the story is dismissed, partly on grounds of ‘the known piety, soberness, moderation, and integrity and the general uprightness of Matthew Parker himself’). 105. Chiefly the entry in Parker’s archiepiscopal register: W. H. Frere (ed.), Registrum Matthei Parker Diocesis Cantuariensis A.D. 1559–1575, 3 vols, The Canterbury and York Society, XXXV, XXXVI and XXXIX (n.p., 1928–1933), I pp. 31–3. 106. D. F. Sutton (ed.), Unpublished Works by William Alabaster (1568– 1640), Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, No. 126 (Salzburg, 1997), p. 161. See also J. Bertram, ‘The Conversion of William Alabaster’, The Venerabile, XXXII No. 3 (2002), p. 18; F. J. Bremer, ‘Alabaster, William (1568–1640)’, in ODNB. 107. Christophoro a Sacrobosco, De Investiganda Vera ac Visibili Christi Ecclesia, Libellus (Antwerp, 1604), pp. 17–18, mentioning Thomas Neal and William Alabaster. See also J. T. Gilbert, revised by B. Cunningham, ‘Holywood [à Sacro Bosco], Christopher (1559?–1626)’, in ODNB. 108. [W. Bishop] (ed.), Ioannis Pitsei [J. Pits], Relationvm Historicarvm de Rebus Anglicis (Paris, 1619), which is commonly cited by its running title as ‘De Illustribus Angliæ Scriptoribus ’. Pits claimed that Neal had witnessed proceedings at the Nag’s Head: G. Lloyd Jones, ‘Neal [Neale], Thomas (b. c.1519, d. in or after 1590)’, in ODNB. 109. F. Mason, Of the Consecration of the Bishops in the Church of England … (London, 1613) [STC, 17597], pp. 121–32. On the disputed authorship, see N. W. S. Cranfield, ‘Mason, Francis (1565/66–1621)’, in ODNB. 110. F. Godwin, De Præsvlibvs Angliæ Commentarius … (London, 1616) [STC, 11941], pp. 217–20. Two of the men named were Thomas Fitzherbert (Jesuit) and Matthew Kellison (secular priest). 111. T. Fuller, The Church-History of Britain; From the Birth of Jesus Christ, Untill the Year MDCXLVIII (London, 1655) [Wing, F2416], Book IX pp. 61, 62, 60, 74, 60, 108. 112. G. Burnet, The Abridgment of the History of the Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1682) [Wing, B5755], pp. 343–4. For his fuller appraisal of Parker, see G. Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, 2 parts (London, 1679–1681) [Wing, B5797 and B5798A], II pp. 378–9, 401–4 (denouncing ‘the impudence’ of the Nag’s Head ‘fiction’). The work is briefly assessed in M. Greig, ‘Burnet, Gilbert (1643–1715)’, in ODNB. 113. For an invitation to subscribe, see The Daily Courant, Issue 2659 (2 May 1710), p. [2], where Parker is described as the archbishop ‘under whose primacy and influence the Reformation of religion was happily

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114. 115. 116. 117.

118.

119.

120.

121. 122.

123. 124.

effected; and the Church of England … establish’d upon the principles whereon it stands to this day’. G. H. Martin and A. McConnell, ‘Strype, John (1643–1737)’, in ODNB. Strype, Parker, p. 524. Ibid. J. Le Neve, The Lives and Characters, Deaths, Burials, and Epitaphs, Works of Piety, Charity, and Other Munificent Benefactions of all the Protestant Bishops of the Church of England Since the Reformation, as Settled by Queen Elizabeth Anno Dom. 1559 (London, 1720), pp. 3–28 (at p. 12). Anon., ‘The Life of Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury’, in The Weekly Journal or, British Gazetteer, unnumbered issue of 16 April 1720, pp. 1578–79 (at p. 1578). [Timothy Brecknock], Droit Le Roy. Or a Digest of the Rights and Prerogatives of the Imperial Crown of Great-Britain (London, 1764), p. 50. Anon., A Catalogue of the Large and Capital Collection of Pictures … of James West … ([London, 1773]), p. 2 (Lots 13, 24). The copy accessible via Eighteenth Century Collections Online is annotated with what I take to be the sum realized for each lot. On West, politician and antiquary, see W. P. Courtney, revised by P. Woodland, ‘West, James (1703–1772)’, in ODNB. John, Lord Sheffield (ed.), Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon …, 2 vols (London, 1796), II p. 710. J. P. Andrews, History of Great Britain, From the Death of Henry VIII to the Accession of James VI of Scotland to the Crown of England. Being a Continuation of Dr Henry’s History of Great Britain, and Written on the Same Plan, 2 vols (London, 1796), I pp. 274, 281–3, 288–91, II pp. 164, 176. See also W. P. Courtney, revised by J. A. Marchand, ‘Andrews, James Pettit (c.1737–1797)’, in ODNB. Important revisionist analyses (both mentioning the [1567] edn of Parker’s metrical psalter) are available in R. Ahnert, ‘Introduction: The Psalms and the English Reformation’, RS, 29 (2015), pp. 493–508 (prefacing an issue concentrating on engagement with the psalms) and J. Milsom, ‘Tallis, the Parker Psalter, and Some Known Unknowns’, Early Music, XLIV (2016), pp. 207–18. Anon., A New and General Biographical Dictionary …, 15 vols (London, 1798), XII pp. 19–20. e.g. positive assessments in H. Soames, Elizabethan Religious History (London, 1839), pp. 204–13 and C. Hardwick, A History of the Christian Church During the Reformation (Cambridge, 1856), pp. 245–6.

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125. W. Guirey, The History of Episcopacy, in Four Parts, From its Rise to the Present Day ([Raleigh, North Carolina?, 1799?]), p. 83. On Guirey, see the Preface to his book and J. B. North, Union in Truth: An Interpretive History of the Restoration Movement (Cincinnati, Ohio, 1994; republished Eugene, Oregon, 2019), pp. 19–24 (of latter publication). 126. J. Aikin et al., General Biography; or, Lives, Critical and Historical, of the Most Eminent Persons of all Ages, Countries, Conditions, and Professions …, 10 vols (London, 1799–1815), VII pp. 624–33 (at p. 632). 127. See M. L. Brooks, ‘Aikin, John (1747–1822)’, in ODNB and K. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005), p. 19. 128. D. J. Crankshaw, ‘Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Surveys of the Ministry of the Church of England’, University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis (2000), pp. 20–37. 129. L. Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth, 2 vols (3rd edn, London, 1819), I pp. 14, 149, 254, 322–6. On the author, who was John Aikin’s daughter, see B. Brandon Schnorrenberg, ‘Aikin, Lucy (1781–1864)’, in ODNB (where she is described as ‘a dissenting Liberal’) and A. Laurence, ‘Women Historians and Documentary Research: Lucy Aikin, Agnes Strickland, Mary Anne Everett Green and Lucy Toulmin Smith’, in J. Bellamy et al. (eds), Women, Scholarship and Criticism: Gender and Knowledge c.1790–1900 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 125–41. 130. T. Morell, Studies in History; Containing the History of England, from its Earliest Records to the Death of Elizabeth …, 2 vols (3rd edn, London, 1822), I p. 439. Morell was a non-conformist minister who in 1821 became theological tutor in the Coward Trust’s academy at Wymondley, Hertfordshire, and accompanied the institution when it removed to London in 1833: S. N. Dixon, ‘Morell, Thomas (1782– 1840)’, Dissenting Academies Online: Database and Encyclopedia, Dr. Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies (June 2011). 131. J. A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth, 12 vols (London, 1856–1870), VII pp. 173–5, XI pp. 82–3 (quoted here). See also A. F. Pollard, revised by W. Thomas, ‘Froude, James Anthony (1818–1894)’, in ODNB, but additionally J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 231–85, G. R. Elton, ‘J. A. Froude and His History of England’, in G. R. Elton, Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government, 4 vols (Cambridge, 1974–1992), III pp. 391–412 and J. Garnett, ‘Protestant Histories: James Anthony Froude, Partisanship and National Identity’, in P. Ghosh and L. Goldman (eds), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew (Oxford, 2006), pp. 171–91.

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132. H. Hall, Society in the Elizabethan Age (5th edn, London, 1902), p. 170. See also C. Johnson, revised by G. H. Martin, ‘Hall, Hubert (1857– 1944)’, in ODNB, where any religious beliefs go unmentioned. 133. See, however, the disgraceful account—uninformed, partisan and erroneous—presented in P. G. Maxwell-Stuart, The Archbishops of Canterbury (Stroud, 2006), pp. 160, 189–93. 134. E. Evenden and T. S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge, 2011). 135. A. Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago, Illinois, and London, 1994); P. Kewes et al. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Holinshed’s Chronicles (Oxford, 2013). 136. e.g. J. P. Carley, ‘The Manuscript Remains of John Leland, “The King’s Antiquary”’, Text, 2 (1985), pp. 111–20; J. P. Carley (ed. and trans.), John Leland, De Uiris Illustribus: On Famous Men (Toronto and Oxford, c.2010); and J. P. Carley, ‘“Many Good Autors”: Two of John Leland’s Manuscripts and the Cambridge Connexion’, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15 No. 3 (2014), pp. 27–56. 137. I. Gadd and A. Gillespie (eds), John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modern Culture and the History of the Book (London, 2004). 138. N. B. Bjorklund, ‘Parker’s Purposes for His Manuscripts: Matthew Parker in the Context of his Early Career and Sixteenth-Century Church Reform’, in J. T. Lionarons (ed.), Old English Literature in Its Manuscript Context, Medieval European Studies, 5 (Morgantown, West Virginia, 2004), pp. 217–41. 139. P. M. Black, ‘Matthew Parker’s Search for Cranmer’s “Great Notable Written Books”’, The Library, 5th Series, XXIX (1974), pp. 312–22. 140. A. Grafton, ‘A Medical Man Among Ecclesiastical Historians: John Caius, Matthew Parker and the History of Cambridge University’, in G. Manning and C. Klestinec (eds), Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, Archimedes, 50 (Cham, [2017]), pp. 113–27. 141. T. Graham, ‘Matthew Parker’s Manuscripts: An Elizabethan Library and its Use’, in E. Leedham-Green et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2006), I pp. 322– 41. 142. T. Graham and A. G. Watson (eds), The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan England: Documents by John Bale and John Joscelyn from the Circle of Matthew Parker, Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Monograph No. 13 (Cambridge, 1998). 143. N. L. Jones, ‘Matthew Parker, John Bale, and the Magdeburg Centuriators’, SCJ , XII (1981), pp. 35–49.

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144. A. J. Kleist, ‘Matthew Parker, Old English, and the Defense of Priestly Marriage’, in T. N. Hall and D. Scragg (eds), Anglo-Saxon Books and Their Readers: Essays in Celebration of Helmut Gneuss’s Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts (Kalamazoo, Michigan, 2008), pp. 106–35. 145. B. S. Robinson, ‘“Darke Speech”: Matthew Parker and the Reforming of History’, SCJ , XXIX (1998), pp. 1061–83. 146. W. H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2008). 147. J. Broadway, ‘No Historie So Meete’: Gentry Culture and the Development of Local History in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Manchester, 2006); A. Grafton, What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2007); D. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford, 2003). 148. A. Grafton, ‘Matthew Parker: The Book as Archive’, History of Humanities, 2 (2017), pp. 15–50; F. Heal, ‘Appropriating History: Catholic and Protestant Polemics and the National Past’, HLQ , 68 (2005), pp. 109– 32, reprinted in P. Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, California, 2006), pp. 105–28, and F. Heal, ‘What Can King Lucius Do For You? The Reformation and the Early British Church’, EHR, CXX (2005), pp. 593–614; R. Oates, ‘Elizabethan Histories of English Christian Origins’, in K. van Liere et al. (eds), Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World (Oxford, 2012), pp. 165–85. 149. C. Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford, 1993). 150. S. Doran and N. Jones (eds), The Elizabethan World (Abingdon, 2011). 151. E. Ives, The Reformation Experience: Living Through the Turbulent 16th Century (Oxford, 2012); Marshall, Heretics & Believers, where (p. 516) he is especially critical of Parker’s editorship of the Bishops’ Bible. 152. B. McNeil (trans.), K. Ganzer and B. Steimer (eds), Dictionary of the Reformation (New York, 2004), pp. 24–5 (Barlow), 31–2 (Bilney). 153. M. Lapidge, The Anglo-Saxon Library (Oxford, 2006), p. 399. 154. Strype, Parker, p. 543.

CHAPTER 7

John Whitgift Redivivus: Reconsidering the Reputation of Elizabeth’s Last Archbishop of Canterbury Felicity Heal

It is remarkable that there has been no full biography of Elizabeth I’s third archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift (1530/31?–1604), since John Strype (1643–1737) published his weighty tome in 1718.1 As long ago as the 1950s, when Norman Sykes introduced the published version of Powel Dawley’s Hale Lectures, John Whitgift and the Reformation, he observed that his subject needed ‘a modern biographer’, and regrettably he still does.2 This is not to discount the lucid and thorough Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article by William Sheils, which should be the starting point for any future study, or to ignore the recent short illustrated survey by Christopher Barnett, lately headmaster of the school that the archbishop founded.3 But the fact remains that Whitgift has not been the focus of attention of the kind that Thomas Cranmer, Reginald Pole and Edmund Grindal have been accorded. There is also the curious fact that the archbishop languishes between the two key studies of

F. Heal (B) Jesus College, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_7

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his predecessor and successor written by Patrick Collinson (1929–2011): his admired Grindal (1516×20–1583) and loathed Richard Bancroft (bap. 1544, d. 1610).4 Various explanations could be adduced for this lacuna. Dawley’s observation in the Introduction to his lectures was that Whitgift is ‘not a man whom it is easy to know’, lacking as he does the ‘human touches’ of Matthew Parker, or, we might add, Thomas Cranmer.5 A. L. Rowse (1903–1997) observed that Whitgift’s total devotion to the Church ‘robs his private life of any interest’.6 But intellectual and political biographies of the Tudor period have rarely depended on a capacity to achieve intimacy with their subject, and anyway there is plenty of material from Sir George Paule’s biography and from the archbishop’s Croydon foundation to gain some sense of who this man was.7 A more convincing explanation is that touched upon by Sheils in the concluding section of his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography article. Whitgift’s reputation, he says, ‘has been dominated by those controversies that dominated his life’.8 The man and the fate of the Elizabethan Church of England seem so intertwined that the former is easily lost in complex debates about the latter. Strype’s advertisement for his biography gets this point effectively when he describes his narrative as ‘interwoven [with] much of the history of the affairs of this Church’.9 The list that follows skims breathlessly through patronage, parliamentary conflicts, Jesuits, puritans, separatists, visitations, ecclesiastical courts, royal authority and the Hampton Court Conference. Strype might be accused of lacking discrimination, but he is correct in essentials: these themes and more are necessary components to an evaluation of Whitgift’s contribution. While few have been sufficiently courageous to engage fully with this complex story, its sheer diversity means that historians writing on any aspect of the Elizabethan Church have to give much attention to the archbishop. ‘The history of Whitgift’, says John Ayre in his biographical memoir added to the Parker Society edition of the Works, ‘becomes the history of the Church of England’.10 Understanding his role in the formation of that Church is an essential part of the Reformation historian’s tool-kit. John Whitgift’s reputation among his contemporaries and the immediately following generations can be conceptualized in dichotomies. From the moment at which he became a hammer of Thomas Cartwright (1534/35–1603) in 1570s Cambridge, he was the focus of bitter resentment among the godly. Giles Wigginton (fl. 1564–1597) is often quoted here because of the longevity of his hostility, which began when, as a

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scholar of Trinity College, Whitgift as master had reproved him and others as ‘saucy boys, busy bodies and meddlers’ for breaching discipline and abandoning the surplice.11 The radicals had every reason to articulate such anger at the determined archbishop, and they tended, of course, to have the best tunes. This was so whether in the form of Barrow’s assault on ‘a monster[,] a miserable compound … even that second beast spoken of in the Revelation’ or in the form of the caustic wit of the Marprelate Tracts, where he became ‘the pope of Lambeth’, ‘a desparate caytiffe’ and Andrew Perne’s ‘bag boy’.12 None of this is surprising, but it may be worth pointing to one of the more surprising Martinist charges that recurs in attacks on Whitgift’s reputation. He was said not to be worthy to ‘carry Cartwright’s books after him for learning’, to have no ‘great portion of learning’ and to have shown his lack of learning in his replies to Cartwright.13 The soi-disant godly had every reason to endorse the early comment of Sir Francis Walsingham’s secretary that the choice of Whitgift as archbishop ‘maketh me to think that the Lord is even determined to scourge his Church for their unthankfulness’.14 Their complaints are crudely summed up in the libel epitaph that was pinned to his hearse in 1604, which became the subject of a Court of Star Chamber case. In the version recorded by the barrister John Hawarde, the first eight lines read— The prelate spoke. The Cananites hope. Masked impietie, cunninge hipocrisie, Prelates’ pope, Jesuites’ hope, Papistes’ broker, atheistes’ cloker, Latin doctor, devill’s proctor, Dum dog’s patron, non residentes’ champion, Oure reformers’ sclaunderer, true pastors’ punisher, Colored conformitie, vaine superstition, …

The rest continues in much the same vein, assailing the Church courts, and warning Bancroft against being, like his old patron, one of the ‘ravening cleargie woolves in the land’.15 The libel was sweeping in its condemnation: here was a prelate who was not only the hammer of the puritans, but also the favourer of Catholics and atheists, and the defender of the ecclesiastical courts whose passing would be mourned by the whole tribe of proctors, registrars, apparitors and summoners.

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In Whitgift’s lifetime, the views of the queen herself were the most influential counter-balance to this hostility. Her general support for his policies was well-known among the political elite, and she demonstrated her approval with gestures of affection and frequent visits to his Croydon palace.16 The idea that Elizabeth liked his good housekeeping and ‘good tall men’ was the subject of a discussion reported to the authorities as early as [1585].17 There are a few positive comments about the archbishop from his lifetime. One of the most interesting is the letter sent by George Cranmer (1564–1600) to Richard Hooker (1554–1600) in 1598, in which he denounced the brethren of the Discipline, and represented Whitgift as a heroic figure, ‘one man alone’, who stood in the breach created by a radical Cartwright and his followers ‘and gave others respite to prepare themselves to the defence’. Thereby he had ensured that ‘God hath made good unto him his own impress, vincit qui patitur’.18 Another admirer was the antiquary John Stow [Stowe] (1524/25–1605), who dedicated his Annales (1592) to Whitgift: to him the archbishop was ‘a man born for the benefit of his country and the good of his Church’.19 Only after his demise did Whitgift’s reputation as a courageous leader of the Church of England gain greater traction. There were encomia to countervail the hearse epitaph from the literary hack Thomas Churchyard (1523?–1604); from one of the archbishop’s chaplains, Dr Benjamin Carier (bap. 1565, d. 1614); from John Rhodes, minister of Enborne; from William Gamage; and from an unknown Oxford scholar quoted by Sir John Harington (bap. 1560, d. 1612).20 Then the Crown’s Star Chamber case against Lewis Pickering (bap. 1571)—who may, or may not, have been the author of the hearse poem—gave privy councillors an extraordinary opportunity to sing the archbishop’s praises. For Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, he was a foe of the ‘factious, turbulent and virulente’, but lenient in affairs of state, virtuous and generous, and the rest all followed his comments, the earls of Worcester and Cumberland and Lord Zouche of Haryngworth recalling their Cambridge days under his instruction, and Attorney-General Sir Edward Coke praising his wisdom, experience and slowness to anger.21 Sir George Paule (1563–1635), Whitgift’s comptroller of household, was aware of these plaudits when he published his Life of the Most Reverend and Religious Prelate John Whitgift, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury (1612). Paule’s biography, derived from the knowledge accumulated during his long personal service to the archbishop, has ever since been used as the essential guide to his household, style of governance and

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personal behaviour, while often ignored for its judgements. Brett Usher is merely more forthright than many other historians in categorizing the book as ‘whitewash’.22 There is, however, a good argument for looking more closely and positively at Paule, though more for the construction of the image of Whitgift than for detailed evidence about his political actions. The publication date is interesting because of the interval since the archbishop’s death. Paule blamed the delay on ‘the backwardnesse of some’ who should have made use of the scribblings and notes he had jotted down—probably a mere rhetorical trope. The delay, whatever its cause, allowed him to dedicate the book to George Abbot after the death of his pugilistic predecessor, Bancroft, and to use the regime change to highlight his central theme: that the mission of the Church was peace and that Whitgift had been dedicated to that end. Of course, Paule made it clear that this peace had been achieved only through a heroic willingness to forgive enemies of the truth: his text on the title-page is Romans 16:17: ‘now I beseech you brethren, marke them diligently which cause division and offences, contrary to the doctrine which yee have learned, and avoide them’.23 Paule’s narrative actually presents a biography more dominated by strife than peace: he concentrates upon Whitgift’s Cambridge disputes, on his defence against Cartwright in the 1570s, on the building crisis of radical puritanism, the Marprelate Tracts, the William Hacket debacle and finally the trials of John Penry and John Udall in the early 1590s. Thomas Cartwright is consistently presented as the leading villain in Paule’s story, seen as instrumental in stirring up Hacket and others and as the ‘fountaine and principall author’ of all these broils.24 Paule also saw conflict at the heart of the political regime, and it should be stressed that his is a very political story. The earl of Leicester is cast as a constant opponent of the archbishop’s plans, and Lord Burghley, less convincingly, as a faithful friend. Not all Whitgift’s conflicts are given equal attention: there is little on the use of the ex-officio oath in the Ecclesiastical Commission and, remarkably, nothing at all on the Lambeth Articles of 1595, possibly because they lacked royal approval, or did not entirely show his master in a good light. How then with this story of conflict is it possible to present Whitgift as a man of peace? Paule’s favoured technique is to denigrate the motives of his enemies: he argues, for example, that Cartwright’s initial hostility to Whitgift was caused by pique at losing his disputation before the queen at the 1564 royal visit to Cambridge. In this, and in most

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other examples, the response by Whitgift is presented as mild and patient. Taking his cue from what the great had already said, Paule returned again and again to moderation co-existing with firmness. As master of Trinity College, Whitgift, he says, ‘breathed nothing but sweet … love and peace’ to the factious young; he was characterized as an incorruptible friend of the weak when bishop of Worcester; he was generous in rescuing Udall and others from the full penalties of the law; constant in his affection for those who had supported him, notably Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex. He was, says Paule, never ‘puffed up with pride’ and was temperate in all his doings.25 When the passages on the archbishop as a conscientious preacher, on the formality of his household and train and on his unstinting service to the State are added, the reader is offered a nearly perfect model of the godly leader of the Church. Paule recognizes, though only to deny it, that the danger of the sectaries was thought by ‘some, not of the greatest foresight’ to have been exaggerated by his master. He felt the need to respond to criticism of Whitgift’s learning by saying that the scholarly lectures he had given at Cambridge would be printed.26 And the archbishop is allowed his ‘fatal flaw’, choler, though only as a rhetorical device to show how he had overcome this weakness. Other anti-puritans also heaped praise upon the archbishop. William Camden (1551–1623) in his Annales, the first instalment published in Latin in 1615, though not translated into English until 1625, called him ‘a man of singular goodnesse and learning’, full of ‘wisedome and patience’, who re-established the discipline of the Church of England that ‘then lay dismembred’. Camden singled out the enforcement of the Three Articles (1583), and his protection of ecclesiastical property from greedy nobles as the apogee of his career.27 Sir John Harington, in his sketchy account designed as a supplement to Francis Godwin’s Catalogue of the Bishops of England … (London, 1601) [STC, 11937] and only printed in modern times, describes Whitgift’s ‘orderly troop of tawny coats’ who attended him at Parliament while bishop of Worcester. Like Paule, he admires his ‘mild and charitable course’ as archbishop, claiming this won over the puritans and garnered the praise of all the clergy of England.28 By the end of the Jacobean period, the reputation of the archbishop as a hero of the ecclesiastical Establishment had been firmly constructed. He was represented as showing a combination of resolution and mercifulness in the face of the puritan onslaught, doing as much as any man could do to save the Church. While none of this was forgotten in the years that followed, in the intensifying doctrinal debates of the 1620s

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controversialists paid more specific heed to his views on ecclesiology and soteriology. Whitgift’s stand in the Admonition Controversy against iure divino episcopacy, and his acceptance that the pope was antichrist, provided useful ammunition for William Prynne (1600–1669) in a variety of his 1630s pamphlets against the Arminians.29 Above all, contention about the nature and status of the 1595 Lambeth Articles raised questions about where Whitgift stood on the key issue of predestination. In 1629, in The Church of Englands Old Antithesis to New Arminianisme, Prynne printed the nine Lambeth Articles, with their explicit endorsement of Calvinist theology on this matter.30 His objective was to lend the authority of the leaders of the Church, above all Whitgift, to this affirmation of what was held to be true doctrine. The archbishop was now represented as the pillar of predestinarian orthodoxy, standing against a new hierarchy that was its nemesis. While Prynne had to mute Whitgift’s relentless hostility to puritanism, Peter Heylyn (1599–1662), who otherwise subscribed to many of the elements in Paule’s vision, had to explain away his role in the Lambeth Articles. A cautious position would have been that adopted by the editor of the re-titled 1634 edition of Camden’s Annales. He added a lengthy addendum on the Articles to the original text, praising the pastoral role that Whitgift had undertaken in resolving the doctrinal ‘stirs’ in Cambridge.31 By then, however, the evaluation of the Articles had been absorbed into the general attack on Calvinist theology. Richard Mountague (bap. 1575, d. 1641) in Appello Caesarem (1625) wrote of the ‘sharp reproof’ which the Articles had encountered.32 Heylyn was more blunt: he blamed the promotion of the Articles on the ‘Calvinian faction’ who ‘preoccupate’ the archbishop with ‘sad complaints’ of disturbance in the university until they gained their predestinarian way. Heylyn dismissed the Articles as having ‘no authority in themselves’, made as they were in consultation with only a small group at Lambeth, and then banned from publication by the queen. Whitgift could not be exonerated from the charge that this was an aberration in his anti-Calvinist management of the Church, but this did not need to trouble later generations, said Heylyn, since the Articles had been decisively rejected in the convocation of 1634.33 Thomas Fuller (1607/8–1661) in his Church-History of Britain … (London, 1655) was far more at ease with Whitgift. Calling him ‘one of the worthiest men that ever the English hierarchy did enjoy’, he praised him as courteous and respectful to the great. This was no bland portrait,

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however, for Fuller followed Paule on his subject as a tough politician who ‘never denied any great man’s desire, and yet never granted it’.34 Fuller’s own position as a moderate Calvinist with episcopalian sympathies made it possible for him to sympathize with Whitgift’s doctrinal outlook as well as with his control of the Church. On the Lambeth Articles, he spoke directly against Arminian views: I must tread tenderly [as I] am ready to touch the quick of some yet alive … though these Articles want authentic reputation to pass for provincial acts …, yet will they be readily received of orthodox Christians for as far as their own purity bears conformity to God’s Word.35

In the aftermath of the Restoration, Whitgift’s specific views are less frequently represented in religious controversy. The archbishop often becomes one of a rather undifferentiated list of worthies who had laid the foundation stones for the English Church, beginning with Cranmer and leading up to Hooker. There were occasions for more polemical focus, best demonstrated by Bishop Stillingfleet’s massive oeuvre. Edward Stillingfleet (1635–1699) was able to use Whitgift’s writing to accompany him in his shift from acceptance of different forms of ecclesiology in the early 1660s to an attack on separation in the 1680s. In the first example, much is made of the statement that ‘no form of Church government is by the Scriptures prescribed to, or commanded[,] the Church of God’. In the latter example, Stillingfleet returns to the Admonition Controversy, now extracting from it the assertion that government of the Church by archbishops and bishops, following the apostolical model, is in this Church ‘most meet’.36 In this, Stillingfleet was trying to counter Richard Baxter’s far more consistent invocation of Whitgift’s assertion that forms of Church government were ‘matters indifferent’.37 That Whitgift the man was not wholly lost in this desire to enlist his writing as a useful polemical tool is largely attributable to Izaak Walton (1651–1719). In his Life of Richard Hooker, published in 1665, Walton delivered a long and influential excursus on the archbishop. This ‘character’ brushed aside the story of Presbyterian conflicts, and indeed much observation on his writings, in favour of presenting a man ‘of prudence and piety, and of an high and fearless fortitude’ who was the great defender of the rights and power of the Church, especially of its lands and property. The speech that Whitgift made to the queen against the sacrilegious greed of the laity, especially the earl of Leicester, is given in

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full, and much is made of the queen’s warm response. The archbishop, says Walton, was so loyal to the queen that ‘he lived to be the chief comfort of her life in her declining age’. In his description of the charity and humility demonstrated in Whitgift’s Croydon almshouse foundation, where he ‘was so truly humble that he called [the almsmen and women] brothers and sisters’, Walton exceeds even Paule’s encomia.38 Reading this praise of the archbishop’s heroic defence of the Church and his extraordinary charity, we can understand why Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677) asked to be buried with his Elizabethan predecessor.39 By the time John Strype published his Whitgift in 1718, he was already a vastly experienced historian of the English Reformation, with biographies of Aylmer, Cheke, Parker and Grindal to his credit. While his purpose in writing had always been articulated as the defence of the Church established, his ambition was primarily that of an archival historian, documenting his subjects from ‘records, registers, original letters and other authentick MSS’. In the dedication to this volume, Strype singled out the features that distinguished Whitgift from his predecessors. He had suffered attacks in Parliaments, Court, city and country ‘and for nothing else, but for labouring to preserve and keep the Church of England as it was legally established in the first Reformation of it’.40 He maintained the tone of didacticism throughout the volume, but even in its own time it seems that this, like his other volumes, was valued more for his assiduity in accumulating evidence than from its guide to correct interpretation. There is an indiscriminate quality about his acquisition of documents, as well as some suspicion of omissions of difficult material. However, the depth of his investigation is well indicated by his devotion of four lengthy chapters to the Cambridge crisis of the 1590s and the Lambeth Articles; his caution is shown by his one brief comment on the outcome: ‘these Articles gave great offence … tho the archbishop’s intention was sincere’.41 In the two centuries following Strype’s massive biography, Whitgift was usually consigned to a listed place among the worthy progenitors of the Church of England or excoriated as a manifestation of a narrowminded Anglican authoritarianism. The Whig interpretation of English history naturally turned to the second view, with David Hume (1711– 1776) denouncing the use of the ex-officio oath and Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) assailing him with his usual intemperate vigour. The latter produced the most quoted evaluation of the archbishop in his essay on Francis Bacon. The master of Trinity College was

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a narrow-minded, mean, and tyrannical priest, who gained power by servility and adulation, and employed it in persecuting both those who agreed with Calvin on Church-government, and those who differed from Calvin touching the doctrine of reprobation.42

By the time Samuel Rawson Gardiner (1829–1902) came to publish his History of England, such an attack must have seemed too crudely judgemental, though Gardiner remained equally critical of the system that Whitgift had defended. ‘Narrow-minded and ungentle by nature and education’, the archbishop was unable to comprehend the scruples of ‘sincere and pious’ men, but ‘at least believed that he was working for the Church of God’.43 While Whig historians were unconstrained in their criticism of Whitgift’s policies, High Church Anglicans have often ignored him in favour of a lineage that stretched from Hooker to Laud, Sancroft and beyond. Like Heylyn, they struggled to explain away the Lambeth Articles, troubled by exactly the paradox that Macaulay had articulated. Whitgift did not provide a ready hero for the Oxford Movement.44 This, of course, explains why the Parker Society went to considerable lengths to publish the whole Admonition Controversy and the archbishop’s other writings in three volumes in the early 1850s. The evangelical editor, the prolific John Ayre, included an extensive biographical memoir which depended on Paule and Strype, and drew much of its interpretative framework from the former. This nineteenth-century archbishop is noble and restrained and, though acknowledged to be intolerant of dissent, is excused because there was no idea of toleration in his generation ‘in accordance with the principles of our own times’. Despite such failure to be a good Whig, the archbishop was presented as a proponent of a reasonable ecclesiology. His view of Church governance, Ayre noted with approval, was that it was properly by bishops, provided this accorded with sound doctrine and the views of the Christian magistrate: ‘higher ground than this has often been taken’, he added in a dig at his contemporary opponents.45 Whitgift the reasonable and enlightened Anglican has had a strong presence in twentieth-century historiography. Donald McGinn, in the only major study of The Admonition Controversy (1949), concluded unequivocally in praise of Whitgift’s role in the dispute—with the wonderfully sweeping generalization that ‘all in all, Whitgift’s writings inspire nothing but confidence’. McGinn had little patience with the assertion of some of Cartwright’s supporters that he displayed greater learning than

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his opponent: instead, Whitgift is praised for the clarity of his expression, for his meticulous acknowledgement of sources and for his rich citation of authorities. McGinn’s Introduction to his edition of abridgements articulates his position explicitly: the conformist case in The Defense established the via media that ‘became the mark of distinction of the Anglican Church’.46 And, in a later review of Dawley’s Hale Lectures, he signs off in even more triumphalist mode: ‘if the Church of England were looking for candidates for canonization, certainly John Whitgift would be among the foremost’.47 While few other historians have been quite this exuberant, there has been plenty of writing infused with the conviction that the archbishop ‘saved the day’ for the English Church. Powel Dawley, who in his Hale Lectures, based on his dissertation, hoped to present the preliminaries to a full study of Whitgift, spoke of his subject as a developer of ‘the distinctive ethos of Anglicanism’ and praised An Answere as a ‘masterpiece in the usual pattern of Tudor controversial writing’.48 While well aware of his subject’s shortcomings, and the failure of some of his initiatives, Dawley brought his lectures firmly back to that spirit of integrity and devotion that Whitgift bequeathed to the English Church.49 Victor Brook, whose short study—Whitgift and the English Church (1957)—remains a useful introduction to the subject, was equally committed to the vision of his subject as the defender of the via media and even more sympathetic to Paule’s original claims than was Dawley. The archbishop, for Brook, was a man who was ‘clear-headed, loyal and strong’, a born administrator who lacked ‘sectarian narrowness’ and was ‘really a man of peace’.50 Any doubts about the prelate himself were countered by looking to his protégé, Richard Hooker, whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity was ‘the crowning victory of Whitgift’s campaign’.51 The most powerful contribution to this way of thinking is to be found in the work of Harry Porter (1927–2003). In Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (1958) he gives a pen-portrait of Whitgift the godly Anglican on which it is difficult to improve. The prelate was an ‘archetypal public-school headmaster: efficient, devoted, an administrator in mind and soul and body’. He possessed far more power than his predecessors, but in exercising that power he was ‘always just and often, especially in his dealings with the university, very charitable’.52 Porter brought a sophisticated theological understanding to his study of Whitgiftian Cambridge, and particularly to the analysis of the Lambeth Articles. However, his conclusion, after close study, was that the archbishop was

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properly aggrieved with the Calvinist heads of house for their persistence in attacking Peter Baro (1534–1599). His concern was that the heads threatened to undermine the studied doctrinal ambiguity that was a necessary part of the via media to which he was profoundly committed. Porter therefore concluded that the archbishop had managed to ‘save the day’ with the revisions of the Articles that he had endorsed. Whitgift became the ultimate Anglican leading a Church in which, in Porter’s wonderful formulation, ‘Rome and Geneva may have called a spade a spade. The Church of England, like Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest, is thankful that it has never seen a spade’.53 Other early twentieth-century evaluations of Whitgift endeavour positive interpretations without the overt expression of confessional sympathy. The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1904) by Walter Howard Frere (1863–1938) identifies narrowness and intolerance with his puritan opponents, ‘who desired to exert … discipline over others’.54 And in an overlooked, but insightful, short volume entitled Archbishop Whitgift and His Times (1911), H. J. Clayton balanced praise of his subject’s commitment and integrity against the crises created by his authoritarian outlook. Like Frere, Clayton acknowledges that many of Whitgift’s difficulties were not of his own making. However, in the end he recognizes that the archbishop ‘must stand or fall’ as a disciplinarian, a test of behaviour rather than of belief. For Clayton, his success is evidenced by his re-establishment of order in the Church of England. In practice, changed patterns of belief did follow from this labour. What was secured was continuity within an ecclesiastical system that was somewhat ‘purified and reformed’, yet which was also a turn away from the tradition of the continental Reformed Churches.55 The most radical challenge to ‘Anglican’ modes of thought came not from a new evaluation of Whitgift, but from Patrick Collinson’s groundbreaking work on the puritan movement.56 Collinson saw Whitgift as everywhere in the persecution of the godly from the origins of the Admonition Controversy in late 1560s Cambridge to the debates at Hampton Court in 1604. His caution in articulating judgement slips from time to time: when the puritan ministers of Norfolk are required to swear to the Three Articles in 1584, Collinson writes that ‘Whitgift’s system had little room for the liberty of the Christian man’; when he comments on the testimonial that the archbishop provided to recommend Bancroft’s elevation to the see of London in 1597, he is scathing.57 Nothing is said about Bancroft’s divinity, learning, preaching or pastoral qualities;

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rather, the archbishop dwells largely on his disciplinary skills and antipuritan credentials. However, it is not these moments that represent the fundamental re-evaluation of Whitgift as the leader of the Church of England. Instead, Collinson places the puritans in the spiritual mainstream, as the ‘vital chord of Protestantism’. So central were they to the fabric of Elizabethan religion that they could not be conceived as having been fundamentally opposed to the national Church, still less to the royal supremacy.58 In matters of doctrine, Collinson stressed that there was no major distinction between puritans and conformists: above all, they shared a view of predestinarian teaching which he and others label a ‘Calvinist consensus’.59 Instead of harnessing this deep accord, the choleric archbishop was left out on a limb of his own making. He was so ferociously addicted to a narrow view of royal supremacy, order and conformity that earlier Elizabethan ideas of the Church as a ‘mixed monarchy’, in which moderate puritanism could be accommodated, was undermined. In Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (2013), Collinson writes directly of the construction of a ‘conspiratorial obsession’, with the godly as the enemy within—the implication is that this was also largely true of his predecessor’s beliefs.60 It was not really Collinson’s purpose to explain the motives behind Whitgift’s drive against Presbyterianism. For Peter Lake, however, the gulf between puritan ideology and conformist thought needed to be addressed directly. Lake broadly endorsed Collinson’s view of the centrality of moderate puritanism, and of consensual belief in predestinarianism. But he sought to understand how this shared ideology could nevertheless issue in different world views. In Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (1988), he argued that an agreed soteriology did not lead to the same perception of the spiritual life of the individual, still less to a shared understanding of the nature of the Church.61 He makes the first point succinctly in a recent essay on puritanism, calling Whitgift’s belief a ‘wintry predestinarianism’ which failed to touch the ‘spiritual and affective core of English Protestantism’.62 The key explanation for this coldness is to be found in his understanding of the relationship between the visible and the invisible Church which underpins his response to Cartwright. For Cartwright, the invisible Church was the end to which the community of the godly should aspire; for Whitgift, the visible Church—‘the field floor or net of the lord’, as he described it—embraced the profane as well, and existed to provide true order, discipline and instruction to all. Lake argued that

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these attitudes extended to almost every aspect of the debate covered in the Admonition Controversy and explicitly to the tenor of Whitgift’s understanding of popery. He defined papists as those who refused obedience to the Established Church; Cartwright ‘believed that only those whose true profession and godly conversation proved them to be nonpapists could be counted as full members of the Church’.63 Lake’s writing on anti-popery continues this theme, contrasting the visceral loathing of the puritans with the careful response of Whitgift, the latter denouncing the pope as antichrist while exercising a politique caution about the relationship between Catholicism and the national Church.64 Between them, Collinson and Lake have displaced the ‘Anglican’ interpretation of Whitgift’s via media, locating moderation instead in mainstream puritanism, whose adherents claimed a middle ground between popery and radicalism. Ethan Shagan has suggested that it was from his rejection of Cartwright’s claim to mediocrity that Whitgift evolved his own concept of the via media, which steered a course between the tyranny of popery and the liberty and license of puritanism. His moderation was defined by the rule of law, the authority of the royal supremacy and the maintenance of hierarchy, very little by a specific theology or even ceremonialism.65 Evaluation of Whitgift’s critique of puritan ecclesiology has focused understandably upon the Admonition Controversy. However, in the 1590s the archbishop was required to react to academic conflict: this time to the Cambridge stirs which eventuated in the Lambeth Articles.66 The Articles have become the subject of complex academic debate: they were controversial from their inception because of their status, and controversial too, as we have seen, because the archbishop’s authority seemed to be loaned to a markedly Calvinist interpretation of soteriology. Nicholas Tyacke and Peter Lake have argued that the archbishop did indeed endorse a firm Calvinist position in the Articles. Amendments that were made to the text produced by the heads of the Cambridge colleges were intended not to weaken its predestinarian nature, but to accommodate two strains of Calvinist thought: the supralapsarian (divine election determined from before the Fall) and sublapsarian (determined after the Fall).67 As for authority, Tyacke argues that, although the Articles lacked the imprimatur of Convocation, they were promulgated by Whitgift with the support of the ecclesiastical high commissioners sitting with him at Lambeth Palace, and were designed anyway to be interpretative guidance for theologians rather than to have canonical status.68

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This understanding of the Articles is in some tension with the idea neatly encapsulated in Peter Marshall’s comment that Whitgift was ‘godfather of a new strain of divinity’.69 ‘Avant-garde conformity’—views espoused from the 1590s by those who questioned a rigid predestinarianism—owed something to the archbishop, through his patronage of Richard Hooker, and of chaplains such as Lancelot Andrewes (1555– 1626). Harry Porter saw 1595 as an opportunity for Whitgift to ensure that ‘the peace of the Church’ be maintained.70 Debora Shuger has argued that we should also perceive the revised version of the Lambeth Articles through this lens and see Whitgift as seeking a ‘studied ambiguity’ which would accommodate a broadish spectrum of theological understanding that was not necessarily fully Calvinist.71 A problem with this approach is that detailed evidence about the process of drafting, and about the royal reaction to the finished text, depend upon narratives constructed long after the event, when positions had hardened.72 Instead, we should perhaps take Whitgift at his word when he observed that ‘I agreed fully with them [the heads] and they with me’. The caveat was that this was true only after ‘some few things’ had been added. Those additions, he continued, made the Articles ‘sound doctrine, and uniformly professed in this Church of England, and agreeable to the Articles of Religion established by authority’.73 The Thirty-Nine Articles were the benchmark of conformity and obedience, even though the Lambeth Articles defined predestinarian theology in a much tighter manner. When in 1600 Whitgift wrote to Archbishop Matthew Hutton of York (1529?–1606) about the continuing controversies over predestination, he referred to ‘suche like matters, never doubted of by any professor of the gospell during all the tyme of your aboade and myne in the universitie’.74 While the Lambeth Articles offered Whitgift the opportunity to deploy his authority on the central issue of Protestant doctrine, he must be evaluated primarily in his role as a politician who dominated the Church and its relations with the State during the critical period of its full establishment under Elizabeth. Recent work on the archbishop as politician has emphasized that his determination to establish order in the Church was also reflected in his attitude to the Crown. In his article ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy …’, Lake has argued that Whitgift’s assumption was that Presbyterianism represented a popular threat to both Church and State. His duty, therefore, was to protect the ‘untrammelled authority of the Crown and the monarch’. In so doing, he assailed not only devolved authority in the Church, but also challenged those, notably

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Burghley, who defended the idea of an aristocratic element, or mixed monarchy, in the State.75 It is scarcely original to argue that Whitgift was wedded to an authoritarian view of state power, or that he recognized the central importance of cleaving to an interpretation of Crown power over the Church that was acceptable to Elizabeth. However, Lake is here identifying Whitgift’s views as ultimately focused on the manipulation of politics as a means of defending the Church. His crusade against puritans could only be represented as an attack on the rule of the Crown if he engaged with the complexities of power politics. Scholarship on the so-called ‘second reign of Elizabeth’ shows how great an engagement was necessary if the archbishop was to achieve his goals.76 Admittedly, the man himself sometimes employed the ‘modesty trope’, disclaiming a role in politics except in order to advance the interests of the Church. Paule’s narrative of course shows a prelate who was deeply committed to the service of the State in ways that transcended any narrow definition of ecclesiastical interest. It is generally accepted that Whitgift owed much of his success to his proximity to the queen, and to his ability, so different from that of his predecessors, to discern what she would tolerate from her prelates. But at the same time, there has been some tendency to regard him as deficient as a politician precisely because he was ‘cloth-eared’ rather than sinuous in his manipulation of Court relationships. Some historians disagree. John Guy argues that ‘it is conventionally observed that Whitgift was no politician[.] … But hubris was not his Achilles heel. He knew how to watch his back, and was constantly fostering connections’.77 Guy suggests that he moved quite skilfully through the complexities of 1590s politics, courting alliances that would benefit the Church, and even gaining surprising allies among the common-law judges in his defence of the Court of High Commission.78 Gilliam and Tighe are even more complimentary, attributing the form of the Lambeth Articles to Whitgift’s political vision. His endorsement of the basic position of the Cambridge heads is presented as an intelligent ‘hedging’ of his bets ahead of an inevitable succession crisis. An affirmation of high Calvinist views looked most likely to accommodate James VI’s religious preferences, but, with chaplains such as Andrewes playing a role in the final drafting, the archbishop could ensure the Church’s position against different monarchical views.79 Shagan, in his work on the Court of High Commission, accepts the effectiveness of the archbishop’s political control, while deploring the consequences for any opponents. Like Guy, he interprets the ‘swing

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to the right’, which legitimated the use of the ex-officio oath and was proclaimed in Richard Cosin’s 1591 Apologie, as being both Whitgift’s principal institutional achievement and the necessary price that he paid for the order with which he was obsessed. Cosin, sponsored, or at least actively approved, by the archbishop, provided a sweeping defence of oath-taking and the civil law that left scarcely any space for claims of conscience. And this attack was conducted in an atmosphere that legitimated the identification of non-conformists as enemies of the State, as well as of the Church. Indeed, the latter could appear as virtually a branch of government. This was, says Shagan, ‘the English Inquisition’.80 And this Whitgift was the prelate of puritan polemic: an autocratic bully bestriding the late Elizabethan State, crushing his enemies with ruthless efficiency. Analysis of Whitgift the politician often emphasizes his determination in achieving his goals, combining a bruising use of influence with a knowledge of how to manage the levers of power. It is therefore surprising to encounter, in one of the most important recent interpretations of Whitgift, an ecclesiastical politician who was at once interventionist and ineffectual. Brett Usher (d. 2013), in his study of Burghley and Whitgift, does not hesitate to reveal where his sympathies lie: at an early point in his Lord Burghley and Episcopacy, 1577 –1603 he describes the archbishop as ‘a loose cannon, always potentially a destructive rather than a constructive force’.81 One of Usher’s chapters is headed ‘Taming Whitgift, 1583–89’. The virtues of Burghley, on the one hand, and the sufferings of the godly, on the other, loom large in the book. His primary purpose, however, is to explain the changing fortunes of the late Elizabethan Church through a close reading of Court conflict. Sir George Paule, as we have seen, had a similar approach. He had insisted that Whitgift succeeded in most of his objectives because he had a close friend in Sir Christopher Hatton (c.1540–1591), and that Burghley was also a true supporter. In later years, says Paule, Essex, Sir Thomas Egerton and Sir Robert Cecil also aided the archbishop. Usher inverts much of this narrative, especially in arguing for significant distance between Whitgift and Burghley. This he detects not only at the well-known moments of the Subscription Crisis in the 1580s and the archbishop’s attack on the radicals in 1590–1591, but also, in more muted form, for much of the rest of the period. There were a few occasions for solidarity, as in the shared attacks on ‘the hare-brained chirrupings’ of Martin Marprelate, but these were superseded by renewed tension.82 The gulf manifested itself in a variety of ways, of which the

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most important was patronage: the struggle over who controlled access to high office in the Church. And Usher’s answer is that the archbishop had precious little success in advancing his chosen candidates, his only truly impressive achievement being his promotion of Bancroft to the see of London in 1597. Usher presents us with an archbishop who constantly intervened in patronage issues, and whose failures indicate that he was far less powerful than has been assumed by both critical and sympathetic authors. He accepts as indisputable that Whitgift had friends at Court: Hatton was one—and, above all, the queen offered a measure of protection. Yet the reins of power lay firmly in the hands of Burghley until the mid-1590s, and with Sir Robert Cecil thereafter. For all his labours, the archbishop was unable to mould the hierarchy of the Church in his chosen manner. Usher concludes his very detailed analysis with the reflection that little had changed by the end of the queen’s reign: ‘Whitgift ended his two decades as primate in a state of subservience to the machinations of Robert Cecil’.83 Since the 1960s, some aspects of the archbishop’s reputation have been given sustained attention by historians. There has been important work on his handling of puritans, his ideology and his management of patronage: in each of these areas, the historiographical debate has advanced our understanding of the Church in the second half of Elizabeth’s reign. Yet there are curious gaps that perhaps help to explain the absence of an overarching study. Most obviously, there is a need for a study of Whitgift as metropolitan: we need to ask how his concerns for order and discipline played out in the institutional Church. Existing studies of his concerns for the economic well-being of the clergy, and of the clerical surveys that he initiated, should be the beginning of a wider examination.84 And the archbishop’s behaviour towards Catholics is another under-researched topic. Strype, at the beginning of his biography, proposed that Whitgift’s achievement was ‘to preserve and keep the Church of England as it was legally established in the first Reformation of it’.85 Does that argument for the defence of the Church of Cranmer, Parker and the Thirty-Nine Articles do justice to his ambition for the institution? I noted at the beginning of this essay Dawley’s comment that Whitgift, as a man, was difficult to know. The archbishop offered little sense of himself in his formal writing, and even his correspondence rarely opens a window into his thinking, though his letters addressed to Matthew Hutton, archbishop of York, are occasionally revealing. He did, however,

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Fig. 7.1 Portrait of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, by an unknown artist, oil on canvas, c.1600

sit for his portrait on several occasions. The painting illustrated here from the collection of the University of Cambridge (see Fig. 7.1) is one of two almost identical copies, described by Ingamells as ‘hard and provincial’.86 They are interesting because of their use of words, not their representational qualities. The image preserved at The Old Schools, Cambridge, executed by an unknown artist c.1600, has the archbishop resting his hands on a legible psalter. The book is open at Psalm 42, a psalm intended for those seeking spiritual assurance, but also for one oppressed

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by enemies. The last verses (as translated in the King James Version of the Bible) read: 10 As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me While they say daily unto me, Where is thy God? 11 Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou Disquieted within me? Hope thou in God: for I shall yet Praise him, who is the health of my countenance and my God.

The other copy of this portrait type hangs in the primate’s almshouses at Croydon. The archbishop’s motto was vincit qui patitur (he that beareth patiently overcomes at last), and he used that motto at every available opportunity. It fits well with his choice of psalm. Yet that rhetoric of suffering and patience under oppression seems too passive for Whitgift. On several occasions, Strype refers to him as ‘wise and stirring’, and that, or at least its second descriptor, is well caught by an inscription that frames the Croydon portrait. The translation reads: I did what I could, Christ, what you gave me to do Those ILL-DISPOSED towards me, do better if you can.87

Sheils concludes his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography evaluation by pointing out that it was Whitgift’s opponents who insisted first that their view of the Church was non-negotiable. But in practice, he grounded himself upon an equally non-negotiable belief in the authority of Crown and bishops, presenting to the world an apparently single-minded and ruthless commitment to his cause.

Notes 1. J. Strype, The Life and Acts of the Most Reverend Father in God, John Whitgift, D. D. The Third and Last Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth; … The Whole Digested, Compiled and Attested from Records, Registers, Original Letters, and Other Authentick MSS. Taken From the Choicest Libraries and Collections of the Kingdom. In Four Books. Together With a Large Appendix of the Said Papers … (London, 1718) [hereafter Strype, Whitgift ].

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2. P. M. Dawley, John Whitgift and the Reformation (London, 1955) [hereafter Dawley, Whitgift ], p. vi. Brett Usher provides a valuable summary of the historiography on Whitgift in the preface to his second volume on the Cecils and episcopacy: B. Usher, Lord Burghley and Episcopacy, 1577 –1603 (Farnham, 2016) [hereafter Usher, Burghley], pp. xii–xvii. 3. W. J. Sheils, ‘Whitgift, John (1530/31?–1604)’, in ODNB; C. Barnett, John Whitgift: Elizabeth I’s Last Archbishop of Canterbury (Croydon, [2015]). 4. P. Collinson, Archbishop Grindal 1519–1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (London, 1979); P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013). 5. Dawley, Whitgift, p. x. 6. A. L. Rowse, The England of Elizabeth: The Structure of Society (London, 1950), p. 473. 7. C. Barnett, John Whitgift: Elizabeth I’s Last Archbishop of Canterbury (Croydon, [2015]), pp. 84–90. There is an unusual insight into the archbishop and his household in P. W. White, ‘Archbishop Whitgift and the Plague in Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament ’, in J. H. Degenhardt and E. Williamson (eds), Religion and Drama in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2011), pp. 139–52. 8. W. J. Sheils, ‘Whitgift, John (1530/31?–1604)’, in ODNB. 9. Strype, Whitgift, frontispiece. 10. J. Ayre (ed.), The Works of John Whitgift, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Dean of Lincoln, &c. Afterwards Successively Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury, 3 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1851–1853), I p. xii. 11. A. Peel (ed.), The Seconde Parte of a Register Being a Calendar of Manuscripts Under That Title Intended for Publication by the Puritans About 1593, and Now in Dr. Williams’s Library, London, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915), II pp. 241–8; P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), pp. 130, 394. 12. Anon. (ed.), The Examinations of Henry Barrowe John Grenewood and John Penrie[,] Before the High Commissioners[,] and Lordes of the Counsel. Penned by the Prisoners Themselves Before Their Deathes ([Dort?, c.1596?]) [STC, 1519], sig. C[1]r; J. L. Black (ed.), The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 29, 53, 163. 13. M. Marprelate (pseudonym), Hay any Worke for Cooper … (Europe [recte Coventry], 1589) [STC, 17456], p. 36. 14. P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967), p. 243. 15. W. P. Baildon (ed.), Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata 1593 to 1609 from the Original MS. of John Hawarde of the Inner Temple, Esquire,

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17. 18. 19.

20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

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Barrister-at-Law (privately published, London, 1894), p. 223. A fuller version of the poem is given in A. Bellany, ‘A Poem on the Archbishop’s Hearse: Puritanism, Libel, and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference’, JBS, 34 (1995), p. 138. While the queen supported Whitgift through his promotions, and her willingness to turn to him in difficult times can be documented, it is, as Dawley remarks, ‘curiously hard to penetrate’ their precise relationship: Dawley, Whitgift, pp. 224–5. TNA, SP 12/185/79. R. Hooker, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie (London, 1666) [Wing, H2637], p. 31. J. Stow [Stowe], The Annales of England, … Untill … 1592 (London, [1592]) [STC, 23334], dedication; W. J. Sheils, ‘Whitgift, John (1530/31?–1604)’, in ODNB. T. Churchyard, Churchyards Good Will … (London, 1604) [STC, 5222]; J. Rhodes, An Epitaph, on the Death of … John … [Whitgift] (London, 1604) [STC, 20574]; W. Gamage, Linsi-Woolsie … ([London], 1613) [STC, 11544], Epigram 27 (of sequence after first and second centuries); R. H. Miller (ed.), Sir John Harington, A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops to the Yeare 1608 (Potomac, MD, c.1979), p. 40. W. P. Baildon (ed.), Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata 1593 to 1609 from the Original MS. of John Hawarde of the Inner Temple, Esquire, Barrister-at-Law (privately published, London, 1894), pp. 225–9. Usher, Burghley, p. xiii. Sir George Paule, The Life of the Most Reverend and Religiovs Prelate John Whitgift, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Written by Sir George Paule Knight, Comptroller of His Graces Householde (London, 1612) [STC, 19484], sigs [A2]r–[A4]r. Ibid., pp. 48–9. Ibid., pp. 7, 11, 25, 59–60. Ibid., pp. 6, 46, 81. A. Darcie (trans.), W. Camden, Annales: The True and Royall History of the Famous Empresse Elizabeth Queene of England France and Ireland &c. …, 3 books (London, 1625) [STC, 4497], Book III pp. 45–6. Earlier, in his Britannia, he had praised Whitgift for consecrating ‘both his whole life to God, and all his painefull labours to the Church’: P. Holland (trans.), W. Camden, Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland … (London, 1610) [STC, 4509], p. 338. R. H. Miller (ed.), Sir John Harington, A Supplie or Addicion to the Catalogue of Bishops to the Yeare 1608 (Potomac, MD, c.1979), pp. 38–9.

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29. [W. Prynne], The Unbishoping of Timothy and Titus … ([Amsterdam], 1636) [STC, 20476.5], pp. 76–7; [W. Prynne], A Looking-Glasse for All Lordly Prelates … ([London?], 1636) [STC, 20466], p. 69. 30. W. Prynne, The Church of Englands Old Antithesis to New Arminianisme … (London, 1629) [STC, 20457], p. 12. 31. T. Browne (trans.), W. Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of That Famous Princesse, Elizabeth … (London, 1634) [STC, 4499], p. 246. 32. R. Mountague, Appello Caesarem … (London, 1625) [STC, 18031], p. 71. 33. P. Heylyn, Certamen Epistolare, or, the Letter-Combate … (London, 1659) [Wing, H1687], p. 177. This is an issue to which Heylyn returned several times: see, e.g., P. Heylyn, Aërius Redivivus: Or the History of the Presbyterians … (2nd edn, London, 1672) [Wing, H1682], pp. 262–5 and P. Heylyn, Examen Historicum: Or a Discovery and Examination of the Mistakes, Falsities, and Defects in Some Modern Histories (London, 1659) [Wing, H1706], p. 106. 34. J. S. Brewer (ed.), T. Fuller, The Church History of Britain …, 6 vols (Oxford, 1845), V pp. 188–9. 35. Ibid., p. 227. Fuller’s marginal note by this comment reads ‘these articles excellent witnesses of the general doctrine of England’. 36. E. Stillingfleet, Irenicum: A Weapon-Salve for the Churches Wounds … (London, 1662) [Wing, S5597C], p. 394; E. Stillingfleet, The Unreasonableness of Separation … (London, 1681) [Wing, S5675], p. 270. 37. R. Baxter, A Treatise of Episcopacy … (London, 1681) [Wing, B1427], pp. 45–6. 38. I. Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne; Sir Henry Wotton; Mr. Richard Hooker; Mr. George Herbert; and Dr. Robert Sanderson (London, 1864), pp. 173–82. 39. G. Tapsell, ‘The Church of England, 1662–1714’, in A. Milton et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, 5 vols (Oxford, 2017), II p. 41. 40. Strype, Whitgift, p. iii (preface). 41. Ibid., pp. 435–78. 42. T. B. Macaulay, Critical and Historical Essays, 2 vols (London, [1907]), II p. 451. 43. S. R. Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I. to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 10 vols (2nd edn, London, 1883–1884), I pp. 33–4, 159. 44. e.g. his name does not appear at all in the latest survey of nineteenthcentury Anglicanism: A. Milton et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, 5 vols (Oxford, 2017), III. 45. J. Ayre (ed.), The Works of John Whitgift, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Dean of Lincoln, &c. Afterwards Successively Bishop of Worcester and Archbishop of Canterbury, 3 vols, PS (Cambridge, 1851–1853), pp. v–xxi (at pp. xviii, xxi).

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46. D. J. McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick, NJ, 1949), pp. 64–5, 96, 134. Commentary on the literary quality of the controversy has usually favoured Cartwright’s style, though McGinn praises Whitgift’s ‘clarity of expression’. A more recent, and characteristic, judgement describes Whitgift’s prose as having the ‘feel of a sledgehammer’: M. Goldblatt, ‘John Whitgift’, Dictionary of Literary Biography, 132 (1993), p. 339. 47. D. J. McGinn, ‘“John Whitgift and the English Reformation”—A Review of Dr. P. M. Dawley’s Hale Lectures’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, XXIV (1955), p. 412. 48. Dawley, Whitgift, pp. x, 95. 49. Ibid., p. 230. 50. V. J. K. Brook, Whitgift and the English Church (London, 1957), pp. 14, 43. 51. Ibid., pp. 150–2. 52. Porter, Cambridge, p. 171. 53. Ibid., pp. 314–43 (at p. 343). Porter elaborated upon his understanding of Whitgift’s via media in H. C. Porter, ‘The Anglicanism of Archbishop Whitgift’, Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, XXXI (1962), pp. 127–41. 54. W. H. Frere, The English Church in the Reigns of Elizabeth and James I (1558–1625) (London, 1904), pp. 305–6. 55. H. J. Clayton, Archbishop Whitgift and His Times (London, 1911), pp. 146–51 (at pp. 150–1). As Usher notes, Clayton has been comprehensively ignored in later scholarship, despite his insightful and non-partisan approach to his subject: Usher, Burghley, p. xiv. 56. P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London, 1967). 57. Ibid., p. 254; P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan AntiPuritanism (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 2–3. 58. P. Collinson, The Reformation (London, 2003), p. 117. This repositioning of moderate puritanism is fully developed in P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982). 59. P. Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 81–5; P. Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–1635’, P&P, 114 (1987), pp. 32–76, reprinted (abridged) in M. Todd (ed.), Reformation to Revolution: Politics and Religion in Early Modern England (London, 1995), pp. 179–207. 60. P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 4–5. 61. P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp. 13–42. 62. P. Lake, ‘“Puritans” and “Anglicans” in the History of the PostReformation English Church’, in A. Milton et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, 5 vols (Oxford, 2017), I pp. 361–2.

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63. P. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988), pp. 28–42. 64. Ibid., pp. 18–21, 42–9. 65. E. H. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 115–21. 66. P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 218–26; N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987). There is also a specialist study: V. C. Miller, The Lambeth Articles: Doctrinal Development and Conflict in 16th Century England (Oxford, 1994), which broadly accepts the argument about Whitgift’s predestinarian convictions. 67. N. Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c.1590–1640 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 30–3 argues that Whitgift, a sublapsarian, sought to frame Article IV of the Lambeth Articles in order to accommodate supralapsarians as well. 68. I am grateful to Nicholas Tyacke for allowing me to see a forthcoming article, ‘“Mysteries Demystified”: The Making and Meaning of the Lambeth Articles’, in which he develops this case. 69. P. Marshall, ‘Settlement Patterns: The Church of England, 1553–1603’, in A. Milton et al. (eds), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, 5 vols (Oxford, 2017), I p. 60. For a recent summary of the topic, see P. McCullough, ‘“Avant-Garde Conformity” in the 1590s’, ibid., pp. 380–94. 70. Porter, Cambridge, pp. 372–3. 71. D. Shuger, ‘The Mysteries of the Lambeth Articles’, JEH , 68 (2017), pp. 306–25. 72. Ibid., pp. 310–16. Tyacke in ‘“Mysteries Demystified”’ (see above, n. 68) describes the key 1651 text as ‘clever … anti-Calvinist propaganda’. 73. Porter, Cambridge, p. 365. 74. J. Raine (ed.), The Correspondence of Dr. Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York. With a Selection From the Letters, etc. of Sir Timothy Hutton, knt., His Son; and Matthew Hutton, Esq., His Grandson, The Publications of the Surtees Society, XVII (London, 1843), p. 156. 75. P. Lake, ‘Puritanism, (Monarchical) Republicanism, and Monarchy; or John Whitgift, Antipuritanism, and the “Invention” of Popularity’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 40 (2010), pp. 463–95. 76. On the complex politics of the 1590s, see J. Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995); and P. E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge, 1999). 77. J. Guy, ‘The Elizabethan Establishment and the Ecclesiastical Polity’, in J. Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995), p. 129 (n. 9).

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78. Ibid., pp. 132–6. 79. E. Gilliam and W. J. Tighe, ‘To “Run with the Time”: Archbishop Whitgift, the Lambeth Articles, and the Politics of Theological Ambiguity in Late Elizabethan England’, SCJ , XXIII (1992), pp. 325–40. 80. E. H. Shagan, ‘The English Inquisition: Constitutional Conflict and Ecclesiastical Law in the 1590s’, HJ , 47 (2004), pp. 541–65. 81. Usher, Burghley, p. 69. 82. Ibid., p. 107. Some elements in Usher’s argument are anticipated in W. Richardson, ‘The Religious Policy of the Cecils, 1588–1598’, University of Oxford DPhil thesis (1994), especially Chapters 2 and 3. 83. Ibid., pp. 182–3. 84. Whitgift’s management of the Church and its property was given considerable attention in C. Hill, Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long Parliament (Oxford, 1956), a view of ecclesiastical exploitation modified by F. Heal, Of Prelates and Princes: A Study of the Economic and Social Position of the Tudor Episcopate (Cambridge, 1980). For Whitgift’s use of clerical surveys, see D. J. Crankshaw, ‘Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Surveys of the Ministry of the Church of England’, University of Cambridge PhD thesis (2000), pp. 59–234, and comments in K. Fincham, ‘Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud’, in P. Lake and M. Questier (eds), Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c.1560–1660 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 130–7. 85. Strype, Whitgift, frontispiece. 86. J. Ingamells, The English Episcopal Portrait 1559–1835: A Catalogue (privately published, [London], c.1981), p. 410 (Type C). 87. I owe this translation to Christopher Barnett, who uses the image in C. Barnett, John Whitgift: Elizabeth I’s Last Archbishop of Canterbury (Croydon, [2015]), p. 103. The Latin reads ‘Feci quod potui, potui quod Christi, dedisti/Improba fac Melius, si potes, INVIDIA’.

CHAPTER 8

Anthony Munday: Eloquent Equivocator or Contemptible Turncoat? Elizabeth Evenden-Kenyon

Gentle reader, even as contrarie thinges compared one with another, do give the better evidence of their value and virtue: so the truth of any matter whatsoever, appeareth most cleerely, when the different reasons against the same, is equalled or neighboured therewith.

‘To the friendly reader’, in A. Mundy (trans.), [either Charles Estienne or Jean-Baptiste Duval] (adaptor), Ortensio Landi, The Defence of Contraries … (London, 1593) [STC, 6467], sig. A4r.

The religious conscience of Anthony Munday (bap. 1560, d. 1633) remains to this day a puzzle. In his lifetime, opinions about him were divided. For some, then as now, there has been an almost pathological determination to prove him a Roman Catholic or to prove him a Protestant. Equally, as soon as an academic throws their hat into the ring on the subject, detractors jump in and the sparring begins, more often than not with a few low punches slung, in an attempt to topple any scholar who

E. Evenden-Kenyon (B) Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_8

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dares to draw conclusions concerning one of the most enigmatic authors and translators of the early modern period. Munday’s reputation has been trashed and rehashed over the centuries, and, even as this essay is written, I am waiting to see whether or not a counter-argument will emerge to my own monograph exploring the rationale behind his work as a translator.1 Re-assessments of Munday’s life and literary activities were revived in 2005 with the publication of Donna B. Hamilton’s Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633 and Tracey Hill’s Anthony Munday and Civic Culture.2 Both books deal with aspects of Munday’s reputation during his lifetime and in recent scholarship. Hill focuses, in the main, on his work and reputation within the capital’s civic community; Hamilton takes a far less well trodden, and potentially more precarious, route—one that has exposed her to some of the most fiery responses seen in intellectual circles since Mark Kishlansky’s notorious ‘tête-à-tête’ with John Adamson or the time when Adrian Johns thought it appropriate to ‘take on’ Elizabeth Eisenstein.3 Both publications were frequently reviewed together, with praise (rightly) being poured on Hill’s detailed archival research into Munday’s metropolitan undertakings in the latter half of his career.4 Hamilton’s impression of his spiritual conscience is formed from an extensive (although not exhaustive) survey of his surviving (and considerable) printed output. She lays out her stall in her Introduction: ‘keen on a strong nation, Munday’s religious sympathies lay in the direction of Catholicism’.5 In January 2017, a group of scholars from Europe and North America (including Hamilton and myself) met in Seville to discuss Munday’s work as a translator, during which we considered the rationale for academic rebuttals of ‘Catholic interpretations’ of his labours. It was interesting to note that the most intense criticisms of such interpretations come from those who have little—if any—knowledge of the relevant French, Spanish and (in particular) Portuguese sources, or of academic debate in those languages.6 This conference was, in and of itself, testimony to how many scholars now consider Hamilton’s ideas to be trailblazing, and suggestive of the degree to which Munday’s engagement with Catholic and Protestant rhetoric is, at the very least, worth investigating. To study Munday’s output, especially for the period after his return from Rome, requires one to explore his ‘contrarie thinges’ in print, and those within their original contexts. It is his choice of topic, and the moments at which he launched such texts in print, that may hold the key to understanding why his reputation can differ so radically among critics.

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But first: who exactly was Anthony Munday? And what was it about his life and activities, as well as about his printed oeuvre, that makes him so controversial?

Anthony Munday: His Formative Years Munday was baptized on 13 October 1560 in the parish church of St. Gregory by St. Paul’s, London—the London depicted in Fig. 8.1. He was the son of Christopher Munday, a stationer, and Jane Munday.7 His route into the book business, therefore, came through his father, who was first apprenticed to the printer Thomas Pettitt and then transferred to Anthony Kitson, a bookseller and publisher, in the summer of 15548 ; Anthony would be made free by patrimony in 1585. His father died when he was just ten years old, in January 1571, leading to the establishment of a guardianship, with Anthony receiving financial support as a London citizen’s orphan. He began an apprenticeship with John Allde (b. in or before 1531, d. 1584) on 24 August 1576.

Fig. 8.1 Panorama of the city of London from Southwark, by an unknown artist, Dutch School, oil on wood, c.1630

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The first we know of Munday’s literary activities is his introductory verse to A Gorgious Gallery, of Gallant Inventions, printed in 1578 by [William How] for Richard Jones (fl. 1564–1613).9 This book was a follow-up publication to Jones’s edition of The Paradyse of Daynty Devises.10 The Gallery was created by Thomas Proctor (fl. 1578–1584), who had likewise been apprenticed to Allde; he quit the book trade to become a rector the following year. John Charlewood (d. 1593) printed many of Munday’s literary endeavours, and their author-printer relationship was to continue for years to come. Successors to Charlewood’s business would also print works by Munday: James Roberts (who married Charlewood’s widow, Alice) and then William Jaggard.11 Ultimately, no other author of the period was responsible for producing such a substantial—and varied—body of printed material as Anthony Munday. It was in the autumn of 1578, while still in his late teens, that Munday left his apprenticeship with Allde and made his now infamous journey to Rome.12 On 2 February 1579, he and his travelling companion, Thomas Nowell, entered the English College (see Fig. 8.2) on Via di Corte Savella (now Via di Monserrato) in its inaugural year. Munday was accepted as a scholar, but did not go so far as to take the missionary oath. As we shall see, speculation abounds over the possibility that Munday went there to spy on—rather than to join—the community, but there is no definitive evidence to prove the stimulus for his decision to depart for Rome, nor for his subsequent decision to return to England in the summer of 1579. We only have Munday’s own account of his sojourn at the College, to which we now turn.

Munday’s Roman Adventure: The English Romayne Lyfe Munday’s account of his stay in Rome, The English Romayne Lyfe, first appeared in print in 1582.13 Its dedicatory epistle addressed to Sir Thomas Bromley (c.1530–1587), lord chancellor of England, opens with the assertion that he has taken every care to ensure that this offering contains ‘nothing in it, that myghte impeach mee, either with error or untrueth, mallice or affection to any’.14 He details how, in an earlier publication entitled A Discoverie of Edmund Campion, and His Confederates, he had promised to deliver this text to Bromley, which he now does, ‘thinking my selfe in as safe securitie, under your honourable favor, as Ulisses supposed himselfe [to be] under the buckler of Ajax’.15 In his

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Fig. 8.2 The English College, Rome, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, woodcut, [c.1596], printed in Marc’ Antonio Ciappi, Compendio delle Heroiche, et Gloriose Attioni, et Santa Vita di Papa Greg. XIII … (Rome, 1596), p. 27

address to ‘the courteous and freendlie reader’, he acknowledges that this present text has taken some time to appear: it ‘is now perfourmed at last, and that which my adversaries thought I would never set forth, to their disproofe and thy profit, I have now published’. He closes with the petition to ‘read [this text] advisedlie, condemne not rashlie, and if thou thinkest mee woorthie anie thanks for my paines, then freendlie bestowe it on me’.16 His account proper begins by giving the rationale behind his visit to Rome, which he did because ‘a number have been desirous, to understand’ and others are ‘doubtfull’ as to why he should have gone there at all.17 He claims straight away that he had travelled simply due to a ‘desire to see straunge countreies, as also affection to learne the languages’.18 After detailing his and Nowell’s occasionally perilous journey, he reports

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the ‘dissension, between the Welshmen and the English men in the colledge’,19 a dispute leading to the banishment of the English contingent from the institution. This section is followed by a relation (Chapters 2 and 6) of his participation in an audience of Pope Gregory XIII. He recounts (Chapters 3 and 4) daily life in the College, as well as providing vivid pen-portraits (Chapters 4 and 5) of the relics housed there. Chapter 7 describes Catholic festivals and practices in Rome, with a peculiar focus on flagellation, and what Munday thought about it. Finally, Chapter 8 covers the recent ‘martyrdom’ of Richard Atkins (1559?–1581) at Rome, rounded off by a tip-in illustration of his last suffering.

Munday’s Life After Rome Although we do not know exactly when he married, we do know that Munday returned home and embraced a young woman named Elizabeth, rather than the celibate life of a Jesuit. Between 1580 and 1589, Munday and his wife Elizabeth had five children: Elizabeth, Rose, Priscilla, Richard and Anne.20 This increasing family was initially supported through his activities as author, translator and actor.21 However, he also assumed other roles, which have been the impetus for differing assessments of Munday’s faith and trustworthiness: during the 1580s, he worked as an intelligencer for Richard Topcliffe (1531–1604), one of the Elizabethan Government’s most notorious enforcers of penal laws against Roman Catholic practice, and, later, he worked for Sir Thomas Heneage, treasurer of the Chamber in the royal household.22 In A Banquet of Daintie Conceits, first entered in the Stationers’ Company register in 1584, Munday describes himself as a ‘servaunt to the queenes most excellent majestie’.23 His 1580s output includes a number of high-profile narratives of the activities (and gruesome ends) of English Catholics, such as A Breefe Discourse of the Taking of Edmund Campion … (London, [1581]) [STC, 18264]; A Discoverie of Edmund Campion, and His Confederates (1582) [STC, 18270]; and A Breefe Aunswer Made Unto Two Seditious Pamphlets (1582) [STC, 18262].24 Campion (1540–1581) had arrived in England with Robert Persons [Parsons]25 and another priest from Rome in June 1580, for the pioneering Jesuit mission ostensibly intended merely to save English souls.26 In 1581, William Allen (1532–1594) produced An Apologie and True Declaration of the Institution and Endevours of the Two English Colleges, the One in Rome, the Other Now Resident in

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Rhemes.27 In November of that year, Munday was one of the witnesses who testified against members of this mission known to him from his spell in Rome, and against Campion, whom he had never met. These priests, along with Campion, were executed in December 1581.28 He first mentioned his intention to print The English Romayne Lyfe in A Discoverie of Edmund Campion, and His Confederates, which was printed within two months of Campion’s Tyburn execution.29 Munday would later (1612) give evidence against the Roman Catholic poet and recusant Hugh Holland (1563–1633).30

Munday’s Reputation During His Lifetime: His Confessional Allegiance In responding to Munday’s printed allegation that Campion had been an inept scholar, Thomas Alfield (1552–1585) denounced Munday as Campion’s antithesis: unlike Munday, he asserted in 1582, Campion was exceptionally erudite. He accused Munday of being nothing more than a charlatan, who, he claimed, was ‘never admitted in the seminary as he pleseth to lye’.31 Munday countered this accusation with further detail, in addition to proof of his and Nowell’s appearance in the College records, reiterating how his forthcoming book, The English Romayne Lyfe, would do much to undermine Alfield’s credibility.32 Alfield also accused Munday of having deceived his former master, John Allde, insisting (‘which tyme he wel feined’) that he had not completed his London apprenticeship prior to his Italian adventure.33 Had this accusation been verified, then Munday could have been imprisoned under the 1563 Statute of Artificers (5 Elizabeth 1 c. 4) for non-completion. Munday defended himself against this charge of lying by printing a ‘certificate’ in A Breefe Aunswer: This is to let all men understand, that Anthony Munday, for the tyme he was my servaunt, dyd his duetie in all respectes, as much as I could desire, without fraude, covin or deceyte: if otherwise I should report of him, I should but say untrueth. By me John Allde.34

1582 also saw Allen reveal Munday as Topcliffe’s informant in A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII. Reverend Priests, placing him at Luke Kirby’s execution in May that year and including him among those

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who were ‘of no religion, of every religion’—that was to say ‘coozeners, dissemblers, espials’ and people charged with adultery, murder and other crimes. Such men, said Allen, were ‘most fit to be corrupted’ and constituted ‘the offal of the world’.35 Munday’s account of his Roman episode was finally released towards the end of 1582, urging readers to consider his testimony in the context of the dangers posed by apostate princes and false magistrates.36 During the Martin Marprelate Controversy (1588–1590),37 Munday continued to work as a Crown pursuivant. For example, he apprehended the godly preacher Giles Wigginton (fl. 1564–1597), presenting him before John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, and claiming that Wigginton was a traitor. He used the preacher’s intimate knowledge of the Marprelate Tracts as evidence against him. In his version of the exchange that had led to his arrest, Wigginton complained that ‘I was treated like a Turk or a dog’ and declared that Munday had tricked him into a discussion of ‘puritan’ doctrine, twisting his words and using them against him. On the basis of this encounter, he concluded that ‘Munday … seemeth to favour the pope and to be a great dissembler’.38 Throughout these early years of his literary career, and parallel career as an informant, Munday was aware of the need to counterbalance in print any possible misreadings of his intentions. As Hill remarks, he nearly always used these occasions not only to defend his good character, but also to advertise his availability to potential patrons.39 This observation certainly holds true for his translations of texts of Portuguese origin. His translation of an account written by a Portuguese friar named José Teixeira—The Strangest Adventure That Ever Happened … Containing a Discourse Concerning … the King of Portugall Dom Sebastian (London, 1601)—brought a curious series of events to an English-language readership for the first time. Many Portuguese did not believe that their much-beloved king, Dom Sebastian, had died at the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in 1578; it was widely rumoured that he had retreated wounded, and would come again to save his subjects from Spanish rule.40 This text purports to reveal evidence as to the veracity of one man’s claim to be Dom Sebastian.41 Munday’s translation is dedicated to William Rider [Ryder] (c.1544–1611), lord mayor of London, and ‘all the rest of the worshipfull senatours and aldermen’—and wastes no time in pointing out that he is readily available for employment, should the opportunity arise. Hill notes how many of his dedicatees, either late in Elizabeth’s reign or

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early in the next one, would later become lord mayor of London themselves and support Munday’s career as a deviser of pageants and mayoral shows.42 Taking a broader view, Hill also recognizes his air of caution when presenting the rationale for his textual choices, urging his honorands to see the goodness within the works and to look beyond any ‘idolatry, superstition and trumperie’ that they may find there.43 In 1587, his English edition of a Latin composition, published as The True Image of Christian Love and purportedly written by Adrian Savorine, was dedicated to the Middlesex magistrate Richard Young, who was not exactly known for his Roman Catholic sympathies.44 It was an interesting pairing: to offer this man, of all men, a text penned by a Dominican friar, particularly when he assured Young that the original translators— from whose work he was making a further translation into English—were ‘friers, men of no smal reckoning among the papists’.45 In 1602, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe was dedicated to John Swynnerton, a wealthy London alderman,46 to whom Munday would also dedicate parts of his Palmeirim Cycle.47 In the 1602 dedication, Munday apologized for an unspecified delay in the volume’s appearance, remarking simply that ‘the troubles of the time, & misinterpretation of the worke by some in authoritie’ had held up publication.48 Hill argues that as late as James I’s reign, while his reputation for devising civic entertainment was increasing, ‘Munday’s religious texts were still causing official disquiet even twenty years after his direct involvement in religious politics’.49

Munday’s Reputation During His Lifetime: His Literary Abilities The quality of Munday’s artistic endeavours certainly sparked conflicting opinions, just as much as did his time in Rome or his work as an intelligencer. The earliest known printed praise of Munday’s literary abilities comes from William Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetrie (1586): Anthony Munday, an earnost [sic] traveller in this arte [of poetry], and in whose name I have seene very excellent workes, among which[,] surely, the most exquisite vaine of a witty poeticall heade is shewed in the sweete sobs of sheepheardes and nymphes: a worke well worthy to be viewed, and to bee esteemed as very rare poetrie.50

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Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia (1598) lists Munday alongside the likes of William Shakespeare (1564–1616), John Heywood (b. 1496/97, d. in or after 1578) and Thomas Lodge (1558–1625) as one of the finest dramatic poets of his age, lauding him as England’s ‘best plotter’.51 Perhaps surprisingly—or not, since he was a man of contradictions— Munday actually attacked writing for the stage, and therefore acting, as a pernicious form of lying. In his A Second and Third Blast of Retrait From Plaies and Theaters (1580), the ‘third blast’ is against the ‘abhomination’ of contemporary theatre.52 In 1582, Alfield exposed this dissonance, sneering at Munday’s theatrical abilities as much as at his prose: I omite to declare howe this scholler new come out of Italy did play extempore, those gentlemen and others whiche were present can best give witnes of his dexterity, who being wery of his folly, hissed him from his stage. Then being therby discouraged, he set forth a balet against playes, but yet (O constant youth) he now beginnes againe to ruffle upon the stage.53

For Alfield, Munday was a dog returning ‘home to his first vomite againe’—an image that would be reiterated within weeks by Stephen Gosson (bap. 1554, d. 1625), when also referring to Munday, albeit obliquely.54 Thomas Nashe [Nash] (bap. 1567, d. c.1601) similarly detested the variety in Munday’s output, as well as his lowly status. In Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Divell … (London, 1592) [STC, 18371], he attacked an unnamed contemporary, generally agreed to have been Munday.55 Nashe’s literary assault upon this ‘squier of low degree’ berates his quarry for arrogance in thinking himself capable of working in such a wide range of genres, and for his relentless attempts to attract new patrons. The quarrelsome Nashe, of course, was not averse to writing for the stage, but he belittled many other genres, not least the kind of popular ‘romance’ that Munday was producing.56 That ‘triviall translators’ such as Munday had the gall to attempt ‘romance’ translations made him an obvious target for Nashe’s wrath.57 Nashe presumably approved of the stage because of its potential as a launch-pad for caustic attack. As with Francis Beaumont’s jibe against Munday’s readers,58 it is from the stage that we witness what would become one of the most enduring denunciations of Munday himself. In the opening scene of Ben Jonson’s His Case Is Alterd (probably performed in early 1597, but not printed until 1609),59 a dialogue occurs

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between Peter Onion and Antonio Balladino (taken to represent Munday) in which ‘Munday is upbraided by Jonson for using stale material and styles in his writing’.60 It is this presentation of Munday as a flawed ‘hack’ writer of little integrity that has reinforced—if not sealed—his reputation for some critics ever since. Hill observes astutely that, like the ridicule offered in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London, 1613) [STC, 1674], Jonson’s remarks could have had as much to do with professional jealousy as they did with talent.61 Munday was both player and playwright, and detractor of both—a man at pains to describe his part in Jesuit life in Rome and the beauty of the relics they safeguarded, and yet a railer and informer against members of the Society of Jesus. It is this very complexity, and Janus-faced authorial identity, that makes Munday so problematic a figure. It is worth noting that many of the attacks upon Munday during his lifetime refer to his bragging about his travel overseas, as if that alone somehow qualified him to become a translator. In Amadís and Palmeirim in England, I consider Continental responses to Munday’s work as a translator, such as the popularity of his Iberian translations among English Catholic exile communities in Portugal and Spain, and their coconfessionalists in England.62 Their reception by Roman Catholic readers adds an extra layer of complexity when considering evidence for his confessional allegiance and contradictory actions. Yet we should, perhaps, not be so surprised over that fact. After all, translators could act as ‘Renaissance go-betweens’ for Catholic states, communities and individuals. A translator’s profession and experience often ensured that he (and occasionally she) was considered a person ‘out of place’, while at the same time being able to function as a conduit.63 From the outset of his career as a translator, any texts imbued with a Roman Catholic heritage, or evoking Catholic practices, raised alarmbells, not least among officers of the Stationers’ Company in London. Their monitoring of Munday’s textual output is especially clear from the register entry relating to ‘Palmerin of Englande’. This entry (of 13 February 1581) records that when that work came to be licenced for the press, it was allowed only ‘uppon condicon that if there be anie thinge founde in the booke when it is extante worthie of reprehension that then all the bookes shalbe put to waste and burnte’.64 The original text, Palmeirim d’Inglaterra,65 contains numerous references to Catholic religious practices, all of which would have made its choice— at this tense time—highly questionable.66 Although many such scenes

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would be removed in Munday’s translations of the Palmeirim Cycle (the same was the case for his Amadís Cycle),67 the fact remains that the original texts had been created with Catholic audiences in mind. Expunging pious formulae for circulation in a Protestant realm did not necessarily hinder their mnemonic functionality within an oral society more than capable of perpetuating earlier devotional practices in seclusion, since it is apparent in the texts where these passages have been removed.68 Stimulating both memory and discussion, private readings of key passages within these publications certainly happened during the late sixteenth century among members of various communities, including the English Bridgettine nuns resident in Lisbon.69 Importantly, Munday’s post-manuscript, pre-publication emendations to one work survive elsewhere, raising questions as to his motives for choosing certain topics and certain dedicatees. On 20 December 1580, what would emerge as Munday’s The True Reporte of the Prosperous Successe Which God Gave Unto Our English Souldiours Against the Forraine Bands of Our Romaine Enemies, Lately Arived … in Ireland … (London, [1581]) [STC, 17124] was entered in the Stationers’ Company register.70 This pamphlet essentially mocks the English for their deceit in slaying their prisoners at Smerwick during the summer of 1579, suggesting that their motives were anything but godly. A printed copy survives containing a variant printed inscription revealing that the publication was originally dedicated to ‘Maister George Gifford’, a gentleman pensioner of the queen.71 Gifford was one of the conspirators implicated by Charles Arundell and Lord Henry Howard (1540–1614) when they were arrested and interrogated over Christmas 1580.72 In 1582, Gifford would be named in the Guise Plot as the man selected to bring about Elizabeth’s assassination.73 Munday’s text was not published until [1581] and, when it was, Gifford’s name had been removed. Clearly, the author must have realized that such a dedication would never make it past the censoring eye of the Stationers’ Company, even if the text did. Similarly, his removal of references to Roman Catholic devotions (such as the Mass) from his edition of Palmerin of England may have been enough to permit its dissemination without further objection.74 Munday’s translation of Iberian romance cycles proved to be prescient, as the rest of his career would involve regular translation and publication of Iberian ‘romance’. These texts, like so much of Munday’s output, were sneered at in their own time, although the recent revival of scholarly interest in them is doing much to unpick the over-simplified notion

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that they are merely frivolous entertainment. This negative perception of Palmeirim is, of course, rooted in its theatrical citation in The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London, 1613), which had been written in 1606– 1607.75 In the opening act, Rafe, an apprentice, is witnessed idling away his time reading one of Munday’s Palmeirim translations; Beaumont intended his doing so to be seen as worthy of indignation. Exactly how much of such ridiculing of Munday’s real readers was born of jealousy can only be a matter of speculation. Unlike Munday’s translations of Palmeirim, The Knight of the Burning Pestle was ‘an unqualified commercial failure’—Beaumont may well already have resented Munday’s success; he had even more reason to do so afterwards.76

Munday’s Reputation in Current Academic Debate: Was He a Roman Catholic or a Protestant Author? After the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829, the demand for literature exploring England’s Catholic past increased steadily.77 Consideration of Munday’s motives for travelling to Rome was re-ignited in the midnineteenth century, when Richard Simpson’s biography of Campion speculated about Munday’s reasons for entering the English College in Rome.78 Sixty years later, Celeste Turner shone her spotlight directly upon Munday’s life and career, hailing him as ‘an Elizabethan Man of Letters’, despite the fact that his career was far from over in 1603.79 Turner would prove to have the single greatest impact on Munday’s reputation in twentieth- and twenty-first century scholarship. Her description of Munday as ‘rabidly anti-papist’ has taken root so well, and flowered so insidiously, that it has left little room for those who consider his confessional allegiance to have been anything but decidedly Protestant.80 In the 1940s, Beatrice Hamilton Thompson’s ‘Anthony Munday’s Journey to Rome’ suggested that his motivation lay simply in a desire to travel, but her essay was answered by Giuseppe Galigani, who questioned why she should take Munday’s comments at face value.81 E. H. Miller, writing in 1959, preferred to focus on his literary endeavours, describing him as the ‘patriarch of the Elizabethan Grub Street’—a man willing to pick up, and run with, some of the vitriol against ‘hack’ writers thrown by Nashe and his contemporaries.82 Surveying the worthies of sixteenth century English Literature, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)—that weather-vane of acceptability—makes his opinion of Munday clear: he omits him.83

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Miller may have been influenced by Henry Thomas, who had earlier declared, somewhat bizarrely, that ‘Anthony Munday, aided and abetted by various English publishers, ran [in England] a factory for the production of chivalresque romances [of foreign origin] on the lines of the Venetian house of Mambrino Roseo and Michele Tramezzino’.84 Yet, as Joshua Phillips and I have independently acknowledged, there is no evidence to support this claim that Munday had farmed out the chivalric translations to others, beyond a single reference in Munday’s prefatory epistle to The Second Booke of Primaleon of Greece (1596). In that epistle, Munday states that it was ‘not my hap to doo the first part of Primaleon, (but onely the first foure sheetes thereof) by reason of my urgent occasions at that time’.85 This disclosure that he had been unable to complete a translation of the first part of that work does not mean that Munday had created a sweatshop of translators, relieving him entirely of the task of translating Iberian romance.86 Yet this reputation for personal responsibility for the translations has held tight for some considerable time.87 In the early 1960s, Anthony Kenny published a lengthy article, dealing with the period after the Elizabethan Church Settlement, which details developments at the English Hospice leading to its inauguration as a college.88 He blames Munday for making the dissension between the English and the Welsh in Rome ‘the talk of England’. Moreover, Kenny accuses Munday of having created an account that is ‘partly fictional, and betrays parti pris in places’, but which is, nonetheless, ‘well informed and vivid’.89 During the 1970s and 1980s, interest would again focus on Munday’s rationale for his 1579 Italian trip. In a book-length study of the Venerable English College in Rome (1979), Michael Williams concluded that Munday had travelled to the eternal city in good faith, only to turn informant later.90 The following year, introducing his edition of The English Roman Life, Ayres offered an interpretation of the reasons for the journey that aligned with Hamilton Thompson’s account. He claims that in Munday’s ‘few words’ on the subject in the text itself ‘surely lies both the reason and the excuse, in that order, while boredom with his life as an apprentice no doubt provided the spur’.91 His analysis of Munday’s apparent ‘gap year’—an analysis that fails to explain how a young, orphaned apprentice might fund such an adventure—concludes that ‘wanderlust is a far more satisfactory explanation for his travelling

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abroad than piety, or another that has been suggested – that he had the future English Roman Life in mind (a costly way of getting material)’.92 What we witness, then, by the latter half of the twentieth-century is the delineation of Munday’s travel motives and publication strategies into several (sometimes interchangeable) camps: he was a Catholic, he was a Protestant, he had wanderlust (which facilitated his writing portfolio) and he was a ‘hack’ writer, simply churning out copy for profit. So when Hill and Hamilton reinvigorated consideration of Munday in the early twentyfirst century, it was not that interest in him had died, but rather that scholarship had become excessively atomised, concentrating on fragments of his career at the expense of an appreciation of his whole life. To some extent, Hill still does that, in that she privileges the latter half of Munday’s career, as creator of London’s civic pageants. Of course, such a strategy makes perfect sense, since it is the portion not previously examined in any real depth and the one giving rise to the works of greatest longevity. Nevertheless, her book is a master-class in how to breathe new life into what had become a near-moribund body of material. In other quarters, the main focus has been on Munday’s dramatic oeuvre. The ‘Huntington Plays’ have been investigated thoroughly; Nora Johnson’s evaluation preceded the Hill and Hamilton books by only a few months.93 In her wider assessment of his stage portrayal of martyrdom, she argues that ‘Munday’s career … marks him as the champion of conscience while simultaneously marking him as the champion of economic opportunism’—a verdict that strikingly links his religious and pecuniary reputations.94 Non-dramatic texts, such as The English Romayne Lyfe, are, to Johnson, ‘profoundly puzzling’, engendering what she calls ‘a profound epistemological anxiety’.95 Munday’s collaborative involvement in writing Sir Thomas More for the stage is seen as an ‘exercise in duplicity for financial gain’.96 Johnson’s appraisal demonstrates the continuing disjunction between Munday’s literary and confessional reputations. Throughout her account, we see chinks of light shed upon his enduring reputation within literary circles: he ‘stumbles into a paradoxical version of [Michel] Foucault’s author-function’—a man who was ‘at once a powerful figure and a duplicitous one’.97 Munday rendered truth ‘hopelessly elastic’ and had ‘trouble positioning himself in relation to real and false martyrs’.98 For Hamilton, it is the page, not the stage, that opens up the greatest opportunities for Catholic readings of Munday. According to her, the character of mise-en-page in texts such as The English Romayne Lyfe

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suggests that he used his printing expertise to his advantage, specifically in order to equivocate. She argues that Munday’s demotion of Protestant commentary on Roman relics and locations to the margins permits the body of the text to present its burden from a Catholic perspective. Hamilton holds that this disposition of material was ‘Munday’s typical manoeuvre’, that is to say ‘to bracket his work with statements of government policy and loyalty’ as a means of placing a discreet missive to English recusant communities within an envelope of conformity.99 From this perspective, Munday appeased Elizabeth’s government by decrying Catholics in his introductory and concluding lines, as well as in the marginalia, while simultaneously deploying the body of the text to supply recusants with essential information about their co-confessionalists and about life in exile. Significantly, this finding tallies with other observations about Catholic textual stratagems made by scholars such as Olga Valbuena.100 Such stratagems could be invoked both orally and in print, albeit with great care, thereby making two interpretations possible. If this was indeed Munday’s tactic to enable him to sustain livelihood and family, then it is in the very nature of a Janus-faced text to cause its readers to disagree. Johnson takes what is perhaps Munday’s most infamous line, and the one with which Hamilton opens the Introduction to her monograph—‘Favour comes by conformity, and death by obstinacy’—as ‘remarkably incriminating’ and ‘an exercise in duplicity’.101 Hamilton reads the aphorism somewhat differently. So does Ceri Sullivan, who sees potential recusant benefits in Munday’s descriptions of the buildings and relics of Rome: ‘The reader can [go on] pilgrimage in his imagination’ via such texts, and Protestants can disdain them.102 In yet another avenue of literary criticism, Liz Oakley-Brown’s important assessment of Munday’s ‘Huntington Plays’ sets these portrayals of the world of Robin Hood in a wider framework; the publication of her essay more or less coincided with the appearance of the works by Hamilton, Hill and Johnson that have already been noticed.103 Like Johnson, Oakley-Brown provides detailed textual analysis, in this case drawing attention to ‘issues of representation’ in these plays, issues which ‘disrupt the opposition between history and fiction, leaving the textual politics of history itself open to question’.104 Citing Michel de Certeau’s assertion that ‘history is not an epistemological criticism. It remains always a narrative’, Oakley-Brown argues that Munday’s plays are intentionally open to interpretation through their own interpretations of history.105

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Malcolm Nelson notes how ‘we are never quite allowed to forget that we are watching an earl playing at being an outlaw’.106 Although the description of Robert/Robin as an earl had first appeared in Richard Grafton’s Chronicle at Large (1568–1569),107 Munday is, for all intents and purposes, the author who sealed in popular culture the idea that Robin Hood was a man of noble birth, and a loyal servant of the Crown, brought low by those of evil intent.108 Stephen Knight explicitly makes this point in his analysis of the two plays, suggesting that they present a ‘viewpoint’ which ‘accepts royal authority and fears most forcefully those arch-enemies of the hierarchy, the untrustworthy confidante or employee’.109 I argue that the same holds true for Munday’s translations of Amadís de Gaula and Palmeirim d’Inglaterra: they facilitate both Protestant and Roman Catholic readings, they explore loyalty to the Crown and they examine the role of evil counsel—and do so intentionally.110 Other Munday texts, however, have prompted scholars to see him as nothing more than a ‘hack’, labouring for whoever would pay. In 1593, he issued an English edition of Ortensio Landi’s Paradossi, Cioè, Sententie Fuori del Comun Parere … (Lione, 1543) entitled The Defence of Contraries.111 Translating once more not from the original language but from French, Munday’s version proved popular enough to be reprinted early in the next century, curiously with a re-worked title: Paradoxes Against Common Opinion: Debated in Form of Declamations in Place of Publique Censure … (London, 1602) [STC, 6467.5]. In the Introduction to her 2002 critical edition of this text, Patrizia Grimaldi Pizzorno describes Munday as a man who simply ‘worked for profit-seeking printers such as John Allde and John Charlewood’ and bands him with other ‘enterprising, unscrupulous but not particularly talented young men [who] managed to make a living in the tough world of the Elizabethan literary profession’.112 Munday, she insists, was ‘an opportunist and canny businessman of letters rather than a disinterested advocate of religious principles’. We should note, though, that she relies almost entirely upon Turner for her conjectures as to Munday’s motives.113 Yet not all modern students have resorted to Turner’s opinion in addressing that problem. Recent scholarship has mainly moved to a position in which Munday’s writing is regarded as far more complex and nuanced in its approach to literary representation (on both page and stage) than previous generations of critics had recognized. OakleyBrown’s sharp-eyed scrutiny of his literary strategies finds a sophisticated

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methodology in operation, noting how Munday utilized historical and/or fictional figures in order to comment on the here and now of Elizabethan England: Rather than foregrounding history as a linear narrative, the plays manufacture a version of reality that hinges on a mise-en-abîme of temporal frames: the plays are set within the Court of Henry VII, the plot concerned with the time of Richard I, while Munday’s texts themselves are the products of Elizabethan England.114

In 2010, Stefano Villani contextualized Munday’s The English Romayne Lyfe within wider debates about the Jesuit mission, both at the time and in current academic inquiry.115 Munday’s account, he maintains, presents the English College in Rome as ‘un covo di cospiratori e di spie’ (a den of conspirators and spies)—and he gives an impressive, multi-lingual assessment of its place in an ongoing pamphlet war. In doing so, Villani highlights how any study of the English Literature of this period can benefit significantly from reading and contemplating both primary and secondary sources written in various languages.116 His dramatic works, Oakley-Brown contends, ‘negotiate the precarious political circumstances to which Munday was personally subject’.117 It was the age in which he lived that explains ‘the problematic nature of representation in these “crouching hypocrite dissembling times”’.118 Munday’s later work on John Stow and for the city of London, as Hill’s book shows, reveals a narrower and increasingly indigenous specificity to his concerns and output. Scholars have accordingly seen it as being less in need of critical exegesis. If Munday’s youthful Elizabethan phase testifies to both his diverse interests and mixed reception, then by the time of James VI’s accession to the English throne (and beyond) the older man can be seen to have concentrated more intently on aspects of English history and identity on the page and in performance. Hill perceives the result of this trajectory in his London compositions: ‘One gains a strong sense from Munday’s civic productions not only of a geographical but also of a temporal “home” with which he is comfortable’.119 In fact, she says, his mayoral shows ‘habitually emphasized the historical over the contemporary’, thus pushing current conflicts aside.120 Those conclusions are not wholly original, for Paula Johnson had observed in the 1970s how ‘Munday sets his entire discourse [in the

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pageants] in the context of origins and continuity’.121 Hill’s contribution is especially valuable, however, for seizing upon this visual dimension and incorporating it into a thoroughgoing analysis, thereby opening up Munday studies to fresh perspectives—taking the enterprise away, in other words, from a narrow focus on simply The English Romayne Lyfe. In short, Munday’s legacy is far more wide-ranging and, inevitably, more complex than such an old-fashioned and reductive approach would imply. To date, the monographs written by Hill and Hamilton remain the key texts offering alternative readings of some—if not all—of Munday’s oeuvre. Even though not all of Munday’s works survive, it is likely that he will continue to be studied, and judged, in terms of particular pamphlets, or even specific genres, rather than on the basis of his entire extant output. Having said that, a large-scale research project, along the lines accorded to Nashe’s publications, should not be ruled out.122 So where does this historiography leave us in gauging Munday’s reputation now?

Conclusion Seemingly, the closest that we can get to a consensus is that his literary and translation skills were sometimes flawed, that the quantity and range of his output was impressive and that the case for Munday as Catholic equivocator remains open to challenge, since no evidence survives beyond his printed texts. Yet scholars may find themselves, once again, standing on shifting sands, for in 2017 Anne Ashley Davenport published a booklength study of the life and writings of Francis à Sancta Clara.123 This monograph opens with a discussion of The English Romayne Lyfe, which, according to the author, enabled English Protestants ‘to read a firsthand account of Roman Catholic brainwashing’.124 Munday is presented as having divulged to an English, Protestant readership the ‘tricks of the trade’ utilized in the Jesuit-run College to turn fellow natives back to Rome. Here we have reverted—but with a twist—to something not far distant from the thesis that The English Romayne Lyfe is ‘rabidly anti-papist’. Apropos of the charges related earlier, to the effect that Munday’s literary style was poor and stale, Davenport contends otherwise. For her, it was precisely because he ‘had a playwright’s flair for detail’ that ‘Munday’s narrative was all the more forceful in its impact’.125 Strangely enough, another monograph to roll off the press in 2017, that by Andrew Hadfield, also opens by discussing Munday’s notorious sojourn in Rome.

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When they learn that Munday was ‘one of the very few Englishmen in this period to meet the pope’, and that he was a writer capable of describing ‘his encounter in vivid detail’, readers familiar with the myriad responses to this extraordinary pamphlet must surely suspect where Hadfield is going with his analysis, not least because a spoiler alert features in his title: Lying in Early Modern English Culture.126 Hadfield examines the presentation of the text for clues to help fathom Munday’s intentions: ‘What is noticeable is that it is Munday’s comments surrounding the speeches of the pope and the unnamed English student … [that] cast those speeches in a negative light’.127 Here, Hadfield’s as-always razor-sharp analysis stresses not what this fact tells us about Munday the author, but rather what it reveals about the text’s potential for provoking multiple readings: The question is not really whether Munday is telling the truth about the pope’s words, but whether he has recorded his reactions honestly, or framed the story of his visit to Rome in a recognizable manner that supports what would have been expected of a loyal Protestant in the pope’s city.128

Indeed, Hadfield remarks that in this description of the papal audience, as elsewhere in The English Romayne Lyfe, Munday’s narrative ‘raises as many questions as it answers and it is hard to take Munday’s words at face value’.129 Nearly a century ago, that was not a problem which Turner had faced. Nevertheless, Hadfield’s insight pinpoints something with which I agree: Munday intentionally ‘leaves the reader to make up his or her own mind about Munday’.130 It is only once we embrace early modern conceptions of truth, lies, equivocation, paradox and rhetorical obfuscation that we can begin to appreciate the reality behind Munday’s reputation: like or loathe his literary style, the man’s most controversial works deliberately remain open to question. To put it another way: the author provocatively gave carte blanche for further disagreement over his legacy and, therefore, over his reputation.131 Brian Cummings has demonstrated eloquently how text and language are active participants in the forging of meaning and the facilitation of comprehension, particularly in periods of religious and political tension— and repression.132 Alexandra Walsham commends Cummings’s approach for underlining a point central to any understanding of textual politics during the periods of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation: in

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a world in which the ‘hermeneutic struggle’ was ‘inescapably linguistic’, the ‘ascendancy of godly kingship and absolutist monarchy both inflected and engendered particular literary developments’. Arguably, the religiopolitical pressures that reached their apogee in the 1580s ‘shaped the conditions of reading and writing’: authors, translators and readers sought to traverse and grasp the options presented by conformism, loyalty and dissent.133 Hostile waters necessitated careful navigation.134 This is the background to the high-water mark for attacks upon Munday in his lifetime, and for modern assessments of his efforts during this phase of a long career. Hill recognizes that his output throughout the 1580s in particular ‘is frequently evasive and ambiguous, even cryptic’.135 Hamilton urges us to question the view which classifies Munday as other than ‘someone whose work constructed English national identity’; rather, he sought, across his entire oeuvre, to fashion an identity that found space for the articulation of the views of loyal Roman Catholics, despite the restraints upon what they could print on authorized presses in England.136 In 2017, Brian Lockey exhorted scholars to rethink the relationship between the process of national identity formation in England and those who were associated with ‘religious orders and hierarchies, transnational Humanism, travel and commerce’. He insists that scholarly debates in earlier decades either ignored or over-simplified Catholic contributions to that process. Frequently disagreeing with Hamilton, he asserts that the ‘relationship between Catholicism and English national identity is far more complex than has traditionally been thought’.137 Hadfield’s belief that we ought to judge Munday on how his language at any given point intentionally fostered (and fosters) multiple readings ultimately explains why there has long been such divergence over his reputation—professional and religious. In essence: Munday allows us to see what we wish to see.

Notes 1. E. Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim in England: Anglo-Iberian Relations and the Uses of Medieval and Early Modern Arthuriana (forthcoming, 2019) [hereafter Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim]. 2. D. B. Hamilton, Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633 (Aldershot, 2005) [hereafter Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics ]; T. Hill, Anthony Munday and Civic Culture: Theatre, History and Power in Early

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3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Modern London 1580–1633 (Manchester, 2004) [hereafter Hill, Munday and Civic Culture]. I refer, of course, to the crossing of swords that began with (i) M. A. Kishlansky, ‘Saye What?’, HJ , 33 (1990), pp. 917–37, continued with (ii) J. S. A. Adamson, ‘Politics and the Nobility in Civil-War England’, ibid., 34 (1991), pp. 231–55 and concluded with (iii) M. A. Kishlansky, ‘Saye No More’, JBS, 30 (1991), pp. 399–448. The later (unrelated) debate was stimulated by (i) E. L. Eisenstein, ‘An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited’, The American Historical Review, 107 (2002), pp. 87–105, which brought forth (ii) A. Johns, ‘How to Acknowledge a Revolution’, ibid., pp. 106–25 and concluded with E. L. Eisenstein, ‘Reply’, ibid., pp. 126–8. See, e.g., R. Rowland, ‘Should We Like Munday After All?’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 36 (2007), pp. 365–9 (review article). Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, p. xvi. Iberian Chivalric Romance in English Translation: Anthony Munday and Early Modern English Culture, Universidad de Seville, 18–19 January 2018: http://filologia.us.es. A vol. of conference proceedings is forthcoming from University of Toronto Press. For a detailed biography, see D. M. Bergeron, ‘Munday, Anthony (bap. 1560, d. 1633)’, in ODNB, which explains his route into printing. Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, pp. xix–xxiv. T.[homas] P.[roctor], A Gorgious Gallery, of Gallant Inventions … (London, 1578) [STC, 20402]. [R.] Edwards, The Paradyse of Daynty Devises … (London, 1576) [STC, 7516]. See M. Eccles, ‘Anthony Munday’, in J. W. Bennett et al. (eds), Studies in The English Renaissance Drama (London, 1959), pp. 98–9. Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, p. xx. A. Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe … (London, 1582) [STC, 18272], which was reprinted in London in 1590 [STC, 18273]. References here are to the 1st edn. For a modern critical edn of that publication, see P. J. Ayres (ed.), Anthony Munday: The English Roman Life (Oxford, 1980). A. Munday, The English Romayne Lyfe … (London, 1582) [STC, 18272], sig. A2r. Ibid., sigs A2v–A3r. Ibid., sig. [A4]r. Ibid., sig. B1r. Ibid. Ibid., p. 12. D. M. Bergeron, ‘Munday, Anthony (bap. 1560, d. 1633)’, in ODNB.

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21. See ibid.; N. Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2003) [hereafter Johnson, Actor], pp. 97–8. 22. M. Hicks, ‘Heneage, Sir Thomas (b. in or before 1532, d. 1595)’, in ODNB. 23. See Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, pp. xx–xxi; A. Munday, A Banquet of Daintie Conceits. Furnished With Verie Delicate and Choyse Inventions, to Delight Their Mindes, Who Take Pleasure in Musique, and There-Withall to Sing Sweete Ditties, Either to the Lute, Bandora, Virginalles, or Anie Other Instrument … (London, 1588) [STC, 18260]. Munday made good use of this role and was rewarded on 19 July 1587 with a grant (in reversion) of some (presumably profitable) leases of Crown properties lying in various counties: L. J. Wilkinson (ed.), Calendar of Patent Rolls 29 Elizabeth I (1586–1587) Part 1 (Calendar): C 66/1286–1303), List and Index Society, 295 (Kew, 2003), pp. 174–5 (Item 1184). 24. See B. C. Lockey, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth (Burlington, Vermont, [2015]) [hereafter Lockey, Catholics ], pp. 104–5. 25. See below, Chapter 10. 26. See G. Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham, 2015). See also J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975), pp. 11–34. 27. W. Allen, An Apologie and True Declaration of the Institution and Endevours of the Two English Colleges, the One in Rome, the Other Now Resident in Rhemes … (Mounts in Henault [recte Rheims], 1981) [STC, 369]. See also E. Duffy, ‘Allen, William (1532–1594)’, in ODNB. 28. G. Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham, 2015), pp. 331–48 (Chapter 11: ‘We are Made a Spectacle’). 29. A. Munday, A Discoverie of Edmund Campion, and His Confederates … (London, 1582) [STC, 18270], sig. C4r. See also Lockey, Catholics, pp. 104–5. [T. Alfield, possibly with H. Walpole], A True Reporte of the Death & Martyrdome of M. Campion Jesuite and Preiste, & M. Sherwin, & M. Bryan Priestes, at Tiborne the First of December 1581 … ([London, 1582]) [STC, 4537] [hereafter [Alfield], True Reporte], sig. E[1]r. 30. See M. Eccles, ‘Anthony Munday’, in J. W. Bennett et al. (eds), Studies in The English Renaissance Drama (London, 1959), p. 103; H. Bowler (ed.), London Sessions Records 1605–1685, PCRS, XXXIV (London, 1934), pp. 63–4, 71. 31. [Alfield], True Reporte, sig. E[1]r. 32. A. Munday, A Breefe Aunswer Made Unto Two Seditious Pamphlets … Contayning a Defence of Edmund Campion and His Complices, Their Moste Horrible and Unnaturall Treasons, Against Her Majestie and the Realme (London, 1582) [STC, 18262], sigs D3v–D4v. See

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33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

also J. Phillips, ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time: Anthony Munday, Tudor Romance, and Literary Labor’, ELH , 73 (2006), pp. 793–6. [Alfield], True Reporte, sig. [D4]v. A. Munday, A Breefe Aunswer Made Unto Two Seditious Pamphlets … Contayning a Defence of Edmund Campion and His Complices, Their Moste Horrible and Unnaturall Treasons, Against Her Majestie and the Realme (London, 1582) [STC, 18262], sig. D3v. [W. Allen], A Briefe Historie of the Glorious Martyrdom of XII. Reverend Priests … ([Rheims], 1582) [STC, 369.5], sig. [A7]v. On this defence tactic, see Lockey, Catholics, pp. 105–9. ‘The Marprelate Tracts urged the necessity of public debate on controverted subjects, and sought to create a popularizing polemic that modelled the sound of that debate’: J. L. Black, ‘The Marprelate Controversy’, in A. Hadfield (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of English Prose 1500–1640 (Oxford, 2013), p. 546. Cited by C. Turner, Anthony Mundy, An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, California, 1928), p. 84. On Whitgift, see above, Chapter 7. Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, pp. 88–92. See also J. de Castro, Discurso da Vida do Sempre Bem Vindo e Apparecido Rey Dom Sebastiam Nosso Senhor o Encuberto Desdo seu Naçime to tee o Presente: Feito & Dirigido (Paris, 1602), of which a modern edn was published in Lisbon in 1994. The work is noticed in A. S. Wilkinson and A. Ulla Lorenzo (eds), Iberian Books, 3 vols (Leiden, 2010–16), II p. 252 (No. 24424). The longevity of this belief that Sebastian would eventually return (‘Sebastianism’) is detailed in F. Moreno-Carvalho, ‘A Portuguese Jewish Agent of the Philips and a Sebastianist: The Strange Case of Rosales/Manuel Bocarro’, in A. P. Torres and L. F. Silvério Lima (eds), Visions, Prophecies and Divinations: Early Modern Messianism and Millenarianism in Iberian America, Spain and Portugal, The Iberian Religious World, 3 (Leiden, 2016), pp. 161–78. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (trans.), J. Teixeira, The Strangest Adventure That Ever Happened … Containing a Discourse Concerning … the King of Portugall Dom Sebastian … (London, 1601) [STC, 23864]. Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, p. 89. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (ed.) and [J. Gough] (trans.), A. Savorine [recte J. Ryckes], The True Image of Christian Love … (London, 1587) [STC, 21801], sig. [unsigned] [3]r (counting the title-page as 1). See D. Shuger, ‘A Protesting Catholic Puritan in Elizabethan England’, JBS, 48 (2009), p. 591. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (ed.) and [J. Gough] (trans.), A. Savorine [recte J. Ryckes], The True Image of Christian Love … (London, 1587) [STC, 21801], sig. [unsigned] [3]r (counting the title-page as 1).

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387

46. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (trans.), P. de Mornay, Seigneur du Plessis-Marly, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe … (London, 1602) [STC, 18163], sigs A3r–[A6]r. 47. I.e., a series of eight books of chivalric romance attributed to Francisco de Moraes [or de Morais] Cabral (c.1500–1572) and centred upon the exploits of Palmerin D’Oliva, emperor of Constantinople, and his descendants. Sections of it were translated into English, via French, by Munday in the period 1581–1595. I have used ‘Palmeirim’ in line with the Portuguese spelling, rather than ‘Palmerin’ more commonly found in connection with Spanish and English renderings of the tale. For a fuller explanation, see Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim. 48. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (trans.), P. de Mornay, Seigneur du Plessis-Marly, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe … (London, 1602) [STC, 18163], sig. A5r. 49. Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, p. 91. 50. W. Webbe, A Discourse of English Poetrie … (London, 1586) [STC, 25172], sig. C4v. 51. N. Ling (ed.), F. Meres, Palladis Tamia. Wits Treasury[:] Being the Second Part of Wits Common Wealth (London, 1598) [STC, 17834], fol. 283v. 52. Salvian of Marseilles and [A. Munday], A Second and Third Blast of Retrait From Plaies and Theaters … (London, 1580) [STC, 21677], p. 41. According to EEBO, the ‘first blast’ was a book by Stephen Gosson, the ‘second blast’ is a translation of Book 6 of ‘De Gubernatione Dei’ by Salvian of Marseilles (c.400–c.480), while the ‘third blast’ is sometimes attributed to Munday. 53. [Alfield], True Reporte, sig. E[1]r. 54. cf. ibid. and S. Gosson, Playes Confuted in Five Actions … (London, [1582]) [STC, 12095], sig. G3v. 55. Sigs F3v–[F4]. For that passage in a modern critical edn, see F. P. Wilson (ed.), R. B. McKerrow (ed.), The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols (Oxford, 1966), I pp. 213–5. 56. Lee urges English-language scholars to consider how early modern authors and translators categorized their work. Here I follow Lee’s cautionary practice by qualifying the term ‘romance’ through the use of inverted commas: C. S. Lee, ‘The Meanings of Romance: Rethinking Early Modern Fiction’, MP, 112 (2014), pp. 287–311. 57. T. Nash, ‘To the Gentlemen Students of Both Universities’, introductory epistle in R. Greene, Menaphon … (London, 1589) [STC, 12272], sig. **3r. See also Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, pp. 72–5. 58. M. Hattaway (ed.), Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London, 1969), pp. 25–6 (Act I, lines 211–30).

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59. On the performance, see I. Donaldson, ‘Jonson, Benjamin [Ben] (1572– 1637)’, in ODNB. 60. B. Jonson, His Case is Alterd. As It Hath Beene Sundry Times Acted by the Children of the Blacke-Friers (London, 1609) [STC, 14757]; G. D. George, ‘Earning a Living as an Author in Early Modern England: The Case of Anthony Munday’, Graduate College of Bowling Green State University PhD thesis (2006), p. 8; I. Donaldson, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford, 2011), pp. 91, 92, 457 (n. 20), 479 (n. 13). 61. Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, p. 75. Note also the character ‘Maister Post-hast’, described as a ‘peaking pagenter’, which is almost certainly meant to represent Munday: [John Marston], Histrio-Mastix. Or, The Player Whipt ([London], 1610) [STC, 13529], sig. [E4]v. 62. Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim, Chapter 7. 63. See P. Burke, ‘The Renaissance Translator as Go-Between’, in A. Höfele and W. von Koppenfels (eds), Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Berlin, 2005), pp. 17–31. 64. E. Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols (privately published, London and Birmingham, 1875–94), II p. 388. The editio princeps of Palmerin of England was probably published in 1581, though appears not to be extant: J. Sánchez-Martí, ‘The Publication History of Anthony Munday’s Palmerin d’Oliva’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 89 (2014), p. 193. 65. Francisco de Moraes [or de Morais] Cabral, Cronica do Famoso e Muito Esforçado Cavalleiro Palmeirim d’Inglaterra (Évora, 1567)—though it should be remembered that Munday approached the work through a French translation. 66. Dedicating to the 17th earl of Oxford his translation of The Psalmes of David and Others. With M. John Calvins Commentaries (London, 1571) [STC, 4395], Arthur Golding juxtaposed chivalric and religious interests (sig. *2r–v) so as to ‘emphasize the value of right religion to political and social life’: D. B. Hamilton, ‘Anthony Munday’s Translations of Iberian Chivalric Romances: Palmerin of England, Part 1 as Exemplar’, in R. Corthell et al. (eds), Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, Indiana, 2007), p. 283. 67. Amadís de Gaula is an Iberian romance. The oldest surviving edn is by Garcia Rodríguez de Montalvo, who acknowledged that his version was a reworking and lengthening of an earlier one. Munday published an English translation of Nicolas de Herberay’s French translation of the Spanish text. The five books of the English translation were printed individually, with separate title-pages and pagination, but were sometimes issued together (and are often found bound together) and have therefore in certain cases been assigned joint STC numbers. The components of the cycle are: First Book ([London, 1590?]) [STC, 541]; Second Book

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ANTHONY MUNDAY: ELOQUENT EQUIVOCATOR OR CONTEMPTIBLE …

68.

69.

70.

71.

72.

73. 74.

75. 76.

77.

78.

389

(London, 1619) [STC, 544 is First Book and Second Book together, the latter in fact having been translated by Lazarus Pyott, Munday acting as ed.]; Third Book (London, 1618); Fourth Book (London, 1618) [STC, 543 is Third Book and Fourth Book together]; and Fifth Book (London, 1598) [STC, 542.5]. For detailed discussion of Munday’s manipulation of these texts, and evidence of how they were read, see Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim, Chapters 6 and 7. See R. Dalrymple, Language and Piety in Middle English Romance (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 141–2 on eliding physical and mnemonic text in order to evoke devotional consciousness. On Catholic exile communities reading Iberian ‘romance’ in translation, see Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim, Chapter 7. E. Arber (ed.), A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640 A.D., 5 vols (privately published, London and Birmingham, 1875–94), II p. 384. CUL, Shelfmark Syn.7.58.11 (dedication signed ‘A. M.’), accessible via EEBO. Hamilton covers this episode at length: Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, pp. 21–3. The figures are discussed in relation to Munday and the wider book trade in T. Provvidera, ‘Bruno, Charlewood and Munday: Politics, Culture and Religion During Bruno’s Time in England’, in M. McLaughlin et al. (eds), Authority, Innovation and Early Modern Epistemology: Essays in Honour of Hilary Gatti (Cambridge and Leeds, 2015), pp. 137–56. See also D. C. Andersson, Lord Henry Howard (1540–1614): An Elizabethan Life (Cambridge, 2009), p. 123. S. Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford, 2009), p. 242. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (trans.), Francisco de Moraes [or de Morais] Cabral, [The [First] Seconde Part, of the No Lesse Rare, Historie of Palmerin of England], 2 parts (London, 1596) [STC, 19161]. Since the Part I title-page is lacking, details come from the separate title-page to Part II. M. Hattaway (ed.), Francis Beaumont, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London, 1969), pp. 25–6 (Act I, lines 211–30). A. J. Rodgers, A Monster with a Thousand Hands: The Discursive Spectator in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2018), p. 170 (n. 80). Elsewhere, I have considered the impact of Catholic emancipation upon interest in Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes: E. Evenden, ‘John Foxe, Samuel Potter and the Illustration of the Book of Martyrs ’, BJRL, 90 (2014), pp. 203–30. R. Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography (London, 1867), p. 305.

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79. C. Turner, Anthony Mundy, An Elizabethan Man of Letters (Berkeley, California, 1928). 80. Ibid., p. 14. 81. B. Hamilton Thompson, ‘Anthony Munday’s Journey to Rome, 1578– 9’, The Durham University Journal, New Series, III (1941), p. 4; G. Galigani, ‘La English Romayne Lyfe di A. Mundy’, Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, XVIII (1965), p. 112. C. Turner Wright returned to the subject once more in ‘Young Anthony Mundy Again’, Studies in Philology, LVI (1959), pp. 154–68. 82. E. H. Miller, The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England: A Study of Nondramatic Literature (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1959), p. 9. 83. See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954). 84. H. Thomas, ‘The Palmerin Romances’, The Library, 3rd Series, TBS-13 (1913), pp. 97–144 (at p. 124). 85. A.[nthony] M.[unday] (trans.), Anon., The Second Booke of Primaleon of Greece … (London, 1596) [STC, 20366A], sig. A2r–v. 86. See also G. R. Hayes, ‘Anthony Munday’s Romances of Chivalry’, The Library, 4th Series, VI (1925), pp. 57–81; G. R. Hayes, ‘Anthony Munday’s Romances: A Postscript’, ibid., VII (1926), pp. 31–8. 87. J. Phillips, ‘Chronicles of Wasted Time: Anthony Munday, Tudor Romance, and Literary Labor’, ELH , 73 (2006), p. 782; EvendenKenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim, Chapter 3. 88. A. Kenny, ‘From Hospice to College’, The Venerabile, XIX (1958– 60), pp. 477–85 and ibid., XX (1960–62), pp. 1–11, 89–103, 171–96, reprinted (abridged) in Anon. (ed.), The English Hospice in Rome (Leominster, 2005), pp. 218–73. 89. Ibid., p. 251. 90. M. E. Williams, The Venerable English College Rome: A History 1579– 1979 (London, 1979), p. 12. 91. P. J. Ayres (ed.), Anthony Munday: The English Roman Life (Oxford, 1980), p. xiv. 92. Ibid. 93. See Johnson, Actor, pp. 84–121 (Chapter 3: ‘Anthony Munday and the Spectacle of Martyrdom’) and Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, pp. 129–37. The two Huntington plays are [A. Munday and H. Chettle], The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, Afterward Called Robin Hood of Merrie Sherwodde … (London, 1601) [STC, 18271] and [A. Munday and H. Chettle], The Death of Robert, Earle of Huntington. Otherwise Called Robin Hood of Merrie Sherwodde … (London, 1601) [STC, 18269]. 94. Johnson, Actor, p. 118. 95. Ibid., p. 87.

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96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112. 113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

391

Ibid., p. 88. Ibid., p. 86. Ibid., pp. 98 and 102 respectively. Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, p. xvii. O. L. Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington, Indiana, 2003), p. 128. Johnson, Actor, pp. 100, 101, 106, 107. C. Sullivan, Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580 to 1603 (Madison, New Jersey, and London, c.1995), p. 107. L. Oakley-Brown, ‘Framing Robin Hood: Temporality and Textuality in Anthony Munday’s Huntington Plays’, in H. Phillips (ed.), Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval (Dublin, 2005), pp. 113–28 [hereafter Oakley-Brown, ‘Framing Robin Hood’]. Ibid., p. 114. T. Conley (trans.), M. de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York, 1988), cited in Oakley-Brown, ‘Framing Robin Hood’, p. 114. M. A. Nelson, The Robin Hood Tradition in the English Renaissance, Salzburg Studies in English Literature: Elizabethan Studies No. 14 (Salzburg, 1973), p. 160. R. Grafton, A Chronicle at Large …, 2 vols (London, 1568–69) [STC, 12147], II pp. 84–5. See Oakley-Brown, ‘Framing Robin Hood’, pp. 113–5. S. Knight, Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994), p. 123. Evenden-Kenyon, Amadís and Palmeirim, Chapter 7 and Conclusion. A. Mundy (trans.), [either Charles Estienne or Jean-Baptiste Duval] (adaptor), Ortensio Landi, The Defence of Contraries. Paradoxes Against Common Opinion, Debated in Forme of Declamations in Place of Publike Censure: Only to Exercise Yong Wittes in Difficult Matters. Wherein Is No Offence to Gods Honour, the Estate of Princes, or Private Mens Honest Actions: But Pleasant Recreation to Beguile the Iniquity of Time … (London, 1593) [STC, 6467]. P. Grimaldi Pizzorno, The Ways of Paradox from Lando to Donne (Florence, 2007), pp. 42, 46. Ibid., p. 47. Oakley-Brown, ‘Framing Robin Hood’, p. 118. S. Villani, ‘Martirio, Spionaggio e Propaganda. I Roghi di Richard Atkins (1581) e Walter Marsh (1595) Condannati a Roma dall’Inquisizione’, in G. Dall’Olio et al. (eds), Per Adriano Prosperi, 3 vols (Pisa, 2010–), 1 pp. 113–36, especially pp. 113–7. Ibid., p. 114. Oakley-Brown, ‘Framing Robin Hood’, p. 123.

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118. Ibid. The lines ‘A shame upon this peevish apish age,/These crouching hypocrite dissembling times.’ are uttered by Lord Fitzwater in [A. Munday and H. Chettle], The Downfall of Robert, Earle of Huntington, Afterward Called Robin Hood of Merrie Sherwodde… (London, 1601) [STC, 18271], sig. E[1]r. 119. Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, p. 152. 120. Ibid., p. 153. 121. P. Johnson, ‘Jacobean Ephemera and the Immortal Word’, Renaissance Drama, New Series, 8 (1977), pp. 151–71 (at p. 161). 122. I.e., The Thomas Nashe Project: https://research.ncl.ac.uk/thethomas nasheproject. 123. A. A. Davenport, Suspicious Moderate: The Life and Writings of Francis à Sancta Clara (1598–1680) (Notre Dame, Indiana, [2017]). 124. Ibid., p. 1. 125. Ibid., p. 2. 126. A. Hadfield, Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance (Oxford, 2017), pp. 5–6. 127. Ibid., p. 9 (my emphasis). 128. Ibid., p. 10. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid. 131. In another discussion of Munday’s Iberian ‘romances’, Phillips notes that ‘there is method in his buffoonery’: J. Phillips, English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485–1603 (Farnham, c.2010), pp. 121–51 (Chapter 4: ‘Anthony Munday, Romance, and the Production of Collective Selves’). 132. B. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford, 2002), passim. 133. A. Walsham, ‘Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration’, The Seventeenth Century, 28 (2013), pp. 119–20 (the last quotation relates to the ‘tensions fomented by the Reformation and the wars of religion of the seventeenth century’ rather than specifically to the 1580s). 134. See J. Yates, ‘Parasitic Geographies: Manifesting Catholic Identity in Early Modern England’, in A. F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke, 1999), pp. 63–84. 135. Hill, Munday and Civic Culture, p. 44. 136. Hamilton, Munday and the Catholics, p. xv. 137. Lockey, Catholics, pp. 4–5.

CHAPTER 9

Polemic, Memory and Emotion: John Gerard and the Writing of the Counter-Reformation in England Peter Lake and Michael Questier

Introduction In late 1609, John Gerard1 and William Weston,2 two veterans of the Jesuit mission to England, now safely abroad in exile, were instructed by their superiors to write accounts of their experiences in the field. The result was two of the seminal texts of contemporary Jesuit Catholicism. Tales of both spiritual and actual derring-do, they are, ostensibly, entirely spiritual documents. They recount the miraculous accomplishments of divine grace, the Holy Spirit and God’s providence in sustaining the true Church under the Cross of persecution (see Fig. 9.1), and in enabling these Jesuit priests to withstand the extreme psychological stresses of their ministry—and, in Gerard’s case, the excruciating torments inflicted by the heretical regime in England. The blurb on the Ignatius Press website

P. Lake (B) · M. Questier Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Questier e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_9

393

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Fig. 9.1 A Roman Catholic priest on The Rack, by an unknown engraver, after an unknown artist, engraving, [c.1582], seemingly first printed in [Robert Persons], De Persecvtione Anglicana Libellvs … (Rome, 1582), [Plate 4] in unpaginated end section and reprinted (the source here) in Anon. (trans.), Historia del Glorioso Martirio di Sedici Sacerdoti Martirizati in Inghilterra per la Confessione … della Fede Catolica, Fanno 1581[,] 1582 & 1583 … (Macerata, 1583), [Plate 4] in unpaginated end section (NB present in copy at Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Rome, but omitted from some copies elsewhere)

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POLEMIC, MEMORY AND EMOTION: JOHN GERARD …

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says that Gerard’s autobiography ‘epitomizes the constant struggle of all human beings through the ages to maintain their freedom’.3 These texts are known principally from the partial translation of Gerard effected by the Jesuit John Morris (1826–1893) and from the editions of both Gerard and Weston published by his twentieth-century confrère Philip Caraman. Morris and Caraman were involved in the promotion of the cause of the English martyrs of the post-Reformation period. Caraman was, in the 1950s and 1960s, one of the vice-postulators in the office set up at Farm Street in London’s Mayfair. An insider as well as an outsider, someone partly of Armenian extraction, he courted the rich and famous in the literary world, and was a close friend of Graham Greene (1904– 1991), Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), the Sitwells and others. Incidentally, in 1962 Caraman met the film director Fred Zinnemann, who asked him ‘about subjects with a religious interest’. Caraman suggested, inter alia, John Gerard, though Zinnemann evidently opted for Sir Thomas More, leading to the film version of A Man for all Seasons (1966). Gerard’s and Weston’s memoirs are indeed crucial texts for anyone wishing to investigate the world of repression and persecution which is taken to have characterized the late Elizabethan period. But Caraman must in some sense have identified with both figures, particularly with Gerard as a charismatic lone cleric, ranging through the houses of the gentry, bringing order and harmony to the Church of his times, even though others, of course, saw him and his work rather differently. Each memoir is heavily dramatic in tone and content. However, amid their tales of almost inconceivable bravery and fortitude, both relations feature, at their centre, accounts of how soul after soul was saved, not from the attentions of the State—on the contrary, the conversions to Catholicism re-told in these texts often ended if not in ruin for the converts, then certainly in their considerable suffering at the hands of the regime—but rather from Satan’s maw, by the evangelical efforts of Jesuit priests such as these. Ultimately, and in essence, these are spiritual adventure stories, tales of the victory of divine grace over the forces of heresy and oppression, sin and the devil. As such, their authors strove to elevate them above the particular political circumstances from which they had, in fact, originated, intending them to become part of an essentially timeless narrative about the triumph of the true Church, about the autonomous action of the Holy Spirit and about the victory of God’s providence and divine grace over those malign forces. The heroic entity in this story was the Society of Jesus.

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In so far as any of this has been noticed in the scholarly literature, it has been in the claim that ‘Catholic’ accounts of the period, such as these, are essentially mythical. Christopher Haigh argues that they were designed to present the English Catholic community as essentially new made by missionary priests and, more particularly, by the Jesuits, rather than sustained by the collective efforts of ordinary Catholics and priests who had been ordained before Elizabeth’s reign.4 This interpretation raises the question of how we actually read such texts, and how we elicit truths and/or truth from them. The first point to make here is that the date of composition is crucial. Gerard wrote almost entirely about the late Elizabethan period. However, the date at which he set down this extended account of his time as a missionary priest appears to have been about mid-to-late 1609. This chronology matters because late 1608 saw the re-launch, in some sense, of the programme of those members of the Catholic clergy often referred to as ‘Appellants’. They had, back in 1598, begun a series of appeals against the authority of the archpriest appointed by Rome in that year, a man named George Blackwell (1547–1612), who was reputed to be a client and cat’s paw of the Jesuits. This new attempt by members of the secular clergy to reform, as they saw it, their community came shortly after Blackwell’s deposition earlier in 1608, that is to say after he had been arrested and, under immense pressure from the authorities, capitulated, taking the 1606 Oath of Allegiance that had been condemned by the papacy. The new archpriest, George Birket [Birkhead] (1549–1614), sent two agents—Richard Smith (1567–1655) and Thomas More (1565–1625)— to Rome in order to face down those who had stood in the way of the appeals of 1598–1602: principally the Jesuit Robert Persons and his associate Thomas Fitzherbert (1552–1640). The suits commenced at Rome in early 1609 and later—with the knowledge and, in some sense, the support of the early Stuart State, and, more particularly, that of Richard Bancroft, archbishop of Canterbury—included the demand that Rome appoint a bishop to rule over the English Catholic community. The claim here was that episcopal government, warranted of course by ecclesiastical tradition, would not only allow the Catholic community to be adequately policed, but would also ensure that the Jesuitical errors and malfeasance that Appellant writers had condemned in print would be purged from the Catholic fraction of the national Church.5

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So, here, we wish to place these texts, though we shall concentrate on Gerard’s narrative, in an altogether more precise and explicitly polemical context—one provided by the original Archpriest Controversy and its Jacobean continuation in the shape of a fresh round of arguments about the need to appoint a bishop to preside over the English Catholic community and to reform that community from within. The aim of those now petitioning Rome was to bring the Jesuits and their followers, newly associated with subversion and attempted regicide because of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot, to heel, and, having thus established order from the inside, as it were, to approach the Protestant State for a new deal for English Catholics. It was in the face of that entirely unwelcome development that Jesuit superiors instructed these two veterans of the English mission, and of the Archpriest Controversy, to write down their experiences for the guidance of a younger generation of English Catholic clergy. The consequence was an exercise in Jesuit propaganda, but one with a very specific end and target in mind. In what follows, in order to prove these contentions, we wish to read the contents of that exercise, and chiefly Gerard’s work, against the portrayal of Jesuit deviance and disorder presented by the Appellants.

The Appellant Critique Let us briefly rehearse the central claims of the Appellant programme. Their pamphlets often seem rather tedious, delineating, as they do, the complex legal issues involved in Blackwell’s appointment as archpriest over the English secular clergy. But, of course, that was to some extent only a peg upon which to hang their other concerns and obsessions. The underlying premise was, as one pamphlet put it, that the Jesuits sought not the salvation of souls and the glory of God, but rather ‘to rule the roste [i.e. roost], to have all men at their beck and commandement, to have nothing doon whithout their advice and appointement and that they wil have all priests [to be] their prentizes’.6 In order to accomplish their plans, said William Watson (1559?–1603), the Jesuits boasted that they were more free ‘from errour, more familiar with God, more precisely and peculiarly illuminated, and more specially indued with the spirit of guiding soules’ than the secular priests.7 While, as Watson argued, these assertions were all nonsense, the unfortunate fact was that such absurdly inflated

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claims had won the fathers of the Society of Jesus a considerable public following.8 As a result, in ‘such gentlemens houses as they reside in… they will commaund and over-rule all, as knowing best how every thing must be done’. Indeed, ‘no lease must be let, but by their advice[;] the tenants must please them or repent at leasure[;] such fines are to be taken as they thinke convenient, and some part of them must be imployed as they shall prescribe’. Scarcely can either master or mistress of the house give alms at their own door, it was alleged, ‘but it must be done with their approbation’. Far from being a sign of spiritual rigour, the frequency with which the Jesuits heard confessions was merely a means to an end, namely to learn all the secrets of those families harbouring them: ‘the wifes against her husband[;] the husbands against his wife’—and the servants’ against them both. This was knowledge which all too often they ‘abuse to tyranize over them, and to dispose of their civill affayres’.9 Lying behind the whole enterprise was the Jesuits’ sinister use of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) so as to brainwash their intended victims. i. Women When it came to women, things got worse. In extending their control, the Jesuits frequently played upon the susceptibilities of their female acolytes. In the process, they overthrew the structures of natural hierarchy in nearly all of the households in which their influence took hold—a process that the Appellants figured through the imagery if not of women ‘on top’, then certainly of women escaping from their proper positions of subordination and interfering in matters far above their natural capacities. Thus Messrs Christopher Bagshaw (1552–1625?), William Bishop (c.1554–1624) and William Watson each claimed that women were being allowed into the ‘secret counsels’ of Archpriest Blackwell and his Jesuit friends, where they should not be.10 As Anthony Copley (b. 1567, d. in or after 1609) put it, the ‘ordinarie frailtie’ of women—‘they having little or nothing besides a will and a tongue’—rendered them peculiarly vulnerable to seduction by the Jesuits. Those who had started out as ‘modest, meeke, religious’ and ‘charitable’ seemingly became unbearable harpies, who, moreover, were shameless in swanning off to participate in nocturnal Jesuit conventicles.11

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ii. Money Jesuits, of course, did not simply lust after women—not when there was money (and power) to be had as well; hence their interest in gentry estates. At stake here was not merely influence over the Catholic laity, but also the cash and the authority that came with it. This, as Copley remarked, was where the Spiritual Exercises were such a useful tool. So blatantly exploitative had the Jesuits been with, for example, George Gilbert and Henry Drury that these cases had, said Watson, become proverbial: ‘as [that] some in jest would say “such a one is Gilberted, and such a one is Druried”, and “they shall never Gilbert me, nor Drurie me”’.12 iii. Politics Nevertheless, the project was about more than personal selfindulgence. John Mush [alias Ratcliffe] (1552–1612) explained that the Jesuits were channelling funds to the colleges that they had founded in Spain.13 The result would be that the Society would gradually take over the English mission. In turn, the Jesuits used the influence over the seminaries which their control over financial resources had secured to decidedly sinister political ends. Thomas Bluet declared that, in the Spanish seminaries, Persons had been agitating for students to endorse the infanta’s title to the English Crown, and soliciting their assurances that when they reached England they would persuade Catholics there to do the like.14 Of course, while their meddling in affairs of state was calling down the wrath of the Elizabethan authorities upon the general run of English Catholics, the Jesuits themselves—utter hypocrites that they were—were all too eager to avoid martyrdom. Here, as elsewhere, the representative bogey-man was Persons himself, who (Watson alleged) having turned the world upside down in 1580–1581 had scuttled back to the Continent, leaving ‘us [his fellow priests] and Christ his flocke to the spoile’.15 Appellant pamphleteers such as Copley busily counted up the number of Catholics who might be reckoned to have been martyrs, and there seemed to be very few Jesuits among them.

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Gerard and Weston Respond The Archpriest Controversy generated approximately twenty pamphlets, some of them fairly substantial. However, the scholarly assumption has been that the thing was largely a damp squib. If these bickering Catholics really thought that they were going to influence the succession, or secure tolerance from the State, then their optimism was misconceived. In any case, the papacy moved to impose silence on the disputants in late 1602. On one level, of course, this interpretation is correct. Such a view underpins much of John Bossy’s 1975 book,16 and it has structured most accounts of the topic ever since—that is to say that the Appellant clergy failed in their attempts to create a new Church, that a ‘Jesuit’ understanding of ‘mission’ necessitated a retreat into a sectarian minority and that the expression of that kind of religious belief and practice became increasingly restricted to a social elite: the gentry and above. Nevertheless, that analysis is also, arguably, misleading: first, because the archpriest business was a multi-layered intervention in the late Elizabethan polity, and one which, in several respects, predicted the future correctly—that is to say the emergence of a more pluralist Church as a result of the Stuart inheritance; and second, because in some ways Rome did, of course, accede to the demands of the appeal of 1602. To all of which—and to subsequent claims that Gerard himself had (in 1603) been planning a Spanish coup and had (in 1605) been involved in the Gunpowder treason—Gerard’s memoirs are a response. Unsurprisingly, Gerard’s 1609 account is not written in the style of Appellant dispute pamphleteering. Rather, it describes the way in which Catholics in England should lead their daily lives, guided, it has to be said, by the counsel and example of the best sort of clergy, one of whom, the (impartial) reader would almost be obliged to conclude, was Gerard himself, though the author protested modestly that ‘what I achieved was insignificant when it is compared with the work of others’.17 Gerard did mention, from time to time, the Appellant business; and, perhaps inevitably, took Persons’s and Henry Garnet’s line that it involved a simple division between the majority (all the good clergy) and a factious minority.18 But this issue is not the subject upon which, formally, Gerard concentrated. As Caraman noted, Gerard made ‘only passing references to the controversy’, even though Watson had denounced him in print.19 In thus responding to Appellant accusations, and indeed to newly minted arguments about the need to establish episcopal authority over the

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English Catholic community, at least in part for the purpose of controlling Jesuit excesses, it was essential that neither Gerard nor Weston formally admit that that was what they were doing. Still, almost every one of Gerard’s stories, and each description of his Jesuit persona and life-style, implicitly refutes the principal claims of the Appellant pamphlets. And Gerard did this by delineating what he (and undoubtedly others) regarded as the ideal mode of living for those members of the English Church who took their Catholicism seriously. Having briefly related his early life, his experience of persecution in the 1580s before ordination (letting slip that one of those who had stood surety for him had been ‘one of the most distinguished in that group of fourteen gentlemen who were executed in the cause of Mary, queen of Scots’), his clerical training abroad, his entry into the Jesuit novitiate with Persons’s help and his return to England, he embarked upon an account of his missionary activity, starting in late 1588.20 He emphasized that he had ventured back in the company of ‘dear Father Oldcorne’, Edward Oldcorne (1561–1606), whom Gerard regarded as a martyr, despite Oldcorne’s conviction for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. One of the insistent claims of the Appellant tracts had been that the Society’s ranks contained (virtually) no martyrs.21 Gerard’s text is suffused by stories of martyrdom. Famously, Gerard’s text celebrates his own ability to integrate himself into elite social circles. The author described how his style of ministry made it necessary for him to dissimulate. When he met strangers and discerned that not all of them were Catholic, he would speak ‘about hunting and falconry, a thing no one could do in correct technical language unless he was familiar with the sports’.22 Edward Yelverton ‘introduced’ Gerard ‘to the house and circle of nearly every gentleman in Norfolk’ and to his kin, especially his sister Grizel Wodehouse, who recovered from a difficult and potentially fatal labour, and did so after the last rites had been administered by a Marian priest whom Gerard had brought to the house.23 In this account, we have a typical instance of the polemical implications of Gerard’s reminiscences. For here, one is confronted by evidence of a Jesuit priest not simply working for the conversion of a whole family, and bringing both spiritual comfort and, indirectly, physical healing to those under his charge, but also co-operating to good (indeed miraculous) effect with other Catholic clergy, quite contrary to what Gerard and his friends would have seen as

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the ludicrous Appellant allegation that Jesuits were hostile to other kinds of Catholic priests. Mr. Wodehouse’s subsequent conversion demonstrated Gerard’s legendary capacity for shape-shifting. As soon as Grizel’s husband had decided to make his confession and cast off his old self, Gerard announced that he would ‘return almost immediately with a priest’. ‘Downstairs I changed into my soutane and returned completely transformed’, appearing in front of the astonished convert. On this basis, Gerard could dispel Mr. Wodehouse’s ‘anxiety about the ill consequences he feared as a result of my visit’. Gerard remarked, with satisfaction, that although he ‘had been all this time in very close contact with him [Wodehouse], never once had he suspected that I might be a priest’.24 And, Gerard might have added, by immersing himself in the semi-private locales of these major gentry houses, he, as a Jesuit priest illegally resident in England, had enjoyed a protective screen behind which the faith could expand exponentially without fear of the kind of persecution said by some malign people to flow from the machinations of members of the Society of Jesus. Gerard’s account is, admittedly, populated mainly by those of high social status, who lived in mansions like Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire (see Fig. 9.2), where the author himself hid in a priest-hole during a search by pursuivants in October 1591.25 However, he sought to make it clear that these were not the only people whom he had encountered. In his first missionary field, he had (so he said) ‘reconciled to the Church many fathers and mothers of families, more than twenty in all, of the same or higher social standing’. Yet, additionally, he had ostensibly ‘received a large number of servants and poorer people – I forget the precise number – and, through the grace of God, I steadied many tottering souls in their allegiance and heard numerous general confessions’.26 In the case of Father Oldcorne, ‘countless poor Catholics relied on him for alms’— yes, that was right: a Jesuit giving rather than taking. And, indeed, ‘the place where he lived was every bit like one of our houses in some foreign country – so many Catholics flocked there to receive the sacraments or to hear him preach or to get his advice’. To cap it all: ‘Father Thomas Lister, a very learned and remarkable man, was his fellow-worker’27 —the very same priest who, some people undoubtedly did recall, had sparked the second and exceedingly bitter stage of the Archpriest Controversy by accusing the Appellants of being schismatics. Undeniably, some of Gerard’s spiritual clients were rich; but, contrary to Watson’s jibes, he insisted that when he (i.e. Gerard) had approached

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Fig. 9.2 Baddesley Clinton, Warwickshire, mostly fifteenth century and later, showing the west side, in the outer wall of which is the drainage passage probably used to conceal John Gerard and other Roman Catholic priests in October 1591, The National Trust, by an unknown photographer, photograph, 2008

Henry Drury of Lawshall in Suffolk, ‘heir to a fairly big estate’, it was Drury who had made the running: ‘his only desire was to lead a more perfect life’. Gerard’s role was minimal: ‘to tell him of certain spiritual exercises which could lead a generous soul on that way by holding out before him all that was good and thus help him to make the best choice of life’. The exercises were, therefore, far from being a means to gull the simple-minded who happened to possess large wallets; Drury had joined the Society entirely of his own free will.28 Indeed, Drury’s conversion to a life of faith proved one of the key contentions advanced by Gerard’s narrative. The author had gone to reside with Drury in summer 1589. ‘Almost everyone in the house was a Catholic’—and in that environment ‘it was easier to live the life of a Jesuit, even in the external details of dress and arrangement of time’. Anyone reading that statement could only conclude that along with the quiet (almost invisible) Catholicization of the gentry by clergy such as Gerard,

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there would be enabled a more orderly (and, indeed, recognizable) observance of clerical and priestly duties than one marred by endless conflict with other Catholics and, in addition, with the State. At this point, Gerard again reminded his readers that his presence had not in any way implied hostility towards, or from, those clergy who were not formally members of the Society of Jesus. Drury’s live-in chaplain, William Hanse, had in fact asked to make the Spiritual Exercises .29 Here we are presented with the picture of a perfect domestic setting, almost self-regulating, in which lay and clerical needs are practically identical and in which the ministrations of the Society of Jesus are never at odds with the concerns of those spiritual patrons upon whom Gerard, and other clergy, came to rely. The wishes and self-evident holiness of such patrons at the same time made possible the co-existence of different kinds of clergy and facilitated their own ministrations to the wider ranks of the faithful. No one in their right mind (this category unfortunately did not include the Appellants) could think that the Society brought anything other than good. The clincher for Gerard was that, in 1598, when Blackwell had been appointed archpriest, Drury’s domestic chaplain, Hanse, had been nominated as one of his assistants—in other words, that nominee was one of those reliable and well-intentioned priests who could be counted on to bring peace and order to the Church.30 Of course, Gerard did not deny that there were indeed adverse consequences of people employing Jesuit chaplains. Much of his text is about the persecution suffered by himself and his closest associates. But, for Gerard, the reason for the harsh treatment of the Jesuits and their friends was two-fold: firstly, because ‘our numbers have grown so much’; and secondly, because ‘it has something to do with the quarrels that have broken out between us and a section of the secular clergy (first in the seminaries and then in England) which makes the Government anxious to crush the more uncompromising party… by imposing fearful penalties on the people who house and protect us’.31 To put it another way: in the face of Catholic unity around the true centre of the community, the regime would back down, exactly as Persons had said it would in his attacks on his foes during the Archpriest Controversy. It was this perception, in part, which made it necessary to remodel and, if required, purge gentry households of their unco-operative/Protestant members.32 This was still not the same as the kind of popular Catholic culture that, Gerard admitted, existed in, for example, Lancashire, where ‘I have seen myself more than two hundred present at Mass and sermon’. Things

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were not like that in Gerard’s East Anglian territory, where ‘Catholics were very few’ and ‘mostly from the better classes’, with ‘none, or hardly any, from the ordinary people’. However, Gerard’s claim was that the upside to this latter scenario was the existence of a thorough-going mode of Catholic belief and culture. By contrast, Catholics of the sort found in Lancashire ‘come into the Church without difficulty’, but ‘fall away the moment persecution blows up’, even if ‘when the alarm is over, they come back again’.33 Fair-weather Catholicism was not an appropriate rock upon which to build a Church. What interested Gerard was an absolute and outstanding commitment to the faith—the sort of example set by Dorothea (or Dorothy) Rookwood (d. 1602), who went (with his assistance) to the Augustinian convent at Louvain and was venerated there, after her death, as a saint.34 Gerard was at pains to deny that what he did fomented any kind of disorder in the Catholic fraction of the Church in England. In fact, rather the reverse. He described the periodic meetings held with his superior during the year: Often I had some important question to discuss with him. And regularly twice every year all of us came to give him our six-monthly account of conscience and offer Our Lord Jesus the renewal of our vows. As I can bear witness, this good custom of the Society was a great help to the others, and, to speak for myself only[,]… I never found anything that did me more good. It braced my soul to meet all the obligations of my life as a Jesuit and meet all the demands made of a priest on the mission.35

But, he might have added, without a bishop or an interfering episcopal hierarchy anywhere in sight, and certainly not along the lines recommended by the Appellant agitators, even though (it is worth saying) some European Jesuits themselves had severe doubts about the way in which the English Jesuit mission (prefecture after 1598) was being run. Was Gerard, then, provoking the State authorities into the kind of retaliation against Catholics that, from time to time, the public witnessed during the 1580s and after? He said no.36 Relating how he had been arrested and interrogated, the Jesuit made sure to set down exactly what he had said to his adversaries about the relationship between politics and religion. Following his detention in April 1594, he had been questioned by Sir Thomas Egerton (1540–1617), lately appointed master of the rolls, and other commissioners. On being told that he had been ‘sent to seduce

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people’ from their allegiance to the queen and ‘to meddle in state business’, Gerard ostensibly replied that, ‘regarding things of state’, they were ‘no concern of ours’. Jesuit clergy were ‘forbidden to have anything to do with them’. And ‘this prohibition’ was ‘general to all Jesuits’. Yet besides the general prohibition, there was ‘a special prohibition included in the instructions given to the fathers sent on this mission’.37 This was a conventional enough statement, both in the 1590s and at the time that Gerard set down his memoirs, but it was being made by him, in those memoirs, in the context of the slew of still recent Appellant pamphlets which had said exactly the opposite. Gerard himself was believed in certain quarters to have been a moving spirit in the Gunpowder Plot. The accusation that he had participated in digging the (in the end) abandoned mine at Westminster would resurface in 1628, when some of the religious orders sought to deprive Richard Smith of his authority as bishop of Chalcedon during what is known as the Approbation Controversy.38 As we saw, Smith had been one of the two agents sent to Rome in 1608/1609 in order to petition against Jesuit influence in England.39 Anyone familiar with Gerard’s narrative, and thus with the stories that he evidently told about his time in England, could easily have concluded that here was a practiced operator: somebody capable of cloaking himself so as to evade the authorities, of disguising his handwriting and of deceiving a whole range of people who had to deal with him. Nevertheless, Gerard insisted that those measures were only means to an evangelical end—that of spreading the faith and of confronting error.40 Faced with the gruesome twosome of Richard Topcliffe (1531–1604) and Richard Young, Gerard had reiterated the prohibition against meddling in state matters and had said, moreover, that ‘my endeavour has been to bring back souls to the knowledge and love of their creator, to make them live in due obedience to God’s laws and man’s’.41 Gerard here puts some of the Appellants’ accusations into the mouths of the regime’s enforcers. On the occasion of this interrogation, Topcliffe ‘flew into a rage, cursing and abusing me’, accusing him of immoral conduct with women: ‘It was you, wasn’t it,… who on such and such a day stayed in such and such a house with Lady so-and-so’.42 Remarks like these, which we saw had been all too frequent among the Appellants when they commented on the Jesuit clergy, were apparently traceable to a known persecutor and evil representative of a demonstrably tyrannical regime.

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Actually, Gerard’s narrative makes a great deal out of his purportedly charismatic effect on women. Mrs. Wiseman—Jane Wiseman [née Vaughan] (d. 1610), mistress of one of the households that Gerard remodelled—‘every day… seemed to give me some new proof of her affection and respect’. Her mother-in-law (also resident there) had gone further: upon Gerard’s arrival, ‘she threw herself down at my feet and begged me to let her kiss them’.43 William Watson would not have been surprised! In Gerard’s accounts of his trials and tribulations at the hands of the queen’s torturers, he may have been telling something like the literal truth. We know that others whom he mentioned, notably Robert Southwell [St. Robert Southwell] (1561–1595), who had been imprisoned contemporaneously, were tortured almost to death. However, Gerard’s narrative stresses not only the physical torments that he had endured, but also the fact that he had refused to volunteer information to his interrogators—and, equally, that he had refused in any way to conform.44 The Appellant case was that needless provocation of the State brought harm to the true Church because the faithful, unable to bear the heat of persecution, were likely to be driven into apostasy. Only proper obedience to the secular authorities or, rather, a proper understanding of the distinction between what was due to Caesar and what was due to God could prevent that outcome. Gerard said ‘no’, at least not in the sense that the Appellants appeared to mean. The author claimed that, during much of his time in prison, he had been able to exercise his vocation exactly as he should. There he could ‘perform… all the tasks of a Jesuit priest’, so much so that had he remained in the relatively easy conditions of the Clink, ‘I should never have wished to have [had] my liberty again in England’ – he could exercise his ministry with as much profit as if he had been free.45 Gerard related an extraordinary story of how, when Topcliffe had (temporarily) been disgraced in Lent 1595, he—Gerard— had held the Good Friday service for ‘a large crowd’ of Catholics within the Clink, and also for ‘many others from outside’. The gaol-keeper had tried, albeit without much enthusiasm, to break up the proceedings.46 Once the prison authorities had been bribed into giving Gerard a modicum of liberty inside the gaol, he was able to hear ‘a large number of confessions’. Indeed, he had ‘reconciled many people to the Church; some were heretics, but the greater number [were] schismatics’.47

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This throwaway remark allowed Gerard to mention one of those schismatics, John Rigby. He recounted how Rigby had sent him, from prison, a letter full of thanks for my making him a Catholic and helping him (it was ever so slightly) to that state of soul which he hoped would soon be made perfect by God. He sent me also his purse which I still have and use to this day in the martyr’s honour – I carry my reliquary in it.48

Rigby’s story had been located at the centre of a scathing anti-Appellant tract about recent martyrs penned by Thomas Worthington (1549–1626). Gerard related Rigby’s sufferings and courage at some length.49 The reader could hardly but acknowledge that it had been the Jesuit path, and the intervention of a Jesuit confessor, that had brought a holy martyr into the Church—not the shenanigans of the likes of the Appellants. Similarly zealous, remarked Gerard, was the priest Robert Drury, eventually executed in 1607. One of the author’s friends, he had resided in the London house run by the future martyr Anne Line [née Heigham] [St. Anne Line] (d. 1601). Refusing to swear the new Oath of Allegiance, Drury had been sentenced to death on the ground of his having been ordained a priest. He had refused to save himself by conforming. Gerard did not mention it, but many people would have known that Drury had once been on the other side in the quarrel over the archpriest’s authority. He had signed (while confined at Wisbech Castle in Cambridgeshire) the appeal of 17 December 1600, and had also put his name to the protestation of allegiance of 31 January 1603. Over this background, Gerard remained uncharacteristically silent; but the fact was that, in the end, Drury had come good. God’s grace had revealed itself in Drury’s opting to make the supreme sacrifice in the face of a state with which, as Persons had always insisted, no bargaining was possible, at least not on its own terms.50 Gerard was transferred from the Clink to the Tower of London in April 1597.51 The long chapter describing how he had resolved, in October that year, to abscond from imprisonment there could easily have been dismissed by his critics as utterly disingenuous. Cheerily narrating how he had manipulated fellow prisoners, prison warders and friends on the outside—and all written in the style of, as it were, ‘the Famous Five do the

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Tower of London’—Gerard utilized every shade of what could be interpreted as sophistical and duplicitous argumentation to justify his escape from Crown custody.52 Yet Gerard simply described how, following that escape, he had continued his missionary work. One of his converts was the poet William Alabaster (1568–1640), who had asked to enter the Society of Jesus, citing three reasons. The first reason was ‘the fact that heretics and all enemies of God hold the Society in far greater detestation than any other body’. This circumstance, he concluded, ‘must be because it has the Spirit of God which the devil cannot abide; and because[,] in God’s providence, it is destined to destroy heresy and combat sin of every kind’. Secondly, the Society ‘will not allow its members to accept ecclesiastical preferment’; ‘ambition’ was ‘therefore… less likely to affect them, and as their best men are not drawn off they are better able to maintain a tradition of holiness and learning’. Thirdly, it had ‘a special regard for obedience’.53 All of this might be viewed as constituting a searing and direct riposte to Appellant claims that none of these things was true. And, right on cue, Gerard mentioned again, if only fleetingly, what he took to have been the unfortunate opposition to Archpriest Blackwell.54 Another Gerard convert whose change of religion is described was the wife of Sir Francis Fortescue. Lady Fortescue (née Grace Manners) was no less than the daughter-in-law of the privy councillor Sir John Fortescue, chancellor of the Exchequer at the close of Elizabeth’s reign. Without exactly mentioning what had happened to Sir John after March 1603, when he had lost out in the jockeying for position following James VI’s accession to the English throne, Gerard cleverly implied that, under the right conditions, Jesuit missionary clergy could bring round even those within the inner circles of the regime’s ruling members.55 At this point, Gerard cited, controversially, his conversion of Sir Everard (c.1578–1606) and Lady Digby. When the Jesuit came to put pen to paper, Digby had, of course, been executed for his alleged part in the Gunpowder Plot. Gerard had already written a separate account of that episode, again at his superiors’ direction—and principally for the purpose of exonerating Henry Garnet, a fellow member of the Society. Gerard’s claim now was relatively straightforward: it was, in essence, that had the Jesuits’ penitents been more open with their ghostly counsellors about what they were doing, then they—the Jesuit chaplains to these people—would have prevented the conspiracy. Here, however, Gerard also—and on some level this is quite astonishing—praised Digby as a

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good and religious man, averring, seemingly without blush, that he had sacrificed ‘all his property, his freedom and his life too for God’s Church’.56 Gerard now concentrated on relating the conversion of, and the giving of the Spiritual Exercises to, Sir Oliver Manners, fourth son of the 4th earl of Rutland; Sir Oliver was a courtier who held a valuable reversion to a clerkship of the Court of Star Chamber. A reader of Gerard’s words would probably know that a government insider had been turned to Rome by his efforts, but perhaps also that Manners had been instrumental, in 1609, in petitioning at Rome against what was, in effect, a renewal of the Elizabethan appeal. He had taken to Rome a document— a list of Jesuit ‘churches’—which must, we think, have been submitted there in opposition to the various suits propounded by Richard Smith and Thomas More.57 By contrast, Persons’s enemies, Smith and More, had presented to the cardinal protector, Edouardo Farnese, a work printed at their instigation. This book was the ‘Life’ of Lady Magdalen Browne [née Dacre], viscountess Montagu (1538–1608), which had been written by Smith himself. In fact, the text is that of her funeral sermon, evidently now re-deployed as a characterization of the appropriate relationship that should subsist between a great lay patron and her chaplains, and, indeed, the rest of the Catholic community—one which was diametrically at odds with the vision articulated by Gerard.58 Just before the final section of the narrative on the Gunpowder Plot, Gerard mentioned the case of Henry Hastings, grandson of the 2nd earl of Huntingdon, who had requested to make the Spiritual Exercises . Gerard claims that he had asked him ‘what had decided him to do this’. The young man had allegedly replied: ‘I read in a book written against the Society’—he meant Watson’s Martin Marprelate-like Decacordon—that you use this means to persuade people to enter the religious life and then rob them of their property. Among other names mine was mentioned as one of those who had made the exercises under you. It was said that though you failed to make me a religious you wheedled a large sum of money out of me.

Hastings seemingly went on the record to say that this was not so—and ‘as they have calumniated you so badly[,] I am come to redress their lies’.59

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Conclusion The Archpriest Controversy, for all its petty and personally libellous aspects, turned upon some of the most pressing and significant issues of the day, both practical and theoretical. In theoretical terms, it was about the origins and nature of political authority; the right to resist; elective versus free hereditary monarchy; the relations between religion and politics, Church and State; and toleration. In practical terms, domestically, it was about the succession and the religious complexion of the postReformation English polity. It was also about the character and legitimacy of the politics of ‘popularity’—and how best to manage the politics of de facto (if not de jure) religious pluralism. In Catholic terms, it concerned the ordering of the English mission and the Catholic community, on the one hand in its relations with the papacy and on the other in its relations with the English monarchical State. Apropos of the internal power structures of the community—that is to say the interface between various religious orders and the secular priests, and that between the clergy and the laity—the dispute was about the fate (and future exercise) of the office of archpriest: this was to become a decades-long struggle over the appointment of bishops, by Rome, to rule over Catholics of the English nation. Internationally, the Archpriest Controversy was played out in close proximity to another nexus, or rather more than one: the bilateral connections between the French and Spanish monarchies and the papacy. And last, but not least, it was about what the accession of James VI would mean for the governance of national Churches of the British Isles.60 And thus, despite its libellous characteristics, indeed because of those characteristics, the Archpriest Controversy is an almost paradigmatic example of the post-Reformation public sphere in action.61 Ad hominem to be sure, and at times outrageously scandalous, in its forms and allegations the dispute also raised (and discussed) some of the central political and religious questions of the age, often at relatively high levels of abstraction. Moreover, it did all that in front of—and, indeed, invited both participation and judgement by—promiscuously ill-defined publics; or rather publics defined only by their exposure to the media mix—print, manuscript and orally transmitted news and rumour – through which the polemical war was waged. Typically, no disputant could endorse the legitimacy of such a full and free exchange of views in the public prints; every one vociferously blamed another for its outbreak and continuance. Nevertheless, each side exhibited very considerable skill in making its case to the

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public, inevitably (and accurately) accusing its adversaries of familiarity with, and ready deployment of, all the dark arts of the libellous secret history and the covert release of information and allegation. However, when we put John Gerard’s memoir back into the context out of which it came—the renewal of the appeal in 1608/1609—the stories that he told, and the milieu with which they are concerned, begin to look rather different. And they look rather different because this is not (just) a memoir, at least not in the sense perhaps assumed by many scholars. Instead, it was part of that same process of making a pitch to a particular kind of readership, one that could be regarded as sufficiently astute to evaluate the arguments with which it was being presented. In short, it seems highly likely that Gerard’s material was intended for deployment in opposition to the new campaign to refashion the Catholic fraction of the English Church. Exactly why it did not go into print around that time, even in Latin, is obscure. However, Gerard was then living in Flanders. One imagines that, following the conclusion of the Anglo-Spanish peace in 1604, and with the archduke being badgered by the English Government to surrender suspected Gunpowder Plotters, including William Baldwin [Bawden] [alias Octaviano Fuscincelli] (1562–1632) and Hugh Owen, the archducal regime would have been loath to see so much as a partial defence of the conspirators anywhere in print—and certainly not one written by a Jesuit as controversial as Gerard. Gerard’s work takes the form, essentially, of a series of chatty anecdotes, though informed throughout by a distinctively Jesuit charism. The tone oscillates somewhere between Country Life and Tatler before an appalling combination of Tina Brown and Thatcherism made it ‘fashionable’. There is no reason to believe that anything in it is deliberately fictitious; frequently, archival sources confirm that Gerard’s stories are factually accurate. As we have suggested, these anecdotes were refutations of the Appellants’ principal lines of attack, though, ironically, they also provided (indirectly) what was in effect a kind of corroboration for many of the Jesuits’ opponents’ assertions, at least to the extent that Gerard’s celebratory narrative of his ministry would be re-interpreted negatively by those who were less enthusiastic about Jesuit styles of ministry. At every turn, Gerard’s account shows us just what it was about the Jesuits that got up the Appellants’ collective nose. One thinks here of the Jesuits’ claims to an effortless spiritual superiority over some (mere) secular clergy; of their concern with the wealthiest and best connected gentry circles; of their evangelical conversion and guidance of godly women; of their

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success as fund-raisers; and of their drive to re-order to their advantage any environment—be it the prison at Wisbech or an elite household—in which they found themselves. Gerard’s ‘refutation’ of the Appellant case thus took the form not of a denial of the central characteristics and practices excoriated by his critics, but rather of a re-description, a re-assignment, of what was recognizably the same amalgam of activities and attitudes under the auspices of the self-evident spiritual potency, and spectacular evangelical success, of the Society of Jesus. Hence what the Appellants viewed as products of the Jesuits’ will to power and ruthless pursuit of private interest, the Jesuits, inevitably, saw as actions taken for the greater glory of God. What the Appellants regarded as gross disruptions of order and hierarchy—needless, often wholly deleterious, disruptions of normal social, familial, clerical and political life—the Jesuits hailed as the irruptive influence of divine grace, reconfiguring a fallen world so as to create those conditions necessary for true order to be established and for spiritual renewal to occur. Gerard’s narrative is a complex collection of stories and reflections. Yet in its constant references, even elliptically and tangentially, to the issues which had recently torn the Catholic community apart, it deals with those topics in an entirely different manner to that adopted in Persons’s Appellant-dispute pamphlets, freighted as those are with the profuse citation of ‘original’ documents, lengthy quotations, the circulation of letter texts and so on. Instead, Gerard mapped out what he believed to be the appropriate way to be a Catholic and to live a Catholic life, refuting by implication the Appellants’ core assertions. For him, those people who talked the talk of order and governance had little in the way of backbone when it came to walking the walk of resisting persecution. Watson was known to have conformed on at least one occasion, to the extent of attending a prayer-book service in his prison chapel. He had also been convicted of real treason after the breaking of the Bye and Main Plots.62 By contrast, Gerard seems to have been unwilling to admit that those of his friends caught up in the Gunpowder cataclysm really had been traitors. It would, however, be a mistake to see Gerard’s reminiscences (and Weston’s too) as merely the fag-end of the Archpriest Controversy, a settling of scores by old men looking back over long and tumultuous careers, recalling just how right and righteous they had been. For these autobiographies were also contributions to a new (or incipient) debate in which some of the crucial issues of that earlier controversy were again being raised in the context of a campaign for the appointment of a

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bishop to oversee the English Catholic community, and also of uncertainty, post-1605, over how the Stuart monarchy would address such problems. Let us, in conclusion, return to the matter of the form in which Gerard’s memoir (and that of Weston) are couched. Polemical as they are, these works do not assume overtly polemical shape. They do not respond with formal argumentation to accusations made by the other side; nor are they, in any sense, political narratives: detailed ‘he-said, she-said’ retellings of what had actually happened during the course of the English mission of the sort that Persons had produced in his immediate printed responses to the Appellants’ complaints. While the Gerard-Weston narratives might loosely be tied to specific events—even at moments of crisis like the Babington or Gunpowder Plots be organized around them— they both aspired to the status of spiritual dramas about the age-old conflict between true religion and heresy, between grace under pressure and the forces of sin, persecution and tyranny. To carry this off successfully, both accounts had to achieve a certain timelessness, unconnected to the exigencies of particular factional or polemical quarrels. These books necessarily rely on their character as first-person narratives, eye-witness renditions of personal experience, to win over the reader. After all, both texts are studded with tales of miracles and of the miraculous. Yet the real miracles on display here are those wrought in the souls of individual Christians. Both Gerard and Weston paid particular attention to the often tear-drenched moment of conversion and to the equally spiritdrenched scene at the death-bed. In each scenario, while the presiding Jesuit played a starring role, the event is presented as a shining example of the power of God’s grace and of the capacity of individuals, under Jesuit tutelage, to achieve levels of spiritual perfection that were simply unavailable to those who had not subjected themselves to the Society’s direction. Importantly, not all of the anecdotes and set-pieces out of which these narratives are constructed were based upon personal experience. And if we pay close attention to the ways in which our two authors sought to persuade their readers that even these reported wonders were true, then we may gain considerable insight not only into how the collective identities and memories of English Catholics were formed in this period, but also into how Gerard and Weston sought to manipulate those formative processes—now feeding off them, now feeding into them—in order to further their own polemical and propagandistic purposes.

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The repetition and glossing of anecdotes and exemplary stories, which then circulated and were further embellished through a variety of media, was all part of a larger enterprise of creating and sustaining Catholic identity and memory—indeed, of doing precisely what each side in the Archpriest Controversy had accused its enemies of doing for their own polemical ends. Even as they responded, fairly aggressively, to Appellant claims, Gerard and Weston were pursuing divisive strategies that, on the surface, both disavowed in these spirit- and emotion-saturated accounts of their Church in a time of persecution. There could scarcely be a clearer example of the interpenetration of the polemical and the devotional, of the intellectual and the affective, in the confessional discourse of the post-Reformation, nor of the deep emotional and religious resonances even of disputes seemingly as arid and as petty as the Archpriest Controversy.

Notes 1. T. M. McCoog, ‘Gerard, John (1564–1637)’, in ODNB, to which should be added M. Hodgetts, Secret Hiding-Places, Oscott Series 3 (Dublin, 1989), passim, but especially pp. 45–64, 140–58. 2. T. Harmsen, ‘Weston [alias Edmunds, Hunt], William (1549/50–1615)’, in ODNB. 3. https://www.ignatius.com/The-Autobiography-of-a-Hunted-PriestP106.aspx. 4. C. Haigh, ‘From Monopoly to Minority: Catholicism in Early Modern England’, TRHS, 5th Series, 31 (1981), pp. 129–47. 5. M. C. Questier (ed.), Newsletters from the Archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, CS, 5th Series, 12 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 1–39 (Introduction). 6. Anon. (ed.), H. Ely, Certaine Briefe Notes Upon a Briefe Apologie Set Out Under the Name of the Priestes United to the Archpriest… (Paris, [1602]) [STC, 7628], sections separately numbered: section entitled ‘To the united priests’, p. 34. 7. Watson, Decacordon, sig. [C7]r (misnumbered p. 21). See also W.[illiam] W.[atson] (ed.) [C. Bagshaw], A Sparing Discoverie of Our English Jesuits, and of Fa. Parsons Proceedings Under Pretence of Promoting the Catholike Faith in England… ([London], 1601) [STC, 25126], p. 2. 8. Watson, Decacordon, pp. 123–4. 9. W.[illiam] W.[atson] (ed.) [C. Bagshaw], A Sparing Discoverie of Our English Jesuits, and of Fa. Parsons Proceedings Under Pretence of Promoting the Catholike Faith in England… ([London], 1601) [STC, 25126], pp. 15–6.

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10. Ibid., pp. 1, 2; [W. Bishop], The Copies of Certaine Discourses… (‘Roane’ i.e. Rouen [recte London], 1601) [STC, 5724], p. 80; and Watson, Decacordon, p. 31. 11. A.[nthony] C.[opley], An Answere to a Letter of a Jesuited Gentleman, by his Cosin, Maister A. C. Concerning the Appeale; State, Jesuits ([London], 1601) [STC, 5735], p. 108. 12. Watson, Decacordon, pp. 89–90. 13. W.[illiam] W.[atson] (ed.), J. Mush, A Dialogue Betwixt a Secular Priest, and a Lay Gentleman. Concerning Some Points Objected by the Jesuiticall Faction Against Such Secular Priests, as Have Shewed Their Dislike of M. Blackwell and the Jesuits Proceedings (‘Rhemes’ i.e. Rheims [recte London], 1601) [STC, 25124.5], pp. 80, 102–3, 110–2. 14. W.[illiam] W.[atson] (ed.), T. Bluet, Important Considerations, Which Ought to Move All True and Sound Catholikes, Who Are Not Wholly Jesuited, to Acknowledge Without All Equivocations, Ambiguities, or Shiftings, That the Proceedings of Her Majesty, and of the State With Them, Since the Beginning of Her Highnesse Raigne, Have Bene Both Mild and Mercifull… ([London], 1601) [STC, 25125], ‘The epistle generall’, sig. [**4]v. 15. Watson, Decacordon, p. 237. 16. J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London, 1975). 17. Caraman, Gerard, p. xxiv. 18. Ibid., p. xix. 19. Ibid., pp. xx, 193. Caraman notes that the nineteenth-century translation of Gerard’s work, by John Morris, omits material: ibid., p. xix. 20. Ibid., pp. 1–6. 21. Ibid., pp. 6, 8–9. Gerard made the same comment about Ambrose Rookwood (c.1578–1606), who had been ‘executed on a charge of treason, but really died a martyr for the faith’: ibid., p. 33. The final chapter of his autobiography would have struck some contemporaries as insufficiently condemnatory of the plot; Gerard’s line was that the conspiracy was merely a response to insufferable persecution: ibid., Chapter 23. 22. Ibid., pp. 10, 15. 23. Ibid., pp. 18–20. 24. Ibid., p. 21. 25. Ibid., pp. 37–43. For a thorough analysis of the house, see N. W. Alcock and R. A. Meeson, ‘Baddesley Clinton: Architectural Responses to Social Circumstances’, The Antiquaries Journal, 87 (2007), pp. 295–345 (especially pp. 326–7 on hiding-places). 26. Caraman, Gerard, p. 21. 27. Ibid., p. 45. 28. Ibid., p. 22. 29. Ibid., p. 24. On Hanse, see Anstruther, Seminary Priests, I pp. 147–8.

9

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

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Caraman, Gerard, p. 24. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., pp. 29–30. Ibid., pp. 32–3. Ibid., p. 33. Ibid., pp. 40–1. See e.g. the case of Mrs. Wiseman: ibid., pp. 52–4. Ibid., pp. 66–7; McCoog, Building the Faith, p. 165. A. F. Allison, ‘John Gerard and the Gunpowder Plot’, Recusant History, 5 (1959–60), pp. 43–63. See above, p. 396. For Gerard’s disguising his handwriting, see Caraman, Gerard, p. 69. For his use of invisible writing, see ibid., pp. 92, 117–8, 119, 129; McCoog, Building the Faith, p. 315. Caraman, Gerard, pp. 69–70. Ibid., p. 96. Ibid., pp. 30–1. Ibid., pp. 67–70, 71. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., pp. 100–1. The long sections describing his being tortured in the Tower (ibid., pp. 104–15), though undoubtedly an accurate rendition of the use of force against him, can hardly but be read against the sarcastic passages in the pamphlets of Watson and other Appellants about the Jesuits’ alleged addiction to the comfortable life. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 81. Ibid., pp. 79–81; T. Worthington, A Relation of Sixtene Martyrs: Glorified in England in Twelve Monethes. With a Declaration. That English Catholiques Suffer for the Catholique Religion. And that the Seminarie Priests Agree with the Jesuites… ([Douai, 1601]) [STC, 26000.9]. Anstruther, Seminary Priests, I pp. 104–5. Caraman, Gerard, p. 104 (n. 1). Ibid., pp. 128–39; McCoog, Building the Faith, pp. 315–6. Caraman, Gerard, p. 141; McCoog, Building the Faith, p. 316. Alabaster perhaps did not turn out as well as Gerard might have hoped. Caraman, Gerard, p. 142. Ibid., pp. 161–3. Ibid., Chapter 20 and especially pp. 167, 199, 203–4. See also J. Morris (ed.), The Condition of Catholics Under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot (London, 1871), pp. 87–90. Caraman, Gerard, pp. 185–6; T. M. McCoog, ‘The Society of Jesus in England, 1623–1688: An Institutional Study’, University of Warwick PhD

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59. 60.

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thesis (1984), pp. 194–5; and P. W. Hasler (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1558–1603, 3 vols (London, 1981), III p. 8; Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Anglia MS 36/ii, fol. 325r. A copy of the same document contained in this Anglia volume bears the note ‘Interpretatio scedularum 17 January 1609’ and has a memorandum explaining that it had been exhibited to the pope by the brother of the earl of Rutland and Thomas Fitzherbert in Holy Week 1609: ibid., fol. 317r– v. We are very grateful to Dr. McCoog for drawing our attention to the annotated example of this document. Sir Oliver Manners was ordained in 1611 by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine: Caraman, Gerard, pp. 185–7; Anstruther, Seminary Priests, II pp. 209–10. R. Smith, Vita Illustrissimae, ac Piissimae Dominae Magdalenae Montis-Acuti in Anglia Vicecomitissae (Rome, 1609), translated into English as C.[uthbert] F.[ursdon] (trans.), The Life of the Most Honourable and Vertuous Lady the La. Magdalen Viscountesse Montague ([St. Omer], 1627) [STC, 22811], of which a modern edn is available as A. C. Southern (ed.), An Elizabethan Recusant House: Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague (1538–1608) Translated into English from the Original Latin of Dr. Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, by Cuthbert Fursdon, O.S.B., in the Year 1627 (London and Glasgow, [1954]). The original work is noticed in A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English CounterReformation Between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1989–94), II Item 707. See also M. C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 209, 211–8, 344–5 and passim. Caraman, Gerard, p. 193. McCoog, ‘Our Lamp’, passim; P. Lake and M. Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). As both sides sought to present their own practice as an appeal, based on ‘authentical’, or, as we might say, ‘primary’ historical sources and arguments, an appeal made to an ‘indifferent’ or ‘discreet’ readership, well capable of evaluating the evidence on its merits and coming to a verdict about just who was in the right and who in the wrong, in that process, print was, or rather, by the end of the dispute, had become, absolutely central, precisely because of its (alleged or notional) capacity to reach beyond the selective audiences described by circulating manuscript and oral news, and to present evidence and argument to a general audience or readership, defined only by its capacity to obtain and read the relevant printed materials. We see here, in short, the (both theoretical and practical) beginnings of a normative public sphere, based on print.

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62. For Watson’s conformity, see [R. Persons], A Manifestation of the Great Folly and Bad Spirit of Certayne in England Calling Themselves Secular Priestes… ([Antwerp], 1602) [STC, 19411], sigs Yv, Cc2r. Watson was swiftly dropped by his former friends. William Gifford wrote to the nuncio, Ottavio Mirto Frangipani, on 14/24 August 1603 that Watson had been ‘expelled from the main body of the priests for certain scandalous proceedings’. He had, declared Gifford, ‘said a great many things most extravagantly at the expense of Father Persons, and had done many things unworthy of a Catholic priest’. Faced with his friends’ disapproval, Watson ‘from ambition and a certain desperation became reconciled to the Jesuits quite recently by the mediation of the Jesuits John Gerard and [John] Percy’, allowing ‘the Jesuits and the supporters of the archpriest… to traduce the Appellants as enemies of the king and State’: ASV, Borghese MS II 448 ab, fols 275r–280v, quotation at ABSI, 100/967/3, p. 1430 (transcript and translation).

CHAPTER 10

Rehabilitating Robert Persons: Then and Now Victor Houliston

Introduction Robert Persons [Parsons] has been cast as both villain and hero of the English Catholic Reformation. The two extremes are reflected in the spelling of his name: he is usually ‘Parsons’ for hostile commentators, and ‘Persons’ to sympathizers and admirers. In the original Dictionary of National Biography, his entry, written by T. G. Law (1836–1904), is headed ‘Parsons’, for Law was working extensively on the Archpriest Controversy (1598–1602) and sided retrospectively with Persons’s opponents.1 Scholars working within the ambit of the Catholic Record Society, founded in 1904 to document post-Reformation British Catholic history, almost invariably spelled the name ‘Persons’, and when A. F. Allison (1916–1996) and D. M. Rogers (1917–1995), eminent bibliographers holding positions at the British and Bodleian Libraries respectively, compiled their finding-lists of English recusant and Counter-Reformation printed books, they had no hesitation in plumping for ‘Persons’.2 But because ‘recusant history’ represented a somewhat isolated, minority tradition, the spelling ‘Parsons’ has until recently tended to dominate

V. Houliston (B) University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7_10

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most historiography and is still common in general overviews of the period. Today, the overwhelming manuscript evidence of the signature ‘Personius ’ (in Latin) or ‘Personio’ (in Italian or Spanish) has prevailed.3 To some extent this marks a withdrawal from polarized positions. Yet the story of ‘Father Parsons’—schemer, traitor and meddler in politics, or peace-maker, mentor and indefatigable missionary leader, the martyr not of a moment but of a lifetime (and perhaps beyond)4 —has much to tell us about British religious culture from his day to ours. The contrast may be represented by the vituperative attacks of William Watson (1559?–1603), a secular priest: Cursed be the hower wherein he was borne, this filius peccati, sacrilegij, iniquitatis, populi, diaboli … O monster of all other … wo woorth thee wretch: wo woorth thee and all the Jesuiticall broode: who to maintaine thy ambition, hast brought this obloquie, reproch and discredite upon our deare countriemen and brethren, innocent, harmlesse hearts, torne out bleeding by thy massacring mercilesse crueltie5

—and the epitaph on his tomb: As defender and patron of the truth he routed the recklessness of his adversaries. By his books, sermons, letters and example religion was vindicated and holiness restored … He was always prepared, always, alert, always plunging magnanimously right into the flame of the most perilous conflict.6

Jesuit Missionary, Educationist, Diplomat Who, then, was Robert Persons? He had no illustrious forebears. Born on or about 24 June 1546, son of a Somerset yeoman, he received his education through the interest of a canon regular, John Hayward, who had charge of his parish church at Nether Stowey.7 At Oxford he flourished, both as student and then tutor, until, after a spell as dean of Balliol College, he fell foul of the master, Adam Squire (d. 1588?), and was expelled for embezzlement. The circumstances are obscure, but the story, possibly apocryphal, of the bells of St. Mary Magdalen ringing backward as for a fire at his departure, has at least a symbolic truth to it. Throughout

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his career, there were those who were pleased to see his back. Another patron, Thomas Sackville, 1st baron Buckhurst (c.1536–1608), saw him safely to Padua, where he planned to study medicine—another false start, for, returning from a visit to Rome in the Jubilee Year of 1575, he was so struck by compunction that he decided to return on foot and offer himself to the Society of Jesus. There was a sudden flurry of English vocations, which caused Edmund Campion [St. Edmund Campion] (1540–1581), then in Prague, to rejoice.8 What had made the difference for Persons, as for so many, was the Spiritual Exercises 9 of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491– 1556): he had only just arrived on the Continent when he encountered them through William Good, a Jesuit, also from Somerset. Controversy next touched Persons when, as novice-master at the Roman College (now the Pontifical Gregorian University), he was drawn into a tussle between English and Welsh students at the inauguration of the (now Venerable) English College, Rome (see Fig. 8.2). Some of the English students, outraged by the favouritism of the Welsh rector, Maurice [Morys] Clenock [Clenocke, Clynnog] (c.1525–1580?), were reduced to an Ash Wednesday sleep-out and a pilgrimage to Cardinal Farnese’s palace by the sea, where Pope Gregory XIII was staying. With Persons looking on approvingly, the College received its papal Bull of foundation, and an Italian Jesuit, Alfonso Agazzari, soon to become a fast friend, replaced Clenock as rector. These circumstances also united Persons with the leader of the English Catholics in exile, William Allen (1532–1594), with whom his reputation has become very closely associated. Together they managed to persuade a reluctant Everard Mercurian, superior-general of the Society, to approve a Jesuit mission to England. A small band of thirteen—a secular bishop, two Jesuits, some laymen, and some seminary priests—set off from Rome in April 1580. It included Edmund Campion and Robert Persons. Perhaps surprisingly, Persons was superior, although six years younger than Campion: the idea may have been to give the charismatic preacher and debater more freedom. They crossed the English Channel separately, and in disguise: Persons as a military captain, Campion as a jewel merchant. By the following spring they were ready to start printing books secretly at Stonor Park near Henley. Campion’s Rationes Decem was smuggled up-river to Oxford and into St. Mary’s, the University Church, to surprise the dons at the commencement exercises.10 Earlier, ‘Campion’s Brag’, supposedly intended for

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release in case of arrest, had been leaked, challenging the universities to find fault with his Roman theology. Persons’s equivalent, his ‘Confession of Faith’, was addressed to the London magistrates, but remained largely unread. It seemed to be his fate, to be in the shadow of his partner.11 And so Campion, against Persons’s explicit instructions, returned to Lyford Grange, Berkshire, and was taken. While the high drama was in motion of Campion’s being brought back in triumph to London, tortured, forced to debate without book, and finally hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor on 1 December 1581, Robert Persons took the road for the Sussex coast and escaped to France. There he found refuge with a connection of the powerful Guise family, Michel de Monsi, archdeacon of Rouen, and kept low. But he was not inactive. He soon had a new printing press in operation, and was writing and printing defences of Campion and works of devotion, including his own First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution, which was to become an Elizabethan best-seller (see Fig. 10.1).12 This publication was intended to compensate in some measure for the lack of priests to minister to the Catholic community in England, and to keep them strong in the faith. From now until the end of his life Persons was in charge of directing the English mission, advising and posting missionaries, arranging the routes of access, smuggling in shipments of books. The energy and strategic acuteness he showed in this role should not be underestimated. He could claim to have been Elizabethan Catholicism’s greatest pastor. But in the light of Campion’s execution and the intensified persecution, of which he was receiving regular reports, he was inclined now to a more forceful solution to the predicament of English Catholicism. No doubt it was partly due to the influence of his host in Rouen that Persons took an increasing interest in the plans of Henry, duke of Guise to invade England and free his cousin, Mary, queen of Scots.13 Thus began the involvement in political and military intrigues that became a determining factor in his reputation. So long as Persons was in exile, he felt no compunction in aiding, abetting and encouraging any Catholic prince who was ready to restore the Catholic faith in England by force. He acted as Guise’s agent in visits to Lisbon, Madrid and Rome, and he joined Alessandro Farnese, prince (later duke) of Parma, in his camp in Flanders, ministering to the English volunteers. By March 1587 he and Allen were in Rome, writing memorials for the Spanish ambassador

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Fig. 10.1 Title-page of The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution …, by R.[obert] P.[ersons] ([Rouen], 1582) [STC, 19353]

and the pope about the enterprise of England.14 Furthermore, they took Nicholas Sander’s manuscript The Origins and Growth of the English Schism, extended it, and published it widely in support of the enterprise. They even recruited Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Ignatius’s first biographer, to adapt the work for a Spanish readership.15

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Persons thus devoted his diplomatic and writing skills, and his influence, to the cause of bringing down Elizabeth’s government. The failure of the Spanish Armada was a bitter disappointment, but he was very quickly in action again. A new phase of his career began, as a senior Jesuit diplomat and advisor. Sent to Spain as emissary of the superiorgeneral of the Society, Claudio Acquaviva, to negotiate with Philip II over the dissident Jesuits there, he appears to have won the confidence of the king and the friendship of his secretary of state, Don Juan de Idiáquez. But he now had a new purpose of his own: to accelerate and reinforce the English mission by founding new seminaries. These would compensate for the problems at Rheims/Douai and Rome, and supply fresh troops of missionaries. Within a few years he had seminaries operating in Valladolid and Seville, and a boys’ school in St-Omer (then in the Spanish Low Countries, now in France). He is, fittingly, revered today as the founder of St. Alban’s Royal English College, Valladolid,16 and of Stonyhurst College, Lancashire, where the College of ‘St Omers’ finally migrated in 1794.17 In 1596, Persons was recalled to Rome to deal with renewed strife at the English College, Rome. This he did with his customary aplomb, sealing the peace with an impassioned speech. Before long, he was appointed rector, a position he held for the rest of his life. From that vantage-point he seemed to have control of all matters English that concerned the city of Rome. The cardinal-nephew, Pietro Aldobrandini, frequently offered his carriage to convey the English Jesuit to the Vatican. He died, honoured and beloved there, in holy week of 1610 (see Fig. 10.2). Elsewhere, many breathed their sigh of relief.

Royal Proclamations: Traitor and Equivocator Persons’s public reputation was shaped, in the first instance, by the Elizabethan authorities. Soon after his arrival in London in June 1580, the Jesuits became the target of successive royal proclamations: they had come ‘under the color of a holy name to deceive and abuse the simpler sort … by special direction from the pope and his delegates, with intent not only to corrupt and pervert [Elizabeth’s] good and loving subjects in matter of conscience and religion, but also to draw them from the loyalty and duty of obedience’.18 Their arrival coincided with a papal military expedition to Ireland, led by James fitz Maurice Fitzgerald (d. 1579) and attended by the papal legate Nicholas Sander [Sanders] (c.1530–1581), an English

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Fig. 10.2 Portrait of Robert Persons, by Charles Weld, after an unknown artist, drawing, c.1857, probably from an original image then in Rome

theologian who very nearly became a Jesuit. The suspicion that the Jesuits were intent on drumming up support for a possible invasion of England, to follow, continues to raise questions about the purely pastoral nature of the mission. In addition, Persons and Campion took a resolute stand against what came to be known as ‘church papism’, attendance at services of the State Church by adherents of the old religion. Their admonition to the faithful struck at the root of Elizabeth’s thus far successful policy of obtaining outward conformity. Arguably, Campion’s execution was a disaster for Elizabeth but a catastrophe for Persons’s public reputation. Recusancy was now the required standard for English Catholics, prosecution to the death for treason the

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expected norm for captured priests, and Persons the symbol of Catholic resistance or obduracy. Anti-Catholic legislation escalated through the 1580s. The exposure of the Babington Plot in 1586, the execution of Mary, queen of Scots in 1587 and the coming of the Armada in 1588 furnished plenty of ammunition for a strident attack on King Philip II of Spain and his secret service, the seminaries, the Jesuits and seminary priests, contained in the royal proclamation ‘Establishing Commissions against Seminary Priests and Jesuits’ of 18 October 1591, where Persons is specifically named as ‘a schoolman … arrogating to himself the name of the King Catholic’s councilor’.19 That he responded so memorably in his Latin Philopater, supported by two entertaining English squibs written by his agent in Antwerp, Richard Verstegan [formerly Rowlands] (1548× 50–1640), could only cement his position in the popular imagination as the Jesuit mastermind, lining up the Catholic powers of Europe against his native country.20 Worse was to follow. Henry Garnet’s defence in the Gunpowder Plot trial associated the Jesuits especially with the doctrine and practice of equivocation.21 Persons reacted swiftly to the attorney-general’s censures in his Answere to the Fifth Part of Reportes Lately Set Forth by Syr Edward Cooke,22 presenting the ancient and received arguments for the legitimate, limited use of equivocation. This did not stop Shakespeare from ridiculing the practice in Macbeth (1606).23 When King James I promulgated a new Oath of Allegiance, Persons weighed in. Although his English contributions were overshadowed by the Latin controversy waged between James and Cardinal (later St.) Robert Bellarmine, his engagement reinforced the association with treason and duplicity, the casuistry of legal evasions.24

Persons in Print: Polemic and Devotion Persons was by any standard one of the most effective writers of his day. His commitment to the printed word is evident in the presses he established at Stonor Park and in Rouen, and in the number of his publications.25 Most of his works were dashed off at high speed, exhibiting a remarkable rhetorical readiness and ease of style. He had a formidable reputation both as polemicist and satirist, being especially notorious for two books, ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ (1584)26 and A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland (1594/95),27 which he may not in fact have written. Both of them caused scandal in their

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day and had unexpected afterlives. ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ is a satirical dialogue cleverly designed to blame Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester (1532/33–1588), for England’s ills: its lack of freedom of worship and its Machiavellian culture of plot and poison. Leicester’s rivals at Court were naturally delighted and it was said that readers were willing to pay twenty crowns to borrow ‘Parsons Greencoat’ for a few hours.28 Ten years later, the silence imposed upon Englishmen over the urgent question of the succession was broken by A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland, dedicated to Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex (1565–1601), and commonly referred to as ‘Doleman’, its pseudonymous author. This treatise put Essex temporarily under a cloud and reinforced the perception of Persons, the supposed author, as a troublesome meddler and would-be king-maker. Persons’s Scottish colleague, William Crichton (c.1535–1617), protested that it had achieved only negative publicity: ‘A French proverb says that a hare is not to be caught by a drum. In the pulpits both of England and Scotland the ministers are beating this one’.29 The work awakened so much passion by its apparent support of a Spanish succession that Persons was obliged to disown it. It also came under attack for undermining royal authority, although this also led to its being revived in the context of resistance to Charles I’s personal rule in the 1630s, and again during the brief revival of republicanism under Charles II.30 Persons also composed, but never published, ‘A Memorial for the Reformation of England under her next Catholic Prince’ (1596), written chiefly for the benefit of his preferred candidate for the succession, the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia of Spain, governor of the Spanish Netherlands. This work had limited impact at the time, because the infanta showed little interest in compromising her state (now Belgium) for the sake of an English adventure. But when, a century later, the direction of the Stuart monarchy was again in doubt, a concerned patriot thought it prudent to publish the work under the title of The Jesuit’s Memorial, as a warning against any deviation from the true Protestant line.31 Persons achieved fame as a spiritual guide through the exceptional popularity of his Booke of … Resolution or Christian Directory.32 It became a byword in its day for the recovery of sinners, who could be reclaimed for God, even on their deathbed, by the overpowering persuasiveness of Persons’s prose which, it was claimed, was virtually unequalled in bringing to vivid life the ultimate spiritual realities: our accountability to God, the awful consequences of sin, the inescapability of judgement.

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In the following century, a great puritan, Richard Baxter, compared it to other books: I had before heard some sermons, and read a good book or two, which made me more love and honour godliness in the general; but I had never felt any other change by them on my heart … And in the reading of this book (when I was about fifteen years of age) … it pleased God to awaken my soul, and shew me the folly of sinning, and the misery of the wicked, and the unexpressible weight of things eternal, and the necessity of resolving on a holy life, more than I was ever acquainted with before. The same things which I knew before came now in another manner, with light, and sense, and seriousness to my heart.33

Persons thus took the considerations of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and worked them up to a pitch of realization. When The First Booke of the Christian Exercise first appeared in 1582, and was ‘read to pieces’,34 it put some Protestant prelates into a state of fright, supposing that unsuspecting lay people might be lured back into papal darkness by this innocent-seeming book. Edmund Bunny (1540– 1618) was commissioned to remove all papist phraseology and make the book safe for Protestant readers.35 Attempts were made to dissociate the book from Persons, both by Protestants and later by Catholic antagonists. His role was discounted by reducing him to a mere compiler or translator of Luis de Granada, a popular Dominican writer whose name held less terror to English ears.36 But the book, in either version, was a printing phenomenon. Persons’s Resolution continued to bear his name and uphold his reputation for godliness. Indeed, it has been argued, with good reason, that there was considerable overlap between the Jesuit and the Calvinist appeal for a deeper commitment to God’s service.37

Catholic Detractors: The ‘Hispanized Camelion’ and the ‘Polypragmon’ Persons was at first highly respected, almost revered, by the great majority of English Catholics both at home and abroad. He was a leading figure, active among the exiles in Rouen, Paris, Louvain and Rome. But his commitment to various invasion schemes was destined to divide opinion. He wavered briefly: ‘Wee had resolved’, he wrote to Mary Stuart in October 1584, ‘to leave cogitation of soch matters and to follow only

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owr spirituall cowrse wheruppon all dependeth thowgh in longer time’,38 but he did not keep to this persuasion long. In opposition, a party (Persons called it a faction) of disaffected exiles was growing in Paris: at its centre were Thomas Morgan (b. 1543, d. in or after 1611), who thought of himself as Mary’s primary agent in Paris, and Charles Paget (c.1546–1612), brother of the emigré peer Thomas, 4th baron Paget (c.1544–1590), former patron of the composer William Byrd (1539×43– 1623). The group attracted William Gifford [name in religion Gabriel of St. Mary] (1557/58–1629), dean of Lille, later a leading light in the Benedictine revival, and through his connections gradually extended its range to those students in Rheims, Douai and Rome who resented Jesuit influence or control. Morgan, Paget and their allies were driven by their apprehension that the cause of English Catholicism was being ‘hispaniolated’, subordinated to schemes of Spanish aggrandizement. The inability of France and Spain to join forces was a great boon to Protestant England; not only because it reduced the chances of a successful invasion, but also because it divided the exiles. Once the duke of Guise’s pro-Spanish influence began to diminish in France, the anti-Spanish lobby among the exiles began to look to the French monarchy. The French connection was to play an important part in the Archpriest Controversy which erupted near the turn of the century, deepening the divisions within the English Catholic community, clerical and lay, at home and abroad. The Appellants protested against Spanish domination of the Jesuit mission and dubbed Persons a ‘hispanized camelion’.39 On the surface, the Archpriest Controversy was about the restitution of an ecclesiastical hierarchy for the secular clergy, deprived of meaningful episcopal oversight since the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign in 1558. A bishop was felt to be badly needed. Persons himself proposed episcopal oversight, but he was countermanded by the cardinal protector, who appointed an archpriest instead, accountable to the Jesuit superior. Not unpredictably, a group of seculars (how representative of the English clergy at large is debatable) saw Persons’s hand in this, as a contrivance for a perpetual Jesuit stranglehold. They appealed to Pope Clement VIII. The first appeal, in 1598, failed, partly because of Persons’s inside knowledge; the second, in 1601–1602, succeeded in part, thanks to the support of the French embassy.40 The archpriest’s independence from

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the Jesuits was now guaranteed, and in time the incumbent George Blackwell (1547–1612), and especially his successor George Birket [Birkhead] (1549–1614), became the focus of opposition to them. The Appellants’ feud with Persons was driven partly by apprehension that he monopolized all information flowing to the pope about England, and all related decisions emanating from the Vatican. A favourite phrase of disparagement was ‘polypragmon Parsons’: the jack-of-all-trades who was everywhere to be found, interfering in everyone’s business.41 Many priests wished to practise their calling without state harassment, by coming to some understanding with the Government. This suited Elizabeth’s advisers, conscious of the effectiveness of Persons’s polemic against those ardent Protestants who, like Sir Francis Hastings (c.1546–1610) and Dean Matthew Sutcliffe of Exeter (1549/50–1629), went to press to issue warnings to true-hearted Englishmen of the inherent treacherousness of Catholics.42 The prospect of fostering division among Catholics at a time of uncertainty about the succession was another benefit that may have induced the bishop of London, Richard Bancroft (bap. 1544, d. 1610), to sponsor Appellant publications in which Persons was derided and defamed without quarter given, or indeed expected.43 Clerical opposition to Persons was not, however, merely the bilious reaction of loyalist dupes, although the hint of toleration in return for repudiation of the Jesuits turned out to be illusory. There was a deeper cause of estrangement, originating in their vision of the English Church. Persons looked for a revitalized, resolved community suffused with Counter-Reformation ardour, in which ecclesiastical structures played only a subsidiary part. Many seculars longed for a restoration of the ancient hierarchies and privileges, where priests knew their place and people observed it. The situation was complicated by the dynamics of the mission: Jesuits were relatively free agents, responsible only to their superior; secular priests tended to be tied into the local networks of Catholic gentry. Arguably, they were more cognizant of lay Catholic political sentiment than Persons, who had been out of the country for twenty years, surrounded by foreign princes and potentates.44 Catholic unease with Persons stemmed also from the feeling that by pursuing a militant policy against the Elizabethan Government he and Allen, safe in exile, increased the suffering of the Catholic community in England. The charge was echoed in John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr, published in the year of Persons’s death. Lamenting the folly of those priests who chose death rather than compromise with a state religion

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which, if not Roman, was certainly Catholic, Donne (1572–1631) blamed Persons as the devil’s ‘instrument … whose continuall libels, and incantatorie bookes, have occasioned more afflictions, and drawne more of that bloud, which they call Catholique, in this kingdome, then all our Acts of Parliament have done’.45 This complaint became a motif in unflattering and bitter representations of Persons.

Protestant and Catholic Historians: The ‘Black Legend’ and the Politician Each of these elements in Persons’s reputation has undergone modification in the historiography of the Elizabethan era. From the very beginning, the contrast with Campion meant that he attracted most of the accusations that came to be associated with the ‘Black Legend’ of the Jesuits: equivocation, casuistry, moral slipperiness, seduction of the susceptible, sedition, rebellion, attempts to overturn the Protestant settlement in Church and State, and a determination to subject England to Spanish and papal tyranny. William Camden (1551–1623), who knew both Jesuits from his Oxford days, compared them memorably in his Annales Rerum Anglicarum et Hibernicarum Regnante Elizabetha (1615–1625): This Persons was a Somersetshire man, vehement, fierce of nature, and of rude behaviour: Campian was of London, a sweet natured and most courteous man … Persons who was constituted superior, being a man of a seditious and turbulent spirit, and armed with audacious boldnesse, brake forth so farre with the papists about deposing the queene, that some of them (I speake upon their owne credit) thought to have delivered him into the magistrates hands.46

In the Protestant Church histories of the eighteenth century, Persons was subsumed into a general category of super-subtle Jesuits and traitorous Catholics: John Strype (1643–1737) teamed him with William Allen, described as ‘this malicious, unnatural Englishman [writing] against his queen and country’.47 Gilbert Burnet (1643–1715), dealing with the ‘Popish Plot’ invented by Titus Oates (an alumnus of Persons’s foundation at St-Omer), noted the common opinion of the Jesuits: that they could justify lying under oath.48 Later, Henry Hallam (1777–1859), in his Constitutional History of England (London, 1827), attributed

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such moral depravity to the influence of Persons, held to have been ‘a subtle and lying Jesuit’ whose books (‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’ and A Conference About the Next Succession) are ‘full of the mendacity generally and justly ascribed to his order … worthy to be read by any one who is curious about the secret politics of the queen’s reign’.49 Following the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy by papal Bull in 1850, Persons entered the popular imagination as a kind of Jesuit bogey-man. In Charles Kingsley’s enormously popular Westward Ho! (1855), he is presented as a villainous figure, ‘a blustering … vulgar bully’. In an early chapter, Kingsley (1819–1875) mimics Persons’s traitorous political philosophy: ‘And what is England?’ said Parsons: ‘A heretic and schismatic Babylon, whereof it is written, “Come out of her, my people, lest you be partakers of her plagues”. Yea, what is a country? An arbitrary division of territory by the princes of this world, who are nought, and come to nought. They are created by the people’s will; their existence depends on the sanction of him to whom all power is given in Heaven and earth – our holy father the pope. Take away the latter, and what is a king? – the people who have made him, may unmake him’ … ‘I tell you, Sir, rebellion is now not merely permitted, it is a duty’.50

In the plot of Westward Ho!, Campion and Persons are deeply implicated in the Irish insurrection, but are no match for the honest men of Devon: Campion is kind-hearted but ineffectual, while Persons is devious, bad-tempered, militant, and unable to contain his impatience with compromise. James Anthony Froude (1818–1894) also seized upon the apparent link between the ‘Jesuit Invasion’ and the Irish rebellion, treating Persons as a mere papal agent. Unlike Campion, who was the more deceived, he masked his designs under ‘the character of a purely religious crusade … The poison of asps was under the lips of the bearers of such a message of treachery’. Froude could not understand how any intelligent person could believe the ‘preposterous … hypothesis’ that Persons was ignorant of the Sander-Fitzgerald expedition.51 The stereotype of the wily, treacherous Jesuit schemer thus became part of the imperial pageantry of the golden age of Queen Elizabeth I, the buccaneers on the Spanish Main and the glorious victory over the Spanish Armada. This view chimed with a certain idea of the English gentleman—brave, frank and independent-minded—to be contrasted with the servile, superstitious

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and mean-spirited culture of priest-ridden popery, to which Persons had been assimilated and sought to reduce his native country. Many Catholic church historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries censured Persons as a politician, one who betrayed his priestly calling by dabbling in politics. Hugh Tootel [Charles Dodd] (1672– 1743)52 and John Lingard (1771–1851) were relatively mild in their treatment.53 But when Mark Aloysius Tierney (1795–1862) took it upon himself to annotate and enlarge what appeared as Dodd’s Church History of England, his extensive notes almost swamped the original, and savaged Persons’s reputation.54 Persons was here reduced to a schemer hungry for personal power and Jesuit ascendancy. In particular, Tierney felt that he had exposed Persons’s duplicity in relation to the succession: that he had lied about the authorship and intention of ‘Doleman’, and was forced to prevaricate once James VI was on the English throne. Tierney’s characterization of Persons led Cardinal Manning (1808– 1892) to conclude that ‘there can be no doubt that the Jesuits, from R. Parsons downwards, have hindered the restoration of the Church in England’.55 The view that Persons’s militancy was largely to blame for the official treatment of English Catholics was thus frequently entangled with the judgement of his character and personality. In the influential Dictionary of National Biography, T. G. Law described him as ‘impetuous and self-willed … subject to “inveterate prejudices”, and … “easily deceived”’.56 An extensive psychological analysis was offered by Ethelred Taunton (1857–1907), a priest of the Oblates (an order founded by Manning). He mingled moral censure with almost unbounded admiration for Persons’s abilities as a strategist, a magnetic leader of men, and an undaunted pursuer of a single-minded purpose. Perhaps Persons deceived himself that he acted always in the interest of religion and piety, but truly he was a politician who could not resist the itch to meddle. In the end, his projects came to naught. Taunton concluded that Persons’s story had the ‘dignity of a human tragedy’, according to the formula by which a great and gifted man is brought low by a single flaw: in Persons’s case, a puritanical belief that he was the elect instrument of God and therefore always right.57 If the nineteenth-century Catholic revival blackened Persons’s reputation as a politician, it also enhanced his standing as a spiritual writer. His style had always commanded respect: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), for example, averred that of all Elizabethan prose writers, only Richard Hooker (1554–1600) and Robert Persons could be read with pleasure

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in his more polished age.58 Now The Christian Directory, which had already been modernized and reprinted for both Catholic and Protestant readers,59 enjoyed even wider dissemination, with numerous editions in North America and Ireland.60 James Joyce’s parody of a Jesuit school sermon on hell, in Chapter 3 of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York, 1916), gives some indication of the educational and catechetical culture to which Persons’s popular work was assimilated. Although actually based on a translation of a seventeenth-century Italian text, Joyce’s homiletic extravaganza resonates with the relevant chapter of The Christian Directory.61

Jesuit Historiography: The Heroic Tradition Meanwhile, Jesuit historians pursued their own course of honouring Persons. In the seventeenth century, histories of the Society of Jesus in England were written by the English provincial, Henry More [Moore] (c.1587–1661), and an Italian Jesuit, Daniello Bartoli.62 With the loss of so many documents at the time of the suppression of the Society in 1773, we are reliant upon partial transcripts and summaries, prepared for Bartoli’s convenience by Christopher Grene. In these works, Persons appears chiefly as a pastor, missionary strategist and educator. More depicted him as disinterested, moderate, reasonable and virtuous: ‘patient in waiting, bold in doing’.63 This portrait was writ large after the Society’s restoration in 1814, when the enterprise of consolidating the archival record was pushed forward by Henry Foley (1811–1891). His eight volumes of Jesuit records (1875–1883) constitute a vast storehouse of documentary material, much of it closely related to Persons’s activities and friendships, cast in the light of ‘labours and sufferings’. A similar tone was adopted by John Morris (1826–1893) in his Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers (1872–1877), which contains transcripts of biographical material and memoirs written by Persons and others.64 Further impetus came from the founding of the Catholic Record Society in 1904, two of its earliest publications being largely devoted to J. H. Pollen’s editions of Persons’s memoirs.65 Twentieth-century biographical studies of Elizabethan Catholics added lustre to the story of Persons and his colleagues.66 Leo Hicks (d. 1968) published several articles about Persons’s role in founding seminaries in Spain, extending the testimony of Peter Guilday’s study of Catholic exiles in Europe (1914).67 He also edited an initial volume of Persons’s letters

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(1942),68 and prepared materials for more. Philip Caraman’s translations of the autobiographies of John Gerard and William Weston, and his biography of Garnet (1951, 1955 and 1964 respectively)69 portrayed Persons as a missionary leader of gravitas and counsel. Godfrey Anstruther’s painstaking researches into the lives of missionary priests ([1968]–1977) bulked out the evidence of the English mission.70 The extent and distinction of Persons’s writing career was illuminated by Allison and Rogers in their bibliographies of Catholic printed books (1956–1994),71 and by Thomas Clancy (1964), who skilfully detailed and analyzed his prolific polemical works.72 Bernard Basset gave prominence to Persons in The English Jesuits: From Campion to Martindale (1967),73 but the first fulllength scholarly biography was published only in 1990, when Federico Eguiluz announced ‘Architraidor’ with some irony in his title74 ; Francis Edwards’s rival ‘Life’ followed in 1995. Edwards (1922–2006) protested Persons’s innocence too much, but he had scoured the archives industriously and to good effect. Indeed, his asseveration that Persons’s ‘primary vocation was that of priest; his avocation, politics’ admirably sums up this line of Jesuit historiography.75 Edwards’s successor, but one, at the archives of the British Province of the Society of Jesus, Thomas McCoog, SJ, worked so hard to bring Jesuit history into the ambit of mainstream historiography that he found himself unjustly accused of personal hostility to Edwards.76 But his efforts coincided with, and partly guided, the emergence of early modern British Catholic studies as an academic field free, so far as possible, from either institutional control or ecclesiastical bias.77 The period of relative isolation of English Catholic and Jesuit history was drawing to a close.

‘Early Modern British Catholic Studies’ Evelyn Waugh’s popular biography of Campion (1935) introduced Persons to the general twentieth-century reader as a lesser, but admirable, hero, author and pastor.78 Its confident air belonged to the heyday of literary conversion under the intellectual ascendancy of Ronald Knox (1888–1957) and Martin D’Arcy (1888–1976). Another lively, somewhat eccentric modern portrait of Robert Persons, standing apart from the politics of ecclesiastical history, is that produced by A. L. Rowse (1903–1997) as one of his Eminent Elizabethans (1983). In a rather supercilious tour-de-force, emulating Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (London, 1918) both in title and in style, Rowse characterized

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‘Father Parsons the Jesuit’ as one whose ‘obsession drove him relentlessly on – an outsize ego … an immensely strong, unmistakable personality, complex and plausible, uncompromising yet tactful, capable of arousing ardent discipleship and a host of enemies’.79 He psychologized Persons’s genius as akin to Swift’s—tortured and provoked by rejection and opposition—and endorsed Donne’s view of Persons as a man responsible for much Catholic blood-shedding. Our subject’s personality also fascinated John Bossy (1933–2015), who, searching for the elusive ‘heart of Robert Persons’ (1996), perceived a nervousness caused by his implication in plots of invasion and even, possibly, assassination.80 But it is not simply the enigma of Persons’s character that has forced him on the attention of contemporary historians. The expansion of scholarship on early modern politics, literature and religion over the past thirty years, spearheaded by influential figures such as John Bossy, Patrick Collinson, Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, Peter Lake, Diarmaid MacCulloch and Alexandra Walsham, has enriched our understanding of his engagement in many areas. The picture remains diverse. Some commentators insist on his shady dealings: the papal expedition to Ireland,81 and his meetings in London with the Spanish ambassador Don Bernardino de Mendoza.82 Conversely, ambivalence towards Elizabeth’s rule—encapsulated in the title of Peter Lake’s Bad Queen Bess? 83 —has opened up an imaginative space for empathetic accounts of Jesuit infiltration into Protestant England, as in Alice Hogge’s God’s Secret Agents and Jessie Childs’s God’s Traitors.84 Others focus on his political ideology: it has been claimed, with some credibility, that the Conference About the Next Succession was the most important work of political philosophy to appear in England between More and Hobbes.85 Persons’s opposition to absolutism has commended him to literary critics determined to dismantle ‘the Elizabethan world picture’ and to give Shakespearean studies a more subversive profile.86 Even today, the Memorial prompts occasional musing about the road not taken, while it is derided by others as ‘day-dreaming’, entirely out of touch with reality.87 In the recent spate of studies of the succession problem, Persons provides the title, Doubtful and Dangerous, for a major collection of essays edited by Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes.88 There is a growing recognition of his role in international Jesuit politics and diplomacy.89 A project to complete the publication of his correspondence is in hand, which will serve to gather

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together all aspects of contemporary research on his life and immediate context.90 Ironically, then, democratization and secularization, neither of which figured in Persons’s agenda, have made contemporary commentators more open to his virtues and vices, often naming them by new names: scheming becomes diplomacy, treason becomes resistance, stubbornness becomes resilience and militancy realism. Conversely, the stimulus and ecumenism of the Reformation quincentenary leave room for a new assessment of The Christian Directory, described in 1959 as ‘one of the simplest, sweetest, soundest books of devotion in the English tongue’.91 With the Ignatian way being taken by many from various Christian denominational traditions, Persons could find a more general audience.92 But historiographically, the current challenge is to assess the impact that he had on seminarians and fellow-Jesuits, and the traditions they passed on in the century after his death. A notable indication of this dimension is the so-called Brudenell manuscript, or ‘Jollet Miscellany’, which contains a seventeenth-century compendium of recusant lore.93 It is not, I would argue, the production of a partisan or a member of a faction. Persons’s name appears again and again, as author and activist. The evil that Persons did, the battles that he fought, has long been kept alive; his good is now oft being disinterred.

Notes 1. T. G. Law, ‘Parsons or Persons, Robert’, in L. Stephen and S. Lee (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols (1st edn, London, 1885–1900), XLIII pp. 411–8; T. G. Law (ed.), The Archpriest Controversy: Documents Relating to the Dissensions of the Roman Catholic Clergy, 1597 –1602. Edited from the Petyt MSS. of the Inner Temple, 2 vols, CS, Second (New) Series, LVI and LVIII ([London] and London, 1896–1898). 2. A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English Printed Abroad or Secretly in England, 1558–1640, 2 vols (Bognor Regis, 1956); revised and expanded as A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation Between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1989–1994). 3. McCoog, ‘Our Lamp’, has abandoned the ‘Parsons’ used in earlier vols: T. M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden, 1996); McCoog, Building the Faith. P. Ribadeneira [P. de Ribadeneyra], Bibliotheca Scriptorum Societatis Iesu … (Rome, 1676), p. 725. Watson, Decacordon, pp. 128–9. ‘Vindice et patrono veritatis hostium passim exagitata temeritas libris scriptis sermonibus literis exemplis defensa religio recreata sanctitas … semper paratus semper erectus semper in mediam flammam periculosissimae concertationis irrumpens animae magnae prodigus ’ (inscription in the chapel of the Venerable English College, Rome). Reliable information on his life can be found in the Introduction to L. Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S. J., I (to 1588) [no subsequent vols], PCRS, XXXIX (London, 1942); F. Edwards, Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit, 1546–1610 (St. Louis, MO, 1995). Campion to Persons, Prague, 24 June 1577, printed in V. Houliston et al. (eds), The Correspondence and Unpublished Papers of Robert Persons, SJ , I: 1574–1588 (Toronto, 2017) [hereafter Houliston et al., Correspondence], pp. 35–7. Composed in 1522–1524, but first published (translated from the original Spanish) as Exercitia Spiritualia (Rome, 1548). E. Campion, Rationes Decem: Quibus Fretus, Certamen Adversarijs Obtulit in Causa Fidei Edmundus Campianus … ([Stonor Park, 1581]) [STC, 4536.5]. ‘Campion’s Brag’ has been very widely reproduced, e.g. in B. Basset, The English Jesuits: From Campion to Martindale (London, 1967), pp. 454–6; for Persons’s ‘Confessio fidei’, see Houliston et al., Correspondence, pp. 91– 104. R.[obert] P.[ersons], The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution … ([Rouen], 1582) [STC, 19353]. See S. Carroll, Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe (Oxford, 2009). Houliston et al., Correspondence, pp. 654–76. E. Rishton (ed.), N. Sander, De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani Liber … (Coloniae Agrippinae, i.e. Cologne [recte Rheims], 1585); R. Persons and W. Allen (eds), N. Sander, De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani Libri Tres … (Rome and Ingolstadt, 1586–1588); S. J. Weinreich (ed. and trans.), Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s ‘Ecclesiastical History of the Schism of the Kingdom of England’: A Spanish Jesuit’s History of the English Reformation (Leiden, 2017). See F. C. Dominguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II (University Park, PA, 2020).

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16. For the festivities in Valladolid, see J. Burrieza Sánchez and P. Harris (eds), La Misión de Robert Persons: Un Jesuita Inglés En La Antigua Corte de Valladolid: Robert Persons Mission: An English Jesuit in the Old Court of Valladolid (Valladolid, 2010). 17. H. Chadwick, St. Omers to Stonyhurst: A History of Two Centuries (London, 1962); M. Whitehead, English Jesuit Education: Expulsion, Suppression, Survival, Restoration, 1762–1803 (Burlington, VT, [2013]). 18. E.g., ‘Ordering Return of Seminarians, Arrest of Jesuits’, 10 January 1581, 23 Elizabeth I, in P. L. Hughes and J. F. Larkin (eds), Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3 vols (New Haven, CT, and London, 1964–1969), II pp. 481–4 (at p. 483). 19. Ibid., III pp. 86–95 (at p. 89). 20. [R. Verstegan], A Declaration of the True Causes of the Great Troubles, Presupposed to be Intended Against the Realme of England … ([Antwerp], 1592) [STC, 10005, previously 19400] and [R. Verstegan], An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of My L. Treasurers of Ingland, by an Inglishe Intelligencer as he Passed Throughe Germanie Towardes Italie. Concerninge an Other Booke Newly Written in Latin, and Published in Diverse Languages and Countreyes, Against Her Majesties Late Proclamation … ([Antwerp], 1592) [STC, 19885]; A. Philopater [pseudonym for R. Persons], Elizabethae Angliae Reginae Haeresim Calvinianam Propugnantis, Saevissimum in Catholicos Sui Regni Edictum … Cum Responsione ad Singula Capita … Per D. Andream Philopatrum (Antwerp, Ingolstadt, Lyons, and Rome, 1592). 21. Persons defended Garnet in P.[ersons] R.[obert], A Treatise Tending to Mitigation Towardes Catholicke-Subjectes in England … ([St. Omer], 1607) [STC, 19417]. 22. [R. Persons], An Answere to the Fifth Part of Reportes Lately Set Forth by Syr Edward Cooke Knight … ([St. Omer], 1606) [STC, 19352]. 23. See G. Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (New York and Oxford, c.1995). 24. [R. Persons], The Judgment of a Catholicke English-Man, Living in Banishment for his Religion: Written to His Private Friend in England. Concerninge a Late Booke Set Forth, and Entituled; Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus, or, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance … ([St. Omer], 1608) [STC, 19408]. On the new Oath of Allegiance, see J. Brodrick, The Life and Work of Blessed Robert Francis Cardinal Bellarmine, S. J., 1542–1621, 2 vols (London, 1928); M. C. Questier, ‘Loyalty, Religion and State Power in Early Modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’, HJ , 40 (1997), pp. 311–29; and J. P. Sommerville, ‘Papalist Political Thought and the Controversy over the Jacobean Oath of

442

25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

V. HOULISTON

Allegiance’, in E. Shagan (ed.), Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2005), pp. 162–84. A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation Between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols (Aldershot, 1989–1994), I Items 871–99, II Items 608– 40. I.e. The Copie of a Leter, Wryten by a Master of Arte of Cambrige, to His Friend in London, Concerning Some Talke Past of Late Betwen Two Worshipful and Grave Men, About the Present State, and Some Procedinges of the Erle of Leycester and his Friendes in England … (n.p., 1584) [STC, 5742.9], attributed to Charles Arundell by Allison and Rogers and to Persons in P. Holmes, ‘The Authorship of “Leicester’s Commonwealth”’, JEH , 33 (1982), pp. 424–30. R. Doleman [pseudonym for R. Persons], A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crowne of Ingland … (‘N’ [recte Antwerp], 1594 [recte 1595]) [STC, 19398]. Persons to Agazzari, Rouen, 13 December 1584, printed in Houliston et al., Correspondence, pp. 548–56, reference at pp. 551 (Latin) and 554 (English). Crichton to Persons, Douai, 20 August 1596: ABSI, Coll P 318 (‘Est proverbium Gallicum leporem non esse capiendum tympano, in pulpitis tam Angliae quam Scotiae Ministri pulsant ’). e.g. Severall Speeches Delivered at a Conference Concerning the Power of Parliament, to Proeeed [ sic] Against Their King for Misgovernment … (London, 1648) [Wing, P573A]; [A. Sidney] (ed.), A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England … ([London], 1681) [Wing, P568]. E. Gee (ed.), The Jesuit’s Memorial, for the Intended Reformation of England, Under Their First Popish Prince … (London, 1690) [Wing, P569]. See also J. J. Scarisbrick, ‘Robert Persons’s Plans for the “True” Reformation of England’, in N. McKendrick (ed.), Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J. H. Plumb (London, 1974), pp. 19–42. R.[obert] P.[ersons], The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, Appertayning to Resolution … ([Rouen], 1582) [STC, 19353]; revised and expanded as A Christian Directorie Guiding Men to Their Salvation … ([Rouen], 1585) [STC, 19354.1]; revised again as The Christian Directory Guiding Men to Eternall Salvation … ([St. Omer], 1607) [STC, 19354.5]. M. Sylvester (ed.), R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae: Or, Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times … (London, 1696) [Wing, B1370], p. 3. See D. Salomon, ‘Examinations of

10

34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

43.

44.

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Conscience: Robert Parsons’ “Christian Directory” and Catholic Spirituality in Post-Reformation England’, University of Connecticut PhD thesis (1999). Persons to Acquaviva, Rouen, 12 February 1585, printed in Houliston et al., Correspondence, pp. 564–74, at pp. 565 (Latin) and 569 (English). E. Bunny (ed.), A Booke of Christian Exercise, Appertaining to Resolution … Perused, and Accompanied Now with a Treatise Tending to Pacification: by Edm. Bunny (London, 1584) [STC, 19355]; many times reprinted 1584–1599 [STC, 19356–19368.5]. ‘O. E.’ [M. Sutcliffe], A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, Calling Himselfe N. D. in Defence Both of Publike Enemies, and Disloyall Subjects, and Entitled A Temperate Wardword … (London, 1600) [STC, 23453], sig. A3v. B. S. Gregory, ‘The “True and Zealouse Seruice of God”: Robert Parsons, Edmund Bunny, and The First Booke of the Christian Exercise’, JEH , 45 (1994), pp. 238–68. Persons to Mary, queen of Scots, Rouen, probably 10 October 1584, printed in Houliston et al., Correspondence, pp. 519–27 (at p. 521). Watson, Decacordon, pp. 150, 239. Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). For the term’s currency, see S.[amuel] H.[arsnett], A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures … (London, 1603) [STC, 12880], p. 7. On the ‘Watchword’ controversy, see P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1977), pp. 138–45. It was initiated by Sir Francis Hastings, A Watch-Word to all Religious, and True Hearted English-Men (London, 1598) [STC, 12927] and included N.[icholas] D.[oleman] [i.e. R. Persons], A Temperate Ward-Word, to the Turbulent and Seditious Wach-Word of Sir Francis Hastinges Knight … ([Antwerp], 1599) [STC, 19415] and ‘O. E.’ [M. Sutcliffe], A Briefe Replie to … (London, 1600) [STC, 23453]. G. Jenkins, ‘The Archpriest Controversy and the Printers, 1601–1603’, The Library, 5th Series, II (1948), pp. 180–6; P. Collinson, ‘Bishop Richard Bancroft and the Succession’, in S. Doran and P. Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014), pp. 92–111. See M. C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640 (Cambridge, 2006). A. Raspa (ed.), John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr: Wherein Out of Certaine Propositions and Gradations, This Conclusion Is Evicted. That Those Which

444

46.

47.

48.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54.

55.

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Are of the Romane Religion in This Kingdome, May and Ought to Take the Oath of Allegiance (Montreal, 1993), p. 9. This book is a modern edn of a work originally published in London in 1618 [STC, 7048]. R. Norton (trans.), W. Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princesse Elizabeth, Late Queene of England …, 4 books in 1 (London, 1630) [STC, 4500.5], II p. 108. J. Strype, Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion, and Other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, During Queen Elizabeth’s Happy Reign … (‘new edn’, 4 vols in 7 parts, Oxford, 1824), III Part II p. 78 (1st edn published London, 1709). T. Burnet and M. J. Routh (eds), Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time …, 6 vols (Oxford, 1823), II p. 192 (work first published in 2 vols, [The Hague?] and London, 1724–1734). H. Hallam, The Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VII to the Death of George II , 3 vols (reprint of 2nd London edn, Boston, 1829), I pp. 388–90 [recte 389] (n. 1). In the same n., Hallam conjectures that ‘Dodd plainly thinks worse of him than he dares speak’ (on Charles Dodd, i.e. Hugh Tootel, see below, n. 52). C. Kingsley, Westward Ho! or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight …, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1855), I pp. 104–5, 114–5 (quoted above) and 193–206. J. A. Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth [title modified from this for vols XI and XII], 12 vols (London, 1856–1870), XI pp. 314–15. Froude’s scepticism about Persons’s profession of ignorance, aimed at R. Simpson, Edmund Campion: A Biography (London, 1867), is echoed by J. E. Parish and G. Kilroy (see below, n. 81). [Charles Dodd] [pseudonym for Hugh Tootel], The Church History of England, from the Year 1500, to the Year 1688. Chiefly with Regard to Catholicks …, 8 parts in 3 vols (Brussels [recte London], 1737–1742); see also R. C. [C. Dodd], The History of the English College at Doway … (London, 1713); and [C. Dodd], The Secret Policy of the English Society of Jesus … (London, 1715). J. Lingard, A History of England from the First Invasion by the Romans (3rd edn, 14 vols, London, 1825–1831), VIII passim (quotations at pp. 538 and 544). See J. Vidmar, ‘John Lingard’s History of the English Reformation: History or Apologetics?’, CHR, 85 (1999), pp. 383–419. M. A. Tierney (ed.), Dodd’s Church History of England: From the Commencement of the Sixteenth Century to the Revolution in 1688 …, 5 vols (London, 1839–1843). From a note ‘On the corporate action of the Society of Jesus in England’, partially published in S. Leslie, Henry Edward Manning: His Life and

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57. 58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

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Labours … (London, 1921), pp. 295–7 (at p. 296); see M. V. Hay, The Jesuits and the Popish Plot (London, 1934), pp. 68–72. T. G. Law, ‘Parsons or Persons, Robert’, in L. Stephen and S. Lee (eds), Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols (1st edn, London, 1885–1900), XLIII p. 416, quoting (as ‘Manareus’) Olivier Mannaerts (1523–1614)—a leading Jesuit with whom Persons had a slightly uncomfortable relationship. E. L. Taunton, The History of the Jesuits in England, 1580–1773 … (London, 1901), especially pp. 366–96. J. Swift, The Tatler, No. 230 (28 September 1710), reprinted in H. Davis et al. (eds), The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, 14 vols (Oxford, 1939– 1968), II p. 177. [George Stanhope] (ed.), Parsons His Christian Directory … Put into Modern English … (London, 1699) [Wing, P566A]; this abridgement ran to at least seven edns and was many times reprinted. E.g. R. Parsons, A Christian Directory, Guiding Men to Their Salvation (New York, n.d., but printer was J. Harris, [b.] 1820) and R. Parsons, The Christian Directory: Guiding Men to Their Eternal Salvation … (revised edn, with ‘Life’ of the author, Dublin, 1852). Joyce attended the prestigious Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare, from 1888 to 1891, aged 6–9: J. R. Thrane, ‘Joyce’s Sermon on Hell: Its Source and Its Backgrounds’, MP, 57 (1960), pp. 172–98. H. More, Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Iesu … (St. Omer, 1660), partially translated as F. Edwards (ed. and trans.), The Elizabethan Jesuits: Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (1660) of Henry More (London, 1981); D. Bartoli, Dell’istoria della Compagnia di Giesu L’Inghilterra Parte dell’Europa (Rome, 1667); ABSI, Collectanea, Christopher Grene’s collections. H. More, Historia Missionis Anglicanae Societatis Iesu … (St. Omer, 1660), pp. 388–9, this passage being translated in E. L. Taunton, The History of the Jesuits in England, 1580–1773 … (London, 1901), pp. 391–3. H. Foley (ed.), Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus: Historic Facts Illustrative of the Labours and Sufferings of its Members in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 7 vols in 8 parts (n.p. and London, 1875–1883); J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, 3 vols (London, 1872–1877). J. H. Pollen (ed.), ‘The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons’, Miscellanea II , PCRS, II (London, 1906), pp. 12–218 and Miscellanea IV , PCRS, IV (London, 1907), pp. 1–161; L. Hicks (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S. J., I (to 1588) [no subsequent vols], PCRS, XXXIX (London, 1942). The journal known since 2015 as British Catholic History began life as Biographical Studies in 1951, under the auspices of the Catholic Record

446

67.

68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

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Society, and became Recusant History: A Journal of Research in PostReformation Catholic History in the British Isles in 1956. L. Hicks, ‘Father Persons, S. J., and the Seminaries in Spain’, The Month, CLVII (1931), pp. 193–204, 410–17, 497–506 and ibid., CLVIII (1931), pp. 26–35, 143–52, 234–44; P. K. Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795, I: The English Colleges and Convents in the Catholic Low Countries (London, 1914); a projected second volume was never completed. See above, n. 65. Caraman, Gerard, passim; P. Caraman (ed. and trans.), William Weston: The Autobiography of an Elizabethan (London, 1955); P. Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555–1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (New York, 1964). See also his anthology: P. Caraman (ed.), The Other Face: Catholic Life Under Elizabeth I (London, 1960; reprinted with corrections, London, 1961). Anstruther, Seminary Priests, I. See above, n. 2; see also A. C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559–1582: A Historical and Critical Account of the Books of the Catholic Refugees Printed and Published Abroad and at Secret Presses in England Together with an Annotated Bibliography of the Same (London and Glasgow, [1950]); P. Milward, Religious Controversies ... (Lincoln, NE, and London, 1977); P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1978). T. H. Clancy, Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago, IL, 1964). B. Basset, The English Jesuits: From Campion to Martindale (London, 1967). F. Eguiluz, Robert Persons ‘El Architraidor’: Su Vida y Su Obra (1546–1610) (Madrid, 1990). F. Edwards, Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit, 1546– 1610 (St. Louis, MO, 1995), p. 62. McCoog, ‘Our Lamp’, p. 31. See T. M. McCoog and L. Lukács (eds), Monumenta Anglia, 3 vols, Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu, 142, 143, and 151 (Rome, 1992–2000); and T. M. McCoog, English and Welsh Jesuits 1555–1650, 2 vols, PCRS (Records Series), 74 and 75 (n.p., 1994–1995). This shift was marked by the change of the name of the journal Recusant History to British Catholic History in 2015 (see above, n. 66). E. Waugh, Edmund Campion (London, 1935). A. L. Rowse, Eminent Elizabethans (London, 1983), pp. 41–74 (at p. 41). J. Bossy, ‘The Heart of Robert Persons’, in T. M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits: Essays

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81.

82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

89.

90. 91. 92.

93.

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in Celebration of the First Centenary of Campion Hall, Oxford (1896– 1996) (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 141–58. J. E. Parish, Robert Parsons and the English Counter-Reformation, Rice University Studies, 52 (Houston, TX, 1966), p. 13; G. Kilroy, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life (Farnham, 2015), pp. 184–5. M. L. Carrafiello, Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610 (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998), p. 24. P. Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016). A. Hogge, God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (London, 2005); J. Childs, God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England (London, 2014). P. Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 146–57; M. L. Carrafiello, Robert Parsons and English ... (Selinsgrove, PA, 1998). E.g. W. Sanders, The Dramatist and the Received Idea: Studies in the Plays of Marlowe & Shakespeare (London, 1968), pp. 150–4. E.g. J. Egerton, ‘Robert Parsons: A Jesuit for Today?’, Thinking Faith, posted on 14 April 2010, https://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/201 00414_1.htm; E. L. Taunton, The History of the Jesuits in England, 1580–1773 … (London, 1901), p. 154. S. Doran and P. Kewes (eds), Doubtful and Dangerous: The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014); the title phrase is found in [R. Persons], Newes from Spayne and Holland … ([Antwerp], 1593) [STC, 22994], fol. 35r. In the 2014 collection of essays, see especially Chapter 3, ‘The Puritan, the Jesuit and the Jacobean Succession’, by P. Kewes, pp. 47–70, and Chapter 4, ‘Taking It to the Street? The Archpriest Controversy and the Issue of the Succession’, by P. Lake and M. Questier, pp. 71–91. See J. E. Kelly and H. Thomas (eds), Jesuit Intellectual and Physical Exchange Between England and Mainland Europe, c.1580–1789: ‘The World is Our House?’, Jesuit Studies, 18 (Leiden, 2019). Houliston et al., Correspondence; two further vols are in preparation. G. Mattingly, The Defeat of the Spanish Armada (London, 1959), p. 72. See, e.g., The Way: A Review of Christian Spirituality Published by the British Jesuits, 46 (2017), the October issue of which is specially devoted to the subject of ‘The Reformation: A Gift from God?’. Bodl., MS Eng.th.b.1–2. See G. Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, 2005), Chapters 1 and 5; K. McKeogh, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham (1543–1605) and Early Modern Catholic Culture and Identity, 1580–1610’, University of Oxford DPhil thesis (2017). Grateful thanks to Dr. McKeogh for discussions and comments.

Index

A Abbot, George, archbishop of Canterbury, 75, 341 Abbot, Robert, 76 Acquaviva, Claudio, superior-general of the Society of Jesus, 426, 443 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, 262–264 ‘Act of Six Articles’, 120, 121, 225, 229, 234, 264, 265, 267, 271, 285 Act of Succession, 259 Actes and Monuments [‘Book of Martyrs’], 48, 50, 72, 84, 94, 162, 226, 250, 251, 253, 255, 272, 276–281 Acworth, George, 303, 326 Admonition Controversy, 313, 343, 344, 346, 348, 350 The Admonition Controversy, 346, 360 Affective piety, 195, 197 Africa, 165 Agazzari, Alfonso, rector of the English College, Rome, 423, 442 Agricola, Rudolph, 44, 45, 141

Ahab, 245 Aikin, John, 315, 333 Aikin, Lucy, 316, 333 Ajax, 366 Alabaster, William, 57, 66, 309, 331, 409, 417 Aldobrandini, Pietro, 426 Aldrich, Thomas, 303 Alexandre, Pierre [pseudonym Simon Alexius], 201 Alfield, Thomas, 54, 369, 372 Allde, John, 365, 366, 369, 379 Allen, William, 171, 368–370, 385, 386, 423, 424, 432, 433, 440 Allison, A. F., 421, 437 Alphabet Bills, 301 Ambassador, 99, 152, 166, 229, 321, 424, 438 Amici Thomae Mori, 180 Amigo, Peter, archbishop of Southwark, 162, 165, 182 Amyot, Jacques, 44 Anabaptist, 275 Andrewes, Lancelot, 75, 76, 351, 352 Andrews, James Pettit, 314, 332

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 D. J. Crankshaw and G. W. C. Gross (eds.), Reformation Reputations, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55434-7

449

450

INDEX

Anglican, 113–116, 124, 163, 164, 171, 173, 174, 179, 180, 200, 310, 345–348, 350, 360 Anglican Orders, 291 Anglo-Spanish peace, 412 Anglo, Sydney, 5–7, 11, 128, 135, 140 Anne of the Thousand Days , 109 Anstruther, Godfrey, 416–418, 437, 446 Anthology, 19, 44, 51, 73–75, 84, 91, 308 Antiquarianism, 27, 73, 309, 311, 313 Antwerp, 21, 31, 35, 38, 69, 96, 136, 138, 140, 210, 232, 250, 283, 289, 323, 324, 331, 419, 428, 441–443, 447 Apostolic succession, 291 Appellants, 396–402, 404–409, 412–415, 417, 419, 431, 432 Approbation Controversy, 406 Archbishop of Canterbury, 64, 123, 180, 190, 191, 229, 251, 291, 292, 305, 308, 318, 320, 321, 328, 332, 337, 355, 370, 396 Archpriest Controversy, 397, 400, 402, 404, 411, 413, 415, 421, 431 Arminian, 308, 343, 344 Arminianism, 343 Arundell, Charles, 95, 374 Ascham, Roger, 32, 91, 136 Ashley, Robert, 32, 136 Askew, Anne, 52, 106, 117–123, 255–257, 259–282, 285 Askew, Sir William, 257–260 Assheton, Abdias, 57, 67 Aston, Margaret, 112 Athanasius of Alexandria, 201 Athena, 190, 191, 208 Atkins, Richard, 116, 368, 391

Australia, 180 Authority, 5, 7, 47, 104, 107, 120, 121, 124, 126, 166, 175, 185, 200, 259, 262–265, 268, 270, 271, 279, 303, 314, 316, 338, 340, 343, 347, 350, 351, 356, 379, 396, 399, 400, 405–408, 411, 426, 429 Autobiography, 298, 309, 395, 413, 416, 437 Aylmer, John, bishop of London, 47, 61, 91, 345 Ayre, John, 338, 346, 357, 359 B Babington, Gervase, 76 Babington Plot, 428 Bacon, Sir Francis, 3, 5, 73, 127, 144, 345 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, lord keeper of the great seal, 62, 76, 91, 311, 320 Baddesley Clinton, 402, 403, 416 Bagshaw, Christopher, 398, 415 Baker, Augustine, 171 Baldwin [Bawden], William [alias Octaviano Fuscincelli], 412 Bale, John, 63, 75, 76, 118–122, 140, 255–257, 259–261, 271, 273–276, 278–282, 288, 308, 334 Ballad, 21–26, 31, 86, 92, 93, 149, 150, 257, 273, 274 Balliol College, Oxford, 126, 422 Bancroft, Richard, archbishop of Canterbury, 315, 338, 339, 341, 348, 354, 396, 432 Baptismal names, 14 Baptist Union of England and Wales, 170 Barclay, Alexander, 39 Barker, William, 91, 148

INDEX

Barlow, Jerome, 40 Barlow [Finch], William, 40, 56, 66, 193, 210, 317 Barnes, Robert, 41, 140 Baro, Peter, 348 Barrow, Henry, 339 Bartoli, Daniello, 436, 445 Basel, 19, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 63, 64, 136, 137, 200, 205, 206, 212, 215, 216, 232, 250, 256, 276, 280, 300, 321, 323 Bassanius, Varius Avitus [Heliogabalus], Roman emperor, 95 Basset, Bernard, 437, 440, 446 Battle of Alcácer Quibir, 370 Baxter, Richard, 344, 359, 430, 442 Baynes, Paul, 74, 76 BBC, 171, 188 Beauchamp family, 11 Beaufort, Lady Margaret, countess of Richmond and Derby, 115, 169, 192, 195 Beaufort Street convent, London, 163 Beaumont, Francis, 372, 375 Beccadelli, Ludovico, 53, 64, 71 Becon, Thomas, 75, 76 Beda College, Rome, 170, 184 Bellarmine, Cardinal Robert [St. Robert Bellarmine], 418, 428 Belloc, Hilaire, 163 Belmonte, Cardinal Pignatelli di, dean of the Sacred College, 166 Benefactor, 184, 306, 307, 315, 317 Bentley, Thomas, 278, 289 Bergzabern, 235, 246, 251 Beza, Theodore, 53, 65 Bible, 19, 20, 32, 118, 120, 132, 137, 196, 198, 261, 262, 264, 297, 306, 356 ‘Bible man’, 115, 190, 192 Bibliander, Theodore, 212, 234, 237

451

Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 201, 211 Bilney, Thomas, 75, 76, 115, 196, 197, 210, 317, 335 Biography, 9, 11, 18, 33, 37, 44, 45, 47, 51, 64, 65, 71–73, 75, 84–87, 89, 105, 107, 108, 113, 115, 119, 122, 123, 142, 143, 152, 163, 165, 174–176, 180, 249, 293, 299, 303, 307–313, 317, 318, 337, 338, 340, 341, 345, 346, 354, 375, 384, 436, 437 Birket [Birkhead], George, 396, 432 Bishop, 12, 14, 15, 29, 37, 40, 74, 89, 93, 94, 103, 116, 122, 123, 159, 164, 165, 170, 176, 179, 191, 193, 223–226, 228, 232, 234, 237–240, 246, 247, 258, 263–269, 279, 298, 300, 305, 306, 309–311, 342, 344, 396, 397, 405, 406, 414, 423, 431, 432 Bishop, William, 398 Bishop’s wife, 232, 236, 239, 241, 247 Bishops’ Bible, 123, 304–307, 335 Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, 171 Black Legend, 96, 433 Blackwell, George, 396–398, 404, 409, 432 Blage, George, 268, 269, 276 Blandina, 273, 275 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 99 Bocher, Joan, 275, 288 Bodleian Library, Oxford, 18, 67, 102, 170, 184, 326, 328 Bohemia, 38 Bokenham, Osbern, 18, 19 Boleyn, Anne, queen of England, 57, 99, 103, 104, 123, 168, 234, 294, 295, 298, 299

452

INDEX

Boleyn, Thomas, earl of Wiltshire and earl of Ormond, 99 Bolt, Robert, 106, 108, 109, 114, 174, 180, 181, 187 Bolton, Robert, 76 Bombino, Paolo, 60, 69 Bonner, Edmund, bishop of London, 50, 94, 98, 151, 263–271, 276, 285–287, 309 Book of Common Prayer, 121, 246, 271, 307 ‘Book of Homilies’, 198, 305 Bossy, John, 385, 400, 416, 438, 446 Bourgogne, Jacques de, seigneur de Falais, 230, 250 Bourne, Cardinal Francis, archbishop of Westminster, 165 Bowes, Martin, lord mayor of London, 268, 271 Bradford, John, 76, 308 Bradshaw, William, 74, 76 Brandon, Charles, 1st duke of Suffolk, 259 Brandon, Charles, 3rd duke of Suffolk, 62 Brandon, Henry, 2nd duke of Suffolk, 62 Brant, Sebastian, 39, 140 Brazil, 180 Brettergh [née Bruen], Katherine, 57 Bristol, 36 British Crown, 166 British Library, London, 105 British Museum, London, 172 Brittayne, Christopher, 265, 266 Broadside, 92–94, 97, 98, 149, 150 Broadway, New York, 188 Broke, Thomas, the Younger, 94 Bromley, Sir Thomas, lord chancellor of England, 366 Broughton, Rowland, 62 Browne, Henry, 163

Browne [née Dacre], Lady Magdalen, viscountess Montagu, 58, 410 Bruges, 31 Bryan, Sir Francis, 99 Bucer, Martin, 37, 76, 138, 202, 205, 235, 236, 240, 300, 308, 322 Buchanan, George, 91, 147 Bullinger, Heinrich, 230, 232–234, 237, 238, 243–245, 250–252, 261, 283, 324 Bunny, Edmund, 430, 443 Bure, Idelette de, 235 Burnet, Gilbert, 139, 311, 312, 331, 433 Butts, Edmund, 265 Bye Plot, 413 Byrd, William, 431

C Caius, John, 76, 334 Calendar, 17, 19, 22, 123, 161, 304 Calvinism, 51, 96, 308, 343, 344, 348–352, 430 Calvin, Jean, 51, 53, 65, 230, 235, 236, 250, 251, 346 Cambridge, 21, 52, 58–60, 62, 67, 69, 72, 113, 122, 123, 127, 128, 133–138, 140–147, 149, 152, 169, 170, 172, 174, 178, 184, 186, 188, 192, 201, 209, 212, 249–252, 258, 280–282, 284–286, 288, 289, 291, 294, 296–300, 303, 305–307, 318, 320, 322, 324, 326–329, 332–335, 338, 340–343, 345, 347, 348, 350, 352, 355, 357, 359–362, 385, 389, 390, 415, 418, 443, 444, 447 Cambridgeshire, 87, 91, 408 Camden, William, 86, 88, 90, 96, 128, 146, 147, 307, 308, 329,

INDEX

330, 342, 343, 358, 359, 433, 444 Campeggio, Cardinal Lorenzo, 103 Campion, Edmund [St. Edmund Campion], 56, 60, 112, 155, 171, 368, 369, 375, 423, 424, 427, 433, 434, 437, 440 Campion Hall, Oxford, 170, 171 Canada, 180 Canonization, 12, 13, 15, 35, 37, 39, 47, 113, 159–162, 164–166, 168–174, 176–179, 181–187, 347 Canterbury, archbishopric, 305, 315 Canterbury, archiepiscopal palace, 306, 307 Canterbury Cathedral, 35, 37, 39, 186 Capgrave, John, 17, 131 Capito, Wolfgang, 52, 63, 236 Caracciolo, Antonio, 54 Caraman, Philip, 68, 69, 395, 400, 416–418, 437, 446 Carier, Dr Benjamin, 91, 340 Carleton, George, 61, 71 Carthusian, 106, 175 Cartigny, Jean de, 32, 136 Cartwright, Thomas, 74, 75, 77, 303, 326, 338–341, 346, 349, 350, 360 Catherine of Aragon, queen of England, 99 Catholic Emancipation, 162, 389 The Catholic Herald, 172, 185 Catholicism, 26, 39, 84, 91, 103, 104, 113, 125, 126, 134, 156, 159, 162–164, 172, 175, 177, 179, 180, 193, 224, 247, 350, 364, 383, 393, 395, 401, 405, 424, 431 Catholic Record Society, 421, 436, 446

453

Catholic Truth Society, 176 Cavendish, George, 44, 51, 52, 64, 99–105, 152–154 Caxton, William, 10, 19, 20, 38, 129, 131, 133 Cecil [née Cooke], Mildred, Lady Burghley, 97 Cecil, Robert, 1st earl of Salisbury, 340, 353, 354 Cecil, William, 1st baron Burghley, 57, 67, 77, 320, 326, 328 Celebrity, 1–3, 5, 8, 12, 27, 46, 50, 72, 73, 109, 137 Celibacy, 223, 224, 227, 229 Censorship, 8, 105, 118 Chaderton, Laurence, 61, 75, 77, 143 Chambers, R. W., 64, 113, 163–165, 171, 173–178, 182, 185, 186 Chancery, 239, 241, 242, 261 Chaplain, 91, 123, 171, 175, 226, 234, 240, 246, 260, 294, 296, 299, 303, 309, 320, 340, 351, 352, 404, 409, 410 Chard, Thomas, 72 Charles V, holy Roman emperor, 30, 229, 230 Charlewood, John, 366, 379 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 1, 16, 88 Cheke, Sir John, 47, 61, 75, 77, 321, 322, 345 Chelsea, 122, 162, 173 Chelsea Old Church, 115, 181 Chesterton, G. K., 163 Chivalry, 10, 23, 29, 30, 33, 34 Christ’s College, Cambridge, 169, 184 Christ Church Newgate, London, 89 Christian Directory, 429, 436, 439, 443 Christian Humanist, 175, 176 Christian living, 192

454

INDEX

Christian III, king of Denmark, 234, 246 Christmas, 374 Christology, 205, 206 Chrysostom, John, 201, 202, 208 Church, 8, 9, 14–17, 22, 36, 37, 45, 51, 74, 75, 84, 88, 96, 113, 114, 123, 125, 129, 145, 164, 165, 167–172, 175, 176, 178–180, 187, 191, 192, 195, 198, 199, 201, 203, 206, 223, 224, 228, 234–236, 240, 243–246, 259–264, 266, 269, 271–273, 275, 276, 292, 294, 296, 299, 300, 303–305, 307, 309, 311, 313, 315, 316, 318, 338–354, 356, 362, 365, 376, 393, 395, 396, 400–402, 404, 405, 407, 408, 410–412, 415, 422, 423, 427, 432, 433, 435 Church Fathers, 116, 194 Church government, 344 Church history, 74, 144, 249, 281, 283, 288, 318, 323, 327, 330, 433, 435 Church of England, 37, 117, 118, 123, 124, 198, 208, 223, 247, 293, 297, 305, 307, 309, 312, 313, 317, 318, 332, 333, 338, 340, 342, 345, 347–349, 351, 354, 359, 361, 362 The Church Times , 172, 178, 185 Churchyard, Thomas, 149, 340, 358 Cicero, 42, 43 Clancy, Thomas, 437 Clapham, John, 57 Clarke, Samuel, 73–75, 84, 144, 308, 330 Classical antiquity, 27, 174 Clayton, H. J., 348, 360

Clenock [Clenocke, Clynnog], Maurice [Morys], rector of the English College, Rome, 423 Clere, Thomas, 91 Clerical marriage, 117, 223–229, 236, 240, 247, 248, 314 Clerics, 67, 75, 169, 177, 235 Cleves, 273 Clifford, George, 3rd earl of Cumberland, 340 Clifford, Henry, 60 The Clink, Southwark, 407, 408 Clitherow [née Middleton], Margaret [St. Margaret Clitherow], 54, 275 Coke, Sir Edward, 340 Cole, Henry, 263, 284 Colet, John, dean of St. Paul’s, 74, 75, 77, 308 Coligny, Gaspard de, comte de Châtillon, 53 Communion, 179, 180, 206, 279 Conformity, 28, 118, 130, 311, 315, 344, 349, 351, 362, 378, 419, 427 Congregation of Sacred Rites, 165 Conscience, 108–110, 113, 121, 160, 162, 165, 174, 176, 180, 247, 266, 312, 353, 363, 364, 377, 405, 426 Consecration, 237, 291, 299, 309, 310, 313, 320 Conservative, 97, 101, 104, 164, 236, 242, 260, 267 Conversion, 97, 195, 210, 228, 261, 395, 401–403, 409, 410, 412, 414, 437 Convocation, 37, 225, 264, 343, 350 Cooper, Thomas, bishop of Lincoln, 289, 305 Copland, William, 32, 136, 141 Copley, Anthony, 398, 399

INDEX

Coronation Chair, 294 Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 58, 123, 296, 297, 303, 306, 307, 315, 328 Cosin, Richard, 56, 71, 353 Cotton, Roger, 92 Coulton, G. G., 174, 175, 177, 186 Counter-culture, 24 Counter-Reformation, 39, 103, 126, 139, 382, 421, 432 The Counter, London, 264 Country Life, 412 The Court, 3, 7, 105, 229, 261, 263, 267–269, 273, 278, 294, 321, 380 Courtier, 6, 29, 93, 99, 109, 299, 312, 410 Court of High Commission, 352 Court of Star Chamber, 105, 339, 410 Coverdale [née Matthewson or Macheson], Elizabeth, 116, 224, 228, 230, 234, 235, 246, 247 Coverdale, Miles, bishop of Exeter, 74, 75, 77, 91, 117, 227, 228, 235, 236, 240, 241, 246, 251, 253, 281, 283, 288 Cox, Richard, bishop of Ely, 210, 214, 282, 283, 302, 306, 329 Cranmer, Edmund, archdeacon of Canterbury, 241 Cranmer, George, 340 Cranmer, Margaret, 116, 117, 224, 228–230, 236, 239–243, 247, 250, 252 Cranmer, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 52, 53, 77, 106, 114–117, 123, 124, 156, 189– 208, 209–220, 227–230, 234, 239–243, 246, 258, 264, 275, 282, 283, 286, 287, 308–310,

455

311, 320, 321, 334, 337, 338, 344, 354 Crichton, William, 429, 442 Croft, Sir James, 54 Crome, Edward, 121, 267, 268, 270, 287 Crompton, Richard, 92 Cromwell, Thomas, earl of Essex, 37, 63, 77, 122, 235, 258, 282, 283, 298 Croydon, 91, 147, 283, 338, 340, 345, 356, 357, 362 Cult, 9, 12, 13, 15, 26, 34, 36, 37, 39, 42, 45, 178 Culture war, 27, 28, 45, 84, 135 Cumberland, 14, 340 Cyprian of Carthage, 201 Cyril of Alexandria, 116, 203, 206, 208 D D’Arcy, Martin, 437 Dark, Sidney, 178 Dawley, Powel, 337, 338, 347, 354, 357, 358, 360 Day, John, 303, 314 De Antiqvitate Britannicæ, 229, 303, 308 Dee, John, 55, 66 Dekker, Thomas, 92 Denmark, 234, 246 Denny [née Champernowne], Joan, Lady Denny, 263, 269 Denny, Sir Anthony, 263, 265 Denton, John, 97, 149 Dering, Edward, 77 Devereux, Robert, 2nd earl of Essex, 342, 429 Devereux, Walter, 1st earl of Essex, 77 Devon, 22, 162, 434 Digby [née Mulsho], Mary, Lady Digby, 409

456

INDEX

Digby, Sir Everard, 409 Dillingham, William, 61 Dionysius the Areopagite, 201 ‘Dives and Pauper’, 39 Divus , 168 Doleman, R. [pseudonym], 429, 435, 442 Dominicans, 17, 171, 234, 371, 430 Donne, John, dean of St. Paul’s, 432, 433, 438 Dorman, Thomas, 300, 301, 324 Douai, 66, 69, 417, 442 Douai College, 171, 426, 431 Drake, Sir Francis, 32, 33, 83 Drama, 15, 22, 23, 41, 47, 103, 106, 107, 109–111, 139, 140, 168, 230, 276, 372, 377, 380, 395, 414, 424 Drayton, Michael, 63, 70 Drummond, Lady, 166 Drury, Henry, 399, 403, 404 Drury, Robert, 408 Duchemin, Charles, 170, 184 Dudley, Ambrose, earl of Warwick, 78 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 78, 95, 151, 429 Duffy, Eamon, 17, 18, 36, 114, 129–131, 138, 146, 181, 186, 188, 385, 438 Dugdale, Sir William, 296 Duplicity, 377, 378, 428, 435 Durham, 39, 67, 184, 258 Dyer, Sir James, 62 E Ecclesiology, 343, 344, 346, 350 Ecumenical, 114, 116, 125, 156, 168, 172, 179 Edward III, king of England, 11, 22 Edward IV, king of England, 192 Edward VI, king of England and Ireland, 60, 62, 93, 115, 120,

149, 198, 212, 225, 229, 237, 240, 247, 248, 258, 271, 275, 298, 299, 309 Edwards, Francis, 102, 103, 437, 440, 445, 446 Egerton, Sir Thomas, master of the rolls, later lord chancellor of England, 68, 353, 405 Eguiluz, Federico, 437 Elderton, William, 93, 149, 150 Elegy, 85, 87, 92 Eleven Articles, 123, 304 Eliot, John, 92, 148 Eliot, T. S., 171, 197 Elizabethan, 6, 32, 51, 58, 71, 94, 123, 124, 126, 144, 226, 247, 276, 301, 305, 338, 345, 349, 353, 368, 375, 376, 379, 380, 395, 396, 399, 400, 410, 424, 426, 432, 433, 435, 436, 438 Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland, 83, 103, 123, 128, 154, 223, 245, 272, 275, 291, 324, 326, 337, 434, 441 Elton, Sir Geoffrey, 32, 37, 114, 138, 139, 180, 188 Ely, 298, 306, 329, 415 England, 3, 5, 6, 16, 22, 23, 27, 30, 36–39, 45, 47, 51, 72, 74, 83–85, 88, 90, 99, 109, 111, 113, 117, 118, 120, 123, 125, 126, 163–166, 170, 172, 175, 178, 182, 189, 192, 195, 197, 199, 209, 223, 224, 226, 229, 230, 232, 234, 235, 237, 239–246, 248, 256–259, 264, 274, 278, 282, 291, 294, 295, 300, 309, 315, 323, 330, 342, 366, 368, 372, 373, 375, 376, 380, 383, 393, 399–402, 404–407, 423–425, 427, 429, 431–433, 435, 436, 438, 441

INDEX

English, 4, 5, 10, 11, 17–19, 21, 25, 29, 31, 32, 34–37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 51–54, 60, 61, 63, 64, 66–69, 71–75, 84, 87, 88, 99, 104, 106, 113, 125, 126, 132, 136, 146–148, 152, 159, 162–166, 169, 170, 172, 174–179, 185, 186, 191–195, 197, 199, 210, 223, 224, 228, 235, 245, 246, 259, 271, 272, 274–276, 280, 296, 299–301, 303, 305, 307, 308, 314, 335, 342–345, 347, 349, 368, 370, 371, 373–376, 378–384, 387, 388, 395, 397, 399, 401, 405, 409, 411, 412, 414, 418, 421, 423, 424, 426–432, 434–437, 439, 443 English Bible, 50, 120, 173, 235, 262, 264, 273 English Catholic community, 142, 179, 396, 397, 401, 414, 431 English College, Rome, 57, 66, 69, 167, 176, 183, 184, 366, 367, 375, 376, 380, 423, 426, 440, 446 English Establishment, 162, 169, 170 Englishness, 167, 177–179 English Reformation, 45–47, 71, 72, 75, 83, 84, 97, 103, 109, 110, 112, 191, 223, 224, 228, 256, 265, 345 English saints, 18, 178 English-speaking world, 114, 178, 179 Epiphanius of Salamis, 201 Episcopacy, 294, 300, 308, 315, 343, 357 Epistles of St. Paul, 189, 191, 192, 262

457

Epitaph, 86–98, 115, 146–150, 181, 293, 294, 296, 306, 308, 319, 320, 339, 340, 422 Eppstein, J., 172, 185 Erasmus, Desiderius, 28–31, 34–36, 39, 40, 43, 73, 75, 78, 135–137, 140, 180, 195, 196, 210, 258 Essex, 75, 269, 323, 342, 353, 429 Eucharist, 118, 120, 199–201, 203, 206, 208, 212, 214, 216, 264, 266, 271, 285 Eusebius, 273 Evangelical correspondence, 227, 235, 298 Eworth, Hans, 276, 277, 289 Examinations , 255–257, 261, 262, 265, 267, 273, 275, 276, 278–288, 290 Exeter, 21, 22, 39, 240, 246, 252, 307, 432 Exile, 74, 95, 117, 226, 228, 230, 232, 235, 240, 241, 244, 245, 247, 249, 273, 276, 300, 324, 373, 378, 389, 393, 423, 424, 430–432, 436

F Faculty Office, 301 Fagius, Paul, 78, 240 Fairford, 86 Fame, 1–3, 5, 9, 11, 42, 47, 50, 89, 90, 93, 122, 126, 298, 318, 429 Farnese, Alessandro, prince (later duke) of Parma, 424 Faulhaber, Cardinal Michael von, archbishop of Munich, 172, 185 Feast day of St. Thomas Becket, 162 Female agency, 227 Ferrar, Robert, bishop of St. David’s, 309 Field, John, 301

458

INDEX

Fifteenth century, 5, 19, 21, 22, 25, 192, 231, 403 Film, 85, 106–112, 125, 155, 180, 181, 395 Fisher, Cardinal John, bishop of Rochester [St. John Fisher], 58, 75, 78, 103, 106, 112–115, 159– 162, 165, 167–173, 175–179, 181–187 Fitzalan, Henry, 12th earl of Arundel, 54 Fitzgerald, James fitz Maurice, 426, 434 Fitzherbert, Thomas, 331, 396, 418 Fitzwilliam, Lady, 269 Flanders, 18, 412, 424 Fleet Prison, London, 241 Fletcher, John, 104 Flicke, Gerlach, 189, 190, 193, 194, 208, 209 Foley, Henry, 436, 445 Ford, 229, 282 Fortescue [née Manners], Grace, Lady Fortescue, 409 Fortescue, Sir Francis, 409 Fortescue, Sir John, 409 Fortune, 100–102, 104, 235, 244, 353 400th anniversary of the Reformation, 173 Fox, Richard, bishop of Winchester, 29 Foxe, John, 48–50, 60, 64, 72, 73, 78, 84, 94, 118, 119, 121, 122, 143, 148, 162, 210, 226, 230, 232, 238, 250, 251, 253, 255–257, 263, 264, 271, 272, 276–281, 284, 286–288, 308, 317, 324, 389 Foxe, Simeon, 60

France, 29, 72, 92, 105, 139, 179, 231, 273, 283, 299, 424, 426, 431 Frankfurt, 243–246, 251–253, 329 Free Church, 172, 173 French, 9–11, 16, 18, 19, 34, 39, 44, 53, 54, 64, 65, 68, 71, 86, 99, 170, 173, 180, 364, 379, 387, 388, 411, 429, 431 Frere, Walter Howard, 305, 324, 331, 348, 360 Frith, John, 75, 78 Froissart, Jean, 11, 129 Froude, James Anthony, 163, 316, 333, 434, 444 Fuller, Thomas, 65, 75, 144, 147, 293, 310, 311, 314, 318, 319, 331, 343, 344, 359 G Gage family, 91 Gairdner, James, 168 Gardiner, Samuel Rawson, 346, 359 Gardiner, Stephen, bishop of Winchester, 62, 268, 271, 275, 278, 279, 346 Garnet, Henry, 400, 409, 428, 437, 441 Garter ceremony, 6 Gataker, Thomas, 293, 319 Gauden, John, 308, 309, 330 Geneva, 19, 65, 230, 232, 246, 304, 348 Geneva Bible, 246 George V, king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 166 Gerard, John, 59, 125, 393, 395–397, 400–410, 412–417, 419, 437 Germany, 44, 104, 111, 172, 182, 228, 229, 232, 233, 235, 241 Gibbon, Edward, 313, 314, 317

INDEX

Gifford, George, 374 Gifford, William [name in religion Gabriel of St. Mary], dean of Lille, 419, 431 Gilbert, George, 49, 399 Gilby, Anthony, 302, 324, 325 Gild, 16, 17 Gill, Eric, 168 Gilpin, Bernard, 61, 71, 75, 78, 112, 155 ‘Gilte Legende’, 18, 19, 131 Glory, 2, 29, 33, 42, 43, 89, 100, 166, 397, 413 Gloucester, 237, 238, 245, 250, 251, 308 Glover, Robert, 274 Glover, T. R., 170 Godparenthood, 246 Godwin, Francis, sub-dean of Exeter, 104, 307, 308, 310, 329, 331, 342 ‘Golden Legend’, 17, 131–133 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, 306, 307 Good, William, 423 Goodrich, Thomas, bishop of Ely, 89, 298 Gospel, 168, 194, 195, 240, 257, 264 Gospellers, 194, 197, 252 Gosson, Stephen, 372 Government, 7, 24, 25, 37, 38, 42, 109, 118, 121, 166, 240, 259, 262, 264, 267, 269, 270, 275, 278, 344, 346, 353, 368, 378, 396, 404, 410, 412, 426, 432 Grafton, Richard, 85, 145, 317, 379, 391 Gratian, 200 Gray’s Inn, London, 265 ‘Great Commonplaces’, 195, 203–205, 207, 210, 213, 220 Great Bookham, 88

459

Greene, Graham, 395 Greenham, Richard, 51, 74, 75, 78 Grene, Christopher, 66, 436, 445 Greville, Sir Fulke, 1st baron Brooke of Beauchamps Court, 44, 59, 68, 329 Grey, Lady Jane, queen of England and Ireland, 78, 83 Grindal, Edmund, bishop of London, later archbishop of York, archbishop of Canterbury, 47, 62, 78, 305, 316, 337, 338, 345 The Guardian, 172, 173, 185 Guilday, Peter, 436 The Guildhall, London, 266–268, 276 Guirey, William, 315, 333 Guise, Henry, duke of, 424 Guise Plot, 374 Gunpowder Plot, 397, 401, 406, 409, 410, 412, 414, 417, 428 Guy of Warwick, 9, 32, 143 H Habsburg [née von Habsburg], Isabella Clara Eugenia von, 429 Hack, 20, 93, 97, 340, 373, 375, 377, 379 Hacket, William, 341 Haddon, Dr Walter, 306, 308, 319 Hadleigh, 145, 234 Haemstede, Adriaen van, 276, 279, 289 Hagiography, 15, 18, 28, 155, 289 Hainault, 11 Hall, Edward, 29, 85, 99, 102–105, 265 Hall, Hubert, 316, 334 Hallam, Henry, 433, 444 Hampton Court, 102, 320, 338, 348, 358 Hanse, William, 404

460

INDEX

Happiness, 43 Hardy, Matthew, 294, 296 Harington, Sir John, 340, 342 Harpsfield, Nicholas, 52, 171 Harrison, William, 57, 67 Hastings, Henry, 410 Hastings, Sir Francis, 432, 443 Hatton, Sir Christopher, lord chancellor of England, 150, 353, 354 Hawarde, John, 339 Hawkins, John, 61 Hayward, John, 422 Hayward, Sir John, 60 Heath, Nicholas, bishop of Worcester, later archbishop of York, 268, 269 Heidelberg, 65, 303, 319 Heneage, Sir Thomas, 368, 385 Henley-on-Thames, 22 Henrician regime, 171 Henry VI, king of England, 21, 39 Henry VII, king of England, 5, 29, 128, 169, 192, 380 Henry VIII, king of England and Ireland, 5, 12, 29, 30, 38, 41, 52, 58, 68, 87, 88, 99, 101, 104, 109, 120, 122, 128, 129, 138, 141, 152, 155, 168, 196, 197, 225, 227, 229, 236, 248, 255, 258–261, 274, 275, 282, 283, 285, 294, 298, 307, 309 Herald, 8, 11, 29, 113, 176, 191, 208 Herbert, Edward, 1st baron Herbert of Cherbury, 104, 154 Herbert, Henry, 2nd earl of Pembroke, 79 Herbert, William, 1st earl of Pembroke, 79 Hero, 8, 10, 11, 20, 23, 24, 27, 32, 33, 39, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50,

72, 84, 92, 115, 125, 175–178, 310, 342, 346, 421, 437 Herod, 168 Heroine, 5, 39, 45, 46, 84, 117, 261, 278 Hertfordshire, 59, 91, 333 Heylyn, Peter, 343, 346, 359 Heywood, John, 372 Hickes, Michael, 303 Hicks, Leo, 436, 440, 445, 446 Hildersham [Hildersam], Arthur, 74, 75, 79 [Hilles], Richard, 230 Hillyard, Dr Richard, 260, 283 Hilton, Walter, 192, 195, 198, 209 Hinsley, Arthur, archbishop of Westminster, 165, 166, 171, 179, 185 Historiography, 27, 116, 117, 124, 185, 224, 225, 346, 354, 357, 381, 422, 433, 437, 439 Hitler, Adolf, 165, 185 Hoby, Lady Margaret, 51 Holinshed, Raphael, 85, 104, 128, 145, 317 Holland, Henry, 308 Holland, Hugh, 369 Holland, Thomas, 79 Hollis, Christopher, 164, 177, 182 Hollywood, 106, 109 Holt, J. C., 21, 23, 134 Holy Communion, 203, 204, 207, 208 Holy Spirit, 195, 206, 393, 395 Honour, 3, 8, 15, 34, 35, 42, 46, 86, 90, 160, 161, 166, 167, 171, 198, 238, 258, 259, 278, 311, 315, 408, 430 Hood, Robin, 5, 20–28, 39, 41, 45, 133, 134, 140, 378, 379, 391 Hooker [Vowell], John, 240

INDEX

Hooker, Richard, 75, 79, 83, 112, 155, 340, 347, 351, 358, 435 Hooper [née de Tscerlas], Anne, 116, 117, 224, 228, 230, 232–238, 240, 243–245, 247 Hooper, John, bishop of Gloucester and Worcester, 75, 79, 117, 173, 227, 228, 230, 232, 234, 237, 238, 240, 243–246, 309 Horne, Robert, bishop of Winchester, 302 Hospitality, 235, 238–240, 260, 304 Hotel Victoria, Zermatt, 161 House of Commons, 225, 301 House of Lords, 229, 264, 296, 320 Howard [née Dacre], Anne, countess of Arundel, 61 Howard, Charles, 1st earl of Nottingham, 310 Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey, 91 Howard, Lord Henry, 374 Howard, Philip, 13th earl of Arundel [St. Philip Howard], 61 Howard, Thomas, 3rd duke of Norfolk, 99 Hubert, Konrad, 235, 236, 251 Huggarde, Miles, 199, 200, 210, 275, 279, 283, 288 Humanism, 27, 28, 123, 147, 195, 209, 259, 383 Humanist, 27, 28, 30, 32–35, 41, 42, 44, 84, 90, 107, 113, 114, 120, 126, 176, 180, 192, 194, 195, 199–201 Hume, David, 345 Humphrey, Laurence, 53, 65, 71, 79 Hundred Years War, 10, 11 Hutton, Matthew, archbishop of York, 22, 258, 351, 354 I Iberian romance, 374, 376, 388 Iconoclasm, 36, 86

461

Identity, 2, 8, 22, 47, 107, 141, 156, 179, 200, 255, 289, 373, 380, 383, 414, 415 Idiáquez, Don Juan de, 426 Idolatry, 36, 37, 371 Ignatius of Antioch, 201 Index Librorum Prohibitorum, 36 Intelligencer, 124, 320, 368, 371 Intercession, 46, 87, 88, 90 Ireland, 166, 183, 426, 436, 438 Irenaeus of Lyon, 201 Irish, 14, 171, 178, 186, 309, 327, 434 Italian, 17, 19, 42, 52–55, 61, 71, 148, 173, 369, 376, 422, 423, 436

J James VI and I, king of Scotland, England and Ireland, 93, 128, 171, 371, 428 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, 174 Jarrett, Cyril [name in religion Bede], 163 Jenkins, Claude, 178 Jerusalem, 88, 318 Jesuit, 125, 126, 163, 171, 187, 309, 310, 331, 338, 368, 373, 380, 381, 393, 395–410, 412–414, 417, 419, 423, 426–428, 430–439, 445, 447 Jewel, John, bishop of Salisbury, 53, 71, 79, 91, 93, 149, 300, 305, 308 Jezebel, 245 Joachimsen, Paul, 27 Johnston, William, 315 Jones, Richard, 317, 366 Jonson, Ben, 372, 373, 388 Joscelin [Joscelyn], John, 53, 303, 304, 319, 320, 326, 327 Joyce, James, 436, 445

462

INDEX

Justice, 20, 24, 25, 33, 42, 43, 117, 164, 177, 255, 267, 268, 293, 312, 354 Justification, 19, 156, 191, 194–197, 200, 208 Juxon, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 296 K Kant, Immanuel, 169 Kent, 69, 91, 249 Kett’s Rebellion, 314 King Arthur, 10, 20 King’s College London, 178 Kingsley, Charles, 434, 444 Kingston, Sir William, 102 Kirby, Luke, 369 Knight, 5, 8–12, 20, 27, 28, 32, 33, 45, 46, 93, 258, 260, 379 Knight, Samuel, 20, 133, 168, 391 Knox, John, 226 Knox, Ronald, 162–164, 171, 182, 246, 437 Kyme family, 260 L The Ladder of Perfection, 192 Lambarde, William, 91, 148, 306 Lambe, William, 97, 150 Lambeth Articles, 341, 343–347, 350–352 Lambeth Palace, 122, 178, 201, 239, 241, 291, 294, 303, 304, 308, 326, 350 Lancashire, 56, 59, 60, 67, 162, 164, 306, 404, 405, 426 Lando, Ortensio, 42 Laski, Jan [Johannes à Lasco], 79, 202 Lassells [Lascelles], John, 120, 268, 270, 271, 276

Lasco, Johannes à [Jan Laski], 79, 202 Latimer, Hugh, bishop of Worcester, 36, 79, 173, 249, 298, 308, 309, 320 Latin, 18–20, 28, 34, 37–44, 51–54, 56–61, 64, 65, 68, 71, 72, 84, 87–89, 99, 104, 136, 147, 148, 196, 201, 202, 207, 210, 234, 259, 276, 280, 293, 296, 299, 300, 303, 307, 308, 319, 321, 322, 326, 328, 342, 362, 371, 412, 422, 428, 442, 443 Latin Mass, 15 Laud, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 346 Law, T. G., 421, 435, 439, 445 Lawrence, T. E., 173, 458 Laxton, William, lord mayor of London, 264, 265, 285 Lay reader, 123, 304 le Bel, Jean, 11 Lee, Sir Sidney, 163, 439 ‘Legenda Aurea’, 17–20, 34, 38, 39, 50, 131, 132, 143 ‘Légende Dorée’, 18, 19, 131 Leicester Abbey, 98 ‘Leicester’s Commonwealth’, 95, 428, 429, 434, 442 Leland, John, 86, 91, 146, 317, 334 Le Neve, John, 312, 320, 332 Lewis, C. S., 375 Liberal, 27, 164, 172, 174, 175, 177, 179, 240, 333 Lincoln Cathedral, 262 Lincoln’s Inn, London, 171, 183, 185, 313 Lincolnshire, 17, 120, 257–260, 263, 268, 283 Line [née Heigham], Anne [St. Anne Line], 408 Lingard, John, 435, 444

INDEX

Linton, 91 Linus of Thrace, 86 Lisbon, 374, 386, 424 Lister, Thomas, 402 Locke, Anne, 226 Lodge, Edmund, 304, 327 Lodge, Thomas, 372 Lollardy, 47, 264 London, 6, 12, 14, 21, 32, 41, 48, 50, 63–70, 72, 75, 83, 91–94, 99, 103–105, 120, 127–131, 134–155, 162, 166, 174, 178, 181–183, 185–189, 198, 200, 209–212, 237, 241, 242, 248– 253, 263, 267, 269–272, 275, 280–283, 295, 299, 308–310, 313, 329–334, 342, 343, 348, 354, 356–363, 365, 368–375, 377, 379, 380, 384–392, 395, 408, 415–418, 424, 426, 432, 433, 437–447 Lord mayor of London, 150, 265, 370, 371 Lord of Misrule, 22 Lord protector of England, 269, 275 Louthe, John, 263, 265, 267, 271, 279, 284, 285 Louvain, 19, 38, 300, 405, 430 Low Church, 172 Low Countries, 228, 250, 323, 426, 446 Lucas, John Seymour, 98 Lucian of Samosata, 28 Lupton, Donald, 308 Luther, Martin, 35, 38, 51, 52, 72, 117, 144, 191, 236, 264, 275, 300 Lutheranism, 323 Lydgate, John, 9, 28, 100, 153 Lyford Grange, 424

463

M Macalpine, John [John Machabeus], 234, 235, 246, 250 Macaulay, Rose, 173, 180 Macaulay, Thomas Babington, baron Macaulay, 168, 187, 345, 346, 359 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 100 Machyn, Henry, 299, 300, 321 Madrid, 53, 69, 424, 446 Maffei, Giampietro, 54 Main Plot, 413 Makin, Bathsua, 278, 289 Malory, Sir Thomas, 10, 28, 141 Malta, 175 A Man for All Seasons , 106–110, 112, 114, 116, 125, 154, 155, 174, 180, 187, 395 The Manchester Guardian, 172 Manners, Sir Oliver, 410, 418 Manning, Cardinal Henry, archbishop of Westminster, 435 Mantel, Hilary, 114, 181, 188 Manuscripts, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 18, 20, 21, 29, 35, 39, 43, 51, 71, 84, 94, 95, 98, 102, 104, 123, 172, 199, 201, 257, 296, 299, 302, 374, 411, 418, 422, 425, 439 Marburg, 273 Marc’hadour, Germain, 114, 180 Marguerite of Navarre, queen of Navarre, 278, 280, 282, 288 Marprelate Tracts, 339, 341, 370, 386 Marriage, 34, 99, 101, 103, 110, 117, 167, 169, 177, 223, 225, 227–229, 232, 234–236, 239–243, 247, 250, 260, 261, 265, 281, 304 Marshall, Peter, 128, 141, 146, 147, 152, 154, 155, 187, 193, 287, 361

464

INDEX

Marshall, William, 37, 97, 106, 111, 138, 317, 351 Martin Marprelate Controversy, 370 Martyr, 13, 15, 18, 38, 41, 47, 49, 50, 72, 84, 86, 106, 107, 117, 118, 122, 162, 165–167, 169, 170, 172–174, 176, 226, 242, 245, 255, 263, 264, 273–275, 278, 279, 309, 377, 395, 399, 401, 408, 422 Martyrdom, 50, 113, 162, 168, 175, 176, 184, 273, 275, 368, 377, 390, 399, 401 Martyrology, 48, 51, 72, 73, 238, 279, 280 The Martyrs’ Memorial, Oxford, 141 Mary [Mary Stewart/Stuart], queen of Scots, dowager queen of France, 58, 401, 424, 428, 430, 431, 443 Mary [of Teck], queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 166 Mary I, queen of England and Ireland, 93, 119, 149, 224, 240, 246, 300 Mason, Francis, 309, 331 Mathew, David, 113, 175–177, 186 Mattishall, 306 Mayoral pageant, 371 McGinn, Donald, 346, 347, 360 Medieval, 7, 10–12, 14–16, 18–21, 23, 26–28, 33, 38, 41, 42, 45, 83, 84, 86, 89, 92, 113, 133, 138, 175, 176, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197–200, 202, 208, 239, 264, 273, 312 Melanchthon, Philip, 45, 52, 64, 72, 204, 205, 207, 213 Memory, 8, 37, 86, 88–90, 110–112, 145, 148, 245, 275, 276, 316, 374, 414, 415

Mendoza, Don Bernardino de, Spanish ambassador to England, 438 Mercurian, Everard, superior-general of the Society of Jesus, 423 Meres, Francis, 372, 387 Methodism, 315 Micronius, Martin, 237, 238, 251 Middle Temple, London, 265 Middlesex, 371 Midlands, 22, 96, 170 Milles, Walter, 91, 147 Minstrel, 92 Miracle, 12, 13, 15, 18, 34, 39, 46, 165, 168, 191, 414 Mission, 126, 227, 229, 242, 341, 368, 369, 380, 393, 397, 399, 400, 405, 406, 411, 414, 423, 424, 426, 427, 431, 432, 437 Mistruzzi, Aurelio, 160, 161 Mixed-life, 191–193, 195, 208 Monarchical Republicanism, 127, 351, 361 Monasticism, 26, 41 Monsi, Michel de, archdeacon of Rouen, 424 Montagu, James, 79 Monument, 9, 47, 87–92, 94, 98, 146, 148, 296, 306, 318 More, (Christopher) Cresacre, 60 More [Moore], Henry, English provincial of the Society of Jesus, 436 More, John, 80 More, Margaret, 168 More, Sir Thomas, lord chancellor of England [St. Thomas More], 27–30, 33, 34, 36, 43, 51, 52, 54, 57, 60, 61, 80, 106–110, 112–116, 117, 121–126, 138, 154, 156, 159–165, 167–182, 184–188, 258, 259, 395, 438

INDEX

More, Thomas, 396, 410 Morell, Thomas, 316, 333 Morgan, Thomas, 315, 316, 431 Morice, Ralph, 53, 192, 193, 209 Morison, Richard, 41 Morris, John, 66, 68, 395, 416, 417, 436, 445 Mountague, Richard, 343, 359 Munday, Anthony, 124, 125, 157, 363–366, 368–390, 392 Mush [alias Ratcliffe], John, 54, 399, 416 Myconius, Oswald, 52, 63 Myrfin, Edward, 87

N Nachleben, 8, 105 Nag’s Head fable, 309, 312 Narrenschiff, 39, 140 Nashe [Nash], Thomas, 357, 372, 375, 381 National Portrait Gallery, London, 189 Nationalism, 172 Nazism, 172 Neal, Thomas, 309, 310, 331 Neale, Sir John, 47 Nehemiah, 318 Nero, Roman emperor, 95, 151 Nestorius, 206 Nevinson [Nevynson], Stephen, 52 Newdigate, Father, 171 Newgate Prison, London, 268, 271 Newton Abbot, 162 Newton, Thomas, 300 Nicholas of Cusa, 34 Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio, 61, 69 Norden, John, 91 Norfolk, 21, 69, 99, 100, 258, 292, 306, 307, 318, 348, 401 North, Thomas, 44, 141

465

Norton, Thomas, 241, 242, 252, 324 Norwich, 16, 122, 291, 306–308, 310 Nottinghamshire, 25, 96 Nowell, Alexander, dean of St. Paul’s, 80, 300, 308 Nowell, Thomas, 366, 367, 369 Nuremberg, 19, 38, 228, 229

O Oath of Allegiance, 396, 408, 428, 441 O’Connell, Father Sir John, 166 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 51, 52, 200, 202–208, 213, 214, 220, 236 Old Testament, 65, 245 Oldcastle, Sir John, called Lord Cobham, 75, 80 Oldcorne, Edward, 401, 402 Oldmeadow, Ernest, 171, 173 Orchard, W. E., 172, 185 Origen of Alexandria, 201 Oscott College, Birmingham, 171 Osiander, Andreas, 228, 229 Overall, John, bishop of Norwich, 108, 310 Owen, Hugh, 412 Oxford, 18, 47, 49, 58, 65–68, 113, 126, 128–136, 138–148, 150–153, 155, 156, 164, 170, 171, 173, 175, 180, 182–184, 186, 199, 209–211, 213, 248, 249, 251, 252, 266, 281–283, 286, 288, 289, 300, 308, 309, 318–323, 325, 326, 328, 330, 333–335, 340, 346, 359–362, 384, 386–392, 418, 422, 423, 433, 440, 441, 444, 445, 447 Oxfordshire, 22

466

INDEX

P Pace, Richard, 31, 135 Pacifism, 30 Paget, Charles, 431 Paget, Sir William, 1st baron Paget, 275 Paget, Thomas, 4th baron Paget, 431 Palmeirim Cycle, 371, 374 Palmer, William, 62 Papacy, 47, 105, 114, 165, 166, 175–178, 259, 273, 396, 400, 411 Papal, 12, 13, 35, 126, 160, 175, 177, 182, 300, 382, 423, 426, 430, 433, 434, 438 Paris, 19, 34, 64, 201, 211, 215–217, 230, 314, 331, 386, 415, 430, 431 The Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 123, 296, 297 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury, 47, 53, 62, 80, 114, 122, 123, 229, 239, 243, 251, 291–318, 320, 321, 322, 326, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 334, 335, 338, 345, 354 Parliament, 138, 159, 240, 242, 258, 262, 264, 267, 298, 299, 301, 324, 342, 345, 433 Parr, Katherine, queen of England and Ireland, 115, 196, 197, 210, 263, 269, 271, 276, 278 Parry, William, 54 Parys family, 91 Pastor, 171, 191, 227, 236, 424, 436, 437 Patriotism, 162, 172, 178 Patristic, 116, 199–203, 206–208 Paul’s Cross, London, 268, 270, 271, 299

Paule, Sir George, 60, 69, 338, 340–347, 352, 353, 358 Paulet, William, 1st marquess of Winchester, 62 Pembrokeshire, 14 Penry, John, 341 Pepler, Harry [Hilary], 168 Perkins, William, 80 Perne, Andrew, 328, 339 Persecution, 84, 114, 164, 172, 177, 181, 271, 304, 348, 393, 395, 401, 402, 404, 405, 407, 413–416, 424 Persons, Robert [pseudonym R. Doleman], 56, 66, 124–126, 171, 368, 394, 396, 399–401, 404, 408, 410, 413, 414, 419, 421–424, 426–447 Philip II and I, king of Spain and Portugal, 58, 321, 426, 428 Phillips [Phillip], John, 93, 97, 149, 150, 376, 390, 392 Philpott [Philpot], John, 75, 80 Pickering, Lewis, 340 Pighe, Albert, 204, 205, 213 Pilgrimage of Grace, 41, 120, 259 Pilgrimage, 16, 38, 378, 423 Pits, John, 309, 331 Plantagenet [née Neville], Cecily [Cicely], duchess of York, 192 Platonist, 180 Plutarch of Chaeronea, 43, 44, 72, 140, 141, 143, 144, 156 Poetry, 73, 314, 371 Pole, Cardinal Reginald, archbishop of Canterbury, 53, 80, 112, 174, 303, 337 Polemic, 4, 35, 39, 49, 71, 73, 85, 98, 102, 103, 105, 118, 168, 208, 224, 300, 308, 317, 344, 353, 386, 397, 401, 411, 414, 415, 432, 437

INDEX

Pollen, J. H., 66, 139, 436, 445 Pollock, Sir Frederick, 171 Polycarp of Smyrna, 201 Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, 423 Pope, 12, 13, 15, 18, 37, 140, 162, 165–167, 176, 178, 182, 183, 301–303, 310, 343, 350, 370, 382, 418, 425, 426, 432, 434 Pope Gregory I [‘St. Gregory the Great’], 191, 192, 193 Pope Gregory XIII, 368, 423 Pope John Paul II, 179 Pope Leo XIII, 162, 166 Pope Paul IV, 52, 54 Pope Pius XI, 160, 165, 169, 178, 179, 186 Pope Sixtus V, 55 Popularity, 3, 14, 16, 22, 26, 50, 84, 127, 187, 361, 373, 411, 429 Porter, H. C., 328, 347, 351, 360 Porter, John, 50, 118, 143, 264, 285, 305, 321, 326, 360, 361 Portugal, 373 Portuguese, 364, 370, 387 Pory, John, 296, 320 Pory, Robert, 296, 320 Potens , 168 Poullain, Valérand, 232, 243, 244 Preacher, 17, 26, 34, 41, 96, 97, 123, 149, 191, 193, 210, 240, 267, 275, 298, 299, 315, 342, 370, 423 Preaching, 36, 145, 192, 235, 237, 240, 275, 298–300, 303, 348 Predestination, 343, 351 Prefecture, 405 Presbyterian, 73, 300–302, 308, 344 Presbyterianism, 47, 349, 351 Prette, Pierre de, 58 Price, Richard, 93, 150

467

Priest, 16, 17, 20, 21, 42, 176, 224, 225, 228, 262, 271, 299, 309, 346, 368, 369, 393–397, 399–405, 407, 408, 411, 419, 422–424, 428, 432, 435, 437 Priest-hole, 402 Il Principe, 100 Printer, 19, 32, 241, 314, 365, 366, 379, 445 Privy Chamber, 258, 263, 267, 268 Privy Council, 121, 124, 242, 246, 260, 267–270, 299 Proclamation, 7, 37, 88, 199, 426, 428 Proctor, Thomas, 366 Progress, 5, 48, 101, 111, 120, 162, 163, 165, 180, 195, 240, 305 Protestant, 26, 27, 32, 42, 50, 51, 74, 86–90, 93, 96, 97, 117, 118, 121, 124, 125, 160, 163, 168, 173, 174, 176, 179, 191, 200, 225, 226, 234, 236, 242, 244–246, 255, 261, 265, 274, 276, 277, 300, 302, 305, 313, 315, 316, 351, 363, 364, 374, 375, 377–379, 381, 382, 397, 404, 429–433, 436, 438 Protestantism, 103, 116, 144, 175, 195, 197, 245, 273, 315, 318, 349 Prynne, William, 343, 359 Public memory, 20, 110 Purgatory, 36, 87, 88, 267 Puritan, 45, 72–74, 105, 124, 301–303, 308, 316, 324, 338, 339, 342, 348–350, 352–354, 370, 430 Pursuivant, 370, 402 Q Quarles, Francis, 293, 319 Quarles, John, 293

468

INDEX

Queens’ College, Cambridge, 169, 184 R The Rack, 394 Radcliffe [née Calthorp], Anne, countess of Sussex, 269 Radcliffe, Thomas, 3rd earl of Sussex, 62 Rainolds [Reynolds], John, 80 Ramsey, Lady, 89 Rare books, 123, 296 Raven, Charles, 169 Real Presence, 264, 265, 268, 271, 272 Recantation, 36, 266, 268, 270, 276, 286, 287 Recusancy, 47, 175, 226, 427 Recusant, 103, 170, 171, 369, 378, 421, 439 Reformation, 4, 5, 16, 26, 27, 35, 36, 38, 39, 42, 45, 47, 50, 51, 71–73, 75, 84–90, 101, 107, 109, 110, 112, 114, 116–120, 122–125, 163, 194, 195, 200, 223–228, 232, 238, 239, 247, 257, 258, 264, 270, 273, 278, 300, 305, 311–313, 315, 338, 345, 354, 382, 395, 411, 415, 421, 429, 439 Regi, Domenico, 61, 69 Relic, 14, 35, 162, 368, 373, 378 Remembrance, 8, 16, 89, 90, 180 Renaissance, 4, 6, 27, 28, 100, 133, 163, 173, 180, 199, 317, 373 Renaissance humanism, 5, 27, 33, 34, 39, 42–45, 50, 85, 88–90, 95, 109, 169, 197, 209, 258 Reputation, 1–7, 9, 10, 12, 13, 27, 34, 38, 42, 45–48, 50, 51, 71, 73, 75, 84–86, 90, 93, 94, 96–98, 102–107, 109, 112–126,

150, 169, 173, 178–181, 188, 193, 208, 224, 226, 247, 255, 257, 278, 279, 291, 296, 298, 300, 302, 303, 308, 315, 318, 338–340, 342, 344, 354, 364, 371, 373, 375–377, 381–383, 423, 424, 426–428, 430, 433, 435 Restoration Church, 308 Rheims, 385, 386, 416, 426, 431, 440 Rhine, River, 244, 273 Rhodes, John, minister of Enborne, 340 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 53, 71, 425, 440 Rich, Sir Richard, later 1st baron Rich, lord chancellor of England, 121, 269 Rider [Ryder], William, lord mayor of London, 370 Ridley, Nicholas, bishop of London, 80, 173, 308, 309 Rigby, John, 408 Rochdale, 306, 307 Rochester Cathedral, 171 Rogers, D. M., 151, 418, 421, 437, 439, 442 Rogers, John, 80 Role-model, 11, 27, 29, 46, 72, 84 Rolle, Richard, 195, 198 Roman Catholic, 4, 26, 36, 45, 49, 87, 89, 95, 96, 103, 114, 116, 124–126, 165, 172, 175, 176, 179, 182, 185, 275, 300, 309, 310, 313, 363, 368, 369, 371, 373–375, 379, 381, 383, 394, 403, 434 Rome, 10, 12, 13, 28, 36, 41, 44, 57, 59, 66, 68, 84, 88, 118, 126, 148, 159, 162, 165–167, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176, 178,

INDEX

182–186, 260, 273, 302, 348, 364, 366–369, 371, 373, 375, 376, 378, 380–382, 390, 394, 396, 397, 400, 406, 410, 411, 418, 423, 424, 426, 427, 430, 431, 440, 441, 445, 446 Rookwood, Dorothea [or Dorothy], 405 Rope, Father Henry, 176 Roper, William, 51, 52, 168, 188, 225, 248 Rosenblatt, Wibrandis, 236 Rouen, 416, 424, 425, 428, 430, 440, 442, 443 Rowse, A. L., 173, 174, 338, 357, 437, 446 Roy, William, 40 Royal Injunctions, 37, 262, 283 Royal Supremacy, 349, 350 Russell, Francis, 2nd earl of Bedford, 63 Russell, Francis, baron Russell of Killowen, 171, 183, 184 Ruthall, Thomas, archdeacon of Gloucester, later bishop of Durham, 29 S Sackville, Thomas, 1st baron Buckhurst, later 1st earl of Dorset, 423 Sacrament, 121, 167, 202, 203, 205–208, 244, 264, 266, 268, 402 Sacred College, 166 Sacrifice, 110, 121, 206, 267, 268, 272, 273, 408, 410 Saint, 5, 12–20, 27, 28, 34–39, 45, 46, 72, 114, 131, 162, 166, 168, 171–173, 175–179, 187, 259, 273–275, 300, 405 Saints’ days, 13, 15, 16, 37

469

Salome, 168 Salvation, 12, 47, 87, 96, 101, 191, 194, 196–198, 245, 270, 397 Sancroft, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 296, 320, 346 Sanctity, 12, 115, 139, 162, 164, 167–169, 177, 181, 194 Sander [Sanders], Nicholas, 425, 426, 434, 440 Sandys, Edwin, bishop of Worcester, later bishop of London, archbishop of York, 74, 75, 80, 308 Saravia, Adrian, 32 Saunders, Lawrence, 81 Saunders, Sir Edward, 93, 149 Scofield, Paul, 174 Scotland, 18, 21, 61, 186, 228, 234, 235, 260, 429 Scott, Bartholomew, 241, 252 Scott, Thomas, 294 Scripture, 31, 41, 50, 115, 189–191, 194–198, 208, 238, 257–259, 262–266, 271, 274, 279, 344 Sebastian, king of Portugal, 370 Secular, 11, 84, 114, 126, 160, 163, 165, 168, 172, 174, 177, 264, 331, 397, 407, 411, 422, 423, 431, 432 Secular clergy, 396, 397, 404, 412, 431 Sedition, 7, 358, 433 Seminary/Seminaries, 184, 369, 399, 404, 423, 426, 428, 436 Sermon, 17, 26, 36, 67, 68, 74, 85, 97, 169, 183, 198, 235, 244, 264, 267, 284, 298–300, 305–308, 321, 322, 404, 410, 422, 430, 436 Seville, 364, 384, 426

470

INDEX

Seymour, Edward, 1st duke of Somerset, lord protector of England, 81, 237, 269 Seyntpole, George, 260, 282, 289 Shakespeare, William, 1, 44, 92, 104, 154, 188, 372, 428 Sharpe, Kevin, 5–7, 107, 128, 142, 144, 154, 330 Shaxton, Nicholas, bishop of Salisbury, 156, 234, 250, 269–271, 275 Sheale, Richard, 92, 93 Sheldon, Gilbert, archbishop of Canterbury, 345 Shelford, 96 Sherwood Forest, 24, 134 Shrine, 37–39, 162 Sidney, Robert, 2nd earl of Leicester, 72 Sidney, Sir Henry, 75, 81 Sidney, Sir Philip, 44, 59, 63, 68, 81, 92, 148, 150 Silver Jubilee, 166, 167 Sir Gawain, 10 Sir Lancelot, 10 Skelton, John, 28 Skinner, Vincent, 303 Skip, John, later bishop of Hereford, 298, 320 Slyfield, Edmund, 88 Smerwick, 374 Smith, Dr, 55 Smith, Father Richard, 167 Smith, Richard, later bishop of Chalcedon, 58, 68, 396, 406, 410, 418 Smithfield, London, 271 Smyth [Smith], Dr Richard, regius professor of divinity at Oxford, 266 Society of Antiquaries, 92, 146

Society of Jesus, 59, 66, 373, 395, 398, 402, 404, 409, 413, 423, 436, 437 Socrates, 174, 177 Solifidianism, 115, 116, 191, 194, 197, 198, 208 Somerset, 14, 22, 86, 126, 237, 269, 275, 299, 422, 423 Somerset, Edward, 4th earl of Worcester, 340 South Africa, 180 Southwell, Robert [St. Robert Southwell], 170, 407 Southwell, Sir Robert, 241 Spain, 38, 126, 373, 399, 426, 428, 429, 431, 436 Spanish, 53, 61, 68, 71, 97, 173, 364, 370, 387, 388, 399, 400, 411, 422, 424–426, 429, 431, 433, 434, 438, 440 Spanish Armada, 310, 426, 434 Spanish Civil War, 179 Speaight, Robert, 172, 185 The Spectator, 173, 185 Speed, John, 104 Spiritual Exercises , 398, 399, 404, 410, 423, 430 Squire, Adam, master of Balliol College, Oxford, 422 St. Aloysius’s Church, Oxford, 170 St. Augustine of Hippo, 17, 191 St. Benno of Meissen, 35 St. Dominic’s Press, Ditchling, 168 St. Dunstan’s Church, Canterbury, 180 St. Edward’s Crown, 294 St. Francis of Assisi, 15, 20, 113, 163, 177 St. Gregory the Great, 191, 192, 193 St. Gregory’s Church by St. Paul’s, London, 365 St. Ignatius of Loyola, 398, 423, 430

INDEX

St. John’s College, Cambridge, 169, 170 St. John the Baptist, 168 St. Margaret of Antioch, 273 St. Martin of Tours, 20 St. Mary’s Abbey, Shaftesbury, 14 St. Paul, 15, 195, 196, 198, 201, 216, 262, 263, 266, 275, 279, 302 St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 6, 50, 92, 264, 268, 299, 300 St. Peter’s Basilica, Rome, 159, 166 St. Stephen, 263, 264 St. Teresa of Avila, 226 St. Thomas Becket, 131, 139, 162 The Stage, 174, 181, 372, 377, 379 Stallingborough, 257, 260, 283 Standish, Dr John, 266 Stanhope, Anne, countess of Hertford, later duchess of Somerset, 269 Stanhope, Lady, 96 Stanley, Edward, 3rd earl of Derby, 92, 152 Stanley [née Barlow], Margaret, countess of Derby, 92, 152 Stapleton, Thomas, 49, 54, 66, 171, 300, 323 Starkey, Thomas, 31, 136 State, 51, 93, 99, 107–110, 113, 121, 168, 172, 174, 175, 177, 225, 265, 316, 342, 351–353, 395–397, 400, 404, 405, 407, 411, 433 Stationers’ Company, 93, 150, 368, 373, 374 Stillingfleet, Edward, 344, 359 Stoke-by-Clare, 307, 319 Stokesley, John, bishop of London, 89 Stoke sub Hamdon, 86, 146 St-Omer, 426, 433 Stonley, Richard, 72 Stonor Park, 423, 428, 440

471

Stonyhurst College, 56, 59, 60, 162, 171, 426 Storer, Thomas, 63, 70 Story, John, 53 Stow [Stowe], John, 85, 91, 102–104, 306, 307, 317, 329, 340, 358, 380 Strasbourg, 19, 30, 38, 63, 140, 230, 231, 235, 245, 250, 323 Straten, Dirick van der, 273 Strong, Sir Roy, 6, 7 Strype, John, 47, 48, 61, 62, 70, 122, 123, 141, 251, 296, 312, 314, 317, 320, 321, 325, 328, 329, 332, 335, 337, 338, 345, 346, 354, 356, 357, 359, 362, 433, 444 Stuart, 44, 104, 317, 396, 400, 414, 429 Stubbes [Stubbs] [née Emmes], Katherine, 55, 66 Stubbes [Stubbs], Philip, 55, 66 Stubbs, John, 53, 65, 303, 327 Suárez de Figueroa [née Dormer], Jane, duchess of Feria, 60 Sub-culture, 164, 167, 171, 175, 178 Subscription Crisis, 353 Succession, 104, 105, 109, 352, 400, 411, 429, 432, 435, 438 Suetonius, 44 Suffolk, 62, 91, 100, 145, 234, 259, 260, 263, 269, 276, 283, 307, 319, 403 Sutcliffe, Matthew, dean of Exeter, 432, 443 Swift, Jonathan, 169, 435, 438, 445 Switzerland, 161, 246, 250 ‘Sword of the Spirit’, 179 Swynnerton, John, 371

472

INDEX

T The Tablet , 171, 173, 183–185 Talbot, George, 6th earl of Shrewsbury, 148 Talbot, John, 1st earl of Shrewsbury, 92 Tarantino, Quentin, 111 Tatler, 412 Taunton, Ethelred, 435, 445, 447 Taylor, Rowland, 23, 26, 75, 81, 145, 146 Teixeira, José, 370, 386 Ten Articles, 37 Tertullian of Carthage, 201 Thames, River, 22, 122, 291 Theatre, 372 Thirty-Eight Articles of Religion, 123, 304 Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, 313 Thomas More Society, 171 Thomas, Sir Keith, 47 Three Articles, 342, 348 Tierney, Mark Aloysius, 435, 444 The Times , 166, 168–170 Tomb, 9, 86, 88, 90–92, 96, 97, 115, 181, 293, 296, 306, 422 Tootel, Hugh [Charles Dodd], 435, 444 Topcliffe, Richard, 368, 369, 406, 407 Torture, 120, 121, 255, 269, 270, 407, 417, 424, 438 Tournament, 6, 8, 10, 23 Tower of London, 240, 269, 408, 409 Trade union movement, 179 Translation, 12, 14, 18, 19, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35–38, 40, 44, 51, 53, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 104, 116, 136, 138, 146, 147, 183, 196, 210, 253, 276, 278, 293, 300, 304, 306, 322, 327, 329,

356, 362, 370–376, 379, 381, 387–389, 395, 416, 419, 436, 437 Traps, Robert, 91 Treason, 7, 38, 99, 242, 400, 413, 416, 427, 428, 439 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, later baron Dacre of Glanton, 154, 180, 187 Trinity College, Cambridge, 58–60, 62, 133, 170, 305, 322, 328, 339, 342, 345 Trinity Hall, Cambridge, 306, 307 Trust, 22, 46, 47, 49, 84, 100, 190, 196, 197, 198, 242, 268, 293, 312, 333, 368, 379 Tudor Humanism, 192 Tudor, 3–5, 7, 8, 11, 20, 44, 45, 47, 51, 73, 85, 109, 111, 117, 122, 124, 126, 128, 129, 172, 181, 193, 195, 209, 224, 225, 247, 248, 255, 259, 275, 282, 317, 338, 347 The Tudors , 106 Tunstall, Cuthbert, bishop of London, later bishop of Durham, 171, 210, 258, 260, 281 Tyndale, William, 31, 35, 40, 47, 81, 116, 120, 136, 137, 140, 141, 156, 273, 308 Tyrant, 7, 33, 168 U Udall, John, 40, 325, 341, 342 Ulysses, 366 Underhill, Francis, dean of Rochester, 171, 185 University of Cambridge, 113, 169, 170, 176, 228, 307, 333, 355, 362 University of London, 129, 175, 253 Urswick, Christopher, archdeacon of Wiltshire and of Norfolk, 29

INDEX

Usher, Brett, 319, 324, 327, 341, 353, 354, 357, 358, 360, 362 Utopia, 30, 43, 188 V Validation, 46, 47, 200 Valladolid, 426, 441 The Vatican, 54, 165, 187, 426, 432 Vaudeville Theatre, London, 166, 167, 183 Vaughan, Richard, bishop of London, 58, 68, 75, 81, 91 Vergil, Polydore, 99, 103 Vermigli, Pietro Martire [Peter Martyr], 81, 200, 202, 245, 321 Verstegan [formerly Rowlands], Richard, 96, 142, 428, 441 Vestiarian Controversy, 123, 301, 313, 314, 324 Veysey [formerly Harman], John, bishop of Exeter, 240 Via media, 347, 348, 350, 360 Victoria, queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, 47, 166 Virgin Mary, 13, 16, 26, 260, 264, 269, 275 Vives, Juan Luis, 31, 34, 36, 135, 136, 138, 258, 282 Voragine, Jacobus de, 17–20, 36, 38, 50, 131 W Walsingham, 35 Walsingham, Sir Francis, 81, 97, 149, 339 Walsingham, Thomas, 306, 314 Walton, Izaak, 44, 83, 344, 345, 359 War, 29, 30, 33, 42, 119, 165, 199, 300, 308, 380, 392, 411 Warburg School, 5

473

Ward, Mary, 226 Ward, Roger, 72, 144 Warham, William, archbishop of Canterbury, 81 Warwick, 9, 75 Watson, William, 317, 397–400, 402, 407, 410, 413, 415–417, 419, 422, 443 Waugh, Evelyn, 164, 395, 437, 446 Webbe, William, 371, 387 Weever, John, 92, 148 Welsh, 14, 93, 376, 423 Wentworth, Peter, 301 Wesel, 63, 246, 273, 280, 282, 288 West Firle, 91 West, James, 313 Westminster, 19, 20, 165, 179, 192, 291, 299, 320, 321, 406 Weston [alias Edmunds, Hunt], William, 60, 393, 395, 401, 413–415, 437 West Sussex, 91 Westward Ho!, 434, 444 Whetstone, George, 62, 70 Whig historiography, 51 Whitaker, William, 57, 71, 81 Whitchurch, Edward, 241, 242, 252 Whitehead, David, 82 Whitgift, John, bishop of Worcester, later archbishop of Canterbury, 47, 60, 62, 82, 91, 123, 124, 127, 143, 300, 305, 315, 316, 328, 337–358, 360–362, 370, 386 Whithorne, Thomas, 54 Whittingham, William, dean of Durham, 57, 67 Widdowes, Giles, 308, 330 Wigginton, Giles, 338, 370 Wilcox, Thomas, 301, 302, 324, 325 Willet, Andrew, 82 Williams, John, 58

474

INDEX

Williams, Thomas, archbishop of Birmingham, 98, 165, 295 Willoughby, Katherine, 12th baroness Willoughby de Eresby, duchess of Suffolk, 260, 276 Windsor Castle, 6 Wingfield, Sir Charles, 166 Wisbech Castle, 408 Wiseman [née Vaughan], Jane, 407 Wittenberg, 35, 45, 213 Wodehouse, Grizel, 401 Wolf Hall , 106, 114, 181, 188 Wolfe, Reyner [Reginald, Reynold], 242, 243 Wolsey, Thomas, archbishop of York, lord chancellor of England, 40, 51, 52, 63, 82, 98–105, 152 Women, 2, 4, 17, 34, 45, 47, 84, 109, 117, 223–228, 230, 232, 236, 237, 245, 247–249, 257, 262, 263, 266, 275, 278, 279, 345, 398, 399, 406, 407, 412 Worcester, 238, 268, 298, 308, 340, 342 Word of God, 50, 120, 206, 232, 237, 238, 257, 263, 301 Worde, Wynkyn de, 10, 21, 192

Worthies, 32, 75, 84, 85, 308, 344, 375 Worthington, Thomas, 408, 417 Wriothesley, Thomas, 1st earl of Southampton, lord chancellor of England, 121, 261, 269–271, 287 Wyatt, George, 57, 67 Wyclif [Wycliffe], John, 82 Y Yelverton, Edward, 401 Yeoman, 23, 24, 126, 422 York, 5, 39, 187, 275, 305, 351, 354 Yorkshire, 21, 24, 66, 99, 187, 242, 259 Young, Richard, 371, 406 Z Zeus, 191 Zinnemann, Fred, 106, 108, 109, 112, 114, 125, 154, 155, 180, 395 Zouche, Edward, 11th baron Zouche of Haryngworth, 340 Zürich, 230, 232, 234, 237, 244, 303 Zwingli, Huldrych, 51, 52, 230