Political and religious practice in the early modern British world 9781526151360

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Political and religious practice in the early modern British world

Politics, culture and society in early modern Britain General Editors

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Professor Alastair Bellany Dr Alexandra Gajda Professor Peter Lake Professor Anthony Milton Professor Jason Peacey This important series publishes monographs that take a fresh and challenging look at the interactions between politics, culture and society in Britain between 1500 and the mid-eighteenth century. It counteracts the fragmentation of current historiography through encouraging a variety of approaches which attempt to redefine the political, social and cultural worlds, and to explore their interconnection in a flexible and creative fashion. All the volumes in the series question and transcend traditional interdisciplinary boundaries, such as those between political history and literary studies, social history and divinity, urban history and anthropology. They thus contribute to a broader understanding of crucial developments in early modern Britain. Recently published in the series Chaplains in early modern England: Patronage, ‘Black Tom’  Andrew Hopper literature and religion  Hugh Adlington, Tom Reformation without end: Religion, politics and Lockwood and Gillian Wright (eds) the past in post-revolutionary England  Robert G. The Cooke sisters: Education, piety and patronage Ingram in early modern England  Gemma Allen Freedom of speech, 1500–1850  Robert G. Ingram, Black Bartholomew’s Day: Preaching, polemic and Jason Peacey and Alex W. Barber (eds) Restoration nonconformity  David J. Appleby Connecting centre and locality: Political communication in early modern England  Chris R. Insular Christianity: Alternative models of the Church in Britain and Ireland, c.1570–c.1700 Kyle and Jason Peacey (eds) Robert Armstrong and Tadhg ó Hannrachain (eds) Insolent proceedings: Rethinking public politics Reading and politics in early modern England: The in the English Revolution  Peter Lake and Jason mental world of a seventeenth-century Catholic Peacey (eds) gentleman  Geoff Baker Revolution remembered: Seditious memories after the British Civil Wars  Edward James Legon ‘No historie so meete’  Jan Broadway Writing the history of parliament in Tudor and Royalists and Royalism during the Interregnum early Stuart England  Paul Cavill and Alexandra Jason Mcelligott and David L. Smith Gajda (eds) Laudian and Royalist polemic in Stuart England Anthony Milton Republican learning: John Toland and the crisis of Christian culture, 1696–1722  Justin Champion The crisis of British Protestantism: Church power in the Puritan Revolution, 1638–44  Hunter Powell News and rumour in Jacobean England: Information, court politics and diplomacy, 1618–25 Lollards in the English Reformation: History, David Coast radicalism, and John Foxe  Susan Royal This England: Essays on the English nation The gentlewoman’s remembrance: Patriarchy, and Commonwealth in the sixteenth piety, and singlehood in early Stuart century Patrick Collinson England Isaac Stephens Gentry culture and the politics of religion: Exploring Russia in the Elizabethan Cheshire on the eve of civil war  Richard Cust Commonwealth: The Muscovy Company and Giles and Peter Lake Fletcher, the elder (1546–1611)  Felicity Jane Stout Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) and the patriotic Loyalty, memory and public opinion in England, monarch  Cesare Cuttica 1658–1727  Edward Vallance Doubtful and dangerous: The question of succession London presbyterians and the British revolutions, in late Elizabethan England  Susan Doran and 1638–64  Elliot Vernon Paulina Kewes (eds) Church polity and politics in the British Atlantic Civil war London: Mobilising for parliament, world, c. 1635–66  Elliot Vernon and Hunter 1641–5  JOrdan S. Downs Powell (eds) Brave community  John Gurney Full details of the series are available at www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk. Revolutionising politics: Culture and conflict in England, 1620–60  Paul D. Halliday, Eleanor Hubbard and Scott Sowerby (eds)

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Political and religious practice in the early modern British world Edited by

William J. Bulman and Freddy C. Domínguez

manchester university press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2022

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While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 5135 3 hardback First published 2022 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

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For Peter Lake

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Contents

List of figures Notes on contributors

page ix x

Introduction: Post-revisionism and the history of practices in the early modern British world – William J. Bulman

1

Part I:  Political and religious practices   1 Stealing bibles in early modern London – Ethan H. Shagan  37   2 Printed English-language Bible concordances to c. 1640 and intentions for lay Bible use – Amy G. Tan 55   3 In the company of merchants: Edward Sherburne, the East India Company, and the transformation of Stuart political practices – Rupali Mishra 77   4 Consensual conflict in the early Stuart House of Commons – William J. Bulman 97   5 John Hacket’s Scrinia Reserata and the oral history of early Stuart England – Noah Millstone 115   6 ‘Man of moderation’: the Restoration bishop of Norwich – Isaac Stephens 138   7 Hoadly the high and Sacheverell the low: religious and political celebrity in post-revolutionary England – Brian Cowan 158 Part II:  British, European, and Atlantic dimensions   8 The Nine Years’ War in Ireland (1594–1603) as problem of government – Brendan Kane   9 Luisa de Carvajal, her ‘Life’, and the place of women in Counter-Reformation politics – Freddy C. Domínguez

181 203



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10 Of gods and beasts: the many bodies of James VI and I – Alastair Bellany 11 Empire of heresy: Samuel Gorton, Gerrard Winstanley, and the London roots of transatlantic revolutionary religion – David R. Como

220

241

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Index262

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Figures

7.1 Detail from: The Modern Champions: Or, a Tryal of Skill to be Fought at Her Majesty’s Bear-Garden, on Wednesday Next, Between a Jereboam Tory, and a Jerusalem Whig, Madan 203 (1710). Courtesy of: Harvard University, Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shelfmark: *pEB65.A100.B675b v.5 no. C70.  8.1 ‘Exposition of several Irish words’ (1), Lambeth Palace Library, London, Carew Papers vol. 607, 149. 8.2 ‘Exposition of Several Irish words’ (2), Lambeth Palace Library, London, Carew Papers vol. 607, 150.

170 192 194

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Notes on contributors

Alastair Bellany is Professor of History at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), The Murder of King James I (with Thomas Cogswell) (New Haven and London, 2015), and many essays on early modern political culture. He is also the editor with Andrew McRae of the online Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (2005), and is currently working on a general history of Britain and a project on climate history, climate science and the Little Ice Age. William J. Bulman is Professor of History at Lehigh University. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2010 and then held research fellowships at Vanderbilt University and Yale University. He is the author of Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015), The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Cambridge, 2021), and over a dozen articles and book chapters published in Past and Present, The Historical Journal, and other venues. He is also co-editor with Robert G. Ingram of God in the Enlightenment (Oxford, 2016). David R. Como is Professor of History at Stanford University. He is the author of Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil War England (Stanford, 2004), Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), and a series of articles on the religious and political history of seventeenth-century England and colonial North America published in Past and Present, English Historical Review, and other venues. Brian Cowan is Associate Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (New Haven, 2005); editor of The State Trial of Doctor Henry



Notes on contributors xi

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Sacheverell (Malden and Oxford, 2012); a contributor to the Multigraph Collective’s Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018); and co-editor, with Scott Sowerby, of The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2021). He is currently editing The Cultural History of Fame in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury) and is President of the Board of Directors for the international Groupe d’Intérêt Scientifique – Sociabilités. Freddy C. Domínguez is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. He is the author of Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (University Park, PA, 2020). His next book will be Bob Dylan in the Attic: A Study in History (University of Massachusetts Press) and he is currently finishing a third monograph, Luisa de Carvajal: The Politics of an Anglo-Spanish Life. He is also editing Spanish Elizabethans: Anglo-Iberian Entanglements during the CounterReformation (Brill). Brendan Kane is Professor in the departments of History and Literatures, Cultures and Languages at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (Cambridge, 2010), and his current research focuses on legitimacy in early modern Irish-English relations. He is the founder of the digital humanities collaborative project Léamh.org, a web-based tool created to assist those  interested in learning and researching in Early Modern Irish (1200–1700), and he is founder and director of UConn’s Democracy and Dialogues Initiative, which seeks to increase democratic and civic capacity through the promotion of dialogic exchange on campus and in the community. Noah Millstone teaches early modern history at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England  (Cambridge, 2016) and oversaw the creation of the Manuscript Pamphleteering in Early Stuart England database  (http://mpese.ac.uk). Other work has appeared in the  Journal of British Studies,  Media History,  Past and Present, and several edited collections. Rupali Mishra is Associate Professor of History at Auburn University. Her first book,  A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company, was published by Harvard University Press in 2018. She is completing a book on the social and political difficulties of establishing the first East India Company factories in the Mughal Empire. 

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xii

Notes on contributors

Ethan H. Shagan  is Professor of History and Zaffaroni Family Chair in Undergraduate Education at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author, most recently, of The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, 2018). His books have been awarded prizes by both the American Historical Association and the Royal Historical Society, and he has won both the E. LeRoy Hall award at Northwestern University and the Distinguished Teaching Award of the academic senate at UC Berkeley, the highest teaching awards at both the universities where he has been privileged to serve.  Isaac Stephens is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Mississippi. He is the author of The Gentlewoman’s Remembrance: Piety, Patriarchy, and Singlehood in Early Stuart England  (Manchester, 2016), and co-author, with Peter Lake, of Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (Woodbridge, 2015). He has also published articles in The Historical Journal and the Journal of British Studies. Currently, he is working on two separate projects – books on Edward Reynolds (bishop of Norwich) and on clerical ejections in London that occurred between 1642 and 1662.  Amy G. Tan is a historian of early modern religion and print culture. She is the author of The Pastor in Print: Genre, Audience, and Religious Change in Early Modern England  (Manchester, forthcoming, 2022). In addition to her interests in biblical concordances and other reference tools, she has published two articles on theological responses to demon possession and is completing a study related to church covenanting in 1630s New England. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University in 2015.

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William J. Bulman

This volume samples from the best current scholarship on religion and politics in early modern Britain in order to highlight one future line of inquiry for the field. The goal is to draw attention to practice as an organizing category and focal point. The volume is also meant to honour Peter Lake, perhaps the most important inspiration for the project sketched here. The book therefore joins the focus and purpose of a Festschrift to a broader scholarly agenda. Each chapter, written by one of Lake’s former advisees or protégés, exemplifies the burgeoning historiography of practices and testifies to Lake’s leading role in fostering this development. My aim in this Introduction is to distil the pivotal contribution that Lake himself has made and to show how his work points to further opportunities. The dual purpose of this Introduction entails limitations of depth and scope. Many historians have joined Lake in contributing to the historiographical developments under consideration here. In a different setting, I would present the arguments of this Introduction in more extended form, with reference to a wider literature. Similarly, anyone well versed in the field of early modern British history will know that Peter Lake’s impact is much wider and more diverse than a discussion of his work on political and religious practices alone might suggest. Over the course of ten monographs, five edited volumes, and nearly eighty articles and book chapters to date, with much more to come, Lake has made deep imprints on numerous fields of inquiry. My hope is simply that an examination of Lake’s scholarship in this particular area of research will serve both to recognize his outsized contribution to it and lay the groundwork for broader investigations in the years to come. To the extent that Lake’s work fits within traditional categories, one would probably identify him as the single most distinguished student of early modern English religion in his generation. His studies of puritanism, conformism, Laudianism, and Catholicism in the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods are foundational to our knowledge of all four topics and continue to move knowledge forward. But even when one reads this strand

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2

Introduction

of Lake’s work, it becomes obvious that the real hallmark of his role has been his ability to transcend and connect traditional areas of specialization. In particular, he has immeasurably enriched our grasp of the interrelationships among religion, politics, thought, and culture, repeatedly proving that properly understanding any one of these four realms requires simultaneous attention to the other three. The range and interconnection of Lake’s scholarship ultimately point to his role as perhaps the primary architect of ‘post-revisionism’, the approach to Elizabethan and early Stuart British political and religious history that was first articulated in the later 1980s and eventually yielded the most widely accepted interpretation of the period.1 While ‘post-revisionism’ is an umbrella term for a diverse literature, it is possible to generalize about what stands under the umbrella. The post-revisionists sought to retain the advances made by their immediate predecessors, the revisionists, while addressing what they saw as the deficiencies and excesses in revisionism. They valued the revisionists’ commitment to thorough manuscript research, their resistance to anachronism and teleology, their attention to locality and contingency, their careful study of political events, their analysis of the British problem in English politics, and their awareness of the role of religious conflict in the outbreak of the English Civil War. But they worried about some revisionists’ dismissal of polemical, propagandistic, and printed sources, their focus on high politics, their evocation of separate local and national spheres, and their emphasis on the role of ideological consensus and personality in political outcomes. In short, the post-revisionists sought to move beyond a series of false dilemmas that had resulted from the revisionist assault on Whig, Marxian, and Weberian historiography. By highlighting conflicting perceptions of religion and politics often documented in printed sources, exploring connections between local and national politics, identifying tensions inherent to England’s Reformation, and excavating a socially deep and multifocal political process that underwent important changes between the accession of Elizabeth I and the death of Charles I, they vastly improved our understanding of the convulsions of the 1640s and the crucial episodes of the preceding decades. Yet this is no place for a detailed account of the relationship between revisionism and post-revisionism. Indeed one of the benefits of a focus on practice, this volume shows, is that it takes the field away from that relationship, which once productively structured inquiry but has largely ceased to do so. Instead this Introduction will try to explain how one might get from the central emphases of post-revisionism, as exemplified in Lake’s work and its signature style, to new historiographical territory. While post-revisionism is now over thirty years old, its practitioners have hardly been spinning their wheels. On the contrary, innovation has

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Introduction 3

continued apace, in Lake’s work and elsewhere. This volume identifies and furthers the latest stage of that innovation: the emergence of narratives of practice set in their English, British, European, Atlantic, and global contexts. The volume focuses on political and religious practice in the Elizabethan and Stuart periods, the terrain of Lake’s scholarship. But the book’s central arguments apply to work across the field – from intellectual history to social history, and from the early Tudors to the Hanoverians. Much like Lake’s oeuvre as a whole, the theme of practice is eminently suited to breaking down barriers in a field that has become overly compartmentalized. It is also well suited to cross-fertilization with more established lines of inquiry in the field. This Introduction has five parts. The first summarizes and conceptualizes Lake’s version of the post-revisionist commitment to the primacy of perceptions in political and religious life. It then shows how Lake’s study of ideology as a context for action led to his distinctive approach to religious politics and his focus on the public communication of ideology. After setting out the historiographical implications of these developments, the second part explains how Lake’s concern with communicative action became the basis of a burgeoning body of scholarship on the ‘public sphere’. It is in this work that the independent significance of practices in early modern British political and religious history first became clear. The second part of the Introduction demonstrates this by teasing out of some of the methodological and conceptual implications of Lake’s work on public politics. The third part identifies some of the inevitable gaps between Lake’s work on public politics and a fully fledged history of political and religious practices. I then begin to fill in these gaps by thinking through a few clues that can be found within Lake’s own scholarship. The fourth part completes the task with recourse to broader theoretical perspectives on practice, institutions, and structural transformation drawn from the work of sociologists, economists, and other historians. It moves back and forth between the theoretical work and Lake’s discussions of public politics, reading one in the context of the other, in order to sketch a general, explicit conceptualization of practice history, and to establish its consistency with the usually implicit conceptual commitments of early modernists. The Introduction’s conclusion uses this conceptual framework to connect Lake’s work with scholarship on the history of practices in early modern Britain that falls outside the subfields of political and religious history. This maps a path by which new work on religion and politics can come into dialogue with and draw guidance from established historiographies of social, cultural, and economic practice. This part also observes the potential for narratives of political and religious practice to follow the newly expanded geography of early modern British historiography. I wind up the

4

Introduction

Introduction by noting how this expanding historiography of practices has helped and will continue to help historians tackle perennial questions about political and religious events that have intrigued them for generations. Throughout the Introduction, I point to specific chapters in the present volume as exemplars of the developments under discussion.

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From ideology to ideological practices In keeping with the post-revisionist insight that perceptions are just as ‘real’ in political and religious life as material events, the mainstay of the Lakean style has been the historical study of ideology and other forms of culturally structured perception and imagination. Also in keeping with post-­ revisionism – in this case the post-revisionists’ limited references to social theory and their humility about claims to methodological innovation – Lake, to my knowledge, never explicitly defines or conceptualizes ideology. The synonyms he uses for it throughout his work suggest a very inclusive, ‘common sense’ concept, one untethered to any particular theory of society. Lake most often describes ideology as a ‘vision’: a mental or discursive image or schema of (and for) the organization and conduct of communities, states, terrestrial churches, and the metaphysical realm. Other synonyms for ideology that appear regularly in his work include ‘world-views’ (subjective accounts of reality), ‘mental worlds’ (historically specific, shared thought environments), ‘positions’ or ‘cases’ (accounts of the world organized as arguments), and ‘traditions of thought’ (patterns of thinking that exhibit diachronic continuity).2 At the same time, Lake distances his conception of ideology from formal thought systems, including political theory, political thought, and theology.3 He also depicts ideologies as neither fully coherent nor deterministic in their relation to action.4 Some of the most important ideologies or means of perceiving the world under consideration in Lake’s work are puritanism, presbyterianism, conformism, Laudianism, Catholicism, and absolutism.5 Lake construes ideology in this way because, while he takes actors’ visions of the world to be significant objects of inquiry in themselves, he studies them with the ultimate aim of understanding the decisions and behaviour  to which they bear an intimate and complex relation. For all the contributions that Lake’s wide-ranging ‘discourse analysis or ideology critique’6 has made to our understanding of political thinking, culture, and theology, he rarely engages in ideological analysis without putting that analysis to use in understanding action. His studies of political and religious perception are always at least outfitted to render intelligible historically specific actions taken within historically specific fields of power.7 This pattern

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Introduction 5

in Lake’s scholarship implies a claim about social action. ‘Proponents of the same world-view’ share ‘concerns’ that motivate co-ordinated action when those world-views and concerns are linked in actors’ minds to specific events and circumstances.8 In at least two senses, then, ideologies are dynamic. They exhibit ‘trends’9 or ‘trajectories’,10 and they also cause trends and trajectories by prompting action. What actions did ideology tend to cause or motivate on Lake’s preferred historical terrain? Most importantly for Lake and for this Introduction, ideology motivated and structured ‘communicative practice[s]’, discursive practices, and ‘ideological practices’.11 In other words, ideology prompted early modern actors to present their ideology, or a version of past or contemporary events consistent with that ideology, to others, and to falsify competing world-views, or competing understandings of people and events. In this sense, ideology was instrumental to its own dissemination. Foremost among the forms of ideological practice that populate Lake’s scholarship is polemic, through which an actor’s ideology or ‘position’ is ‘refracted’ by a particular context of events and arguments.12 A clear example would be the public battle waged in print between the presbyterian Thomas Cartwright and the conformist John Whitgift in the early 1570s.13 Another variant of ideological practice was petitioning, highlighted in Lake’s work on politics in Cheshire on the eve of the Civil War. His protagonist, the episcopalian Sir Thomas Aston, purposely floated ambiguous ideological slogans, unlikely to alienate those who might sign or see the petition, and connected those slogans to a particular course of action.14 Finally, a genus of action worth stress in any summary of Lake’s work on ideological practices would be the more elaborately material but less ideologically stable practices of public performance, from Elizabethan state executions to the plays of Shakespeare.15 The typical goal of such practices was twofold. First was what we might call – as Lake does in a critique of Foucauldian readings of Elizabethan ­governance – ‘ideological control’.16 The idea was to convince targets of ideological practices to adopt the ideology the practices conveyed (or at least a series of claims about a particular situation or event that were consistent with that ideology) while rejecting competing perspectives. Second, as a result of this ideological internalization, assent, or side-taking, these actors might be motivated to act in a manner consistent with the actions of other adherents of that ideology. This could ultimately produce forms of co-ordination and power that favoured the original ideological practitioners. For this reason, state actors were both central ideological practitioners and the most prized or ultimate targets of ideological practices. One can take Lake’s Elizabeth I as the classic case of the latter and James VI of Scotland, author of The True Law of Free Monarchies (1598), as the classic case of the former.17

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6

Introduction

A secondary and relatively simple strand in Lake’s work documents ideology motivating action of the relatively non-communicative variety. In the religious realm, for instance, puritans, conformists, Laudians, and Catholics all tried and struggled to bring into being the ideal community envisioned by their ideology. They also sought to prevent relationships and activities that were excluded by or existed in binary opposition to that ideology. In short, they worked on every front and in every way to close the gap between their ideology and the world they encountered, a world populated by others doing the same thing with different ideologies. They fined or protected recusants; they gathered churches or put separatists in prison; they paid or refused tithes; they avoided or collected forced loans; they received holy communion standing or kneeling; they erected or smashed altars. These overlapping forms of ideologically driven action, from the discursively rich to the symbolically blunt, imply a summary of the Lakean historical actor: meaning-making and communicative, to be sure, but, above all, ideological. Since Lakean actors are constantly motivated by an ever-present gap between their ideological vision and their experience, which is itself processed through the lens of ideology, their actions cannot be rendered intelligible unless that vision is understood. Lake’s emphasis on ideological perception and action had a series of important historiographical implications. First, it fed the characteristic post-revisionist emphasis on conflict. Evidence of ideological difference, of variant descriptions of the same reality, or of actions implied by such divergence, is itself evidence of different forms of conflict. The presence of such conflict by no means precludes the existence of significant realms of consensus (either on an ideological level or with respect to the meaning of past, present, and future events) or an ideologically inflected commitment to consensus, both of which were prominent themes in revisionism. But ideological differences can help explain how efforts to forge consensus might fail, despite a strong desire for it, because of the tendency of opposed mental worlds to spill into action.18 Second, the related post-revisionist emphasis on the instability of political and religious communities also flows from Lake’s attention to ideological action. His work suggests that the major political outcomes of the period were partly dependent on a hermeneutical, ideological, and communicative competition. This competition could be closer-fought than resource discrepancies among various groups and actors might suggest. The ‘discursive structures’ employed by the Elizabethan state when executing a Jesuit, for instance, could be ‘glossed and appropriated’ for the purposes of others. Even the material assets and brute force of the state could backfire because of the polysemy of both the state’s weapons and the bodies of its victims. ‘Ideological control’ was not simply the province

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Introduction 7

of the state, and one person’s providential justice was another person’s diabolical tyranny.19 Finally, Lake’s focus on ideology accounts for much of the richness of post-revisionist analyses of change over time. The connections between ideology and action help explain how broader political developments and structural transformations occurred in the post-Reformation era. The attempts of ideologically driven individuals and groups to bridge the gap between ideology and perceived reality can result in changes to political and religious structures. Furthermore, the communication of ideology and ideologically inflected readings of events, when internalized by its recipients, can expand the set of people acting towards a common goal, thus increasing the likelihood of its realization. In addition, since ideological actors process their experiences through the lens of ideology, events themselves can provoke transformative activity. Finally, and most importantly, the material events that historians reconstruct empirically can be said to independently influence actors’ perceptions of the world. They make certain views possible and discourage others, and this process is ultimately a source of ideological change and attendant changes in the patterning of action in the political and religious fields. As I will explain later in the Introduction with reference to social theory, these implicit components of Lake’s work can contribute much to the conceptual basis for a historiography of practice.

From ideological practices to public politics For all the importance of Lake’s work on ideology and discourse, the most direct pathways between his scholarship and future studies of practice are to be found in his accounts of the specific set of practices that his perennial focus on ideology has caused him to foreground. These accounts point to a research agenda that puts ideology and practices on equal footing as objects of inquiry. They also suggest a more novel agenda in which practice would be the primary unit of analysis. In the latter mode of scholarship, narratives of the emergence, transformation, and disintegration of practices would employ narratives of major political and religious occurrences as context, reversing the typical orientation of post-revisionist scholarship, in which practices feature more incidentally. These histories of practice could then contribute, in turn, to an enriched understanding of important events of longstanding interest. As I have already suggested, practices were an important but secondary element in Lake’s work during the first half of his career to date. In the new millennium, however, Lake’s work began consistently to highlight the independent interest of practices. The most important aspect of this focus

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8

Introduction

is that Lake achieved it partly by working in a comparative mode. He went beyond singular instances of ideological practice and described important changes in constellations of practices and the political process as a whole. This was a move informed by two decades of work on more specific topics. By immersing himself in separate studies of puritan, conformist, Laudian, and Catholic ideologies, and a series of case studies in particular events, controversies, and conjunctures, Lake unearthed the knowledge of particular groups’ communicative activities that was prerequisite to observing patterns. At this point he could identify similar sequences of action across different controversies in the same general period and discern structural similarities among the ideologies and the behaviour of competing groups.20 Sometimes this comparative stance yielded brilliant analyses of ideological isomorphism. But it also led Lake to devote more sustained attention to familiar sequences of political action and individual political practices that were common to groups across the ideological spectrum. This comparative perspective is of immense significance for my purposes here, because it relegates the importance of particular ideological formations to a secondary or contextual role – not finally or universally, but within individual research projects. This relegation characterizes all of the chapters in the present volume. The constellation of practices Lake has identified by comparing the communicative practices of ideologically competing groups are those that constitute what he calls ‘the post-Reformation public sphere’.21 Here Lake is of course employing a social-scientific term made famous by Jürgen Habermas (originally, Öffentlichkeit). But he has tailored this concept to the empirical findings of late Tudor and early Stuart historians, and to actors’ c­ ategories – above all, the category of ‘popularity’, a pejorative term used by early modern contemporaries to describe political publicity.22 From one perspective, the distinguishing feature of Lake’s work on the public sphere, relative to his earlier work, is simply a matter of emphasis and thematic focus. Lake focuses less on the whole-cloth communication of ideologies (as worldviews and abstract structures of thought) and more on the application of ideology to specific events, both past and present. This type of ideological communication was often structured by a late Renaissance convention that Lake often refers to as the ‘politic mode’. In this discursive and interpretative mode – whose early Stuart manifestation has been described in depth by one of our contributors here, Noah Millstone – writers and performers claimed to disclose the true, often hidden meaning of events and the true motivations of the most important figures of the day.23 Lake finds the politic mode at work everywhere from the Shakespearean stage to the pages of Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) and other works of Catholic propaganda.

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Introduction 9

These early modern mappings of ideology on to events were made available to potentially unlimited audiences and purposefully related to specific decisions facing powerful men and women. The characteristic communicative practices of the public sphere were therefore events-specific, socially deep, and action-oriented. Accordingly Lake defines the post-Reformation public sphere featured in Bad Queen Bess? (2016) as ‘a struggle to control events by explaining them to a series of wider publics, both at home and abroad, through the medium of printed polemic and commentary, and the penumbra of rumour, gossip, and libel out of which much of this material was in fact composed and back into which it was designed to feed’.24 Such publics existed when there appeared ‘an appeal, launched through various media, in terms of known criteria of truth and common interest, in order to induce people to adjudicate a certain issue, endorse one set of opinions or proposals as against another, and, often on the basis of having made that decision, to take one course of action rather than another’.25 Participants’ goals in the Elizabethan version of public politics, in particular, were to ‘garner general support for some policy or initiative, or to make a popular and political fuss sufficiently great that the queen’s hand would be forced or at least certain policy options and outcomes would be pushed off limits’.26 There is of course one very straightforward sense in which Lake’s work on this front opens the door to a history of political and religious practices in early modern Britain. In the phrase ‘post-Reformation public sphere’ itself, we see an explicit recognition of the historically specific nature of the publicity practices in question. Over the past two decades, a number of scholars, with Lake in the lead, have sketched the emergence, institutionalization, and dynamics of this sphere over the course of the Tudor and Stuart periods.27 Lake has argued recently that an English politics of publicity, one of many ramifications of the break with Rome, can be dated from the Henrician era.28 He has also offered a more detailed chronological summary of his own period of focus, the second half of the sixteenth century, and set that summary within a longer history of the public sphere that extends into the later Stuart period. ‘The modes of politique political analysis and of public pitch-making that we can see being developed and deployed during the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s’, Lake submits, ‘represented a major new development in the ways in which English politics was both thought about and practised’.29 In these decades the ambit of public politics was more confined than it would be from the 1590s onwards. Until at least the later 1580s, public politics was ‘scarcely … either normal or normative’; it was instead episodic and illicit.30 As the particular dynastic and confessional conditions that had given rise to Elizabethan public politics began to dissolve, however, these ‘modes of doing and thinking about politics … became available for other groups

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Introduction

and purposes’. At this point, ‘rearranged both by the political contingencies and structural necessities of the next century, and the working out of certain structural and ideological logics set in play by the events of the later sixteenth century, the politique mode and the paranoid style served not to determine, but certainly to frame, and helped to shape, the political crises of both the 1620s and the 1640s, and arguably of the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s as well’.31 In this nutshell history of the public sphere in early modern England, we have an account of an initial rupture caused by a structural conjuncture that eventually led to an enduring transformation of the political process. Elsewhere Lake has expanded this timeline even further, intimated how this broader narrative of public politics might be constructed in terms of particular practices, and noted some non-linear aspects of the story. ‘The balance between the various media and genre in play’, he explains, ‘could vary widely and change very considerably over time’. The practical dynamics of the public sphere were subtle: ‘each communicative mode would see the emergence of new forms: the explosion of cheap print during the 1640s and later during the Exclusion crisis; the rise of the news book or the newspaper; mass petitions as both a genre of manuscript and print and a form of public performance; later still, the emergence, in the post-Restoration period, of the pope-burning procession and an intensified popular politics of show trials and executions’. Here the narrative of early modern public politics begins to look like a master narrative of political practices. Gradually changing ‘forms’ of practice eventually yielded new practices. ‘Encompassing the media of performance and of print, manuscript circulation and oral transmission’, Lake notes, following the work of one of our contributors, Brian Cowan, ‘was a politics of fame or celebrity’. For Lake ‘this involved a sort of cult of personality, based on the vicissitudes, indeed, on the alleged persecution and even martyrdom, of certain individuals, whose travails could be seen as a synecdoche for wider political struggles or principles, and whose life stories could then be told and retold, indeed sold and resold, as the organizing themes for various sorts of popular agitation or even of more sustained movements’. Stretching from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, this history of the early modern public sphere illustrates, much like Isaac Stephens’s chapter in the present volume, how a focus on practices disrupts the traditional periodizations and specialist silos of early modern English historiography and opens up lines of inquiry into relatively long-term narratives of religion and politics. Again, as Lake’s scholarship suggests and Cowan’s chapter in the present volume shows, these long-term transformations in practice can best be identified and understood by the employment of comparison – across periods, ideologies, persons, groups, and actions. What Cowan and

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Introduction 11

others have called ‘celebrification’ was according to Lake ‘an emergent political form that links Puritan polemicists such as Henry Burton, John Bastwick, and William Prynne, to the Leveller John Lilburne, the “popish plotter” Titus Oates, and beyond them, to Dr. Sacheverell and even John Wilkes’. Celebrification was a subtly but fundamentally altered form of the public and economic practices associated with Tudor-era martyrdom. ‘Longstanding tropes of martyrdom and persecution, the release of emotional and cultural energy attendant upon the exemplary punishment of notorious malefactors, and the financial gain to be made from retailing such stories to a popular audience’, Lake continues, ‘were all being taken up and appropriated for new purposes: more expressly political, often largely “secular,” and sometimes frankly commercial’.32 Notice how here familiar grand narratives – in this case, secularization and ­ commercialization  – become contexts for a narrative of practices, specifying the conditions under which those practices emerged. This approach is characteristic of most of the chapters in the present volume, but most obvious in contributions by Cowan, Shagan, and Tan. Setting aside the theme of change over time for the moment and turning to Lake’s analysis of the characteristic practices of the post-Reformation public sphere, we can first briefly observe that this work exhibits the components of Lake’s earlier scholarship on ideological communication. These components include the conditioning of ideological practices by empirical truths or ‘realities’, both those recognized by contemporaries and those documented by historians.33 The relative success of competing acts of meaningmaking was to some extent dependent upon their correspondence to one or both of these empirical realms.34 As Lake puts it in Bad Queen Bess?, the study of political publicity deals with the production and dissemination of ‘alternative versions of reality, different, ideologically inflected, and mutually exclusive interpretations or versions of what were recognizably the same events, each with more than enough basis in what we might term “reality” to qualify as plausible, even rather likely, accounts of the current conjuncture and its potentials’.35 A phrase that is synonymous with ‘the post-Reformation public sphere’ in Lake’s work is ‘post-Reformation public politics’, and I have already employed it as such in this Introduction. When Lake describes this form of public politics, the connections to his earliest work are again clear. Elizabethan and early Stuart public politics, in Lake’s view, was ‘an ideological politics of pitch-making, whereby various bodies of opinion, various publics, were to be called into being, appealed to, and mobilized’. Public politics for Lake is thus a general phenomenon that took particular forms in specific historical settings, including the setting of Bad Queen Bess?, where the public confrontation between the Elizabethan regime and its

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Introduction

Catholic opponents is described as a ‘struggle between the various rival secret or libellous histories’ that ‘was constitutive of the politics of the postReformation public sphere’. In this form of politics, ‘a variety of publics were asked to choose between the rival versions of what had just happened, was happening, or might be about to happen next’.36 The characteristic, general practices of both the public sphere and the public politics of the post-Reformation were ‘appeals’ and ‘pitches’ – ­discursive, rhetorical modes of action. But these practices themselves took more specific forms on any individual occasion. Lake notes that these forms included the writing and performance of plays;37 the imposition of press restrictions and censorship;38 the oral transmission of news, rumour and libel; the circulation of manuscripts, including letters, newsletters, petitions, position papers, and formal tracts; and the sale and circulation of printed polemic.39 Relatedly, the media involved in post-Reformation public politics were ‘the full gamut of print (formal polemic, sermons, cheap tracts, printed proclamations and parliamentary legislation), circulating manuscript, public performance of variety of types (sermons, show trials, disputations, executions, and even, at times, plays), and rumor’.40 Alastair Bellany’s chapter in the present volume is comparable to Lake’s work on these fronts to the extent that it incorporates many of these practices in a single study – rather literally, in fact, by using the body of James I as a meeting point for them. Having now identified the specific practices that characterize Lake’s post-Reformation public sphere and public politics, we ought to pause and appreciate the historiographical significance of Lake’s turn to these themes. By perpetuating itself, post-revisionism was giving rise to something new. This is why, despite its continuities with earlier scholarship, the historiography of public politics marks a turning point with particular implications for future work. It grew out of post-revisionists’ insistence on the utility of the same printed, public, and polemical sources that the revisionists had often rejected for their supposed lack of correspondence to empirical reality or their atypicality within that reality.41 Post-revisionists thought otherwise, in part because, as we have already seen, they insisted that perceptions of reality were just as ‘real’ and just as causally important as other objects of empirical inquiry, and that the artefacts of ideological practices – printed and polemical texts above all – were reliable sources for reconstructing those perceptions. Indeed Lake often goes further. As I hinted earlier, he has observed the extent to which ideologically charged texts actually correspond with other empirical findings about the behaviour of historical actors drawn from supposedly more reliable but often rarer archival finds. In other words, in Lake’s view there is often a strong correspondence between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ records of political and religious life in the period, as

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Introduction 13

he and Isaac Stephens show, for instance, in their book on puritans and Laudians in early Stuart Northamptonshire.42 This particular critique of revisionist source criticism in turn suggested a final, transformative move: treating these allegedly unreliable sources not only as indirect evidence of political perceptions that exhibited significant correspondence to empirical reality but also as direct evidence of attempts to convince others to embrace the ideology or description of reality present in the text. Noah Millstone’s chapter in this volume, a study of the clergyman and future bishop John Hacket’s Interregnum-era biography of Bishop John Williams, is an excellent example of this way of treating sources that historians had often discarded for their unreliability. At this point in the post-revisionists’ reorientation of the field’s relationship to published texts, they were in essence writing a history of communicative practices. From the perspective of leading participants in public politics, this amounted to the history of a ‘dialogue’ held in public, addressed to a public, conducted between opposed ideological groupings,43 and legitimated by shared signifiers of the public interest (for example, ‘true religion’ or ‘the commonweal’).44 This is much the same competitive meaning­-making that lies at the core of what we might see as one of Lake’s two transitional texts: The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (2002), written with Michael Questier.45 In large part, to be sure, this book about the religious and political significance of cheap pamphlets is a study of perceptions: it works across genres first to excavate shared cultural and ideological assumptions and then to show that those fields of consensus were subject to appropriation in the service of competing ideological agendas. But the same texts that serve as primary sources for this dimension of the project also serve as direct evidence of communicative practices employed in specific events and material settings, from scaffolds to prisons. There is a bridge being built in Lake’s work here from the study of ‘cultural materials, tropes, narrative forms and assumptions, images and concerns’, or ‘a sediment of ideological or cultural material’, to ‘pitches for popular support’.46 In other words, we see a move from ‘a form of cultural history with at least some of the politics left in’ that ‘goes beyond the assumed or implicit intentions of both authors and readers to include an analysis of these texts as sites of cultural anxiety and tension, of ideological contradiction and debate, of desire and fantasy, of self-reflexivity and critique’47 to a political history of publicity. In short, this is a shift from a history of culture, with both subjective and objective perspectives built in, to a history of practice. What was ultimately transformative in Lake’s developing output, then, was the observation that published primary sources could be treated not only as sources for the study of ideology but also as evidence for particular

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Introduction

acts. By comparing these acts across sources and specific settings, and noting patterns, scholars could then begin documenting historically specific ways of doing things that emerged, persisted, and changed over the course of the early modern period. In this mode of inquiry, artefacts are being employed as sources in a more direct way than when they serve as evidence of world-views or ideologies. They are simply read as evidence of the act of their own production, instead of being taken as referents to other material, mental, or discursive phenomena of greater interest. In a sense, the material remains of the past – along with their creation and use, when evidence of these acts is inscribed on the artefact or implied by their archival l­ocation – become the events and phenomena of interest. On a methodological level, this is essentially what has enabled scholars of early modern Britain to begin constructing a new type of religious and political narrative. What had previously been treated as largely autonomous, semiotic phenomena could instead be considered as acts that existed on the same ontological plane as other forms of behaviour.

From public politics to practice Once we have begun to appreciate the extent to which Lake’s work on public politics can serve as a roadmap for a wider history of political and religious practices in the early modern British world, we need to scrutinize how the particular characteristics of public politics and Lake’s writing on it to date also occlude or sideline certain aspects of what a fully fledged history of practices would look like. Any particular origin point for a new style of inquiry, and certainly the work of any individual scholar, exhibits these sorts of selection effects. Teasing them out and transcending them, in this case, require both further scrutiny of Lake’s work and recourse to a wider array of historiographical and theoretical resources. There are at least three such selection effects in Lake’s work, each of which is also characteristic of a much wider body of scholarship. First, the form that Lake’s studies of practice usually take is not what one would see in a more dedicated historiography of practice. Lake tends to examine singular instances of a practice and to situate those instances within narratives of events and ideological faceoffs. Particular practices rarely get sustained treatment as patterned, repeated forms of action, which is normally how practices are approached as the primary object of an historical analysis. Similarly, narratives of practice would normally be narratives of the emergence and transformation of a particular practice over time, not narratives of events in which one or a few instances of a practice featured. Second, Lake’s focus on ideology and publicity ensures that certain practices will get

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Introduction 15

more attention than others. While he favours practices that are primarily communicative, triggered and structured by ideology, and directly tied to surviving artefacts, some important practices exhibit only a subset or even none of these characteristics, as Shagan, myself, and others indicate in the chapters that follow. Third, Lake primarily contributes to our understanding of practices by describing their ideological and discursive foundation and content. We hear much less about their other components. Lake’s accounts of competitive meaning-making, for instance, may leave some readers with the mistaken impression that, in Lake’s view, the visions of the world that triumphed under conditions of ideological difference would simply be the ones that were most persuasively communicated to contemporaries. In addition, Lake does not grapple much with the historically specific manner in which ideology is applied or instrumentalized in different times and strategic fields.48 There are, however, multiple moments in Lake’s work that point the way forward in addressing these three issues. As I have already noted, Lake does at points describe the patterning of practices, even if this is mostly a matter of repeated sequences of multiple practices. In the struggle between William Cecil and his Catholic enemies between the late 1560s and the early 1590s, for instance, rumour and libel were repeatedly converted into secret histories of the recent past.49 In particular, the Elizabethan regime’s campaign against Mary Stuart with respect to the Babington conspiracy followed what by 1585–86, according to Lake, was ‘a smooth and predictable course: the discovery of a plot, an almost immediate publicity campaign, driven through a trial and executions, and all the forms of publicity that attended them, culminating in (further) recourse to the pamphlet press and the calling of a parliament. This represented what had by now become a practised modus operandi.’50 In addition, there are strands of Lake’s work that can help us think about the non-discursive, non-ideological components of practices. First, Lake is keenly aware that communicative power is partly dependent upon material conditions: for instance, possession of or access to a printing press or scriptorium, or even the use of royal proclamations as opposed to petitions, but also the wider sets of resources and modes of power actors use to enable and amplify the effectiveness of their communication. While these material aspects of religious and political conflict have not been a focal point of his own research, Lake regularly highlights the work of historians who work intensively in these areas. His own scholarship employs their work to generate contexts for understanding the ideological competition and conflict that primarily interest him.51 Lake has made clear that a sound account of the post-Reformation public sphere, in particular, requires a reconstruction of not simply the

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Introduction

cultural schemas relevant to a practice, but the material conditions that enable it.52 In a recent article he writes that ‘the nature and efficacy’ of the techniques of popularity were ‘contingent upon certain wider social, economic, and cultural changes, none of which on their own would have been sufficient to cause the developments under discussion here but without which they arguably would have been very different’. These changes, at bottom, were fundamental developments in social and economic history: ‘the increase in literacy, the proliferation of print, the (increasing) prominence and prevalence of a godly preaching ministry, the spread of the commercial theater, the rise of scribal news and circulating manuscript: all of those changes enabled by the increase in disposable income, the shifting patterns of consumption, and the credit relations described by’ recent scholarship.53 These are important cues for future work on political and religious practices. Second, Lake’s work is suggestive about how we might historicize the application or instrumentalization of ideology. His work on this primarily relates to how contemporaries demonstrated self-consciousness about this instrumentalization. Take, for instance, Lake’s analyses of what he often calls ‘theory to practice’ phenomena. These are not quite what one might expect from the phrase. Lake discusses not the practices themselves  but rather contemporary discourse on how ideological visions of religious and political communities were to be realized in practice. Lake sometimes refers to this discourse as accomplishing a ‘translation’ of broader or more formal principles. Practical divinity is probably the most common topic of this sort in his publications.54 At points, Lake goes further, and describes early modern actors using practical discourse as a resource for action. Early Stuart parishioners, for instance, heard a life of puritan practice adumbrated in local sermons and put it into practice.55 Another form of practical discourse and awareness that Lake has documented, which I mentioned earlier, concerned the topic of ‘popularity’ and the proper conduct of public politics more generally. Lake argues that these practical discussions emerged during the 1590s, especially in the writings of the Catholics featured in All Hail to the Archpriest (2019).56 These tracts featured elaborations upon the ‘politique mode and the paranoid style’ of political analysis developed in England from the 1560s onward.57 Lake also argues that Shakespeare’s plays exhibited similar discourse, training spectators in a political hermeneutics that could be applied to other situations.58 The 1620s, too, were a later watershed in the emergence of these discussions and polemics of practice.59 Finally, Lake often shows historical actors not prescribing but merely describing their practices and those of others.60 While most practices are not so explicitly or consciously based upon prescriptive or descriptive discourses, these discourses do provide one way in

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Introduction 17

which historians can build a bridge between histories of ideology and histories of practice and capture historically specific forms of instrumentalizing ideology. Moments of contemporary reflexivity provide important clues that can aid in the investigation of both the foundations and the dynamics of practice. Isaac Stephens’s chapter on moderate puritanism in the present volume is in some respects an example of this approach. Yet perhaps the most important insight in Lake’s work for thinking through the components of practice comes from moments in which he identifies a certain disconnection between action and the normative, ideological, and practical discourses that surround it. He has observed on multiple occasions that the characteristic activities of public politics, at least by the later 1580s or 1590s, were ‘normal but not normative’.61 Their normality registers their status as practices, while their non-normativity registers their independence from ideological restraints. Public appeals became normal because of a recurring sense of emergency, crisis, or exception. At the same time, though, they remained not only non-normative but illicit because they touched upon secrets of state and their circulation involved a theoretically unlimited and in fact relatively broad, ‘popular’ group of recipients, observers, and producers. As Lake explains in one article, ‘the repeated recourse to public politicking never became normative or licit, but arguably it did become, though repetition, something like normal; that is to say, it became one of a range practices, techniques, moves, and counter-moves that a variety of political actors learned how to use and to which they had serial recourse as they struggled to bend events to their own purposes’.62 Considering this Lake asks, evoking the Schmittian intellectual moment in which he was writing, ‘How many times does the “exceptional” response to an “emergency” have to be repeated before it becomes something like normal?’63 One also might ask: How does a practice emerge in the absence of a normative justification for it? Here Lake is of course still identifying post-Reformation public politics as a specific subset of the ideologically motivated practices he has studied throughout his career. But he raises the question of how practices come to exist without having a direct ideological (not to mention authoritative) sanction or legitimacy. Every particular pitch made in the public sphere was presumably motivated by the desire to gain support for a particular ideological outlook and it also of course exhibited ideological discourse. It was therefore ‘ideological’ in these senses. But the particular act of ‘pitching’ itself was neither implied nor suggested nor legitimated by any available ideological framework. In fact, it was quite clearly illicit according to the prevailing frameworks of the day, which rejected ‘popular’ or ‘populist’ politics. And yet it became a taken-for-granted element of the political process.64 Such acts could be defended, for the most part, only with

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Introduction

references to extreme emergency or a state of exception, references which might include mention of public appeals being made by enemies.65 In other words, public pitches were justified to the extent that they were anything but normal or routine. A similar but independently interesting facet of the emergence and normalization of practices can be found in Lake’s accounts of sub-national publics or semi-publics, such as those that emerged from London’s puritan underground during the early Stuart period. Here again, puritans’ recourse to publicity in the course of their disputes with one another contravened important norms, in this case not those concerning secrets of state, but those mandating brotherhood and charity in the Christian community. But the more distinctive aspect of these situations was the way in which publicity was the result of seemingly uncontrollable escalation, despite actors’ self-conscious recourse to a pre-existing repertoire of dispute resolution mechanisms. In addition, the application of the relevant norms in these situations was generally unclear. Partly as a result of this, contemporaries were only partially aware that, in communicating with a socially deep public, they were in fact stepping over a clear threshold or transgressing typical forms of private and fundamentally charitable Christian dispute. Yet it was precisely these institutional failures that gave rise to new practices that would eventually become normal as the particular conditions that led to such failures became more widespread.66 These moments of non-normativity, unintentionality, and ambiguity are very similar to the ones I encountered while writing my chapter on the early Stuart Commons in the present volume and my recent book on the emergence of majority rule in Britain and its empire.67 A doubly challenging sort of case is that of emergent practices that are not only illicit in ideological terms but also not apparently ideological in motivation. This is the form of practice studied by Ethan Shagan both in his chapter here and in parts of his book on popular politics during the English Reformation.68 How does one render these practices intelligible? How does one account for the paradoxical transformation of a series of emergency acts into a normal but nevertheless illicit fixture of political or religious life? It seems that, after a series of exceptional conjunctures that jolted actors out of normal routines, such practices came to be generated by a disposition that was internalized but nevertheless connected to neither an ideological subjectivity nor a consciously normative stance. This disposition operated independent of rules but nevertheless produced practices that had acquired regularity. Recent work on the public sphere by Lake and others does provide some clues for explaining the emergence and perpetuation of practices that exhibit neither internal nor external normativity. One such clue, similar to perspectives offered in The Boxmaker’s Revenge, is Lake’s comment

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Introduction 19

in Bad Queen Bess? that ‘mutually exclusive and polemically constructed versions of reality were put into play by rival groups’, and ‘both views’ were ‘in many ways mutually constitutive, and once put into play, seemed to prove one another true’. This was a process of communicative feedback in which reinforced perceptions of threat continued to motivate recourse to what were normally perceived as emergency measures to the point that, even in the absence of new feedback, the perception of crisis would lastingly prompt recourse to publicity. ‘As soon as one side started to act on its view of the situation’, Lake continues, ‘its actions in that mode tended to confirm the other side in their view of the matter, so that the two versions of reality became yoked together in a series of mutually confirming charges and counter charges’.69 The public appeals and other actions of one group, precisely because they were illicit and associated with nefarious conspiracies, confirmed the other group’s ideological perspective on events and prompted further action. This is at least a partial explanation for the continuation and the routinization and institutionalization of public politics, and one might ask whether similar mechanisms were at work in other practical contexts.

Conceptual frameworks for the history of practices At this point it should be clear how Lake’s work on the post-Reformation public sphere provides a starting-point for conceiving of a broader history of political and religious practices in the early modern British world. Lake established the study of early modern English publicity practices, from preaching to propaganda, as an intrinsically valuable object of historical inquiry, drawing from both modern social-scientific and actors’ categories to describe those practices and their interrelationships. Doing so involved thinking comparatively, across confessional and ideological divides, and  constructing a chronology for the emergence, routinization, and perpetuation of specific forms of action. Finally, it entailed developing an explanatory framework for the character and dynamics of publicity practices. On the explanatory front, as we have seen, Lake continued to lean on the ideological, communicative, semiotic, and discursive dimensions of these practices in order to account for their emergence, institutionalization, and change. One way of appreciating all this is to recognize that it gives us a much richer understanding of practice than the rather flat one that prevails in the religious and political historiography of early modern Britain. Casual references to practice in the historiography, to people ‘doing things’, are typically references to a positivist and ahistorical understanding of practice,

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Introduction

often reflected in familiar phrases like ‘theory and practice’, ‘saying and doing’, and ‘perception and reality’. Among revisionist political historians, for instance, close attention to practice tended to mean close attention to the granular details of the political narrative and political procedure. The basic shortcoming of this understanding of practice is that it has no cultural, schematic, or discursive component. In fact, in this historiography, disregarding such a component often appears to be the very point of using the term ‘practice’.70 On this view, the term implies an absolute distinction between the mental and the material, the subjective and the objective. Partly as a result, this style of practice history tends to proceed on the assumption that a practice that goes by a single name – reading, for instance – is essentially the same in all times, places, and cultures.71 This ahistorical understanding of practices is part of what often made it so difficult for revisionists to account for fundamental change over time. There was no clear way to merge the revisionists’ studies of largely autonomous culture and representation, which tended to be synchronic and semiotic in orientation, to their rigorously reconstructed narratives of political and religious events.72 This was precisely the problem that Lake’s close attention to the links between ideology and action was relatively well-equipped so solve. These links, as we have seen, were the key elements in his attempts to render political and religious activity historically intelligible. At the same time, I have pointed out that Lake’s work on the dynamics and routinization of the public sphere necessarily bears to the marks of its  particular emphases and foci. A broader historiography of the emergence, institutionalization, and transformation of political and religious practices obviously cannot be created by anything like a simple cloning of Lake’s seminal scholarship on publicity. With this mind, however, it is useful to recall the ways in which Lake has at least touched on many aspects of practice history that will require more conceptual elaboration and different types of empirical study. In order to understand the episodic emergence and changing character of public politics, Lake has paid considerable attention to the relationship between ideologically structured descriptions of the world and the undisputed, empirical aspects of historical actors’ experience of the world, which included events as they unfolded. Similarly, he recognized the need to incorporate an understanding of the role of material resources and modes of power in accounts of practice, and he noted the particular challenge of accounting for practices that became normal without ever becoming normative. We can add to all this the aforementioned challenges of accounting for practices that were not apparently motivated by ideology or primarily communicative in nature, and of historicizing the way in which ideology plays an instrumental role in particular practices. These are all crucial aspects of the way practices are rendered historically

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Introduction 21

intelligible, in addition to their placement within relevant ideological and discursive contexts. Addressing these challenges and imagining a broader historiography of political and religious practices first requires a more general and more explicit conceptualization of practice, one that is applicable beyond the study of early modern British public politics yet still identifiable within that historiography. The rest of this part of the Introduction provides a starting point for such a conceptualization. The basic goal of a history of practice as understood here is to understand ways of doing things that are historically specific because they derive their distinctive character from social structures and ordinarily reproduce those structures. A successful account of practice ought to include a thorough explanation for why a specific pattern of action pertains as opposed to another at a given moment in time. Practices, like structures, are subject to transformation as a result of both external contingency and inherent instability and dynamism. Practices can be physical, material, discursive, and communicative. To focus on practice, again, is not to dismiss mental or symbolic phenomena or to treat the political as something self-evident, unchanging, or autonomous. Rather it involves turning one’s attention away from the study of autonomous or analytically separable systems of meaning – a mode characteristic of the  so-called ‘cultural turn’ in historical scholarship – and towards historically situated, patterned actions, without falling back on a methodology tainted by outright objectivism, universalism, materialism, or individualism.73 Understood in basic accordance with the most famous and familiar conceptualization of practice, that of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, a research agenda focused on practice is not a positivist or objectivist response to the subjectivism of culturally, communicatively, or ideologically focused forms of historical analysis that allegedly emphasize ‘perception’ over ‘reality’. Instead the entire point of such an agenda is to provide an alternative to both naively objectivist or positivist accounts and overwhelmingly culturalist accounts, both of which are premised on false dilemmas that exclude the other perspective. In this sense, histories of practice stand in some tension with strands of both revisionism and post-revisionism. It is no accident, for instance, that some of first movements in post-revisionist scholarship, to the extent that they referenced social and cultural theory, were explicitly indebted to the structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz, and the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre.74 The fact that precisely these approaches and figures were some of the primary targets of Bourdieu’s famous critiques of other scholarship is a sign of the differences between some older currents of post-revisionism and more recent post-revisionist scholarship on political

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and religious practices, even if those differences certainly do not amount to incompatibility. As Bourdieu argued and a number of disciplines have subsequently established, the false choice between objectivism and subjectivism can be surmounted with an actor-centred conceptualization of practice, structure, and institutions that assumes neither the primacy of meaning-making and symbolic communication in human action nor its epiphenomenality or unreality. Bourdieu in fact identified three false dilemmas that a successful understanding of social action had to resolve: one between autonomous culture and the material world; another between structure and agency; and yet another between subjectivism and objectivism. While recognizing both how a break from objectivism and structuralism allowed phenomenologists and students of culture to work within actors’ categories and thereby understand the role of actor perception in action, and how a break from subjectivism and actors’ categories allowed structuralists to transcend the limitations of actors’ theories or understandings of their world, Bourdieu insisted that a second break was required by both parties to avoid the pitfalls of both perspectives. The idea was for students of society to proceed reflexively, by paying close attention to the conditions under which they worked and their relation to the objects of study. On the one hand, Bourdieu observed that students of society tend to understand human action as overwhelmingly communicative in nature because communicative action is the primary means by which the objects of our analysis are susceptible to analysis. It seemed necessary to develop an understanding of human subjectivity that takes form on the basis of neither our relationship with those subjects nor a transposition of the form of subjectivity governing our own own analysis (rationalism) on to the objects of that analysis. The aim would be to balance and combine these inevitably imperfect perspectives. It is in this sense that Bourdieu’s ‘theory’ of practice is more like a recommended research procedure than a theory.75 Indeed, the simultaneous study of subjective understandings of the political and religious world and the broader political structures or patterns of political practice in which those ideologies were communicated and otherwise acted upon, which epitomizes work by Lake and others on the public sphere, shows basic signs of this double break. For instance, actors’ ideological understandings of the political and religious landscape are described in tandem with an objective account of the patterned political activities or structures that constitute the public sphere. Artefacts are described both as evidence of ‘thought’, the subjective working out of meaning in the world, and as evidence of action, the creation and use of material objects to prompt action in others.

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As we have seen already, Lake’s work on the public sphere and his discussion of it as the focus of a research agenda seem to mark his most dramatic departure from actors’ categories: he adopted a famous Habermasian concept and then tried to develop from it a conception more appropriate to the understanding of early modern political and religious history. But this was no objectivist revolt, of course. One way in which Lake massaged the Habermasian framework was particularly telling on this front. As we have seen, he documented an intense awareness among contemporaries of the mechanics of ‘popularity’ and ‘public’ politics if not the public sphere per se. This self-conscious oscillation between subjectivist and objectivist modes approximates many dimensions of the method Bourdieu appears to have had in mind. Despite the Habermasian theoretical context in which it was commonly framed and debated, much of this work was quite clearly an attempt to fold together what Bourdieu would call ‘mental structures’ and ‘the world of objects’76 in an account of communicative practices. As Lake and Steve Pincus put it in 2007, scholarship on the public sphere has attempted seamlessly to merge ‘what “really happened”’ with ‘the stories people told about what was happening’ in a political and religious history centred on public ‘communication’.77 Bourdieu called his own primary conceptual solution to the three dilemmas of social research he identified the ‘habitus’: a set of learned dispositions by which actors navigate their social world in accordance with a strategic logic. The product of habitus is practice: historically and culturally specific ways of doing things that are enabled and limited by the cultural and material structures that they also perpetuate and reinforce. The notion of practice captures our common-sense awareness that world-views and meaning are not always present in people’s minds and instrumentally applied. Instead practices, even though they have an underlying strategic logic, reflect not intention or striving but habit, or rather dispositions learned from previous experience with structure and continuously reinforced as ‘reasonable’ in the ongoing experience of those structural conditions. We can render practices intelligible by describing the structures and habitus that induce them. As we have seen, however, Lake’s work suggests that the history of early modern political and religious practices must have a strong dynamic or diachronic component, while also remaining capable of accounting for continuity and stability. This is where for many scholars Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is less useful, because of the emphasis it places on the powerful tendency of practices to reinforce the same social structures that produce them. While there is dispute over whether the habitus concept in the end implies a determinist understanding of social life and therefore cannot account for structural change, it is easier to agree that it does not include a

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robust ­conceptualization of structural change.78 Two of the most promising sources of a way forward on this front, I suggest, are the economist Avner Greif’s theory of institutional change (along with allied approaches in the so-called new institutional social sciences) and the historian William H. Sewell, Jr’s theory of structural transformation. Despite Bourdieu’s frequent attacks on rational-choice theory, his theory of practice is surprisingly compatible with and complementary to some recent rational-choice approaches, such as those of Greif and the sociologist  Ivan Emarkoff. These models of strategic action (here I focus on Greif’s)  accommodate the historical and cultural specificity of rational  action that enables equilibria or regularities of behaviour. They also avoid unrealistic assumptions about the strategic consciousness, knowledge, and acumen of historical actors. In the new institutionalist literature, the central concept and object of inquiry are of course institutions, not practices, but institutions are understood as the context for a social practice. The point of studying institutions is to account for the emergence and dynamics of a central practice or ‘transaction’, which is the ultimate intellectual concern. For Greif, an institution is best understood as an array of elements – including rules, beliefs, organizations, and norms (that is, a combination of social structures and historically informed expectations about others’ behaviour) – that consistently enables and generates a central transaction or social practice.79 As Greif points out and I emphasize in my own chapter in this volume, accounting for a practice or rendering it intelligible requires a full account of its institutional or structural environment and its strategic logic, not simply the citation of norms consistent with it, because norms and ideologies are normally consistent with a range of specific practices, and some practices have multiple non-normative components. One additional benefit of approaches like Greif’s for political and religious historians interested in building bridges with other subfields is that this framework is compatible with the practice-oriented scholarship that already exists in some of the best work in English social and economic historiography from the past twenty years.80 Like Bourdieu, new institutionalists of Greif’s ilk recognize that most practices are so routine that the maintenance of patterned conduct normally requires little conscious, cognitive effort. This does not contradict the claim that institutionalized practices have an underlying strategic logic. Recognizing this latent sense in which practices are strategic in nature helps one explain how institutions and practices are capable of change. If novel circumstances, either intrinsic or external to the workings of an institution, repeatedly make clear to even the least self-consciously strategic actors that a particular practice no longer constitutes a logical response to repeated,

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Introduction 25

similar scenarios, those actors will gradually grow more conscious of the embedded, strategic aspects of those scenarios and devise a more appropriate practice that deviates from past routine.81 The historian of France William H. Sewell, Jr’s approach to much the same intellectual challenge, which draws on both Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and the sociologist Anthony Giddens’s theory of structuration, is explicitly focused on the concept of structure in a way that the rationalchoice approaches favoured in the new institutional social sciences are not. It is an equally promising, compatible, and complementary model for understanding how practices are transformed despite the fact that practices are both the enactment of structures and the means by which structures are reproduced. Adapting Giddens’s thesis that structures are ‘dual’ in nature, Sewell understands them to be composed of schemas (transposable procedures employed, often subconsciously and creatively, in social action that cannot be reduced to a particular practice, time, or place) and resources (material objects and human endowments, both mental and physical, that are sources of power in social interactions and exist in particular times and places). Schemas and resources are normally generated by and reinforce one another. Structures can change, in Sewell’s view, primarily because of the instabilities inherent in their ordinary employment in practice. First, practices derive from multiple, heterogeneous, and intersecting structures, which means these structures can conflict in certain situations, thereby disrupting the ordinary operation of practices. Second, as Bourdieu recognized, schemas can be creatively transposed to new but similar types of situation in an unpredictable manner. Third, by implication, the accumulation and arrangement of resources is unpredictable, which in turn has a dynamic effect on schemas. Finally, resources are polysemous, which means that their power consequences and relevance to schema formation vary. Both the reproduction and the transformation of structures are therefore human achievements. Structures constantly fail to reproduce themselves temporarily in isolated instances, and Sewell refers to these failures of practice as ruptures. But he distinguishes these occurences from events, which he theorizes as cascades of ruptures that result in the dislocation, rearticulation, and durable transformation of structures in a process of creativity and (eventually) authoritative sanction.82 Sewell’s theory of structural transformation, although he joins Bourdieu in attacking rational-choice approaches, is in fact compatible with the rational-choice approaches discussed above.83 It is also the theoretical perspective that most obviously resonates with Lake’s histories of the complex interactions between ideology and events, which I discussed in the first part of this Introduction.84 Taken together, these theoretical

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frameworks from sociology, economics, and history can provide scholars of early modern Britain with a robust conceptualization of practices and their institutional and structural contexts. This in turn enables thorough explanations of the emergence, normalization, and transformation of practices. While this broad, interdisciplinary conceptualization of practices and their historical trajectories is more abstract, explicit, and elaborated than anything found in the historiography of early modern Britain, its outlines, as I have pointed out, are already partly present in post-revisionist scholarship in general and Lake’s writing on ideological action and public politics in particular.

Extensions and connections This conceptual sketch can serve as a bridge between the historiography of the early modern British public sphere and a wider field of scholarship, both actual and potential, on practices in the early modern British world. As noted earlier, it was in many respects entirely fitting that the first moments of the recent practical turn in early modern British political historiography focused on communication. But the communicative practices under study to date are only a sampling of many realms of political and religious practice that emerged or changed profoundly in the early modern period. Lake has, for instance, shown how the study of public-political practices leads to the history of others by exploring the semi-public community-regulation processes of the godly and the ‘private public sphere’ evident in the Admonition Controversy.85 Domínguez’s chapter in the present volume uncovers a similar Catholic ‘semi-public’. Wider inquiries into histories of practice have the potential to unearth entirely new narratives of religious and political change that may come to rival the importance of more familiar narratives centred on the emergence and dynamics of dynastic, constitutional, confessional, and ideological conflict. Others might alter our understanding of long-term processes such as secularization and commcercialization. Shagan’s chapter, for instance, identifies a particular practice, bible theft, which seems to fit not with a narrative of secularization (since its ubiquity was premised on the sacred status of the Bible among Protestants) but with a history of profanation. My own chapter, by focusing on voting practices in the English House of Commons, is a contribution to a broader and largely unwritten history of the emergence of majority rule, and to a still broader history of political decision-making. Other chapters pivot from already burgeoning historiographies of practice to explore largely uncharted histories of practice in other institutional settings. Rupali Mishra’s chapter, for instance, charts the

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Introduction 27

migration of state practices to the East India Company and their consequent transformation and dynamics in a corporate environment. In other cases, the chapters here document practices that may not become the seeds of independent narratives of major significance but help us ­understand other practices whose historical importance has long been recognized. Tan’s chapter, for instance, introduces an ambitious research agenda centred on the production of Bible concordances, and the case studies pursued in some detail in the chapter throw significant light upon a well-established historiography of practice: that of Bible reading. Millstone’s chapter, by reconstructing the practices of conversational anecdote and oral history, adds new dimensions to our understanding of the practices of early modern historical inquiry. Finally, Cowan’s chapter on celebrity similarly excavates the history of a political practice that was integral to the dynamics of party politics, the subject of one of the most long-running historiographies of practice and one with wide import for a range of other disciplines. The novelty of the narratives sketched in this volume emerges not only from the particular practices under consideration and the way in which they are examined but also from the broad geographical framework within which they are being studied and documented. This is the emphasis in Part  II of the book. European, Atlantic, and global narratives of British political practice have become possible to construct because recent work on early modern publics, mostly centred on England and sometimes elsewhere in Britain, has shown us how to imagine narratives of political practice that are not centred on Parliament and other national institutions. In some of his most recent work on the public politics of Catholics within the confessional and dynastic controversies of the Elizabethan period, Lake has been keen to recognize that, when one follows practices, instead of following, as a primary guide, national constitutional or religious disputes, the path of inquiry tends to cross national borders, even if the character of practices still remains partly defined by those borders.86 Thus he has figured as one of the leaders in a European turn in the study of early modern British politics and religion, and, in particular, in the study of public politics. The chapters by Domínguez, Bellany, Kane, and Como follow suit. Domínguez reads Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’s autobiographical fragments from multiple perspectives as a text intended for intervention in public politics that was simultaneously Spanish, English, and transnational in its potential public significance. Bellany recounts a competition to affix the political meaning of the body of James I that took place in a variety of locales from the royal court to the Spanish Netherlands, documenting a transnational political public that nevertheless exhibited national variation. Kane is only able to unearth the distinction between government and

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sovereignty in Irish political practice and imaginaries by placing the question of Irish kingship in English, Irish, and Spanish contexts, because the distinction and its importance are obscured from more limited perspectives. Finally, Como investigates the shadowy world of transoceanic religious practices by reconstructing the milieu that produced two of the most notorious radical dissidents of the seventeenth-century Anglophone world: Samuel Gorton, one of the ‘founding fathers’ of Rhode Island, and Gerrard Winstanley, the intellectual leader of England’s ‘Digger’ movement. Each of these chapters employs a transnational frame of analysis to unearth distinctive forms of political and religious practice that remain invisible or only dimly illuminated within the framework of national politics and churches. As a whole, then, this volume goes some ways toward mapping new territory for the religious and political historiography of early modern Britain. But as I have already suggested at a number of points, once the move to political and religious practice is made, and its conceptual foundations are made explicit, bridges can also be built to other realms of historiography in which practice has long featured as a prominent category of analysis. The work of Jason Peacey and others on print and public politics, for instance, already reflects this opportunity, since it has merged the history of politics with the history of reading.87 Indeed one of the most obvious benefits of a shift to practice in political history is the opportunity it presents for connecting political historiography to strands of scholarship in cultural and intellectual history broadly conceived that have hitherto figured very little in this area, in contrast to the hugely influential, discourse-focused styles of intellectual history especially associated with the Cambridge School. The history of scholarly, scientific, and intellectual practices was and is very often a history of political practices.88 In the present volume, the potential of this sort of work is wonderfully exemplified in the chapter by Kane. By paying close attention to the traditional practices and attendant lexicon of pan-insular authority in Ireland, Kane is able completely to reframe our understanding of the politics of Irish kingship, which had hitherto been understood in terms of the transfer of sovereignty to foreign princes without recognition of a crucial distinction the Irish (and elites in neighbouring countries) made between government and sovereignty. Kane manages this intervention by moving back and forth between actors’ categories and the objective categories used by historians and social scientists to describe claims and structures of government and political authority. What emerges from this analysis has important implications for the political, colonial, and intellectual histories of early modern Europe precisely because it works in all these subfields simultaneously. Similar opportunities exist, for instance, at the intersection of religious and political history with the history of gender, which may have been

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Introduction 29

in recent years the strongest subfield in early modern British studies for recourse to practice-oriented approaches.89 As Domínguez’s chapter shows, following Lake and Questier’s work on Margaret Clitherow,90 a focus on practice that works against the (in this case, patriarchal) structuring of the archive to excavate obscured but obviously political patterns of action (in this case, autobiographical self-fashioning) might serve to redress the way in which women historical actors are still often depoliticized in the historiography, which tends in turn to render them only subjects of social, cultural, and religious history, creating in the process an arbitrary division between the history of politics (a province of men) and the histories of women and gender. One goal of this volume, then, is to draw on existing and ongoing work on the history of practice across numerous subfields in the historiography of the early modern British world in order to lay the groundwork for a unified historiography of the period that resists compartmentalization into thematic subfields. After all, the hallmark of successful accounts of practice, including scholarly practice, is that they recognize, in part through reflexivity on part of the researcher, the many structural inputs that make those practices what they are, inputs that are themselves the product of practices in other fields. Having now travelled from the beginnings of post-revisionism to the broader (and still broadening) historiography of practices in the early modern British world, we should, for a moment, return to where we began. The questions that animated post-revisionism were in many ways the questions that had animated religious and political historians throughout the twentieth century and continue to do so in this century. These are essentially questions about events, questions about the great religious and political transformations and upheaveals that puncuated the Tudor and Stuart periods, from the Reformation to the Glorious Revolution. Whatever independent significance the historiography of political and religious practices in this period eventually acquires, we already know from Lake’s work that it promises to contribute immensely to our understanding of these perennial questions about events. Pioneering work on the post-Reformation public sphere immediately added a new element to emerging explanations for the outbreak of the Civil War and the many important conjunctures preceding it. Changes in the nature of the political process clearly made profound, explosive conflict increasingly likely over time, by initiating, accelerating, and intensifying a series of dynamic processes, from confessional fissiparousness to politicization. As we have seen, studies of the public sphere also improved upon existing accounts of the emergence of serious political conflict in early modern England by exploring the mutual relationship between the textual and the material, or between changing patterns of political and religious action and changing

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understandings of the political and religious scene. The scholarly agenda sketched in this volume can only hope to make a comparable impact on our understanding of these events, and of similar processes such as confessionalization, modernization, secularization, and imperialism, whose longstanding interest has often accounted for the ­prominence of early modern Britain within the historical discipline.

Notes I am grateful to Freddy Domínguez, Noah Millstone, Jason Peacey, and Nick Popper for their thoughts and advice on earlier drafts of this chapter.  1 Still probably the best general, accessible post-revisionist analysis, Anne Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, 1998), appeared just before the explosion of work on public politics.   2 Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 11–12, 279; Peter Lake and Isaac Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (Woodbridge, 2015), 293; Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal 25:4 (1982), 805–25 (806). Neither these references nor references in the notes to follow should be considered exhaustive citations of the relevant examples but rather illustrations.  3 Peter Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage: Power and Succession in the History Plays (New Haven, 2016), 44–5; Peter Lake, Bad Queen Bess? Libels, Secret Histories, and the Politics of Publicity in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford, 2016), 4–5, 14; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2019), 23. But see also Peter Lake, ‘The “Political Thought” of the “Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I,” Discovered and Anatomized’, Journal of British Studies 54:2 (2015), 257–87.  4 Peter Lake, ‘Review Article’, Huntington Library Quarterly 57:2 (1994), 167–97 (173).  5 Of course, Lake also uses these terms for phenomena beyond ideology, he often uses terms other than ‘ideology’ to define these terms, and these ideological constructs partly overlap with one another.  6 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 7.  7 Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition’, 825; Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 8. Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 1988) is Lake’s major work that comes closest to being confined to ideological analysis.  8 Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 11–12.  9 Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity, 8.

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10 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘Heterodoxy,’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 2001), 5. 11 Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 11; Peter Lake, ‘PostReformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long Term Causes of the English Civil War’, in Michael Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015), 34. 12 Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 93. 13 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 1–87. 14 Peter Lake, ‘Puritans, Popularity and Petitions: Local Politics in National Context, Cheshire, 1641’, in Peter Lake, Thomas Cogswell, and Richard Cust (eds), Politics, Religion and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain (Cambridge, 2002), 259–89 (276). 15 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows: Puritans, Romanists and the State in Early Modern England’, Past and Present 153 (1996), 64–107; Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on  the  Stage;  Peter Lake, Hamlet’s Choice: Religion and Resistance in Shakespeare’s Revenge Tragedies (New Haven, 2020). For yet another variant of ideological practice see Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition’. 16 Lake and Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric’, esp. 65, 69. 17 Peter Lake, ‘The King (the Queen) and the Jesuit: James Stuart’s True Law of Free Monarchies in Context/s’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (2004), 243–60. 18 Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition’; Lake, ‘Review Article’, 173. 19 Lake and Questier, ‘Agency, Appropriation and Rhetoric under the Gallows’, esp. 65, 69. 20 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 471; Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, 179; Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, esp. 170–260. 21 Peter Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, in Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), 4; Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 569; Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 468. 22 On popularity see for instance Peter Lake, ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: The “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’, in Lake and Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere, 59–94. 23 Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, Past and Present 223 (2014), 77–127. 24 Ibid., 9. 25 Peter Lake, ‘Publics and Participation: England, Britain, and Europe in the “Post-Reformation”’, Journal of British Studies 65:4 (2017), 836–54 (840). 26 Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’, 60. 27 Due to space limitations the voluminous relevant bibliography is not listed here, but it can be found in Lake’s publications on public politics cited here, a few other items cited here, and in the endnotes for other chapters in this book.

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28 Lake, ‘Post-Reformation Politics’, 22. 29 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 482. Lake, ‘Publics and Participation’, 837, describes the structural conditions that caused the emergence of the post-Reformation public sphere. 30 Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’, 87. 31 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 482. 32 Lake, ‘Publics and Participation’, 844 (for this and the previous two paragraphs). 33 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 469. 34 Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity, 74. Some communicative practices that were bounded in these ways, particularly literary ones, were themselves polysemous. In these cases, Lake’s work on public politics has taken the form of ‘virtual reception histories’ of plays, in the absence of documented readings and reception. See Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 65; Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven 2002), 714. 35 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 469. See also 474 and Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 47–8. 36 Ibid., 9, 10 (my emphasis). 37 Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 50. 38 Ibid., 55. 39 Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, 137–8. 40 Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’, 59–60. 41 Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 5, 8. 42 Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity, esp. 7. 43 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 7. 44 Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’, 60. 45 The other would be Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge. 46 Lake, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 315, 483. 47 Ibid., 714. 48 On this last point see William J. Bulman, ‘The Practice of Politics: The English Civil War and the “Resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’, Past and Present 206:1 (2010), 43–79. 49 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 9. 50 Ibid., 285. For another example see Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, 137–45, and for general description, Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’, 70. See also Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 170–260. 51 See, e.g., Peter Lake, ‘Periodisation, Politics, and “the Social”’, Journal of British Studies 37:3 (1998), 279–90. 52 See, e.g., Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, 138–45. 53 Lake, ‘Publics and Participation’, 838. 54 Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 116. 55 Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity; Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge. 56 Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, 137–77, 179–92. For another sort of practical discourse, see Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church, 36–8, 43–4.

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57 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 482. 58 Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage; Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 478. 59 Lake, ‘Post-Reformation Politics’, 33. 60 Lake and Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity, 175; Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 178–93. 61 Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage, 62, 569. 62 Lake, ‘Publics and Participation’, 837. 63 Lake, ‘Politics of “Popularity”’, 88. See above all Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago, 2006). 64 But for intriguing qualifications to this generalization see Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, 180–3; Lake, How Shakespeare Put Politics on the Stage. 65 Lake, ‘Politics of Popularity’, 87–8. 66 Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, esp. 218–57. 67 William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Cambridge, 2021). 68 Ethan Shagan, Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2003). 69 Lake, Bad Queen Bess?, 474. 70 Similarly, in the work of Michel de Certeau as well as historians like Roger Chartier, practices are understood to be what ordinary, discursively inarticulate people do on a daily basis, while discourse, agency, and action are the province of relatively autonomous, complex elites. A good entry point for historians is William H. Sewell, ‘Language and Practice in Cultural History: Backing Away from the Edge of the Cliff’, French Historical Studies 21:2 (Spring 1998), 241–54. 71 On this problem see Bulman, ‘Practice of Politics’. 72 For revisionist attempts to merge histories of culture and politics see the work of Kevin Sharpe, including The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, 1992) and Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603–1660 (New Haven, 2010); and Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection (Cambridge, 1986). 73 Perhaps the two most successful works on Stuart-era public politics that describe specific political practices are Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2013); and Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2016). 74 Richard Cust and Anne Hughes, ‘Introduction: After Revisionism’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), 17; Peter Lake, ‘Retrospective: Wentworth’s Political World in Revisionist and Post-Revisionist Perspective’, in Julia Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1642 (Cambridge, 1996), 272; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Cust and Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England, 83, 105. 75 The entry point here is Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, 1977). For clarification on Bourdieu’s position more

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generally, see Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992), esp. 26–35. 76 See, e.g., Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 91. 77 Lake and Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, 3. 78 On this question see Philip Gorski (ed.), Bourdieu and Historical Analysis (Durham, NC, 2013). 79 Avner Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade (Cambridge, 2006). See also Avner Greif and David Laitin, ‘A Theory of Endogenous Institutional Change’, American Political Science Review 98:4 (2004), 633–52. 80 See, e.g., for engagement with Bourdieu, a work frequently cited with by praise by Lake, Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London, 1998); and more recently (for some engagement with both Greif and Bourdieu), Tawny Paul, The Poverty of Disaster: Debt and Insecurity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2019). 81 Greif, Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy, esp. 18–23; Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, esp. 72–82; Bourdieu and Wacquant, Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, 131; Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford, 1998), 75–6, 79–83; Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, 1990), 60–64; Ermakoff, ‘Theory of Practice, Rational Choice, and Historical Change’, Theory and Society, 39 (2010), 527–53. 82 William H. Sewell, Jr, Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation (Chicago, 2005), 127–41, 226–8, 244–5 (for this and the previous paragraph). 83 For Sewell on rational choice approaches see Sewell, Logics of History, 262–70. For a mostly implicit illustration of all of the compatibilities asserted here, see Bulman, Rise of Majority Rule. 84 See above, pp. 4–7. 85 Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge; Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest. 86 Lake and Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest, esp. 178–9; Lake, Bad Queen Bess?; Lake, ‘Publics and Participation’, 842. 87 Peacey, Print and Public Politics; Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, 2004). 88 See, e.g., Nicholas Popper, Walter Ralegh’s History of the World and the Historical Culture of the Late Renaissance (Chicago, 2012). 89 For perhaps the most explicit example from this literature, see Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2007). 90 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011).

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Part I

Political and religious practices

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1 Stealing bibles in early modern London

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Ethan H. Shagan

In 1561, about a quarter-century after the first English Bible was legally printed, the first English bible was stolen. In Hackney, John Doone ‘broke sacrilegiously into the church of the said parish, and stole therefrom a horsecloth worth two shillings and a bible worth thirteen shillings’.1 According to a 1531 statute, robbing a church was felony without benefit of clergy, hence John Doone was hanged for his sacrilege.2 This trivial crime signals the beginning of a remarkable, widespread, but almost totally overlooked phenomenon: stealing bibles. There are hundreds of extant cases of bible theft from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Yet stealing bibles has no history. It has been occasionally noticed in accounts of the print trade, a curious footnote to the broader topic of book theft.3 From the history of religion it is wholly absent. To my knowledge, of all the countless books and articles written about the English Bible – the physical object, its theology, its production and reception – none has ever studied the phenomenon of stealing bibles. I cannot recall even seeing it mentioned, presumably because theft is no more interesting to historians of religion than bibles are to historians of crime. In this chapter, focused on London and its environs, I want to consider what might happen to our understanding of England’s long Reformation if we attend to bible theft as a new species of impiety. Stealing bibles relates two separate historical processes: first, commercialisation, the dense new matrix of buyers and sellers attempting to locate one another in the rapidly expanding metropolis, with the resulting commodification of experience; and, second, the intense scriptural piety peddled by the English Protestant regime, which insisted upon the importance of Bible reading and Bible ownership as signs of respectability and participation in the national religious project. The zone of intersection between these two phenomena produced, as we know, a novel commercial piety industry. But it also produced an equally novel commercial impiety industry, parasitic upon the godly throngs who wanted or needed to own bibles. By putting so much new emphasis on the Bible, Protestant authorities increased demand for stolen bibles, leading

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to more theft; and more theft led to more Bible reading, as poor Londoners gained access to cheap stolen bibles on the black market. In a new symbiosis between profanation and devotion, pious Londoners depended upon criminality for access to commoditised devotion, while thieves and fences depended upon the success of the Reformation to peddle their stolen goods. The Protestant regime’s commitment to scriptural piety thus not only discursively invented a new category of sacrilege against God’s Word, it also produced that very category as a lived experience. This is not a history of ‘secularisation’. After all, far from producing spaces outside religion, stealing bibles for resale on the black market buoyed Christianity, contributing to its proliferation among the urban poor. Bible theft can be read as evidence of Christianity’s continued strength into the eighteenth century, now measured in the new idiom of market demand. But none the less, it must be acknowledged that something profoundly corrosive and unsettling to traditional religion was implicit in the pervasive new activity of bible theft, something for which we do not yet have a scholarly vocabulary. Call it profanation rather than secularisation. This was a practice without a theory: people who felt alienated from Reformation piety, but who did not yet imagine themselves to have a ‘secular’ existence, profaned Protestant symbols and assimilated them to novel cultural spaces. They hollowed out biblicist Protestantism by reducing scripture to a transactional object, rather than allowing themselves to be the transactional objects on which the bible operated spiritually. Stealing bibles was thus the cutting edge of a profound new experience of modernity. To begin with background: bible theft was not unknown in the Middle Ages, as the chains attaching medieval books to their lecterns suggest.4 For instance, a bible was stolen from Reading Abbey in 1253. The bishop of Salisbury excommunicated the unknown culprit and a circular letter was sent to nearby monasteries in case they had unwittingly purchased the bible. A more spectacular example occurred in 1327, when a mob raided the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds and stole scores of books, including twelve bibles.5 Some medieval books, including bibles, also contain colourful curses against anyone who steals them, calling down God’s wrath in the form of leprosy, hanging, or the swords of demons. We cannot tell from these curiosities how common theft was, only that it occurred.6 But the emergence of bible theft as a substantial social phenomenon depended upon the proliferation of English bibles. The first legal bible in English was the so called ‘Matthew Bible’ printed in 1537 with the support of Henry VIII’s government. After 1538, an English bible was required in every church, and the printers who worked to fulfil that injunction soon discovered they had a best-seller on their hands: with English bibles legal, lots

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Stealing bibles in early modern London 39

of people wanted them, so more editions followed. By 1640, some 280 editions of the complete Bible had been printed, and by 1729 a further  338 editions. Beginning in the 1580s this included smaller-format bibles in significant numbers, then with the Authorized Version in 1611 pocket-sized editions exploded into prominence. In the 1630s, one of these small bibles cost between 3 and 4 shillings, well within the budget of a conscientious London artisan if not a landless rural labourer.7 If we take 618 separate editions of the Bible and multiply by an average print run of one thousand, we get over six hundred thousand English bibles printed by 1730, plus nearly 250,000 more copies of the New Testament without the Old.8 That means close to a million English bibles or new testaments were printed by 1730, and the total population of England and Wales in the year 1700 was about 5.1 million. And those numbers, based on the research of Ian Green, do not include Irish or Scottish bibles, or the Douai–Rheims Bible created by and for English Catholics, or psalm books and other excerpts, or bibles in other languages spoken by England’s cosmopolitan population. That is a lot of bibles. It suggests that bibles were the primal objects of consumer desire in one of the first consumer societies in history. This proliferation of bibles set the stage for the remarkable explosion of bible theft in early modern London. There are a fair number of sixteenth-century examples. In 1573, William Burfield stole a wool cloak and ‘an English book called a bible’ from a man in Whitechapel.9 Burfield was sentenced to death, but pleaded benefit of clergy and so was delivered; many bible thieves escaped the gallows on a first offence. In 1583, Morgan Jones broke into the house of Nicholas Maddox near the Temple Bar and stole from him ‘a book called a bible, to the value of 30s’.10 In 1592, a gang of thieves, identified in the records as a yeoman, a cutler, and two bakers, stole a whole collection of books from the bookseller John Proctour; their haul included six new testaments and two psalm books.11 More examples followed in the first decade of the seventeenth century. In 1605, Edmund Morgan of Southwark, described as a porter, confessed to petty larceny for stealing a bible from John Shermandynes worth 10d. This was a rough-and-ready plea bargain, as the bible was undoubtedly worth more, but in English law any theft under the value of one shilling was petty larceny rather than grand larceny and would likely result in whipping rather than hanging.12 In the village of East Molesey, just outside London and a stone’s throw from Hampton Court, Richard Hunt burgled the house of Garrard Gore, gentleman, in 1607, stealing his doublet and breeches as well as a 4-shilling bible.13 This was a trickle and not yet a flood. But after the publication of the Authorized Version in 1611, the numbers rapidly increased. In 1614 at St  Saviour parish in Southwark, the butcher Richard Canter stole cloth,

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pots, beakers, and a 6-shilling bible from Randal Wood.14 Just down the road in St George parish, Susan Sares, spinster, was indicted in 1620 for stealing a bible worth 6s 8d and a ‘ruff band’ from Barnard Fox; she was acquitted of this theft, and of another, but convicted of a third.15 In 1628, William Towler was taken by the night watch at Fleet Street ‘for pilfering a bible and some other things from his dame where he dwell’.16 In 1636, Thomas Owen was arrested for ‘pilfering two bibles out of the house of Edward Rice’; he denied stealing the bibles but admitted to stealing an iron pot worth 4 pence, another plea bargain to save his life.17 Our sources become richer and more discursive from the later seventeenth century onwards, when we can more often and more clearly reconstruct the nature of the crime. In 1687, for instance, someone stole a bible belonging to Hollan Crevat of St Giles in the Fields, and suspicion immediately fell on two lodgers in his house, Grace Johnson and Susan Johnson. There was, however, no clear evidence against the sisters, and since ‘they both took pains for a ­livelihood’ – that is, they had jobs and therefore social credit – the jury acquitted them.18 In 1690, Benjamin Harvy of Fulham was convicted of having burgled the house of William Skinner three years earlier and stolen a bible, a looking-glass, a pair of sheets, and other beddings. He entered the house by breaking a glass window and using his knife to prise up the bar that closed the shutters. How was this crime discovered after so much time? Harvey and his wife had ‘a falling out between them’ and she took the whole story to a justice of the peace.19 For another example, Mary Bearing had a shop stall in Holborn. On 14 April 1714, according to an eyewitness, Walter Cantwell took from the stall ‘a bible, value 1s, a parcel of tennis balls, glass necklaces, and other things’. The witness ‘took him’ with the stolen goods on his person, as well as ‘some picklock keys in his pocket’. Having nothing to offer in his defence, he was convicted, but the court showed mercy by finding him guilty of stealing only 10d.20 Three years later, Elizabeth Brown of St Ann’s, Westminster, was indicted ‘for picking the pocket of Thomas Appleby of a bible, value 3s’. Remarkably, Brown robbed Appleby inside their parish church.21 ‘Stealing bibles’ was not an official or juridical term: theft of bibles was not statutorily differentiated from other kinds of theft. I would speculate that this was because the phenomenon ran roughshod over contemporary religious categories and could not easily be assimilated into the moral universe of early modern crime. If a bible was stolen in order to be part of orthodox worship, was that theft pious or sacrilegious? Did the special status of the Bible make the theft more worthy of punishment or less? I will discuss this more below, but for now it should be made clear that the term ‘stealing bibles’ is not meant to imply a single juridical or sociocultural phenomenon; stealing bibles covered a multitude of sins. A rough ­taxonomy is therefore in order.

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Stealing bibles in early modern London 41

To begin with social differentiation: at the most elite level we find a group led by the gentlemen Richard Daines and Charles Bourne who attempted to pull off the crime of the century in Jacobean London, stealing hundreds of pounds’ worth of jewels and other luxury goods from the house of Sir Thomas Merry. Their principal target was undoubtedly ‘a rich jewel worth two hundred marks’ which they must surely have known was in the house; but they also took with them ‘a bible with a covering of gold and wrought silver worth ten pounds’, the most valuable in our records.22 At the other end of the spectrum, John Dringe was transferred from the Bridewell workhouse to the pest house in 1636 because he had bubonic plague: he broke out of the pest house and then, presumably in order to survive, stole ‘a cloak, two bibles, and several other things’ from a vintner named William Gray. Gray tried to be lenient and asked only to prosecute him for stealing the cloak, so he would not be indicted for capital felony; the court refused leniency and bound him over to Quarter Sessions for trial.23 Besides their different monetary valuations, bibles also came in different languages and formats. John Norris of St Ann’s, Westminster, stole a Latin bible in 1693.24 Edward Foster stole a Hebrew bible from the Jewish schoolteacher Sarah Galindo in 1761; we know of at least two other thefts of Hebrew bibles in the eighteenth century, evidence of how many Jews were now living in London.25 Catherine Knox in 1724 stole a Dutch bible with silver clasps.26 In 1615, Henry Pyke stole a whole pile of books ­including something called ‘a history bible’ worth 8 shillings.27 Thomas Stevens stole ‘sixteen printed books bound in leather, entitled The Holy Bible with Notes’ in 1776.28 In a famous case from outside London, in 1736 Henry Justice was prosecuted for stealing hundreds of books from the library of Trinity College, Cambridge, among them bibles of great value and historical significance, including an Aldine bible and a Complutensian polyglot.29 In our taxonomy of stealing bibles, it is also important that sometimes bible theft was inadvertent, not in the sense that the theft itself was somehow accidental, but rather that thieves were not particular about what they stole. Either they might toss everything they found into a sack without noticing there was a bible, or they might steal a box or chest that turned out to have a bible in it. For instance, in 1695 we find the case of James Grantham, described in the record as a ‘blackamoor’, that is, a person of African descent. He was ‘indicted for feloniously taking a bible, a hood, a silk gown, a silk petticoat, a fringe, a stuff gown and petticoat, and divers other goods’. This sounds like the contents of a lady’s suitcase, and so it was. The court discovered that a woman named Rebecca Trod was coming from Newington on the south bank of the Thames across the river to London with her goods in a trunk on the back of a coach, and when she

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arrived she found that the trunk was gone. James Grantham was subsequently seen carrying the trunk, so he was arrested. But he claimed that he had only found it rather than stealing it, and, ‘there being no proof that he did take it from behind the coach, the jury found him not guilty’.30 In many other cases, however, it is clear that bibles were specifically targeted by thieves. In 1629, Frank Harvey alias Webb was arrested ‘for pilfering a Testament out of James Glassbrook’s house at Guildhall on the fasting day when folks were at church’.31 In 1635, William Gurnet was arrested by the constable of Farringdon Within ‘for suspicion of stealing bibles’. The plural ‘bibles’ and absence of other booty again suggests that Gurnet knew what he was looking for.32 There are countless similar examples. Many cases, however, lie part-way between inadvertent and targeted bible theft: call them opportunistic bible theft. Thieves could not believe their luck at finding bibles and grabbed them whenever they could, even when they were searching for something else and would have left a different book behind. I want to suggest, without statistical evidence but merely as an impression from the sources, that this was the typical form of bible theft in early modern London. So, for instance, a labourer and a spinster from Southwark were indicted in 1625 for stealing brass kettles, skillets, a mortar and pestle, and a huge block of cheese from one Owen Gratwick. From this description, we can guess Gratwick’s profession. The only thing the thieves stole unrelated to cheese-making was a 6-shilling bible.33 This evidence suggests that they broke into the building to steal dairying equipment but then opportunistically grabbed the bible when they saw it. In 1620, John Nicholson burgled the house of Sir James Stonehouse in Wandsworth and stole velvet gowns, sheets, napkins, and curtains worth over £50; the only item he stole besides cloth was a bible worth £2.34 Or consider the better attested case of George Kelly, who in 1769 shoplifted from a brazier in Holborn. Kelly, a disabled navy veteran nearly blinded by enemy fire, had been reduced to scavenging rags, broken bottles, and shoes for a living. When he entered the brazier’s shop, he stole a ‘tea chest’ and put it under his coat. But then he proceeded back into the brazier’s living quarters, where he quickly grabbed the two things of value small enough to put in his pocket: a bell worth one shilling, and a bible worth 5 shillings. Kelly apologised profusely to the brazier when caught outside, and then again to the jury, and in light of his disability he was convicted of stealing only 10 pence.35 In another well-attested case from 1754, a group of friends stopped at a public house for ‘five or six pots of beer and two half-pints of gin’. Suitably lubricated, they decided they would rob someone; but, not finding an attractive target, they decided to burgle a house with an open window instead. They lifted one of their company through the window, who ‘threw out a bible, a pair of spectacles, and other things, and was just going to throw out the bed, had not the maid come up’.36

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Stealing bibles in early modern London 43

The condition of the archives precludes any attempt to quantify bible theft, not only because so many records are lost but because many cases of book theft failed to specify which books were stolen. In theory, conventions of judicial precision required the accurate description of stolen books, and by the 1730s we have examples of prisoners acquitted because the books they stole were not properly named in the indictment. But none the less, even so central a jurisdiction as the Middlesex Quarter Sessions sometimes listed ‘books’ without further description, and provincial courts often did so.37 In a recent study of the Old Bailey, Richard Coulton, Matthew Mauger, and Christopher Reid found that 40 per cent of indictments for book theft did not indicate which books were stolen.38 Yet despite these provisos about quantification, the incidence of bible theft is remarkable. For instance, in the same sample of London book theft studied by Coulton, Mauger, and Reid, of all the cases where the title was specified, nearly half explicitly named either the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer. Or, to take another data point, in the Surrey assize indictments of the early seventeenth century, calendered by J.S. Cockburn, the index does not mention bibles but lists fifteen cases in which ‘books’ were stolen. Of these fifteen, no fewer than eleven turn out to include bibles.39 An impressionistic reading of cases in the (unquantifiable) Bridewell court books reveals a comparable pattern: you are as likely to encounter a case of bible theft as to encounter a case of any other book, or unnamed books, being stolen. This is far greater prevalence than could be accounted for by selection bias. To put it bluntly: while six-hundred-plus editions of the bible by 1730 is a huge number compared to any other individual book, it amounts to a drop in the bucket compared to the perhaps two hundred thousand different total English books that had been printed by that point. So statistically speaking, on the basis of the overall number of books lying around early modern London, we should not expect bibles to register in our records as more than a blip. And yet there they are, hundreds of cases of bible theft, everywhere we look. With the rough outline of the phenomenon established, I now want to try to make sense of it. What did it mean to steal a bible? To begin, I want to make it clear that, when I use words like ‘sacrilege’ or ‘impiety’, I am not suggesting that stealing bibles was somehow anti-religious, or that it was understood at the time to be anti-religious, in any more than the trivial sense that it was a species of sin. Instead I am groping for a language, using words in a semi-ironic sense, to suggest that our evidence of bible theft points towards a category of experience for which our subjects lacked clear conceptual categories, because it put religion in all the wrong places. The symbiosis between piety and impiety which I am beginning to describe, and which I want in the

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end to call profanation, frustrated the assumptions of early modern English subjects, for whom desecration of bibles was comprehensible because it articulated Reformation disputes, but for whom theft was baffling. Religion could not help being somehow implicated in the crime when it involved the blatant misuse of an object of reverence and devotion. But if the thief did not desecrate the bible but only recirculated it in the broader economy of devotion, it was unclear exactly how religion was implicated. Voluminous evidence suggests that theft of the Bible was at least potentially a matter of spiritual significance. Consider a case from outside London, recorded in a collection of providential stories by the clergyman George Meriton, called Immorality, Debauchery, and Profaneness, Exposed to the Reproof of Scripture and the Censure of the Law (1698). According to Meriton, in 1677 a Staffordshire man named John Duncalf came to a house near Wolverhampton where he ‘begged of the woman there victuals and drink; who formerly knowing him, and compassionating his condition, freely gave him some; but while she was stooping to draw him some drink, he stole her bible, and sold it afterwards for three shillings to a maid not far off, whereby the woman came to hear of it, and paying her the money, received it again’. When Duncalf was accused of the crime, he swore he was innocent and wished ‘his hands might rot off if it were true’. Within days, the flesh of his extremities began to blacken and swell, until both his hands and his legs fell off.40 This was not merely a case of providential just deserts for a thief and swearer, although it was that too. Stealing the bible in this case also represented the rhetorical antithesis of the bible owner’s charity, which Scripture requires. The thief was guilty of a kind of double failure, ironically stealing the very thing he needed most, but then failing to make use of it. Stealing it was not just stealing any old book. As numerous scholars have shown, printed bibles were objects of reverence and devotion in early modern England, imbued with talismanic significance, their physical form invested with remarkable spiritual power. As David Cressy notes, defendants at trial not only swore on bibles but kissed them. Biblio-medicine was commonplace in early modern England: bibles were placed on patients to help them sleep, and printed pages were ground into medications, so that stealing bibles was literally stealing medicine from the sick. Bibliomancy was among the most common forms of divination, most often using the traditional, Augustinian method of opening the book at random and pointing to a passage.41 The Bible was, in popular culture, a physical link between the owner and God. The theology behind this Protestant bibliolatry was sketchy, to put it mildly. The physical words on the page, after all, bore a complicated relationship to the Word made flesh. Consider one of the first debates on the issue: the 1557 interrogation of Richard Woodman in John Foxe’s Acts and

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Stealing bibles in early modern London 45

Monuments (1563). A Catholic priest asked Woodman, ‘Here is a testament in my hand. If I hurl him in the fire and burn him, have I burned God’s word or not? I will buy a new for 16 pence.’ Woodman responded, ‘I say you have burned God’s word, and I believe he that will burn a testament willingly would burn God himself if he were here, if he could. For he and his word are all one.’ The priests ‘made a great laughing’ at this ridiculous transubstantiation of the mass-produced object and Christ’s body, and the bishop of Chichester asked Woodman incredulously, ‘If my counting house were full of books, and if my house should be on fire by chance and so be burned, were God’s word burned?’ ‘No, my lord’, Woodman responded, ‘because they were burned against your will’.42 This was not the most convincing bit of lay theology found in the Book of Martyrs. Evidence of reverence for the physical object is also readily discovered in cases where bibles were desecrated. As Avner Shamir has shown, Catholics and sectarian radicals desecrated bibles precisely because they understood that it was an easy way to offend mainstream Protestant sensibilities. So, for instance, accounts of the 1641 Irish Rebellion overflow with stories of Catholics burning bibles, urinating on bibles, putting bibles on Protestant genitals, and so forth. What is more interesting than the alleged acts themselves is how powerful a trope they became for Protestants seeking to emphasise Catholic perfidy. So, for example, there is the story of Anne Nicholson: told that she must either burn her own bible or die, she chose to die a martyr. This story was endlessly repeated in subsequent English accounts, even though only one of the many depositions describing Anne Nicholson mentioned the bible, while others contradicted this unlikely story and offered alternative accounts of her death. But the story hit a Protestant nerve, so it was reproduced.43 The Protestant elite constantly reminded English subjects of the special status of the biblical codex, beginning with Queen Elizabeth’s entrance into London for her coronation, when the City presented her with a bible, ‘at the receipt whereof, how reverently did she with both her hands take it, kiss it, and lay it upon her breast, to the great comfort of the lookers-on’.44 Endless quotations could be offered showing the reverence in which bibles as physical objects were supposed to be held, but let one suffice. The philosopher Henry More, writing in 1673 to defend the widespread practice of kissing bibles, wrote that the ceremony is an expression of our love and value we have ever for the material word of God … and if a man after the serious reading of a chapter therein, his heart being full of joy and holy consolation, should at the close of all kiss the bible as he lays it down, out of a pious affection unto the very instrument of communicating such grace and comfort unto him, what more idolatry were there

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in this, than in such an one’s hugging his bible in the pulpit before the people, to signify how dear it was to himself, and should be to them all?45

Evidently public bible-hugging by preachers was so common that More could simply take it for granted. In the London court records, we occasionally catch glimpses of the reverence in which bibles were held in popular culture. In 1694, for instance, the highwayman Charles Pynes was tried for killing Daniel Roberts late one night on Lincoln’s Inn Field. This crime was witnessed by Pynes’s associate and fellow thief Richard Tovey, so after the murder Pynes ‘went to Tovey’s house, and took a bible, and made him swear that he would never discover the murder as long as he lived’.46 During the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780, London citizens displayed their bibles to avoid becoming victims of the mob. Cornelius Murphy, for instance, was keeper of a public house in Golden Lane. ‘On the 7th of June’, he deposed, ‘a very numerous mob came to my house between six and seven in the evening; they called for my books and looked over them. I showed them a bible and other books; they seemed very well satisfied; they had what liquor they liked. When they went out at the door some of them shook hands with me and wished me well, and cried three times, No Popery’. Unfortunately, and perhaps inevitably given his surname, Murphy, they came back and wrecked his pub anyway. Another man, Charles Lee, deposed that he ‘brought down a large church-bible I had. I went into the street and held it up and said, “This is my religion; here is no Popery; for God’s sake do not pull the house down.”’47 If even London’s murderers and rioters took bibles so seriously as objects of talismanic power, their theft could not have been without some kind of religious significance. But what kind of significance? Generally speaking, the point of stealing bibles was not to damage them but to profit from their illicit resale. Other than a tiny number of cases where thieves claimed (however preposterously) to steal bibles for their own edification,48 and a tiny number where books were stolen to be pulped for waste paper,49 bibles were sought by thieves because they were easy to sell. And why were they easy to sell? Because of a vast market for hot bibles, with pious Londoners buying cheap, second-hand scripture from shady fences and pawnshops. Pious English Protestants thus depended for their piety on the impious thieves who stole bibles and the impious receivers of stolen goods who sold them at knockdown prices. But those thieves and fences equally depended for their livelihoods on the pious Londoners who kept bibles in their bedchambers or in their pockets. This was, in short, a symbiotic relationship. It did not pit saints against sinners but positioned them on the same side, undermining Protestant values from within rather than without, in a way that made stealing bibles almost impossible to talk about as a crime against

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religion even as it broke down the conceptual barrier between piety and impiety. Stealing bibles violated no Protestant doctrine except the Eighth Commandment, but it was none the less a doctrinal threat, no less than idolatry, because it corrupted Protestant biblicism itself. The point is that bibles were stolen because of their holiness and their totemic quality, not despite it. The fact that bibles were so precious, objects of value far exceeding the cost of materials and labour, established the conditions for a lively market in second-hand bibles, objects of power and prestige which might be purchased by even the poorest citizen. In a remarkably literal example of commodity fetishism, here was a fetish transformed into a commodity. What all this suggests is that, to understand the meaning of stealing bibles, we must look to the dynamics of resale, where ostensibly pious Londoners were secondarily implicated in the theft of holiness. There were elaborate networks of unscrupulous pawnshops and fences in London already by the middle of the sixteenth century. In one of the earliest entries in the London Bridewell court books, for instance, John Mone was arrested in May 1559 as ‘a common receiver of certain chests and other things that diverse men’s servants and apprentices have bribed and stolen from their several masters’.50 But, to understand the market for stolen bibles, we must rely on evidence from the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when our records provide more detail than the bare entries of earlier court books. By the later seventeenth century, as London became a thriving capital of global commerce, the archives overflow with records of people of ‘receiving’ stolen goods of all sorts. And according to the research of Alannah Tomkins, by the middle of the eighteenth century ‘there were around 250 large pawnshops in London and countless smaller ones’.51 The places where stolen bibles were resold varied enormously. At the bottom end of the trade, there was a semi-underground world of stalls, carts, and boards, epitomised by a woman sent to the London Bridewell in 1650, described simply as ‘a common swearing seller of books’.52 Of this world we know too little.53 At the top end of the trade, there were professional dealers in rarities and antiquities, who sometimes found themselves in possession of stolen goods, whether knowingly or unknowingly. It was in order to access this network that the Derbyshire book collector Sir William Boothby wrote to a Coventry bookseller in 1684 looking for a copy of Brian Walton’s 1657 Polyglot Bible, asking ‘whether you can get me one at second hand cheap?’54 But the vast majority fell somewhere in between: small booksellers or pawnbrokers whose businesses were theoretically legitimate but who routinely declined to inquire too closely into the provenance of the goods that came into their shops, and were well known for their (in)discretion. Into this category fell the pawnbroker John Stowe, who was told by a judge in 1751 that he might as well put a sign above his door

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saying ‘A receiver of stolen goods’ after it became clear how many books in his shop had their ownership marks clipped off with a knife.55 From the point of view of this semi-illicit world, bible theft was a demand-driven business. Bibles were stolen, like jewellery, handkerchiefs, and pocket watches, because they were portable repositories of monetary value, but it was their religious value that made them easy to resell. Thieves who stole other valuable books – Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Allestree’s Whole Duty of Man – generally had to unload them to professional booksellers, who might eventually pass them on to educated and prosperous buyers, a process which took considerable time and for which the bookseller assumed some risk. Thieves therefore saw little profit. On the other hand, thieves who stole more popular and accessible texts  – like Moll Flanders, or a song book or almanac – could not hope to see much reward for their dangerous efforts, because the books themselves were of low value. But bibles were both valuable and liquid. They could be pledged easily to pawn shops (then usually abandoned rather than redeemed, so effectively sold rather than loaned), or else sold to fences of bric-a-brac who were not professional booksellers, because they moved so quickly off the shelves. Hence there was little risk and significantly more profit to be made in stealing them than other books. This was why, for instance, in 1788 when Mr John Cock left his bible alongside another book on the windowsill of his house in east London, when he came home he found his bible stolen but not the other book.56 Because there were so many pious buyers willing to ignore the dubious provenance of bibles sold by shady merchants, thieves got high value for their sales and pledges. In 1716, for instance, Robert Jones stole an unusually upmarket 20-shilling bible out of an establishment run by Robert Healing: he ‘came into his shop for a dram of waters, but seeing a more convenient room, he made an excuse to go into it; and stole away the bible without drinking his waters, and made off’. Jones sold the stolen bible to a bookbinder in Duck Lane for 9 shillings, a huge payday for the thief, possible only because the bookbinder assumed that he could resell the book quickly for something close to its full value. Jones seemed to have got away with it, except that Healing happened to go into the same bookbinder’s shop and complained that the book was his. The bookbinder could do nothing about it, not knowing the name of the person who had sold it to him, until two days later, when the thief pushed his luck and returned to the same bookbinder, at which point he was arrested.57 Consider a more elaborate story of resale. In July 1789, Ann Walker, who ran a school in Covent Garden, was robbed of ‘one half-bound printed book, called the Holy Bible’, two volumes of James Harvey’s Meditations, ‘and a few trifling articles beside’. The bible then went on a circuitous

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journey. The books were allegedly stolen by William Cawsey, a painter who was working on repairs at Walker’s house; but Cawsey claimed he had not stolen them but rather bought them from a labourer who was the real thief. If he was telling the truth, then that was the first sale. Then on 21 August, Cawsey brought the books to ‘Mr. Lucas’s, a sale shop, in Duke’s Court’, where he had been seen many times before and ran a lucrative side-hustle. There Cawsey sold the stolen books to Mr John Thomas; that was the second sale. Thomas evidently ran some kind of shop, because only a few days later, around 26 August, he sold the stolen bible and two other, unrelated books to Mr Henry Satchell, who kept a bookseller’s shop at the corner of Rose Street and King Street in Covent Garden. That was the third sale. Then, finally, Ann Walker was walking on Rose Street and ‘saw it laying for sale’. Recognizing her bible, an heirloom from her mother, she paid Satchell 1 shilling earnest money to reserve it for her. A hot bible in Covent Garden was not hard to move in the eighteenth century.58 Or listen to this detailed story from earlier in the century. In 1725, Rachel Pearson was indicted for stealing a bible belonging to St Martin’s Almshouse. Mary Ballinger, an employee of the almshouse, testified that one Sunday a woman named Rachel Pearson desired me to fetch her down the bible, which I did. She sat down to read, and so I left her; and neither saw nor missed the bible till Thursday, and then I asked her what she did with it? She said she put it upon her partner’s bed on the Monday morning; but it could not be found. I sent for a constable, and had her before a justice, thinking that might bring her to confess what she had done with it; but she denied it stiffly; and as I could not prove it upon her, the justice discharged her. The next day she arrested me for scandal; and I was forced to carry my clothes to pawn, to pay the charges. I begged of the pawnbroker to let me have as much as ever she could upon my things, because I was arrested. She asked me for what? I told her it was for charging a woman with taking a bible that was lost. A bible, says she, what was the woman’s name? Rachel, says I. Rachel! And what besides Rachel? says she. Why Pearson, says I. Ay, says she; And do you know the bible when you see it? Yes, says I. Why then, says she, I’ll show you a bible that was pawned here in the name of Rachel Pearson. So she brings me a bible, and it was the very same that we had lost.59

In another vivid episode from 1744, Archer Hard took a 5-shilling bible from his sister and brother-in-law without their knowledge and brought it to a pawn shop. According to testimony at his trial, Hard had borrowed the bible from his sister several times before to pawn, without his brotherin-law knowing. This rings true: the bible would have been among the most valuable pieces of moveable property owned by many poor Londoners, and we can easily imagine how, when Archer fell on hard times, his sister

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would allow him secretly to take it for collateral at a pawnshop and then redeem it again when he could – effectively a payday loan. But on this occasion in 1744, things were different: Archer ‘had a child lay dead, and had not money to bury it, and that was the reason of his bringing it’. Under the false name of Smith, he offered the bible to a pawnbroker he had never met before named Anthony Barnes, at the Three Blue Balls in Golden Lane, asking 12 shillings for it because of his bereavement. The pawnbroker refused and offered him 5 shillings instead. ‘Smith’ replied that that was not enough, and so ‘out of compassion’, as he put it, Barnes gave him 7 shillings.60 There is much to learn about early modern London life from this story, but for our purposes we may notice the ease with which the pawnbroker believed he could move the bible at a profit if it were not redeemed. We are glimpsing a world where bibles could be more or less freely converted back and forth between their spiritual and monetary value, because of the existence of a mercantile sector willing to stand as intermediaries between the buyers and sellers who would never have done business together directly. Holiness had become fungible. High demand for bibles, generated by the success of the Protestant regime in shaping cultural values, created the conditions for an enormous profane subculture, which in turn drove down prices and fuelled more demand, in a vicious cycle that ensnared the godly as well as the reprobate. This is a story about London, and I have largely limited myself to metropolitan evidence. But the capital is the tip of an iceberg whose size will be known only when all the Quarter Sessions and Assizes are systematically searched, a task of several lifetimes. A brief and partial survey of printed calendars, which cover only a small fraction of jurisdictions for very limited periods, yields dozens of cases. In Yorkshire, a linen draper stole the great bible from the church at Newton under Ormsbury in 1634.61 In Devon during the English Revolution, a Quaker accused a minister of stealing a bible or using a stolen one.62 In Derbyshire in 1652, a bible seems to have been stolen twice: Edward Holt had it in his ‘hawking bag’ along with other goods of dubious provenance ready for resale, but then the bag itself was stolen by Henry Firth.63 In Jacobean Oxford a jury acquitted Richard Claxton of stealing a bible from Jason Robinson of Magdalen Hall, but the recorder of Oxford was so certain he was guilty that he admonished Claxton anyway and arranged for his re-arrest on other charges.64 In Kent multiple house burglaries yielded bibles.65 We are dealing here with a vast phenomenon. I have tried to suggest that while stealing bibles was different from other offences that have garnered attention from historians of religion  – like recusancy, heresy, or atheism  – it is no less important. While those

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other offences transgressed orthodoxy, stealing bibles signals something more insidious and potentially more profound: a kind of destabilization of the categories of sacrality by the glacial forces of commercialization and capitalism. Indifference to religion is an ancient phenomenon, but bible thieves were not indifferent. Unlike the criminals of earlier generations who stole church plate and then melted it down for silver, these men and women absolutely depended upon the continuing sacredness of their booty. They were not disenchanting the world, not converting the holy into the mundane in a familiar story of secularization, but rather profiting from a vast new industrialization of enchantment. And just as interesting as the thieves and fences were their buyers: conventionally pious Protestant Londoners who, with whatever level of knowledge or suspicion, lay in bed at night reading stolen bibles, the names of former owners cut away but still bearing the marginalia of previous hands in silent rebuke. Their complicity in this pervasive world of moral ambiguity signals the failure of any simple opposition between the sacred and the profane in a world where the impious riffraff of the London streets, hawking stolen bibles to the faithful, had become the new apostles of Christianity. The effect of commercial capitalism on religion was thus not to offend the pious but so fundamentally to change the rules governing religious life that the old dichotomies between pious and impious broke down in a slurry of transactions and exchanges. The English Protestant regime thus created a monster. Sixteenth-century Protestants stressed the primacy of the written word and the physical codex of the Bible, insisting, for the first time in history, upon the spiritual significance of a mass-produced object. They understood the danger of idolatry in this biblicism, so they invented complex arguments explaining why bibles were different from statues or stained glass. But like generals fighting the last war, their fear was misplaced: as they built a Maginot Line against idolatry, commercial capitalism drove over their trenches. The Reformation had always been a process of profanation in the eyes of its Catholic critics, disenchanting so many holy times, places, and objects. Catholicism was also a species of profanation in the eyes of Protestants, not least for denying the unique authority of the Word. But stealing bibles was not the kind of profanation any of them had in mind. It was neither Catholic nor Protestant, puritan nor Laudian, Anglican nor sectarian; nor was it particularly contrary to any of those things. Instead it was a massive phenomenon at the heart of English biblicist culture which reshuffled the too-familiar categories of early modern religious behaviour. By attending to stolen bibles, we can see developing already in the era of the Reformation the leading edge of the Reformation’s long and unsatisfying end: how theological controversies, instead of being settled, slowly ceased to matter.

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Notes  1 J.C. Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records (London, 4 vols, 1886–89), vol. 1, 42–3.  2 23 Henry VIII, cap. 1, described in R. Coulton, M. Mauger, and C. Reid, Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2016), ch. 2.  3 Coulton, Mauger, and Reid, Stealing Books.  4 C. de Hamel, ‘Book Thefts in the Middle Ages’, in R. Meyers, M. Harris, and G. Mandelbrote (eds), Against the Law: Crime, Sharp Practice and the Control of Print (London, 2004), 12.  5 Ibid., 2–8.  6 M. Drogin, Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (Totowa, 1983), 86–7.  7 See e.g. J. King and A. Pratt, ‘The Materiality of English Printed Bibles from the Tyndale New Testament to the King James Bible’, in H. Hamlin and N. Jones (eds), The King James Bible after Four Hundred Years (Cambridge, 2010); and see D. Shuger, Nothing So Dark but Will Be Made Light: The Paratexts of the English Bible, 1525–1611, forthcoming. I am grateful to Professor Shuger for sharing her unpublished work with me.  8 I. Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000). Not all bibles survived, of course, but I have not found references to them being discarded, and the attrition rate is impossible to estimate.  9 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, vol. 1, 82. 10 Ibid., 114. 11 Ibid., 206. 12 J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Surrey Indictments, James I (London, 1982), no. 80, p. 15. Beattie suggests that 40 per cent of defendants in property crimes were convicted of lesser offences rather than their actual crimes: J.M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford, 2001), 338–46. 13 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Surrey Indictments, no. 165, p. 32. 14 Ibid., no. 664, 111–12. 15 Ibid., no. 1150, p. 198. 16 Bridewell and Bethlem, minutes of the court of governors, BCB-07, fol. 62v, https://archives.museumofthemind.org.uk/BCB.htm. All websites cited in this chapter were last accessed 20 July 2020. 17 Ibid., BCB-08, fol. 96r. 18 Old Bailey proceedings, 7 December 1687, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse. jsp?id=t16871207–34&div=t16871207–34&. 19 Ibid., 10 December 1690, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t16901210– 45&div=t16901210–45&. 20 Ibid., 12 May 1714, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17140513– 19&div=t17140513–19&. 21 Ibid., 27 February 1717, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17170227– 14&div=t17170227–14&.

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22 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, vol. 2, 162. 23 Bridewell and Bethlem, minutes of the court of governors, BCB-08, fol. 100v, https://archives.museumofthemind.org.uk/BCB.htm. 24 Old Bailey proceedings, 16 January 1693, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse. jsp?id=t16930116–2&div=t16930116–2&. 25 Ibid., 25 February 1761, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17610225– 19&div=t17610225–19&. For other examples, see City of London Sessions Papers, 24 August 1716 and 28 June 1712; and see also Old Bailey proceedings, 10 December 1783. 26 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer (24 October 1724); British Journal (24 October 1724) calls her Nicks instead of Knox. 27 Jeaffreson (ed.), Middlesex County Records, vol. 2, 109. 28 Old Bailey proceedings, 16 October 1776, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse. jsp?id=t17761016–10&div=t17761016–10&. 29 Ibid., 5 May 1736, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17360505–88 &div=t17360505–88&. 30 Ibid., 14 October 1695, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t16951014– 33&div=t16951014–33&. 31 Bridewell and Bethlem, minutes of the court of governors, BCB-07, fol. 111v, https://archives.museumofthemind.org.uk/BCB.htm. 32 Ibid., BCB-08, fol. 22v (and see fol. 24v). 33 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Surrey Indictments, no. 1698, p. 291. 34 Ibid., no. 1156, p. 199. 35 Old Bailey proceedings, 28 June 1769, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse. jsp?id=t17690628–5&div=t17690628–5&. 36 Ibid., 24 April 1754, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17540424– 42&div=t17540424–42&. 37 Coulton, Mauger, and Reid, Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London, 21. 38 Ibid., 10. 39 Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Surrey Indictments. Another case of book theft not mentioned in the index is no. 823. 40 George Meriton, Immorality, Debauchery, and Profaneness, Exposed to the Reproof of Scripture and the Censure of the Law (London, 1698), 68–9. 41 D. Cressy, ‘Books as Totems in Seventeenth-Century England and New England’, Journal of Library History 21:1 (Winter 1986), 92–106. 42 J. Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1563 edition), 1665, www.johnfoxe.org/index. php?realm=text&gototype=&edition=1563&pageid=1665&anchor=pence#kw. 43 A. Shamir, English Bibles on Trial: Bible Burning and the Desecration of Bibles, 1640–1800 (London, 2017), 22–3, 140–3. For cases of sectarians desecrating bibles, see 87–96. 44 L. Marcus, J. Mueller, and M.B. Rose (eds), Elizabeth I, Collected Works (Chicago, 2000), 55. 45 Henry More, An Appendix to the Late Antidote Against Idolatry (London, 1673), 45.

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46 Old Bailey proceedings, 11 July 1694, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse. jsp?id=t16940711–17&div=t16940711–17&. For a similar case, see Old Bailey proceedings, 6 June 1717. 47 Ibid., 28 June 1780, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17800628–115&​ div=t17800628–115&. 48 E.g. Old Bailey proceedings, 16 October 1717; Oracle and Public Advertiser (18 May 1795). 49 E.g. Old Bailey proceedings, 27 October 1802, cited in Coulton, Mauger, and Reid, Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London, 70–1. 50 Bridewell and Bethlem, minutes of the court of governors, BCB-01, fol. 2v, https://archives.museumofthemind.org.uk/BCB.htm. 51 A. Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723–82: Parish, Charity, and Credit (Manchester, 2006), 204. 52 Bridewell and Bethlem, minutes of the court of governors, BCB-09, 442, https:// archives.museumofthemind.org.uk/BCB.htm. 53 But see e.g. M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1981); T. Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991). 54 I. Mitchell, ‘“Old Books  – New Bound?” Selling Second-Hand Books in England, c. 1680–1850’, in J. Stobart and I. Van Damme (eds), Modernity and the Second-Hand Trade: European Consumption Cultures and Practices, 1700–1900 (Basingstoke, 2010), 139. 55 Cited in Coulton, Mauger, and Reid, Stealing Books in Eighteenth-Century London, 27. 56 Old Bailey proceedings, 9 January 1788, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse. jsp?id=t17880109–13&div=t17880109–13&. 57 Ibid., 6 September 1716, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17160906– 21&div=t17160906–21&. 58 Ibid., 9 September 1789, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17890909– 102&div=t17890909–102&. 59 Ibid., 13 October 1725, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17251013– 32&div=t17251013–32&. 60 Ibid., 28 July 1744, www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17440728– 19&div=t17440728–19&. 61 J.C. Atkinson (ed.), Quarter Sessions Records (London, 9 vols, 1884–92), vol. 3, 365. 62 A.H.A. Hamilton, Quarter Sessions Records from Queen Elizabeth to Queen Anne … Chiefly from the County of Devon (London, 1878), 312–13. 63 J.C. Cox, Three Centuries of Derbyshire Annals (London, 2 vols, 1890), vol. 2, 79. 64 R. Blades, Oxford Quarter Sessions Order Book 1614–1637 (Woodbridge, 2009), 68. 65 J.S. Cockburn, Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments, 1649–1659 (London, 1989), 32, 130; J.S. Cockburn (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments, James I (London, 1980), 108.

2 Printed English-language Bible concordances to c. 1640 and intentions for lay Bible use Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Amy G. Tan

A partially completed English concordance to the Bible was among the documents seized during a 1543 search of Windsor. The manuscript belonged to the musician John Merbecke, who was arrested for heresy.1 Merbecke had been laboriously assembling the concordance by crossreferencing an English Bible with a Latin concordance, despite understanding little Latin. Being ‘desirous for the profit of many’, he had ‘spent no small time’ and reached letter L before the search halted his efforts.2 According to John Foxe’s later account, when Merbecke appeared before Bishop Stephen Gardiner, the concordance was the first issue at hand, and shortly into questioning Gardiner began describing ‘the nature of a  concordance,  and how it was first compiled in Latin by the great diligence of the learned men for the ease of preachers concluding with this reason, that if such a book should go forth in English, it would destroy the Latin tongue’.3 Though he was examined regarding several issues, Merbecke would describe the concordance as ‘not one of the least matters, that then they alleged, to aggravate the cause of my trouble’.4 Gardiner’s comments, and the fact that the concordance was raised as evidence against Merbecke, point to two key aspects of early modern English-language Bible concordances:  they were viewed as having religio-political significance, and they had some relationship to the question of clerical versus lay biblical interpretation. What follows will address these aspects of concordances, and others, in more detail. A range of resources with different types, amounts, and arrangements of content were variously described as ‘concordances’ during the early modern period. For example, reference tables in certain editions of the Geneva Bible were not titled ‘concordances’, but R.F. Herry’s markedly similar publication was. Thomas Wilson specified that his Christian Dictionarie (1612) was not a concordance, but John Wilkins would later categorize it as such.5 While acknowledging such diversity in terminology, here I use ‘concordance’ in view of publications that are alphabetically arranged according to headwords or keywords, designed to be used immediately alongside a

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particular text (here, an entire Testament or the Bible), and intended to direct users to particular words or concepts within that text. As David Cram observes (following Wilkins), a useful way to subdivide early modern concordances is to consider whether each indexed ‘words’ or ‘things’: the former allowed users to identify passages where particular words appeared, while the latter pointed to passages addressing particular topics.6 Here I adopt this terminology, but I identify another aspect of concordances as even more critical: whether entries included interpretative, doctrinal content – paraphrases, summaries, explanations, and the like – or featured little or no such commentary. In what follows, I argue that the amount of interpretative content was a key feature of concordances, one related to authors’ and authorities’ intentions for lay Bible reading. Since Cram’s 1994 article, early modern English vernacular Bible concordances have received little consideration as a category or subgenre, despite a growing attention to information management and reference publications, lay Bible reading, and biblical paratexts.7 Although a number of studies have discussed particular concordances individually, or in context of Bible editions with which they were bound, there has been limited comparative analysis across different concordances.8 There has also been limited attention to the structural features of concordances or intended methods of use – the important exception being Peter Stallybrass’s discussion of Herry’s concordance vis-à-vis discontinuous reading practices.9 Among the few studies that have addressed Bible concordances as a group, perhaps the best known is in Ian Green’s chapter on Bible study aids, which include but are not limited to concordances. Yet his summary claim that study aids before the mid-seventeenth century were ‘published in reasonable quantities, but their use was not seen as crucial’ underplays the widespread distribution of concordances throughout the Tudor and early Stuart period – especially those bound with relatively affordable editions of the Bible – and passes by, among other things, the implied significance that inclusion in the same volume as the Bible would have given to many concordances.10 The present chapter is a step towards a fuller and more nuanced view of printed English vernacular Bible concordances composed in the period before 1640, with special attention to resources that saw broad distribution among lay readers and/or featured prefatory material discussing lay use.11 I argue that these concordances’ suggested uses, along with a wide range of structural features (arrangement and type of content, use of headwords versus keywords, citation of Bible passage versus page number, and more), reflect certain approaches to, and goals for, lay Bible use. They therefore display a range of positions taken by authors and authorities from the ‘hotter sort’ of Protestants all the way to Catholics, as they pursued religious ends in society. I further show that, despite numerous

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similarities in content, concordances had critical differences: in doctrinal emphases, in format or arrangement of content which facilitated certain types of use, and sometimes in detailed tailoring of particular entries visà-vis contemporary religio-political circumstances. With all this in mind, I also address change over time, showing that the increasing proliferation of interpretative reference resources before about 1622 gave way to a proliferation of non-interpretative and quotation-based concordances in the later 1620s and 1630s. I suggest that this shift was related to Caroline or Laudian policies of limiting the proliferation of puritan-leaning interpretative resources in a particular context where lay readers had become accustomed over several decades to having Bible concordances readily available. Non-interpretative, quotation-based concordances – with prefaces suggesting only limited sorts of uses, especially memory, for the broadest range of readers – were the alternative.

Henrician and Edwardian concordances: the question of including or excluding interpretative content The first officially sanctioned printing of an English Bible, the ‘Matthew’s Bible’ of 1537, contained in its front matter a table of the ‘Principal matters contained in the Bible’ translated from French.12 Despite being censored for a time during the latter part of Henry’s reign, it would become the most oft-printed English Bible concordance during the Henrician and Edwardian periods.13 Regarding audience, its preface  – also translated  – explained that it ‘expounded / gathered together / concorded / and compared’ various ‘hard places’ in the Bible and emphasized use ‘for the consolation of those which are not yet exercised and instructed in the holy Scripture … to thintent that the prudent reader (by the spirit of God) may bear away pure and clear understanding’.14 It was thus a sort of guide, allowing even lay users to proceed safely not only in liturgical or sequential reading but also in topically based, discontinuous reading, across even contentious or difficult passages. Entries in this concordance addressed a range of issues; however, there was a noticeable anti-Catholic bent complementing the preface’s suggestion of use for answering heretics and confounding ‘adversaries of the word of God’.15 The first headword readers encountered was ‘Abomination’, under which the use of images was decried. One entry under ‘Minister’ asserted: ‘if the minister do preach any works necessary for the remission of sins he is abominable and excommunicate’. Certain headwords such as ‘Purgatory’ were included only to have entries point out their absence from the biblical text and refute them.

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Careful thought seems to have been given to the table’s portrayal of key points vis-à-vis the 1536 Ten Articles. While the French table had taken the common Protestant position that there were two sacraments, this ran contrary to the Articles’ position on penance. But rather than altering the wording to support the Henrician position, the English table omitted this entry altogether. Elsewhere, statements which did not explicitly and directly counter a Henrician position were retained even if there were implied diversions: thus, the Matthew’s concordance kept the entry under ‘Supper’ (‘Cene’), which affirmed memorial aspects of the Lord’s Supper but did not explicitly condemn transubstantiation.16 In short, content obviously and explicitly counter to the position of the national church was changed, but the work was not recast to fully conform to the Henrician model. The Matthew’s concordance’s reformed doctrinal content set the table up for opposition, initially from more traditional-minded clerics who disliked the moves toward reform initiated by the Henrician church,17 but eventually from those moving in concert with the direction of the national church. The latter shift was apparent as early as the release of the Great Bible in 1539, which did not facilitate individual Bible investigation or interpretation: it omitted marginal annotations and any accompanying resources similar to the Matthew’s concordance.18 Active censoring of the Matthew’s concordance began as early as Bishop Bonner’s 1542 list of prohibited books, which specified ‘The table … of Thomas Mathews’ doing, and printed beyond the sea without priviledg, set in his Bible in English’. It would also have been censured under the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion’s ban on ‘preambles’ et al. from the Matthew’s Bible.19 These moves signalled a key interest of the Henrician establishment in keeping interpretative paratexts out of readers’ hands. It was in this context that Merbecke was compiling his quotation-based concordance of words. Even as Henrician authorities in the later 1530s and the 1540s were moving against paratexts including the Matthew’s concordance, they did so by describing that content as going beyond the text of the Bible, as in Bonner’s comment above. It did not necessarily follow (at least for those still allowed to read the Bible under the 1543 Act) that there would be concern with a reference work without commentary, which merely quoted snippets of an officially permitted biblical text. The assumption that the biblical content itself was permissible  – even if rearranged – may well have been a reason why Merbecke continued compiling his concordance after his experiences before Gardiner (which had culminated in his condemnation and only a last-minute pardon), and why, on the encouragement of a well-connected friend, he was hopeful for publication even during this later portion of Henry’s reign.20

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This brings us to the crucial difference between interpretative concordances and those with little or no interpretative content (typically, the latter were quotation-based, though we will see a partial exception below). In so far as concordances merely cited passages or quoted portions of a sanctioned Bible text, they avoided explicit doctrinal comments that might be out of step with the national church, and thus could be seen as fostering religious conformity. Yet while interpretative concordances by nature hedged or directed users’ understanding of texts, non-interpretative concordances potentially invited a diversity of views. Moreover, concordances were resources traditionally used by clerics comparing difficult passages, drawing theological conclusions, constructing sermons, and the like. To provide them in English was to offer lay readers an opportunity to similarly use (or misuse) biblical content. This perspective seems to have undergirded Gardiner’s comment, above, that concordances were for the ‘ease of preachers’, but this dynamic was not singular. Even decades later, Richard Bernard’s pastoral manual emphasized ‘the right knowledge how to use a Concordance’ as ‘every way a sufficient help for proofs, reasons and illustrations’ from the Bible to be used in sermons.21 Though Bernard did not eschew vernacular concordances as Gardiner did, this illustrates the theologically interpretative potential understood to be inherent in certain concordances, which, if offered in English, might lead untrained users to erroneous theological conclusions. Such concerns were not merely about concordances: Kate Narveson has highlighted longstanding tensions between Protestant clerics’ desire to foster lay Bible reading while simultaneously keeping it within proper bounds.22 Nevertheless, non-interpretative vernacular concordances put a particularly fine point on the concern, as they offered readers a tool long used by clerics.23 Beyond the option of interpretative concordances, one potential solution was to offer these resources while attempting to restrict use. The use most frequently (at times, solely) suggested was for memory, as an aid in locating a text one could not fully recall. We can see this emphasis in Merbecke’s dedicatory epistle, which mentioned that, by means of a concordance, ‘the memory of the Latin men’ was helped to find the verse they sought; he explained that this prompted his desire to provide a similar resource in English. Notably, this was the only use of a concordance that Merbecke mentioned.24 In what follows I will suggest that this approach – avoiding interpretative commentary while encouraging limited types of use – offered the potential for concordance publication during periods when other resources were not permitted. Merbecke’s preface made relatively few claims. He stressed that he used only the ‘English Bible of the most allowed translation’ for his text, adding nothing: ‘so that now this book must needs be clear from all erronious

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doctrine, yea or suspicion thereof’.25 Given that he completed the preponderance of this work during Henry’s reign, and given his experiences before Gardiner, he understandably took a conservative approach, emphasizing his non-interpretation and making only modest gestures towards the work’s utility for memory. Yet this is not to say he had a limited view of its potential significance. To the contrary, his dogged commitment to complete and publish the resource, his feeling ‘utterly in despair that ever it should forward’ when publication looked unlikely, and his desire ‘for the profit of many’ suggested he saw key value for a wide audience.26 While Merbecke’s was a late-born Henrician concordance, the reign of Edward was a new juncture, with publication once again possible for doctrinally interpretative resources. The Matthew’s concordance saw print again in a relatively affordable standalone 16o edition and also bound with bibles.27 Gwalter Lynne’s 1550 translation of a concordance by Bullinger (et al.) appeared in 1550. This Brief and Compendious Table fitted its Edwardian moment. It clearly advertised its Continental origins (echoing increased Edwardian openness to Continental influences) and included an entry not found in the original that addressed ‘sedition, insurrection, rebellion, and their punishment’. This was a pro-monarchical gesture in view of the 1549 rebellions.28 This resource held something of a middle ground between the interpretative and the non-interpretative. It provided summaries of content (often) and doctrinal statements (occasionally). However, in comparison with prior and later interpretative concordances, it featured a high number of entries concatenating multiple passage citations without intervening commentary or description. Within these blocks of citations, users were essentially left to select for themselves which passages were relevant for their needs. But if one were to begin comparing passages to draw doctrinal conclusions, one might enter the bounds of clerical territory. Here we would expect some lines to be drawn, and they were: all learned men have thought [such a concordance] so necessary a thing to the furtherance of their study … (and so did the first Authors of this book,) … Most necessary therefore it is for all manner of persons (that do employ any part of their study to the holy Scriptures) to have either this or the like table or concordance to help their memory with all.29

This was key: Lynne’s preface had explicitly encouraged lay use, yet here acknowledged clerical uses of the resource. This, along with the concatenated citations offering comparatively little interpretative guidance, levelled the playing field between the original (clerical) and present (lay) readers. Therefore, as with Merbecke’s quotation-based concordance, only one type of use – aid of memory – was emphasized.



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Elizabethan and Jacobean concordances to c. 1622: Protestant and Catholic interpretative resources The availability of English Bibles increased significantly over the decades following the introduction of the Geneva translation. We turn now to concordances produced in this period, many of which were bound with Bibles in relatively affordable editions and which, as Ethan Shagan underscores in Chapter 1 above, circulated both new and secondhand. The first such concordance, translated from French, appeared in 1557 with Geneva New Testaments.30 The epistle to readers suggested a broad audience, while a preface introduced the concordance and mentioned a range of uses: That which many have scarcely attained unto by long study and great diligence, is offered here unto thee Reader in a compendious table: to the intent that nothing, which might seem to further thy knowledge in the word of ­salvation, might be omitted … For what can be more necessary for us in these latter times than to have a perfect and speedy way to buckle our harness (which is God’s word) that we may resist the deceiving and cruel spirits, that are sent forth out of the bottomless pit … to trouble the church of Christ and pervert the souls of many? Which thing is here briefly performed in this table … So that hereby thou mayest have ever at hand thy weapons to resist against all heresies and false opinions, to the glory of God, the quieting of thy conscience, and instruction of others.31

The table was ‘necessary’, and the image was striking. Without a resource like this to ‘buckle’ on God’s word, one would not have full benefit of Scripture against attacks. Moreover, the passage specified uses towards resisting false ideas in view of glorifying God, fostering personal faith, and teaching others. Locating passages as a memory aid was not mentioned, and, indeed, it would be a poor use, for the table was not set up to direct users to all, or most, passages mentioning a particular topic.  Rather it was  meant to direct users to specific passages that best clarified or defended  key doctrinal points, a mechanism to which I will return below. From 1560, complete Geneva Bibles were accompanied by another concordance (also translated).32 This and a preceding table of names were both described in the preface to the entire volume: ‘That nothing might lack which might be bought by labours, for the increase of knowledge and furtherance of God’s glory, we have adjoined two most profitable tables … so that nothing (as we trust) that any could justly desire, is omitted.’33 To be sure, this is a positive description; but it pales in comparison to the 1557 text’s image of a ‘necessary’ resource for ‘buckling’ on the Word. This difference in tone may have reflected the massive religio-political shift which

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took place between the 1557 publication under Mary, and the latter’s completion under Elizabeth and the 1559 settlement, where limited steps toward Protestant reform and an emphasis on uniformity may have suggested to those producing the concordance that a conservative discussion of use might be most likely to be countenanced by authorities. Despite these differences in describing use and necessity, the two tables had significant similarity in doctrine, with both taking a Protestant, Calvinist approach, emphasizing doctrines such as justification by faith and predestination.34 They also had a similar structure, and this is notable in view of intended uses. Both concordances lacked headwords which might have prefaced groups of entries. Instead, keywords appeared within individual entries, and, most often, these were embedded within a phrase or statement. When context was clear enough, some entries lacked the keyword altogether. The effect was that readers did not look up a term itself (as a headword) and then select an appropriate subentry; instead, the first appearance of most keywords was already within an interpretative context. In other words, one’s engagement of the concordance would not only conclude but often begin with a degree of meaning or context already provided. Despite Protestant beliefs about the importance of all people reading Scripture and the clarity of (at least certain) passages regarding key doctrines, concern remained about how to help lay readers properly engage and understand passages and topics.35 The Geneva marginal annotations certainly addressed this concern by providing commentary alongside the text. And here the volumes offered further guidance to readers interested in seeking out particular topics. The concordances’ contents were not identical. The 1557 publication made a number of overt anti-Catholic gestures unmatched in 1560.36 And the 1560 text included a greater percentage of entries set as full statements, and, on average, fewer passages cited per entry, than its earlier counterpart, offering somewhat less interpretative freedom to users. I suggested above that differences in prefatory comments may have reflected the different religio-political situations before and after Elizabeth’s accession, and it is tempting to view these distinctions in the same light. Yet it is not clear this was the case: both texts were translated from existing resources, so the choice of table more likely depended largely upon scope (the New Testament versus the whole Bible). Nevertheless, these doctrinal distinctions were not missed: as Cameron MacKenzie has argued, the 1557 table closely complemented the theological aims of the Tomson New Testaments with which it would later appear.37 The authorized Elizabethan translation, the Bishops’ Bible, would lack the ‘bitter’ annotations and interpretative paratexts of the Geneva, including concordances.38 From 1575, however, Geneva Bibles were able to be

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printed in England. A New Testament appeared that year, accompanied by the 1557 concordance, and full Bibles appeared in 1578, accompanied by the 1560 concordance. But from 1580 Geneva Bibles were regularly accompanied by R.F. Herry’s Two Right Profitable and Fruitfull Concordances.39 This resource was interpretative, addressing a wide audience with several suggested uses: even a ‘less learned or unlearned reader’ might find ‘an aid and help to their godly studies, and honest trade of life’ and ‘understand what is necessarily to be learned’ about certain topics.40 Herry’s primary source was Robert Estienne’s Latin reference to biblical names and terms, but he reworked much of this material by (among other things) incorporating certain lengthier discussions regarding proper names, from Estienne’s second table, into his first table.41 This not only had the effect of situating Herry’s concordance of names as doctrinally interpretative content (a key difference from the 1560 table of names, which was described in terms of naming children) but also resulted in a higher percentage of entries in the second concordance now addressing controversial and doctrinal issues. From the start, there was an unmistakably anti-Catholic gesture: instead of addressing ‘Aaron’, it now began ‘Idolatry to be counted most Abominable’. This anti-Catholic positioning was further reflected in the inclusion of certain keywords, which did not appear in Scripture, merely in order to refute them (for example, ‘Transubstantiation overthrown by these places rightly understood … Look Supper of the Lord’). Moreover, some keywords not necessarily invoking Catholicism on their own received anti-Catholic contexts: under ‘prayer’, for instance, one entry decried worshipping and praying to saints. The anti-Catholic emphasis was so great that Stallybrass characterizes Herry’s publication as an ‘attempt to secure an interpretation of the bible in which the main threat is Catholic idolatry’.42 Herry’s concordances also reflected certain puritan leanings, notably on issues of church polity and the role of bishops and elders. Maurice Betteridge suggests that the concordance trended more puritan than even some of the marginalia in the text.43 As such content could suggest priorities out of step with the Elizabethan establishment, and thus receive censure, Herry moved with care. Some aspects remained vague enough that, as MacKenzie observes, readers of different Protestant stripes could employ terms in different ways.44 Further, Herry’s preface clearly prioritized obedience to authorities. In the preface, upon enumerating many theological concepts addressed in the concordance, he stated: ‘if thou wouldst understand what is necessarily to be learned in the same Scriptures, touching the estate, authority, office or duty of Kings or Princes, Judges or Magistrates, Bishops and Pastors, Elders or Ministers, Fathers and Mothers … children and servants, how every one … ought to behave themselves towards

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God, and towards one another’.45 Whatever was said about contentious issues, their ‘brief’ application was to direct proper behaviour in society. This emphasis upon social roles complemented the volume’s production by the royal printer. It was often bound alongside the Prayer Book and T. Grashop’s table emphasising boundaries on Bible reading. From 1585 it also advertised an ability to ‘serve as well for the translation … authorized to be read in churches’ as for the Geneva.46 Herry’s concordances may have been puritan-leaning, but they were overtly conforming. The resource also emphasized theological conformity by means of highly mediated content. Anticipating that readers might be ‘affected unto’ or desire ‘to be satisfied’ about a range of topics, the concordance directed users to ‘so much thereof, as for a godly Christian, and necessary knowledge shall be thought requisite’. That is, not all topics were ‘thought requisite’, and the concordance implicitly guided readers to those that were.47 As with the prior Geneva concordances, Herry’s keywords appeared within interpretative statements that directed inquiries, and the Bible’s marginal annotations (Herry specified) further clarified certain issues. In other words, these aspects of the work did not free users to construct biblical support for any range of their own views (as Catholic polemicists suggested was a problem with Protestantism and vernacular Bible circulation).48 Perhaps this strongly anti-Catholic resource appeared all the more relevant when (amidst continuing concerns related to Catholic missionary activity, potential attacks from Catholic states, and the loyalty of Catholics within the realm) the Rheims New Testament (1582) began circulating. It too featured a concordance: ‘An ample and particular table directing the reader to all catholic truths, deduced out of the holy Scriptures’.49 Although it could be used in much the same manner as the Protestant interpretative concordances we saw above – helping users locate biblical texts on a range of issues – there were significant differences. First, it is not clear that the volume was aimed towards lay audiences; Alexandra Walsham has described it as a ‘manual for missionaries’.50 Nevertheless, given its large print run and the situation of many lay Catholics lacking consistent access to clerical guidance, there must have been acknowledgement that some lay readers might consult the volume on their own. Moreover, the ability to counter lay reading of Protestant Bibles had been considered by Thomas Harding and Nicholas Sander when seeking approval for the translation, and there is evidence that both Protestant and Catholic lay readers did engage the volume.51 Second, the intended use of the Rheims testament was distinctively narrow. Even the most vehemently anti-Catholic of the Protestant concordances, Matthew’s and Herry’s, also addressed other uses. In contrast, the Rheims testament was expressly intended for penetrating into a hostile religio-political context, with no suggestion that readers

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should use vernacular Bibles (or vernacular concordances) to facilitate faith and piety under normal circumstances. The concordance complemented this situation-centred focus of the New Testament. Its content was expressly controversial, directing readers to truths ‘impugned by the Adversaries’ with one aim: defending against heresy. By helping users navigate the volume and locate relevant marginal annotations clarifying key issues, this ‘Table of Controversies’, as the running heads called it, served the volume’s purpose of turning English people back to the Catholic faith. Regarding doctrine, MacKenzie has emphasized ways the Table of Controversies furthered the specifically polemical, anti-Protestant aims of the volume.52 Though a limited number of issues appeared without a clear anti-Protestant angle (for example, ‘usury’), the overarching weight of the work was to address points of controversy either by means of headwords addressing particular Protestant or Catholic names or terms (e.g. ‘Calvin’, ‘mass’, ‘penance’) or by means of common Christian terms addressed from a particularly Catholic or anti-Protestant angle (for example, under ‘zeal’ and ‘widowhood’). This single emphasis accorded with that of the vernacular Scriptures altogether. As I suggested above, Protestant interpretative concordances were highly mediated in ways that might channel doctrinal thinking, as readers engaged the text, within appropriate bounds. The Rheims table introduced methods to mediate and direct use even more narrowly. Importantly, citations directed readers not to a biblical passage but to a page number. In other words, they pointed equally to the annotations and to the biblical text itself, and sometimes explicitly to the former. Such a highly mediated approach not only reflected the aims behind the production of the text (the annotations would address contemporary disputes more clearly and directly than the text alone) but it also underscored longstanding Catholic positions on the authority of the church and the lack of any need for a vernacular Bible. The concordance also echoed the volume’s ‘­imitation-with-a-difference’ of Protestant Bibles (in punctuation and page layout, for example). Yet, in this instance, the doctrinal implications about authority – with the paratext being placed equally to the biblical text – were fundamental.53 That this concordance was viewed as a significant feature within the Rheims volume, and that the use of page numbers versus biblical citations was likewise observed and treated as significant, is suggested by William Fulke’s 1589 response to the Rheims Bible.54 Fulke pitted the Catholic translation and annotations side-by-side against the national church’s translation and included a new concordance. The latter directly countered the Table of Controversies, following its structure and content while altering certain wordings to call assumptions into question or make the opposite assertion. Fulke also upended the Rheims treatment of citations, resuming the typical

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Protestant practice of citing book, chapter, and verse. Even in places where Fulke intended to reference an annotation, he first mentioned a biblical citation and then the relevant annotation number. As in other Protestant concordances, for Fulke, first directing users to Scripture was key. An Old Testament complement to the Rheims concordance was mentioned in 1609 at the conclusion of the first volume of the Douai Old Testament: the tables would appear with the second volume and would index the ‘principal matters in the Annotations’. This privileged the annotations even over the biblical text: the concordance was to them. ­ While the table itself (published in 1610, accompanying the second volume of the  Old Testament) did not underscore this distinction, it did follow the practice of keying citations to page numbers and locating nearly all keywords within contextualizing phrases or statements. Again, this was a highly mediated resource, and one with the primary goal of defending Catholic teachings over and against Protestant ones.55 Despite the circulation of these Catholic texts, and in addition to a proliferation of other Bible reference aids, over this period Herry’s concordance would become ubiquitous.56 It continued in print for over four decades, seeing some twenty-nine editions.57 Its continuing popularity may be attributed, in part, to its brevity: this made it relatively affordable and suitable to be bound alongside various Bible editions. As an interpretative concordance of things rather than a concordance of words, it was also a flexible resource, able to complement various translations of the Bible including the Bishops’ Bible (so advertised on some title pages from 1584) and the newly Authorized Version from 1611. The popularity of Herry’s concordance may further be attributed to its particular doctrinal emphases (especially its strident anti-Catholicism), which retained their currency throughout the period, at least among certain puritan elements in the church. Moreover, as with its several interpretative predecessors, it offered a sort of middle ground between the ideal of independent lay Bible reading and the fear of improper lay theologizing.

Quotation-based Bible concordances from c. 1622 While we cannot identify a specific moment of change, we now turn to trace the outlines of a shift that began around 1622 with the last edition of Herry’s concordance and the appearance of Clement Cotton’s non-interpretative, quotation-based New Testament concordance.58 As Cotton’s work was a concordance of words rather than of things, and (as yet) encompassed only the New Testament, it is not clear that he intended it as a direct competitor to Herry’s or any other existing interpretative concordance. Nevertheless,

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it appeared just as the priorities of the later Jacobean and (soon) Caroline church began viewing less favourably publications which expressed strident anti-Catholicism or proffered certain Calvinist or puritan doctrines. Several prefatory epistles in Cotton’s New Testament concordance suggested a broad audience and indicated intended use as a memory aid for locating passages partially remembered, or for confirmation of things heard in a sermon. Stephen Denison’s epistle gestured towards a more specific use: to ‘withstand heretics and to confute them’. Yet even this was embedded within a discussion of using the concordance as an aid to memory.59 Interestingly, however, the concordance’s title page made an additional gesture: between mentioning use for memory and featuring two Bible verses echoing that emphasis, it stated that ‘by conferring one place with another he may easily discern the diverse acceptations of one and the same word’. This seems to acknowledge that the resource could potentially support interpretation. Yet this was unacknowledged inside the volume, where the prefatory matter made it clear that memory was the appropriate use for untrained readers. This approach aligned with authorities’ goals for lay Bible reading: ‘rehearsal and internalization of existing knowledge’, as Kate Narveson puts it.60 Here and with his later concordances, Cotton was concerned to ensure that his resources were aligned with church priorities. This would facilitate licensing and publication. While his preface to the New Testament concordance somewhat apologetically explained that he had followed the translation (Geneva) with which he was most familiar, he added an index listing places where the Authorized Version diverged from the Geneva.61 By 1627, with the publication of his Old Testament concordance, he had shifted to the Authorized Version, despite his earlier-stated preference for the Geneva. This perhaps reflected increasing familiarity, but was more likely meant to signal continued conformity.62 Moreover, the prefatory matter in 1627 specified use for the concordance only in aiding memory. The brief gesture towards interpretation that had appeared on the New Testament concordance’s title page was now absent. These resources had not been bound with Bibles, but Cotton soon saw opportunity for an abbreviated concordance for that purpose. It would be based upon his own recently licensed concordances and also profitable, because authorities were tightening restrictions on which resources were allowed to appear with Bibles. Upon a 1628 warrant from William Laud, the master and wardens of the Stationers’ Company had warned binders not to bind any book with the Bible except the Prayer Book, the Psalms, or the genealogies, as specifically permitted by authority. This suggests concern about paratexts fostering divergent views.63 The minister John Downame (among whose publications was a guide for lay Bible reading)64

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proved willing to compile an abbreviated concordance, and by September 1629 Cotton procured a grant for this shorter concordance to be bound with Bibles for twenty-one years. When some bookbinders still did not bind Downame’s concordance with the Bible, Cotton petitioned authorities. Laud’s response specified ‘avoiding of unnecessary additions to the Bible’ and limiting any ‘concordance, table or book whatsoever shalbe hereafter bound with the Bible’ to those, such as Cotton’s, that had been specifically approved. Laud further clarified that no one was to be ‘constrained to buy the said concordance’ alongside the Bible text.65 This is enlightening with regard to the contemporary establishment’s views on lay concordance use, and it provides a benchmark for assessing change over the period. A century earlier, Bishop Gardiner had decried even the existence of an English concordance, in a period in which lay Bible reading was only beginning to proliferate, and there was little precedent for the amount or type of resources that might accompany Bibles. Even under Elizabeth, authorized Bible texts had no concordances bound with them until 1575. Yet early Stuart lay readers had long had ready access to Bibles with concordances, and this was now expected so much that Cotton saw the abbreviated concordance as of critical financial interest.66 Whether he liked it or not, Laud’s situation was not determining whether to allow paratexts but rather determining which ones to permit. The overt anti-Catholic and pro-puritan leanings of existing Protestant interpretative concordances were doctrinally out of step with the priorities of the establishment. Beyond the option of creating a more conformist, Laudian interpretative concordance (an improbable project that I have no evidence of anyone pursuing), the obvious alternative was to sanction a quotation-based resource. Downame’s text, as published in 1630, was just that: a concordance of words without interpretative passages preceded by an introduction that suggested use solely as an aid to memory. Readers could recall passages that came partially to their minds, perhaps in the course of personal meditation, and they could locate texts mentioned in sermons ‘for the confirming of their faith’.67 It was this resource that would supplant Herry’s as the primary concordance bound with Bibles. It would see some twenty-six editions well into the next century.68 Cotton’s next step was a complete concordance of the Bible, which appeared in 1631.69 This sizeable resource probably attracted a limited, mostly clerical, audience, not only due to its size and expense but also because Downame’s resource was already able to meet the needs of average Bible readers. Consequently, Cotton’s prefatory epistles discussed uses beyond the aiding of memory, including the proving of doctrines and the clarification of difficult passages by means of the comparison of parallel texts. But importantly, those more advanced uses were still discussed in a

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context that acknowledged different uses for readers of different training. For those at the ‘lower end’, Daniel Featley’s prefatory epistle primarily encouraged use as an aid to memory, as well as the (just slightly more interpretatively advanced) activities of observing ‘the manifold allegations in the New Testament out of the Old’, which might confirm ‘faith in the harmony of scripture’, and of noting the repetition of doctrines and directions.70 Likewise, when specifically addressing lay readers, William Gouge’s epistle emphasized limited uses including looking up something one remembered or heard ‘briefly quoted by Preachers or others’.71 It is striking that neither epistle expressly fenced more advanced uses from lay readers, perhaps accepting that capable lay readers could do some of this. Nevertheless, there was consistency about proper use (aid to memory) for the widest audience of readers. During this period several additional concordances had been submitted for licensing. Of these, John Clarke’s Holy Oyle saw print in 1630.72 Perhaps making the work especially palatable to authorities, Clarke emphasized a primarily clerical audience, though he mentioned some lay use. The concordance was also, like Cotton’s, quotation-only rather than interpretative. (While most quotation-based concordances indexed words, Clarke’s was unusual in being a concordance of things.)73 But while Cotton’s and Clarke’s resources achieved publication, others did not. Samuel Hartlib noted the development around 1634 of certain other Bible concordances unable to gain licence: one a ‘brave Sentious [Sententious?] Concordance’ and the other a ‘Real Concordance’ (that is, a concordance of ‘things’ and thus likely interpretative).74 These anecdotes are spotty, but, coupled with what we know of Laud’s comments in response to Cotton’s petition, we can make out a picture in which it was possible to have a quotation-based concordance published during the 1630s (with publication prospects maximized if the concordance encouraged limited lay uses), while other types of concordances were not typically licensed. We have one more example to add to this picture. Around 1639, licensers rejected Richard Bernard’s concordance-like reference work, Thesaurus Biblicus. By considering the reasons given for its rejection, alongside its content (as later published in 1644), we can further refine our view of what lay Bible uses would not be countenanced by the Caroline Church. As Bernard would explain in his later preface, the work was intended to teach readers how to use the Bible to: be able to apply the word to thy text, or to a doctrine drawn out of thy text, so be it, that the words of the Doctrine be framed of such words, as are words in the Scripture. This indeed is one of the principal uses of this Book, in which I should here more fully explain myself, but that some who would not license this

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Book heretofore, said, This were to make every man a preacher: and another, that it would mar their Trade. These are enemies to knowledge, and have not the spirit of Moses, to wish that all the Lord’s people could prophesy.75

Previously, Bernard’s Faithfull Shepheard highlighted uses of (non-­vernacular) concordances for sermon-making.76 Here, he apparently envisioned a vernacular extension of this, intending for ‘all the Lord’s people’ to draw out doctrines and make applications. He was, explicitly, looking beyond memory, which, he lamented, was ‘the common and almost only use made of a concordance heretofore’. In contrast, his Thesaurus taught ‘how to make various uses of a concordance, more than to help memory’.77 In contrast to earlier interpretative resources such as Herry’s, the Thesaurus’s doctrinal content was restrained and thus potentially more in line with the current environment in the national church. For example, the Thesaurus contained relatively few mentions of Catholicism, even under headwords that might seem to invite such commentary (for instance, ‘Idolatry’ or ‘Antichrist’), and it was understated regarding contentious issues (e.g. under ‘Sabbath’).78 Thus it is conceivable that the Thesaurus might have been published even under Laud if Bernard had been willing to remove this explanation and/or target his work more explicitly to a clerical audience (a comment by Samuel Hartlib, who heard reports of the work’s fate before the licenser, seems to gesture to this).79 Ultimately, however, Bernard did not find licence for the Thesaurus in the 1630s, but would succeed in 1641, as the Laudian licensing regime broke down and more puritan works saw publication. Yet significantly, even in the finally published version, Bernard’s preface explained, the section describing how to construct uses out of the biblical text was absent. He made some gestures to his intentions but remained unable to ‘fully explain’ himself. Even among those with more puritan-leaning views, and even in the context of the early 1640s, it seems, Bernard’s view of proper lay Bible activities was pushing a boundary.

Concordances and the trajectory of independent lay Bible use This chapter has addressed several aspects of vernacular Bible concordances, highlighting ways that not only content but also structural features of publications were targeted in view of their religio-political circumstances and of goals for readers. These features demonstrate care in addressing – or silently passing by  – key issues, and in encouraging particular types of lay engagement with the biblical text. We have seen that in certain periods interpretative resources were restricted, often in view of doctrinal content running counter to the position of the national church. I have

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suggested that in these situations, non-interpretative (typically quotationbased) concordances were a potential alternative, if they appropriately bounded lay use. It is worth underscoring that non-interpretative did not mean nontheological: on the contrary, non-interpretative concordances made both implicit and explicit suggestions about key issues, including the overall harmony and consistency of the biblical text and the perspicuity of Scripture for lay readers.80 Further, all concordances had to establish in one way or another which translation or translations of the Bible they could accompany, something that authors were sometimes at pains to explain, and something that had clear religio-political significance, not to mention significance in terms of official sanction for distribution. Finally, as we saw, descriptions of uses in concordances’ prefaces made clear statements about the proper types or degrees of independent lay Bible engagement. This was clearly a fraught issue throughout the period. Of course, what authors and authorities intended or feared and how lay readers actually employed concordances were not necessarily identical. It is beyond the scope of this study to survey evidence of what lay people were – or were perceived to be  – actually doing with concordances. I will close, however, with two examples from the 1640s, just later than the period discussed above, in which non-interpretative resources including Cotton’s and Downame’s were in significant circulation. These illustrate the contemporary perception that some readers were in fact using concordances to draw ‘incorrect’ theological conclusions and the further concern that unwitting audiences might be led astray as the result of such misuse. In 1641, Sir Thomas Aston authored a pro-episcopal treatise in which he asserted that an opponent had improperly used a concordance in constructing arguments: ‘to delude the (ignorant or negligent) reader, he stuffs his margin full of texts’, including many which were ‘mere citing of texts out of a concordance where ever he finds the word Elder, quoting it for a Bishop, never observing whether it be for him, or against him’.81 This suggested that readers of the prior treatise could have been misled by the appearance of amassed Bible passages (something made particularly easy by the help of a concordance), instead of being presented with proper textual analysis. Such an idea that wrongful use of a concordance might lead both the concordance user and others astray appeared all the more memorably in a 1647 poem satirizing a woman tub-preacher: She with her Bible and a Concordance, Could Preach nine times a week, morning and night … Deare Brother, said she, if you would be wise,

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I’ll teach you how your gifts to exercise; One Concordance will serve us both to note; Such Scriptures as we’ll easily get by rote.82

This underscored the continuing view that concordances were a clerical resource fit for aiding sermon construction, and that it was possible for lay people – including lay women – to take wrongful advantage of this resource. Nevertheless, despite potential misuse, vernacular Bible concordances had come to stay, and concordances both of words and of things would remain a regular part of lay Bible use in the coming decades and beyond.83

Notes  1 John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1570), 1386–1400; Hyun-ah Kim, Humanism and the Reform of Sacred Music in Early Modern England (Burlington, 2008), 22–6, 48–52. Throughout, I modernize spelling in quotations from primary sources, except when quoting from an edited edition of a manuscript.  2 Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 1394.  3 Ibid., 1390; John Merbecke, preface to A Concorda[n]ce (London, 1550).  4 Merbecke, preface to A Concorda[n]ce.  5 Thomas Wilson, ‘Differences between this Booke, and Mr. William Knights’ in A Christian Dictionarie, n.p.; John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes (London, 1646), 24–5.  6 David Cram, ‘Concordances of Words and Concordances of Things’, in Werner Hüllen (ed.), The World in a List of Words, Lexicographica, Series Maior 58 (Tübingen, 1994).  7 On reference works see e.g. Ann Blair, Too Much to Know (New Haven, 2010); Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 1996); and Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago, 2014). On lay reading see inter alia Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford, 2013), ch.  11; Kate Narveson, Bible Readers and Lay Writers in Early Modern England (Abingdon, 2016); Narveson, ‘“Their practice bringeth little profit”: Clerical Anxieties about Lay Scripture Reading in Early Modern England’ and Jeremy Schildt, ‘“In my private reading of the scriptures”: Protestant Bible-Reading in England, circa 1580–1720’, both in Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Abingdon, 2012); Femke Molekamp, Women and the Bible in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2013), 34–40; Andrew Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge, 2011). On paratexts see inter alia Vivienne Westbrook, Long Travail and Great Paynes (Dordrecht, 2001); Ezra Horbury, ‘The Bible Abbreviated: Summaries in Early Modern English Bibles’, Harvard Theological Review 112 (2019).

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 8 Cameron MacKenzie, The Battle for the Bible in England, 1557–1582 (New York, 2002), most extensively connects several concordances’ content with aims of particular Bible editions: yet comparisons are primarily between entire editions rather than between concordances, and it attends primarily to doctrinal content rather than considering structural features.  9 Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls: Navigating the Bible’, in Jennifer Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer (eds), Books and Readers in Early Modern England (Philadelphia, 2012). 10 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism (Oxford, 2000), 71–9 and ch. 3 (quote 102). See also Susan Hardman Moore, ‘For the Mind’s Eye Only: Puritans, Images and “the golden mines of Scripture”’, Scottish Journal of Theology 59 (2006); David Norton, ‘English Bibles from c. 1520 to c. 1750’, in Euan Cameron (ed.), The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 2016), 341–4. 11 Note that it does not discuss every such concordance published in the period. 12 The Byble (London, 1537); cf. Matthieu Gramelin (Malingre), ‘Indice des principales matieres’ in La Bible (1535); Westbrook, Long Travail, 36–7. On an earlier manuscript concordance see Sherman Kuhn, ‘The Preface to a FifteenthCentury Concordance’, Speculum 43 (1968). On a printed 1535 New Testament concordance released before the first authorized English Bible (but curiously, advertising publication cum privilegio regali) see Peter Blayney, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (Cambridge, 2013), 395, 481. 13 It would also appear with the Taverner Bible (The Most Sacred Bible (London, 1539)); and under Edward with bibles and on its own (see below). 14 The Byble, sig. **. 15 See Westbrook, Long Travail, 44. 16 Note the inconsistent alphabetization. 17 Foxe, Acts and Monuments (1570), 1402. 18 The Byble in Englyshe (1539). 19 Gilbert Burnet, The History of the Reformation of the Church of England, first part (London, 1679), 257; 34 & 35 Henry viii, c.1, The Statutes of the Realm, vol. 3 (London, 1817), 894–7. 20 Merbecke, preface to A Concorda[n]ce. 21 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard (London, 1607), 39. 22 Narveson, ‘Their Practice bringeth little profit’; cf. Green, Print and Protestantism, 101–4. 23 Ian Green emphasizes that several sorts of audiences could all benefit from concordances: Print and Protestantism, 124–6. 24 Merbecke, Concorda[n]ce, sig. a.ii.v. 25 Ibid., sig. a.iii.v. 26 Ibid., sigs a.ii.v – a.iii.v. Alec Ryrie discusses Merbecke’s concordance-making as a method for structuring personal devotion; however, if that purpose were primary, we might expect Merbecke, now viscerally aware of the potential opposition to his work, to return to copying the Bible sequentially (something he had done previously), or to compile the concordance without attempts to publish: cf. Being Protestant, 301–2. See also Merbecke’s comment in his dedicatory epistle

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to A Book of Notes and Common Places (London, 1581) describing his inability to have a concordance published: this may suggest attempts to publish a second or revised edition. 27 [A] Table of [the] Principall Matters (London, 1548?); The Byble (London, 1549). 28 A Briefe and Compendiouse Table, trans. Gwalter Lynne (1550); Carrie Euler, Couriers of the Gospel (Zurich, 2006), 224–5; 113, 123–34, 145–6, 225, 308. There was a 1563 reprint. 29 Lynne, Compendiouse Table, sig. Aiii v. Italics mine. 30 ‘The Table of the Newe Testament’, in The Newe Testament (Geneva, 1557); cf. ‘La table du nouueau Testament’, in Le Nouveau Testament (Geneva, 1551). 31 Epistle to the reader, and preface to ‘Table of the Newe Testament’, both in The Newe Testament. 32 ‘A table of the principal things’, in The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva, 1560); cf. ‘Indice ou table des choses’, in La Bible (1555). On paratexts with this and other editions of the Geneva Bible, see Green, Print and Protestantism, 71–9. 33 Epistle to the reader in Bible and Holy Scriptures. The table of proper names, also translated, was possibly useful for study, but a preface introduced it in the context of naming children. 34 E.g., ‘elect’, ‘works’ in ‘Table of the New Testament’; and ‘justified’, ‘predestinate’ in ‘Table of the principal things’. 35 Narveson, ‘Practice bringeth little profit’, 166–8; see also Green, Print and Protestantism, chs 2–3. 36 E.g., entries for ‘Christ’ gestured against transubstantiation and Purgatory: ‘He was only once offered, and can be offered no more’; ‘only purgatory, propitiation, reconciliation, appointment, ransom, and satisfaction for our sins’ (emphasis mine). Rome was briefly named under ‘Babylon’. 37 MacKenzie, Battle, 146–54. 38 Ibid., ch. 3, 128–36; Maurice Betteridge, ‘The Bitter Notes: The Geneva Bible and Its Annotations’, Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983), 50–3. 39 R.F.H. [Robert Herry], Two Right Profitable and Fruitfull Concordances in The Bible (London, 1580); see Green, Print and Protestantism, 77, 125. 40 Herry, preface to Two Right Profitable. 41 DeWitt Starnes, Robert Estienne’s Influence on Lexicography (Austin, 1963), ch. 3. 42 Stallybrass, ‘Books and Scrolls’, 60. 43 Betteridge, ‘Bitter Notes’, 44–5. 44 MacKenzie, Battle, 132. 45 Herry, preface in Two Right Profitable. 46 MacKenzie, Battle, 132–5. 47 Herry, preface to the reader in Two Right Profitable. 48 MacKenzie, Battle, 128–31. 49 The New Testament (Rheims, 1582).

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50 Walsham, ‘Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible’, Journal of British Studies 42 (2003), 155. 51 Ibid., 153–8; MacKenzie, Battle, 161–6, 184. 52 MacKenzie, Battle, 174–7. 53 Thomas Fulton and Jeremy Specland, ‘The Elizabethan Catholic New Testament and Its Readers’, Journal of Early Modern Chrsitianity 6 (2019), 260–2. 54 Ibid., 265–8; Fulke previously published a different sort of response, delaying work here because he expected Thomas Cartwright’s work (published posthumously, 1618): see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans (Cambridge, 1982), 73–5; Fulke, The Text of the New Testament … (London, 1589). 55 The Holie Bible (Douai, 1609–10). 56 Among comparable aids published in this period see William Knight, A Concordance Axiomaticall (London, 1610); Thomas Wilson, Christian Dictionarie. 57 Green, Print and Protestantism, appendix 1. 58 Green, Print and Protestantism, appendix 1. Cotton, The Christians Concordance (London, 1622). 59 Stephen Denison, ‘To the Christian Reader’, in Cotton, Christians Concordance. 60 Narveson, Lay Writers, 33. 61 Cotton, Christians Concordance, sigs A1r–4v. On Cotton’s and Downame’s concordances see also Green, Print and Protestantism, 124–7. 62 Cotton, A Concordance (London, 1627). 63 William Jackson (ed.), Records of the Court of the Stationers’ Company, vol. 2 (London, 1957), 206. Cf. Matthew Day, ‘Deceit, Self-Interest, and Censorship: Problems at the Bookbinders in Early Modern England’, Papers of the Bibliographical Soceity of America 112 (2018). 64 Downame, A Guide to Godlynesse (London, 1622). This work both encouraged and attempted to properly bound lay reading. It does not directly address concordances, but the overall perspective suggests that Downame (like Featley and Gouge, below) might have countenanced concordance uses beyond memory for certain lay readers: nevertheless, he would have seen use for memory as proper, particularly in view of the very broad intended audience for the concordance. See Narveson, ‘Practice bringeth little profit’, 170–9. 65 Day, ‘Deceit, Self-Interest, and Censorship’, 17–19; NA, SP 16/162, fols 75–7; SP 16/187, fol. 68v; PC 2/40, fol. 426. 66 NA, SP 16/162, fol. 75 (cf. SP 16/315, fol. 66, addressing financial need vis-à-vis a later revision to his complete concordance). 67 John Downame, A Briefe Concordance (London, 1630), sig. *2v. 68 Green, Print and Protestantism, appendix 1. 69 Clement Cotton, A Complete Concordance (London, 1631). 70 Daniel Featley, ‘An advertisement to the Christian reader’, in Cotton, Complete Concordance. 71 William Gouge, ‘To the reader’, in Cotton, Complete Concordance. 72 Clarke, Holy Oyle (London, 1630). 73 Ibid. His preface called it a ‘logical concordance’.

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74 The former was perhaps circulating in manuscript or produced without licence: it might ‘be enquired’ for at a certain shop. Hartlib also mentions other concordances in development, including Bernard’s, and further discusses concordances: Samuel Hartlib Papers, HRI Online Publications (Sheffield), hrionline.ac.uk/ hartlib, 29/2/33A-36A. On ‘real’ see Cram, ‘Concordances of Words’, 87–90. Cram also discusses Hartlib’s records. 75 Richard Bernard, ‘To the Reader’, in Thesaurus Biblicus (London, 1644). 76 Bernard, Faithfull Shepheard, 38–9. 77 Bernard, ‘To the Reader’, in Thesaurus. 78 Amy G. Tan, The Pastor in Print: Genre, Audience, and Religious Change in Early Modern England (Manchester, forthcoming, 2022), 197–200. 79 Samuel Hartlib Papers, 30/4/17A. 80 See John Pendergast, Religion, Allegory, and Literacy in Early Modern England, 1560–1640 (Aldershot, 2006), 54. His reading of certain details of Merbecke’s situation differs from mine. See above. 81 Thomas Aston, ‘To the Reader’, in A Remonstrance, Against Presbitery (London, 1641). On the context for this publication see Richard Cust and Peter Lake, Gentry Culture and the Politics of Religion (Manchester, 2020), chs 6–7; and see Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2000), 156–70. 82 Anon., Tub-Preachers Overturned (London, 1647), 15; see Ann Hughes, Gangraena (Oxford, 2004), 113. 83 Green, Print and Protestantism, 124–9.

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Huntington Library for the opportunity to complete portions of this research during a Summer Seminar, and to Ann Hughes for comments on an earlier version.

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In the company of merchants: Edward Sherburne, the East India Company, and the transformation of Stuart political practices Rupali Mishra In the margins of a 1632 letter from East India Company factors in Gombroon (now Bandar Abbas, Iran) to the Company leadership in London are a series of neat and tiny annotations. Paragraph by paragraph, the annotations index key ideas and topics. One reads ‘Edward Haines [a Company agent in Persia] dangerously sick’; another ‘the custom amount the last year’; and still another ‘gold not in so good request in Persia as in India’. These summative marginalia sit alongside notes that show that the annotator had other information at hand that he used as he processed the letters. Beneath the note about gold in India versus Persia, for example, was a further comment, ‘but I have 3 letters to confirm it’. An annotation at the end observes that the letter was ‘eleven months on the way between Spahan [Isfahan] and Aleppo’. Other annotations showed value judgements not present in the letter. A paragraph about the types of silk sent from Persia, for instance, noted that the Company factors had sent silk from Sherwan rather than the preferred Gilan silk, because only Sherwan silk was available. The annotation summed up the situation: ‘we must be grateful with what they [Persian merchants] will deliver us. Therefore you [the Company] take all manner of trash’.1 Similar annotations  – summative, analytic, and cross-referencing – mark hundreds of other letters in the India Office records. These letters did not arrive in London already annotated. Instead, they were painstakingly read and processed by or at the direction of the Company’s secretary. This was more than rote clerical work. It required a depth of specialized and sensitive knowledge about the East Indies trade. At a time when access to the Company’s trade secrets was strictly guarded, and no one beyond the institution’s elected leaders was supposed to be able freely to consult these letters, the Company’s secretary had greater access than almost all of the hundreds of Company members. The secretary was one of only a few people with long-term access to the documents. The annotations, therefore, represented inside knowledge about the East India Company’s trade that was uniquely entrusted to the Company’s secretary.

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In 1632, that secretary was Edward Sherburne. He was not an obvious candidate for the job. Sherburne was no merchant; he had long pursued a non-mercantile career before he became the Company’s secretary in 1625. His early résumé suggested a moderately successful political trajectory. His background was modest; he was born in 1578 in Oxford, where his father was a groom at Corpus Christi College.2 Sherburne’s education is unknown, but, by 1610, he was serving as a secretary to George Calvert, newly sworn clerk of the Privy Council. Sherburne concurrently took over Calvert’s previous job as one of the earl of Salisbury’s secretaries. In early 1612 he was provisionally appointed Registrar to the Secretary of the Council in the North, although someone else secured the permanent post. His employment after Salisbury’s death in 1612 is unclear (possibly he re-entered Calvert’s employ), but in 1613 he managed to secure the promise of official office in the form of the reversion to the Clerkship of the Ordnance (which he took up in 1635).3 In early 1616, he became Sir Dudley Carleton’s agent in England while Carleton served as ambassador at The Hague. Sherburne managed Carleton’s financial affairs in England and sent him weekly newsletters for two years, leaving that position in 1617 to become a secretary to the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, whom he served until the latter’s impeachment in 1621.4 Had anyone tried to predict Edward Sherburne’s future career in the years before he entered the Company’s service, it would have been a reasonable conjecture that with a bit of luck he might end up as the principal secretary to the Secretary of State, or something similar.5 A position like that required administrative ability and political know-how, as well as personal connections to the men in power in the regime. Sherburne spent the early years of his career working for Salisbury, Calvert, Carleton, and Bacon, stepping into positions of increasing power and responsibility. No one looking at the trajectory of Sherburne’s career would have foreseen that he would wind up working for a mercantile body. How did someone like Sherburne end up employed by the East India Company? And why would the East India Company require a secretary with his background and skills? As historians consider the day-to-day workings of the early modern English state, the significance of secretaries has become increasingly clear. Secretaries, some of Patrick Collinson’s ‘second-rank’ men, played important roles in the functioning of the early modern state. They were often responsible for conducting the ‘hands-on work of government’ on behalf of their more illustrious masters.6 Secretaries in particular had a uniquely ambiguous role, acting both as their employers’ ‘public mouthpiece’ and as keepers of their secrets, privy to the inner workings of their masters’ lives. They were entrusted with sensitive and weighty matters, both public and

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private.7 But these men did more than the bidding of their employers – they also chose which petitions to advance, for example, or how to present a case to get a favourable response (or not). Their influence was widely recognised, as petitioners paid fees and/or bribes to secretaries to secure their efforts.8 Secretaries were the men behind the scenes, and their power, though limited, was real. This active political role of secretaries is often hard to trace, however, as the nature of a secretary’s influence was not of the sort to leave an extensive paper trail.9 The paper trail, where it exists, emphatically points to a different and equally important aspect of secretaries’ responsibilities: their role in managing information. In addition to the face-to-face work they did as representatives of their masters, secretaries collected and interpreted information for their patrons and employers. Information and information management were central to the functioning of the Elizabethan and early Stuart state – the best decision-making and counsel were understood to proceed from the proper interpretation of good information. Indeed, the prevalence of information and the perception that it required correct interpretation shaped popular approaches to politics, forming what Noah Millstone has argued was a historically specific ‘political gaze’.10 Yet, although members of the Elizabethan and early Stuart regimes sought and received increasing amounts of information, the sheer bulk engendered difficulties in management, evaluation, and synthetization. One attempt to deal with the problem of too much information was to systematize the collection and interpretation of information, to more easily identify and mobilize relevant information.11 The secretarial skillset was indispensable to this project. Secretaries, many of whom had extensive formal education or experience, became the specialists who, in part by creating and maintaining archives, managed both physical papers and the information they contained.12 The widening of the political nation to encompass a more varied group of actors, coupled with the centrality of information and information management to the conduct of politics and business in the early seventeenth century, meant that the skills of a secretary like Sherburne became necessary even to corporate bodies like the East India Company.13 Firstly, the Company needed a secretary to manage the growing informational requirements of the East Indies trade. From keeping its records and managing its correspondence to organizing the sensitive information that correspondence contained, the administrative and information management burden on the Company’s secretary was heavy.14 Secondly, as the Company became a political actor in its own right in the early seventeenth century, acting alongside the major office holders of the regime, it required a secretary who could manage that aspect of the business as well. By 1625, when Edward Sherburne was hired, Company leaders had learned that they needed a secretary who was

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competent not just in the management of paperwork and information but also in the navigation of politics. Since the 1610s, Company leaders spent increasing amounts of time consulting with privy councillors and attending the royal court. Company leaders saw themselves as state actors, and their activities abroad as state activities. Members of the regime thought so too. Events in the East Indies, like the fall of Hormuz in 1622 and the legal execution at Amboyna in 1623, increasingly required co-ordinated action between the English state and the Company.15 In other words, by the 1620s, the Company required someone like Sherburne precisely for the political background he had. Company leaders needed him to be able to competently carry out the political negotiations the business entailed. Sherburne’s career with the East India Company reveals the scope and character of the Company’s political activities in the early seventeenth century, and the ways in which both the political and intellectual skills of a good secretary had become necessary to the functioning of a body like the Company. Sherburne’s career with the East India Company also revealed tensions in what he was asked to do. He was hired to navigate the politics of the state for the Company. He also had to navigate the politics of the Company itself, a corporate body divided into a small group of elite elected leaders and a much larger generality, whose divergent expectations of access to the sensitive information in Sherburne’s keeping led to periodic conflict.16 In other words, alongside all other duties, he had to act in two different political arenas that he had to treat as separate: one in which he represented the Company, and one in which he was the servant of an institution sometimes at odds with itself, with those tensions often encompassing Sherburne’s management and control of information. Sherburne serves therefore as an example of how political secretaries adapted to the new semi-public institutions of the early Stuart period, and what happened to the tools of Stuart statecraft when subjected to the requirements of a corporate institution. Sherburne was the East India Company’s first secretary to be skilled in both politicking and information management. The earliest Company secretaries were drawn from the Company’s membership, essentially merchants serving as secretary alongside their other business.17 Their Company duties primarily involved handling matters directly related to the material requirements of the East Indies trade. Yet as the Company’s administrative and political needs increasingly required ongoing and active collaboration with the state, and especially the Privy Council, Company leaders looked to hire someone with different skills. Sherburne’s immediate predecessor, Robert Bacon, had been a political operator and lobbyist, with experience working with Parliament and the Privy Council on behalf of London corporate bodies.18 Bacon’s performance revealed to Company leaders that a greater scope for

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the position of secretary was both possible and useful. In addition to the administrative work of the secretary, he sometimes acted on behalf of the Company, handling sensitive political matters and meeting with members of the regime to represent the Company, in a way earlier Company secretaries had not. When he retired, Company leaders chose Edward Sherburne, consciously selecting a secretary with political experience and connections rather than mercantile experience.19 Edward Sherburne’s own motivations are harder to decipher. The East India Company was a less obvious step to the kind of office suggested by his earlier career. For example, of the eleven secretaries Salisbury employed, Sherburne was the only one to take a position with a mercantile body. All the rest secured official offices across their entire careers.20 The Company had not, to date, seen many employees move from Company service into Crown service. On the other hand, that the East India Company could be used to secure subsequent office with the state was the underlying hope in at least one other high-profile case: Sir Thomas Roe’s embassy to the Mughal Court in 1615–19, where Roe was chosen and paid for by the Company but accredited by James I. Roe hoped that his Company-embassy would help him secure a more traditional embassy or other office upon his return, and arguably it did: by 1625 he was ambassador in Constantinople.21 The kind of work Company leaders wanted their secretary to engage in would keep Sherburne in contact with the men for whom he might later prefer to work and allow him to cultivate ties. It is possible that he made such a calculation in 1625. It is also possible that Edward Sherburne was at loose ends in 1625, and in no position to turn down a respectable and well-paid job that required his specialised skillset. He had five young children. He had remained loyal to Sir Francis Bacon during the latter’s impeachment in 1621, even standing surety for some of Bacon’s debts.22 His employment between Bacon’s fall and the offer from the East India Company is opaque, though he seems to have resumed work for Sir George Calvert, who was then Secretary of State. Calvert resigned and sold his commission in early 1625, however, and Sherburne  – though blameless  – was again in the position of looking for employment after his master released him under less-than-favourable circumstances. The steady salary of £120 offered by the East India Company and the knowledge that work for the Company would keep him in contact with the political world might have looked very enticing in April 1625. Whatever his reasons, Sherburne accepted the Company’s offer. Despite his extensive experience, Sherburne had to prove himself in his new position. Robert Bacon was still handling sensitive Company matters with the Privy Council, and continued to do so for another year and a half.23 Company leaders essentially eased Sherburne into the political

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function of his job, monitoring his competence before turning over more sensitive tasks. The earliest Company work that Edward Sherburne did that brought him into contact with the Privy Council required few specialized skills: he delivered letters and written answers.24 However, the tasks delegated to Sherburne quickly ramped up in both frequency and sensitivity, increasingly requiring his intervention in some way. He was sent to secure letters, to correctly ‘inform’ privy councillors and other officials, and to attend audiences with them. Sherburne was soon regularly dispatched to secure particular outcomes for the Company. In other words, he began to lobby for the corporation.25 Sherburne also increasingly handled elements of Company business by himself. In 1626, for example, he managed much of the Company’s negotiation with the Privy Council and other officials about the reception of Naqd Ali Beg, a Persian ambassador whose cause the Company had taken up. Company leaders sometimes accompanied him to meetings, but not always.26 Over the next two years he handled many of the in-person meetings required between the Company and Naqd Ali Beg’s English ambassadorial rivals (Sir Dodmore Cotton and Sir Robert Sherley, neither of whom the East India Company supported).27 The delegation of the Persia business to Sherburne was not a sign that this matter was uncomplicated. It required complex negotiations  – all three ambassadors involved were difficult in some way – and took Sherburne to a number of privy councillors to secure a range of promises and concessions.28 This was not the only matter delegated to him. From 1627 he also had a prominent role in securing saltpetre and gunpowder, necessary supplies for East Indies voyages.29 When Company leaders decided to petition Parliament in 1628, they relied on Sherburne to act as a Company representative, consulting with privy councillors, customs farmers, and sympathetic members of Parliament about their petition and strategy.30 None of these matters was straightforward or unimportant, and Sherburne was more closely involved than almost any elected Company official. His actions revealed more than a secretary carrying out his employer’s directives; this was a secretary entrusted to act with autonomy to secure the Company’s objectives.31 A different acknowledgement of Sherburne’s ability to influence the Company is represented by the attempts of people to reach Company leaders through him. When Sir Dudley Carleton failed to convince the Company governor of his recommendations for handling Amboyna, he sent for Sherburne to get him to sway Company leaders.32 Others also petitioned Sherburne personally. Edward Misselden, Company agent in Delft, wrote to Sherburne that his recent letters to Company leaders had worryingly gone unanswered. He had ‘forborne to touch that again to the Company’, instead ‘choosing rather to desire that at your [Sherburne’s] hands’ he might

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receive a response. He asked Sherburne to mediate for him with Company leaders.33 Gifts sent from East Indies factors as thanks for ‘favours’ done by Sherburne acknowledged his influence, and one supplicant asked Sherburne to secure him a wage increase, as he ‘doubt[ed] not but your word may prevail’.34 These examples testified to the perceived power of the secretary to forward petitions and encourage particular courses of action. By the 1630s, Company leaders relied on Sherburne to do the kind of tasks they usually entrusted only to each other. Sherburne’s work on the East India Company’s behalf took him far from the Company’s house. He regularly met with the Attorney General, Secretary of State, Lord Treasurer, customs farmers, and other officials of the regime. Sherburne went to talk, explain, request, and negotiate. He would have been one of the most visible representatives of the East India Company at the royal court. He drew up letters and petitions, his compositions serving as the official voice of the Company. Sherburne handled sensitive matters that had been entrusted to him by Company leaders, using his knowledge of Company affairs to guide his actions and relying on his own judgement. The secretaryship, as he developed it, required initiative and agency, which Company leaders allowed him as the benefit to them became clear of a secretary skilled at political negotiation and familiar with the men in power. They also rewarded him with a regular bonus of 100 marks a year in open acknowledgement of the work he did beyond his administrative duties, thanking him, for example, in 1631 ‘for his extraordinary pains for the year past, as well in town as at court in attending the lords and soliciting the Company’s business’, and in 1634 ‘for his extraordinary services in following their business in Court and elsewhere’.35 As their secretary he became their political surrogate, using the tools at his disposal to work on the Company’s behalf, and seeing his own power and influence acknowledged as well. It was not only national politics that Edward Sherburne had to navigate but also the East India Company’s internal politics. The Company was subject to intermittent tension and controversy between members of the generality and the elected leaders, often arising out of issues of access to information and decision-making within the institution. Company leaders greatly restricted the access even of other Company members to almost all information from and about the East Indies. This restriction of access helped construct and maintain the structures of power within the Company  – clearly distinguishing those who governed from those who were  governed  – but was subject to challenge from the excluded. Members of the generality regularly complained about their inability to see letters from the East Indies or even to see the Company’s accounts beyond quarterly disclosures required by Company rules.36 Their exclusion from

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Company records was possible only if the secretary complied with the directives of Company leaders. In light of the restrictions to access that shaped most Company members’ experience, Edward Sherburne occupied an unusual place. He was not required to be a member (nor is there evidence that he ever became one, though other Company officers were). He was not an elected leader of the Company, a group which included the governor, deputy governor, treasurer, and twenty-four committees.37 He received a salary from the Company, while elected leaders did not (they received yearly gratuities). Despite the political work Sherburne did for the Company, he was officially an employee, part of the staff. Yet the nature of his employment meant that he had complete access to Company resources as almost no one else did. He could not be subject to the restrictions that members of the generality were and still do his job, and, indeed, he was supposed to help maintain the restrictions on access that kept information from members of the generality. Additionally, there was every expectation that he would continue in the position of secretary for years, while the same could be said only for a very few of the Company’s elected leaders. The governor, deputy governor, and treasurer were re-elected many times, but Company rules restricted incumbency, requiring that at least six of the twenty-four committees elected each year cycle off.38 What this meant in practice was that Sherburne had greater first-hand knowledge of the workings of the East India Company and its trade secrets than many of the institution’s elected leaders did. He was more of a Company insider than most leaders, and certainly more than most members of the generality. As secretary to the East India Company, Edward Sherburne headed a department usually referred to as the secretary’s office. He managed the labour of several Company employees: the Company remembrancer, John Cappur; Richard Swinglehurst, a servant initially hired by Robert Bacon who now answered to Sherburne; and another he hired later, Hugh Lockett.39 Under Sherburne’s direction these men handled the administration of a large and wealthy corporation, keeping the Company’s court minutes, managing the Company’s correspondence, making copies, and delivering messages.40 Sherburne was, in some ways, re-creating in the Company secretary’s office the division of labour and administrative structure of the larger secretariats that he had been part of, with himself as principal secretary and his servants as either specialized or general secretaries.41 The administrative work of the Company’s secretary was a collaborative effort. The fair copies of the Company’s minutes, for example, exist in several different hands for the period of Sherburne’s secretaryship. The majority of entries are in Swinglehurst’s hand, but some entries are not.42 These fair copies were based on rough notes taken during Company courts;

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unlike the fair copies, the rough copies show words and passages marked out, as well as insertions and clarifications, and were written with more haste and less neatness. Sherburne himself generally drafted the rough notes, but on occasion John Cappur did, presumably when Sherburne was unable to attend.43 Keeping the Company’s court books, therefore, was a shared venture, with sensitive parts of the work directly done by Sherburne, but the more tedious copying labour done by an underling. The one key administrative task Sherburne does not seem to have delegated much was annotating the letters from the East Indies. Where those letters are annotated (and a number were not), they were annotated in his hand, suggesting that the analytical reading of the letters that Sherburne conducted could not be outsourced. This type of intellectual labour was the hallmark of a good secretary. Information – and better yet the right interpretation of that information – was the foundation of good decision-making. But the volume of information most councillors or institutions like the East India Company received meant that identifying informational gold from dross was difficult. The hundreds of pages of correspondence the Company received each year from the East Indies were useful only if the relevant information in them could be identified, verified, and found as needed. Though no English state or commercial practice could match the enviable regularization of information management employed in Italian diplomatic archives – in the form of avvisi, relazioni, sommari, registri, and the like – the drive to make information useable and accessible was widespread.44 That Sherburne would process Company letters to make the information more useable for present and future decision-making was in keeping with his training and experience. Any of his previous masters could have expected him to do similar work with their correspondence. The annotations were tools to regularize and tame the Company’s information streams. That he, rather than a subordinate, would work with Company letters was a mark of his specialized skills and the importance of the work. The letters from the East Indies and the Company’s court minutes represented the most sensitive information the Company possessed.45 With their reports on the status of trade, information on commodities, and assessments of problems and possibilities, these letters were valuable both to Company leaders and to those seeking to challenge Company leaders. Access to them was supposed to be strictly controlled at all times; letters were meant to be opened and read in the Company’s court of committees, with only elected Company leaders (and the secretary) present. Some of the information in the letters might be announced at one of the Company’s general courts, where the entire membership could hear, but the letters were not supposed to be read in full, nor were non-elected Company members meant to be able

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to consult them. Repeated instructions in the court minutes about measures to restrict access and new policies to keep the letters from the hands of the Company’s generality suggest, however, that access to the letters was not always as strictly regulated as Company leaders sometimes wished.46 Indeed, Company information thus resembled all sorts of contemporary privileged information that regularly leaked despite official prohibitions. The proceedings of Parliament, after all, were revealed in notes and diaries that circulated widely, transforming private proceedings into public discourse from the 1620s onwards.47 Despite their value and sensitivity, the East Indies letters, like the minutes and the other documents in the secretary’s keeping (patents, petitions, and  other letters), were working documents. They were annotated and indexed because they were consulted frequently.48 On occasion Sherburne added information to make a document more useable, as when he attached a list of the relevant Company employees to a letter.49 Sherburne was regularly sent to go through old documents to find information on particular topics. Contracts, commissions, past decisions made by Company leaders – all could be and were referenced when needed from documents the secretary held, with Sherburne instructed to ‘search’ them out as necessary.50 They provided the information on which Company leaders based decisions about how to run the trade. They also provided the material to justify decisions made by Company leaders. In early February 1628, for example, Sherburne composed a list of reasons to present at the royal court justifying the relative smallness of the Company’s fleet that year, which the monarch disliked. The reasons were drawn from information presented in letters from the East Indies, past decisions recorded in the court books, and other official documents in the Company’s possession.51 In November 1628, to persuade King Charles to take actions against the Dutch, Company leaders had Sherburne read Charles an ‘extract of their Letters from their factors’ in the East Indies during a royal audience.52 In March 1633, Sherburne worked with Thomas Mun, a Company leader, to frame a petition about the trade in Japan based on letters from the East Indies.53 This type of information management, from finding past information as needed to synthesizing varied information to persuade, to composing a petition to help sway and even counsel a king, was the province of a good secretary. It was the commercial equivalent of, for example, the humanist treatises the earl of Essex’s secretaries produced for him.54 Given the importance of the Company’s written documents and the limitations on their access, it is little surprise that the Company’s letters and court books became sites of contestation about the role of the secretary and the power he wielded over their creation. In 1628, a member of the generality complained that Sherburne had wrongly attributed words and

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sentiments to him, though it emerged that he now disavowed the words rather than disputing that he had said them. To prevent further challenges of the sort, Company leaders instructed Sherburne to leave out ‘unnecessary questions and disputes’ between parties that seemed to arise from ‘spleen’ and restrict the court minutes to decisions and debate related to the business at hand.55 In another instance, a member of the generality challenged the court minutes, asserting that something was ‘not so fully set down as it ought to have been’. Sherburne’s apology made clear the role he played in shaping the official account. He explained that it was ‘impossible for any either by pen or memory to set down all that is answered and replied’, but apologized if he ‘hath omitted anything material’. He would of course correct any mistakes. Sherburne was acknowledging that he edited discussions, choosing the most material aspects to record, and omitting others.56 The court minutes were political documents, and the inclusion and exclusion of material from them represented conscious choices made by Company leaders and Sherburne. Whether Sherburne was being accused of including too much or too little information, his critics spoke from the conviction that he exercised significant control over what did and did not become official Company decisions. The Company had a complex internal political life that Sherburne had to navigate. His actions could and did align him with particular groups, and his alignments were conscious (and political) choices. In July 1627, for example, some members of the generality tried to get a motion entered into the court minutes at the tail end of a meeting, ‘after the court [had] risen’. Their motion – to deny the elected Company leaders any financial gratuities for the year – was controversial, and they were trying to circumvent normal procedure. The reminder and chastisement that ended up in the  minutes was that they should not try to slip in contentious motions at the end, ‘well knowing that the Secretary is not to be directed by any private man out of court’, and that ‘the Secretary [is] by his oath enjoined to draw up the Acts of the Court accordingly’ based on what passed in the sitting of the court and nothing else.57 On the one hand, this incident represents a simple enforcement by Company leaders of normal procedure. On the other hand, this incident reveals the power of the secretary not just to potentially slip a motion into the minutes but to play a role in the contest. That Company leaders knew about the incident could only be due to the fact that Sherburne not only refused to enter the motion but also informed them of what he had been asked to do. He cast his lot with Company leaders.58 For their part, when faced with complaints from Company members about the secretary and restrictions of access to documents, Company leaders protected Sherburne and the secretary’s office. They cast their lot

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with him. This decision further augmented the power of the secretary compared to the general membership. In 1632, for example, Thomas Smethwick, a Company member unhappy with how the East India trade was being run, came to Company leaders with a complaint. It was not the first time he had complained to them. Over the past several years, he had delivered frequent criticisms and suggestions for how the trade might be better managed. Company leaders had restricted his access to Company documents, and he had been disenfranchised at one point for his divisiveness and factious behaviour.59 This time, however, he came to complain about Sherburne. The secretary’s office, he reported, encompassed four men, but only three of them were sworn to confidentiality. The fourth, ‘who is servant to Mr. Sherburne’, ‘hath sight of the Company’s books’ and might freely reveal Company secrets. Instead of provoking increased concern about Swinglehurst, Lockett, or Sherburne’s management of them, Smethwick’s complaints led Company leaders to decide that the problem was members of the generality like Smethwick having too easy access to restricted documents. They emphasized how ‘dangerous it is, that the counting house and secretary’s office should be open to any of the Company to ravel into the accounts, the Company’s letters, and orders of court’.60 Ultimately, after failing to prevent members from consulting the letters and making copies of extracts, in December 1634 Company leaders required Sherburne to post a written notice in the secretary’s office about the restrictions on access, stating that members of the generality would not be allowed to hear the first reading of any letters from the East Indies, but should trust that Company leaders would reveal relevant portions.61 This led to accusations by some Company members that the secretary was being made a servant of Company leaders rather than of the Company as a whole.62 This formulation underscored the perceived alliances and tensions among Company leaders, general members, and the secretary’s office, and the fact that the secretary’s office was allied with Company leaders against the generality. This tripartite struggle encompassed one of the key differences between the Company secretary’s office and the secretariats of officials of the regime. No privy councillors had a generality claiming access as a right to their documents.63 The notionally public records in the Tower of London, or the records of legal institutions like Star Chamber or Chancery, could be consulted by set procedures, usually involving the payment of fees, even if these entities were hardly known for providing easy, timely, or affordable access. Other archives, like the State Papers Office, were not intended to be public.64 In contrast to all of these settings, in the Company Sherburne had to act as a gatekeeper between the Company and the generality, a group which arguably had a claim to access the whole of the documents in Sherburne’s keeping. The Company’s internal politics  – the alliances and

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divisions within the Company summed up by the contest over access to the records of the institution – was a novel situation for Sherburne to navigate, and not one he could emerge unscathed from; someone was always going to be unhappy with his performance when the Company leadership and generality were at odds. The converse of these complaints (which the Company minutes did not dwell on) was that access to letters and court minutes that the notice posted by Sherburne was supposed to prevent only ever took place because the secretary (and his staff) either enabled it or were so delinquent that it took place without his knowledge. The posted notice in that sense was as much about reminding the secretary and his staff as it was aimed at members of the generality. The secretary’s office was a real physical space, likely furnished with cabinets, (locked) boxes, and bags, all used to file papers according to topic or date.65 A posted notice would have been most visible to Sherburne and his clerks. The court minutes highlighted Sherburne’s compliance with the directives of Company leaders, but, reading between the lines, one can see that Sherburne’s navigation of Company politics might well have included allowing his documents to have an occasional unauthorized airing. At times of less tension between Company leaders and members, it is possible that a savvy secretary might be more flexible than a posted notice directed him to be. The official stance of secrecy might not preclude the occasional leak, and, as with Parliament, there may even have been an expectation of porosity unacknowledged by official rules. East India Company leaders had not hired Sherburne specifically to manage politics within the Company; none the less, he had to do so. The Company had a complex and contested internal politics that Sherburne had to accommodate. He managed the most secret information of the Company, in a time and place where access to secrets denoted power. Critics within the Company of the consolidation of power in the hands of the leaders took aim at Sherburne and the secretary’s office as tools at the disposal of those leaders. Yet Sherburne was no mere tool: the documents he controlled and helped create were powerful, and thus he, and the office of secretary, as their keeper and creator were powerful. Company leaders certainly recognized and used the power of the documents in the secretary’s office. To get the most from those documents, however, they had to vest considerable power and trust in the secretary and his office. Edward Sherburne’s career with the East India Company represented the extension of a particular role, and, with it, a particular understanding of the functioning of the political nation, to the economic landscape. By hiring a secretary with political experience and the skillset it entailed, a man who had worked under leading politicians of the realm, Company leaders embraced

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a new understanding of the nature of the East India Company as an actor on the national and international stage. This was part of a wider transformation in the early seventeenth century. England’s growing long-distance trade led to the increasing intertwining of the  business of merchants and the business of state.66 Company leaders thus  openly  employed  the tools and personnel of the political world because the Company had become part of that world. The Company in the early seventeenth century was an institution deeply and regularly involved with affairs of state, whose leaders worked extensively with members of the regime. Sherburne’s career as secretary reveals just how extensively: his political connections and skillset were useable and valuable only because of the Company’s political profile. Had the Company’s circumstances been otherwise, Sherburne’s political experience would have had no outlet.67 As Company secretary, Sherburne turned practices learned elsewhere to the service of a merchant venture. In the form of the secretary’s office, he developed a quasi-secretariat of clerks and servants whose work complemented his own. They developed routines to generate and manage the extensive archives of the East India Company while leaving the most sensitive analytical tasks to Sherburne himself. Understanding developments in paperwork and information management, however, is only part of the story. The position of secretary as he remade it also assumed the labour of a secretary acting autonomously on behalf of the Company beyond the physical confines of the secretary’s office. The Company had hired a political secretary, and Sherburne embraced that role. Sherburne also had to develop tools to deal with aspects of the Company that had no counterpart in his previous experience. It was the organization of the corporate institution that proved most novel. As secretary, Sherburne stood between competing groups, and in particular between the elected leaders and the generality. Tensions within the Company over access to information and decision-making could make him the focus of anger or frustration, since he was the keeper and creator of restricted and powerful documents. He did not automatically belong with any group, however, and that engendered unexpected opportunities for autonomy. That he kept and created the documents opened up choices for him. The decision to include or exclude a discussion, to highlight particular information, to allow or refuse a request to see a restricted letter – these were extensions of the normal powers of a secretary but with new resonances in the contested space of the Company. Edward Sherburne was not just a Company servant but an actor in his own right. He, like all secretaries, knew the power of his position. It was the power to promote particular business, to make sure a particular petition made it to his employers’ eyes. It was the power that came with the

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control of documents and paperwork. Whether he worked for an institution or an official, this kind of power was inherent to the administrative work a secretary did. It is a power that has proved difficult for historians to trace, however, because its exercise was necessarily subtle. Glimmerings of it survive in the appeal of Edward Misselden to Sherburne to keep him apprised, in the private audiences Sherburne had with Carleton that were intended for Company leaders to learn of, and in the questions about what Sherburne chose to include or exclude from the Company’s minutes. Secretaries always shaped the political processes of which they were a part. There was no counterpart to the internal politics of the East India Company in the experience of political secretaries employed by individuals. Yet the East India Company was not an aberration. Institutions like it were transforming the political landscape and the experiences of actors across the political spectrum in the early modern period, widening the political nation and the self-conscious practice of politics. We can see through Sherburne how these semi-public corporate institutions were adapting how they worked as they learned to act politically. The challenges Sherburne faced as the political secretary of a merchant company, moreover, reveal how actors in the political world of the early seventeenth century had to navigate distinct but overlapping political spheres, each with its own structures, concerns, and tensions. The East India Company may have been adopting practices of the state, but in doing so it was not necessarily becoming more like the state – the forms of the political world were far more diverse. Even when institutions like the Company imitated state-like practices, they transformed them into something new and different.

Notes  1 British Library (hereafter BL) IOR E/3/13, no. 1425, fols 182r–v, 183v, 184v.  2 The most detailed account of Edward Sherburne’s life can be found in F.J. Van Beeck, introduction to The Poems and Translations of Sir Edward Sherburne (1616–1702) (Assen, 1961), xvii–xlv. See also Hugh de Quehen, ‘Sir Edward Sherburne’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Sir Edward Sherburne was the son of Edward Sherburne.  3 HMC, Report on the Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, Preserved at Drumlanrig Castle, 2 vols (1897–1903), vol. 1, 91; Alan G.R. Smith, ‘The Secretariats of the Cecils, circa 1580–1612’, English Historical Review 83:328 (1968), 482, 493.  4 Sherburne’s weekly letters to Carleton survive in Jacobean State Papers.  5 His career trajectory resembled that of numerous clerks of the Privy Council. See Jacqueline D. Vaughn, ‘Secretaries, Statesmen and Spies: the Clerks of the

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Tudor Privy Council, c. 1540–c. 1603’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2007).  6 Patrick Collinson, ‘Servants and Citizens: Robert Beale and Other Elizabethans’, Historical Research 79:206 (2006), 496–7. By ‘second-rank’, Collinson meant public men below the rank of privy councillor.  7 Paul Hammer, ‘The Uses of Scholarship: the Secretariat of Robert Devereaux, Second Earl of Essex, c. 1585–1601’, English Historical Review 109:430 (1994), 26. See also Arnold Hunt, ‘The Early Modern Secretary and the Early Modern Archive’, in Kate Peters, Alexandra Walsham, and Liesbeth Corens (eds), Archives and Information in the Early Modern World (Oxford, 2018), 109–13.  8 Jennifer Bishop, ‘The Clerk’s Tale: Civic Writing in Sixteenth-Century London’, Past and Present, 230: issue supplement 11 (2016), 118–20; Smith, ‘Secretariats of the Cecils’, 486–90; Alan G.R. Smith, Servant of the Cecils: The Life of Sir Michael Hickes, 1543–1612 (Totowa, 1977), 51–80.  9 One exception is Robert Beale, who left an extensive archive documenting his activities, including while he was a clerk of the Privy Council. See Collinson, ‘Servants and Citizens’, 488–511; Mark Taviner, ‘Robert Beale and the Elizabethan Polity’ (PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 2000). 10 Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, Past and Present 233 (2014), 77–9, 82–4; Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2016). 11 Nicholas Popper, ‘An Information State for Elizabethan England’, Journal of Modern History 90 (2018), 503–35. 12 Hunt, ‘Early Modern Secretary’, 116–26. 13 On the expansion of the political nation see, e.g., Alastair Bellany, ‘The Embarrassment of Libels: Perceptions and Representations of Verse Libelling in Early Stuart England’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), 144–67; Peter Lake, ‘The Politics of “Popularity” and the Public Sphere: the “Monarchical Republic” of Elizabeth I Defends Itself’, in Lake and Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere, 59–94; Millstone, Manuscript Circulation. See Ian Archer, ‘The London Lobbies in the Later Sixteenth Century’, Historical Journal 31:1 (1988), 17–44, for the complex political manoeuvring of the London livery companies. 14 Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago, 2007), 1–66, reveals the sophisticated uses of manuscript technology in the East India Company’s early trading ventures, but it does not examine the administrative paperwork created and maintained by the secretary. 15 See Rupali Mishra, A Business of State: Commerce, Politics, and the Birth of the East India Company (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 7–11. 16 The semi-public corporate institutions of the early Stuart period provide unparalleled test cases for the functioning of the politics of publicity and the nascent public sphere. See Mishra, Business of State, 35–60, 102–16; Anthony Milton,

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‘Marketing a Massacre: Amboyna, the East India Company and the Public Sphere in Early Stuart England’, in Lake and Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere, 168–90; Phil Withington, ‘Public Discourse, Corporate Citizenship, and State Formation in Early Modern England’, American Historical Review 112:4 (2007), 1018. 17 This would have been a familiar method of managing the administrative requirements of a corporate body; clerks of London livery companies were usually themselves free of the company and regularly held such positions alongside other work. For example, see Bishop, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, 121–2. 18 For Bacon’s biography, see his entry in Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris (eds), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1604–1629 (Cambridge, 2010). 19 Company leaders chose Sherburne over two candidates with mercantile experience, BL IOR B/9, 13 and 14 April 1625. 20 Smith, ‘Secretariats of the Cecils’, 503–4. 21 See Rupali Mishra, ‘Diplomacy at the Edge: Split Interests in the Roe Embassy to the Mughal Court’, Journal of British Studies 53:1 (2014), 1–24. 22 Sherburne never recovered the money, though he (unsuccessfully) petitioned the Privy Council for relief. J.R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council, new ser. (46 vols, London, 1890–1964), vol. 39, 232. 23 BL IOR B/9, 13 and 14 April 1625. 24 See for example BL IOR B/10, 29 July and 4 October 1625; 16 January 1626. 25 BL IOR B/10, 10 and 17 February, and 5 April 1626. 26 For example, BL IOR B/10, 15, 20, 24, 28 March, and 5 April 1626; BL IOR B/11, 31 January 1627 all involved Sherburne handling matters with members of the regime related to the Persian ambassador. 27 See for example BL IOR B/11, 14, 23, and 26 February 1627. 28 See for example, BL IOR B/10, 15, 20, 24, 28 March, and 5 April 1626; BL IOR B/11, 31 January 1627. See also BL IOR B/11, 14, 23, and 26 February 1627. 29 Delegating saltpetre and gunpowder supplies to Sherburne may have been an attempt to make use of Sherburne’s connections, given he held the reversion of the clerkship of the Ordnance. See for example BL IOR B/12, 31 October and 16 November 1627; BL IOR B/14, 22 November 1630. 30 BL IOR B/12, 21 April 1628. 31 These accounts of Sherburne’s activities come from documents he produced himself (see below). This fact only serves to underline the extent to which he perceived the need to document his competence for Company leadership. The inclusion of multiple notes on Sherburne’s activities over time suggests both that the Company leadership agreed with his characterizations, as the minutes were always read and approved in subsequent meetings before becoming official, and that they were sufficiently important to merit referenceable records of them. 32 BL IOR B/13, 1 August 1628. 33 TNA CO 77/3/74, fol. 194r. Reference to another letter requesting Sherburne to arrange a meeting can be found in BL IOR B/15, 18 January 1633. 34 TNA CO 77/4/89, fol. 174r; TNA CO 77/4/79.

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35 BL IOR B/14, 1 July 1631; BL IOR B/16, 21 May 1634. 36 Mishra, Business of State, 46–52. 37 As a Company officer, he was elected yearly, but officer elections were held separately from general elections, and only Company leaders voted. In contrast, Company leaders were elected by the full generality. We have limited knowledge of Company membership, as the roll books have not survived. Sherburne was not sworn a member in any of the years with surviving court minutes. It is possible he became a member in a year for which records have not survived, but I have not found any note after his death of what became of his adventure, which should have happened if he was a member. 38 Mishra, Business of State, 42. 39 Swinglehurst was paid directly by Bacon and then Sherburne for years, finally becoming a Company employee in 1627; BL IOR B/12, 22 October 1627. Lockett was Sherburne’s own, and not a Company, employee. 40 The institutional records  – the court minutes  – kept by the Company’s office had no counterpart in the records kept by secretaries of individual officeholders. The closest counterparts outside of other corporations were the Privy Council registers and Parliament journals, though each differed in scope and purpose from the Company minutes in key ways. Sabrina Baron, ‘“The Board did think fit and order”: Structure and Function of the Privy Council of Charles I, c. 1625–41’ (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1995), 192–213; Elizabeth Read Foster, ‘The Painful Labour of Mr. Elsyng’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society new ser., 62 (1972), 8–9, 11. 41 Cappur, for example, seems to have specialized in legal matters, while Swinglehurst and Lockett functioned in a general capacity. 42 BL IOR B/10 for example is in Swinglehurst’s handwriting. This very neat and tidy hand is similar to Sherburne’s hand, but differs in a few letter forms. The entry for 20 January 1636 makes clear that Swinglehurst was generally responsible for the fair copy of the minutes. In the parlance of the minutes, he was responsible for ‘registering’ the courts. BL IOR B/18, 20 January 1636. For an entry in Sherburne’s hand, see BL IOR B/12, 10 June 1628. 43 BL IOR B/248, rough notes from 11 May 1625. The handwriting on this entry matches the handwriting on Sherburne’s signed letters to Carleton. BL IOR B/248, rough notes from 29 July 1625, are in John Cappur’s handwriting. The ‘a’ letter form in his hand is visibly different from the ‘a’ letter form Sherburne used. 44 Filippo de Vivo, ‘Archival Intelligence: Diplomatic Correspondence, Information Overload, and Information Management in Italy, 1450–1650’, in Peters, Walsham, and Corens (eds), Archives and Information, 54, 59, 69–73. 45 Also in this category were the account books, which were not the secretary’s responsibility, and were housed in the counting house. 46 See Mishra, Business of State, 51–2, 86–8. 47 Chris Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 2012), 60–83.

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48 Contrast this working archive with the ceremonial keeping of town charters in specialized cabinets detailed by Randolph Head, ‘Knowing like a State: the Transformation of Political Knowledge in Swiss Archives, 1450–1770’, Journal of Modern History 75:4 (2003), 745–82. 49 BL IOR E/3/13, no. 1426. 50 See for example BL IOR B/16, 6 September 1633; BL IOR B/17, 24 December 1634 and 29 April 1635. 51 BL IOR B/12, 1 February 1628; TNA CO 77/4/43. 52 BL IOR B/13, 26 November 1628. 53 BL IOR B/15, 16 March 1633. 54 Hammer, ‘Uses of Scholarship’, 37–8, 47–9; Popper, ‘Information State’, 527–30. Similar works were produced for other patrons: Millstone, ‘Seeing like a Statesman’, 100–5. 55 BL IOR B/12, 10 June 1628. 56 BL IOR B/17, 8 May 1635. 57 BL IOR B/12, 20 July 1627. 58 That a corporation’s secretary or clerk could be drawn into power struggles within the corporation is incontrovertible. That the secretary or clerk could take sides is also clear. For example, see Bishop, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, 114–20. 59 Mishra, Business of State, 258. 60 BL IOR B/15, 28 November 1632. A similar discussion took place on 17 April 1633 (BL IOR B/15). 61 BL IOR B/17, 24 December 1634. 62 BL IOR B/17, 6 February 1635. 63 There were comparable cases of disputes between the leadership and the general membership in some livery companies, though (if existing documentation serves as an accurate guide) less so in other overseas companies. Company archives have not survived for most overseas companies, and, where they do, they are much less detailed than the East India Company’s archives. On disputes in livery companies, see Ian Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge, 1989), 101–4; Janelle Jenstad, ‘Public Glory, Private Gilt: the Goldsmiths’ Company and the Spectacle of Punishment’, in Anne Goldgar and Robert I. Frost (eds), Institutional Culture in Early Modern Society, 207–10; Joseph P. Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford, 1997), 92–7. 64 Foster, ‘Painful Labour of Mr. Elsyng’, 7; Kate Peters, ‘“Friction in the archives”: Access and the Politics of Record-Keeping in Revolutionary England’, in Peters, Walsham, and Corens (eds), Archives and Information, 152, 158–65. 65 See James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2012), 222–5; Hunt, ‘Early Modern Secretary’, 116–26; Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass, ‘The Material Culture of Record-Keeping n Early Modern England’, in Peters, Walsham, and Corens (eds), Archives and Information, 179–208. 66 For those studying later periods, this overlapping of politics and economics means that the paperwork of institutions like the Board of Trade is a key

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source for understanding the development of imperial policy: Asheesh Siddique, ‘Governance through Documents: the Board of Trade, Its Archive, and the Imperial Constitution of the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World’, Journal of British Studies 59:2 (2020), 264–90; Siddique, ‘The Archival Epistemology of Political Economy in the Early Modern British Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly 77:4 (2020), 641–74. 67 Indeed, when Sherburne died in 1641, the Company’s political situation had already changed. The 1630s saw growing mistrust between the Company and the monarch, and the waning of the Company’s clout. Richard Swinglehurst, whom Company leaders picked as Sherburne’s successor, had none of Sherburne’s pre-Company political career. He had, however, almost twenty years’ experience in the secretary’s office, mostly under Sherburne’s direct tutelage. He had already assumed some of the work outside the Company that Sherburne typically did, and followed Sherburne’s pattern as secretary: managing paperwork as well as acting alongside Company leaders. One can view Swinglehurst’s election in two lights: that his choice represented a decision by Company leaders that, in response to increasing political uncertainty, stability was more important than the limited gain a new face might offer; or that Sherburne had trained a first-rate successor. See Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, Calendar of the Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1640–1643 (Oxford, 1909), 219; Smith, ‘Secretariat of the Cecils’, 483–4.

4 Consensual conflict in the early Stuart House of Commons Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

William J. Bulman

In the 1980s and 1990s, as they sought to move beyond the dialectics of Marxism, Whiggery and revisionism in early Stuart historiography, the historians now known as post-revisionists often pointed out that the great debate over whether early Stuart English politics was fundamentally consensual or conflicted was based upon a false dilemma.1 On an ideological level, realms of consensus could easily accompany delimited areas of conflict. Moreover, many consensual strands of English political discourse were evidence of rhetoric, not norms. More concretely, shared values did not necessarily lead to agreement on how those values were to be realized. Consensus might be an aspiration but not a reality. Finally and rather paradoxically, as Ann Hughes and Richard Cust put it, ‘although consensus was stressed as an ideal, many felt it was an ideal which could only be achieved through vigilance, struggle and sometimes conflict’.2 While everyone likes peace, peace might require war. For all the efforts of post-revisionists to conceive of the co-existence of consensus and conflict, however, the title of the closest thing to a postrevisionist manifesto  – Conflict in Early Stuart England (1989)  – was telling. Because they mostly engaged with the scholarship of the revisionists and paid relatively little attention to the excesses of Whig, Marxian, and Weberian historians, post-revisionists were led to focus their energies on describing the nature and underpinnings of conflict, even if this was not the modernizing sort of conflict their predecessors had seen. As a result the postrevisionists tended to reproduce, albeit in altered form, the ‘conflict versus consensus’ dialectic of the previous generation of scholarship. The post-revisionists primarily documented conflict by paying close attention to what Cust and Hughes called ‘perceptions of politics’.3 This was a reaction against what they saw as a series of revisionist sins (themselves reactions to defects in earlier historiography): the arbitrary rejection of print sources in favour of supposedly more reliable archival or manuscript materials, an undue focus on ‘the mechanics and practical functioning of the political system’, and a misleading tendency, when attention was paid

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to political perceptions, to ‘reject some perceptions and take others at face value’, in effect dividing the world of perception into truth and untruth, reality and unreality.4 The post-revisionist turn to perceptions was part of a broader ‘cultural turn’ in the historical discipline as a whole, one in which a few revisionists, most notably Kevin Sharpe, joined the post-revisionists, albeit to different ends, in submitting that the ‘line between the real and the represented’ had been overdrawn in the field and more generally in the discipline.5 With great effect, post-revisionists turned back to printed and other polemical materials in order to demonstrate both the widespread perception in the later Elizabethan and early Stuart periods that the political scene was one of conflict and the existence of contradictory political and religious ideologies.6 By contrasting ‘perceptions of politics’ with the ‘practical functioning of the political system’, however, Hughes and Cust implicitly retained the dichotomy between practice and perception favoured by revisionists while reversing the harsher revisionist judgments on the relevance of perception for historians. In order to move beyond this dichotomy and the persistent dialectic of consensus and conflict to which it has been wedded, the present chapter returns to the topic of political practice, and, in particular, to the way in which the English House of Commons deliberated and made decisions. An apparently simple, factual argument about parliamentary practice has survived largely unscathed as a core element of revisionism since its earliest moments. In the late 1970s, in order to establish the consensual nature of parliamentary politics well into the 1640s, Conrad Russell and Mark Kishlansky asserted that debate on motions in the House of Commons was ‘meant to convince, not to conquer’.7 Accordingly, since members of the House valued consensus so deeply, they would end debate and put the question only once a consensus had been reached. The main piece of evidence Russell and Kishlansky furnished for this was  the fact that the early Stuart House of Commons was hardly ever so divided on an issue when debate ended that the matter could be resolved only by an enumerated majority vote (appropriately known in the English parliamentary lexicon as a division). When something was put to the question in the House, the first step was a voice vote. Only if the verdict of the voice vote was unclear or disputed did the House proceed to count the votes on each side with recourse to the division procedure. In this procedure, members on one side of the question would process out of the House chamber. Those remaining would be counted, and then those who had left the chamber would be counted as they returned. In their most compelling assertion about the consensual nature of the parliamentary process, Kishlansky and Russell simply pointed out that the division procedure was hardly ever necessary. At the moment of final decision, the House apparently

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almost always reached a consensus. This chapter revisits this specific but profoundly important aspect of what Hughes and Cust called ‘the practical functioning of the political system’ in early Stuart England. By doing so it provides a particularly salient example of how a re-conceptualization of practice and its history allows scholars to move past some of the persistent dialectics and dichotomies in Stuart historiography of all stripes and open up important new lines of inquiry.8 It is necessary to begin, however, by noting that the revisionist account of the realm of political practice as a consensual space is vulnerable to fundamental criticism even in the absence of such a re-conceptualization. Post-revisionists mostly seized on this vulnerability in the new millennium. They pointed out that the obvious willingness of contemporaries to pen and print adversarial accounts of the political process and competing accounts of the practical implications of shared values was in itself evidence of an adversarial environment of political practice. This treatment of the same documents used to describe political perceptions as evidence of political speech acts prompted a wave of scholarship on public politics that thoroughly undermined revisionist arguments about the nature of ‘the political system’ or process.9 As the Introduction to this volume explains, any move towards treating political practice as a primary focal point for scholarship on Stuart politics must be viewed as in many respects a direct continuation of the past twenty years of post-revisionism. At the same time, however, the emphasis on public politics in recent scholarship has arguably left the core of the revisionist argument about (and conceptualization of) political practice largely intact and uninterrogated. Post-revisionism in general and the historiography of public politics in particular were partly the result of a decision by many scholars to follow Russell’s own recommendation to no longer treat Parliament (or the court) as the focal point of the political process and to turn attention to what occurred outside of it and when it was not sitting.10 One side effect of this move, however, was that it left a central plank of revisionism in place. With respect to ideology, perception, and major events, post-revisionists have amply demonstrated the often gravely conflictual nature of parliamentary politics from this period.11 But the core of the revisionist case was arguably not about these aspects of Parliament, but rather about its ‘mechanics and practical functioning’. Kishlansky and Russell seemed quite aware of the existence of ideological conflict within Parliament in the later 1620s.12 But they still insisted that the House of Commons remained a fundamentally consensual body. One post-revisionist historian, Markku Peltonen, has already recognized this and returned to the revisionists’ claims about the nature of parliamentary interaction and decision-making. In classic post-revisionist fashion,

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Peltonen begins by paying close attention to contemporaries’ ‘theory of practice’: he documents the ways in which young men destined for service in the Commons were trained in grammar schools to see Parliament, and parliamentary speech-making in particular, as deeply adversarial undertakings. Peltonen then goes on the show this theory in practice by providing a rhetorical analysis of actual parliamentary speeches.13 Peltonen certainly provides considerable evidence that formal speeches in the House of Commons featured adversarial forms of rhetoric. But in the end this argument, like other post-revisionist arguments, does not quite meet the revisionist thesis head-on. First, on the most superficial level, as Peltonen admits, there is also evidence of consensual rhetoric being used in Parliament. More importantly, most deliberation in the House of Commons was conducted not on the model of rhetoric, but on the model of logic, and perhaps even hybrid, informal models particular to Parliament itself, as Chris Kyle has suggested.14 Even more importantly, the goal of adversary rhetoric, like all forms of rhetoric, was to persuade. If successful, one might argue, this apparently adversary style of politics was itself a means for the production of consensus through the elimination of disagreement.15 In rather different way, once again, war made peace. The observation that adversarial speech, however prevalent, was nevertheless prior to the events that made any given decision by the Commons consensual or conflictual leads us back to the most important way in which the revisionist position still retains some traction. As we will see below, Russell and Kishlansky were absolutely right to assert that very few divisions were held in the early Stuart period, even if they never thoroughly documented this claim. This chapter clarifies the fundamentally consensual nature of decisionmaking in the early Stuart Commons with recourse to a unique database of all decisions made by this body over the course of the period, drawn primarily from the journal of the House. It then uses diaries and other manuscript materials to explain the informal institution – a pattern of status interaction  – that made consensual decision-making possible even under conditions of ideological conflict. In other words, it describes a consensual politics – not the one envisaged by revisionists, but one understood instead in terms of the prosecution of political conflict with recourse to fundamentally consensual practices of decision-making. It therefore exposes a history of political practices in early modern Britain that was simultaneously independent of and intimately connected to the ideological and constitutional histories that have long dominated the historiography. The basis of consensual Commons decision-making in the conflict-ridden realm of early modern status interaction clarifies the necessity of understanding patterned political action in a manner that seamlessly merges ‘perceptions of politics’ with ‘mechanics and practical functioning’.



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The record of consensus and a hypothesis regarding status In order to describe the consensual decision-making of the early modern House of Commons, it is first necessary to make clear what is meant here by any reference to consensual or conflict-oriented, adversarial, or majoritarian decisions. On a formal level, the putting of the question was always a majoritarian procedure. Both voice votes and divisions measured which answer to the question was predominant, whether because its proponents were louder or because they were more numerous. But such a formal means of measurement is uninformative. As a number of social scientists have recently emphasized, formal rules of conduct are not equivalent to the institutional realities they may or may not support. Formal rules, procedures, and organizations that are dismissed or ignored have little significance. In the House of Commons, for instance, the question is not whether House rules allowed enumerated majority voting, but whether the House consistently had recourse to this practice. Accordingly, this chapter understands institutions as arrays of elements – among them rules, beliefs, organizations, and norms – that consistently make possible and motivate a particular form of social exchange. Put differently, an institution is a system of social entities that jointly give rise to patterned practices like consensual and majority voting.16 Commons votes were crucial social exchanges enabled by a formal organization, a set of procedural rules, a set of beliefs about possible outcomes and member behavior, and a set of internalized norms. With these considerations in mind, our first task is to determine the nature and patterning of decisions made in the House. ‘Consensus’ decisions are best understood not restrictively as moments of unanimity or a lack of opposition, but somewhat more broadly, as overwhelming expressions of collective preference. In a consensual Commons, then, we would expect lopsided votes to be common and close votes – which would normally lead to divisions – to be rare. A majoritarian Commons, by contrast, would be one in which close and usually enumerated votes were so common that they indicated no reluctance on the part of members to push for a vote when victory seemed probable. This, of course, would not mean that most decisions were made with recourse to divisions. Close votes are still unusual today in the most obviously majoritarian legislatures. The most informative way to assess the nature of decision-making in the early Stuart Commons in keeping with these definitions is to compute the frequency of divisions over the course of the period. These data make abundantly clear that the Commons was a thoroughly consensual d ­ ecision-making body, as it had been since the early sixteenth century, when divisions probably first became a procedural option. Division data for the House become

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nearly complete only beginning in 1614. From that point onwards we can use the frequency of divisions as a proportion of questions put to the House over a given period of time as an index of consensual decision-making. The results of such a computation are overwhelmingly conclusive. Between 1614 and 1640, only 2.6 per cent of voice votes were followed by divisions. The frequency increases to only 3.4 per cent when 1641 and 1642 are included in the figure. It is hard to imagine a stronger indication that the House of Commons was a firmly consensual body, on the level of decision-making, right up to the outbreak of the Civil War. Even more interesting, perhaps, are the apparent underpinnings of this institution. It is abundantly clear, as post-revisionists have argued, that the House of Commons dealt with extremely divisive issues throughout the early Stuart period. So how were divisions and close votes avoided, and why? Even in situations of disagreement on politically important matters, members were willing and able to avoid putting the question until the question could be answered by means of an acclamation and without hazarding a division. It is therefore no contradiction to say that the House regularly managed to achieve consensus under conditions of conflict – the opposite paradox to the one originally offered by Hughes and Cust. While it was certainly common for one side to give way, or for the question to be avoided entirely, debate was the main vehicle of consensus formation when disagreement was present.17 Members assumed that conversion, compromise, or yielding were the possible outcomes of prolonged debate, and they were almost always proved right.18 Aside from persisting in debate both in the House proper and in committees of the whole, the Commons also had other ways of avoiding divisions. These included the entrusting of a matter to a select committee or the initiation of a conference with the Lords or the monarch.19 Finally, the House’s strong preference for consensus decisions was not only evident in its record of success and the multiple tactics it employed to avoid divisions. Members’ reactions to attempts to jettison traditional practice were also telling. When, on occasion, a member tried to force a question to be put, he was confronted by others who were ‘wary of putting this to the question’ when ‘the sense of the House’ was still unclear, and who were ready to employ consensual tactics against him.20 More difficult than establishing how consensus decisions were achieved is understanding why. After all, if the presumed majority in a given situation is simply aiming to secure its preferred result, it should have no hesitation in forcing a vote as soon as its majority status was discernible. It is also unclear why minorities would not force a division instead of capitulating, when a division offered a means of registering their opposition to the motion and probing any uncertainty they had about the balance of opinion. It is hard to avoid the impression that members were for some reason intrinsically

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inclined towards consensual decisions, even when an acclamation merely covered up an underlying conflict.21 Yet simply referring to the contemporary articulation of consensual norms that were consistent with observed behaviour – the explanatory method of Kishlansky and many other revisionists (and some p ­ ost-revisionists), especially in the thick of the cultural turn – is insufficient for demonstrating that a norm was in fact operative for political actors. Cultural analysis cannot simply be welded on to the record of action. Contemporary norms certainly provide the grounds for hypotheses about motivations, but taken in isolation they cannot confirm those hypotheses. Members certainly registered their strong distaste for hazarding close voice votes (and risking divisions), and they regularly pleaded with the membership to avoid prematurely putting the question on politically important decisions. Supply debates, in which consensus was of even greater significance than normal but conflict was commonly present, were frequent settings for such interventions.22 In one such debate in 1628, for instance, Sir John Coke bluntly reminded the House that it ought not to put the question when a division was likely.23 Yet however strong the aversion to divisions was, it was a conditional aversion: in the pre-Civil War period, politically significant divisions did occur on occasion. What sort of opposition to divisions would prevent them in nearly all cases but make them possible in others? This is a case in which a more robust conception of practices and institutions is indispensable. Here, I want to argue, contemporary invocations of the importance of status considerations – in particular, notions of honour and privilege  – are the crucial discursive clues, but only the beginning of an adequate explanation. It is a commonplace to note that early modern elites were status-obsessed, and status considerations have been a topic of considerable interest to both revisionists and post-revisionists. Honour, in particular, was central to the way in which these elites conceived of and sought power and brought order to the societies in which they lived.24 The operation of honour considerations in the House of Commons is not particularly well understood; it is best grasped by studying its invocation in particular instances and contexts. But the contextual study of honour in the Commons yields results very similar in content to more general discussions of honour from the period and in modern historiography. On the eve of the outbreak of the Civil War, Thomas Hobbes submitted a characteristically concise definition of honour: it was, he wrote, ‘nothing else but an opinion of another’s power joined with goodness’.25 Honour was the acknowledgement of a person’s (and by extension, a collectivity’s) power and morality. Honourable things and actions were those that provoked such acknowledgement; dishonourable things and actions did the opposite. Similarly, Mervyn James linked early modern honour to

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‘competitive assertiveness’, ‘pre-eminence’, and ‘consistency in standing by a position once taken up’, all of which had by the early Stuart period been rendered consistent with both Christian ethics and the demands of the state. This meant that honour was strongly associated with upright public conduct in addition to violence and aggression, and increasingly prized by the gentry as well as the nobility.26 As a result, it should come as no surprise that these understandings of honour played an important role in the work of ‘the honourable House of Commons’, as it was called at the time. Privilege operated in Parliament as a more precisely defined but closely related notion. Members of the House requested freedom from arrest and freedom of speech from the monarch at the beginning of each session. Free speech made it possible to act for the common good without hindrance, and freedom from arrest made it possible for members to avoid retaliation or purging in response to their conduct in the House. More generally, privilege protected against any threat to the power or continued existence of a sitting Parliament. A variety of invocations of privilege in the period fit with this general conception. In essence, every member needed protection from anything that might prevent him from engaging independently in the parliamentary process. It is not hard to see how privilege, like honour, was a matter of status, and closely linked to parliamentary honour through its connection to parliamentary and monarchical power. The House of Commons expected as a matter of privilege that taxes were levied with the consent of Parliament and that subsidy bills originated in the lower house. Members quickly identified even public appeals that sought to undermine parliamentary power as threats to privilege. By 1642, after both James I and Charles I had signalled that parliamentary privilege was not an automatic possession but a free grant from the king, privilege had become synonymous with both Houses’ precarious control over their own proceedings.27 Nowhere was the link between honour and privilege clearer than in struggles over supply, which were ordinarily among the most politically important episodes in each parliamentary session. In order for the Commons to reach a consensus on such measures, free speech and a recognition of parliamentary control over taxation were crucial. By implication, consent to taxation was an honourable act, because it confirmed the power of Parliament in this arena while also signifying the unity and power of both the nation represented in Parliament and the king in Parliament. Consensual or unanimous votes in favour of supply maximized the honour accrued in these situations. In contrast, minority votes against a supply measure could result in dishonour because they signified incomplete control of the nation over taxation (since representatives of some local populations were overruled) and spotty support for national military operations.

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A series of episodes throughout the period demonstrate this reality. In 1614, as supply was being debated, Sir Edwin Sandys cited a division on supply from 1606 with a vote margin of one. As in 1606, Sandys commented, if the king ‘should now gain diverse subsidies with so many negative voices’, the vote would be ‘not honourable’. The preferred outcome, as William Hakewill noted after hearing Sandys, was ‘that the honourable persons about the chair may, as voluntarily of themselves, inform the King that generally all that have spoken (which are many) have, una voce, agreed in their thoughts and speeches to relieve his Majesty’.28 Consensual decisions were honourable decisions. In 1625, when supply was again being debated, a member noted that whenever ‘the disputes against supply are greater in number, and weightier in reason’, the House tended not ‘to rush so far as to a question, till it be seen to be granted; for as it will be a dishonour to the King if it be denied, so to pass with difficulty by numbering our voices will take away the merit from us’. In other words, win or lose, hazarding a division hazarded dishonour; only the object of the dishonour would be in question. Another member concurred, noting that he ‘would not have the matter decided by question’. Why? ‘For whether carry it or lose shall reap dishonour’.29 The Commons avoided risking divisions on politically significant motions primarily because they threatened its status.

An institution revealed by its failures Direct invocations of the way in which concerns about status motivated the production of consensus decisions in the Commons are understandably rare in situations where this institution was operating normally. Since the norms driving this institution were broadly shared, members would be likely to invoke them only when concerned that they were being violated. As a result, members most clearly spoke of the role of status in their decision-making when the institution of consensus decision-making was on the brink of failure or had in fact failed to the point of allowing a division on a matter of serious political importance and status significance. Detailed examination of the situations in which divisions did occur in the early Stuart period is therefore particularly illuminating. Indeed when utilized properly, these episodes lay bare the underpinnings of the institution. The best means of assessing the hypothesis that status considerations underpinned the House’s approach to decision-making is to consider the observable implications of such an institution. First, we would expect that in the case of private bills, which were devoid of broader status significance, members would in fact be willing to divide on matters on which there existed significant disagreement. Doing so would not dishonour the House.

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The division data from the early Stuart period strongly indicate that this was the case. The vast majority of divisions in this period were on matters of only private significance. In these cases, majoritarian victories could be sought in accordance with members’ goals without worry about the status effects of these votes. Second, and most importantly, we would expect that divisions would at least occasionally result from situations where a matter of public significance was under dispute and its status implications (or perhaps some other considerations) trumped the status implications of making a decision on such an issue by majority vote. This, in fact, describes nearly every division of public significance held in the early Stuart period. Each disastrous vote of this sort occurred after extended debate and persistent disagreement on a matter that had clear public significance and serious status implications. These were the sorts of divisions that would become ubiquitous once the House of Commons took its majoritarian turn after the outbreak of the Civil War. And they are the divisions that are most informative about the institution of which they constituted serious failures. These sorts of divisions were taken to be distressing, uncomfortable, and embarrassing moments of symbolic disunity. They implied dishonour to the House, its members, and Parliament as a whole, partly because unity was a sign of power and disunity a sign of weakness. In these moments, one or both parties to the disagreement were convinced that the dishonour that would follow from yielding to their opponents’ preference was greater than the dishonour that would might follow from hazarding a division on the question. Even if hazarding or demanding a division was a rational course for one or more groups in these situations, the resulting vote was in effect and in symbolic terms an admission that the nation’s representatives were divided, which implied a division of the political nation or the body politic. Such events were commonly attributed to a host of causes, including corruptions of the parliamentary process and the violation of biblical dicta condemning division and urging unity among God’s people. The most informative instances from the early Stuart period come from the beginning of the reign of Charles I, when divisions were held just 2.8 per cent of the time a question was put to the House. Among the dozen divisions held in 1626, for instance, the politically important votes, which were almost all related to the House’s campaign against the duke of Buckingham, illuminate the role of status considerations in both the institution of consensus decision-making and in failures of the institution. In early March, the Commons was doggedly committed to its attack on Buckingham and to that attack’s precedence over supply. This ideologically inflected conflict, so pivotal in post-revisionist accounts of the period, was, however, insufficient for destroying the politics of consensus. It did so only when a significant matter of honour or privilege was at play.

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On 8 March, for instance, the Commons agreed in a 226–166 division to consider the Lords’ request to turn their attention to what Archbishop Abbot had told them was the one matter that ‘most mainly concerns the honour and safety of the King and kingdom’: financing war against Spain. Unlike a host of other decisions to which the matter of Buckingham was related, this one was loaded with status implications that extended beyond the one Abbot had cited. Many members feared that granting this request was tantamount to suffering an attack on their privileges, since it would implicitly grant the Lords the right to launch the process of deliberation that resulted in the granting of supply. This was normally taken to be the preserve of the Commons.30 Similarly, the next division in 1626 was underpinned by ideological conflict but enabled by specific status considerations. Along with an additional two divisions in later months, it related to an episode in which Buckingham had re-arrested the St Peter, a French mercantile vessel, after its release by the Court of Admiralty. The ship was first arrested because it was allegedly carrying goods destined for Spain. The basic question for the House was whether Buckingham’s action ought to be addressed formally as a grievance. In the debates over the St Peter, the honour of the English state (including the Commons and its members) was regularly cited as a crucial consideration. John Bankes, for instance, was concerned that contesting Buckingham’s action ‘will tend to the dishonour of our state’, with William Noye expressing much the same sentiment in noting that ‘if we determine that this stay was unjust, we shall condemn ourselves and be stopped to say the French did us unjustice’. Such concerns about international status were similar to concerns about consensus in votes on supply, an issue which was also part of the problem posed by the St Peter re-arrest, because pursuing it as a grievance would hinder the House from considering the financing of the war.31 The attack on Buckingham itself was closely linked to the House’s concern for its own status once Charles commanded the members on 29 March to end their campaign against the royal favourite. The Remonstrance with which the Commons responded drew no answer from the king, instead prompting him to advise the Commons to adjourn for Easter for only a week in order to get back to the business of supply. Opponents of a short adjournment saw it as an admission of the impropriety of their investigation of Buckingham and thus a blow to their privilege and, in broad terms, their status. This provoked a division on the adjournment.32 Matters only escalated after the break, with late April divisions on empowering a select committee to expand the investigation of Buckingham and on debating the committee’s report on testimony from the King’s physicians regarding the death of James I. The first motion was taken by opponents to be an

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unparliamentary violation of privilege and a source of dishonour to the House and to excluded members.33 The second was spurred on by continuing concern about the status implications of the committee’s work, in addition to the strong desire of the duke’s clients to avoid further inquiry into the possible murder of James I by their patron.34 These sorts of divisions, which clearly entailed ideological conflict but also involved crucial concerns over matters of status, continued in May. In a close division on 3 May the House declined to write to the High Commission (which included the duke) to annul its 1624 excommunication of Sir Robert Howard, a sitting member of the House, for adultery. The letter would of course have been an aggressive statement of constitutional principle made against a primary symbol of Caroline absolutism and Laudian ecclesiastical aggression, but it was most directly a matter of parliamentary privilege and honour. Many took the excommunication of Howard to hazard the status of all members of the House.35 The House had not needed a division either to agree that the Commission’s 1624 proceedings were void and ought to be vacated or to agree that all members of the Commission they were interviewing should be made aware of the House’s position. What prevented the members from following the usual, consensual procedure was not ideological division in general but the question of what specifically was required for vindicating their privileges in the excommunication of Howard, which Sir Nathaniel Rich called an ‘injury done to the House’. Moreover, opponents of writing to the Commission rooted their argument in honour considerations, alleging that just as ‘it is against our dignity to entreat and not prevail’, as John Lowther put it, ‘so likewise not to command because we cannot enforce’.36 The culmination of the 1626 divisions related to Buckingham was the 9 May decision to move the Lords to imprison him. This was also, in some senses, the culmination of the honour politics of the session. When the division was held, the noes actually yielded as they watched around two-thirds of the members proceed out of the chamber to vote yes, but the triumphant yes voters, ‘to have honour in it’, according to Lowther, rejected the offer of submission and demanded to be counted.37 The yes voters were apparently determined both to display their honourable action against Buckingham and to heap dishonour upon those who opposed his imprisonment. This was a spectacular moment, but, with a division already under way, the decision to carry out the entirety of the voting ritual was also a sensible way of managing the status implications of this divisive confrontation among members. More clearly and importantly, the move to imprison the Duke was itself motivated by concerns over status. On the previous day, as members of the Commons spoke in the House of Lords, Buckingham had apparently

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slighted them.38 Imprisonment was a means of redressing this threat to the House’s honour, but, as Sir John Finch remarked, the move had to be conventional to be honourable. Since ‘it is the honour of our House to go the same way that our predecessors have done’, it was crucial to find a precedent for the proposed action. In addition, Sir Richard Weston cautioned, hasty punishment for unproven crimes ‘behooves not the gravity of this House’. Opponents of the move to request the immediate imprisonment of the duke therefore also presented their view as the one consistent with ‘the honour of this House’.39 The epilogue to this climactic division concerned the duke’s client Sir John Savile, a member of the House who had written a letter to his Leeds allies condemning the Commons’ attack on his patron. Savile responded to the accusation that he had insulted and thus dishonoured the House by claiming that he had been dishonoured in the form of defamation. On 13 June, the House divided over whether to hear Savile’s arguments the next day.40 A series of divisions from May and June 1628 make equally clear that, while ideological conflict was consistent with consensual institutions, competing status considerations could successfully endanger them. All these divisions concerned the ideologically pivotal issue of the Petition of Right. The first, on 14 May, concerned a conference with the Lords regarding the Petition and the king’s 12 May letter that resisted the Petition provision that would restrict his power to commit men to prison without cause. Was the Petition to be revised in light of this objection and requests for revisions from the Lords? Was the king dishonouring the Commons by answering the Petition before it had been delivered?41 These questions had profound status implications, with regard both to the issue of imprisonment and to the procedural aspects of such a constitutionally important Commons initiative. In essence ‘all that is called ours’, as Sir John Eliot put it, could be implicated in the House’s response to this situation.42 In addition, the particular questions of responding to the king’s letter and considering the Lords’ requests were questions about what actions would or would not maintain the House’s privileges and honour. On these fronts Eliot, for one, was concerned with ‘the honour of this House and the safety of the cause’.43 Moreover, the disputed statements about imprisonment in the Petition were taken to be vindications of parliamentary privilege.44 Finally, the particular subject of the division on 14 May was whether the House ought to explain to the Lords in their acceptance of a conference why the Commons was going to take no account of the king’s letter. The dispute here was over whether the most honourable way of proceeding was to provide this explanation because it was owed or to ignore the letter at this particular juncture.45 There was a subtle but significant status consideration at issue.

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Consensus decision-making and the history of practices Just as it is important to see that ideological conflict was not by itself a sufficient condition for the breakdown of consensus decision-making in the Commons, it is important to recognize that the number of status-related divisions in this period is only a small fraction of the number of statusrelated decisions made by the House at the time. Divisions resulted only when both conflict over a decision and important status considerations were present. Under those conditions, members were unusually willing to use divisions to make decisions, and it was also likely harder for members to budge on the issue at hand and be convinced to change their minds. But even here a division was not quite inevitable. In many situations, conflict was successfully resolved by means of debate and other consensual tactics such as committees and conferences. The point is simply that divisions were far more likely in situations were members were in persistent disagreement on a status-related issue. Ideological conflict was often present in the case of divisions, and status considerations were nearly always present, but, even when both were factors, consensus was often a possibility. Explaining the circumstances under which divisions occurred in this period, however, is not the primary concern of this chapter. It is important only in that it illuminates why the institution of consensus-decision was so remarkably stable during the pre-Civil War era. With this institution in place, consensus decisions were an almost inevitable result under a range of conditions or parameters that were nearly always present. The status costs of divisions on public matters were normally so clear and grave that minorities were even willing to capitulate when debate and the usual tactics had been unsuccessful in forging genuine agreement on the matter at hand. As I have suggested elsewhere, studying political practices, and, in particular, the decision-making processes at the core of every political system, requires a closer look at the mechanics of practice than one tends to find in either revisionist or post-revisionist scholarship.46 What we see in the case of decision-making in the Commons prior to the English Revolution is that, while contemporary invocations of norms can serve as the source of hypotheses about the structuring of practices, they are not in themselves evidence of the nature of those structures. In this case and others there are too often too many articulated norms that can be made to fit observed patterns of action. This is one of the reasons why it was so difficult for Kishlansky successfully to explain the eventual abandonment of consensual politics in either the House of Commons or the elections to it, and so difficult for revisionists to account for structural change more generally.47 Instead of deducing the existence of operative norms merely from the record of political speech, we need to think more carefully about what forms of political rationality

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obtained in a particular historical and cultural environment, and how those forms of rationality were related to norms. This requires thinking about the precise observable implications of the operation of specific values. Once we have identified the precise mechanism producing the pattern of action we have observed, we have also developed a hypothesis about the conditions under which the pattern could change. This, in turn, prompts a series of questions about the conditions that obtained when the pattern did change, as parliamentary decision-making did in the early 1640s, when the Commons’ institutionalized tradition of consensual decision-making fell apart. We are thereby in a position to precisely explain this change while also utilizing the change itself as further confirmation of the underlying structure of the original institution or pattern of practice. It is this procedure that makes it possible to see that, while the early Stuart House of Commons was without doubt the site of serious ideological and constitutional conflict, it is equally important to recognize that, in the end, the Commons nearly always made decisions in a consensual manner. To fail to recognize this is to occlude one of the most fundamental changes wrought by the early stages of the Civil War, and, as Kishlansky argued, one of the primary causes of the revolution of the late 1640s: the emergence of majority rule in the Commons.48

Notes  1 Among many examples see Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, 1998), esp. 3, 8; Peter Lake, ‘Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish Match’, Historical Journal 25:4 (1982), 805–25; Peter Lake, ‘Review Article’, Huntington Library Quarterly 57:2 (1994), 167–97 (173); Peter Lake, ‘Retrospective: Wentworth’s Political World in Revisionist and Post-Revisionist Perspective’, in Julia Merritt (ed.), The Political World of Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, 1621–1642 (Cambridge, 1996), 273, 275; Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe (a postrevisionist and a revisionist, respectively), ‘Introduction’, in Peter Lake and Kevin Sharpe (eds), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (London, 1994), 3, 5.  2 Richard Cust and Anne Hughes, ‘Introduction: After Revisionism’, in Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England (Harlow, 1989), 17.  3 Cust and Hughes, ‘Introduction: After Revisionism’, 14.  4 Ibid., 13, 14.  5 Sharpe and Lake, ‘Introduction’, 6.  6 See, e.g., Johann P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (London, 1999); Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early

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Seventeenth-Century England’, Past and Present 112 (1986), 60–90; Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: the Structure of a Prejudice’, in Cust and Hughes (eds), Conflict in Early Stuart England, 72–106.  7 Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979); Mark Kishlansky, ‘The Emergence of Adversary Politics in the Long Parliament’, Journal of Modern History 49 (1977), 617–40 (quotation on 620).  8 For additional detail on the procedures, measurements, and methodological considerations relevant to this chapter, and for a more detailed and differently framed description of Commons debate and decision-making prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, see William J. Bulman, The Rise of Majority Rule in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire (Cambridge, 2021), 21–62.  9 See, e.g., Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake (eds), Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (Cambridge, 2002); Peter Lake and Steve Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); and (on a later period but exemplary) Ann Hughes, Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution (Oxford, 2005). 10 Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution: English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989), 3–4, referring to Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 1–2; Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics 1626–1628 (Oxford, 1987). 11 See, e.g., Cogswell, Blessed Revolution; Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell,  The Murder of James I (New Haven, 2015); Thomas Cogswell, ‘A Low Road to Extinction? Supply and Redress of Grievances in the Parliaments of the 1620s’, Historical Journal 33 (1990), 283–303; Richard Cust, ‘Charles I and Popularity’, in Cust, Cogswell, and Lake (eds), Politics, Religion, and Popularity, 235–58. 12 Kishlansky, ‘Emergence of Adversary Politics’, 623; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 323–89. 13 Markku Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity in Pre-Revolutionary England (Cambridge, 2013). 14 Peter Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice (Cambridge, 2002), esp. 215, 232; Chris Kyle, Theater of State: Parliament and Political Culture in Early Stuart England (Stanford, 2012), esp. 16, 21, 30. 15 Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 40; Kishlansky, ‘Adversary Politics’, 619, 621, 622. 16 For this understanding of institutions, see the Introduction, above. 17 For giving way and avoiding the question, see Philip Baker (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1624: The House of Commons (British History Online 2015–2018), British History Online, (accessed 29 November 2021) www. british-history.ac.uk/no-series/proceedings-​ 1624-parl/apr-1717/1624; CJ 6/17/​ 1610; 6/7/1610; 6/26/1610; 5/6/1626; 5/21/1628; 5/27/1624; Wilson H. Coates, Anne Steele Young, and Vernon F. Snow (eds), The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 3 vols (New Haven, 1982–92), vol. 2, 98; Conrad Russell, King James VI and I and His English Parliaments, ed. Richard Cust and Andrew

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Thrush (Oxford, 2011), 64; David Harriss Wilson (ed.), The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, 1606–1607 (Minneapolis, 1931), 190–1. 18 Mack, Elizabethan Rhetoric, esp. 215, 232; Peltonen, Rhetoric, Politics and Popularity, esp. 212; J.E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments (London, 1953), 289–90; Maija Jansson and William B. Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625 (New Haven, 1987), 275–80, 259–60, 265. See also Heywood Townshend (ed.), Historical Collections: Or, An Exact Account of the Proceedings of the Four Last Parliaments of Q. Elizabeth (London, 1680), 5 March 1593. For a 1620s description of parliamentary debate as ‘disputing’, see British Library MS Add 36856, fol. 28r. 19 Jansson and Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625, 259–60, 265; Maija Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in the Opening Session of the Long Parliament, 7 vols (Rochester, 2000–7), vol. 3, 582. 20 Elizabeth Read Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1610, 2 vols (New Haven, 1966), vol. I, 336–7; Jansson and Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625, 444, 446, 450–1, 453; Wallace Notestein and Frances Helen Relf (eds), Commons Debates for 1629 (Minneapolis, 1921), 157, 171; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 189, 250, 251, 258, 308; Jansson and Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625, 114–22, 440, 450–1; Catherine Sims (ed.), ‘The Speaker of the House of Commons’, American Historical Review 45:1 (1939), 90–5 (94). 21 There was, to be sure, one realm of practical considerations that influenced members’ willingness to force divisions. If information on a secure majority was scarce, a motion risked rejection if a vote was pushed at the time. See, e.g., T.E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 2 vols (Leicester, 1995), vol. 1, 369; Maija Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1614 (Philadelphia, 1988), 440; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 189, 250, 251, 258, 308; Jansson and Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625, 114–22; Sims (ed.), ‘Speaker of the House of Commons’, 93. 22 Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies, 1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991), 118, 121; Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 185; Jansson and Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625, 446. 23 Robert Johnson, Mary Frear Keeler, Maija Jansson Cole, and William B. Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1628, 6 vols (New Haven, 1977–1983), vol. 2, 319. See also vol. 2, 324, 329; and, for other examples, Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1614, 123, 125, 146. 24 Brendan Kane, The Politics and Culture of Honour in Britain and Ireland, 1541–1641 (Cambridge, 2010), 6, 10–11; R. Malcolm Smuts, Culture and Power in England, 1585–1685 (New York, 1999), 7–17; Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: the Case of Beaumont v Hastings’, Past and Present 149 (1996), 57–94; Richard Cust, Charles I and the Aristocracy, 1625–1642 (Cambridge, 2013). 25 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Michael Silverthorne and Richard Tuck (Cambridge, 1998), 175–6 (XV.9). See also Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 3 vols, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford, 2012), vol. II, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142, 143.

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26 Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986), 309–410, quotations on 313, 316. 27 Johann Sommerville, ‘Parliament, Privilege, and the Liberties of the Subject’, in J.H. Hexter (ed.), Parliament and Liberty from the Reign of Elizabeth to the English Civil War (Stanford, 1992), 56–84. 28 Jansson (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament 1614, 153–4. 29 Jansson and Bidwell (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1625, 452, 463, 470. See also Johnson et al. (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1628, vol. 3, 141. 30 Bidwell and Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, vol. 2, 221 (quotation), vol. 2, 227–32; BL Harley MS 390, fol. 24r. 31 Bidwell and Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, vol. 3, 109, 114; BL Harley MS 390, fol. 27r. 32 Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 291, 293; Bidwell and Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, vol. 2, 431, 434. 33 Bidwell and Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, vol. 3, 53, 55, 56. 34 Ibid., vol. 3, 84–6; Bellany and Cogswell, Murder of King James I, 228–9. 35 Russell, Parliaments and English Politics, 277. 36 Bidwell and Jansson (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1626, vol. 3, 141–52, esp. 142, 145, 150. 37 Ibid., vol. 3, 201, 216. 38 Ibid., vol. 3, 202, 204, 207, 208, 211, 212, 215. 39 Ibid., vol, 3, 210. 40 Ibid., vol. 3, 301, 303–4, 306–8, 392–401, 433. 41 Johnson et al. (eds), Proceedings in Parliament 1628, vol. 3, 404, 406, 408, 409, 411, 412, 417. 42 Ibid., vol. 3, 373. 43 Ibid., vol. 3, 394. 44 Ibid., vol. 3, 413. 45 Ibid., vol. 3, 411. 46 William J. Bulman, ‘The Practice of Politics: the English Civil War and the “Resolution” of Henrietta Maria and Charles I’, Past and Present 206 (Feb. 2010), 43–79. 47 Kishlansky, ‘Emergence of Adversary Politics’; Mark Kishlansky, Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986). 48 On which see Bulman, Rise of Majority Rule.

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Noah Millstone

Scrinia Reserata, a biography of the bishop and statesman John Williams (1582–1650) composed by his protégé, John Hacket (1592–1670), has been mined by generations of historians for its wealth of unique detail. But even before the revisionist crusade against untrustworthy, post-hoc, printed sources, Hacket’s work was regarded as problematic. While Scrinia Reserata concentrates on the 1620s and 1630s, and was composed (on internal evidence) between 1654 and 1658, it has been known only through an edition printed in 1693, more than twenty years after Hacket’s death. Not only had Hacket written long after most events he described, but it was also impossible to evaluate the relationship between the printed Scrinia and Hacket’s composition. Hacket has, accordingly, been subject to severe, and sometimes deserved, criticism: S.R. Gardiner found him prone to ‘miserable confusion’, while more recent historians have declared Scrinia Reserata ‘almost completely unreliable’, ‘inaccurate’, and full of ‘nonsense’.1 I recently came across Hacket’s holograph of Scrinia Reserata in Trinity College, Cambridge. The volume bears a note in the hand of William Aldis Wright, the nineteenth-century Trinity librarian, and may have come to the college with Hacket’s library; but the volume was omitted from James’s 1900–4 catalogue of the college’s manuscripts, which explains why it is largely unknown. Like the printed Scrinia, the manuscript is divided into numbered paragraphs; the text is further divided by square brackets, corresponding exactly to leaf divisions in the printed Scrinia; and the text is identical to the printed edition, except for a number of deletions, none of which appears in print. Either someone altered the manuscript Scrinia to better match the printed version, or, more plausibly, the Trinity manuscript was the basis for the printed edition. The most interesting aspects of the manuscript are the deletions: passages removed, some by Hacket, others probably by someone else, possibly Hacket’s literary executor Thomas Plume, or Archbishop John Tillotson, whose imprimatur appears on the printed edition’s title page.2 Some

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deletions correct errors  – these are often in Hacket’s hand  – and a few moderate remarks about Williams’s great rival, Archbishop William Laud. But the majority of significant deletions restrain attacks on other histories published in the 1650s. For example, the printed Scrinia runs this way:

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What then made an unsavoury historian call [Williams] a Country Pedant? A Reproach with which H.L. doth flirt at him in his History of King Charles; a scornful Untruth.

H.L. is the royalist Hamon L’Estrange, author of The Reign of King Charles (1655), who, in an extended attack on Williams’s character and conduct, had indeed described him as a ‘country pedant’. The manuscript Scrinia shows that ‘an unsavoury historian’ replaced a now illegible but presumably more opprobrious phrase (perhaps ‘that silly liar’), and adds a clause: A scornful untruth, bolted against a better gentleman then himself. But he that hath a polypus to his nose, or some such disease, can smell nothing but the unsavoriness of his own nostrils.

Other historians receive similar criticism. The printed Scrinia undermines an anecdote repeated by ‘Sir Ant. W. in his Court and Character of K[ing] James’ (1650); the manuscript Scrinia has instead, ‘Sr Ant. W. in his box of pusill that is in his Court & Character of K. James’. ‘Mr. W.S.’ – William Sanderson, author of Aulicus Coquinariae (1650) – allowed Williams ‘not a good word beside in his history’; the manuscript adding that Williams was ‘no whit the worse that he wants his praise’.3 General comments about historians turn out to have particular targets: ‘This will stop the mouth of slander, unless his credit came before such as had rather hear the worst of men, than the truth’, the printed Scrinia decreed; the manuscript specified, ‘unless his credit came before such a liar as Sr A. W.’.4 The deletions highlight the extent to which Hacket saw Scrinia Reserata as a response to other narratives of the early Stuart era published in the 1650s; a perspective his later editor appears not to have shared.5 This chapter takes the rediscovery of Hacket’s holograph as an opportunity to reconstruct some of the polemical, historical and social practices that produced Scrinia Reserata and its interlocutors, that is, the first generation of early Stuart histories. As I argue, Hacket’s polemical agenda was twofold. First, he aimed to defend the memory of his patron John Williams, a man vilified by libel during his lifetime and defamed by the histories built on those libels. Second, Hacked wanted to compose a narrative of Williams’s churchmanship useable for debates raging within the Interregnum episcopalian church about the legacy of Laudianism  – debates that were partly conducted through historical writing.

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In pursuit of these projects Hacket embraced a distinct set of rhetorical and epistemic practices, ultimately creating a quite distinctive work. First, Hacket adopted a formal, self-consciously high style, filled with moralism and flourish. The text quoted incessantly from the classics, humanist scholarship, and early modern biographies of leading clergymen, particularly Joachim Camerarius’s 1566 life of the reformer Philip Melanchthon (1497– 1560) and Fulgenzio Micanzio’s life (printed 1646) of the Servite friar Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623).6 This contrasted starkly with the low, almost satiric tone adopted by other historians. Second, rather than pretending objectivity, Hacket used his relationship with his subject to claim priority for his version of events. Unlike most other Interregnum historians, Hacket – an intimate of Williams, and a royal chaplain since 1623 – had been relatively well placed to observe the twists of early Stuart high politics. Thus he continuously emphasized first- or second-hand observation, and regularly quoted from documents and even conversations. Indeed, Scrinia Reserata is haunted throughout by conversation. This chapter concludes by arguing that much Interregnum historical writing, and particularly Scrinia Reserata, were attempts to textualize what had been primarily a vibrant oral culture of anecdote and story-swapping – a culture this chapter makes a first pass at excavating. Before defending Williams in print, or in manuscript, Hacket defended him in speech, retelling in conversation many stories that later ended up on the page. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of 1650s historical practice was its heavy reliance on this substratum of orality. The Court and Character of King James appeared in London in October 1650. Its extraordinary content, such as its famously insulting portrait of King James, touched off a wave of responses and imitations. The Interregnum historians of early Stuart England  – William Sanderson, Hamon L’Estrange, Godfrey Goodman, Arthur Wilson, Thomas Fuller, Peter Heylyn, John Rushworth, and Hacket himself  – all laboured in the shadow of the Court and Character.7 Those who rejected its structure, methods, or interpretations did so purposefully and often explicitly. That structure was largely modelled on the ‘secret history’; the work even described itself as ‘a general discourse of some secret passages of state’. Behind the procession of public events, the Jacobean court turned out to be a festering swamp of impiety, vice, disordered passions, and selfseeking placemen. The narrative combined malicious reinterpretations of well-known episodes, seemingly revelatory anecdotes, and nasty portraits of figures both major and minor. The authority of the account rested on its origins in ‘the author’s own observation, who was either an eye, or ear witness, or from such as were actors in them’. The authorial initials, listed

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as ‘Sir A:W:’, were rapidly understood as referring to the recently deceased Kentish parliamentarian Sir Anthony Weldon, who had spent his youth as a minor officer in the royal household.8 The Court and Character had little good to say about anyone, and the material devoted to John Williams is characteristic. Williams was ‘generally voiced’ to be the ‘secret friend’ of the dowager countess of Buckingham. After becoming Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and bishop of Lincoln in 1621 (to ‘serve turns’, and to ‘do that which none of the laity could be found bad enough to undertake’), Williams abandoned ‘the old Countess’ in favour of ‘much younger ware, who had keys to his chamber’, a romantic break that ‘afterwards was cause of his downfall’. His ignorance of law was a positive asset when it came to the Spanish Match, allowing him to ‘clap the Great Seal’ to things that no one with legal training ‘would venture upon’. What he lacked in ability, he made up in corruption, excelling even his predecessor for ‘bribery’.9 Almost every allegation can be traced to gossip of the early 1620s. A sexual relationship between Williams and the favourite’s mother was detailed in verse; complaints about the bishop’s ignorance of the law attended his installation in high office; and accusations of bribery were advanced in Parliament in 1624.10 While disagreeing on much else, responses to the Court and Character tended to be equally hostile to Williams. Indeed, some levelled another, perhaps more damning charge: that Williams was fundamentally selfinterested and unprincipled. This reputation had dogged Williams from his involvement in the Spanish Match negotiations in 1622–24; to his flirtation with parliamentary malcontents in 1625–29; to his trimming between the godly and ceremonialist wings of the Church of England in the 1630s; to (worst of all) his eventual embrace of parliamentarianism in 1646. Archbishop Laud once gleefully reported that the Puritan grandee William Fiennes, Viscount Saye and Sele, had described Williams as ‘so false, that were our Saviour upon earth he would betray him again if he stood cross to his ends’.11 It takes a special sort of person to earn the distrust of both Laud and Fiennes. Williams’s late parliamentarian turn, Hacket acknowledged, ‘fell into a hard Construction, derogating much to the Archbishop’s credit’ – Williams had been made archbishop of York in 1641  – ‘and the infamy was not only hot, when it was fresh, but it cools not much to this time’.12 The infamy had been hot, and even parliamentary newspapers had been contemptuous. John Dillingham’s Moderate Intelligencer, for example, reported that ‘the Bishop of York, who hath gone several ways in his days’ was ‘now for the Parliament’, while George Smith’s Scottish Dove explained that Williams, ‘our Bishop of Lincoln, that can turn on tiptoe, were he not an experienced turner’, was ‘resolved to take [Conwy] Castle, or to lose himself, but that’s



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too late’.13 Royalists were positively scathing: a 1647 satire described Williams as the ‘Welsh weather-cock’, more changeable than ‘Proteus’, and proposed an epitaph for whenever Williams should die:

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Here York’s great Metropolitan is laid, Who God’s Anointed, and his Church betrayed.14

This impression of slipperiness featured heavily in the characterizations printed in the 1650s. After quoting from Court and Character, Sanderson added that Williams later fell from royal favour, and then ‘from worse to worst of all’, calling on him, ‘if he be living, to lead a better life, and make a Godly end’. L’Estrange invoked the inappropriate relationship to the dowager countess, who ‘loved the bishop (if fame belies her not) better than was fit’; noted the bishop’s efforts to ‘accumulate vast sums of money’; and detailed how, after losing office in 1625, the ‘malevolently inclined’ Williams decided to seek ‘revenge’ by ‘fomenting popular discourses’ against the king. Wilson directly invoked the 1647 verse, calling Williams ‘Proteus-like’, ‘var[ying] from one shape to another’ and ‘shap[ing] no direct course, but to go still as the wind blows’.15 Hacket’s need to refute these allegations and characterizations governed almost every part of Scrinia Reserata, from Williams’s boyhood to his senescence. For example, while acknowledging that Williams and the dowager countess of Buckingham were friendly, Hacket centred his account of Williams’s boyhood on a gruesome injury, ‘fitter to be understood, than further describ’d’. This injury ‘compell’d’ Williams ‘to actual chastity’, meaning that Williams could not have sustained a sexual relationship with a ‘great lady’, as some alleged. Wilson (who suggested that Williams had been a eunuch ab utero), ‘by some secret whisper’, had come close to the truth, but Hacket wanted to definitively eradicate an allegation built by decades of rumour and reinforced by contemporary historiography.16 To challenge the notion that Williams had been deeply involved with critics of the Stuart regime between the 1620s and early 1640s  – which was at least partly true – Hacket recounted numerous ‘private’ conversations between Williams and unnamed parliamentarians, Williams and Buckingham, Williams and King Charles. For example, in 1626, Williams was approached by parliamentary malcontents, but ‘I heard him my self’ counsel them to abandon Buckingham’s impeachment.17 In 1628, Hacket claimed, Williams and Buckingham not only reconciled but even agreed to maintain ‘a seeming Enmity’, so that Williams might cultivate ‘popular estimation’ and prove a better servant in the end.18 In 1641, Williams refused an offer from John Pym to include his legal harassment by the Caroline regime among the ‘Irregularities’ in the upcoming Grand Remonstrance.19 Hacket told these stories to show that Williams habitually refused to take

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sides against the king, even after having been badly mistreated, even when offered great rewards for doing so. It would be consonant with Renaissance historical practice for Hacket to have invented at least the speeches, but Williams regularly regaled even slight acquaintances with stories about his political career – a habit that provoked two separate Star Chamber prosecutions – and Hacket probably heard at least some of this material from Williams himself.20 Hacket’s reliance on personal memory complicated his treatment of the 1646 North Wales campaign, scene of the archbishop’s least appealing volte face. Hacket last saw Williams in 1642, meaning that the final pages of Scrinia Reserata, covering Civil Wars, regicide, and nearly the final decade of Williams’s life, were written without access to his subject.21 Although boasting he was ‘better acquainted from sure hands and papers about every occurrence’ than other writers, Hacket’s defence of the archbishop’s conduct in North Wales relied on second- and third-hand reports and judgements. Williams sought accommodation with Parliament partly because of the misconduct of Conwy Castle’s royalist commander, which Hacket established by reproducing a complaint (‘the very words, not a syllable varied’) Williams had forwarded to Oxford in 1645. More important, the Civil War was essentially over – Charles already fled, Oxford already surrendered – and by charming the parliamentarian general ‘up and down with fine discourses’, Williams secured the entire region’s surrender on easy terms. Williams did the best anyone could have done; this was not merely Hacket’s conjecture, but rather the well-informed ‘judgment of Col. Samuel Sands of Ombersly near to Worcester which he gave to Mr John Griffith, and the resolution of Col. Samuel Sands of Ewell in Surrey delivered to my self, That this matter was discoursed by many as good as themselves, and that all concluded, it was an action very excusable, and full of prudence’.22 Royalist officers had discussed the archbishop’s behaviour, and a report of their consensus was all Hacket could muster for a conclusion. The argument was weak; that Hacket needed to mount it at all, to build such strong claims on such a tenuous foundation, shows how far the drive to revise Williams’s reputation for treachery dominated Scrinia Reserata. Hacket’s polemical agenda extended beyond rescue of his patron’s reputation. As F.J. Trott notes, Scrinia Reserata engaged with a set of Interregnum disputes that troubled the rump Episcopalian Church. The crux was whether moderate episcopalians (such as Thomas Fuller and John Gauden) ought to embrace an alliance with conservative Presbyterians (such as Richard Baxter), or instead with post-Laudian anti-puritans (such as Henry Hammond). This controversy proceeded partly through the production of competing historical narratives explaining who was to blame for the

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English Civil War. For men like Gauden and Fuller, much blame lay with Laud, whose devotion to Arminianism, ceremonialism, and anti-puritanism provoked the convulsions of nation and church.23 Much of Scrinia Reserata was devoted to supporting this contention. Most explicit was a prediction Hacket attributed to King James. Midcentury historians loved scenarios of prophetic prolepsis, with someone foreseeing the coming troubles of the English Revolution; Hacket, as we shall see, collected such predictions. The prolepsis Hacket included in Scrinia Reserata was this: when Williams asked King James to make Laud a bishop, James replied that he had purposely kept Laud back from promotion ‘because I find he hath a restless spirit, and cannot see when matters are well, but loves to toss and change, and to bring things to a pitch of reformation floating in his own brain, which may endanger the steadfastness of that which is in a good pass, God be praised. I speak not at random; he hath made himself known to me to be such a one’. Laud, the king continued, had been too eager to meddle with religious affairs in Scotland; if Laud were promoted, he told Williams, ‘on my soul you will repent it’, a pronouncement Hacket termed ‘ominous’.24 King James’s prophecy suggested that Laud’s recklessness would later be responsible for Britain’s troubles. If Laudianism had wrecked the Church of England, Hacket hoped to make a rehabilitated Williams into an emblem for an alternative path not taken in the 1630s. This meant constructing a carefully balanced representation of Williams’s attitude towards puritans and puritanism. Hacket emphasized Williams’s enthusiastic ceremonial conformity, which made him unpopular among the nonconformist fellows of his college, and reported how, throughout his life, Williams would speak enthusiastically about the divinity lectures of the avant-garde conformist John Overall. Simultaneously, however, Hacket described the undergraduate Williams as a ‘constant auditor’ of the elderly Calvinist theologian William Perkins; while the aspect of Overall’s style that Williams praised most was his practice of distinguishing between logically necessary conclusions and matters on which reasonable men might disagree, allowing ‘copious latitude to his auditors, how far they might dissent … without breach of charity’.25 In power, Hacket explained, Williams was positively protective of conformable puritans, interceding for the suspended lecturer Samuel Ward of Ipswich because he saw that Ward was ready ‘to serve the Church of England in its present establishment’. Williams was also ‘very communicable, I have seen it, with dissentient Brethren, that did not conform’, hosting them courteously, advising them on legal cases, and urging ceremony with patience. Williams even advised the king ‘to allure some of the chief in name and worth among the Non-conformitants’ into accepting bishoprics as a way to draw their admirers ‘into a good opinion of the Hierarchy’.26

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These were, to an extent, Jacobean nostrums, which Hacket honed by contrasting Williams with his ‘sharpest enemy’, Laud. While Williams sought to win men to conformity, ‘Bishop Laud’ refused to ‘connive at the puritans, nor seek them, with fair entreaties’, preferring instead ‘to suppress the ringleaders, or to make them fly the kingdom’, a course that Williams believed ‘made the faction grow more violent, to triumph against justice, as if it were Persecution’. The consequence of this over-severity was rebellion: ‘a cruel lord make them desperate that are under him; but another shall gain their persons, if not their consciences’.27 Laud’s conduct towards conformist clergy was equally divisive. Laud, Hacket claimed, allowed a dispute about a difficult doctrinal question – predestination – to infect the ecclesiastical patronage system, ‘prefer[ring] them only who were of the  same judgment’ on the question as himself, while adherents of ‘the opposite part’ got at most the ‘deuces and treys in all church-preferments’. Williams followed instead the example of the great conformist bishops  – Whitgift, Bancroft, Andrewes, and Overall – who had all been ‘observers of unity’, ­deliberately bracketing a man’s opinion on contested questions when dispersing advancement.28 Scrinia Reserata thus constructed a tradition of conformist bishops – Whitgift, Bancroft, Andrewes, Overall, Williams – who allowed ‘latitude’ on difficult questions and adopted a conciliatory posture towards even nonconformist puritans. Hacket’s vision has been seductive, drawing counterfactual speculations from Gardiner and Trevor-Roper about how a Williams-led Church of England might have altered the course of history. But Hacket’s account of his past was very much an intervention in his present, invoking prolepsis and continuing disputes to condemn the Laudian approach to puritanism and praise conciliation.29 Hacket’s commitment to conciliation would not last. After the Restoration, Hacket opposed including Presbyterians and nonconformists in the national church, a course he had depicted Williams as advocating. In the mid-1660s, as bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, Hacket would use ‘Presbyterian’ as a synonym for ‘enemy of the Church of England’; by 1670, he was sending spies into the parishes of his diocese to root out partial conformists, and praying for ‘strict’ laws against dissenters ‘to preserve the peace, nay the being of the kingdom as well as the church’.30 Trott proposes that Hacket came to detest puritans during the failed settlement negotiations of 1640–41, but this mistakes history for biography: Hacket’s praise for conciliation was written years later, in the mid-1650s.31 A shift in Hacket’s approach to puritanism, however, is noticeable in Scrinia Reserata itself. When his narrative reached the opening of the Long Parliament in 1640, Hacket explained, ‘I turned away for no little time, and interrupted myself for above two years from writing any more’.32 This marks a major rupture in the process of composition: while the first

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three-quarters of the book were probably finished in 1655 or early 1656, the final quarter, dealing with Williams’s short-lived reintegration into the king’s counsels, the negotiations with the Presbyterians in 1640–41, and the entire English Revolution, was written in late 1657–58. The two sections are very different. All the criticisms of Laud and all the moderation towards puritanism belong to the earlier section. The later section ignores Laud completely, instead introducing new villains, ‘the Presbyterians’, a southern counterpart to the Scots rebels. Although Williams initially approached these men with concession and sweetness – even proposing a system of ‘regulated episcopacy’ that Hacket passed over as quickly as he might – Williams soon discovered that the Presbyterians ‘aimed more at a regulated crown, than a regulated mitre’. This sent Hacket into an extended reverie on the inherently anti-monarchical and revolutionary character of Presbyterianism.33 In the first section, Hacket praised Williams for pursuing conciliation, and attacked the Laudians for adopting a confrontational posture towards nonconformists; in the second, written two years later, Hacket depicted conciliation as naive and impossible and was completely silent on Laudianism. It appears that, between 1655 and 1657, Hacket came to see Presbyterians, rather than Laudians, as the main threat to the survival of the episcopalian church. Hacket’s change of heart, if that is what it was, owed nothing to the imminent restoration of the Stuart monarchy: throughout, Hacket wrote under the grim conviction that the blasphemous English Republic would last till doomsday. However, the political situation had changed substantially. Scholars have identified numerous attempts to find common ground between episcopalians and Presbyterians between 1654 and 1656. Both groups were clericalist and recoiled at the new Cromwellian church settlement that tasked lay ‘ejectors’ with overseeing the parish ministry; both were also deeply engaged in royalist plotting. This was the moment of the episcopalian Thomas Fuller’s Church History of Britain (1655), which (like Scrinia Reserata) blamed the collapse of the English church on the Laudians; of the republication of Ussher’s model for reduced episcopacy (1656); and of the conferences between the conservative Presbyterian Richard Baxter and Bishop Ralph Brownrigg aimed at identifying a form of church government that would satisfy both groups.34 By 1657, however, this nascent coalition may have begun to splinter. The Protectorate Parliament’s Humble Petition and Advice (May 1657) called for a new ‘Confession of Faith’ and reiterated the abolition of the church’s old diocesan structure. It was followed almost immediately by an Act for the Quiet Enjoyment of Sequestered Parsonages (June 1657), which confirmed the rights of the intruded (often Presbyterian) incumbents and the ejection of episcopalian ministers from their old livings. 1658 would

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see Presbyterian-driven attempts to create national confessions culminating in the Savoy Conference later that year. Perhaps, with the protectorate on firmer ground, Presbyterians lost interest in rapprochement with episcopalians, placing their hopes instead in Independents and the Cromwellian regime. To moderate episcopalians like Hacket, this may have strengthened post-Laudian arguments that Presbyterians were untrustworthy schismatics. The period 1657–58 was also when the firm Calvinist Robert Sanderson was persuaded to stop attacking Arminians and instead join a united front against Presbyterians.35 This is admittedly circumstantial; but while scholars have generally seen episcopalian thought either as unified or as divided into stable factions, Scrinia Reserata’s inconsistent account of the origins of the English Revolution hints instead at how factional splits within Interregnum episcopalianism might have evolved under the pressure of events. These polemical aims drove Hacket to produce an unusual work. Scrinia Reserata abandons most touchstones of clerical biography, godly or conformist. Williams had no foundational conversion experience and displayed little personal piety. His pastoral practices (his patience with nonconformists; his preaching; the high standards he expected of ordinands) received only brief treatments. And while Williams had a good death, Hacket’s account of it was highly abbreviated: in a book of over 450 folio pages, the subject’s death covered one-third of a leaf.36 Yet Scrinia Reserata was, as Pritchard observes, perhaps the longest biography yet written of an Englishman. Much of that length was spent in literary flourish. Whereas other midcentury historians adopted a plain or even satiric style, more or less each of Scrinia Reserata’s 441 numbered paragraphs contained references to authors ancient and modern. Selecting one at random, paragraph 232 of part I, a discussion of the posthumous reputation of King James, includes, alongside references to English and Roman history and a modified tag from the English Bible, Latin quotations from Cicero’s Philippics, Seneca’s De Clementia, Guillaume Budé’s De Asse et Partibus Eius (1514), and the first volume of Cesare Baronius’s Annales Ecclesiastici (1588). The next paragraph has only one Latin quotation (from Pliny the Younger’s Panegyricus), but two in Greek, from Isocrates and Gregory Nanzianzen. Hacket’s text incessantly introduced historical and literary parallels, not only for persons and situations but also for his own feelings. Introducing his defence of Williams’s late parliamentarianism, and after quotations from, among others, John Climachus, Claudian, Propertius, and Chaucer, Hacket wrote: ‘Camerarius penning the Life of Melanchthon, casts in a few sweet words thus, Out of my great opinion of him, quaedam forte carius existimem quam mereantur [I may perhaps esteem some things more than they deserve].’ The effect is of a man

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so steeped in erudition that he saw, heard, and felt through the echoes of books.37 In addition to this ostentatious literary character, Scrinia Reserata differed from other mid-century histories in the openly partial position adopted towards its subject. Hacket and Williams had been close, and the avowed purpose of Scrinia Reserata was apologetic, ‘to sweeten my master’s memory’. As Hacket recognized, this commitment clashed with the presumption that history ought to be impartial. There were, however, benefits as well as costs from this position. Where other histories had relied on what was ‘generally voiced’, with narratives composed from impressions and public rumours, Scrinia Reserata would offer a ‘real’ secret history, based on privileged information. Some of this information was documentary. Numerous scholars have shown how early modern enthusiasts for contemporary history transposed humanist textual practices, such as collection, comparison and excerpting, to recent documents, particularly printed and manuscript ephemera. The Parisian legal official Pierre de L’Estoile (1546–1611), the East Anglian clergyman John Rous (1584–1644), the Dorchester merchant William Whiteway (1599–1635) and numerous other figures collected news and documents as part of an amateur historical practice. Hacket himself had long projected writing a history of the reign of King James, abandoning the project only after papers he and a collaborator had been collecting were lost. In the 1640s and 1650s, both Edward Hyde and John Rushworth relied quite heavily on ephemeral print, particularly newsbooks, to supply detail and even text to their narratives.38 Hacket’s documents were of a different kind. Scrinia Reserata means The Document-Cabinets Unlocked, and Hacket regularly referred to and quoted extensively from ‘hand-writings’  – autograph, unpublished ­manuscripts – drawn up by Williams. Williams was a diligent undergraduate; ‘the evidence of it was in his note-books’. Sir John Lambe was a shocking ingrate, as Williams had petitioned to obtain Lambe’s knighthood; ‘the letter is among my papers’. Williams became one of King James’s closest advisers thanks to a brief he wrote about managing the 1621 parliament; Hacket quoted from ‘this advice … in a breviate of his own hand writing’.39 The quotations from documents are probably valid – they resemble his few surviving briefs in tone – although Hacket’s interpretations are tendentious, and he acknowledged the difficulty of working backward from his ‘written notes, in my keeping’, to what Williams actually said or did.40 Hacket had a second, perhaps more important source of information: his own ‘memory’, particularly for talk he heard in Williams’s household or from Williams himself. These memories of speech were less reliable; but, as

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Hacket noted, the best politic histories were built on no firmer foundation. Often the politic effect – by which the narrative voice uncovered the secret deliberations and internal mental processes animating historical actors  – was mere invention or fantasy. Better politic historians had themselves been intimates of the great, giving them at least some insight into what had passed through the minds of their subjects; ‘such’, Hacket pointed out, was the status of ‘many matters reported by [Philip de] Commines concerning his master Louis XI’.41 Accordingly, Scrinia Reserata was largely a record of things Hacket had seen and heard. Much was second-hand, including Cambridge stories about Williams from before Hacket knew him: about the thick Welsh accent Williams sported on arrival, or about an effort by the young Williams to collect funds for the poor Hebrew professor Edward Lively, a story ‘which I have heard much quoted in Cambridge’. Hacket reported observations obtained in Williams’s household: his sleeping and eating habits, the quality of his furniture, and how he would harangue young graduates ‘at his table’. Some of Hacket’s stories match reports from other household clients, suggesting that, like Cavendish’s Life and Death of Wolsey, Scrinia Reserata partly presents the version of events prevailing among the subject’s servants.42 Most important were Williams’s own words, what Hacket called ‘his familiar conference with me’: Williams discoursing about his method of studying divinity, favours received from Lord Lumley, and numerous other matters.43 Williams’s volubility seems to have been a distinctive personal attribute: the complaints raised against Williams during the 1630s featured numerous accounts of indiscreet speech, including creative insults (a junior prebendary of Westminster was ‘not well inhabited in his upper parts’), detailed stories about his time in power, threats against his adversaries, and complaints about the king’s injustice.44 Hacket stressed that Williams liked to talk: ‘he was as free as water that runs from a public conduit, to lay open his Knowledge to all that would listen to his discourse’. Williams’s talk endeared him to King James, who loved ‘discourses’, ‘verbal learning’, and chasing over ‘disputable doubts’, while ruining relations with Buckingham and King Charles, who found him ‘too nimble, and versatile in his ­discourses’.45 In death and memory, the bishop’s tongue gave Hacket a way to claim priority over his competitors, none of whom  – not even Heylyn – had enjoyed such intimacy with a powerful person, let alone one famous for unguarded speech. The result was an erudite, textual, but also ineluctably oral history. A final form of spoken discourse haunts Scrinia Reserata. In the prefatory Life he composed for Hacket’s published sermons, Thomas Plume noted

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that Hacket also loved ‘discourse’, and was himself full of ‘witty apophthegms and other ingenious sallies of wit’. Plume was well placed to know, because in the early 1650s he had been Hacket’s neighbour and frequent visitor. The young Plume took extensive notes of his conversations with ‘Dr H’: his beliefs about episcopacy, about whether God would permit men to build libraries, and, of course, about Williams. As Plume’s notebooks show, Hacket quoted Williams’s opinions, told stories of Jacobean court politics for which Williams was the source, and generally depicted the early Stuart era through Williams’s eyes. Several remarks recorded by Plume mirror exactly stories later inserted into Scrinia Reserata.46 In other words, before the printed Scrinia, or even the manuscript Scrinia, there had merely been Hacket, the Williams bore, who loved telling stories about his old patron. Plume recalled that Hacket often ‘discoursed’ on the past more generally, and particularly how ‘he foresaw our troubles gathering in the clouds and discontents’ of ‘bad Parliaments’ and ‘libels and licentious discourses’. Hacket collected and repeated reports of similar premonitions and warnings, much like the prolepsis in Scrinia Reserata: ‘he would tell how the late Bishop of Chichester hath said unto him, his father foretold the same’; John Shearman, registrar of Canterbury diocese, told Hacket (who told Plume) that Archbishop Abbot had foretold the revolution before his death; while ‘Bishop Wren said the same from Bishop Andrews’. In his notebook, Plume clarified that ‘Dr H had’ this not from Wren directly but rather ‘from 2 or 3’ who had ‘come from Bishop Wren out of the Tower’. An independent copy of Wren’s account survives, suggesting Wren mentioned the ‘Andrewes prophecy’ with some regularity.47 Traces of similar conversations about the past appear throughout Scrinia Reserata. As we saw above, the defence of Williams’s conduct in North Wales was based on conversations with royalist officers. Hacket introduced his discussion of the Williams–Laud dispute as answering a ‘question, which many have ask’d me’ regarding the roots of their rivalry.48 Discussing whether King Charles had encouraged the Irish rebellion, Hacket set down ‘a passage … that came to my own knowledge’; affected by importance, ‘I was so scrupulous to forget nothing of it, that before I stirred I wrote down the speaker, the words, the place, the year, the day’. On July 24. Ann. 1654 at Reigate in Surrey, I had conference about this ­defamation, with that excellent Primate of Armagh, Dr Ussher; says he, stop their mouths with this that I shall faithfully tell you. Sir William Parsons, our Chief-Justice, was much trusted with the King’s affairs in Ireland; he ­deceasing … In his cabinet I found a Letter written by the King, to warn him to look well to the meetings of the Popish Irish, for he had received certain ­intelligence out of Spain, that they were upon some great design of blood and confusion.

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Ussher had seen the paper, not Hacket; Hacket instead recorded the conversation with Ussher, assigning it a certain time and place, showing how assiduous, how ‘scrupulous’, a recorder he was of the oral history of the early Stuart England.49 Scrinia Reserata is thus an archive not merely of things Hacket saw and heard during Williams’s life but also of the discussions and conversations Hacket had after Williams’s death. This suggests that the boom in historical writing in the 1650s sat atop an iceberg of largely oral memorial practices. Although early modern historians generally associate the oral circulation of memory with plebeian milieux, England’s social elites had their own oral economies of anecdote.50 The relation of anecdotes (or chreia) was one of the twelve classroom exercises prescribed by late antique rhetorical training. Chreia were shorter than narratives and more specific with respect to person and situation than maxims: asked about X, specific person Y made remark Z: ‘Alexander the King of the Macedonians, asked by someone where he kept his treasures, said “In these”, pointing to his friends’.51 Early modern conversation abounded in stories about contemporary or nearcontemporary figures. The Middle Temple lawyer John Manningham heard numerous witty anecdotes involving lawyers, courtiers, and Londoners, many relayed at several removes. Hacket’s stories about his patron’s early years in Cambridge suggest that recounting anecdotes about other students and faculty was part of informal conversation practice of 1610s Cambridge; Plume, who attended Cambridge thirty years later, also recorded numerous anecdotes about older scholars.52 While many questions about early modern conversation practice  – how were anecdotes introduced? Would people swap anecdotes, or would an older figure hold forth?  – seem impossible to answer, existing scholarship has equipped us to approach anecdote collecting as a form of the early modern enthusiasm for preserving ephemera.53 Collectors seem to have chosen  two  approaches. First, some men  – and this seems to have been a  largely male practice  – collected sayings from a single, notable individual:  examples include the group of Luther’s companions and students who  began collecting Tischreden in the 1530s; the physician François  Vertunien (d. 1607) and the brothers Jean and Nicolas de Vassan,  who recorded the remarks of Joseph Scaliger (d. 1609); François  Pithou, a cousin of the Vassans, who  recorded the sayings of his  eponymous uncle in the mid-1610s; the Dupuy brothers, who, around the same time, collected the remarks of Jacques Auguste de Thou (d. 1617) and Jacques Davy du Perron (d. 1618); the compilers of the different collections of sayings attributed to King James; and Richard Milward, who spent twenty years collecting the ‘discourse’ of his employer, John Selden. Many of these were anecdotal rather than sententious: discussing

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Justus Lipsius, for example, Scaliger gossiped about his salary at Leuven, bemoaned his poor judgement for poetry, and charted a decline in his Latin style.54 Others collected material wherever they came across it. Printed collections of apophthegms from ancient sources are usually traced to Valerius Maximus’s Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX, a medieval school text that was regularly reprinted; or to Erasmus’s Apothegmatum Opus. The late sixteenth century, however, saw a turn towards contemporary and vernacular material. In his influential Floresta Española (1574), which went through at least twenty-eight editions by 1646, Melchor de Santa Cruz insisted that the sayings of his countrymen were no worse – and perhaps better – than those in ‘old books’, and presented remarks attributed to recent figures like Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros and Dionisio Vazquez alongside jests featuring archetypal characters. Anthony Copley’s English amplification inserted a handful of English and French anecdotes,  for example: ‘Bishop Gardiner being deprived of his Bishopric,  one thus  saluted him in derision: Farewell Bishop olim; He answered: Gramercie  Knave semper.’55 Richard Verstegan’s Den Wet-Steen des Verstants (1620) repeated material from Santa Cruz, adding  further  anecdotes about figures like Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Thomas More.56 Francis Bacon’s 1625 Apothegmes combined classical remarks and material derived from Santa Cruz and Copley with a sprinkling of ‘new’ examples ‘that otherwise would have died’ had Bacon not preserved them, including conversations between King James and the earl of Northampton or Bishop Andrewes, and several anecdotes involving Sir Walter Raleigh.57 Recording such stories directly from conversation also formed part of note-taking practices. Francis Russell, earl of Bedford (d. 1641), recorded the remarks of his acquaintances in a pocket-book, which his secretaries then entered into vast commonplace books alongside reading notes. William Rawley, Bacon’s chaplain, collected remarks Bacon left out of the first edition of the Apothegmes, as well as archetypal jokes and dozens of anecdotes about figures like William Noy and George Abbot.58 The law student John Manningham often recorded not merely the persons, c­ ircumstances, and what was said, but also from whom he had the story. Older students like Thomas Overbury and John Bramston figured prominently, as did Manningham’s chamber-mate, Edward Curle. Other informants included family members, prominent clergymen, and lawyers from other Inns, including one Foster of Lincoln’s Inn, who retailed a number of Sir Thomas More jokes (one of which later appeared in Bacon’s Apothegmes).59 The Norfolk gentleman Nicholas Lestrange also noted sources, including ­clergymen, gentlemen, and his parents:

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Wiggett the fool at a Norwich Assizes, the judges being at dinner, and he sat the lower end of the table, some gentlemen making a report to the Judges of some serious business, after they had spoke, he rose up very soberly, and beseeched their Lords[hip]s they would but hear him; they expecting he could have answered something to the point in hand, bade the fool speak, who presently let a great Fart and sat down again to his meat [my mother].60

Some stories circulated for years; a bawdy story about Shakespeare and Richard Burbage, which Manningham heard in March 1601/2, was recorded by Plume more than four decades later.61 In the retelling, ‘Burbage’ became ‘an actor’. An anecdote’s attachment to particular persons, once lost, was probably difficult to recover (though new figures might be drafted in); this entropic loss meant that anecdotes about people were probably constantly evolving into jokes about archetypes.62 What was the point of these conversational practices? Drawing from social psychology, Edward Legon suggests that discussing the past can help form and reproduce social identity within particular communities. Instead of focusing on broad-based public memory, Legon identifies smaller ‘communities of memory’, each with its own communicative practices and focus. For aspiring humanists, or students at the Inns of Court or the universities – for the Vassans, Manningham, Hacket and Plume – hearing and repeating humanist anecdotes or lawyer anecdotes or university anecdotes perhaps represented a form of social education, an initiation into a community with its own practices, privileges, and values. It is significant that Manningham heard many of his lawyer anecdotes from older students; we are probably observing a form of socialization. For disappointed royalists like Hacket, a community of memory constituted by conversation practices might do even more important work, helping sustain solidarity and sectarian identity in a world defined by compromise and isolation.63 A comparison with news highlights distinctive features of the oral economy of anecdote. Both ramified through existing networks, primarily through conversation. But news’s epistemic logic made privileged informants out of relative outsiders: a stranger, a traveller, a family member gone to London or abroad. News hopped easily between networks, partly because the social capital involved in possessing new information had to be used quickly, before it turned stale. And while news was primarily an oral medium, seventeenth-century people developed elaborate protocols for reporting news through correspondence and print. With anecdote, the privileged informant was a relative insider – a revered scholar, a parent, an older student – someone with longer immersion in the milieu. We have less evidence of anecdotes travelling between social milieux, partly because we have less evidence of transmission at all, but perhaps also because  many

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subjects were interesting only within milieux. Plume enthusiastically recorded the humorous remarks of the King’s College provost Dr Samuel Collins, but perhaps few outside Cambridge would have been so interested. The century’s most enthusiastic and self-aware collector of oral traditions, John Aubrey, noted how difficult it was for men to gather ‘minutiae’ about figures outside ‘their own relations, or societies’.64 Seen this way, Scrinia Reserata becomes not only an archive of discourse but also an itinerary, a progress, through the successive oral milieux in which Hacket participated: Cambridge in the 1610s, where Hacket heard stories about older figures like Williams; Williams’s household in the 1620s and 1630s, where Hacket saw and heard things about national politics, particularly from Williams himself; and Surrey in the 1640s and 1650s, where Hacket traded stories with other veterans of the pre-revolutionary era, and repeated them to younger men like Plume. Finally, anecdote remained a largely oral form, rarely appearing in correspondence, and with only vestigial manuscript and printed witnesses to what must have been a gigantic volume of talk. The trade of anecdotes seems to have been generally reserved for meetings in-person, suggesting that the social work performed by anecdote  – socialization and identitybuilding – played a relatively large role in the satisfaction people derived from it. More generally, scholars are becoming alert to the limits of early modern correspondence: Elizabeth Yale, for example, has argued that early modern philosophers and natural historians imagined and created societies to facilitate in-person conversation, and prized travel partly because it created occasions for immediate encounters.65 Meetings in-person left frustratingly little evidence, but clearly held special social and epistemic importance for early modern people– something the recent pandemic has made readily understandable to us. Although they emphasized it less, other mid-century historians also drew on conversation. Thomas Fuller was said to have sought biographical information while travelling as a chaplain in the Royalist army, and with such devotion that he would ‘endure … an hours or more impertinence from any aged Church-officer, or other superannuated people for the gleaning of two lines to his purpose … attend[ing] those circular rambles till they came to a point’. In his Life of Richard Hooker, Izaak Walton depicted this precise scene: visitors to Hooker’s grave, Walton wrote, were guided by an aged parish clerk, who rehearsed his memories of the man. Walton, too, relied heavily on oral informants for his Lives, especially of Hooker, whom he had never met, and stressed his ‘diligence’ in making enquiries among his subjects’ surviving acquaintance. Such anecdotes he described as ‘received by Tradition’. Aubrey was such an insatiable listener, as Hearne recorded, that Wood ‘us’d to say of him, when he was at the same time in company,

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look yonder goes such a one who can tell such and such stories, and I’ll warrant Mr Aubrey will break his neck down stairs rather than miss him’. For Aubrey, conversation could spark biographical projects; meeting ‘old Mr Beeston’, whose father had been an actor, inspired Aubrey to imagine writing the ‘lives of the poets’.66 Fuller, Walton, Aubrey, and Hacket all embarked on their historical projects in the 1640s and 1650s; it was also in the 1650s that Guy Patin and Isaac Vossius became interested in the manuscript volumes of table-talk compiled earlier in the century by the Dupuy brothers and their associates. Was there, perhaps, something about the mid-century crises  – with their formal acts of oblivion, leaving men and women none the less haunted by memories of vanished political orders  – that made attending to anecdote and oral history seem like crucial activities?67 Scrinia Reserata remained unprinted in the 1650s. The only explanation is a paraphrased passage from Thomas Gataker’s Adversaria Miscellania (1659) appended to the very end of the printed edition, just before the errata. Gataker’s text referred to an unnamed great English bishop accused of lèsemajesté. After answering the accusations by speech, the bishop remained reluctant to subscribe to written-up responses, because, he said, he did not know how others might add in punctuation. This, Gataker explained, was simultaneously a joke and a deadly serious meditation on textual integrity. Scrinia Reserata thus closed with a reflection on the difficulties involved in turning spoken words into writing.68 Scrinia Reserata finally appeared in circumstances similar to those under which it was composed: a post-revolutionary moment, in which the proper relationship between the Church of England, the state, and nonconforming Protestants was again a subject of debate. Archbishop Tillotson, who provided an imprimatur, had led a failed project for the comprehension of dissenters in 1689–90, and may have seen the conciliatory approach Hacket associated with Williams as worth endorsing (equally, Tillotson was a friend of Plume’s, and perhaps added the imprimatur as a favour).69 More broadly, the early Stuart period remained of intense interest to men and women of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Competing formal histories constructed useable pasts for the struggles of the 1690s and 1700s, while John Somers, Thomas Tanner, and Humphrey Wanley surveyed libraries and assembled collections.70 This was also the age of Aubrey (d. 1697), who – even more than Hacket – pursued the past more through conversation than by collecting documents. These two levels  – polemical aim on the one hand, and foundational practice on the other  – are complementary ways of approaching works like Scrinia Reserata. At one level, Scrinia Reserata is a text, engaged in

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a polemic against other texts, attempting to influence perceptions and move minds. At another, Scrinia Reserata and the Interregnum historical texts more generally were products of a set of scholarly, material, and social practices, from the paper technologies of copying, excerpting, and organizing documents, to forms of elite socialization and conversation. Analysed as a product of practice, Scrinia Reserata can help us reconstruct something of the vanished character of early modern social life, where communities were constituted and sustained by the ultimate ephemera of speech and memory.

Notes I am grateful to Nicholas Bell, Jeffrey Collins, Richard Cust, Tony Doe, Eilish Gregory, Joel Halcomb, Helen Kemp, Peter Lake, Ed Legon, Anthony Milton, Nicholas Popper, Richard Serjeantson, Nicholas Tyacke and Angus Vine for their advice.  1 John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata (1693) [hereafter Scrinia], 2:229; S.R. Gardiner, The History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War 1603–1642, 10 vols (1899–1900), vol, 5, 209–11; G.W. Thomas, ‘Archbishop John Williams’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1974), 1; C.E. Welch, ‘The Downfall of Bishop Williams’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society 40 (1964–65), n. 84; Clive Holmes, ‘Law and Politics in the Reign of Charles I’, Journal of Legal History 28 (2007), 170; Allan Pritchard, English Biography in the Seventeenth Century (Toronto, 2005), 99–104.  2 Tony Doe, ‘Thomas Plume “was the editor of two bishops’ biographies”’, Essex Journal 54 (2019), 66–9.  3 [Hamon L’Estrange,] The Reign of King Charles (London, 1655), 145. Compare Scrinia, 1:54 [L’Estrange], 1:115 [Weldon], 2:31 [Sanderson] with Trinity College MS R.5.31, 63, 127, and 273 respectively.  4 Scrinia, 2:35; Trinity College MS R.5.31, 278.  5 Cf. A. Milton, ‘Canon Fire’, in C.S. Knighton and R. Mortimer (eds), Westminster Abbey Reformed 1540–1640 (Aldershot, 2003), 229.  6 Timothy J. Wengert, ‘“With Friends Like This …” The Biography of Philip Melanchthon by Joachim Camerarius’, in Thomas F. Mayer and D.R. Woolf (eds), The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor, 1995); Antonella Barzazi, ‘Micanzio, Fulgenzio’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, 92 vols (1960–2020), vol. 74, 118–19.  7 We lack an adequate treatment of Interregnum historiography; but see Anthony Milton, Royal and Laudian Polemic in Seventeenth-Century England (Manchester, 2007), ch. 5; and W.B. Patterson, Thomas Fuller (Oxford, 2018), ch. 7.

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 8 The Court and Character of King James (London, 1650), tp and B1r; on the structure of the ‘secret history’, see Noah Millstone, ‘Seeing like a Statesman in Early Stuart England’, Past and Present 223 (2014).  9 Court and Character, 138–41. 10 ‘Heaven blesse King James our Joy’, Early Stuart Libels. www.earlystuartlibels. net/htdocs/king_and_favorite_section/L10.html (accessed 29 November 2021); Thomas, ‘Archbishop John Williams’, 50; Conrad Russell, Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (Oxford, 1979), 160, 166, 187. 11 Sheffield Archives, WWM/Str P/7, 75 [Laud to Wentworth, 16 November 1637]. 12 Hacket, Scrinia, 2:218. 13 Moderate Intelligencer 61 (30 April–7 May 1646), 425; Scottish Dove, 142 (8–15 July 1646), 725. 14 Character of a London-Diurnall (London, 1647), 49–50. 15 Court and Character, 139–41; William Sanderson, Aulicus Coquinariae (1650), 179; L’Estrange, Reign of King Charles, 20–1, 145–6; Arthur Wilson, History of Great Britain (London, 1653), 197. 16 Court and Character, 138–9; Wilson, History, 197; Hacket, Scrinia, 1:8. Other early modern biographies were similarly motivated: Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding (eds), Two Early Tudor Lives (New Haven, 1990), 3–4; Norfolk Record Office, HARE 6156, 228x4, fols 3r-v, 6r-v [‘Of Thomas Lord Coventry’]; BL Add. MS 11600, fols 35r-43v [Cope, ‘Il di Lodi La Sera’]. 17 Hacket, Scrinia, 2:70. 18 Scrinia, 2:80. 19 Scrinia, 2:140, 144, 163. 20 Scrinia, 2:14–26; Anthony Grafton, What Was History? (Cambridge, 2012), ch. 1; Holmes, ‘Law and Politics’, 167–8; TNA, SP 16/280/77, fol. 192r–v. 21 Scrinia, 2:184–7. 22 Scrinia, 2:218–21. 23 Scrinia, 2:87; F.J. Trott, ‘Prelude to Restoration’ (PhD thesis, University of London, 1992), 7–12, 52–4, 255, etc. Heylyn, conversely, argued that the Civil War was caused by too little anti-Puritanism; Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic, 167–8. 24 Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660 (New Haven, 1994), 348; Scrinia, 1:64. 25 Scrinia, 1:9, 11; Thomas Plume’s Library [hereafter TPL], MA0029, fol. 33r. 26 Scrinia, 2:86, 1:95, 2:43. 27 Scrinia, 1:108, 2:86, 46. 28 Scrinia, 2:42, 86–7. As Plume clarified, this was really Hacket’s position, and perhaps was not Williams’s at all: Thomas Plume, ‘An Account of the Life and Death of the Author’, in John Hacket, A Century of Sermons (London, 1675), xliv. 29 Gardiner, History, vol. 8, 251; H. Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans (London, 1989), 41. 30 Plume, ‘Account’, xlii–xliii. Thomas Birch (ed.), Life of … Tillotson, 2nd ed. (London, 1753), 391; John Spurr, ‘“Latitudinarianism” and the Restoration

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Church’, Historical Journal 31:1 (1988), 73; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991), 50, 58, 59, 189. 31 Trott, ‘Prelude to Restoration’, 53–4. 32 Scrinia, 2:139. 33 Scrinia, 2:141, 144–5. 34 J.R. Collins, ‘The Church Settlement of Oliver Cromwell’, History 87 (2002), 27–34; Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic, 168, 174–5. 35 Milton, Laudian and Royalist Polemic, 151–2; Joel Halcomb, ‘The Association Movement and the Politics of Church Settlement during the Interregnum’, in Elliot Vernon and Hunter Powell (eds), Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c. 1635–66 (Manchester, 2020), 182–4. 36 Pritchard, English Biography, chs 2–3; Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor (Oxford, 1990), 7, ch. 1, but cf. 274; Scrinia, 1:8, 2:227. 37 Pritchard, English Biography, 100; Scrinia, 1:225–77, 2:218. 38 Tom Hamilton, Pierre de L’Estoile and His World in the Wars of Religion (Oxford, 2017); Noah Millstone, Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 2016), ch. 6; Millstone, ‘Designed for Collection: Early Modern News and the Production of History’, Media History 23 (2017); Plume, ‘Account’, x; Jason Peacey, ‘A Royalist Reads the News’, in Philp Major (ed.), Clarendon Reconsidered (London, 2018), 29–30; Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper (Oxford, 1996), 281–309. 39 Scrinia, 1:3, 7, 37, 49–50, etc. 40 Scrinia, 2:163. 41 Scrinia, 1:3; Fritz Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino, 1967), 244. 42 Scrinia, 1:6–10, 30; compare Scrinia, 1:95 and Calendar of Wynn (of Gwydir) Papers 1515–1690 (Aberystwyth, 1926), 1033; Sylvester and Harding (eds), Two Early Tudor Lives. 43 Scrinia, 1:2, 9–12. 44 Westminster Abbey, WAM 25095, fol. 9r; TNA, SP 16/280/77, fol. 192r. 45 Scrinia, 1:15, 38–9; 2:19. 46 Plume, ‘Account’, xlvi; TPL MA0029, fols 30v–32r, 33r–34r; compare 33r with Scrinia, 1:10–11. 47 Plume, ‘Account’, xv–xvi; TPL MS 25, 24; Bodl. MS Rawlinson D 392, fol. 185v. 48 Scrinia, 1:108. 49 Scrinia, 2:197. 50 Daniel Woolf, ‘Speaking of History’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds), The Spoken Word (Manchester, 2002), 129–30; Edward Legon, Revolution Remembered (Manchester, 2019). For ‘gossip’, a related phenomenon, see Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire, 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004), 212–13; Love, ‘Gossip and Biography’, in K. Sharpe and S.N. Zwicker (eds), Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2012). 51 Wengert, “With Friends Like This …”, 119; D.M. Searby, ‘The Fossilized Meaning of Chreia as Anecdote’, Mnemosyne 72 (2019), 200.

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52 J. Bruce (ed.), Diary of John Manningham (Westminster, 1868), 16–17, 19, 33–4, 36–7, etc.; TPL MS 25, fol. 2r-v; MS 30, fol. 23. 53 Erving Goffman, Forms of Talk (Philadelphia, 1981); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature (Berkeley, 1994); Millstone, ‘Designed for Collection’. 54 Pierre Des Maizeaux (ed.), Scaligerana, Thuana, Perroniana, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1740), vol. 1, sigs A1r, C8v, X3v, vol. 2, ii-iv, 428–9; King James his Apopthegmes (1643), sig. A1v; Flores Regij (1627); John Selden, Table-Talk (London, 1689), dedicatory epistle; Francine Wild, Naissance du Genre des Ana (1574–1712) (Paris, 2001), 15–20. 55 Marijke Crab, Exemplary Reading (Zurich, 2015); Melchor de Santa Cruz, Floresta Española (Brussels, 1598), A2r; Anthony Copley, Wits fittes and fancies (London, 1595), 56. The Gardiner joke reappears in A Banquet of Ieasts (1630), 129. 56 Cf. R. V[erstegan], Den Wet-Steen des Verstants (Antwerp, 1620), sig. F1v, with Santa Cruz, Floresta Espanola, sig. A5v; Paul Arblaster, Antwerp and the World (Leuven, 2004), 128, 111. 57 Francis Bacon, Apophthegmes New and Old (London, 1625), 6, 296–7, 299–300, etc.; M.T. Kiernan (ed.), The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh (Oxford, 2011), lxxvii. 58 Woburn Abbey, MS 22, fols 87, 226; LPL, MS 2086, passim; Angus Vine, ‘“His Lordships First, and Last, CHAPLEINE”’, in Hugh Adlington, Tom Lockwood and Gillian Wright (eds), Chaplains in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2016), 128–30; Kiernan (ed.), Historie of the Raigne of King Henry, cix–cxxiii. 59 Bruce (ed.), Diary of Manningham, 54, 58, 80 [Overbury], 40, 60–1 [Bramston], 17, 36, 41, [Curle], 38–9 [Foster]; cf. the last with Bacon, Apophthegmes, 116–17. H.A.C. Sturgess (ed.), Register of Admissions to the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple Volume 1 (London, 1949), 72–3. 60 British Library, Harley MS 6395, fol. 2r. 61 Compare Bruce (ed.), Diary of Manningham, 39–40; and TPL MS 30, 41. 62 For similar conversions, see Kiernan (ed.), Historie of the Raigne of King Henry, cxxi. 63 Legon, Revolution Remembered, 6–8, 90–8. 64 K.J. Williams, The Antiquary (Oxford, 2016), 111; M. Balme (ed.), Two Antiquaries (Edinburgh, 2001), 92. 65 Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge (Philadelphia, 2016), ch. 3. 66 [John Fell,] The life of … Thomas Fuller (London, 1661), 25–9; Andrea Walkden, Private Lives Made Public (Pittsburgh, 2016), 2, 73–5, 98; J. Martin, Walton’s Lives (Oxford, 2001), 247–8; Pritchard, English Biography, 178–81; Thomas Hearne, Remarks and Collections, ed. C.E. Doble (Oxford, 1889), vol. 3, 35 [note, 5 August 1710]; John Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. K. Bennett, 2 vols (Oxford, 2015), vol. 1, 436, 447. 67 Williams, Antiquary, 96, 101–5; Wild, Naissance, 18; J. Dumont (ed.), Corps universel Diplomatique, 8 vols (Amsterdam, 1726–31), vol. 6.1, 451, 6.2, 266; Randall Lesaffer, ‘The Westphalia Peace Treaties and the Development of the

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Tradition of Great European Peace Settlements Prior to 1648’, Grotiana n.s. 18 (1997), 87–90; Legon, Revolution Remembered, ch. 3. 68 Scrinia, 2:Ff4r; Thomas Gataker, Adversaria Miscellanea (London, 1659), 145. 69 Brent S. Sirota, ‘The Trinitiarian Crisis in Church and State’, Journal of British Studies 52 (2013). For the association between Plume and Tillotson, see the copy of Tillotson’s Sermons Preach’d Upon Several Occasions (London, 1678) subscribed by Plume ‘Ex dono Authoris’ [TPL, B02986]. Tony Doe showed me this volume. 70 Matthew Neufeld, The Civil Wars after 1660 (Woodbridge, 2013), ch. 4; Richard Sharpe, ‘Thomas Tanner (1674–1735), the 1697 Catalogue, and Bibliotheca Britannica’, The Library 7th series, 6 (2005).

6 ‘Man of moderation’: the Restoration bishop of Norwich Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Isaac Stephens

Peter Lake has provided considerable insight on Interregnum and Restoration England in his study of Samuel Clarke’s anthologized lives of puritan clergy. Such editions of lives  – particularly those produced after the Clarendon Code  – invoked a largely Elizabethan and early Stuart puritan tradition, both conformist and nonconformist, centred on learning, respectability, presbyterianism, and moderation. In the wake of the English Revolution and the Restoration, Clarke’s lives professed truth to error by constructing a puritan via media situated between popery and Arminianism on one side and sectarian heterodoxy on the other. This  polemical practice was meant to refute Anglican claims that all puritans were sectarians, heretics, and rebels, and to promote comprehension, which would primarily allow Presbyterians of Clarke’s persuasion to  commune with  the Restoration church. To reunite with the godly tradition that Clarke chronicled would make the episcopal national church one with Christ’s true church. In this way Clarke pursued a more reformed Church of England, similar to the moderate-puritan forefathers who populated his anthologies. Here Lake has brought questions and an analytical framework originally meant for the study of an earlier period to bear upon our understanding of puritanism in a moment when civil war, revolution, and restoration had dramatically altered England’s religio-political landscape.1 This remains an unusual way of proceeding. Moderate puritanism rarely if ever carries any weight in post-1660 historical studies, as either an explanatory tool or a category of analysis. Instead, terms entirely foreign to antebellum historiography, such as low churchmanship, high churchmanship, and latitudinarianism, tend to prevail. At the same time, however, a number of scholars have come to view the Restoration period as part of the ‘Long Reformation’, and the category of puritanism has garnered some attention, especially in relation to the politics of conformity and toleration. Mark Goldie has contended that the ‘Puritan turned Whig’ and that ‘Puritanism remained at the heart of early Whig politics’, shaping struggles against revanchist Anglicans and Tories.2 Deploying a formulation of

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‘Episcopalians’, ‘Reformed Protestants’, and ‘Sectarians’, Gary De Krey has defined Reformed Protestants as those faithful to the legacy of puritanism. They included Presbyterians, some Independents, and those partially conforming to the Church of England. All sought to connect to the ‘best reformed churches’ abroad.3 Viewing Restoration puritanism in less rigid terms, John Spurr has stressed that it ‘is not reducible to Calvinist theology, Presbyterian discipline or separatist ecclesiology’, but rather best seen as evolving after 1662, ‘adapting to new circumstances and re-forming in the guise of Dissent’.4 Underscoring Spurr, George Southcombe has argued that dissenters did not always inhabit ‘a clearly defined position in Restoration England’ and their ‘impermeable core’ identities ‘could co-exist alongside a productive dialogic relationship with the Anglican Church’.5 These perspectives raise the question of whether in some sense puritanism was to be found both within and without the estblished church in the later Stuart period, as it was in previous periods. Further encouraging such a suggestion are recent depictions of the Restoration Church of England as far from monolithic, depictions that themselves resemble post-revisionist treatments of the Church in the Elizabethan and early Stuart eras. As Spurr, Stephen Hampton, William Bulman, and others have shown, there was considerable confessional, pastoral, and ideological variance among the Church’s conforming and conformist members and leadership after 1662. Hampton, for instance, has identified an ‘Anglican Reformed tradition’ that continued to reject Arminian theology throughout the later Stuart period; and William Bulman has outlined the manifold, competing pastoral practices, visions of the Christian community, and recipes for civil peace that were embraced by members of the Church’s intellectual and administrative leaders between the reigns of Charles II and Anne.6 The legacy of the 1640s and 1650s looms large in this historiography. Religion proved pivotal to the causes and consequences of the English Civil Wars and Revolution, perhaps no more profoundly than in fostering Presbyterians, Independents (Congregationalists), Baptists, Fifth Monarchists, and Quakers, and bequeathing all of these confessional groups to the Restoration. Small wonder, then, that historians of the post1660 period have found little use for the category of moderate puritanism. The religio-political environment of this period simply looks much different from what existed in Elizabethan and early Stuart England, and it was. Yet the puritanism of the earlier era, it is worth remembering, was far from monolithic, and, in the last analysis, the period’s confessional and political realities were no less complex. Etymologically, of course, ‘puritan’ belongs to the earlier period: it was a term of abuse developed in the broader context of the Tudor succession crisis and the Elizabethan state’s increased worries about conformity.

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This is where Lake originally identified moderate puritanism’s origins. He deemed it a mode of piety, perceptions, doctrines, and practices meant to reform the national church through the godly’s conformity to existing ecclesiastical structures. In the kingdom’s universities, dioceses, and parishes, moderate puritans aimed to promote their beliefs in predestinarian theology, in the spiritual efficacy of preaching, in a personal piety of spiritual ­ self-examination, and in an intense, eschatologically informed anti-popery. While many made concerted efforts against Laudianism’s rise during the Personal Rule and also proved essential to parliamentarianism, they were none the less anything but always straightforwardly adversarial to the established church and the state. They were an essential element of the Jacobean ‘Calvinist consensus’, and they also monitored the so-called ‘Puritan underground’, a milieu in which much of the diverse confessional and political expressions of the 1640s and 1650s originated. In all of these contexts, moderate puritans commonly turned to the rhetoric and ideal of moderation, which typically pivoted on a via media situated between extremes. These middle ways could both accrue religio-political dividends and promote violence against excluded groups.7 By the 1640s, this moderation had arguably been inculcated in multiple generations of puritan clergy and laity. As was the case for Samuel Clarke, many men exhbiting the characteristics of moderate puritanism became dissenters after 1662, but others conformed to the Restoration church and proved pivotal contributors to the reformed traditions that Hampton has identified. One such person was Edward Reynolds, a figure whose clerical career stretched from the 1620s to the 1670s and included ministering cures in Northamptonshire and London, enjoying membership to the Westminster Assembly, and serving as one of Charles II’s royal chaplains prior to becoming bishop of Norwich, the seat that he occupied between 1661 and 1676. Reynolds has lacked extensive scholarly examination despite his religiopolitical prominence and his consistent contestation in favour of his vision for the national church over the course of a half century.8 Moderation served as his instrumentalised ideology: it determined Reynolds’s career, rhetoric, puritan practices, and ecclesiological and irenic perspectives. Living through much of the ‘Long Reformation’, he personified moderate puritanism and its continuity between the early Stuart and Restoration periods.

Clerical ascendance through moderation Preaching at Westminster Abbey on 7 November 1666 before members of the House of Lords as bishop of Norwich, Reynolds offered the following: ‘As touching moderation ye need not that I write unto you, for you your

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selves are taught of God to shew all meekness to all men, and to restore those that are overtaken … with the spirit of meekness’. Reynolds uttered these words just two months after the Great Fire of London, a catastrophe preceded by one of the worst outbreaks of plague in the City’s history. The Second Anglo-Dutch War only compounded these hardships and left the Crown and its servants reeling. Providential interpretations – to which Reynolds’s basis of his sermon, Philippians 4:5, belonged – thrived in this context: ‘Let your Moderation be known unto all Men. The Lord is at hand.’9 His exegesis stressed that moderation revolved around the emulation of Christ, an emulation acted out through the cultivation of patience, candour, equanimity, meekness, charity, and kindness. All of this served as the foundation to edify the person in reverence to God, who ultimately embodied peace and love. Acrimony resulting from the Restoration’s religious settlement defied such peace and love, and Providence thus struck with plagues, fires, and wars. Following Christ’s path proved the remedy: ‘to love our Enemies, to Bless them that curse us, to do Good unto those that Hate us, to recompense to no man Evil for Evil, to weep as though we wept not, and to rejoyce as though we rejoyced not’.10 The rhetoric was similar to that deployed by others who ran the confessional gamut, from men of episcopalian backgrounds like John Gauden (bishop of Exeter and then Worcester) and John Wilkins (bishop of Chester) to nonconformists of puritan stock like Clarke and Richard Baxter. It promoted, at least in degrees, comprehension in the national church.11 Reynolds’s own moderation, tinged with irenicism, propelled him on to the national stage well before 1666. His entire clerical career was heavily influenced by Jacobean puritanism. Born in 1599 and hailing from Southampton, Reynolds first served as a preacher at Lincoln’s Inn beginning in 1622. He moved on from here to acquire the living of Braunston, Northamptonshire, in 1631.12 He held the rectorship for thirty years, establishing a reputation as a level-headed, moderate, and godly minister in a county rife with tension between puritans and Laudians during the Personal Rule. This tension was fully displayed in the John Barker scandal, which culminated in the execution of Barker, a puritan minister, and two women, named Beatrice and Ursula, for infanticide on 14 July 1637. Two days prior to the executions, Reynolds delivered a visitation sermon at Daventry before Francis Dee, the Laudian bishop of Peterborough, stressing that all sides needed to desist or schism would result, giving popery and Satan advantage: ‘Peace may in this case be preserved by moderating the fervour of our zeal against those that are otherwise minded’.13 Of course, confessional tensions subsequently rose throughout all the Stuart kingdoms. Reynolds’s godliness led him to side with Parliament in the Civil War. His national profile rose on the eve of war in July 1642, when

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he preached a fast sermon on Hosea 14:2 before Members of Parliament at St Margaret Westminster. He warned that sin produced England’s conflict: ‘O then get Remissions and Removal of sin, get this bonum hominis, the oyle of grace in your Lampes, the peace of God in your hearts, the streames of the Rivers of God in your consciences’.14 Here Reynolds echoed his moderate message in Daventry and presaged the thrust of the sermon he preached after the fire of London in 1666. The ideal was to secure benevolent Providence by rejecting sin and embracing God’s peace. In the summer of 1642, Reynolds urged all to step away from the precipice of war, something both Parliament and the Crown failed to do. Reynolds’s prominence increased further when he became a member of the Westminster Assembly and took the Oath of Covenant in 1643, illustrating his Presbyterian ecclesiology. He participated widely in the Assembly. He had a hand in drafting the Directory Public Worship, proved active in debates and discussions about ordination, discussed qualifications for the sacrament of communion, and engaged in talks about reconciling differences with Independents.15 On 8 August 1645, he also preached before the Assembly. His sermon addressed the many divisions in English society, particularly those between Presbyterians, Independents, and sectarians. Reynolds once again struck an irenic tone: ‘set up the love of Christ and his church uppermost in our hearts: this love will constraine us, and make us willing to be offered up in public service’.16 Divisions existed because too many people, especially clergy, had become self-seekers, and their ‘failings’ manifested most ominously as ‘affection for New senses and Expositions of Scripture’ that proved dangerous to the unity and peace of the church.17 Blame also rested on the Laudianism of the 1630s: ‘I have long had this opinion, that a divided Ministry in this Kingdom, of Conformists and Non-conformists, was fomented by an Episcopal interest.’18 Consequently, adherence to ‘fancies of New Light, and Liberty of Conscience’ grew and Reynolds urged: ‘let ministeriall prudence and zeale for the soules of our hearers, and for the peace of the Church, teach us to deny all pride and wantonesse of wit … and make us busie ourselves in finding out a Northwest passage … unto heaven’.19 Reynolds made a classic moderatepuritan move here, establishing a middle way between Laudian prelacy and heretical sectarianism. During that spring and summer, the noted London ministers John Goodwin of St Stephen Coleman Street and Henry Burton of St Matthew Friday Street faced ejection from their livings for promoting Independency in their respective parishes, and the latter went on to engage in polemics with his fellow godly martyr John Bastwick, and the prominent London Presbyterian cleric Edmund Calamy.20 In such a context, Reynolds’s preaching for a middle way full of ‘prudence’ and the ‘peace of the Church’ was both an attempt to bolster presbyterianism and likely an

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overture to his Independent brethren to maintain unity against sectarianism and episcopacy. The Westminster Assembly’s achievements were too significant to do otherwise. Yet presbyterianism proved problematic subsequent to the regicide, the formation of the Republic, the ‘Engagement Controversy’, and the establishment of the Protectorate. Prior to Charles I’s execution, Reynolds participated, primarily as vice-chancellor and dean of Christ Church, in Parliament’s visitation of the University of Oxford and the implementation of reforms that ultimately led to the purge of Royalist faculty and students. He lost his positions at Christ Church because of his refusal to subscribe to the Engagement but maintained his living at Braunston for much of the Interregnum because of his 1649 authoring of The Humble Proposals of Sundry and Learned and Pious Divines. Rhetorically moderate, the tract was an apology for clergy refusing the Engagement. It stated that faithful ‘ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ’ served Parliament well; they had suffered ‘from the common Enemy’ and therefore promised to ‘maintain the Peace of this Nation, and pay obedience to the Laws thereof’.21 Neither an extreme Royalist nor an extreme Presbyterian, Reynolds situated himself yet again in a middle way, and he ultimately proved successful with such rhetoric, rebuffing any significant sanctions from the Commonwealth. Reynolds retired to Braunston and remained there until 1656, when he accepted an invitation to become rector of St Lawrence Old Jewry in London, a Presbyterian parish throughout the 1640s and 1650s where divines like Anthony Burgess, Christopher Love, and Richard Vines served the cure.22 From this City base, Reynolds’s profile again rose, and he became a leader – along with Simeon Ashe, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Manton, William Bates, Matthew Poole, William Spurstowe, Lazarus Seaman, and William Jenkyn  – in the promotion of Presbyterian accommodation with Richard Cromwell. Both the Daventry sermon of 1637 and the 1645 sermon before the Westminster Assembly, with their moderate messages, were reprinted in 1659, published together in a collected volume of Reynolds’s preaching.23 By January 1660, with General Monck’s army on the move from Scotland, Reynolds joined his fellow London clergy as the first signatory and the key hand in printing A Seasonable Exhortation of Sundry Ministers. A tract that featured yet another rhetorical via media (this time between popery and sectarianism), it made overtures to episcopalian clergy to combat these dual threats to true religion.24 Along with fellow Presbyterians Baxter and Calamy, Reynolds subsequently led the moderate puritan charge for reconciliation with the Crown at the Restoration. As a reward for these efforts, in autumn 1660 Charles II offered the bishopric of Hereford to Baxter, Coventry and Lichfield to Calamy, and Norwich to Reynolds. Reflecting on their nominations, Baxter wrote years

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later: ‘for Dr. Reynolds I persuaded him to accept it, so be it, he would publickly declare that he took it but on the terms of the King’s declaration, and would lay it down when he could no longer exercise it on those terms’.25 Referenced here was Charles’s 25 October Worcester House Declaration, which reiterated the principles published by the king at Breda in early April and expressed the king’s willingness to have reduced episcopacy, with active Presbyterian checks and balances, serve as the national church’s ecclesiastical structure. The declaration represented the culmination of months of negotiations, beginning with the opening of the Convention Parliament on 25 April. The negotiations involved royal officials like Clarendon, episcopalians like Gauden and Edward Stillingfeet, and Presbyterian divines like Baxter, Calamy, and Reynolds.26 Invited to preach to the Convention that day, Reynolds delivered a sermon on Malachi 4:2–3 at St Margaret Westminster, urging that ‘Love may be the soul of the body politick’ and observing that the ‘breaches I hope are not so wide, but that if animosities and prejudices were removed, they might by amicable and fraternal debates be closed up’.27 Here Reynolds intended ‘amicable and fraternal debates’ to refer to discussions not simply between Presbyterians and Independents but also with episcopalian Royalists. Within weeks, he joined a delegation of Presbyterians who met the king at the Hague. The clergy included Calamy and other London clergy who had signed the Seasonable Exhortation in January. Reynolds’s reputation preceded him. Describing the delegation, Sir Thomas Wharton wrote to James Butler, duke of Ormond: ‘Doctor Reynolds is a very learned, pious, moderate man’.28 By the end of May, Charles II made most of the delegation, along with Baxter, royal chaplains, and, in the late summer, the king began nominating new bishops to vacant dioceses. Many were ‘moderates’: Humphrey Henchman, Robert Sanderson, and Gauden represented notable episcopalians, while Baxter, Calamy, and Reynolds stood as the only Presbyterians offered sees.29 The latter three’s individual decisions on whether to accept the bishoprics allow us to contrast their respective practices of moderate puritanism. If we believe Baxter’s remembrance, they ‘all thought a Bishoprick might be accepted according to the Description of the [Worcester House] Declaration, without any violation of the [Solemn League and] Covenant’. Reynolds accepted, concluding that ‘a Bishop was but the Chief Presbyter’.30 Baxter and Calamy ultimately declined. The former suspected that the Worcester House Declaration only served temporary political ends designed to restore pre-Civil War episcopacy, and the latter received discouragement from both his family and the City’s Presbyterians, who worried that acceptance would seem hypocritical, given Calamy’s intense critiques of prelacy in the previous decades.31

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Despite choosing different paths from Reynolds, Baxter and Calamy none the less made similar public statements of reconciliation, unity, and peace with episcopalians and Royalists at the time of the Restoration. Five days after the Convention Parliament opened, Baxter delivered a sermon before the Commons on Ezekiel 36:31: ‘Our calamities begun in differences about religion, and still that’s the wound that most needs closing … our concord a very easie thing, if the prudent and moderate might be the guides’.32 The following year, Calamy printed the third edition of a collection of sermons delivered at his home parish, St Mary Aldermanbury, between 1639 and 1657, in which he urged in the dedicatory: ‘Blessed are the Peace-Makers. Now I beseech you Brethren … that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you.’33 He also warned in the dedicatory against separatism. It led people to become ‘Anabaptists, some Quakers, some Ranters, some direct Athiests … Take heed of unchurching the churches of Christ, lest you prove schismastics instead.’34 Read in the context of 1657, such a statement evoked a middle way that united Presbyterians and Independents, but, in the context of 1661, it easily could have been taken to mean that episcopalians belonged to the ‘churches of Christ’. Reynolds assumed his new ecclesiastical position as bishop of Norwich that January. Nevertheless in April he joined fellow Presbyterian and episcopalian clergy (among them Gauden, Sanderson, Accepted Frewen, and George Morley) at the Savoy Conference to discuss revisions to the Book of Common Prayer. Yet the tide in favour of reconciliation between these groups turned once the Cavalier parliament assembled in May and revanchist hardliners gained the upper hand politically. This led to the eventual passage in 1662 of the Act of Uniformity, which deprived roughly 1,700 clergy of their benefices on 24 August.35 Calamy lost his living at St Mary Aldermanbury. He suffered imprisonment in Newgate for delivering a sermon in the parish that December, and subsequently continued to preach in his home and to hold conventicles until his death in 1666. Baxter’s refusal to conform ensured that he never again enjoyed preferment to a cure officially linked to the Church of England, but he continued, before his death in 1691, to deploy a moderate rhetoric of peace and reconciliation in promotion of comprehension.36 Sharing similar moderate-puritan sensibilities with these two men, Reynolds none the less channelled his in conformity to the Restoration Church of England, doing so as a bishop no less. The kingdom had entered into a period characterized by intense persecution against a wide gamut of Protestants, most with roots squarely in puritanism, including Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and Baptists. If puritanism, as manifested in these groups, could evolve under the ‘guise of dissent’, it proved

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also capable of enveloping itself within Restoration episcopacy. This is exemplified by Reynolds, a moderate prelate who held ample Presbyterian credentials developed in the 1640s and 1650s. As the bishop of Norwich, he used his position within the ecclesiastical establishment to reform the national church.

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A bishop’s moderate puritanism On 31 October 1661, William Cooke of Broome, Norfolk, wrote to William Sancroft, the future archbishop of Canterbury and non-juror, with news: ‘Our Bp … very seldome goes to his Cathedrall, he gave orders in St. Peters & not at Christ Church which was the place alwayese used for that purpose by his predecessors, he is thought to love the portion more than the spouse’. Besides offering sarcastic critique, Cooke revealed that Reynolds, as the new bishop of Norwich, broke with tradition in the diocese by choosing to perform ordinations at the Norwich parish of St Peter Mancroft rather than Christ Church, the colloquial name of the local cathedral.37 Cooke’s news came over a month after Reynolds’s actions. We know he preached an ordination sermon at Mancroft on 22 September, which was subsequently printed. In the dedicatory, he echoed the reduced episcopacy outlined in the Worcester House Declaration: ‘I hope it will not be grevious unto you, or offensive unto any, if after the Example of the Antient Bishops in the primitive and purer ages of the Church who were wont to sit with their Clergy and preside in an Ecclesiastical Senate, I shall in matters of weight and difficulty intreat … assistance of you who are Presbyteri urbis.’38 Here Reynolds essentially declared the reasoning for why he chose to accept his episcopal nomination, and he intended presbyterianism to inform a prelacy characterized by equanimity and recourse to counsel from the diocese’s conforming clergy. Before his newly ordained auditory, Reynolds stressed in the body of the sermon that his clergy represented an ‘evangelical ministry’ who guided people to ‘edification and salvation’ through prayer and preaching.39 Like Paul, who combated ‘the suggestions of false Apostles, and deceitful workers’, the ministry of ‘sober and fixed divines’ stood against ‘self created preachers’ who had been ‘in the late licentious days amongst us’.40 Reynolds told his hearers to ‘preach not your own passions and animosities … to shake the piety which the people owe to God, or loyalty they owe to their Prince’. Instead they were to ‘preach those things which make for peace, and which may heal divisions and compose the distempers which yet remain in the midst of us’.41 Once again, Reynolds deployed the rhetoric of moderation, infused with irencism, just as he had done in other sermons between

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the 1630s and 1660s. Now a bishop, he projected what informed his religio-political sentiments: a commitment to presbyterianism, confidence in the efficacy of preaching, and apprehension about sectarianism. Through moderate puritanism, Reynolds had ascended to a position of great influence and power, and he proved ready to shape the Restoration church of England, at least in his diocese, in accordance with his godly principles. Reynolds’s diocese consisted of Norfolk and Suffolk  – two longtime havens for puritanism  – and a small portion of Cambridgeshire.42 By 1660, the diocese was home to significant numbers of Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Quakers. Reynolds’s first episcopal visitation in October 1662 reveals one aspect of how he managed the confessional makeup of this diocese. The previous March, an episcopal committee established in June 1661 by Convocation had completed a standard set of visitation articles. Many bishops had copies of previous drafts at their disposal, and a number of them modified these standard articles for their respective dioceses. This introduced variation in the articles presented when these bishops conducted their first visitations in the autumn after the Bartholomew Day ejections of 24 August.43 Reynolds significantly amended the standard articles, particularly those addressing the clergy. His first article for the clergy asked: ‘Hath your Minister been freely presented, and legally instituted, and inducted into his benefice? Did he within two moneths after his induction read … in the Church in the time of divine service the thirty nine Articles, and declare his assent thereunto?’44 In contrast, the first article presented for the clergy in many dioceses, such as Lincoln, Durham, Exeter, Hereford, and Coventry and Lichfield – where Robert Sanderson, John Cosin, Seth Ward, Herbert Croft, and John Hacket followed more closely the standard articles – asked whether a parish cleric had received episcopal ordination ‘according to the laws of the Church of England’.45 Reynolds’s first article notably gave clergy room to conform simply by publicly subscribing to the Thirty-Nine Articles, even if their ordinations came not from an episcopal but instead from a Presbyterian hand during the 1640s and 1650s. Yet if Reynolds was something of a maverick bishop, he was also a measured and precise one. In his eighth article, he inquired about parish clergy: ‘Doth he in his Sermons preach only sound and wholsome doctrine, tending to Peace, holinesse, and edification … or doth he at any time preach any false, heretical, seditious, dangerous doctrines?’46 The question echoed similar queries posed by the bishops of Lincoln, Durham, Exeter, Hereford, and Coventry and Lichfield, as did Reynolds’s ninth article, which considered further the role of a preacher: ‘Doth he endeavour to reclaim Popish Recusants, or any other persons of corrupt Judgements, from such their errours to the acknowledged Truth?’ Reynolds departed from the other

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bishops here by speaking of ‘persons of corrupt Judgements’ rather than ‘sectaries’.47 The latter term was used to encompass all dissenters, including Presbyterians and Congregationalists, while the former phrase was not. The via media implied in Reynolds’s eighth and ninth articles mirrored those he deployed in previous decades, excluding Catholics, Baptists, Quakers, and Socinians. Although enforcement of the Clarendon Code, like the Act of Uniformity and the Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670, came under the civil authority of city magistrates and justices of the peace, ecclesiastical officials none the less often felt obligated and possessed the legal means to pressure officials to diligently carry out their duties. The enforcement of conformity also precipitated increased calls for comprehension in the latter 1660s, as Reynolds’s sermon in November 1666 at Westminster Abbey illustrated. After Clarendon’s fall from power, a group led by John Wilkins pushed unsuccessfully in 1668 for the passage of a comprehension bill in Parliament.48 In this context, Reynolds delivered a sermon before the king at Whitehall on Easter. The bishop lamented the ‘Divisions which still continue and woefully increase’ and foster ‘Atheistical prejudices against religion’ that only ‘peace and unity’ within both the kingdom and its national church could rectify.49 Reynolds’s endorsement of comprehension had limits: ‘Atheistical prejudices’ fell well beyond the pale of acceptable godly belief, which included presbyterianism and (judging by his previous willingness to accommodate Independents in the 1640s and 1650s) Congregationalism. As Noah Millstone notes in Chapter 5 above, Hacket and other Restoration bishops may have had similar moderate tendencies to Reynolds, but they could still become vehement opponents of comprehension. The bishop of Norwich’s inclinations proved different, and his public pronouncements in sermons corresponded to his administrative style in the diocese. Besides deploying ambiguous visitation articles that allowed room for at least Presbyterians to conform, Reynolds governed his diocese in order to promote degrees of comprehension in Norwich. Take, for instance, the diocesesan cathedral in the 1660s. The archbishop of Canterbury, Gilbert Sheldon, learned from an anonymous informant in the city that ‘My Lord Bishopp of Norwich suffers diverse Presbyterians, and factious preachers, to bee put into the combination [lecture] for preachers at Christ Church in Norwich’. Thomas Thorowgood, an old godly divine and erstwhile member of the Westminster Assembly, was among ‘these seditious & factious preachers’, all of whom Reynolds ‘received with all kind respects’. Accused of accommodating nonconformists, the bishop remarked that their sermons ‘might bee taken in double sense’ and that ‘there was noe such difference betweene the Presbyterians, and the Church of England’.50

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Reynolds also proved willing to welcome ejected clergy into the national church after 1662 by granting them episcopal ordination and directing them towards new livings in either Norfolk or Suffolk. In both counties, a total of twenty ejected clergy who experienced deprivation subsequently conformed, with Norfolk having eight and Suffolk twelve. On average, four divines per county fully returned to serve the national church. Therefore Norfolk and Suffolk, not to mention Norwich diocese as a whole, were well above the national average. Only Exeter and York (which encompassed the counties of Devon and Cornwall and Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, respectively) had comparable numbers of returning clergy. Norwich’s restored ministers included men like John Candler, Jeremiah Catlin, Samuel Crossman, George Havil, Mark Lewis, and William Sparrow, and their individual ordinations spanned Reynolds’s entire prelacy.51 Most of these clergy had strictly Presbyterian backgrounds and ordinations, but some had ambiguous pasts. Ordained by the seventh classis of the London Provincial Assembly in 1647, Crossman had strong Congregationalist links: he attended the 1658 Savoy Conference and served as pastor to an Independent church in Sudbury, Suffolk, while also enjoying the rectorship of All Saints in the same city before the Restoration. Ejected from the rectorship after the king’s return, he remained without an official living until 28 October 1665, as the news man Henry Muddiman learned from his Norwich source, William Newell, on 3 November: ‘Last Saturday being Simon and Jude, one Mr. Crossman … who was one of the most notorious Presbyterians in Suffolk … came then and was ordained privately by Bp Reynolds’.52 Newell’s characterization of Crossman’s confessional leanings may have reflected ignorance of the cleric’s Congregational background, but certainly the 1665 ordination paved the way for a homecoming in Sudbury, as he became ‘Deacon & Priest Curate’ in the town’s parish of St Gregory and St Peter.53 Reynolds’s willingness to allow Presbyterians to preach in the diocese’s cathedral and to bring divines of Crossman’s godly ilk back into the fold of the national church exposes a clear difference between his governing style and the rigid enforcement of conformity characteristic of episcopal contemporaries such as Ward and Sheldon, both of whom proved steadfast in viewing dissenters as religious and political threats.54 This did not mean that Reynolds turned a blind eye to dissent in his diocese: there were 139 deprivations in Norwich between 1660 and 1662. Most of these ejections, however, resulted from the Act of Uniformity. Secular magistrates took the lead for much of Reynolds’s prelacy. The bishop preferred a subtler approach, particularly when dealing with Presbyterians and Congregationalists.55 A case in point is the way he

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addressed his worries about the Sudbury parish of All Saints in 1670. That June, Reynolds felt pressure from the Crown to inquire about reports that nonconformists utilized All Saints because the living was so small that no divine officially served the cure.56 Consequently, the bishop wrote to John Spencer, archdeacon of Sudbury, on 6 July, seeking ‘speedy assistance’ and advice on how ‘maintenance for a constant Minister maybe raised’. He also commanded ‘the churchwardens of that parish, to see that none Preach but those that can produce licenses & testimonials of their subscriptions’.57 The nonconformists were likely Presbyterians or Congregationalists, especially given that All Saints was Crossman’s former living. Reynolds’s request was no aggressive crackdown but rather an effort to secure regular, reliable pastoral care for All Saints parishioners. This behaviour contrasted dramatically with how the bishop dealt with the Society of Friends. Reynolds’s ecclesiastical courts consistently targeted Quakers in both Norfolk and Suffolk throughout his prelacy, particularly with writs de excommunicato capiendo, which ordered secular authorities to imprison any person excommunicated who had not repented within forty days. Refusals to pay tithes commonly prompted these writs in the diocese, and a number of Quakers experienced prolonged imprisonment for this offence.58 Substantial periods in gaol also resulted from writs de excommunicato capiendo that cited lack of attendance at, and communion with, the Church of England. Reynolds’s victims here included James King and Thomas Ledeman of Edmundsbury in 1665, and also William Falkner and John Manning in 1675, both of whom endured ‘twenty three weeks together in a place called the Bottom’ for their offences.59 Many of these Quakers suffered imprisonment while Reynolds preached for comprehension, ordained dissenting clergy of either a Presbyterian or Congregational ilk, and took a passive approach to enforcing conformity in places like Sudbury. None of this is surprising. Reynolds had consistently made public pronouncements against sectarians like Quakers from the 1640s onwards. To the bishop, they belonged neither in his diocese nor in the national church. Also important to the character of Reynolds’s administration of the diocese were officials like the archdeacon Spencer, as well as the diocese’s commissaries, deans, and prebends. By the late 1660s, the bishop had proved successful in filling many of these positions with like-minded people, including his brother John, his son Edward, and his son-in-law, John Conant. Reynolds had also ordained Conant in 1670 after he had been deprived of his rectorship at Exeter College, Oxford, in 1662.60 Moreover, Reynolds resisted both the appointment and the actions of episcopal administrators who did not share his sentiments. A clear example is Owen Hughes, a civil lawyer who had staunchly Anglican sensibilities, infused

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with Laudian reverence for ceremony and a revanchist attitude to dissenters. Hughes served as commissary in both the Norwich and the Norfolk archdeaconries during the 1670s. His place in the diocese was owed to his patron, Sir Robert Southwell, the Privy Council clerk and diplomat, who had provided letters of commendation to Reynolds in November 1672.61 Upon the death of Sir Justinian Lewyn, the Norwich and Norfolk commissaryships, along with the officialty of the former, lay vacant. Charles II wanted Hughes to have all three positions, but Reynolds resisted. The king voiced his displeasure in January that the bishop had appointed Hughes to serve only the archdeaconry of Norwich but not that of Norfolk as commissary.62 The Crown’s prodding did the trick, and Hughes had assumed all three positions before winter’s end. Hughes did not take long to stir up controversy, particularly when he conducted in September a thorough visitation of the parish churches in the  city of Norwich. This spawned a prolonged row over the placement of the chancel gallery obstructing the sight of, and light on, the communion table in St George Tombland, the curacy held by Benedict Riveley, Reynolds’s chaplain.63 Hughes complained to Southwell on 16 March 1674 that his ‘well wishes for the best constitution, and most excellent establishment of our holy mother the Church of England’ through enforcement of conformity were too extreme for many in the diocese. This included Reynolds: ‘the man of moderation discourages all such activities; this is the great censure I lay under, for this I suffer, and am like to suffer still’.64 Hughes’s troubles continued over the subsequent years, especially when he faced harassment and threats of excommunication from the church courts in Norwich. Here he informed Southwell on 29 March 1675 that he had suffered the ‘ingratitude and unkindness of the Presbyterian Palace’.65 Reynolds’s moderate puritanism and penchant for comprehension created an uncomfortable environment for men of Hughes’s ilk in the diocese, and the commissary found little to admire about ‘the man of moderation’. Hughes did not have to endure the bishop’s discouragement much longer, as Reynolds died on 28 July 1676. Soon after, a broadside ballad circulated in print memorializing the bishop. It exclaimed that the nine classical muses adorned Reynolds with many qualities, but a tenth, ‘Madam Sophronia, she poured on his head great prudence and discretion’.66 The line celebrated Reynolds’s moderation, as did Riveley in a funeral sermon, though the prelate’s chaplain also admitted that the bishop proved a polarizing figure to some: ‘the one sort think him not good, because a Bishop at all, making those terms, Good and Bishop, inconsistent … the other can’t afford him to be good in his capacity, because he was not much a Bishop  ... as he would not drive their pace’.67 Here Riveley situated Reynolds and his prelacy at a centre resented by extremists on opposite sides. At one end

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stood Quakers who had suffered from his episcopal administration, as well as dissenting Presbyterians and Congregationalists who remained steadfast despite Reynolds’s overtures to such groups through acts of ordination and loose enforcement of conformity. On the other end were Anglicans like Hughes, men who could not stomach Reynolds’s refusal to enact revanchist policies against nonconformists. For Reynolds and his admirers, however, his prelatical governance of moderation, degrees of irenicism and comprehension, and Presbyterian principles ensured the edification of the national church along puritan lines.

Contesting the national church Shortly before his passing, Edward Reynolds finalized his last will and testament. Desiring to die in ‘Beliefe of that true Reformed Protestant Religion’ that Providence established ‘far above these hundred yeares’, he prayed that God continue blessing England and the other Stuart kingdoms: ‘poure forth a spirit of unity, peace, love and a sound mind upon all the professors thereof that so [sic] those sad devisions, which staine the beauty and shake the stability thereof amongst us’.68 Again irenic, he left little doubt here about his belief that the national church was ‘Reformed’, something that suggests that we must broaden the parameters of De Krey’s definition of the term and examine further puritanism’s legacy after the Restoration in ways that go beyond dissent. Of course, Reynolds maintained this legacy fully within the Church of England, and Hampton has therefore included him among the ‘Anglican Reformed’ of the later seventeenth century. Hampton has also placed figures like Hacket, Ward, Wilkins, Crossman, and Conant in these ranks, but we have seen how these men were far from uniform in their ecclesiology or in their attitudes to conformity.69 Indeed, it is difficult to profile Hacket and Ward as puritans, and both had aversions to comprehension, while Crossman and Conant eventually conformed under Reynolds’s prelacy to hold clerical positions in the national church. Both had initially dissented from the Restoration church, as did two other clerics, Baxter and Calamy, with whom Reynolds enjoyed close ties. Men with clear moderate credentials, Baxter especially, neither conformed after 1662. But this never meant that they relinquished interest in finding room within the Church of England for clergy of their persuasions. Reynolds shared these persuasions, particularly in his presbyterianism and moderation, but he could just as easily find common ground with moderates more firmly wedded to episcopacy like Wilkins, who also proved keen for comprehension in the late 1660s. Both bishops had moderate sensibilities, and Wilkins’s familial experience likely influenced his accommodating

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attitudes towards dissenters. After all, he was the grandson of John Dod, that puritan paragon in Elizabethan and early Stuart England who engaged in both conformity and nonconformity during his long life. Not only did this expose Wilkins to the nuances, if not the ambiguities, of moderate puritanism, but it also put him in the godly Dryden–Knightley orbit of Jacobean and Caroline Northamptonshire, which patronized both clergy of Dod’s ilk and steadfast conformists.70 Wilkins’s career and background highlight the fact that many clergy who proved key actors in shaping the confessional landscape after the Restoration came of age during the early seventeenth century, as was the case for Crossman, Conant, Crossman, Calamy, Baxter, and Reynolds. In other words, these men knew and recognized early modern moderation – both its rhetoric and its practice – and experienced first hand its various puritan applications in contestations over what defined the confessional character of the national church. Such contestations manifested in the post-Restoration period in various ways and indeed throughout the entire seventeenth century at many points, including the Jacobean ‘Calvinist Consensus’, the Personal Rule, the Civil Wars, and, as Ann Hughes has reminded us, the Interregnum.71 Reynolds participated abundantly in this oscillating environment, and when he sought to edify the national church – no matter its incarnation – he did so as a moderate puritan. A product of the early Stuart period, he witnessed religio-political turmoil and discord, as it was manifest around the Laudian reforms, the English Civil Wars and Revolution, the Interregnum, and the Restoration settlement. Through this ever-changing context, he held numerous clerical positions: a provincial living in a hotbed of confessional strife, a seat at the Westminster Assembly, a rectorship in a Presbyterian parish in London, a chaplaincy at the royal court, and finally a bishopric in the Church of England. Moderation defined his rhetoric and practices. It was his instrumentalised ideology, and he consistently deployed it while his national profile rose. In his preaching and prelacy he extolled unity, peace, and love while also establishing clear middle ways for what defined ‘true’ English Protestantism. Catholics and sectarians were always beyond the pale but, depending on contingencies, episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Independents could be welcome. While other moderates like Baxter and  Calamy declined Charles II’s episcopal nominations, Reynolds chose the opposite path and accepted a bishopric. Perhaps an Edmund Grindal or a Mathew Hutton redivivus, he practised moderate puritanism to reform the national church along godly lines centred on a­ nti-popery and a­ nti-sectarianism, the efficacy of preaching, the doctrine and theology of predestination, and the worthiness of reduced ­episcopacy based on Presbyterianism. Puritanism was alive and well after the Restoration, its moderate forms personified in the bishop of Norwich,

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who sat not among dissenters, partial conformists, or future Whigs but right in the heart of the ecclesiastical establishment. If indeed a ‘Long Reformation’ occurred in England, moderate puritanism surely played no small role in it.

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Notes  1 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), 293–318.  2 M. Goldie, Roger Morrice and the Puritan Whigs, 2nd ed. (Woodbridge, 2016), 149; M. Goldie, ‘The Theory of Religious Intolerance in Restoration England’, in O.P. Grell, J. Israel and N. Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford, 1991), 331–68.  3 G. De Krey, ‘Between Revolutions: Re-Appraising the Restoration in Britain’, History Compass 6 (2008), 738–73; G. De Krey, London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge, 2005), 5, n. 5.  4 J. Spurr, ‘Later Stuart Puritanism’, in J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim (eds), The Camb­ ridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge, 2008), 89–105, at 90 and 100.  5 G. Southcombe, The Culture of Dissent in Restoration England: ‘The Wonders of the Lord’ (Woodbridge, 2019), 164.  6 J. Spurr, The Restoration Church of England, 1646–1689 (New Haven, 1991); S. Hampton, Anti-Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), especially 1–38 and 266–74; W.J. Bulman, Anglican Enlightenment: Orientalism, Religion, and Politics in England and Its Empire, 1648–1715 (Cambridge, 2015), esp. 149–290.  7 P. Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982); P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester, 2001); D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in PreCivil War England (Stanford, 2004); D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018); P. Lake, ‘Joseph Hall, Robert Skinner, and the Rhetoric of Moderation of the Early Stuart Court’, in L.A. Ferrell and P. McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester, 2000), 167–85; E. Shagan, The Rule of Moderation: Violence, Religion and the Politics of Restraint in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2011), ch. 4.  8 Significant studies are J.J. Jeremiah, ‘Edward Reynolds (1599–1676): Pride of the Presbyterian Party’ (PhD thesis, George Washington University, 1992); G.R. Abernathy, ‘The English Presbyterians and the Stuart Restoration, 1648– 1663’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 55 (1965), 1–101.  9 E. Reynolds, A Sermon Preached Before the Peers, In the Abby Church at Westminster, Novemb. 7 1666 (London, 1666), 1, 28. 10 Ibid., 31–2.

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11 R.S. Bosher, The Making of the Restoration Settlement: The Influence of the Laudians, 1649–1662 (London, 1951), 120–1, 150–1, 191–2; I.M. Green, The Re-establishment of the Church of England, 1660–1663 (Oxford, 1978) chs 1, 4; Spurr, Restoration Church of England, 31–3, 57, 59; M.P. Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism in Restoration England: Richard Baxter and Others Respond to a Friendly Debate’, The Historical Journal 54 (2011), 689–715; Lake, ‘Reading Clarke’s Lives’, 298–318. 12 I. Atherton (8 January 2009), ‘Reynolds, Edward (1599–1676), Bishop of Norwich’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [hereafter, ODNB]. 13 E. Reynolds, A Sermon Touching the Peace and Edification of the Church (London, 1638), 20; P. Lake and I. Stephens, Scandal and Religious Identity in Early Stuart England: A Northamptonshire Maid’s Tragedy (Woodbridge, 2015), 159–67. 14 E. Reynolds, Israels Petition in Time of Trouble. A Sermon Preached in St.  Margarets Church at Westminster, Before the Honourable House of Commons now Assembled in Parliament (London, 1642), 44. 15 C. Van Dixhoorn and D.F. Wright (eds), The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652 [hereafter MPWA], vol. II (Oxford, 2012), 564, 610; MPWA, vol. III, 467, 566–7, 629, 641, 685, 700–1, 703, 753. 16 E. Reynolds, Self-Deniall: Opened and Applied in a Sermon Before the Reverend Assembly of Divines: on a Day of their Private Humiliation (London, 1645), 21. 17 Ibid., 35. 18 Ibid., 43. 19 Ibid., 36–7. 20 British Library [hereafter BL], Add. MS 15669, fols 66r, 68r, 74r–v, 87r, 96r, 150v, 164r; T. Liu (3 January 2008), ‘John Goodwin (c. 1594–1665)’, ODNB; K. Gibson (28 May 2015) ‘Henry Burton (bap. 1578–d. 1648)’, ODNB. 21 E. Reynolds, The Humble Proposals of Sundry Learned and Pious Divines (London, 1649), 1. 22 London Metropolitan Archives, P69/LAW1/B/001/MS02590/001, 341, 382, 408, 431, 460, 468. 23 E. Reynolds, Divers Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions (London, 1659). 24 A Seasonable Exhortation of Sundry Ministers in London to the People of their Respective Congregations (London, 1659/60), 1–24. 25 R. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae; or Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times Faithfully Published from His Own Original Manuscript By Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), 282. 26 His Maitesties Declaration to All His Loving Subjects of his Kingdom of England, and Dominion of Wales, Concerning Ecclesiastical Affairs (London, 1660), 1–9; B. Till, ‘The Worcester House Declaration and the Restoration of the Church of England’, Historical Research 70 (1997), 203–30. 27 E. Reynolds, The Author and Subject of Healing in the Church Set Forth in a Sermon (London, 1660), 34 and 36. 28 Bodleian Library [hereafter Bod.], Carte 214, fol. 155r. 29 Spurr, Restoration Church, 35; Green, Re-Establishment, 81–3.

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30 Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 283. 31 Ibid., 281, 283. 32 R. Baxter, A Sermon of Repentance (London, 1660), 41. 33 E. Calamy, The Godly Mans Ark or, City of Refuge in the day of Distresse, 3rd ed. (London, 1661), sig. B6–v. 34 Ibid., sig. A8r. 35 A.G. Matthews, Calamy Revised: Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660–62 (Oxford, 1934), ix–xv; Spurr, Restoration Church, 42–50; Green, Re-Establishment, ch. 7. 36 Winship, ‘Defining Puritanism’, 693–701; S. Achinstein (3 October 2013), ‘Edmund Calamy, 1600–1666’, ODNB; N.H. Keeble, ‘Richard Baxter, ­1615–1691’, ODNB. 37 Bod., Tanner 49, fol. 125r. Thanks to Ken Fincham and Joel Halcomb for assisting with this source. 38 E. Reynolds, Preaching of Christ. Opened in a Sermon Preached at St. Peters Church in the City of Norwich at an Ordination (London, 1662), dedicatory. 39 Ibid., 12. 40 Ibid., 2, 20–1. 41 Ibid., 45–6. 42 J.T. Evans, Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion, and Government, 1620–1690 (Oxford, 1979); Jeremiah, ‘Reynolds’, 317. 43 Green, Re-Establishment, 135–8. 44 Articles to be Enquired in the Diocesse of Norwich (London, 1662), 2. 45 Articles of Visitation … Within the Diocess of Lincoln (London, 1662), 4; Articles of Inquiry Concerning Matters Ecclesiastical, Exhibited … In the First Episcopal Visitation of the Right Reverend Father of God John by Divine Providence Lord Bishop of Durham (London, 1662), 4; Articles of Visitation & Enquiry Concerning Matters Ecclesiastical … Within the Diocese of Exeter (London, 1662), 3; Articles of Visitation and Enquiry Concerning Matters Ecclesiastical: Exhibited … Within the Diocesse of Hereford (London, 1662), 4; Articles of Inquiry Concerning Matters Ecclesiastical … Within the Diocesse of Litchfield and Coventry (London, 1662), 3. 46 Norwich, 4. 47 Lincoln, 6; Durham, 5; Exeter, 5; Hereford, 5–6; Coventry and Litchfield, 5–6; Norwich, 4. 48 W.G. Simon, ‘Comprehension in the Age of Charles II’, Church History 31 (1962), 440–8. 49 E. Reynolds, A Sermon Preached Before the King at White-Hall, March 22 1667[68], Being Easter-Day (London, 1668), 10, 12. 50 Bod., Add. C. 304a, fol. 68r. 51 Matthews, Calamy Revised, xii–xiii, 50, 100–1, 105, 150, 160, 183, 205–6, 252, 271, 280–1, 324, 365, 388, 443, 453, 552; Norfolk Record Office, DN/ ORR1/3, 1667; Lambeth Palace Library [hereafter LPL], MS 951, fols 65 and 68.

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52 The National Archives [TNA], SP 29/136, fol. 18; Matthews, Calamy Revised, 150. 53 LPL, MS 951, fol. 68. 54 Spurr, Restoration Church, 47–50, 52, 64; De Krey, London and the Restoration, 76, 83. 55 Walker, Calamy Revised, xii–xiii; Jeremiah, ‘Reynolds’, 352–64. 56 TNA, SP 44/35B, fol. 8. 57 LPL, MS 674, fol. 52r. 58 Joseph Besse, A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers, vol. I (London, 1753), 493, 672, 677. 59 Ibid., 673, 678. 60 BL, Add. MS 22579, fols 25v, 30v–31r; Atherton, ‘Reynolds’; Jeremiah, ‘Reynolds’, 343–4. 61 Folger Shakespeare Library [hereafter, FSL], MSS, V.b. 305, letter no. 2. 62 TNA, SP 44/27, fol. 45; FSL MSS, V.b. 305, letter no. 11. 63 K. Fincham, ‘Material Evidence: the Religious Legacy of the Interregnum at St George Tombland, Norwich’, in K. Fincham and P. Lake (eds), Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke (Woodbridge, 2006), 224–40. 64 FSL MSS, V.b. 305, letter no. 19. 65 Ibid., letter no. 31. 66 An Elegy on the Renowned Memory of the Right Reverend Edward late Bishop of Norwich (London, 1676). 67 B. Riveley, A Sermon Preach’d in the Cathedral Church of Norwich at the Funeral of the Right Reverend Father in God, Edward Bishop of Norwich (Norwich, 1677), 23. 68 TNA, PROB 11/351, fols 386v–387r. Thanks to Sarah Ward Clavier for assisting with this source. 69 Hampton, Anti-Arminians, ch. 1. 70 J. Henry (8 October 2009), ‘John Wilkins, 1614–1642’, ODNB. 71 A. Hughes, ‘The Cromwellian Church’, in A. Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism: Reformation and Identity, c. 1520–1662, vol. I (Oxford, 2017), 444–56.

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Hoadly the high and Sacheverell the low: religious and political celebrity in post-revolutionary England Brian Cowan A short piece of doggerel verse began to circulate widely in print and manuscript in the autumn of 1709, and it would continue to do so for the next year or more. The poem paired and mocked two of the best-known young clergymen of Anne’s reign: the Reverend Benjamin Hoadly, rector of St Peter-le-Poor, London – already known as a staunch Whig – and the notorious Tory Doctor Henry Sacheverell, chaplain at St Saviour’s, Southwark. The poem was even printed on the flyleaf for a pirated edition of Sacheverell’s sermon The Communication of Sin preached at the Derbyshire assizes on 15 August 1709, even though the lines hardly flattered the Tory Doctor.1 Possibly written by the Tory wit Matthew Prior, the poem read: Among the High Church Men, I find there are several That stick to the Doctrine of Henry Sacheverell: Among the Low Church too, I find that as Odly, Some pin all their Faith on one Benjamin Hoadly. But We Moderate Men do our Judgment Suspend. For GOD only knows where these Matters will End; And Salisbury Burnett and White Kennet show, That as the times vary, so Principles go. And Twenty Years hence, for ought you or I know, ’Twill be Hoadly the high, and Sacheverel the low.2

Although Prior (or whoever penned these lines) could hardly know it at the time, the last lines would prove to be prophetic. By 1729, Sacheverell would be deceased, having died in 1724 as a result of complications relating to slipping on the ice on the steps outside his London home; despite his enormous fame, Sacheverell’s only subsequent promotion would be to the (admittedly lucrative) rectory of St Andrew’s, Holborn. His aspirations to elevation to a bishopric after he emerged as a champion for the Tory cause were not satisfied by Queen Anne and they were definitively frustrated after the accession of George I.3 By contrast, Hoadly in 1729

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had been appointed to his third bishopric, holding the see of Salisbury after having previously held the sees of Bangor (1715–21) and Hereford (1721–23). By 1734, Hoadly would be promoted once more to become bishop of Winchester, a position which he would hold until his death in 1761. Hoadly the low church champion had indeed succeeded in reaching the heights of the ecclesiastical hierarchy after the Hanoverian accession, whereas Sacheverell the ambitious high church firebrand was humbled by events beyond his control. Hoadly and Sacheverell were nearly exact contemporaries – Sacheverell being born in February 1674 and Hoadly in November 1676 – and both came of age during England’s post-revolutionary moment in the 1690s. Both men, like everyone else of their generation, had to come to terms with the political and religious consequences of the Glorious Revolution. Although the revolution itself happened while they were teenagers, the meaning of the revolution for the constitution in church and state would loom large over both men’s careers. Hoadly cast his lot with the Whigs and emerged as the most vociferous and prominent defender of the ‘low church’ cause in the eighteenth century.4 Despite his family connections to Presbyterian dissent, Sacheverell did not hesitate to join the Tories and he soon gained notoriety as perhaps the most energetic and uncompromising high churchman of his generation.5 Although their partisan affiliations occupied opposite ends of the postrevolutionary spectrum, Hoadly and Sacheverell each became famous in their day as individualized symbols for the low church and high church factions within the Church of England, and for Whig and Tory partisanship respectively. While both clerics held views that were extreme even for their fellow partisan travellers, they were exemplary for their radicalness and hence became useful caricatures for their enemies. Their fame was enabled by a burgeoning and highly politicized public sphere, the emergence of which was shaped by two long-term processes that structured the early modern era in England: the ‘long reformation’ in religious belief and the ‘long revolution’ in political allegiance.6 In both cases, personal identities were increasingly shaped by an individual’s religious beliefs or political allegiances through processes that early modern historians have identified as confessionalization and the rise of partisanship.7 As the public faces of the low church and high church factions as well as Whig and Tory politics respectively, Hoadly and Sacheverell emerged as religious and political celebrities in the early eighteenth century. Their fame was constructed by the partisan polemics of England’s post-revolutionary moment in a way that neither political historians nor historians of celebrity have yet fully recognized.

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Celebrity before celebrities Historians of celebrity have largely ignored religious and political forms of fame and charisma in narratives of the invention of celebrity as a particularly modern phenomenon. For historians such as Antoine Lilti and Stella Tillyard, celebrity emerged in the later eighteenth century and properly came into its own only in the nineteenth century along with modern forms of publicity and new notions of the self.8 According to these accounts, modern celebrity must be distinguished from earlier, more traditional forms of fame or notoriety because celebrity focused on contemporaneity and psychological interiority rather than posterity and outward achievements: celebrities were famous because the news industry made them so and because the modern public was as interested in private lives and personalities as it was in public accomplishments. I have argued elsewhere that such putatively modern aspects of celebrity were not an invention of the Romantic era, and they can be found in the seventeenth century and perhaps even earlier as well.9 Rather than understanding celebrity as a quality conferred upon individuals by the modern media, one can fruitfully think of celebrity as a form of practice. This accords well with the earliest understandings of the English word ‘celebrity’, which seems to have emerged in the late Middle Ages to refer both to the state of being well known (or famous) and to acts of celebration, particularly ritual acts of ceremony. It is telling that the most common early uses of the word celebrity in English referred to political or religious fame or ceremonies. For example, in his Acts and Monuments (1563) John Foxe referred to Queen Elizabeth’s ‘triumphant passage and honorable entertainment … through the City of London, with suche celebrity, prayers, wishes, welcomminges, cries, tender wordes, Pageantes, Interludes, declamations and verses set vp, as the lyke hathe not commonly bene sene, arguing and declaring a wonderful earnest affection of louyng hartes towarde their soueraigne’.10 The early modern period saw the gradual transformation of celebrity from practices relating to the fame and ceremony attached primarily to monarchs and religious leaders to similar practices of renown that became increasingly accessible to a much wider variety of individuals. This transformation was intimately related to the broader processes of confessionalization and the rise of partisanship that were shaping new forms of religious and political identities more generally. The post-revolutionary milieu into which both Hoadly and Sacheverell came of age was a particularly important moment in this transition, as traditional forms of religious and political charisma came to be mediated through a burgeoning commercial print and entertainment market.11

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The practice of ‘celebrification’, or the creation and maintenance of celebrity status, has begun to attract attention from social theorists. Drawing upon the work of Erving Goffman on the presentation of self, Alice Marwick and danah boyd have conceptualized celebrity as ‘an organic and ever-changing performative practice rather than a set of intrinsic personal characteristics or external labels’ in their study of contemporary celebrity self-presentation on Twitter.12 In a related vein, Robert van Krieken has recently used Norbert Elias’s social process theory to develop an understanding of celebrity as the product of a particular social formation, the ‘celebrity society’ akin to, but distinct from Elias’s ‘court society’.13 Celebrity, in these understandings, is a form of social experience that involves both individual agency (practice) that operates within a given social structure and can, in turn, gradually work to alter that social structure. This is a fruitful approach to the study of celebrity as a social experience, but it is one that has not been hitherto taken up by historians. Benjamin Hoadly and Henry Sacheverell offer two excellent examples of a form of celebrity formation that illuminates the transitional moment in the making of the modern experience of celebrity. In some ways, the celebrity of Hoadly and Sacheverell is akin to the modern phenomenon associated with later eighteenth-century celebrities such as David Garrick or Lord Byron: the fame that accrued to them during their lifetimes generated a public interest in their personalities, their eccentricities, and even to a certain extent to their interior lives. But their celebrity was also clearly related to more traditional forms of charisma rooted in the way in which their personas stood for broader religious beliefs and political loyalties that were in no way unique to them alone.14 Indeed, the way in which the public figures of these particular clergymen could represent a collection of beliefs and allegiances that had a meaning greater than just their own was part of their appeal. Hoadly was an exceptionally interesting clerical celebrity because he could easily stand for a set of religious and political principles that contemporaries recognized as the epitome of what it meant to be a ‘low churchman’ and a Whig. The same was true of Sacheverell with regard to contemporaries’ sense of ‘high churchman’ and Tory. Neither of these clergymen set out to become celebrities in England’s post-revolutionary moment. The notion of a celebrity as a social category did not yet exist. It would take another century or more before the word ‘celebrity’ would be used as a noun to refer to specific famous individuals.15 But their actions as religious leaders and political actors garnered enough public attention that they would become famous; furthermore, their public personas became a form of public property, readily identifiable enough that they could be usefully appropriated by others as part of the vociferous propaganda wars that characterized post-revolutionary England.16 The

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practice of ‘celebrification’ through which Hoadly and Sacheverell emerged as celebrities was one that involved their publics more so than the objects of this process. It could hardly be otherwise in a culture that largely frowned upon vainglorious aspirations, particularly among commoners and especially for clergymen, who were supposed to exemplify Christian virtues of modesty and temperance in their personal demeanour. Even though both Hoadly and Sacheverell were exceptionally ambitious young clergymen, they could not afford to appear to court popularity or preferment too nakedly. Sacheverell’s ecclesiastical career arguably suffered because his personal temperament was such that he was often unable to hide his ambition successfully. The bishop of Oxford denied Sacheverell upon his first attempt to obtain a clerical appointment, explaining in a private letter to William Lloyd that the young cleric ‘is really proud and thinks too well of himself, which I have often told him in plain terms and with as much severity as I could (tho[ugh] to little purpose)’.17 The pursuit of fame was a dangerous game in the early modern era due to the generally negative attitudes towards ambition, vanity, and publicity that prevailed. Despite this putative rejection of publicity-seeking behaviour, it was nearly impossible for anyone engaged in the religious and political debates of post-revolutionary England to avoid garnering attention from a public that keenly followed these debates. Public figures such as Hoadly and Sacheverell were produced by the religious and political divisions of the long reformation as well as the long revolution. Both of these processes demanded the construction of recognizable personalities who could represent for a broader public the causes for which they stood. This was a form of fame construction that relied heavily upon traditional models of martyrdom that were activated in highly competitive ways in the postReformation religious turmoil that characterized the Tudor and Stuart eras, as Peter Lake’s scholarship has amply demonstrated.18 Histories of celebrity that efface figures such as Hoadly or Sacheverell from their narratives fail to account for the impact that long-term processes such as the long reformation and the long revolution had on the making of modern celebrity. The celebrity of Hoadly and Sacheverell also developed in tandem: their public identities were shaped in opposition to one another. One might even say that their celebrity was mutually constitutive. Hoadly was already well known as a prominent low church clergyman before Sacheverell’s notorious St Paul’s Cathedral sermon in 1709 and his subsequent parliamentary impeachment trial in 1710 made the Doctor famous. But Hoadly was far from a celebrity until the Sacheverell controversy exploded. Once this happened, Sacheverell’s ensuing celebrity brought Hoadly with him as the emblematic Whig anti-Sacheverell figure. Given the extremely partisan nature of post-revolutionary political culture, it could hardly have been

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otherwise. If Hoadly had not already existed as the best known Whig churchman of his day, the partisan furors of the age would have required that someone else emerge as a low church counterpart to Sacheverell. The celebrity of partisan clerics such as Benjamin Hoadly and Henry Sacheverell was forged by the multiple forms of mediated publicity that prevailed in early eighteenth-century England. Publics responded to the media available to them, and the forms of mediation shaped the ways in which people became aware of their celebrities.19 The primary forms of public mediation are oral, written, and visual; for Hoadly and Sacheverell, their celebrity emerged out of the ways in which their public images were shaped by each of these forms of mediation as they existed in the early eighteenth century. While Hoadly and Sacheverell were exceptional in so far as their widespread celebrity was not shared by the rest of their clerical brethren, the ways in which their celebrity was constructed tell us much about the structures of publicity in post-revolutionary England.

Preaching and publishing Above all, both Hoadly and Sacheverell were best known as preachers. The modern and secularist prejudices of contemporary celebrity studies may explain why famous preachers do not figure prominently in the history of celebrity, but historians of the early modern era can hardly afford to make the same mistake.20 The sermon has now taken a prominent place in the history of early modern English religion, and preaching is recognized as a key aspect of the post-reformation public sphere, not least due to the pioneering work of Professor Lake.21 Aside from the occasional reference to the early modern era as ‘an age of celebrity preachers’, however, the role of preaching as an aspect of early modern celebrity formation remains under-appreciated.22 Sermons were important and popular events that could draw large crowds in early eighteenth-century England, especially in London, where the large population and a substantial number of Anglican parishes, court and corporation preachers, along with dissenting congregations and foreign churches, created a particularly rich and diverse environment for preaching. Sacheverell’s triumphant homecoming sermon preached at St Saviour’s Southwark in March 1713 was eagerly anticipated as the Doctor had been banned from preaching for three years as a result of his conviction at his impeachment trial. A Tory journalist noted that ‘the prodigious multitude of his congregation is inconceivable to those who did not see it, and inexpressible by those who did; as was the excessive joy which was shewn by so many thousands at his returning to the exercise of his function’.

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Sacheverell’s next sermon at St Andrew’s Holborn a month later attracted an audience of six thousand.23 Sermon-going was a popular activity in early eighteenth-century London. Avid ‘sermon tasters’ bounced around the churches of London ‘in search of a wide variety of sermons, perhaps as many as five or six on a Sunday, often without discrimination for denomination or doctrine’. Even Hoadly was accused of the impropriety of being a taster of dissenting sermons long after he had been elevated to his bishopric.24 Particularly well-known preachers attracted avid fans who followed their pulpit performances in a manner akin to fans of pop stars or famous actors today. Applause and effusive displays of approbation would follow a sermon that met the expectations of the audience.25 In a culture where oral communication was the primary mode for most of the population, public speaking was perhaps the most efficacious means of generating immediate notoriety.26 Preachers had to be able to project their voices with the skill of an actor in order to be heard by large audiences, and vocal skills such as controlled cadences and use of a proper accent were also essential. Sacheverell was particularly noted for his impressive speaking skills. An observer at the Doctor’s parliamentary trial remarked that Sacheverell ‘spoke with a fine Accent & the most agreeable Voice, that ever I heard’, when called upon to defend himself before the House of Lords. Even a hostile critic such as the Whig cleric White Kennett had to admit that Sacheverell’s voice was ‘audible without Noise or any harsh grating accent to impress the Close of a Sentence upon the Ears of the Congregation’.27 Sacheverell’s sermons were eagerly awaited by his fans, and the cancellation of his scheduled performances was a newsworthy event.28 Hoadly too became ‘famous by his preaching and writing’.29 There is no reason to believe Gareth Bennett’s hostile assessment that ‘without a shadow of a doubt [Hoadly] was the most detested Anglican clergyman of his day’ or that his ardently Whiggish political views ‘courted deep unpopularity [of which] he was fully aware, and he observed without dismay that his style of preaching had emptied the pews of his London church’. The basis for Bennett’s dismissive appraisal of Hoadly’s preaching is likely a statement made by Hoadly’s son John in the biographical preface to the three-volume collected edition of Hoadly’s Works (1773), in which John noted that his father had once ‘pleasantly observed’ that, after his appointment as a Lecturer for the London parish of St Mildred in the Poultry, Benjamin ‘preached it down to 30 £ a year’ before ‘he thought it high time to quit it’, presumably because his responsibilities as Rector for the parish of St Peter le Poer (as well as his work as a Whig propagandist) made holding both appointments untenable.30 Hoadly was Rector for St  Peter Le Poer from 1704 to 1720, and he held the lectureship at St Mildred in

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the Poultry from 1700 to 1710; his claim to have preached his lectureship ‘down to 30 £ a year’ was surely an ironic boast couched in dry humour. His son noted that it was made ‘as [Hoadly] pleasantly observed’, and it makes more sense to read Hoadly’s remark as a claim to have increased the value of the lectureship up to £30 due to his skill in attracting audiences to his pulpit.31 Certainly, Whig writers such as John Dunton praised Hoadly as a ‘preaching cherubim’ whose ‘sermons in his conversation shine’.32 By contrast, the Tory-dominated Convocation of the Lower House of the Clergy saw fit to condemn Hoadly’s sermon in defence of resistance theory preached at St Lawrence Jewry on 29 September 1705 for ‘containing positions contrary to the doctrine of the church, expressed in the first and second parts of the homily against disobedience or wilful rebellion’.33 Like Sacheverell, Hoadly courted controversy in his preaching, and listeners grew to expect a firestorming pulpit performance from both of them. For Hoadly, it was not his voice but rather his unique pulpit presence, along with the vehemence and persistence with which he articulated a powerful low church position regarding the controversies of Anne’s reign, that made him into a celebrity preacher. Not long after he matriculated at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, Hoadly contracted smallpox and he was crippled as a result of the unfortunate mishandling of his treatment by an unskilled surgeon. Henceforth, he would be forced to rely upon crutches for his personal mobility, and he became known for preaching on his knees because his body could not support standing in the pulpit for the length of an entire sermon. Hoadly’s son John noted that his father ‘was a cripple all his life, using a cane when he appeared in public, and crutches at home and always preaching in a kneeling posture on a stool’.34 Hoadly’s striking appearance as a disabled preacher distinguished him from his contemporaries and it certainly garnered him additional attention. A contemporary supporter noted somewhat awkwardly that Hoadly ‘is fain to be assisted, when he walks, with two sticks to lean on; but not crutches, as I have seen represented in some pictures, or if it had been so, I cannot but think those reflections upon natural imperfections, to be very absurd and displeasing’; nevertheless, his infirmity was taken to be a virtue in disguise, for Hoadly ‘being incapable to pursue those diversions which most young students do whilst they are at the university, he had the greater leisure to follow his studies, to which he constantly apply’d himself with the greatest diligence’.35 This sanguine assessment of Hoadly’s disability was perhaps uniquely charitable, as on the whole it mainly generated commentary from hostile Grub Street critics who enjoyed ridiculing his infirmity. As Simon Dickie observes, they ‘delighted in pictorial representations of the “Cripl’d Priest” and gloried in the predictable sneers about “crooked arguments”, his “lame” intellect, and doctrines so weak that they “like himself must be

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upheld by Crutches”’.36 Cruel as it was, ridicule of this sort only helped to generate further publicity for Hoadly and thus his disability bolstered his celebrity by making him even more recognizable to contemporaries. Preachers could command regular and devoted audiences to hear and watch them perform. Much of the population attended church services or dissenting meeting houses regularly and public worship was a central aspect of the social lives of most people: preachers thus had a captive audience for their sermons, even if relations with their congregations could be strained at times.37 Standing, or kneeling as in Hoadly’s case, before parishioners and other interested visitors made preachers the centre of attention while they delivered their sermons. When these structural factors were combined with a heightened interest in the political and social ramifications of religious matters due to the increasingly ardent divisions between high church Tories and low church Whigs, the sermon became a primary, if not the primary, means of fame generation in post-revolutionary England. Aside from preaching directly to audiences from their pulpits, Hoadly and Sacheverell also cultivated their public images through print culture.38 Their most controversial sermons became best-selling titles and, even more so, they kicked off controversies in print that stimulated scores of other writers to weigh in on the debates provoked by these clerics. Sacheverell’s infamous sermon The Perils of False Brethren (1709) sold perhaps around a hundred thousand copies in various forms, both official and pirated. Geoffrey Holmes was surely right to claim that ‘as a short-term best-seller The Perils of False Brethren had no equal in the early eighteenth century’.39 The standard bibliography of the Sacheverell controversies lists 1,160 titles, and this undercounts several additional works that can rightly be considered relevant to the debates. Even contemporaries were so impressed (and overwhelmed) by the output from the presses with tracts relating to the debates provoked by Sacheverell’s sermons and his impeachment trial that several published their own catalogues or histories of the print controversies relating to Sacheverell’s case.40 While Hoadly’s most famous sermon, The Nature of the Kingdom, Or Church, of Christ (1717) did not sell nearly as well as Sacheverell’s work, it also initiated a controversy that provoked the publication of over four hundred titles authored by over fifty writers. Some of these works sold thousands of copies, and within a year the whole affair had become popularly known as ‘the Bangorian controversy’ with reference to Hoadly’s position at the time as the bishop of Bangor. It too prompted Thomas Herne to publish a history of the print controversies provoked by Hoadly’s sermon in two instalments.41 Hoadly’s son later claimed that the controversy was so engaging that ‘for a day or two the common business of the City was at a stand, little or nothing done on the Exchange, and even many shops shut up’.42 The publishing industry of early eighteenth-century

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England thrived on the controversies provoked by celebrity clerics such as Hoadly and Sacheverell. The early eighteenth century was the high-water moment for highly politicized preaching and this created an ideal environment for vaulting partisan preachers into the limelight. Clerical celebrities were forged by the combination of the provocative content of controversial sermons and a vibrant media ecology. Sermons preached by Hoadly and Sacheverell were newsworthy events. Newspapers, newsletters, pamphlets and satires contained regular notices about, and commentaries on, the most politically charged sermons of the day. Popular preachers could attract shorthand scribes who attended their sermons in order to take down notes on the contents.43 The propaganda power of the pulpit was so great, and became so apparent through the efforts of deliberately incendiary preachers such as Hoadly and Sacheverell, that their sermon controversies provoked attempts to restrain the clergy from preaching on controversial political matters.44 Sacheverell’s spectacular state trial in 1710 was the ne plus ultra of these efforts.45 Indeed, it could be argued that the provocative celebrity that accrued to clerics such as Hoadly and Sacheverell in the first two decades of the eighteenth century ultimately provoked new tactics designed to diffuse the vitriol provoked by such controversial preaching. Sir Robert Walpole experienced firsthand the political dangers of dealing with clerical celebrity as a manager for Sacheverell’s prosecution when he lost his seat in Parliament in the general election of 1710 after the trial’s pathetic conclusion; thereafter, Walpole would not countenance similar prosecutions of the clergy during his lengthy premiership and he instead sought to encourage a system of ‘reciprocal advantages’ between his administration and the clergy.46

Polarities Hoadly and Sacheverell emerged as representatives for opposite poles of the religious divisions within the post-revolutionary Church of England due to their unambiguously partisan preaching and publishing practices. No one could fail to mistake Hoadly’s low church position or Sacheverell’s high church prejudices, and regular commentary in newspapers and pamphlets kept their views in the public eye. It was this public commentary that transformed the clergymen into celebrities. What became most important about Hoadly and Sacheverell was not the particular claims that either made about the post-revolutionary church or state, as controversial as their exaggerated positions were. The arguments of both were often borrowed

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from others or relied heavily on repetition of polemic catchphrases such as the Whiggish ‘late happy Revolution’ or the Tory ‘church in danger’. It was rather the fact that the highly partisan post-revolutionary public sphere constantly kept their personas in the public eye. The names ‘Hoadly’ and ‘Sacheverell’ came to stand for low church and high church positions, respectively, and each man became the public face for his cause. Even before Sacheverell’s trial had begun, Hoadly had emerged as his most obvious, and most publicly recognized, Whig counterpart. When the House of Commons was debating the articles of impeachment levied against the Doctor, a few vociferous parliamentary Whigs decided to pair the passage of Sacheverell’s impeachment with a complementary resolution praising Hoadly and asking the Queen to grant him preferment. The sponsor of these resolutions, Anthony Henly, MP for Weymouth, said to the House: in such licentious times as these it was not sufficient to punish the offenders that write against the Constitution [i.e., Sacheverell], but they ought to distinguish those, who writ serviceably for it, and therefore would make them a motion if they would give him leave. Being ordered to go on, he moved that her Majesty might be addressed to confer some ecclesiastical dignity upon the Rev. Mr. Ben Hoadly for his excellent defence of the Constitution, which was agreed to with great noise.47

As a result, the Commons voted to acknowledge Hoadly’s services to church and state for ‘having often strenuously justified the principles upon which Her Majesty, and the nation proceeded in the late happy Revolution’. The queen did not take well to the address when it was duly presented to her, and the matter was swiftly dropped, but the ordeal ensconced the connection between Sacheverell and Hoadly as representatives of the opposite ends of the religio-political divisions of the moment.48 Several months later, Jonathan Swift identified Hoadly as that ‘whig clergyman, so famous for acting the contrary part to Sacheverell’.49 Hoadly and Sacheverell thus served as personal symbols for the abstract partisan divisions that animated the rage of party and this made both clerics perfect emblems for representing these debates in caricatured form. Pamphlets began to refer to Tories as ‘Sacheverellites’ and Whigs as ‘Hoadleians’ and used the two clerics to stand for, as one pamphlet put it, ‘the respective opinions of each party’, concerning issues such as ‘passive obedience and non-resistance, the supream power, moderation, the toleration, hereditary right, and jure divino title, the abdication, the Queen’s Supremacy, church lands, &c.’.50 This was particularly true for graphic satires. In the later Stuart era, printed graphic satire had found its niche as another key part of the partisan media ecology, and the public

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had grown accustomed to seeing visual representations of the Whig versus Tory and high church versus low church arguments that were rehearsed verbally in speech and print.51 The controversies provoked by Sacheverell’s trial allowed for these divisions to become particularly personalized since the parliamentary prosecution was necessarily aimed at the offences committed by the Doctor. Hoadly’s emergence as the Whig clergyman who played the ‘contrary part’ provided the visual artists of Anne’s reign with a convenient and easily caricatured (due to his disability) foil to Sacheverell. Graphic satires offered the most salient representations of the Hoadly versus Sacheverell polarity, perhaps because the genre itself had already developed a dialogic tradition in which one print was often ‘answered’ by  another and collectors were encouraged to purchase both in order to complete their collections.52 In some cases, effigies of Hoadly and Sacheverell were paired in the same print.53 One broadside titled The Modern Champions (1710, Figure 7.1) was published just before Sacheverell’s state trial by the House of Lords. It represented Hoadly and Sacheverell as contestants in a duel, or ‘a trial of skill to be fought at Her Majesty’s Bear-Garden’: Hoadly was represented as ‘Balthasar Turn-Coat’, a ‘Jerusalem Whig’, whose second in the contest was Dr Daniel Burgess, a famous dissenting preacher; whereas Sacheverell was represented as ‘Jehu Hotspur’, seconded by Dr Francis Higgins, another well-known high church cleric who had garnered a reputation for being ‘the Irish Sacheverell’ due to his imitation of the more famous high church Doctor’s acerbic style of preaching.54 The print presented Hoadly and Sacheverell as mirror opposites of one another, and, in a certain sense, equally ridiculous as well, as their satirical pseudonyms suggested. Hoadly, or Balthasar Turn-Coat, was the ‘chief orator and champion for the upright and blessed principles of moderation’ and Sacheverell, or Jehu Hotspur, was ‘the high church champion, defender of the cause, against all the schismatical and rebellious saints wherever’ or else the ‘avow’d champion and maintainer of the high church and Jacobite cause’.55 Visual representations of clergymen such as Hoadly and Sacheverell were not mere pictures meant for amusement; they worked as symbols for political mobilization and as such they had as much influence on the political culture of partisanship as printed words did, perhaps even more.56 Mark Knights has suggested that The Modern Champions print may have helped to provoke the crowds that attacked dissenting meeting houses during Sacheverell’s trial.57 Certainly, many commentators on Sacheverell’s trial complained that the Doctor’s image could be found on publicly displayed prints and shop signs. The Whig Observator complained that ‘Sacheverell’s picture is now more hugg’d and admir’d than any that we have in the late

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Figure 7.1  Detail from: The Modern Champions: Or, a Tryal of Skill to be Fought at Her Majesty’s Bear-Garden, on Wednesday Next, Between a Jereboam Tory, and a Jerusalem Whig, Madan 203 (1710)

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editions of our Common-Prayer books’.58 As a result of the publicity provoked by his trial, Sacheverell surely became one of the most recognizable men in England, on par with a military and aristocratic luminary such as the duke of Marlborough.59 Hoadly too became a recognized figure as a result of his emergence as the clerical Whig counterpart to Dr Sacheverell. When recounting the history of the riots that resulted in the demolition of several dissenting meeting houses in London, John Toland recalled that some in the crowd had ‘talk’d of pulling down Mr. Hoadly’s church and house, and would certainly have murder’d him and Mr. Burgess had they come into their hands, but both of ’em withdrew by the advice of their friends’.60 Several months after the trial, the malcontent Whig Earl Rivers, who had in fact voted to convict Sacheverell at the trial, tried to blame Hoadly for the riots; Rivers claimed ‘he believed the mob was more owing to Hoadly than to the Doctor’.61 In the wake of the trial, Hoadly’s effigy as well as some of his publications were all burned, along with those of other well-known dissenting preachers outside of London, by Tory crowds in the Welsh town of Wrexham in Denbighshire, and also in Oxford, Dorset, and Exeter.62 The burning of figures in effigy was a long-established practice that owed much to the structures of anti-popish sentiment. Pope-burning processions became a standard part of Whig political demonstrations in the 1670s and 1680s when the earl of Shaftesbury organized them as part of his campaign to support the parliamentary exclusion bills he had sponsored. They were revived in Anne’s reign as part of the rage of party that divided Whigs and Tories, but now with a larger cast of characters whose effigies were subject to derision and burning by the crowds. Sacheverell and Hoadly both suffered these indignities, as well as figures representing the Stuart Pretender or dissenters such as Dr Williams or Daniel Burgess among others. The practice of effigy-burning would continue through the eighteenth century and it constituted a crude, if often effective, form of mobilizing enmity towards political enemies, particularly in so far as it gave a human face to the often abstract constitutional or theological issues at stake in the conflicts that provoked them.63 While effigy-burning has been studied as an aspect of popular politics, it should also be understood as playing a role in the construction of political celebrities. Burning effigies served as a symbolic replacement for the burning of real people, but the act also served to make the objects of these fires even more famous. Like the symbolism of the pillory, effigy burning began as a practice in which collective enmity was enacted as a form of punishment through public shaming but, as the practice became more widespread, the shock wore off and the objects of such derision could enjoy a certain perverse pleasure in being recognized by their enemies.64

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Conclusion It is uncertain whether Hoadly or Sacheverell ever met one another. It is likely that they would have had occasion for a personal encounter, given that both men lived in London throughout Anne’s reign, but no account of any such meeting exists. Any public debates or confrontations between the two celebrities would certainly have been noteworthy, so it appears that the two kept their distance from one another. It was not their physical proximity, but the way in which their public personas came to represent the larger religious and political divisions of their age, that made them such recognizably paired celebrities in the early eighteenth century. Hoadly and Sacheverell did not need to meet, or even mention one another in speech or writing, for their fame to become linked in the public imagination. Sacheverell surely achieved greater short-term fame due to the furious debates provoked by his trial and his subsequent emergence as a living martyr for the Tory cause, but Hoadly also benefited from Sacheverell’s celebrity as he emerged in the public mind as a kind of Whiggish ‘antiSacheverell’. Later in the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon remembered Hoadly as ‘the object of Whig Idolatry and Tory abhorrence’.65 Hoadly’s long-term fame owed much to luck and longevity. He was lucky enough to be on the right side of the dynastic revolution that installed the Hanoverians on the throne and cemented the Whig hegemony that would persist throughout the rest of his long lifetime. Unlike Sacheverell, Hoadly managed to obtain the ecclesiastical preferments that would always escape his rival. He was the tortoise to Sacheverell’s hare. It would be too easy to say that Hoadly had the last laugh. By the time of his death, it did indeed seem that his career had seen success followed by even greater successes. But his reputation did not age well. In the Victorian era, Sir Leslie Stephen judged Hoadly to have been ‘probably the best hated clergyman of the century amongst his own order’ and this assessment largely persisted through the twentieth century.66 Today, Hoadly and Sacheverell are both remembered mainly for the controversies they provoked rather than their positive achievements as theologians or political theorists. Their controversial status, however, makes them excellent fodder for the emergent history of celebrity. The controversies of post-revolutionary England transformed Hoadly and Sacheverell into celebrities.

Notes   1 Henry Sacheverell, The Communication of Sin (London, 1709), BL, Sach. 14/3 and ESTC T164100, flyleaf. Catalogued in F.F. Madan, A Critical Bibliography

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of Dr. Henry Sacheverell, ed. W.A. Speck (Lawrence, 1979), no. 52. Due to the complex bibliography of works related to Sacheverell and the controversies he provoked, all works mentioned in this standard bibliography are hereafter noted as ‘Madan’ followed by the catalogue number.   2 Frank Ellis (ed.), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1 ­ 660–1714, 7 vols (New Haven, 1963–75), vol. VII, 359–60; evidence for Prior’s authorship is discussed in 357–8. Thirteen MS copies of the poem are identified in Alexander Lindsay and Margaret McFadden Smith (eds), Index of English Literary Manuscripts: Vol. 3, Pope–Steele, Part 3 (London, 1992), PrM 511–PrM 522; also listed in Harold Love, English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702 (Oxford, 2004), 313: BLa94*221 [= BL, Add. MS 21094]. The poem is not included in the authoritative critical edition of Prior’s literary works: The Literary Works of Matthew Prior, ed. H. Bunker Wright and Monroe K. Spears, 2 vols (Oxford, 1959). For another version, see C.E. Doble (ed.), Remarks and Collections of Thomas Hearne, 7 vols (Oxford, 1886), vol. II, 352 (4–5 March 1710).   3 Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London, 1973), 262, notes that St Andrews ‘was financially more valuable than at least half a dozen of the poorer bishoprics’.   4 William Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate: Benjamin Hoadly 1676–1761 (Cambridge, 2004); Stephen Taylor, ‘Benjamin Hoadly’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3 January 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13375.   5 Brian Cowan, ‘Mr. Spectator and the Doctor: Joseph Addison and Henry Sacheverell’, in Paul Davis (ed.), Tercentenary Essays on Joseph Addison (Oxford, 2021), 40–60.   6 Articulating and explaining the significance of the relationship between the public sphere, the Reformation and the Revolution has been a longstanding concern of Peter Lake’s historical argument, although he has been adamant that the latter two were separate processes and must be understood as such. For his most recent statements on these issues, see Peter Lake, ‘Publics and Participation: England, Britain, and Europe in the “Post-Reformation”’, Journal of British Studies 56:4 (2017), 836–54; ‘Post-Reformation Politics, or on Not Looking for the Long-Term Causes of the English Civil War’, in Michael Braddick (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution (Oxford, 2015); and ‘From Revisionist to Royalist History; or, Was Charles I the First Whig Historian’, Huntington Library Quarterly 78:4 (Winter 2015), 657–81. See also Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007); and Peter Lake and Steven Pincus, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere in Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 45:2 (2006), 270–92.   7 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford, 2005).   8 Antoine Lilti, The Invention of Celebrity 1750–1850, trans. Lynn Jeffress (Cambridge, 2017); Stella Tillyard, ‘Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century London’,

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History Today 55:6 (2005), 20–7; see also Fred Inglis, A Short History of Celebrity (Princeton, 2010); Sharon Marcus, The Drama of Celebrity (Princeton, 2019).   9 Brian Cowan, ‘News, Biography and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity’, Oxford Handbooks Online (Sept. 2016): http://doi.org/crzx; Brian Cowan, ‘Histories of Celebrity in Post-Revolutionary England’, Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung, Supplement, No. 32 (2019), 83–98. 10 John Foxe, The Unabridged Acts and Monuments Online (1576 ed.) (HRI Online Publications, Sheffield, 2011). Available from: http//www.johnfoxe.org [accessed 12 July 2020], book 5, 1802. See also the Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com, s.v. ‘celebrity’ (accessed 29 November 2021). 11 Robert Hume, ‘The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740’, Huntington Library Quarterly 69:4 (Dec. 2006), 487–533; Clifford Siskin and William Warner (eds), This Is Enlightenment (Chicago, 2010). 12 Alice Marwick and dannah boyd, ‘To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter’, Convergence 17:2 (May 2011), 139–58; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York, 1959). 13 Robert van Krieken, Celebrity Society: The Struggle for Attention, 2nd ed. (London, 2019); Norbert Elias, The Court Society, ed. Stephen Mennell (Dublin, 2006). 14 Brian Cowan, ‘Doctor Sacheverell and the Politics of Celebrity in PostRevolutionary Britain’, in Emrys D. Jones and Victoria Joule (eds), Intimacy and Celebrity in Eighteenth-Century Literary Culture: Public Interiors (Cham, 2018), 111–37. Compare Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge, 2019); and Clara Tuite, Lord Byron and Scandalous Celebrity (Cambridge, 2015). 15 This is the reason why Romanticists wish to claim the early nineteenth century as the moment for the birth of modern celebrity. See Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Houndmills, 2007). 16 Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation; J.A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979). 17 John Hough to William Lloyd, 26 June 1697, in Gloucestershire Record Office, D3549/2/4/20, no. 216. For other examples, see Cowan, ‘Doctor Sacheverell and the Politics of Celebrity’. 18 Lake, ‘Publics and Participation’, 844; Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England, 2nd ed. (London, 2019); Thomas Freeman and Thomas Mayer (eds), Martyrs and Martyrdom in England, c. 1400–1700 (Woodbridge, 2007). On Sacheverell’s posture as a ‘living martyr’, see Brian Cowan, ‘The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society’, Parliamentary History 31:1 (2012), 28–46. 19 For mediation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin (eds), Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People,

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Things, Forms of Knowledge (London, 2010); for mediation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see The Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018). 20 Michael Mascuch, ‘John Wesley, Superstar: Periodicity, Celebrity and the Sensibility of Methodist Society in Wesley’s Journal (1740–1791)’, in Rudolf Dekker (ed.), Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in Its Social Context since the Middle Ages (Hilversum, 2002), 137–61, is a significant exception. 21 Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, 2002), 335–76; see also Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and Their Audiences, 1590–1640 (Cambridge, 2010); Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (eds), The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750 (Manchester, 2000); Keith A. Francis and William Gibson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the British Sermon 1689–1901 (Oxford, 2012). 22 Jennifer Farooq, Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London (Woodbridge, 2013), 121. 23 Post Boy, no. 2791 (28–31 March 1713); Evening Post, no. 580 (25–28 April 1713). 24 Farooq, Preaching, 110; Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 227. 25 Farooq, ‘The Politicising Influence of Print: the Responses of Hearers and Readers to the Sermons of Gilbert Burnet and Henry Sacheverell’, in G. Baker and A. McGruer (eds), Readers, Audiences and Coteries in Early Modern England (Newcastle, 2006), 33; Gibson, ‘The British Sermon 1689–1901’, 11. 26 Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700 (Oxford, 2000); Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (Chicago, 1999). 27 Brian Cowan (ed.), The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (Malden, MA, and Oxford, 2012), 62; White Kennett, A Visit to St. Saviour’s Southwark, with Advice to Dr. Sacheverell’s Preachers There [Madan 426] (London, 1710), 16. See also James Winn, Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts (Oxford, 2014), 438–41; and Brian Cowan, ‘The Spin Doctor: Sacheverell’s Trial Speech and Political Performance in the Divided Society’, Parliamentary History 31:1 (Feb. 2012), 28–46. 28 Folger Shakespeare Library, MS L.c. 3298 (4 Jan. 1709). 29 The life, birth and education of the Reverend Mr. Benjamin Hoadly ([London, 1710]), 4. 30 G.V. Bennett, The Tory Crisis in Church and State 1688–1730: The Career of Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester (Oxford, 1975), 105; Benjamin Hoadly, The Works of Benjamin Hoadly (3 vols, London, 1773), vol. I, viii. This anecdote is absent from the biography originally published in Andrew Kippis, Biographia Britannica: Or The Lives Of The Most Eminent Persons, 7 vols (London, 1747–66), vol. VI, pt 2, 99–102, and was therefore likely added to the edition of Hoadly’s Works to bolster his posthumous reputation. Leslie Stephen also cites disparagingly this anecdote about Hoadly’s preaching in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols, London, 1876), vol. II, 153.

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31 Clergy of the Church of England Database, https://theclergydatabase.org. uk/, person ID 93582; Hoadly, Works, vol. 1, viii; Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 54. 32 John Dunton, The Life and Errors of John Dunton, 2 vols (1705 reprint; London, 1818), vol. 2, 669. 33 Edward Cardwell (ed.), Synodalia: A Collection of Articles of Religion, Canons, and Proceedings of Convocations, 2 vols (Oxford, 1842), vol. II, 723; Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 82–5. 34 Kippis, Biographia Britannica, vol. 6, pt 2, suppl., 99; also in Hoadly, Works, vol. 1, viii; Stephen Taylor, ‘Benjamin Hoadly’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 3 January 2008, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/13375. 35 The life, birth and education of the Reverend Mr. Benjamin Hoadly, 5. 36 Simon Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago, 2011), 76. 37 Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Reformation (Cambridge, 1996), 84; Grant Tapsell, ‘Pastors, Preachers and Politicians: the Clergy of the Later Stuart Church’, in Grant Tapsell (ed.), The Later Stuart Church, 1660–1714 (Manchester, 2012), 73–4. 38 Key works on the relationship between the early modern pulpit and the press focus primarily on the Hanoverian era: Jamie Marc Latham, ‘The Clergy and Print in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–1750’ (PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 2017); James Caudle, ‘Measures of Allegiance: Sermon Culture and the Creation of a Public Discourse of Obedience and Resistance in Georgian Britain, 1714–1760’ (PhD thesis, Yale University, 1995). 39 Holmes, Trial, 73–5, quote at 75; compare Cowan, State Trial, 209. 40 Madan, A Critical Bibliography of Dr. Henry Sacheverell; [John Toland], HighChurch Display’d, Madan 1041 (London, 1711); White Kennett, The Wisdom of Looking Backward, Madan 1118 (London, 1715). 41 Andrew Starkie, The Church of England and the Bangorian Controversy, 1716–1721 (Woodbridge, 2007), 203–45; Gibson, Enlightenment Prelate, 152; Thomas Herne, An Account of All the Considerable Pamphlets That Have Been Published on Either Side in the Present Controversy (London, 1719); and [Herne], A Continuation of the Account of All the Considerable Pamphlets that have been Published on Either Side in the Present Controversy (London, 1719). 42 Hoadly, Works, vol. II, 429. 43 E.g., Flying Post, no. 3601 (29 Jan.–1 Feb. 1715); Post Boy, no. 3080 (1–3 Feb. 1715). 44 Alex Barber, The Restraint of the Press in England, 1660–1715 (Woodbridge, forthcoming). I am grateful to Dr Barber for our many discussions of efforts to restrain political preaching in post-revolutionary England. 45 On political trials as public events, see Brian Cowan and Scott Sowerby (eds), The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (Woodbridge, 2021). 46 John, Lord Hervey, Some Materials Towards Memoirs of the Reign of King George II, ed. Romney Sedgwick, 3 vols (London, 1931), vol. 1, 92. See also

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John Walsh and Stephen Taylor, ‘Introduction: the Church and Anglicanism in the “Long” Eighteenth Century’, in John Walsh, Colin Haydon, and Stephen Taylor (eds), The Church of England c. 1689–c. 1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge, 1993), 54–5. 47 Historical Manuscripts Commission [HMC] Report on the Manuscripts of the Earl of Egmont (2 vols, London, 1905–9), vol. II, 244. 48 Journals of the House of Commons (43 vols, London, 1803), vol. XVI, 242; A Compleat History of the Whole Proceedings of the Parliament of Great Britain Against Dr. Henry Sacheverell, Madan 511 (1710), 6–7; Holmes, Trial of Doctor Sacheverell, 94–5. 49 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, 1710–1713, ed. Abigail Williams (Cambridge, 2013), 11. 50 Chuse Which You Please or, Dr. Sacheverell, and Mr. Hoadley, Drawn to the Life, Madan 655 (1710); compare The Loyal Subject the Best Choice, Madan 1013 (1711). 51 Mark Knights, ‘Possessing the Visual: the Materiality of Visual Print Culture in Later Stuart Britain’, in James Daybell and Peter Hinds (eds), Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580–1730 (Basingstoke, 2010), 85–122; Adam Morton,  ‘Popery,  Politics and Play:  Visual Culture in Succession Crisis England’, The Seventeenth Century 31:4 (2016), 411–49. 52 Knights, ‘Possessing the Visual’, 88–96; Mark Hallett, The Spectacle of Difference: Graphic Satire in the Age of Hogarth (New Haven, 1999), 27–55. 53 Other examples not discussed here include: Faction Display’d (1709), British Museum [BM] 1868,0808.3419 [Satire 1508]; The Living Man’s Elegie (1710), BM 1868,0808.3443 [Satire 1510]. 54 The Modern Champions, Madan 203 (1710); Alex Barber, ‘Censorship, Salvation and the Preaching of Francis Higgins: A Reconsideration of High Church Politics and Theology in the Early 18th Century’, Parliamentary History 33:1 (2014), 114–39; and David Hayton, ‘Irish Tories and Victims of Whig Persecution: Sacheverell Fever by Proxy’, Parliamentary History 31:1 (2012), 80–98. 55 The Modern Champions: Or, a Tryal of Skill to be Fought at Her Majesty’s Bear-Garden, on Wednesday Next, Between a Jereboam Tory, and a Jerusalem Whig, Madan 203 (1710). 56 Justin Champion, ‘Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images, 1651–1714’, in Michael Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation (Farnham, 2010), 255–75. 57 Knights, ‘Possessing the Visual’, 113; Mark Knights, The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion, and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment (Oxford, 2011), 152–3. See also Holmes, Trial, 161. 58 Observator, vol. 9, no. 12 (22–5 Feb. 1710). 59 Matthew Hargraves, ‘The Public Image of John Churchill, First Duke of  Marlborough, 1702–1708’, in Mark Hallett, Nigel Llewellyn and Martin Myrone (eds), Court, Country, City: British Art and Architecture, 1660–1735 (New Haven, 2016), 177–94.

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60 [John Toland], High Church Display’d, Madan 1041 (1711), 96. 61 HMC, The Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland (10 vols, London, 1891–1931), vol. IV, 621. 62 [Toland], High Church Display’d, 105; Observator, no. 23 (1–5 Apr. 1710), no. 24 (5–8 Apr. 1710); Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford, 1998), 31. 63 O.W. Furley, ‘The Pope-Burning Processions of the Late 17th Century’, History, n.s., 44:150 (1959), 16–23; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Burning Tom Paine: Loyalism and Counter-Revolution in Britain, 1792–1793’, Histoire Sociale / Social History 32 (1999), 139–71; Frank O’Gorman, ‘The Paine Burnings of 1792–1793’, Past and Present 193 (2006), 111–56. 64 Thomas Keymer, Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660–1820 (Oxford, 2019). 65 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life, ed. Georges Bonnard (London, 1966), 22. 66 Stephen, English Thought, vol. II, 152.

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Part II

British, European, and Atlantic dimensions

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8 The Nine Years’ War in Ireland (1594–1603) as problem of government Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Brendan Kane

What started in Ulster as rebellion quickly escalated to potential revolution. Hugh O’Neill the second earl of Tyrone’s tense relationship with the Elizabethan regime, fuelled by visions of his own grandeur and fears of dispossession, had by 1594 boiled over into armed skirmishes with agents of the Crown. This was rebellion of the ‘loyal’ variety, a rattling of the sceana to demonstrate the disaffected nobleman’s necessary role in maintaining law and order and celebrating the monarch’s majesty before the locals. Such brinkmanship was a tried-and-true aspect of the relationship linking monarchs and aristocrats. Although more commonly a phenomenon of internal English politics, it was also a longstanding element in Irish lords’ relations with holders of the English Crown.1 By September 1595, however, O’Neill and his primary confederate in resisting Crown authority, Red Hugh O’Donnell, were sending letters to the king of Spain beseeching him to send troops to expel the ‘heretic’ English and sever the political links between the polities. For his troubles, the Ulster lords promised, Philip II would not only see the world made safer for the true faith but he would gain the kingdom of Ireland as another jewel in the imperial crown. In making their offer to Philip, O’Neill and O’Donnell sought not only to overturn the constitutional arrangement enshrined in the Act of Kingly Title of 1541, by which Ireland was made a kingdom under the English monarchy, but also the historically much deeper relationship linking Irish and English kings since the twelfth century, however fraught and episodic that link may have been. Acceptance and successful followthrough on that offer would have been revolutionary for Ireland, shifting the putative seat of pan-insular executive authority to Madrid rather than London and spurring a wholly new set of political, economic, religious and social relations locally and transnationally. The effects on England would have been hardly less dramatic. In the 1590s, the only political configuration that made real the fantasies of an English empire was the dual Crown held by the Tudors over England and Ireland. Were control of the latter to slip to the Habsburgs, a critical blow would be dealt to England’s imperial

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claims and ambitions. The stakes in this escalating conflict could hardly have been higher on both sides of the Irish Sea. Uncertainties regarding the line of succession following Elizabeth I were critical to the evolution from loyal rebellion to revolutionary political reconfigurations. The queen’s unwillingness to name her successor unsettled English politics. In terms of political culture, uncertainty at the top helped foster the return of factionalism to the Elizabethan court, embodied in the acrimonious relationship between Essex and the Cecils, father and son; in terms of political thinking and imagination, indecision helped facilitate the spread of theologically grounded notions of ‘resistance’ and innovative modes of political conduct and understanding described recently in terms of an ‘Elizabethan public sphere’.2 If anything, the destabilizing effects wrought by England’s executive uncertainty were even stronger in Ireland. On the ground, the lack of clarity regarding central authority, chains of command and mechanisms of accountability fostered chaos whereby New English soldiers, settlers, and speculators were largely free to carve up the polity for personal profit.3 One way to eliminate such chaos was simply to swear allegiance to a different executive power, to see the Tudors replaced as the administrative authority over the island and its residents. This was a strategy indulged in by Gaelic Irish and Old English alike, and recent studies have explored such possible reconfigurations through the lens of sovereignty, with O’Neill and O’Donnell’s Habsburg fantasies offering a particularly explosive example. This chapter takes a different approach to understanding the relationship between the Elizabethan succession crisis, the Nine Years’ War and Gaelic lords’ pursuit of a Habsburg executive, analysing the relationship as one driven by questions of government rather than of sovereignty. The distinction is suggested by the sources. In their appeals to the king of Spain, O’Neill and O’Donnell seem to have been engaged not in radical rethinking of, or alteration to notions of, sovereignty but rather in the deployment of stable sovereign claims towards the goal of establishing more congenial political realities for themselves. These heads of ancient dynasties may have viewed the contemporaneous political landscape with alarm, but they were in no doubt about their perpetual capacity to pursue alternative arrangements: the problem they faced was one of government, and their claims to sovereignty offered the means to rectify it. This distinction is further supported by recent revisions in the historiography of early modern European political theory. Richard Tuck argues the uniqueness of the categories to have been a development of the late sixteenth century, initially broached by Jean Bodin in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, further refined in the Republic and consequently discussed and debated by others in terms of summum imperium (sovereignty) and administratio (government).4 It is

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highly unlikely that our Ulster lords were familiar with the works of the French thinker, but what Tuck attributes to him as an innovative intellectual construct was, I wish to argue, a longstanding practice in Ireland: be it a Tudor or a Habsburg, an externally located prince exercising pan-insular authority served in an administrative role at the behest of a collective ‘sovereign’ of lineal lords. Those external governors’ power, however capacious it may have been at any given moment, was conditional, contractual, and contingent; the claim to choose the prince-as-magistrate, however, was perpetual and was retained by the Irish themselves. Resisting Elizabeth I or courting Philip of Spain, then, was an exercise of imperium intended to correct perceived faults in administratio. The distinction, or more accurately the need to explore the possibility of its existence, is also suggested by the state of the historiography. Recent research on sovereignty as a factor in the Nine Years’ War has been built out of English and Latin sources, inviting a complementary exploration of Irish-language sources. But given Tuck’s reminder of the range of approaches to and understandings of sovereignty itself, a necessary first step in tracing Gaelic Irish perspectives on the concept is to offer some explanation of how the term in English will be approached. Reading the actions of O’Neill and O’Donnell during the Nine Years’ War as attempted resolution of a problem of government offers fresh perspective on both the nature of the conflict and the contexts out of which it arose. Most fundamentally, it provides an opportunity to deepen our understanding of what constituted Irish political theory and practice in the late medieval and early modern period. This is a subject on which much work remains to be done.5 Too frequently Irish texts, if consulted, are read with limited sensitivity to genre, form, or date of composition. Doing so carries the danger of collapsing varieties of thought and motivation into some version of a unified ‘Gaelic mind’. By restricting the source base here to texts available during the lifetimes of the earls, we will gain a clearer understanding of the conceptual and behavioural frameworks in which the Ulster lords operated and, consequently, offer means by which change over time in later seventeenth-century political expression might be measured. Second, these sources allow us to further reconstruct the political understandings of those historical figures by triangulating across prescriptive texts, abstract concepts and descriptions of historically contingent action. O’Neill is often portrayed in the literature as an opportunist, one whose seeming innovations in the political realm were a product of contingent reaction rather than an expression of a culturally conditioned political understanding fundamental across his career. Conversely, O’Donnell is taken to be the more conservative, adhering closely to traditional aristocratic norms obtaining in Ireland’s Gaelic polities and, consequently, incapable of adapting to the demands of modern warfare which brought

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disastrous results on the field at Kinsale.6 There is much to recommend such interpretations, but I hope here to see the movements of both as taking place within a field of force defined by dynamics internal and external, conceptual and practical, in which obeisance to a foreign potentate was no less ‘traditional’ than, say, demanding tribute from local and lesser lords, if more rare. As such, the following case study does not argue for innovative thought and action created in response to exigency. Rather, it explores how a moment of rupture can expose and bring into relief normative political understandings that otherwise operated at the level of assumption and, thus, beyond the external observer’s gaze.7 The courting of foreign princes to intervene in the governance of Ireland was nothing new by 1600. Justifying such diplomatic efforts was an understanding of pan-insular authority articulated in theory and practice: the notion of a high-kingship of Ireland, distinguishable from and superseding the kingships of individual petty kingdoms, was enshrined in law from at least the ninth century and periodically manifested as political reality, most famously during the reign of Brian Boru.8 In the wake of the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late twelfth century – itself the product of an invitation to an English king to assist one claimant to the high-kingship – development towards a centralized, indigenous monarchy was disrupted and effective executive power left to operate only at the level of individual lordships, Gaelic and English.9 Within that chaotic political patchwork, however, the vision of the high-kingship remained strong, evidenced by court eulogy that praised secular lords, no matter how local and circumscribed their power, as rightful rulers of Ireland and by genealogies that traced out the line of high-kings implying that the patron was due that ultimate honour. That vision of pan-insular executive authority, however, had now to accommodate the claims of a foreign monarch, grounded in both practice (the conquest engineered by Henry II) and theory (the papal charge to defend the faith conveyed to Henry II in the form of the bull Laudabiliter). Members of the Gaelic intellectual classes, as the above might suggest, often decried or simply ignored this transnational element of high politics; their secular lord colleagues – na ríthe, or kings – expressed their own dissatisfaction with it and its inherent challenge to the autonomous power of regional Irish kings through physical resistance, sometimes in the historiography referred to collectively as ‘Gaelic recovery’.10 At other times, that dissatisfaction took the form of outreach to rival foreign potentates to assume the political supremacy claimed by English kings, the great medieval example being the invasion-by-invitation of Edward Bruce, heir to the Scottish throne. Bruce, allied with the powerful O’Neill dynasty, was declared high-king of Ireland, and with his Ulster compatriots sought, if unsuccessfully, to overturn the

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power of resident vassals of the English king Edward II. Acts of physical repudiation of English authority were, however, interspersed with highly public and ritualized shows of loyalty, such as those made by no fewer than eighty Gaelic lords during Richard II’s Irish progress of 1394–95.11 The break with Rome under Henry VIII brought a new urgency to the relationship between Irish lords and English Crown. The Tudor regime became all the more desperate to ensure the loyalty of its (claimed) vassals in Ireland, and Irish elites found themselves with a further option to play in navigating the dynamics of local-insular-transnational authority and right. A particularly worrisome development in the eyes of the Crown was the innovative possibility of Gaelic Irish–‘English-Irish’ joint resistance based in confession.12 The so-called Geraldine League, a coalition of Gaelic and English-Irish lords formed in the wake of the Henrician regime’s crushing of the earls of Kildare, approached the king of Scotland with an offer of executive authority over the island. He refused this, and thus League representatives reached out to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Such offers would pop up across the sixteenth century, with traffic trending over time towards the Spanish court. The object of affection need be not the king himself but simply one of his more powerful subalterns. One Alexander Lynch appeared at the Spanish court claiming he represented a confederacy of Irish lords interested to have Philip II name a prince of his choice to be king of Ireland, and in 1588 some parties out of Ireland pursued efforts for Archduke Albert, Philip’s nephew, to be king.13 The Nine Years’ War (1594–1603) marked a particularly explosive moment in these cross-border political dynamics. Efforts to court the Scottish king – redolent of the Bruce invasion and the designs of the  Geraldine League – were rekindled in dramatic fashion as one Walter Quin, of Gaelic Irish stock, took the occasion of an audience before James I on New Year’s Day 1596 to perform a prepared argument on the Stuart right to the kingdom of Ireland.14 The more revolutionary development, however, was a collaborative effort by the two great dynasts of Ulster, Hugh O’Neill and Red Hugh O’Donnell, to forge links with the Spanish Habsburgs. This was historically significant in that it marked a rare co-operation among these historically antagonistic princely houses; it was politically significant in that it had a very real chance of success.15 Co-ordination of goals and victory in the field left the Ulster lords’ forces in an advantageous position relative to an English regime weakened by uncertainties over the succession and consequent disfunction in court and council. In time-honoured fashion, Irish lords unhappy with life under an English monarch, and encouraged by weakness of the central administration, ignored the possibility of proclaiming an indigenous high-king, choosing instead to pursue arrangements with some other external potentate to administer pan-insular executive

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authority. Philip II was the natural choice: in addition to the obvious attractions that he was Catholic and arguably the most powerful contemporary political figure in Europe, there was the deep historical link provided by Gaelic origin legends which held the Gaelic Irish to have descended from Spanish adventurers, and the more recent connection of Philip’s having held title of ‘King of Ireland’ through his marriage to Mary I of England. In the late 1590s, the strategy of replacing one foreign executive with another seemed primed for success. However, what was obvious in practice went unexamined in the textual record. The actions of Gaelic Ireland’s great dynasts, over centuries, made manifest the understanding of pan-insular executive power as something that could be gifted to a non-Irish lord. The great texts of political right and responsibility in the Irish tradition are, however, silent on the matter. Bardic poetry, which Nicholas Canny has evocatively described as being the closest Gaelic Ireland got to producing ‘state papers’, is replete with reference to kings of all Ireland.16 Yet the honour is invariably reserved for the poet’s patron and proclaimed with no reference made to broader political realities of external claims to the same.17 Doing otherwise would, of course, go against the very point of praise poetry by subordinating the honorand’s status to that of some third party. The law tracts and various compendia of the rights of kings are similarly mute. The Lebor na Cert (The Book of Rights), a detailing of the powers and duties of high, regional and local kings copied out and consulted from the tenth century up to and beyond the period of the Nine Years’ War, offers no commentary on nonIrish kings of Ireland.18 Likewise, the Ceart Uí Néill (Right of O’Neill), also copied out and consulted across the centuries before and beyond the Nine Years’ War, carefully taxonomizes the privileges and duties of this tremendously powerful royal dynasty yet spares not a word for what the relationship between an O’Neill and an English or European holder of the high-kingship might look like.19 Mention of kings and emperors across Europe peppers the various annals, but appears in the mode of reportage, as record of significant events rather than as analysis of the personages involved and their potential connections and claims to internal Irish affairs. One text that does meet head-on the pretentions of foreign potentates to authority over Ireland – the twelfth-century composition Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh – focuses not on their legitimacy or possible realization but rather on how Norse invaders were quashed by Brian Boru in his march to claim the high-kingship for the O’Briens. Indeed, the text’s commissioning, done at the behest of Brian’s great-grandson Muirchertach, may have been part of a rhetorical campaign of warning to the Norse king Magnus Barelegs as he worked to expand his power throughout the Irish Sea.20

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That which was obscure in the Irish sources remains so in the modern historiography. The various political machinations linking Gaels and external executive authorities in the medieval and early modern periods have been closely tracked and detailed; placing them within an understanding of Irish political world-views and understandings is a task still in need of doing. A highly productive and suggestive recent approach has been to frame these transnational dynamics in terms of sovereignty. Christopher Maginn has suggested that Gaelic and English-Irish courting of Continental kings for Ireland amounted to would-be ‘transfers of sovereignty’.21 In doing so, he invites us to consider what exactly the Irish might have thought of as ‘sovereignty’ and the means and words by which they would have expressed it. Rory Rapple has homed in specifically on the period of the Nine Years’ War and the late Elizabethan succession crisis, insightfully commenting that Gaelic political world-views operated as a variety of ‘ancient constitution’. The conflict, he explains, offered rich opportunity for translatio imperii, with Spain or Scotland being the most likely destinations, two places that enjoyed longstanding presence in Gaelic historical thinking.22 Tom O’Connor remarks that the ‘turmoil of the 1590s and early 1600s was also the occasion for new thinking on Irish sovereignty and the country’s role in Europe’.23 O’Connor’s subject is not the Gaelic intelligentsia or Irish texts but rather the Old English Peter Lombard and his De Hibernia insula commentarius stromaticus (1600), a text penned to persuade Pope Clement VIII that the English monarchy’s failure to uphold the terms of the twelfthcentury papal bull Laudabiliter ‘necessitated a transfer of sovereignty to another prince’.24 Nevertheless, Lombard was an ally of O’Neill and presented him as a legitimate defender of the faith who would secure the island for a Catholic ruler; any such ‘transfer of sovereignty’ would run through Ulster’s military dynasts. These depictions of period politics in terms of sovereignty, alongside the Gaelic sources briefly surveyed above, present us with the question of the transnational elements of the concept. How, we might wonder, did the efforts of Lombard, O’Donnell, and O’Neill differ from similar cross-border politicking indulged in by Irish elites of earlier periods? More fundamentally, what was the thing they were attempting to give away, and what allowed them to think that they were the ones to effect its transfer? Attempting to answer those questions requires some reflection on what is meant by ‘sovereignty’, followed by the search for what Irish word or words might serve as synonym. Here I follow James Sheehan’s lead in approaching sovereignty as ‘a set of claims made by those seeking or wielding power, claims about the superiority and autonomy of their a­ uthority’.25 A more common definition as supreme authority within a bounded territory applies well to individual lordships, but only aspirationally in the

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case of pan-insular authority. As such, sovereignty will be approached here in terms of a ‘basket’ of claims regarding both the possession of and the choices to be made about the exercise of executive authority within a recognized space, whether local or island-wide. In an effort to guard against the creep of anachronism in searching for equivalent Irish concepts and their related terms, the brief lexical investigation that follows is based on sources available or produced during the political career of the conflict’s main protagonist, Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone (d. 1616), with one brief foray into the mid-seventeenth century for comparative purposes. Within the wide political vocabulary employed by the Gaelic learned classes, flaitheas is the most proximate to ‘sovereignty’ as described above.26 Its semantic range allows rendering as sovereignty in its more abstract sense of claim to executive power within a bounded space, something suggested in the first line of Eochaidh Ó hEoghusa’s poem written to proclaim O’Donnell’s claims to the kingship of Ireland, Díol fuatha flaitheas Éireann.27 There was no realistic sense that O’Donnell would ascend to the high-kingship; the political resonance was local or regional in impact and intent. But the trope of a lord’s rightful claim to the high-kingship was an essential one in determining the successful candidate to rule at the head of Gaelic lineages, and flaitheas here carries that legitimating sense of claim as opposed to the holding of title. That sense of abstract right and ultimate authority is strengthened by its linkage to matters divine. Generically the term can mean heaven, and more specifically the kingdom of God, flaitheas Dé, a use encountered in Seaán Ó Cearnaigh’s late sixteenth-century Protestant primer Abidil Gaoidheilge & Caticiosma.28 The word can, however, also carry the more concrete sense of practical governance. In Luaghaidh Ó Cléirigh’s political biography of Red Hugh O’Donnell, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill (The life of Red Hugh O’Donnell), written in the wake of the latter’s death in 1602, O’Donnell is described as coming into his flaithius.29 Unlike in the case of Ó hEoghusa’s encomium to the same figure, here flaithius means both the actualization of sovereign claim and the practical headship of the dynasty. Such use was not ‘ethnically’ specific: the Old English son of Ulick Burke, for instance, is similarly described by Ó Cléirigh as being inaugurated in his rulership (oirdnedh isin flaithius).30 In keeping with the semantic range inclusive of abstract claim and practical governance found in flaitheas, the related noun flaith is the most common choice when describing those of O’Donnell and O’Neill’s status and is generally rendered as prince, itself carrying both the sense of claim to and the exercise or delegation of supreme authority. An elegant example comes in Fearghal Óg Mac an Bhaird’s elegy to O’Donnell in wake of his self-exile to Spain, Teasda Éire san Easpáinn, in which he likens the absence of the prince (flaith) to the loss of Gaelic claims to sovereignty over the island

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(flaitheas), a further reminder of the link between sovereignty as a ‘basket of claims’ to executive authority in a given physical space and the actual exercise or delegation of that authority.31 Ríoghdhacht and its related terms share much of the semantic range of flaitheas/flaith and can be similarly employed to translate sovereignty/sovereign and kingdom/king. A telling example of that definitional flexibility is supplied by Paul Walsh’s gloss of the following fascinating episode in the Beatha, which highlights the relationship between local and transnational political concerns: Ro rannta i ndé 7 do rattadh an rann tanuise dÚa Néill amail ba hiomairgidhe ar as déroinn no bhiodh for gach naiscidh dusficcedh día saigidh on Spáin 7 basedh roba téchta dhoibh ó ré na sen ar níro dhlighset Cenél cConaill imfhorcraidh ó Chenél nEóghain acht techt ina ttionól an tan budh la Cenél cConaill righe nErenn 7 Cenél cConuill do dhul ina ttionól somh an tan budh la Cenél nEoghain an righe. They [i.e. arms and materiel] were divided into two parts, and the second part was given to O’Neill, as was meet, for a twofold division was made of every gift which came to them from Spain, and that was due to them from olden times, for the Cenél Conaill had no right to any claim over Cenél Eóghain save that they come to their muster when the sovereignty of Ireland belonged to Cenél Conaill, and that Cenél Conaill should go to their muster when Cenél Eóghain had the kingship.32

The verb Walsh translates as ‘was due’ carries the implication of legality (dlighedh = law), a sense immediately reinforced by reference to ancient conditions and rights obtaining among regal lineages in a setting wherein the high-kingship was a moveable feast among dynasties. The first instance of righe links to the aspirational and to claims-making, the second to the holding and administering of the high-kingship as office. In spite of the considerable overlap in these terms, a broader lexical investigation reveals that flaitheas/flaith relates more closely to the meanings encapsulated in ‘sovereignty’ as understood here and ríoghdhacht/rí/ríghe to those associated with office and administration. A few comparisons might help draw more clearly the distinction. Whereas translators have referred to an Irish lord’s authority and territory using either term – see the Walsh quotation, above – Gaelic succession politics and inaugurations of new heads are frequently discussed in the original documents with reference to a ríoghdhamhna, literally one of kingly stuff. There is no similar usage associated with flaith.33 In speaking of foreign powers and polities, Gaelic observers primarily rely on that same linguistic cluster: ríoghdhacht/rí/ríghe. Ó Cléirigh, for instance, invariably refers to Philip III as Rígh, and he makes note of Galicia as ríoghacht (kingdom).34 Ó Cearnaigh describes Sir Henry

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Sidney as the ‘lord and deputy of the kingdom of Ireland under the rule of the queen’ (tighearna 7 débiti rióghochda na hÉreann fa fhlaithéas na bannrióghan): the bounded political territory of Ireland is termed rióghochd, Elizabeth’s claims to and holding of pan-insular executive authority as flaitheas, and her title with the feminine bannrióghan.35 But if a king is a rí, a tyrant is an anflaith, the opposite of flaith. This stands to reason in that ‘king’ denotes a title or office, and ‘tyrant’ a value judgement regarding claim and/or governing practice. While of ancient usage and defined in Old Irish legal tracts, anf(h)laith enjoyed a particular popularity in the unsettled political circumstances of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. An illustrative example appears in a later text, Seathrún Céitinn’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn (c. 1634), in a passage addressing controversies surrounding the legitimacy of Brian Boru’s highkingship: do-bheirid na seanchaidhe ar Bhrian nar dhlightheach anfhlaith do ghairm dhe, óir ní do réir a thoile nó a neirt do rinne follamhnughadh na críche ré linn bheith i bhflaitheas dó, acht do réir reachta is dlighidh na críche. Óir is é is anfhlaith ann an tí do-ní follamhnughadh nó riaghlughadh do réir neirt is ní do réir cheirt; agus ó nach mar sin do rinne Brian, acht do réir cheirt is reachta, ní hiontughtha anfhlaith air.36 the historians observe that it is not lawful to call Brian a tyrant, for it was not according to his will or his strength that he ruled the territory during his reign, but according to the rules and laws of the land. For he is a tyrant who governs or rules according to strength and not according to right; and as that is not what Brian did, but acted according to right and law, he is not to be known as a tyrant.

The highlighted terms include variations of ones encountered above in reference to O’Neill’s and O’Donnell’s arrangement for how to divide Spanish support: the adjective ‘lawful’ (dlightheach) and the negation of flaith (anfhlaith). Regarding the latter, there is (and can be) no similar antonymic form of rí, further suggesting that flaith, and by extension flaitheas, shade more to the sense of abstract power and claims-making associated with ‘sovereignty’ with rí and its related terms more suggestive of title and office. Bolded as well is cheirt (nominative singular = ceart), for it may offer final clues to the links between flaitheas and ríoghdhacht, sovereignty and government. Ceart equates to ‘right’, as noted above in discussion of the Ceart Uí Néill, the Lebor na Cert and Céitinn’s commentary on Brian Boru. Cairt, by contrast, is the ‘charter’ that allows ceart to be recognized, defended, and actualized. This could manifest in many forms: a written document, victory in battle, prophecy and so on. We might take as one illustrative example an anonymous poet’s assessment that the ‘charter

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of the sword is the best charter’ (Cairt cloidhimh ca cairt is fearr), this in celebration of the second earl of Clanricarde’s claims to territory in Connacht.37 In addition to appearing in legal and historical tracts, the term was ubiquitous in bardic poetry. A search in the Bardic Poetry Database of poems composed across the late-sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries turns up fifty-five examples, and this for the nominative singular form alone. Broader evidence of the central place of ceart and cairt in Irish political thinking can be found in the English-language archive, as well. Tucked away in the papers of Sir George Carew is an extraordinary little document that demonstrates English officials’ sense for the terms’ importance in establishing political legitimacy in Ireland and a desire to understand their meanings and the relationship between them. Carew was a long-serving member of the Tudor colonial administration in Ireland and was appointed Lord President of Munster in 1600 as the Nine Years’ War raged. By virtue of appointment he was tasked with establishing a stable English regime in the country; by temperament and intellectual predilection, it seems, he was keen to understand indigenous history and custom. His voluminous papers, housed presently in Lambeth Palace and constituting something of a second collection of ‘state papers’ relating to early modern Ireland, demonstrate both his antiquarian interests and his efforts to translate that knowledge into governing power.38 Reproduced in Figure 8.1 is a record of an Irish prophecy, collected by Carew in 1599, and the parsing of its critical political terminology. In the top left is a single quatrain of verse in Irish orthography: Ticfed[h] do ceart an Carúnaig[h] go mud[h] haireach lib[h] an deantaoi bud[h] hiomd[h]a glór alluraig[h] da scaoiled[h] cois na miat[h]laoi

Below that appears an English rendering: It will proceed of Carewes right you will repent your p[rese]nte Actes when many foreyn voyce unknytt wilbe; on brinke of Myathlaght

To the right of this English text appear some possibilities for identification of the placename miat[h]laoi mentioned in the quatrain’s last line. More critical for present purposes, however, is the fascinating bit of political parsing that appears above. The first hand is Carew’s, introducing the matter as ‘The exposition of those two words’, and below in the copyist’s hand are the following glosses:

Figure 8.1  ‘Exposition of several Irish words’ (1)

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The Nine Years’ War in Ireland 193 Ceart: } a mans title, a mans interest, but more fittly a mans lawfull estate, or a mans right.   Cairt } an evidence of wryting, escripte, charters or deedes of Conveyance.39

On the document’s opposite side, then, appears a second version of the verse (Figure 8.2):

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Tioicfa do c[h]eart an carrunaid[h] budh ait[h]reac[h] lib[h] an dentaoi bud[h] iomd[h]a glor allm[h]araid[h] ar lorg coise met[h]luide

Which is rendered thus: It shall come of Carewe his right, that yee shall repent your doings many a strangers voice shalbe about the rivere of Myalthagh.

The reader is coming into a conversation well in train given that only one of ‘those two words’, ceart, appears in the quatrains given. The exercise is likely connected to Carew’s claims for land in Ireland, something he argued were longstanding and which his description of the text implies: ‘An old prophesie of Carew in Irishe Called Caruunagh’.40 However personal the motivation behind this bit of linguistic parsing, it is sign of the importance attached to these terms in Gaelic discourse and practice and by agents of the Elizabethan regime. Here, then, we have something of a rough sketch of the political matrix during the Nine Years’ War and in which O’Donnell and O’Neill operated as they courted a foreign executive. Rather than drawing a binary comparison of sovereignty and government, imperium and administratio, it frames a field of force encapsulating the prescriptive and the practical: the ‘basket of claims’ constituting flaitheas is built out of forms of ceart to which only some were eligible, and the practical holding of office and the administration of government associated with ríoghdhacht also required pre-existing ceart but could only be actualized by virtue of cairt delegated by other actors claiming flaitheas. Cairt, of course, was defined very narrowly by Carew’s informer and rather more broadly by, say, our anonymous author valorizing the ‘charter of the sword’ (Cairt cloidhimh). But the fundamental role of the bard was to provide the ‘evidence of writing’ and ‘escripte’ by which ‘Conveyance’ of power could be effected. Indeed, it is for that reason that we have the written record of bardic verse: it was the cairt that operationalized ceart, and what Carew’s source explained in local political context would have applied equally to the national. With this basic taxonomy of early modern Irish political understandings in hand, we may return to the matter of the Ulster earls’ engagement with the king of Spain and their motivations concerning sovereignty and government. I wish to suggest that at stake in the minds of the Ulster earls was

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Figure 8.2  ‘Exposition of Several Irish words’ (2)

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not fleathas but rather ríoghdhacht. Indeed, it was the former that made possible the gift of the latter, a process which a bit of triangulating across different sorts of evidence might bring into focus. To start, we might consider the language used in the letters penned on O’Neill’s and O’Donnell’s behalf seeking Spanish aid. As an example, a trio of dispatches, each dated 29 September 1595 and sent to different members of the court, suggests a concern for regime change: one appealed to Don John Delaguila to intercede with the Spanish king, claiming that in return Philip II ‘will acquire a kingdom in which he will find us and others the most loyal of subjects and a land not unprofitable and a sea of satisfactory yield’ (‘regnum acquiret, in quo nos et alios inueniet sibi fidelissimos subditos, terramque non inutilem, et mare satis commodum’), another sent to Don Carolo assured that were the king’s support sufficient no other king but he would be recognized by them (‘regem agnoscent’), and the third beseeched Philip himself to clear the Regnum Hiberniae of heretics and assume its kingship.41 Imperium was not on the table, but rather the holding of executive authority and the exercise of government. We might perhaps see something of the contractual nature of the offer in the use of the future tense: it is not that the Irish lords consider Philip to be the ‘true’ king denied his right by English usurpers; rather his meeting of certain demands of confession and material support – i.e. a particular cluster of ceart – would trigger their loyalty. This reading might be reinforced by considering the broader context of negotiation engaged in by the Ulster lords prior to their devastating loss in the field at Kinsale in 1601. As missives went off to Spain, competing ones travelled to London. Much of the action of the war’s first years consisted of epistolary feints, parries, and threats passing among the Gaelic confederates and the Crown and court. The most famous of these is known simply as ‘Tyrone’s demands’, a list of twenty-two requirements to be met by the Elizabethan regime before O’Neill and his allies would come back into the Tudor fold. Two stand out in considering distinctions between sovereignty and government: item 16, ‘That the Queen nor her successors may in no sort press an Irishman to serve them against his will’; and item 18, ‘That all Irishmen, of what quality they be, may freely travel in foreign countries, for their better experience, without making any of the Queen’s officers acquainted withal’.42 The surrender of flaitheas, of the right and capacity to make decisions regarding loyalty to superiors, was not on the table. Nor was restriction on movement to and from the Continent. It would not have taken much imagination to see that the latter item would ensure the freedom of political choice contained in the former. Be it to a Habsburg or a Tudor, the loyalty promised by these Irish lords was always conditional. O’Donnell’s certainty on this point, so Ó Cléirigh tells us, stood even in the physical presence of Philip III himself. The text of the Beatha describes

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O’Donnell’s journey from Ireland in personal pursuit of the promise of Spanish aid. Having landed in Corunna, he made his way to Castile where the king happened then to be in the city of Zamora. Given audience with Philip, he knelt before him and made three requests. The first was for military aid, the second for guarantee that should Philip become king of Ireland he would not raise any nobles there to status that exceeded his (O’Donnell’s) own and that this arrangement would apply to his descendants. The third is worth quoting in full: An tres itche gan cert [ceart] a shinnsior do laghdugadh no duirbernadh fair fein no forsan tí no biadh ina ionadh diaidh i ndíaidh in gach maighen i tarrusair nert 7 cumhachta ó chein aca inn Erinn ríasan tan sin. The third request was that he should not lessen or impair the rights of his [O’Donnell’s] ancestors as regards himself or whoever should succeed him in any place in Ireland where they held power and sway since times long gone by.43

Here is an arrangement in keeping with the ‘elective’ qualities of Irish political theory and practice, illustrative of the ‘basket of claims’ that O’Donnell brought to matters of government nationally and regionally. Left unsaid was what would happen were one of Philip’s successors to violate the agreement. Given the contractual nature of Irish constitutional thought and practice – whether in the context of internal or external relations – we might imagine that such a transgression would trigger a renewed search for a more tractable holder of supreme executive power. This was not, then, an effort at translatio imperii, but rather exercise of sovereign claims in the interest of ameliorating circumstances of practical governance deemed illegitimate. Within the matrix of Irish political understanding sketched above, we might see the courting of the Habsburgs as a series of moves in which the flaitheas (the capacity to determine who would rule and how) hereditarily invested in the Ulster lords served as grounds by which the ríoghdhacht (kingship and kingdom) of Ireland could be transferred to some other more fitting candidate. Philips II and III held sufficient ceart to warrant candidacy based on confession – something which would satisfy both the historical terms of the papal bull Laudabiliter and the contemporary desire to associate with a Catholic state – and on blood, given that the Gaelic Irish traced their lineage back to Spain. The invitation made by O’Neill and O’Donnell as possessors of flaitheas, be it by writing or personal appeal, would then serve as the cairt by which legitimate claim could be translated into title and the act of governance. Approaching the actions of the Ulster lords in the Nine Years’ War as a problem of government might offer insight not only into broader political dynamics in late medieval and early modern Ireland but into how we attempt

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to reconstruct and interpret them. As a first point, it offers a reminder of the need to focus on practice and contemporary descriptions of action and to interrogate prescriptive vocabularies in re-creating early modern Irish political world-views: the movements of O’Neill and O’Donnell demonstrate that certain political assumptions that went unexamined in the written record were in fact historically and culturally conditioned and enabling of action. With that awareness of a political lattice formed out of ideas and behaviour, we can see with greater clarity the transnational aspects of the Gaelic Irish political world-view and recognize them not as aberrations but as time-honoured options, however rarely actualized. The historical record of periodic invitations to foreign powers to intercede in island-wide politics, and of occasional rituals of obeisance to English monarchs, from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, amply demonstrates this. Reaching out to the Spanish court in pursuit of a more congenial exercise of government may have been triggered by contemporary circumstances, but it was not a concept or strategy created by them. Nor were the criteria by which the Philips were selected, or the process of their invitation to govern, alien in the context of more quotidian operations of Irish high politics. This may be suggested analogically through comparison with Ó Cléirigh’s telling of a local transition of power, the contested inauguration of a new chief of the Maguires. After the head of the dynasty fell in battle, one Conor believed the title would fall to him, an expectation based on ‘right of his ancestry, his age, his dignity, his friendship, and his relationship to O Néill, whose cousin he was on his mother’s side, as the mothers of both were sisters, and thus was the same purpose of mind and thought which O Néill himself had and his advisers also. He went to O Néill to ask command of his patrimony’. Before blessing Conor’s accession, O’Neill sent ‘letters and messengers’ to O’Donnell informing him of the situation and his intention to honour the request. The latter was unhappy with the choice, however, given Conor’s recent siding with the Dublin administration in the conflict, and he favoured a rival claimant, one Cúchonnacht Óg, brother of the previous chief, whom he deemed more politically reliable. Eventually this latter candidate would prevail, declared in his title by O’Donnell at a banquet attended by all the parties involved.44 The courting of Philips II and III was grounded in similar criteria – blood, age, historical links to Ireland and the Irish, and personal connections to those making the invitation – and a similar process, namely the weighing of different options (Elizabeth, James and Philip), consultation among the ‘nominating committee’, and engagement with the parties by letter and envoy and through in-person supplication. In both cases O’Donnell and O’Neill played the role of kingmaker, be it to legitimize an inferior or a superior, and did so according to protocol that, while wellestablished, is visible only through observation of both word and action.

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Second, approaching the War as response to a problem of government offers a caution on method, namely that the search for sovereignty in an Irish context may not be the most fruitful approach in attempting to recreate the Irish political imaginary. Doing so is always going to produce ill-fitting comparisons, in part because ‘sovereignty’ itself in the Englishlanguage history and historiography is contested and a matter of longstanding debate. The addition of Irish examples adds further complications to an already unstable category. Unfortunately, in the Irish case those complications can come across not simply as further variations on a theme but rather as signs of political failure or ‘beyond the pale’ oddities serving to further exoticize the Irish experience relative to some assumption of European norms. Building outward from Irish text and practice, and only then comparing findings with those from other early modern settings, might offer a productive counter-approach. Indeed, there are interesting elements to the Irish political system that appear unique when compared against other contemporary examples, chief among them the institutionalized role of ‘kingmaker’, the influence of ecclesiastical figures and bards as both members of the lordly court and emissaries to other territories, and the phenomenon of a self-determining polity having both a collective ‘sovereign’ and a place for an external governor. Completing such a project would necessitate digging more deeply into the lexical record to interrogate terms noted above but, out of concerns for space, left unqueried – ceannas, tighearnas, oireachtas, dúthchas and so on – and tracking critical terms like anf(h)laith further into the seventeenth century to see how they developed across genres in the wake of the transformative events of the post-Nine Years’ War period. In doing so, however, sovereignty should serve as a heuristic not as an analytical starting point or interpretative goal. If we accept the above two points then we might have a basis upon which to rethink the historical question with which this chapter began: what role did succession politics in England have in Irish politics? As the English historiography tells us, succession uncertainty offered a great opportunity for political and social experimentation. Windows could open up that were not previously available, then close again without necessarily having any effect on later political thought and action. The Bond and Act of Association serve as famous examples. As the historiography briefly surveyed here demonstrates, the Nine Years’ War was itself an example of such contingent phenomena and it produced conditions in which all sorts of innovative thinking on political relationships, internal and external, became possible. But those windows closed quickly in the war’s wake as the Gaelic political and intellectual classes returned to favouring more proximate dynasts in the Stuarts. Yet, as reiterated here, the transnational aspect of Irish politics and political thought was hardly new. Nor were

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the Irish ruling classes unfamiliar with the dynamics opened up by uncertainties in English monarchical politics. O’Donnell’s and O’Neill’s turn to Europe, then, was not something pursued merely because all standard options appeared closed. Rather, it was a well-established course of action grounded in precedent and culturally embedded through repeated action, both in Gaelic Irish history and in the lifetimes of O’Neill and O’Donnell. As such it might be valuable to think of a much longer ‘war of English succession’ commencing in the 1540s, involving various Continental players, and having ongoing if unpredictable effects in numerous polities. Ireland, in such a scenario, would prove particularly unstable from the 1550s onward given both the reality of colonialism and the ease with which government, without sovereignty, was deemed transferable. While frequently operative as a cold one of threats, conspiracies, and shifting alliances, this ‘war’ produced the kind of uncertainty that allowed the emergence of O’Neill and O’Donnell as particular kinds of internationally minded regional power brokers and not simply as late-career enticers of the Philips. Indeed, they and their peculiar horizons of political possibility were products of the English succession crisis as much as they were reactive to it. And, as two of the only characters in this drama familiar with anything akin to elective executive politics on a ‘national’ level, the Ulster lords may well have understood that their inspiration was always Warwick rather than Brian Boru, and that whatever ‘revolutionary’ outcomes their conflict with the English Crown might help bring forth, they reserved the hold on flaitheas by which they could tear them down and start again.

Notes   1 Anthony Fletcher and Diarmaid MacCulloch, Tudor Rebellions (London, 2008); Brendan Kane, ‘Elizabeth I and Rebellion in England and Ireland: semper eadem?’, in Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (eds), Elizabeth I and Ireland (Cambridge, 2014), 261–85.   2 Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester, 2007), 1–30.   3 David Edwards, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and Tudor Ireland’, History Ireland 5:2 (1997), 16–21. The standard on the Nine Years’ War remains Hiram Morgan, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Ireland (Woodbridge, 1993).   4 Richard Tuck, The Sleeping Sovereign: The Invention of Modern Democracy (Cambridge, 2016). I wish to thank William Bulman for this reference and providing a copy of the text.  5 The texts from which all investigations on this subject must proceed are Katharine Simms, From Kings to Warlords: The Changing Political Structure

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of Gaelic Ireland in the Later Middle Ages (Woodbridge, 2000); and Breandán Ó Buachalla, Aisling ghéar: na Stíobhartaigh agus an taos léinn, 1603–1788 (Dublin, 1996), especially chs 1–3. Critical for a later period is Bernadette Cunningham, ‘Representations of King, Parliament and the Irish People in Geoffrey Keating’s Foras feasa ar Éirinn and John Lynch’s Cambrensis Eversus (1662)’, in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought in Seventeenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge, 2000), 131–54.   6 As insightful exception, see Éamon Ó Doibhlin, ‘Ceart Uí Néill: a Discussion and Translation of the Document’, Seanchas Ardmhaca: Journal of the Armagh Diocesan Historical Society 5:2 (1970), 324–58 (332).   7 Although the focus here is on Gaelic Irish norms and patterns of behaviour, comparison could be made with other European settings and situations, such as those found over the course of the Dutch Revolt. I suspect that such comparison would reveal similarities in how Irish and Continental actors understood and approached sovereignty, government and the relationship between them.   8 On the structure of kingship in Ireland generally, see F.J. Byrne, Irish Kings and High-Kings (Dublin, reprint 2001).   9 Simms, From Kings to Warlords, ch. 2. 10 For discussion of both the history and historiography of this dynamic see Katharine Simms, ‘The Norman Invasion and the Gaelic Recovery’, in Roy Foster (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (New York, 1989), 53–103. 11 Edmund Curtis, Richard II in Ireland, 1394–5, and Submissions of the Irish Chiefs (Oxford, 1927). 12 ‘English-Irish’ is used here in reference to the descendants of the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman invaders and other loyal English subjects resident in Ireland, a community that would come to be known as the ‘Old English’ by the end of the sixteenth century. 13 Christopher Maginn, ‘Whose Ireland? Sovereignty in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ireland’, Éire-Ireland 44:3 & 4 (Winter 1999), 229–47 (239). 14 Rory Rapple, ‘Brinkmanship and Bad Luck: Ireland, the Nine Years’ War and the Succession’, in Susan Doran and Paulina Kewes (eds), The Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (Manchester, 2014), 236–56 (241). 15 On the military sophistication of the Irish forces see James O’Neill, The Nine Years War, 1593–1603: O’Neill, Mountjoy and the Military Revolution (Dublin, 2017). 16 Nicholas Canny, ‘The Formation of the Irish Mind: Religion, Politics and Gaelic Literature 1580–1750’, Past and Present 95 (1982), 91–116. 17 On the need to separate the stock from the unique see Katharine Simms, ‘Bardic Poetry as a Historical Source’, Historical Studies 17 (1987), 58–75. 18 There is occasional mention of the foreigners, Gallaibh, but always in the context of the tribute they owe to Irish kings. As one example see the section on ‘tradition of the Foreigners of Dublin’ (senchus Gall Átha Cliath) in Myles Dillon (ed.), Lebor na cert: The Book of Rights (Dublin, 1962), 110–15. 19 Ó Doibhlin, ‘Ceart Uí Néill’.

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20 Anthony Candon, ‘Muirchertach Ua Briain: Politics and Naval Activity in the Irish Sea’, in Gearórd Mac Niocaill and Patrick F. Wallace (eds), Keimelia: Studies in Medieval Archaeology and History in Memory of Tom Delaney (Galway, 1988), 99, 397–415. 21 Maginn, ‘Whose Ireland?’, 239. 22 Rapple, ‘Brinkmanship and Bad Luck’, 237, 241. 23 Thomas O’Connor, ‘A Justification for Foreign Intervention in Early Modern Ireland: Peter Lombard’s Commentarius (1600)’, in Thomas O’Connor (ed.), Irish Migrants in Europe after Kinsale, 1602–1800 (Dublin, 2003), 14–31; quotation 14. 24 O’Connor, ‘A Justification for Foreign Intervention’, 15. 25 James Sheehan, ‘The Problem of Sovereignty in European History’, The American Historical Review 111:1 (2006), 1–15 (3). 26 Other words with overlapping or adjacent meanings include ceannas, tighearnas, oireachtas and dúthchas, and a longer version of this study would consider why they are poor candidates as synonyms for ‘sovereignty’. 27 Bardic Poetry Database, poem no. 698. 28 Aibidil, 151–2. 29 Lughaidh Ó Cléirigh, Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill, ed. and trans. Paul Walsh (London, 1948; reprint 1988), vol. I, 41. Please note that orthography varies considerably in Irish documents, e.g. flaitheas and flaithius. The policy followed here is to list the most common variant, using the Glossary of Léamh.org as source, when introducing and discussing terms but when referring to instances from specific texts to reproduce them as found in the original. 30 Ó Cléirigh, Beatha, vol. I, 295. 31 Bardic Poetry Database, poem 1816. 32 Ó Cléirigh, Beatha, vol. I, 211. 33 For an example of usage, see Ó Cléirigh, Beatha, vol. I, 114. Related terms include adhbhar ríogh and mac ríogh, on which see Simms, From Kings to Warlords, ch. 4. 34 Ó Cléirigh, Beatha, vol. I, 120, 340. Spain, it should be noted, is always simply Spain. 35 Ó Cearnaigh, Aibidil, 130–1. Note that the forms in the original are inflected, thus the difference in spelling of rióghochd (genitive singular = rióghochda) and flaitheas (fhlaitheas = dative singular). This is an interesting case in that Ó Cearnaigh was a Protestant and loyalist and was likely making the radical argument that flaitheas indeed rested with the Tudors. 36 Seathrún Céitinn, Foras feasa ar Érinn, 264; accessed through UCC CELT (https://celt.ucc.ie//published/G100054/index.html). As always, please note that orthographic variation is determined in part by inflection. 37 Bardic Poetry Database, poem 1692: Seanoir cuilg cairt an Bhurcaigh; reference in line A of second quatrain. 38 The finest study of Carew’s antiquarianism remains Jason Dorsett, ‘Sir James Carew: the Study and Conquest of Ireland’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford University, 2009). However, see also Valerie McGowan-Doyle, The Book

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of Howth: Elizabethan Conquest and the New English (Cork, 2011); and Brendan Kane, ‘Languages of Legitimacy? an Ghaeilge and British Politics in the Renaissance Pale, 1600–1624’, in Thomas Herron and Michael Potterton (eds), Dublin and the Pale in the Renaissance, c. 1494–1660 (Dublin, 2011), 267–79. 39 Carew Papers, vol. 607, 149. 40 Ibid., 150? (unpaginated). 41 Ibid., vol. 612, 45, 45a, and 46. These are summarized in the Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts, vol. 3 (London, 1869; reprint 1974), 122–3, but not transcribed or translated. 42 TNA SP 63/206, fol. 251. 43 Ó Cléirigh, Beatha, vol. I, 342–3. 44 Ó Cléirigh, Beatha, vol. I, 242–7. In thinking more broadly of the elective nature of Irish monarchy, the system of tanistry – by which an heir-apparent to the headship of an Irish lordship (or, to use the terms explored here, the king of a petty kingship) was designated – offers a further example of the importance of choice-making in the establishment of political legitimacy among the Gaelic Irish.

9 Luisa de Carvajal, her ‘Life’, and the place of women in Counter-Reformation politics Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Freddy C. Domínguez

Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (1566–1614) came from elite noble stock and could have had, should she have wanted it, an easy life. Much to the chagrin of her family, she chose another course. Bypassing the convent, which would have been an acceptable alternative to marriage, she chose asceticism in communal life with other laywomen in Spain, starting in the 1590s. In 1605, at the age of thirty-nine, she left Catholic Spain for Protestant England where she would do her best to help the afflicted Catholic community there and where she would seek to fulfil a vow of martyrdom made a decade earlier. Her story involves, among other things, a shadowy uncle who taught her the ways of pious self-harm (perhaps while secretly watching her), her own efforts to enact ostentatious self-denial and poverty in the streets of Madrid, a series of secret and not-so-secret visits to English Catholic prisoners in London gaols, and public squabbles in her broken English with Protestants in London markets. Her story has been told in various guises since the seventeenth century and interest in her has witnessed a renaissance in the last fifteen years. This chapter is partly an effort to critique two blind-spots in the literature on Luisa as it currently stands.1 The first is the result of lingering nationalist sentiment. Luisa was Spanish by birth and by self-identification and so she has, with good reason, been treated as a Spanish figure, an exemplar of a kind of Spanish spirituality. But, as anyone familiar with her story knows, the most critical, ambitious, and controversial part of her life took place in England where she travelled to help the English Catholic cause and where she looked forward to the torments at the hand of heretics. These crucial years (1605–14) require historians to grapple with her liminality; the ambiguous place she holds between England and Spain undoubtedly marks how her life and writings should be interpreted. Just as English exiles in Spain were once dubbed ‘Spanish Elizabethans’, so too we might think of her as a ‘Spanish Stuart’ in so far as she lived in James I’s England and was deeply embedded in English Catholic culture from her base in and around England.2

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The second shortcoming, as far as Luisa is concerned, has to do with what we might call a ‘spiritual’ bias. Modern scholarship has, to an extent, simply reinscribed the hagiographical inclination of those who wrote Luisa’s early modern ‘lives’.3 Her early biographers sought to establish her holiness, indeed her sanctity, thereby placing her within a long-established tradition of exceptional women with spiritual acumen. These narratives tended to underplay Luisa’s worldly activities – except, of course her proselytizing efforts – and anything with even a whiff of the ‘political’. Modern scholarship has pivoted away from hagiographical imperatives, but the emphasis has been on aspects of her identity through a predominantly religious lens. Even Glyn Redworth’s work, which describes many of her more overtly political activities, focuses largely on her ‘apostolic’ mission and lingers somewhat luridly on matters concerning her physical asceticism (especially as it relates to her purportedly abusive relationship with her uncle).4 These problems can be overcome, in part, by acknowledging that Luisa was, perhaps above all, a public figure.5 While much scholarship has focused on her self-actualization, her writings – poetic, epistolary, ­biographical – scream out for more attention to how she conveyed herself to others and how she thought such conveyance was meant to ‘work’ in a broader field of public activities well beyond her own spiritual and martyrological longings.6 Indeed, her obstinate decision to avoid the convent ensured that she would be very much of this world even if her everyday was spent (mostly) trying to get closer to God. This is true of her life in Spain, but especially of her time in England when her public persona as diehard Catholic was unmitigatedly controversial and from the point of view of James’s regime potentially dangerous. If we take her seriously as a public personality, her time in England must be considered within the context of the English politico-religious scene.7 Luisa’s place in England was surely unique – there were not many Spanish missionaries in England, and certainly not women – but her story fits comfortably within what scholarship has taught us about English (Catholic) women in religious and public life. In Protestant scholarship figures such as Anne Askew have been recognized as important figures in Reformation history, but in English Catholic scholarship the road has been rockier. The role of women in the conservation of English Catholicism has long been acknowledged, but only recently has it been deeply explored.8 For example, on the back of Caroline Bowden’s efforts to identify English nuns and their writings on the Continent, we have learned a great deal about women’s role as potent counter-Reformation forces.9 Most of these studies treat the lives of nuns and other exalted women as part of endogamous Catholic stories with a tight focus on ‘spirituality’ and religious practices, but of late Peter Lake and Michael Questier

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have pointed in a different direction. In their joint-monograph, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow, they discuss the life and death (by crushing) of a staunch Catholic woman who would not conform to the state-sponsored church as dictated by the ruling regimes in York and London.10 Lake and Questier explore the Clitherow affair from outside the mostly hagiographic literature that has taken up her cause and placed her within the ‘mainstream’ of English history as a participant and object of public discussion amid dizzyingly varied inter- and intra-confessional dissensions. Moreover, they extricate Clitherow from purely Catholic confines and place her squarely within a context of multi-confessional controversy that was fundamentally polemical and partook of the ‘political’. In doing so they place her within a terrain that has of late mostly been preserved for Catholic men during the late Tudor and Stuart periods.11 In their telling, Clitherow herself, in her intransigent Catholicism and support for missionary activities, took a stand against both Protestants and those whom she perceived as milquetoast Catholics to the extent that she even (partially) turned her back on her husband and other ‘conformists’ in her most immediate circles. Her ‘Life’, as written by the secular priest John Mush, becomes, within this troubled background, not only evidence for the ambiguities and tensions of her situation but a polemical text amid various claims and counter-claims of ‘church papistry’ with Clitherow as the positive exemplar of maximalist recusancy. Her life as lived and written was consequently an explosive text amid Elizabethan efforts to equate recusancy with sedition.12 Clitherow and the many lay women like her who were caught up in or helped forge the politico-religious discourse of their times are important for understanding Luisa. Below, I underscore that during her years in England (1605–14) Luisa recognized the importance of such women for the maintenance of the Church and understood herself to be instrumental in helping other laywomen stay the course despite the tugging and pulling at their skirts by Protestants and weak Catholics. Suggesting this, however, is not an end, but a means by which to shed some light on the tools used by Luisa to establish herself as a public figure instrumental within such a context. By considering her ‘publicness’, this chapter offers a way to take a closer look at Luisa’s autobiographical writings. Most importantly, we have sketches she wrote about her youth before she became a publicly visible figure in Spain and well before she went to England. Although these texts were ‘private’ in that their immediate audience was restricted, their adherence to hagiographical tropes implies that it was, at least in part, a self-fashioning endeavour, an intervention at a specific time and within a specific space. This chapter tries to think through the implications of her narrative for the English moment. From this perspective, I will suggest that

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her posturing is evidence of her attempts to provide a model of English Catholic rigour. I will expand this claim in two ways. First, by underlining contexts that make it plausible, I argue that she would have been fully aware of the ‘public’ side of her sort of autobiographical narrative and that she understood herself to be part of a politico-religious scene in which she herself functioned as an exemplar. Because it is near impossible to know the extent to which her autobiographical writings were read, there is a strong speculative thread to what follows, but I have little doubt that they provide insights about the kind of self-styling that would have been part and parcel of how she was represented to English Catholics. In light of this, I conclude by teasing out how some elements of her autobiography could have ‘worked’ in English Catholic spheres as she understood them. In the past few decades there has been a deluge of scholarship on women’s spiritual writings and spiritual autobiographies, and more broadly on tropes of female sanctity in medieval and early modern culture.13 This chapter deals with a particular facet of these broader themes: the polemicisation and, indeed, politicisation, of holy lives, a quality that must be ­understood as a symptom of post-Reformation realities. Given the confessional strife of the times, stories such as Luisa’s were not simply reflections of true piety and spiritual desires nor were they even meant as pure exempla as they would often be during the twilight of the Middle Ages.14 If, as Brad Gregory has insisted, martyrologies of the period reflected real religious aspirations, they were also polemical interventions in a fractured field of confessional possibilities.15 Luisa’s persona was partly dictated by her understanding of herself and her public activities within a performative repertoire meant to have long-lasting effects both on English Catholicism and Christendom as a whole. All that survives of Luisa’s formal autobiography, in her own hand, is fragmentary. A clean copy of her story from birth to about the age of twenty remains with some notes on a plan for expanding the project further. Scholars simply do not know why more of her life was not written (if indeed a more extended version was not written), and they are not in agreement about when Luisa sat down to write. There is, however, general consensus that it was produced in connection with her voyage to England in 1605. Of the most recent commentators, Anne Cruz and Glyn Redworth suggest that it was written relatively early during her stay in England, against Camilo Abad’s older suggestion that it was put together towards the end (around 1614) and Elizabeth Rhode’s suggestion that it was written in Spain. Christopher Henstock, in a recent dissertation, suggests that the text would have been started in Valladolid just before her hurried departure for

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England. The sources do not allow for precision, but, following Redworth and Cruz, this chapter assumes that Luisa wrote in England, likely at the start of her stay. If ‘when’ and ‘where’ leave some room for controversy, the question of ‘why’ seems more straightforward. Early in her manuscript, Luisa somewhat apologetically says that she feels compelled to write about childish things (niñerias), at the insistence of ‘your majesty’ (v.m) who asked that she write everything she remembered.16 The man in question was undoubtedly the English Catholic Michael Walpole, her confessor. By the time Walpole came around, Luisa was already well-versed in writing spiritual autobiographies. Though we hear of it only second-hand, it seems that confessional writing (again, at the behest of confessors) was an important facet of her spiritual life from the 1590s when, in Spain, she became a public penitential figure on the streets of Madrid.17 The connection between ‘private’ writing and public persona must have been twofold: it was a typical means of ensuring the legitimacy of her actions through the mediation of confessors, but it was also part of an equally important effort to reinforce and even inform the holy persona exhibited to the public. As Jodi Billinkoff has surveyed, just as the relationship between confessor and (female) confessant varied in terms of the power dynamic, so did authorial control.18 Part of this had to do with the spiritual qualities of the confessant, but there was a social element as well: those with more wealth and social capital may have wielded more influence. In Luisa’s case, she struck the subservient pose, but in fact had some leverage vis-à-vis Walpole, because of her noble status and her role as (moral and financial) supporter of the English Catholic cause and the Society of Jesus to which he belonged. Moreover, she had firmly declared her right to choose and, if necessary, change confessor on a regular basis. ‘Confessional’ life-writings would also serve the practical purpose of providing confessors with materials to write proper ‘lives’ that might, in the most important of cases, be used as evidence for canonization, or, more informally, as raw materials for books meant to edify a broad readership. This facet was a well-known dynamic to confessant and confessor, not least because published lives of holy women speak in no ambiguous terms of having used autobiographical writings to develop their narratives – indeed, this was a trope used to legitimate the authorial voice of the confessor. Luisa – an avid reader of saints’ lives and spiritual literature (among other things) – would have been alive to all this. Of course, she did not have to look back to ancient or distant ‘saints’ for such understanding. When she was still in Spain, Luisa wanted to start a relationship with two of the most famous spiritual figures of the time, both resident in Lisbon: the Dominican friar Luis de Granada, perhaps the

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‘best-selling’ author of spiritual books, and the Dominican nun Maria da Visitaçao who had in the 1580s become a superstar for her stigmata and prophetic powers. Before her fall and inquisitorial pronouncements about her fraudulence, Granada had carried out a print and manuscript campaign on her behalf (including a manuscript vita), making her out to be evidence of God’s grace in the flesh against the sins of heresy afflicting Europe. Tellingly, Luisa reached out to Maria in hopes of getting her and Granada’s spiritual advice as she journeyed further on her own spiritual quest. Luckily for Luisa, given Maria’s inquisitorial punishments, Maria never wrote back. But for us, the gesture is important. It seems likely that Luisa wanted ‘in’ on the benefits that would be accrued, both internally and outwardly, from the connection potentially afforded by two of the most well known Catholic figures at the time. At the very least, we can be assured that Maria’s case – one of pan-European fame (before infamy) – was a living example of the perfectly acceptable function of publicist played by confessors, even while their confessants lived in a liminal zone where ‘living saints’ resided.19 Scholars have long understood that the kind of life-writing Luisa endeavoured was not autobiographical in any simple sense. As Henstock and others suggest, Luisa’s work was dependent on hagiographic tropes and was highly attuned to the needs of her readers, most important of whom was her confessor, who would become her promoter and ultimately the most influential teller of her own story. It seems logical that in confecting a version of herself concordant with literary patterns, with events as she perceived them, and with the expectations of her readers, she emphasized those parts of her life which proved her orthodoxy, including her childhood instincts toward charity and the mortifications sanctioned by her pious uncle (a man who stands in for her confessor). This sort of goal-oriented selectivity, however, is not akin to mendacity. As Redworth and others have argued, there is reason to believe that aspects of her ‘life’ seem, by our standards, genuinely autobiographical even if she was fully aware of generic expectations. These positions are not mutually exclusive since self-presentation requires authors to use archetypes to express versions of themselves, and the success of the author’s intention requires the apprehension of narratives as a function of reality. Ultimately, because Luisa describes her life in rhetorically structured ways it is useful and wise to think about her writings as reflective of her public intentions. They are evidence of how she intended to position herself to her confessor, but also to the publics that confessors spoke to (in the manner of Maria and Fray Luis mentioned above). Moreover, her fashioning likely tells us something about the ‘public’ versions of herself that she wanted to manifest (and may have actually manifested). Admittedly, given the scattered autobiographical sources at our disposal, we cannot know with any precision what details of her life were ‘leaked’ or spread among



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English Catholic networks, but her life writings – together with her vast epistolary corpus – allow us to extrapolate the general outlines of her story that would have been available both to her close companions and her English Catholic networks. As the following section will suggest, her self-fashioning efforts should be seen as part of a repertoire of activities meant to engage with an English Catholic community, which existed semi-publicly during the early Stuart years. Before we touch on her autobiographical sketches, efforts at self-fashioning should be understood as part of her general activities aimed to strengthen English Catholic resolve. Luisa understood her voyage to England as a sacrifice, an act of penance, which might ultimately result in martyrdom, something that by 1598 (while in Spain) she vowed to pursue without hesitation.20 The impetus for such self-punishment predated by far her decision to risk death, but, once that decision was made, it is no surprise that she would long to reach English shores. As with all other Spaniards (and Catholics in general), she was nourished by a healthy diet of horror stories, sermons, manuscripts, and printed books about the evils of English kings and queens as well as the heroism of the glorious dead.21 Especially because she was close to the priests and seminarians at the English College in Valladolid – she lived next door to it for several years before her journey (1601–4) – Luisa would have also well understood that her plans to lend aid and comfort to English Catholics would be perceived through the lens of the ‘political’ if only because, from the Stuart regime’s point of view, Catholics could and did deserve punishment, not for the sake of their consciences but because of their unrepentant disloyalty. Catholics like the controversial English Jesuit exile Robert Persons and his confrères including Joseph Creswell, who knew Luisa well, were fully cognizant that they could not disentangle their missionary efforts from ‘political’ brambles.22 Luisa may have gone to England with only a vague sense of what she was going to do, but she understood the importance of exemplarity. In England, she claimed to have found a morally and spiritually desiccated terrain, even despite the wondrous deeds of home-grown martyrs. The problem went beyond heresy itself; the whole culture had been diminished to the extent that holiness went uncelebrated and, as she put it, ‘Any good and holy action is so undermined or compromised that even good people often disapprove of it, so that everything is filled with wretched moral obstacles’.23 Good Catholics, just like the many she left behind in Spain, might be possible antidotes to the situation: ‘just what is needed is the example of religious people of perfection after the manner practiced in Spain’.24 She would never quite say it, out of prudence and fear of pride, but there is no doubt that

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she positioned herself as an exemplary figure in line with the saints who came before her. When in 1609 she was imprisoned for publicly proclaiming pro-Catholic sentiments in London, she told an English judge that she had deliberately decided to ‘follow the example of the many saints who had voluntarily left the shelter of their own homeland, friends and relatives, to live without protection and in poverty in foreign lands’.25 Further, she explicitly chose not to follow those who removed themselves from society – she mentions St Irenaeus – but instead to place herself firmly within the world, ‘amid a terrible, wretched Babylon’.26 There is little doubt, then, that she saw her mission as a public one, that she herself would be that Spanish model that the English so desperately needed. She also recognized that her place as a secular woman was of particular value given English realities. Although priests were crucial maintainers of the true faith and although English martyrs were largely men, she had a strong sense that the Elizabethan and Stuart regimes had succeeded in thwarting their best efforts. Because priests were so muzzled by statute and popular inhibitions about them, she came to understand that ‘the conversion of these people falls to such insignificant people as myself and others’.27 To the extent that there was any success in actually coaxing people towards a godly path, that burden fell on an unexpected population: ‘a woman who was a neighbour, a serving girl, a daughter of the house, or it was a man who was a friend or acquaintance that they bumped into and who talked to them about religion’.28 Nevertheless, she was also aware that the family dynamics in which these ‘marginal’ actors worked in God’s favour were inauspicious for widespread success. For example, she followed closely the case of Mary Neville who had turned towards Catholicism to the consternation of her family. Both her husband and father were distressed, she reported, even if she did not ‘think that in their hearts they are out-and-out heretics’.29 Luisa thus perceived the world that Questier and Lake evoke in their story about Clitherow. Luisa would have been tutored on English Catholic experiences both by her close friends among English Catholic exiles in Spain and by the Catholics she was introduced to by Henry Garnet (superior of the English mission) once she got to England. She would have been aware that she was becoming part of a Catholic sphere riven with internal factions, with contradictory visions of how ‘true’ Catholics could negotiate their faith with their loyalty to the state. This is a world where women played a crucial role in extending Catholic networks and ensuring recusancy. This is a world in which these imperatives were achieved in the face of great strain and social limitations.30 Luisa’s efforts hinged on promoting a way of life that was, to an extent, more unambiguous than her fellow Catholics in England could truly afford. This was, in large part, because of the (explicit and implicit) protection

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afforded to her by the Spanish embassy in England. Although she decided to live on her own with equally zealous English women and distance herself from the embassy, this arrangement did not fully dissolve the security that her connections provided. Thus, she would emerge relatively unscathed for performances of politico-religious intransigence, such as the time in 1608 when she loudly argued with Protestants at a Cheapside market over such staples of radical Catholic discourse as Elizabethan bastardy and succession politics together with defences of Catholic theology, which led to her imprisonment. Such soapbox activities recall stories of past martyrs who stood in public squares vituperating heretics and infidels – St Francis among Muslims in the Holy Land, for example – and suggest an indifference to punishment which all good Catholics should ideally embrace, but Luisa knew that any retribution would be softened by the delicacies of Anglo-Spanish diplomacy. Consequently, Luisa could embody a maximalist stance that few English men and women could truly achieve and could thus embody a lay sanctity to which others might aspire. But she surely understood that martyrdom was a special grace, that the gallows would be the ultimate demonstration of sacrifice that few could merit. Her grandiloquent gestures, then, aimed at exemplarity, but not necessarily at inspiring a vast population of copycats, at least not given the times as they were. What remains of her ‘life’, written in her own hand, seems to deal with the complexity of asceticism in such a way that would ‘work’ well within the context of English turmoil. It reveals exceptional, even bracing acts of self-denial not so much as a guide to others towards similar ends but as a way to provide a general paradigm, sets of strategies to follow even amid criticisms and dissension. It is a shame that we do not have a full ‘life’ of Luisa in her own hand, but for our purposes the first twenty years that we do have are crucial. Because her life-writings deal with formative years, they focus on her family environs well before she branched out on her own and developed a community of laywomen in Madrid and later, in a more modest form, in England. As suggested above, this is important, because to a large extent the expansion and compression of Catholic possibilities in England depended on the activities within and between family units who harboured missionaries or otherwise participated in complicated forms of what the Protestant regime would call papistry. I contend Luisa recognized that aspects of her biography would have been powerful amid the deep ambiguities of the English situation that she cared about so much. Most important of these was the tension between following a path of spiritual rectitude and the tensions that this might cause within the confines of a society that was in fact saturated with, if not heretics or outright schismatics, then with rather tepid Catholics afraid of the law. It is no surprise, given these realities, that Luisa spends a great deal of

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time lingering on stories of concealment, of finding ways around publicizing acts of piety and her most extreme forms of self-abnegation. Like other extraordinary figures, Luisa found it hard to fit in within the confines of her family circle. From the very start, although she has mostly positive things to say about her mother, who was ‘an uncommon example of modesty and demureness’, Luisa was critical and even disapproving of her mother’s active social life. She was said to take too many visitors, according to Luisa, though it was more a result of ‘permissiveness than immodesty’. It seems that this was an example of just one qualm publicly expressed, because she confesses that ‘I would carry on like this, they tell me, on other issues, pleasing to all who heard’.31 This sort of spiritual limitation was mild and largely forgivable, but would take on darker hues after her parents’ death and during the time spent under her uncle’s aegis and under his harsh spiritual direction in Pamplona. There, Luisa’s aunt disapproved of such rigours as her husband encouraged and even tried her best to impede them. Luisa does not describe her aunt as lax, but clearly she was not up to Luisa’s devotional standards and thus yet again, during key years of maturation, she found herself within the context of a family that was not in concordance with her own spiritual ambitions and desires. Luisa’s aunt posed serious problems. At core, as Luisa lucidly describes, whether or not she followed her aunt’s rules impinged on matters of authority. Luisa was ‘as regards earthly guidance … subject to her rule because I was a woman’. However, and here was the rub, ‘the marquis [her uncle] was my spiritual adviser, whose advice also touched on things of a temporal nature’. She would often be spared the task of having to choose between the guidance of her uncle and aunt, because one of the two would be away. When they were both at home, however, she would follow the ‘marquis’s orders first, as he was the head of the household, and his authority more spiritual and of greater benefit to my soul, for it was permanent and enduring’. When she could not ask for her uncle’s permission to do any given thing, ‘I would remain quiet and let myself be blamed for what seemed my fault in not following their wishes’. When she thought herself free to do something without asking her uncle, ‘I obeyed the marquise, happy that I could please her in something’.32 The internal dynamics of her family life, the conflicting interests between spiritual and secular authorities, thus forced Luisa at a very young age, according to the narrative, into contortions of casuistry that required day-to-day measures of partial obedience in order to remain spiritually whole. Importantly, however, when push came to shove, she clearly states that spiritual authority was superior to secular authority. She accepts that the church and its clerics (remember, her uncle was her de facto confessor) were superior to the magistrate, though there was some wiggle room (again, as suggested by her uncle’s ambiguous role).

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Much of Luisa’s story touches on themes of secrecy or forms of dissimulation. From her earliest youth, she made quick decisions about when to be silent, when to conceal. Her silences could be out of charity for others, such as the time when a family servant mistakenly burned her with a brazier. The servant feared being fired and so, out of consideration for her, Luisa did not say a word. Later on, and in the context of her life under the care of the marquis, the greater her devotions, the greater her secrecy. She tells of the time her uncle gave her a white silken whip for self-mortification. Thinking it too mild an object, she filched a silver thistle from her cousin, which led to a great scene. Luisa refused to show her the whip, both because she had taken the thistle but also because it had made her bleed. Luisa feared she would be ridiculed for her ‘devotions’. Ultimately, she ran around the palace and hid the whip atop a bed canopy. To distract her cousin, she swore by her life that the whip was not where she had in fact placed it. Almost immediately, she realized that by wilfully lying she had committed a mortal sin. This event, she says, never escaped her memory.33 Luisa told this story regretfully, but it is of a piece with the kinds of decisions she had to make before she lived an openly ascetic life, before she fully released herself from the shackles of social expectations for a woman of her status. Thus, she told of the marquise’s efforts to have her behave as the other members of the household were expected to at the dinner table. She was fed up with Luisa’s fasting and seems to have been worried about her health, so Luisa had to navigate her inclinations towards ascetism and her aunt’s demands. As a result, she decided to ‘remain silent and content myself with the first dishes and the desserts of the table, tasting some of the other dishes while I was being watched. But I would spit them into my napkin, pretending I was wiping my mouth.’34 Over time, then, she moved away from childish lying to sleights of hand that were more nuanced and carefully calculated to both serve the world and her own godly desires. Shade covers Luisa’s relationship with her uncle, who filled in as pater familias and confessor. Scholars have been legitimately interested in their relationship, especially as it relates to his support and direction of Luisa’s extreme forms of penitence. At present, these aspects matter less than how their relationship, as described by Luisa, allowed her to explore power dynamics. The marquis did not expect Luisa to vaunt her penitential activities or to publicize her most violent acts of self-punishment, which were done in the utmost secrecy of a private oratory, where she would strip down to the waist to be beaten with a whip of stiff guitar strings.35 Luisa insists that she would do very little without her uncle’s direction and would follow his rules, more or less without question. And yet, her uncle was not completely satisfied. She reports that he faulted her ‘for how carefully he believed I concealed my sentiments, penitential discipline, and spiritual exercises’. While

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her uncle apparently wanted her to make her everyday piety more public, she decided that ‘Unless it seems that our lord wishes otherwise, our interior worth should far exceed what we exhibit externally’.36 Just as he was dissatisfied, however, Luisa grew sceptical of her uncle. She ‘began to sense that there was a great discrepancy between his behaviour, although it was so saintly, and his being a lay person, as I was, and that we were in the world and continually in contact. I therefore thought it a good idea to remain very quiet and readily obey him in all that was not sin’. This somewhat opaque statement suggests that she obeyed her superior with reservations born of the fact that her uncle was in fact not a priest and thus particularly susceptible to the frailties of man. She was ultimately indebted to God not man and so ultimately had to withdraw from him too. Luisa was in no way advocating against ferocious loyalty to a proper confessor, but was underlining at the same time that laymen were not quite the same thing and so even the head of household (as secular ruler) could be ignored. This dynamic was most readily evident in Luisa’s discussions about her possible marriage. Starting at fifteen or sixteen the proposals for marriage started and, although these could be easily deflected, her uncle thought it good that she should wed. She says that ‘he wanted me to marry, because that state was in need of persons who could give a great example of sanctity, and he believed that I would satisfy this need’.37 Luisa would marvel that he, a man of such ‘great understanding and spirit’, did not realize that the kind of piety he ingrained in her could not be nurtured in a state of marriage, but she did not make a habit of defying him. Instead, she ‘remained quiet without responding to him’. When he told her of the possibility of her marrying a knight (when she was fifteen), she just ‘smiled, which was not enough for him, since he wanted to hear my reply’. When he pushed, she could not dissimulate any longer and so she simply told him she was ‘surprised to see that he would propose such a thing’.38 At this point in Luisa’s life, her uncle was ‘pleased to see my resolution and strength of character, and that I appeared to be more mature than my age, as I wanted to await a more advantageous marriage’. Of course, what her uncle (a man of the world as he was) saw as a strategic refusal given the economy of early modern marriage was, from Luisa’s point of view, more a matter of choice given her spiritual sensibilities. But her decision could be variously construed given her coyness. In underlining the extent to which she had to somehow balance her goals of spiritual fortitude with her existence in the world, she was hearkening back to old tropes. More often than not, saints and martyrs followed their path to holiness despite the efforts of more worldly people, often family members, who did not wish to support them. It is also the case that a willingness to avoid fame or glory based on acts of penance was a sign of grace

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in itself, evidence that various forms of asceticism and penance performed and enjoyed were not being carried out for the wrong reasons. Thus, her troubles and struggles to keep on the right path despite impediments cannot be said to be English or Spanish in any concrete ways. However, it is safe to say that to understand the resonance of her narrative we have to think closely about her specific situation and the problems that she found herself in around the time that she was putting her thoughts on paper. Part of this had to do with, as scholars have pointed out, her many Spanish critics – at Philip III’s court and many outside of it – who thought her quest for martyrdom to be misguided and dangerous. The other context, of course, is the English situation which was, as she herself described, fraught and filled with tensions. Families grumbled about mutual attachments to different confessions, the state wanted to close in on families that harboured confessors, everyone struggled with ideas concerning the limits of subjecthood and freedom of conscience. Luisa’s early life modelled how to cope with the conflicts and barriers placed in this world while never undermining or rejecting the realities imposed by it. Here we have an argument to follow the guidance of your confessor even against the desires of ‘natural’ superiors (in her case, her aunt). She argues that it is legitimate to think through the realities of your social situation and find ways to conform to the requirements imposed by family and social expectations. However, she also argues that God’s rule and will should not be trampled on, that ultimately the desires of the soul, if they are godly, should not be perverted by others and that this integrity must be what ultimately governs decisions and actions. These ultimate imperatives do not diminish a certain amount of savvy and tactical wisdom, especially among those who had not formally removed themselves from secular matters. To survive, Luisa suggests, though she never uses the word or concept in her autobiographical writings, people need to dissimulate, carry out forms of concealment, even perform the occasional optical illusion (as when she pretended to eat). Such a version of her early life would have resonated with most readers, had she had any, or anyone that she talked to about her life experiences, largely because it exhibited convenient silences, a kind of real-life model, a casuistical case like the many that circulated among English Catholics, formally and informally, to teach about when ‘holding back’ was appropriate, even if the confessor and devotion to God should ultimately win. Luisa died of natural causes in 1614 soon after her second imprisonment. Some contemporaries linked her bondage to her demise, endowing her with the patina of sanctity even if she would never be recognized as a saint. That she remains uncanonized, however, is not for lack of trying. Interestingly,

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renewed modern interest in Luisa during the nineteenth century and again in the twentieth century coincided with efforts to promote the sanctity of a slew of English Catholics from the Tudor and Stuart periods.39 As in the Victorian period and thereafter, Luisa is as much part of that English story as she was a part of the Spanish story. If her identity was bound up with her sense of Spanishness, there is no doubt that those ‘Spanish’ qualities which she brought to England were meant to speak to that strange and grey land. The resonances between Luisa’s autobiographical sketches and contemporary ‘audiences’ deserve attention. The extent of self-fashioning and tropic references suggests that hers was no simple diary but a sophisticated exercise attempting to legitimize herself and focus her confessor’s attention. As such, it is reasonable to expect that the story she gave him was to be the ‘authorized’ version that might be shared with English Catholic audiences, presumably when her confessor wrote a vita, and even before the publication of an official life. More broadly, it is safe to assume that it is the kind of story Luisa would have told about herself to all those English Catholics and heretics that she met. Thus, the life-writing examined here is a reflection of the means by which she attempted to tell her story and fit it within the networks to which her confessor, Walpole, belonged, and they are reflections of a narrative thrust that would have (and might have) actually been spread from Luisa’s own mouth in one way or another. If we know anything about her, it is that when not in some state of sufferance, she was talking to anyone who would listen, in prisons, in ambassadorial headquarters, in her home, and even on the street. Luisa’s life-writings thus can be seen to be doing many things. It is legitimate to see them as conforming to penitential practices. It is legitimate to find echoes of her own desires. However, this should not undermine the extent to which this ‘private’ realm was also part of a much broader set of activities that she knew were of public consequence. It cannot be a mere coincidence that so much of what we have of her early life was so concerned with the discomforts of her family life, her need to compromise while maintaining her conscience uncompromised. It would be wrong to ignore the fact that when she considers some of these topics – for example, her interest in describing her family life in terms of the body politic – she was consciously entering forms of public discourse.40 Luisa would have never wanted to suggest that compromise should be the ‘rule’, but, if she expected that the elements of her life would become ‘public’, she must have understood that her experiences would have spoken to those among whom she then dwelled and, of course, Christians at large. Thus, in showing the resonances between what she wrote and the situation on the ground, I have tried to imply that we can gain a better sense of what

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the text was potentially ‘doing’ as well as the public possibilities of confessional life-writing. We can think of Luisa’s autobiographical sketches as part of a polemical continuum. What she did in the streets of London spoke louder than words, but those actions were part of a constellation of significance that needed to be articulated by various means. She could not publish a book of her own accomplishments or a premodern dummies’ guide to good Spanish Catholicism for bad Catholics in England (and elsewhere). The only real hope of that kind of concerted publicity required a confessor, a legitimate intermediary. And yet, her life in the flesh and her life on the page were parts of a performative whole which were in turn undoubtedly based on the ‘performative’ qualities of sanctity of the past, and, more importantly, the sanctity of women during her own times. A wannabe martyr as she was, she knew well that her life would have meaning beyond her own salvation, that God’s grace would be inscribed in her own flesh and in her every wound. Until then, she would work hard to stand out, to render herself a spectacle in England as an emblem of true faith against the powers of evil. She would be a woman, and a Spanish woman too, who would try to help England save itself from its basest qualities largely with the aid of other women who would have to be on the forefront of the battle against Protestant evils.

Notes   1 Camilo Abad, Una misionera española en la Inglaterra del siglo XVII: Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, 1566–1614 (Comillas, 1966); Maria Nieves Pinillos Iglesias, Hilando oro: Vida de Luisa de Carvajal (Madrid, 2001); Glyn Redworth, The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal (Oxford, 2008); Elizabeth Rhodes (ed.), This Tight Embrace (Milwaukee, 2000); Anne J. Cruz (ed.), The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal and Mendoza (Toronto, 2014); Christopher Henstock, ‘Luisa de Carvajal: Text, Context and (Self-)Identity’ (PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2012).   2 Albert J. Loomie, Spanish Elizabethans (New York, 1966). For this dynamic also see Freddy Domínguez, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books during the Reign of Philip II (University Park, PA, 2020), and in the near future Freddy Domínguez (ed.), Spanish Elizabethans:  Anglo-Iberian  Entanglements during the Counter-Reformation (Leiden, forthcoming).   3 Luis Muñoz, Vida y virtudes de la venerable virgen Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoça (Madrid, 1632); Michael Walpole, La vida de Doña Luysa de Carvajal y Mendoca. Archivo del Palacio Real, Madrid, Encarnación, Libro 4.   4 Redworth, The She-Apostle.   5 Nieves Roméro-Díaz, ‘Women, Space, and Power in Early Modern Spain’, Early Modern Women 11:2 (Spring 2017), 42–58.

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  6 María J. Pando Canteli, ‘Tentados Vados: The Martyrdom Politics of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10:1 (Spring/ Summer 2010), 117–41; Miguel Iglesias, ‘Catolicismo y estrategia política en la Inglaterra jacobina’, in María Luisa García-Verdugo (ed.), Luisa de Carvajal en sus contextos (Madrid, 2008), 47–73; Elena Levy-Navarro, ‘Religious Warrior: Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza’s Correspondence with Rodrigo de Calderón’, in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400–1700 (New York, 2005), 263–73.   7 This theme is explored in Kathryn Marshalek’s excellent essay ‘The Politics of Sanctity: the Career of Luisa de Carvajal in Anglo-Spanish Contexts’ (forthcoming).   8 John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London, 1975), 157–65.   9 Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (eds), The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture, and Identity (Farnham, 2013); James E. Kelly, English Convents in Catholic Europe, c. 1600–1800 (Cambridge, 2020); Caroline Bowden (ed.), English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800 (London, 2012); Laurence Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictines in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester, 2017); Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life: French Ursulines and English Ladies in Seventeenth-Century Catholicism (Aldershot, 2006). 10 Peter Lake and Michael Questier, The Trials of Margaret Clitherow: Persecution, Martyrdom and the Politics of Sanctity in Elizabethan England (London, 2011). 11 There are, of course, exceptions. See, for the Henrician period, Ethan Shagan’s discussion of the ‘Maid of Kent’, Elizabeth Barton: Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2002), 61–88. 12 The classic study is Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1999). 13 The classic overview for early modern Spain is Isabelle Poutrin, Le voile et la plume: autobiographie et sainteté féminine dans l’Espagne modern (Madrid, 1995). 14 This is, of course, a simplification. For a classic study, see André Vauchez, La sainteté en Occident aux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge (1198–1431): Recherches sur les mentalités religieuses médiévales (Paris, 2014 [orig. 1981]). 15 Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999); Alister Chapman, John Coffey and Brad Gregory (eds), Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion (South Bend, 2009). 16 Camilo Abad (ed.), Escritos autobiográficos (Barcelona, 1966), 132. 17 Walpole, Vida, fol. 42v. 18 Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750 (Ithaca, 2005). 19 Freddy Domínguez, ‘From Saint to Sinner: Sixteenth-Century Perceptions of “La Monja de Lisboa”’, in Hilaire Kallendorf (ed.), A New Companion to Hispanic Mysticism (Leiden, 2010), 297–322; Gabriella Zarri, Le sante vive: Cultura e religiosità femminile nella prima età moderna (Turin, 1990).

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20 ‘Voto del martirio’ in Abad (ed.), Escritos autobiográficos, 245. 21 Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, 2002). 22 See, for example, Robert Persons’s comment to the Jesuit General, Claudio Acquaviva: ‘things concerning the Catholic religion in England are so bound and mixed with those of the State, the one cannot treat one without dealing with the other, as there is no other state in England than a heretical one, and everything that we do in favour of religion is against their state.’ Persons to Acquaviva, Marchena, 12 May 1594. Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome, Hisp. 136, fol. 318. 23 Luisa de Carvajal to Mariana de San Jose, London, December 1606, in Glyn Redworth (ed.), The Letters of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza (London, 2012), vol. 1, 214. 24 Redworth, Letters, vol. 1, 215. 25 Luisa de Carvajal to the marquis of Caracena, London, 28 August 1608, Redworth, Letters, vol. 2, 46. 26 Ibid., 42. 27 Ibid., 43. 28 Ibid., 44. 29 Luisa de Carvajal to Joseph Creswell, London, 31 August 1607, in Redworth, Letters, vol.1, 270. 30 This dynamic is the subject of Peter Lake and Michael Questier, All Hail to the Archpriest: Confessional Conflict, Toleration, and the Politics of Publicity in Post-Reformation England (Oxford, 2019). 31 Cruz, Life and Writings, 114. 32 Ibid., 138. 33 Ibid., 132. 34 Ibid., 144. 35 Ibid., 140. 36 Ibid., 136. 37 Ibid., 149. 38 Ibid. 39 We await anxiously Michael Questier’s treatment of these phenomena in the near future. For the revival of interest in Luisa see: Lady Georgiana Fullerton, The Life of Luisa de Carvajal (London, 1873). 40 The issue is taken up in my future monograph in progress: Luisa de Carvajal: The Spiritual Politics of an Anglo-Spanish Life.

10 Of gods and beasts: the many bodies of James VI and I Downloaded from manchesterhive © Copyright protected It is illegal to copy or distribute this document

Alastair Bellany

Royal persons are both gods and beasts. Hilary Mantel1

Hilary Mantel’s 2013 lecture ‘Royal Bodies’ is best known for the media storm that ensued when the Daily Mail took umbrage at the novelist’s characterization of the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton, as a ‘plastic princess’. Fun though it would be to deconstruct the politics behind the Daily Mail’s wilful misreading of Mantel’s lecture, I want instead to focus on Mantel’s astute meditations on the ‘royal body’ in contemporary and early modern contexts. Since Kantorowicz, we have become accustomed to thinking about the king’s ‘two bodies’ – the human and mythic, the mortal and immortal.2 Mantel’s lecture effectively subdivides and multiplies those royal bodies: kings (and princesses) have mythologized bodies, shrouded in magic and mystery; they have bodies that are staged, dressed, and represented, ritualized and fashioned; they have embodied characters and personalities, hidden or repressed – ‘the man inside the clothes’ or the ‘young woman … before monarchy froze her and made her a thing’; they have bodies subject to all kinds of gazes – awestruck and reverent, sexual and violating; and they have biological bodies, ‘collections of organs’, at the mercy of disease and decay, yet also rendered mysterious by the business of sexual reproduction, the bodily function at the heart of hereditary monarchy. Mantel reminds us that the royal body, in all its guises, has been essential to the historical experience and imagination of monarchy. The royal body – mythic, represented, staged, clothed, performed, imagined, gazed upon  – has been a central element in the cultural construction and projection of monarchical legitimacy, and, because of this, the royal body has also been a site of monarchical vulnerability, a locus for the subversion and critique of authority. But Mantel’s fascination with the royal body as a ‘collection of organs’ – as a body subject to disease, ageng and death – also suggests the importance of a politico-medical history of the royal body, a history that

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pays attention not only to the embodied experience of kings and queens but also to the ways in which a monarch’s bodily illness (or health) could be implicated in broader political practices and discourses. This chapter explores interlinked aspects of the embodied kingship of James VI and I, analysing the techniques and practices (literary, artistic, communicative, medical) that enmeshed the king’s many bodies (and embodied experience) in monarchist and libellous political discourse. The chapter begins with the fashioned monarchical body as a locus of royal authority, looking at the representation of the kingly body in James’s own writings. After briefly discussing painted images of the royal body, the analysis turns to the subversive libellous counterpoint to these authorizing representations, a counterpoint that made the royal body a crux for wide-ranging political critique. Finally, the chapter pursues Mantel’s suggestions about the importance of the pathological history of royal bodies. James’s  chronic physical ailments figure in both official and libellous representations of the royal body, but his suffering body was at the centre of several other political histories. As Tom Cogswell and I have argued, the circumstances of James’s final illness and death and the post-mortem condition of his body became the subject of controversial and long-lasting political scrutiny.3 But ill-health shaped James’s kingship in other ways. It was integral to key dynamics of Jacobean court politics, in particular the role of the royal favourite, and stimulated not only the public expression of political anxiety but also the practice of royal myth-making in the public sphere. James VI and I understood the importance of a well-managed royal body to the exercise of kingly authority, and he signalled that understanding in published writings designed to project and perform his ideal of virtuous kingship.4 A king, James told his son Henry in Basilikon Doron, the most extended (and most publicized) Jacobean meditation on the nature and practice of royal virtue, is ‘set on a stage’ where even his ‘smallest actions and gestures’ will be ‘gazingly’ scrutinized by his subjects as they try to divine his inward moral disposition from his outward actions. Thus, it was crucial that a king’s ‘outward behaviour’, even in the most ‘indifferent actions’, always signal to his subjects the monarch’s ‘inward vertuous disposition’.5 These ‘indifferent actions’ included several bodily activities – eating and drinking, sleeping, dress, gesture, and physical recreation. Each had to be monitored, with (conventional) ‘moderation’ serving as the golden rule; but other, more specific political goals were also in play. Eating – performed, always, before an audience – should display royal virtue and contribute to the physical health required for royal duty, making the ‘bodie strong and durable for travell at all occasions, either in peace or

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in warre’. Yet the dictates of healthy living could sometimes conflict with the press of royal business. Diet and sleep ideally should follow regular patterns, but when necessary the king’s ‘diet’ should be ‘accommodated to your affaires, and not your affaires to your diet’.6 It also mattered how the royal body was clothed. Clothes should signal virtuous moderation, neither ‘over superfluous’ nor ‘over base’, and should be worn with the courtier’s studied nonchalance, ‘in a carelesse, yet comely forme’. Clothing also signalled different aspects of royal power, adopting a ‘midde forme’ between the judge and the soldier, the civilian, and the ecclesiastic, though during wartime the king had to be ‘galliardest and bravest, both in cloathes and countenance’. Furthermore, royal clothing had to avoid transgressing sexual and gender norms. Clothes should hide nakedness and thus could never use ‘undecent formes’ to represent shameful parts nor ‘serve for baites to filthie lecherie’. And a king must ‘specially eschew to be effeminate in [his] cloathes, in perfuming, preening, or such like’. Clothes could also indicate moral failings. Obsession with fashion for fashion’s sake suggested an ‘idle’ mind, ‘which wil make your spirit and iudgment to be lesse thought of’, while a taste for ‘disguising’ or for ‘long haire or nailes’ suggested folly. Hair and nails, James noted, were ‘but the excrements of nature, and bewray such misusers of them, to bee either of a vindictive, or a vaine light natural’.7 Gesture, treated as an adjunct to speech and including countenance and affect as well as bodily motions, was a similarly expressive political medium. The king had to match his gestures to circumstance, avoiding the opposing extremes of stupidity or arrogance, and remaining conscious that bodily gesture communicated messages about the style and nature of his kingship. ‘Courtesies’ – embodied interpersonal interactions – had to be deployed in moderation. Too few suggested ‘incivilitie and arrogancie’; too many, with ‘iowking or nodding at every step’, indicated a ‘forme of being popular’ that ‘becommeth better aspiring Absalons, then lawfull Kings’. The king had to fashion his countenance – facial expression and embodied affect – to different audiences and settings, indicating gravity and ‘maiestie’ when giving judgement or receiving ambassadors, while remaining ‘homely’ in private with servants for company. A king should be merry at ‘pastime’, but during war his ‘countenance’ must ‘smell of courage and magnanimitie’.8 James also argued that ‘exercises of the bodie’ were crucial for health, and trained the body for royal responsibilities. But a king had to avoid ‘rough and violent exercises’ that might lower the royal body to plebeian status – football was thus forbidden, as were ‘tumbling trickes’. The most important exercise for the royal body was riding the great horse, ‘for it becometh a Prince best of any man, to be a faire and good horse-man’. Various equestrian sports helped prepare a king for warfare, but James laid

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greatest stress on hunting with hounds, a sport that resembled battle and made ‘a man hardie’ and capable of riding on all terrains.9 For James, then, the royal body was both a medium for signifying royal virtue or vice and an instrument of rule. The royal body could help secure obedience from the subject whose scrutinizing gaze deduced royal virtue from bodily signs, and, when properly managed through the regulation of diet, sleep, and exercise, the royal body became fit for the physical demands of kingship. James’s own writings – derivative though they were – thus suggest that historians might usefully pay attention to the embodied presentation of the royal self as a political practice, in both formal (ritualized) and informal settings and among different groups of observers (courtiers, intimates, favourites, ambassadors, servants, subjects, etc.). We might also focus profitably on the practices of managing the royal body – the ways in which early modern kingship demanded a specific ‘technology’ of the body (and the self), rooted in long-established ethical norms around diet, moderation and self-discipline. The royal body also became an instrument of rule through its representation in visual media: in commissioned portraits, where the image of the royal body was (in part) a collaboration between artist and subject, and in the broader print market, where images of royal bodies were (re)­produced under loose official supervision for commercial sale and consumption, and thus for a more diverse set of scrutinizing gazes. It is a critical commonplace  that James’s portraits lack the innovative style and iconographic invention that distinguished the painted images of his predecessor, Elizabeth, and his successor, Charles.10 But painted images of James, both as a young ruler in Scotland and during his maturity in England, contain numerous lessons for historians about the politics of represented royal bodies. The depiction of meaningful pose and gesture, the representation of physical assertion or awkwardness, the use of clothing and props to signify ideals and myths of kingship, all made James’s re-presented body a meaningful site of royal authority. Late in James’s life, he was targeted by satirical visual images printed on the Continent, including a ‘picture at Rome’ that depicted Prince Charles and the favourite Buckingham (then in Madrid) splendidly attired yet captive ‘in a cage’, while James appeared as ‘an ancient man standing by, in a fooles coate’, his royal body a target of visual mockery, its age exaggerated and its splendour replaced by motley attire.11 The satire exaggerated bodily decrepitude to emphasize James’s political feebleness, but some of James’s official portraiture documented his ageing body in relatively naturalistic ways. A gendered logic is at work here – the ageing male body could lay claim to positive qualities, such as wisdom – but these depictions of the ageing king deserve closer inspection. The last major portrait of

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James, painted c. 1621 by Daniel Mytens, depicts the king in garter robes. In contrast to Paul Van Somer’s 1620 image of a physically assertive and imposing king in his coronation vestments, Mytens depicts James seated on his throne. His dress exudes majesty, and the tapestry behind him proudly asserts ‘Beati Pacifici’ in explicit rebuke to his bellicose critics; but James looks physically drained, and several scholars have read the portrait as a study in bodily, and perhaps political, exhaustion.12 A.W. Beasley has suggested that Mytens’s painting captures something else about the royal body. Noting the odd position of James’s left foot, Beasley argues that this was a naturalistic representation of a physical abnormality known as equinus, ‘in which the foot points downwards, rather than at right angles to the line of the shin’. Equinus is quite common and can have many causes, but Beasley connects it to other physical abnormalities visible in James’s portraiture or documented in contemporary texts, concluding that the king’s equinus was a symptom of a mild form of cerebral palsy. Beasley argues that Mytens’s depiction of James’s ageing features reveals not simply fatigue but ‘facial contours’ with distinctive indicators of cerebral palsy, including ‘eyes … set behind the upper lip’ and a jutting lower lip.13 Beasley ignores the aesthetics and politics of pose and gesture and takes for granted the artist’s ability and intent to depict the king naturalistically. But his essay is a useful reminder of the materiality of the physical royal body – the ‘collection of organs’ – that coexisted with the represented royal body, and raises interesting questions about whether bodily weakness or deformity could provide grounds for political anxiety or critique. Throughout James’s reign, the royal body, whether considered as a collection of organs and physical pathologies or as a vessel for passions, desires, and sensual experience, was the target of multi-generic libellous representation which in turn reflected and generated a richly subversive political discourse. A handful of English verse libels in the early 1620s sensationally targeted royal bodily incontinence or vulnerability, focusing in particular on the seemingly transgressive intimate bodily relationship between James and his favourite Buckingham.14 But the most complex and sustained libellous assault on the king’s body appeared some years before these poems. The stylized, allusive Latin prose libel Corona Regia, published in the Spanish Netherlands in 1615, enjoyed only limited circulation in James’s kingdoms, although connoisseurs of ‘rare bookes’ could obtain copies (or, at least, engage in informed conversation about them) well into the 1620s.15 James, however, was incensed by the book, and mobilized his diplomatic agents in what became a multi-year manhunt to track down the responsible parties. The investigation eventually concluded that Corona Regia was the work of a small knot of Flemish writers, printers, and politicians, several of

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them linked to the Archducal regime.16 Thanks to the regular stream of diplomatic and intelligence reports from Whitehall to Brussels, the men who wrote Corona Regia knew a lot about not only the Jacobean court but also the physical anomalies of the king’s body. James had good reason to be incensed. As Simonds D’Ewes noted, Corona was directed ‘whollye against the King’, accusing him of shocking crimes, including ‘athisme’ and ‘sodomye’.17 It depicted James as a Machiavellian tyrant and the changeling son of a Calvinist preacher.18 It attacked the English Church and Royal Supremacy and mocked James’s intellectual pretensions.19 And images of James’s body – its myths, its physical frailty, its impulses, desires, and actions – permeated Corona’s assault. The book portrayed James as a physically deformed sodomite, connecting his disordered rule to his disorderly desires and disordered body.20 The libel concluded, for instance, with a striking image of James, the soi-disant Protestant crusader, descending on Rome ‘to emancipate the Church from superstition’, with an entourage of catamites who would prove that the epicene Italians had nothing to teach the British about ‘the coaxings of pleasure’.21 One source of the libel’s power was its exquisitely calibrated subversion of the generic modes of conventional royal panegyric. Deploying the fiction that the book was actually a celebration of James, Corona repeatedly mobilized the language of compliment only to undermine it. Sometimes the tract would subvert conventional panegyric by inflating it to the point of absurdity; sometimes it would add a ridiculous panegyric gloss to a straightforwardly libelous accusation. But sometimes the book directly subverted the authorizing fictions of monarchy, and myths surrounding the royal body provided Corona with an important angle of attack. Corona’s most elaborate libellous subversion of the mythologized royal body focused on a birthmark supposedly visible on James’s chest. Stories of royal birthmarks – embodied signs of identity and destiny – had been among the array of legends that grew out of high and late medieval conceptions of royalty as, in Marc Bloch’s words, ‘something miraculous and sacred’.22 Claims that James had a significant birthmark were not widely aired, but they did perform significant political work. The Nuremburg jurist Philip Camerarius noted early in James’s English reign that credible witnesses had reported at least two birthmarks on the king, clearly recognizable as a ‘lion and crown’, with perhaps a third in the shape of a ‘sword’. Camerarius glossed the marks as auspicious signs, royal and heraldic in idiom, portending great things.23 The courtier and poet Sir John Harington’s 1602 manuscript on the royal succession included a more explicit reading of the lion’s portentous significance, transcribing a Welsh prophetic poem which foretold how ‘a babe crownd in his cradle … markt

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with a lyon in his skyn … shall recover againe the crosse … shall make the ile of Brutus whole and unparted … and to growe hence forward better and better’. A note to Harington’s manuscript – perhaps by the bishop of Durham, Tobie Matthew – added that ‘The K. of Scottes is said to have a mole like a Lyon’. Harington was reluctant to trust too much in old prophecies, but, like other Stuart apologists, he was happy to mobilize old British foundation myths to make the case for a glorious and imperial British future.24 Corona made great satirical capital out of the Jacobean birthmark, playing cleverly with the sign’s uncertain origins and meaning. Was the mark natural or supernatural? What exactly did it depict? And what did that signify? Perhaps it was just ‘a formless blotch arising from a defect of nature and signifies only what it is’, or perhaps ‘Nature owed you some distinguishing mark for your doctrine or sect, which would notify all kings  to humble their scepters under your pen’. Perhaps it was comparable to the birthmarks of good Roman emperors like Augustus, or to those on the ‘spotted and loathsome body’ of the tyrant Nero. Or perhaps James’s mother had imprinted on her unborn child the image of a creature she had either seen or imagined during his gestation.25 But was the mark really a lion, and, if so, what did that mean? Ignoring the usual heraldic interpretation of kingly birthmarks, Corona initially treated the birthmark as a symbol of royal character, worrying that the lion was a problematic emblem for one who preferred ‘the sedentary life’ and lacked the leonine qualities of ‘ferocity … anger and frenzy’. Corona then offered two alternative satirical interpretations of the lion. Perhaps it was a sign of  the ‘courageous and leonine seed of your genius’ that ‘springs forth, with an evangelic roar’ against the Pope and his apologists. Or perhaps it was a mark of sexual depravity. The lion might be an emblem of a hunter king, but the ‘hunt’ James preferred was not the invigorating exercise recommended by Basilikon Doron but rather sodomitical sexual predation, the pursuit of ‘attractive and graceful animals’ with ‘a different kind of spear’, searching ‘through a different kind of underbrush’ to ‘capture different kinds of pleasure’.26 But maybe the mark was not a lion after all; perhaps it was a toad or frog. After some deliberately unpersuasive panegyric on the possible meanings of toad birthmarks, which played on the toad’s associations with demonism and poison, the libeller left the choice to James. ‘If you say that it is a lion, I say it is a lion; if you allow that it is a toad, I say the same’, adding, in an opaque but possibly lewd pun on ‘buffonem’ (toad or fool), ‘especially since it was your noble custom to devour toad’.27 Corona’s mocking play with the myths of kingly bodies was augmented by repeated libellous reflections on the physical idiosyncrasies of James’s body, movement, and gesture. These bodily idiosyncrasies are best known



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to historians through Sir Anthony Weldon’s notorious 1640s pen portrait of the king: His eyes large, ever rowling after any stranger came in his presence, insomuch as many for shame have left the roome, as being out of countenance. His beard was very thin. His tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the mouth, and made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth. His skin was as soft as Taffeta Sarsnet, which felt so, because hee never washt his hands, onely rubb’d his fingers ends slightly with the wet end of a Napkin. His Legs were very weake, having had (as was thought) some foul play in his youth, or rather before he was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of age, that weaknesse made him ever leaning on other mens shoulders, his walke was ever circular, his fingers ever in that walke fiddling about his codpiece.28

Weldon’s polemical agenda – and the regicidal politics of those who published his history – should give us pause before we take anything he wrote at face value.29 But, as A.W. Beasley noted, virtually everything Weldon claimed about James’s physical idiosyncrasies can be supported by other contemporary witnesses and by the empathetic medical portrait of the king produced by his chief physician, Theodore de Mayerne.30 Many of these bodily idiosyncrasies were also central to Corona’s libellous assault. Corona introduced its discussion of James’s ‘bodily endowments’ by celebrating him as an Epicurean devotee of bodily pleasures, both alcoholic and sexual, a claim that associated James with the decadent tyrants Sardanapalus and Heliogabalus. Corona argued that ‘the constitution of a body such as yours seems in every way worthy of delights and pleasure’, and began its account of the king’s physical ‘shapeliness’ with a meditation on James’s legs.31 Mayerne’s detailed 1623 medical memorandum on James emphasized the weakness in his legs, which ‘seem not strong enough to sustain the weight of the body’, and, while this could in part be explained by advancing arthritic disorders, the weakness was also chronic and long-term. Mayerne noted, for instance, that James ‘could not walk until six years of age, but was carried about’, attributing this to ‘bad milk’ from James’s drunken wet-nurse. Mayerne also noted that severe ‘Pains many years since’ had ‘invaded first the [king’s] right foot, which had an odd twist when walking, and from a wrong habit of steps had a less right position than the other, and grew weaker as he grew older’.32 A diplomatic report noted that in his late teens James often walked restlessly but that his walking was ‘mal composée’, characterized by erratic and wandering steps.33 Modern scholars have offered various diagnoses of these symptoms, including rickets, ‘hereditary neuromuscular disease, possibly Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease’, and cerebral palsy.34 But Corona was uninterested in diagnosis, offering

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instead two libellous elaborations on James’s legs and gait. Noting that James’s body was designed ‘more for the needs of a scholar than a king’, Corona focused first on the disproportionate length of his legs, an abnormality caused by his outsized shins. This disproportion rendered James’s body grotesque, and Corona highlighted this malformation by turning it into mock panegyric: Those who see you standing erect notice there is more in your shins than your thighs, buttocks, belly, chest, neck, and head can match proportionately. Just as if a moderate-sized mass of a building were upheld by too large [a pair] of columns, the special majesty of your body is engulfed in its supports … I say this so that all painters might learn from it what is most important to portray in your portrait and they might acknowledge that your body does depart from the basic principles of nature, yet does not forfeit its splendor. For with regard to utility, nothing is more functional. Crafted in this way, you increase your height, you are grander in your stride, and more nobly in every way do you carry around your well-kept little body and its burgeoning paunch. Let others use stilts. You will accomplish just as much with your shanks and walk on high as if you despised the earth.35

Corona also targeted James’s gait. ‘When you are alone and you go for a walk’, Corona claimed, ‘you do not proceed in a straight line with distinct footsteps; instead you pace in a circle round and round’. Corona amplified this observation with a mix of insult and implausible panegyric. James’s circular meanderings might simply be the result of too much drink, with the king ‘led by Bacchus, a god favorably disposed to you’. But perhaps the circle was a deeper symbol – a ‘heavenly motion’ indicating James’s contemplation of the divine, or an embodied act of philosophy that depicted the circularity of human affairs, or a political gesture indicating a will to turn the world upside down, or merely an enactment of the idea of perfection, for ‘nothing is more beautiful and perfect than the circle, nothing more divine, and nothing worthier of a king’. Corona then shifted tone to depict James’s circular walk as a dangerous encouragement to disorder – whether ‘circuitous’ dealings in the law courts, or circumlocution in prose – or as licence for religious radicals to ‘take the diversions and hallucinations of their mind for divine wisdom’. Eventually, Corona turned James’s walk into a royal manifesto for deformity: ‘Come on Britons, take heart ministers, no one is going to fault all things curved, twisted, and wretched; by the example of the king all things straight, level, and upright shall be banished’.36 The deformation of the royal body mirrored and shaped the deformation of the polity. A similar link between physical and political deformity shaped Corona’s assessment of the king’s face. But James’s eating habits allowed Corona a more creative libelous scope. Mayerne noted that James’s ‘fauces’, the cavity

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at the back of his mouth, were unusually narrow, a condition that caused him difficulty in swallowing. (More recent diagnoses suggest cerebral palsy or ‘a genetic facial defect’ such as the ‘autosomal recessive disorder mandibuloacral dysplasia’.)37 Corona turned James’s difficulty swallowing into the centrepiece of a grotesque portrait of the king at table. James had written that a king’s ‘manner of refection at his Table’ was ‘one of the publickest’ of those ‘indifferent’ but necessary bodily activities by which a king’s subjects could judge their ruler. James conventionally emphasized moderation in diet, avoiding the excesses of gluttony, drunkenness, and over-delicacy, and preferring plain food to the heavily sauced. He stressed too that the ‘form of … meate-eating’ must be correct and that a king should ‘eate in manlie, round, and honest fashion’. Table talk was also crucial to the king’s image – the table was no place for business or deep thought, but ideal for ‘pleasant, quicke, but honest discourses’, with ‘pleasant histories’ perhaps read aloud as entertainment.38 Corona, however, depicted James’s table as a theatre not of moderation, manliness, and virtue, but of bodily excess and perverted desire, of profanation and debauchery. Religion was  profaned by royal table talk, for ‘You are light-hearted and discuss matters of faith – this is kingly’. You gratify your appetites and determine mysteries of salvation – this is kingly’. James’s sexual tastes – his ‘amorous passions and enticements’ – were also on public display at the table, with the king ‘feasting [his] eyes with drunken pleasure at banquets, inciting desire with immodest words, caressing cheeks, stealing a kiss, stoking a flame from smoke … and extinguishing it in private’. The table was also a site of bodily leakiness, as Corona refigured James’s difficulty swallowing into a display of animalistic consumption and regurgitation. You do not eat your food, you gulp it down – this is kingly. You do not drink, but with a loud noise you slurp your wine and, so to speak, inhale it – this is kingly. Moreover, to spend so much time everyday chewing and scarcely to give the mouth rest is so natural that all animals do it. To regurgitate food whenever it is a burden is, I think, supernatural. Galen prescribed that this could be done monthly, but you, most capacious king, do it frequently and assiduously and do not fall ill. It is as easy for you to vomit from off a horse as to load up at the table.39

Mayerne’s medical memoranda on James offer not only useful context for Corona’s attacks but also a chance to explore the broader political histories of the diseased royal body. Mayerne’s precisely observed accounts of James’s chronic and acute illnesses have provided modern diagnosticians with significant clues for identifying the king’s ailments, and, for all the epistemological hazards in diagnosing long-dead bodies from the merely discursive traces that survive them, there is some licence to move from

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the original medical evidence and the suggestive modern diagnoses to biographical and historical speculation.40 Beasley wonders, for instance, if James’s palsied body might explain his attraction to the finer physical specimens among his male courtiers, while Timothy Peters and his colleagues ask whether the ‘psychological and medical problems’ associated with their diagnosis of Lesch-Nyhan disease might explain the ‘paradox’ of James’s successful Scottish kingship and his ‘relative failure’ in England. One might also speculate whether one team’s recent diagnosis of the king’s progressive mental deterioration in the wake of worsening vascular dementia might explain James’s more frequent political stumbles after 1619.41 Even absent modern medical diagnoses, Mayerne’s chronology of James’s serious illnesses – his 1623 memorandum covers the king’s medical history from childhood, listing both chronic ailments and major crises – suggests politically interesting patterns. Mayerne’s narrative reveals a striking correlation, for instance, between periods of serious royal illness and periods of intense political and/or personal stress, and sometimes Mayerne himself noted a connection. The 1610 parliamentary dissolution, which ended the dream of Union and the chance of financial settlement under the Great Contract, was followed by ‘melancholic symptoms’, including a ‘great sadness’ that preceded a serious illness ‘not without danger to his life’ – eight days of diarrhoea ‘with watery bilious very fetid, and at last black excreta’, along with heartburn, palpitations, and vomiting. A similar combination – a ‘melancholic fit’ followed by diarrhoea – struck the king early in December 1612 following the death of Prince Henry, while the death of Queen Anne in 1619 triggered the most serious medical crisis of the reign.42 Other medical crises may also have had political correlations. James’s first serious bout with what became a chronic kidney condition occurred in July and August 1613, during the heightened tension at court over the controversial marriage nullity suit between the earl and countess of Essex. The king’s next major ‘nephritic’ attack came in October 1615, the month that the favourite Somerset – and his wife, the former countess of Essex – were directly implicated in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury.43 There are a number of other ways to write a political history centred on James’s physical ailments – the centrality of the bodily intimacies of illness and nursing in James’s relationships with his favourites, for instance44 – but I want to conclude this discussion of the politics of royal illness with a case study of the most serious of James’s health scares. Mayerne noted in 1623 that ‘the most dangerous illness’ the king had ever suffered began shortly after Queen Anne’s death on 2 March 1619. James was mildly indisposed for nearly three weeks before his condition worsened dramatically during the last week of March. Over the next eight days, he endured desperate and dramatic symptoms. Although James appeared to have pulled through the

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worst by early April, he suffered occasional relapses and was so debilitated that he was unable to walk for several weeks after his apparent recovery. Mayerne described in detail the cascading symptoms – arthritic attacks, ‘nephritis with thick sand’, ‘continued fever’, and ‘bilious diarrhea, watery and profuse throughout the illness’. For several days, James suffered hiccups and developed ulcers inside his mouth and oesophagus. His lips and chin were also ulcerated by ‘bitter humors’ fermenting in his stomach and frothing up into his mouth. At the crisis of the illness, James’s pulse grew weak and ‘intermittent’, he suffered fainting fits and bouts of sighing, and he was roiled by feelings of ‘dread’ and ‘incredible sadness’. James’s nephritis continued and he eventually passed a kidney stone of a crumbly, sand-like consistency. The severity of the illness warranted a vigorous response, and, in his desperation, James partially abandoned his usual resistance to orthodox physic, allowing the doctors to bleed him and to apply a blistering cup to draw off the melancholic humour from his spleen.45 The medical crisis of March–April 1619 was also a political crisis (or stress-test). The death of a king in a personal monarchy inevitably placed pressures on royal government, no matter the protocols in place to manage royal successions; a seemingly mortal illness had similar, if shorter-lived, effects. Although James had a healthy male heir, Prince Charles had comparatively little political experience, and would face daunting domestic and international challenges if required to ascend the throne. James survived, but the crisis of March 1619 put a number of political dynamics into play. The ailing king prepared himself to die a good death, thus scripting an ideal of godly kingship that his publicists could exploit. The court observed and manoeuvred, one eye on the dying past, the other on the new day. And news of the king’s illness and the court’s manoeuvres circulated widely. As the king lay ill at Royston, London’s news-hubs filled with talk, and news intelligencers gathered, sifted, and assessed this information to keep their patrons informed. But other publics – metropolitan, national, and international – were also invested in news of the king’s illness, with intriguing evidence to suggest that the news triggered popular political anxieties that found voice in prophetic muttering and rumour. And once the king passed the crisis and began to recover, the regime represented and interpreted the royal illness to a variety of audiences through textual, ritual, and symbolic media, attempting to calm and reassure James’s subjects while reasserting the vigour of a temporarily weakened authority. The newsletters sent by clients and friends to Dudley Carleton, the English ambassador in the Hague, reveal not only the extent of court and metropolitan talk about the medical specifics of James’s illness, but also an intense interest in its political ramifications.46 The letters document, for instance, the evolution of a significant and highly politicized narrative that focused

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attention not only on the physical suffering of James’s mortal body but also on the moral stature of his mystical, kingly body in the face of seemingly terminal sickness. The image of James as a patient, wise, and Christian ruler charismatically performing the role of virtuous king from his sickbed was to become one of the crisis’s most significant political legacies. James had been most seriously ill on Wednesday and Thursday 24 and 25 March; on Friday 26 March, he had summoned to his bedchamber his son, his leading courtiers, and privy councillors, and had delivered a speech from his sickbed. The speech had two goals. It was a calculated act of embodied self-presentation to the most powerful men of the realm, designed to demonstrate James’s steadfast spiritual confidence in the face of bodily dissolution. But it was also an act of political management designed to deliver to his son, in the presence of the court, the old king’s advice for the future. The newsletter-writers quickly realized the speech’s significance, although specific details, often spun to score political advantage, took longer to make their way to London. One reporter heard that James had made ‘a very religious & wise speeche’, but the details were ‘kepte soe secrete as yet it is not knowen’ exactly what he had said. Speculation, however, was rampant, perhaps fuelled by hints and leaks from courtiers eager to give the impression that the dying king had singled them out for praise.47 As more details circulated, some reports focused on the king’s pious performance – ‘The Kinge in his sicknes beynge most well resollved to die (yf God pleased so) made many excellent & most devyne speeches’ – others on hints about future policies and promotions.48 In the following days and weeks, the intelligencers focused on the king’s recovery. Their letters graded the king’s progress according to several criteria, some medical, some political. When would James move from Royston to Theobalds?49 To what extent could James conduct normal business as he recuperated?50 When would the king recover mobility, leave his bed, sit on a chair, go outside, or ride a horse? When might he hunt again or walk unaided? Would he ever recover the use of his legs? When would his diet and sleep return to normal?51 Initially, reports were cautious and fears of relapse frequent.52 As late as the end of April, well-informed observers could be taken aback by reports of how seriously ill James had been and of the ‘daungerous and deadly signes and symptoms’ he had endured.53 The constant circulation of news and rumour about James’s illness and rehabilitation required the regime to pay attention to international opinion. Worried lest dis- or misinformation trigger uncertainty – rumours of James’s death, for instance, were ‘dispersed and Fomented’ by ‘disaffected’ Catholic exiles in Brussels – the council ordered ambassadors to manage the news carefully. After James was deemed ‘past all danger’, Secretary Naunton instructed Carleton in The Hague to make sure that he quashed any ‘ungrounded Alarmes and apprehensions’ there.54



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The council also had to monitor domestic opinion. James’s crisis and the accompanying anxiety may have helped stimulate a small but noticeable rash of political prophecy that flared up during the spring of 1619. On 12 March, a week after James first began to experience symptoms at Newmarket, Matthew Mason, a London apprentice, reported a strange story to his parents in Wigan.55 Matthew claimed that ‘Newes I have but litle’, except there is like to be great changing in England, many strange Wonders about London, There is a hand and a sword risen out of the ground at a Towne called Newmarkett, where the kinge is and standes strikeinge at him, And the kinge went to see it, and ever since hee hath kepte his chamber, and cannott tell what it meanes; and other strange thinges, which nowe I will not speake of.

Where this story originated is unclear, but it is possible that early news of the king’s indisposition at Newmarket supplied the impetus – whoever launched the tale knew the king’s whereabouts, and claims that the king ‘hath kepte his chamber’ since seeing the portent may have derived from reports about the king’s illness. By the time the local authorities learned of Mason’s letter, such stories could not be ignored. The Lancashire Deputy Lieutenants’ assessment on 31 March, when James was still bedridden and not yet out of danger, classified Mason’s story as a piece of ‘Sedition, and false & scandalous Newes’ that had already got out of hand. Mason’s letter had been shown to several people in Wigan, had been read ‘openly in the streete’, and perhaps been lent out and copied before being plastered on to a chest by one of Mason’s siblings. Among the readers were Wigan’s deputy mayor and several humbler townsmen, including a yeoman and a shoemaker. The council was concerned enough to have Mason committed to Bridewell on 11 April for divulging ‘certaine false, scandalous, and seditious newes concerning the sacred Majestie of the King, and the state of the realme’. By the time the Council issued the order, however, their worries were easing, and they concluded Mason not worth serious punishment. They instructed the Bridewell treasurer to have Mason ‘well corrected with the whipp’ and to detain him until further notice. Two weeks later, the council ordered his release.56 Rumblings of potentially dangerous prophetic discourse continued during James’s convalescence. At the end of April, reports reached London that the king had been approached by ‘a franticke man’ who ‘spake strange wordes’ as James was ‘abroad in his chaire’ at Theobalds. The man, a former soldier of gentlemanly appearance, had commanded James to halt, declaring, ‘I have a message from God!’ Mixing Biblical imagery with Scotophobia and commonwealth critique, the man ‘told the King that [James] was come out of a barren country into a land that flowed with milk & hony & that the Lande should be taken from him & his, bycause he had not done iustice to the

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widowe & fatherless’. He handed James papers that contained more in this vein and was eventually committed for further questioning.57 He claimed that he was ‘the prophet of the Most High’, but his full confession  – he belonged to ‘the order of Melchi Sadack’ and joked that he was no Puritan as the Holy Spirit had appeared to him in the guise of a bishop – soon convinced interrogators that ‘his prophetical spirit’ was a ‘spirit of phrenzy and madness’.58 The London newsmongers agreed that the man was ‘mad’, while courtly commentators praised James’s patient response to his ‘bold’ interlocutor. By early May, the prophet was in Bedlam.59 James’s prolonged medical crisis and convalescence may have stimulated this spike of threatening prophetical discourse in the public sphere, perhaps catalysing anxieties already present at an unusually unsettled time, and prompting a jittery regime to take note and respond. A prophetical imagination over-stimulated by the remarkable portents of 1618 (a comet, war on the Continent) was perhaps unusually susceptible to provocation by the more mundane assortment of portentous events (earthquakes, monstrous births) and public calamities (the death of a queen of England and of rulers in Europe, the long sickness of a king) that followed. The king’s illness and recovery eventually acquired an officially authorized political meaning through the staging of public rituals that aimed to reassure his subjects that James had returned to health with his authority undamaged. This process began shortly after the physicians concluded that James would recover. On Sunday 11 April, the council orchestrated a Paul’s Cross service of thanksgiving. They had used London’s pulpits to communicate with the City earlier in the medical crisis, but the Paul’s Cross thanksgiving was a more ambitious piece of political theatre. The ceremony brought court, noble, and City elites together in a collective act of piety that honoured God by honouring the king, and honoured the king by honouring God. John Chamberlain was impressed not only by the bishop of London’s ‘very pleasing’ sermon, but also by the size and status of the audience, ‘the greatest that I remember to have seen there’. The attendance of the civic elite – mayor, aldermen, and the ‘citie-companies’, all in ‘theyre best aray’ – was not uncommon, but Chamberlain was struck by the presence of ‘almost all the counsaile and great men about this towne’.60 This display of elite status and solidarity was significant, but the central event of the ritual was the sermon delivered by John King, bishop of London. King began by emphasizing the unusually ceremonious nature of the occasion, its ‘face of Solemnitie, such as reserveth it selfe onley for festivals’, and referring to the ‘presence, not ordinarie’ of the elite, ‘the heads and corners of the people’.61 Taking as his text the narrative of Hezekiah’s sickness in Isaiah 38, King ruminated on the ever-present danger of disease and sudden death, and on the need to live a religious life in full consciousness of these

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facts. The sermon eventually moved from the universal to the particular, from the common lot of man to the illness of a king, from Hezekiah to his modern ‘pattern’, James. King represented James’s illness by glossing it with the standard scripts of Jacobean royal authority. James, like his biblical prototype, was a champion of true religion, a man of learning, and a ‘King of Peace’. He had long been blessed by Providential mercy, and was ‘famous … for his miraculous deliverance’ from the hands of assassins and powder plotters.62 His escape from the horrors of illness was yet another providential deliverance, yet more testimony of ‘the good pleasure and love of God’.63 And thus ‘many thousand’ were gathered ‘in the fairest and fittest theatre we have for such purposes’, to offer thanksgiving for God’s mercy not just to James but to ‘the whole kingdome’.64 Deliberately associating James with other icons of charismatic kingship and implicitly comparing his recovery with other national providential deliverances, King noted that it was to St Paul’s that Elizabeth had come to offer thanksgiving after the Armada, and he compared the thanksgiving for James to the Roman rituals offered for the recovery of Augustus, the archetypal exemplar of virtuous imperial rule.65 King magnified God’s mercy by dwelling on the seriousness of James’s sickness – he was ‘sicke to the death’, his ‘sicknesse was ‘bitternesse, bitternesse’, downe to the very side and mouth of the pit’.66 But the account of James’s suffering also allowed King to amplify the legitimating narrative of royal patience that had already begun to circulate in the courtly newsletters. James’s sickbed had been a theatre of royal virtue: The bed of a sicke man is as a schoole, a doctorall chaire of learning and discipline; then are his words written with an adamant claw, and go deepe into the minds of them that heare them … There are [those] that are able to report [James’s] Swans songs, the last before his death (for ought appeared to the contrary) how he behaved himselfe towards God and man, and acted both King and Priest; and setting himselfe in articulo mortis, in the very ioynt and point of dying: Looking backwards to his life past, and forwards to the life to come, neglected not anything, neither of his private nor of the publike State, with many divine meditations, holy professions, religious promises, prudent instructions, which … I wish they were … brought to the light of the world, that all might understand them.67

James had thus rehearsed his own good death. As his mortal body weakened, his kingly body reasserted its inherent sacrality and its Solomonic wisdom. King’s sermon, positioned at the heart of, and, in effect, glossing, a ritual of civic and courtly political communion, had articulated the authorized version of James’s illness, a version soon to reach a larger audience when the sermon appeared ‘by commandement’ in print.

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By late May 1619, James was well enough to play his own part in the process of ritual reassurance, participating in two significant public ceremonies in close succession. The first was the St George’s Day Garter feast, during which James ‘performed all the ceremonies with great contentment’, with the festivities also visually marking an end to the period of grieving for the queen as ‘glittering colours’ and ‘silver and gold lace’ chased away ‘sad mourning weeds’.68 But the culminating act of ritual reassertion came on 1 June, when James returned to London for the first time since falling ill. Unable to walk but now able to ride, James left Theobalds and headed with a courtly entourage for Whitehall. Dressed in blue satin and silver lace with a blue and white feather in his cap and mounted on a horse caparisoned in the same colours, James entered the City at Gray’s Inn Lane. The king’s stylish, colourful dress signified not only royal status but also a restored masculine vigour as he marked the end of formal mourning for Queen Anne. Chamberlain reported that ‘all the companie was glad’ at the sight of the king ‘so gallant and more like a wooer then a mourner’. Royal display typically helped ­ritually articulate and affirm distance and hierarchy, but the entry into London also aimed to regenerate feelings of community between the king and the City’s governors. A ‘fayre troupe’ of mounted, and lavishly dressed, citizens met the king’s entourage ‘on the backside of Grayes Ynne’, where the Recorder of London made a speech ‘in gratulation’ of James’s recovery.69 While Chamberlain thought the ritual a success, others had mixed feelings. Nathaniel Brent noted that James and his entourage ‘glittered in colours’ and ‘made a solemne entrie into white hale’, while James ‘showed more then ordinarie Courtesie unto many’, deploying strategic modesty to good effect. Yet Brent worried that the impact of this mix of display and ritualized condescension had been undermined by decisions about the ceremonial route. The king had intended ‘to shew him self to his people, after his great sicknesse’, but by skirting the capital’s crowded thoroughfares he had reduced his audience, and ‘Many wondred that he made not choice rather to passe through the street’. Yet James did perform at least one compelling show of embodied ‘Courtesie’ within the confines of Whitehall, where he greeted the judges, talking ‘very graciously’ with the ‘cheifest’ before moving down the ‘file’ from greater to lesser, greeting them all and giving them ‘his hand to kisse’.70 The king’s medical crisis of 1619, the traumas of the king’s mortal body, his ‘collection of organs’, placed real pressure on royal authority, triggering discussion and debate and occasionally dissident words in the public sphere, and straining the usual conduct of court politics. But it also provided several opportunities for myth-making, and for the ritual reassertion of royal authority. The frail royal body could be a source of both political vulnerability and political strength.

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The historiography of early Stuart British politics and the historiography of the body are both at transitional points: the former working to develop new paradigmatic questions to shape what we might term (for the sake of academic comedy) its ‘post-post-revisionist’ phase; the latter at a more critical methodological juncture as once-dominant paradigms of cultural constructivism wrestle with renewed interest in the body’s transhistorical materiality. Perhaps James VI and I, with his peculiar gait, narrow jaw, and malformed legs, might provide one site where a new political history and a new history of the body could meet. Critical attention to the king’s many bodies pushes us towards a more complex understanding of the interplay of images and perceptions, events and experiences, fantasies and materialities, and literary, artistic, medical, ritual, and communicative practices that sustained and eroded early modern royal authority. This body-centred political history also demands a more critically reflexive approach towards our own methodological practices and working assumptions, our own scholastic and professional habitus, and thus an openness to new modes of interdisciplinarity that might include experiments in ‘consilience’ with medical and other scientific analyses of the material past.71 As 1066 and All That famously concluded, ‘James I slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was thus a Bad King’.72 Perhaps it is time to pay attention to James’s slobber.

Notes   1 Hilary Mantel, ‘Royal Bodies’, London Review of Books, 21 February, 2013, www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n04/hilary-mantel/royal-bodies (accessed 29 November 2021).   2 Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, 1957).   3 Alastair Bellany and Thomas Cogswell, The Murder of King James I (New Haven and London, 2015).   4 On this aspect of the Jacobean poetics of power, see Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England 1603–1660 (New Haven and London, 2010), ch. 1.   5 Basilikon Doron, reprinted in The Workes of the Most High and Mightie Prince, Iames (London, 1616), 180. On the book’s print history in England, see Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and The Trew Law of Free Monarchies: the Scottish Context and the English Translation’, in Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), 51–2.   6 James, Workes, 181.   7 Ibid., 182–3.

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  8 Ibid., 184.   9 Ibid., 185–6. 10 Sharpe, Image Wars, ch. 2. 11 Elisabeth Bourcier (ed.), The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes (1622–1624) (Paris, 1974), 142. 12 Sharpe, Image Wars, 64–5. 13 A.W. Beasley, ‘The Disability of James VI & I’, Seventeenth Century 10:2 (1995), 161, n. 43 and 159. 14 Alastair Bellany and Andrew McRae (eds), Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry from Manuscript Sources (2005), www.earlystuartlibels.net, L7, L8, and Nv9 (accessed 29 November 2021). 15 Winfried Schleiner and Tyler Fyotek (eds), Corona Regia (Geneva, 2010), 13–14, 25; D’Ewes, Diary, 100; Logan Pearsall Smith (ed.), The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton (Oxford, 1907), vol. II, 92–3 (Wotton to Winwood: 23 April 1616). 16 The National Archives, Kew (hereafter NA), SP Flanders 77/17, fols 176r–77r (c. 1624); Schleiner, ‘Introduction’, in Corona; Gilbert Tournoy, ‘Erycius Puteanus, Isaac Casaubon and the Author of the Corona Regia’, Humanistica Lovaniensia 49 (2000), 382 and n. 19, 383, 386–8; Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 146. 17 D’Ewes, Diary, 100; Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 145–7. 18 Corona, 35, 47–55, 63, 65, 67. 19 Ibid., 57. 20 Ibid., 79–81, 89. 21 Ibid., 99, 101. 22 Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch: Monarchy and Miracles in France and England, trans. J.E. Anderson (New York, 1989), 142–7. 23 Les Meditations Historiques de M. Philippe Camerarius, trans. Simon Goulart (Lyon, 1610), III, 3:2, 173–4. 24 Clements R. Markham (ed.), A Tract of Succession to the Crown (A.D. 1602). By Sir John Harington (London, 1880), 120–1. 25 Corona, 93–5. 26 Ibid., 91. 27 Ibid., 93 and n. 77. 28 Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (London, 1651), 165–6. 29 Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History 68: 223 (1983); Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), 266–9; Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 469–73. 30 Beasley, ‘Disability’. 31 Corona, 87. 32 ‘Mayerne’s Note on the Health of James I’ (BL Sloane MS 1679, fols 42ff), in Norman Moore, The History of the Study of Medicine in the British Isles (Oxford, 1908), 163, 165, 168.

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33 Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable the Marquess of Salisbury, 24 vols (London, 1883–1976), vol. III, 60 (Fontenay to Nau: 15 August, 1584). 34 Timothy Peters,  Peter Garrard,  Vijeya Ganesan,  and John Stephenson, ‘The Nature of King James VI/I’s Medical Conditions: New Approaches to the Diagnosis’, History of Psychiatry 23:3 (2012), 283. 35 Corona, 87. 36 Ibid., 97. 37 ‘Mayerne’s Note’, 163; Peters et al., ‘James VI/I’s Medical Conditions’, 285. 38 James, Workes, 180–1. 39 Corona, 89 (and n. 68), 95. 40 Brian Nance, Turquet de Mayerne as Baroque Physician: The Art of Medical Portraiture (Amsterdam and New York, 2001); Beasley, ‘Disability’; Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter, George III and the Mad Business (London, 1969), 201–9; Peters et al., ‘James VI/I’s Medical Conditions’; and Kristine Williams et al, ‘Written Language Clues to Cognitive Changes of Aging: An Analysis of the Letters of King James VI/I’, Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences 58B no. 1 (2003), P42–4. 41 Beasley, ‘Disability’, 160; Peters et al., ‘James VI/I’s Medical Conditions’, 279; Williams et al., ‘Written Language Clues’. 42 ‘Mayerne’s Note’, 166–7. 43 ‘Mayerne’s Note’, 168; Bellany, Politics, 52–4, 72–3. 44 See, e.g., Bellany and Cogswell, Murder, 12–13, 18–22, and Mayerne’s late August 1613 correspondence with Somerset, NA SP 14/74/52, 54, 55. 45 Mayerne, ‘Note’, 166–7. 46 Norman E. McClure (ed.), The Letters of John Chamberlain (Philadelphia, 1939), vol. II, 220, 222, 225–6 (6, 19, and 27 March 1619); NA SP 14/107/42, 44, 55 and 60 (from Herbert: 19 March 1619; Williams: 20 March 1619; Locke: 27 March 1619; and Harwood: 30 March 1619). 47 NA SP 14/107/60 (Harwood to Carleton: 30 March 1619). 48 NA SP 14/108/16 (Herbert to Carleton: 4 April 1619); SP 14/108/15 (Harwood to Carleton: 4 April 1619); Letters, vol. II, 227 (10 April 1619); and SP 14/109/16 (Conway to Carleton: 5 May 1619). 49 See, e.g., NA SP 14/108/15, 16 and 70. 50 Letters, vol. II, 229 (10 April 1619). 51 NA SP 14/108/50; Letters, vol. II, 234; John Nichols (ed.), The Progresses, Processions and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First (London, 1828), vol. III, 534–6; SP 14/108/70; SP 14/109/19. 52 NA SP 14/107/60, 14/108/15 (Harwood to Carleton: 30 March, 4 April1619); Letters, vol. II, 227 (10 April 1619); SP 14/108/50 (Harwood to Carleton: 16 April 1619). 53 Letters, vol. II, 232 (24 April 1619). 54 NA SP Holland, 84/89, fol. 99r (Naunton to Carleton: 1 April 1619). 55 NA SP 14/107/66, 66: I–VI (from the Lancashire deputy lieutenants: 31 March 1619). 56 Acts of the Privy Council 1618–19, 419, 437–8; NA SP 14/108/43.

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57 NA SP 14/108/85, 14/109/7 (Locke to Carleton: 30 April and 1 May 1619); Thomas Birch (comp.), The Court and Times of James I (London, 1849), vol. II, 156 (Lorkin to Puckering: 4 May 1619). 58 Birch, Court and Times, vol. II, 157 (Lorkin to Puckering). 59 NA SP 14/109/7 (Locke to Carleton: 1 May 1619); SP 14/109/11 (Harwood to Carleton: 4 May 1619); Birch, Court and Times, vol. II, 157. For another case, SP 14/109/19 (Brent to Carleton: 8 May 1619). 60 Letters, vol. II, 229–30 (17 April 1619); John Stow and Edmund Howes, Annales (London, 1631), 1031–2. 61 John King, A Sermon of Publicke Thanks-giving (London, 1619), 2. 62 King, Sermon, 38–9. 63 Ibid., 44–6. 64 Ibid., 41, 46–7. 65 Ibid., 47–8. 66 Ibid., 40–1; Letters, vol. II, 229–30. 67 King, Sermon, 42–3. 68 NA SP 14/109/59 (Brent to Carleton: 29 May 1619). 69 Letters, vol. II, 242 (5 June 1619); NA SP 14/109/76 (Brent to Carleton: 5 June 1619). 70 NA SP 14/109/76 (Brent to Carleton: 5 June 1619). 71 See, e.g., Michael McCormick, ‘History’s Changing Climate: Climate Science, Genomics, and the Emerging Consilient Approach to Interdisciplinary History’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 42:2 (Autumn 2011). 72 W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That (New York, 1931), 62.

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Empire of heresy: Samuel Gorton, Gerrard Winstanley, and the London roots of transatlantic revolutionary religion David R. Como This chapter revisits two of the most infamous heresiarchs of the seventeenth century. Samuel Gorton and Gerrard Winstanley stand as towering figures in the chronicles of English revolutionary religion. Notorious in their day as heretical ringleaders of sectarian movements, each receded into obscurity after death. Their reputations rose again in the twentieth century, resurrected by modern scholars intent on recovering the remains of English radicalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Winstanley, spokesman  of the ‘Diggers’ in 1649–50, has often been seen as the very embodiment of the English Revolution, particularly among left-leaning historians, who viewed his challenge to private property as marking an unprecedented retort to nascent capitalism.1 Gorton, meanwhile, has assumed a parallel role for colonial American historians: he and his ‘Gortonist’ followers have been portrayed as occupying the pinnacle of radical puritan dissent in New England.2 Yet, even as they have risen as binary lodestars of seventeenth-century ‘radicalism’, Winstanley and Gorton have rarely been considered in tandem. This is something of a surprise. For a start, there were strong affinities between their modes of divinity. Winstanley and Gorton each entered the frenetic English public sphere in 1646–48, printing extensive pamphlets outlining their theological opinions. Both rejected all existing churches and church ordinances embraced by mainstream godly groups (including adult baptism).3 This flowed from a broader renunciation of outward devotional practices, what Gorton called ‘earthly and carnall formes and administrations in ... worship’, and Winstanley dismissed as the ‘outward lazie, formall, customary, and tyth-oppressing way of pretended divine worship’.4 For both men, the essential work of Christ was internal, and they accordingly embraced highly allegorical scriptural hermeneutics, whereby outward ‘histories’ of the letter were regarded as shells containing inner spiritual ‘mysteries’, which were read as unfolding within humans.5 Chief among these mysteries was the union of believers with Christ, a union which in Gorton’s view did ‘transfer unto us ... [Christ’s] own righteousnesse, peace,

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ease, life, courage, confidence, joy, freedome, and liberty ... setting us in his own wisdom, and authority, inheritance and sonship, therefore is it said, As he is, so are we even in this world’. As Winstanley described this immersive union, ‘this is it, to be saved by Jesus Christ, for that mighty man or spirit hath taken up his habitation within your body, and your body is his body’.6 In Winstanley’s case, these theological positions fed directly into the celebrated social vision he began to articulate in 1649: the indwelling spirit, and the new Law of Love that reigned in believers, demanded abandonment of private property.7 Gorton’s writings by contrast contain scant commentary on socio-political matters, but on the basis of his career and habitual collisions with New England authorities, scholars have ascribed to him a pronounced political radicalism, placing him in the camp of the English Levellers, and attributing to Gorton a thoroughgoing egalitarianism, which found its purest manifestation in his presumed involvement in Rhode Island’s 1652 ordinance forbidding perpetual enslavement.8 In the social, as well as theological, realms, there are thus arguably likenesses between the two figures. This is not to claim that Winstanley and Gorton were identical in approach – indeed there remained key stylistic and theological differences between them – but they manifestly partook of similar ideological fashions and tendencies rampant at the radical frontier of civil-war puritanism. Their wholesale anti-formalism, their allegorical treatment of biblical stories or characters, and their exalted views of immediate union with Christ were familiar tropes among extreme puritans by the later 1640s. This was a genus of spiritualized religion distinct from (although sometimes overlapping with) other common forms of puritan zeal, such as Congregationalism, separatism, and anabaptism. It was a mode contemporaries associated, rightly or wrongly, with the infamous prophet Hendrik Niclaes and his Family of Love.9 Unsurprisingly, Gorton, whose theological opinions were well formed when he arrived in New England in 1636–37, was dogged by charges that he peddled ‘the very dregs of Familisme’ (John Cotton); that he was enthralled in ‘depth of Familisme’ (Roger Williams); or that he was simply ‘a wicked Familist’ (Samuel Rutherford).10 Winstanley’s critics, appalled by the social threat of the Diggers, paid less attention to his theological opinions, and Winstanley laboured to present his ideas as the product of recent divine revelations, a posture that obscured antecedent influences shaping his thought. This should not distract us from the extent to which his innovative vision flowed from well-worn channels of English radical religious discourse, of which Winstanley was obviously aware. Ariel Hessayon, for instance, has emphasized Winstanley’s connection to Baptist circles, and Winstanley candidly admitted that he underwent rebaptism before rejecting anabaptism and abandoning all ordinances.11 Other

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commentators, more impressed by Winstanley’s ‘spiritualist’ tendencies, have suggested Familism as a possible influence.12 This hypothesis is all the more intriguing, given that one conceit persistently ascribed to Familists was that they ‘doe hold that all things are Common’, making them plausible precursors to Winstanley and the Diggers.13 The complex, hybrid ecosystem of radical puritan religion in the late 1640s means that it is difficult – indeed ill-advised – to isolate a dominant, exclusive tradition or influence behind Winstanley’s thought. Nevertheless, it is worth attempting to identify the diverse currents running through his writings, and to explore how he might have encountered these various strains of divinity. This chapter illuminates the formative religious and social milieu from which Gorton and Winstanley emerged. The historiographical aims of this study are both particular and general. At the particular level, new manuscript evidence will be presented to clarify the life histories of these major sectarian leaders, thereby shedding light on the origins and ­development of their thought. This new evidence shows that the two men inhabited precisely the same social and spatial environment in London in the 1630s; migrants from distant Lancashire, both settled in the parish of St Olave Old Jewry, where they practised identical trades. At a more general level, it will be shown that the particular neighbourhoods and circles inhabited by Gorton and Winstanley epitomize some of the most striking features of London puritan religious life. Here, this chapter seeks to explore further the world made familiar in Peter Lake’s classic study The Boxmaker’s Revenge – an ecosystem of intensive preaching, voluntary religious meetings, performative mutual prayer, and shared devotional practices. While the ostensible ends of these practices were true faith, orthodox unity, and godly comity, this environment of spiritual experimentation was paradoxically inclined at times to generate conflict and ideological diversity.14 Indeed, in this regard, the London worlds of Gorton and Winstanley prove unusually instructive, for the neighbourhoods they occupied witnessed precisely this centrifugal dynamic, as overheated puritan practices careened into heterodoxy and intra-puritan backbiting. Here, the particular and the general features of this chapter merge: the Old Jewry neighbourhood of Gorton and Winstanley from the late 1620s harboured a persistent tradition of antinomian, if not crypto-Familist, activity, born out of puritan practices and informal institutions. This local undercurrent of heterodoxy likely played a decisive role in Gorton’s theological development prior to his departure for New England in 1636–37, helping to explain a previously unknown clash with one of the city’s most prominent godly heresy-hunters. Even more suggestively, there are tantalizing hints of personal connections linking Gorton and Winstanley together. This raises the possibility that parallels between their respective heterodoxies were not coincidental, but

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rather sprouted from a shared environment or network that helped to germinate their apparently idiosyncratic, novel ideas. Gorton’s life before his departure for America has received only cursory attention, chiefly from New England genealogists. He was almost certainly Samuel, son of Thomas Gorton, baptized in Manchester Cathedral Church in 1592/3. When Thomas Gorton made his will in 1610, he described himself as a husbandman: Samuel later assumed pretensions of gentility, but he was to all appearances from modest, agrarian circumstances.15 As a younger son of a farming family, Samuel migrated to London, as did countless thousands of rural young people during this era of population growth. The calling he undertook reflected the intensifying, shifting commerce of the city. In the 1630s, Gorton would be described as ‘factor of Blackwell hall’.16 Blackwell Hall was London’s ancient cloth mart, where country clothiers descended to sell wares to city merchants and drapers. By the early seventeenth century, the textile trade was changing, growing in volume and becoming more diverse, and, to navigate this newly complex economic landscape, there arose a cadre of middlemen, dedicated ‘factors’ based in Blackwell Hall, who specialized in linking demand and supply. Gorton was thus occupying a novel economic niche, one that did not exist a generation earlier, and which was a by-product of London’s growth and economic diversification.17 Gorton’s trade also dictated where he settled in London. In 1628, he was living in St Michael Bassishaw, the parish that encompassed Blackwell Hall. That year, Gorton wedded Mary Maplett, daughter of John Maplett, a haberdasher and longstanding inhabitant of the nearby parish of St Lawrence Old Jewry.18 Marriage into this prosperous City cloth-trading family brought a sizeable marriage portion.19 By October 1628, Samuel and Mary were residing in St Olave Old Jewry, a stone’s throw from the Mapletts in St Lawrence. The parishes of St Lawrence and St Olave – both in the storied Old Jewry precinct – were strategically placed astride Blackwell Hall, Samuel’s place of business. This district – and in particular St Olave – looms large in the account that follows. In contrast to Gorton, Winstanley has been the subject of extensive research, and the details of his early life have been meticulously excavated by J.D. Alsop, R.J. Dalton, John Gurney, and others.20 Winstanley was seventeen years younger than Gorton, having been baptized in 1609 in Wigan. Gerrard’s father (either Edward or Edmund) was a mercer of middling rank, respectable although not prominent in local affairs.21 He was, however, prosperous enough to send Gerrard to London to be apprenticed in a Merchant Taylor’s establishment, that of the widow Sarah Gater of St  Michael Cornhill, on 25 March 1630. When Gerrard completed his

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apprenticeship, he quickly moved to St Olave Old Jewry. One detractor later described Gerrard as a ‘Blackwell-hall-man thief’, suggesting he retraced Gorton’s steps by becoming a Blackwell Hall factor.22 Like Gorton, then, Winstanley migrated from distant Lancashire to the bustling metropolis, settled in the same parish and pursued the same novel vocation as Gorton. By the time Winstanley moved to St Olave, Gorton had already emigrated to New England, leaving behind him a chain of debts and legal conflicts; Winstanley would soon fall prey to similar pitfalls, resulting in his bankruptcy, which drove him in 1643 to Cobham in Surrey, ultimately a centre of the Digger enterprise. Although both men had long since abandoned Old Jewry and its environs when they came to prominence in the 1640s, the neighbourhood’s religious ambience offers suggestive insight into the improbable trajectories of the two sect masters, likewise enriching our understanding of the spiritual practices and institutions that characterized London. The interest in Winstanley’s early life means that his religious experiences in London have not been neglected. Alsop, in particular, focused attention on the household of Sarah Gater in St Michael Cornhill, and then in turn on St Olave itself. He demonstrated that Gater showed conformist proclivities and connections, while the two parishes were overseen by impeccably conformist ministers, the Laudian William Brough of St Michael and Thomas Tuke of St Olave. To Alsop, this hardly seemed fertile ground for the seeds of Winstanley’s later religious radicalism.23 However, recent scholarship has revealed that beneath London’s episcopal and parochial surface, there existed a shadow world of pietistic activity. The city’s densely packed parishes, loosely overseen peculiar jurisdictions, and sprawling network of curacies, lectureships, and casual preaching arrangements meant that London’s Church of England was a crowded, unruly environment, with numerous clergymen operating without beneficed livings of any kind. Fuelling this sprawling clerical establishment was  an equally energetic lay religious scene, rife with sermon gadding across parish boundaries, and characterized by prayer meetings and conventicles, most of which unfolded in private settings, outside the formal confines of the church. Here, eager layfolk rubbed shoulders with clergy, recording, repeating, and critiquing sermons, praying together, discussing doctrine, and passing books, manuscript sermon notes, and religious treatises from hand to hand.24 While these kinetic devotional practices were geared towards mutual edification, the zealous pursuit of spiritual truth sometimes sparked disagreement, occasionally spiralling into vicious dispute, rumour, and character assassination. In rare but revealing cases, these controversies became so heated that they erupted into public view, prompting unseemly pulpit

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disputes, printed rebukes, or church court prosecutions. Lake’s Boxmaker’s Revenge painstakingly reconstructed this dynamic, as revealed through the story of John Etherington, a lay spiritual virtuoso and sometime religious pamphleteer, who was accused of Familism and convicted before the High Commission in 1626. Etherington’s downfall was engineered by the godly cleric Stephen Denison, but was preceded by conferences between Etherington and numerous lay interlocutors and opponents. On other occasions, the victims of these internal godly feuds were not layfolk. The respected nonconformist minister Anthony Wotton, for instance, was subjected to a similar multi-year campaign of scrutiny and harassment, orchestrated by George Walker, the rebarbative puritan rector of St John the Evangelist, Watling Street. Walker (in Lake’s phrase, ‘a doctrinal attack dog of quite outstanding tenacity and viciousness’) was indeed a habitual participant in this world of informal theological disputation, who assailed numerous fellow clergymen in pulpit, manuscript, and private conference.25 The Old Jewry neighbourhood provides a shining example of this broader set of religious practices, as well as the ways they could sometimes devolve into ideological dissension. In the 1620s, the vicar of St Lawrence Old Jewry, where Gorton’s in-laws lived, was William Boswell, an unremarkable pluralist. Like many London churches, the parish also employed a curate and lecturer. This post was occupied in the 1620s by the famous puritan (and later New England patriarch) John Davenport, then later by Nathaniel Waker, another cleric of godly tendencies.26 Throughout the decade, the administrations of the conformist vicar were supplemented by an extensive preaching ministry, which provided locals with regular godly fare. Beyond this steady spiritual provision, and like many London churches, St Lawrence occasionally hosted guest lecturers. At some point in 1628–29, the young minister Peter Shaw preached at St Lawrence, turning the parish into a cockpit of the debates and pulpit-skirmishes that I have elsewhere described as ‘London’s antinomian controversy’. Of all of London’s intrapuritan squabbles of this period, this was the most acrimonious, running through the late 1620s and early 1630s, and Shaw was at the heart of the conflict.27 Shaw, too, was a Lancashire man, who, after receiving his degree at Cambridge, assumed in 1625 the curacy of Ashton-under-Lyne, just four miles from Gorton’s home village. Here, Shaw reportedly clashed with local ministers over his theological errors. Fleeing to London, he preached from multiple pulpits, earning an enthusiastic lay following, as well as deep hostility from City clergy of all stripes. Shaw’s doctrinal peculiarities have been scrutinized elsewhere; they included a range of opinions that contemporaries labelled ‘antinomian’, including claims that believers were free from the Moral Law and that true Christians were unified with Christ. Indeed, several knowledgeable observers alleged that Shaw was an

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outright Familist. Although such charges invite caution, Shaw indisputably ventilated extremely controversial opinions from several pulpits, including St Lawrence Old Jewry, resulting in a High Commission trial, which assembled dozens of witnesses against him. Boswell, vicar of St Lawrence, and Waker, the regular lecturer, were among these witnesses, suggesting that Shaw’s opinions created turbulence in the parish.28 Shaw’s teachings also earned him enduring local admirers: one St Lawrence man, the clothier Francis Meadowcroft, stood surety for Shaw in 1638.29 There are additional hints that Shaw’s brand of divinity retained a foothold in the parish. Tobias Crispe, member of a distinguished London merchant family, was minister of Brinkworth, Wiltshire, from 1629, after which he became notorious for his antinomianism. Although his pastorate was in the west, Crispe spent time in London at his wife’s Cateaton Street family home in St Lawrence Old Jewry; in 1627 and 1630, he baptized children in the church. During his London stints, Crispe certainly preached casually in the city.30 Whether he dispensed his teachings in St Lawrence is uncertain. But in a sign of abiding local interest in antinomianizing divinity, it was later claimed that the notorious mystic and accused Familist John Pordage also preached at St Lawrence.31 The home parish of Gorton’s father-in-law was thus deeply embroiled in London’s battles over ‘antinomianism’ and ‘Familism’. As these controversies unfolded, Mary and Samuel Gorton were settling into their household in the neighbouring parish of St Olave Old Jewry. Between 1629 and 1633, they baptized multiple children there, and Gorton attended the church vestry from 1628.32 Whether Gorton was aware of the debates stirred by his countryman Shaw, similar theological novelties were unquestionably propagated in St Olave in the early 1630s. The chief purveyor was not the vicar Thomas Tuke, a conformist spiritual author, later ejected during the Civil War for his sympathies.33 Rather, as in St Lawrence, St Olave hosted an ecosystem of extraordinary preaching and religious devotion, and it was here that novel ideas found expression. The parish sponsored its own lectureship, and, in 1624, the vestrymen clashed with Tuke over the institution, eventually coming to an agreement wherein Tuke promised that ‘the divinity lecture shall henceforth be freely read, without his interruption’, and that the choice of the lecturer should ‘forever hereafter rest wholly in the election of the parishioners without molestation or intermeddling’.34 The figure the parishioners selected proved controversial: from 1631 to 1634 the parish lecturer was Thomas Hodges, a Cambridge-trained divine, who was strongly associated with the ‘antinomian’ grouping in the City. In 1631, a notorious antinomian minister identified Hodges as one of a handful of ‘faithfull fellow labourers’ who could be trusted to defend the antinomian evangel. In the late 1630s, Hodges remained under suspicion;

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a 1638 investigation into London Familism again implicated him as the owner of a series of heretical books. Hodges eventually settled into a more orthodox posture, but, in the 1630s, significant evidence, both non-hostile and hostile, identified him among the city’s most prominent antinomian sympathizers.35 The fact that he preached in Gorton’s parish of St Olave through the early 1630s reveals that the cloth dealer had weekly opportunity to contemplate the new strains of divinity spreading through the city. Indeed, Hodges ensured that Gorton and other locals gained access to London’s most infamous heterodox teacher, Dr John Everarde. Everarde first stirred intense controversy as lecturer of St Martin in the Fields and Kensington. His divinity was an extraordinary amalgam, which drew upon various mystical and esoteric religious traditions. In his overt perfectionism, his allegorical mode of scriptural interpretation, and his downplaying of the Law and external ordinances, Everarde presented a serious challenge to reigning orthodoxies, and, by the 1630s, he was routinely denounced as a ‘Familist’ and heretic. These controversial opinions resulted in removal, apparently in 1630–31, from his Kensington lectureship.36 Everarde was left to teach admirers and disciples in private conventicles. However, he also exploited his friendship with Thomas Hodges, who repeatedly shared his own pulpits with Everarde. This included the pulpit of St Olave Jewry, which Hodges lent to Everarde in the early 1630s.37 As in St Lawrence, we see here London’s informal economy of preaching, with frequent guest lectures and casual sermons making strict ecclesiastical oversight difficult and sometimes non-existent. Everarde’s presence in Gorton’s parish church is of some significance. Although Gorton left no testimony concerning his spiritual development, his peculiar style – with its tendency to allegorize scripture, to identify ‘mysteries’ hidden in outward biblical ‘histories’, to ruminate over symbolic meanings of Hebrew words, and to denigrate ‘carnal’ ordinances –  bore no small resemblance to Everarde’s controversial divinity.38 Any presumed influence must be regarded as conjectural. But what cannot be debated is the rich spiritual atmosphere in which Gorton lived prior to his departure for New England. In Hodges and Everarde, Gorton had ample opportunity to taste the exotic mystical fare that, during these years, was disturbing the unity of the London puritan community. Indeed, given the opinions Gorton evidently brought with him to New England in 1637, it must be regarded as probable that the spiritual milieu and clerical presence at St Olave played a role in his intellectual development. Whether Everarde conducted private meetings in the neighbourhood is unknown, but St Olave was certainly home to one of London’s chief venues for extra-parochial godly practice and intercommunication. At the northern end of the parish sat the Nag’s Head Tavern. From the late 1620s, this

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establishment was run by Ann Wilson, a vintner’s widow, whose patronage made the tavern a hub of godly sociability. By the end of the 1630s, it was the site of regular meetings of puritans to plan oppositional activities. Perhaps the most famous incident at the Nag’s Head was a sermon, delivered by the separatist cobbler Samuel How in 1640, before an audience of more than a hundred listeners, including several ministers. During the civil wars, consistent with Wilson’s congregationalist leanings, the tavern became an organizational centre for London’s ‘independent’ party.39 The unusual extra-parochial religious activity at Wilson’s establishment sharpens our picture of the rich pietistic subculture in this pocket of London. St Lawrence and St Olave Old Jewry hosted during the late 1620s and 1630s many of the most salient practices and institutions that made early Stuart London’s religious scene so remarkable, including laycontrolled lectureships, casual guest preaching, sermon gadding, and godly conventicles. Difficult for the authorities to police, these practices combined in the neighbourhood of Gorton and Winstanley to fulfil the prejudices of puritans’ most jaundiced conformist critics, spawning unpleasant infighting, sectarian preaching, and overt heterodoxy. Gorton himself soon became mired in controversy. At one level, his troubles flowed from growing debts and business woes. Yet these socio-legal and commercial problems – which ultimately helped to drive him to New England –  became subtly intertwined with the intra-puritan politics and informal practices described in this chapter. First hints of tension in Gorton’s affairs could be seen at the time of his father-in-law’s death. On 11 January 1630, ‘John Maplett of the parishe of St Lawrence in the old Jury London sent for Mr William King of the same parishe to come to speake with him hee being sicke’.40 William King was by vocation a surgeon, as well as a longtime neighbour, so it is unsurprising to find Maplett calling him for deathbed attendance. But there are signs of deeper personal connection; also present at Maplett’s bedside was Susannah King, almost certainly William’s wife or daughter.41 Maplett imparted his dying wishes to William King: ‘his desire was to make knowne ... that his wife Mary Maplett should be his sole executrix and did give her his whole estate to dispose of to his children as shee thought fittinge and did also bequeth unto his daughter Mary Gorton fortie shillinges’. King, uncomfortable with this provision, expostulated with his neighbour to rethink his slighting bequest to Mary Gorton: ‘Mr King urged him to give a better legacie to his said daughter but he answered againe that he had given her a greate portion in marriage, and that he knewe not how his estate would fall out. Therefore concluded this to bee his last will and testament.’42 It is unclear if William King intervened on Mary Gorton’s behalf as a general matter of principle or because he had some deeper link to her

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and her husband Samuel Gorton. Likewise uncertain is whether Maplett’s paltry bequest and grumbling mention of the ‘greate portion’ conveyed to the Gortons betrayed some disappointment with his son-in-law. What is indisputable, however, is that William King, barber-surgeon of St Lawrence Old Jewry, interceded on behalf of Gorton’s wife Mary. This crucial fact will receive further consideration in short order. Further signs shortly emerged that Gorton’s business was struggling. In 1633–34, Gorton became embroiled in a series of lawsuits against another factor, William Lambe: each party alleged that the other had contracted a debt of between £60 and £70 and then failed to pay. The trade dispute showed that Gorton was buying and selling goods on credit, a common enough practice in textile commerce, but one that could quickly produce deep and paralysing losses. The energy with which Gorton pursued his adversary suggested that the amount involved, modest though it was, represented a sizeable chunk of Gorton’s working capital and that his business was precarious.43 These difficulties likely played into Gorton’s decision to leave St Olave. He is last mentioned in the vestry minutes in June 1633.44 He relocated to St Botolph Aldgate, a crowded and less genteel parish outside the eastern city wall.45 His business woes were evidently mounting. At some stage, he borrowed from his mother-in-law, Mary Maplett, a debt still unpaid in the mid-1640s.46 After moving to St Botolph, he also hosted a lodger, Robert Duckinfeild, a Cheshire gentleman and, on Gorton’s later account, something of a confidence man. Duckinfeild subsisted partly, it was claimed, through money-lending, and, in still another hint of Gorton’s straitened state, in April 1635 he was forced to borrow £100 upon bond from Duckinfeild.47 Presumably this loan, like the credit from Gorton’s mother-in-law, sought to alleviate pressing cash-flow problems. It was a debt that, improbably but dramatically, forced a collision between Gorton’s ailing estate and the overheated practices and politics of godly spirituality described above. With his fortunes tottering, and the godly under increasing pressure, Gorton began to contemplate removal to New England. In June 1635, Duckinfeild, who had left town for Cambridgeshire, returned to London. Gorton, ‘being desired by some mutuall freinds ... to live in New England acquainted the said Duckingfeild with his intention and did crave his advise therein’. Duckinfeild responded not with sage counsel, but with alarm that his debtor was about to abscond to another continent: ‘which soe soone as he heard he presently called in the one hundred pounds lent ... and would not continue itt upon any Condicions’. At this point, the truth of the story grows murky. Gorton claimed that he quickly repaid the £100, but that Duckinfeild had left the bond in Cambridgeshire, and was thus unable to cancel and return it. Gorton thus contented himself with a signed

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release from Duckinfeild.48 To Gorton’s misfortune, Duckinfeild thereupon returned to Cambridgeshire and promptly died. This might have ended the tale, except that on 29 May 1635, Duckinfeild had drawn up a will, which survives today and expressly mentions the debt: ‘whereas Mr. Samuell Gorton factor of Blackwell hall oweth mee by bond one hundred pounds’, Duckinfeild bequeathed this money, as well as another £20 debt, to five trustees for ‘maintenance forever either for some preacher of Gods worde in some place of Lancasheire or Chesheire where there is greatest want’ or for sending ‘some poore scholler or schollers of those Countryes’ to university. Among the nominated trustees was none other than George Walker, the tireless puritan clergyman, whose Lancashire roots made him ideal for the job.49 As noted above, Walker was also a self-appointed guardian of Calvinist orthodoxy and one of the most aggressive inhabitants of the world of extra-parochial theological disputation described here. Walker immediately enacted Duckinfeild’s plan, using Duckinfeild’s bequest as seed money for a more ambitious project to plant puritan preachers in Lancashire. The goal, it seems, was to export to the north-west London’s zealous preaching culture – with its godly lecturers, maintained outside the grip of an increasingly hostile religious establishment – using capital provided by wealthy benefactors. Other donors were courted, and Walker published a pamphlet advertising the enterprise.50 Between mid1635 and late 1636, Gorton clashed with Walker over the infant project. As Gorton recounted in a later lawsuit, ‘there was some difference in opinion betweene your Orator [Gorton] and George Walker minister of Wattling streete parish Church London, who proposed a Charitable contribucion to be made ... which collection was further pretended to be conveyed to poore ministers in Lancasheire’. Gorton boasted that he exposed some unspecified deceit in Walker’s undertaking: ‘the fraud being discovered by [Gorton] hee withdrew his hand and by his example diverse others who had of that Charitable pretence bin very free’ also abandoned the enterprise. Unsurprisingly, this ‘Accion of [Gorton] did bread a great discontent in the said Walker who as your Orator [Gorton] hath since understood was made executor ... to the estate of the said Duckingfeild’. Gorton’s account conveniently ignored that the entire charitable venture was initiated by Duckinfeild’s will, which explicitly affirmed Gorton’s £100 debt and made it the basis of the new foundation; instead, in Gorton’s telling, all his troubles over the debt resulted from Gorton’s revelation of Walker’s fraudulence. On Gorton’s account, Walker, stewing in malice, laid a trap for the innocent cloth factor: ‘findinge this bond of [Gorton’s] ... amongst the writtings of the said Duckingfeild and withall haveing as [Gorton] beleives knowledge that the money was paid and some release given [Walker] did not publish the same but was sylent therein’.51

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In late 1636, after relocating briefly to Stratford Langton in Essex, just east of the City, Gorton decided at last to depart for America, and at this point, the minister sprung his trap: Walker ‘haveinge true knowledge that [Gorton] was goeing ... to New England ... sent privately in the same ship wherein [Gorton] and his familie passed over to some of his Bretheren in New England that soe soone as [Gorton] was seated there that they should prosecute the said Bond’.52 In all of this, Gorton portrayed himself as the injured, upright party; Gorton had repaid his debt, but a villainous minister, whom Gorton had exposed for ‘fraud’, cunningly laid a transatlantic snare in pursuit of an escalating personal feud. What actually transpired between Gorton and Walker remains uncertain. Their ‘difference in opinion’ over the Lancashire project surely stemmed chiefly from Duckinfeild’s contested bequest, but, unless Gorton was simply confabulating, it also involved some deeper conflict, played out before the court of (London puritan) public opinion. Gorton’s religious position was already clearly unusual by the time he left for New England; as a result, he was unlikely to have approved of a piously orthodox Calvinist evangelical project, inflicted on his native county by the likes of Walker. Gorton was, moreover, precisely the sort of theological miscreant that Walker spent much of his adult life terrorizing within the London puritan scene. Regardless of the details of the quarrel, this hitherto overlooked controversy between Samuel Gorton and puritan London’s arch-heresy-hunter situates Gorton, prior to his emigration, deep within the cacophonous and fractious world of godly preaching, conference, and disputation described here. Samuel Gorton disembarked in New England in winter 1636–37 (with most authorities placing the date in March 1637).53 In New England, of course, puritans suddenly found themselves not an embattled minority but the dominant hegemonic authority. Ironically, however, this in some ways merely served as an accelerant, as previously suppressed intra-puritan controversies rose to the surface, and fissile tendencies of godly practice and culture broke into the open. Gorton arrived as rising controversy, prompted by John Wheelwright and Anne Hutchinson, began to rage over ‘free grace’ and ‘antinomianism’. As Gorton later wrote, ‘Landing ... at Boston in the Massachusetts Bay, we found our Countrymen at great variance in point of Religion, prosecuting it very hotly in their publique Courts’. He decried the persecuting temper of Massachusetts’s authorities: ‘at the time of our arrivall at Boston, they were proceeding against ... John Wheelwright ... whom they also banished for differing with them in point of Doctrine ... and many other manifesting their thoughts about such points then controverted  ... were also imprisoned, fined, banished, disarmed, and cast out amongst them’. This forced him and his allies immediately to flee Boston, ‘we plainly perceiving that the scope of their doctrine was bent only to maintain that

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outward forme of worship which they had erected to themselves ... leaving those principles of Divinity, wherein we had been instructed in our native Country, tending to faith towards God in Christ’.54 Gorton’s account has usually been understood to mean that he was from the beginning sympathetic to Boston’s Hutchinsonian party. Moreover, it provides strong testimony that Gorton conveyed from England the heterodox opinions that subsequently made him a byword for sectarian error. And it agrees with the independent documentary record, which shows that Gorton quickly decamped from Boston to the separatist outpost of Plymouth, a more congenial destination for unconventional puritans. He was certainly in Plymouth before 17 May 1637.55 Gorton’s tale of his high-minded departure from Boston is complicated, however, by an alternative explanation for his flight. As John Cotton wrote in 1647, ‘Gorton ... arrived in our Bay, and continued a while in our Towne, till a reverend Minister in London (Mr. Walker) sent over Directions to some friends, to demand an 100. li. debt of him, which he having borrowed of a Citizen, the Citizen bequeathed it to some good use, whereof Mr. Walker was called to some Trust. But then Mr. Gorton departed out of this Jurisdiction to Plymouth.’56 On Cotton’s account, then, Gorton left Boston not for religious principles (although the minister affirmed that Gorton was a deluded Familist) but instead to evade legal action over the Duckinfeild debt. In his lawsuit the next year, Gorton provided his own counter-narrative. Gorton claimed that, upon his arrival in New England, Walker’s agents (receiving instruction via the ship that carried Gorton) brought Walker’s devious stratagem to fruition, presenting the bond to the authorities, and demanding the money Gorton had already repaid. Gorton, by now in Plymouth, alleged that he ‘was forced at the heering of the cause in the winter tyme not onely to a great expence but alsoe to the hazard of his life through the wildernesse to travile threescore miles to the Courte of Justice where ... as Judge Sir Henry Vane Junior Governor’ heard the case. Here, Gorton presented Duckinfeild’s signed release, whereupon ‘the Accion in that Courte was dismissed’. This appearance, which must have transpired before 17 May 1637, might have concluded the affair. But Gorton’s rising stature as a political and spiritual leader, his endless battles with New England authorities, and his eventual return to London in 1645 to secure his new Narragansett settlement at Shawomet, ensured that Duckinfeild’s legacy lived on. With Gorton back in England, Walker again tried to extract the money, suing Gorton, arresting him for debt, and forcing him into a counter-suit in Chancery. The battle over the Duckinfield bond continued into early 1648, occupying much of Gorton’s attention, even as he rose to public notoriety for his sectarian preaching and pamphleteering.57

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In the 1630s, when Gorton was living in St Olave (hosting Duckinfeild and jousting with Walker), Winstanley was a lowly apprentice in St Michael Cornhill, five hundred metres to the east. Cornhill was not untouched by the controversies described here. St Michael’s Laudian rector William Brough, for instance, was a deponent against Peter Shaw, suggesting Shaw’s teaching reached St Michael.58 Moreover, Cornhill hosted a ­lectureship, offsetting the presence of its staunchly conformist rector. In 1630, the Sunday morning lecturer was Philip Nye, the future Congregationalist.59 While Nye had not yet embraced the ‘independent’ views that would make him famous, he did draw unwelcome attention at St Michael. Indeed, Nye was engulfed in the atmosphere of distrust and recrimination created by London’s ‘antinomian’ controversies. Nye’s fiercest critic was Stephen Denison, that implacable foe of the alleged ‘Familism’ spreading in the City, whose campaign against John Etherington had in many ways inaugurated London’s contentions over antinomianism. As Lake has shown, Denison was a self-anointed steward of orthodoxy, much like George Walker. Extensive notes, recorded by a hostile onlooker, were taken at a sermon delivered by Nye at Cornhill in December 1630, then passed to the authorities. These notes suggest that Nye was preaching hyper-predestinarian doctrine, coupled with a supercharged defence of believers’ union with Christ. While Nye expressed nothing like Shaw’s outrageous opinions, in the sensitive atmosphere that followed the prosecutions of Shaw and others, Nye’s statements were inevitably assimilated to ‘antinomian’ error. The notes on Nye’s sermons were captioned ‘These things and such lyke delyvered by Mr Nye were so fowle and so much dislyked yt Mr Doctor Dennyson an able and worthy divine did preach diverse Sermons against them’.60 Despite these attacks, Nye survived to lecture at St Michael until 1633. All of this should underscore that Winstanley – in December 1630, ten months an apprentice in Gater’s household – had extensive opportunity to encounter strenuous puritan preaching at St Michael. Sermons and religious observances were among the few escapes routinely allowed city apprentices. Indeed, St Michael offers one of our most remarkable testimonies of this fact. In old age, the Baptist pioneer William Kiffin recalled that, in late 1632, he became ‘acquainted with several young men who diligently attended on the means of grace’. As all were apprentices, ‘they had no opportunity of converse, but on the Lord’s days’, and so it became their ‘constant practice to attend the morning lecture, which began at six o’clock ... at Cornhill’ – that is, the Sunday lecture at St Michael Cornhill (in 1632–33, delivered by the controversial celebrity Nye). The apprentices would ‘meet together an hour before service, to spend it in prayer, and in communicating to each other what experience we had received from the Lord; or else to repeat some

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sermon’, and would often ‘also read some portion of scripture, and spake from it what it pleased God to enable us’. Kiffin’s recollections encapsulate the most striking practices of the London puritan scene, suggesting that St Michael was something of a hotbed of such activities.61 Whether Winstanley knew of this regular conclave of fellow apprentices, the resulting insight into the spiritual disposition of his parish helps us see how he might have acquired the godly sensibilities, which, by his own confession, he embraced as a young man.62 Moreover, Nye’s presence reveals that Winstanley was hardly insulated from the internecine theological battles and pulpit-skirmishes unfolding in London’s parishes, notwithstanding the opinions of his mistress Gater or the presence of Brough. Winstanley served out his apprenticeship without known incident. On 21 February 1638, he was made free of the Merchant Taylors upon report of Thomas Wells, a cordwainer of the adjacent parish of St Peter Cornhill, perhaps suggesting that Winstanley finished his term outside Gater’s household.63 Winstanley soon moved to St Olave Old Jewry, where, by May 1639, he was an independent householder.64 This inevitably raises the question of whether any residual tradition of puritan heterodoxy persisted in St Olave after Hodges and Everarde departed the scene around 1634. To be sure, busy puritan (even sectarian) activity continued while Winstanley lived in the parish, as evidenced by the conferences at the Nag’s Head. Christopher Feake, the future Fifth Monarchist, possibly lectured at St Olave in 1641.65 But while Hodges and Everarde may have left some vestigial legacy of their presence among parish laity, there is no proof that overtly heterodox ideas were propagated from St Olave’s pulpit during Winstanley’s half-decade in the parish. There is, however, one very direct tie linking Gorton and his family to Gerrard Winstanley. On 28 September 1640, Winstanley sought licence to marry Susan King, then twenty-seven years of age. Susan or Susanna King (as her name was recorded at baptism) was the daughter of William King, barber-surgeon of St Lawrence Old Jewry.66 This was, of course, the very same William King who in 1630 attended John Maplett on his deathbed, pleading on behalf of Maplett’s daughter Mary Gorton, wife of Samuel Gorton. Indeed, it is not impossible that ‘Susannah King’, also present at Maplett’s sickbed, was Gerrard Winstanley’s new bride. As modern scholars have demonstrated, Winstanley’s marriage, and his link to William King, intimately shaped Winstanley’s social and economic fortunes thereafter.67 King’s earlier association with Gorton’s wife and father-in-law surely demands attention. It raises the distinct possibility that lurking behind the family tie between the Kings and the Gortons there was some spiritual community or interest, which has until now remained invisible.

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The importance of this find for understanding the particular intellectual trajectories of Gorton and Winstanley should not be minimized. It suggests that both were linked into a discrete spiritual community of some kind, which served as an incubator for the novel and indeed heretical theological ideas that made them notorious. That community was tied to the Old Jewry parishes, and initially fostered by the presence of controversial preachers such as Shaw, Hodges, and Everarde. Gorton’s connection to such a community provides the first credible explanation ever put forward to explain the disruptive theology he carried to New England. When and how Winstanley brushed up against these circles remains uncertain, but the evidence suggests that the King family played a crucial mediating role, and likely exercised an important impact on Gerrard’s spiritual development as well as his economic fortunes. This conjectural narrative would certainly account for the striking parallels between the thought of Gorton and Winstanley. Moreover, it also suggests a plausible ideological context for Winstanley’s renunciation of private property (and indeed, more indirectly, for Gorton’s putative political radicalism): ideas of Christian egalitarianism, redistributionism, and even communism were particularly prevalent in the antinomian circles described here – most notoriously, but not exclusively, among accused ‘Familists’.68 This is not to insist that Winstanley was unaffected by other strands of thought; his involvement in such a spiritual connection would in fact help to explain his exposure to varying heterodox ideas – anabaptism or universalism, for instance – for such sectarian ­sub-communities were highly porous and open to new spiritual influences and revelations.69 Nor is this to deny the importance of Winstanley’s chastening bankruptcy of 1643, his removal to Surrey, or the powerful epiphanies that ensued. The ‘Blackwell-hall-man thief’ Gerrard Winstanley saw his estate deteriorate in a manner uncannily similar to Gorton. Like Gorton, Winstanley conducted business by buying and selling on credit; he likewise suffered when he advanced goods to a customer who failed to pay (in this case, the aspiring transatlantic merchant and slave-trader Matthew Backhouse, who disappeared to Barbados). Like Gorton, Gerrard tried to recover his losses through fruitless litigation. Both Lancashire men had migrated to the city to gamble in the casino of the London textile economy, and both lost their bets in spectacular fashion. Gorton escaped his troubles by fleeing to New England, remaking himself as the founding patriarch of a new colony and a spiritual writer of ocean-spanning repute; Winstanley abandoned his business and relocated to Cobham, reinventing himself as a country grazier.70 These traumatic experiences undoubtedly played a decisive role for Winstanley, pushing him towards his climactic revelations and the distinctive social vision that underpinned the Digger project in 1649:

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that ‘the whole earth of trading, is generally become the neat art of thieving and oppressing fellow-creatures ... but when the earth becomes a common treasury this burden will be taken off’.71 Distinctive though this vision was, and powerful though the revelations may have been, they did not emerge from a vacuum; both the content of the vision, and the reflex to embrace immediate divine revelation, bore unmistakable signs of deep prior engagement with sectarian puritan circles, practices, and thought. This hypothesis, while plausible and supported by the evidence presented here, must in the end remain conjectural. Beyond doubt, however, both Gorton and Winstanley were surrounded, during their years in London, by an environment of extraordinary religious practices and informal institutions – a world of constant preaching, doctrinal and spiritual experimentation, bustling godly sociability, private conferences, and mutual prayer, reading, and repetition. These practices and arrangements, at their most effective, produced formidable ideological solidarity and communal cohesion among the godly. But they also carried a degree of instability, which under certain circumstances generated ideological deviance, and, with it, fierce competition and controversy, sometimes resulting in the kind of rumour-mongering, posturing, and reputational sabotage of the sort that erupted between Gorton and Walker. At their most fissiparous, these practices gave rise to overtly sectarian offshoots, which began to separate themselves out from the broader godly community. If Gorton’s ascent to prominence unfolded on the shores of Narragansett Bay, and Winstanley’s amidst the pastures and commons of Surrey, both men – like the wider phenomenon of revolutionary puritanism they epitomized – bore the unmistakable imprint of the city of London.

Notes   1 Most influentially in C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, 1972).   2 K. Porter, ‘Samuell Gorton: New England Firebrand’, The New England Quarterly 7 (1934), 405–44; P. Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England (Middletown, 1984); J. Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution (Chicago, 2013).   3 S. Gorton, An Incorruptible Key (London, 1647), sigs M3v–M4r, Bb3v, Ffv– Ff2r; T. Corns, A. Hughes, and D. Loewenstein (eds), The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009) [hereafter CWGW], vol. 1, 447–52.   4 Gorton, Incorruptible Key, sig. Ff2r; CWGW, vol. 1, 176.   5 Gorton, Incorruptible Key, sigs b4r, Ff4r–v, Kk3v–Kk4v, N3r–v; CWGW, vol. 1, 177, 260, 536, 538.   6 Gorton, Incorruptible Key, sig. Gg2r; CWGW, vol. 1, 358.

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  7 For links between Winstanley’s theology and social vision, see A. Bradstock, ‘Theological Aspects of Winstanley’s Writing’, Prose Studies 36 (2014), 32–42.   8 Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory; W. Jordan, ‘The Influence of the West Indies on the Origins of New England Slavery’, William and Mary Quarterly 18 (1961), 245 n. 8; M. Burnham, ‘Samuel Gorton’s Leveller Aesthetics and the Economics of Colonial Dissent’, William and Mary Quarterly 67 (2010), 433–58; Donoghue, Fire under the Ashes, 239–76.   9 A. Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge, 1981); C. Marsh, The Family of Love in English Society, 1550–1630 (Cambridge, 1994). 10 J. Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed (London, 1648), second pagination, sig. Aa3r; G. LaFantasie (ed.), The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols (Providence, 1988), vol. 1, 215; S. Rutherford, A Survey of the Spirituall Antichrist (London, 1648), sig. dv. 11 A. Hessayon, ‘Winstanley and Baptist Thought’, Prose Studies 36 (2014), 15–31. 12 N. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA, 1972), 44–58; G. Sabine (ed.), The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Ithaca, 1941), 28–9. 13 D. Como, ‘The Family of Love and the Making of English Revolutionary Religion: the Confession and “Conversions” of Giles Creech’, The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 48 (2018), 560, 567, 593. 14 P. Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford, 2001). 15 Key records for Gorton’s early life are abstracted in G. Andrews Moriarty, ‘Genealogical Research in England’, New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 82 (1928), 185–93, 333–42. 16 TNA, PROB 11/169/201. 17 G.D. Ramsey, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York, 1965), 131–8; E. Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester, 1985), 215–18. 18 London Metropolitan Archives [LMA], P69/MRY10/A/001/MS011529, fol. 72v. 19 For the marriage portion, see TNA, PROB 11/157/40. 20 J.D. Alsop, ‘Ethics in the Marketplace: Gerrard Winstanley’s London Bankruptcy, 1643’, Journal of British Studies 28 (1989), 97–119; J.D. Alsop, ‘Revolutionary Puritanism in the Parishes? The Case of St Olave, Old Jewry’, London Journal 15 (1990), 29–37; R.J. Dalton, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: the Experience of Fraud 1641’, Historical Journal 34 (1991), 973–84; J.D. Alsop, ‘A High Road to Radicalism? Gerrard Winstanley’s Youth’, Seventeenth Century 9 (1994), 11–24; J.D. Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: What Do We Know of His Life’, Prose Studies 22 (1999), 19–36; J. Gurney, Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution (Manchester, 2007). 21 Gurney, Brave Community, 60–89 (arguing the father was Edmund, not Edward, as some have claimed). 22 J. Rutt (ed.), Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., 4 vols (London, 1828), vol. 1, 156. 23 Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’, 22–5; Alsop, ‘Revolutionary Puritanism’.

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24 See especially P. Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent, 1560–1662 (Stanford, 1970); P. Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century England (Stanford, 1985). For communal reading and repetition, see A. Cambers, Godly Reading: Print, Manuscript and Puritanism in England, 1580–1720 (Cambridge, 2011). 25 Lake, Boxmaker’s Revenge, 198 and passim; P. Lake and D. Como, ‘“Orthodoxy” and its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground”’, Journal of British Studies 39 (2000), 34–70. 26 Seaver, Puritan Lectureships. 27 D. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford, 2004). 28 D. Como and P. Lake, ‘Puritans, Antinomians and Laudians in Caroline London: the Strange Case of Peter Shaw in Its Contexts’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 50 (1999), 684–715; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 66–7, 317–18, 334–48; D.  Como, ‘City on the Other Hill: the Plough Patent, the Company of Husbandmen, and a Radical Puritan Colonization Project’, New England Quarterly 92 (2019), 348–90. 29 TNA, E 334/19, fol. 227r; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 316–18. 30 TNA, E179/147/585 (for Rowland Wilson’s Cateaton residence); A.W. Hughes Clarke (ed.), The Register of St. Lawrence Jewry, London. 1538–1676, Publications of the Harleian Society, 70 (1940), 41–2; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 63–4. 31 Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses ... The Second Volume (London, 1692), 450. For Pordage’s London activities, see Como, ‘Giles Creech’, 562–5. 32 LMA, P69/OLA2/B/001/MS04415/001, fols 33v, 43v, 60v; P69/OLA2/A/002/ MS04400/001, 129–31. 33 LJ 5:667. 34 J.F. Merritt, ‘Religion and the English Parish’, in A. Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, Volume 1: Reformation and Identity c. 1520–1662 (Oxford, 2017), 137. 35 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 59–66, 486–90; Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 142–3; Como, ‘Creech’, 596. 36 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 219–25; cf. E. Allen, ‘John Everard, 1584–1641’, ODNB, which corrects important details. 37 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 66. 38 Ibid., 219–65. 39 D. Como, Radical Parliamentarians and the English Civil War (Oxford, 2018), 57–62, 143, 305–6. 40 TNA, PROB 11/157/40. 41 Gurney, Brave Community, 67–9, for William’s wife, the midwife Susan King. Their daughter, Susan or Susannah, was seventeen in 1630. 42 TNA, PROB 11/157/40. 43 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G4/57/1–2; C 2/ChasI/G27/34. 44 LMA, P69/OLA2/B/001/MS04415/001, fol. 60v.

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45 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G20/44, for Aldgate. 46 TNA, PROB 11/200/73. 47 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G20/44. 48 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G20/44. The release was allegedly dated 18 June 1635: G. Brayton, A Defence of Samuel Gorton (Providence, 1883), 6, 15. 49 TNA, PROB 11/169/201. 50 G. Walker, An exhortation to his Dearely beloved Countrimen (n.p., n.d.). 51 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G20/44. 52 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G4/57 (showing he lived in Stratford by Feb. 1636); TNA, C 2/ ChasI/G20/44. 53 This date was offered by A. Gorton, The Life and Times of Samuel Gorton (Philadelphia, 1907), 13, and widely accepted thereafter. 54 [S. Gorton], Simplicities Defence against Seven-Headed Policy (London, 1646), 2–3. For Boston’s controversies, see M.P. Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts (Princeton, 2002). 55 For his trip from Plymouth to Boston during Vane’s governorship (which ended 17 May 1637), see TNA, C 2/ChasI/G20/44; see also N. Shurtleff and D. Pulsifer (eds), Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, 12 vols (Boston, 1855–61), vol, 1, 60–1. 56 Cotton, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed, second pagination, sig. Aa3r. 57 TNA, C 2/ChasI/G20/44. Vane’s governorship ended on 17 May 1637. Reportedly, while in England in mid-1647, Gorton remotely directed Duckinfeild’s release copied into colony records at Newport, presumably to inoculate himself against legal action. Brayton, Samuel Gorton, 6, 15–16. 58 Como and Lake, ‘Strange Case’, 686–7, 709. 59 P. Seaver, ‘Laud and the Livery Companies’, in Charles Carlton with Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson, and Joseph S. Block (eds), States, Sovereigns and Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honor of A.J. Slavin (Stroud, 1998), 225–6. 60 Como and Lake, ‘Strange Case’, 704–5, 714–15. 61 W. Orme (ed.), Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin (London, 1823), 11–12. St Michael’s Sunday lecture was held at 6 a.m., for which see J.G. White, The Churches & Chapels of Old London (London, 1901), 16. There was also a Sunday lecture at St Peter Cornhill, but it began at 10 a.m. 62 CWGW, vol. 1, 265, 567, where Winstanley bemoaned his past as a ‘Professor’, a label of godly self-description. 63 Guildhall Library, Microfilm 351, Merchant Taylors’ Presentment Books, vol.  2, 21 Feb. 1637/8. For Wells’s residence, see TNA, E179/251/22 (cordwainers), fol. 114r. Completion of his term with Wells might suggest Gater and Winstanley were alienated (see Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’, 23). 64 Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley’, 25; Gurney, Brave Community, 70, suggests he arrived by Christmas 1638. 65 CWGW, vol. 1, 5–6. 66 LMA, DL/A/D/002/MS10091/021, fol. 184v; Clarke (ed.), Register of St. Lawrence Jewry, 33.

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Empire of heresy 261

67 Gurney, Brave Community, 65–9, 216–17; J.D. Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: Religion and Respectability’, Historical Journal 28 (1985), 705–9. 68 Como, Blown by the Spirit, 161–2; Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 186–94; Como, ‘The Family of Love’, 560, 567, 593 69 Como, Radical Parliamentarians, 180–212; Como, ‘The Family of Love’, 580–3. Intriguingly, a ‘Susanah King’ was among the first wave of Londoners rebaptized in 1642: Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in the Light of Recent Research (1550–1641), 2 vols (Cambridge, 1912), vol. 2, 304. 70 Alsop, ‘Ethics in the Marketplace’; Dalton, ‘Experience of Fraud’; J.D. Alsop, ‘Gerrard Winstanley: A Reply’, Historical Journal 38 (1995), 1013–15. Cf. J. Gurney, ‘Postscript: William King, Gerrard Winstanley and Cobham’, Prose Studies 22 (1999), 42–6; Barbados Department of Archives, RB 3/2, 12. 71 CWGW, vol. 1, 510–11; vol. 2, 80.

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Index

Abad, Camilo 206 Act for the Quiet Enjoyment of Sequestered Parsonages 123 Act of Uniformity 145, 148–9 Acts and Monuments 45, 160 see also Book of Martyrs Alsop, J.D. 244–5 anabaptism 242, 256 antinomianism 247, 252, 254 Arminianism 121, 138 A Seasonable Exhortation of Sundry Ministers 143–4 Ashe, Simeon, 143 Askew, Anne 204 Aston, (Sir) Thomas 5, 71 Authorized Version (Bible) 39, 66, 67 Bacon, (Sir) Francis 81, 129 Bacon, Robert 80, 81, 84 Bankes, John 107 Baronius, Cesare 124 Bastwick, John 11, 141–2 Bates, William 142 Baxter, Richard 120, 123, 141, 143–5, 152–3 Beasley, A.W. 224, 227, 230 Bennett, Gareth 164 Bernard, Richard 59, 69, 70 Betteridge, Maurice 63 Bible 26, 124 theft of 37–54 concordances of 55–76 see also Authorized Version; Bishops’ Bible; Douai Old

Testament; Geneva Bible; Great Bible; Matthew Bible; Rheims New Testament Bishops’ Bible 62, 66 Bloch, Marc 225 Bodin, Jean 182 Bond and Act of Association 198 Book of Common Prayer 43, 145 Book of Martyrs 45 Boru, Brian 184, 186 Bourdieu, Pierre 21–5 Bowden, Caroline 204 Brent, Nathaniel 236 Brough, William 245, 254 Brownrigg, (Bishop) Ralph 123 Budé, Guillaume 124 Buckingham, duke of 106–8, 119, 223–4 Burbage, Richard 130 Burgess, Anthony 143 Burton, Henry 11, 142 Calamy, Edmund 142, 144–5, 152–3 Calvert, George 78, 81 Camerarius, Joachim 117 Camerarius, Philip 225 Candler, John 149 Canny, Nicholas 186 Cappur, John 84, 85 Carew, (Sir) George 191–3 Carleton, (Sir) Dudley 78, 82, 91, 231 Cartwright, Thomas 5 Carvajal y Mendoza, Luisa de 27, 203–19 composition of autobiography 206–9 exemplarity 209–11, 215

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Index 263

Catholicism 1, 4, 51, 63, 66–7, 70, 204–6, 210, 217 anti- 15, 45–6, 51, 57, 62–4, 68, 148, 153 anti-Protestantism 64 and bible 39, 45, 65–6 and Irish succession 186–7, 196 and missionary work 64–5, 204 in scholarship 8, 12, 15, 204 and women 204–5 Ceart 190–1, 193, 196 Ceart Uí Néill 186, 190 Cecil, William 15 Chamberlain, John 234 Charles I 2, 86, 104, 106, 107, 119, 120, 126–7, 143, 223, 231 Charles II 139–40, 151, 153 Church of England 118, 121–2, 132, 138–9, 145, 147, 150–3, 159, 167 Cicero 124 Civil War 2, 5, 29, 102, 103, 106, 111, 120, 139, 141, 153, 247 Clarendon Code 148 Clarke, John 69 Clarke, Samuel 138, 140 Clitherow, Margaret 29, 205 Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh 186 Cogswell, Tom 221 Coke, (Sir) John 103 Collinson, Patrick 78 Conant, John 150, 152–3 conformism 1, 4 Congregationalists 139, 145, 147, 149–52 Conventicle Acts 148 Convention Parliament 144–5 Cooke, William 146 Corona Regia 224–5 Cosin, John 147 Cotton, Clement 66–9, 71 Cotton, (Sir) Dodmore 82 Cotton, John 242, 253 Coulton, Richard 43 Counter-Reformation 204 Court and Character of King James 117 Cram, David 56

Cressy, David 44 Creswell, Joseph 209 Crispe, Tobias 247 Croft, Herbert 147 Cromwell, Richard 143 Crossman, Samuel 149–50, 152–3 Cruz, Anne 206 Cust, Richard 97–8, 102 Dalton, R.J. 244 Davenport, John 246 De Krey, Gary 139, 152 Delaguila, (Don) John 195 Denison, Stephen 67, 246, 254 D’Ewes, Simonds 225 Diggers 241, 245, 256 Dillingham, John 118 Dod, John 153 Doone, John 37 Douai Old Testament 66 Downame, John 67–8, 71 Duckinfeild, Robert 250–3 East India Company 77–90 internal politics 87–9 letters of 85–6 national and international role 90 and parliament 80, 82, 86, 89 Edward VI 60 Elias, Norbert 161 Eliot, (Sir) John 109 Elizabeth I 2, 5, 45, 62, 68, 160, 182–3, 197, 223, 235 Emarkoff, Ivan 24 English Revolution 110, 121, 123–4, 139, 153, 241 Essex, countess of 230 Essex, earl of 230 Estienne, Robert 63 Etherington, John 246, 254 Everarde, (Dr) John 248, 255–6 familism 242–3, 246–7, 254 Family of Love 242 Fiennes, William 118 Finch, (Sir) John 109 flaitheas 188–90, 193, 195–6, 199

264

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Foxe, John 55 Frewen, Accepted 145 Fulke, William 65–6 Fuller, Thomas 117, 120–1, 123, 131–2 Gardiner, S.R. 115 Gardiner, Stephen 55, 58–9, 68 Garnet, Henry 210 Gataker, Thomas 132 Gater, Sarah 244–5 Gauden, John 120–1, 141, 144–5 Geertz, Clifford 21 Geneva Bible 61–3 George I 158 Giddens, Anthony 25 Glorious Revolution 29, 159 Goffman, Erving 161 Goldie, Mark 138 Goodman, Godfrey 117 Goodwin, John 142 Gordon Riots 46 Gorton, Samuel 28, 241–57 in America 252–3 business troubles 250–1 spiritual influences 246–9 Granada, Luis de 207 Grand Remonstrance 119 Great Bible 58 Great Contract 230 Green, Ian 56 Gregory, Brad 206 Greif, Avner 24 Grindal, (Archbishop) Edmund 153 Gurney, John 244 Gwalter Lynne, 60 Habermas, Jürgen 8 Hacket, John 13, 115–33, 147–8, 152 religious controversy 120–4 on John Williams 118–22 sources used 125–32 Scrinia Reserata 115–33 holograph of 115–16 literary qualities 124–5 Hakewill, William 105 Hammond, Henry 120

Index Hampton, Stephen 139 Harding, Thomas 64 Harington, (Sir) John 225–6 Hartlib, Samuel 69 Henchman, Humphrey 144 Henry VIII 38, 60, 185 Henstock, Christopher 206 Herry, R.F. 55–6, 63, 66, 68 Hessayon, Ariel 242 Heylyn, Peter 117, 126 Hoadly, Benjamin 158–72 preaching 164 print culture 166–8 public presence 165 as symbol 168 visual representations of 169 Hoadly, John 164–5 Hobbes, Thomas 103 Hodges, Thomas 247–8, 255–6 Hooker, Richard 131 House of Commons 97–111, 168 consensus in 104–10 divisions in 101–2, 105–10 honour in 103–9 and post-revisionism 97–100, 102 and revisionism 98–100 status in 100–10 House of Lords 102, 107–9, 140, 164, 169 Howard, (Sir) Robert 108 Hughes, Ann 97–8, 102, 153 Hughes, Owen 150–2 Humble Petition and Advice 123 Hutchinson, Anne 252 Hutton, Mathew 153 Independents 142–5, 148 Interregnum 133, 138, 153 Irish Rebellion (1641) 45 James I/VI 5, 27, 81, 104, 107, 121, 124–6, 128–9, 185, 197, 203–4, 220–37 libels against 223–9 medical crisis 231–6 medical diagnosis of 229–30 royal ideals 221–3



Index 265

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James, Mervyn 103 Jenkyn, William 143 Kennett, White 164 Kiffin, William 254 King, (Bishop) John 234 King, Susannah 249, 255 King, William 249, 255 Kinsale 184, 195 Kishlansky, Mark 98, 99, 103, 110–11 Knights, Mark 169 Krieken, Robert van 161 Kyle, Chris 100 Lake, Peter 1–30, 138, 140, 162–3, 204–5, 210, 243, 246, 254 All Hail to the Archpriest 16 Bad Queen Bess? 9, 11, 19 The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat 13 The Boxmaker’s Revenge 18, 243, 246 and post-revisionism 4–7, 12–13, 26 on the public sphere 3, 8–29 Laud, (Archbishop) William 67–70, 116, 118, 121–4, 127 Laudabiliter 184, 187, 196 Laudianism 1, 4, 51, 57, 68, 70, 108, 116, 120–3, 140–1, 151 anti- 140–2 and concordances 67–70 legacy of 120–4 and puritanism 141–2, 151, 153 in scholarship 1, 2, 4, 6, 8 Lebor na Cert 186, 190 Legon, Edward 130 Leicester’s Commonwealth 8 L’Estrange, Hamon 116, 117, 119 Lestrange, Nicholas 129 Levellers 242 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 21 Lilburne, John 11 Lilti, Antoine 160 Lipsius, Justus 129 Lloyd, William 162 Lockett, Hugh 84, 88 Lombard, Peter 187 Long Parliament 122

Long Reformation 37, 138, 140, 154, 159, 162 Love, Christopher 143 Lowther, John 108 Mackenzie, Cameron 62, 63, 65 Maginn, Christopher 187 Manningham, John 129–30 Mantel, Hilary 220–1 Manton, Thomas 143 Maplett, John 249, 255 Marwick, Alice 161 Mary I 62, 186 Mason, Matthew 233 Matthew Bible 38, 57 Mauger, Matthew 43 Mayerne, Theodore de 227–31 Melanchthon, Philip 117 Merbecke, John 55, 58–60 Meriton, George 44 Micanzio, Fulgenzio 117 Milward, Richard 128 Misselden, Edward 82, 91 More, Henry 45 More, (Sir) Thomas 129 Morley, George 145 Mun, Thomas 86 Mush, John 205 Mytens, Daniel 224 Narveson, Kate 59 Naunton, (Secretary) Robert 232 Neville, Mary 210 Newell, William 149 Niclaes, Hendrik 242 Nine Years’ War 182–3, 185–7, 191, 193, 196, 198 Nye, Philip 254 Oates, Titus 11 Oath of Covenant 142 Ó Cearnaigh, Seaán 189 Ó Cléirigh, Luaghaidh 188–9, 195, 197 Beatha Aodha Ruaidh Uí Dhomhnaill 188, 195 O’Connor, Tom 187 O’Donnell, Red Hugh 181–99

266

Index

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Óg, Cúchonnacht 197 Óg Mac, Fearghal 188 Ó hEoghusa, Eochaidh 188 Old Bailey 43 O’Neill, Hugh 181–99 Overall, John 121 Overbury, (Sir) Thomas 129 Parliament 15, 27, 80, 82, 86, 89, 99–100, 104, 106, 118, 120, 122, 125, 141–3, 144–5, 148, 167 see also Convention Parliament; House of Commons; House of Lords; Long Parliament; Protectorate Parliament Peacey, Jason 28 Peltonen, Markku 99–100 Perkins, William 121 Perron, Jacques Davy du 128 Personal Rule 141, 153 Persons, Robert 209 Peters, Timothy 230 Petition of Right 109 Philip II 181, 183, 186, 195–7 Philip III 189, 195–7, 215 Pincus, Steve 23 Pithou, François 128 Pliny (the Younger) 124 Panegyricus 124 Plume, Thomas 115, 126–7, 130–2 Poole, Matthew 143 post-Reformation 7, 9, 11–12, 15, 17, 19, 29, 162–3, 206 post-revisionism 2–4, 6, 12, 20, 26, 29, 97–9, 106, 110 Prayer Book 64, 67 presbyterianism 4, 123, 138, 142–3, 147–8, 153 Prior, Matthew 158 profanation 26, 38, 44, 51 Protectorate Parliament 123 Prynne, William 11 public sphere 3, 8–12, 15, 17–23, 26, 29, 159, 163, 168, 182, 234, 241 puritanism 1, 4, 17, 121–3, 138–41, 144–7, 151–4, 242, 257

anti- 67, 120–3 civil war 242 and interpretive resources 57, 63–4, 68 and Laudianism 57, 68, 70, 140–1 in London 246–52 moderate 17, 138–54 in New England 252–3 and publicity 18 intra-puritan disputes 243, 246 radical 241–3, 249, 257 in scholarship 1, 4, 6, 8, 13, 16, 138–40 Pym, John 119 Questier, Michael 13, 29, 204–5, 210 Rapple, Rory 187 Redworth, Glyn 204, 206, 208 Reformation 2, 37–8, 44, 51, 138, 204 see also Counter-Reformation; Long Reformation; post-Reformation Reid, Christopher 43 Restoration 138–40, 142, 145–53 revisionists 2, 20, 21, 97, 99, 100, 106, 110 Reynolds, Edward 140–54 and dissent 149–50 irenicism 141–2, 146 moderation 141, 146, 151–3 sermons of 142, 144, 146–8 Rheims New Testament 64–5 Rhodes, Elizabeth 206 Rich, Nathaniel 108 Ríoghdhacht 189–90, 195–6 Riveley, Benedict 151 Rivers, Earl 171 Roe, (Sir) Thomas 81 Rushworth, John 117 Russell, Conrad 98–9 Rutherford, Samuel 242 Sacheverell, Henry 158–72 and print culture 166–7 sermons 163–4 as symbol 168 visual representations 169

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Salisbury, earl of 78, 81 Sancroft, William 146 Sander, Nicholas 64 Sanderson, Robert 124, 144–5, 147 Sanderson, William 116, 117, 119 Sandys, (Sir) Edwin 105 Santa Cruz, Melchor 129 Sarpi, Paolo 117 Sartre, Jean-Paul 21 Savile, (Sir) John 109 Savoy Conference 124, 145, 149 Scaliger, Joseph 128–9 sceanna 181 Seaman, Lazarus 143 Selden, John 128 Seneca 124 Sewell, William H. 24–5 Shakespeare, William 5, 16, 130 Shamir, Avner 45 Sharpe, Kevin 98 Shaw, Peter 246, 254, 256 Sheehan, James 187 Sheldon, Gilbert 148 Sherburne, Edward 77–91 information management 84–8 as political liaison 81–2, 90 and politics of East India Company 87–9 power of 90–1 Sherley, (Sir) Robert 82 Sidney, (Sir) Henry 190 Sidney, (Sir) Philip 129 Smethwick, Thomas 88 Smith, George 118 Somer, Paul Van 224 Southcombe, George 139 Southwell, (Sir) Robert 151 Spanish Match 118 Spencer, John 150 Spurr, John 139 Spurstowe, William 143 Stallybrass, Peter 56, 63 Stationers’ Company 67 Stillingfeet, Edward 144 Stuart, Mary 15 Swinglehurst, Richard 84, 88

Index 267 Ten Articles 58 The Modern Champions 169 Thorowgood, Thomas 148 Thou, Jacques Auguste de 128 Tillotson, (Archbishop) John 115 Tillyard, Stella 160 Tomkins, Alannah 47 Trott, F.J. 120, 122 Tuck, Richard 182–3 Tuke, Thomas 247 universalism 256 Valerius, Maximus 129 Vassan, Jean de 128, 130 Vassan, Nicolas de 128, 130 Verstegan, Richard 129 Vertunien, François 128 Vines, Richard 143 Visitaçao, Maria da 208 Waker, Nathaniel 246–7 Walker, George 246, 251, 253–4 Walpole, Michael 207, 216 Walsh, Paul 189 Walsham, Alexandra 64 Walton, Izaak 131–2 Ward, Samuel 121 Ward, Seth 147, 152 Weldon, (Sir) Anthony 118, 227 Weston, (Sir) Richard 109 Wheelwright, John 252 Whitgift, (Archbishop) John 5 Wilkes, John 11 Wilkins, John 55–6, 141, 148, 152–3 Williams, John 13, 115–33 Williams, Roger 242 Wilson, Ann 249 Wilson, Arthur 117, 119 Wilson, Thomas 55 Winstanley, Gerrard 28, 241–57 as apprentice 254–5 scholarship on 244 spiritual influences 254–6 Wotton, Anthony 246 Yale, Elizabeth 131