ffurst we present that the Roode loft stode vpe in carved work in the ffurst yeare of the Queenes maiestie Reigne that nowe is and was broken downe and sold and the mony to the use of the poore and paying wages for taking downe to carpenters and masons and of the surplasage accompt was made by John Taylyer then being churche warden to master Bentham master ffleetwod and mast everyngton then beying visitors.20
At Grantham, too, we find them selling ‘a silver and copper shrine called senet Wulffran shrine’ . . . ‘and bought wythe the pyrce thereof a silver pott pcell Glyt an [sic] an ewer of silver for the mynistracion of the holye and most sacred supper of our lorde Jesus Crist called the holye comanyon’.21
These visitations, and the enforcement of the injunctions, should not be seen in purely religious terms. It is true that many of the Elizabethan bishops, and the enforcers they employed to visit parishes and ensure the destruction of the ‘monuments of superstition’, were motivated by Protestant zeal. But during a decade when Mary, Queen of Scots was seen as a constant threat to Elizabeth’s throne, the government was terrified by the political implications of Catholicism. It did not want a repetition of what had happened upon the death of Edward VI when, for example, at Cratfield the reredos of a medieval high altar had been brought out of hiding from the vicarage barn; or at Long Metlow, or Morebath, where much-loved vestments, statues, reliquaries and Mass books came out from hiding upon the accession of Mary Tudor.22 It was essential, from a political point of view, for Cecil and Parker to drive forward a much more thoroughgoing destruction of the outward signs of Catholic piety. To this extent, some of the vandalism – the ripping-up of copes and chasubles and the use of missals to line pudding basins – should be seen in the light of those patriotic enthusiasts in 1939–40 who turned signposts the wrong away round to confuse any Nazi storm-troopers who might have come marching down the English roads. The Queen of Scotland, or the armies of France, would not find an England secretly eager to reinstate reliquaries or to reclothe their clergy in Mass vestments, which were by now indelibly associated with intrusions upon the political as well as the religious liberties of the English.
The piety of those for whom holy water stoups, crucifixes or coloured stoles were valuable did not vanish as easily as broken stained glass or a shredded frontal. John Cosin, chaplain to the royalist court in exile during the 1650s and subsequently Bishop of Durham in 1660, looked back on his time as chaplain to Bishop Overall of Norwich (1560–1619) and remembered, for example, how that bishop ignored the Protestantising rubrics of the Settlement and used (as did the Queen herself in the Chapel Royal) the more Catholic order of the 1549 liturgy.23 Bishop Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), who received a supposedly Protestant education from Richard Mulcaster at Merchant Taylors’ School (see Chapter 6), when he became Bishop of Ely had ‘an altar with two silver candlesticks on it. A silver gilt canister for the wafers . . . A chalice with Christ engraven on it’ and other tokens of the belief, expressed in his Preces Privatae, in the:
Catholic Church
Eastern, Western, British.
To a Roman cardinal, Andrewes would write, ‘Our Bishops have been ordained in each case by three bishops and by true bishops. I say by true bishops for they were ordained by yours, unless yours are not true bishops.’ Archbishop Laud, in the reign of Charles I, could insist that ‘The altar is the greatest place of God’s residence upon earth, for there it is . . . This is my body.’24 And again:
In the sacrament is the very true and natural body and blood of Christ, even that which was born of the Virgin Mary which ascended into heaven, which sitteth at the right hand of God the Father, which shall come to judge the quick and the dead: only we differ ‘in modo’ [from Roman Catholics] in the way and manner of being we confess all the one thing to be in The Sacrament, and dissent in the manner of being there.25
What Hilaire Belloc called ‘the Catholic thing’ – Mass, the recitation of the hours of prayer, confession – continued within the Church of England, as did the Catholic order of bishops, priests and deacons, even if there were times when it became an underground stream invisible from the surface. It is often assumed, by Roman Catholic or secularist historians, that idleness and cowardice explained the fact that so few clergy and laity stood out against the Elizabethan Settlement. ‘Out of 9,400 clergy in England only 192 refused the oath of supremacy.’26 One reason for this could have been that, whatever Protestant resolutions were being passed in London, and whatever was demanded by bishops and official busybodies, the people of England continued to find Catholic sustenance in their national Church. A modern historian asks how ‘one of the most Catholic countries became one of the least.’27 One answer to this is that it did not, but that its Catholicism found it could survive, under the Protestant dispensation of the Elizabethan Church. Another answer is that the Reformation took a very, very long time. Yet another answer is that only a minority of zealots – and those chiefly in the North – felt it was necessary to ally themselves with the Queen of Scots or the King of Spain or the Pope of Rome in order to worship God in an English church; and the more these foreign potentates threatened England, the more entrenched the Protestantism of the English became.
But, as the parish visitations to the diocese of Chichester revealed, as late as 1569 the Reformation was not greeted with enthusiasm in all areas of the national Church. In the cathedral itself was one William Weaye, appointed by the Henrician Bishop Sherburne to a clerkship and summoned before the dean and chapter on 13 October 1569. It was charged that he had in his possession certain Catholic theological and devotional books and a portable altar. He did not deny it, and when asked what he thought of Purgatory, the veneration of the saints, the Mass and transubstantiation, he admitted that he ‘lyketh of these’. ‘He believes as the Catholic Church does, whereof he thinks the Pope to be head, or else there should be many heads if every prince were supreme governor in their own realm.’ Poor old Weaye was deprived of his clerkship and fined thirty shillings ‘out of hand’,28 but for every case brought before the courts there must have been hundreds where a blind eye was turned to Catholicism being practised within the Church of England.
The archbishop’s commissary, visiting in 1569, concluded sadly:
except it be about Lewes and a little in Chichester, the whole diocese is very blind and superstitious for want of teaching.
They use in many places ringing between morning and the litany, and all the night following All Saints’ day, as before in time of blind ignorance and superstition taught by the pope’s clergy.
Many bring to church the old popish Latin primers, and use to pray upon them all the time when the lessons are being read.
Some old folks and women used to have beads in the churches, but these I took away from them but they have some yet at home in their houses.29
In the country parishes of Sussex there was little contact with the outside world. For much of the year the few existent roads were impassable. No wonder that twelve years after they had been made illegal in London, the tiny Sussex parish of Tarring should still be using ‘vestments and the old mass book’.
Eamon Duffy, a modern historian of the sixteenth-century Church, ended his haunting account The Stripping of the Altars, which is the story of the Reformation: ‘Cranmer’s sombrely magnificent prose, read week by week, entered and possessed their minds, and became the fabric of their prayer, the utterance of their most solemn and their most vulnerable moments.’30 But this was not something that happened overnight. The outward events of the political world had far more to do with this than the often Cambridge-educated Lutheran or Calvinist preachers sent to unresponsive congregations from London to the remoter corners of England. If the English stopped praying from Latin primers or muttering over beads (and not all did), it was not necessarily because they had been bossed by home-grown Protestants. It was because if there was anything they resented more than the busybodydom of an ‘archbishop’s commissary’, it was the threat to their own queen’s authorit
y by the Queen of Scotland or some other foreign power. The successive popes did far more to make England Protestant. At home, the system of double-think, of turning a blind eye, of nodding and winking, which has often made English life so confusing for social observers, left their inner and religious life rather more ambiguous, rather less easy to categorise than the busybodies would have liked. This was certainly true of the 1560s before events made life for crypto-Catholics much more difficult. For the first dozen years of the reign it was perfectly in order to pay lip service to the new Church order and, if challenged, to offer a bribe or a fine, to carry on regardless.
‘As for the commissaries court,’ opined The Admonition to the Parliament of 1572, ‘that is but a pettie little stinking ditche, that floweth oute of that former great puddle, robbing Christes church of lawfull pastors, of watchfull Seniors and Elders, and carefull Deacons.’31
But it would give a misleading impression to end this chapter on so vinaigrous or negative a tone.
Mandell Creighton, in his superb biography of Queen Elizabeth (1896), said, of the Elizabethan Settlement, ‘England was again independent. Its Church was again free to work out its own problems. Its system has not changed from that day to this.’32
It is hard to imagine any member of the Church of England in the twenty-first century who would be able to echo the great Victorian bishop’s words. Since the advent of a multicultural Britain, the ‘C of E’ has become one sect among many, even though its technical and legal status might remain still as it was in the reign of the first Elizabeth. Although, wearing Elizabethan costume, Church of England bishops still, at the time of writing, sit as of right in the British Parliament, this cannot be for long. Their presence there can scarcely be justified to the great majority of citizens who do not share their faith. This is one of the most fundamental signs that the England created in Elizabeth’s reign has been brought to an end. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Elizabethan Settlement in the Church was not a wholly spiritual thing. Elizabeth’s national Church was a coalition. It was not tolerant of those, such as Roman Catholics or Puritans, who denied its grounds for existence. It did, however, for the huge majority of citizens, teach the necessity of two incompatible parties learning to live together. To this degree, it is possible to see in the workings of the Elizabethan Church the ancestry of a later ‘consensus’ politics.
6
The New Learning
RICHARD MULCASTER, THE observant recorder of the pageantry and celebrations on Queen Elizabeth’s coronation day, was a northerner and an Old Etonian. His father was one of the two Members of Parliament for Carlisle, and Mulcaster himself would serve in the same capacity in the first of Elizabeth’s parliaments.1
In 1561 he was chosen as the first headmaster of the newly founded Merchant Taylors’ School in the City of London. The building selected for the grammar school, at the expense of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, was a house formerly belonging to the Dukes of Buckingham at the Manor of the Rose in the parish of St Lawrence-Poultney. In Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, the duke’s ownership of the house is still remembered:
Nor long before your highness sped to France
The Duke, being at The Rose, within the parish
St Lawrence Poultney, did of me demand
What was the speech among the Londoners
Concerning the French journey . . .2
The Merchant Taylors’ School – destined to become, almost instantaneously, one of the most prestigious of English Renaissance schools – was only one of dozens that were founded, or reconstituted, in these times. John Colet (1467–1519), friend of Erasmus and Sir Thomas More, had led the way with the foundation of St Paul’s School in London in 1509 – with the trustees being the Mercers’ Company. With the coming of the Reformation and the removal of monastery schools and charity schools, the need to found new educational establishments became urgent. The monasteries were dissolved between 1536 and 1541. The Charities Act of Henry VIII left many a teacher in a charity school penniless. For example, Libeus Byard, the chantry chaplain at Stamford, Lincolnshire, earned his living as the teacher of young boys, such as William Cecil, the future Secretary to Elizabeth I.3 Some of the educational damage done by the removal of Church teachers was repaired in Henry VIII’s own time, with the foundation of fine schools such as the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle-on-Tyne. The school song, composed in the 1920s by the school’s historian and history master, J.B. Brodie, was historically accurate when it proclaimed:
Horsley, a Merchant Venturer bold,
Of good Northumbrian strain,
Founded our rule and built our school
In bluff King Harry’s reign . . .4
Yet though Henry promised to raise a subsidy through Parliament to fund schools, he did little about it, and most educational initiatives of the time came from benevolent private means, such as those of Robert Thorn, a Spanish oil merchant and soap-maker who – as it says on his Latin monument in the Temple Church in London – ‘devised certain property for the erection, foundation, continuance and support of a Free Grammar School to be established in Bristol’, his home town.5
Even more schools were rescued, reconstituted or founded in the reign of Edward VI: famous establishments such as Sherborne and the King Edward VI School in Birmingham, as well as many smaller ones. Protector Somerset did much to undo the damage of Henry VIII’s Chantries Act and to re-endow local schools. ‘He should be regarded,’ wrote one historian, ‘as the true patron saint of the Grammar Schools of Grantham and Louth, and Morpeth, of Birmingham and Macclesfield, and of the Public Schools of Sedbergh, Shrewsbury and Sherborne.’ (Of course the distinction between grammar schools and ‘public schools’ is a Victorian one. In the Tudor age Sir Philip Sidney [Shrewsbury] and William Shakespeare [Stratford-upon-Avon Grammar School], whatever differences in the social status of their families, would have made none between their schools.)
There is a natural tendency to see the Tudor passion for education as a Protestant phenomenon, but the distinction is not necessarily a fair one. Colet, after all, was a Catholic. In regions where Catholicism persisted during or after the landmark dates of the Reformation, there was no less zeal than in Protestant regions for maintaining or founding schools. Sir Richard Towneley, for example, a devoted Catholic, together with the families of Haydock, Habergham, Woodneff and Whitacre, was among the founders and first governors of the grammar school at Burnley in Lancashire. ‘The school which was refounded was possibly intended to keep alive the Catholic Faith.’6 The founder of the grammar school at Appleby, in Westmorland – Robert Langton, Archdeacon of Dorset – became a monk of the Charterhouse in London and an Elizabethan headmaster of the school. And John Boste, Master of the school, was a convert to Catholicism who was canonised in 1970 as one of the forty English and Welsh martyrs steadfast to death for their beliefs.
Even within the Merchant Taylors’ Company itself, with which we began, there was by no means a simple religious mono-culture. The school’s founder is usually named as Sir Thomas White, a Catholic Merchant Taylor who, during the reign of Mary Tudor, had founded St John’s College, Oxford.7 The real founder of the school, however, was a Merchant Taylor of a very different complexion, Richard Hilles. A convinced Protestant, Hilles had taken a leading part in the nomination of Lady Jane Grey as Queen. (He was lucky to receive a pardon from the Queen.) For ten years (1539–49) Hilles had lived in Strasbourg and absorbed the tenets of Calvinism. During Mary’s reign, he had maintained contacts with English Protestant exiles on the continent – men such as Miles Coverdale, the translator of our unforgettable Psalter, as still sung daily in England ‘in quires and places where they sing’; or Edmund Grindal, later Bishop of London and Archbishop of Canterbury under Elizabeth. When Hilles set in train the foundation of the Merchant Taylors’ School he had it in mind to establish a distinctly Protestant school. The Elizabethan schools were nurseries in which the Reformation could be planted and nurtured.
The letters of the Queen�
��s Council to the Archbishop of Canterbury were silent on the subject of any intellectual training for schoolmasters, or on the details of secular life in the schools. What mattered was ‘That all teachers of children shall stir and move them to live and do reverence to God’s true religion now truly set forth by public authority’ and that ‘every parson, vicar and curate shall upon every holy day and every second Sunday in the year hear and instruct the youth of the parish for half an hour at least before evening prayer in the ten commandments, the Articles of the Belief, and the Lord’s Prayer, and diligently examine them and teach the Catechism set forth in the book of public prayer’.8
Just as for the brief years of Mary Tudor’s reign the Catholics had attempted to further their ideas among children, so with the accession of Elizabeth there was a systematic insistence that the children be imbued not only with new learning, but also with the faith of the Reformation. To some extent they went together. Sir John Cheke, Provost of King’s College, ‘Who once taught Cambridge and King Edward Greek’9 (as Milton wrote in a sonnet), was ardent for the Reformation. Mulcaster was at Cheke’s college in Cambridge from 1548 to 1553 and, as well as a mastery of Greek, Latin and Hebrew, which he passed on so successfully to his pupils, he also shared Cheke’s passion for the religion of the continental Reformers.
When the arch-Protestant Bishop of London, Edmund Grindal, made a ‘solempne visitacon’ to the Merchant Taylors’ School, he brought with him as examiners learned Protestants who had gone into exile during Mary’s reign, as he had done himself: in 1562, David Whitehead, Canon Calfhill of Christ Church, and Archdeacon Watts; in 1564, Dean Nowell of St Paul’s and Miles Coverdale himself. They found the children competent in Latin, Greek and Hebrew – Mulcaster had ‘moche profited the schollers there & there for worthy of greate comendacon’. The only feature of Mulcaster’s education to which they took exception was his North Country accent, something shared with the ushers or assistant masters, who ‘therefore did not pronounce so well as those that be brought up in the schools of the south pites of the realme’.10
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