The Elizabethans

by Wilson, A. N.

  22

  Marprelate and Hooker

  SOME OF THE funniest writing of Elizabeth’s reign is to be found in the seven anonymous pamphlets of Martin Marprelate, published on a secret printing press between 1588 and 1589. The object of his satirical abuse is the Church of England, and its bishops in particular. Although the specific matter of the tracts would seem to a modern reader narrowly ecclesiastical – ‘Martin’ is arguing for the abolition of bishops and the setting up of a form of Presbyterianism in England – the pamphlets have a far wider importance in literary and political history. For a start, they are superbly inventive and surreal in their manipulation of language, standing worthy of comparison with the prose of Milton (which they plainly influenced), Dean Swift and – in their gleeful puns and coinages – James Joyce.

  But they are also, from the midst of that repressively censored world, a cry for intellectual and political freedom. At the centre of his target is the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, who in 1586 had persuaded the Council in the Star Chamber (it was not difficult!) to give to himself and John Aylmer, the bustling, aggressive, diminutive Bishop of London, the power of sole censors of all printed material. They had the power – if they did not like what the press was printing – to destroy the press, deface the type, disable the printer and imprison him for up to six months.1 Marprelate cited the case of a Protestant painter, Robert Waldegrave, who:

  dares not show his face for the bloodthirsty desire you have for his life, only for printing of books which toucheth the Bishops’ mitres. You know that Waldegrave’s printing press and letters [i.e. type] were taken away. His press, being timber, was sawn and hewed in pieces. The iron work battered and made unserviceable, his letters melted, with cases and other tools defaced . . . and he himself utterly deprived forever [of] printing again, having a wife and six small children. Will this monstrous cruelty never be revenged, think you?2

  Marprelate pretends to address the archbishop reverently as ‘your Grace’ and ‘your Lordship’, but it isn’t long before the archbishop has become ‘Master Whitgift’ and ‘your Paltripolitanship’ (a coinage suggesting the paltriness of Whitgift and his claims to exercise authority from the Metropolitical See of Canterbury. Whitgift is also addressed as ‘His Canterburinesse’. Doctors of Divinity become ‘Doctors of Divillitie’. And the pamphlets fizz with imagined hecklers in the margins – ‘M. Marprelate you put more then the question in the conclusion of your syllogisme’ – with Marprelate then shouting back at the supposed interruption, ‘This is a pretie matter that standers by must be so busie in other men’s games.’ He represents sniggering and laughter: ‘Tse, tse, tse – hy, hy – py, py. Ha, ha ha.’ No writing of this freshness and spontaneity had ever appeared in English prose, still less in a work whose primary function was religious.

  Marprelate voiced the view, widespread among Puritans, that the laws and censors persecuted Protestantism more vigorously than it condemned papism. Compare the fate of poor Waldegrave having his press, and his livelihood, destroyed, with ‘knave Thackwen the printer, which printed popish and traitorous Welsh books in Wales. Thackwen is at liberty to walk where he will and permitted to make the most he could of his press and letters . . .’ As well as making a strong point about the perils of Protestantism, there was also a brave joke here since Waldegrave was, we presume, the printer of the tract itself. Two presses were involved in the series, one in the possession of John Penry, which was hidden by Elizabeth Crane, a London Puritan in her house in East Molesey, and another that was concealed by a Warwickshire squire called Roger Wigston.

  We can hear in Marprelate the authentic voice of radicalism, who proclaims, ‘Thought is free.’ He is giving witty and fantastical voice to a constituency of opinion that would sail to America in the Mayflower; which would take up arms against Charles Stuart in the Civil Wars; which, among the nonconformists of the eighteenth century, would give birth to more robustly political forms of republicanism and egalitarianism in the writings of Blake and Paine and Shelley.

  Likewise, the response of the Establishment to Marprelate was the classic establishment view that by pulling one thread, episcopacy, the Puritans would undo the whole fabric of society. ‘If this outragious spirit of boldenesse be not stopped speedily,’ opined Thomas Cooper, the Bishop of Winchester, ‘I feare he wil prove himself to bee, not only Marprelate but Mar-prince, Mar-state, Mar-lawe, Mar-magistrate, and all together, until he bring it to an Anabaptisticall equalitie and communite.’ Cooper had reason to complain of Marprelate, who in the tract entitled An Epistle to the Terrible Priests had denounced ‘My Lord of Winchester’ as ‘a monstrous hypocrite’ and ‘a very dunce’.3

  Marprelate, by contrast, saw the bishops themselves as ‘not only traitors against God and His Word, but also enemies to the Prince and to the State’.4

  Despite their best endeavours, they never did find out for certain who wrote the tracts. Nor did the literary historians and detectives of subsequent ages. At least twenty-two candidates have been suggested as the likely author. Leland H. Carlson makes strong claims for Job Throckmorton, an Oxford-educated (the Queen’s College) country gentleman from Haseley in Warwickshire. From the 1570s onwards, Throckmorton wrote many letters and pamphlets insulting the bishops. Carlson makes out a convincing case for stylistic similarity between the anonymous Marprelate and works to which Throckmorton gave his name. He points to the number of allusions to betting and games of chance in both authors; to a similarly knowledgeable use of legal terminology. Both authors like coining words with the preface ‘be’ – Marprelate has ‘bedeaconed, besir, becetyfull’ and Throckmorton ‘beglazed, beprouded, behackled’. Both, tellingly, refer to Dean Bridges of Salisbury as ‘old Lockwood of Sarum’; both denounce the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘a giddie head’ – and there are many other persuasive points of comparison.5

  The most persuasive feature of Carlson’s thesis is that, plainly, Marprelate was not representative of any faction. Though he sided with the Puritans, they distanced themselves from him: they disliked his ribaldry, his bawdry, his satire. Throckmorton, who was a Member of Parliament, believed passionately in free speech for those speaking in the House of Commons and those speaking from a pulpit. He was really a hundred years at least ahead of his time, advocating political ideals that were not achieved until the Bill of Rights and the Toleration Act in the reign of William and Mary.

  Viewed as a campaign on behalf of the Puritans, the Marprelate tracts misfired. The authorities rumbled Throckmorton, but they could not prove his authorship. It may even be the case that the Queen herself was partly amused by the vigour of the tracts, and smiled upon a cousin of a lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton – who was a favourite of the Queen until it was discovered that she had secretly married Sir Walter Raleigh.6

  One of the more remarkable features of the Marprelate controversy was how quickly it burst out of the confines of the Church and became a matter of general public interest. The prelates writhed beneath his lash, but they could not match his wit. The bishops engaged Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe to answer Marprelate in kind. But in a sense this was just what was not needed. The mainstream Puritans shared Marprelate’s view that contemporary Church order should be modelled as simply as possible on the elders, presbyters and deacons mentioned in the New Testament. But they knew that he was not really one of their number. Josias Nichols, a Puritan writing at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, said that the appearance of the Marprelate pamphlets ‘did greatlie astonish us, & verie much demean the righteouesnesse of our cause’. Nichols would never have used Throckmorton’s vivid turns of phrase, which were applied to Puritans as well as prelates. When he visited William Hacket, a self-proclaimed prophet, for instance, Throckmorton likened his prayer to ‘the wildgoose chase, neither heade, nor foote, rime nor reason’. He was amused by ‘the very puffing and swellinge of his face, the staring and goggling of his eies, with his gahstlie [sic] countenance’.7

  The Marprelate episode revealed in
stark and semi-comic clarity that, after thirty years, the Elizabethan Church was very far from being perfect. The experiment, of setting up a Church that was both Catholic and Reformed, might be seen, through Marprelate’s eyes, as a pathetic failure. The bishops had the greatest difficulty in filling the 8,700 parishes of England with educated priests. Far from being good preachers, many of them had the greatest difficulty in reading from the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies.8

  There is an understandable tendency among historians, particularly among those who are not themselves religious, to suppose that the serious contenders in the sixteenth-century debate were, on the one hand, the Puritans, or Calvinists, who wanted a wholesale Reformation; and on the other, the supporters of the Pope, the Counter-Reformation; and the Jesuits. Viewed from this perspective, the Queen’s religion – Henrician Catholicism within a National Church – is seen as a quasi-political compromise, even an expression of religious indifferentism. And the defenders of the position which had been carefully worked out by the National Church, above all Richard Hooker, are seen as wishy-washies, or small-c conservatives who merely wanted to retain the status quo.

  In the case of Richard Hooker (1554?–1600) no judgement could be less accurate or less fair. He is one of the few writers in the English language with claims to be an original theologian. And although the title of his most celebrated work makes it seem as if his interests were limited to the Church, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity is actually a carefully considered philosophical Summa, a great contribution to European thought, which is not merely a defence of the Church of England, but also a synthesis of medieval scholastic thought, radically reworked for the modern age. He was the English Aristotle, interested in everything, temperate, curious, profoundly learned and, by the way, a superb prose writer. In many respects it makes sense to read Hooker beside the Principall Voyages of Hakluyt or the Arcadias of Sidney. In all three writers, we sense the distinctiveness and isolation of England since the Reformation; and yet, with all three, we find acute minds aware of the greater world: in Hakluyt’s case, the larger geography and cosmography; in Sidney’s, the whole world of European humanism and in particular the Italian poetic tradition; in Hooker’s case, a sense of the vast continuing tradition of Christianity, from its earliest biblical origins and its Greek patristic literature through the Western traditions of the Roman Church. Nothing makes Hooker’s Puritan opponents seem more petty-minded or parochial than their being scandalised by his view, expressed in A Learned Discourse of Justification, that Roman Catholics were actually Christians, even if they belonged to a branch of the Church that was flawed. (‘But how many millions of them are known so to have ended their mortal lives, that the drawing of their breath hath ceased with the uttering of this faith, “Christ my Saviour, my Redeemer Jesus!” And shall we say that such did not hold the foundation of Christian faith?’9

  Both to the papists, who considered that the Institution of the Church was of such godly perfection that it could not err, and to the Calvinists, who wanted to destroy all existent Christian traditions and start again in pursuit of some perfect image of the New Testament Church, Hooker wanted to say that all human institutions were by their very nature imperfect. Yet this deeply holy, humble, learned man had a view of the Church that was more philosophically coherent than either of the alternatives on offer. It was not a compromise – still less a fudge – his philosophy. Extremists on either side could dismiss him as ‘Latitudinarian’. Readers of his charming biography by Isaak Walton will treasure the moment, when he was the vicar of Drayton Beauchamp in Buckinghamshire, when his two favourite pupils, Cranmer (great-nephew of the archbishop) and Sandys (son of the Archbishop of York), visited him in his rural fastness and found him in a field reading the odes of Horace while tending his sheep. Hooker belonged to that benign company described by William James as the ‘once born’; and even so sympathetic a commentator as C.S. Lewis could write, ‘Sometimes a suspicion crosses our mind that the doctrine of the Fall did not loom quite large enough in his universe.’ Lewis’s phrase – though he insists it is not his own view of Hooker – ‘a mild eupeptic’ stays in the mind.10

  Hooker came from Exeter, as every visitor to that city, who passes his statue in the Cathedral Close will know. His great-grandfather had been a mayor of the city, but the family had fallen on hard times, and by the time Hooker was a boy, they were poor. His uncle, who somehow knew John Jewel when he was Bishop of Salisbury, asked Jewel to ‘become his patron and prevent him from being a tradesman, for he was a boy of remarkable hopes’.11

  Hooker thereby got a place at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, though making frequent return visits on foot to Exeter to visit his family. He was deeply learned in Hebrew and Greek, and in 1581 took Holy Orders. On 17 March 1584–5 Hooker was appointed as Master of the Temple. It was a baptism of fire. London and the Inns of Court were the centre of religious controversy in England. As we have already noted, the Inns were full of Catholic recusants and their sympathisers; but, on the other side, there were also many ardent Calvinists who wanted the Elizabethan Church rooted out, who objected, on a superficial level, to such things as set forms of liturgy, feast days of the Church other than the Sabbath (Christmas, Easter, and so on, they saw as popish) and the wearing of ceremonial robes such as surplices in church; and who believed that between Apostolic times and the present there had been an ecclesiastical Dark Age, in which the Holy Spirit had not breathed over the ecclesiastical waters. An ardent exponent of this extreme Calvinistic position, directly inspired by the French theologian from his Genevan theocracy, was Walter Travers, afternoon lecturer at the Temple, who had been hoping for the mastership and was angered at being passed over in favour of Hooker. Increasingly the two men appeared to be offering to the congregation of the Temple Church a critique of two opposing views of the sixteenth-century religious dilemma. It was probably painful to the mild-mannered Hooker, but he did not shrink from the controversy. An observer tells us that ‘The pulpit spake pure Canterbury in the morning and Geneva in the afternoon.’12

  But these engagements with Travers laid the foundation of Hooker’s masterwork. When offered a country living – first at Boscombe in Wiltshire and later at Bishopsbourne near Canterbury – Hooker could retreat from the glare of public argy-bargy and concentrate upon his writing. (Friends pitied him for his ill-tempered wife – ‘a clownish silly woman and withal a mere Xanthippe,’ according to Anthony Wood, who is not always a reliable gossip.) There were children, but Hooker was never a healthy person, and this showed with his blotchy, spotty complexion. Presumably he ate unwisely.

  The present book is not the sort of work where it would be appropriate to expound Hooker’s philosophical and religious position in detail. He wrote, ‘Though for no other cause, yet for this; that posterity may know we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream’.13

  Hooker did not share the Puritan fear of the secular polis. He believed that the state was a human construct, and that, while human beings were fallen creatures, they were capable of building rational, rich institutions that enable virtue to flourish. The fact that an institution is of human origin, and human beings are fallen, does not of itself logically demand that all human institutions are inherently evil. Therefore Hooker can reject both the theocracy of Geneva and of Rome. As a follower of Thomas Aquinas, he was dubious about absolute monarchy. He was no lickspittle for the Elizabethan Settlement. He saw the role of the Church, and of individual Christians, as the redemption of public life. Elizabeth was Governor of the Church of (and in) England, but the Church’s life was given to it not by the Crown, but by God. He was ‘High Church’ in so far as he defended such traditions as going to confession, making the sign of the Cross and revering Christ in the Eucharist. But he recognised that how Christians organise their Church is determined by where they find themselves in history. Thus, although he took a high view of the episcopate, he saw bishops – the highest form of priests, since th
ey can themselves make priests – as of the bonum esse of the Church, not of its esse, as a good thing, but they were not the essence of the thing. One could conceive, in other words, of being a Christian without bishops, though it was better to have them. That is, the Church is made by the people of God, in obedience to God; it is not made, as it were, by the magic of sacrament. The Roman Catholics of the Counter-Reformation appeared to be teaching that the priesthood and the Eucharist have, so to say, a life of their own – independent, almost of the people through whom they are mediated. Sacrament, in this view of things, can degenerate into something like magic. Similarly the hierarchical structure of society, in which Hooker deeply believed, can degenerate into tyranny if it is not seen as a contract between all peoples of goodwill.