The Story of Civilization: Volume VII: The Age of Reason Begins

by Will Durant

  The Puritan attack on Elizabeth took form (1569) when the lectures of Thomas Cartwright, professor of theology at Cambridge, stressed the contrast between the presbyter-ian organization of the early Christian Church and the episcopal-ian structure of the Anglican Establishment. Many of the faculty supported Cartwright, but John Whitgift, headmaster of Trinity College, denounced him to the Queen and secured his dismissal from the teaching staff (1570). Cartwright emigrated to Geneva, where, under Théodore de Bèze, he imbibed the full ardor of Calvinist theocracy. Returning to England, he shared with Walter Travers and others in formulating the Puritan conception of the Church. Christ, in their view, had arranged that all ecclesiastical authority should be vested in ministers and lay elders elected by each parish, province, and state. The consistories so formed should determine creed, ritual, and moral code in conformity with Scripture. They should have access to every home, power to enforce at least outward observance of “godly living,” and the right to excommunicate recalcitrants and condemn heretics to death. The civil magistrates were to carry out these disciplinary decrees, but the state was to have no spiritual jurisdiction whatever.80

  The first English parish organized on these principles was set up at Wandsworth in 1572, and similar “presbyteries” sprang up in the eastern and middle counties. By this time the majority of the London Protestants, and of the House of Commons, were Puritans. The artisans of London, powerfully infiltrated by Calvinist refugees from France and the Netherlands, applauded the Puritan attack on episcopacy and ritual. The businessmen of the capital looked upon Puritanism as the bulwark of Protestantism against a Catholicism traditionally unsympathetic to “usury” and the middle classes. Calvin was a bit too strict for them, but he had sanctioned interest and had recognized the virtues of industry and thrift. Even men close to the Queen had found some good in Puritanism; Cecil, Leicester, Walsingham, and Knollys hoped to use it as a foil to Catholicism if Mary Stuart reached the English throne.81

  But Elizabeth felt that the Puritan movement threatened the whole settlement by which she had planned to ease the religious strife. She thought of Calvinism as the doctrine of John Knox, whom she had never forgiven for his scorn of women rulers. She despised the Puritan dogmatism even more heartily than the Catholic. She had a lingering fondness for the crucifix and other religious images, and when an iconoclastic fury destroyed paintings, statuary, and stained glass early in her reign,82 she awarded damages to the victims and forbade such actions in the future.83 She was not finicky in her own language, but she resented the description which some Puritan had given of the Prayer Book as “culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the Mass Book,” and of the Court of High Commission as a “little stinking ditch.”84 She saw in the popular election of ministers, and in the government of the Church by presbyteries and synods independent of the state, a republican threat to monarchy. Only her monarchical power, she thought, could keep England Protestant; popular suffrage would restore Catholicism.

  She encouraged bishops to trouble the troublemakers. Archbishop Parker suppressed their publications, silenced them in the churches, and obstructed their assemblies. Puritan clergymen had organized groups for the public discussion of Scriptural passages; Elizabeth bade Parker put an end to these “prophesyings”; he did. His successor, Edmund Grindal, tried to protect the Puritans; Elizabeth suspended him; and when he died (1583) she advanced to the Canterbury see her new chaplain, John Whitgift, who dedicated himself to the silencing of the Puritans. He demanded of all English clergymen an oath accepting the Thirty-nine Articles, the Prayer Book, and the Queen’s religious supremacy; he subpoenaed all objectors before the High Commission Court; and there they were subjected to such detailed and insistent inquiry into their conduct and belief that Cecil compared the procedure to the Spanish Inquisition.85

  The Puritan rebellion was intensified. A determined minority openly seceded from the Anglican communion, and set up independent congregations that elected their own ministers and acknowledged no episcopal control. In 1581 Robert Browne, a pupil (later an enemy) of Cartwright, and chief voice of these “Independents,” “Separatists,” or “Congregationalists,” crossed over to Holland, and he published there two tracts outlining a democratic constitution for Christianity. Any group of Christians should have the right to organize itself for worship, formulate its own creed on the basis of Scripture, choose its own leaders, and live its religious life free from outside interference, acknowledging no rule but the Bible, no authority but Christ. Two of Browne’s followers were arrested in England, were judged in contempt of the Queen’s religious sovereignty, and were hanged (1583).

  In the campaign for election to the Parliament of 1586 the Puritans waged oratorical war upon any candidate unsympathetic to their cause. One such was branded as a “common gamester and pot companion”; another was “much suspect of popery, cometh very seldom to his church, and is a whoremaster”; those were days of virile speech. When Parliament convened, John Penry presented a petition for reform of the Church, and charged the bishops with responsibility for clerical abuses and popular paganism. Whitgift ordered his arrest, but he was soon released. Antony Cope introduced a bill to abolish the entire episcopal establishment and reorganize English Christianity on the presbyterian plan. Elizabeth ordered Parliament to remove the bill from discussion. Peter Wentworth rose to a question of parliamentary freedom, and four members supported him; Elizabeth had all five lodged in the Tower.

  Frustrated in Parliament, Penry and other Puritans took to the press. Eluding Whitgift’s severe censorship of publications, they deluged England (1588–89) with a succession of privately printed pamphlets, all signed “Martin Marprelate, Gentleman,” and attacking the authority and personal character of the bishops in terms of satirical abuse. Whitgift and the High Commission deployed all the machinery of espionage to find the authors and printers; but the printers moved from town to town, and public sympathy helped them to escape detection until April 1589. Professional writers like John Lyly and Thomas Nash were engaged to answer “Martin” and gave him good competition in scurrility. Finally, as billingsgate ran out, the controversy subsided, and moderate men mourned the degradation of Christianity into an art of vituperation.

  Stung by these pamphlets, Elizabeth gave Whitgift a free hand to check the Puritans. The Marprelate printers were found, arrests multiplied, executions followed. Cartwright was sentenced to death, but was pardoned by the Queen. Two leaders of the “Brownian Movement,” John Greenwood and Henry Barrow, were hanged in 1593, and soon thereafter John Penry. Parliament decreed (1593) that anyone who questioned the Queen’s religious supremacy, or persistently absented himself from Anglican services, or attended “any assemblies, conventicles, or meetings under cover or pretense of any exercise of religion” should be imprisoned and—unless he gave a pledge of future conformity—should leave England and never return, on pain of death.86

  At this juncture, and amid the turmoil and fury, a modest parson raised the controversy to the level of philosophy, piety, and stately prose. Richard Hooker was one of two clergymen assigned to conduct services in the London Temple; the other was Walter Travers, Cartwright’s friend. In the morning sermon Hooker expounded the ecclesiastical polity of Elizabeth; in the afternoon Travers criticized that church government from the Puritan view. Each developed his sermons into a book. As Hooker was writing literature as well as theology, he begged his bishop to transfer him to a quiet rural parsonage. So at Boscombe in Wiltshire he completed the first four books of his great work Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1594); three years later, at Bishopsbourne, he sent Book V to the press; and there, in 1600, age forty-seven, he died.

  His Laws astonished England by the calm and even-tempered dignity of its argument and the sonorous majesty of its almost Latin style. Cardinal Allen praised it as the best book that had yet come out of England; Pope Clement VIII lauded its eloquence and learning; Queen Elizabeth read it gratefully as a splendid apology for her religious government
; the Puritans were mollified by the gentle clarity of its tone; and posterity received it as a noble attempt to harmonize religion and reason. Hooker astonished his contemporaries by admitting that even a pope could be saved; he shocked the theologians by declaring that “the assurance of what we believe by the Word of God is to us not so certain as that which we perceive by sense”;87 man’s reasoning faculty is also a divine gift and revelation.

  Hooker based his theory of law on medieval philosophy as formulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, and he anticipated the “social contract” of Hobbes and Locke. After showing the need and boon of social organization, he argued that voluntary participation in a society implies consent to be governed by its laws. But the ultimate source of the laws is the community itself: a king or a parliament may issue laws only as the delegate or representatives of the community. “Law makes the king; the king’s grant of any favor contrary to the law is void … For peaceable contentment on both sides, the assent of those who are governed seemeth necessary … Laws are not which public approbation has not made so.”88 And Hooker added a passage that might have warned Charles I:

  The Parliament of England, together with the [ecclesiastical] Convocation annexed thereunto, is that whereupon the very essence of all government within this kingdom doth depend; it is even the body of the whole realm; it consisteth of the king and of all that within the land are subject to him, for they are all there present, either in person, or by such as they voluntarily have derived [delegated] their power unto.89

  To Hooker religion seemed an integral part of the state, for social order and therefore even material prosperity depend on moral discipline, which collapses without religious inculcation and support. Consequently every state should provide religious training for its people. The Anglican Church might be imperfect, but so would be all institutions made and manned by the children of Adam. “He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well off as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers; because they know the manifold defects whereunto every kind of regiment [government] is subject, but the secret lets and difficulties, which in public proceedings are innumerable and inevitable, they have not ordinarily the judgment to consider.”90

  Hooker’s logic was too circular to be convincing, his learning too scholastic to meet the issues of his time, his shy spirit too thankful for order to understand the longing for liberty. The Puritans acknowledged his eloquence, but went on their way. Compelled to choose between their country and their faith, many of them emigrated, reversing the movement of Continental Protestants into England. Holland welcomed them, and English congregations rose at Middelburg, Leiden, and Amsterdam. There the exiles and their offspring labored, taught, preached, and wrote, preparing with quiet passion for their triumphs in England and their fulfillment in America.

  VIII. ELIZABETH AND IRELAND

  Ireland had been conquered by the English in 1169–71, and had been held ever since on the ground that otherwise it would be used by France or Spain as a base for attacks on England. At Elizabeth’s accession direct English rule in Ireland was confined to the eastern coast—”the Pale”—around and south of Dublin; the rest of the island was governed by Irish chieftains only nominally acknowledging English sovereignty. The perennial conflict with the English disrupted the tribal administration that had given Ireland chaos and violence, but also poets, scholars, and saints. Most of the land was left to woods and bogs; transport and communication were heroic enterprises, and the native Celtic population of some 800,000 souls lived in a half-lawless misery on the edge of barbarism. The English in the Pale were almost as poor, and they made Elizabeth’s problem worse by debauchery, peculation, and crime; they robbed the London government as sedulously as they plundered the Irish peasantry. Throughout the reign English settlers drove Irish proprietors and tenants from “clearances”; the dispossessed fought back with assassinations; and life for conquerors and conquered alike became a persisting fever of force and hate.. Cecil himself thought that “the Flemings had not such cause to rebel against the oppression of the Spaniards” as the Irish against English rule.91

  Elizabeth’s Irish policy was based on the conviction that a Catholic Ireland would be a peril to a Protestant England. She ordered a full enforcement of Protestantism throughout the island. Mass was prohibited, the monasteries were closed; public worship ceased outside the narrow Pale. Priests survived in hiding, and administered the sacraments furtively to a few. Morality, deprived of both religion and peace, almost disappeared; murder, theft, adultery, and rape flourished, and men changed wives without grudge or qualm. Irish leaders appealed to the popes and Philip II for protection or aid. Philip feared to invade Ireland, lest the English should invade and help the rebellious Netherlands, but he established centers and colleges for Irish refugees in Spain. Pius IV sent to Ireland an Irish Jesuit, David Wolfe (1560); with the courage and devotion characteristic of his order, Wolfe established clandestine missions, brought in other disguised Jesuits, and restored Catholic piety and hope. The chieftains took heart, and one after another rose in revolt against English rule.

  The most powerful of them was Shane (i.e., John) O’Neill of Tyrone. Here was such a man as legend could sing of and Irishmen could fight for. He fiercely defended his title of the O’Neill against a usurping brother. He ignored the Commandments and adored the Church. He foiled all English efforts to subdue him, risked his head to visit London and win Elizabeth’s alliance and support, and returned in triumph to rule Ulster as well as Tyrone. He fought the rival O’Donnell clan ferociously, was finally defeated by it (1567), and was killed when he took refuge with the MacDonnells, Scottish immigrants whose settlement at Antrim he had formerly attacked.

  The history of Ireland after his death was a parade of rebellions, massacres, and lords deputy. Sir Henry Sidney, father of Sir Philip, served Elizabeth faithfully in that ungrateful office for nine years. He joined in defeating O’Neill, hunted Rory O’More to the death, and was recalled (1578) because of the high cost of his victories. In two years as Lord Deputy, Walter Devereux, first Earl of Essex, distinguished himself by a massacre on the island of Rathlin, off the Antrim coast. Thither the rebel MacDonnells had sent for safety their wives and children, their aged and ailing, with a protective guard. Essex dispatched a force to capture the island. The garrison offered to surrender if they might be allowed to sail for Scotland; the offer was refused; they surrendered unconditionally; they and the women and children, the sick and the old, numbering six hundred, were put to the sword (1575).92

  The great revolt of the reign was that of the Geraldine clan in Munster. After many captivities and escapes, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald crossed to the Continent, raised a troop of Spaniards, Italians, Portuguese, Flemings, and English Catholic emigrés, and landed them on the coast of Kerry (1579), only to lose his life in an incidental war with another clan. His cousin Gerald Fitzgerald, fifteenth Earl of Desmond, carried on the revolt, but the neighboring Butler clan, under the Protestant Earl of Ormonde, declared for England. The Catholics of the Pale organized an army and defeated the levies of the new Lord Deputy, Arthur, Lord Grey (1580). Reinforced, Grey beseiged Desmond’s main force by land and sea on a promontory in Smerwick Bay. Finding themselves defenseless against Grey’s artillery, the six hundred surviving rebels surrendered and begged for mercy; all were slaughtered, women and men, except for officers who could promise substantial ransoms.93 The war of English against Irish, and of clan against clan, so ravaged Munster that (said an Irish chronicler) “the lowing of a cow, or the voice of a plowman, was not to be heard that year from Dingle to the Rock of Cashel”; and an Englishman wrote (1582) that “there hath died by famine … thirty thousand in Munster in less than half a year, besides others that are hanged and killed.”94 For “to kill an Irishman in that province,” wrote a great English historian, “was thought no more of than to kill a mad dog.”95 Almost denuded of Irish, Munster was divided into plantations for English settlers (1586)—one of the
m Edmund Spenser, who there completed The Faerie Queene.

  The desperate Irish rose again in 1593. Hugh O’Donnell, Lord of Tyrconnel, joined forces with Hugh O’Neill, second Earl of Tyrone. Spain, now at open war with England, promised help. In an interregnum between lords deputy, O’Neill routed an English army at Armagh, captured Blackwater, an English stronghold in the north (1598), and sent a force to renew the Munster revolt. The English colonists fled, abandoning their plantations. Hope and joy spread in Ireland, and even the English expected that Dublin itself would fall.

  It was in this crisis that Elizabeth appointed the youthful Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, as her Lord Deputy in Ireland (March 1599). She gave him an army of 17,500 men—the greatest that England had ever sent to the island. She bade him attack O’Neill in Tyrone, make no peace without consulting her, and not return without her permission. Arrived in Dublin, he dallied through the spring, undertook a few skirmishes, let his army waste away with disease, signed an unauthorized truce with O’Neill, and returned to England (September 1599) to explain his failure to the Queen. Quickly replacing him, Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, faced with courage and skill a combination of tricky O’Neill, fearless O’Donnell, and a fleet landing at Kinsale with troops and arms from Spain and indulgences from Clement VIII for all who would defend Ireland and the faith. Mountjoy rushed south to meet the Spaniards, and defeated them so decisively that O’Neill submitted; the revolt collapsed, and a general amnesty brought a precarious peace (1603). Meanwhile Elizabeth had died.