by Susan Ronald
Born the daughter of Stephen Vaughan, who was Henry VIII’s factor, merchant adventurer, and diplomat at Antwerp, Anne abandoned her mercer husband, Henry Locke, with his permission, to go live in Geneva with their two children, to learn at the knee of John Knox.7 When Locke died in 1572, she swiftly married Edward Dering, the godly preacher who had shown the queen the state of her church, and who was ten years her junior. Dering’s correspondence is replete with his earnest teachings to Lady Mary Mildmay, Lady Golding, Mrs. Mary Honeywood, and Mrs. Catherine Killigrew, sister-in-law to both Sir Nicholas Bacon and Lord Burghley. His Puritanism showed an unlimited concern with the concept of sin and its remedy through practical and plain preaching. His congregation was large, helping not only these influential women but hundreds of faceless others.
Dering’s female following of “spiritual patients” was not at all uncommon. Wilcox corresponded with the Countess of Bedford, Lady Fielding, and Lady Anne Bacon, among others, preaching “little but godly, plain and necessary exhortations and directions for the exercise of godliness.”8 Like Catholic wives, Protestant wives seemed deeply committed to their religion as the guardians of the faith through their children and homes. There is no doubt that English Protestant wives frequently looked to their counterparts in the stranger churches for ways in which they might be able to improve the religious education of their families and servants.
Still, there was one woman who remained distinctly unimpressed. By the summer of 1572, Elizabeth had already been preached to by the spellbinding and godly Edward Dering about the parlous state of her church. Thomas Cartwright, who had argued against the motion Monarchy is the best form of Republic at the Cambridge debates of 1564 during Elizabeth’s progress, had gone on to stir up more trouble. In 1570, Cartwright had angered the Cambridge hierarchy when, from the dignity of his Lady Margaret Chair, his devastating oratory on the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles condemned the Church of England on Episcopal and hierarchical grounds. Worst of all, An Admonition to Parliament, written by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and inspired by Cartwright’s words, marked the point of no return.9 The queen was not amused.
* * *
It all began shortly after the Duke of Norfolk’s delayed execution for treason in the Ridolfi Plot, two months after the signing of the Treaty of Blois with France. Parliament was in session, pressing for sweeping religious reforms of the Anglican Church. Even before the cause had been lost, an anonymous popular diatribe entitled An Admonition to the Parliament was published from a secret printing press. The Admonition had moved on from attacks against the vestiges of “popery” and the dress of Anglican bishops, concentrating instead on the new Puritan issue of whether the church needed bishops or a group of elders and an entirely different hierarchy.
For them, this was the crux of the problem with the Anglican settlement. Elizabeth had changed the prayer book but not the way in which the Anglican Church worked. This was true. From the queen’s viewpoint, by retaining the framework of the Catholic Church, it was easiest to spread her religious solution with the least upheaval. She had retained the system of bishops and archbishops and all the trappings of their offices just as it had existed in her father’s time. The main change had been the reinstitution of the prayer book substantially in the form of her brother’s. The privileges and superiority of the bishop’s office were seen as “rather granted by man for maintaining of better order and quietness in commonwealths, than commanded by God in his word.”10
Two years earlier, Thomas Cartwright had called for the abolition of the titles and offices of the archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons, suggesting instead that the government of the church should be restored to the primitive church with ministers elected by their congregation and presbytery at the local level. This was precisely what John Field and Thomas Wilcox called for in their Admonition attack on Parliament.11 It was how the stranger churches were run in England, just as it had been the experience of the English Protestants in Geneva, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg when they had once been in exile, too.
It was the younger of the two authors, the curate of All Hallows Honey Lane, Thomas Wilcox, who wrote the penetrating and fiery tirade at the beginning of the Admonition: “We in England are so far off from having a Church rightly reformed according to the prescript of God’s word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same.” Field later admitted that he had added the malicious and rabble-rousing “view of popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church.” In fact, Field took sole responsibility for its “bitterness of style,” particularly the really memorable phrases about the Book of Common Prayer like “an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass book, full of all abominations”; and “reading is not feeding, but as evil as playing upon a stage, and worse too”; and “they toss the psalms in most places like tennis balls”; and even “the commissary’s court, that is, but a petty little stinking ditch that floweth out of that former great puddle.”12
The church elders rapidly distanced themselves from the new extremism of Wilcox and Field. John Whitgift, master of divinity at Trinity College Cambridge and future archbishop of Canterbury, who had recently stripped Thomas Cartwright of his fellowship at the university on the technicality that he had never been ordained, was proud to take up the cudgels against the Puritans with his Replye. Meanwhile, Burghley, desperately ill with a recurrence of gout, was hell-bent on finding the illegal printing press and the printer of the pamphlets.
Whitgift was appointed to the task. The investigation led to the Huguenot printing presses of London, but when no proof could be found, Burghley became convinced that the Puritan aldermen of London were sheltering the printer. One of the names put forward was Thomas Vautrollier, an exiled Huguenot printer who had been established in the Stationers Company only two years earlier.13 Elizabeth seethed at the lack of progress in finding the culprit press. What the queen hadn’t immediately realized was that the actions of Field and Wilcox had split the Puritan wing in half.
Field and Wilcox were swiftly sentenced to a year’s imprisonment at London’s notorious Newgate Prison. Though they were feted by the younger and hotter gospellers, effectively keeping an “open house” at Newgate, older, calmer heads like Laurence Humphrey and a host of others visited them in prison to deplore “such Admonitions as are abroad … for that in some points and terms they are too broad and overshoot themselves.”14 In other words, they had done more harm than good and had “with unreasonableness and unseasonableness … hindered much good and done much hurt.”15 Even staunch Puritan sympathizers within the Privy Council—men like Leicester, Bedford, Sir Francis Knollys, Sir Walter Mildmay, Warwick, and Burghley—were aghast. Still, Leicester and Huntingdon—the most left wing in the council and consummate politicians suspected of duplicity by Burghley—watched and waited.
The damage that An Admonition had wreaked was done, however. It spelled the ultimate failure of the religion bill proposed in Parliament that spring that bore all the hallmarks of the most devoted Puritan members. Sir Francis Knollys defended the outrageous preamble to the bill, which claimed that “divers orders of rights, ceremonies, and observations” had been allowed since the Act of Settlement in 1559 and had been “permitted in respect of the great weakness of the people, then blinded with superstition.”16 The bill proposed one law for Protestants and another for Catholics. The Act of Settlement would only remain in force against “Papistical services, rites, or ceremonies,” while all Protestant services would be allowed, with the consent of the bishop in each diocese, to omit certain forms of the established service or to use the form of service as the French and Dutch congregations were permitted in England.17
The bill was, of course, an anathema to the queen. On its third reading, its backers finally realized they would need to amend it. The offensive preamble was omitted, and varying services would be allowed only by the consent of a majority of bishops. Still, it was not enough. Elizabeth sent the Speaker of the House a
message that no bills concerning religion were to be put before the House, unless the bishops “liked it” and the originally proposed bill and any amendments were shown to her first. Those who had spoken out about the “liberty of the House” at the previous session said nothing this time, thanks in large part to Field’s and Wilcox’s handiwork.
* * *
All this happened before the fateful genocide on August 24, 1572, in Paris. By the time of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, three editions of the Puritan pamphlets by Field and Wilcox had been printed, including A view of Popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church for the which godly ministers have refused to subscribe and a smaller one entitled An exhortation to the bishops to deal brotherly with their brethren, in which Field and Wilcox compared the bishops to “galled horses that cannot abide to be rubbed.”18 Where a few short months earlier the Puritans had sought to bind the crown and the papacy through intolerable and intolerant legislation, their militancy was suddenly seen as having great foresight against the evils of the Catholic League.
Leicester and Huntingdon saw their moment to help the authors of An Admonition and especially the cause of reform of the church. Together they pleaded for the release of Field and Wilcox with the Privy Council. Their timing was perfect. Naturally, there had been a great furor and uproar from the pulpits, in broadsides, and in ballads against the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. By October, when the pair was released early, there was an added complication. They were “esteemed as gods” by the London mob, with Archbishop Parker lampooned as the “last” archbishop of Canterbury if the Puritan manifesto were adopted.19 By Christmas, Thomas Wilcox was touring the Puritan strongholds in Leicester’s and Huntingdon’s lands in the Midlands, returning to his London home by early February 1573.
Interestingly, John Field disappeared without trace for nearly three years. Vanished, too, were his scathing manifestos against the church establishment. The question is, where had Field gone? The answer is we don’t know for sure. In any event, his three-year silence seems to have been broken from the printing press of Michael Schirat at Heidelberg, where Thomas Cartwright had been languishing. Could it be that Field hadn’t wanted to be silent but rather had been silenced by the lack of a clandestine press or printer in England willing to risk everything for him?
The printed word—whether in cheap print or as a work of art in books—had become a powerful tool, which Field had wielded with aplomb, but a printer or stationer who would take on these high-profile and dangerous projects in Elizabethan England would have to be a brave man indeed. Given Field’s return to London in the late 1570s, his absence from the manifesto scene seems reasonable if his former printer refused further contact.
Yet in the intervening years, Puritan ballads had proliferated, with lessons of ungrateful children, the constant Susanna, and the return of the prodigal son sung on street corners, at public prophesyings, or in the home. Printed pages were torn out of cheap ballad chapbooks and adorned the walls of homes and taverns alike. Unlike the Protestant ballads that treated biblical subjects with humor, theirs considered such levity as pure blasphemy. Elizabeth had become convinced that the godly people were no longer interested in obedience to the crown despite the fact that she had not disfavored any “repugnant or mislikers of her religion.”20
By June 1573, Elizabeth had had enough. The international Catholic League had pushed long and hard against England’s door, and now more and more Englishmen were deserting her church to worship at public Puritan prophesyings or in stranger churches. Even her beloved Leicester attended the French church from time to time. With her middle way seemingly eroded daily, Archbishop Parker wrote to Burghley that he must warn the queen that “both papists and precisians [Puritans] have one mark to shoot at, plain disobedience.” In response Elizabeth issued a proclamation commanding her subjects to use only the Anglican prayer book and hand over all Puritan writings in their possession to their bishop or diocese or to the Privy Council.21 When virtually none were returned by October 1573, she issued another proclamation to bishops and magistrates condemning them for lax enforcement of her June law, threatening imprisonment of anyone who spoke out against the Act of Settlement and Uniformity.
Elizabeth had managed to keep the chaos of religious civil war that plagued so many countries on the Continent at bay, but she feared in the first half of the decade that she would lose control. In her personal prayer for wisdom in the administration of the realm, she prayed:
Send therefore, O inexhaustible Fount of all wisdom, from Thy holy heaven and the most high throne of Thy majesty, Thy wisdom to be ever with me, that it may keep watch with me in governing the commonwealth, and that it may take pains, that it may teach me, Thy handmaid, and may train me that I may be able to distinguish between good and evil, equity and iniquity, so as rightly to judge Thy people, justly to impose deserved punishments on those who do harm, mercifully to protect the innocent, freely to encourage those who are industrious and useful to the commonwealth.22
Whether she believed it was possible for those prayers to be answered at the beginning of 1574 remains a mystery.
SEVENTEEN
Via Dolorosa
It is so difficult in these times to know the difference between seeming and being.
—Elizabeth to Anjou, 1580
A new wave of religious exiles now joined the old. Many of those Puritans in London’s underworld who had turned to the printed word to build their reformed church were hunted down and thrown unceremoniously into its prisons. London’s Bishop Sandys, attacked alongside Archbishop Parker and others in these Puritan manifestos, described Newgate, the Marshalsea, and London’s other jails as “filthy and unclean places, more unwholesome than dunghills, more stinking than swine sties.”1 Many of the godly succumbed to the infections rampant in London’s prisons, becoming pestilential martyrs to their cause. Of course, whatever happened in London was replicated throughout the realm a hundredfold.
Somehow, the preacher Thomas Cartwright escaped to Heidelberg, most likely with the assistance of one or more of the wives of the privy councillors who corresponded regularly with him. During his time at Heidelberg, the printing presses worked overtime disseminating the Word, as the city and its university had become the throbbing crucible of a Calvinist state welcoming French, Dutch, and now English Puritan refugees demanding to be heard.
Others were not so lucky. Edward Dering and others remained behind in London, suffering prolonged interrogations by the council’s feared Star Chamber for sedition. Dering wrote of his relief that his wife, Anne Locke, had remained untouched despite her long devotion to the godly cause. He himself eventually escaped rough justice through the good offices of the Earls of Huntingdon and Leicester, possibly as it was widely known that he was dying of tuberculosis.
* * *
Where the godly like Dering had champions within the Privy Council—despite the witch hunts against others of their ilk—English Catholics had none. Their steady exodus from England’s shores throughout the first twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign is etched in history as a catalog of admirable faith and strength, impossible heroism and foolhardiness, tremendous sadness, and misguided political will.
Perhaps the most stirring of all the individual stories among the English Catholics is that of Edmund Campion. The Oxford graduate who had so impressed Elizabeth and Leicester during her 1564 progress had taken Holy Orders in the Church of England and was a deacon of Elizabeth’s church. Leicester had recognized Campion’s exceptional talent and oratory skills since that time and made the young man his protégé. Tall and well built, with a commanding yet soft voice, Campion inspired those around him as a man of great promise with a gift for language. When he left England in the summer of 1569 to visit his Oxford friend Richard Stanihurst at the family home in Dublin, even Leicester had no idea of Campion’s troubled soul.
Campion’s apparent attraction to the Stanihurst home was its library. He browsed its shelves with the intention of dedicati
ng his history of Ireland to Leicester. Though he never completed it, Campion’s work would be finished and eventually included in the great history of the British Isles undertaken by Ralph Holinshed entitled the Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland. The work would be authored under Richard Stanihurst’s name. Whether Campion knew at that stage that it would be a history of Britain as seen through Tudor propagandist eyes is probable. Whether this influenced what was to follow is not.
From August 1569 until March 1570, Campion toiled away on his history. He knew his host family had served the Tudors for generations with distinction. In fact, Richard’s father, James Stanihurst, had been the Speaker of the 1560 parliament that passed the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity that consigned Catholicism to the past. Campion’s friend Richard seemed to be following in his father’s footsteps and was poised to propose marriage to Janet Barnewall, the daughter of another great Anglo-Irish family noted for serving the English crown faithfully. There was nothing to indicate that Campion’s choice of host family or the timing of his visit was in any way nefarious to the crown. The only blot on Campion’s record so far was that he had recently engaged himself as tutor in the household of Lord Vaux, the notoriously Catholic peer, before leaving England.
Though relatively insignificant, this was enough to raise the suspicions of Ireland’s Lord Lieutenant, Sir Henry Sidney. After Campion had been with the Stanihursts for seven months, the Dublin Pale authorities suddenly came to interview him but found he had already decamped. What they hadn’t realized was that Campion had found shelter with the Barnewalls, some dozen miles distant from the Stanihursts in Dublin. In thanking James Stanihurst for his hospitality and excusing his sudden need to escape, Campion wrote quite openly that he had been in danger from “the heretics of Dublin.”2 Weeks later, Campion was spirited out of Ireland through Drogheda and back into England. It was 1571. Within a few months, he left England to join his friends at the Catholic seminary in Douai in the Netherlands.
