Their leaders, honest, fierce men, the spiritual forebears of the future Massachusetts colonists, were to be interrogated (or ‘conversed with’ as Bancroft described it; the meetings were known among the Separatists themselves as ‘Spanish conferences’) by the more brilliant and trustworthy members of the Church of England. Andrewes was at their head. Bancroft instructed him to interrogate Henry Barrow, the leading Separatist who had been arrested in 1587 and kept in the Fleet.
Andrewes visited the gaol accompanied by another divine, William Hutchinson. Their descent into the Separatists’ hell is a moment of sudden, film-like intensity, when the passionate realities of early modern England come starkly to life. The entire context of the King James Bible is dramatised in these prison meetings: holiness meets power, or at least one version of holiness meets another; the relative claims of society and the individual, and the legitimacy of those claims, clash; the individual conscience grates against the authority structures of an age which senses incipient anarchy at every turn and so is obsessed with order; the candid plays against the cynical, worldliness against a kind of stripped Puritan idealism; and the godly comes face to face with the political.
The purpose of the visiting churchmen, Barrow wrote later, was ‘to fish from [him] som matter, wheruppon they might accuse them to their holy fathers the bishops’. This was true: a good interrogation would be a good career move. Other Translators were nosing around these ratty dungeons: Hadrian á Saravia, a major propagandist of the Divine Right of Kings, was interrogating a Separatist called Daniel Studley, also in the Fleet. The Thomas Sparkes who had so meekly and dumbly sat at the Hampton Court Conference was to be found at this time trying to convince the young Roger Waters of his sins, as he hung in chains in the worst of the stinking pits of Newgate gaol, known as the Limbo.
With Barrow, in March 1590, Hutchinson and Andrewes began kindly. They were sitting in the parlour of the Fleet prison (one of the better of the London prisons, ‘fit for gentlemen’). Hutchinson told the Separatist that he wanted ‘to confer brotherly with you concerning certain positions that you are said to hold’. It was a gentle beginning and Barrow responded in the same vein. He was keen ‘to obtain such conference where the Book of God might peaceably decide all our controversy’.
That phrase, innocuous as it might sound, was salt in the eyes for Andrewes. It released a flood of hostile questions. All the issues of order and authority, the great political questions of the day, streamed out over his prisoner-conversant. ‘Whie,’ Andrewes said, ‘the booke of God cannot speake, which way should that decide owr controversies?’ That was the central question of the Reformation: did Christians not need a church to interpret God for them? Or could they have access to the godhead without help, with all the immediacy of the inspired? Barrow replied in the spirit of Luther: each soul could converse with God direct, unmediated by any worldly church, his thoughts and actions to be interpreted by the words of scripture itself.
DR ANDREWES: But the spirits of men must be subject unto men, will you not subject your spirit to the judgment of men?
BARROW: The spirit of the prophets must be subject to the prophets, yet must the prophets judge by the word of God. As for me I willingly submit my whole faith to be tried and judged by the word of God, of all men.
DR ANDREWES: All men cannot judge, who then shal judge the Word?
BARROW: The word, and let every one that judgeth take hede that he judge aright thereby; ‘Wisdom is justified of her children.’ (Matthew 11:19)
Andrewes thought he spotted error. ‘This savoreth of a pryvat spyrit,’ he said. Nothing was more damning in his lexicon than that phrase. The privateness of the Puritan spirit was its defining sin, its arrogance and withdrawal in the face of communal and inherited wisdom, treating the word of God, the scriptures, not as a common inheritance, whose significance could be understood only within the tradition that had grown and flowered around it, but as a private guidebook to a personal and selfish salvation. The heart of the Puritan error was that social divisiveness, that failure to join in, its stepping outside the necessity of order, its assumption that the Puritan himself was a member of God’s elect, and the rest could look to the hindmost. How could a society be based on that predestinarian arrogance? Increasingly, for churchmen such as Andrewes, it seemed that the true church could only be inclusive, one in which God’s grace would descend on believers not through some brutal predestinarian edict but through the sacraments, through the ceremony of the church.
Separateness was of course an unacceptable political position. It severed the links on which order relied and carried the seeds of anarchy within it. The fact that the words of Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians sanctioned such separatism was for Andrewes secondary. The Separatists quoted the passage at every turn: ‘Come out from among them, and bee yee separate, saieth the Lord, and touch not the vncleane thing, and I will receiue you, And will bee a Father vnto you, and ye shall bee my sonnes and daughters, saith the Lord Almightie.’ The response of Andrewes and Bancroft to the emphasis placed on those words, to its implication of God-sanctioned individual freedom, was brief: it was ‘libertine’, meaning the thought typical of a man ‘loose in religion, one that thinks he may doe what he listeth’, as a 1604 dictionary defined it.
Barrow responded sharply. It was not a private spirit but ‘the spirit of Christ and his Apostles’. They had been happy to be judged by the word of God and so was Barrow. This, for Andrewes, so crushingly aware of his own sin, was too much.
DR ANDREWES: What, are you an apostle?
BARROW: No, but I have the spirit of the apostles.
DR ANDREWES: What, the spirit of the apostles?
BARROW: Yea, the spirit of the apostles.
DR ANDREWES: What, in that measure?
BARROW: In that measure that God hath imparted unto me, though not in that measure that the apostles had, by anie comparison, yet the same spirit. There is but one spirit.
That was not an unreasonable answer: God had blown his spirit into Adam, and it was acceptable to think that the life of men was a divine gift. But Andrewes, revealing himself here in a way he would rarely do later in life, curiously narrowed and harsh like Bancroft at the conference, clung to his hostility. They argued over the difference between a schism and a sect. Then, in an emblematic moment of the English Reformation, angry, impassioned, pedantic, scholarly, they called for a dictionary. The heretic and his interrogator pored together over the Greek– Latin Lexicon of Joannes Scapula (Basel, 1580) to try and sort out the etymologies of the two words, but they could come to no shared conclusion.
Andrewes then uttered one of the most despicable remarks he ever made. Barrow said his imprisonment had been horrible. He had been there for three years and the loneliness of it, the sheer sensory deprivation, the nastiness of the conditions, had sunk him deep into depression. Andrewes’s reply, witty, super-cilious, a pastiche of the sympathetic confessor, is still shocking 400 years later: ‘For close imprisonment’, he told Barrow, ‘you are most happie. The solitarie and contemplative life I hold the most blessed life. It is the life I would chuse.’ It is Henry Barrow, martyr to his beliefs, who emerges from this confrontation as the holy man. ‘You speak philosophically,’ he told Andrewes with some self-control,
but not Christianly. So sweete is the harmonie of God’s grace unto me in the congregation, and the conversation of the saints at all times, as I think my self as a sparrow on the howse toppe when I am exiled thereby. But could you be content also, Mr Androes, to be kept from exercise and ayre so long togeather? These are also necessarie to a natural body.
The poor man was lonely, longing for his friends and for a sight of the sky, from which the intolerance of the state had excluded him. Andrewes’s breathtaking insouciance continued until the last. In conversation, he had used the word ‘luck’. For fundamentalists such as Barrow, there was no such thing: all was ordained, everything from the death of a sparrow to the execution of a heretic was the working out
of God’s providence. Calvin had written, in a famous passage, that to believe in luck was a ‘carnal’ way to look at the world. Barrow told the departing Andrewes ‘there was no fortune or luck. To proove luck[Andrewes] torned in my Testament to the 10 of Luke, verse 31, ‘‘By chance there went down a certain priest that way.’’ And torned in a leafe uppon the place, and as he was going out willed me to consider of it.’
That folded-down page of the Puritan’s Bible, Andrewes’s all-too-complacent knowledge of the scriptural text, ‘the poor worne bodie’ of the prematurely aged Barrow (he was about thirty-seven, a couple of years older than Andrewes) standing in the room, silenced by the rising self-congratulatory confidence of the young Master of Pembroke College, prebendary of St Paul’s, vicar of St Giles Cripplegate, a candidate for the bishopric of Salisbury, sweeping out of the prison parlour door, with his departing quip, his patronising flourish: could you ask for a more chilling indictment of established religion than that?
Three years later Barrow’s life ended in execution, for denying the authority of bishops, for denying the holiness of the English Church and its liturgy and denying the authority over it of the queen. Andrewes saw him again on the eve of his death. The prisoner had been transferred to Newgate, to the Limbo itself, and he was high on his impending martyrdom. He was reminded by one of those present of the Englishmen who had been martyred by the Roman Catholics in the reign of Queen Mary for their defence of the very church which Barrow now denied. ‘‘‘These holy bonds of mine’’ he replied, (and therewith he shooke the fetters which he did wear) ‘‘are much more glorious than any of theirs.’’’ Andrewes argued with him again over points in the Geneva Bible. Barrow would have none of it and he told his adversary that his ‘time now was short unto this world, neyther were we to bestow it unto controversies’. He was finally executed early in the morning on 6 April at Tyburn, where the mallows and bulrushes were just sprouting in the ditches.
Andrewes could put the knife in. What little one can judge from contemporary portraits—the Jacobean image is so much less revealing than the Jacobean word—shows a narrow and shrewd face, a certain distance in the eyes, as if the person had withdrawn an inch or two below the surface of the skin, but that surface was bien soigné, a well-trimmed beard, a well-brushed moustache. He could look the church’s adversaries in the eye, and he was clever enough to slalom around the complexities of theological dispute: not only a great scholar but a government man, aware of political realities, able to articulate the correct version of the truth. He was a trusty (a Jacobean word, used in that sense), and useful for his extensive network of connections. It is clear that in 1604 he played a large part in selecting the men for his, and perhaps also for Barlow’s, company. Several themes emerge: there is a strong Cambridge connection (Andrewes had been an undergraduate and fellow there and was still Master of Pembroke College); an emphasis on scholarly brilliance—more so than in the other companies; a clear ideological bent in choosing none who could be accused of Puritanism, however mild, and several who would later emerge as leading anti-Calvinists in the struggles of the 1620s; there was also a connection with Westminster Abbey, where Andrewes had been appointed dean on the recommendation of Robert Cecil; and, stemming from that, a clear thread of Cecil influence. In this marrying of leverage and discrimination, it is a microcosm of the workings of Jacobean England: the right men were chosen and part of their qualifications for being chosen was their ability to work the systems of deference and power on which the society relied.
They met in the famous Jerusalem Chamber, the fourteenth-century room in what had been the abbot’s lodgings at Westminster, where Henry IV had died; now it was part of Andrewes’s deanery. It was where the chapter usually met, on which Andrewes had secured for his brother Nicholas the valuable post of registrar for life. Such nepotism was habitual and habitually condemned. Ten years before, Andrewes had preached at St Paul’s (in Latin), lashing the indigent clergy for their corruption: ‘You are extremely careful to enrich your own sons and daughters,’ he had told them. ‘You are so careful of the heirs of your flesh that you forget your successors.’ One of the Translators, in the Cambridge company dealing with the central section of the Old Testament, was Andrewes’s brother Roger. Judging by every other aspect of Roger’s life we know of, he was almost certainly there on Lancelot’s recommendation: when Lancelot had become Master of Pembroke, he made Roger a fellow; when he became Bishop of Chichester, he made Roger a prebendary, archdeacon and chancellor of the cathedral. When Lancelot moved on to Ely in 1609, Roger became a prebendary there and also Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, which was in the gift of the Bishop of Ely. At Jesus, Roger was not a success. He argued with the fellows, neglected the financial affairs of the college and was finally sacked in 1632 for stealing college funds. Meanwhile, when in 1616 his saintly brother was translated to Winchester, the richest see in England, Roger received another prebend there.
Roger was certainly on his brother’s side against the reformists in the church and it is clear that Andrewes’s selection for the first Westminster company was made at least partly on the basis of that kind of political orientation. Whom could he rely on not to make Puritan-style difficulties? One can make out several layers within the company. First, there are the high-level church politicians and apologists for the regime. Andrewes took on Hadrian á Saravia, a Protestant Fleming who, like Andrewes, had become a client of the Cecils, had interrogated Separatists in London gaols, had been appointed a prebendary at Westminster where Andrewes was dean, and, like Andrewes, held several other positions in the church guaranteeing a satisfactory income from which he could propagandise on behalf of church and Crown. Although Saravia was seventy-three in 1604, he and Andrewes were soulmates, sharing a view of government and the episcopate, deeply conservative, both authoritarian and inclusionist, and opposed both to revision and controversy.
The third member of this high-level leadership of the group was John Overall, Dean of St Paul’s, one of Andrewes’s most loyal supporters and friends. It is significant that neither he nor Saravia was acknowledged as a great Hebrew scholar. Saravia was a general linguist, Overall a classicist, who been a Greek lecturer and Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge; but both were members of the anti-Puritan party in the church and, at this leadership level, attitude mattered more than qualifications. Overall himself would later overstep the mark, arguing at the convocation of the church in 1606 that obedience by all subjects was owed to a king simply through the fact that he was the king, not through any right or legitimacy he might have. Overall, in other words, was perfectly happy to worship and obey power itself. Legitimacy mattered less than potency; he was a pure authoritarian. To James’s own credit, the king repudiated such views. They were too extreme and took no account of the inclusive and fatherly nature of kingship. It is easy enough to portray James as an absolutist in waiting, but he wasn’t. As James himself said, ‘I am for the medium in all things.’
With these men, it is often difficult to penetrate beneath the slew of titles and appointments, of publicly declared positions and overt alliances, but a correspondence survives, not of Overall himself but of his secretary, John Cosin, who worked for him when Overall later became Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield and then of Norwich. Cosin would have his own famous career, as Bishop of Durham and Master of Peterhouse in Cambridge where ‘A glorious new altar was set up, and mounted on steps, to which the master, fellowes, schollers, bowed, and were enjoyned to bow by Doctor Cosins. There were basins, candelstickes, tapers standing on it, a great crucifix hanging over it,’ and other ‘ceremonious and babylonish practices’ which made Cosins one of the most loathed of all anti-Puritan churchmen during the Civil War. But there is one letter from his time as John Overall’s secretary which is suddenly revealing of this world beneath its skin.
Overall had just been promoted from the relatively junior and impoverished see of Coventry and Lichfield to become Bishop of Lincoln, one of the plums of the English Church
. Cosin wrote to his successor, the secretary of the new Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, to tell him how to maximise his own revenue. (This new bishop, incidentally, was the saintly Thomas Morton who in 1603 had worked to save the lives of plague victims in York while Lancelot Andrewes was relaxing at Chiswick.) The occasion for Cosin’s letter was the visitation, the moment, usually every three years, when the bishop investigated the state of affairs in his own diocese. Every minister had to appear before the diocesan registrar (or ‘Register’) to show him the licence by which he was allowed to preach. (The licence was a tool of conformity: it would be granted only if the minister had explicitly signed up to the canons which Richard Bancroft had drawn up for the English Church.) This was the moment at which the bishop’s secretary could make his killing.
To my verie loving friend, Mr Baddeley, secretary to ye Rt. Reverend Father in God ye Ld. Bp. of Coven. & Lichfield, These in London.
MR BADDELEY
Your best course wilbe, as mine was, in your Lord’s Visitation, when their instruments are consigned, to sit with the Register, and demaunde of every minister their license, whereby you shall deprehend them which you want. One secret I will tell you, which I must entreat you to make a secret stil: vjd. a piece you may demaunde of every one of them, either licensed or not, for the exhibition of their license, and keep the profit to your self, howsoever the Register may perhaps challenge it. But I’le assure you they never yet had it…Collect the mony your selfe, els you may have some of it detein’d, as we had at first…I heare you leave not London yet this long while. If upon better remembrance and leisure I may thinke on anything to instruct you better, I shall not neglect that office to so good a friende. Thus in much hast I bid you hartily farewell.
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