The Elizabethans (12 page)

We see it being woven in that Westminster ceremony on 29 September 1564 when the Queen, in her splendour, entered the chamber to raise her beloved Eyes, her sweet Robin, to the earldom of Leicester. He knelt before her and she, always very physical in her expressions both of love and anger, fixed his ermine robe about him. As she did so, she tickled his neck and turned to the Scottish Ambassador, Melville. ‘How like you my creation?’ she asked. The ambassador was nonplussed and murmured diplomatic niceties. Pointing to the lanky teenager, Henry Darnley, Elizabeth answered for him, and for the bloody future, ‘And yet you like better of yonder long lad.’
⁴³
She said it jokingly, but perhaps with an inkling of the stormy future that lay ahead for the long lad and his heirs.

5

Which Church?

IT IS TIME
to speak of the Church, that subject of such minimal importance to a majority in England today, of such centrality to men and women of the sixteenth century.

Christianity, institutional Christianity, has taken a tremendous battering since the time of the Napoleonic Wars in the West. Religious conservatives would wish this had not been so, but so it is. In this chapter, we will be concerned with that branch of Christianity known as the Church of England. It was during the reign of the first Queen Elizabeth that this institution took its particular and distinctive shape. It was during the reign of the second Elizabeth that this Church, as originally conceived in the sixteenth century, was seen to unravel. This is to comment upon a fact, not to make any kind of partisan ‘point’. So much has it unravelled that it will be necessary, if the reader is to make any sense either of it in particular or of the Elizabethan age in general, to spell out (at the risk of stating the obvious) what the Church of England was intended to be.

Technically, it does, at the time of writing, still survive. Bishops still sit in the House of Lords, the second legislative chamber of the English Parliament. The Queen – Elizabeth II – is supreme governor of the Established Church. The cathedrals and medieval parish churches of England are the property of this Church. The old colleges at Oxford and Cambridge all subscribe to this Church. Many of England’s schools are Church of England schools – the majority of primary schools have this status. But you only have to read a newspaper account of any of these phenomena to realise how little the average journalist or member of the public understands what the Church of England is.

Many speak of the Church of England schools, for example, as ‘faith schools’, as though they were items on a multicultural menu, to which various alternatives – Roman Catholic, secular, Muslim schools – could be offered to parents wondering where to send their children. Likewise, the bishops of the Church are spoken of as
Anglican
bishops. The word ‘Anglican’, deriving from dog Latin or Church Latin for ‘English’, was technically in existence in the seventeenth century, but did not really gain widespread usage until the nineteenth century, when many English Christians decided to become Roman Catholics and it became semantically necessary to distinguish between those who believed in bishops, the sacramental life, and so on, and did belong to the Church of England (Anglicans) and those who had decided to leave the Church of England for that of Rome. The
Oxford English Dictionary
records Charles Kingsley, author of
The Water Babies
, as the first, in 1838, to use the word ‘Anglicanism’. In the sixteenth century there was no such thing as Anglicanism, which is why people did not need a word for it. Queen Elizabeth was not an Anglican, nor were her bishops. They believed themselves to belong to the Church of Christ, the Church that Christ had founded. Historically speaking, the oldest branches of this Church were in the East: in Antioch, in Alexandria, in Jerusalem, in Constantinople, where the various patriarchates took local titles. The Patriarch of Constantinople came to be seen as the senior of these Eastern Churches and some, such as the Copts of Egypt, were separated from the others on the grounds of doctrine, but they all regarded themselves as members of the Church of Christ – what the Prayer Book of Edward VI called ‘the blessed company of all faithful people’.

In the England of Elizabeth, only the very learned or the far-travelled (that is, a small minority) would have been aware of the Church in its oriental manifestations. For them, the arguments boiled down to whether or not they accepted the Roman Catholic authority or followed one of the Reformers – Luther or Zwingli or Calvin.

No one in the sixteenth century, in all its disputes, controversies and wars about religion, said, ‘I don’t like
this
Church, let’s go and start
another
.’ The fact that, as a result of the Reformation, and the fissiparous nature of Protestantism, there are many ‘denominations’ in today’s Western world, confuses the modern observer into such anachronism as speaking of the Elizabethan Church as ‘Anglican’. The ‘Puritans’ – those who wished the Church to follow the path it had done in Zwingli’s or Calvin’s Switzerland or Luther’s Germany – are seen as proto-Presbyterians, Baptists or some other denomination, whereas those who could not in conscience take the oath swearing allegiance to the Queen as Governor of the Church of England are seen as members of yet another ‘denomination’: the Catholics.

But it was not like that. There was one Church that in the West had suffered the sort of crisis which had divided the Eastern Churches in the past – but never so radically. Since the twelfth century the popes had asserted, with increasing boldness, their quasi-monarchical status. When the separation and quarrels with Eastern Churches became an actual Schism in the twelfth century, the Roman Popes made ever more confident claims to jurisdiction over the entire Church – claiming the right to temporal as well as spiritual power.

It was really in these political quarrels – between the papacy and the East, the papacy and the Western (usually German) emperors, and the papacy and the Kings of France, between 1200 and 1500 – that the seeds of the
religious
quarrels of the Reformation began. In the East, which had made the Emperor Constantine into a saint, it was perfectly imaginable that a secular ruler could be the Church’s Governor on Earth. In the West, where popes had quarrelled with almost all the monarchs of Europe at some time or another, on precisely this issue, it was seen by many Christians as improper for any but the Pope to appoint bishops or authorise liturgies. Henry VIII’s quarrel with the Pope about divorce in 1529 was far less radical than, say, the outright rejection of Christianity by the Emperor Frederick II (died 1250) or Philip the Fair of France’s rejection of papal taxes and the Pope’s right to appoint bishops.

What was new in the sixteenth century was an upsurge of
intellectual
enquiry about what the Church was. Luther did not nail his Treatise to the great doors of the abbey at Wittenberg because he wanted to start a Lutheran Church as a rival show to the Roman Catholic Church. He did so because he believed that late-medieval Christianity – with its sales of indulgences, its use of the Eucharistic Sacrament as a sort of bargaining tool or bribe to shorten a dead person’s time in Purgatory, its lax sexual morals in monasteries, its papal politicking – was grossly failing to be the Church: the Church that Christ wanted it to be. Luther believed he had rediscovered the very Gospel itself. This was the Gospel of Justification by Faith Only, obscured and encrusted for centuries by superstition, and by attempts to win God’s favour by ‘good works’, pilgrimages, requiem Masses, and the like. Calvin’s view was different. For him, the key to all mythologies was predestination. Those who followed Calvin were (like Marxists and Darwinists) in that long tradition of thinkers who believe humanity is
programmed
(by God, by the materialist forces of history, by inheritance and DNA) to be as it is. Nothing can alter it. The concept of grace is severely limited by such a theology. But all these thinkers (who revolutionised the way Christians think and who blew to smithereens any chance of one undivided European Church acknowledging the supremacy of the Pope) believed they were trying to persuade the Church to find its true nature.

One of the most eloquent expressions of this yearning for the Church to find its true nature, and to find unity on Earth, was written by John Donne (1572–1631). Donne was brought up in a family that would not accept the Church of England. Two of his uncles were Jesuit priests. In 1593 a Roman Catholic priest, William Harrington, was found in the rooms of Donne’s brother Henry. Both were arrested and imprisoned in the clink prison in Southwark. Harrington was hanged, drawn and quartered for treason. Donne was not yet twenty-one. He is noted for his extraordinary satires and tautly rendered erotic lyrics. But he also, in middle age, took Holy Orders. By now he had abandoned the Romanist sympathies of his family and he became Dean of St Paul’s in London.

We do not know exactly when he wrote the sonnet which so eloquently encapsulates the sixteenth-century yearning not simply for unity and concord among Christians, but for truth. Helen Gardner glossed this poem as follows, and it might help the reader to follow her prose ‘translation’ before reading the poem itself:

Make visible, dear Lord, the Church as she is described in Scripture. Can she be either the insolent, proud Church of Rome, or the mourning and desolate Protestant Church of Germany and here? Am I to believe that for a thousand years or more there was no true Church on earth? Or, that a Church claiming to be the truth itself, yet constantly erring – both innovating and deserting what she formerly held – can be she? Am I to believe that now, as of old, and in future, as long as the world lasts, she is to be found in one place only – here, or there, or elsewhere? Am I to believe that she is to be found here on earth, or am I to hold that only in heaven, after our pilgrimage, can we see her as she is? Lord, do not thus hide thy Bride from our sight, but let me woo the gentle spouse of thy marriage song, who is most faithful to Thy will and most pleasing to Thee when the greatest number of men seek and receive her embraces.

Show me deare Christ, thy spouse, so bright and cleare.

What, is it she, which on the other shore

Goes richly painted? Or which rob’d and tore

Laments and mournes in Germany and here?

Sleepes she a thousand, then peepes up one yeare?

Is she selfe truth and errs? Now new, now outwore?

Doth she, and did she, and shall she evermore

On one, on seaven, or on no hill appeare?

Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights

First travaile we to seeke and then make Love?

Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights,

And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove,

Who is most trew, and most pleasing to thee, then

When she is embrac’d and open to most men.
¹

It really was the aim of Elizabeth, when she came to the throne, to enable the Church to be ‘open to most men’ – and women, of course. That is, rather than adhering to her sister’s policy of burning many heretics at the stake, or to her brother’s highly divisive continental Protestantism, she aimed to create an ecclesiastical polity that was inclusive. There was great intellectual seriousness about her aim, and that of her first Parliament, to get the formula right: to arrange the Government of the Church, its rites and liturgies, in such a way that the majority of (ideally all) men and women could in conscience subscribe to it. It was necessary to cast the net as broadly as possible, since, once the formula had been decided, there was no room
politically
for dissent. The Church of England was not conceived as a religious denomination for ‘Anglicans’. It was the Church for all the People of England. A failure to get it right would alienate large quantities of people, and create such a lack of sympathy between monarch and subjects as had obtained in Mary Tudor’s reign. Such alienation of sympathy was not something that Elizabeth, politically, could afford.

The situation of the English Church at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign was one of complete chaos, a chaos heightened by the Queen’s subtle and ambivalent attitude, her attempts not merely to adopt, but to explain, the religious position of her father Henry VIII in his last days. Was England to go Protestant, as the ‘wolves of Germany’ hoped, those thoroughgoing Lutherans or Calvinists who had gone into European exile during the reign of Mary? By no means, said Elizabeth. Within six weeks of her accession she had issued a proclamation (three days after Christmas 1558) forbidding all preaching, but permitting the Gospel and Epistle to be read in English at Mass. So the Roman Catholics had reason to be optimistic? Not so, since Elizabeth’s first Parliament swept away all Mary’s legislation, gave supreme power over the national Church to the Crown, brought back the second Prayer Book (the more Protestant version – Elizabeth herself preferred the first) of King Edward VI’s reign, and made it a treasonable offence, punishable by death, to make written or oral defence of the ‘authority of a foreign prince, prelate or potentate within her majesty’s dominions’ – that is, to accept the Pope as a higher
religious
authority than the Queen. All clergy, judges, justices, mayors, royal officials and persons wishing to take a degree at one of the universities were obliged to take the Oath of Supremacy, which declared the Queen to be the ‘only supreme governor of this realm, as well in all spiritual and ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal’. She did not claim, as Henry VIII had done, to be ‘the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England’, but her defiance of papal authority put Catholics in an awkward position.