The Elizabethans (52 page)

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.
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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.’
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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 they 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.

The Puritans were especially scandalised by Hooker’s high doctrine of the Eucharist, just as, no doubt, there were Roman Catholics who regarded as suspect his insistence that ‘
the soul of man
is the receptacle of Christ’s presence’ (Hooker’s italics).
¹⁴
‘The fruit of the Eucharist is the participation of the body and blood of Christ.’
¹⁵
This statement, in the fifth of Hooker’s books of
Laws
, actually lies at the heart of his whole philosophy of life. Far from being a compromiser who cobbled together a political justification for the Church of England, he saw the Church as emblematic of human society as a whole, men and women joined together for the common good to fulfil their destiny as children of God. He believed this to be the destiny of all human beings, regardless of whether they had the good fortune to have been born in England. In the England of Elizabeth, he believed this destiny was best fulfilled by an obedient membership of the National Church, whose faults he readily acknowledged. Indeed, the faults in part authenticated his viewpoint, since he believed that, this side of the grave, no institution – ecclesiastical, legal or political – could be perfect, and that wheat and tares would grow together in the Lord’s field until the harvest.

E.M.W. Tillyard, in a book that was once very popular, called
The Elizabethan World Picture
, demonstrated that the great writers of the age – Spenser, Sidney, Raleigh, Hooker, Shakespeare and Jonson – were all ‘united in holding with earnestness and passion and assurance to the main outlines of the medieval world picture’.
¹⁶
Since this was true of the poets in their Neoplatonism, in their shared concepts of a ‘chain of being’, in their idea of order and hierarchy, it was inevitably true of the Elizabethan Church. As all the inspectors’ and bishops’ reports and visitations show, the majority of English men and women were wistful about the parting of the old order, missed many of the old ways, but did not want to follow the Jesuits into civil war and regicide. They found that, for all the hurly-burly of the Reformation years, the Catholic religion – as found in the formularies of the Church of England – was in essence what it had been before, with changes that were on the whole welcome: a vernacular liturgy, and a Bible you could read for yourself. Hooker spoke to this generation, but he was not merely the mouthpiece of the zeitgeist. He was the carefully considered philosophical expression of a fact: nothing in
essence
had altered about England or its Church. There had been a few local improvements.

Hooker’s last years were clouded by illness, but brightened by the friendship of a Dutch priest, Dr Saravia, a prebend of Canterbury. They were one another’s confessors. His life at Bishopsbourne – as an active parish priest, and as a scholar – was cut short when he was only forty-six, by what seems to have been pneumonia. As he lay on his final sickbed he heard that his house had been burgled. ‘Are my books and written papers safe?’ was his revealing response. As he became weaker, Dr Saravia came once more to hear his confession:

and then the Doctor gave him, and some of those friends which were with him, the blessed sacrament of the body and blood of our Jesus. Which being performed, the Doctor thought he saw a reverend gaiety and joy in his face; but it lasted not long; for his bodily infirmities did return suddenly, and became more visible, insomuch that the Doctor apprehended death ready to seize him; yet, after some amendment, left him at night, with a promise to return early the day following; which he did and then found him better in appearance, deep in contemplation, and not inclinable to discourse; which gave the Doctor occasion to require his present thoughts. To which he replied, ‘That he was meditating the number and nature of angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which peace could not be in heaven: and Oh! That it might be so on earth.
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Part Four

The Close of the Reign

23

A Hive for Bees

THE ACCESSION DAY
Tilt on 17 November 1590 marked the retirement of Sir Henry Lee as the Queen’s Champion. The whole ceremony was choreographed, as had been the previous twenty or so (opinion differs about the date of the first), by Lee himself. He was not only an inspired deviser of symbolic ceremonial. He was himself an embodiment of Elizabethan tastes, values, history and aspirations. He was Elizabeth’s champion in far more than name only, and although he would live for another twenty years, his withdrawal from this particular role blew a chill wind. He was sixty. Some said that he was the Queen’s half-brother, a by-blow of Henry VIII’s. (‘He ordered that all his family should be christened
Harry’s
,’
¹
gossiped John Aubrey). Whatever the truth of that, he was brought up as the child of gentry – of Sir Anthony Lee of Borston, Buckinghamshire – but entered royal service at the court of Henry VIII when he was fourteen. Aubrey tells us that Lee never married, but this is untrue: it was his (unhappy) marriage to the Catholic Anne Paget that saved this stoutly Protestant gentleman’s bacon during the precarious reign of Mary Tudor.