The Elizabethans (36 page)

Yet these thirty Dutch Anabaptists, by their refusal to attend the services of the Church of England on Easter Day, had undermined the whole idea of the Elizabethan Settlement: namely that the National Church was comprehensive. Its rites and formularies had been painstakingly worked out to satisfy the consciences of as many Christians as possible, both those who inclined to a Catholic position and those who were convinced Protestants. To refuse to go along with this, for whatever reason, undermined the whole system.

The Dutch Anabaptists were asked four questions:

1 Whether Christ did not assume this flesh from the body of Mary.

The Dutch replied that ‘He is the son of the living God.’ This implied that they did not literally believe in the Virgin birth.

2 Whether infants should not be baptised.

Their reply was, ‘We cannot understand matters so, for we read nothing of it in the Scripture.’ Then came an exposure of their essential anarchism – again, an attitude and set of beliefs that they shared with the huge majority of early Christians:

3 Whether it was lawful for a Christian to attend or discharge the duties of a magistrate’s officer.

They replied that their conscience would not suffer them to do so, but they considered the magistracy as a minister of God for the protection of the servants of God.

Last, they were asked:

4 Whether a Christian was allowed to take an oath.

They replied, quite truthfully, that the taking of oaths was forbidden by Christ in the Gospel of St Matthew.

The Bishop of London, Edwin Sandys, told them that they must choose between recanting these opinions and being burned at the stake.
¹
Five chose to return to prison, where they were given fifty days, until the Feast of Pentecost, to make up their minds. Some recanted, and the rest were banished. Of the five in prison, one died and two, having been tortured, were allowed to go free. Jan Pieters and Hendrick Terwoot were burned at the stake. John Foxe, the martyrologist, wrote to the Queen to plead for them:

As to these fanatical sects . . . it is certain they are by no means to be countenanced in a commonwealth, but, in my opinion ought to be suppressed by proper correction. But to roast alive the bodies of poor wretches that offend rather through blindness of judgment than perverseness of will, in fire and flames, raging with pitch and brimstone, is a hard-hearted thing, and more agreeable to the practice of Romanists than the customs of the Gospeller.
²

The Queen and the bishop were both adamant. She who preferred to watch the abominable sport of bear-baiting to stage plays,
³
and who was prepared to profit from John Hawkins’s slave trading, was not the sort of Christian who would be swayed by appeals for clemency. Throughout her reign, she displayed an unremitting intolerance towards Protestant dissent. Prison or exile were the choices for those whose Protestant sensibilities made it impossible to attend the services of the Established Church.

The number of Protestants burned by Elizabeth was tiny compared with the number burned by her sister Mary. The persecution was nonetheless fierce. And if Elizabethan England is compared with the rest of Europe, it was just as intolerant as the other countries in its laws and attitudes. The difference, perhaps, was that by virtue of its very nature the Church of England, and its early apologists, were obliged to indulge in much saving ‘double-think’. Though the laws were draconian, and toleration was theoretically non-existent, there were many nods and winks, and much of the ‘persecution’ took the form of fines, which appealed to the parsimonious monarch.

William Byrd (1543–1623), for example, was an Elizabethan whose work endures, continuing to delight and uplift all who are not tone deaf. He lived to the age of eighty. We remember the anthems and songs, the keyboard works and the madrigals that survive as such exuberant witnesses to his fertile, imaginative life. But his greatest work is liturgical. His
Nunc Dimittis
from his setting of Evensong has been described as ‘probably the finest and the most beautiful ever written for the English use’.
⁴
No one who has ever heard it will forget the end of the Canticle in G, and then the switch of chord to F for the
Gloria
, the phrase ‘and ever shall be’ passed contrapuntally from voice to voice while the bass sings the same phrase in augmentation. A similar ‘trick’ occurs in his setting of the Creed, where he switches from the main key of the work, C major, to B-flat major for the phrase ‘And was crucified.’

Byrd wrote two complete ‘Services’ –
Venite
,
Te Deum
,
Benedicite
,
Magnificat
and
Nunc Dimittis
– several settings of the Prayer Book Eucharist and many settings of the Latin texts of the Mass. Queen Elizabeth was lucky enough to have him as the organist of the Chapel Royal, where he worked in tandem with Thomas Tallis (
c
.1505–85). Tallis was one of the most sublime of all English composers, and his motet for forty voices,
Spem in alium
, must be one of the greatest pieces in the English repertoire. Almost certainly he was a Roman Catholic, or Catholic sympathiser, but he was able to function as a court musician. Byrd was in the same position. When Tallis retired, Byrd took over as organist of the Chapel Royal. To compensate Byrd for loss of potential income as a teacher (he was obliged to attend daily at court) the Queen allowed him and Tallis the exclusive right to print ‘any songe or songes in partes, either in English, Latine, Frenche, Italian or other tongues that may serve for musicke either in Church or chamber, or otherwise be either plaid or soonge’ for a period of twenty-one years (the licence was given in 1575). This was tantamount to an official recognition that Byrd’s settings of the Mass in Latin would be used in the private chapels of Roman Catholics. Byrd was always short of money. This was partly because of his commitment to the badly paid post of organist at the Chapel Royal, where he supplied the Anglo-Catholic Queen with glorious settings of the liturgy, largely in Latin. It was also partly because he and his wife, Julian Birley, sympathised with the Roman Catholic position. When not in London, they lived with their children in the village of Harlington in Middlesex. It would seem as if Julian was more obdurate than her husband in her refusal to attend services in Harlington parish church, and they paid stiff fines. Nevertheless, in spite of his open sympathy for Roman Catholic recusants, Byrd continued to be organist in the Chapel Royal until 1595, and even after he moved to Stondon Massey in Essex, he continued to have some part in the music of the court. He attended the Queen’s funeral, and the coronation of James I, and sang ‘melodious songs’ with the likes of Orlando Gibbons, Elway Bevin, William Lawes and other gentlemen when James I dined at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in 1607.
⁵
His career was obviously a special case – the Queen liked his music. But his long life touched many others, and his friends included open dissidents, as well as conformists of one kind or another, many of whose experience reflected what an historian of the English Reformation called ‘legislative severity and administrative moderation’.
⁶

Nor should we imagine that even those recusants who suffered imprisonment were all confined in vile dungeons. Francis Mills, one of Walsingham’s secretaries, describes a priest in the Marshalsea prison:

C was with me last night and tells me that he was yesterday invited for his farewell to a banquet in the chamber of Lister, the priest in the Marshalsea, where among other guests were three gentlewomen very brave in their attire, two of them daughters to Sir John Arundel, the third the daughter or wife of one Mr Becker. There were also one Browne, a citizen, and one Mr Moore, with others. It was Magdalen Day and the priest catechised the company with the doctrine of Popish repentance, taking for his theme the story of Magdalen, absurdly applying the same to his purpose. You see how these kind of prisoners be by their keepers looked unto.
⁷

And there was a very practical reason why in so many cases the severe laws were not severely enforced: a high proportion of judges and lawyers were themselves either recusants or secret Catholic sympathisers. John Milton (1608–74) in his pamphlet
Of Reformation Touching Church Discipline in England and the causes that hitherto have hindered it
(1641) listed among the reasons why ‘Religion attain’d not a perfect reducement in the beginning of [Elizabeth’s] Reigne’ the fact that ‘the Judges, the lawyers, the Justices of Peace’ were ‘for the most part Popish’. Milton, though a famous Puritan, came from a popish family and his brother was both popish and a judge. So he knew whereof he spoke.

Archbishop Parker and Sir Francis Walsingham were both worried by the number of Catholic lawyers. In October 1577, when the Council insisted upon the bishops all making returns of all the recusants in their dioceses, they realised they had overlooked the Inns of Court, which were ‘greatlie infected with Poperie’. The Lord Chancellor was told to make a similar investigation into the Inns of Chancery. As you would expect from clever lawyers, the evidence is conflicting and confusing, but the certificate for Lincoln’s Inn listed forty recusants, or 25 per cent of all members of the Inn.
⁸
Of the Inner Temple, 33 per cent of members were ‘Popish’ – sixty-two members out of 189. But those who had been expelled from their inns for religious reasons are not included in these statistics, and by definition many of the Catholics were secretive about their allegiance. So the proportions must have been much higher than these statistics suggest. In 1583 in the Inner Temple there was a row about a bencher called Ridgeley being given a particular set of rooms. Those who were against Ridgeley alleged that he had made ‘persuasion to . . . fellows that now are or have been of this house either to draw them to popery or confirm them in the same’.
⁹
In other words, the Inner Temple was perfectly prepared to accept Catholic lawyers so long as they kept quiet about it and did not attempt to proselytise.

This is the background to the story of the persecution of the Roman Catholics in Elizabeth’s reign, and the attempted extirpation of all dissent, whether Protestant or Catholic. At times it was intrusive. At times it caused great hardship and suffering, but they
were
hard times. The great majority were not truly hurt or inconvenienced by the laws forbidding dissent; and with a few pathetic exceptions, the Catholics who were actually killed by the Elizabethan state were deemed, in most cases rightly, to be actively engaged in treason. It is difficult to think of any political system, any state, that could tolerate in its midst those who plotted the murder of the head of state and the overthrow of the system. Comparable cases today, in which Islamists have been involved in terrorist plots or attempts to bring about a pan-Islamic world order, are rooted out as thoroughly as governments are able. Likewise, the government of Elizabeth, Burghley and Walsingham would have deemed itself irresponsible not to repress Jesuit missionaries and others who could not accept Elizabeth as Queen and who tried to persuade others to take part in plots for her overthrow. Government fears were well placed, as was shown in 1586–7 when the Pope offered the King of Spain two million gold ducats if he would invade England, and in 1588 the English who lived on the south coast would watch the magnificent sails of the Armada speed past Plymouth and the Isle of Wight towards London.

Obviously, on one level, the Elizabethan Settlement in religion had not worked. There was a significant number of Protestants for whom the Reformation had not gone far enough. For them, the solution was to flood the land with preachers. Elizabeth, who knew how rare was the gift of effective preaching, thought that three or four preachers for a shire were sufficient. This shocked the puritanical Archbishop Grindal,
¹⁰
who wanted 13,000 preachers loosed upon the unresponsive population.

Examples multiply, wherever you go in England, of the sheer inefficacy of evangelical propaganda. Richard Greenham was the rector of Dry Drayton in Cambridgeshire for more than twenty years, from 1570 to 1591. Filled with the new learning and the desire to convert his village flock to the exciting new ideas of Luther, Zwingli or Calvin, he preached six sermons a week – some 6,000 in all. But when he left for London he felt disgust at the ‘untractableness and unreachableness of that people among whom he had taken exceeding great pains’. In 1602 Josias Nichols, a comparably serious clergyman, had a parish in Kent:

I have been in a parish of 400 or so communicants, and marvelling that my preaching was so little regarded I took upon me to confer with every man and woman before they received the communion. And I asked them of Christ, what he was in his person; what his office; how sin came into the world; what punishment for sin; what becomes of our bodies being rotten in the graves; and lastly whether it was possible for a man to live so uprightly that by well-doing he might win heaven. In all the former questions I scarce found ten in the hundred to have any knowledge, but in the last question, scarce one, but did affirm that a man might be saved by his own well-doing, and that he trusted he did so live, and that by God’s grace he should obtain everlasting life by serving of God and good prayers.

Had they absorbed the tenets of European Protestantism these agricultural workers in Kent would have known that, to satisfy their vicar’s definition of true faith, they should have said that no amount of upright living could save a person: only faith in Christ could do that.

Protestant enthusiasts could look at the fledgling Church of England and think it a poor thing because it was so un-Lutheran, un-Calvinist or un-Zwinglian. Catholic enthusiasts, and Catholic revisionist historians, could make a comparable mistake, by imagining that widespread conservatism and attachment to Catholic habits of mind and, indeed, sympathy for the heroism of the Catholic recusants when they suffered for their faith, constituted a wish to return to the Pope’s obedience at any price. And that certainly was not true.