Elizabethan Controversialists. Peter Milward
used as a convenient means of defending the Anglican position on the royal supremacy in ecclesiastical affairs, while attacking the Catholic opposition, under the guise of an Answer.
In the following year a Catholic rejoinder was published at Louvain from the pen not of Harding, who was then preoccupied with his controversy against Jewel, but of a younger scholar, Thomas Stapleton. Like many of his fellow Lovanists, Stapleton had been educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, and was already engaged with them in a corporate task of refuting the whole Anglican position. From the beginning his share in the task had been the modest one of translating from Latin certain writings that seemed to have a bearing on the main issue. One was The Apology of Fredericus Staphylus, an eminent convert to the Catholic cause from Lutheranism, who devoted much of his book to an exposition of the radical excesses of the German reformers. Another was Bede’s History of the Church of England, as bearing witness to the substantial agreement between the English Church of that time (six centuries after Christ) and the contemporary Catholic Church. Together with his translation of Bede Stapleton published a treatise of his own entitled A Fortress of the Faith, showing how “in all points of doctrine, of ceremonies and of ecclesiastical government mentioned and by occasion reported in this History… our first faith agreeth and concurreth with the faith of the first six hundred years and the primitive Church”. But now, he complains, “a new faith is pretended, a new gospel is preached, a new religion is commended and commanded”. These writings of his were all published in the same year 1565, and from them he went on to take a more active part in the hue and cry against Jewel, with his Return of Untruths published in the following year. Following his adversary’s example in enumerating 255 untruths in Harding’s Answer, Stapleton produced no fewer than 562 untruths in two articles alone of Jewel’s Reply.
Now, however, his attention was diverted from Jewel, who was already under fire from other Lovanists, to the publication of Horne’s Answer to Feckenham. Considering that Feckenham, like Cole before him, was in no position to defend himself, and having received various “instructions” from friends in England to this purpose, Stapleton undertook his defence, and he entitled his work, with a play on his adversary’s name, A Counterblast to M.Horne’s Vain Blast. Already in his Preface to Horne, he emphasizes the fundamental nature of this controversy, which has the same effect of sharpening his style as Jewel’s Apology had on that of Harding. “The matter you have taken in hand to prove,” he tells Horne, “is of such and so great importance as no matter more now in controversy. It is the castle of your profession, the key of your doctrine, the principal fort of all your religion. It is the pillar of your authority, the fountain of your jurisdiction, the anchorhold of all your proceedings. Without right of this supreme government by you here defended, your cause is betrayed, your doctrine dissolveth, your whole religion goeth to wrack.” Coming as he does from Jewel to Horne, Stapleton resorts to the same method of enumerating his adversary’s untruths, which, he announces “amount to the number of six hundred four-score and odd. They be so notorious and so many, that it pitieth me in your behalf to remember them. But the places be evident and cry corruption and may by no shift be denied.” As for his method, he has thought it good, he confesses, “in a matter of such importance to be rather tedious, to make all perfect, than short and compendious, to leave aught imperfect.” Finally, turning from his Protestant adversary to his possibly uncommitted reader, he makes this urgent appeal into which he concentrates the substance of his book. “Now, good reader, as thou tenderest thy own salvation, and hopest to be a saved soul in the joyful and everlasting bliss of heaven, to consider and weigh well with thyself the importance of this matter in hand. First, religion without authority is no religion. For no true religion (saith Augustine) can by any means be received without some weighty force of authority. Then if this religion whereby thou hopest to be saved have no authority to ground itself upon, what hope of salvation, remaining in this religion, canst thou conceive? If it have any authority, it hath the authority of the prince, by whose supreme government it is enacted, erected and forced upon thee. Other authority it hath none. If then that supreme government be not due to the lay prince, but to the spiritual magistrate, and to the one chief magistrate among the whole spirituality, thou seest thy religion is but a bare name of religion, and no religion in deed.”
In keeping with his challenging title, Stapleton maintains the language of knightly combat throughout his volume. Taking up the gauntlet thrown down by Horne, he boldly defies him, declaring, “In all this book there is not as much as one word of Scripture, one doctor, one council general or provincial, not the practice of any one country throughout the world counted Catholic, that maketh for such kind of regiment as M.Horne avoucheth.” Even before coming to deal with the main issue, the Oath of Supremacy, he sees it implied in his adversary’s title, which Feckenham was over-ready to grant him for courtesy’s sake, “Bishop of Winchester”. For indeed, he affirms, “ye are but an usurper and an intruder, as called thereto by no lawful and ordinary vocation nor canonical consecration.” From this he goes on to complain, with not a little of Harding’s eloquence, that the faith of Englishmen should be made to depend, as now it does, on the proceedings of a lay parliament. “O poor and silly help, O miserable shift, that our faith should hang upon an act of parliament, contrary as well to all acts of parliament ever holden in England before as to the canons and fathers of the Catholic Church. A strange and wonderful matter to hear in a Christian commonwealth, that matters of faith are parliament cases, that civil and profane matters be converted into holy and ecclesiastical matters, yea, and what worse is, that laymen that are of the fold only, not shepherds at all, and therefore bound to learn of their Catholic bishops and pastors, may alter the whole Catholic religion, maugre the heads of all the bishops and the whole convocation. This is to trouble all things. This is, as it were, to confound together heaven and earth.”
In reply to Horne’s accusation of treason against the Catholics, Stapleton insists that their refusal to take the Oath is “only for conscience’ sake, grounded upon the canons and laws of the holy Church and the continual practice of all Christian and Catholic realms, finally upon holy Scripture, namely that saying of St.Peter, Oportet obedire Deo, magis quam hominibus. God must be obeyed more than men.” All they desire of the Queen, he adds, is “to be borne withal, if we cannot upon the sudden, and without sure and substantial grounds, abandon that faith that we were baptized in and (as we are assured) all our ancestors”. Then, turning from defence to attack, he points out that, so far from the Catholics being traitors to their sovereign, it is the Protestants who have always shown themselves both in theory and in practice addicted to treason, whenever it is to their advantage. He recalls how much trouble was stirred up by them in Queen Mary’s time, though now these traitors have been canonized by John Foxe in that “devilish dirty dunghill” of his Book of Martyrs. He relates similar troubles caused by them in Germany, France and the Low Countries, and he adds his own eye-witness account of their recent turbulent behaviour in Antwerp. Referring to these “outrageous enormities”, he exclaims, “what tongue can express, what pen can decipher sufficiently the extremity thereof?” One night, in particular, has seared itself on his memory, when “the zealous brotherhood followed the chase, that they left not one church in Antwerp, great or small, where they hunted not up good game and carried away flesh good store. Chalices, patens, cruets of gold and silver, copes and vestments of silk and of velvet, fine linen and coarse, none came amiss…. To describe particularly the horrible and outrageous sacrileges of that night, an eternal document of the gospel-like zeal of this sacred brotherhood, would require a full treatise of itself.” Not that the new religion in England enjoys the full support of the Protestants, seeing that “not only the Catholics, but the very patriarchs of the new evangelical brotherhood”, including both Luther and Calvin, reject and condemn it. By them it is only supported for the time being, as a convenient means of displacing the Catholics, but the time will surely come when they will rise against what one of their leaders, John Knox, has rejected as “the monstrous regiment” of women.
Finally, with regard to the Oath itself, Stapleton emphasizes that, whereas a man might be persuaded for worldly reasons to take it, “Yet to declare the same in conscience no man can possibly… without manifest perjury, except his conscience be persuaded thereto.” “Now to persuade the conscience,”