Elizabethan Controversialists. Peter Milward
be instructed, informed and taught that which we never learned before.” Such an oath, he insists, “though a thousand acts of parliament should command it,” is not only unreasonable but forces Englishmen to incur “the horrible crime of perjury, and that of double perjury, which God will never suffer unrevenged without hearty repentance.” This decree was, moreover, passed by a lay parliament which did “utterly disobey the doctrine of all their bishops and enact a new contrary to theirs”. It gave a totally unprecedented permission to the secular prince to “alter our religion, set up a new, stop the shepherds’ mouths, play the shepherd himself”. Such indeed is the absurdity of this Oath that it makes all Englishmen “strangers from the whole body of Christendom beside, as though we had a proper Christ, a proper Gospel, and looked for a proper heaven, in which the other christened nations should find no place”.
Such were the principal arguments of Stapleton against Horne on this substantial point of difference between the Catholic exiles and the Protestant party in England. Yet, whereas Jewel had immediately responded to Harding, Horne remained strangely silent in the face of his opponent’s criticism. There was some talk that the newly appointed Dean of St.Paul’s, Alexander Nowell, who had just emerged from a minor controversy with another Lovanist, Thomas Dorman, might undertake the major task of refuting Stapleton, but nothing came from his pen. It was not till 1573 that John Bridges, later Dean of Salisbury and Bishop of Oxford, published a combined refutation of the English Counterblast and Sanders’ more formidable Latin De Visibili Monarchia Ecclesiae under the title of The Supremacy of Christian Princes.
In his dedication to Queen Elizabeth Bridges reaffirms the importance of the controversy, but he strangely exaggerates the number of books it has provoked. “There is no controversy,” he declares, “at this day betwixt us and the enemies of the Gospel more impugned than this one of the Supremacy, nor more books compiled, more libels scattered, more vaunts made of truth on their party, more slanders devised of our doctrine and your Majesty’s title, more secret conspiracies and open treasons against your royal person and state of the realm, than our adversaries make only for this Supremacy.” In fact, Stapleton’s book had been the first to take up the matter at any length, in sole response to Horne’s challenge, and since then it had been followed up only by the more influential and sensational Latin treatise of Sanders in 1571. Anyhow Bridges finds himself faced with the task of explaining “the reasons why this answer came forth no sooner”. He was merely waiting, he pleads, first for Horne, then for Nowell, to come forth with their answers. Why they failed to do so, he has never inquired of them but merely assumed that they must have considered the book “not worth the answering at all (as in very deed, to the learned marker, it is not)”. After all, he adds, who is this Stapleton but “a lusty younker” and “a very unfit match for so grave a bishop” with his “scold’s and scorner’s rhetoric”? Now, however, considering that many have misconstrued their silence, Bridges has taken up his pen on their behalf not only against Stapleton’s book but also against the more recent and weighty Latin treatise of Sanders.
As Stapleton did with the name of Horne, so Bridges takes the title of Stapleton’s book and plays with it at some length. Terming it “a very blast blown out to encounter the grave and pithy answers” of Horne, he professes to have gathered together “all those blasts wherewith his Counterblast is puffed up, and have sorted them in several winds and blasts”, for their more effective refutation. In it he has, he declares, found nothing but “vain words and a vain title of a vain book… proceeding of a vain head”. Yet for all the abundance of his word-play and the heaviness of his humour, Bridges comes at length to the point of the Anglican position when he tells his adversary, “As ye detract your duty from your prince, so ye ascribe a great deal too much to your pope.” He denies that “all articles or any article of faith depends on the prince’s government, but the prince’s government depends on them, to oversee them dutifully set forth.” Rather, he maintains, so far from the prince claiming any absolute supreme government, “it is your pope only that taketh this absolute supremacy on him, and you that give it him.” He is therefore unable to see any difficulty or danger of perjury in taking the Oath of Supremacy, which is rather the clear duty of any Christian subject. As for the misdeeds with which Stapleton has charged the Protestants, he protests that “we shall have all laid in our dish, nought shall be left behind concealed that any Protestants unadvisedly ever did or spake”. Rather, when it comes to muck-raking, he can give his opponent many similar tales of Papist misdeeds, but of such mutual abuse there is no end.
So this particular controversy came to an end. Neither Stapleton nor Sanders attempted to answer Bridges. Their minds were preoccupied with other matters during the new decade. A new situation had arisen with Allen’s founding of his seminary or English College at Douai in 1568, and then the rising of the Northern Earls in 1569. Stapleton himself was one of Allen’s first assistants in his enterprise, and was soon busy lecturing in divinity at the University of Douai. From now on all his published writings were in Latin. As for Sanders, his zeal for the Catholic cause in England led him in an increasingly political direction, till he came to be regarded by the English government as the arch-traitor. On the Anglican side, Horne never again took up his pen in controversy but was tireless in taking practical action against the Papists in his diocese. As for Bridges, he turned his controversial pen from the Catholics to the Puritans in his celebrated Defence of the Government Established in 1587 – celebrated not so much for its arguments as for its length, which drew upon its author the merciless ridicule of Martin Marprelate – as remains to be seen in detail.
Bibliographical Note
1 An Answer made by Rob.Bishop of Winchester, to a book entitled The Declaration of such Scruples and Stays of Conscience concerning the Oath of Supremacy as M.John Feckenham by writing did deliver unto the L.Bishop of Winchester, with his resolutions made thereunto. 1566 (RC 38)
2 A Counterblast to M.Horne’s Vain Blast against M.Feckenham, touching the Oath of Supremacy… By Thomas Stapleton Student in Divinity. 1567 (RC 39)
3 The Supremacy of Christian Princes, over all persons throughout their dominions, in all causes so well ecclesiastical as temporal, both against the Counterblast of Thomas Stapleton, replying on the reverend father in Christ, Robert Bishop of Winchester, and also against Nicholas Sanders his Visible Monarchy of the Roman Church, touching this controversy of the Prince’s Supremacy. Answered by John Bridges. 1573 (RC 40)
Puritan Admonition
a) The Brief Discourser, Robert Cowley (1518-88)
Who was the first Puritan? That is no easy question to answer. For every manifestation of Puritanism, whether the vestiarian controversy of the mid-sixties, or the troubles at Frankfurt in the mid-fifties, or the intransigence of John Hooper in the early fifties, one can point to some precedent or fore-runner. Sooner or later, in fact, one is inevitably led back to the original revolt of Martin Luther in 1517. Not that Luther can himself be called a Puritan, but it is in his ideas that the seeds and first principles of what later came to be known as Puritanism were originally contained.
What then is Puritanism? That, too, is no easy concept to define. One may say it represents the radical element in the Protestant Reformation, the negative attitude of opposition to whatever in Christian tradition is not explicitly allowed in the Bible. As the reforms of Luther, Zwingli and even Calvin came to be accepted in any country, their radicalism had to be softened in face of the practical needs and requirements of the people, and so their revolt became established and institutionalized. A new Church, or what may be called an anti-Church Church, thus came into existence on the ruins of the old Church. But in so far as the original spirit of revolt remained, the practical reforms were often criticized for not going far enough. Thus within the Protestant establishment there arose, by a kind of Hegelian dialectic of thesis and antithesis, a movement of opposition.
This was particularly the case in England after the accession of Queen Elizabeth. Already among the English Protestant exiles in Frankfurt during Queen Mary’s reign a dissension had broken out between those who, like Richard Cox and John Jewel, contented themselves with the Edwardian reforms and those