Heretic Queen (29 page)

This may be in part due to bishops like John Whitgift who felt that their influence was exaggerated, with many women preachers being of the “lower sort.” However, Bishop Grindal harkened back to the Vestments Controversy of the 1560s when women “hooted at” him with cries of “wear horns” at St. Anne's Blackfriars. It was a bitter memory. At times, the moderate Grindal recalled that he had had to distance himself from the “eagerness of their affection, that maketh them, which way soever they take, diligent in drawing their husbands, children, servants, friends and allies in the same way.”
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Yet women believed themselves to be the “weaker vessel,” the descendants of Eve, who brought man down from the Garden of Eden. They were the perpetrators of the Original Sin, or so at least the Bible said and everyone believed. Most of these “activist” women found the Church of England perplexing and nonresponsive to their needs. With the Puritan emphasis on personal preaching and their public prophesyings, where laity and clergy were taught and exchanged ideas openly, suddenly women were able to ask meaningful questions and receive answers. Women like Lady Elizabeth Russell, Lady Walsingham, and the Countess of Sussex (foundress of Sidney Sussex College at Cambridge) all sought private as well as public solace from their male preacher counterparts. The Puritan preacher Thomas Wilcox wrote to one of his lady correspondents who was in the “fearful tempest of her perplexities … most heartily” beseeching her to go “forward and faint not in the course of godliness.”
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These were no wayward innkeepers' wives or strumpets. They were well-educated women who reflected an overwhelming need to communicate directly with their preachers on a highly personal level. Among the most notable activist women was the exceptional Anne Locke.

Born the daughter of Stephen Vaughan, who was Henry VIII's factor, merchant adventurer, and diplomat at Antwerp, Anne abandoned her mercer husband, Henry Locke, with his permission, to go live in Geneva with their two children, to learn at the knee of John Knox.
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When Locke died in 1572, she swiftly married Edward Dering, the godly preacher who had shown the queen the state of her church, and who was ten years her junior. Dering's correspondence is replete with his earnest teachings to Lady Mary Mildmay, Lady Golding, Mrs. Mary Honeywood, and Mrs. Catherine Killigrew, sister-in-law to both Sir Nicholas Bacon and Lord Burghley. His Puritanism showed an unlimited concern with the concept of sin and its remedy through practical and plain preaching. His congregation was large, helping not only these influential women but hundreds of faceless others.

Dering's female following of “spiritual patients” was not at all uncommon. Wilcox corresponded with the Countess of Bedford, Lady Fielding, and Lady Anne Bacon, among others, preaching “little but godly, plain and necessary exhortations and directions for the exercise of godliness.”
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Like Catholic wives, Protestant wives seemed deeply committed to their religion as the guardians of the faith through their children and homes. There is no doubt that English Protestant wives frequently looked to their counterparts in the stranger churches for ways in which they might be able to improve the religious education of their families and servants.

Still, there was one woman who remained distinctly unimpressed. By the summer of 1572, Elizabeth had already been preached to by the spellbinding and godly Edward Dering about the parlous state of her church. Thomas Cartwright, who had argued against the motion
Monarchy is the best form of Republic
at the Cambridge debates of 1564 during Elizabeth's progress, had gone on to stir up more trouble. In 1570, Cartwright had angered the Cambridge hierarchy when, from the dignity of his Lady Margaret Chair, his devastating oratory on the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles condemned the Church of England on Episcopal and hierarchical grounds. Worst of all,
An Admonition to Parliament,
written by John Field and Thomas Wilcox, and inspired by Cartwright's words, marked the point of no return.
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The queen was not amused.

*   *   *

It all began shortly
after the Duke of Norfolk's delayed execution for treason in the Ridolfi Plot, two months after the signing of the Treaty of Blois with France. Parliament was in session, pressing for sweeping religious reforms of the Anglican Church. Even before the cause had been lost, an anonymous popular diatribe entitled
An Admonition to the Parliament
was published from a secret printing press. The
Admonition
had moved on from attacks against the vestiges of “popery” and the dress of Anglican bishops, concentrating instead on the new Puritan issue of whether the church needed bishops or a group of elders and an entirely different hierarchy.

For them, this was the crux of the problem with the Anglican settlement. Elizabeth had changed the prayer book but not the way in which the Anglican Church worked. This was true. From the queen's viewpoint, by retaining the framework of the Catholic Church, it was easiest to spread her religious solution with the least upheaval. She had retained the system of bishops and archbishops and all the trappings of their offices just as it had existed in her father's time. The main change had been the reinstitution of the prayer book substantially in the form of her brother's. The privileges and superiority of the bishop's office were seen as “rather granted by man for maintaining of better order and quietness in commonwealths, than commanded by God in his word.”
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Two years earlier, Thomas Cartwright had called for the abolition of the titles and offices of the archbishops, bishops, deans, and archdeacons, suggesting instead that the government of the church should be restored to the primitive church with ministers elected by their congregation and presbytery at the local level. This was precisely what John Field and Thomas Wilcox called for in their
Admonition
attack on Parliament.
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It was how the stranger churches were run in England, just as it had been the experience of the English Protestants in Geneva, Frankfurt, and Strasbourg when they had once been in exile, too.

It was the younger of the two authors, the curate of All Hallows Honey Lane, Thomas Wilcox, who wrote the penetrating and fiery tirade at the beginning of the
Admonition
: “We in England are so far off from having a Church rightly reformed according to the prescript of God's word, that as yet we are not come to the outward face of the same.” Field later admitted that he had added the malicious and rabble-rousing “view of popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church.” In fact, Field took sole responsibility for its “bitterness of style,” particularly the really memorable phrases about the Book of Common Prayer like “an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill, the mass book, full of all abominations”; and “reading is not feeding, but as evil as playing upon a stage, and worse too”; and “they toss the psalms in most places like tennis balls”; and even “the commissary's court, that is, but a petty little stinking ditch that floweth out of that former great puddle.”
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The church elders rapidly distanced themselves from the new extremism of Wilcox and Field. John Whitgift, master of divinity at Trinity College Cambridge and future archbishop of Canterbury, who had recently stripped Thomas Cartwright of his fellowship at the university on the technicality that he had never been ordained, was proud to take up the cudgels against the Puritans with his
Replye
. Meanwhile, Burghley, desperately ill with a recurrence of gout, was hell-bent on finding the illegal printing press and the printer of the pamphlets.

Whitgift was appointed to the task. The investigation led to the Huguenot printing presses of London, but when no proof could be found, Burghley became convinced that the Puritan aldermen of London were sheltering the printer. One of the names put forward was Thomas Vautrollier, an exiled Huguenot printer who had been established in the Stationers Company only two years earlier.
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Elizabeth seethed at the lack of progress in finding the culprit press. What the queen hadn't immediately realized was that the actions of Field and Wilcox had split the Puritan wing in half.

Field and Wilcox were swiftly sentenced to a year's imprisonment at London's notorious Newgate Prison. Though they were feted by the younger and hotter gospellers, effectively keeping an “open house” at Newgate, older, calmer heads like Laurence Humphrey and a host of others visited them in prison to deplore “such Admonitions as are abroad … for that in some points and terms they are too broad and overshoot themselves.”
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In other words, they had done more harm than good and had “with unreasonableness and unseasonableness … hindered much good and done much hurt.”
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Even staunch Puritan sympathizers within the Privy Council—men like Leicester, Bedford, Sir Francis Knollys, Sir Walter Mildmay, Warwick, and Burghley—were aghast. Still, Leicester and Huntingdon—the most left wing in the council and consummate politicians suspected of duplicity by Burghley—watched and waited.

The damage that
An Admonition
had wreaked was done, however. It spelled the ultimate failure of the religion bill proposed in Parliament that spring that bore all the hallmarks of the most devoted Puritan members. Sir Francis Knollys defended the outrageous preamble to the bill, which claimed that “divers orders of rights, ceremonies, and observations” had been allowed since the Act of Settlement in 1559 and had been “permitted in respect of the great weakness of the people, then blinded with superstition.”
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The bill proposed one law for Protestants and another for Catholics. The Act of Settlement would only remain in force against “Papistical services, rites, or ceremonies,” while all Protestant services would be allowed, with the consent of the bishop in each diocese, to omit certain forms of the established service or to use the form of service as the French and Dutch congregations were permitted in England.
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The bill was, of course, an anathema to the queen. On its third reading, its backers finally realized they would need to amend it. The offensive preamble was omitted, and varying services would be allowed only by the consent of a majority of bishops. Still, it was not enough. Elizabeth sent the Speaker of the House a message that no bills concerning religion were to be put before the House, unless the bishops “liked it” and the originally proposed bill and any amendments were shown to her first. Those who had spoken out about the “liberty of the House” at the previous session said nothing this time, thanks in large part to Field's and Wilcox's handiwork.

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All this happened before
the fateful genocide on August 24, 1572, in Paris. By the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, three editions of the Puritan pamphlets by Field and Wilcox had been printed, including
A view of Popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church for the which godly ministers have refused to
subscribe
and a smaller one entitled
An exhortation to the bishops to deal brotherly with their brethren,
in which Field and Wilcox compared the bishops to “galled horses that cannot abide to be rubbed.”
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Where a few short months earlier the Puritans had sought to bind the crown and the papacy through intolerable and intolerant legislation, their militancy was suddenly seen as having great foresight against the evils of the Catholic League.

Leicester and Huntingdon saw their moment to help the authors of
An Admonition
and especially the cause of reform of the church. Together they pleaded for the release of Field and Wilcox with the Privy Council. Their timing was perfect. Naturally, there had been a great furor and uproar from the pulpits, in broadsides, and in ballads against the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre. By October, when the pair was released early, there was an added complication. They were “esteemed as gods” by the London mob, with Archbishop Parker lampooned as the “last” archbishop of Canterbury if the Puritan manifesto were adopted.
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By Christmas, Thomas Wilcox was touring the Puritan strongholds in Leicester's and Huntingdon's lands in the Midlands, returning to his London home by early February 1573.

Interestingly, John Field disappeared without trace for nearly three years. Vanished, too, were his scathing manifestos against the church establishment. The question is, where had Field gone? The answer is we don't know for sure. In any event, his three-year silence seems to have been broken from the printing press of Michael Schirat at Heidelberg, where Thomas Cartwright had been languishing. Could it be that Field hadn't
wanted
to be silent but rather had been silenced by the lack of a clandestine press or printer in England willing to risk everything for him?

The printed word—whether in cheap print or as a work of art in books—had become a powerful tool, which Field had wielded with aplomb, but a printer or stationer who would take on these high-profile and dangerous projects in Elizabethan England would have to be a brave man indeed. Given Field's return to London in the late 1570s, his absence from the manifesto scene seems reasonable if his former printer refused further contact.

Yet in the intervening years, Puritan ballads had proliferated, with lessons of ungrateful children, the constant Susanna, and the return of the prodigal son sung on street corners, at public prophesyings, or in the home. Printed pages were torn out of cheap ballad chapbooks and adorned the walls of homes and taverns alike. Unlike the Protestant ballads that treated biblical subjects with humor, theirs considered such levity as pure blasphemy. Elizabeth had become convinced that the godly people were no longer interested in obedience to the crown despite the fact that she had not disfavored any “repugnant or mislikers of her religion.”
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