The Penguin History of Britain: New Worlds, Lost Worlds:The Rule of the Tudors 1485-1630 (43 page)

Could there have been a massacre at London as there had been at Paris? The same text – Deuteronomy, Chapter 13 – which had stirred the citizens of Paris to slaughter was cited by the lord bishops at Westminster in 1572: death to those who incited the people of God to false worship. The Bishop of London – who, so he said, was ‘always to be pitied’, so unruly was his flock – feared that the French treachery would ‘reach over unto us’, and that the Londoners would be excited to violence by young preachers of more zeal than wisdom. London was the heartland of the radical puritan movement. Here presbyterian ringleaders found patrons and audiences. The religious enthusiasm of the Londoners was a powerful impetus to reform, but it was also a deterrent because of the division it brought. When the episcopal reaction came, as it did again in 1573, repression was most marked in London. But even though London’s governors constantly predicted trouble because religious passions were often so inflamed, there was no major religious riot in Elizabethan London; no bodies in the Thames nor blood in the streets because of religion. Government in London worked; diffused as it was through all the parishes, wards, precincts, companies, and households. Those who held divergent beliefs usually managed to worship together, work together and trade together. The wars in the streets were only wars of words.

Yet the ‘civil wars of the Church of God’ continued. The contention was between ‘zeal’ and ‘policy’; between those of the older generation who remembered how far they had come through persecution and exile, how hard it was to keep what they had; and the younger generation, who saw only the deformity and degeneration of the Church, so distant still from the True Church. The more radical bishops always hoped for better times and further reform, but they were, however uncomfortably, servants of a conservative mistress; commissioners for a Supreme Governor who was resistant to change and terrified of disorder. As the bishops stood in the way of reform, the presbyterians thought that they must go. ‘What is your judgement, ought there to be any bishops in the churches of Christians?’ they asked. Archbishop Matthew Parker, seen as ageing and antediluvian, despaired. In 1574 puritan satirists argued that seventy archbishops of Canterbury had been enough: ‘As Augustine was the first, so Matthew might be the last.’

Puritan satirists? The godly were not usually associated with satire, with fun. Puritan jokes were more often made against them than by them; against their behaviour as sanctimonious, censorious, holier-than-thou, hypocritical. As the godly few sought increasingly to impose their will
upon the profane multitude the jokes became more bitter. Since the Fall, when humanity lost the divine likeness, every Christian had fought a lonely battle against sin but, because Protestantism stressed human depravity, that battle must now be fought with greater urgency. The godly led a campaign against the drunkard, the blasphemer and the lecher in order to create a society more conformable to God’s Word. From the middle of Elizabeth’s reign, as Protestantism won over the establishment, and godly magistrates aligned with godly ministers began to tighten their grip upon many a provincial town, puritanism came to be identified with moral and social repression. The old moral discipline of the ecclesiastical courts the godly thought no discipline at all. What punishment was it for fornicators to be ‘turned out of a hot sheet’ to stand in the white sheet of penance? Paternalist puritan Justices, driven by scripture and righteous indignation, exercised stern rule in their petty sessions. In 1578 the Justices in Bury St Edmunds drew up a new penal code. Women found guilty of fornication would receive thirty lashes ‘well laid on till the blood come’. The Old Testament punishment for adultery was death, and the most extreme godly fundamentalists called for its return. Even licit wedded love, they believed, might derogate from the reverence due to God alone. For a husband to vow ‘with my body I thee worship’ was to make an idol of his wife, said John Field. Romantic love might even fuse adultery and idolatry. ‘Let not my love be called idolatry, nor my beloved as an idol show,’ wrote William Shakespeare, playing upon that temptation.

In these ways the godly might be at war with what it was to be human. A chasm opened between the old permissive culture of neighbourliness and good fellowship and the godly code of discipline and restraint. The festivities which had bound the traditional community now began to divide it, for the godly denounced church ales, bridal wakes, morris dancing and maying as ‘idle pastimes’ and ‘belly cheer’. It was on Sunday – the only day free from labour, but also the day consecrated to God – that the carnal and the godly were especially at odds. The people, especially young people, were drawn to ‘heathenish rioting’, drunken cavorting, and dancing that led to debauchery, while the godly spent their time at sermons and reading scripture. So preachers alleged. In the heroic early days of the Reformation reformers had not been at war with music and drama: far from it. The ballad and the interlude had been the medium of the evangelists’ message. Protestant playwrights then had used bawdy jokes for a godly purpose, and scripture
songs and psalms had been sung to ballad metre in alehouse singsongs.

In the mid 1570s all this started to change. Religious songs could no longer be sung to the tune ‘Greensleeves’. Sacred and secular music were divorced, and even sacred music viewed with suspicion, its beauty seen as part of the Devil’s wiles to seduce people from true worship. The writer of the most sublime Elizabethan choral music was William Byrd, a Catholic. At the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the old religious drama of the mystery plays had continued, but in the mid 1570s the York, Wakefield and Chester cycles were suppressed, for it was thought idolatrous for a man to play God; and polluting for divine truths to be the toy of human imagination. War was declared against drama just as it was about to enter its most brilliant age. Theatres were banished from London in 1575 as ‘seminaries of impiety’, ‘houses of bawdery’.

Were the godly fighting a losing battle? A trumpet blast would summon a thousand to some ‘filthy play’, while an hour’s tolling of a bell would gather only a hundred to a sermon, so preachers complained. But it was always an uphill struggle to save people from themselves. The godly knew that the greater part of humanity – if not precisely which part – were damned, whatever they did. Scripture showed that Christ’s promise of heaven was only for His ‘tiny flock’; that strait was the gate, narrow the way, ‘and few there be that find it’. The question that exercised them, as a matter of practical divinity, was whether the community of those who made Calvinist beliefs the heart of their lives should make that fellowship real and visible by dividing themselves from a national Church composed mostly of papist changelings and carnal worldlings. It was hard for the godly to contemplate communion with the ungodly, but though despairing of the Church of England they stayed within it. The restraint and the impulse to obedience of England’s godly should not be underestimated. England’s only massacre for religion in 1572, as France ran with blood, was of a Sussex boy who was shot dead as he sawed down a maypole.

Christian religious metaphors are often of war and battle. As Walter Devereux, 1st Earl of Essex, died an exemplary Christian death, he called out: ‘Courage, courage! I am a soldier that must fight under the banner of my saviour Christ.’ This Christian soldier died in Ireland, which he had known would be the death of him, where he, like others, had used the unchristian methods of betrayal and massacre.

If there were no wars of religion yet in England, could they be averted in Ireland? In 1569 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald had risen in the name of the Pope and preached a crusade against the ‘Hugnottes’. After his eventual submission in 1573 he fled to France and then to Spain to raise Catholic forces for a new holy war against the heretic Queen in Ireland. The godly, as they sought to beam evangelical light into the ‘dark corners’ and to make every city Jerusalem, faced no greater challenge than in Ireland, for here the new faith had hardly penetrated. A prudent Elizabeth chose not to unsettle and provoke her fragile polity in Ireland by ‘curious inquisition of men’s consciences’ and determined imposition of religious change. Although the statutes of supremacy and uniformity had established Protestantism as the official state religion in Ireland under the royal governorship of the Church, allegiance was hardly tested, nor was non-conformity punished, even in Dublin and the Pale. When Edmund Campion, newly and dangerously received into the Catholic faith in England, sought refuge, it was to Dublin that he came in 1570, to stay in the houses of James Stanihurst and Sir Christopher Barnewall, leading figures of the Pale.

If there were to be rebellion in the name of religion again, it was likely to be in Ireland. But it was not Catholicism which led Gaelic and Anglo-Irish lords to rebel against Elizabeth in the 1570s, nor ardent Protestantism which drew the English to serve and settle in Ireland in the later sixteenth century, though it was often in the language of the Old Testament that the English governors came to speak of the suppression of Irish rebellions. ‘It must be fire and sword and the rod of God’s vengeance that must make these stubborn and cankered hearts yield for fear,’ wrote Ralph Rokeby, Chief Justice of Connacht, in 1571. Sir Edmund Butler, who had with his brother joined their Geraldine enemies in rebellion in 1569, spoke for many when he said: ‘I do not make war against the Queen, but against those that banish Ireland, and mean conquest.’ But to ‘banish Ireland’ was still the purpose only of a very few hardliners.

English governors saw a congruity between their defiance of Spanish oppression in the Netherlands and their crusade for the extension of English law and forms of government in Ireland. Burghley supposedly said, ‘The Flemings had not such cause to rebel by the oppression of the Spaniards as it is reported by the Irish people [who were so oppressed by their lords].’ Those who supported the Dutch in their just resistance against the tyrant Spain also came to fight in Elizabeth’s western kingdom. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who went, he said, ‘with Gideon’s
faith’ to help make the inhabitants of Flushing ‘owners of themselves’ in 1572, had served in Ireland. But there his war of liberation took a summary, sanguinary form in 1569 when he put down the Munster rebellion with what seemed a terrible finality, and proposed wholesale confiscation and colonization there. Philip Sidney, son of the chief governor Sir Henry Sidney, had watched with despair the loss of liberty on the Continent through the 1570s, but argued for an extension of the royal prerogative in Ireland. In justification, he claimed that there liberty was already lost: ‘Under the sun there is not a nation which lives more tyrannously than they do one over the other.’ The tyrants were the Irish lords, not the English governors. Neither ‘wicked Saracen nor yet cruel Turk’ so pillaged the ‘poor commons’ as did the Irish lords who imposed their arbitrary rule. When Edmund Spenser, secretary to the Lord Deputy in 1581, wrote allegorically in his prophetic epic
The Faerie Queene
of the evil force to be conquered in Ireland by the Christian knight Artegall and his iron page Talus, it was Grantorto, the tyrant. Contemporary annotations associated Grantorto, the model of injustice, with members of the Geraldine Desmond family. English claims to own and rule were stronger where the Irish had forfeited theirs, so it came to be argued. Yet although the English saw themselves as liberators they were rarely seen as such by those they came to liberate.

When they thought about the nature of Irish society, with its ‘wild shamrock manners’ (as John Derricke, the pamphleteer, called them), the English were bewildered. Hopes remained that exotic Gaelic customs would disappear with the extension of English law and ‘civility’. The ending of the ‘savage life’, wrote Rowland White (an Anglo-Irish merchant and proponent of reform) to William Cecil in 1569, ‘shall enforce men to civility’. The reformers still believed, in the 1570s, that the Irish people could be won to English ways and that conciliation would be more effective than coercion. Sir William Garrard, the Lord Chancellor, arriving in Ireland in 1576, was clear that the sword was limited as an instrument of civility. ‘Can the sword teach them [the “English degenerates”] to speak English, to use English apparel, to restrain them from Irish exactions and extortions?’ It could not: ‘It is the rod of justice that must scour out these blots.’ Of course, a judge would believe that the common law must be the instrument of reform, and to deny that justice was a way to reform was like denying the virtue of education. Justices did go on assize; commissions were sent forth from the Dublin Council into distant regions; statutes were published. Sir Henry Sidney
had been Lord Justice before his first period as chief governor (1565–71), and his commitment to judicial reform marked his office. He presided over extended assizes in 1565, travelling with judges in Leinster and conducting sittings in Munster. Yet many of those charged with governing Ireland came to despair that justice could effect reform, and were pessimistic of finding impartial juries in Irish society. If justice failed to bring order, overawe local lords and extirpate the ‘savage life’, then a military presence must be extended and law must follow the sword. It was less certain whether that military force should take the form of garrisoning or a campaign army.